Strictly speaking, the tailor himself gave the young man with the fire-engine-red toupee the idea of making a grab for the cash register. The fact that he was in the shop at all was more or less coincidental. Strictly speaking, the amateur stickup man is completely unfamiliar with the language of violence, and fate put the gun in his hand. Strictly speaking, fate is anything but just, but such is the beginning of the most interesting stories.
Although Der Überfall, Florian Flicker's third feature film, might sound like an action movie, it soon reveals itself to be a subtle exercise in minimalism, a bitterly ironic piece about absurd games with power and vanity. The crook, the tailor and the customer comprise the simple constellation of an increasingly complex construct. There is Andreas, in his early 30s, unemployed, separated from wife and child, who desperately wants to pay back the 10,000 schillings he owes his wife on his son's birthday. He knows where to find a pistol, the gun carried by his brother-in-law the cop. Now all he needs is a little courage and steady nerves. But rather than brazenly grabbing the day's take at a bank or supermarket, he unthinkingly follows his first impulse and enters a shabby tailor's shop to try his luck. This turns out to be an extremely bad choice. He is met by the grouchy, bankrupt tailor Böckel (Joachim Bissmeier) and his customer Kopper (Josef Hader), a hypochondriac in early retirement whose life is still ruled by his mother's iron hand. Three men in a trap There is no easy money for Andreas here. The robber even seems to lose sight of his original goal as the afternoon wears on.
In the subsequent hours, a poignant study is made of a triangle in which alliances and power structures shift constantly, balances tip, and vulnerabilities penetrate their thin veneer. "The original idea," said Flicker, "was to show a collision of characters who are so eccentric, lonely and unusual that each one represents a tragedy in and of himself. And the meeting of these three tragedies results in a fourth. The longer the afternoon lasts, the more instinctive and irrational their actions become." After the restless pace of his last success, Suzie Washington, the story of a woman who illegally crosses the Austrian border in her search for a new identity, Flicker worked with immobility and a closely defined space in this film. An excursion into men's worlds was an initial motif for this story, and the director wanted to work intensely with his actors.
"The difficult thing," claims Flicker, "was that there are no external elements which can influence the story, and it has to develop through the characters alone." For that reason, he decided to work with Susanne Freund, who joined the crew as a co-author after several versions of the screenplay were discarded. "Otherwise," explained Flicker, "there would be a danger of going nowhere with the characters, you need someone to pull you out of it." The crook, the taylor ... In order to avoid making a picture which resembles a filmed play, a danger posed by the static situation, a wide variation of shots was employed, which provided an appropriate rhythm. The use of Cinemascope made it possible to fully take advantage of the available space and show two actors in a close-up without cramping the scene.
There are fundamental differences in the characters' language- Andreas' slangy, working-class Viennese is far removed from Kopper's bourgeois accent, and although Böckel has obviously lived in Vienna for decades, the fact that he is originally from Germany is immediately obvious. Providing his characters with definite linguistic roots which tell us about their background, thereby increasing the level of authenticity, was not only the director's idea. Roland Düringer, one of Flicker's first choices for the role of the robber, made a demand before he consented to participate, that he be allowed to use the type of language he knew would be authentic for Andreas, regardless of the danger that it would not be understood outside Austria.
Both Düringer and Hader, two actors with deep roots in the Austrian cabaret scene, were the favorites, and Flicker had already tried to convince the latter to appear in Suzie Washington. The plan was to form a trio around the one who accepted, but to the director's surprise, both said yes. The initial reading with Joachim Bissmeier, which preceded the final decision concerning the cast, was decisive. "I immediately sensed a certain chemistry," remembers the director, "although they didn't know each other and had different backgrounds." ... his customer and a gun Innumerable discussions lasting hours followed, sometimes trying the patience of the waiting crew.
