ZDF film “As loud as you can: For the perpetrator, this is obviously part of the “service”

Eonce a year Dr. Christian Gramberg (Peter Lohmeyer) takes the friends of the “Traditional Business Club” to a luxury hotel in Hamburg for the “Gentlemen’s Evening”. Cultivated bar jazz, exquisite dinner and opportunities to network, that’s the program for the powerful, mostly grey-flecked gentlemen of mature age.

It is said that people are moving with the times, now even allowing women. The one (quota) woman among the guests is greeted with jovial laughter. Who is still talking about the glass ceiling? Merely weak underperformers, that’s clear for the self-proclaimed top performers. The hostesses of Ines Betzold’s (Gesine Cukrowski) agency have been hired to provide drinks. Her job: looking good, stumbling around using blister plasters, recommending wines and discreetly flirting until one o’clock in the morning, “what you do afterwards is up to you”. For Maja (Nina Gummich) and Kim (Friederike Becht) it should be the last well-paid part-time job as a hostess. The deposit for the joint physiotherapy practice has been saved. Like all the other women, they are briefed, also through their life experiences, in which hardly any of them have not already experienced harassment or worse. Here you push a hand off your buttocks while pouring, overhear clumsy requests for later sexual intercourse there. Gagging only behind the scenes, “completely gross”, but they do not feel defenseless, the group experience supports and protects.

Shame, helplessness and despair

A nightcap at the bar, the glass unattended for two minutes. Kim lets the lawyer Max (Jan Krauter) take her home, they know each other from school. Maja wakes up in room 217 in the morning, her body abused, bruised and raped (the “consensual sex was just rougher, she asked for it”, the perpetrator will later put on record). Maya sneaks home, locks herself in, compulsively cleans up, falls silent. Maybe the old life will come back. Don’t talk about it, then it’s not true.

Kim, already a rebel at school, drags her to the police, for intimate questioning, for a gynecological examination, where the strongest scene is a view of Maya’s bare feet cramping. The Maya after the act of violence is a being overwhelmed by shame, abuse, powerlessness, humiliation. And of brutal flashbacks (the sensitive camera comes from Martin Neumeyer). With the help of her new lawyer friend Max, Kim tries to apprehend the rapist Lukas Berger (Ulrich Brandhoff), who heirs to the shipping company and who has been identified beyond a doubt. His big law firm boss Bovert (Marcel Hensema) has business ties with Berger. Kim discovers more and more women who have been raped at the Gentlemen’s Event for years. And a system of intimidation and non-disclosure agreements. Gramberg soon threatens her with a lawsuit for defamation.

For a ZDF thriller, the film So Loud You Can is unusually nuanced and relevant, and it gets more gripping and exciting to the end. It is about systematic and structural violence by powerful men against women, who are seen as “decorative accessories” and “easy prey”. An uncomfortable tone of misogyny runs through the entire film like a sticky film. The men in this film are portrayed – often with few but revealing statements – especially by Lohmeyer and Krauter as realistic figures with contours and not as speaking cardboard comrades. Above all, however, the film by Esther Bialas (director) and Sophia Krapoth, Isabel Kleefeld, Lilly Bogenberger and David Weichelt (script) is an actress film.

Nina Gummich, who can be seen in a few days as Alice Schwarzer in the film “Alice”, is cast here as initially silent, trying to come to terms with the act of violence, against the grain. The inflexibility that she exudes and tries to regain in her own way makes her playing particularly impressive. Kim, who fights as a deputy, embodies Friederike Becht as a figure with unquestionable motives, but an encroaching trait. There isn’t one right reaction, emphasize those involved in the film in the accompanying text.

With MeToo, the issue of – often tacit – acceptance of this type of violence is not off the table. “As Loud You Can” is based on a true case from the UK. The “Presidents Club Charity Dinner” has been held annually in a luxury London hotel since 1985, for 33 years. Until 2018, two journalists from the “Financial Times” went undercover and made notorious “salacious remarks, clumsy groping and serious sexual assaults” public. None of the perpetrators were prosecuted, but the men’s union meeting was history.

As loud as you can runs at 8.15 p.m. on ZDF and is available in the media library.