01/08/2023 - Fabian Stumm’s directorial feature debut is a profound interrogation of relationships and interpersonal closeness

Magnus Mariuson, Susie Meyer and Fabian Stumm in Bones and Names

Bones and Names begins as the story of a couple settled in a long-term relationship in the Berlin art scene. Boris (actor-turned-director Fabian Stumm) is an actor who’s just been cast in a relationship drama, and Jonathan (the soft-spoken Knut Berger) is a writer working on his next book. For both artists, there is an element of autobiography in the work they do, and the blending of reality and fiction in their respective professions seems inevitable. Yet they seem to criss-cross, more than actually meet, through this kind of artistic proximity. While Jonathan redefines his approach to writing in a secretive manuscript about an actor-writer couple, Boris leans into the film role he’s rehearsing for a little too hard. Relationships are tactile and quietly simmering under the surface, but when the couple’s frustrations pour out, the viewer is washed over with a wave of tenderness for the flawed human beings on screen. Although the film premiered at the Berlinale, its inclusion in the Discoveries section of New Horizons says a lot about its thematic and aesthetic richness: the subtle build-up of the film’s emotional peaks rewards every rewatch.

What is clear from this feature debut is that film and theater actor Stumm has a firm grip on his film, yet knows not to take up all the space. One of the things that make the rehearsal sequences a place for shared discovery is his talent for finding the right rhythm and for stepping away when necessary. Making the film within a film (the one Boris has been cast in) a woman-led project allows for a distanced perspective that mirrors his in a curious way, without feeling like a simple gender swap. When the French director Jeanne (Marie-Lou Sellem) is exacting towards her actors, we get a sense of her temperament and personal disposition towards the subject matter: the fallout of a heterosexual marriage and the blooming of a gay relationship.

Stumm is a director with a gentle touch, but his artistic vision is assertive enough to not dissipate — Michael Bennett’s contemplative camerawork compliments the multiple episodes that make up the film’s mosaic of storylines. Nine-year-old Josie (Alma Meyer-Prescott), Jonathan’s niece, can’t help but get into trouble: she steals some shampoo, she catfishes an older guy, and these rebellious streaks somehow reflect on the calm, collected adults. In this way, Bones and Names is playful and humorous, reminding us as an audience of the many ways we often take ourselves too seriously. 

There is a scene which encompasses the film’s emotional potency and it is, rightfully so, relegated to the rehearsal space. In it, Jeanne is encouraging Boris to stand in line, between his on-screen wife and boyfriend, and she proceeds to interrogate the three of them, one after the other, about what they feel in such a horizontal arrangement. The use of blocking to configure the actors in a nondescript room is almost theatrical, but the slow camera movements draw out a particular cinematic energy from a scene that is written as improvisational (as it is a fictional rehearsal of a script about personal heartbreak), but is, in the end, a masterfully put together universe of its own. Without a doubt, Stumm’s future as a filmmaker is no less promising than his present as an actor, finely tuned to human sensualities and shortcomings.

Bones and Names is produced by the German company Postofilm while Salzgeber & Co. Medien handles world sales.