What a Feeling

What a Feeling, dir. Kat Rohrer, 2024 Austria, 110 min., in German and Farsi (Persian) with English subtitles and in English without subtitles, often switching mid-sentence 💖

Sunday, June 23, 2024, 6:00 PM, New Parkway [at rush — show up early for last-minute tickets]

not available in the Digital Screening Room streaming encore

What a Feeling
Fa and Marie Theres

Two “women of a certain age” in Vienna keep running into each other, sometimes almost literally. Fa (Proschat Madani) is an Iranian immigrant, who is the lesbian equivalent of a lothario (is there a word for that?), but not out to her conservative family. Marie Theres (Caroline Peters) is a German immigrant, a doctor, who glides through her high society life until her husband of exactly 20 years announces at their anniversary dinner (to which she invited two other couples) that he wants a divorce. She stumbles into what she doesn’t realize is a lesbian bar, where she encounters Fa, but it turns out they had already met earlier that day. Marie Theres also has to deal with a 16-year-old daughter who is very much in the “rebellious teenager” phase. Through more coincidences, and then some intentional crossing of paths, Fa and Marie Theres circle around trying to figure out what their relationship is and what they want it to be. Through it all, the song “What a Feeling” keeps popping up, pressing them to “take your passion and make it happen.” (By the way, the title of the film in German is also What a Feeling.)

The two main characters, as well as some of the secondary characters, are initially not portrayed as very likable people, but they grow on you as they grow on one another. There are plenty of laughs, some fun moments on stage on Open Mic night at the Pussy Cat bar, and some real pathos, with well-drawn characters following a story arc that brings us eagerly along for the rom-com ride. Definitely a MUST SEE, especially for lesbians “of a certain age” but also for everyone.

There are some steamy sex scenes, probably enough for an R rating in the U.S., but nothing explicit, and actually relatively little skin, just something happening under the bedsheet with sounds of joy.

My one complaint is that the dialogue often switches languages multiple times within a single sentence, and any bits that are in English are not subtitled, making it very difficult to follow the gist from the subtitles alone. At least on the screener copy, the auto-generated closed captions were no help, since they kept trying to find English words that matched the German or Farsi dialogue. Hopefully in the wider release, there will be at least an option for full subtitles, or closed captions that don’t get jumbled up with the subtitles.

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