Silvester Countdown is a detailed portrait of the difficult and tragi-comic adventures of a young couple from Berlin – Romeo and Juliet – who flee the city on New Year’s Eve. On their way East, their relationship gets into a negative spiral. Romeo treats Juliet like an object and underestimates her intelligence. Juliet slowly but surely starts to resent this. In the car, where they can no longer avoid each other’s company, tensions rise to boiling point. After five nerve wracking days of driving back and forth, they return to Berlin, but all that changes is the backdrop to their bickering. The young couple seems to be imprisoned in a relationship that offers less and less satisfaction and perspective.Oskar Roehler, the director of this energetic tragi-comedy, is one of the new generation of German film-makers who have worked with few facilities and plenty of imagination on a corpus of films that have started to acquire international renown in the last five years. Dominant themes in these films are emotional unheimlichkeit among young people and difficult times in their love life. Roehler about his characters: ‘Neither of them are mature enough for love and maybe never will be.’
