Frank Giering was actually intended for a completely different role – that of the chubby and comfortable Walter, a harmless car nerd. One of the three types director Sebastian Schipper sought for his debut “Absolute Giganten” (1999): the doll-like screwdriver, the talker and the yearning dreamer. But Schipper saw the latter in Giering. And cast him as Floyd, in the title role.
The film tells the story of his last night in Hamburg. Because Floyd wanted to leave everything behind. Concrete blocks in Eimsbüttel where life passes by. A suspended sentence of more than two years from his youth, which ends at the beginning of the plot – and his two best friends Ricco (Florian Lukas) and Walter (Antoine Monot). So Floyd was hired on a container ship. Via Cape Town, he had to go to Singapore, to where he was. Just one day before his departure, Floyd dared to reveal his betrayal to his friends.
Uncompromising male romance
That’s the high that Schipper sends his heroes on their final night in Hamburg: three boys stuck together like tar and brimstone – and held back by life. As a nursing assistant, Floyd must atone for his crimes. Talentless rapper Ricco fantasizes about his big break while flipping burger patties one by one under the watchful eye of his shift manager. Walter, who lives with his Italian nonna and can be a car pimp like no other, is bullied by his boss at the repair shop. What unites these three losers are big dreams and a friendship that ends painfully.
It is an uncompromising male romance, full of longing and melancholy, that Schipper and his cameraman Frank Griebe immortalized some twenty-five years ago. Your films are full of scenes that make you sad and happy at the same time. Full of echoing images and lines, it is infused with the melancholic music of British sadcore band Sophia. For example, when the friends glide silently across the Köhlbrand Bridge into the gray-blue Hamburg morning after they grab the last ice cream of their youth from a gas station vending machine. As was often the case, Greedy sought distance with his longing gaze, and no one else could receive this gentle pain but him.
Griebe also iconically portrayed his dreamy, sad companion, prefabricated building girl Telsa, played brilliantly by the then eighteen-year-old Julia Hummer, on the dance floor of a techno club. With flowing hair and a cowboy hat, she swayed her fragile body under the spotlight. Schipper stared at his monitor in disbelief during filming, as he said in an interview several years ago. For him it was “the most unbroken and enchanting moment of happiness in the entire film.”
A sad sadness spread across his blue eyes
Anyone who praises the film’s impressive scenes cannot ignore the table football fight, an unequal duel at the football table. Tough gambler Snake mercilessly cheats the boys in their first game. But there’s no giving up: So, for revenge, Walter uses the keys to his 1974 Ford Granada, GLX Coupé, which takes the heroes from one adventure to the next last night like it’s in a road movie.
The scene is now legendary, and not only among table football players. Schipper has world soccer champion Florian Lienkamp and other professionals doubling him. Griebe achieves perfection with brilliant camera work. He used a construction snorkel to follow the ball between the playing figures, and Plexiglas panels on the walls of the football table made it possible to follow the game as if from the sidelines of a real football match. That image is what makes “Absolute Giants” a special and artistic film. A declaration of love for Hamburg, a ballad about friendship and the oppressed. And a monument to the German film giant.
Legend has it that Frank Giering looked at the camera sadly during the casting process in 1998 because he was supposed to play a fat man again. Instead, Floyd’s text messages were handed over to him. The “German James Dean,” as some critics have called him, has now been discovered. The extraordinary Magdeburg actor, who was born fifty-four years ago this Sunday and died prematurely of biliary colic in 2010, often played villains in his short but intense career. His breakthrough came as a sadistic family killer in Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games” (1997). But Floyd’s role is the most important. Her existence resonated within him; a sad sadness that stretched across his blue eyes.
