Continuity 2012

It follows a young German soldier returning to his parents’ house after serving in Afghanistan; the action repeats three times, with the soldier played by a different actor in each version. According to the press materials, and to several people I spoke to about the film, this is the story of a family seeking to reconstruct their lost son’s return by hiring a series of male prostitutes. Certainly this implication is there: incest thrums throughout, like a threat; the father exploring the younger man’s mouth with his fingers, the mother climbing into his bed. But it seems to me that Continuity is more obviously involved with Fast’s enduring themes of repetition, trauma and the fraught ways in which conflict becomes news, fiction or documentary.

It follows a young German soldier returning to his parents’ house after serving in Afghanistan; the action repeats three times, with the soldier played by a different actor in each version. According to the press materials, and to several people I spoke to about the film, this is the story of a family seeking to reconstruct their lost son’s return by hiring a series of male prostitutes. Certainly this implication is there: incest thrums throughout, like a threat; the father exploring the younger man’s mouth with his fingers, the mother climbing into his bed. But it seems to me that Continuity is more obviously involved with Fast’s enduring themes of repetition, trauma and the fraught ways in which conflict becomes news, fiction or documentary.