It’s not that unusual when two films with similar themes come along at the same time, but it’s a pleasant surprise when both of them are excellent. Following on the heels of the movie Ezra, which was released in Israel two weeks ago, comes the German film, Weekend Rebels, another movie about a boy on the autism spectrum who is both very brilliant and very difficult and who goes on a road trip – in this case, a series of road trips – with his loving but often bewildered father.
Weekend Rebels, directed by Marc Rothemund and with a script by Richard Kropf, which opened in Israeli theaters on June 27, is based on the true story of Mirco von Juterczenka and his autistic son, Jason. They collaborated on a memoir about their weekend hobby of going to games at soccer stadiums all over Germany together.
I hate the clichéd expression heart-warming, but this dramatized version of their life is such a pitch-perfect depiction of the realities of life with someone on the autism spectrum – the highs and the lows, and the challenge for a parent to understand what is going on in the autistic child’s mind – that it really touched me.
I have written in the past about the fact that I have a son on the spectrum and so this film is of particular interest to me, but the empathic and quirky way that Jason and Mirco are portrayed and the challenges they face together should make this an engrossing story for anyone.
Jason’s father, Mirco (Florian David Fitz), is a quality-control manager for a fast-food chain, a regular guy who likes to drink beer and watch soccer. The boy’s mother, Fatime (Aylin Tezel), an Albanian immigrant, devotes herself to caring for him and making life as easy as possible for her brilliant but easily upset son.
JASON (Cecilio Andresen) dreams of becoming an astrophysicist and so needs to stay in a mainstream school, but the set of rules he has developed to calm his anxieties make life difficult. He has to wait for the bus in a certain seat at the bus stop every day and if someone else is there, he melts down. Aware of the threat of climate change, he has a list of rules his parents must follow to reduce their carbon footprint. We see that when Mirco is on a business trip, he gorges on meat and uses plastic utensils – he just can’t help it: Jason’s rules get to him.
Trying to get closer to Jason, father and son develop a plan to watch soccer games at all of Germany’s 56 stadiums, to try to find a team Jason loves. Of course, there is a set of rules involving the team and venue: no dirty bathrooms, no stupid mascots, and so on, and it may warm your heart to know that if a team has Nazi fans, that’s a deal breaker (this becomes a bigger issue later on).
In transit
Their adventures on these trips to find the right team make up the bulk of the movie. I thought I knew what was coming in the soccer game scenes a few times, but I was often surprised. The movie is occasionally sentimental but it never whitewashes the difficulties father and son face.
In one scene, they are on a train on the way to a match and order a meal in the dining car. Jason very clearly describes what he needs to the affable waiter: that the pasta on his plate must not touch the sauce, and the man says he gets it. But when he brings the plate the train shifts and one piece of penne touches the tomato sauce. Jason cannot eat it if they touch – that’s his rule. But his climate-change rules dictate that no food can be thrown out, and one of his other rules is that he doesn’t share food. He melts down and they get off the train.
The defeated look on his father’s face is one all autism parents have worn many times, in many similar situations, and it’s also clear that the one who suffers the most is Jason, which is what breaks Mirco’s heart.
IT’S WORTH noting that this horror over different things touching is fairly common. When my son was just starting at a preschool in Israel for children on the spectrum, I stayed with him for a few days to make sure he truly understood Hebrew well enough to be left with the staff. He was in a class where there was a new employee. She had not been briefed that one of his classmates couldn’t bear it if two colors touched in his drawing.
Probably trying to get him to engage socially, she sat down and started drawing with him, and when blue and purple lines touched on the design she was doing on his paper, he had a meltdown the likes of which I have never seen before or since. He turned white and had to be restrained from banging his head on the table, while he made sounds like a wounded animal. His mother couldn’t be reached right away, and before the staff could get hold of her, they called an ambulance to take him to the emergency room, which seemed like a very good idea. Once they did speak to her, she said there was no need, and they canceled the ambulance. When she showed up, she got him calmed down within minutes.
He was one of the sweetest children I ever met, and it was really hard to understand what the blue and purple lines touching meant to him. Although he was very bright, he could only put one or two words together back then and he couldn’t articulate what was going on in his head.
Weekend Rebels does as good a job as any I’ve seen of explaining what all these rules mean to a kid like Jason, and it helps that he is able to express himself in a way that the boy I saw freak out over the drawing couldn’t. Hearing a song about war, Jason says that there is a war in his head, as he has to fight himself over the often contradictory rules he has created. It’s wonderful when he is able to roll with some of the changes and enjoy himself, giving himself permission to take short breaks from his own rigidity, and says that he and his father are “weekend rebels,” the phrase that gives the movie its title.
One of Jason’s obsessions is riding elevators, and at one point, his father says, “He’ll be riding the elevator his whole life and all we can do is ride along.” Maybe that’s all any of us can do, and to paraphrase Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, this truthful and funny movie can help us to imagine ourselves being happy on that elevator ride.