"Mostly Martha": Review *Edited*

When most people want to be happy, they try everything to make it happen, right? The German film “Mostly Martha”, Is a mournful comedy. When a completely thrown together family become happy in the end, you ought to know what they had to go through.

I think this movie was great because it shows a lot of changes and challenges that a very emotional person has to go through, and in the end she starts to see the light in the end of the tunnel. The movie had a lot of inspiration tied into its melancholy mood until the end, where the mood was uplifted.

Martina Gedeck plays Martha Klein, a woman who is all about her work life. She is the master chef and ruler of the kitchen at a restaurant named Lido, located in Hungary, Germany. Martha’s obsession with her cooking sometimes gets in the way and causes outrageous confrontations with customers. The owner of the restaurant, Frida (Sibylle Canonica), recommends that she starts talking to a therapist (August Zirner), who did a very good job listening. I thought it was funny because, her therapy sessions often turn into food monologues instead of a stress manager. Martha get stuck raising her niece Lina, played by Maxime Foerste. She did an amazing job with this role. There were some parts that must have been unbelievably hard to act out, like losing your mother.

After Lina meets Mario, played by Sergio Castellitto, a fun-loving person, she starts to emerge from her depression. Martha realizes she is going to have to accept the fact that she has to share her kitchen with another chef. She accepts his loving personality into her life and opens up to him tremendously. I was very surprised with this because Martha is very uptight about who she talks too and never seems to find love in any human.

Martha reaches out to Mario for help in contacting Lina’s Italian father, Giuseppe Lorenzo, who has been out of the picture since before Lina was born. I’m actually glad that Martha and Mario are starting to hit it off because I thought they would have been a cute couple.

Now, Martha and Lina’s relationship isn’t all that perfect either. With many outrageous fight scenes they had, it almost surprised me that Martha let the girl back in her house. After smacking her, trying to run away to Italy because Martha had simply stated she couldn’t bring her to work anymore because she was missing school.

In the end of the movie, they all end up being a big happy family, but they obviously needed to go through many battles to make this happen. I think this film was truly amazing! I would definitely recommend it to anyone who loves rom-com dramas. I enjoy that this film was about love and food, my two favorite things.