Light Blue - a love story

Exposé for a movie - app. 90 min

Based on the novel «Hellblau» by Thomas Meinecke, published by the suhrkamp verlag. Screenplay by Uli Aumüller and Thomas Meinecke

Tillmann is in his late thirties. He is not athletic, more of a girlish build. If you thought he was a woman, you might think he looked more like a boy.

Cordula, his girlfriend, has left him and is now living with his best friend Heinrich in Berlin. Tillmann shuts himself away as a recluse in a small fisherman’s hut on the Outer Banks in North Carolina. He is finally starting his long-planned project to write a book.

What this book is about, nobody really knows until the end of the film. Something about Afro-American pop, Techno, House, Rhythm&Blues – and their African and Jewish origins, their myths, sexual and racial expressions: What colour is Mariah Carey’s skin? What sex is Dana International? Tillmann researches everywhere. Cordula supports him by sending him all kind of materials from Berlin, one of the international hot-spots of Techno. And he also has Yolanda, the Afro-Americo-German ex-girlfriend of Heinrich from his youth in Bitburg. She is working in the Regenstein library at Chicago University and dives into the rougher districts of Chicago and Detroit. She then tells Tillmann - based on her experiences - lots of detail about the social background of the music in his book.

In a café on the Outer Banks Tillmann meets the attractive American Vermilion, a student, about 10 years younger than him, and falls in love. Vermilion is writing her PhD about the sexual relationships of Hassidic Jews in New York. Her initial interest in Tillmann is mistaken, as she thought he was a German Jew. But to her surprise he is not even circumcised. Nevertheless they stick together, and in their daily lives and their love-life Vermilion increasingly adopts the “male” role and casts Tillman as the “female”, a “Jewish” man.

Vermilion appears to explore aspects of her scientific research on her boyfriend, who slips willingly into the game as her erotic partner, and at the same time begins to think about Jewish sexual stereotypes in his writing. Within Jewish circles themselves, and seen from outside, in Europe during the 19th and 20th century, the “Jewish” man was sometimes understood as the “female” man. Tillmann asks himself what kind of effect this had for Jews in general - but especially for the development of American pop, where these sexual roles were mixed up with the conflicts of white and black culture and communities.

Whatever Tillmann and Vermilion do, erotically or professionally, affects another level of their love story; whether they make love, whether they take a walk on the beach, swim in the Atlantic, whether they visit the Hassidic districts of New York, whether they escape from hurricane that regularly passes over and devastates the Outer-Banks, whether Cordula spends her holidays with them, diving with her light blue diving suite to German submarine wrecks – everything they do affects the stories that swirl around in their imaginations. And in this film all these stories combine with imagery from the music, the submarine war, Hollywood divas of the 30s and 40s, the Jewish composers of early American jazz, the transportation of African slaves during the 17th and 18th centuries and all the myths that are still linked to them in the 21st century.

This film “LIGHT BLUE” tells the love story of Tillmann and Vermilion from the very beginning with gentle, carefully-composed pictures and movement. It also opens up to an associative patchwork of anecdotes and documentary material, using their private love story, and embedding it in the wider flow of events across the centuries, all of which are found and felt within popular music.

All these elements are bound together by an almost uninterrupted soundtrack, with the regular beat of Techno, of House, Rhythm&Blues, in a sort of timeline that integrates all the different themes.

uli aumüller
berlin, april 2005