Jules Herrmann | Liebmann (aka The Strange Summer) / 2016

the invasion of the hun

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jules Herrmann (screenwriter and director) Liebmann (aka The Strange Summer) / 2016

 

German teacher Antek Liebmann (Godehard Giese) suddenly shows up in a small picturesque French village (shot in Saint-Erme-Outre-et-Ramecourt, in Picardy) where he rents a room from a local friendly elderly couple Antoine (Alain Denizart) and Giselle (Denis Lecocq), who live next door. Another neighbor, renting from Antoine and Giselle, Geneviève (Adeline Moreau) lives with her young daughter Morgaine (Morgane Delamotte) next door.

    All seem quite friendly, particularly the single and attractive Geneviève, who greet the German who, however, doesn’t speak French well and clearly prefers to remain to himself. When he expresses the need to relax and be alone, Antoine assures him he has come to the right place, as long as he doesn’t enter the nearby forest wherein evidently there are numerous hunters ready to shoot anything on sight.

    Geneviève is a bit more intrusive, particularly her young daughter who soon after Leibmann moves his room furniture into different locations and gets a good rest, attempts to impress and entertain the quiet man with every hula hoop trick she has ever learned.

    Liebmann uncomfortably moves back inside, realizing that any public sunbathing will be amount to an invasion of his privacy, which it is clear—if nothing else—that he very much desires. The Hollywood Reporter critic Boyd van Hoeij describes him as “bone weary,” since it is also apparent that he is attempting to escape some terrible incident from his past.

    Letterboxd commentator Michael Scott expresses it quite clearly: “….Liebmann [is]…an awkward, seemingly apathetic, loner who is dealing with an undisclosed, life-scouring incident. He’s upped and offed to rural France and he just wants to be left alone to sort his shit. How deep that shit runs is the source of much of the film’s angsty anti-comedy.”

    And we soon recognize that there may be even darker elements at play when, despite the warnings, Liebmann insists upon entering the forest, where he is quickly shot at. He later enters in the dark of night, and eventually, after a short fall, discovers a rifle hidden in the grass. As Geneviève soon also warns him even stranger things are happening in the forest since two bodies have already been discovered, evidently the work of a serial killer.

    Even though he at first turns down the invite of his landlords to dinner, he relents and together with the couple and Geneviève spends a pleasant evening enjoying simple peasant French cuisine.

   Herrmann’s oddball character, we quickly realizie, isn’t necessary mean or truly frightening, as he soon begins a friendly relationship with Geneviève and Morgaine, joining them on a picnic, and at one point when Antonine his temporarily hospitalized, picking up Morgaine from school while Geneviève attempts to nurse her landlord back to health.

    Later Geneviève takes him to a performance at the nearby Artist’s residency and feels hopeful enough about his intentions that—one of the numerous genre shifts this film makes—performs a sort of mock cooking show as she explains how to make her Le Gateau enchanté (the magic cake), obviously in hopes of further capturing any amorous attentions Leibmann might wish to show, particularly after one night when drunk he collapses, with her in hand, into a nearby bush.

     Perhaps that cake is magic since Liebmann, meanwhile, has taken a job at the local antique store, and when a young man, Sébastian (Fabien Ara) purchases a bed, the new employee is forced to help him move it to his house, where after their hard work they both fall into bed embracing and enjoying lovely sex. They later meet up again in Liebman’s room.

     For a while, it appears that the two have become a couple, and if nothing else his invitation to Sébastian to his own room makes it clear to his female neighbor that her would-be lover is, in fact, gay.

     But even here, Liebmann quickly pulls away from any permanent relationship, obviously haunted by events back in Germany. Critics have described these incidents as terribly oblique and have dismissed the comic moment of genre shifts (a brief history lesson by Antoine on the German attempts to invade France and the whiff of the horror genre in the serial killer, who turns out to be none other than Antoine, who with his wife often cared for Geneviève’s daughter Morgaine) as confusing and experimental.  

     Actually, I find them quite charming and a kind of tonic for Liebmann’s dark mental meanderings. And when Liebmann’s sister Ines (Bettina Grahs) Ines shows up, we quickly perceive that her brother’s inner demons are a result of the murder of his male German lover.

     True, as van Hoeij observes, “the two talk in the shorthand of siblings, referring to past events and character traits in quick half-references because they know each other well enough to understand what the other means.” But I don’t see their conversation to be at all “muddled” as The Hollywood Reporter critic argues. It’s quite clear by now that somehow Liebmann’s ex was murdered, and he has escaped to help himself heal. Despite the fact that Ines argues that it’s time for him to return home and face the simple truth of what happened, Liebmann doesn’t feel at all ready and almost angrily sends off beloved sister home.

     Meanwhile, he rejuvenates his relationship with Sébastian while still remaining friendly with his female neighbors. And finally, in a moment of pure genius, he perceives a way to express the horror that he has suffered through art.

     Entering the Artist’s building late at night, he picks up a piece chalk, and falling and lying in various positions throughout the building, up and down staircases and in several different rooms outlining the boundaries of his own body. Beside the chalk drawings he leaves various of the genre paintings that have lined the walls of his rented room.

     The large conceptual art piece makes clear that his lover was killed in a mass shooting that only now is he able to share with others through the creation of the art piece, in the process ridding any feelings of guilt that he has carried with him from Germany.

     By film’s end, it is clear Liebmann has found a new life with his French friends that permits him to now laugh and smile again. And in the film’s last image we observe Liebmann, Sébastian, Geneviève, and her daughter all skating hand-in-hand on an abandoned airplane runway.

     I found Herrmann’s film to be a small masterwork in dramatic comedy, and I look forward to seeing her earlier works of cinema as well.

 

Los Angeles, February 27, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).