Three teenagers, unclothed, stand close to one another in a forest, gently caressing the wounds they have inflicted on one another. This is the climactic moment in “Oasis,” a film that at times feels like a Grimms Brothers fairytale, and, at others, an all-too-real vision of modern-day youth in crisis.
If you were told that the German director, Jannis Lenz, was tutored by Jessica Hausner and was an assistant to Michael Haneke, then you’d get a sense of the influences at play in the film — his debut feature — which has its world premiere on Sunday in the Horizons section of Venice Film Festival.
He does, though, share his mentors’ love of “precision,” he says. In his case, this is mainly evident during the preparatory stage. “I prepare myself very precisely, otherwise it would be chaos later on,” he says. However, once the filming starts, you should “be willing to let yourself be surprised,” he says.
The film begins with Andy, a newcomer to his high school in Southern Germany, being caught on camera threatening other students, and as a result he is faced with expulsion. His only friend is Lukas, the son of a teacher at the school, with whom he escapes to the forest where they engage in paintball combat.
For the boys, the forest is “a place where they can retreat to,” says the director. Here, they find “some kind of a space that isn’t part of a rigid system.”
As pressure builds on Andy from the other students, their parents and the school staff, he and Lukas find an unexpected ally in Maya, who attends a different school — one that specializes in music and the performing arts.
The “Oasis” of the film’s title isn’t the forest, Lenz says. “It’s not a geographical place. It’s more something they create by themselves, by their togetherness, and by the trust and safe place they build together.”
The director encouraged his young actors to feel their own way into the scenes in the forest, which they did with the help of an intimacy coordinator. The idea was to allow the actors to build trust with each other and the director.
In the production notes, Lenz mentions that he grew up close to the site of the Winnenden school massacre in 2009. “The questions it raised — about fear and exclusion, about what happens to young people who can’t find their place — never fully left me,” he says. But anyone expecting to find a “birth of a killer” narrative will be disappointed. The film is far more subtle, nuanced and ambiguous than that.
