Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Faraway’ on Netflix, a German Rom-Com That’s All Postcard Photography and Cliches

Faraway (now on Netflix) is a German comedy starring Naomi Krauss as a stressed-out woman who desperately lunges at her first opportunity to escape her harried life, even if just for a moment. Or maybe forever, since it involves running away from her dumbass unappreciative demanding obnoxious family to a locale so beautiful it makes vacation postcards look like brochures for the local landfill. So will this entry in the Woman Needs a New Life subgenre of rom-coms offer us a fresh story, or the same old cliches? Let’s find out.

FARAWAY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Zey (Krauss) is surrounded by jerks – jerks who happen to be her family, but don’t worry, this isn’t the type of movie where they won’t come around, especially considering how jerkish they’re being on the day of her mother’s funeral, nobody cutting her even a millimeter of slack. But aren’t they in mourning too, you might ask, but that would make sense, and this is the type of movie that doesn’t really make sense, but hey, at least it’s congenial. Anyway. Zey’s husband Ilyas (Adnan Maral) is too busy having a great time laughing and cutting vegetables with the new, young, female hire at his Turkish restaurant to make it to the funeral on time. Her father (Verdat Erincin) is an unreasonable, blustery ol’ coot. And her daughter Via (Bahar Balci) is a teenager, and teenagers are just that way. In a word, Zey is exasperated.

If ever Calgon needed to take someone away, it is Zey. And it’s not Calgon but a deus ex machina that does exactly that, in the form of a plot development where Zey learns she just inherited her mother’s secret cottage in Croatia. She doesn’t even pack a bag before she hops in the car and GTFOs from the bustle of urban Germany to the anti-bustle of a lazy, sun-drenched seaside locale, where she’ll almost be trampled by a herd of sheep and stand slackjawed as the locals drink milk fresh out of the goat. But before that happens, she arrives at the cottage in the pitch-black of night, gropes through the door to the bed and wakes up next to a man named Josip (Goran Bogdan), who sleeps with his butt out. All the way out. Same goes for his other junk. And then he makes fun of her spanx. 

Turns out, Zey’s mother bought the property from Josip’s family, and told him it was OK to stay there until someone else arrives to stake claim. And here’s Zey, so he pitches a tent in the garden because he still owns that piece of ground and then she goes into town to the store and Josip works there and then she goes to the restaurant and Josip works there too. She can’t escape the guy, and at first she absolutely wants to, since they bicker and annoy each other, but then eventually maybe she doesn’t after all? You know how these things go. Zey consults with a real estate slickster (Artjom Gilz) about selling the property for a very pretty penny, but Josip does his damnedest to convince her that whoever buys it will just, you know, run electricity to it and rent it to tourists and ruin it – and maybe it’s the type of place that’ll make a smart woman like Zey look at all the many annoying things in her stressful life and reconsider the living crap out of them.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Methinks Zey ventured to Croatia to Eat and/or Pray and/or Love – although checking off two out of the three ain’t bad.

Performance Worth Watching: Even when the writing is loose and sloppy, Krauss maintains enough of her charismatic presence to hold the movie together.  

Memorable Dialogue: This is how people flirt in this movie:

Josip: I want to show you something. Also tell you something. And give you something.

Zey: How do I know that at least one of those things isn’t your penis?

Sex and Skin: Bare dadbod butt; female toplessness.

Our Take: OK, so “fresh” doesn’t really apply to Faraway, which sticks tight to the foreign-escape rom-com formula in every way except maybe the age of our protagonist, who’s pushing 50 and contemplating mortality in the wake of her mother’s passing and might just be ripe for change and might find that change not in a handsome chunk of muscle but in an age-appropriate gent who probably could stand to do a few sit-ups. But that’s mostly me interpreting things outside the broad, simplistic lines of this screenplay, whose characters don’t really deal with anything – grief, identity, loss, etc. – that isn’t dictated by the plot. The film will fulfill its shallow agenda, or else.

This isn’t to say it’s an unpleasant experience. Krauss’ amiable approach to the material goes a long way, even when it’s mildly failing her. And the cinematography is nice – imagine how unconvincing this whole silly affair, with its off-the-rack characters and predictable arcs, might be if pastoral Croatia’s rugged charms weren’t rendered so sumptuously. And I’m still not sure we should buy any of it, since the blocking, staging and editing can be awkward, and the comedy is mawkish and rarely inspires more than a light smirk, and the screenplay is so lazy we don’t know if the main character has a damn job or not, and it never makes us feel truly emotionally involved in the story. In that sense, it does Krauss a disservice, because lurking beneath this nonsense is the sense that Zey is a woman of substance who deserves more happiness than she has. 

Our Call: SKIP IT. Faraway is nice, but “nice” doesn’t always mean “good.”  

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.