Der Eissturm - Digital Remastered (DVD)

Connecticut, 1973. The infamous "Summer of Love" has already passed a few years ago and the sexual revolution has now also reached the American suburbs - even New Canaan, named in reference to the "promised land". The American middle class has apparently rejected its bourgeois conformity in order to replace it with permissiveness and a demonstratively open approach to the previously narrowly defined conventions; the pleasure of so-called key parties, for example, is fed by the random selection of the respective sexual partners of their guests. The two families Hood and Carver, who are at the center of the film, are no exception among their contemporaries, but rather represent showpieces of 1970s society, whose world, characterized by coldness, loneliness and egocentricity, is portrayed here by Ang Lee. The closer people get physically, the more they become emotionally alienated from their fellow human beings. However, on the Thanksgiving weekend, of all days, which is so important in American society, the families are torn out of their lethargic rut when the pent-up cold finally breaks out in full force in the eponymous ice storm. Ang Lee's "The Ice Storm", the adaptation of the novel of the same name by Rick Moody, which is strongly based on its literary original, was awarded the prize for Best Screenplay in Cannes in 1997. Even though the big commercial success ultimately failed to materialize, Lee's subtle cinematic appeal to honest interpersonal warmth developed into an independent pearl of the late 90s, to which the first-class cast around Elijah Wood, Sigourney Weaver, Kevin Kline and Christina Ricci certainly contributes in addition to the aesthetics.