A young woman dies in the river, her family buries itself in grief, and the machines dance: "Bagger Drama" gets under your skin

Excavators inspire imaginations, and not just in classic boyhood dreams: Their shovels represent demolition as well as departure and new beginnings. And now they dig through the mold of the Swiss Plateau in a feature film that masterfully balances lightness and heaviness in a way rarely seen in Swiss filmmaking.

Piet Baumgartner, a Bernese native, directed and scripted "Bagger Drama," until now better known as a theater artist and performer than as a filmmaker. In his documentary film debut, "The Driven Ones" (2023), he portrayed students at the University of St. Gallen, a training ground for the local economy.

His first feature film is set in an excavation company, for the couple who own it, both a life goal and a place of refuge. They put everything into this venture; after all, they want to leave something behind for their children. Of these, however, only Daniel (Vincent Furrer) remains. His sister Nadine died a year ago at the age of nineteen in a canoeing accident.

It happened in the river that runs through the village, a body of water that is normally safe. Except for a concrete block in the middle of the current, the young woman's unhelmeted head struck it. "A stupid accident," says her father, Paul, whose role is played by Phil Hayes, as well as Bettina Stucky as her mother, Conny.

The son had to witness the accident. One can only imagine the images that have become fixed in his mind. This family remains silent about their innermost being. Paul now wants to cover up the ill-fated canoes that are still lying around in the garden and garage. Out of sight, out of mind. Instead, the fatal lump of concrete keeps coming into view, until one day Conny decides: "This lump has to go." She sues the canoe club, saying that someone must be found responsible for a senseless death. Daniel, for his part, wants to escape the prison of trimmed hedges in a Mediterranean backwater by planning to study in America.

At the beginning of the film, blood-red excavator shovels stretch against the blue sky in a communal dance, as if synchronized swimmers had taken flight. Set to a consistently harmonious soundtrack by Swiss composer Rio Wolta, with whom Baumgartner has a long-standing collaboration, the robotic ballet later expands to include half a dozen vehicles.

Such an excavator choreography is nothing new; years ago, Zurich light artist Gerry Hofstetter staged something similar for the company anniversary of a gravel pit in the Zurich lowlands. But Baumgartner, a trained mechanical draftsman, uses his flair for the poetry of technology to contrast it with the depths of human emotion. One is vaguely reminded of Jacques Tati.

The son sits lost in thought at a desk, the electronic height adjustment slowly raising and lowering him, skyward and earthward. The parents stand in front of the mirror, electric toothbrushes brushing over their dentures, while a robot vacuum cleaner rolls through the next room. The father buys a new car and, fascinated, demonstrates its automatic controls to his son.

The family has also switched to autopilot during the grieving process. There's no unloving interaction, nor would one call them dysfunctional. But their speechlessness in the face of shared grief is maddening. The father catches his son kissing the foreman. Instead of talking about the accidental outing, he pressures Daniel to confess and ask if he'll take over the company one day. And when he reveals his homosexuality to his unsurprised mother, she simply says she would have loved to have grandchildren.

The loss of a child must shake any marriage to its foundations. This relationship crumbles over the four years following the daughter's death, which the film captures. The pet dog, which belonged to Nadine, begs in vain for attention. People have enough to deal with on their own.

The father is moving out temporarily; he needs some space. He loads the essentials, including a black kettle grill, onto a forklift. Does he want to eat meat after the mother suggested abstaining from it more often in memory of her daughter? In fact, he'll serve his new love a grilled steak later.

He seeks solace in the choir and its new director. Hitting on her would be a cheap pun, and this isn't a film of cheap punchlines. Instead of caricaturing his characters for a few laughs, as is common in local cinema, he takes them seriously in all their awkwardness.

"Bagger Drama," which won the Young Director Award at the San Sebastián Film Festival and two awards in Germany at the Max Ophüls Film Festival, doesn't aim for too much and achieves more precisely because of that. This is thanks not only to the strong cast and straightforward script, but also to sophisticated visual aesthetics. Faces are sometimes harshly lit, then bathed in warm light. A couple's dialogue is filmed from above through a car sunroof, a surprising perspective, accompanied by "Heaven": The ballad by the hard rock band Gotthard develops into a leitmotif of this film, which nevertheless avoids becoming sentimental. That is one of its many small miracles.