German

Stream of the Week: WESTERN – alienated man goes native

by
Meinhard Neumann in WESTERN

In the evocative and thought-provoking German drama Western, a crew of German hardhats sets up a construction camp on a remote Bulgarian mountainside to build a water power plant.  They aren’t cultural tourists and certainly not diplomats, and they see the nearby Bulgarian village as a distraction from, even an impediment to, their project.  Of the Germans, only Meinhard (Meinhard Neumann) seeks out contact with the Bulgarians.

Writer-director Valeska Grisebach lets the audience connect the dots about what’s going on. The Germans and the Bulgarians have encounters at the camp, at the riverside swimming hole and in the village.  As one would expect from any modern German filmmaker, Grisebach shines a harsh light on the German sense of superiority and entitlement.  One German even says, “They know we’re back. 70 years later, but we’re back.”  But the characters have dimension.  The blustery project boss Vincent (Reinhardt Wetrek) is an asshole, but even he has his own personal and job problems.

Of the Germans, only Meinhard makes Bulgarian friends.  Meinhard is a loner among his co-workers, yet he seems to be searching for something among the Bulgarians and their alien language and culture.  Meinhard is well-traveled and looks like he Has Lived a Life.  He’s not a misfit (he’s very functional), but he hasn’t found where he DOES fit.

What has caused Meinhard’s alienation?  That’s not clear, but it doesn’t need to be.  Hell, Jack Nicholson just shows up alienated in every movie from Five Easy Pieces through The Passenger, and that works out just fine.

Meinhard has no ties.  Asked if he is homesick, he queries, “what is homesick?” He thrives in the simpler culture, and this solitary man finds himself becoming social.  He develops a deep trusting friendship with a local leader, Adrian (Syuleyman Alilov Letifov).

We have the advantage of subtitles, so we know what is being said in German and in Bulgarian. The characters are not understanding about 90% of what is spoken in the other language.  The friendship between Meinhard and Adrian transcends language. The highlight of Western is a beautiful dialogue in which the two don’t understand all (or even most) of each other’s words.

Meinhard goes native.  Will it work out for him?  The Germans and the Bulgarians learn that they are competing for the same scarce resource.  The Germans are always on the verge of provoking a riot.  The insular Bulgarians are wary of strangers.

Western is not a brisk movie, but Grisebach paces it just about perfectly.  This character-driven story is a sequence of revelations, and we need Grisebach to take her time. Grisebach uses the handheld camera effectively to plunge us right into the experience of the characters, who are often trying to discover something about the other guys.

Meinhard Neumann and Syuleyman Alilov Letifov in WESTERN

So that’s what is on the screen. I was astounded to learn that Grisebach used no professional actors in Western.  She reportedly auditioned 600 working folks to get her cast.  She snagged two sublime natural talents in Meinhard Neumann and Syuleyman Alilov Letifov. Not only that, but Grisebach did not use a script.

Quoted by Stefan Dobroiu in Cineuropa, Grisebach said, “I wanted to get closer to the solitary, inflated, often melancholic male characters of the western.”  Grisebach may not have intended it, but she nailed the Going Native subgenre of Westerns, where a first world man becomes immersed into a native culture, which he ultimately embraces.  Examples include A Man Called Horse and Dances with Wolves.

I saw Western in October at Cinema Club Silicon Valley. It played the Cannes and Toronto film festivals in 2017. Western can be streamed from Amazon (included with Prime), iTunes, YouTube and Google Play.

Stream of the Week: PHOENIX – riveting psychodrama, wowzer ending

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Ronald Zehfeld and nina Hoss in PHOENIX
Ronald Zehfeld and Nina Hoss in PHOENIX

In the German psychological drama Phoenix, Nina Hoss plays Nelly, an Auschwitz survivor whose face has been destroyed by a Nazi gunshot; her sister has arranged for plastic surgery to reconstruct her face. When Nelly gets her new face, we accompany her on an intense quest.

Writer-director Christian Petzold is an economical story-teller, respectful of the audience’s intelligence. Watching a border guard’s reaction to her disfigurement and hearing snippets from the sister and the plastic surgeon, we gradually piece together her back story. The doctor asks what seems like a very good question – Why would a Jewish woman successfully rooted in London return to Germany in 1938? The answer to that question involves a Woman Loving Too Much.

The sister plans to re-settle both of them in Israel, but Nelly is obsessed with finding her husband. She does find her husband, who firmly believes that Nelly is dead. But he notes that the post-surgery Nelly resembles his pre-war wife, and he has a reason to have her impersonate the real Nelly. So he has the real Nelly (who he doesn’t think IS the real Nelly) pretending to be herself. It’s kind of a reverse version of The Return of Martin Guerre.

It’s the ultimate masquerade. How would you feel while listening to your spouse describe you in detail to a stranger?

Nina Hoss is an uncommonly gifted actress. Here she acts with her face fully bandaged for the first third of the film. We ache for her Nelly’s obsessive need for her husband – and when she finally finds him, she still doesn’t really have him.

As the husband, Ronald Zehfeld shows us the magnetism that attracts Nina, along with the brusque purposefulness that he thinks he needs to survive and flourish in the post-war Germany.

Christian Petzold and Nina Hoss collaborated on the recent film Barbara (he won the Berlin Film Festival’s Silver Bear for his work). About Barbara, I wrote

“Given that’s it difficult to imagine how anyone else could have improved Barbara, I’ll be looking for Petzold’s next movie.”

Well, here it is, and it’s gripping.

The ending of the film is both surprising and satisfying. Several people in my audience let out an audible “Wow!” at the same time.

Phoenix was one of my Best Movies of 2015. It is available to stream from Netflix Instant, Amazon Video, YouTube and Google Play.

THE BRA: just your average silent Azerbaijani comedy

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THE BRA

In the charming Azerbaijani-German comedy The Bra, train tracks run through the narrow main street of a remote Azerbaijani village.  The villagers set up cafe tables and hang their laundry across the tracks.  When the daily train arrives, a 10-year-old boy runs up the tracks sounding the alarm, and the villagers scramble to clear the tracks.  Occasionally, the train snags an object or a piece of laundry, which is rescued by the train’s mournful engineer Nurian (Serbian actor Predrag ‘Miki’ Manojlovic). Nurian then hikes from his even more remote home back to the village to return the item.

One day, the train ends up with a blue brassiere. Nurian goes door-to-door, holding up the bra to each woman in the village, hoping to find its owner. Along with many doors slammed in his face, he gets a variety of responses from village women. Of course all this is absurd, and The Bra is a triumph of absurdist humor.

One day, the train ends up with a blue brassiere. Nurian goes door-to-door, holding up the bra to each woman in the village, hoping to find its owner. Along with many doors slammed in his face, he gets a variety of responses from village women. Of course all this is absurd, and The Bra is a triumph of absurdist humor

Subtitles are unnecessary in The Bra because there is no discernible dialogue.  It’s not a silent film – we hear the ambient noises and the human characters mutter and yell, but we can’t distinguish what they are saying.  Like a silent film, the actors convey their feelings by what is essentially pantomime.  And it’s all more naturalistic than it may seem on paper.

The Bra is the work of German director and co-writer Veit Helmer, who has been making films in Central Asisn nations for a decade.  The cast is Central Asian and Pan-European, with some recognizable faces like Denis Lavant from France and Paz Vega from Spain.  The performance by Manojlovic, so filled with humanity, is very special.

The little boy who runs up the tracks is a homeless orphan, cruelly treated by the villagers. The relationship that Nurian builds with the boy is a touching counterpoint to the film’s many comic situations.

Now I need to say that The Wife hated this movie and found it offensive to women; I think this was an aberration caused by her physical discomfort during the screening. I heard women laughing heartily throughout the film and other women told me how much they liked the film, which was, after all, a festival favorite among all genders.

Cinequest hosted the US premiere of The Bra, and was one of the hits of the festival. The Bra won the jury prize for Best Narrative Feature (Comedy) and, when a prime time screening needed to be filled, programmers called on The Bra. Yes, this is an Azerbaijani comedy without any dialogue, but it’s a Must See if you get the chance

STYX: a confident woman with no good choices

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Susanne Wolff in STYX

In the gripping drama, Rieke (Susanne Wolff) is a woman who intends to pilot her sailboat on a solo voyage from Europe to Ascension Island off the coast of Africa. That’s one woman, all alone on her boat for 3,000 miles of open ocean.

Oozing matter of fact confidence, Rieke seems well-equipped for the adventure. She is fit, highly skilled, an experienced sailor and provisioned up with top quality gear and supplies. Rieke’s day job is as an emergency physician, and we see that no crisis situation seems to faze her.

In the first part of Styx, we think we’re watching a survival tale – woman against nature. But when a dramatic storm hits, we’re afraid for her but she’s not.

After the storm, she faces the first situation that she can’t handle on her own – one of life-and-death that has been spawned by a humanitarian crisis bigger than any individual. Frustratingly, she knows exactly what must be done, but she can’t do it herself; she must rely on civilized nations behaving according to expected norms. But are those expected norms available to everyone? And will it come?

Rieke’s persona is based on acting to solve every problem. But here, there are no good choices.

This is a German film about a German character, but almost all the dialogue is in English, the international language of navigation.

The second feature for director Wolfgang Fischer, Styx has won film festival awards, including at the Berlin International Film Festival. I saw Styx before its release at Silicon Valley’s Cinema Club. I’ll let you know when it becomes widely available.

Cinequest: BERLIN FALLING

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Tom Wlaschiha and Ken Duken in BERLIN FALLING

In the intense German thriller Berlin Falling, Frank (Ken Duken) is a troubled vet hoping to reunite at Christmas with his estranged wife and kid.  But he picks up the hitchhiker Andreas (Tom Wlaschiha of Game of Thrones), who turns out to be any contemporary European’s worst nightmare (exactly what kind of nightmare is revealed at the end).  Andreas subdues Frank with a highly personalized threat and forces him him to engage in a horrific terrorist attack, complete with its own chilling Isis video.  It looks like there is no way out for Frank, and Berlin Falling ticks on like a time bomb to its uncompromising and violent conclusion.

With its comments on terrorism, immigration and xenophobia, Berlin Falling covers much of the same ground as this year’s German Oscar submission, In the Fade, but with a huge plot twist.  It’s the writing-directing feature debut for actor Ken Duken, who plays Frank.  It all works as a nail-biter, but it’s a bit exhausting.  I saw Berlin Falling at Cinequest.

Stream of the week: PHOENIX – riveting psychodrama, wowzer ending

by

Ronald Zehfeld and nina Hoss in PHOENIX
Ronald Zehfeld and Nina Hoss in PHOENIX

In the German psychological drama Phoenix, Nina Hoss plays Nelly, an Auschwitz survivor whose face has been destroyed by a Nazi gunshot; her sister has arranged for plastic surgery to reconstruct her face. When Nelly gets her new face, we accompany her on an intense quest.

Writer-director Christian Petzhold is an economical story-teller, respectful of the audience’s intelligence. Watching a border guard’s reaction to her disfigurement and hearing snippets from the sister and the plastic surgeon, we gradually piece together her back story. The doctor asks what seems like a very good question – Why would a Jewish woman successfully rooted in London return to Germany in 1938? The answer to that question involves a Woman Loving Too Much.

The sister plans to re-settle both of them in Israel, but Nelly is obsessed with finding her husband. She does find her husband, who firmly believes that Nelly is dead. But he notes that the post-surgery Nelly resembles his pre-war wife, and he has a reason to have her impersonate the real Nelly. So he has the real Nelly (who he doesn’t think IS the real Nelly) pretending to be herself. It’s kind of a reverse version of The Return of Martin Guerre.

It’s the ultimate masquerade. How would you feel while listening to your spouse describe you in detail to a stranger?

Nina Hoss is an uncommonly gifted actress. Here she acts with her face fully bandaged for the first third of the film. We ache for her Nelly’s obsessive need for her husband – and when she finally finds him, she still doesn’t really have him.

As the husband, Ronald Zehfeld shows us the magnetism that attracts Nina, along with the brusque purposefulness that he thinks he needs to survive and flourish in the post-war Germany.

Christian Petzold and Nina Hoss collaborated on the recent film Barbara (he won the Berlin Film Festival’s Silver Bear for his work). About Barbara, I wrote

“Given that’s it difficult to imagine how anyone else could have improved Barbara, I’ll be looking for Petzold’s next movie.”

Well, here it is, and it’s gripping.

The ending of the film is both surprising and satisfying. Several people in my audience let out an audible “Wow!” at the same time.

Phoenix was one of my Best Movies of 2015. It is available to stream from Netflix Instant, Amazon Video, YouTube and Google Play.

IN THE FADE: a moral choice in a revenge thriller

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Diane Kruger in IN THE FADE, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

Diane Kruger gives a brilliant performance in the searing and emotionally devastating German thriller In the Fade.  Kruger plays a German woman whose husband and child are murdered.  Her life essentially disintegrates, as a whodunit carries on mostly beyond her.  Katja is not exactly the German Betty Crocker.   She’s tatted up and has married a Turkish Kurdish man who is a reformed drug dealer.  But her grief is universal, and so is her impulse for revenge.  Her husband’s attorney Danilo (Denis Moschitto) leads her on a quest for justice.  But she must decide whether to take justice into her own hands.  And how. And at what cost.  The final scene in In the Fade is unforgettable.

German writer-director Fatih Akin, like Katja’s husband, is the son of Turkish immigrants.  In In the Fade’s taut one hour, 46 minutes, he has crafted a pulsating page-turner.  It can’t be easy to keep the pace of a movie from grinding down when the protagonist is plunging into a puddle of grief, but Akin pulls it off.  The horror of the murder is not shown on-screen, but Akin funds a way to make it even more horrible than if we had watched it happen.  Akin has made a successful thriller here, not a “message movie”, but he also effectively addresses the topical issues of immigration, racism and terrorism.

Diane Kruger in IN THE FADE, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

Diane Kruger won Best Actress at last year’s Cannes film festival for this performance.  She creates a fundamentally vibrant Katja, who must react to a horrific loss, and then to a series of indignities capped by brutal gut-punch from her mother-in-law.  This is a profoundly authentic depiction of grief.  When any chance for resolution is jerked away from Katja by a shocking injustice, Kruger takes Katja into steely resolve.

Kruger is an impressively versatile actress.  She’s equally good as an American detective with Asberger’s in the absorbing American miniseries The Bridge and as a whim-driven queen in the French costume drama Farewell, My Queen.

Denis Moschitto and Diane Kruger in IN THE FADE, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

In the Fade is filled with excellent performances. Besides Moschitto, I’ll point out

  • Johannes Krisch as cinema’s most despicable defense attorney, loathsome down to the prefunctory danke with which he ends each argument.
  • Hening Peker as the earnest-to-a-fault police investigator, doing everything rationally and by the book, but not in a way comfortable for our sympathetic victim, Katja.
  • Ulrich Tukur as a character who has found serenity in doing the right thing, difficult as it may have been.

In the Fade won a Golden Globe for Best Foreign language Picture last Sunday and
opens this weekend in San Francisco.

WESTERN: alienated man goes native

by

Meinhard Neumann in WESTERN

In the evocative and thought-provoking German drama Western, a crew of German hardhats sets up a construction camp on a remote Bulgarian mountainside to build a water power plant.  They aren’t cultural tourists and certainly not diplomats, and they see the nearby Bulgarian village as a distraction from, even an impediment to, their project.  Of the Germans, only Meinhard (Meinhard Neumann) seeks out contact with the Bulgarians.

Writer-director Valeska Grisebach lets the audience connect the dots about what’s going on. The Germans and the Bulgarians have encounters at the camp, at the riverside swimming hole and in the village.  As one would expect from any modern German filmmaker, Grisebach shines a harsh light on the German sense of superiority and entitlement.  One German even says, “They know we’re back. 70 years later, but we’re back.”  But the characters have dimension.  The blustery project boss Vincent (Reinhardt Wetrek) is an asshole, but even he has his own personal and job problems.

Of the Germans, only Meinhard makes Bulgarian friends.  Meinhard is a loner among his co-workers, yet he seems to be searching for something among the Bulgarians and their alien language and culture.  Meinhard is well-traveled and looks like he Has Lived a Life.  He’s not a misfit (he’s very functional), but he hasn’t found where he DOES fit.

What has caused Meinhard’s alienation?  That’s not clear, but it doesn’t need to be.  Hell, Jack Nicholson just shows up alienated in every movie from Five Easy Pieces through The Passenger, and that works out just fine.

Meinhard has no ties.  Asked if he is homesick, he queries, “what is homesick?” He thrives in the simpler culture, and this solitary man finds himself becoming social.  He develops a deep trusting friendship with a local leader, Adrian (Syuleyman Alilov Letifov).

We have the advantage of subtitles, so we know what is being said in German and in Bulgarian. The characters are not understanding about 90% of what is spoken in the other language.  The friendship between Meinhard and Adrian transcends language. The highlight of Western is a beautiful dialogue in which the two don’t understand all (or even most) of each other’s words.

Meinhard goes native.  Will it work out for him?  The Germans and the Bulgarians learn that they are competing for the same scarce resource.  The Germans are always on the verge of provoking a riot.  The insular Bulgarians are wary of strangers.

Western is not a brisk movie, but Grisebach paces it just about perfectly.  This character-driven story is a sequence of revelations, and we need Grisebach to take her time. Grisebach uses the handheld camera effectively to plunge us right into the experience of the characters, who are often trying to discover something about the other guys.

Meinhard Neumann and Syuleyman Alilov Letifov in WESTERN

So that’s what is on the screen. I was astounded to learn that Grisebach used no professional actors in Western.  She reportedly auditioned 600 working folks to get her cast.  She snagged two sublime natural talents in Meinhard Neumann and Syuleyman Alilov Letifov. Not only that, but Grisebach did not use a script.

Quoted by Stefan Dobroiu in Cineuropa, Grisebach said, “I wanted to get closer to the solitary, inflated, often melancholic male characters of the western.”  Grisebach may not have intended it, but she nailed the Going Native subgenre of Westerns, where a first world man becomes immersed into a native culture, which he ultimately embraces.  Examples include A Man Called Horse and Dances with Wolves.

I saw Western in October at Camera Cinema Club. It played the Cannes and Toronto film festivals in 2017. Western has a US distributor (The Cinema Guild), and a US theatrical release is planned for 2018.  Western is a strong film and should satisfy art house audiences.

Cinequest: ALOYS

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ALOYS
ALOYS

The title character of the Swiss drama Aloys is a solitary and harshly anti-social guy who repulses all gestures of human kindness and interest by others.  He is a private detective who specializes in documenting infidelity through undercover surveillance.  Using hidden microphones and cameras, he is steadfast in always avoiding contacting with his subjects.  Then, in a moment of recklessness, he allows someone to rock his life, which results in the riveting story of Aloys.

An unknown woman steals his surveillance tapes and taunts him over the phone.  In a completely original twist, she teases him with what she calls “phone walking”, daring him to use aural clues to visualize himself in places and situations and, ultimately find her.  At first, his desperation to find her creates an obsession worthy of The Conversation.  But then his imagination is unleashed, and he creates fantasies at once both more real and more outlandish.  This is not a movie that you’ve seen before.

Aloys is on a thrill ride that he can’t get off.  What is real, and what is fantasy? Can we be what we imagine?  Can someone trade in his own life for a more appealing fantasy life?  Can the fantasy be sustained?   Aloys delivers surprise after surprise for the audience.

TONI ERDMANN: father and daughter, laugh and marvel

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TONI ERDMANN
Sandra Hüller and Peter Simonischek in TONI ERDMANN

Toni Erdmann is a MUST SEE. You might not expect an almost three-hour German comedy to break through, but I’ve seen it, and I think that it should win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Picture.  Writer-director Maren Ade gives us a woman’s perspective of a father-daughter relationship, creating a totally original and unforgettable father who takes prankstering into performance art.

Ines (Sandra Hüller) is a hard charging international management consultant.  She is somewhat estranged from her dad Winfried (Peter Simonischek), an under achieving music teacher.  You get the impression that Winfried wasn’t the most responsible parent. Regretting the state of their relationship and unable to relate to the workaholic that she’s become, he decides to impose himself on her life. He takes an extended vacation and shows up uninvited at her current corporate gig in Romania – and reinvents himself into a corporate alter ego who crashes her business meetings. It’s hilarious.

Winfried is a compulsive jokester of uncommon imagination, relentless and deviousness. The brilliance in Peter Simonischek’s performance is the devilish determination in his eyes (“Yes, I AM really going there”).  He gets the most out of a set of gag false teeth than any single prop in cinema history.

Ines must react to Winfried’s onslaught of ever more elaborate, outrageous and high stakes practical jokes by maintaining a straight face and carrying on without giving away her shock, embarrassment and desperation. She’s on the verge of abject mortification for the entire movie. Sandra Hüller is a master of the take and the slow burn. It’s a remarkable performance.

It’s almost worth watching the whole movie for a deadpan rendition of Whitney Houston’s Greatest Love of All“, all the funnier because it contains the lyric “they can’t take away my dignity”. There’s the funniest nude brunch you’ll ever witness. And the most random Romanian folk monster. Yet Toni Erdmann will still leave you choked up at the end.

Now the daughter is obsessively ambitious, and she has embraced cut throat global capitalism. And, if the father were related to you, you’d often want to kill him. If you hate these people, you’re not going to like the movie. But I think that Ade has made their human needs so universal, that you’ll become invested in them. I sure did.

I saw Toni Erdmann at the Mill Valley Film Festival, and I’ve been waiting months to share it with you. It’s #3 on my Best Movies of 2016. Toni Erdmann opens Friday, January 20 in San Francisco and wider throughout the Bay Area on January 27.