The 64th Berlinale: Mitteleuropa makes a comeback

Whenever I hear people dismiss movies as “fantasy” and make a hard distinction between film and life, I think to myself that it’s just a way of avoiding the power of cinema. Of course it’s not life—it’s the invocation of life, it’s in an ongoing dialogue with life.  Martin Scorsese *

Voila a heartfelt explanation about the pull of movies.  I have been coming to the Berlin Film Festival since 1985, and every year I land at Tegel airport with the same sense of excitement.  Politics, history, the state of European affairs, friendships, have always been ingredients in the mix. But the lure of flickering lights in the darkness of a theater has never abated.

This giant beanstalk growing into the February skies of a big city has already taken me to intriguing places, worlds and characters that I have enjoyed exploring, mightily enhanced by that library of Alexandria called the IPad.

A few thought about the films in competition.

Providing the star wattage for the red carpet of the opening night on February 7 was the quirky Wes Anderson’s historical fantasy The Grand Budapest Hotel. Recreating the Mitteleuropa of Berlin, Vienna and Prague, that nourished the filmmakers, painters, composers that we teach in film classes – Herr Lubitsch in Hollywood, then Ophuls and Wilder and those exiles in Los Angeles – Anderson finds inspiration in Stefan Zweig.  A Proust moment for me, because my grandmother loved the work of this Austrian; and I remember vividly her discussing his memoir, The World of Yesterday (1942), about the collapse of a cultural and artistic mindset. The Grand Budapest Hotel is both a wink to the shipwreck of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the winds of two wars (yes, all stereotypes are there) and a valentine to classical Hollywood. But the sensibility –the mix and match, the plot, the visual style, the exaggerations – is post-modern and a tad obvious. Wes Anderson can only recreate the world of Central Europe Lubistch so lovingly replicated in the Los Angeles lots. Or to say it differently, the sets of The Shop around the Corner look more Hungarian than the production design possibilities offered by Babelsberg, the former UFA studios south of Berlin.  The movie provides for a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

The Monuments Men, directed by George Clooney with a knockout cast of veteran comedians, is mostly a WWII comedy about the team of art historians put together to salvage and recover artwork from German and eventual Soviet plunder. (The first account of these thrilling adventures I read was The Rape of Europa and a subsequent documentary a few years ago).   It’s a strange picture (there was a quick boo in the press screening I attended), structured around a series of anecdotes – mostly funny, some tragic, with a dash of thwarted romance involving a stiff Cate Blanchett and a straight arrow Matt Damon as a Met curator. One can see the time-honored conventions of the WWII films from the 1940s to the 70s – the thrilling ones like The Longest Day, and the silly ones, such as The Dirty Dozen and Kelly’s Heroes – in the handling of a group of men initially mismatched to the task.  The best moments are the interaction of Bill Murray and Bob Balaban, and all the appearances of John Goodman. Lacking the brilliant savagery of Inglorious Basterds, or the poignancy of Saving Private Ryan, The Monuments Men is a divertimento, fun to watch.  The book and documentary are much more gripping, as the b&w photos of the real men shown over the credit sequence imply.  Can’t wait to read the copy I bought at the Filmmuseum, on the flight home.

The German entry Beloved Sisters was another crowd pleaser.  Directed by the veteran Dominik Graf as a three-hour television miniseries, the story centers around a young Friederich Schiller and his relationship with two sisters, one of which he married while the  other became his biographer.  It’s a fictionalized account based on historical speculation – the director discussed it in the press conference – about the romantic triangle entangling the literary giant, over thirteen years until his death at age 45.   German television has the resources, the talents and the craft to recreate daily life in Weimar and the countryside in the late eighteenth century, on location, making the conflicts believable.  It’s Jane Austen auf Deutsch – great costumes, an intriguing conflict, and excellent dramatic writing.  I can’t help but think that if we were in the 1950s, a young Truffaut would have vilified this ‘tradition de qualite’.  I would have paid no attention to this malcontent’s comments.

* Martin Scorsese, “The Persisting Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema”, The New York Review of Book, 15 August 2013.  I’ve uploaded it on my class website, http://www.csun.edu/~med61203/

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On German styles

 German presence in the competition section of the Berlinale has been – for my money – unusually strong this year.  Two were my favorites.

Quite a splash – on a formal and thematic level – was created by Kreuzweg (Via Crucis) an austere theological drama directed by Dietrich Bruggemann and co-written with his sister Anna.  The filmmaker and his sibling – young, blond, on the casual side of things – came up with a stunning piece of filmmaking, probing a radical understanding of sacrifice and the communion of saints within a Catholic frame of reference.  Out of left field.  Like Kieslowski’s modern-day take on the Ten Commandments, the Bruggemann siblings link the 14 Stations of the Cross – a particularly Catholic and moving Holy Week tradition reliving Our Lord’s journey to a criminal’s death – to a modern day young girl’s decision to offer her life so that her baby brother can be cured.  

Each of the stations is one long take, some fifteen minutes long, and all except three with a stationary camera.  In the meticulously staged movement of the characters – driving a car, at the dinner table, in a doctor’s office, a church and a hospital – the film lays out the theological groundwork in the form of exacting conversations between the protagonist - aptly or obviously named Maria – and the priest preparing her for Confirmation (Florian Stetter, the Schiller of Beloved Sisters) and her iron-steeled mother.  Operating from fundamentalist premises, these two figures of authority are gauging a battle for the soul of a kid who longs for beauty and goodness and is struggling to get there.

The correspondence between the suffering of Christ and the Via Dolorosa of this young girl is made terrifyingly explicit in the titles of each episode.  Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest becomes an indispensable reference since the literary original and the film adaptation are also examining questions of mercy and grace – the two unspoken issues at play in Kreuzweg – none of which grows in the hearts of the adult antagonists, who live their faith from an arid platform of duty.  Unlike Bunuel, who went for the jugular in Nazarin, showing how a Christian living the Gospel to the extreme should behave, Kreuzweg describes how the lack of radical joy and openness to the other  – the message perhaps that most identifies Cardinal Bergoglio since becoming Pope Francis last March - leads to spiritual starvation. 

What is a fecund way to live the faith, the Bruggemann siblings seem to be asking when all has come to an end.  Their response is theologically opaque; no hopeful plunge into  “Tout est grace”, like Diary of a Country Priest.  And from a cinematographic viewpoint, the Bruggemanns also look through a glass, darkly:  a slow crane shot rises to a gray sky from the tomb where Maria has been laid to rest.  A hint, perhaps, that the sacrifice has been accepted and the mysterious workings of grace have saved the soul. In the upward mobility of the camera may be hidden the response.

Another approach to cinematic language is at play in Zwischen Welten (Inbetween Worlds), a no-nonsense film by Feo Aladag.  You wouldn’t know by the name that you are dealing with a cool beautiful blond, with a Ph.D. and an acting career, who spent two months last year in Afghanistan with a small crew, including a superb female cinematographer, illustrating the drama contained in the title.  One could be tempted to describe her as a Germanic Kathryn Bigelow exploring a male universe unhinged by violence. But Ms. Aladag’s Sturm und Drang is of a different nature.  The film is an effectively built counterpoint between a young Afghani translator (Mohsin Ahmady) and the German commander (Ronald Zehrfeld) of a small German unit in charge of helping the local militia defend their village from Al-Qaeda.  This interaction succeeds on a dramatic and psychological level because Aladag quietly pursues a documentary-style strategy - location shooting, extensive use of real time, extensive research– that pays on handsomely by creating a Middle Eastern world alien to the Europeans and fraught with danger for an Afghani who works for the occupying forces.  On the German side of the equation, the film doggedly explores the conflicting demands of duty and humanity, of following orders and obeying the conscience; on the Afghani, the translator’s unreachable goals of a safe, stable world (his visa requests for Germany and the US keep getting rejected) ultimately lead to tragedy. 

Interestingly, Zwischen Welten eschews both the blunt political commentary and the melodramatic temptations of effects-laden context-free war films like The Hurt Locker or Zero Dark Thirty (there is a space for these works, I know).  It’s a film worth watching.