The last two films shown in this 68 Berlinale, from Poland and
Germany, continued the conversation the festival has always carried with the
history and politics of what during the Cold War was Eastern Europe. Mug,
directed by Malgorzata Szumowska, and Thomas Stuber's In
the Aisles explore a current state of affairs, through
the lens of a village in southern Poland, and the interactions of Costco-style
warehouse employees in the former East Germany, regarding life in a
capitalistic environment as it affects ordinary folks. However, their overt or subtle critiques are
not against the new system, now in place for 25 years, but about the its impact
on the social fabric. Pointing at this films, Marx would have been pleased to show how alienation works,
and Freud would have been equally interested in the functioning of the super
ego. For the Frankfurt school, the pictures would be a field trip to dissect the
dominant ideology.
Mug is a modern
day Polish fairy tale that works seamlessly at two levels: the first one is a
restrained satire on consumption and materialism, made explicit in the opening
sequence, a YouTube-style video with frenzied customers on a super sale day. It
lays the subtext for the story involving a family of peasants. The second one makes
the various members of that family, owners of some land and cows, a microcosm
of Poland today. Traditional and
Catholic, the family has one black sheep, Jacek (Mateusz Kosciukiewicz), who
plans to leave for Britain (to wash dishes, or to become someone, depending on
whose family member is talking). The
director and writer Szumowska, an habitué of the Berlinale, describes with
loving care the rituals and customs of the family, rooted to the soil and the
Church, until an accident derails the plans of Jacek and makes him the “mug” of
the title. The second part of the film
is a transparent and intricate allegory about the “other” in Polish society; an exploration
of social and political identity; and most importantly, a search for a
place. 
Visually, Mug is
structured as a game between seeing and how we are seen. It proposes a way to
look at the Polish landscape, dreamy and romantic; and the Catholic Church,
with her folk traditions and scary practices like exorcism. This context of soil and culture frame the gently
ironic portraits of mothers, fathers and siblings. At the center is Jacek, a symbol representing
the fear of the other, in his physical deformity (like the monster created by
Dr. Frankenstein, alluded in the makeup) and as a political metaphor. Mug
is an interesting complement to the thriller Traces,
Agnezka Holland’s Berlinale entry last year, also an allegory about Poland
today that packed a punch.
German writer Clemens Meyer, born in 1977 in then East
Germany, has captured in novels and short stories the everyday life of ordinary
people as they are shaped by forces outside of their control, like the Wende (the change), or reunification of 1991. Director Thomas Stuber, a graduate from a German film school in 2011, also
born in East Germany, adapted with Meyer one of his short stories, a 25-page
account of a young man (Franz Rogowski) who begins to work in a warehouse operating
a lift fork, in eastern Germany. Minimalist,
with a lot of the action happening outside the frame, or left unexplained, even
though its impact propels the story, In
the Aisles works like Mug at two
levels. However, there is no explicit
laying out of the subject at the beginning, nor any specific moment where the
characters’ interactions point out to something else – namely the loss of
social cohesiveness and a sense of isolation.
The film works by an intriguing accumulation of details about how humans
figure out their most elementary bonds – friendship and love– and cope with
emotional catastrophes. Sandra Hüller (the daughter in Toni Erdmann) and And it is also a
very wry comedy about the absurdities of modern shopping and what goes on,
precisely, in the aisles. (One cannot
shop at Costco the same way).
Smart and poignant, In
the Aisles is every bit as fascinating as last year’s Berlinale Special In Times of Fading Light, a dramatic
comedy directed by Matti Geschonneck from a novel by Eugen Ruge, another writer
from East Germany. Both films show a cross section of the German Volk – high and low – as they cope with
the cards history deals them.
No comments:
Post a Comment