German film

By Tracy

Last night I went to one of the last films of the 10th Audi Festival of German Films in Perth. (The Festival was held in five state capitals, but Perth had the smallest selection, running from the Thursday night through to the Monday.)

The offerings were divided into three: "German Currents", "Retro 2001-2011", both of which speak for themselves, and "Radical Docs", which the programme described as "taking you into the minds of radical lifestyles across the globe, be they in art, fashion or sports".

The film I saw was in the second category, and billed as a tragicomedy, which was roughly accurate. Made in 2001, "Berlin is in Germany" follows Martin, imprisoned in the Brandenburg penitentiary before the wall came down, and released after more than a decade into reunified Germany, a Berlin whose once-familiar east has changed all its street names.

Reading the blurbs beforehand, I expected something of a Rip Van Winkle tale, and it's true that the movie makes poignantly humorous contrasts between the "outside world" that Martin came from and the one he emerges into (planes in the sky where travel was once impossible, the constant ringing of mobile phones), where those who mattered in his previous life at first hardly recognise him. Or don't know what to do with him... 

But he's by no means been asleep: Martin's experiences in prison have shaped both his understanding of the regime that put him away, and his future struggles, through the otherwise-unlikely friendships or alliances formed during his incarceration.

The film has just enough lightness of touch to steer between traumatic political fable on the one hand and sentimentality on the other. At least part of this is due to the handling of the main roles (Martin firmly understated and well controlled by Jörg Schüttauf; his estranged wife again kept low-key by Julia Jäger), and to director Hannes Stöhr's emphasis on simplicity and restriction of the field -- the film doesn't try to bite off more than it can chew).

The only pity with this Festival was that Perth got so few of the films, relatively speaking. In Sydney, understandably, it ran from the 6th to the 18th of April. Several of the drama-thriller type films I would like to have seen were not showing here.

By the same token, we were spared Goethe!, which looks like a shocker. I know it's not fair to say that when I've not seen even the trailer, but any film whose blurb says, "The spirit of Shakespeare in Love is alive and well in this impeccably performed and beautifully decorated period piece", has given me fair warning... And that's without even taking into account the still on the back of the printed programme: a male-model-looking "Goethe" of vacant expression in low-necked frilled white shirt running along a dusty village street with what looks like a manuscript or letter in his hand. Why do films about writers always look like this?