Kirschblüten (Cherry Blossoms, Germany/France 2008)

Hokusai's 'Red Fuji'

I enjoyed this film that sneaked out in the UK on a single print from Dogwoof – who appear to have offered it no support at all. In Germany it was a significant hit (1.1 million admissions) and it seems to have had a reasonable distribution in North America. The reviews in the UK were generally OK I think, but in the US I’ve come across some real stinkers in which the filmmaker is accused of banality and ‘hippie fripperies’. It’s clearly a film that touches the ’superior art’ button in some critics. I know I’m prone to this kind of response, so I’ll tread carefully.

Doris Dörrie is a German filmmaker who I’ve tended to associate with comedies – often about gender relations. I’m not sure that I’ve seen any of her earlier films. If I have, I don’t remember. I watched this film without any other preconceptions and was quickly aware that the narrative in the first half closely follows that of Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953). Perhaps more surprising, the second half of the film corresponds more closely to aspects of Zhang Yimou’s Riding Along for Thousands of Miles and also includes sequences that could remind audiences of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. In a way, none of this is surprising since the central narrative ideas are universal. However, any filmmaker foregrounding a debt to Ozu needs to tread carefully. I thought Dörrie’s script and direction, and especially the performances of her leads, kept the narrative simple and provided a moving experience for the audience. Others clearly don’t agree.

Trudi (Hannelore Elsner) und Rudi (Elmar Wepper) – the parents

If you don’t know Tokyo Story, it involves an older couple living in Osaka who decide at short notice to visit their grown-up children in Tokyo. Their son and daughter have busy lives with jobs and families and the parents feel as if they are imposing. They visit a spa to relieve the burden and the only real welcome they receive is from their dead son’s young widow. There is also another son who doesn’t live in Tokyo. Dörrie locates her parental couple in rural Bavaria and their children in Berlin and Tokyo. Ozu’s young widow becomes their daughter’s lesbian partner. Dörrie also utilises two other Ozu traits – trains and what has been termed the ‘pillow shot’. The film is a rail fetishist’s dream with numerous railway scenes in both Germany and Japan. The ‘pillow shot’ in Ozu’s mise en scène is a ‘cutaway’ to a shot of a deserted street or landscape placed between the shots of characters inside buildings and engaged in some form of discourse. Personally, I thought that Dörrie used this idea this very well and I didn’t find the images banal.

There are a number of specific Japanese elements in the German sequences that become of great significance when the story moves to Tokyo. The first is the work of the artist Hokusai and specifically his famous series of woodblock prints, 36 Views of Mount Fuji produced in the 1830s. Hokusai was very popular in Japan and woodblock prints were arguably the world’s first mass medium. Contrasted with this is a much more modern Japanese cultural form, butoh – a form of contemporary dance developed in the 1950s. Both the relatively old and the new japanese cultural forms have fans in the West and Dörrie  uses this as the basis for the trip to Japan. The Zhang Yimou film Riding Along For Thousands of Miles sees a father travelling to rural China to film the folk opera that was his dying son’s research objective. In Cherry Blossoms, the quest is to see one of Hokusai’s views  of Fuji, the ’shy mountain’. The quest means engagement with a totally different language and culture and finding a sympathetic local to act as a guide.

Japanese culture produces many festivals, often associated with seasonal phenomena and the spirits that inhabit places of natural beauty. The blooming of the cherry tree for a few weeks in Spring is the signal for ‘viewing parties’ – social gatherings beneath the trees. (The festival is known as hanami.) Dörrie  uses one of these in a Tokyo park as a central focus for her Japan-set narrative – one in which a bewildered German tries to find some form of spiritual connection. Unlike Coppola whose film controversially offers a postmodernist view of Tokyo, Dörrie just lets us struggle with her German character to comprehend another culture through mundane actions like buying a cabbage. If this is cinematic banality (“unoriginal and boring”) for some critics, I think that they must inhabit very different worlds to the one I experience. 

I think that most adults in their thirties with ageing parents or most couples in their sixties with grown-up children will find this film to be moving and gently provocative in thinking about how they feel as parents and children. If it also gets anyone interested in Ozu, Zhang, Hokusai or simply visiting Tokyo that would be a bonus. I’d certainly recommend it. The music is also terrific with some pieces by Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Here is the trailer from the film. Spoiler – it rather gives away the plot twists, but apart from that gives a fair indication of the film.

Critics and film – the same old story

Most Friday nights I subject myself to a form of torture known as the Newsnight Review on BBC2 TV, a programme that rarely fails to leave me fuming. My main gripe is that the programme parades an array of cultural critics who collectively have around seven or eight minutes on four or five of the week’s new productions. Each of the critics tends to have a specific area of expertise, but they are required to speak on all of the items. Very occasionally there is someone with expertise in cinema, but films are regularly reviewed – usually the major Hollywood offering, but sometimes a European film (never anything from India, China, Africa etc.)

The idea of an educated liberal elite who are able to speak about all art forms is a British cultural tradition. There are some things to be said in favour of this approach, but mostly it creates problems. The critics on shows like these rarely have the space to say anything vaguely theoretical or ‘intellectual’ so discourse is at the level of genteel discussion. (The programme has in the last few years ditched the older and more curmudgeonly critics like Tom Paulin who could often be entertaining in his ignorance of popular culture as well as sharply analytical.) The real problem is that the British tradition is still mired in a worldview that recognises writers, fine artists and other high art practitioners, but pretty clueless about cinema and by extension filmed drama on television.

On last night’s show the four topics were an opera, Dr Atomic, the Picasso exhibition at the National Gallery, Red Riding (a trilogy of Channel 4 films) and the ‘Eurothriller’,  The International. The quartet of critics, Paul Morley (popular music and popular culture generally), Jeanette Winterson (novelist), Tom Service (classical music) and Tim Marlow (chair and art critic) referred to both Picasso and the opera’s composer John Adams, but when it came to the film and TV material, the references were only to the writer of the source novels for the television film and to the actors involved. 

I haven’t seen either The International or Red Riding (which airs during the coming month), but I have got some sense of what they are about and what disappoints me is the refusal to see the medium of ‘filmed entertainment’ as worthy of proper coverage. It has long been the case that UK television has been discussed in terms of its writers and producers and virtually never in terms of its directors, cinematographers, designers, editors or any other creative personnel other than the actors. Red Riding is a major production based on a quartet of novels by Yorkshire-born (currently Tokyo domiciled) David Peace. Peace has received plenty of recent attention having developed as a cult crime writer over several years. His recent ‘novelisation’ of the legendary football manager Brian Clough’s disastrous 44 day reign at Leeds United has also been adapted as a feature film and The Damned United is released in a few weeks. So, I have no problem with a discussion of Red Riding in terms of an adaptation of Peace’s work. Yet the trilogy was written for television (melding four stories into three two-hour films) by Tony Grisoni, himself a relatively high profile figure in the British film industry after work with Michael Winterbottom and Terry Gilliam. The films were a co-production between Channel 4 and Revolution Films (the company owned by Michael Winterbottom and Andrew Eaton) and together they represent a significant investment in UK filmmaking. Each of the films is directed by a significant UK director (Julian Jarrold, Anand Tucker and James Marsh) – surely this deserves some kind of comment? As it was, the critics mostly discussed whether the film (the first of the trilogy) was a faithful adaptation and whether this was proof that British television could match recent US TV drama (something of an obsession with UK television critics).

The same issue arises with The International. This was discussed in terms of a mainstream feature in which Clive Owen and Naomi Watts were underused in a film that clearly failed to be a Bond thriller or a Bourne adventure. Other than this, the main discussion was about the theme of corrupt bankers. In the current circumstances focus on corrupt bankers is understandable, but the big question is why nobody was interested in this as a Tom Tykwer film. Tykwer has been a controversial figure with plenty of gainsayers, but in Run, Lola Run (1998) he gave a much-needed boost to European filmmaking in the international market-place and he recently had a major European hit with Perfume (2006).  His 2002 film, Heaven, from a script by Krzysztof Kieslowski and starring Cate Blanchett, was poorly received (unjustly in my opinion). Both Lola and Heaven sound like they were important references for The International yet the film was discussed as just another Hollywood thriller. Officially the film is a German/US co-production with some UK involvement. There are four US independents and three German companies involved. The film has been sold to Sony and Disney in terms of international distribution. Although it has some fans, the general US feeling is that it doesn’t work. OK, but wouldn’t it be more useful to discuss the difficulties of ‘international’ filmmaking in English for European directors – or perhaps, the difficulties that American audiences (and Europeans in love with Hollywood) have with these kinds of films. Whatever Tykwer’s successes or failures, he at least needs recognition as the director of this film.

Update: BBC reviewers on Radio 4’s Saturday Review programme recovered the corporation’s reputation a little by discussing Red Riding and mentioning both the screenwriter and director of the first film – perhaps they should take over Late Review?

The Reader (US/Germany 2008)

Kate Winslet with director, Stephen Daldry

This film has met with mixed reviews in the UK, with a resistance to the piecemeal structure of the film and to the presence of British stars in so German a story.  I’m not sure I should be including it here on a world film website – which is almost why I am putting up this post.  Financed by Neunte Babelsberg (a subsidiary of Studio Babelsberg), Mirage Films (a joint production company set up by Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella based in the UK) and The Weinstein Company, therefore without major conglomerate studio financing.  However, it has English language stars in Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes (Winslet is bothering the nominations twice with this and her performance in Revolutionary Road).

The supporting cast has a number of well-known German actors, not least Bruno Ganz, Wenders’ angel in Himmel über Berlin (who recently took on the potentially poisoned chalice role of Hitler in Der Untergang and who appeared in the German Foreign Language Oscar contender Der Baader Meinhof Komplex).  Also, Burghart Klaußner who has been visible in roles for Hans-Christian Schmid (such as Requiem) and Christian Petzold (Yella) and played the father in Goodbye Lenin.
Stephen Daldry has discussed his apprehension about how German audiences will react to his representation of the story – both because it deals with the issue of collusion by ordinary people in the Nazi regime, supposedly ignorant or otherwise, and because of the iconic status of the source material novel (interview at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/filmnetwork/A45065469).

It’s interesting why it is not being made by a German company, with German actors – particularly given the strength of talent within a revitalised German film industry at the moment.  Perhaps Daldry is wise to be uncertain, because of the controversy that films such as Der Untergang have created before this.  The Reader has (like the book) a potentially ‘apologist’ tone – casting the central character in the role of victim, despite her guilt and involvement in the atrocities in the camps.  The story’s emphasis on Michael’s responses to her, as a boy and man, is criticised as attempting to create forgiveness through this everyman figure.   Fiennes (who plays the older Michael) contends that it cannot be regarded as having a universal meaning, but rather it is a personal story, it cannot be read outside of one particular perspective.  I felt the film does work to allow a debate about our responses to this woman, and more widely, about how we judge and condemn others.  Or how any society deals with its own guilty past (not limited to German experiences).

Der Untergang produced a number of angry responses because of its portrayal of Hitler.  Wim Wenders, for example, wrote in depth about his abhorrence of the way the film evades narrative perspective, and allows Hitler a certain dignity in the way it renders his death.  The use of Traudi Junge (the young secretary employed by Hitler in the bunker) as an more ‘innocent’ point of view and the absence of the real histories and actions of those Nazi leaders created an effect to render ‘harmless’ the evil of those people.  (Wenders article is far more substantial than my summary – and my poor German! – can do credit to.  In Die Zeit “Tja, dann wollen wir mal” 21/10/04).

With Valkyrie on the horizon, already with the controversy over Cruise’s nationality and Scientology beliefs, the debate might be set to continue.  This film is backed by a Hollywood studio, Universal, which suggests a different approach again.  When the New New German wave of filmmakers offers a real change in perspective and subject matter, then some might question the revisiting of the past.  And particularly by perspectives outside of Germany itself.  For what it’s worth, I think The Reader does manage to open up all the complexities of those different relationships.  And reinforces film’s power as a place for these debates.  The scene with Lena Olin as Ilana Mather is incredibly powerful in demonstrating a Jewish victim’s less obvious responses to the past.  The film left me with the potential of literature to humanise us, whatever our crimes, without ever forgetting those crimes.

Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (2008)

Rebellion or Iconic Resistance: German history microscoped again

Saw this film in Hamburg last weekend.  Based on the book written by Stefan Aust (published in 1985), the screenplay is co-written by Aust and Bernd Eichinger. Eichinger, of course, is the influential producer behind Constantin Films and has been credited with power-housing much of German film production and ditribution in recent years. His previous credits demonstrate an eye on the international (Hollywood) market as well as the indigenous German one. Added to this, is the acting star power: Moritz Bleibtrau (Lola Rennt, Female Agents, Munich), Christine Gedeck (The Lives of Others, The Good Shepherd) and Bruno Ganz (Downfall, Wings of Desire).

The star value of these is relevant, since the subject matter is still mired in controversy.  Over the weekend, the German newspapers reported an attack on Aust’s house (with his wife and children home) throwing paint against the walls. Anecdotally, the cinema attendant told us the difficulties she had had, explaining the film’s content to a British tourist. Translating into English, should she refer to them as terrorists, as disaffected students, even as freedom fighters? Thirty years on, their status is still under discussion. That a major German film company, and stars with an international as well as national profile, were willing to portray these characters could be regarded as a significant weighing-in in the sympathy corner.

The film, from this particular British tourist’s point of view, is very episodic in its attempt to be fair to the history, covering a period from Meinhof still married and pre-radicalisation to their suicides. In between, it covers Rudi Dutschke (and the attempted assassination), Baader and Ennslin’s communal home for the insipient revolutionaries, deliberations of the pursuing police. It seems to want to be true to all these perspectives, as well as all the events.  For me, this was crystallised in a scene where Baader and Meins are arrested, famously, at a garage in residential Frankfurt.  Suddenly, in this scene, we switch perspectives again to that of a little girl living in a flat above who takes a photograph of the surrounded men. Even as an outsider, you realise the writers/director are recreating an iconic moment from German history – an iconic news picture from that era. However, the film risks losing a narrative centre by its attention to this fairness between all the different characters involved. However, the historical story’s needs outweigh the film’s role as fiction – and its structure moves away from a classical narrative.

This emphasises the difference in watching as a foreign audience compared to an indigenous one. As a German viewer, I would identify those moments from public history that resonate with my own private memory, because I was somehow there.  Bruno Ganz, as Horst Herold (Chief Commissioner of the Bundeskriminalamt) offers us an authoritative voice that ensures a return to equilibrium – his performance and dialogue as the policeman suggest that whilst many in government may be foolish, he recognises the reasons behind the actions and, therefore, the continuing risks. By this, the film seems to signal its wish not to challenge the hegemony – then or now.

The review in Screen International (3.10.08) identifies that the film is emotionally uninvolving, locating it in the numbers of characters and their character “there are too many of them and they are all creeps.”  It points up that the film serves, for today’s young, a look at “the birth of modern terrorism.” The film did make interesting, and I assume strategic, references to American Imperialism (in Vietnam) and the fight for oil – seeming to imply it wanted to make the politics at least a little resonant now. One German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (access through imdb.com page) writes of a portrayal of “dieser Gefühlsterrorismus” – which literally translates as emotional terrorism.

With the film being the German entry for Foreign Language Oscar, one can’t help feeling the debates will continue, especially its credentials to be a film representing German culture at international awards. I can’t help mentioning Petzold’s Die Innere Sicherheit, for a representation of 1970s terrorism and its ultimate emotional toll; a film with the politics and the emotional centre, if not the historical accuracy.

For a useful timeline of the historical events, I found: http://www.baader-meinhof.com/timeline/1971.html

A word about the cinema, Streif’s, near the Binnen-Alster in Hamburg.  Refurbished inside, it’s a nostalgia trip for pre-multiplex film viewers, with even cushioned double seats in the premium rows (one euro extra) in blue velveteen.  Proper cinema experience for grown-ups.

Die Welle (The Wave, Germany 2008)

Herr Wenger gets started on 'Autocracy'

Die Welle has received good coverage in the UK media for what is a ’specialised release’ in the UK (i.e. only a few prints on release). However, it was slagged off by both Bradshaw in the Guardian and the academic turned critic Sarah Churchwell on BBC2 Newsnight Review. For me, they both make the mistake of judging the film as an art object and not what it is – a solid, mainstream teen movie (or youth picture as I would prefer).

The first thing to be clear about is that this is that very rare beast in the UK – a mainstream German picture, from one of the main German film companies. Usually, we don’t get to see the big German comedies and action films, presumably on the grounds that it is too expensive to dub them for the multiplex and that the arthouse audience won’t like them if subtitled (as per Bradshaw). This is unfortunate as it deprives us of German popular culture as study texts for film and media studies.

The plot of the film is derived from a German best-selling novel, in turn based on events in a California high school in the 1960s when a teacher decided to teach about fascism by putting his students through a programme of inculcating discipline, uniformity and commitment to the group. In the film, the self-selecting group of students who opt for a Project Week topic on ‘autocracy’ find themselves with a popular and laid-back teacher, horrified that he’s been given the topic to teach and that his preferred option ‘anarchy’ (he has been a real anarchist) has been given to the most conservative teacher in the school. Faced with a class expecting something new, “Not the Third Reich again, man!”, he quickly decides he needs a new idea.

The narrative, as befits the youth picture genre, is compressed into a week, Monday to Saturday. Things happen very fast in the youth picture. Another convention of the youth picture is that there are plenty of characters, all of whom are ‘typed’ in some way because there isn’t time to make them into ’rounded characters’. (Apart from the teacher, there are at least eight or nine important student characters.) Watching some critics grapple with this is amusing, but also frustrating.

The filmmakers obviously want to reach the 15-24 market and they have adopted a muscular and very American style. It’s in ‘Scope and features some fast cutting matched to a rock soundtrack as well as the usual array of computers and software that perform tasks at an astonishing speed in highly visual ways. If only students could design webpages and logos at this speed – but this is a genre movie.

I have two interests in the film. First, amongst all the Americanisation, what is distinctive about German popular culture, since we see it so rarely? I gleaned a couple of things. In the play with types it is important that one sympathetic character is a rather good-looking young Turk and another character is identified as an Ossi. I don’t have much of a problem with typing, but the rather cynical/dour young woman who represents the ideologically pure hippie dissenter was a mistake, I think. The main distinguishing feature in the school, apart from the wealth of many of the students and the quality of the school building, was the choice of water polo as the sport in which the ‘jocks’ display their macho prowess (the central teacher character is also the water polo coach). This is a welcome riposte to the American football of Hollywood teen movies (American ‘football’ is one of the few sports that leaves me completely unmoved). I always think of the famous water polo match between Hungary and the USSR in 1956 (recently the subject of a Joe Esterhazy-scripted movie) as being an indicator of a different sports outlook in Central Europe. The water polo is linked to another aspect of Die Welle, which is the location of the teacher’s home on a houseboat moored on a lake near the school. Summer, lakes and forests take me back to the German textbook we had at school for O Level. I’m sure we followed a German family through the Summer from school (do German schools start early in the morning in Summer?) to the holidays.

The second interesting aspect of the film is, of course, how it deals with fascism. Here the film is quite astute. It may be ’simplistic’ and ‘naive’ as the critics make out, but the filmmakers have thought about a teen audience and how they might be engaged. There are aspects of fascism which are not just attractive, but seemingly morally pure – the possibility of inclusivity, the eradication of differences caused by wealth etc. The teacher uses these aspects to draw in students. One visual signifier of this is the uniform. The whole uniform scenario works very well – not least because it is so visual, but also, in a UK context, because the return of uniforms happened a long time ago and it will be interesting to see what UK teens think of the film in this respect. There are some great scenes and I really enjoyed the burning of Nike and Adidas sportswear in favour of the simple uniform the students adopt – an attack on German and US capitalism as part of a ‘new movement’. The revelation of the evils of fascism is much more effective when it can be seen to be seductive and reasonable as well. I also thought the film handled the conflicting emotions around romance and commitment to the cause very well.

I think the film does run out of steam in the third quarter and I felt the ending was a mistake in some ways, but overall, I think this will work well with its target audience. It certainly bears comparison with Hollywood and it’s good to see an entertainment film that tries to take on board ideas. I don’t think teen audiences will feel patronised by the film and even if they don’t like it, I’ll be interested to hear what they have to say.

Das Leben der Anderen(The Lives of Others, Germany, 2006)

Humanising the inhuman

It was no surprise that this should win an Oscar: technically proficient, superbly acted and humanist whilst bashing the ‘commies’. It is a gripping thriller but, as Anna Funder points out in Sight & Sound (May ‘07) utterly ridiculous. The Stasi member who is humanised by music and a poem by Brecht! Great to think so: play that music to Bush!

Funder, who’s book Stasiland (2004) is excellent, also points out that the Stasi are currently trying to rehabilitate themselves and so this sympathetic portrayal of a member of that organisation is politically dubious to say the least. But the film’s excellent for the reasons cited above and who wouldn’t want to believe that art can humanise a monstrous system? Well, those who run that system I suppose.

From the Life of the Marionettes (Aus dem Leben der Marionetten, W.Germany, 1980)

Consoling passion?

It was interesting watching this ‘German’ Bergman in the midst of the New German films I’ve been looking at. Whilst I think of Bergman as a ‘philosophical’ filmmaker often dealing with characters’ metaphysical angst, watching these characters trying to deal with their anomie, after yesterday’s Fassbinder, suggests that – in this film at least – Bergman is critiquing the bourgeoisie.

This probably out-grims the Fassbinder. Partly this is to do with the bleak monochrome cinematography (Nykvist: brilliant of course); partly the devastating, opening murder – shot in lurid red – that sets the rest of the film up as an investigation into the protagonists’ motivation.

Händler der vier Jahreszeiten (The Merchant of Four Seasons, W.Germany, 1972)

Hans holds court

It’s striking that this bleak, overtly stylised film should have been a commercial hit. Whilst Fassbinder draws upon Sirkian melodrama, no one would mistake this for a Hollywood film. Fassbinder had the talent to create an almost surrealist mise en scène from a banal setting. For example, Irmgard is framed against a shop window featuring a wedding dress when she’s mistaken for a prostitute in the street; the image above shows Hans pontificating about how hard done by he is to an almost mute coterie of men.

The stylisation is probably most notable in the performances; the robotic-like postures and glances of dehumanised bourgeoisie. Except Hanna Schygulla’s Anna, the commentator on the corruption of her family; even Renate, Hans’ and Irmgard’s daughter, looks like (a Hitler youth) automaton though she may just be traumatised by her parents.

If Herzog and Wenders, in the Stroszek and Alice in the Cities, blogged recently, were searching for identity then Fassbinder explains why they are looking.