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Four Women In Search
By Wolfgang J. Ruf | March 4, 2013
New films by Jeanine Meerapfel, Didi Danquart, David Wnendt and Margarethe von Trotta
Nothing against love stories on the background of history! Always I liked such cinematic approach to the tension between individual fate and the great social and political events – from the highest level of art as Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour down to a mainstrem spectacle as David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago. Jeanine Meerapfel’s film The German Friend has something of both. The plot is very personally marked, there are even a lot of autobiographical aspects of the director and writer who grew up as a child of german-jewish immigrants at Buenos Aires and came as a student in the turbulent 60s in Germany – exactly as the heroine of this film. But the style of story telling, the supremely well change of rythm, the juxtaposition of sentimental moods and ironical spots, the close look on specific characters and the wide panorama of Patagonian landscapes form a movie which is able to move the brains as well as the heart. I think this quality is significant for Jeanine Meerapfel’s work; already her first feature film Malou, 1981, was estimated by the New York Times for its »genuine decency and intelligence.«
Meerapfel’s film starts with the bizarre reality, that jewish refugees from Germany and Nazis, who left the Reich after its total defeat, did not prefer only the same countries, but in Argentina also the same city districts to live and even the same holiday resorts. So the young Sulamit, the daugther of jewish immigrants, lives vis-à-vis of Friedrich, the son of a Ex-SS-officer – and both become real friends and even more. When Friedrich discovers his father’s story, he leaves for Germany. Sulamit follows him, curious to find out from where her parents came. But she must discover that Friedrich is more and more involved in the German student’s revolt and has no time to settle with her a personal life. »It was during those years that I met German students my age who fanatically tried to debunk their parents,« Meerapfel stated in an interview with the Buenos Aires Herold. »These young men and women were so ashamed of the Nazi atrocities that they would conceal their German passports, or would blindly join extreme leftwing parties. They all had to go a long way before learning to love themselves and to love others.« Friedrich goes back to Argentina to fight in the underground against the Junta. But Sulamit, though engaged in a new relation in Germany, stays in search of her first love. She visits Friedrich in a remoted prison – and she comes back to Argentina after the Junta’s fall and succeeds to find him in a Patagonian village where he discovers the importance of the daily life. »Let’s plant potatoes,« answer the indios when he offers to fight for their rights. Meerapfel prefers an open end of this love story. I liked very much her mixture of emotions and intellectual distance, also her subtle description of German and Jewish life circumstances seen by children, and her mocking look on the German students revolt. She is right with her judgement, and arouses with her film a lot of useful feelings and thoughts. The actress Celeste Cid from Argentine as Sulamit and also Julieta Vetrano in Sulamit’s child part, attest with their frank performance the film’s warm and pleasant sincerity.
Bitter Cherries is the recent feature film of well experienced Didi Danquart. He is the twin brother of Pepe Danquart who is well known as a director of short films and documentaries: Schwarzfahrer (Black Rider) won an Academy Award in 1994 for Best Short Subject. Didi who tought film and video at highschools in Berlin and Karlsruhe got also international attention for some of his documentary and feature films. Above all I remember Viehjud Levi, 1998, an empathic adaption of Thomas Strittmatter’s theatre play of the same title on a jewish livestock dealer in the early Nazi period. It won in 1999 the Caligari Prize of the Berlinale. Also I was impressed strongly by Offset, 2006, a sensitive as well as grotesque german-romanian love story set in the chaotic city of Bucharest, when Romania became a member of the EU. This film should also be kept in mind for one of the most outstanding performances of Alexandra Maria Lara, which started then her international career.
Didi Danquart’s new film is based on the novel Lena’s Love by Judith Kuckart who had already success as a dancer and choreographer before she started to establish as a writer. Probably there is still too much of the novel’s twisted labyrinth in the film. Nevertheless Danquart knows to fascinate with an original constellation of characters in strange situations. In the focus of Bitter Cherries is the actress Lena in search of her life’s roots and perspectives. She just lost her theatre engagement and returns on the occasion of her mothers funeral in her small and dreary home town in eastern Germany. She finds lodging in Julius Dahlmann’s house, who was the partner of her mother. She meets Ludwig, her youth’s love, and accompanies him, when his sports club goes for a match in the Polish city of Oswiecim, much more known under it’s terrible German name Auschwitz. Now Dahlmann follows them in search of his childhood as the son of a concentration camp guard, and meets an old friend, a priest who organizes at the denounced place the German-Polish youth exchange. Finally we stick with the main characters in a bizarre road movie between reality and imagination, where the horrors of history are the nightmares of the present. The intensive and authentic documentary style which shows the tristesse of the landscapes as reflections of their desperate disorientation, does ground the film when it gets in the danger to lose the line. And Anna Stieblich as Lena and Martin Lüttge as the old Dahlmann are setting strong accents of acting. There are some scenes which may remind of Wild Strawberries, i. e. when the old guy is watching scenes of his childhood. Director Didi Danquart did even state, that his film’s title can be understood as an allusion to Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece from 1957.
Combat Girl (Kriegerin) by the young David Wnendt is an outstanding debut. The 1977 born Wnendt studied at the FAMU in Prague and then at the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen »Konrad Wolf« in Potsdam. In 2006 his California Dreams won already a First Prize at the interfilm Berlin short film festival. Now, his first feature film is an exciting, almost breathless excursion in the disturbing reality of so called »no-go-areas« in eastern Germany, where Neo-Nazi gangs dominate the daily life and foreigners are in serious danger.
The 20-years-old Marisa is in search for her identity. Educated by her militaristic grandfather to be »tough girl« and involved in steady conflicts with her mother, with whom she works at a super market, she is locked in the depressing lower class conditions around her. The only place she feels at home is the local gang, where the youngsters drink, fight and express their hate against foreigners, jews, cops, and everyone who is different. Several unexpected events break the monotony of Marisa’s desparate life. Svenja, a 14-year-old girl starts joining the gang, admiring Marisa as a warrior for the group’s daft ideology. Marisa’s friend is sentenced to prison. She attacks two young immigrants from Afghanistan. But after all she gets slowly in a friendly contact with one of them. She seems to learn that there is an other way of living together – and she tries to help the young Afghan refugee to get to Sweden, where he hopes to find his family.
But from the film’s very start we know Marisa won’t have a chance to escape her fate. What at first sight looks just as a stupid, noisy and violent mess of asocial behaviour very soon turns out to be a thouroughly researched web of social relationships with a lot of tenseful dramatic interaction. Through Marisa’s tragedy which is told without any melodramatic mockery, the film wins a touching metaphoric dimension. The entire film team, the director and writer, the cameraman, the cutter, the composer (who created a neo-nazi rock especially for the film, because the existing Neo-Nazi music shouldn’t be honored) and the actors impress by an intensity which is rare.
But foremost, Kriegerin is the film of the young actress Alina Levshin, by Ukrainian origin and also graduate of the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen »Konrad Wolf« Potsdam. Her performance as Marisa is a permanent burning power, feverish and energetic, authentic and artistic at the same time, a tour de force which can be found rarely. No wonder that Alina Levshin is collecting important awards, Best Actress at the 35th International Sao Paolo Festival and Best Actress at the Deutscher Filmpreis.
My personal favourite among the recent German films is Hannah Arendt by Margarethe von Trotta. This film is a masterpiece! I’ve never seen a film which has as its main subject the importance of thinking, of independent and critical thinking – and which is nevertheless plenty of living characters and exciting situations. Margarethe is well experienced with the portrays of outstanding women like Marianne and Juliane (Die bleierne Zeit, 1981) Rosa Luxemburg (1986), Vision (2009) on Hildegard von Bingen, also of Uwe Johnson’s Gesine Cressphal in Jahrestage (2000). Margarethe and her co-writer, the american Pamela Katz, decided early in their nearly ten years of preparations for this film to not create a conventional biopic of the great German-American thinker. The film is focussing on Hannah Ahrendt as a women in search for truth – and on her greatest challenge. The film covers the years 1960 to 1964 – except for a few quick flashbacks on her relationship with the controversial German philosopher Martin Heidegger in her student days and their meeting again after the war. Probably to remind us that there was always an other, darker line in her life. It starts with the kidnapping of the Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina by the Mossad and switches directly in the apartment of Hannah Arendt and her husband Heinrich Blücher. Here, the tribe, the famous circle of friends and intellectuals – including the philosopher Hans Jonas and the writer Mary McCarthy –, regularly meet.
Hannah is electrified when she heared that Eichmann will be accused at Jerusalem. Her interest to report on this exceptional trial, which offers the chance of an encounter with the radical evil, is welcomed by The New Yorker. The rest is known. Hannah Arendt discovers that Eichmann who was responsable for the deportation of the European jews in the concentration camps is just a thoughtless administrator. He makes her laugh but not frightened. In her reports for The New Yorker and the following book she coined the term of the »the banality of evil.« This conclusions – a comment on the Jewish leader’s cooperation with the Nazis – and above all her rational and often ironical attitude caused a worldwide controversy towards Hannah Arendt in the Jewish-American establishment, in the Israeli government, Jewish organisations and many intellectuals. Some of her best friends broke off any relations with her. This situation with all its pro and cons is the central aspect of this film. It shows the delight, but also the difficulties and the isolation as a result of independent thinking.
Of course such a film works only with an exceptional cast, which Margarethe von Trotta perfectly accomplished. The stroke of luck is Barbara Sukowa as Hannah Arendt, the famous actress in films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and in many of Margarethe’s films: She was the terrorist Gudrun Ensslin, the socialist Rosa Luxemburg and the saint Hildegard von Bingen. Barbara Sukowa approaches Hannah Arend at eye level, avoiding any superficial imitation. She studied an english intonation with German accent, similiar to Hannah Arendt, but she made no make-up efforts to get a visual similarity. It is obvious that she understands what she is saying, even in the great lecture which the film is ending with. Barbara Sukowa just was awarded the Bavarian film prize for the Best Actress for this role– and Margarethe von Trotta got the Honorary Prize for her continous and courageous work.
Hannah Arendt’s book on the Eichmann trial is her most known, but probably not her most important. The film stimulates to discover much more of her writing, which surprises by its variety and its modernity.
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