Sturm und Drang at San Sebastian 2002

No one knows exactly why the San Sebastian Film Festival has become a welcomed haven for young German directors, but perhaps it all began back in 1998. That’s when Irish-born director Eoin Moore’s plus-minus null (Break Even), his low budget graduation feature at the Berlin Film Academy (DFFB) was awarded in the New Directors competition. This year, Moore returned to the main competition at San Sebastian with Pigs Will Fly, shot in Berlin and San Francisco with a digital camera. A story of turbulent emotions that relies heavily on the improvisational skills of the actors, it’s about a wife-beating policeman who sees red whenever and for whatever reason another male draws too close to her side. After the last brutal attack, Laxe (Andreas Schmidt, a Moore regular) is suspended from duty and flies off to San Francisco to visit his younger brother Walter (Thomas Morris), who lives a rather peaceful existence in a communal apartment and discharges his emotions in slam-poetry readings. Walter left Germany ten years ago to escape the outbursts of his violence-prone father. The rest is how Laxe slides downhill once again into his latent abuses after meeting the waitress Inga (Laura Tonke), who herself has been badly abused by a rich uncle who resides in Frisco. Pigs Will Fly has a lot to recommend it ­ particularly those muted, finely sketched performances by the fragile Laura Tonke and by Kirsten Block as the long suffering wife. The film opened recently in Berlin to strong reviews.

        A broken family with dark secrets is also at the core of Chris Kraus’s Scherbentanz (roughly: Shambles), the hit in the New Directors competition at this year’s San Sebastian film festival. Reckoned by some German critics as the discovery of the year ­ »it stands in the long tradition of great European drama,« wrote one enthusiast ­ Scherbentanz is the surprising debut of another DFFB graduate who had first established himself as journalist, novelist, and screenwriter of such quirky films as Rosa von Praunheim’s Der Einstein des Sex (The Einstein of Sex) (1999) and Detlev Buck’s Liebesluder (A Bundle of Joy) (2000). Adapting his own novel to the screen, Kraus made sure that the story of young Jesko (Jürgen Vogel), a failed fashion-designer stricken with leukemia and badly in need of a bone-marrow donor that only his deranged mother (Margit Carstensen) can supply, did not sink into maudlin sentimentality. When the ghosts of the family past reappear in a flashback, we understand Jesko’s troubled soul but at the same wonder why his brother Ansgar (Peter Davor), the designated family heir, has chosen to stay around even though his mother in one of psychotic fits had once beaten him into a coma. Scherbentanz features tight low-key performances by the acting ensemble.

       Maria von Heland’s Grosse Mädchen weinen nicht (Big Girls Don’t Cry), the third in the trio of German films at San Sebastian, is the second feature film by the Swedish-born, Berlin-based filmmaker. After studying journalism in Stockholm, acting in Paris, and directing at the California Institute of the Arts and the Konrad Wolf Film School in Potsdam-Babelsberg, she shot a remarkable short feature in Ulan Bator. Real Men Eat Meat (1998), a German-Swedish-Mongolian coproduction, is about a Swedish lad who makes friends with a Mongolian girl while accompanying his father on a business trip and thereby learns a lesson of adult responsibility. This youth theme of coming-of-age is reworked again in Big Girls Don’t Cry, a Deutsche Columbia Pictures coproduction with Egoli Tossell Film, in which the friendship of Kati (Karoline Herfurth) and Stefi (Anna Maria Mühe), a pair of 17-year-old girls with sex and boys on their mind, is put to a severe test. When Kati discovers that her father is having an extra-marital affair, she decides to take revenge on the daughter of her father’s girlfriend ­ an outburst of pain and hate that leaves her emotionally unstable to deal with life itself. Stefi bears the pain with her until the limits of loyalty are reached. Big Girls Don’t Cry also underscores an enlightened and productive cofunding policy undertaken by Jürgen Schau and Andrea Willson at Columbia-TriStar in Berlin.

Ronald Holloway