German Laurels at Berlinale 2003 Blue Angel and Critics Awards
Shortly after Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin! received at the Berlinale the Blue Angel Prize for Best European Film, the film took off like a rocket at the home box office. By mid-April, when the Lola Nominations rolled around, it had past the 5 million attendance mark and, appropriately, bagged six nominations: Best Feature Film, Best Director, Best Actress (Katrin Sass), Best Actor (Daniel Brühl), Best Supporting Actress (Maria Simon), and Best Supporting Actor (Florian Lukas) a nomination in every possible category. The icing on the cake was added when Dr. Christina Weiss, the German Cultural Minister, organized a screening for members of parliament.
Good Bye, Lenin! is a fiction-documentary that reenacts history. Since only the chosen few had actually witnessed the turbulent events of 1989/90, when the Berlin wall came tumbling down, the time was ripe for a dramatic retelling of the story. Three years ago, the same electrifying response greeted the broadcast of Roland Suso Richter’s Der Tunnel (2000), a two-part telefeature about an escape tunnel under the wall that had 7 million Germans glued to their TV sets. Indeed, the success of the former might well have inspired the latter. Just as Good Bye, Lenin! is sure to inspire another »Berlin story« a few years hence.
In the first half of Good Bye, Lenin! Becker reviews the events in the autumn of 1989 that brought down the Berlin wall, relying for the most part on familiar tv footage to set the stage for the second half. Some months later, in the summer of 1990, Frau Kerner (Katrin Sass), a faithful acolyte of the former German Democratic Republic, rises out of a coma after a near fatal heart attack and has to be protected from the truth by her ever-loving son Alex (Daniel Brühl). The shock of realizing that her beloved GDR has completely vanished from the map just might lead to another, this time fatal, heart attack. The ploy works.
Daniel Brühl (surely the best young German actor since Horst Buchholz) gives a charismatic performance as Alex, the caring son determined to keep his mother’s illusions intact after she has awakened from her eight-month coma. Bernd Lichtenberg’s screenplay, spiced with bizarre cameos (Michael Gwisdek is memorable as the mumbling ex-GDR functionary Klapprath) with pungent dialogue to match, is another reason for the film’s success. Martin Kukula, twice awarded the German Camera Prize for his previous work on Becker’s award winning Kinderspiele (Children's Games) (1992) and Das Leben ist eine Baustelle (Life Is All You Get) (1997), gives the tale that needed polished »documentary look«. Viewed from different angles, Good Bye, Lenin! is at one and the same time an historical scrapbook, a Berlin fairy tale, a droll tragicomedy, a comédie humaine.
In Hans-Christian Schmid’s Lichter (Distant Lights), awarded the FIPRESCI (International Critics) Prize in the Competition, the theme of »losers« is reworked in five different episodes. »The characters have to struggle,« says Schmid, »but they go on struggling and never give up.« And although the stories are linked to five incidents and 18 different people within 48 hours on the German border to Poland at Frankfurt(Oder)/Slubice, their stories are typical and their fates universal. A Polish taxi-driver will barter his soul to raise the money he needs to buy a communion dress for his daughter. A young Ukrainian will dupe a friendly interpreter to sneak across the border to see the lights of Potsdamer Platz. A young smuggler will betray his older brother in a vain effort to prove his manhood to a runaway delinquent. A mattress-salesman will not admit that his discount-store is doomed because of his own ineptness. And a young architect will stubbornly try to rekindle a romance that had fallen by the wayside because of his own irresponsibilty. Related to these stories are more tales lurking in the background of hope and despair, of illusion and danger, of life and death for »the border-crossing on the Oder is a unique and spooky place.«
Hans-Christian Schmid works in tandem with screenwriter Michael Gutmann. As a team they collaborated previously on a trio of award-winning featuresremarkable for finely sketched acting performances: Nach fünf im Urwald (It’s a Jungle Out There) (1995), with Franka Potente as a naive miss arriving in the big city from the provinces; 23 (1998), with August Diehl (the naive architect in Distant Lights) as a computer hacker on the way to paranoia; and Crazy (2000), with Robert Stadlober as a partially paralyzed youth coming of age at a boarding-school for misfits. Place these next to Distant Lights, and the personal vision of Hans-Christian Schmid as an Autor emerges. »I feel a great sympathy for people who fight so hard for their happiness.«
If the FIPRESCI Prize awarded to Christian Petzold’s Wolfsburg in the Panorama can be taken as an index of excellence, then the film deserved to run in the Competition. Wolfsburg, named for the industrial town in which it is set (the home of Volkswagen), is the third film in Petzold’s trilogy on moral ethics and individual conscience after his award-winning Die innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In) (2000), about a terrorist family still on the run, and the equally acclaimed telefeature Toter Mann (Dead Man) (2001), about a woman’s pained quest to avenge the murder of her sister.
In Wolfsburg Phillip, a successful car salesman (Benno Fürmann in his best role to date), accidentally kills a youngster on a country road, abruptly leaves the scene without reporting it, and thereafter has to drag his hit-and-run conscience around with him wherever he goes. Not even a rushed marriage with his girlfriend with whom he had been arguing on his mobile phone when the accident occurred helps him to forget. When Phillip finally musters the courage to meet Laura, the single mother of the victim (Nina Hoss, the avenging sister in Dead Man), he has already forfeited all that he formerly stood for in his disoriented quest for peace of mind.
A devotee of the psycho-thriller, Christian Petzold makes sure in Wolfsbug that each shot (cameraman Hans Fromm), every image on the screen, counts. Like pieces of a mosaic, they not only help to push along the narrative with as little dialogue as possible, but they also serve to uncover layers of personal guilt and remorse, deceit and prevarication, doubt and vacillation. In this regard, Petzold is want to seek the advice and council of filmmaker Harun Farocki, a mentor and colleague on all his feature films to date. Since Wolfsburg was produced for ZDF television, the film can only be seen at festivals. Without a commercial release, unfortunately, the film did not qualify for this year’s Lola Awards 6shy; for that Film Band in Gold the director had been awarded three years ago for The State I Am In. Ethics has its price.
Ronald Holloway