Berlinale 2003 ­ Das Fest der deutschen Schauspieler

Of the 59 German films programmed at the Berlinale, I viewed a round dozen in four different sections: three in the Competition, three in the Panorama, five in the Perspektive Deutsches Kino, and one in the International Forum of Young Cinema. All were notable for a broad range of acting performances, some quite exceptional.

        In the Competition, for instance, Daniel Brühl, as the caring son Alex in Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin!, keeps the story moving and accounts for much of the film’s commercial success at the box office ­ at this writing an audience of over five million and still climbing! Set in East Berlin in 1989, just before the fall of the wall, Alex blames himself when his mother ­ played by the poignant, sympathetic, compassionate Katrin Sass ­ falls into a coma upon her son being arrested by the police for demonstrating. Eight months later, when she opens her eyes again, she has missed all the political excitement of the Wende ­ worse, she might suffer another heart attack if informed of the truth that her beloved GDR has disappeared forever from the map. So to keep her illusions in tact Alex enlists friends and neighbors to fabricate a charade in her bedroom. Michael Gwisdek is memorable as the drunken ex-GDR-teacher.
       In Hans-Christian Schmid’s Lichter (Distant Lights) the fates of losers are examined at close range in five interlinked episodes, which, taken altogether, portray the woes besetting Germans and Poles in the border towns of Frankfurt(Oder)/Slubice. Blinded by a cockeyed scheme to strike it rich, David Striesov is Ingo, the mattress-salesman who fails even to appreciate a kind helping-hand extended by the unemployed Simone (Claudia Geisler). In the cigarette-smuggling episode Sebastian Urzendowsky as the sensitive Andreas and Alice Dwyer as the juvenile delinquent Katharina are convincing in their roles, so too Tom Jahn as Andreas’s tyrannical father. Maria Simon ­ seen as Daniel Brühl’s wacky sister in Good Bye, Lenin! ­ plays a warm-hearted German border-translator who is duped by a Ukrainian asylum-seeker who will lie and steal to get across the border. And Herbert Knaup is altogether convincing as the corrupt West German architect-shark, who knows all the tricks to get what he wants at whatever cost.
       Oskar Roehler structured Der alte Affe Angst (Angst) around the improvisational talents of André Hennicke as Robert, the burnout stage director and impotent husband, and the lovely Marie Bäumer as Marie, his long-suffering wife with troubles of her own as head of a hospital clinic for AIDS-inflicted children. Angst also features a fine supporting role by Vadim Glowna as Robert’s father, a writer who finds it particularly hard to accept death by cancer when he’s right in the middle of a new book.
       Over in the Panorama, in Christian Petzold’s Wolfsburg, Benno Fürmann gives an outstanding performance as the guilt-ridden Philipp Wagner, a car-salesman whose career comes crashing down after he leaves the scene of an accident as a hit-and-run driver. Petzold deepens the moral dilemma by intimating that his victim, a boy on a bicycle, might possibly have been saved had Philipp used his mobile (indirectly the cause of the accident) to phone for an ambulance. Later, Philipp’s conscience distracts him from his job, forces a break with an employer-friend (Stephan Kampwirth), alienates him from his fiancee (Antje Westermann), and eventually leads him to contact the single mother of the victim, Laura (played with commanding presence by Nina Hoss). Meanwhile, Laura has been searching day and night to find the hit-and-run driver, helped by her colleague friend Vera (Astrid Meyerfeldt) at a supermarket run by the sycophant manager Scholz (Matthias Matschke). A psycho-drama with razor-sharp acting performances.
       In Igor Zaritzki’s Devot (Devoted), a debut feature programmed in the Panorama, Annett Renneberg deftly plays a wild young thing in a psycho-thriller with enough twists to turn the story upside down. When the considerate Henry (Simon Böer) brings the distraught Anja home, thinking she’s a prostitute who wants to jump off a bridge, a game of one-upmanship between the couple begins, and the thin line between dream and nightmare is explored. Annett Renneberg, awarded the 2002 Golden Camera for Best New Generation Actress, is a talented newcomer to keep an eye on in the future.
       In the Panorama in Lothar Lambert’s Ich bin Gott sei Dank beim Film (Thank God I’m in the Film Business) we are introduced to Eva Ebner, an octogenarian whose whole life has been connected in one way or another with filmmaking ever since the Danzig-born, half-Jewish artist settled in Berlin in 1945. Being a new Berliner, I was not at first aware of just who this fragile, red-haired, extravagantly dressed lady was before me in the foyer of the Cine-Star-Kinos. But I soon discovered in her film portrait how deftly this Künstlerin could parry Lambert’s cheeky verbal questions with a measure of calm and graceful dignity.
       In the Perspektive Deutsches Kino Tom Schreiber’s Narren (Fools), a debut feature shot in Cologne during the carnival celebration, stars Christoph Bach as Roman, a newly employed, wet-behind-the-eyes draftsman in an architect office. It isn’t long before Roman gets caught up in a whirlwind of surreal events, lunatic coincidences, and Kafka-esque nonsequiturs. Franz Müller’s Science Fiction, a debut feature by a graduate of the Kölner Kunsthochschule für Medien, carries the same absurdity a step further at a seminar on »mental syntax« for young managers in eastern Germany. Marius (Jan Henrik Stahlberg), a glib seminar instructor, more than meets his match in the bellicose novice Jörg (Arvid Birnbaum), who for his part can’t comprehend the whys and wherefores of motivational training. Gradually, this weirdo seminar plummet to a complete standstill.
       Two short features in the Perspektive Deutsches Kino feature fine performances by non-German actors. Alain Gsponer’s Kiki & Tiger, about a friendship between a Serb and an Albanian, is a true story based on the director’s acquaintance with similar individuals in question. Kiki (Stipe Erceg), an illegal refugee from Kosovo, is living with Tiger (Lenn Kurdjawizki), a Serb who grew up in Germany. As the war in the Balkans progresses, their friendship is put to the test. Tiger’s father, a Serb nationalist, arranges for Kiki to be deported, and Tiger soon finds himself on the front lines fighting Albanians. More than just a sketch about the folly of war, Kiki & Tiger is remarkable for its choice of actors, professional and nonprofessional, down to the last important bit-player.
       Robin von Hardenberg’s Hinh bon (The Shadow), the 20-minute companion film to the 50-minute Kiki & Tiger, explores how a innocent misunderstanding in a war-torn Asian land can lead to a family tragedy. When Ngoc (Minh-Khai Phan Thi), a sensitive mother, teaches her young son a shadow-game to curb his longing for his father away at war, the ploy with the ersatz »shadow-image« works. One day, however, when the father returns home, he misinterprets the shadow as representative of a supposed lover ­ and kills his wife. The Shadow, inspired by an poem by Matthias Claudius, is the second project of a talented young filmmaker at the Berlin Film and TV Academy.
       Over in the International Forum of Young Cinema, Sören Voigt’s Identity Kills, based on a true story, impresses because it was improvised on the stop without a written screenplay. Brigitte Hobmeier plays Karen, a frail psychopath whose boyfriend Ben (Daniel Lommarzsch) exploits their brittle relationship to the hilt by running up bills and running off at every opportunity. To get away from the pain of being alone and abandoned, Karen hits on the idea of a sure-fire escape: she murders a chance acquaintance in order to impersonate her and take the victim’s job at a hotel in the Caribbean. Her scheme almost works ...
       Lastly, again in the Perspektive Deutsches Kino, Bernd Fischer’s documentary Grüsse aus Dachau (From Dachau with Love) well deserves singling out in this report for several reasons. First of all, it was shot by a cameraman who grew up in this city near München with its 39,000 inhabitants, the site too of a memorial to a Nazi concentration camp where 31,000 prisoners had lost their lives. Fischer sketches how its citizens long to live a normal life without the onus of the past hanging over their heads ­ indeed, parents were want to have their children born in a different place to order to avoid listing Dachau as the birthplace in their passports. But the people of Dachau are justly proud of their Altstadt quarter, of their annual Bavarian hunting festival, of their other tourist attractions. From Dachau with Love, as the title hints, is a colorful palette of native performances.

Dorothea Paschen