Film Festival Article

Hmm........ things are a bit quiet here. So, here's my article on the German Film Week. Do comment.

DETACHED FROM THE PAST



The annual German Film Week, jointly hosted by Max Mueller Bhawan and Suchitra Film Society was held from August 8 – 14 at Lavanya Theatre, Bangalore. Keeping up with tradition, this year’s festival featured a mix of award-winning films, relatively recent features and children’s films.


Since the era of New German Cinema, cinema in Germany has suffered through an extended period of steady decline, at least from the international perspective. However, there has been a revival of sorts since the late nineties with the meteoric success of ‘Run, Lola Run’, followed by a string of internationally acclaimed films. Leading this trend of revival in the global setup, are directors like Tom Tykwer, Hans-Christian Schmid and Fatih Akin to name a few.


Following in this upbeat tone, this year’s festival showcased a selection of German films in the new millennium. What sets apart these films from their venerated predecessors is a conscious effort to distance themselves from the clutches of dominant history and offer spectators a feel of the present life in post-war Germany. Though films like ‘Gespenster’ and ‘Warchild’ are melodramatic narratives that dwell on the human cost of war, most films showcased here tend to present it simply as a factual background.


One such film offering a fresh perspective of a no-strings attached German life is Rosenmuller’s ‘Grave Decisions’. It follows the adventures of 8 year old Sebastian who believes he is a criminal for ‘murdering’ his mother and other childish misdeeds. He wants to be immortal to evade hell and also tries to ‘put things right’ in his family. What follows is a hilarious catastrophe disrupting the whole town, in which fantasies colour perfectly ordinary events to charming mysteries and vice versa.


The highlight of the festival however, was the inaugural film ‘Requiem’. Director Hans-Christian Schmid’s second film is based on the true story of Anneliese Michel, a German student who died after an exorcism ritual. Sensational as the subject might appear to audiences suited to the regular fare of ‘The Exorcist’ or ‘The Exorcism of Emily Rose’, this film has a different tale to relate. Schmid adamantly refuses to take sides between religion and science right till the end. Instead, he simply chooses to look at the story through the eyes of the protagonist herself. The events are narrated in a pseudo-documentary style with remarkable self-restraint. Schmid seems to imitate Bressonian techniques and refuses to make use of the huge dramatic potential of the narrative. Sandra Huller is commendable in the role of Michaela Klinger, a devout Catholic student, who simply tries to be a 21 year old despite of her trials, but ultimately succumbs to faith. The success of Requiem perhaps lies in that it doesn’t herald the triumph of religion over science despite of its provocative plot. It simply records the life of a protagonist who makes a personal choice in having faith in religion over science to solve her existential problem. Schmid somehow manages to extricate the phenomenon from its supernatural overtones and make it seem plausible in reality. A refreshingly different perspective.


Fatih Akin’s much feted ‘The Edge of Heaven’ fails to live up to the expectations created by his earlier films, though. As is prominent in Akin’s oeuvre, this film too deals with multiple plot lines and the dualisms of an immigrant experience. However, this experience is only very distantly related to the political past. The protagonists seem to have accepted their situations more as a result of their immediate present and personal choices. However, the characters themselves are sketchy and broadly divided into white and black (who transform). But, apart from employing clichéd plot lines that only pretend to be different at first, the film seems to sink into the trap of the emotional power of its own narrative, that it brilliantly avoids for the first 20 minutes. The end result is yet another ‘message film’ which focuses on the human cost of turbulent times.


‘Four Minutes’ is another much applauded feature in the international circuit. Mainly because of the plot and the stereotyped protagonists, this film is a bit reminiscent of the Amitabh-starrer ‘Black’. Now this film isn’t half as obscenely shrill as Black. But, except for a few twists in the tedious plot and an acceptable performance by Monica Bleibtreu, this film is simply another ‘run-of-the-mill’ story of championing adversities. However, ‘Four Minutes’ too uses historical background to account for the miserable life of one of its main protagonist.


The German Film Week seems to have caught a snap of a slow transition in German cinema. A cultural phase that seems to be struggling to come out of the ‘guilt syndrome’ and dominant political/historical background….. To re-invent itself in the present times.