Tag: German

The Chambermaid (Sluzka)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

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Part British television drama Upstairs Downstairs, part illicit lesbian romance, this film undercuts fears of stodgy, conservative product to deliver instead a story full of fearless performances which, for all its faults, constantly disturbs and surprises. The action takes place in Prague before and during the time of World War I.

he late 19th century, a small town in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Anka (Dana Droppová) is the bastard child of Eva. The pair are close until in Anka’s teenage years, her mother marries a man with three children who promptly finds a position for Anka to get her out of the way. Thus, the girl commences work as a chambermaid in a wealthy German household in Prague where she’s told to say Yes Milord and Yes Milady whenever anything’s asked of her by the master and mistress of the house.

She arrives when there’s a big social gathering going on, and is asked by Milady (Zuzana Mauréry) if she can sing. This leads to a her confident rendition of a Slavic folk song. You might think this is going to develop into a narrative thread but it doesn’t, an indication of the film’s major weakness: it constantly throws in new ideas some of which then don’t go anywhere, and there are even new ideas coming up in the final reel, for instance that Milord (Karel Dobrý) has been involved with various dodgy dealings (arms manufacture and sales, perhaps?) for which the incriminating paperwork needs to be burned when there has been no hint of this up to that point.

Likewise, she’s warned that the daughter Resi (Radka Caldová) can be difficult, but nothing quite prepares you for a sequence where Resi, on the pretext of not being able to find a brooch, orders Anka to strip off to prove she hasn’t stolen it. This seems to be primarily about humiliating the servants rather than any peculiar sexual fetish, and bears no relationship to their subsequent friendship and lesbian relationship either.

Other ideas thrown up by the narrative ARE however taken up to emerge as major story threads, and there are quite a few of them. Milord is partial to violently slapping those to whom he objects, which sometimes includes his wife should she dare to offer her opinion. As she later explains to her daughter when talking about marriage, you soon learn to keep quiet after you’ve been slapped a few times.

Milord is also partial to seeking temptations of the flesh elsewhere, something one of the older, more established maids Lisa (Vica Kerekes) is keen to exploit, working her was up to becoming his mistress with a house that he’ll pay for. The gardener is upfront about messing around with any woman who will let him, so when Resi is on the verge of marrying Gustav (Cyril Dobrý from All Quiet On The Western Front, Edward Berger, 2022)), she sends Anka to sleep with the gardener to obtain a full report. Anka’s verdict is, bearable and over quickly, but when she attempts to demonstrate this to Resi, it lasts longer, is far more satisfying and develops into a long-running relationship. So much so, that after Resi has birthed her first daughter, Anka becomes the child’s nursemaid until Milady bans her from that position after discovering Anka and Resi sharing a full bathtub together.

The cook Kristina (Anna Geislerová) is branded an old maid by Lisa, although she also possesses midwifery and abortionist skills which makes you wonder what happened to her in her past. Nevertheless, a memorable scene or Resi giving birth in which there’s a real possibility she might die is brilliantly conveyed in a lengthy reaction shot of Anka’s face. A later sequence has Kristina diagnose Lisa as pregnant and perform an abortion, with Anka required to drop a foetus-sized package of one of the city’s bridges into the water just as throughout the film she also empties chamber pots into street drains under the admonition, our employers must be allowed to think their shit smells sweeter than ours.

Resi, meanwhile, comes to despise her husband. He is sheltered and foolish enough to be delighted to get called up for active service in WW1, and Resi is so keen for him not to come back that Anka elicits details of how to curse somebody from Kristina so that Anka and Resi can perform a makeshift witchcraft ritual (basically, walking round a room stark naked with a broomstick between her legs) to curse him. He comes back from the war wounded, an embittered figure who has lost one leg, one eye and, perhaps more significantly, whatever self-dignity he previously possessed.

Anka is religious enough to pray nightly for her mother and the Emperor, so clearly her Christianity (probably Catholic or Orthodox) is of the state- and establishment-bolstering variety. It’s difficult to see what other impact it has on her life.

For all its veering around all over the place narrative-wise, this proves an engrossing two hours, far more so than you might reasonably expect.

The Chambermaid premieres in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:

Precious Ivie (Ivie wie Ivie)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

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Is Germany finally having a reckoning around race? The classic text Berlin Alexanderplatz (Burhan Qurbani, 2020) was reimagined for the immigrant generation, then Mr Bachmann and His Class (Maria Speth, 2021) sensitively told the story of a German teacher managing a class full of second-generation children in a rural part of the country. Now we have Precious Ivie from Sarah Blaßkewietz, a tender and powered exploration of mixed-racial identity that shows Germany’s difficulty in becoming a truly multikulti society.

I live in Germany myself and notice the awkward ways so-called liberals even in cities such as Berlin talk about racism. While the country’s own anti-semitic past is dealt with frankly, conversations around its Black citizens are still littered with stereotypes and mischaracterisations. Precious Ivie dives straight into it when the titular, mixed-race protagonist (Haley Louise Jones) interviews for a teaching position and shuts down when asked about where’s she’s really from. White Germans might not see the problem with such a question; for Afro-Germans it reinforces their difference from mainstream society.

It’s the kind of topic that’s been explored a lot in British TV — think the brilliant May I Destroy You (Michaela Cole, 2020) or the Small Axe (Steve McQueen, 2020) project — but remains something of a taboo topic in Germany. It’s something Ivie herself, living in the internationally-positioned but provincially-minded city of Leipzig, doesn’t try to think about too much, even brushing off her friend Anne’s (Anne Haug) use of the word “brownie” as a term of endearment. Nothing malicious is meant by it, but it’s the kind of thing that white people might not recognise can be harmful.

Which is all to say that Precious Ivie is an important debut by Blaßkewietz, herself Afro-German, that uses a melodramatic form to explore issues of identity, belonging and sisterhood. The story feels like something out of an Pedro Almodóvar film, Ivie forced to think about her relationship to her Black Senegalese father when her darker-skinned half-sister Naomi (Lorna Ishema) turns up out of the blue from Berlin. Having no idea who her father really was, the two sisters navigate what it means to be Black in a majority-white country.

If it feels like a heavy topic, Blaßkewietz has a great naturalist approach to everyday scene construction, crafting the inner lives of both women. The dialogue flows naturally, often showing characters not being able to say exactly what they mean or changing their minds mid-flow. She has also takes great care to sketch out how Ivie and Naomi’s experiences differ; while the light-skinned Ivie faces more passive-aggressive discrimination, the darker Naomi sees herself as the victim of genuine racist abuse.

But there are also many moments of genuine joy and friendship, as well as the potential for romance. A meet-cute on the bus between Ivie and a handsome white man is especially well handled, as well as Naomi’s burgeoning lesbian side, making me want to see the same director handle an outright romantic comedy. We get a true sense of these characters and want to hang out with them more, many plotlines frustratingly feeling unfulfilled by the time the credits roll around. Because of this emotional connection we have to the characters, once it moves into weepie territory it feels completely hard-earned. Here’s hoping it has a wide release in Germany and can open up fresh conversations about race in the country.

Precious Ivie plays in the First Feature section of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 12-28th November.

No Hard Feelings (Futur Drei)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Germany has a curious relationship with its non-white residents. You can be third or fourth-generation in the country, and still be referred to as an Ausländer (foreigner). Yet, connecting with your supposed homeland can be a perilous task if you have grown up in Germany your whole life. No Hard Feelings, centring around the experiences of a gay Iranian-German in a small town near Hanover, deftly explores this theme, providing a fresh, intersectional take on the coming-of-age story.

Parvis (Benny Radjaipour) is an aimless young man, who begins in the film in a gay club, stealing a bottle of champagne and hooking up with whoever will have him. His parents, Iranian exiles who run a supermarket, are disappointed in him, not necessarily because he’s homosexual, but because he has no real purpose in life. This changes when he’s suddenly forced to work in a refugee centre.

The job is surprisingly tough. When he is tasked with translating the Farsi of a woman scheduled for deportation, he can barely understand her regional accent. But this experience gives him an eye-opening insight into the plight of his fellow ausländer, who may not have German citizenship but share the discrimination he feels. These feelings come to the fore when he falls for the Iranian refugee Amon (Benny Radjaipour) and makes friends with his sister Banafshe (Banafshe Hourmazdi).

No Hard Feelings

No Hard Feelings deserves credit for the way it weaves systematic racism within a queer coming-of-age tale. For example, after a refreshingly graphic hook-up with an older white German man, he is immediately singled out by his race — the other man saying that he normally doesn’t go for hairy südlander (a term that usually refers to anyone dark from Balkans, Greece, Turkey and the Middle East), but that Parvis shouldn’t worry, as he “isn’t hairy”. The racist insult rolls off the tongue in such a way that the speaker has no idea that he’s being offensive, showing how embedded and unquestioned such views can be within German culture. Yet, among the refugees, also homophobia runs unchecked within the Arab/Iranian community, director Faraz Shariat skilfully aiming shots at both side of the cultural divide.

Utilising an Instagram friendly aesthetic, with a square frame and a popcorn-pastel colour palette, the style of the movie reflects the expressive nature of its characters. Stagier moments, scored to electronic music, contrast against the hand-held naturalism of dialogue or sex driven-scenes, showing both the world as these young people imagine it (or might stage it on their phone) and the way it really is. Later scenes of intimacy are shot with much more focus on emotion, later giving one of the best contrasts between merely shagging and actually making love.

While the scenes don’t flow together to create maximum effect, with random inserts or fantasy-esque sequences often undercutting the impact of the story, the style of No Hard Feelings asserts the strong sensibility of debut writer-director Shariat.

No Hard Feelings is out on Digital on Monday, December 7th.

Thirty (Dreissig)

Posted on by victorfraga

A somewhat millennial take on the midlife crisis, Simona Kostova’s Thirty follows a bunch of friends in a hip Berlin neighbourhood for 24 hours while they celebrate – or at least attempt – the birthday of one of them. The German drama, which premiered in Rotterdam earlier this year and is available online throughout December as part of the ArteKino Festival, is a snapshot of the existential ennui of the 30-somethings.

The writer Övünç (Övünç Güvenisik) turns 30 and calls upon his mates to party, all the while coping with a severe creative block. His friend Pascal (Pascal Houdus) is coming to terms with a bad breakup with Raha (Raha Emami Khansari), a struggling actress with bouts of depression. Other members of the group – such as Henner (Henner Borchers) and Kara (Kara Schröder) – also deal with insecurities. Together, they venture outside in order to enjoy life, although internally, they have no clue how to begin.

Thirty exudes a realistic charm. It focuses on seemingly unimportant dialogue and wandering scenes. We follow Övünç’s go through the first ciggies of the day for eight minutes. An entire conversation stops for almost 2 minutes just so one of the characters can use a blender. The movie relies on mood and understated acting to do the heavy lifting. Nowhere this is clearer – and more effective – than on scenes centred on Raha, who carries a muted pain around and always seems to be hiding something. Her monologue about her inability to find a reason to get out of bed is one of the production’s best moments.

The feature is divided in two parts. The first half is a theatrical and brightly-lighted affair, focused on long takes in minimalistic apartments. The second half is an exploratory and colourful night out, somewhere between Gus van Sant and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The dramatic elements of the first part get audiences hooked, while the second part provides the film with a sense of purpose and emotional punch.

Said search is echoed in Övünç’s opening of his birthday gift – a potent scene which is the heart of the film. He starts off with a big box that reveals, Matryoshka-style, several smaller boxes within itself, only the find the last and smallest one empty. While his friends argue that “the journey is the reward”, what’s clear in his face – and in Thirty as a whole – is the disappointment which comes with the end of youth.

Watch Thirty for free during the month of December only with ArteKino – click here for more information.

Man from Beirut

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM THE TALLINN BLACK NIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL

This German crime thriller may as well be described as a neo-noir. It has all the ingredients of the genre: a low budget (with no public funding), black and white footage, abundant interplay of light, numerous and murderous twists and even a blond femme fatale sporting a black wig. It’s an indie production targeted at a niche audience. It won’t make it big outside Germany.

Bulky and heavily bearded Momo (played by Kida Khodr Ramadan, who was indeed born in Beirut) is a skilled Lebanese hitman living in Berlin. He’s extremely nimble and accurate. Despite being sightless, he always kills his victims with surprising precision. One day, he is commissioned to murder three people inside a flat. He fatally shoots two adults, but does not manage to pull the trigger on a young girl called Junah (played by his very own daughter Dunya Ramadan).

Momo and Junah bond. He treats the child with a type of kindness and affection that he does not bestow upon adults. He does his utmost to evade both his associates (who wish to eliminate Junah) and the authorities. A blonde woman called Jessica is tasked with tracking down the missing child, and she is prepared to resort to very unorthodox procedures (including faking a motorbike accident) in order to achieve her goal.

There are various problems with The Man from Beirut. The script is disjointed. Many characters are entirely redundant (such as the two men in the car crash). Junah’s character isn’t credible: she is completely unfazed by successive deaths in front of her very eyes (quite unusual for a child). And her chemistry with Momo is rather lukewarm (despite the fact that the actor is her real father). The connection with Lebanon is also a little clumsy. Momo wants to escape to his home nation with Junah. His desire is illustrated by successive images of the Mediterranean country’s coast, including underwater wave shots. It feels a little random and unimaginative. Plus the violence in the very last sequence is excessive and gratuitous. All in all, a misfire.

Man from Beirut is showing in Competition at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

Gipsy Queen

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK SNAP: LIVE THE THE TALLINN BLACK NIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL

In this Austro-German production, 30-year-old Ali (Alina Serban) has to fend for herself in a hostile Hamburg with her two young children, after being evicted from her home in Romania by her father (presumably upon becoming an unmarried mother). She works as a cleaner in successive jobs, until one day she ends up in collecting gasses in the iconic nightclub Ritze.

The Ritze has a boxing ring in the basement. One day, Ali quietly practises with a punching bag while being observed by the club manager Tanne (played by German film veteran Tobias Moretti). Hamburg has an extensive underground boxing subculture. We learn that Ali used to train with her now estranged father as a child. She was taught to “fly like a butterfly and sting like a bee”. The nominative determinism speaks for itself: Ali shares her name with the greatest boxer of all time. Tanne invites her to get back into the ring, and she hesitantly agrees. Gradually, fighting becomes a powerful venting outlet for the hapless young woman. She becomes extremely successful, and begins to make a living out of boxing.

Meanwhile, Ali grapples with various issues at home. Her family has to share an apartment with a young German woman, and she does not have the means to rent a place for herself. Her daughter Esmeralda is doing poorly at school, and her mother constantly demands that she studies more. Ali’s parenting skills aren’t sterling, and she often comes across as aggressive and dysfunctional. The relationship between mother and daughter thus begins to collapse.

Alina Serban is extremely powerful in her debut performance. She is petite yet never fragile. Her latent rage is extremely palpable. The laconic character communicates very proficiently with her pearly eyes and powerful fists. She has to fight many physical as well as metaphorical battles: against her rival on the ring, against a racist society that constantly exploits and looks down on her (while offering limited opportunities for social ascension), against her family at home, and – perhaps more significantly – against her internalised anger and frustration. Ali has anger management issues, and she needs to ensure that no one gets hurt along her journey.

Upon learning that her father has passed away, she begins to communicate and make amends with him in her dreams and imagination, in a clear attempt to reconcile with her past and manage her temperament and frustrations.

The fourth feature film by Kurdish German filmmaker Huseyin Tabak is a complex psychological drama dotted with socio-political commentary. The narrative is very conventional: it’s very easy to work out what happens in the second half of the movie. It all wraps up with a momentous battle on the ring, in a fine example of physical acting. There’s just too much at stake: her humanity, her dignity, her career and even her motherhood. Can Ali afford to lose this fight?

Gipsy Queen just premiered in Competition at the 23rd Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

A Voluntary Year (Das Freiwillige Jahr)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

A tale of adolescent indecisiveness, fatherly overbearance and the inability to communicate, A Voluntary Year is a painful, funny and slyly profound work. Spinning gold from the most basic of premises, it is also another fine addition to the “German awkwardness canon” (a phrase I coined myself).

In recent years, ranging from Maren Ade films such as Everyone Else (2009) and Toni Erdmann (2016), running through to elements of I Was At Home, But (Angela Schanelec, 2019) and The Ground Beneath My Feet (Marie Kreutzer, 2019), German-Language directors have been particularly adroit at mining social awkwardness and communicational failures for bitterly dark comic effect. A Voluntary Year follows in this recent, rich vein, creating moments of genuine comedy from relatable, personal failures. They work because no one acts like they are in a comedy. By treating everyone’s issues very seriously, the comic beats land harder, making you laugh while you cringe.

It starts on the way to the airport. Urs (Sebastian Rudolph) is driving his daughter Jette (Maj-Britt Klenke) there so she can take a flight to Costa Rica, where she will spend a gap year in a hospital. She looks less than pleased, still roiling from the breakup with her boyfriend Mario (Thomas Schubert) and nervous about what this future halfway across the world will bring. Not that her father notices. He thinks she’ll have a wonderful time.

A Voluntary Year

“You can’t please everyone all the time,” Urs lectures his unsure daughter, all the while showing how disastrous it is trying to be an expert on everything. An early scene involving a changed lock quickly establishes Urs as an unreliable father; panicking over nothing instead of taking the time to think rationally. Meanwhile Mario turns up to say goodbye, throwing her central conflict into sharp relief. Perhaps she won’t catch that flight after all?

In the hands of a less confident director, these personal issues would’ve been more obviously telegraphed through endless backstories. This limited viewpoint works wonders for the film, which is all about how the desires we project onto others affects our own lives. The flight to Costa Rica is the central metaphor here, seen by Urs as an escape from small town life and by Jette as a great plunge into the unknown away from Mario. The conventional script of teenage escape versus parental provincialism is flipped, the film expertly blurring the lines between the generations.

Sebastian Rudolph does fine work as the hubris-laden father, fully chewing into a screenplay that allows him to be arrogant, stupid, naive and caring all at the same time. Whether it’s his strained relationship with his brother, his joyless affair with his married secretary, or his negative attitude towards his own patients at the clinic, he cannot seem to maintain a truly wholesome relationship with anyone. He’s not a stereotypically bad person, yet his myopic viewpoint — stressed by the film’s use of limited perspective — blinds him to the real issues at hand. Klenke is equally game, flitting endlessly between rash decision-making and indecisiveness, sometimes in the same scene, showing that even if father and daughter have different viewpoints in life, they deal with their issues in often the same way.

Ulrich Köhler keeps the viewpoints close, never cross-cutting, only following characters from one point to another if they have met in the same space. This is a particular effective technique as it truly lays bare how easily miscommunication can happen. Taking place over only a couple of days, A Voluntary Year provides a convincing snapshot of German provincialism. Complemented by overcast skies, sodden fields and barren woods, A Voluntary Year makes a good case for escaping the complications of small town living, but only if you can escape yourself first.

No release date has been set yet for A Voluntary Year, which debuted in the Concorso internazionale at Locarno, but expect a warm release in Köhler’s native Germany.

7500

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

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The limited thriller has been growing in popularity in recent years. Whether its the police responder drama The Guilty (Gustav Möller, 2018) or the man-in-the-car-with-great-phone-reception talkie Locke (Steven Knight, 2013), the thriller has been pushed further and further in terms of doing more with less. You can now count 7500 — referring to the code pilots used when being hijacked — on that list, a German production that reinvents the wheel by trimming it down to the absolute barest essentials.

Bar a few opening scenes via CCTV, the entirety of the movie’s point-of-view is from the cockpit of the airplane. Once we are in the cockpit of a plane going from Berlin Tegel to Paris, it starts with almost rigorous realism; both the pilot (Carlo Kitzlinger) and his first captain (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) going over in fine detail about procedure that no one but a pilot or radio controller could understand. Taking place in almost real time, 7500’s premise isn’t very subtle. We know from the beginning that there will be some kind of Islamist threat, it’s how it goes about it that makes it such an entertaining, turbulent ride.

7500

Patrick Vollrath and his cinematographer deserve credit for keeping things interesting inside such a close space, quick exchanges of point-of-view, insert shots and close-ups allowing momentum to continuously build. This is all edited with invisible precision, easily allowing us to go along with the plot despite the limited amount of scenarios that are possible. All extraneous cutaway scenes plane hijacking thrillers are known for — such as the control tower going haywire, the police chief facing a difficult decision, or the accompanying fighter jets — are completely missing, referenced only through radio and seen through the plane window. This works very effectively because a) these scenes are almost always completely rote anyway and b) they allow us to use our imagination instead, making the film far more unpredictable and enjoyable.

All in all, it’s an almost perfect pure thriller, with the extra thematic elements — such as the threat of Islamic extremism and German-Turkish conflict within cities like Berlin — almost completely unnecessary to the plot itself. These hijackers could’ve been far-right fascists, money-grabbing freeloaders, Quebec nationalists, or pro-Brexit extremists and the film would’ve worked in almost exactly the same way. It’s a little bit of a shame that in a post-9/11 world that the de facto plane hijackers are still Muslim when there are so many conflicting ideologies across the world ready for adaption, but this plot is really just a threadbare line to hang the enjoyable ride upon.

Ultimately this isn’t a film about themes; this is a film that rests purely upon style and succeeds tremendously. With Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the main role, 7500 has the potential to be a breakout hit. While his Americanness doesn’t add much to the screenplay — which in fact may have worked better if he were simply a white German — his recognisable face and over-the-top acting style perhaps tells us much more than a lesser name could. It also means that it has more potential to be seen. Let’s just hope its rollout isn’t as limited as its premise.

7500 debuted to strong acclaim in the Piazza Grande open-air section. Amazon Studios are helming this one in all territories apart from German-speaking regions. Expect it in a cinema near you!

Never Look Away (Werk Ohne Autor)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

What is art? Why do artists make art? These questions lie behind Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s latest film, like his earlier The Lives Of Others (2006) a German story exploring that country’s history and identity. It clocks in at over three hours, but don’t let that put you off because it needs that time to cover the considerable ground it does. Never Look Away spans the bombing of Dresden by the Allies in WW2, the liquidation of people considered by the Nazis inferior and therefore unfit to live and the very different worlds of post-war art schools in first East and later West Germany. This means it also spans two generations: those who were adults during the war, and those who were children at that time and became adults in post-war Germany.

Six year old Kurt Barnert (Cai Cohrs) wants to be an artist. He is taken to Dresden by his Aunt Elizabeth (Saskia Rosenthal from Lore, Cate Shortland, 2012) to see an exhibition of Degenerate Art mounted by the Nazis. He is fascinated. She tells him she rather likes the works displayed, but warns him not to tell anyone else. Later, he finds her playing the piano nude. She extols the mysteries of art to be found in life and exhorts him to “never look away”. She’s both creatively gifted and mentally ill. Being taken away in an ambulance to be incarcerated in a hospital she again issues that same exhortation. She will never leave the hospital system, thanks to Nazi doctors who have the power of life or death over their patients.

During the war, one night Kurt watches tin foil dropped by bombers around his home “to jam radio communication” before they drop bombs on Dresden in the distance, razing it to the ground.

After the war, Kurt – now a young man (Tom Schilling) – works painting signs until his boss, impressed by Kurt’s artistic skill, has him apply to Dresden art school where he falls in love with Ellie Seeband (Paula Beer) whose gynaecologist father (Sebastian Koch from The Lives Of Others) regards him as inferior stock and tries to destroy the couple’s relationship. After a promising career as a Socialist Realist painter of murals, Kurt with Ellie in tow defects from East to West Berlin a couple of months before the Berlin Wall is built. Kurt becomes a student at that hotbed of modern art Düsseldorf Kunstakademie and later a famous artist.

It’s a lot more complicated than that, but it’s difficult to give away much more without spoilers. The whole is based on the life of internationally renowned artist Gerhard Richter, who has read the script by the writer-director and made one or two suggestions which were incorporated. However, Richter has subsequently disowned the film (despite not having viewed it). Kurt’s tutor at the Kunstakademie is based on equally celebrated artist Joseph Beuys. Von Donnersmarck describes the piece as a work of fiction, although a great deal of the material appears to be historically accurate with names changed.


This is masterful storytelling with top-notch performances. More importantly, it seems to pick at the soul of a nation (Germany). There’s a lot of very nasty material festering beneath the surface and as you watch certain elements really start to get to you. Having watched it twice, this writer can attest to its being even more powerful on a second viewing: lots of little details elude you first time round as you grapple with the shocking overall story only to make themselves known second time around as you have a chance to take in the detail.

Never Look Away garnered two well deserved Oscar nominations earlier this year, for Best Foreign Film and Best Cinematography (it was shot by Caleb Deschanel whose impressive credits include The Black Stallion, Carroll Ballard, 1979). Alongside The Lives Of Others, which dealt with the Stasi (the East German secret police), it feels as if von Donnersmarck is building a panorama of German history through a series of historically grounded narratives of which this is only the second.

Finally, the German title Werk Ohne Autor translates literally as Work Without Author in reference to the artist’s claim that the photographs which form the basis of paintings “are just photographs”. This film suggests there’s a lot more to these apparently random images than that. Possibly the most effective slice of narrative storytelling we’ll see in the cinema this year. Supremely powerful, dirtylicious stuff.

Never Look Away is out in the UK on Friday, July 5th. On VoD on Monday, October 28th.

Never Look Away is in our list of Top 10 dirtiest films of 2019.

Mario

Posted on by Alasdair Bayman

Back in 2010, Germany striker Mario Gomez urged footballers who were homosexual to come out as they “would play as if they had been liberated.” Cut to 2018 and this call to arms from Gomez, who has since never stated if he is gay or not, the situation is as dire as ever. Being the only football player who has played in an array of Europe’s top five leagues to come out, former Aston Villa midfielder Thomas Hitzlsperger felt “he wanted to tell the world he was gay while he was still playing in Germany for Wolfsburg, but was advised against it” – according to an interview with German journalist Raphael Honigstein in 2014.

The overtly masculine and competitive nature of the sport means that any small piece of humanity or personality shown by a player results in ridicule by the press and opposing fans. Touching on Hitzlsperger’s experience of being a gay man in the blatantly heterosexual world of football – with its oppressions – Mario (Marcel Gisler, 2018) focuses acutely on the blossoming career of the titular Mario Lüthi (Max Hubacher). Whilst in the U21 squad of Swiss giants BSC Young Boys, he falls in love with their latest signing, Leon Saldo (Aaron Altaras). Complicating matters further, Mario and Leon both play in offensive positions and the pathway into the first team is only for a select few. Merging career ambition with a formative love relationship, this Swiss-Germanic production eventually conjures up some pathos after a slow start.

Shy and timid, Mario’s life is conjoined to the hip with football. In early pre-season where a professional focus is needed, the club transfer in Leon Saldo from Hannover 96’s U21 Academy. Strong, athletic and good-looking, Leon appears the perfect fit to be nurtured into the first team. Competing for the same spot, the two eventually form a prolific on-field relationship, leading the U21 squad towards league glory. Seeing the prospect held by both players, the Swiss club decide to room the two boys together, in an attempt to strengthen their on the field chemistry further. Consequentially, their off-field understanding grows into a shared love and understanding of one another. Seen by another team member kissing when away travelling to a game, the two must thus face the costs of sharing this twofold relationship.

Bringing a delicate edge to Mario, Max Hubacher, in moments, achieves a tenderness that feels fully realised. Contrasted against the confidence of Leon, the two work hold chemistry in periodic moments. Such instances occur after a long period of the film establishing its characters and mood. A juxtaposition of the dazzling heights of Goal! The Dream Begins (Danny Cannon, 2005), the world of a young upcoming footballer includes moments of loneliness, anxiety and resolve. Throughout its lengthy running time, the glamorous lives of Paul Pogba and Zlatan Ibrahimovic seem like galaxies away from the hard demands of continuous physical exercise and intense periods of nothingness. Talent is one thing, but the drive to succeed in a competitive environment is another aspect.

From the moment that rumours surrounding their relationship get out into the internal system at BSC Young Boys, Leon and Mario’s lives change forever. The clean almost corporate-like qualities possessed in the environments of the training ground work against the deeply personable relationships held between the two lovers. Accompanied by a shockingly suppressive meeting between the manager and club representative, Mario is informed that it would be best for him to be seen with a woman to suppress the rumours around him and Leon. This particular scene, alongside the final moments of the film, does unearth a sensitive soul to Mario. Regardless, the journey to these two specific moments lacks the eloquence apparent in other young LGBT tales as Maurice (James Ivory, 1987).

Addressing a key social and sporting subject that does not appear to be high on the agenda of Fifa or Uefa, Mario, through all this, is tragic in its few shining scenes. It is appropriate to suggest that the professionalism that radiates from its lead character impacts its stirring core. Credit where credit is due, however, I am sure solace and inspiration will be found from audience members and professional athletes who hold their sexuality as a closely guarded secret. Gisler and his team thankfully do not park the bus and come out against their subject matter in an assertive attacking manner. Still, it is void of the masterstroke that would be deployed by Pep Guardiola in footballing masterclass against Jose Mourinho.

Mario premiered at BFI Flare: LGBT Film Festival 2018 in March, when this piece was originally written. It’s out in cinemas on Friday, July 13th. It’s available on VoD and DVD from Friday, August 17th.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIGxpk9c-7U

All of a Sudden (Auf Einmal)

Posted on by victorfraga

The small town of Altena sits in the Germanic North Rhine-Westphalia with luscious valleys and clearly an idyllic life for some. The antithesis to his tranquil surroundings, Karsten’s (Sebastian Hülk) life takes a drastic change when a girl unexpectedly dies at a house party he is hosting. She is called Anna and prior to her death, Karsten and her are framed kissing before an abrupt cut. Berlin based director Asli Ozge, working in the German language for the first time, constructs a fairly atypical mystery narrative in All of a Sudden. Still, what unfolds is heightened significantly by the performances of all her cast, a deep cinematic style and a riveting final act.

As Karsten runs out of his apartment and towards the nearest clinic, one cannot help notice all his future worries would have been avoided by simply calling an ambulance, rather than leaving the dying Anna alone in his flat. The result of a hasty transition to the film’s titles, the audience are left unaware of what truly happened after Karsten and Anna kissed. Rippling through the whole narrative, this cut leaves every action of the character down to interpretation and second guessing – is our protagonist really a murderer or has fate playing a cruel trick on him?

From the evidence stacked against him, Anna’s underwear is unearthed under his table and his inability to call the services leaves many, including his lawyer, questioning his true intentions. From a cinematic perspective, Muriel Breton’s editing proposes an infinite amount of possibilities for what really happened in the final moments of Anna’s life.

A calm man, it does not appear that Karsten is capable of murder, yet Hülk plays the character with an understated level of vulnerability; as his job, girlfriend and home town turn on him, there lingers a degree of emotional instability to him. This all comes to a head when a local newspaper reports on the incident in the press, resulting in his boss requesting for his imminent leave until the whole situation has ‘blown over’.

The only beacon of hope for him lays in his father’s strong connections to the town as a loyal patron and affluent donor to charities etc. As Karsten’s appearance in court draws nearer, Ozge deploys a tangible class divide in the form of Anna’s familial ties. The family are uncovered to be Russian immigrants to Germany- a juxtaposition to Karsten’s affluent roots in Altena. Extending this class divide, the low key lighting employed in the industrial estate of Anna’s home acts against the natural light of the protagonist’s working environment in a prestigious bank. Further, some scenes are light with a David Fincher-esque quality, strengthening the peculiar and off beat position the audience finds their opinion on Karsten.

Though the trail sequence plays out in a rudimentary manner, All of a Sudden’s most captivating scenes occur after Karsten has been placed under severe emotional and psychological pressure. Using the situation to his advantage with others, he is relentless in the pursuit of his old equilibrium. Hülk transforms from a shy reserved man, into a sinister, depraved human being. Ozge final shot leaves a tactile impression of the real world, a world where the corrupt succeed and exploit others to their own advantage.

All of a Sudden is part of the Award Winners’ series of the Walk This Way Collection, and it’s available for viewing on all major VoD platforms from November 2017.