Wim Wenders
Palermo Shooting
A musician as film actor is a role-change that is dreaded equally by critics and film fans. Yet Wim Wenders has carried out the experiment in his latest film, and rightly so. Campino, front man with the German punk band Die Toten Hosen, appears before the camera in a contemplative film about an artist’s crisis of meaning. And the singer certainly knows how a main film protagonist should move and how to say a lot with very little text. The camera explores his face, focusing repeatedly on his striking features, which are initially depressive and then become increasingly softer. The interplay between them is simply wonderful. Never before has a Wenders film concentrated so much on a face. So for dedicated Wenders fans there is certainly something new to discover in the German director’s latest film. And there is much that is familiar as well. For example, a polished sound track – 62-year-old Wenders has selected 27 songs, ranging from Nick Cave to Portishead to Lou Reed. These form the protective wall behind which the Düsseldorf fashion photographer Finn (Campino) repeatedly retreats. Finn only finds peace when he has his headphones on. His works disgusts him, he rushes from appointment to appointment in his cabriolet, wakes up at night bathed in sweat, plagued by nightmares. A near-miss with a car driving in the wrong direction throws this restless figure into a crisis which he tries to escape by fleeing to Sicily, more precisely, to Palermo. In his search for the meaning of life, he wanders through the streets of that picturesque city with his old camera in his hand. A beautiful restorer (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) is waiting for him there, and he will fall in love with her. She could mean happiness for Finn, that is, if he could rediscover an enthusiasm for life. But the searcher is also being pursued. A mysterious figures is on his trail, a man with a hood, who repeatedly aims his bow and arrow at the photographer. It is death in person, played by Dennis Hopper. Love, life, death – Wenders has (again) made a philosophical road-movie. But this time he takes the viewers along on the inner journey. Wenders is a master at capturing moods. It is possible to wallow in the images in Palermo Shooting as in no other film currently on show. They are coolly aesthetic in the decadent fashion world, and beneath the Italian sun they are lively. The dialogues are the film’s greatest weakness. Frequently these sound totally banal – for example, when Finn wonders when was the last time he was present after receiving the message that there were 23 calls on his mobile phone in his absence. Wenders has never made things easy for film audiences – but that is his strength.
Uli Edel
Baader Meinhof Complex
Very few films have been as hotly debated in Germany as The Baader Meinhof Complex, even before it reached the cinemas. The great question was whether it was permissible to make a feature film about the terror of the extreme leftist Red Army Faction (RAF) that kept people in Germany on tenterhooks in the 1970s? What is more, could you intersperse that film with action sequences, and have more stars in it than in any other German film before it? According to producer Bernd Eichinger and director Uli Edel, you could. So the two of them set about working over this chapter in German post-war history. The result is impressive – and far removed from any kind of revolutionary romanticism. It presents the horror of terrorism with compelling intensity. To do this, the same duo who were successful with We Children from Bahnhof Zoo and Last Exit to Brooklyn took a different path to other films about the RAF, where the perpetrators of the terror were very much the main focus. The Baader Meinhof Complex centres instead on their actions. The film shows, with merciless authenticity, what terrorism means for the victims. The screenplay – based on research work by the former editor of Der Spiegel Stefan Aust – does without fiction and concentrates ten years into two-and-a half hours of film. The director Edel has also dexterously included documentary material into the action. After this film, nothing remains of the RAF myth.
Philipp Stölzl
Nordwand
A gripping plot, outstanding actors, breathtaking landscape scenes – and when the icy winds blow on the mountain, we freeze even in our warm cinema seats. In brief, Nordwand is a great adventure film. It is about the first attempt to climb the north face of the Eiger, the extremely difficult “wall of death”. Until now, director Philipp Stölzl had made a name for himself above all with music videos – for Madonna, for example – and as a director of advertising films. With his second feature film, however, the 41-year-old has bought his admission ticket to the world of cinema. The story, based on historical facts, of the two German mountaineers Toni Kurz and Andreas Hinterstoisser, played by Benno Fürmann and Florian Lukas, takes place in 1936, the year Hitler instrumentalized the Berlin Olympic Games. On their way to the summit the two are in competition with an Austrian team, but a sudden change in the weather and an injury turn the one-time opponents into a group fighting together for their survival. Stölzl’s drama has something almost documentary about it. It was filmed under conditions of genuine hardship and using historical mountaineering equipment – hobnailed mountain boots, woollen mittens, hemp ropes. Needless to say, one theme of this film is the National Socialist era, when conquering the north face of the Eiger was a matter of prestige. At the same time, its modern aesthetic revives a genre that was also popular in the 1930s, the so-called mountain film. This is a fine balancing act in which Stölzl focuses precisely on the ideological exploitation of the sport at that time. Despite this, however, the way the action is embedded in the history of the time is somewhat simple, for example, the two mountaineers are presented as appealingly critical of the Nazis, while the slick sensation-seeking reporter, excellently played by Ulrich Tukur, is characterized as their antipode, sympathetic towards the Nazis. But Stölzl’s main concern is the struggle between man and the primal forces of nature. Ultimately, this story of a horrendous failure shatters the dream of heroism, turning it into its opposite. Stölzl has neither time nor space for pathos.
Christian Schwochow
November Child
This is a film debut, a work presented for a qualifying examination at the Film Academy Baden-Württemberg, which is hard to believe, given how confidently Christian Schwochow narrates his story with the help of compelling images and outstanding actors. The theme of the film is the division of Germany into the GDR and the FRG – but above all, the consequences of that division. Schwochow himself was born in eastern Germany, but grew up in western Germany, with a “half eastern, half western socialization”, as he himself puts it. He wrote the screenplay for November Child with his mother, and Anna Maria Mühe plays a dual role in the film: Anna leaves her child Inga behind in the GDR and flees to the West. Inga grows up with her grandparents in a tiny village in Mecklenburg, believing that her mother drowned in the Baltic, as this is what her grandparents told her. As a young woman she finds out that this is not the case and sets out to find her mother, crossing Germany with the help of the strange literature professor Robert (Ulrich Matthes). Schwochow’s film is a tragic road-movie, a story about grand delusions, silence, repression and guilt feelings. November Child, which has been running in German cinemas since late November, has already won two audience prizes, at the Max Ophüls Film Festival in Saarbrücken and the film festival in Schwerin.
