Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Mon Jul 13, 2015 7:21 pm 
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CARLA ZURI AND LEONARD SCHLEICHER IN FINSTERWORLD

Dark collection of interconnected film tales roast today's Germany

You can see where things are going in the sardonic anthology film Finsterworld, a remarkable if over-ambitious first narrative feature by the young German documentary fimmaker Frauke Finsterwalder, which interrelates its ten or twelve characters and separate storylines, by the fact that a central thread is a school instructional trip to the site of a Nazi concentration camp. It's a class from an elite school, with a soft and sweet boy and girl (Leonard Schleicher, "Dominik," and Carla Zuri, "Natalie") and a sneering tall, blond meanie (Polish actor Jakob Gierszal, "Maximilian"). Natalie is absorbed in Daniel Clowes' cult graphic novel of the 'nineties, Ghost World. None of the kids are paying attention to the pompous teacher, Nickel (Christof Bach), who would like to impose his liberal German guilt with ironically Nazi-like fervor. Dominik and Natalie are horribly punished for their sweetness, and Nickel for his righteousness, while Maximilian triumphs, returning to school to score the goal, having won the girl. None of these kids, least of all Dominik, the history student, cares for the lesson about the Nazis.

Maximilian's parents despise Germany, and tell us so, as they head to Paris driving a Cadillac Escalade. The wife, Inge Sandberg (Corinna Harfouch), who seems to run the show, has directed her company not to send them a "Nazi car," meaning any Gereman brand; hence the Escalade. She even refuses to go to a German highway rest stop, declaring German public toilets dirtier than anything in the Third World (but not Paris!), preferring to relieve herself en route in a field. This leads the Sandbergs to an encounter with a student who's gone AWOL from the class trip. Meanwhile there is the hermit ("eniseidler") and raven trainer (Johannes Krisch), who has spotted Tom, another character, putting on his Furry suit, and subsequently finds his quiet life of nature and meditation rudely destroyed and himself transformed into a villain.

Maybe Finsterwalder and her co-writer Christian Kracht are having a little too much cruel fun, but it's amusing to trace the ingenious and far-fetched ways they have their characters interconnect. (I diagrammed them; but I needed a bigger sheet of paper than I had. ) The two threads that precede those of the class and the couple involve Claude (Michael Maertens), a lonely foot masseur-pedicurist who makes house calls, including the nursing-home-confined (and also lonely) Frau Sandberg (former Fassbinder regular Margit Carstensen), who just happens to be the mother of Inge's husband (Benard Schutz, "Georgi"). We see the relationship between pedicurist and client grow from affectionate to creepy. The screenplay plays a bit with the ideas of masks, costumes, skins, and ashes, with a reference to Nazi camps implied each time. I won't go into details about that. Some of it's too creepy, and too much designed to surprise the audience, to reveal in a review.

Right at the beginning of the movie, Claude, in his car, feels compelled to take a cell phone call from a new client while driving. He has to because business is bad, so he tells Tom (Ronald Zehrfeld), an amiable and easily bribed sweetheart of a traffic cop who pulls him over. As we follow Tom, he switches his police uniform to become a "Furry," joining a club of folks who congregate wearing hairy animal suits. This is not known to his girlfriend, a frustrated documentary filmmaker (Sandra Huller, "Franziska") who's trying to do a film about a bored lonely man, and is hitting a brick wall. "But depressing is good for documentaries, isn't it?" says Tom. They are not working out as a couple. He suggests she go to Africa, and cover colorful natives. Or cute animals.

Movies that seek profundity humorlessly by skipping around among a set of connected stories like Crash or 27 Grams tend to be unbearably pompous. Finsterrwalder escapes the worst pretensions of that genre by crafting an obviously over-the-top, darkly sardonic fairy tale. Her references to documentary, her previous métier, are sardonic too. But that character's mention of admiration for Austrians (Haneke and Seidl) and Sofia Coppola and the alienated ending of Antonioni's L'Eclisse can't be wholly ironic. And she and her co-writer Christian Kracht, even if we accept the preposterous artifice of the interwoven stories, pay the price with it of never engaging us deeply with any of the characters the way Roy Andersson does. Andersson's world view is equally pessimistic, but there is a delicacy and sweetness in his little tales that leaves one feeling touched, not put off. Finsterworld has a defiant energy about its negativity and anti-Germanness. But it's guilty of an unevenness of tone and a resorting to what Kevin Matthews calls "cheap shocks." I'm a fan of new German cinema and am excited about Christian Petzold, Benjamin Heisenberg's The Robber , Christoph Hochhäusler's The City Below and other stuff from the Berlin School. Those movies have a chastening coolness lacking here. However, the acting and tech credits, particularly dp Markus Forderder's ironically bright cinematography, are all fine.

For a German it might be bracing to have the country so overtly discussed in a narrative feature and so bitterly condemned by almost everybody here. On the other hand though it's all intentionally absurd and over-the-top, one feels lectured at times.

Finsterworld (a pointed play on the director's name), a manageable 91 mins., debuted Aug. 2013 at Montreal (see Hollywood Reporter review by Boyd van Hoeij) and opened in Germany 17 Oct. 2013. Screened for this review as part of the July-Aug. 2015 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

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