Berlin & Beyond.

I don't think I'm all that unique in the expectations I come with to the Berlin & Beyond Film Festival every year, or any festival that focuses on the cinema of any particular country or region. In its 11th installment, bringing San Franciscans an opportunity to see "New Films from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland," I don't expect to be blown away by all of them, if any. Of course, I'm happy to watch great cinema, but I also come simply to recall my time spent with good friends who grew up in some of the cities shown on screen (in my case, Munich and Stuttgart in Germany and Salzburg, Vienna and Villach in Austria) and to be exposed to cultural issues my country's mainstream news media are unwilling to address. I am not so naive to assume that what I see on the screen truly represents these countries and the lives of their citizens, but I come to world cinema for the same reasons I read books, magazines and online newspapers from lands other than my own - to educate myself. All I ask is that the films, in my street critic parlance, don't suck.

Johannes Brunner's Oktoberfest (Germany, 2005) came closest to not meeting my extremely lenient qualifications. In the intertwined stories meant to represent a dodge-'em car amusement ride of lives bouncing off each other, there are some interesting interactions, but too many of the efforts to push the plot along seem contrived. The film begins on the last day of Oktoberfest and we follow this day in the lives of Germans and Africans working the beer gardens, young women from Hamburg down on holiday, a Japanese couple on honeymoon, three generations of a family running a haunted house ride, a divorced father spending the day with his reluctant older daughter and excited younger son, a young German man playing cat and mouse with security, and Italian tourists. Players in each storyline will intermix at some point in the film. Many of these random trajectories are believable, considering the dizzying mass confusion that such an event allows.

The film is not a celebration of Oktoberfest; instead, it primarily focuses on the pathetic goings on behind all the pretty lights and carnival noise. Oktoberfest the movie definitely leaves you with more reservations about getting reservations to attend Oktoberfest the event. Similarly, I'm reluctant to recommend the film simply because there are too many weak moments, such as the lack of motivation behind the infidelity of the leader of the oompah-pah band in the main beer hall and several love-at-first-sights that seem to happen way too easily. Oktoberfest is a ride better avoided, unless you have your own memories of Oktoberfest you'd like to revisit.

Next rung up the critical ladder is Hannes Stöhr's Night on Earth-inspired One Day In Europe (Germany/Spain, 2005). Stöhr takes us to four different locales on the final day of the European Soccer Championships. Connecting all our stories are not Jarmusch's taxi cabs, but alternating legitimate and illegitimate insurance claims that require assistance from the local police. An English woman robbed of all her luggage is befriended by a non-English-speaking Russian grandmother in Moscow. A German tourist fakes the loss of his possessions while in Turkey in order to acquire cash from his insurance company and stumbles into the taxi cab of a Turkish citizen who, rather than rush him to the police station, offers to beat the living crap out of the individuals who never mugged the German in the first place. A too-friendly Hungarian will meet a Spanish police officer after naively asking a stranger to take a picture of him standing in front of a major tourist spot in Santiago de Campostela, losing his digital camera and all 500 photos of his pilgrimage in the process.

And finally, French street performers in Berlin fake a mugging so as to attain insurance money to repair their broken down vehicle. Evident of the little effect this film had on me, I had trouble recalling what happened in the final story. (The friend I brought with me reminded me that it worked off the efficiency for which the Berlin police are apparently known, an efficiency this story desired to emulate because it seemed to be the quickest of the four and ended quite abruptly.) Stöhr is obviously serving up his own L'Auberge espagnole in exploring the comic possibilities of the emerging European Union identity. The highlights for me were the first two stories, particularly the second where laughter erupted from the audience when the Turkish cab driver begins speaking not only German, but German of the Schwäbisch dialect, which many linguists argue is the most divergent of German dialects from the mainstream Hochdeutsch taught in schools. As Stöhr commented in the Q&A afterwards, you couldn't make up a character like the real-life Turkish-born actor Erdal Yildiz who played that character. Yildiz indeed learned his German in the Swabian regions and he has appeared in many German television and film productions.

Speaking of Turkish-Germans, Anno Saul's Kebab Connection (Germany, 2004) was the film I was most excited to see at this year's Berlin & Beyond. Thankfully, this film, co-produced by Fatih Akin (Head-On) lived up to my hopes and was the perfect introduction to German film for the friend who accompanied me. Ingrid Eggers, organizer and co-founder of the Berlin & Beyond Film Festival, introduced the film as one of the rare comedies playing the festival this year, which brought a laugh from the audience well aware that German films are more known for looking at our shadows than our jesters.

A young Turkish Tarantino named Ibo (Denis Moschitto) directs stylish splatterfest commercials for his Uncle's kebab stand that generate serious traffic after being screened at the local Kino. As his star begins to rise, he discovers that his German girlfriend's belly is beginning to as well. Ibo's father has been lenient about Ibo messing around with German girls, asking only one thing - not to get them pregnant. Having failed that one request, Ibo’s father disowns him. Ibo's indecisiveness about how to resolve all this family and career confusion begins to frustrate his girlfriend and the comedy definitely milks this confusion for all its worth. Cultural inside jokes abound (add to the mix that Ibo's uncle's main competitor is a Greek restaurant across the street), but even if one is hip to neither the Turkish nor the German references, the film has enough universal humor about young adulthood, young parenthood and family politics that even the most apolitical could find the humor in this flick.

Wanting to see a film based in Salzburg so I could have the pleasure in recognizing sights from that lovely city, I caught another of the rare comedies, Wolfgang Murnberger's Silentium, which we were told was a huge hit in Austria in 2005. This dark comedy takes some definitely cavernous routes to unearth humor, working off the sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church. We meet the unemployed private investigator Brenner (Josef Hader) just as he becomes unemployed and quickly stumbles into getting hired by the daughter (Maria Köstlinger) of a famous festival promoter. She wants Brenner to find out who murdered her husband. Her husband had accused the archbishop of sexually molesting him when he was younger and the town has been led to believe that her husband committed suicide. Brenner finds much more than he bargained for as he digs deeper and deeper into the goings on of the local diocese and the festival promoter.

For the most part, the film is a laugh riot. The topic allows for some hilarious irreverence involving multiple Catholic icons. Plus, there's an expertly done parody of North by Northwest. But the film loses itself in the resolution of all the secrets hidden in the catacombs of Salzburg's Da Vinci Code. When the puzzle pieces fall into place, the picture is just too outlandish to be believable. Plus, Silentium continues the long tradition of limiting the roles available to actresses of Asian descents, something that has tainted films of otherwise exemplary quality such as Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. (One thing I learned from Silentium is the German language variant of that schoolyard racist taunt 'Chinese/Japanese.' Perhaps there are English variants I'm not aware of, but the German translation we were given of the final couplet "Dirty knees/Look at these" was replaced with "Owl/Fowl." The person reciting the rhyme uses his fingers to widen his eyes when saying "Owl" and then the person the rhyme is being recited to is bonked on the head when he says "Fowl." Some universals divide more than unite, I guess.) The same old, same old that rears its ugly Western eyes here is a tired cliché if not offensive. I'm not for censorship, so Murnberger can do whatever he wants, but I don't have to like this part of the film. Unfortunately, I can't reveal a more detailed argument about the problems with this aspect of the film because it is part of a crucial twist in the plot. Therefore, I can't deflect dirty knee jerks from calling my comments mere political correctness. Like the confessional ethics of priests, I have my own ethical code of silence when writing about films in a forum bounded by the same decorum as a review.

But enough of disappointment; the best of the bunch I caught was the film awarded Best New Feature at the festival, Robert Thalheim's Netto (Germany, 2004). Netto follows a divorced father, Marcel Werner (Milan Peschel) with impulse control problems exacerbated by his drinking problem. We meet him ordering a Clausthaler at a local Chinese restaurant and his conversation demonstrates how Marcel has difficulty properly discerning social cues, going on and on about his delusional life when it is clear no one at the restaurant is really interested in what he has to say. Although unemployment is a problem affecting everyone in Germany, we can see why this particular man has trouble keeping a job. His son Sebastian (Sebastian Butz) re-enters Marcel's life in an effort to avoid changing schools after his mother moves into the home of her new husband. Sebastian ends up being his father's surrogate father by assisting him in getting the security-related position his father fantasizes about.

Butz's portrayal is impressive and Peschel puts in a quality performance as well. Thalheim makes some nice shot choices, such as Marcel bike-peddling past important sites in Berlin as if staking them out for security preparations. There is a hilarious scene when Marcel acts out his secret service fantasies that Thalheim gives us from a surveillance camera overhead shot that wonderfully underscores the scene. (What's this about the Germans not being funny?) Weaving in and out of the film is the country music of the "Johnny Cash of East Berlin," Peter Tschernig, and it works nicely throughout the film. The only other films I saw up for the Best First Feature award were the aforementioned poor Oktoberfest and a film I saw in Busan, Benjamin Heisenberg's compelling Sleeper (Germany, 2005), so I can't speak for all of them but I find Netto a more than worthy choice.

I was limited in what I could watch over this three-day weekend by a cold or flu or something else I'm self-diagnosing. (On the phone, my father on the phone advised me to "make sure it's not that bird flu.") Particularly disappointing was missing Curt and Robert Siodmak, Edgar G Ulmer and Fred Zinnemann's silent film, People on Sunday (Germany, 1929). And I felt obligated to catch at least some of the Michael Verhoeven films featured since The Nasty Girl was the first film I ever saw with subtitles, catching it back during its initial release in the US at either the Tivoli Theatre or the Hi-Pointe Theatre in St Louis. I now prefer to read my films and Verhoeven can take some of the credit for that. At least I got to see films like Netto and Kebab Connection that will be staying with me longer than this cold, hopefully.

Posted by dwhudson at January 21, 2006 7:06 AM