Screen Machine

Review: MIFF Review: Dreileben

Dreileben

Beats Being Dead – Christian Petzold

Don’t Follow Me Around – Dominik Graf

One Minute of Darkness – Christoph Hochhäusler

Directors Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf and Christoph Hochhäusler

International film festivals, for all their smug self-congratulation, still operate in a (sub)culture which takes the majority of its cues from the mainstream. To wit, barely anyone goes to see a German crime trilogy by three of the most shrewd directors operating in Europe today, but there’s a line snaking around the block for a middling documentary about a goddamn restaurant (El Bulli). The effects of the current fetishisation of food, chefs and restaurants, particularly as visual pleasure, are evident here — but so too is a longer-standing logic in the film market and film audience: Germans make films about their traumatic past which are worth seeing, anything else they make, is not. Basically.

This cycle could be perpetuated endlessly: no one in Germany can get much money to do anything but make historical dramas, no one outside of Germany goes to see anything German, only German historical dramas. So the Germans make historical dramas. For those filmmakers wishing to escape the cycle, if they do not make these Stasi/Nazi dramas, they will end up making films for television, the last bastion of genre filmmaking in Germany. This is not without its compromises, unless the director is lucky enough to end up on one of the publicly funded “weirder” (i.e. SBS style) channels, where ambivalence, experiment and ambiguity are tolerated. This is a nation whose TV stations, after all, gave us Fassbinder’s Berlin, Alexanderplatz. Admittedly, that is an historical drama too, but of a far more unsettling type than what we commonly see promoted today. Point is, since the 1960s (West) German TV stations have had a large role in nurturing and promoting the work of young directors—to a far greater extent than is the case in Australia.

This is part one of the backstory to how these three astute German directors come to be directing a crime trilogy for television. Part two is that this series emerged from a letter exchange in 2007 between three of that country’s most active, articulate and critical directors: Christoph Hochhäusler, Christian Petzold and Dominik Graf. The trio’s exchange was published in German film journal Revolver, although it is yet to be translated. The debate was largely around genre filmmaking in Germany and the effect of New German Cinema. Dominik Graf is the oldest of the three, born just after the core group of the New German Cinema. Graf has been in antagonistic — albeit one-sided — dispute with New German Cinema for most of his long, productive filmmaking career. The younger pair, Hochhäusler and Petzold (who is only eight years younger than Graf), by contrast, have found much to admire in Graf’s anti-auteurist stance. The older director has increasingly come to be a model for Hochhäusler, Petzold and other filmmakers of the loose Berlin School, especially as they have reflexively begun to make more genre-based work. The correspondence, you can imagine, is fascinating. But for the moment, the non-German-speaking international audience will have to content itself with the trilogy, shorn of pre-emptive discussion and lacking some awareness of the stake held by each director. Perhaps it is better this way.

The first part of the trilogy is Petzold’s Beats Being Dead. It is a crime film only glancingly. Just beyond the edge of the frame is a crime film; in its centre is a teen romance straight out of a slasher flick. It’s tempting to call it a fairytale, but that would be intended in the Germanic Brothers Grimm sense, not the sense we get from prim Disney cartoons. Beats Being Dead is largely concerned with the confused romance of a boy and girl fresh from high school. He is a little rich kid, bound for medical school, skiving from national service by doing a little lazy work in a family friend’s private hospital. She is a Bosnian girl who hangs out with a group of bikie tough guys; she’s recently found work, as all good Eastern Europeans ought to do, as a housekeeper in the town’s hotel. It is an age-old tale of hormonal exuberance defying class lines — only to be channelled, inevitably, frustratingly, back into socially acceptable relations of like-with-like. Watching this romance play out, we keep waiting for one of our adolescent leads to be killed, murdered, maimed. In scene after scene, the Bernard Herrmann-esque soundtrack begins to screech and scrape, as it typically does in films when someone is about to meet with death, evil incarnate or sexual torture. But here no one is murdered, raped or otherwise violently detained. At least not on screen. Instead, there is an unsettling leitmotif: a convoy of Polizei – motorbikes, cars, riot vans, the full apparatus — which either speeds past with sirens blasting or sets up roadblocks or clambers through the neighbouring forest with search dogs, or just generally mills about. A prisoner has escaped, yes, but what the hell is going on? The police presence seems as threatening as the usual crazy-with-a-gun. A suggestive menace settles in, never fully erupting.

Christian Petzold's BEATS BEING DEAD

Petzold, more than the other two directors here, is toying with generic expectations: what is a crime film, after all, without a bit of the old ultra violence and cops mumbling about criminals? Depending on your taste for this type of tease, the lack of a generic payoff will be tantalising or excruciating, genius or pretentious. The calm alienation of Petzold’s films is rarely satisfying in any conventional sense. I have now seen several of his films and I am still not sure if Petzold is a genius or throttled by his own intelligence — but that very indecision suggests there is something going on. (And he gives good interview.)

Beats Being Dead is particularly effective in its role of opening the trilogy. The film sets us up in the titular town, Dreileben — literally, three lives. This fictitious village was decided upon by the filmmakers as one of the pins to hold these three films together. The other pin is the escaped prisoner. We learn more about both as the films play on, each director unfolding aspects of the town’s workings and the escapee’s movements. We ultimately learn that this is Thuringia, part of the old GDR, right in the middle of today’s Germany. Dreileben—a village, in a thick of forest, logging trucks running through its streets, a coursing river through its centre, a psycho in the woods.

Dominik Graf explores the location as a semi-urban, semi-rural setting in his contribution, Don’t Follow Me Around. Graf’s scenario follows Johanna, a single young (West) German police psychologist, who has been called into Dreileben after attempts to apprehend the escaped criminal come to nought. Jo stays with an old uni friend and her partner in their work-in-progress, renovation-job villa in a former East German communal neighbourhood, right on the edge of the forest. The dark woods, dense with enormous birch trees, serve as the perfect setting for night-time frights, as any unexplained rustling ruffles the otherwise tasteful, bourgeois lives of the villa’s inhabitants: nights are whiled away with wine, cheese, smallgoods and self-absorbed conversation, followed by book readings and lazy breakfasts. (In other words, the entire plot of most “charming” French cinema on general release in Australia.) Graf suggests tensions here between the communal spirit of the Thuringian neighbours and the Old Money narcissism of these Munich blow-ins. Similar tensions arise elsewhere in some lazy scriptwriting which characterises the village cops as corrupt, old, lazy East Germans, all of them blown aside by Jo’s efficiency and the smarts of cops from the nearby regional cities of Leipzig and Erfurt.

Nevertheless, Graf does here what he knows best: the police drama. Recent critical and artistic attention may have revived interest in Graf — which, in turn, has revived Graf’s interest in Graf, after a series of box-office bombs in the 1990s — but he has spent a large chunk of his career doing the unglamorous slog of working in TV police series. This work is a conscious choice by the director, who understands the role of the police as an “apparatus” which maps across the whole society. Around the same time as he was working on Don’t Follow Me Around, he was also completing Im Angesicht des Verbrechens (In the Face of the Crime), a ten-part TV drama about the Russian Mafia in Berlin. That series explored the tension between its protagonist, a Russian who joins the police, and those Russians who make a risky fortune in the underworld. In its better moments, the series reaches the heights of the firmly established HBO television genre, exposing a shadow economy and the unseemly side of the New Europe (i.e. sex trafficking); in its lesser moments, it’s Underbelly: Berlin, albeit without the Australian drama’s undying, complacent Tarantinoisms and the dull clichés of “larrikin crooks”.

By contrast, Don’t Follow Me Around can’t show much glitz, given the sleepy village life — there’s no strip joint to retire to, just a few tired pubs and the hospital cafeteria. Jo’s work at luring the fugitive into town from the forest is swiftly done and he is arrested: in retrospect, the screen-time devoted to this part of the plot feels very slight. Again, like Petzold’s film, the criminal story feels secondary to the drama in private conversations about the future and the past: tension emerges between Jo and her uni friend as they discover a shared history that goes back further than they first thought. That tension largely motors the film along, before momentarily resolving itself — only to be displaced itself by a new revelation, right at the film’s close. Around the same time as the false narrative closure, the crazy-from-the-forest is apprehended. And so, all tied up, the film concludes feeling a little trivial. It is formally the least innovative of the three, bearing the mark, perhaps, of long-term TV work.

Christoph Hochhäusler’s closing film, One Minute of Darkness, is where our convict gets his screen-time. Seen only briefly in the earlier films, he here comes into the centre of the story. This is the tightest of the series and the most reminiscent of a traditional “psychological thriller.” For what feels like half of its running time, we are, well, running with the convict through the woods, waking with a start each day and then scrambling for cover as the German Shepherds near; the other half of its running time is spent getting to know the fugitive’s background — his foster mother has just died — and exactly what led to his escape. Still, his “psychological profile,” as they say, remains opaque and there seems to be reluctance, from Hochhäusler, to go in for the full cause-and-effect reading, for the stock plot of child abuse. On the other hand, there is a strangely incorporated storyline about one of the main police investigators here: this middle-aged Plod is having troubles with acute tinnitus, perhaps caused by something more serious, and he is ordered to stay at home. Like so many screen cops before him, he just cannot let the case be. He makes a couple of discoveries in his downtime, but otherwise the whole line seems a bit superfluous — as if the fugitive were not enough, as if he were the shared object and Hochhäusler wanted his own guy to toy with…

But One Minute of Darkness is a deft work to end the series. It contains many satisfying “penny drop” moments, where storylines intersect in obvious and tangential ways. It brings all three stories together, while also leaving the film/series resolutely unresolved: it ends with security camera footage of the murder of a character — star of an earlier film — we had not known to be killed. It is hard to say whether any of these films would really work as a standalone experience. It is easier to say that, seen together, they add up to more than their parts. In this, there is a passing similarity to the Red Riding Trilogy, that three-part UK crime drama which evoked a mood of social anomie wrought by the vicious politics of Thatcher, the bleeding of life from the regions by deindustrialisation and anti-union campaigns. Both series, perhaps despite themselves, favour mood over action, mapping a time and place rather than a compelling story. And both series gain from having different directors helm each film — they take off on idiosyncratic tangents from very similar source material and inspiration. Brought back together after the process of production, their stories fill each other out. That is their success, their coming together into something more than they are alone: they do not merely add to each other, they multiply.

Ben Gook is a Melbourne-based critic who has written about cinema for TheVine, The Big Issue and academic outlets. He majored in Cinema Studies at The University of Melbourne and is completing a PhD about remembrance of the GDR in contemporary German culture.

→ more articles by Ben Gook