Der Baader Meinhof Komplex

In a film, in a story, when you do not develop your characters, when you do not give anyone the chance to know them, and when you fill your story with stylistic devices of handsome (here typewritten) statements and repetitive visuals of impact (here, shattering glass and exploding bombs), regardless of how well the film or the story looks or reads, they remain hollow. This is the central problem of the overambitious German film Der Baader Meinhof Komplex.

The film traverses a complex historical layer of (West) Germany, about something that is still awake in public consciousness to some extent: the possibility of violence in the aftermath of the two World Wars remains very much so in Europe, and one feels that even more now than ever we are all sitting on some tinderbox. Germany, because of its myriad emotions coming from pride over an empire or a nation that has seen periods of Frederick the Great, to the Weimar Republic and finally to Hitler's project, is the case most intensified out among all. In many ways, the Baader-Meinhof gang of thugs, or RAF in other words, was the product of this confusion: I am not suggesting Baader to be this product, because whether he was or he was not glosses over the seeming fact that he was simply a common waylayer in the guise of the then extolled "anarchist," but the coloured imagination of the youth certainly was so: youth whose fight against US occupation of Vietnam was their new drug, who had their newfound liberty of doing whatever they like, of being trigger-happy, whether it's fucking anyone and wherever, shooting a pistol shot at whomsoever or whatsoever or just into the void, or glorifying themselves by pushing and bullying others into some cruel act. The so-called anarchist often plays the Russian roulette, not with himself, which he pretends to, but with others' lives: he believes in nothing, but in destruction, in inversion and in perversion. Meinhof and her group may fight against the likes of the Shah of Iran, but they will also take arms and training from the Stasi, or from the Arabs whom they would otherwise disdain by getting nude whenever they want to, with no care for some other culture; or they may easily hijack a plane, because after all the passengers of an airplane can presumably be only capitalists.

And yet, the film tries to go away from who Baader was, who Gudrun was, who Ulrike was, or who Mohnhaupt was. It paints them in a haze of smoke and sex, high-falutin words and a mixed bag of actions, most of which end up botched and all of which are dirty: but fails to reveal the essential insecurity underlying someone like these adrenaline-fuelled terrorists. These are people who are neither Vietnamese, nor Arabs: their land has not been taken away, they have not been subjected to poisonous gas, and even in prison they have access to TV, radio and other means of contact, something that many free people in other countries wouldn't have. These are not terrorists driven by a consuming anger from experience. Their anger is rather the anger from impotence: they know their fathers were impotent, and they know that they are equally impotent, and so since they cannot fuck, their guns do the fucking part. And this is where the film comes up a pathetic cropper: there are a lot of incidents, lot of shouting and shooting, but there is no substance. Even though the film gathers a good cast, the director only succeeds in partially brightening up the image of some of the most despicable murderers in German history, which, considering how littered it is with them, is to say much.

There is no sensitivity of La guerre est finie, there is no small but detailed scope of Buongiorno, Notte, and there is no human uplifting story of The Lives of Others, all comparable films in theme and preoccupations: all there is, is a body but no soul. The body is handsome - the production values are high - but without the soul, the eyes don't light up.

Das Lied in mir

The pool is her cocoon. Her shell, from which she wants to emerge but does not know how. In a world of achievement and gray, black and white, she is trapped. And blue. And then she discovers she has dual identities. She has another country, another family, another life. She has the rich noises and colours of Latin America in her blood. She can be part of the spontaneity; she doesn't need to be confined within the world of Danke and Bitte anymore.

Beautifully shot, the greatest praise for Florian Cossen's debut feature (it is hard to believe that this is a debut!) is that he makes you want to live Buenos Aires, makes you want to go there. He combines the good elements of European cinema with the warmth of Latin America, and the mixture becomes potent when coupled with a stunning performance by the main protagonist Jessica Schwarz (as Maria) and meaningful editing. No one is given to histrionics; if Hollywood were to make this film, people would be throwing and smashing things, there would be too much bitterness and anger, and people would now and then scream or try to evoke pity, or something. Schwarz doesn't do anything of the sort: her low-key performance is the soul of the film. The colour scheme of the film throughout is a marvel to watch, feel and understand: to take an example, the sterile shots of the airport washroom are further enhanced by Maria's white shirt at the beginning of the film.

The movie is much beyond Maria's story: it is also about the clash of cultures as different as German/North European and Latin American. Even before Maria stumbles upon the secret, she feels drawn to the streets, to the chaos, to the cityscape: of course, her mind is active because she has already heard the song, but now that song is ready to burst from her. Not just the song whose words she knows but the meaning she doesn't, but also the song of her soul, the song of her persona - the song whose meaning she knows but not the words - which can now flower, in benign, suitable conditions. The film, whose title means The Song in Me (but strangely given the int'l title of The Day I Was Not Born), is the celebration of that song: of every human song that is ready even if hidden, that must not be strangled as Anton tries to do.

Anton's crime is not that he and his wife stole Maria; not just that he keeps on lying; not in his insecurity of losing Maria. His crime is he denied Maria the world where the song in me could be heard. That is why it will be difficult for Maria to ever forgive Anton. Until Anton learns the song.

Angst essen Seele auf / Vokzal dlya dvoikh

The Cold War wasn't so much war anymore at the time; it was simply cold. Even when it was to flare up, that was to happen in farflung, exotic-sounding and goddamned lands of Afghanistan and the like, not really closer home like the politically Eastern Europe. Newer issues had come up: oil had become the most important thing. Countries like France, Italy and Germany experienced or rather invited a boom of immigrants, many from North Africa; the old noble idea of democracy as conceptualized in Athens had now become the American dream, wherein mediocrity was celebrated and even worshipped; slowly, and inexorably, this would guide the flood-like wave of individualism, a cancer soon to spread all over the world. And with individualism came its issues: that of loneliness, and the idea that man loves another only to run away from his or her loneliness; or rather, is forced to. Around that hidden idea somewhere developed films focused on 'monologues' of a pair of lovers, a family, and so on: the family thing happened more in the US, where films were made showing a family coping with a son's death/drugs problem/etc. (curiously, it was more often son than daughter). Rarely, a Love Story came along, too. In Europe, in a trend that has since continued, it was more about a couple or relationships: while Antonioni deplored the modern, fragmented inner world of a man, some others accepted it as a fatality, and it is there that belong the films Angst essen Seele auf (Fear Eat Soul Up, 1974) and Vokzal dlya dvoikh (known as A Railway Station for Two, 1982), the former German, the latter Russian.

The beauty about Antonioni is that he refuses to accept that there is any permanent salvation in the individualistic man's pursuit of and refuge in romantic love; the answer has to be beyond, since the malaise is in individualism. While many find Antonioni's films pessimistic, I find them optimistic. Rather, I find the two films meant to be the subject of this post as given to fatalism, as pessimistic. Emmi and Ali in Fear Eats the Soul (the grammatically correct title by which the film is strangely better known) are beings eaten away by loneliness: and they think of each other as the messiah who's come into their lives to save them from this utter loneliness, this atmosphere of veneer and civility wherein lurk only prejudices all the more sharpened by the values taught by some civilisation's mores. The same is the case in Station for Two: Vera and Platon here reprising the roles. There is nothing to fault in the stories themselves; woven with humour, an observant eye of the world surrounding, and great or at least adequate performances from most characters, the films are in their own right little gems, depicting authentic slices of life as lived by probably hundreds or thousands, or more, in though different guises, different costumes. Yet, a thought occurs, that there is no question asked that is not rhetorical, there is no transcending: they are good, decent films, being lovely stories, yet they lack what makes a story truly great: finding the answer. The viewer is rather invited to enter the tedium of these characters and swim into it, and self-identify with that: and at the most paint a critical, intelligent-looking picture of what all she or he views, as does Haneke to take an example. Yet, man's intelligence is surely bound for greater destinations than mere observing and analyzing? Analysis is not the goal in itself; sadly, with the modern academics taking analysis itself to be the goal (which they call as "research"), films have not been far behind.

Fear Eats the Soul does portray Germany, especially that of the '70s, quite effectively: the immigrant from Maghreb is still very much the Other in white countries like France and Germany. However, what Fassbinder does well is to portray also how Emmi also experiences the hostile othering gaze when she is among circles not of her class: the opening scene when she enters the bar and everyone looks at her is a classic, exaggerated, lovely scene; later on, it will happen again when she will go to confront Ali at his workplace: this time, it's more economic class distinctions acting (even if Emmi is herself poor, she is German looking, white, and not looking a junkie: hence, for the stranger, she represents respectability, which Ali, even if earning more than Emmi, doesn't; rather Ali, the dark man, means filth, pig, squalor, muscles, hard cock). However, by selecting an actor who doesn't act well to play Ali, Fassbinder may have only reinforced some stereotypes; the only thing that the director has surely done is to show that whites (Germans) can be and often are themselves filth. That is, whiteness has got nothing to do with how dirty - or how clean - you are from inside. However, it is not clear if blackness has got to do something with it or not; Ali doesn't inspire much confidence, especially because of poor acting skills of the actor playing Ali. The film however has to be watched for the superlative acting of Brigitte Mira, playing Emmi.

Another great performance, again by the woman protagonist, Lyudmila Gurchenko, playing Vera, marks Station for Two. On appearances, the two women cannot be more different: while Vera plays a street-smart, gutsy waitress, Emmi is a humble, meek old woman who wants to be integrated into the world around her at every step. Yet, Emmi is as strong as Vera: she married a Polish, against her Hitler-loving father; she excuses her father's memory of Hitler loyalist almost immediately by claiming herself also to have been in the party; she marries Ali in spite of the reactions and keeps trying to go through it, and maybe her own self-doubts at the start. For, probably, in the memorable scene when her coworkers are introduced at first, it is her doubts speaking about the foreigners, rather than her coworkers. And Vera, for all her apparent meanness, is as soft from inside, as much in want of being loved, as Emmi; she is rootless, working in a place where people come and go, and all you have is a nice fuck with a man who comes now and then. But this fornication doesn't give her any company; when she sees another such soul, alone inside but outwardly busy in a bourgeois world, the pianist Platon, she will go even to the prison camps with him; just as Emmi will resolve to protect Ali from stress again if she can. That said, Station for Two does paint certainly a rosier picture of romance than does Fear Eats the Soul. That might be because the latter has one of the protagonists, Ali, whom we are ambiguous about: we also can't trust him!

We do not know the endings of these stories; they do not matter. They are your or mine stories. The ordinary man has triumphed; these films are not about momentous events of history, though history is certainly influencing their life courses. But the films are about hope, fear, stupidity, jealousy, meanness, generosity, altruism, love, irrationality; they are about eating couscous and changing trains. What these films do not set out to achieve, however, is finding the, or a, meaning beyond: they are content contemplating.

Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes

Klaus Kinski had to play only himself; but it is the way that Herzog restrains himself in his critique of the West’s lust for power and riches, not going overboard and yet being to the point, that defines the astonishing film Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (int’l title: Aguirre, the Wrath of God). And it is the music of the film that gives that elemental touch to the film, when man is at war with nature: nature not only of the Amazon but also nature within, where man makes a slave of himself in pursuit of mastery over everything and everyone. Power brings with it the subjugation to the oppressed: something unfinishedly said in Orwell’s “Shooting an elephant” and more refinedly in Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. For when you establish a power over someone’s body and wealth, his will and land, you tie yourself up within the realm that that power gives you; the more vast the reach, probably the wider is the radius of your tether, and yet tied you remain. And sometimes like a hurt animal ready to bite, as Aguirre (Kinski), mad but ready to pierce every envelope, and madder for he has the intelligence to feel that this was not a prison worthy to broken, a fort worthy to be taken; gold means nothing, for fame and power are absolute to him; and yet, if he had attained that fame and power, would he have finally felt satisfied? Or, like Ashoka, been driven on to that eternal lust of repentance and God?

Werner Herzog would have been the right man to make a film on Ashoka, for here he leaves the business unfinished; the final realization, that the powerful is the most powerless, is here only as the apparent truth, but what about the implied truth, when even the senses say otherwise? But given the limited scope of the film, he does marvellously: the way he only touches upon the aspect of incest since the start of the film; the manner in which he handles the pristine beauty of the landscape without letting it be the central element of the film; and how he handles, sparingly, Kinski himself. Rather than any antics or rhetoric, it is Kinski’s burning, blue eyes that bespeak the maniac in him, the man who is not the average but who has risen to only so far as to despise the others, not more above. A bully besotted with himself.