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Aug. 2nd, 2002 11:41 am
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Saw a strange German film last night.
Did I just hear someone say, "What German films aren't strange?" HA! Just shows to go how brainwashed you are by Hollywood! The arty days are over; now Germans make crowd-pleasing romantic comedies like Der bewegte Mann or crowd-pleasing action flicks like Lola rennt. This one, Was tun, wenn's brennt, fit that pattern: An action-comedy with at least one strong romantic subplot. The lead actor, Til Schweiger, is Tinseltown gorgeous; the Berlin locales are all upscale shine or designer grime; the music includes Manic Street Preachers and rises to the foreground for several slo-mo music-video sequences, etc.
The bizarre twist is that the heroes are bomb-building anarchists.
Back in the '80s, they were Autonome, German punks who occupied vacant buildings in Berlin (particularly in the Kreuzberg area, which was undesirable due to its proximity to the wall). They planted a bomb in a villa in Grunewald which waited fifteen years to explode. By the time it does, they've predictably drifted apart. Half are still true to their old politics (two of them still occupying the same decaying apartment in Kreuzberg) and half have sold out to respectability. So what do they do when confronted by discovery, imprisonment, and disgrace? Of course, they reunite to plot a grand caper that culminates in the construction of another bomb, which they attempt to sneak into the police headquarters in Tempelhof in order to destroy the seized evidence linking them to the Grunewald explosion.
And the film is behind them all the way. Any moral qualms are effortlessly smoothed out: Although it had the force to demolish an entire villa, the first bomb reportedly only causes "minor injuries" to the pair standing right next to it when it went off. (We never see these injuries; the characters who suffer them disappear from the film at the point of detonation.) I wasn't surprised to see a flashback to a street fight in their violent youth being gleefully glamourised--who doesn't expect to see 30-something nostalgia pandered to with Grease-like glorification of teenage rebellion?--but it's surreal to see the modern-day bomb-building sequence is given the exact same celebratory music video treatment. Objections--the born-again lawyer wants to turn himself in, the single mother doesn't want to resort to violent means--are raised only to be dismissed and, by the end, even the group's most embittered enemy is on their side.
Did straight-laced middle-aged baby boomers have similar reactions when they saw the druggee layabout radical wastrels of their college days lionised as reformists and visionaries? Maybe, except here the constrast between historical fact and media fiction is even more startling. German's most notorious left-wing terror group, the Rote Armee Fraktion, kept killing people well into the '90s, racking up a total of over 30 murders in its 26-year history. (They are mentioned in the film only to dismiss the comparison; our heroes are warm and cuddly pinko thugs, unlike those sick bloodthirsty bastards.) Even before 9/11 (and this movie was made afterwards), can you imagine the Weathermen being fully rehabilitated?
I hate to relate everything about the psychology of modern Germany to the War, but I wonder if the trauma of Fascist dictatorship hasn't left Germans with a soft spot for left-wing anti-authoritism. After all, as long as you have mobs of disaffected youths running rampant (as happens in Berlin every May Day), there couldn't be another Hitler, right? (Another striking facet of the film is its complete failure to address right-wing violence. If the mother is looking to shame the others out of using violent methods, why doesn't she does point out that they're the ones skinheads most prefer?) The most popular politician in Germany today isn't a progressive centrist like Schroeder or Moellemann who talks about putting WWII behind and acting like a normal nation; it's Joschka Fischer of the Green Party. His status has hardly been shaken by revelations that one of his old buddies was involved in an attack in the '70s that killed several OPEC ministers and footage of him battering a policeman in a street battle. Again, imagine if Clinton won the election not in spite of hanging out in Europe and protesting the war but because of it.
All in all, I can't say I was disgusted by the film. After all, its confused politics (and failure to tackle tough questions) are no worse than those of the average American actioner. I was just baffled to see them trivialised into light entertainment for a country still very much affected by politically-motivated violence.
Die spinnen, die Deutschen!
Did I just hear someone say, "What German films aren't strange?" HA! Just shows to go how brainwashed you are by Hollywood! The arty days are over; now Germans make crowd-pleasing romantic comedies like Der bewegte Mann or crowd-pleasing action flicks like Lola rennt. This one, Was tun, wenn's brennt, fit that pattern: An action-comedy with at least one strong romantic subplot. The lead actor, Til Schweiger, is Tinseltown gorgeous; the Berlin locales are all upscale shine or designer grime; the music includes Manic Street Preachers and rises to the foreground for several slo-mo music-video sequences, etc.
The bizarre twist is that the heroes are bomb-building anarchists.
Back in the '80s, they were Autonome, German punks who occupied vacant buildings in Berlin (particularly in the Kreuzberg area, which was undesirable due to its proximity to the wall). They planted a bomb in a villa in Grunewald which waited fifteen years to explode. By the time it does, they've predictably drifted apart. Half are still true to their old politics (two of them still occupying the same decaying apartment in Kreuzberg) and half have sold out to respectability. So what do they do when confronted by discovery, imprisonment, and disgrace? Of course, they reunite to plot a grand caper that culminates in the construction of another bomb, which they attempt to sneak into the police headquarters in Tempelhof in order to destroy the seized evidence linking them to the Grunewald explosion.
And the film is behind them all the way. Any moral qualms are effortlessly smoothed out: Although it had the force to demolish an entire villa, the first bomb reportedly only causes "minor injuries" to the pair standing right next to it when it went off. (We never see these injuries; the characters who suffer them disappear from the film at the point of detonation.) I wasn't surprised to see a flashback to a street fight in their violent youth being gleefully glamourised--who doesn't expect to see 30-something nostalgia pandered to with Grease-like glorification of teenage rebellion?--but it's surreal to see the modern-day bomb-building sequence is given the exact same celebratory music video treatment. Objections--the born-again lawyer wants to turn himself in, the single mother doesn't want to resort to violent means--are raised only to be dismissed and, by the end, even the group's most embittered enemy is on their side.
Did straight-laced middle-aged baby boomers have similar reactions when they saw the druggee layabout radical wastrels of their college days lionised as reformists and visionaries? Maybe, except here the constrast between historical fact and media fiction is even more startling. German's most notorious left-wing terror group, the Rote Armee Fraktion, kept killing people well into the '90s, racking up a total of over 30 murders in its 26-year history. (They are mentioned in the film only to dismiss the comparison; our heroes are warm and cuddly pinko thugs, unlike those sick bloodthirsty bastards.) Even before 9/11 (and this movie was made afterwards), can you imagine the Weathermen being fully rehabilitated?
I hate to relate everything about the psychology of modern Germany to the War, but I wonder if the trauma of Fascist dictatorship hasn't left Germans with a soft spot for left-wing anti-authoritism. After all, as long as you have mobs of disaffected youths running rampant (as happens in Berlin every May Day), there couldn't be another Hitler, right? (Another striking facet of the film is its complete failure to address right-wing violence. If the mother is looking to shame the others out of using violent methods, why doesn't she does point out that they're the ones skinheads most prefer?) The most popular politician in Germany today isn't a progressive centrist like Schroeder or Moellemann who talks about putting WWII behind and acting like a normal nation; it's Joschka Fischer of the Green Party. His status has hardly been shaken by revelations that one of his old buddies was involved in an attack in the '70s that killed several OPEC ministers and footage of him battering a policeman in a street battle. Again, imagine if Clinton won the election not in spite of hanging out in Europe and protesting the war but because of it.
All in all, I can't say I was disgusted by the film. After all, its confused politics (and failure to tackle tough questions) are no worse than those of the average American actioner. I was just baffled to see them trivialised into light entertainment for a country still very much affected by politically-motivated violence.
Die spinnen, die Deutschen!