2015 Top Ten Films #7 My Golden Days (Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse)

MY GOLDEN DAYS (Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse)                  A-            
France  (120 mi)  2015  ‘Scope  d:  Arnaud Desplechin 

While not exactly a prequel, but a reimagining of an original story used in an earlier film, MY SEX LIFE…OR HOW I GOT INTO AN ARGUMENT (1996), which was a sprawling three-hour French relationship talkathon, while in this film Desplechin has resurrected the central character of Paul Dédalus, played nineteen years apart in both films by Mathieu Amalric, who opens the film as a present day character remembering events occurring in the late 80’s and early 90’s, where a more accurate French title translates to Three Remembrances of My Youth.  Winner of the SACD Prize (Best Screenplay) in the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes, the director (along with Julie Peyr) has written a memory play that explores the Proustian autobiographical memories of the Dédalus character from childhood through adolescence, told in three segments, where the first two, Childhood and Russia, preface a larger story entitled Esther that blends into the early periods of MY SEX LIFE, a film that falls within a great tradition of French coming-of age-films, having made some of the best, including Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), Téchiné’s Wild Reeds (Les Roseaux Sauvages) (1994), and Assayas’s Cold Water (L’eau Froide) (1994).  The brief opening sequences are actually the weakest in the entire film, as the viewer doesn’t have a handle yet on Paul Dédalus, or even a connection to the earlier film.  Instead he’s seen as a middle-aged man leaving his lover, returning to Paris for a government post in Foreign Affairs after spending a decade working as a scholar and anthropologist in Tajikistan.  It’s only at the airport where he’s stopped and questioned, interrogated by a French official, dutifully performed by Resnais regular André Dussollier, with questions about his passport, which shifts the film into a lengthy flashback sequence, often expressed through a round (iris) frame, a holdover technique from the Silent era, suggesting memories of long ago, recounting three seminal moments from his past.  Like Truffaut’s young ruffian alter-ego character Antoine Doinel, a petrified 11-year old Paul Dédalus (Antoine Bui) also ran away from his home in Roubaix escaping from his deranged mother, depicted in a panicked German Expressionist horror scene where he holds her off with a knife (shadows appearing on a staircase), warning her not to come any closer, before running away to his kindly great-aunt Rose, Françoise Lebrun, who played Veronika in The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) (1973), looking better than ever, observed by a curious young Paul as the affectionate recipient of a sweet lesbian kiss.  While he’s sad to learn of his mother’s suicide shortly thereafter (claiming he never loved her), it has a permanent effect on his emotionally depressed father (Olivier Rabourdin), whose mind is elsewhere and is unable to look after his children, where Paul along with his sister and younger brother share their formative teenage years raising themselves. 

However, this does not account for why there is another Paul Dédalus living in Australia with a registered passport using the same birthdate and birthplace.  For that, the scene shifts to Russia, where Paul takes an eventful student high school trip to Minsk in the USSR as an idealistic 16-year old, now played by Quentin Dolmaire, turning into an amateur spy thriller when he along with his Jewish friend Marc (Elyot Milshtein) agree to help the Refuseniks (Refuseniks - Jewish Virtual Library), sneaking away from a student tour of the National Arts Museum to help a group of Russian Jews denied permission to leave the country, providing secret packages filled with money, while Paul goes so far as to offer his passport, allowing someone else to assume his identity.  To cover for his own lost passport, he gives himself a black eye and claims he was mugged and his passport stolen.  Filled with plenty of Cold War tension, including bribing a suspicious police officer that stops them with a pack of American cigarettes, the young boys actually pull it off, blending into his teenage years where he’s with his sister Delphine (Lily Taieb) and brother Ivan (Raphaël Cohen) watching television footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which Paul finds sad as “I can see my childhood ending.”  But most of all he remembers Esther, played by Lou Roy-Lecollinet, an absolute delight as the girl of his dreams, the beauty of his eye, and his soulmate, something he realizes from the moment he sets eyes on her, as she’s “the one,” a dazzling beauty who is mature beyond her years, amusingly aware of the effect she has on men, and couldn’t care less what others think of her, an earlier version of the same character played by Emmanuelle Devos in MY SEX LIFE.  Inviting her to come to a party at their father’s house (believing he is away), Desplechin perfectly frames her entrance, shifting to slow motion with her initial appearance, where celestial music honors her as the Goddess of Love and Beauty.  The same device is used several times, each time more amusing than the next, as this is exactly how high school boys envision their first love.  They’re not just “in love,” but the moon and the stars orbit around her very presence.  Paul has a clever way of showing his interest, especially when she shows up with somebody else, which is to ignore her while she dances with all the other guys, staring ponderously at her throughout, waiting until the guy she came with decides to leave, expecting to take her home, but she insists upon staying, rudely telling him to scram.  Thus begins the long journey of a tumultuous decade-long love affair, but that night, all he does is walk her home, romantically walking through the city streets just before daybreak, awkwardly trying to make clever conversation, confessing whatever comes out of his mouth, which she finds amusing, ending the night with the cinematic perfection of a gentle kiss, conveying in our eyes exactly how he feels and just what she means to him. 

These two, Roy-Lecollinet and Dolmaire, both first time actors, literally light up the screen, where their ecstatic combustible energy is something to savor, as Esther is viewed as royalty, where every male in the vicinity is attracted to her, so she quickly learns to fend them off and has become a master in the art of the put-down, showing an instant disdain for people that get on her nerves, believing life is too short for people to waste her time, but she has the whole world beckoning her, wanting to be with her.  Initially Paul appears to have little chance, spending his time traveling back and forth between Roubaix and Paris, where it turns out absence makes the heart grow fonder.  In an era before social media, where now kids routinely send hundreds of text messages every day, the preferred technique back in the day was writing letters, pouring out one’s heart and soul in confessional outpourings of love (which are read directly into the camera), where every spare moment is dedicated to an idyllic “her,” keeping her foremost on his mind even as he pursues his Parisian studies and a life as an academic, where their exchanges are electric, literally flowing with excitement and energy when they meet, exhibiting all the signs of a sweetness of youth, becoming passionate lovers before long, where they can’t live without each other.  The beauty of this film is really the playfulness of Desplechin’s cinematic presentation, the way he mixes it up, showing plenty of offbeat humor, tenderness, moments of despair, crude awakenings, and a world where nothing makes sense except each other, but where their journey together is anything but smooth as she fights to maintain her fiery independence, often shown facing straight into the camera with a cigarette in her hand, where she’s literally posing for the audience, becoming a snapshot in time.  On again, off again, she’s put off by the extent of his absences, and freely acknowledges she sleeps with other guys, where they go through a series of breakups and reconciliations, but Paul has a way of charming the pants off her (which happens literally with another woman in the film), where she loves the way he’ll poetically describe a work of art, like one of his favorite paintings, putting her somewhere in the center of its majestic beauty, a sacred, unreachable perfection, while he sees himself as some lonely figure off to the side, but perhaps the only thing in the frame alert enough to notice the power of her staggering presence.  It’s a fascinating free-wheeling style that matches the furious pace of his earlier film, literally painting a window into their damaged souls where they have such a special chemistry together that is rare in films today.  With a throbbing soundtrack that matches the elevated emotional reach of the film, there’s something bewitching and enchanting about it, where Desplechin’s masterful direction breathes life into an age-old Romeo and Juliet love story, becoming intensely personal, fiercely sincere, especially a scene late in the film, with tinges of sadness when looked back upon because it never lasted, but the thoughtfulness and thorough detail of the remembrances are a brilliant ode to youth, as illuminating as they are intoxicating.

As We Were Dreaming (Als wir träumten)

AS WE WERE DREAMING (Als wir träumten)            C               
Germany  France  (117 mi)  2015  d:  Andreas Dresen            Official site [Germany]

While it’s unusual to find East German stories before the fall of the Berlin Wall, this anything but subtle film is adapted by Wolfgang Kohlhaase from the 2006 Clemens Meyer award-winning novel by the same name that covers the evolving lives of five friends from the East in Leipzig where the reunification has an unwelcome effect on each of them.  From the outset, one might question the director’s use of a heavily commercial stylization, featuring an in-your-face, high octane adrenal rush amped up by a pulsating techno beat, becoming a coming-of-age, punk rock anthem about a group of hell-raising friends that ends in shattered dreams and despair, as one by one each is on a collision course with destiny.  The relentlessly bleak narrative erupts with such an extreme degree of violence that the film is more of an assault to the senses, excessive to the point of gratuitous, causing a major disconnect between the audience and any of the characters, as the slick stylization supersedes any emotional involvement with the story.  Using strobe lights and bold chapter headings like “Gutter Hound,” “Street Dog,” “Murder in Germany,” “Always Ready,” “Rivalry,” or “Thunderstorm in the Brain,” the film literally revels in delinquent behavior followed by brutal fight scenes where the overall viciousness is hard to describe, where it’s difficult not to think much of this is brought on by their own adolescent stupidity, as a good part of the film is devoted to drinking, stealing, heavy drug use, hot-wiring cars, continual joyrides with drunken screaming and bottle-throwing, even wrecking an entire street full of cars, as these seem to be youthful expressions of rage, rebellion, and a perceived liberation.  The author Clemens Meyer has described himself as a “child of the street,” spending time in and out of youth correctional facilities, as does a featured character in the film, but writing offered him a way out, something that is altogether missing in this film, which is more about a stagnated path to alienation and destruction.  

As a 13-year old in the late 80’s, during an era of the young Pioneers all dressed in red scarves, a new generation indoctrinated with the socialist ideals of Soviet-style communism, Dani (Chiron Elias Krase) wins a poetry competition, raising hopes that he may one day be a reporter, while Rico (Tom von Heymann) dreams of being a boxer, and Mark (Nico Ramon Kleemann) a musician.  The rest are ambivalent about their future, where a depressed economy greets them four years later after the Soviets are gone, leaving behind a crumbling infrastructure of a city in decay, while whatever authority was once present has all but disappeared, where gangs and anarchy fill the void.  Not sure how historically accurate this picture is, though the director was born in East Germany not far from Leipzig, as the film has absolutely no political presence whatsoever other than a reference to the fall of the Berlin wall, as if the entire city is seen as a black market underground where everyone is forced to fend for themselves.  In the absence of an existing political and economic structure, what was East Germany became an open market free for all, where this group decides to open an underground music club in an abandoned building, which is merely an excuse to gather in one place for parties and large scale alcoholic binges.  The story concerns Dani, Merlin Rose from Wetlands (Feuchtgebiete)  (2013), the central figure and unofficial leader of the group whose interior voiceover guides us through the action, along with Rico (Julius Nitschkoff), a bruiser on the streets and in the ring who sees it as an opportunity to fight his natural enemies, Porno Paul (Frederic Haselon) who loves stealing cars, drug addict and official group anarchist Mark (Joel Basman), and Pitbull (Marcel Heuperman), the bouncer of the club who also deals drugs on the side.  Their dilapidated hell-hole of a club becomes the target of a neo-Nazi skinhead group headed by gang leader and neighborhood terrorizer Kehlmann (Gerdy Zint), who after a few street skirmishes decides to annihilate this group once and for all, overwhelming them with superior force and beating them up badly in a graphically raw and protracted fight scene while demolishing their club, suggesting an era of complete lawlessness. 

In the grim aftermath, Dani spends time in a youth detention center while Mark becomes strung out on heroin, leaving their splintered group a somewhat tattered remnant of what it once was.  While Mark tries to pick up the pieces after his release, the entire focus of the film changes from a chaotic group effort of misspent youth to solitary moments of otherwise abandoned souls who are struggling to survive.  Accordingly, Dani shifts the focus of his attention to Sternchen (Ruby O. Fee), the sexy girlfriend of the skinhead leader who remembers him from the neighborhood growing up, as he was the one who supposedly had potential.  But even they have little chemistry together, where their relationship is distant at best, reflecting the disjointed overall feel of the film, where there’s little connection between who they were as children and what they’ve become as young adults, where the hyperkinetic style prevents any identification with any of them, as it’s more a collection of isolated incidents than a coherent storyline, all thrown together in a jumbled mess of anarchy and rebellion.  While they all fail miserably in attempting to make a decent life for themselves, adults or authority figures are noticeably absent, where there is no one showing them the way, while connecting family members are equally missing.  All of which suggests the film is really a portrait of a lost generation of children at the end of the Cold War that were abandoned and neglected, literally hung out to dry by a Soviet government that simply packed up and left, leaving them to live or die on their own.  While their explosive teenage energy is misdirected and problematic, there is nothing to suggest anyone ever came to their rescue and offered them half a chance at a better life.  Instead Leipzig is portrayed as a desolate post-war city in ruins, the last vestiges of a crumbling political system that has failed in its entirety, leaving behind a landscape of abandoned warehouses and empty factories, a wasteland of streets that are continuously void of life, as no one shows their faces except to hurriedly get where they need to go, where there isn’t an ounce of joy anywhere to be found, instead only dark, deserted streets that may as well be an expression of their sadly relinquished futures.   

Alois Nebel

ALOIS NEBEL           B                     

Czech Republic  Germany  (84 mi)  2011  d: Tomáš Lunák       Official site [cz]

Eastern European films often reflect a grim interior mood, especially when rooted in history, where living under the boot of military occupation, an imposed Soviet communist dictatorship and political repression only describes the tip of the iceberg, where a closer examination often reveals scathingly inhumane details.  This film marks Tomás Lunák's feature debut as a director and the first rotoscope animation done in The Czech Republic, an interesting technique to use for such a realistic historical overview.  Just the opening few shots set the tone for the film, where from out of total darkness comes the first glimpses of light, soon recognized as a train heading down the tracks.  Set in a small town located near the Polish border in a peaceful area of Czechoslovakia’s Jesenik Mountains in 1989, just days before the fall of the Berlin Wall, we are quickly introduced to Alois Nebel, the stationmaster at a remote countryside railway station.  Just as we think not much happens in this isolated region, a stranger appears out of the darkness, seen earlier hanging around the railway station, and he appears to be making a desperate attempt to cross the border, though he may have had other intentions, without much luck apparently as he is quickly captured.  This incident seems to trigger something in Nebel’s mind, where the German translation for the word nebel is fog, as he inexplicably becomes withdrawn and uncommunicative, as if retreating into a fog.  He is sent to an asylum where he witnesses the torture of the captured man, who appears to be a mute, so it’s impossible for him to confess, which triggers childhood flashbacks going back to the end of World War II. 

Without offering any historical backdrop, the director assumes Czechs are familiar with their own history, where the mountainous border regions of Czechoslovakia were largely comprised of a German-speaking population, known as the Sudetenland, where it was actually part of Germany until the end of World War I when it became part of Czechoslovakia.  Germans continued to live in the region without incident, but with the Nazi threat to invade Czechoslovakia, Hitler got Britain, France, and Italy to sign the Munich Agreement in 1938 returning the Sudetenland to Germany, a bone of contention with the Russians who occupied the Eastern Czech territory at the end of the war, ruthlessly expelling all the Germans, totalling a half million just from this region, including a young German girl Dorothe, who befriended Nebel as a young boy, emblematic of a larger injustice imposed by the Soviet Red Army, placing the Germans in concentration camps where many died of starvation and disease.  It’s interesting to see the Germans portrayed in a sympathetic light during World War II, especially since they occupied Czechoslovakia during the war, but it’s the Russians that occupied the country militarily ever since and are seen in the present still running corrupt black market businesses, cheating the locals out of potential income, hoarding it all for themselves, seen as drunken louts maintaining a monopoly on all incoming goods.  The picture of state repression, seen by the ruthlessly brutal way they run the asylum, is reminiscent of ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST (1975), an Academy Award winning film and Best Director for Czech compatriot Milos Forman, whose parents were both killed in Auschwitz. 

The mute prisoner escapes, having his own traumatic war story, and shortly afterwards Nebel is released, only to discover he’s lost his job at the station, so he makes his way to Prague, which is undergoing a bureaucratic restructuring under the newly elected democratic leadership of Vaclav Havel.  But Nebel is homeless and destitute, sleeping in railway stations until he’s befriended by the widow of a former railway man, Kveta, who respects the work ethic and commitment of railway workers, always standing up for them, including a few free meals for Nebel.  It’s amusing to see the Russians moan about being left out of the democratic picture, soon forced out of their jobs, eventually forced to exit the country, which allows Nebel to have his former job back in the countryside.  The film is told much like a historical fairytale with grim references to bleak times under Soviet domination, which are never clearly explained and are simply woven together into the multi-stranded narrative.  Nebel’s own mental disintegration reflects that of the nation which must come to terms with their own dark history.  The film offers a quietly reflective tone throughout, featuring pensive characters often seen staring out of windows, where an unusual guitar score from Petr Kruzik is reminiscent of Neil Young’s haunting score of DEAD MAN (1995).  In a gorgeously designed storm sequence where nature batters the mountainous region, what stands out is the recurrent snow and rain continually pelting the countryside, expressing the severity of existential alienation, a tone of Dostoyevskian angst, given a psychic electro shock, where the audience may feel as discombobulated as Nebel. Lunák attempts to combine many of the thematic elements reflective of the freedom and optimism of the Velvet Revolution, where having finally gotten rid of the Russians, people are given the opportunity to simply live their lives.    

Back In Your Arms (Kai apkabinsiu tave)

BACK IN YOUR ARMS (Kai apkabinsiu tave)                 C+             

Lithuania  Germany  Poland  (90 mi)  2010  d:  Kristijonas Vildziunas

A common theme in former Eastern bloc Soviet nations, now that they’re members of NATO and the European Union, is to conveniently blame the Russians in all embarrassing historical references, as if they’re playing the American John Birch Society conservative card of the Republican Party back in the 1950’s, which blamed Communism for all the evils around the globe. What’s missing, of course, in this Lithuanian entry for Best Foreign Film, is any Lithuanian complicity in their own nation’s muddled affairs.  The Lithuanians were notorious Nazi collaborators in rounding up and exterminating Jews, murdering 190,000 Lithuanian Jews, which comprised 91% of the pre-war population.  Taking place in 1961, this is a historical Cold War drama set in Berlin just weeks prior to the construction of the Berlin Wall, as citizens from East Berlin are flooding to the West in record numbers, around two and a half million people alone in 1961, arousing the suspicion of both sides, but especially the Communist East German side as they need to implement a plan to keep their citizens at home.  Using archival footage of the era, what’s interesting is the picture of perceived freedom, a kind of idealized state of mind that doesn’t really exist in the East, as all citizens are under suspicion, where persons crossing the border walking on the sidewalk in the Western sector may be stuffed into a Stasi secret police vehicle taking them back into the Eastern sector where they likely face arrest on some contrived charge.  The director wrote this story, which could just as easily be a play, as except for the archival street scenes which could be projected onto the wall of a theater production, most all of it takes place in various rooms, where the tense atmosphere on both sides of the border is supercharged with paranoia and a Kafkaesque suspicion. 

Elzbieta Latenaite plays Ruta, a Lithuanian-American studying in Hamburg, who travels to Berlin with her friend Aukse (Jurga Jutaite) after she receives word that her father, unseen since age 5, would like to meet her there.  Flashback sequences show the family predicament just prior to their escape to the West, where their left leaning father stayed behind under Soviet occupied Lithuania, replaced by the Nazi’s during World War II, then re-occupied by the Russians again after the war, eventually becoming the first Soviet nation to declare their own independence a year prior to the break-up of the Soviet Union.  In 1961, a phone call could not be made from the West to the East, as calls would have to go through the embassy, so she and her father reach a state of limbo unable to contact one another.  When suspected Stasi agents arrive to pick her up to drive her to the East sector to meet her father, she suspects something is not right when her father is not with them, and is advised not to accept in order to protect herself, as people are whisked away to the East never to return.  However she is motivated to find a location where she can call her father, eventually wandering into the East section on her own, where instead of normal accommodations, buildings remain in a state of ruin after the war, never really repaired, where she ends up in a no man’s zone, a kind of empty, nightmarish dead zone.  Her call goes through, but her father is out searching for a way to contact her. 

Again, seen through flashbacks, we see that her father (Andrius Bialobzeskis) was an actor in Lithuania, seen carrying the cross during a Passion Play performance prior to the Soviets banning all crosses, icons, and references to religion.  What constitutes the narrative is the behind-the-scenes chess game taking place by both sides, each suspecting the other, each trying to out think the other side, where Ruta finds much of this nonsense, as all she wants is to see her father.  However, as people disappear without a trace, or hop into taxi’s that smuggle people back into the East, it is an uncertain time, especially for a woman on her own.  Ruta, however, has a network of friends and associates who are continually looking out for her, while her father, on the other hand, is being manipulated by Stasi agents in an attempt to lure his educated daughter into the East where she might be trained as an agent.  The film has that heavy handed treatment of Communist life under a totalitarian system, where her father may as well be in Siberia at a gulag camp by this portrayal, where all the citizens of the East live under a dictatorial police state.  The exaggerated portrayal of good and evil are a bit much, where just about anyone shown onscreen could be a spy, think Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale in the infamous Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, resorting to melodramatic stereotype and caricature instead of anything resembling social realism, which has become a lost art in the former Eastern bloc nations which, if truth be told, aren’t making films nearly as high quality as when they were under a state run Communist regime.

Rabbit à la Berlin

RABBIT À LA BERLIN                            B+                  

Germany  Poland  (51 mi)  2009  d:  Bartek Konopka

This is a delightful short film that’s likely to catch the viewers off guard, as it takes a look at Berlin history from the perspective of oddly chosen innocent bystanders, the timid little furry creatures that burrow into holes at the first sign of danger while also reproducing several times a year.  A truly amusing Cold War commentary is offered from the perspective of rabbits that just happen to proliferate in the grassy lawns across the street from the Potsdamer Platz, a place of historical merit.  Shown initially with a blend of cuteness and curiosity, the film opens in Black and White, where the war has obliterated one of the most bustling intersections in Europe, leaving behind nothing but rubble, but also, strangely enough, rabbits.  Narrated by Michal Ogórek, it reeks of sarcasm and dry humor, but the Zelig-like editing scheme showing rabbits witnessing the German reconstruction at Potsdamer Platz is hilarious, where construction noise initially drives them into their burrows only to wake up a few days later to see the Berlin Wall, with barbed wire and anti-tank barriers constructed around what used to be their friendly environment.  Adhering to the official party line, the rabbits realize they have been shut in for their own good.  As the wall also keeps their natural predators out, this is seen as a godsend.  Since rabbits are by nature friendly creatures, they warm up to this new renovation, and can be seen resting comfortably protected from the shade under the upright anti-tank slabs.  

Former watchtower guards recall how endlessly boring it was passing the time in the tower, where the only thing that held their attention was watching the rabbits at play in the field directly below the tower, where shots of them using standard military binoculars to watch the rabbits scurrying below are amusingly shown.  Despite the rapid rate of growth in the vicinity, each new project threatening to wipe out their grassy fields, they miraculously survive, even after government attempts to round them up, stretching nets across the landscape and scooping them up, placing them imprisoned in boxes, where we can see them staring out the little air holes.  Located at the center of several major development projects, the architectural design always seems to somehow bypass rabbit turf, leaving them a little bit of open space just in front of the Wall, an area where nothing else can be built, known to humans as the Death Zone, reminding them of the penalty for attempted escape (where we see corpses carried off by guards), but again, a godsend for the rabbits.  There’s hilarious footage of great heads of state who come visit, like Khrushchev, Castro, and even JFK, who can be seen waving to the crowds, which also happens to be bunny turf.  Despite being under siege for almost thirty years, they survive all the Cold War madness, where their seemingly nonpolitical stance is a welcome relief to the nearby population, often lovingly photographed for family albums.   

When the Wall eventually comes down, again overnight without explanation, the rabbits all disappear immediately to the other side, like the Promised Land, where they venture into virgin territory untouched by rabbits for decades.  However, to their surprise, it’s much harder than it looked over on the other side.  Just like Wallace and Gromit in A CLOSE SHAVE (1995), the clever use of alarming newspaper headlines expose a panic stricken public crying foul at a sudden outbreak of rabbits overrunning West Berlin.  Like the Wild West, vigilante justice prevails, where ordinary citizens suddenly turn into hunters to eradicate their neighborhoods of the problem.  The poor critters are rounded up in droves and used for rabbit stew.  Yet still they survive, as many returned to their once thriving grassy fields in front of the Potsdamer Platz, which still offers a chance for a good life, but now wary of hunters and the false dream of inhabiting beautifully landscaped golf courses, as seen in a gorgeous painting, two rabbits sitting overlooking the giant expanse of green—dreaming, hoping.  Back on friendly turf, rabbits may not be so plentiful, but they’ve survived.  Written by the director along with his cinematographer Piotr Rosolowski, this clever rabbit world satire resembles the similarities and confusion East Germans must have faced when they were suddenly free to explore the uncertain world lying in wait on the other side.

The Invisible Frame

Tilda Swinton with the director

THE INVISIBLE FRAME                                           B-                   

Germany  (60 mi)  2009  d:  Cynthia Beatt

The mechanism of this repeated journey afforded us the opportunity to meditate freely on the whole concept of borders, history, adaptation, natural cycles of development and a host of other conceptual and existential territories.

—Tilda Swinton

Cynthia Beatt is considered a British director, as she studied there, but was born and raised in both Jamaica and the Fiji Islands, residing in Berlin since 1975.  She collaborated earlier with actress Tilda Swinton on an experimental documentary photo journalistic essay called CYCLING THE FRAME (1988) where Beatt followed Swinton with a hand held camera while traveling the entire length of the Berlin wall, which was just under 100 miles, as they were only allowed to observe East Germany by photographing what they could see by peeking over the wall.  The actual border between East and West Germany, which was covered in minefields, was closer to 860 miles.  Today, this rarely screened document would be viewed as a historic time capsule.   Having grown up in a former British colony, Beatt was particularly sensitive to the annexation of East Berlin, as the view of East Germans became that of an inferior second class people, whereas before the wall, they were all Germans.  Beatt got the idea after living in Berlin for 12 years above an old factory near the Potsdamer Platz where she could view soldiers in the guard watchtower from her window.  The Wall was her neighbor, not just an inconvenience, but a restrictive spiritual entity, a constant reminder of a divided city where anyone wishing to get to the other side would be shot on sight.  Built in 1961, visited by President Kennedy, after more than 2 and a half million citizens fled from East Germany to the West, eventually losing too many of their skilled workers, so they closed down the borders and constructed a restricted area military wall overnight.  No official figures were kept, but it’s estimated that more than 1200 East German citizens were killed attempting to escape after the wall was built, where Chris Guefrrey was the last official casualty who died in a hail of bullets while trying to flee.  Afterwards it was learned he was under the impression the shoot-to-kill order had been revoked.  He was not the last East German killed however, as a victim known only as Frank M. was found in the Oder River near the German-Polish border just two days before the Berlin Wall fell.    

Marking the twentieth anniversary of both the original film and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, this largely wordless 60-minute film was shot in June, 2009 using Hi-8 film while the director rode her bike with one hand and carried the camera in the other, attempting to follow the route of where the wall used to be, which was obviously difficult at times, as Swinton likely took a few wrong turns, often standing at a crossroads staring at a map while no one stops to offer any assistance.  At times she ran into dead ends, where locked gates or fences had been constructed, and she often ended up in the middle of a heavily wooded forest area, where at one point standing next to a lakeside retreat, a bystander points out that West Germans were only allowed to swim halfway across the lake.  Since no wall exists, there are double brick cobblestones that remain visible on official asphalt roads, but she spent a good deal of time on German bike paths, which are away from German roads and thoroughfares, leaving her out in open countryside regions for a good deal of her journey, where at one point she rides past an inexplicably gorgeous poppy field.  Still, there was evidence of guard watchtowers along her path, as she did visit the memoriam built at the suite of Chris Gueffrey’s death.  The film is mostly a free standing visual essay of Berlin today, where Swinton rides by immaculate flower draped houses built in high rent districts, but also passes by graffiti laden factory districts and remnants of former tenement buildings, eyesores that are now dilapidated and boarded up with plenty of broken windows.  Often, where the wall used to be has been replaced with newly constructed housing developments, where it’s easy to get confused, wondering what used to be there.       

Swinton adds her own spare, personally written inner narration which has poetic overtones, offering views on borders, walls, and freedom, often lapsing into an existential reverie, pondering to herself, “East, West, does it matter where I am anymore?”  Oftentimes she weaves back and forth straddling what used to be the border, while also stopping along the way at pastoral sites, where we see her reading Hans Fallada’s book Alone in Berlin or checking out the street signs for Karl Marx Straße while occasionally electronic music from Derek Jarman collaborator Simon Fisher-Turner adds a quiet poignancy to her otherwise wordless ride that at times resembles a ghost trip, as she’s conjuring up thoughts and images from a world that no longer exists, still haunted by fragments of memory.  Perhaps a fault of the film is relying too exclusively on the viewer’s historical recollections, as the film offers little help.  Thinking about it afterwards, this is really a cyclist's film, perhaps incomplete unless seen from a cyclist’s perspective, like over here:  Bicycle Film Festival at this site:  George the Cyclist, as they're the ones who would truly appreciate a film that is exclusively shot from the perspective of a rider on a bicycle.  As this film suggests repeatedly, cyclists have no narrations or things explained to them when they’re on their bikes, and oftentimes outdated maps are of no use either.  This film replicates the sightline and the virtually-always-alone mentality of a cyclist, where their chosen interactions with strangers are completely random.  There were many walkouts, but they were strictly people who aren't used to seeing a near wordless film, who need an explanation to what they're watching, but that's actually one of the features of riding a bike, in addition to being one of the true pleasures of this film.  That’s the real freedom.