Turning Tables (Klandestin)

 

Writer/director Angelina Maccarone

TURNING TABLES (Klandestin)                B                                                                      Germany  (124 mi)  2024  d: Angelina Maccarone

Reminiscent of the gripping, multi-layered political thrillers of Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974), Michael Haneke’s Caché (Hidden) (2005), Fatih Akin’s 2017 Top Ten List #9 In the Fade (Aus dem Nichts) or his earlier THE EDGE OF HEAVEN (2007), which stars Fassbinder actress Hanna Schygulla, while this one stars Fassbinder actress Barbara Sukowa, who was Mieze in BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ (1980) and the lead in LOLA (1981), both providing magnificent performances, where this is a different side of Sukowa that we haven’t seen before.  The film has that sleek, stylistic flourish of American director Michael Mann that was so prevalent in the 80’s and 90’s, like Thief (1981) or HEAT (1995), chic and sophisticated, with eye-popping visuals and powerfully-lit nighttime scenes.  Making her first film in 13 years, Angelina Maccarone started out as a writer of song lyrics for Udo Lindenberg and other artists, graduating from the University of Hamburg before she got her Master’s degree in literature, and has been a film professor at Babelsberg Film University since 2014, winning the German Film Award (Lola) for Best Unfilmed Script in 2017, which provided the blueprint, so this film has been in the works for a while.  Coming with great expectations, featuring an international cast centered around four lead characters, skillfully interweaving the same story from four different points of view, the film examines the conflict between personal freedom and political constraints, adding political intrigue with personal conflict.  Shot by Florian Foest, who with a few exceptions has worked almost exclusively in television, yet the look of the film is broodingly dark and complex, suggesting truth lies deeply hidden underneath an artificial façade.  Opening with a panoramic view of the Frankfurt skyline in the evening, as the lights come on in the skyscrapers, while rush hour traffic snakes its way through the streets, only to be disturbed by the sound of an explosion, as a bomb rocks through the stillness of the night, setting off a chain of reactions, as the entire city is on edge, with the film exploring the effect this has on the various protagonists, moving back and forth in time through non-linear storytelling as it carefully unravels a little bit more about each one of them.

Told in chapter headings devoted to each new character, where only gradually are their secrets revealed, Richard (Lambert Wilson) is a successfully wealthy gay British painter living a bohemian freestyle life in Tangier, where he’s fallen in love with a boyish-looking younger man named Malik (Habib Adda), whose dream is to get to Europe by any means possible, willing to take any risk, which includes being smuggled in Richard’s van as he transports his paintings to Frankfurt for an exhibition.  Yet Malik’s presence is a precarious one, as the city is ramping up its security following the suspected terrorist blast and police are everywhere making a slew of arrests, where anyone of Arab descent becomes a suspect, so Richard is adamant about him staying indoors, instructing him to never leave the apartment while he goes out to help arrange the gallery opening.  Initially that is not a problem, but things get dicey when Richard has to return to England on business, as Malik grows restless being stuck inside, having no outside contact, so he breaks the rules, thinking nothing will come of it, but the suspense is palpable in his wanderings, as ominous signs are everywhere, yet he’s ridiculously naïve and clueless about the implications.  We subsequently learn they are staying in the home of Mathilda (Barbara Sukowa), Richard’s best friend since childhood, who has transformed herself into a cold, hard-nosed, conservative politician who is campaigning on taking a tough stance against illegal immigration, where both men have put her career in jeopardy by harboring the very thing she stands so vociferously against.  The tenderness of Richard’s relationship with Mathilda, however, stands out, as they are extremely close, like brother and sister, sharing many things in common, like music and a cynical take on conventional bourgeois attitudes, remaining in each other’s trust and confidence despite their stark political and ideological differences.  Adding to the mix is her new assistant, Amina (Banafshe Hourmazdi), described as a “cultural mediator,” who is something of a specialist on new EU immigration laws.      

A staunch advocate of stricter EU border controls, Mathilda is a roundly disliked right-wing hardliner who wants to limit migrant populations, whose blatant hypocrisy requires that Malik stay out of sight, suddenly facing a moral dilemma that calls into question her own basic convictions.  The film beautifully examines both her public and private side, where we discover she’s nothing at all like the chilly veneer of her public perception, which is strictly a façade projecting strength and power, where viewers are allowed to see a quieter, more reflective humanist side.  Certainly part of what’s so effective is how the coolness of the distinct style of film matches her public persona, bathed in a veneer of artificiality and practiced techniques, appearing raw and gritty, yet underneath remains the heart of a woman.  While she and Richard are privileged and well-educated, supposedly cut from the same cloth, Amina has more in common with Malik.  Though she may have a similar education, equally well-spoken and a consummate professional, dressed conventionally in her business suit, her path to success has been decidedly different, where that side of her mirrors the concealment of Malik, as it remains hidden and out of sight, not for public consumption.  This multidimensional aspect of their character is not what we expect, as we rarely see an inner side to these more-often neglected characters, so it adds an element of human intrigue.  Coming from an Italian father and a German mother, the director understands more than most about intercultural complexities, exposing the inhumane consequences of xenophobic policies.  The entangled forces that Maccarone weaves together are simply fascinating (though the world has changed greatly since it was written, much darker and less hopeful, especially after the outbreak of war in Ukraine and Gaza), concluding with a sequence that brings everything together, as terrorism is a hot topic of the day, as is the political overreaction, cynically taking advantage of people’s anxieties and fears, projecting strength through ideological rhetoric that only stirs up that pot and actually foments more violence, where it’s easy to blame an unseen enemy which has no face.  This film, as the title suggests, particularly the German title of “clandestine,” challenges that perception, projecting a human face that is so often associated with the enemy, where they are guilty until proven innocent, as the legal standards in this globalized world are simply not equivalent.   

In a Year of 13 Moons (In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden)

IN A YEAR OF 13 MOONS (In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden)       A               

Frankfurt, Germany  (124 mi)  July – August  1978  d:  Rainer Werner Fassbinder

The film IN A YEAR OF 13 MOONS is told through the encounters of a man during the last five days of his life and it tries, on the basis of these encounters, to figure out whether this man’s decision, that on the final day, the fifth, he will allow no further days to follow, that he will refuse, is somehow understandable, or perhaps even acceptable.

—Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1978)

Every seventh year is a lunar year. Those people whose lives are essentially dominated by their emotions suffer particularly strongly from depressions in these lunar years. The same is also true of years with 13 new moons, albeit not quite so strongly. And if a lunar year also happens to be a year with 13 new moons, the result is often a personal catastrophe.

In an unfortunately short career, from 1969 until his drug-induced death in 1982, Fassbinder directed 40 feature-length films.  One similarity in all of Fassbinder’s films are characters, straight or gay, male or female, who are unable to connect with people in the world around them, whose frustration with their own lives provides the meaning to his films.  A raw, searing, emotional powerhouse, with Fassbinder as the writer, director, cameraman, art director, and editor (with Juliane Lorenz), an extremely provocative and unimaginably compelling response to the guilt the director felt from his partner Armin Meier’s suicide, probably on Fassbinder’s birthday May 31st 1978 in Fassbinder’s apartment while he was receiving accolades at the Cannes Film Festival for DESPAIR (1978), allegedly due to their impending split, the 2nd such suicide in Fassbinder’s personal life, making relationships appear hopelessly dangerous and impossible.  Shot just a month after the death, the subject of the film, which follows the last five days of transsexual Elvira, born Erwin, unwanted and raised by nuns, played powerfully and tragically by Volker Spengler, who rarely speaks above a poetic whisper, where Erwin falls in love with Anton Saetz (Gottfried John), a rich Jewish Holocaust survivor from Bergen-Belsen who now owns real estate in Frankfurt, a city portrayed as a soulless expression of the sadistic effects of capitalism.  Saetz watches a scene with his bodyguards from the Jerry Lewis movie YOU’RE NEVER TOO YOUNG (1955) Jerry Lewis - You're Never Too Young - YouTube (4:18), featuring Jerry masquerading as a member of a female teenage marching band in what has to be one of Fassbinder’s most unforgettable uses of irony, and remarks to Erwin, offhandedly, “too bad you’re not a girl,” which was enough to cause Erwin to have his sex changed, the ultimate act of love, demasculation, and a willingness to die for his love, only to be rejected and laughed at by Saetz, later beaten by men on the street, causing Elvira to revisit the stations of her life.    

Often characters will speak long passages of dialogue while seemingly unconnected images are seen onscreen.  In the company of her friend, a sweet-natured whore, Zora (Ingrid Craven), Elvira sets out to tour the slaughterhouse where she as a he used to work as a butcher, the visuals are similar to Godard’s WEEKEND (1967), but Elvira’s underlying narrative describing her own story is excruciatingly painful, an assaultive, agonizing, yet ecstatic scene, using historical trauma to communicate a sense of the personal, perhaps Fassbinder’s reference to the slaughter of the Holocaust:  “It’s not against life at all.  It is life itself.  The way the blood streams, and death, that’s what gives an animal’s life meaning in the first place.  And the smell when they die and they know death is coming and that it’s beautiful and they wait for it...Come with me, I’ll show you.  It’ll smell, and we’ll see them die and hear their cries, cries for deliverance.”  While the meats are butchered, stripped, and flayed, the intensity of the images mixed with the near hysterical pitch of Volker Spengler’s voice leave a lasting impression that sticks with the viewer through every moment of the film.  Elvira can be heard telling her friend Zora about her life with her last lover, mimicking his distraught, intoxicating lines as an actor, words competing with barely audible images, how she made a “man” out of him quoting a famous final passage from Goethe’s Torquato Tasso, which directly alludes to the relation of pain to expression, of containment and silence:  “And when our gaze lights on a monstrous deed, the soul stands still the while…And if as a man, I am silenced in my agony, a god taught me to speak of how I suffer.” 

Elvira identifies with humans falling silent in their pain and expresses anxiety over castration, the act of demasculation, a reference to the impossible sacrifice it would take to rid the German male identity of the Nazi, which leads to a dream of a cemetery in which are buried not the dead, but the brief times “a person was truly happy.”  Next she visits the convent of her youth, and speaks with the Sister (Lilo Pempeit, Fassbinder’s mother), who describes the intense longing Erwin felt as a young boy waiting for the next visits from his step-parents to be with such detail that Elvira responds by fainting, remembering the stark emptiness she once felt when she realized the visits would eventually end.  Challenging or punctuating our notion of history and forgetfulness, Fassbinder creates a peculiar party sequence underscored by a shrieking soundtrack of recorded screams with one man talking incessantly while another quietly pumps iron, or Elvira witnesses a black man hang himself in one of Anton Saetz’s empty rooms but not before he helps open her bottle of wine, while in another Zora watches television while Elvira is asleep, as a news broadcast details the horrors of Pinochet's regime in Chile, where Fassbinder places himself on the television right after the newsreel footage, literally implicating himself in Armin Meier’s tragic death.  The unforgettable tape recorded narration heard throughout the film (particularly during the final scene) was not scripted, but was recorded with Fassbinder asking questions of Volker Spengler answering in character, where by the end, Fassbinder’s voice was cut out, as Elvira in the end quietly decides to end her life.  The film utilizes harsh color, asymmetric sets, a dissonant sound track, and alternating narrative techniques to evoke the depths of Evira’s pain, a film of suffering, muteness, and repression, emanating grief like no other movie, stretching the boundaries of conventional storytelling, also starring Elisabeth Trissenaar and Eva Mattes, dedicated to Armin Meier - - easily Fassbinder’s most personal film.