Katrin Gebbe on the set with Julius Feldmeier
Katrin Gebbe
Katrin Gebbe
Punk fascism disguised as a religious parable, where Gebbe’s
film is the German answer to Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl’s miserablist Paradise Trilogy, Paradise:
Love (Paradies: Liebe), Paradise:
Faith (Paradies: Glaube), and Paradise:
Hope (Paradies: Hoffnung) (2012), with both films divided into three
chapters, Faith, Love, and Hope, not necessarily in that order, where it seems
the Austrian version was not hard corps enough for this director, who inflicts sadistic
brutality with a surgical precision that recalls the punishing treatment of Michael
Haneke’s Funny
Games (1997), where the inflicting punishers go by the Biblical names of
Peter (Frank Giering) and Paul (Arno Frisch).
Reaching into her trick bag of mercilessly inflicted brutality, which is
all in vogue today with torture porn, Gebbe’s film was invited to Cannes this
year in the Un Certain Regard category, largely for its tortuous provocation,
as instead of plumbing the depths of her nation’s ills, she’s instead made a
graphic exposé of human debasement, which is a well-crafted, but somewhat knee-jerk
reaction to these other stylistically powerful films. Perhaps the one film that may have spawned
this degree of anti-humanist miserablism is Seidl’s DOG DAYS (2001), a darkly
satiric stab at the banality of evil, as it shows what depths of depravity
seemingly ordinary people are capable of, where humiliating others for sport is
viewed as foreplay. While DOG DAYS is
all-in when it comes to holding nothing back, forcing the audience to endure
unending tales of sadism and misery revealing the dark side of Austrian
suburbia, including unsimulated sex that turns to rape, extended torture
scenes, acts of extreme humiliation accompanied by threats of murder, where it’s
a provocatively vile film that emphasizes all manner of grotesque human behavior,
made all the more powerful by the documentary realist style and the unrelentingly
depressing tone. While Haneke was
questioning the audience’s implicit involvement in desiring a violent revenge
to the insufferable outrage they were witnessing onscreen, he made sure to show
viewers that this was only a movie, so the violence witnessed was fictionalized
arthouse movie violence. Gebbe’s film
makes no such distinction, but instead places her characters into a mainstream of
German society, paralleling the increasingly disturbing behavior shown onscreen
with the belligerence of extreme fascist behavior, suggesting a Darwinian
“might makes right” form of domination where powerful interests seeking out
weaker adversaries to attack and bully is a natural part of human development and not something
that can be eliminated from society, even after extensive post-war education efforts.
Supposedly inspired by an actual event, this has to resonate
even more deeply in Germany, home of Hitler’s Third Reich and his extermination
plan, perhaps the ultimate example of the strong brutalizing the weak with a
blitzkrieg of assaults intended to annihilate one group off the face of the
earth. While the religious aspect is
overemphasized, a simplistic exercise in the manner of Mel Gibson’s THE PASSION
OF THE CHRIST (2004) painfully graphic Jesus-like suffering is on full display
for ardent believers, with various references to the passive teachings of
Christ heard throughout, the central character Tore (Julius Feldmeier) may as
well be a cult follower, as the problem isn’t the repetitive use of religious
text, which has multiple layers of meaning, but his slavishly obsessive robotic
adherence to it. Seen as part of a
budding Jesus Freak movement in Hamburg, we know nothing about the background
of any of these participants, seen as young street kids with no home to speak
of, who seem to be part of a beleaguered underground Christian punk movement obsessed
by Biblical catch phrases which they obediently repeat, like Red Book quotations from Chairman Mao, as
if this gives their otherwise worthless lives meaning and purpose. Walking through the streets, imposing their
scripture upon others, they’re seen as little more than an annoying nuisance,
like Hare Krishna cult followers, instead of a serious fabric of society. Nonetheless, Tore can be heard praying and
asking for divine intervention throughout, as if this is the cure for all
ailments. When his praying miraculously
seems to get one man’s stalled car engine started, of course giving all praise to
Christ, Tore hands out cards to onlookers for their next musical gathering,
making a public spectacle praising the power of Christ. When we see his followers jumping around to
angry punk music with a Christian message targeted specifically to those who
have been abused and left destitute, Tone has joined the throng, flailing his
arms around, but drops to the floor, seemingly in an epileptic fit where he is
ignored until the same man seen earlier in the car cradles him in his arms and
places him in his van, supposedly on his way to the hospital when he comes to,
but Benno (Sascha Alexander Gersak) instead decides to bring him home to his
wife Astrid (Annika Kuhl), teenage daughter Sanny (Swantje Kohlhof), who is
Tone’s same age, and young son Dennis.
Benno’s friendship and hospitality seems met by empty stares from his
family, apparently resigned to doing what they’re told, setting up a tent for
him in the back yard while also sharing regular meals.
Benno quickly starts ridiculing Tone’s naïve religious
views, literally punching him in the face at one point, where Tone offers no
resistance, becoming his punching bag on a regular basis after that, where
Benno seems to enjoy bullying the young kid for pleasure. Sanny is drawn to Tone’s helpless fragility,
showing the bruises on her body as well, where it seems Benno is brutalizing
the entire family, making unwanted sexual advances on his stepdaughter Sanny,
where her mother simply ignores Bruno’s behavior. Tone takes this as a sign from God that he
must stand up to this outrageous force of evil, believing God is testing him,
where he must learn to love his enemy, even as he gets pulverized in the
process. When Benno sees Tone as a rival
for the desires of his stepdaughter, he shuts him out of the family, forbidding
him from having food, forcing him to pilfer through the garbage for scraps to eat, where he’s eventually caught stealing from the garbage. Even though the meat is rotting, it’s Astrid who
suddenly gets in on the game by insisting he eat an entire maggot-infested chicken while
she and Benno watch, initially force feeding him until he obediently follows
their demands. The film escalates into
further psychopathic behavior that Tone is humiliatingly forced to endure,
throwing scraps of religious sayings in his face as they continue to torment
him, where he becomes their sadistic play toy. Refusing to walk away, as he’s zealously following
the fanatically passive interpretation (as opposed to a violent example where
Jesus overturns tables and throws all the money lenders out of the temple) of
“being like Christ,” much like the character of Prince Myshkin (also an
epileptic) in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The
Idiot, a walking saint on earth who was considered “an idiot” by the
respectable society of the times, whose endlessly naïve and compassionate outlook
was constantly at odds with the dark forces of evil, moral corruption, and
all-consuming earthly desires. In Tone’s
deranged eyes that means submitting to any test of barbaric humiliation, where
the film takes us into wretchedly uncomfortable territory where the graphic
display of monstrous human behavior seems to be Gebbe’s real interest, where
the film becomes a disturbingly cruel metaphor for the evils of fascism on
display, where the director meticulously documents how this slowly building
process is part of the human condition.
While she only really emphasizes the raw and excruciatingly distressing surface
realities, captured by the fluid handheld camera movements of Moritz
Schultheiss, the rest is for the audience to consider, where one of the
spectacular underlying elements of the film is the quietly haunting musical
score by Peter Folk and Johannes Lehniger which only accentuates the creepy
effects of something unbalanced and off kilter happening. Not for the faint of heart.
