One Minute of Darkness (Dreileben 3 – Eine Minute Dunkel)

DREILEBEN TRILOGY III                       B+                  

ONE MINUTE OF DARKNESS (Dreileben 3 – Eine Minute Dunkel) – made for TV

Germany (90 mi)  2012  d:  Christoph Hochhäusler

While Christoph Hochhäusler is an established German filmmaker, it may be his writing about contemporary German cinema as co-editor and publisher of his film magazine Revolver that has brought him to international acclaim, as it was here that The Dreileben Trilogy took form, where Hochhäusler publicly challenged fellow Berlin School filmmakers Christian Petzold and Dominik Graf to express their thoughts about a lack of genre films as well as the changing German aesthetic emerging from the mid 90’s that has taken a distinct interest in German locations while also examining political and/or cultural ramifications.  It’s only fitting then that Hochhäusler provide the concluding episode (shot in digital) and the segment that is most genre driven.  Dreileben is a small town in the German countryside engulfed by nature, where the enormous surrounding woods have a way of culturally isolating the inhabitants, creating an almost fairy tale and mythic illusion, which are frequently referenced through the Grimm Brother’s Hansel and Gretel, explored in the initial episode, but also Wagner’s Ring cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen, loosely based on characters from Norse mythology where giants and dwarves thrive in the darkness of the Thuringia woods, often finding themselves at odds with one another.  It is here the focus has finally shifted from a peripheral role to the featured attraction, as the concluding episode is largely seen through the eyes of a mentally disturbed escaped killer, Frank Molesch, played by Stefan Kurt in a simply extraordinary mix of innocence and deranged confusion.  Molesch seeks refuge in the forest and spends most of the film roaming aimlessly through the woods, but Hochhäusler also retraces how easily he initially escaped from the hospital, as the police allowed him to visit his dead mother in the Dead Room at the hospital, but only guarded one of the two exit doors. The concluding episode, like Kieslowski’s RED (1994) in his Three Color Trilogy, has the most connecting links to previous episodes, and although each claims to be an independent, stand alone film, it helps if one is familiar with the earlier references, as the finale sheds new light on everything that has come before. 

The finale also introduces us to a new character, the chain-smoking Marcus Kreil (Eberhard Mirchberg), a Columbo-like seasoned police inspector who is on medical leave, but can’t stay away from tinkering with the case, as the town is under siege from strange attacks and unresolved murders, where the audience is treated to gruesome forensic photos of the deceased.  While we get a taste of his family life, where his overbearing wife berates him for not staying in bed and his dim, constantly demanding son wants his approval for another hair-brained business proposition, hoping his dad can interest the police department into using his exercise equipment that is otherwise sitting dormant in an empty gym collecting dust.  Marcus is often seen alone scrutinizing the video security tapes of the hospital, including the evidence used to convict the killer, the last man to see the girl alive, where the title is based on the tape going blank just prior to a young girl’s murder, leaving lingering, unanswered questions, where he is hoping to discover new clues, but he’s also interested in changing the focus of the investigation, trying to fathom why Molesch would go on a murder spree, trying to understand how he thinks, where he often visits Molesch’s mother’s vacant home in the middle of the night hoping to pick up new information, where the constantly wandering Molesch is also seen hovering nearby.  In fact, the latest police strategy is to form tightly connected search lines combing through the woods, where Molesch can frequently be seen just out of reach desperately trying to escape, reminiscent of Peter Lorre’s frantic attempts to escape the police manhunt in Fritz Lang’s M (1931).  When he’s flushed out of the forest, he often meanders into various pieces of the preceding episode, where despite a sighting, his detection was appropriately misidentified, a clue to the filmmaker’s goal of challenging the audience’s expectations.

This finale has a rhapsodic approach when the convict is free to roam through the countryside, feasting on wild berries, talking to himself, his mind often wandering to thoughts of his dead mother, where instead of a vicious monster of the loose, Molesch seems more like a simpleton, a manchild who has been tossed out into the world, frightened and alone, where his mood shifts and nervous body language are often inexplicable.  Perhaps the highlight of the film is a sequence in the woods where Molesch has amusingly stolen sandwiches from a picnic table of visiting tourists enjoying the hillside view of the town nestled in the valley below, where he retreats into the woods to first identify and label the contents of each sandwich before gobbling them down, when he is unexpectedly interrupted by a young girl (Paraschiva Dragus) hanging from a tree limb above who is also hungry.  She immediately trusts and protects him, warning him where the police are, quickly escorting him to safety, developing a tender bond between the two where they sit by an evening fire as he sings a silly song in a beautifully realized tribute to FRANKENSTEIN (1931).  The dual narrative tracks of the finale center upon exposing the heart of each character, the cautiously circumspective police inspector and the gentle giant, often maligned monster in the woods, where at one point the police dragnet forces his retreat into the hidden confines of a cave, which turns out to be a historical witch’s cauldron, where he has to hide from another tourist group as they listen to legendary tales of witch burnings and witches capturing unsuspecting hikers.  Still in the cave when the evening fog rolls in, Molesch can be seen trying to squirm under the enveloping layer quickly filling the empty spaces, obviously threatened by a fear of the unknown.  This all too human quality, ironically from a monster regarded as a deranged serial killer, described by Hochhäusler as “a man who became a murderer only because he was hounded,” becomes a major theme of the film, how easily we jump to the wrong conclusions, as if anything, this Trilogy suggests humans are continually prone to making mistakes.     

Don't Follow Me Around (Dreileben 2 – Komm mir nicht nach)

 




DREILEBEN TRILOGY II                         C-                   

DON’T FOLLOW ME AROUND (Dreileben 2 –  Komm mir nicht nach) – made for TV       

Germany (88 mi)  2012  d:  Dominik Graf

This film makes the biggest departure from the original concept, which was to experiment freely with the use of genre films, claiming this aspect was missing altogether in German films, but there’s little evidence of it here in this second segment of The Dreileben Trilogy, all part of a series of interconnected films, each taking place in the same location and linked by a familiar event, the escape of a deranged killer.  Dominik Graf is not a name widely known overseas, as he is a professor for feature film directing at the International Film School in Cologne, but his success has largely come in the German television industry.  Graf’s claim is that the Berlin School prefers visual style to narrative and well written screenplays, an example of which is noted German cinematographer Uta Briesewitz whose Berlin School aesthetic helped shape the look of the first three seasons of the American television show The Wire, claiming the film school actually downplays the role of language in cinema and overlooks the possibilities of characters communicating with one another onscreen.  Accordingly, this is a decisively different tone than the other two episodes of the Trilogy, a chatty, dialogue driven film, where almost all the action is advanced not by what the audience sees, but hears through various conversations.  What this really turns out to be is an attempted critique of the bourgeoisie, in particular the professional class, where if it was meant to be a comic satire, it falls flat.  What this is most reminiscent of is Fassbinder’s THE THIRD GENERATION (1979), a savage satire on the comic ineptitude of the radical left, people who name drop talk of revolution, including the right books, quoting the right phrases, going to all the important meetings and demonstrations, where the middle class actually turns radical action into a convenient lifestyle choice.  What was once spirited street defiance, confronting the government and the police through mass disobedience, has turned into a comfortable bourgeois lifestyle without any real ideology except self-centered indulgence.

Jeanette Hain plays Jo, a criminal psychology specialist who is called into the town of Dreileben to offer her expertise to the police in helping catch an escaped killer.  She is provided a working team to assist her round the clock, but mostly they do nothing more than sit and toss ideas around from 9 to 5 before heading off for lunch, where food is really what’s at the top of a policeman’s agenda, continually introducing her to new places that serve heaping portions on a plate, offering their rave reviews of noted German delicacies.  Jo has only a single surviving victim to interview who can help identify the killer, and her remembrance is not very helpful, as what she describes is more animal than human, so this does not exactly consume her time.  Instead, because of a foul up at the hotel where she planned to stay, she instead pays a visit to a best friend, Vera (Susanne Wolff) and her pseudo writer of a husband Bruno (Misel Maticevic), both living in a historical home that was used by various East German radical organizations at one time or another, where Bruno loves to point out their former meeting rooms.  They spend the majority of their time rehashing old times over several bottles of wine every night, which turns out to be little more than gossip sessions.  The director struggles to incorporate humor into what is essentially a serious story, so if these intimate conversations were meant to be comic, they’re not, and they’re overlong, minimizing the importance of the criminal at large while they instead share stories about a boyfriend they unwittingly had in common.  Bruno is reduced to little more than an innocent bystander.  The film all but forgets the premise of her visit and instead explores the parameters of Jo and Vera’s long term friendship, whether it can withstand some bracing truths about what happened years ago, as they intently delve into each other’s past history, an attempt to stress an otherwise overlooked factor throughout the Trilogy. 

There’s an interesting contrast between the cop scenes, now introducing a slightly deranged cop and a corruption-within-the-force angle, where their attempts to track down the killer are reduced to brief episodes of non activity, mostly people just standing around, while instead all the focus and attention is on long, drawn out scenes of after-work drinking and socializing.  Unless you knew ahead of time that there was a deranged escaped convict on the loose, you’d barely know this was part of the story, though there is a freeze frame photo-op.  If Graf is supposed to be a screenwriter aficionado, his characters never have an intelligent word to say throughout, making this a tepid and uninteresting experience of the worst kind, as there’s only sketchy character development featuring mediocre acting, lengthy wine-fueled conversations, few police updates, no action to speak of, and literally nothing for the audience to grab hold of.  What this film has to say about professionals is more about their jaded and slightly askew perceptions of themselves, where they are continually seen as petty and insecure, constantly asking for personal reinforcement to help boost their sagging self-esteem.  After all, they’re supposed to be catching a killer on the loose.  Jo’s suggestion on how to catch him not only seems ludicrous but downright criminal in itself, where any department that actually carried out this plan would subject themselves to personal lawsuits for damages in the multi-millions of dollars for placing an innocent civilian in harm’s way.  This feels like television scriptwriting, as it has no place in the real world, which is more interested in convictions that will stick.  Of vague interest, this is the only episode in the Trilogy actually shot on 16 mm film, but you can hardly tell, as this segment, largely shot indoors, makes the least effective use of the actual locations in an area known as Thuringia, which was part of East Germany, known for its historical and legendary past, and while this is the 2nd episode in the Trilogy, chronology-wise this is the final episode.  

Beats Being Dead (Dreileben 1 - Etwas Besseres als den Tod)

DREILEBEN TRILOGY I                           B                     

BEATS BEING DEAD (Dreileben 1 - Etwas Besseres als den Tod) – made for TV

Germany (88 mi)  2012  d:  Christian Petzold

The Dreileben Trilogy is the product of director Christoph Hochhäusler, who was looking for something to write in his film magazine Revolver on the 40th anniversary of the German Film and Television Academy, initiating a public correspondence on film aesthetics and the lack of genre films in Germany with two other filmmakers from the Berlin school, Christian Petzold and Dominik Graf, deciding the only remnants they could find of the genre school was to be found on television.  So they decided to jointly participate in a project for German television, not a mammoth omnibus project like GERMANY IN AUGUST (1978), which featured a critical analysis of the German political landscape of the 1970’s as seen from 11 different directors, but instead combining three individual stories, each about 90-minutes in length, revolving around an escaped mental patient who is also a murderer and sex offender, all set in the small town of Dreileben (meaning three lives), using various genre styles to heighten the suspense, offering a unique perspective on a world where people’s lives may overlap and intersect, and where old feelings buried in the past may have a profound influence on the present.  Christian Petzold may be the most familiar of the group, where Yella (2007) and Jerichow (2008) are both widely acclaimed, each a standout in cleverly creating multiple layers of suspense, including the added twist of interchangeable psychological worlds, where Yella offers a dreamlike Antonioni reverie replacing the meticulous minutiae of drab or ordinary reality, using offscreen sound and a clever editing scheme to continually tease the audience with completely indistinguishable states of mind, while Jerichow is a surgically precise psychological thriller, both notable for the accumulation of small, banal details and characters nearly paralyzed by unseen or imaginary forces. 

Shot on 35 mm, the opening slow-paced and character driven segment beautifully lures us this into this remote locale, almost perfectly integrating the psychological state of mind of a disturbing incident in town with the nearby woods, which is an enchantingly beautiful green forest, offering a pristine walkway to and from town that characters continually use, where each successive trip into the darkened interior touches on a mounting state of dread, as one continually wonders what may be lurking nearby, where the director offers offscreen sounds and a camera vantage point that apparently offers the sightline of the escaped convict, turning this into a Hansel and Gretel story of two young lovers that get lost in the woods.  Jacob Matschenz is Johannes, a somewhat inattentive orderly at the local hospital, supposedly studying to become a doctor, who may have inadvertently left open a door allowing the escape of a demented murderer and sex offender, where the continual police presence throughout of sirens wailing, helicopters combing the vicinity, and officers on the street confirm he’s still on the loose.  Nonetheless, Johannes pays little attention to this escalating crisis developing right outside his window at a nurse hostel, offering him a superb view of the enveloping forest nearby.  Instead, he daydreams about the hospital director’s daughter, Sara (Vijessna Ferkic), while becoming infatuated with another young girl, Ana, Luna Mijovic, recently seen in Breathing (Atmen), that he voyeuristically sees having oral sex with the leader of a biker gang at a nearby lake where Johannes has gone innocently enough for a naked swim, carefully concealing himself while she’s left behind after a demeaning and humiliating experience when the biker shows the rest of the gang a video of them having sex, where she angrily tosses his iPhone into the lake.  After initially rejecting his offer of help, she’s subjected to a brief attack by the escaped patient in the woods before Johannes intervenes, becoming inseparable afterwards, as if fate had brought them together. 

The two spend the rest of the film in the throes of love, where they spend nearly every waking moment together, often seen in bed or playfully hanging out in his room, where Ana can continually be seen walking back and forth through the woods on her way into town where she works as a housekeeper in the local hotel.  This pattern of continually tempting fate is the underlying suspense of the film, accentuated by hyper-expressive chords of pulsating musical hysteria, as the two routinely ignore the ominous presence of an unseen danger lurking nearby, instead lost in their own little world where nothing else matters.  Occasionally brief flare ups occur between the young lovers, where quick tempers and adolescent naiveté seem to account for their momentary blind spots, both exhibiting short attention spans.  Accordingly, Johannes can occasionally be seen falling asleep at work while charged with watching the security video monitors, showing yet another voyeuristic side to his personality, often becoming obsessed with what he sees on the monitor, where Ana may be waiting outside for him.  Initially, he was excited by her presence, running off to see her, but over time her presence becomes an unanticipated added weight.  But it’s at an upscale party at a local resort where the relationship is truly tested, where this on-again, off-again mating ritual inexplicably takes on a hideous dimension, where the motives of both Johannes and Ana undergo a thorough transformation, where their previously inseparable paths diverge into uncommon territory, like split personalities, both becoming unrecognizable to the audience, mysteriously spiraling out of control in a dreamlike finale, leaving the audience emotionally adrift in a suspended state of paralysis.  Petzold may spend an inordinate amount of time in his films establishing a meticulous rhythm of ordinary detail, but he also has a way of shifting our attention on a dime into a netherworld where it’s near impossible to distinguish between what’s real and what’s not.