The Weekend (Das wochenende)

 director Nina Grosse








THE WEEKEND (Das wochenende)   C                    

Germany  (97 mi)  2012  ‘Scope  d:  Nina Grosse

Nina Grosse has mostly directed TV movies, so there’s nothing that suggests she is remotely qualified to tackle this material, based on a novel by Bernard Schlink that she allegedly rewrote, basically removing nearly all political content, in a film re-examining the effects of the RAF activities during their reign of terror from the 1970’s to the late 90’s in Germany, as viewed from the present when revolutionary talk is no longer in the air.  Sebastian Koch plays Jens Kessler, released after spending 18 years in prison for activities that are never named in this film.  A small collective prepares to greet him, but with extreme trepidation, as their lives have taken such a reverse course from their youth, becoming part of the complacent, petty bourgeois, middle class, the  status quo that they were once railing against.  Feeling guilty over their transition from radicals to capitalist consumers, no one wants to be reminded of the indiscretions of their youth.  Kessler’s release, however, does exactly that.  His sister Tina (Barbara Auer) has purchased a country home in what was formerly East Germany, getting a good deal as housing prices remain cheap, but the squabbling couple of the opening is a former girlfriend now married to someone else, Inga (Katja Riemann) and her husband Ulrich (Tobias Moretti), where Inga appears to be in shock at the idea of a mandatory visit and hastens to find an alternative excuse to quickly excuse themselves.  The enormous home and spacious grounds feel more like a retreat and couldn’t be more blended into its natural elements, where the back yard leads to an actual forest.  For whatever reason, in films portraying Baader-Meinhof or RAF radicals, they always live in these luxurious surroundings, an odd comment on their anti-capitalist politics, as it would be unthinkable and impossible, for instance, to see the Black Panthers living in such lavish wealth.            

When Inga and Ulrich arrive to this little welcome home party, followed by a journalist who wrote a book about the movement, Henner (Sylvester Groth), the initial impression is that they have all completely moved on with their lives, but Kessler is an unsettling presence, as he’s still living in the moment of his arrest, feeling irate that he was set up, holding fast to the same principles and revolutionary attitudes of the past even as there is no link to anyone in the present.  While there are various socialist parties existing in Germany today, Kessler never mentions any of them, but continues to live in the past as if that radical world still exists, as it does in his mind, where he spends most of the visit sitting outside alone smoking cigarettes, avoiding social contact.  The actual conversations together have an absurdly ridiculous feel to them, as Ulrich attacks his pompous arrogance for continuing to believe they were anything other than killers, while Kessler angrily calls him a reactionary, where the reunion turns into an adolescent rehashing of personal insults, where the director’s focus written throughout the re-written screenplay appears to be an insistence that radicals apologize for their past sins.  Kessler, on the other hand, feels no remorse, and in this film version the viewers aren’t even allowed to know what sins he committed, which is a superficial whitewash of history.  Instead of any intellectual discourse, which would likely be the real subject of such a gathering, this turns into a dysfunctional family melodrama, as soon the children enter into the story, which completely changes the overly somber and self-absorbed tone of the movie, where Kessler at one point says “I feel like I just lived through my funeral.” 

 

Without being invited, Inga’s daughter Dora (Elisa Schlott) arrives on the scene, a seemingly shallow blond with a groupie complex about her father, where to her it’s all about slogans and massive protests, where her father is more of a name emblematic of a commodity, like a Che Guevara T-shirt, where the past has a thoroughly sanitized but heavily romanticized aspect about it, as if those were the good years, unlike the present where no one believes in anything anymore but themselves.  Her over-protective and indulgent middle class lifestyle is in stark contrast to Kessler’s radical views.  Dora summons her brother Gregor (Robert Gwisdek), who has been mentioned and forgotten by his parents in the same sentence over the weekend, but his entrance into the family proceedings couldn’t be more boldly ostentatious, and it’s the only moment throughout the entire film that has any level of theatrical tension or unpredictability, as he bitterly hates his father with such a vengeance, it’s like Hamlet going after his stepfather, as the kid feels like he’s been wronged and he vows amends, literally challenging the masculinity of this legend of a man, attempting to undermine his stature in a clever but vehemently wicked manner.  What has to be running through the viewer’s minds is the idea that these spoiled and ungrateful children are a reflection of the failed politics of the past, where the chickens have come home to roost, literally deflating the idea that Kessler actually stood for something.  But in truth, their shallowness more accurately reflects the mindset of the filmmaker who hasn’t a clue what she’s dealing with here, turning the idea of radical politics into the Days of Our Lives.  

If Not Us, Who

IF NOT US, WHO (Wer wenn nicht wir)          B                     

Germany  (124 mi)  2011  ‘Scope  d:  Andres Veiel

Why is it so hard for films to get the 60’s right?  Very few capture the right tone of the era, such as Eustache’s THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE (1973) or Coppola’s APOCALYPSE NOW (1979), both of which blend a surreal surge of initial optimism with a fatalistic, Kafkaesque emptiness, exposing a void of leadership or hope, where those responsible for leading social movements were out of the picture by the end of the decade, assassinated, arrested, or dead, yet the Vietnam War was still raging out of control, and no one apparently could stop it, despite the dead bodies and disgust it brought to so many Americans, whose mistrust of their government would only grow larger with Watergate and Nixon’s resignation.  Andres Veiel started with the idea of making a documentary about the German (RAF) Red Army Faction, including the radical Baader-Meinhof offshoot which moved from taking political action to planting bombs and explosives, but he encountered difficulty with one of the central characters, Gudrun Ensslin’s family, where no one would speak about her on camera, probably for good reason.  This film is a good example, as Weiel accentuates the irrational side of Gudrun and the movement, never really offering a balanced or comprehensive view of the politics that was driving the student movements of Europe and America, and in particular Germany.  As recent films like Uli Edel’s THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX (2008) and Olivier Assayas’s mammoth 5-hour made-for-TV exposé of CARLOS (2010) both explored the political dynamics, Veiel decided to take a more personal approach.  Initially this idea succeeds beautifully, as his picture of Bernward Vesper (August Diehl), the intellectually curious son of Nazi novelist Will Vesper (Thomas Thieme), is chilling in its portrayal of German manners on display twenty years after the war was over, where nostalgic Nazi sentiment still prevailed within the war generation.  

Veiel’s screenplay is adapted from Gerd Koenen’s book, Vesper, Ensslin, Baader: Prehistory of German Terrorism, where at Tübingen University in the 1960’s Bernward takes an interest in literature, deciding to form a small publishing house that would usher in a new era of intellectual thought, where he meets fellow student Gudrun Ensslin (Lena Lauzemis), also interested in the expression of radical ideas, quickly becoming lovers, but not the most stable of couples as both venture into sexual affairs with others, which has a crippling effect on each partner, as both attempt suicide at different points preceding their full commitment to political action.  Gudrun is more impulsive and seems driven by whatever feels good at the moment, not willing to invest the time or energy to build alliances, believing a political elite is a necessary vanguard to lead the masses, while Bernward is a more deliberate planner, as he’s really a literature specialist who has faith in the written word, initially the more motivated and driven between the two.  Over time, Gudrun’s politics grew more radical, focusing on the massive bombings and brutal atrocities used by the United States in the Vietnam prison camps, claiming the previous German generation looked aside when the Nazi’s came to power and acquiesced to the atrocities of the death camps, but this modern era had to do all they could to stop these unjust acts, eventually cutting herself off from her family and advocating violent acts of terrorism, as German society remained impassive and complacent in the face of the injustices of the continuing war. 

More significant than anything else is Gudrun’s meeting with Andreas Baader (Alexander Fehling), a smug child of European industrial wealth, driving fast sports cars and wearing stylish, expensive clothes, a guy whose rally cry is “Fuck the system,” even though he was in every respect a product of that system.  However, the two fast become lovers, where she is lured into his beliefs of direct action, taking it right to the sources of power, meeting violence with violence, where everything else in their eyes is a waste of time.  This kind of uncompromising take-it-or-leave-it position is quite similar to the American conservative intolerance in the 60’s of leftists against the war and outside agitators, namely:  America, love it or leave it.  But rather than get into the complex ideologies and political differences of the era, much better described in Edel’s film, Veiel takes the more personal approach of visualizing their road to self-destruction, including Bernward’s fall from grace, all of which ends tragically.  What is easily the best part of this film is the Black and White documentary segments, each featuring musical interludes of iconic songs of the 60’s like SPENCER DAVIS GROUP - Keep on Running (original sound) (YouTube 2:46), Billie Holiday: Strange Fruit (YouTube 2:42), or cover versions of Woolly Bully-Sam The Sham & Pharaohs. - YouTube (2:21), or Summer In The City - Loving Spoonful  (YouTube 2:39).  The rest of the film is more uneven, where the director took some flak at the Berlin Film Festival for his highly irregular portrait of prominent figures from the radical leftist movement, and for good reason, as this movie does tend to sensationalize the less savory aspects of their lives, leaving out much of their more rational intellectual development, and instead leaving a tragic, but pathetic, impression of their ineffectiveness, which even the prison warden sequence suggests is simply not true, as they forced people to stand up and take notice that a clean break from the Nazi past was needed.