German Film Festival 2023.

Margarethe von Trotta’s ponderous new art movie Ingeborg Bachmann - Reise in dieWüste / Ingeborg Bachmann - Journey into the Desert follows the name writer’s association with playright Max Frisch and the other celebrities they jam in. It’s a big picture with shooting in Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, Italy & Jordan. Unfortunately all this ambition is rewarded with tedium.

From the ringing phone which reveals laughter before current thinking man’s love object Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread, Corsage) wakes institutionalised, this one zig zags between  her success as a celebrity poet and her debilitating affair with dramatist Max Frisch (an imposing Ronald Zehrfeld) which leads to her delivering orations like the celebrated “The Truth is Bearable for Humankind.” The pair find it impossible to live together in his native Zurich or her Rome comfort zone - scene of him being got up uneasily in a Roman tailor’s white suit to the admiration of a passing shop girl. The crunch point comes when Krieps burns the diary, which he has used to incorporate their relationship into his plays - something he takes for granted and she sees as betrayal. Throw in the odd actual-turned-surreal touch like her radio drama’s audience of blind men in black ties or the nightmare of the cigar setting her green dress on fire.

He goes off accompanied by blonde tootsie Luna Wedler, while Krieps heads into the desert with replacement squeeze Tobias Resch - scenes of camel riding and being buried in the burning sand. There’s a nice tango scene. Fraulein Krieps’ admirers are belatedly rewarded by her in  four way group sex.

Along the way, they drop more names than a drunken marquee letterer - include poet Guiseppe Ungaretti (an even more aged Renato Carpentieri from Tenderezza), Hans Werner Henze represented by Basil Eidenbenz, Kleist, Laurence of Arabia and Luchino Visconti, who seems to be the template from which they are working.

Despite all this determined aspiration to high art, the piece come across closer to the old Hollywood two for the price of one artists bios - Chopin and Georges Sand in Song to Remember, Van Gogh and Gauguin in Lust for Life or, rather better, George Sanders’ Gauguin and Herbert Marshall’s Somerset Maugham in the Albert Lewin 1942 The Moon and Sixpence.

Ingeborg Bachmann might resonate with people familiar with its subjects’ work -  or it might not. It has the novelty of a mid Twentieth Century setting and the subdued colour craft aspects are superior but, coming with the memory of Margarethe von Trotta’s sharper (and shorter) political thrillers of the seventies, it is a let down. Watching all that intervening work, that  has yet to reach us, would offer some clues.

 

Standing out from the program’s welter of unfamiliar names, comes Michael Bully Herbig. His
Winetou burlesque Der Schuh des Manitu was the all time biggest earning German film. His new Tausend Zeilen/ A Thousand Lines is a change of pace from that one or his Balloon. It’s a brisk not quite clever enough German A feature which explores what we think of as the Trump Era notion of Fake News, through actually a version of the story of real life exposed Der Speigel journalist Claas Relotius. That one now takes on resonance after the Tucker Carlson sacking.

Thousand Lines - Nay & M'Barek

However one of the advantages or hazards, depending which way you look at it, of my watching movies longer than most people have been breathing, is that some fall into line with material I’ve already enjoyed. The Gold Standard here remains Michael Curtiz’ 1935 Front Page Woman, where George Brent’s manipulation puts rival papers on the streets with news boys shouting different verdicts before the trial  judge comes back from diner to announce the Jury’s decision. Closer to the new movie’s subject we get European films like Jean Yanne’s 1972 Tout le monde il est beau, tout le monde il est gentil, where Yanne’s scoop, where he went into the wilds of the Amazon to get the facts from hostile tribals, is up staged by the report his rival sent back from his air conditioned hotel or Frederic Aubertin’s 2009 Envoyés très spéciaux/ Special Correspondents - the Gerards, Jugnot & Lanvin as reporters faking their kidnapping.

Here rumpled Spanish Journalist Elyas M'Barek is overshadowed by clean cut young star Chronik News Magazine reporter Jonas Nay, who has a string of coups like a Gitmo visit, playing soccer with the boy whose graffiti started a Palestinian conflict or talking to the family of black football champion Colin Kaepernick, all despite the demands of caring for his ailing sister. M’Bareck is unhappy at having to share his assignments on militias policing the Mexican border with Nay, who gets to do the fundamentalists, while he handles the refugee column with its woman pushing a baby in a pram through the desert. M’Barek is surprised with the speed with which his opposite number completes his portion.

Meanwhile M’bareck’s ideal family life with neglected wife Marie Burchard and the kids deteriorates.

At Home Office, the executives are planning to crate their furniture and move into bigger offices, after promotions largely brought by Nay’s successes. The young man is dismissive of a traditional journalist at the staff meeting and berates M’Bareck for not getting into the human material behind the headlines, dragging down the standard Nay had set for their joint article.

There’s a nice comic scene with the fact checker, who goes through the material at speed and confirms that Arizona is on the U.S. border and the other verifiable information, leaving the specifics to the correspondent on the spot. 

Alarmed that his name is on a suspect piece of journalism, M’Bareck voices his suspicions after finding a photo of a Militia member Nay claimed he had interviewed under another name in a file article. He is told jealousy is endangering his continued employment.  Nay, accepting German Press awards with a modest speech applauding serious reporting, is cut to M’Bareck flying himself and his photographer on his own dollar to the militia man’s isolated desert shack with the snarling dog in Arizona and slipping him the two hundred dollars he demands, against company policy of not paying for interviews.

Back in Berlin with his recording, M’bareck is dismissed by the golf player executives as a bad loser who pays for stories and he finds himself out of a job. It’s only when fellow foreigner, sub-editor Sara Fazilat pulls the original of an email, which Nay corrupted, that her superiors realise they are in the middle of a major press scandal. She ends up crating her funiture for the big office.

Performances are everything that’s needed. The office infighting is broken up by striking location work - plausibly Monument Valey and the Palestinian Territories. We get the opening filmed backward and a black and white scene. The effects - characters walking through the graphics, placing the text of articles behind the actors or popping off the discredited items in the repeated scenes illustrating Nay’s scoops - is good and the TV commercial putting forward the new journalism claims of the bogus Chronik magazine is spot on.

Herbig’s works all have different textures but the same ironic cynicism underlies each one.

 

Elyas M'Barek is back in Liebesdings / Love Things from director Anika Decker who wrote the Rabbit Without Ears Movies, a polished and topical romcom, which mixes a critique of show business glamor and a bit of current ideology.

M’Barek is a movie star on his way to his premiere past a row of posters with his face already graffitied. To avoid frantic fans, he dives into the small neighborhood Theater 3000, which turns out to be a failing Feminist venue, where the entertainment includes transexuals’ monologues and dancing tampons. One of the acts outlines her intimidating sex quiz, for prospective partners before she puts out. Swigging on their shlooms beverage wipes M’bareck out and passers-by get ‘phone cam shots of him throwing up on a lamp post. Theater Manager, the appealing Lucie Heinze takes pity and he goes undercover (disguised as a clitoris) in her world of fluid sexuality, while she is taken aback with a his luxury apartment featuring a giant yellow push top pen. (“It’s art!”)

This produces the consequences we expect from the Beautiful People. Their night together is gangbusters but the morning after doesn’t go so well. Living from hand to mouth, she tells him he should connect with reality and he comes back that he’s been a star since he was eighteen and champagne galas, TV interviews and adoring fans are his reality.

However his entourage can’t deflect the damage when mean journalist Alexandra Maria Lara, now no longer the ingenue we remember from Downfall and The Tunnel and here doing an authoritative turn as a mean show business journalist, manages to unearth a youthful scandal. When this gets wide publication M’Barek’s show business prospects vanish, with the exception of a fruit beverage commercial where he can’t master delivering lines while being whisked skyward harnessed to a rope. In the nicest twist, now that his past has become public, M’Barek resolves to seek out the member of his teen gang that the cops had taken, only to find him become successful accountant Anton Weil, who is himself feeling guilty about not looking for his old associates. Weil’s young daughters are awe struck to find that he knows the star.

It all works out with what passes for charm in a current European feature movie and fills in the time well enough. Production is smooth.

I only watched a small section of the German Film Festival material but, in days when we are
spoiled for choice, I didn’t find myself motivated to explore more.

Barrie Pattison - 2023.