Berlin

One sparkling, One Lame 

By Alex Deleon <filmfestivals.com>

"Indignation" (Panorama, sparkling) and "Alone in Berlin" (Competition, lame)

The first of these, indignation, is a very close adaptation of Philip Roth's 29th novel, published in 2008. Roth, born 1933, is still alive and kicking at age 82 and a number of his his earlier works, such as "Goodbye Columbus" were successfully adapted for the screen (1969).

Directed by Columbia Professor James Schamus this is a very close adaptation of the novel and a very savvy screen rendition. 

Obviously autobiographical the story follows the adventures and misadventures of scholarly (kosher) butcher's son Marcus Metsner, 19, as he leaves the clutching Jewish family fold in Newark, New Jersey, and goes off to a small Christian college in Winesburg, Ohio, mainly to escape the Korean war draft in 1951. 

There he has a troubled affair with the campus (blowjob) queen, Olivia Hutton (Sarah Gadon), and highly confrontational discussions with the campus dean (Tracy Letts)  during which Marcus strongly defends his God given right to atheism and his right to skip routine christian indoctrination sessions -- also his right to privacy concerning his personal sex life. This eventually gets him kicked out of school and drafted into the army where he will get himself killed and tell the whole story in metaphysical flashback from the great beyond -- as his ex-girlfriend, Olivia, now institutionalized, listens, as only she can ...

What makes this work so well as cinema are very true performances by relatively unknown actors, detailed observation of campus life in the fifties, sparkling dialog (straight from the novel), and intimate familiarity with the convolutions of Jewish-American postwar culture.

The perversely clutching kosher butcher father, the realistic jewish mother, and the need of a budding young intellectual to run from all this suffocating confinement is the underpinning of the picture.

Noteworthy highpoints: The matter of fact act of fellatio administered to sexually naive Marcus on his first date with elegant Olivia, The grinding clash of minds in the deans office where Marcus clearly exposes Roth's own philosophical positions based on atheism and freedom from dogma, and the gripping scene where Marcus's mother comes out to the campus to warn him away from the relationship with a beautiful shicksa who is  mentally disturbed and suicidal.

Though the story has darker overtones director Schamus presents it as a lively campus romance and a string of youthful adventures which is good entertainment on that level alone, as well as an historically accurate period piece. It was well worth a trip in the cold rain out to the International Cinema, once the pride of the Communist Eastside, on Karl Marxx Allee. This film is so close to my own history I could easily visit it again.

Both actor Logan Lerman, 24 (Marcus) and Sarah Gadon, 28 (Olivia) are actors we are likely to be seeing much more of in the near future.

Logan Lerman looks dapper in purple and black while arriving for the premiere of his new movie Indignation held during the 2016 Berlinale International Film Festival at Zoo Palast on Sunday (February 14) in Berlin, Germany. The 24-year-old actor posed on the red carpet with his co-star Sarah Gadon

"Alone in Berlin", in Competition. 

Starring Emma Thompsom, Brendan Gleeson and Daniel Brühl. Based an an original 1947 German novel "Jeder Stirbt für sich Allein" (Everyone dies alone) which was translated into English in 2009. The famous novel by Hans Fallada was dashed off in a few weeks while the events of the war were still hot an fresh in the author's mind and was a hot best seller. Misdirected in English by Swiss born Vincent Perez.

This film would seem to have had everything going for it to make it a big hit at this festival: Three big stars, the Berlin location, based on a novel very well known in Germany, and a strong anti-Hitler theme which always resonates in a country ever anxious to shed the lingering image of National Socialism once and for all.

The story centers on a working class Berlin couple, Otto and Anna Quangel (Gleeson and Thompson) living in WW II Berlin who, when they receive the news that their son has been killed in action decide that this was directly Hitler's fault, whereupon Otto, a respected factory foreman, mounts a one man campaign to undermine The Führer's exalted reputation by planting postcards with hand written Anti Hitler messages here and there around town with solid backing from his bereaved wife.

We see him carefully reworking the printed word "führer" (leader) transforming it into "lügner" (liar) by modifying a couple of letters, on the first of his seditious postcards, and the Campaign is on. He must of course be very careful in planting his little verbal bombshells because not everybody is going to see things his way and the slightest slipup could get him turned in to the Gestapo. Most people do in fact turn these cards in to the police (main investigator, Daniel Brühl) and the Gestapo too is presently hot on Otto's trail. We soon have a tense thriller on our hands, knowing full well this can only come to an unhappy conclusion -- which it does, but not very convincingly in this version of the telling. 

It was done once before much more tellingly, as a German film with great German actress Hildegard Kneff in 1975.

The current resurrection simply doesn't make it. The English dialogues with phony German accents don't really work and are a constant distraction. Worse, the entire motivation for this couple's Quixotic  anti-Hitler campaign seems pretty shallow. 

The film opens with the lightning Blitzkrieg defeat of France in 1940 and we are convincingly shown the general German euphoria at the unexpectedly easy victory over arch rival France. We see, however, one soldier killed in action and this turns out to be the only son of the Quangley's which is enough to turn them into dedicated anti-Nazis overnight. The reason this doesn't quite ring true is that other German parents lost sons in the fighting as well but were still strongly in favor of the war as long as it was victorious. Fever pitch patriotism was very much the tenor of the time in Deutschland. Why this particular set of parents abruptly decided to go against the tide is not too convincingly explored or explained.

From there the story plods along with its most intriguing aspect being that Emma Thompson who is so radiant and glamorous in real life (as she was indeed at the press conference!) manages to look and act like a completely doughty German hausfrau, such that you can almost forget you are watching the fabulous Emma Thompson in rags. Daniel Brühl, the only real German in the cast, doesn't bother to fake a German accent -- why bother, this is an English picture, right? -- and stumbles around with a seriously bloody nose for several scenes after getting beat up by a Swedish Gestapo man who doesn't think he's putting enough of the right stuff into the manhunt -- and so forth, and so on ---

Final assessment: Read the Book!

This is one Movie that will undoubtedly profit from being dubbed into German when it releases here commercially, and may even work to some extent with German audiences. In the outside world it doesn't have as much chance as the proverbial ball of snow in the Devil's domain.