Monthly Archives: June 2017

  • Veronika Voss

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss

    Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1982)

    The Marriage of Maria Braun, the first part of Fassbinder’s ‘Bundesrepublik Deustchland’ trilogy, ends on the day of West Germany’s victory in the soccer World Cup of 1954.  The trilogy’s second film[1], Veronika Voss, picks up, chronologically and with a sporting echo, where Maria Braun left off.  The year is 1955; the principal male character, Robert Krohn (Hilmar Thate), is a football journalist.  The leading lady, the eponymous Veronika (Rosel Zech), is a once-popular German film actress whose career is now on the skids.  Her biography is based loosely on that of the real-life Sybille Schmitz (1909-45).  Elements of the scenario, especially the title character’s delusions of undiminished celebrity, and the chiaroscuro black-and-white photography (by Xaver Schwarzenberger) bring to mind Sunset Boulevard too.

    The key location in Veronika Voss is the Munich house in which a doctor, Marianne Katz (Annemarie Düringer), treats patients, including Veronika, who are suffering from nervous ailments.  This place is the behind-closed-doors of early post-war West Germany and the symbolic nerve centre of what Fassbinder sees as the national psyche of the 1950s.  (He wrote the screenplay with Pea Fröhlich and Peter Märthesheimer, both of whom also worked on Maria Braun and Lola.)  Veronika’s heyday, as a star of UFA pictures, was in the late 1930s and early 1940s; she is rumoured to have slept with Josef Goebbels.  Dr Katz’s patients also include an elderly Jewish couple (Johanna Hofer and Rudolf Platte), concentration camp survivors who eventually die in a suicide pact.  Morphine, the ultimate painkiller, and other opiates are administered freely.  A sense of America calling the tune in post-war Germany is suggested through the Country & Western and other pop music playing on a radio in the clinic, and reinforcing its anaesthetising climate, as well as by a GI dealer (Günther Kaufmann) on the premises, who gives the (somewhat languid) impression of owning the place.

    Even though she’s aware he’s having an affair with femme fatale Veronika, Robert’s girlfriend Henriette (Cornelia Froboess) tries to help him uncover what’s going on at the clinic.  For her pains, Henriette dies at the hands of Dr Katz, whom Veronika helps to cover up her crime.  Soon afterwards, Veronika takes a fatal overdose of medication supplied by the clinic authorities.  They remain in control and Robert’s attempts to expose the status quo are vanquished.  He returns to his day job, asking a cab driver to take him ‘back to the Munich 1860’ football ground.  Fassbinder characteristically complements political metaphor with cinematic references.  The latter also bespeak American cultural influence.  Veronika and Robert, on their first meeting, walk together through woodland and a rainstorm which exaggerate typical forties Hollywood representations of the same.  The stylised visuals made the film often hard going for this photophobic viewer – thanks to the dazzling whiteness of parts of the clinic, the flicker of whirring film projectors in the movie studio sequences and of rotating ceiling fans in the offices of Robert’s newspaper.  Punitively insistent drum rolls on the soundtrack reinforce the oppressive, claustrophobic ambience.

    Veronika Voss, more than The Marriage of Maria Braun, is a film I’d rather read about than sit through.  This later piece makes you appreciate all the more the animating presence of Hanna Schygulla in the earlier one.  Veronika initially finds Robert extraordinary because he’s never heard of her; unlike Norma Desmond, she seems as much deluded as a lover as she is as a movie has-been.  Rosel Zech’s high-pitched neuroticism is startling in the early stages but she’s gradually swamped by Fassbinder’s symbolic scheme.   Hilmar Thate’s strong naturalistic playing of Robert allows the story to keep some kind of foothold in human reality.  The longer German title of the film translates as ‘The Longing of Veronika Voss’.

    29 May 2017

    [1] Veronika Voss is considered the second film even though it was the last of the BRD trilogy to be released.  Lola, which came out a year earlier, is set two years later, in 1957.

  • The Other Side of Hope

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Toivon tuolla puolen

    Ari Kaurismäki (2017)

    Khaled (Sherwan Haji), a thirtyish Syrian refugee, arrives in Finland as a stowaway on a coal freighter.  He didn’t mean to get there:  he was living in Gdansk when, to evade a gang of neo-Nazis, he took refuge on the ship, whose destination turned out to be Helsinki.  Khaled is anxiously waiting for contact from his sister, from whom he’s been separated since their respective departures from Aleppo.  Wikström (Sakari Kuosmanen) abandons his job as a travelling salesman and leaves his wife (Kati Outinen), who has a drink problem.  He goes on a poker tour and wins enough money to buy a rundown restaurant in Helsinki.  He keeps on the previous owner’s three staff (Janne Hyytiäinen, Maria Järvenhelmi and Ilkka Koivula).  The venture doesn’t prosper.  Both these narrative strands in Ari Kaurismäki’s new film are infused with the writer-director’s characteristic absurdist humour, though the prevailing register is different in each.  The sequences at the failing restaurant are largely comical, those dealing with Khaled’s experiences as an asylum seeker more serious.  Khaled’s application for asylum fails.  He escapes from a refugee centre to avoid deportation and ends up sleeping rough by the rubbish bins outside Wikström’s restaurant.  At this point, around halfway through The Other Side of Hope, the two storylines converge.  The sense of humour common to both in the earlier stages helps the film achieve a satisfyingly unified tone

    Le Havre (2011), Kaurismäki’s previous picture, had a fundamentally similar scenario – the unlikely pairing of a young migrant-on-the-run and a protective older man – but I got much more out of The Other Side of Hope.  Kaurismäki’s style is particularly effective in telling Khaled’s story.  The sustained understatement crystallises the precarity and deracination of the asylum seeker’s existence.  The eschewal of melodramatic incident reinforces its reality.  The persistent ironic humour ensures the film is never pompous.  For me, the more explicit comedy in the restaurant doesn’t work so well.  One effect of the unrelenting deadpan is that the punchlines tend to be predictable.  (That may be intentional but it leaves this viewer as straight-faced as the actor delivering the line.)  An employee tells Wikström his predecessor was a bit unreliable when it came to paying wages; the new boss asks in what way; it’s obvious the answer will be:  ‘He didn’t pay wages’.  I laughed only at the broadest comedy, when the restaurant has a short-lived makeover as a sushi bar and the stolidly eccentric, decidedly Northern European staff are kitted out in Oriental costume.  Khaled has joined their number by now, in exchange for safe custody at the restaurant.  In his Japanese outfit, he bears a passing, surprising resemblance to Toshiro Mifune.

    The trailer for The Other Side of Hope ends with a clip of Khaled saying to Mazdak (Simon Al-Bazoon), an Iraqi refugee whom he befriends, ‘I fell in love with Finland – but please find a way out of here’.  This led me to expect a cynical parable, presenting the refugee experience in Europe as so grim that a young Syrian man wasn’t merely homesick but actually tried to return whence he came.  I was relieved to be wrong.  Kaurismäki is a pessimist but not an out-and-out misanthrope.  He gives the Finnish authorities – police and food hygiene inspectors, as well as immigration officers – a hard time.  At the end of the film, Khaled’s future is more uncertain than ever, thanks to a stab wound from a right-wing thug.  But there’s human decency and courage in evidence too:  from Wikström (he eventually makes up with his wife, who’s stayed on the wagon since his departure); from the truck driver who agrees a deal with Wikström to bring Khaled’s sister (Niroz Haji) into Finland in his lorry, after she’s been located in Lithuania.

    Le Havre was enlivened by the 1960s pop song ‘Matelot’ on the soundtrack.  Music plays a larger part in The Other Side of Hope, in the form of live performances in the bars and on the streets of Helsinki – ‘twangy blues and rock’n’roll, wistful folk music’ (Ryan Gilbey).  Some of the subtitling isn’t so hot.  When a character says, ‘I’d forgotten that whole guy’, it may be a literal translation of the Finnish but it’s not English.  (It presumably means, ‘I’d completely forgotten about that guy’.)

    26 May 2017

Posts navigation