Hermine Huntgeburth (2009)

I thought I’d booked to see a new screening of the Fassbinder version with Hanna Schygulla, as part of the ‘Festival of German Film’ at Curzon Soho.  Shortly after picking up the ticket, I discovered it was a new film – according to Wikipedia, the fourth German cinema adaptation of Theodor Fontane’s 1894 novel (there were versions in 1939 and 1955 before Fassbinder’s in 1974, as well as a dramatisation for television).    The largest theatre at Curzon Soho was packed, an unusual experience nowadays.  I think the audience was largely German; there were certainly plenty of German speakers among them anyway (and the youngish ones next to me kept up a running commentary throughout).   Again according to Wikipedia, Fontane’s Effi Briest can be seen as one of the three major European novels of the second half of the nineteenth century which take as their subject the plight, in contemporary bourgeois or aristocratic society, of an ardent, impulsive woman who finds herself trapped in an arid marriage and drawn to an adulterous affair.  Effi Briest is a virtual companion piece to Madame Bovary (1857) and Anna Karenina (1877) and it seems the Fontane classic is a standing dish on the set books menu in German high schools.  If I’m right that many of the audience (who ranged from kids of barely twenty to senior citizens) were German, I assume they were mostly well acquainted with the book.  I’ve not read it so it was hard to watch the picture in the way I’d have watched Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary – making an automatic comparison not just with the original novel but with other screen versions.  Without having the text of the novel to supply a subtext to the film, I found Huntgeburth’s adaptation, from a screenplay by Volker Einrauch, emotionally colourless and narratively predictable.  Seeing Effi Briest as representative of a genre rather than knowing it as an individual work, I felt the film was going through the motions – moving through the Stations of the Cross – of serious marital fiction of the period.

Effi, the daughter of a nobleman in Northern Germany, is still a teenager at the start of the film – and that start is promising.  There’s a whirling, giddy quality to the ball at the Briests’ home:  we experience the event from Effi’s volatile point of view rather than as the series of formalised romantic exchanges usual to this kind of scene.  Effi wants to dance with her cousin Dagobert but her mother pushes the much older Geert von Instetten in her daughter’s direction.  (The mother herself once rejected Instetten as a suitor – now that he’s come up in the world and looks set to rise higher, he’s a much more palatable prospect.)   Effi’s irritated, vital candour and Instetten’s response – he’s more intrigued than piqued by the disrespectful way the girl speaks to him – have a real spark.   But this first sequence is the best in the whole picture.  Once Effi’s arranged marriage with Instetten takes place, Huntgeburth’s direction seems to become as constrained as her heroine’s situation.   The tropes are unexcitingly familiar.  The newlyweds are stuck in a small, bleak Baltic town.  On their wedding night (and presumably subsequently), Instetten treats Effi as a sex object in a crude, mechanical way.

Crampas, the dashing, philandering soldier who eventually livens up her existence, makes love to her more sensitively.  While the marriage continues to rot, the soulless husband’s career progresses – from the provincial civil service to a government position in Berlin.   Effi’s affair is eventually discovered and a duel takes place, in which the wrong man dies.  The shamed Effi is thrown out by her husband and has to make her own living (a job in a library) – estranged from her daughter Annie, the only child of the marriage.  When she meets with Annie again, the little girl is cold and hostile.  At the end of the novel Effi, like Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary, dies; and the only thing that’s relatively unexpected in this film is the upbeat ending.  Effi sees Instetten in a Berlin street and ignores him.  She disappears into the crowd with a half-smile of satisfaction.  Hermine Hertgeburth is telling us that she’s become an independent woman.

It’s hard to fault the principals’ performances except to say that they’re none of them interesting.  Effi is played by Julia Jentsch (best known as Sophie Scholl), Instetten by Sebastian Koch (the writer from The Lives of Others), Crampas by Misel Maticevic.  Rüdiger Vogler (thirty-five years on from Alice in the Cities) is the apothecary Gieshübler.  (The presence of an apothecary in the story brings to mind Madame Bovary in a more specific way.)  There’s some obvious acting in some of the smaller parts – particularly Juliane Köhler as Effi’s (oddly modern-looking) mother and Barbara Auer as a sub-Mrs Danvers-like housekeeper.  (The ghosts of the house in Kessin, which give Effi regular nightmares, also bring Mandelay to mind.)    By far the most vital characterisation is from Amber Bongard, who plays Annie.  This little girl is disconcerting, not least in her slight facial resemblance to the boy in The Tin Drum.  When she watches her mother at their reunion, Annie’s expressions are hard to pin down.  She seems haughty, unhappy and reproachful all at once – and to be enjoying putting Effi through it.  An obviously ‘passionate’ score by Johan Soderqvist (who wrote the music for Let the Right One In) is laid on with a trowel.

2 December 2009