The Germans have nothing to complain about in Cannes this year, as they have three films in the festival. ‘Sound of Falling’, the second film by Mascha Schilinski, even opens the competition. In the ‘Quinzaine des Cinéastes’ series, Christian Petzold follows with ‘Miroirs No. 3’ and Fatih Akin shows his film adaptation of the novel ‘Amrum’ in ‘Cannes Premiere’.
‘Sound of Falling’ perfectly illustrates what a German film has to have in order to make it into the Cannes competition. A French co-producer and world sales agent (MK 2) and a French distributor (Diaphana) are helpful. That's why malicious tongues also refer to Cannes as the ‘Festival International du Cinéma Francais’. Without French participation, a film hardly stands a chance here.
But back to Mascha Schilinski's film, which was made in collaboration with ZDF's Kleines Fernsehspiel and seems like a somnambulistic walk through 100 years of German history. The years pass, but the farm house remains, one could summarise the story in a short formula.
The Berlin School as a dream. Long, meaningful shots, hardly any emotional depth and no dramatic escalation. At most in the soundtrack, which swells fatefully into an acoustic tsunami. The film centres on a farm in Brandenburg. The first episode takes place on the eve of the First World War, which is revealed by the appearance of Wilhelmine officers in spiked helmet. They are obviously looking for recruits. To prevent Fritz from being drafted, he is thrown from the hayloft and his lower left leg is amputated. Since then, he suffers from phantom pains, which the maid Trudi soothes with masturbatory devotion.
Puzzlingly, the dialogue is in dialect, which sounds rather artificial and forces German viewers to read the French/English subtitles. A central character is little Alma, through whose eyes we observe the events on the farm. The dialogues oscillate between thoughtfulness and banality. A cheerless gloom hangs over the scenery. The pre-war village setting is reminiscent of ‘The White Ribbon’. In contrast, however, Haneke's study of the roots of German fascism seems almost like a rural idyll.
If you're not paying close attention, you'll miss the second time level, which is set around 20 to 30 years later. Uncle Fritz has become noticeably older. Now it is Erika who tries out his crutches and takes care of his erotic grooming. There are no explicit references to National Socialism.
The third time period is obviously set in the GDR of the 1970s. The women stand in the kitchen wearing smock aprons while the men drive the combine harvester in netted underwear. The daughter goes off to the nearby disco, people now speak High German or occasionally use Berlin dialect. The large farm has apparently become an agricultural co-operative, and there seem to be family ties to the characters from the beginning. The river, which plays a central role in all episodes, marks the border between East and West Germany.
The epilogue could be set in the early 2000s. A young family has moved from Berlin to the countryside and is settling into the half-ruined farmhouse. Are the children revenants of previous generations? Who knows for sure. The mother smashes the beautiful old tiled stove with a sledgehammer and two containers are ordered to remove the rubble. The past is being demonstratively discarded.
If this all sounds puzzling, it is in keeping with the character of the film, which arranges meaningful close-ups and landscape images like tableaux or indulges in underwater shots that could also be shown as video installations in a museum. At just under two and a half hours, ‘Sound of Falling’ is rather long. I doubt whether the film will attract audiences to the cinema, but the intellectual critics from Germany are enthusiastic about the somnambulistic elliptical form, while the French are only moderately impressed.
The second German film, Fatih Akin's ‘Amrum’, was shown in the ‘Cannes Premiere’ series. It is based on the eponymous autobiographical novel by Hamburg director Hark Bohm, who was sent to the North Sea island with his mother during the war. The story begins in the final weeks of the war, when food is scarce and 12-year-old Nanning, Bohm's alter ego, helps the farmer's wife Tessa (Diane Krüger) in the potato field. Anyone expecting to see the German-American star in a leading role after watching the trailer will be disappointed. Diane Krüger only has a few scenes as a supporting character. Instead, the focus is on the relationship between the son and his Nazi-loyal mother Hille (Laura Tonke). Now that the Führer is dead, she no longer wants to eat any more, except white bread with butter and honey. Nanning, who as a boy in the Jungvolk was also sworn to the spirit of the party, spends the rest of the film trying to fulfil her wish. Until he finally learns that not everything about war and fatherland was the way his mother taught him.
‘Amrum’ has the feel of a history lesson in which we are once again told what it was like back then between the Nazis and the end of the war. At times you get the impression that the actors are talking more to the audience than to each other. You can easily imagine ‘Amrum’ in a school classroom. The costumes are perfectly chosen, the farmers speak local dialect like in the old days, only to add a sentence in High German so as not to frustrate the audience. Cinematically, the film remains bland and conventional; there are no surprises, neither in the story nor in the development of the characters. In its didactic style, ‘Amrum’ comes across as a well-made television drama. In this respect, it is entirely in keeping with the spirit of its author Hark Bohm, who makes a personal appearance in the final shot and gazes lost in thought at the sea. What brought the film to the Cannes programme remains a mystery. Perhaps it was the prospect of Diane Krüger on the red carpet.
In contrast, ‘Enzo’, the opening film of the Quinzaine des Cinéastes (formerly Quinzaine des Réalisateurs), seems like a counterpoint. Laurent Cantet was preparing the film when he died unexpectedly last year. His friend and colleague Robin Campillo realised the project (‘Un film de Laurent Cantet - Réalisé par Robin Campillo’ read the credits). The 16-year-old Enzo comes from a well-off family. His father (the Italian Pierfrancesco Favino with perfect French) is a maths lecturer, his mother (Elodie Bouchez) an engineer. But Enzo has no desire to go to school and starts an apprenticeship in masonry. This is where he meets the Ukrainian Vlad. Maksym Slivinskyi plays him with a physical presence reminiscent of the young Marlon Brando. No wonder Enzo is fascinated by his masculine charisma and hopes (in vain) for a homoerotic relationship. When his colleagues learn that Enzo lives with his well-heeled parents in an elegant house with a pool, they can't believe that he wants to work in construction. ‘If I were you, I'd do nothing and live off my parents‘ money,’ says Vlad.
The film is set in La Ciotat, an industrial town between Marseille and Toulon. Laurent Cantet had already set his coming-of-age film ‘L' Atelier’ (The Workshop, 2017) here. The film casually, but not overbearingly, highlights the class difference between the academic family and the workers on the sun-drenched Mediterranean coast. As does the generational conflict between the parents, whose older son fulfils their intellectual expectations, while Enzo distances himself from all of that.