Angelopoulos’s The Dust of Time

Even for Greek Communists exiled after the Civil War, the USSR was a cold, inhospitable place to live. The mother of Greek-American filmmaker “A” was eventually sentenced to a Siberian gulag and his father was deported, yet somehow, they still managed to find each other again. Their story inspired A’s film within the film, but memory is a tricky thing and so is the narrative approach in Theo Angelopoulos’s The Dust of Time, which screens as part of the UCLA Library Film & TV Archive’s Angelopoulos retrospective, Landscape of Time.

A's latest film is based on the letters his mother Eleni wrote to his father Spyros, while she was banished to a Siberian gulag. Even though he is filming in the illustrious Cinecetta studio in Italy, he is distracted by personal problems, mostly those generated by his disturbed daughter, also named Eleni. It appears she ran away from home, but on the plus side, he finds one of his mother’s missing letters in her room.

Flashing back to early 1950s Temirtau in Kazakhstan, where the Greek exiles had set up their own Soviet style colony, A’s parents are briefly reunited. He had assumed the identity of a dead comrade to sneak her out, but they are discovered by the other Communists. Ironically, Eleni would then spend decades with their torch-carrying Jewish family-friend, Jacob, who would become a Refusenik during his long tenure in the gulag with her.

Angelopoulos’s temporal shifts can be especially confusing, because of the way he blends the time periods in the transitional scenes, with A appearing in the past, or his youthful parents seemingly walking through the present (circa Y2K New Year’s Eve), but that also gives the film a rather striking sense of un-reality. Dust of Time also features a gorgeous score composed by the late Angelopoulos’s regular collaborator, Eleni Karaindrou. The “Dance Theme,” heard performed by a full orchestra in a recording session for A’s film and as a piano solo performed by Spyros, is wonderfully melancholy and nostalgic-sounding.

Dust is a lovely film to look at and listen to, but it still manages to capture the bleakness of the Soviet Communism—rather surprisingly so, given the general ideological tenor of contemporary Greek art house cinema. With wide, wide-swept shots of the mean, Brutalist gulag buildings and the icy surrounding tundra, Angelopoulos and cinematographer Andreas Sinanos vividly evoke the loneliness of Siberian exile. The scene of Jacob translating in a storeroom full of Stalin statues and paintings, hastily withdrawn from public display in the early days of the Khrushchev thaw, is also wonderfully surreal.

The late great Bruno Ganz gave one of the best performances of his accomplished career as the tragically friend-zoned Jacob. Irene Jacob also shows tremendous range portraying both the youthful-gulag-bound and grandmotherly Eleni. Of course, Willem Dafoe broods dependably as “A”—after the fifth or sixth time you write out “Angelopoulos,” you start to appreciate the brevity of his one-initial name (never actually heard in the film itself).

The Tobacconist: Bruno Ganz is Sigmund Freud

This film teaches the pleasures of fine cigar, so enjoy it while you can. Coincidentally, it is also about the rise of a totalitarian regime. Coming of age is never easy, but it gets rather perilous for a naïve teen living in Vienna on the eve of the National Socialist takeover. At least he has access to first-rate counsel in Nikolaus Leytner’s The Tobacconist, which releases virtually tomorrow in New York.

When Franz Huchel’s mother suddenly loses the protection of her older lover, she packs him off to Vienna to work in Otto Trsnjek’s tabak. Apparently, they had a fling years ago, during more care-free times. The film openly invites viewers to speculate Trsnjek, the WWI veteran-amputee, may in fact be Huchel’s father, but the thought apparently never crosses the lad’s mind. Nevertheless, Trsnjek becomes a crusty father figure to Huchel, but for problems of the heart, he turns to their celebrated customer, Prof. Sigmund Freud. Remember, he always had a lot to say about cigars.

Huchel has fallen for the Bavarian Anezka, who you could safely say is much more experienced than he. Perhaps even professionally so. That could very well spell considerable heartache for Huchel, but Freud will be the first to explain to him love does not always make sense. Yet, if The Tobacconist sounds something like Il Postino, with Freud replacing Neruda, than keep in mind the rise of Hitler’s regime is equally weighted with Huchel’s personal drama, until the micro is logically and tragically consumed by the macro.

In fact, Trsnjek could be the sort of radical centrist hero the times are calling out for. The tobacconist is openly contemptuous of Communists, but he still lets them patronize his store, whereas National Socialists are not welcome. Obviously, this policy will cause a great deal of strife as the winds shift in favor of demagogues and statists.

Somehow, Leytner and screenwriter Klaus Richter (who adapted Robert Seethaler’s novel) mostly get the balance right. Frankly, their approach is often downright Freudian, especially the interludes depicts Huchel’s increasingly turbulent dreams. Freud’s scenes with young Huchel are saturated with wistful humanism, but they are never cute, trite, or shticky. These are serious life conversations that just happen to be conducted against an ominous historical backdrop.

Kino! ’18: In Times of Fading Light

At one point in his career, Wilhelm Powileit thought he was being dispatched to Mexico to help assassinate Trotsky. At least that would have been an accomplishment. Instead, his masters temporarily forgot about him. It was one of many disappointments in his career, but he has lived to a ripe old age while remaining fanatically loyal to the Communist Party, so his birthday is now observed by a parade of minor Party officials. However, everyone can sense history is no longer on Powileit’s side when they gather for his 90^th celebration in Matti Geschonneck’s In Times of Fading Light (trailer here), the opening night film of this year’s KINO!: Festival of German Films in New York.

Probably nobody in the Powileit family has suffered more for their Communist faith than Powileit’s stepson, Kurt Umnitzer. Now a respected history professor, Umnitzer spent five years in a Soviet labor camp because troop transport train was sent in the wrong direction. Indeed, it was a costlier interlude in his life than he lets on. However, it is most likely why is so determined to convince his rebellious son Sascha to compromise a little, in order to get along. Alas, his counsel falls on deaf ears, as becomes profoundly clear when Sascha calls his father from the safety of West Berlin on the morning of his grandfather’s milestone party.

Right, super awkward. Unmitzer will try to keep the bombshell news under wraps, but it will be even more difficult when his bitter Russian wife Irina also ditches the party (with a small “p,” not the Party, with a capitol “P’), in favor of a bottle of vodka. Yet, Sascha’s defection just personalizes what all the guests already know—East Germany’s days as Stalinist colony are numbered.

Based Eugen Ruge’s family saga novel, boiled down to one pivotal day for dramatic purposes, Fading Light is a melancholy fin de siècle elegy, but it still has plenty of bite. The Powileit patriarch might be getting slightly dotty, but he is still vain, petty, and sometimes mean-spirited. His casual cruelty really comes out when he refers to Unmitzer’s workcamp confinement as “sawing logs in the forest.”

Without question, Bruno Ganz gives a ferocious lead performance as ninety-year-old Socialist ideologue, Bernie Sanders. As a portrayal of a true believing extremist facing the end of his era, it comes from a similar place as his legendary, often memed Hitler in Downfall, but it is quieter and sadder.

Ganz gets the showy parts, but Sylvester Groth gives it a messily human soul as the conflicted Unmitzer. Groth was an East German defector, who has played his share of Stasi agents and collaborators in films and series like Deutschland ’83 and A Pact, but the world weariness and self-contempt of Unmitzer is an even more representative expression of the GDR experience. It is a restrained, but deeply felt performance, whereas Evgenia Dodina blows the doors off their hinges as Irina Unmitzer. Good golly, can she make an entrance.

Fading Light shares a kinship with classic dinner party disaster movies like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Vinterberg’s The Celebration, but it has a Teutonic soul. It is a wryly sardonic, archly observed summation of all the denial and double-think required of GDR’s Powileit’s that is more bitter than sweet. Highly recommended, In Times of Fading Light screens this Friday and Saturday (4/6 & 4/7), as part of KINO! 2018 in New York City.

Tribeca ’14: In Order of Disappearance

If revenge is a dish best served cold, then provincial Norway is the perfect place for it. Technically, Nils Dickman is Swedish and he will serve up payback with Ikea-like efficiency in Hans Petter Moland’s comic noir In Order of Disappearance (trailer here), which screens during the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.

Dickman (yes, there are comments made regarding his surname) is not a gangster, he is a snowplow driver, but he becomes a very put-out snowplow driver when his son is murdered by a drug gang. Maybe it is in his blood. His older brother was once a gangster, nick-named “Wingman” in honor of Top Gun. Dickman’s anger and initiative are sufficient to ice the low level lackeys who administered his son’s fake overdose, but he will need some help getting to their boss, a legacy kingpin known as “The Count.” As Dickman works his way up the food chain, The Count responds by igniting a gang war with the Serbian mob he assumes is responsible for his underlings’ disappearances.

For some reason, Tribeca programmers have a soft spot for films about snowplow drivers. Even though Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais’s Whitewash won last year’s best new narrative director award, Disappearance is the film to see. Screenwriter Kim Fupz Aakeson (who also wrote the radically different Perfect Sense) neatly balances moody revenge drama (in the tradition of the original Death Wish) with generous helpings of dry, black comedy. In fact, there is a running visual gag that gets funnier and funnier through repetition.

On the other hand, Stellan Skarsgård plays it scrupulously straight as Dickman. He is about as Nordic as a vigilante can get. Despite his severe reserve, viewers get a sense he is so tightly wound, he might shatter if he tipped over. It takes a couple beats to realize the ever-reliable Bruno Ganz appears as the grieving Serbian godfather (known simply as Papa), but his sly turn adds the icing to this frozen ice-cream cake.

On paper, Disappearance would sound like a grim and slightly gory story, but it is great fun on the screen. Moland’s subtle touch and Aakeson’s inventive but rigorously logical plot developments keep the audience locked in every step of the way. Highly recommended for fans of gangster movies with a sardonic attitude, In Order of Disappearance screens again Sunday (4/20) and Wednesday (4/23) during this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

The Reader

Oprah Winfrey book club selections usually conform to a predictable formula. They largely feature female protagonists in rural settings, dealing with issues of abuse, addiction, and empowerment. This made Bernhard Schlink’s novel The Reader a bit of a ringer when it was selected, though one could argue victimization is an important element of the story. One of several Holocaust related films releasing this year in time for the Award season, director Stephen Daldry’s The Reader (trailer here) opens in New York today.

Schlink grew up as part of the German generation that came of age immediately following World War II. Entirely blameless themselves, they still had to come to terms with what their parents and teachers had done over the last twelve years. His surrogate in the film is the painfully sensitive Michael Berg, played as a post-war fifteen year-old by David Kross and as a present day middle-ager by a reserved Ralph Fiennes.

As the story begins, young Berg has contracted a rather nasty bug while riding the tram home from school. After vomiting in a strange courtyard, one of the residents takes pity on him, cleaning up and seeing him home safely. Upon recovering, Berg returns to thank the mysterious woman. Realizing the adolescent’s desire for her, the older woman embarks on a sexual relationship with Berg. Although she refuses to tell him her name, their affair falls into a regular pattern. Every day after school, he reads to her before they make love. Then one day, Berg comes to the apartment as usual, only to find she has cleared out without warning.

Though deeply hurt, Berg carries on with his studies, eventually enrolling in law school. There he signs up for an advanced course taught by the philosophical Professor Rohl. As part of their curriculum, they will observe the sensational war crimes trial of three women who worked as concentration camp guards for the SS. To Berg’s horror, he recognizes one of the accused as his former lover, one Hanna Schmitz.

In many ways, playwright David Hare’s screenplay is problematic. A great amount of time is spent on the Summer of ’42 set-up, effectively de-emphasizing the predatory nature of such a relationship. Things do pick up somewhat when the trial begins, largely thanks to the electric performance of veteran German actor Bruno Ganz as Rohl. When he is on-screen, the film’s IQ increases at least twenty points. However, the presence of such a character, a sixty-some year-old legal ethicist, raises a few unanswered questions, like what was he doing from about 1933 to 1945?

Ralph Fiennes largely appears as the older, emotional withdrawn Berg in order to frame the flashback sequences, sort of the English Patient without the bandages. In truth, Kate Winslet’s performance is quite accomplished, but in a way, that compounds the film’s problems. The more it humanizes her character, the more it seems to invite viewers to identify with an admitted war criminal and statutory rapist (at least in most states of the union).

Aspects of Berg’s actions as a law student are troubling also. Regardless of one’s feelings for Schmitz, he clearly allows a partial miscarriage of justice to stand. The character of Ilana Mather, the lone survivor of Schmitz’s atrocity, is also questionable. Portrayed by Lena Olin as a cold, wealthy Upper Easider, she seems deliberately drawn to be as unsympathetic as possible. However, she does have an important moment of moral clarity for the film when she reminds the middle-aged Berg he was also a victim of Schmitz.

Ultimately it is difficult to understand the moral center of the film or where it wants to lead the audience’s sympathies. Given the sensitive nature of the film’s subject matter, that is a bit of a problem. With so many Holocaust related films opening this season, it raises the stakes for a film like The Reader. While the film features excellent performances from Winslet and Ganz, as a whole, it is uneven and confused.

(On a related note: Inheritance airs on most PBS stations tonight. Review here.)