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 90th
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.