KINO! ’14: Banklady

It is hard to blame Gisela Werler and her accomplices for their spree of bank hold-ups. In 1966, Hamburg was practically begging for it. None of the banks were alarmed and only three patrol cars were equipped with radios. They were easy pickings for Werler and Hermann Wittorff. Of course, since we know who they are their luck must have run out eventually. True crime gets groovy in Christian Alvart’s Banklady (trailer here), which screens during the 2014 KINO! Festival of German Films in New York.

Drab, mousy Werler yearns for a more exciting life, while laboring in a wallpaper factory behind a hulking piece of machinery that looks like it was designed to mangle up hands and feet. Uwe, the factory sad sack, tries to put the moves on her, but she wants someone better. She thinks she has found him when she meets Uwe’s outlaw friend, Wittorff. Initially, she knows him as “Peter,” but what’s in a name? After holding some loot for the pair, Werler is determined to replace her less than steely suitor as Wittorff’s main stick-up accomplice.

Her first job immediately launches the “Banklady” media feeding frenzy. Soon she is enjoying her new chic persona and the attention she always so craved. She is also rather taken with Wittorff. She wants them to be Bonnie and Clyde, but he wants things to be strictly business—more or less. Conflict slowly escalates as Hamburg’s only competent copper, junior police commissioner Fischer doggedly follows their trail.

Banklady’s stranger than fiction tale of crime and self-reinvention looks ripe for a Hollywood remake on paper, but it is hard to see a studio greenlighting a picture with two such earthy, down-to-earth leads (the closest you could conceivably pitch might be Tilda Swinton and Nathan Lane, but that does not really say boffo opening weekend). However, it is easy to understand why Werler would risk so much for such an unprepossessing rake.

In fact, there is something very compelling about her ill-fated empowerment through Jackie O bobs, pill box hats, mod pattern dresses, and guns. Alvart revels in the 1960s period details, even employing Thomas Crown Affair-ish split screens (which seem rather bafflingly underutilized, considering how effective they can be).

Still, Alvart (having survived Hollywood) never lets his style overwhelm the cast’s substance. Severely glammed-down TV star Nadeshda Brennicke puts on an acting showcase as the ferociously romantic-minded Werler. There is also something intriguingly Runyonesque about Charly Hübner’s Wittorff. Frankly, the rest of the cast is just swimming in their wake, but so be it.

Werler’s story is grabby in several respects and Alvart realizes its cinematic possibilities quite thoroughly. It seems like a perfect match for an art house distributor like Music Box Films, who seem to handle more German releases than any of their competitors. Regardless, it is an energetic but mostly serious period crime drama that just about any mainstream viewer will enjoy, except for those who happened to be Hamburg cops in 1960s. Recommended accordingly, Banklady screens this Friday (6/13), Saturday (6/14), and Monday (6/16) at the Quad Cinema, as part of this year’s KINO!

KINO! ’14: Whispers Behind the Wall

Berlin’s rent control policies must be as inflexible and counterproductive as what we have in New York. A meager studio is simply impossible for a first term law student to find. After weeks of living in his car, Martin finally believes he has found a livable pad, but it comes with considerable baggage, including the landlady in Grzegorz Muskala’s Whispers Behind the Wall (trailer here), which screens during the 2014 KINO! Festival of German Films in New York.

Even naïve Martin quickly realizes there is something a little strange about Simone Bader. The application process was a bit unorthodox, but he was more than desperate. It turns out Bader is a borderline psycho with a ragingly jealous lover, but she is also rather attractive. Soon, he is nearly as consumed with her as the previous tenant, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances. He happened to leave behind a diary that does not make for reassuring reading.

After a series of amorous, designer drug-fueled encounters, the young student realizes he is also slowly withdrawing from the world. Yet, he is still lucid enough to be concerned by the suspicious behavior of Bader and her sinister super, Herr Horn, but he is unable to forge alliances with Bader’s lover, Sebastian, or their neighbors. At least the rent is cheap. Can we believe a sad sack like Martin would overlook a lot of craziness, just because Bader is hot? Yes, we can.

Whenever a film shows us a corridor to nowhere, we can be certain this is not a healthy living space. Theresia Anna Ficus’s design team has created two genuinely creepy locations, evoking the spirit of several Polanski and Hitchcock films. However, Maskula does not clearly establish the spatial relationships, leaving us to figure out how the two respects flats could simultaneously be adjoining and across the courtyard from each other.

Frankly, Whispers is most effective during its more grounded moments. In fact, there is a gleeful eccentricity fueling the love triangle scenes Martin reluctantly muddles through. In contrast, when things get more macabre, they also become more familiar. In retrospect, there are also several questions left unresolved.

Regardless, Katharina Heyer puts on a real fireworks exhibition as Bader. It is a ferocious, sexually charged performance that devours the scenery like a Teutonic Pac-Man. Poor Vincent Redetzki’s nebbish Martin hardly stands a chance, wilting next to her, but Florian Panzner also manages to bring some distinctive craziness as the mercurial Sebastian.

Whispers is further distinguished by an unusual role reversal, casting the urban hipsters as the dangerous nut jobs and the provincial as the sympathetic plugger. Clearly, eschewing polite restraint, Muskala goes all in, freely mixing genre conventions with old fashioned melodrama. There is a lot of messy, lurid fun to be had as a result. Recommended for fans of obsessive psycho thrillers, Whispers Behind the Wall screens this Friday (6/13), Saturday (6/14), and Sunday (6/15) as part of this year’s KINO! at the Quad Cinema.

KINO! ’14: West

During the late 1960s, the New Left popularized the slogan “the personal is political.” They did not do Nelly Senff any favors by doing so. When she crosses over to West Berlin, she cites “personal reasons” as her motivation, but the Allied security services are primed to distrust such evasive answers, for good reason. Senff quickly learns she might be unwittingly caught amidst a wider conspiracy in Christian Schwochow’s West (trailer here), which screens during the 2014 KINO! Festival of German Films in New York.

Senff was once a leading scientist in East Germany, much like her late Russian partner, Wassilij. He was an erratic presence in her life and that of their son, Alexej, but they still miss him dearly. Therefore, it is a bit of a shock when Senff learns her roguish lover was also a Stasi courier, who perhaps faked his death to escape their grasp. Keen to find out his whereabouts, the various agencies withhold Senff’s requisite approvals until she gives them answers. That means for the foreseeable future, she and Alexej will be stuck in the gray, institutional Marienfelde Refugee Center and not legally employable.

The respectable West is not nearly comparable to Petzold’s Barbara or Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others, but it never seeks to excuse or deny the human rights violations of the GDR regime. From what we see and hear in the film, life in the East was pretty bad. There is a fair amount of moral equivalency going on, but the Americans emerge looking the best, thanks to the sympathetic presentation and portrayal of CIA agent John Bird, playing with finely nuanced sensitivity by Jacky Ido.

For similar reasons, the obvious comparison between Nina Hoss’s Dr. Barbara Wolff and Jördis Triebel is not favorable to the latter. She does a fine expressing Senff’s mounting paranoia, but she cannot reach the same levels of diffident defiance and quiet vulnerability.

Frankly, in terms of its structure and tenor, West is a bit erratic. Just when it is poised to become a Brezhnev era Third Man, it pulls back from the brink, settling for more domestic dramas. Still, it definitely convinces viewers government buildings are no place to raise a child. It also takes seriously the notion of Stasi persecution targeting GDR defectors.

Ultimately, West works towards a hopeful statement rather than an angry one, making it an interesting film to see in conjunction with Dercourt’s A Pact, also screening during the festival. It is a work of some merit, but it lacks the moral heft and tragic pay-off of its more heralded predecessors. Recommended with minor reservations, West opens this year’s non-MoMA KINO! with an invite only screening at the Museum of the Moving Image this Thursday (6/12), in advance of a forthcoming New York theatrical release.

KINO! ’14: A Pact

Is a former East German informer really the Devil? He is rather Mephistophelean. Yet, in their school days, Paul Meier sort of got the better of Georg Schmidt. Meier’s karmic bill comes due years later, with substantial compounded interest, in Denis Dercourt’s A Pact (trailer here), which screens during the 2014 KINO! Festival of German Films in New York.

The earnest young Meier was so smitten with Anna, he forged a supposed love note from her to him, in hopes of spurring the arrogant Schmidt to dump her. Surprisingly, it works. However, before stealing some other schmuck’s girl, Schmidt extracts a promise from Meier that will loom large. At some unknown point in the future, Meier must return his presumptive new girlfriend, should Schmidt duly request her.

One Unification later, Meier is reasonably happily married to Anna and the proud father of two classically German looking teenagers. Much to his surprise, the new boss of Meier’s investment banking firm turns out to be the very same Georg Schmidt. Initially, things are rather awkward between the two ex-friends. Of course, Schmidt is not exactly a touchy feely sort of fellow. He is, after all, the son of an East German cop, who knew how to drop a dime to further his interests. The doctored blackmail pictures Schmidt received of Meier in an apparently compromising position with his assistant do not help matters. Even worse, the international market turns against copper commodities, after Meier took a bullish position. At least he can still count on the firm’s security chief Daniel as a friend and ally.

Neither Meier nor the audience seriously considers his pal’s suggestion that Schmidt just might be Satan or some sort of djinn, but Meier’s paranoia will entertain just about any other possibility. Frankly, he is such a hapless victim, many viewers will probably start rooting against him. Still, it is hard to root for Schmidt, but Dercourt obliges with a third act, forehead-slapping game-changer.

A Pact is a tonal traffic jam that leaves dozens of question hanging unresolved, but it is never dull. It starts out as an East German Jules & Jim, detours through Jeffrey Archer territory and evolves into a payback thriller. Viewers who are easily annoyed by cinematic head-fakes will probably find more than they can take here. Still, it goes about its murky business with German professionalism. At times, Dercourt (the French expat) takes things over the top, but that is not such a bad thing.

As Schmidt, Sylvester Groth is memorably severe and calculating, setting the atmosphere of intrigue quite nicely. Poor Mark Waschke’s Meier is required to be a bit of a doormat, but Sophie Rois brings all kinds of barely submerged crazy as Schmidt’s fateful girlfriend, Yvonne. Likewise, Marie Bäumer is rather credibly ticked off with the disappointing men in her life, while Johannes Zeiler steals scenes in bulk as the resourceful womanizer, Daniel.

As in a great Hawthorne novel, the GDR past continues to exert a malevolent influence on lives in the present. Frankly, this is not a film a former East German apparatchik with a guilty conscience could enjoy. It clearly implies there are many who still remember the Communist era and are not willing to forgive. Recommended for those who enjoy psychological thrillers with the occasional melodramatic indulgence, A Pact screens this Friday (6/13), Sunday (6/15), and next Tuesday (6/17) as part of this year’s KINO! at the Quad Cinema.