Kino! ’18: The Final Journey

Historically speaking, Russia’s military aggression in eastern Ukraine is nothing new. Just ask the Cossacks—if you can find any left. There is one particular Cossack woman an elderly German man would dearly like to find. His connection to the Cossacks is news to his granddaughter, but their family does not talk very much. However, she might finally get to know the old man before it is too late in Nick Baker-Monteys’s The Final Journey (trailer here), which screens during this year’s KINO!: Festival of German Films in New York.

The recently widowed Eduard Leander was always a prickly cuss, but when he suddenly leaves on a seemingly inexplicable Ukrainian voyage, his daughter Uli still feels duty-bound to dispatch his slacker granddaughter Adele to retrieve him from the station. Much to her chagrin, Adele finds herself train-bound for Kiev instead. Old man Leander is somewhat put out having her tag along, as is she, but at least she finds some companionship with their hard-partying compartment mate, Lew.

Of course, once they reach Kiev, they realize his life is much more complicated than he prefers to let on. Lew is ethnic Russian, but still identifies as Ukrainian—as well as Russian. It turns out he is the only member of his family with such divided sympathies. He was a Maidan supporter, but his brother Boris has become one of the few fig-leaf separatists in Donetsk, providing cover to the plain clothes Russian troops. However, those connections make Lew the perfect guide for Leander as he searches for the mysterious Svetlana.

Frankly, Baker-Monteys and co-screenwriter Alexandra Umminger are tepidly cautious in the way they depict the fighting in Donetsk, preferring to cast it in brother-versus-brother terms, as if it were not unlike the American Civil War, then the conflict of neo-Soviet imperialism that it is. However, they clearly address the repression and ethnic cleansing suffered by Cossacks like Svetlana, whom we learn spent years in a Soviet Gulag (as did Leander, which is quite a surprise to his family).

In some ways, Final Journey is highly formulaic, but that also means it will be very accessible to non-German, non-Ukrainian audiences. In fact, one of its greatest merits is the appealing chemistry that develops between Adele and Lew. Petra Schmidt-Schaller’s turn as Adele is unusually subtle and earthy, while Tambet Tuisk is genuinely charismatic as Lew. Oddly, veteran movie bad guy Jürgen Prochnow largely relies on cranky old man clichés, at least until old Leander’s big third act pay-off.

Arguably, Lew is the film’s most compelling character, but the Cossack back-story is quite distinctive—and in many ways a tragically prescient prologue to the current Imperial Russian war against Ukraine. Recommended for general audiences, The Final Journey screens tomorrow night (4/8) and Tuesday (4/10), as part of KINO! 2018 in New York City.

Kino! ’18: The Garden

The family dynamics are like something out of Osage County and the backdrop has a bit of Summer of Sam’s spirit, but nobody can get too worked up on a lazy summer day like this. Maybe that is part of the problem. A West German family gathers for what could be their last summer getaway on the wild, sprawling property of their late matriarch, while a child murderer remains on the loose in Sonya Maria Kröner’s The Garden (trailer here), which screens during this year’s KINO!: Festival of German Films in New York.

Just what will happen to the garden and the assorted summer cottages now is a very pertinent question. Ilse was Grandma Sophie’s caretaker and is now presumed to control the property. There are several hushed conversations about a potential sale, but they are quickly broken off whenever younger generations wander within earshot. Of course, Eva, the resentful wife of her grown grandson Bernd is convinced they will be swindled out of their share of the inheritance by his better-loved sister, Gitti. However, Gitti has plenty of her own problems, including a disinterested ex-husband. To make matters worse, her daughter blames her for the father’s absence.

Over the course of a late summer day, all the family resentments will slip out, but they never boil over. Kröner also does everything possible to cast suspicion on a creepy neighbor, short of tacking a note to his door that says “out killing children—back soon.” She juggles an awful lot of balls in the air, but none of them pay-off individually or add up to much collectively. In fact, her strategy of keeping most of the big drama off-screen gets hair-pullingly frustrating in the third act.

Nevertheless, as a mood piece and an accomplishment in mise-en-scène, Garden is quite impressive. All the textures and color schemes truly scream early 1970s. Kröner also totally nails the lazy, hazy, slightly-over-heated-in-a-Mersault-from-The-Stranger kind of way vibe. Plus, the cast is totally believable, especially Laura Tonke and Mavie Hörbiger as Eva and Gitti, the battling sisters-in-law. However, as you watch Garden it is hard to shake the feeling that there is a real movie going on in the room next door, but we can only see the players making their entrances and exits.

There is definitely a distinctive sense of time and place throughout The Garden, as well as an eerie feeling of foreboding percolating just below the surface. Unfortunately, it is too coy and too reserved for its own good. Earning a highly mixed response, The Garden screens this Saturday (4/7) and next Wednesday (4/11), as part of KINO! 2018 in New York City.

Kino! ’18: Bad Banks (series)

Jana Liekam’s new employer is too big to like. Deutsche Global is one of Germany’s largest investment banks, but they have recently been thrown off-stride by scandals and bad investments. It represents a second chance for Liekam, who might just save the bank, so she can help destroy it later in the German limited series Bad Banks (trailer here), directed by Christian Schwochow, the first two episodes of which screen during this year’s KINO!: Festival of German Films in New York.

Liekam has just been fired from Luxembourg-based Credit International for making her boss, Luc Jacoby, the chairman’s coked-up, entitled son look bad. Christelle Leblanc, the firm’s director agrees this is unfair, but cautions Liekam she must learn to play the game better. Thanks to her secret string-pulling, she gets Liekam a tryout at Deutsche Global working for their hotshot investment manager Gabriel Fenger. From time to time, Lebanc will supply Liekam with timely “insider” information, but she makes it clear she wants highly compromising information on Credit International in return.

Judging from the in media res opening, the junk bonds will eventually hit the fan in a big, panic-inducing way. Presumably, Liekam will play a major role in the meltdown. Obviously, there is a lot of intrigue building behind the scenes, but the first two episodes are relatively self-contained, thereby making a good festival showcase.

Paula Beer (so terrific in Ozon’s Frantz) is well cast as Liekam. She can be quite forceful and even cynical, but it is clear from her early breakdown, she probably has issues that will later come to the fore. Barry Atsma is also wonderfully flamboyant as Fenger, a true child of Gordon Gekko. May Duong Kieu also makes quite an impression as Thao Hoang, Liekam’s new team-member, who will either be her uneasy ally or a femme fatale rival, or something in between (just how their relationship shakes out will be one of the series’ intriguing uncertainties). Marc Limpach is a clammy mess as Jacoby the younger, but Jean Marc Barr promises plenty of steely skullduggery as Deutsche Global’s chairman, Robert Khano.

Schwochow, a veteran of both film and television, helms with style, hooking viewers right from the start. He lays a good deal of groundwork in the first two episodes, yet still manages to end each one in quite a satisfying manner. Hopefully, MHz or someone will pick up Bad Banks, because it is really smart and addictive television. Until then, the first two episodes are highly recommended when they screen this Saturday (4/7) and next Thursday (4/12), as part of KINO! 2018 in New York City.

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.