1989: a Spy Story, on MHz

Before 1989, if you were named in Stasi records as a mole or an informant, you could count on that intel staying secret. After 1989, you were potentially in a heck of a lot of trouble. That is the position Saskia Starke finds herself in as a mole in America’ West German embassy in Sven Bohse’s 1989: a Spy Story (a.k.a. Wendezeit), a film produced for German television, which premieres this Tuesday on MHz.

Actually, Starke is not the original name she was born with. However, as the daughter of a high-ranking Stasi agent, she had to do her duty, assuming the identity of a West German leftist, who defected to GDR. The real Starke had been estranged from her former National Socialist parents, so it was easy for her imposter to re-start her life fresh in West Berlin.

Eventually, she married her husband, a diplomat in the West German embassy and wormed her way into an in-country analyst gig with the CIA. Yet, it was only by luck that her colleague Betsy Jordan blabbed during a dinner party about an operation to pick up a Stasi defector who could burn her. Starke manages to liquidate him before his rendezvous with the CIA, but that tips off the Agency that they have a mole in the embassy. It will be Jeremy Redman’s job to find the deep-cover Stasi agent. Supposedly, he is the one who sleuthed out the Walker spy ring—and he immediately suspects Starke.

She was once a true believer in Socialism, but Starke's faith has been shaken. However, she still ardently believes in staying alive and at liberty. Given her circumstances and shifting beliefs, her reactions to current events in the GDR are quite conflicted, but she has to put on a happy face at work. She also totally freaks when she learns her rebellious daughter has been secretly seeing an East German punker, for so many reasons.

1989 is a really smart and sophisticated espionage thriller (written by Silke Steiner) that has a lot of le Carre-esque betrayals and shifting loyalties, but is consistently critical of the Communist experiment in misery. It definitely looks and feels like 1989 (wasn’t that a great year) and Bohse keeps building the suspense as Redman gets closer and closer to uncovering Starke’s secret mission.

The Good Traitor: Representing Free Denmark

Ambassador Henrik Kauffmann hoped to be something like a Danish Henry Adams, representing his government-in-exile in DC. However, when the government failed to exile itself, he basically assumed that role—and it was a good thing he did. Kauffmann’s extraordinary diplomatic career is the focus of Christina Rosendahl’s The Good Traitor, which opens this Friday in theaters and on VOD.

The Hon. Kauffmann was a natural ambassador, because he and his wife Charlotte always enjoyed entertaining. Unlike many of his Foreign Service colleagues, Kauffmann also readily identified the looming National Socialist threat. He tried to leverage his well-heeled wife’s family connections to the Roosevelts, but FDR will not give him the assurances he is looking for.

Unfortunately, the German invasion happens sooner than even Kauffmann or his hawkish deputy Povl Bang-Jensen expected. In an even worse development, the Danish government remains in place to negotiate compliant terms for the occupation. Horrified by their collaboration, Kauffmann essentially declares his diplomatic mission the highest functioning branch of the free, independent Danish government. Several important embassies back him up, but he really needs Roosevelt to recognize him, especially when the compromised government proclaims him a traitor.

Kauffmann’s cowboy diplomacy makes for a ripping good yarn, which has the added advantage of being completely true. The chutzpah is awe-inspiring, but it was all for a just cause. Far less interesting is Kauffmann’s torch-carrying for his sister-in-law and his wife’s boozy, jealous resentment. Regardless, it is nice to see Bang-Jensen get his due as well. Frankly, Kauffmann’s colleague deserves a film of his own, focusing on his tenure at the UN, where he refused to reveal the names of Hungarian Revolution witnesses to his organization, to protect their relatives behind the Iron Curtain. He was found dead, "under mysterious circumstances,” shortly thereafter.

The Notebook: A Different Kind of War Diary

Perhaps no nation’s history during World War II is as torturously complex as the Hungarian experience. Although Regent Miklós Horthy largely refused to abet National Socialism’s Final Solution, his resistance was tragically reversed by a full scale occupation and the Arrow Cross coup d’état. In war-torn 1944, twin thirteen year old brothers will learn the worst lessons possible from Germans, Soviets, and their fellow Hungarian countrymen alike in János Szász’s Oscar nominated The Notebook (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

The nameless twins had lived sheltered lives, but the war’s grim turn changes everything. Fearing for their safety in the city, their mother deposits them with the grandmother they have never known. She is not pleased to meet them. Conspicuously estranged from her daughter, the old woman feels no emotional bond to the two boys. Reluctantly accepting their presence on her farm, she works them like animals for meager rations. When they complain, she beats them before drinking herself into a stupor.

The boys receive similar treatment from the villagers, who openly refer to the old woman as a witch. As a survival strategy, the twins banish all memory of their parents. To harden their bodies and deaden their souls, they institute a training regimen of physical abuse and voluntary starvation. Their only friend is “harelip,” a somewhat older girl on a neighboring farm, who tutors them in criminal techniques. Yet, they still document their daily lives in the notebook, in accordance with the father’s instructions.

Based on Agota Kristof’s source novel, The Notebook is sort of the fictional anti-thesis of Anne Frank’s Diary. While the brothers document the horrors of war from a young person’s perspective, there is nothing life-affirming or empathic to glean from their journal entries. Instead, it is a harrowing account of their efforts to become inhuman in order to survive an inhumane situation. Yet, the brothers do not evolve into true sociopaths. Rather, their remnants of decency consistently manifest themselves in problematically violent ways.

Ironically, the brothers’ only protector is the local ranking German officer, who displays suggestively pedophilic tendencies. Ensconced in their grandmother’s former home, he appreciates their singular training sessions. Not so surprisingly, when the Soviets arrive, they act more like rapacious conquerors than liberators. Yet, the worst abuses of Hungarians are arguably committed by other Hungarians.

Since the brothers largely react with such stoic indifference to each new outrage, it is difficult to pass judgment on the young leads, András and László Gyémánt, except to commend their poker faces. In contrast, Piroska Molnár is an absolute dread terror as their Grandmother Dearest, but her monster is not without pathos. As the officer, Ulrich Thomsen is the model of Teutonic severity, whose black leather neck-brace adds creepy Fifty Shades overtones to his appearance.

At times, Szász cranks up the privations and tribulations to almost excessively lurid levels, but the film’s black soul consistently pulls it back into a stark naturalism. Innocence is not merely killed in Notebook it is incinerated and its ashes are dispersed into nothingness. Yet, irony still asserts itself in uncomfortable ways. Recommended with respect rather than affection for those who appreciate uncompromising morality tales, The Notebook opens this Friday (8/29) in New York at the Quad Cinema.

The Silence: Crime and Angst in Germany

For cops, déjà vu can be extremely unpleasant.  When thirteen year old Sinikka is found brutally murdered in the exact same spot and on the exact same date as young Pia was twenty-three years earlier, it obviously means something.  Unfortunately, since the previous case remains unsolved, the police have no prime suspect, but there is plenty of guilt, grief, and general angst to go around in Baran bo Odar’s The Silence (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Unlike the German police, viewers know right from the start who the killers are, because Silence shows us almost immediately.  It was two socially awkward men drawn together by their sick desires.  One actually did the deed, while the other cowered in the car, disappearing shortly thereafter.  Newly retired detective Krischan Mittich never came close to catching either of them.  Of course, when the new victim is discovered he wants back on the case.

Mittich the bridge-burner is not exactly welcomed back by the new boss.  Only his former colleague David Jahn finds time for him.  Frankly, the rumpled cop probably never should have been involved in the investigation in the first place.  Still profoundly grieving his late wife, Jahn is still a basket case, who just happened to answer the call on his first day back.  Yet, like most grungy looking detectives, his intuition is quite keen.

While not exactly a whodunit, the nature of the game played in Silence is a mystery Baran bo Odar lets unfold slowly but sure-footedly.  Indeed, viewers might very well have pitched debates whether the ending represents justice or not.  Regardless, it is certainly distinctive and light years removed from anything Hollywood would countenance.

Sebastian Blomberg is remarkably forceful as Jahn, but never showy.  He is clearly coming apart at the seams, but in a restrained, even repressed way.  Burghart Klaussner’s Mittich is an appropriately charismatic blowhard, who looks like he was born to play an ex-cop.  Yet, Katrin Sass truly dominates the film as Elena Lange, the mother of the first murdered girl.  Her performance is too smart and multi-layered to simply be dismissed as the film’s moral center, though she largely serves that function too.  Banshee fans will also note Ulrich Thomsen (often appearing under a ridiculous wig).  It is a disturbing but sophisticated turn that really gets under one’s skin down the stretch.

Silence is about as existential as crime dramas get while staying within genre.  Cerebral in tone and deeply pessimistic of human nature (befitting a German film from a Swiss filmmaker, featuring a Scandinavian co-star), it is recommended for fans of ambitious, psychologically complex thrillers.  It opens this Friday (3/8) in New York at the Cinema Village.

Banshee: Amish Country Noir

Bufurd T. Pusser would appreciate the new get-tough sheriff of Banshee, PA, were he not an ex-con, living under an assumed identity.  It sounds like a clever Cornell Woolrich set-up, but Alan (True Blood) Ball’s new Cinemax series, created by Jonathan Tropper & David Schickler, is more about action than suspense.  Whatever works.  As it happens, the first two episodes of Banshee work pretty well.  There will be plenty of mayhem for relatively grown-up audiences when Banshee premieres this Friday on Cinemax (promo here).

His name is not really Lucas Hood.  That was the name of the honest loner who had accepted the position of Banshee’s sheriff sight unseen.  The recently released thief on the run from a shadowy Ukrainian gangster happened to be on-hand when Hood met his untimely end.  He even threw his lot in with the lawman.  It was not sufficient to save the real Hood, but it means there will be no witnesses, aside from Banshee’s sympathetic barkeep and former Cruiser weight champion Sugar Bates.

The man now masquerading as Sheriff Hood came to Banshee to confront his former lover and accomplice, now known as Carrie Hopewell, the wife of the crusading district attorney.  Perhaps he will stay to take down Kai Proctor, the local slaughterhouse owner and vice kingpin, who happens to be the blacksheep son of an Amish patriarch.  Meanwhile, the ominous Rabbit’s henchmen are hot on the trail of the ostensive Hood and his reluctant transvestite hacker accomplice, Job.  (Who knew Harry Angstrom was a super-villain?)  Potentially, Hood could find himself juggling two nemesis figures, while ambiguously pursuing his ex-lover and bedding all of Banshee’s willing party girls.

As set-ups go, Banshee’s looks solid enough to sustain at least a full season.  The first episode origin-smackdown is particularly well executed, although it might represent some rather unfortunate product placement for A1 steak sauce.  To judge by the first two installments, there should be plenty of Walking Tall style action.  Cinemax’s horny teenager demographic will also appreciate Ivana Milicevic’s nude scenes as the presumed Hopewell.

Certainly looking the part, Milicevic does a nice job in the early going serving as both femme fatale and soccer mom.  In the lead, Anthony Starr is surprisingly manly and hardnosed, especially by Hollywood’s standards.  He could become a go to guy for an industry suffering from a masculinity deficit.  Although Ulrich Thomsen has played plenty of heavies in his American outings, he seems to enjoy Proctor more.  The Amish angle probably helps.  Ben Cross is certainly on familiar territory as the malevolent Rabbit, but Hoon Lee’s shticky Job trades on some tired stereotypes.

Banshee clearly has enough violence and mature stuff to keep it going for a while, but the underlying premise also shows considerable promise.  It certainly has the right tone to appeal to fans of Cinemax’s breakout hit, Strike Back!  Effectively cast and nicely paced by directors Greg Yaitanes (episode 1) and S.J. Clarkson (episode 2) Banshee is worth taking a shot on.  It premieres this Friday night (1/11) on Cinemax.