A love story ? Tough love !

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23 September

In the Q&A session after the screening of Staub auf unseren Herzen / Dust on our Hearts (2012), Stephanie Stremler (Kathi) described not only how Susanne Lothar (Chris) improvised with her and, when it came to the fight, only the cameraman was in the know, but also the film as a love story between Kathi and Chris, two women who had been left to bring up children on their own, but who had different ways about them.

I had postulated that Stremler, if one of her own parents were a therapist and tried to relate to her on the basis of being a patient, she would think it inappropriate, and asked whether she thought that Chris was trying to achieve that status all along – this is where she, although acknowledging that Chris is trying to gain control, talked of it as a love story.

If so, then a love affair that goes wrong, and seems likely, unlike what Fabian (Florian Loycke) says about his relationships, to result in severance. The flaw in it all is to believe that a mother such as this would only in the course of the short span that we see here come to impose her will on the welfare of her daughter’s child, let alone get her on the sharp side of her therapist’s desk.

Films sometimes do this – present us with a situation and / or a problem and invite us not to think whether it would have happened before, or rather pass over in silence the question of what the director and editor are choosing to show us is actually likely to be new. However, Midnight in Paris (2011), though, does not ask that of us, because it presents a totally new experience for Gil, whereas the allegedly naturalistic world of a film such as this seeks to achieve its impact by simply immersing us in interlocking lives.

Here, the impossibility of Chris as a mother cannot simply have emerged with a loud conversation on her mobile when he daughter is in the changing-room – she has always been like this, and all that is new is that her estranged partner has come back to Berlin from Cologne after many a year. He is clearly expected by Kathi, so is it really likely that the practicality of where, when he drives there (and he drives there with all of his life in the car), he will spend the night, or of telling or not telling Chris that he is back in Berlin, will have been overlooked until now ? And yet the film has Wolfgang have a meal with Kathi and Lenni with none of this resolved.

This is where a slice of life comes up against the exigency of a film, in 90 to 120 minutes (typically around the 90 mark this season), to show us an unfolding – if one had ever had a mother such as Chris, one would not simply be on an even keel of meeting / being in contact with her on a daily basis, and so the starting premise of the film is falsified. To get back to my question of Stremler – a therapist parent who tries to have a son or daughter as a client is straying so far from accepted norms as obviously to have a psychological disorder, and then we are in the realm of the paradigm ‘Shrinks are madder than those whom they purport to treat’.

I do not doubt for a minute that the film arose from the music-making and the real-life puppet theatre of Stremler and Loycke, and this level is the only one on which we can properly view the drama of this film, as of puppets in a life-or-death struggle such as in the synopsis of Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka – if the characters are place-holders for emotions or emotional responses, then the piece can work, because we can acknowledge the artificiality of the theatre, of the depiction. We do not grieve for the policeman killed by Mr Punch because the interaction, the violence of the emotion, is stylized, divorced by being in the province of the booth.

In this film, where the origins lie, the only true human feeling is between Fabian and Kathi. Everything else is froth, and even the notion that Kathi is being moved out by him from the flat that her mother has purchased is belied by no notion that Kathi was ever living there (the last that we see of any joint endeavour to make it habitable is the painting scene), as we only ever see her in her old property, missing Lenni. Much is claimed, but only, in real terms, by insulting our intelligence.



Post-script
As I left Festival Central, I saw the film's poster again, mother and daughter as decorators so ungeschickt (if we believe that a woman who can buy a flat would not pay someone to see to the décor for her daughter) that both have a big daub of clown's red paint on their nose, and a long streak of white on the face of Chris accentuates that look.

In a way, this image both confirms and denies my thesis that the figures can only be seen tokenistically, as puppets, because it demonstrates an awareness that they have the potential just to be seen as archetypes, but nothing else suggests that we were ever asked to see their actions and natures from that viewpoint, and so maybe it does not go beyond thinking that it would make  good poster, easily forgotten.

Having written the review above, I am left feeling that I might be seen to have been too hard on the effort employed to make this film, because maybe it sins no more than many another, or because it was no great crime to have seemed to have promise. Except as to expression and choice of language, though, I do not feel that I need to offer excuses for a heartfelt opinion.


Post-post-script
Maybe we are meant to believe that it is the arrival of Wolfgang (Michael Kind), the father of Kathi, that precipitates everything : maybe Chris, despite signs to the contrary and when her hysteria that Wolfgang is around is based not on issues of domestic violence, but his having betrayed her with one of her friends, is supposed to be this way that we see with Kathi and Wolfgang purely on account of the trauma of his unexplained return from Cologne to Berlin...

I have already said why Wolfgang's arrival is problematic - unless we are meant to imagine that he loaded the car out of desperation and got out, not thinking of anywhere better to go than to his daughter. When he arrives, we have no idea who he is - an elder lover ? a friend ? - and there is nothing to suggest that him coming is anything other than expected, and that he has not been in regular contact with the person whom he is visiting (would Kathi really have concealed - been able to conceal - such contact from Chris ?).

No, I cannot think this through and make it work, which may be the flaw in improvising something that does not make sense beyond the boundaries of what is shown in screen.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Jean-Luc and François meet Ben, Alice and Steve

This is a review of Sightseers (2012)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

24 January

* Contains serious amounts of spoilers – watch the film first ! *

This is a review of Sightseers (2012)

What did I expect from Sightseers (2012) ? Well, the Twitter name Mr Wheatley kept appearing, along with Catherine Bray reporting that she had seen the film five or more times, and I had tantalizingly seen the poster, so I was aware that a caravan was involved, and knew the faces of the principals (well, maybe not one of them as what wasn’t covered by a hat bore a frown and a beard). I knew nothing else, which is the way that I like it – except that (I forget how) I was prepared for a few deaths…

Those principals (Alice Lowe and Steve Oram), I now know, had written the screenplay (with additional material from Amy Jump, whose name was all over the credits), which need not be unusual, but seems to be, and which appeared to have led to a very full conception of who Chris and Tina (together, Christina ?) are, and how they will behave towards each other and react with others.

I was very much reminded - and still am - of À Bout de Souffle (1960), not because Tina and Chris are as stylish as Jean-Paul Belmondo (Michel) and Jean Seberg (Patricia), but because of the common enterprise (though I did, also, think of Thelma and Louise (1991)) – someone with whom I shared this comparison called Tina and Chris ‘plonkers’, but saw what I meant.

The more that I think about it, the more binds me to the notion:

* Both men kick off the chaos, and the women fall in with it

* In Godard’s film, the shooting of the policeman is imprecisely shown (Michel spread-eagled, his hand on the gun, the shot, and the policeman falling into a ditch), so that we cannot be sure how it happened – Tina, though, is present when Chris reverses over his first victim, and maybe is almost initially convinced by his sobs that it is an accident that has ruined the visit to the tramway museum

* In both cases, there is something ludicrous about what happens – Michel running across the fields like a long-legged hare, and the pathetic details of the man under the caravan and his shaking hand

* The women fall in with it for very similar reasons, and Patricia just as much knows that Michel is wanted for murder as Tina does that Chris has killed, but both women are doing it to please the man and as part of finding out whether they love him

* In one case with a caravan, both films feature dangerous overtaking, though Michel’s is more than anything part of his general frustration with others’ driving, rather than to beat a rival to a pitch

* The separate development of the stories apart, with no sense that Chris is exhausted by what is happening (only irritated that Tina has herself taken to killing, and in ways of which he does not approve), the films converge again with the choices, depending on their feelings for the man, that Tina and Patricia make

* Patricia uses the number that she has been given to report Michel, and is not expecting his response that he will not run any more – nonetheless, just before he dies, he is still calling her a louse for what she did (and so remains, to the last, an unreformed child, loving or hating things and people depending just on how they please him)

* Chris is with Tina on the edge of the viaduct, waiting to jump, and he does, but she looses his hand, and he makes no attempt to grab hers and pull him with him


Are these the choices that we make in life ? To run with a man and help him steal cars as long as one loves him, whatever else he has done, and to embrace casual slaughter of others, but maybe hope to pass all the blame onto the person who is dead and cannot contradict what is said ?

Yes, in the Godard, there is a death, but as I have hinted at, what happens in uncertain, although the consequences are not, with detectives somehow knowing who Michel is, reports in the papers, and then the more and more crazy banners and announcements that proclaim that the police are closing in. All of this, and the brisk and casual manner of the film (with the very long bedroom scene at the heart of it), makes for a jumpy but light-hearted quality, because Michel, despite keeping an eye on his pursuers, seems focused on getting his money and escaping to Italy with Patricia.

The feeling about the deaths, largely, in Sightseers is that they are passed off casually in a way reminiscent of Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), although there is no attempt to disguise the bloodiness of the bludgeoning of victims 2 and 3. As with the Godard, we have the reports on the radio that alert Tina and Chris to what is happening, and likewise form part of the texture of the narrative (Michel’s photo is in the paper and so he can be recognized, and a description of Chris and Tina is also given).

So much for the comparison, although I think that there is a compelling case that the similarities cannot be there just by chance. Sightseers begins with Tina’s mother playing on her alleged weakness like someone out of Little Britain, and acting as a sort of Cassandra-like oracle by declaring to Chris I don’t like you ! and calling him a murderer. Later, whether sprawled for attention at the foot of the stairs, or surrounded by the remains of a Chinese take-away and by tonic and gin bottles, she punctuates the supposedly romantic trip.

Tina, with her nutty knitted bra and split-crotch panties, gets a disappointment when Chris feigns sleep on her, and it is only a couple of times what she might hope for (to judge from the rocking of the caravan, drawing fascination from the bystanders, when they first dive into bed). She is a confusingly entertaining mixture of innocence and its opposite, and, because of the matter-of-factness of the killing, it can be the backdrop to not so much the furtherance as disintegration of their relationship, as, another night, Chris gets drunk, rather than being with her.

We never really know who Chris is, or Tina, but that is not the point – whether he is ever telling the truth, e.g. about his job, injection-moulding, or Tina being his muse, the string that we saw being wrapped around pins at the beginning and mapping out their course is what we see unfold. And, with Tina, did the dog really die that way, and, if so, was it an accident, or a petty act of revenge ? Chris + Tina = Christina = two sides of the same coin… ?


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