
Victoria
The best thing about Victoria isn’t actually its technical prowess—it’s the lead performance from the mesmerizing Laia Costa as the title character.
The best thing about Victoria isn’t actually its technical prowess—it’s the lead performance from the mesmerizing Laia Costa as the title character.
As a piece of social satire, Knock Knock winds up being not just toothless but anticlimactic.
"The Ballad of Narayama" is a Japanese film of great beauty and elegant artifice, telling a story of startling cruelty. What a space it opens…
Patrice Leconte's "Monsieur Hire" is a tragedy about loneliness and erotomania, told about two solitary people who have nothing else in common. It involves a…
A NYFF report on Don Cheadle's directorial debut, "Miles Ahead."
A NYFF report on "Carol," "The Assassin" and "Right Now, Wrong Then."
An interview with Joshua Abrams, composer of "Life Itself."
A report about Chaz Ebert's upcoming appearance on OWN's "Where Are They Now?" program.
A FFC review of "The Look of Silence."
A review of "A Girl at My Door".
On the set of "The Knick"; Swedish cinema gives women a bigger role; When Amazon dies; Stories of "Star Wars" extras; Chatting with Abi Morgan.
Eight films to check out before Guillermo Del Toro's "Crimson Peak" comes out Friday.
Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński wrote, in regards to the momentous
events taking place throughout Eastern Europe in the spring of 1989:
"Germans say Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. It
is a fascinating moment, fraught with promise, when this spirit of the
times, dozing pitifully and apathetically, like a huge wet bird on a
branch, suddenly and without a clear reason (or at any rate without a
reason allowing of an entirely rational explanation), unexpectedly takes
off in bold and joyful flight. We all hear the shush
of this flight. It stirs our imagination and gives us energy: we begin
to act."
Set in East Germany during the final decade of Communism, Christian
Schwochow's "The Tower," a German mini-series based on the best-selling
novel by Uwe Tellkamp, is about the lead-up to such a moment of
collective flight. The film ends with the image of a huge flock of birds
erupting up into the sky, wheeling through the free and empty air. When
the end came for the GDR, it came with a whimper, in the form of a
radio broadcast with an official voice announcing to the populace that
there would no longer be any restrictions on border crossings. You're
free to go, basically, was the message. What started as a trickle of
refugees became a vast flood. "The Tower" is beautiful to look at,
elegantly filmed, with very good performances across the board. There
are multiple story-lines (too many, really) and a big cast of
intersecting characters (its literary source-material is evident in the
adaptation). At its best, "The Tower" shows what life felt like to those
who lived at that singular time, to those who dozed "pitifully and
apathetically" in an unchanging political system before the rules
changed, seemingly overnight.
Richard Hoffman (Jan Josef Liefers) is a surgeon at a clinic in Dresden,
with burn tissue all over his back, an eternal reminder of the 1945
firebombing of his hometown when he was a child. He is married to a
nurse (Claudia Michelsen), and they have a teenage son named Christian
(Sebastian Urzendowsky). Richard has been carrying on an affair with his
secretary that has resulted in a child, now 5 years old. Hoffman goes
back and forth between the two homes, and his wife supposedly knows
nothing about the second family, although you can see her give him a
couple of sharp glances on occasion. The mistress wants Hoffman to get a
divorce. Hoffman, due to professional and personal reasons, knows that
is impossible. In the meantime, he is on autopilot with his own
duplicity.
The forms of Communist rule are still in place, and yet are greeted with
eye-rolls by nearly everyone. The forms have become empty, symbols one
must kow-tow to, but are ultimately meaningless. It is a world dominated by
propaganda and censorship, where "thoughtcrimes" (to quote Orwell, as
the characters in "The Tower" often do) are punishable offenses, where
the Stasi are still a terrorizing force. Socialism, ironically, created a
strict caste system (one privileged person jokes, "No privileges.
Wasn't that the message once?"), and the Hoffman family in "The Tower"
would be considered "bourgeois"; a pampered elite group, doctors and
book-publishers and musicians. Their private lives are as chaotic as
their public lives are appropriate. In such a political system, lying is
a necessary skill.
We meet other characters in the Hoffman social circle, including Meno (Götz
Schubert), a book publisher who works with authors on removing
potentially problematic passages in their novels. He loves literature,
and he has been forced to become a censor. It is despicable work and
exacts a psychological toll on Meno (Schubert is phenomenal in the role)
especially when he is assigned to work with an author (Valery
Tscheplanowa) who refuses to edit her novel about the Red Army's rape of
German women upon invading the country. "It happened," she says. The
publisher's reply comes back: "The question is what good does it do to
write about it." She is thrown out of the Writer's Union because of her
refusal, placing her beyond the pale, in exile in her own country, all
publishing doors closed to her. Meno is haunted by her, keeps trying to
reach out, right that wrong.
There are colleagues of Hoffman's at the clinic, one of whom collects
vintage cars, but who also is secretly building an airplane in his
garage to take his wife and daughter across the border. Hoffman's
mistress, played by Nadja Uhl (so excellent in "The Baeder Meinhof
Complex," and excellent here too), is desperate for her lover's
protection and attention, and becomes a liability when he turns his back
on her and their daughter. These are private matters, and yet they get
the attention of the Stasi, who can use it to blackmail Hoffman.
Schwochow keeps these plot-lines moving smoothly and briskly, filming it
all in a cold green-tinted palette, suggesting the deprivations and
stagnancy of the world behind the Iron Curtain. There are no primary
colors. This is a landscape underwater. The film is strongest when it
shows the direct connection between State control and private life. This
is most clearly shown in Meno's relationship with the censored author,
and in Christian's increasing trouble with authority. Christian's
schoolwork is propaganda, and school papers are graded according to
whether or not they express the proper "class attitudes." Christian
starts getting in trouble for reading non-approved books, and his
parents flip out. He was raised in an intellectual household, and yet in
public he is meant to toe the party line. His parents encourage him to
live the same duplicitous life that they do, and he stops being able to
comply. The transformation of Christian from a gawky sweet teenager to
tough-minded grim veteran of multiple authoritative organizations
(school, military, prison) is heartbreaking.
"The Tower" loses focus with some of the characters, becoming generic, a
soap opera we've seen before. Hoffman's situation with his secret
mistress and his wife could happen in any country, any time, and the
film slackens in these sequences. When the story goes back to Meno and
Chrsitian, it tightens up again, finding its underlying architecture, the
themes that are the film's engine. Yes, there is danger in Hoffman's
personal situation, but it's personal, and the danger is not as palpable
as the danger Meno faces when he tries to smuggle the author's banned
manuscript out of the country to more welcoming publishers in the West.
Meno goes from a laughing, confident man to a ruined shell of
an individual, and it drives the tragic point home about what politics have done
to talented minds like Meno's.
Schwochow, who grew up in East Germany, has a wonderful subtle touch in
portraying the small details of everyday life. Meno and Christian sit in
an empty field in the middle of nowhere, watching television in the one
spot where they can pick up the signals from the TV tower in West
Germany. It's like messages arriving from a distant planet. In one
scene, Hoffman and his wife take a walk through the streets of Dresden
at night, and the power goes out (a common occurrence). Neighbors call
out to one another, joking about "the reality of socialism", and then
someone puts a record on an old crank-up victrola, scratchy music
floating out of the house. Hoffman and his wife dance slowly in the
street, holding on to one another. It's a beautiful scene, containing all
the complexity and irony and challenges of the political and personal
moment. In one of the dinner party scenes at the Hoffman house, everyone
shares about how difficult it is to praise Socialism at public events.
One woman says she "thinks of something beautiful" when she has to say
the word "Socialism" and so they go around the table, jokingly listing
movie stars they will think about the next time they have to say the
word. "Brigitte Bardot." "Brooke Shields." "Alain Delon." "The Tower" is
full of such darkly humorous and intelligently observed moments.
As the film veers into 1988, the scenes get shorter, the pace more
relentless, hopping from one person's arc to the next and then back,
Schwochow giving a palpable sense that time, after having been stopped
for almost half a century, is speeding up. The final half-hour of the
film is thrilling, individuals confronting the crack-up of the State in
their own individual ways; the groundswell of freedom and liberty
destabilizing the entire atmosphere. Characters look at one another with
an open sense of awe and fear in their faces, as if to say: "Is this
really happening? Is this real?"
"The Tower" is too long, and could do with some serious trimming, but in
general it is a powerful and engrossing look at the moment in history
when the tide started turning; when the people reared up out of their
apathy; when the "spirit of the times" became an irresistible flood.
This message came to me from a reader named Peter Svensland. He and a fr...
A review of Steven Spielberg's "Bridge of Spies" from its NYFF premiere last night.
A review of season two of FX's "Fargo."