Female Film Critics 24/375
Afire masterfully depicts a taciturn, insecure writer. It takes mere minutes to settle into German writer/director Christian Petzold’s Afire, the title suggesting its incendiary depths. These develop through the interactions of Leon, Felix, Nadja, and Devid, the four sharing photographer Felix’s holiday retreat near Germany’s Baltic Sea.
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Till the End of the Night is a murky drama that delivers on neither of its premises; it’s not a good crime film (in fact it is a terribly plotted one) and it does nothing to deliver on the love-hate relationship between Leni and Robert. Timocin Ziegler’s performance and dialogue are almost comically awful. However, both Ioana Iacob and Thea Ehre elevate the dire material to have some point of watchability despite everything else in the film sabotaging their work.
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Filmmaker Rudiger Suchsland’s Hitler’s Hollywood is a compilation documentary that uses clips from films produced during the Nazi regime to show how the movies were used to indoctrinate the masses and influence their behavior. The theme and point of view are unique. With its fascinating developmental arc, the film delivers a complete and well-conceived treatise about how the Nazis used movies to influence the masses and how movie production reflected public mood and the zeitgeist during the Nazi regime. It provokes thought about how movies produced today have similar impact on our social expectations and behavior. There are some valuable lessons to be had.
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Adapted by writer/director Edward Berger from Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel, it follows idealistic young Germans, caught in patriotic fervor, as they proudly enlist to serve for “the Kaiser, God and the Fatherland,” marching off to war in France, only to find themselves mired in muck, facing almost certain death.
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As a Berlin teenager discovering her sexuality one summer, Lena Urzendowsky gives a rich and heartfelt performance in the coming-of-age drama Cocoon. Nora is a fourteen-year-old who sometimes narrates videos like diary entries into her smartphone. Early in Cocoon, she appears guileless until she feels the first sparks of attraction. Then we realize how guarded she is, watching her subtly transform. She tests her feelings, tentatively bolder, until she stands taller and glows with confidence, finally free.
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A fairy tale gets a modern retelling in Undine, a symbol-laden love story from German director Christian Petzold (Phoenix; Transit). The 19th century Undine (by Friedrich de la Motte Fouque) was a water nymph who marries a human to get a soul; there are strings attached, however. It’s the same territory as Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid, or any other dark fable prior to being Disneyfied.
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Anne Zohra Berrached constructs a powerful, moving love story where politics hovers inescapably around the edges as young lovers struggle against external factors to find a way through together. The electricity between her two leads grants the film its emotional core. While their individual performances are admirable, it is the many scenes in which they appear together that light up the screen. Copilot is a captivating political love story, where all that is pure and good lies in precarious tension with a world gone mad.
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It’s certainly difficult to make an engaging film about aimless, shallow people, and German director Ulrich Köhler hasn’t. Witness nineteen-year-old Paul in Bungalow. In opening scenes he goes AWOL from his German army unit, apparently on a whim. For the remainder of the film, at his parents’ bungalow (of the title), he meanders, swims, lounges, lies, and dodges the army MPs.
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I Was at Home, But . . .opens on a rabbit racing across rough terrain, a dog running in pursuit. The rabbit pauses and rests on a rock. Cut to a donkey walking into a room in an abandoned house. Cut to the dog hungrily eating his prey, and it’s fair to wonder what this film has in store.
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Luz is a sleepy, creepy slow burn that—like oh-so-many films about demonic possession—lives in the twilight zone of adolescent sexuality, a sleepy wasteland that breeds monsters of every shape and form. And like so many films whose origin lie in relationships between adolescent girls, Luz is rooted in the primordial horror of female sexuality that stops short of blaming female problems for all the troubles of the world.
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