European Films

German films are not the first thing that come to mind when thinking about the films that are presented at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2005, the German-Austrian film Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei (The Edukators) was part of the Competition after a long absence of German produce, and Fatih Akin’s Turkish-German co-production Auf der andere Seite (The Edge of Heaven) won the Best Screenplay award last year. But there was no German film in Competition in 2006 and neither is there one this year.

There are some new titles from the country on the other side of the Rhine on the Croisette presented in the various sidebars, however. The Critics’ Week selected the postpartum drama Das Fremde in Mir (The Stranger in Me), while the Un certain regard section has the geriatric love story Wolke 9 (Cloud 9) as part of this year’s offerings. Both are dramas that, at first sight, seem content to simply show aspects of everyday life rarely seen on cinema screens (baby blues, post-retirement sex) and find their raison d’être in the void they fill in the cinematic storytelling landscape. But both films are also much more subtle works about facing life head-on and the decisions that can lead to either happiness or disaster.

An interesting parallel can be drawn with the neighbouring Low Countries in both film and literature. Yesterday’s Flemish film Aanrijding in Moscou (Moscow Belgium) was also in large part about how difficult it is to take a decision but how important decisive action is when trying to find happiness. This is also a recurring theme in the work of Dutch author Renate Dorrestein, who is quite popular in Germany as well and who has written one the most important works of contemporary European fiction on both the havoc of postpartum depression (her novel Heart of Stone, also published in English) and on the acceptance of elderly as fully functioning human beings (My Son Has a Sex Life and I Read Little Red Riding Hood to My Mother, which has been published in German and Italian besides the Dutch).

 

What Dorrestein and the writer-directors of Das Fremde in Mir, Emily Atef, and Wolke 9, Andreas Dresen, have in common, is that they do not pride themselves on simply spotlighting little-discussed topics, but are interested in exploring them in an inclusive manner. The protagonists in all works cited are women but are above all human beings like you and me and everyone we know. Men might never know what it feels like to bear a child, much less what it means to suffer from hormonal disturbances after childbirth and some people never even reach the age of retirement, but this does not make these stories exclusive. By putting the humanity of the protagonists first, their stories are the basis for compelling narratives that are easily accessible for a larger audience than their exotic topics might at first seem to suggest.

Nevertheless, both German films at Cannes this year are clearly arthouse films, with both directors often preferring looks and silence to dialogue and rousing scores that offer on-cue emotions like a musical cheat sheet to the characters’ feelings. Andreas Dresen stays fairly close in approach to his other slice-of-German-life films such as Willenbrock and Sommer vorm Balkon (Summer in Berlin), though for once references to East Germany or the division of the country are completely absent. Atef also offers little clues in terms of geography, which in both films has the effect of making them even more universal stories, borrowing from the Berlin school but lacking what that (even if inadequate) label implies: a clear geography. If this trend continues, perhaps next year Cannes will programme a universal German film in Competition.