European Films

Swiss filmmaker Michael Steiner (fresh off his local box office hit Mein Name is Eugen) takes the well-known case of the Swiss national airline bankruptcy in 2001 as the basis for Grounding - Die letzten Tage der Swissair. The results is a surprisingly gripping docuthriller, mixing real footage and recreated and imagined scenes of various people working for Swissair at the time. The stories are told in flashily filmed vignettes, with a tight-paced crosscutting of storylines and a techno-inspired soundtrack that keeps pulses racing until the inevitable end. Most characters seem to live in need of constant proof of Murphy’s Law -- and seem to get it too -- but despite this Grounding is never less than compelling.

The film’s style is what the Americans call a Euro-thriller: moody but crisp photography, a soundtrack that seems inspired by the complete works of Moby and a breathtaking pace (ironically, its best example is the US-produced thriller The Bourne Identity). After a pre-title introduction to the dire situation at Swissair at the time of the arrival of the new general manager Mario Conti (Hanspeter Müller), who came from Nestlé to clear up the Swissair mess, the audience is plunged into the story of stewardess Susanne (Stephanie Japp), mother of a son (Lukas Schaller) and proud owner of boyfriend Peter (Pasquale Aleardi), who is a co-captain for Swiss Air and hopes to be promoted soon. There is also the aged catering worker (Enzo Scanzi), whose successful son (Leonardo Nigro) works at a bank, where Peter and Susanne have their savings and pensions safely put away and hope to get a loan for a new home.

 
On the company board besides the newly arrived Mario Conti is also his American financial expert Jacky (Katharina Von Bock), another Nestlé alumnus. Not on the board -- or at least not yet as far as his plans are concerned -- is the founder of Cross Air Moritz Suter (Lazlo I. Kish), who hopes that the collapse of its corporate mother Swissair might lead to his company becoming the mountain state’s national airline. He keeps in close contact with André Dosé (Michael Neuenschwander), who worked for Cross Air and is asked to lead the interim Swissair.

As Mario and Jacky try to get an overview of the situation, they uncover holes and debts everywhere, exposing the infinitely complex (and ultimately fragile) construction of holdings that owned and operated each other, obscuring losses and inflating profits. Their first priority is to keep the company in the air and protect its employees, an impossible task. The cash flow is diminishing literally by the minute and companies providing services and fuel start to ask cash payments since they do not want to give Swiss Air credit anymore, constricting Conti to send pilots around the world with wads of cash in their pockets.

Employees, worried about their company and their jobs, follow the work of Conti as close as possible; mostly via television, where the director shows us real footage of interviews with the major players that were broadcast at the time. The casting and make-up departments have done an excellent job of blending the actors in with the real characters they are portraying, as the transitions between real footage and fiction are almost seamless.

 

Grounding suffers (but only lightly) from several improbable situations in which a character’s family seems destined to live through all the modern equivalents of the ten biblical plagues in the space of one film (drunkenness, violence, heart attacks, being in New York on 9/11 and corporate bankruptcy). But director Steiner keeps things going at such a neck-breaking speed that there is little time to assess these occurrences for veracity or likelihood.

 

Grounding also probes the uneasy waters of ethics in business and state responsibility in cases such as the impending Swissair bankruptcy. The business players around Swissair are shown to be involved in a delirious cat-and-mouse that is all about profiting from the stumbling giant. These include the aforementioned Cross Air and the UBS bank that could extend its credit to the airline if only its director Marcel Ospel (Gilles Tschudi) wanted to. As a contrast to these ruthless competitor-killers, Steiner and screenwriters Jürg Brändli, Tobias Fueter and Michael Sauter offer the excellent working relationship of Conti and the American Jacky, which seems to be based on something more than getting the job done as cold-bloodedly as possible; something akin to humanity. Unfortunately, in this case, humanity is not nearly enough.

 

 

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