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A little bit of Europe in Mumbai
Andreas Dresen believes contemporary German cinema is forgotten
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Deepa Gumaste
German filmmaker Andreas Dresen has come to the 5th International Film Festival of Mumbai with a special package of four films. A director who has his roots in theatre (his father was an eminent theatre director), Dresen's cinema tries to transplant the language of theatre on to film.
His debut film Silent Country was about a troupe planning a production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot against the backdrop of the run-up to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
His next film Night Shapes was a bittersweet drama played out on the mean streets of Berlin. The Pope is in town, but for a few inhabitants of this city, the night is anything but heavenly. A homeless man dreams of finding a room to spend the night with his pregnant girlfriend. A farmer dreams of romance and love and lands up in the city's red light district. A businessman finds himself stuck with a small African boy he meets at the airport and roams the streets with him to reach him to his destination.
Night Shapes is an excellent piece of impressionistic cinema and a moving portrait of big city life. The stories that Dresen tells have a universal flavour and each of these episodes could easily take place right on the streets of Mumbai.
Says Dresen about his approach to cinema, "Contemporary German cinema is a little forgotten in Europe because of its lack of reality. I believe that it is much more interesting to talk of everyday life in our society than make fantasies and comedies that no one can understand. As for commercial success, nobody knows anywhere in the world what the audience likes. So it is better to tell a story straight from the heart than to try and work out formulae for success."
In his latest film Grill Point, which released in Germany eight weeks ago, Dresen has used a video camera and shot entirely on location at Frankfurt-Oder, a small town in erstwhile East Germany, using a lean, seven-member crew. In keeping with his hunger for experimenting with new approaches to filmmaking, the 39-year-old director made the entire film without a script!
Dresen took the four-member cast, who play two couples and long-time friends, to his location and improvised the script as the actors slipped into their roles. The film begins at a point in their lives where the charm has gone out of their respective marriages and one of the men ends up having an affair with the friend's wife. The dramatic turn of events in the lives of these two couples is juxtaposed against the hardships of everyday life in the poorer regions of East Germany.
Says Dresen, "There are several social problems in East Germany, most of them stemming from an acute economic crisis. German society is not as peaceful as it appears to be from the outside."
Which is why he used the video format to highlight the crammed spaces his characters occupy, the hand-held camera giving their lives a touch of docu-drama. "After we went to the location, the actors actually took up the jobs they were supposed to do in the film. We shot in two rented flats and had several on-camera rehearsals of scenes which are not in the film, to help them get familiar with the surroundings. In fact, we shot as much as 70 hours of footage, from which we edited the film!" he recalls.
Dresen is now trying to release Grill Point all over Europe. The biggest problem he faces is the lack of respect for German cinema of the recent past. "People in France don't know any German director beyond the 1980s," he laments.
But it looks like this winner of the Andrzej Wajda/Phillip Morris Freedom Prize from the American Cinema Foundation, is all set to change the unflattering perception of contemporary German cinema.
Among the many interesting European films the Festival has showcased are two important works set in the turbulent times of the Second World War. The first is Czech master Karel Kachyna's B&W classic Carriage To Vienna. In the closing days of the war, two German soldiers force a Czech widow to drive them into Vienna. The widow is seeking revenge from the Nazis for killing her husband. The older soldier is injured while the young recruit keeps vigil as the woman drives them through a thick forest near the Austrian border. While the widow wants to avenge her husband's death by killing the young German, she ends up developing a peculiar bond with him.
The second film is Polish director Jan Jakub Kolski's Keep Away From The Window. A childless couple grants refuge to a young Jewish woman named Regina at the time of the Nazi occupation. In due course, the husband gets Regina pregnant, while his wife pretends it is she who is having the child and prepares for the new arrival.
After the birth of the baby girl, Regina finds herself powerless as the wife takes charge of the child. Eventually, she disappears and the girl grows up with the couple. But the husband can never come to terms with the truth about his daughter's real mother and eventually tells her about Regina on his deathbed. 
Apart from the brilliant enactment of this drama by the three key players, the claustrophobic setting and dull lighting further accentuate the Jewish woman's pain and humiliation.
A total contrast to these somewhat depressing stories is Norwegian film Elling, directed by Petter Naess. Incidentally, Elling was in the Oscar race for the Best Foreign Film this year, along with Lagaan.
The film is a witty and poignant tale of Elling and Kjell Bjarne, two mentally challenged inmates of a psychiatric clinic, who are given a welfare apartment in Oslo and asked to take care of themselves. For men who are completely unfamiliar with the concept of living in society, things like picking up the telephone or walking to the grocery store around the corner are mammoth mental blocks that take some crossing.
While Elling may be depicted as an 'abnormal' person for his various phobias, in truth, his worries are common and real in most people's lives --- whether the fear of intimacy or the desire to be a poet. Elling is a singular character enacted with great delicacy by Per Christian Ellefsen. He's ably supported by big man Sven Nordin who forms the intellectual foil to the introspective Elling.
Apparently, Kevin Spacey has bought this film's rights with the intention of adapting it in Hollywood. Whether he can translate the honesty and humaneness of Elling on the American screen remains to be seen.