Halfway through the festival, one thing is clear: The Berlinale is obviously not a superspreader event. The queues in front of the test buses, the presentation of certificates, tickets, badges to dozens of helpful young people, the half-empty cinemas without even a bionade – masks are compulsory! – are routine halfway through the film festival. A quarter fewer films, only half as many journalists as usual: the Berlinale as a beacon of hope is a pretty emaciated affair in terms of performance. And Potsdamer Platz is drafty as always.
A film warm as a ray of sunshine. It’s about Guantanamo
A film breaks into this somewhat chilly festival event like a ray of sunshine, bright and full of warmth and with all the wit and humanity that is sorely lacking these days. This film is about Guantanamo.
“Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush” by Andreas Dresen is one of two German competition entries and tells a story the story of Murat Kurnaz from Bremen, who was abducted in 2001 and spent almost five years in Guantanamo without being guilty. If it had been up to the federal government and the then head of the Chancellery and recently re-elected Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, he might still be there. The USA wanted to release Kurnaz in 2002, but Germany was not interested.
Only Germany, the USA and George W. Bush reckoned without Kurnaz’s mother Rabiye, who fought for her son’s freedom in five years with the help of the lawyer Bernhard Docke. The Berlinale program describes Rabiye in a bourgeois manner as a “simple woman”, as if the complexity of a character depended on academic degrees. It only takes two shots and you get the picture: this woman is in a class of her own. Murat can’t be found, his mother bangs impatiently on the door: “Open up or I’ll cut off your beard!” She whirls through the terraced house, pats the other sons on the head, rushes off to the mosque where Murat usually prays, a knife in his handbag. Rabiye Kurnaz doesn’t really care about religion, the preacher is a rabble-rouser. You never know. But what she does know is that Murat hasn’t done anything bad to her, he’s not a Taliban. “But he looks like that,” says the sister. – “And what do you look like? Like a German hairdresser.”
Rabiye Kurnaz is played by the German-Turkish comedienne Meltem Kaptan. It’s her first leading role – and a casting miracle. Kaptan’s Rabiye is a maternal powerhouse with a bleached minipli that exudes the richly illustrated German-Turkish idiom (screenplay: Laila Stieler) in sparkling coloratura: “I’ve told him a hundred times that home is where you get enough.”
Together with the lawyer Bernhard Docke, she goes all the way to the Supreme Court so that the US judiciary can finally take responsibility for prisoners Guantánamo takes over. Alexander Scheer, who has already played the dazzling East German songwriter “Gundermann” for Dresen, is as tall and gaunt as the real Kurnaz lawyer Docke, and as an actor smart enough not to compete against Kaptan’s lion presence in the first place. The more exuberant and natural she becomes, the more reduced and precise Scheer plays. This not only protects the film from Pygmalion kitsch – a German academic explains the big world to an inexperienced Turkish housewife – but also creates great comedy. On a trip to Washington, Docke gathers his courage and offers his client the familiar form, stretching out his hand with wonderfully timid affection: “I’m Bernhard.” Then she: “I know.”
After the fast-paced start, “Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George Bush” would have had what it takes to be a great political farce, but then it loses some of its pace. The celebration of the liberal, diverse, morally intact America, in which even Hollywood stars support the Guantanamo victims like Tim Williams, who plays himself in the film, could have been left to the Americans by Dresen. They master this genre like no one else.
In the talk show, men smirk about their bikini pictures
The real Murat Kurnaz is now married and has three children, and he has never been conspicuous again. German politics never apologized to him. Rabiye Kurnaz became very ill after his release, but she is doing better. At the end of the film, the family drives through the night with their son, who has just returned. Murat would like to stop now and be alone for a moment. “I understand,” says his mother: “I’ll come with you.”
The second German entry in the competition would also have had what it takes to be a snappy, political comedy too, only “AEIOU – The Fast Alphabet of Love” comes from Nicolette Krebitz, if you will, not beyond the A. The 60-year-old actress Anna (Sophie Rois) has seen better days, her partner becomes intrusive in a radio play, two men talk shop on a talk show, smirking about pictures of her in a bikini, and then she gets the one in front of Berlin’s “Paris Bar”. purse stolen. The thief is 17-year-old Adrian (Milan Herms), a troubled teenager who suddenly turns up at her apartment for language classes and, yes, they fall in love.
Recently there have been a number of films that seem to have been written specifically for great German actresses – “Lara” with Corinna Harfouch is one, “Das Vorspiel” with Nina Hoss is another. However, this idea is often more convincing than the result, because mostly it is the murky fate of artistically talented nuisances. “AEIOU” clearly wants to tell a friendlier story of the female star over 50. Sophie Rois has all the rugged grandezza it needs.
Krebitz’s film could have been a ballad about two hard-to-place people, perhaps the romance of a gangster couple, after all both are habitual shoplifters. It is all the more regrettable that “AEIOU” comes across as old-fashioned as a Liselotte Pulver film, from the initiation – she makes cocoa, he eats her soup – to the presents – a lipstick, a black dress – to the sex scenes.
A similar waste of his leading lady runs “Both Sides of the Blade” by Claire Denis. As a woman, Juliette Binoche has to suffer between two men for two hours until, as expected, she leaves ex-con Jean.
More powerful, deeper and also more surprising is Kamila Andini’s portrait of a woman “Before, Then & Now – Nana”. Nana lost her brother, husband and son in the Indonesian War of Independence in the 1960s. Ironically, her new husband’s lover helps her to leave guilt and conventions behind.
Ursula Meier, on the other hand, attempts an almost archaic treatise on female violence and motherhood with her film “La ligne”, but after the brilliant start of a thrashing woman (Stéphanie Blanchoud) she doesn’t really get anywhere. And Ulrich Seidl’s film “Rimini”, the portrait of the run-down hit star and gigolo Richie Bravo, has its lengths despite the usual ruthless depiction of racism and sex in old age. Everything is still in there.