It enhances a film that’s one of the most thoughtful in his body of work.- Redneck White Trash Ball 3, with Ding Dang, Hotbox, Sister Kissers, Holy Assassins. It is reported that this movie’s scenario was inspired by the life of Schroeder’s own mother, and the film has a personal tone that is not always detectable in his other movies. The writing of this scene, though, and Ganz’s magnificent performance, also has the effect of making Martha’s stance and indignation look petty, imperious. Martha, from inside the house, asks, “What happened to the girls?” and her disembodied voice at that point seems like that of Bruno’s conscience. One of the movie’s most striking moments finds Bruno standing on the patio of Jo’s house, having come to a critical juncture in a war story he’s telling. Schroeder’s film style has always been foursquare and straightforward, but he’s capable of some striking effects within his planispokenness. And Ganz’s character, also named Bruno, has a secret from the war years, one that Martha icily draws out of him. Mom brings with her Jo’s beloved grandfather, played by Bruno Ganz. (Speaking of on-the-nose, the club where DJ Gello hopes to make his splash is itself called “Amnesia.” Forgivable in light of the fact that it is the real name of a the real Ibiza club featured.) Things get more fraught when Jo gets a visit from his physician mother (Corinna Kirchoff), who wants to convince Jo to return to Germany to be part of the changes in the now no-longer-divided country. For the first hour, the movie blends a pleasant story of Platonic love with more disquieting themes of history and memory. When Martha explains her antipathy towards Germany to him, he pushes back slightly, but he comes to find her conviction admirable.Īs does the viewer. The performers’ chemistry helps the movie roll over some of its more on-the-nose dialogue. Keller’s portrayal of her character’s flirty, light side is very disarming you can see why Jo falls for Martha, and hard. He and Martha take an immediate, almost electric liking to each other. Jo, played by Max Riemelt, is good-looking, friendly, open-minded and openhearted. Jo Gellert, a musician who calls himself DJ Gello, is settling in Ibiza to make a name in electronic dance music-the island is (still) a well-known vacation/party spot attracting a lot of trendy revelers. But a new neighbor has recently moved in. Off the grid, she has a pleasant social life with longtime neighbors. She lives in a beautiful house with a beautiful view that has no electricity. Not that, for the most part, she makes a big deal of it. Nazism compelled her to renounce all things German. We learn that she refuses to speak German, to drink German wine, or even to ride in a German car. A self-imposed exile from her country, she now lives on Ibiza, the island on which Schroeder directed his first movie. Keller’s character, named Martha, is speaking English to a man who’s speaking German to her, pestering her about a property in Germany whose sale she is required to supervise in person, in that country. And the movie immediately hopscotches back in time, to a decade-plus prior. Marthe Keller, 70 at the time of the movie’s making, comes into a sumptuous sunset walking with a cane, looking substantially older. His latest fictional film, “Amnesia,” finds him back in Ibiza, but the prevailing tone as the movie opens is placid, almost contemplative. By my lights even his less successful efforts, such as “ Murder by Numbers,” have a certain undercurrent of danger that gives them intrigue. Once his directing career moved to Hollywood, his studies in human perversity, which include pictures like “ Barfly” and “ Reversal of Fortune,” made him one of the most interesting European directors working here. Yes, he used a bit of trickery to get close to his subject, offering him the chance to make an “autoportrait,” but Schroeder also put himself in harm’s way with his subterfuge. His 1974 documentary on the murderous African dictator, named after its subject, “General Idi Amin Dada,” showed that Schroeder was a lot more than an outsider looking in. He continued, toggling between fiction and documentary and revealing an interest in perverse/overstepping states of being that verged on the anthropological if not sociological. He began his directing career with 1969’s “ More,” a vivid, unsparing fictional portrait of a hippie couple whose dreams of a utopian life in Ibiza wither pretty quickly under the weight of heroin addiction. Which by my lights is pretty heroic, and often underrated.
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