Direction: Dominik Graf
Country: Germany
Veteran German director Dominik Graf offers a wryly enlightened view of Jakob Fabian (Tom Schilling), an advertising copywriter with compelling poetic skills who lives nonchalantly in the troubled final days of the Weimar Republic. The film is an adaptation of Erich Kästner's novel of the same name.
The year is 1931, and Berlin’s night life bursts with sweating brothels, lively cabarets, underground pubs, and intoxicated artistic gatherings. This is where Fabian and his best buddy, Stephan Labude (Albrecht Schuch), are found on a daily basis. The former is in love with Cornelia (Saskia Rosendahl), but falls victim to the financial crisis that darkens the city, whereas the latter takes a firm political stand against the quick advances of the right-wing party while trying to recover from a lost love. Meanwhile, the ambitious Cornelia propels her acting career with dire consequences for the relationship.
Graf dominates the lens with peerless openness and gets creative in the presentation. He employs both picture-in-picture and fast-forwarded techniques, shooting off dazzling visual fireworks, and going totally burlesque in tone, often with a touch of madness. The influence of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and his mundane depictions is very much on display here, but there are also glimpses of G.W. Pabst and Fritz Lang, almost in a sort of celebration of the classic German cinema.
The stirring beauty of Graf’s drama comes from the genuine feelings transmitted by the leads, who, together with the editor Claudia Wolscht, contribute to the furiously cinematic outcome. In turn, the big tragedy is called love, and not for a moment does Graf feed our fantasy that this romance will have a happy conclusion. In the end, one gets the notion that life, in all its turmoil, is not always fun.
