German directors are on a crusade to expose child abuse -- first in Edward Berger’s Competition title
“Jack”, now in the world premiere of Dietrich Brüggemann’s latest “Stations of the Cross”, the 37-year-old director’s impressive 4th Berlinale invite. The film opens with a death sentence — Jesus’, and in a way the protagonist Maria’s, who Brüggemann sends on the
stony 14-fold path to Golgatha carrying the cross.
Trial, punishment, sin, war, hell, Satan, sacrifice are excerpts of the vocabulary in chapter 1.
This is not a happy place. 14-year-old Maria is growing up in a fundamentalist Catholic community that will push her over the edge.
Chapter 2 introduces the sadistic mother so well that I flinch as soon as she reappears later (an excellent Franziska Weisz). Just like “Jack”’s mother, she is not coping, emotionally stunted, oblivious to her children’s basic needs (touch, responsiveness, comfort). The intelligent and compassionate oldest, Maria, is one of four dysfunctional children in the family (one wants to call Chilren's Aid, but of course noone does). She struggles with what she is being taught because, if one took the community’s stipulations literally and saw it through to the end, you would annihilate yourself. It feels like Maria is being entrapped into a constant, destructive self-accusation because she thinks too much about the church’s simple tenets.
I love the
stern and accurately framed tableaus the one-shot camera delivers. Brüggemann calls it
“hyper-focus”, starting with a magnificent kind of 15-minute last supper made up of six teens in religious instruction with young father Weber, the fervent priest that take us through the film. Actor Florian Stetter (yesterday’s Friedrich Schiller in Dominik Graf’s “Beloved Sisters”) shows great control here as Weber within his extremist corset. Stetter's priest is a seductive indoctrinator, whose vocal mood shifts from one second to the next are slight but terrifying.
“I’m listening,” becomes a threat of the betrayal of trust, not a helping hand. He ingratiates himself with his charges to make the blows all the more powerful. The confessional that is chapter 4 is another superb scene, with a creepy sexual innuendo that makes one wonder on how many levels the priest enjoys the emotional extortion.
Berlinale boss Dieter Kosslick seems to try to inoculate us against Lars von Trier’s hedonistic romp “Nymphomaniac” (up next at Berlinale Palast) by placing “Stations of the Cross” right before it.
Dietrich Brüggemann is the eloquent and opinionated court jester among the younger filmmakers. He keeps mentioning Monthy Python as role models, not entirely deductible in this film although there are a lot of necessary laughs. Many know him for notoriously handing out the passionate iconoclastic polemic “Go to hell, Berlin School" last year. His favourite word in interviews is a categorical “Quatsch” (nonsense). He coins aphorisms such as
“I believe a film can also take the form of an advent calendar or a visit to the supermarket,” in a recent German Films interview. And this resoluteness and radicalness is mirrored in his new film, which he rightly labels
“hard core art house”. Cinema for Brüggemann has a social dimension, saying “it’s more interesting to neutralize yourself a bit in your films”, although his own anger and passions shine through a lot, if not too much, in this one.
Fundamental Catholicism is an “attack of all other times on the present” he perfectly sums up the film’s feel. What sets Stations of the Cross apart from other explorations of religious mania is that the embattled child Maria actually fulfills the church's calling. The logical fallibility of the religious absoluteness of these “warriors of charity” is clear from chapter 1, but Brüggemann exhibits the players without ridiculing them. Although charity is as far from their behaviour as one can imagine.
A masterpiece like Hans-Christian Schmid's 2006 “Requiem” with the mesmerizing Sandra Hüller it is not quite. I am not sure yet why the film doesn’t impact me as dramatically as it should, because I liked and appreciated it. Perhaps it is Maria who I don’t get too vested in past empathy with a suffering and abused child. The literally and/or figuratively mute father and son are a bit too much male failure. Or perhaps it is because I learn nothing that I didn’t already think or feel or believe -- at a Berlinale world premiere, Brüggemann is preaching to the saved of course.
Both German Competition films
“Jack” and “Stations of the Cross” reminded me of Philip Groening’s
"The Police Officer’s Wife” at last year’s TIFF. “Jack" in the portrayal of a dysfunctional, abusive and hard to escape family constellation, the denial, the desperate attempts to gloss over any problems; Brüggemann in this sonnet format that Groening also used with a 59-chapter fugue. These films offer no chance or choice to do the right thing, no way out. Without this possibility, we can't help but feel entrapped (and perhaps we all constantly are).
by Jutta Brendemuehl, Toronto
image: Kreuzweg by Dietrich Brueggemann
