When I reviewed METEOR STREET at the Berlinale earlier this year, I expressed my pleasant surprise at a young French-German (female) filmmaker successfully delving into the world of two young male Lebanese migrants. I had the same satisfying experience with Michael Koch's MARIJA, the very promising debut feature by the 34-year old Swiss-German writer-director who comes out of the renowned Cologne media arts academy.
The well executed and revealing establishing shots follow Marija, or rather her back, through the rough multicultural streets of post-industrial Dortmund Nordstadt in western Germany. We are quickly, through images not words, introduced to a parallel universe, a black market economy based on the selling of services: (squatted) housing, (mostly illegal) jobs, help with your applications for welfare, the provision of health services. All on a cash-only basis.
If I didn't know this was somewhere in Germany I would have guessed Odessa or Anatolia. This is a ghetto with no ethnic Germans in sight and an unspoken but very clear hacking order, with Russians and second-generation German Turks at the top, Ukrainians like Marija, Romanians and lastly "gypsies" further down. Whoever holds the key to the German language and thus the intersection with mainstream society holds the (very marketable) power.
"If you don't screw them, they screw you," is Cem's astute summary of a dog-eat dog world in the Nordstadt.
The fine camera work by Bernhard Keller concentrates throughout on Marija and keeps following her back: when she is counting her meagre savings, when she is led away by hotel security to be fired from her cleaning job. He inserts, off-camera, the disembodied voices or fuzzy images of the few Germans on the fringes of the story, whether bosses or police officers or doctors who are trying to help, as a side-show to this microcosm.
Maria is portrayed as an involuntary and shrewd femme fatale, who takes her opportunities towards her goal where she sees them.
She keeps her cards close to the chest while keeping the men at arms length.
Marija becomes the assistant-escort to Cem, the Turk who runs the neighbourhood. She becomes the assistant-girlfriend to Georg, also a stranger of sorts, an Austrian contractor who has been in jail and is trying to get into the Russian-run construction business. These entanglements simmer like in a pressure cooker, to the point where Marija has to make a moral decision. Which she does and owns, led by her "inner compass," as Koch calls it in the Toronto Q&A.
Marija, played by the intense and impressive bilingual Berlin theatre actress Margarita Breitkreiz, is taciturn and initially seemingly afraid at every knock on the door. Koch explained how he rewrote the role slightly after casting Breitkreiz to get the actor and the character as close as possible. Very successfully, as
we have a commanding actor playing a refreshingly ambiguous female immigrant character.
The plot and the script introduce a number of tweaks that
establish her not as a victim but a strong-willed, single-minded survivor, including angry outbursts and snippets of revealing information that you have to put together to get the whole picture. Marija is admirable more than loveable and she has a dream -- her own hair salon (I feared a Hollywood ending or a self-fulfilling tragedy, both unfounded).
"You're lucky," says a woman to Marija at some point, and it's written all over Marija's face that luck is an alien concept.
Koch portrays all of this with sensitive insight and slow, quiet observatory power, never explanatory or educational or kitschy, if perhaps a bit positivist at times. But
the story and characters are all "found" and thoroughly researched in Ukraine and Dortmund, he explained in Toronto. Everything that needs saying gets said or rather shown, even with the help of 80s Austrian pop star Falco on the car radio:
'Jeanny, quit livin' on dreams
Jeanny, life is not what it seems
Such a lonely little girl in a cold, cold world
There's someone who needs you.'
But Marija is writing the lyrics to her life. The film stops more than ends with Marija walking towards us, down the street from the new life she is making for herself.
Solid, well-made social realist drama in the continental tradition of the Dardennes, packing less of an emotional punch than the empathic dramatizations of a Ken Loach, but rightly greeted warmly at Locarno. Watch out for Michael Koch's sophomore.
by
@JuttaBrendemuhl
photo: MARIJA courtesy Locarno FF
