The plot is racy: A terrorist attack at the beginning of the film rocks a family to the core. Teenage Maxi – who loses her mother, her brothers and her home – tries to look ahead, but is deeply disoriented and angry. Her father Alex is shell-shocked and fragile. Former certainties and beliefs have been wiped out and the grief that comes with their loss obscures everything. Seeming sidewalk acquaintance Karl gets her out of her paralysis, urges her to conquer her fears, promises solutions. He has organised a meeting of educated, multilingual, and dissatisfied European students called Re/Generation. The task he assigns Maxi could be the deciding factor in the success of a grand plan. Je suis Karl --the pre-manufactured faux grievance call and hashtag battle cry of the film's final scenes-- traces an insidious and seductive political takeover, picking up where the theoretical mind games of The Wave and In the Fade’s legal revenge drama left off.
Factual analysis is not at the heart of this reality -- rage, hubris, and narcissism are. Who is the bomber who kills the progressive German family who recently smuggled in a Libyan refugee? Who cares, the public assumes it was an Islamist.
Re/Generation is portrayed between televangelism, motivational coaching, a warm group hug, and pied piperism. Long-term strategizing —think infiltration of education, law, and policy-making—, media manipulation, and opportunistic fear-mongering not street fighting (at least at the beginning). Sexy not ugly. "Sieg heil! - “Stop, that was yesterday. We are the future.”
Plus ça change though. Women are the mediated face of the movement, men run the show. You want to onboard as broad a base as possible without losing sight of the endgame. “I'm so sorry about what happened to you,” Maxi sympathizes with the implied plight of the teary-eyed dyed blond Eastern European instigator who just proclaimed into the camera “We are not war trophies, we are the daughters of Europe.” “Oh no, I wasn’t raped,” she corrects Maxi's assumptions (not the masses'). "But it happens all the time these days. We give the victims a voice.” Maxi is hesitant and suspicious but Karl and his friends have a reasonable explanation for everything, and who doesn’t want to live safely and make sure pedophiles are imprisoned?
Handsome, sanitized demagoguery, running a “knowledge revolution,” beating freedoms-based democracies and liberal societies with their own wafting discourse. “Speaking truth to power” is an essential liberty— that runs both ways or can effortlessly be coopted, the Marseillaise read different ways.
Christian Schwochow is that rare breed of German filmmaker who can wrap up complex political subject matter in solid dramas and fast-paced, attractively shot thriller formats; he is doing well with high-quality TV series, having directed The Crown and Bad Banks and working on also fascist-themed Munich for Netflix. Authoritarian movements are his pet peeve, from his quiet, nuanced GDR refugee drama West to his hard and dark Siegfried Lenz adaptation of The German Lesson and the dissection of the Neo-Nazi terrorist underground in NSU: German History X, where he already looked at the perpetrators.
With Je Suis Karl, he goes very mainstream and at times emotionally over-simplistic, as in the final scenes. The supporting characters are one-dimensionally sketched and functionally employed --unnecessarily and annoyingly so: the naive do-gooder appears as a literal clown, the investigators are eye-rollingly insensitive and thus easy to ignore. Every TV crime drama can do better than the old "I understand what you are going through." - "No, you don't!" dialogue. We have seen plot twists of staged and manipulated attacks before, so they don’t come as a huge shock, the reveal here too early. It feels as if Schwochow, whose track record should make him trust he can investigate and handle complex political contexts, was too taken in with the urgency of creating a "what if the NSU had fully succeeded/what if the extreme right AfD party infiltrates public life further" story and wanted to make really sure no-one misses the point and sees the dangers. Controlling that overdrive impetus would have been more convincing. Je Suis Karl is worth watching but could have easily been so much better (and still accessible) at the hands of a director like Schwochow.
Luna Wedler (The Most Beautiful Girl in the World; Biohackers) in the lead is unobtrusively precise and in control of the role throughout; and who wouldn’t follow the charismatic Jannis Niewöhner --on a career roll and soon to appear in Munich and Detlev Buck’s Confessions of Felix Krull-- on a scheming tour gathering European agitators. When it comes to it, will Maxi’s affections and loyalties be with her new boyfriend or with her father and the life she was raised to have? The plot escalates to a right-wing seizing of power like the US Capitol riots we just saw on TV, streamed through cell phones, and we get the message loud and clear: Karl is everywhere. What can be done to resist and prevent that has to wait till another day.
by
@JuttaBrendemuhl
image: Luna Wedler, Jannis Niewöhner in Je suis Karl by Christian Schwochow. DEU, CZE 2021, Berlinale Special © Sammy Hart / Pandora Film
