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Weird and abject: Eine flexible Frau (The Drifter) represents a remarkable sign of life in contemporary German cinema. Tatjana Turanskyj’s feature debut is an Abschied von gestern (Yesterday Girl, 1966) for the globalisation era. It trails Greta M. (played by Mira Partecke), an unemployed architect on the verge of a nervous breakdown, through a series of absurd encounters in the capital. She divides her time between job centres and call centres, outmoded cafés and hypermodern townhouse developments. Earnest in her wish to work again, she is stymied by the hypocrisies and vocabularies of the new economy. She is schooled in mellifluous platitudes (“pragmatic utopian architecture”) and not allowed to be “unemployed”, but rather “looking for a new challenge”. Cold-calling to sell prefabricated houses, she must always “smile on the inside”. In the most charming terms, her boss (Laura Tonke) instructs her that every conversation must be a “rhetorical masterpiece”; after all, “communication is argumentation”. As an agent for the film’s overall concerns, Greta pursues a psychogeography of the new Berlin. This eludes her, if not us: the city is seen, literally and figuratively, through tinted lenses. Greta’s oversized shades reflect the capital’s new class of attractive urban professionals and fragmented prospects of gated townhouse communities. Through these semi-privatised streets (“surveilled, but ecologically correct!”) and the clans that dwell in them, Turanskyj lays bare the traditional (West German) gender dynamics in action behind the hip Prenzlauer Berg idyll and entertains the possibility of material existence and connectivity in an increasingly conformist society. The tone and form are post-Wall Fassbinder or Herbert Achternbusch on the Spree: to tourist groups and in YouTube missives, a chorus figure narrates Greta M.’s ultimate drowning in this “flexible” social order. Although at moments flawed and unfocused, Turanskyj’s portent promises a bright future for her career and a hopeless present for our civilisation.
Art and Artifice: German Films at the 60th Berlin International Film Festival Mattias Frey, www.soundofcinema.com
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