No Place to Go *****
Dir: Oskar Roehler
With: Hannelore Elsner, Vadim Glowna, Jasmin Tabatabai, Lars Rudolph, Michael Gwisdek, Nina Petri
100 mins, no cert
Nothing is too good for socialists, said Günter Grass, a figure who was also candidly nervous about the fall of the Berlin Wall: anxious about the future and sceptical about the avalanche of prosperity and freedom Germany was promised as a result. This movie is imbued with that tactless Grass spirit; written and directed by the novelist and film-maker Oskar Roehler, its reappearance on release is the best possible news.
This is a remarkable film: coldly and glitteringly brilliant, at once a parable for a complex and unacknowledged German reaction to the abolition of the Berlin Wall, and a harrowingly tragic account of one woman's very personal collapse, her own flesh-and-blood decline and fall, pitilessly accelerated by the gigantic destruction of a geopolitical system in which she has believed, or affected to believe, for her entire working life.
This is Hanna, played by Hannelore Elsner, a middle-aged literary grande dame of the Old Left, haughtily unswerving in her dedication to Soviet Communism, but living in West Germany in an expensive Munich apartment and much given to shopping for designer gowns in Christian Dior. But nowadays she lacks the credit for this retail therapy, and it is in any case ineffective in healing her anxiety at the crack in the bi-polar political universe. This is what she has based her prestige as a sexily caustic political writer on since the swinging 60s, incessantly attacking the bourgeois west to an increasingly bored and indifferent readership.
As the news comes through, Hanna is on the skids but driven by a strange sense of confronting the zeitgeist, a compulsive need to stand in front of history's tidal wave. She packs her bags to go to Berlin, where she hopes to take up again with her old editor and lover Joachim. But he rejects her - and she is treated everywhere with contempt for the way she promoted a regime that enslaved and pauperised them all. A scene of exquisite cruelty shows desperate Hanna attempting to take back a coat to Christian Dior for a 50% refund and getting contemptuously rebuffed.
A few kind souls take pity on her, but Hanna is further rejected by her ex-husband, her son, her parents - everyone - and winds up in hospital, being treated for addiction to barbiturates and 100 fags a day minimum.
This is a magnificent performance from Hannelore Elsner, her face a ruined mask of worldly patrician beauty under a ghastly sheen of make-up and a truly awful hairpiece that makes her look like a cross between Carol Channing and Erich Honecker. It is almost unwatchably raw, powerful acting, and Elsner has furthermore two wince-inducing and yet deeply poignant sex scenes: one with her alcoholic ex-husband in his grim apartment, and another with a smooth young man she has picked up and who matter-of-factly asks for 400 marks in her ruinously expensive Berlin hotel room. Hanna is too embarrassed, or too proud, or perhaps simply too out of it, to query this.
Roehler's direction, and Hagen Bogdanski's black-and-white cinematography depict a nightmarish world: the ruined landscape of Hanna's hopes. Briefly holed up in a damp grace-and-favour flat that her former publisher keeps for "writers", or staggering across the wasteground in some godforsaken Ost housing project, or just staring at the hospital's walls, Hanna occupies a universe that could have been imagined by Polanski, or Lynch. But it has its very own radioactive quality, a kind of nuclear winter of the soul.
What makes this film extraordinary is that it is closely based on the director's own mother, Gisela Elsner: a writer who committed suicide in 1992, having been a social and political outcast in just the same way - although presumably Hannelore Elsner is no relation. So the scene in which Hanna is angrily rejected by her son Viktor (Lars Rudolph) really is an incredible psycho-drama. (I confess I hadn't heard of Gisela Elsner before this; though one of her books was revived here in translation by Virago in the mid-1980s.)
It is a film with real things to say about Germany, about Europe, and about that remarkable political cataclysm of 1989. And what an outstanding performance from Elsner this is: there's nothing to touch it in any other film around. She has a gut-wrenching power and real tragic grandeur. This is a woman who is absurd, certainly, and contemptible in many ways, but also someone whose vulnerability, and sheer terror, compel compassion. Her pallid, grotesque face, which looms disturbingly close to the camera lens, is like Klaus Maria Brandauer's in Mephisto. Or perhaps she is a kind of Soviet bloc Norma Desmond. She's still big; it's Marxist-Leninist café society that got small.
