Heimat 3
(680 mins, 15)
Directed by Edgar Reitz; starring Henry Arnold, Salome Kammer, Michael Kausch, Matthias Kniesbeck
Twin Sisters
(137 mins, 12A)
Directed by Ben Sombogaart; starring Ellen Vogel, Gudrun Okras, Thekla Reuten
Brothers
(110 mins, 15)
Directed by Susanne Bier; starring Ulrich Thomsen, Connie Nielsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas
Machuca
(120 mins, 15)
Directed by Andrés Wood; starring Mat'as Quer, Ariel Mateluna, Manuela Martelli
Palindromes
(100 mins, 15)
Directed by Todd Solondz; starring Ellen Barkin, Matthew Faber, Richard Masur, Jennifer Jason Leigh
Andrew & Jeremy Get Married
(75 mins, 15)
Directed by Don Boyd; featuring Jeremy Trafford, Andrew Thomas, Hanif Kureishi
Four of this week's films (or five, if you include Kingdom of Heaven) are about the interaction of private lives and public events, which is, as writers from Homer through Shakespeare to Tolstoy have recognised, one of the greatest subjects of art. The most acute of these is Edgar Reitz's Heimat 3, in which he concludes the saga of the Simon family, their friends and neighbours from the fictitious Rhineland village of Schabbach in the Hunsrück.
The first Heimat sequence, which lasted more than 15 hours, covered 1919 to 1982, and centred on the wonderfully resilient Maria. She married the son of the local blacksmith and had two sons by him in the 1920s, before he disappeared to make his fortune in America, and then a third son, born during the Second World War, whose father was an army engineer. Heimat 2, which I haven't seen, lasts 25 hours and concerns almost entirely the younger son, Hermann, who leaves home to study music and becomes a celebrated avant-garde composer.
Heimat 3, subtitled 'a chronicle of endings and beginnings', begins with the Berlin Wall coming down and concludes with a party celebrating the new millennium. Though made for TV, it was shot on 35mm and looks fine on the big screen. It is distinguished from soap opera by being one man's vision, having an overarching structure and featuring a series of motifs and metaphors.
The central image is of the 200-year-old house, long connected with a famous German poet, that Hermann and his lover, Clarissa, renovate on a cliff overlooking the Rhine near the Lorelei rocks. The builders are young East German artisans, their lives transformed by reunification. Another symbol (echoing, like others in Reitz's work, Wagner's Ring Cycle) is the collection of once banned Expressionist paintings that Hermann's older brother, Ernst, is accumulating and keeps locked away in a cavern beneath the town.
Reitz's people crisscross Germany from Hamburg to Munich, from Cologne to Berlin, but always come back to the Hunsrück, and his film draws on everything from eastern European immigration to Aids. The decade begins with high hopes and ends not exactly in despair, but in disillusionment, much of it caused by materialism, self-interest and entropy.
One becomes immersed in the movie over its 10 hours, but the characters are less involving than in the original Heimat and they don't embody or reflect historical change in the same forcefully dramatic way. The film ends with the heroine singing 'Maybe Next Time', that defiant song from Cabaret celebrating the victory of hope over experience, redolent of the last days of the Weimar Republic.
Completely overshadowed by Heimat, the Dutch film-maker Ben Sombogaart's Twin Sisters is a contrived affair in which middle-class German twins go off in different directions when they're orphaned at the age of six in the late 1920s. Anna is taken in by a harsh uncle and aunt, to be raised a Catholic, on their decrepit farm, denied an education and brutally beaten when she forms a friendship with a young Nazi sympathiser.
Lotte is adopted by more distant relatives, a well-off Dutch family and brought up in a cultured milieu where she meets her handsome Jewish boyfriend. The girls are deliberately refused contact with each other, but have two brief meetings. One is on the eve of the invasion of Holland, the other immediately after the war, both of them ending disastrously because of Lotte's violent reaction to what she considers her sister's corruption by Nazism.
Their lives are unfolded in flashback from the present, when the elderly Anna tracks her sister down at a smart hotel in Spa. The film has been very popular in Germany and Holland and may well help heal old wounds. But it is a sentimental, crudely manipulative picture, though well enough acted, especially by the two elderly actors.
Susanne Bier's Brothers, a movie by a former Dogme signatory, features three of Denmark's best-known actors: Ulrich Thomsen as Michael, an army major, Connie Nielsen as Sarah, his beautiful wife, and Nikolaj Lie Kaas as his charming, feckless brother.
The movie begins with Michael picking up his brother from jail and then accompanying his unit to Afghanistan, where he's reported dead, but is, in fact, a prisoner of the Taliban. The picture is highly topical in the way it juxtaposes the complacent, comfortable life of western European cities with the experience of soldiers faced with terrible dangers and traumatic decisions in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.
That said, Brothers is somewhat blunt and none too convincing. Ulrich Thomsen, a familiar face from Festen, Inheritance and Kingdom of Heaven, bears an uncanny resemblance to Charles Kennedy.
The political background to Andrés Wood's Machuca is the tense period in Chile in 1973 that concluded with Pinochet's military coup, the death of Allende and years of military oppression. These events are seen from the point of view of two 11-year-old pupils at Saint Patrick's, a self-styled 'English school for boys' in Santiago. One is from a well-off, middle-class family, the other a scholarship boy from a slum area brought in by the headmaster, a left-wing priest.
Their growing friendship is well-observed, and the movie concludes with the school being taken over by the state and the priests led away in a manner that recalls Louis Malle's Au Revoir Les Enfants, which has clearly been an influence on Wood.
In Palindromes, his fourth idiosyncratic movie, the gifted Todd Solondz continues his comic exploration of the sadness, repression, transgressive impulses, humiliations, hypocrisy and self-deception that, in his view, constitute American lower-middle-class life, specifically that of his native New Jersey.
His central character is the palindromically named Aviva who starts off around the age of 10 wanting to have a baby. She's subsequently made pregnant by a family friend's son, forced by her parents to have an abortion and runs away from home to become involved with a paedophile truck driver, a happy-clappy religious family that trains handicapped orphans to perform as a chorus and a group of right-to-lifers who assassinate abortionists.
This bizarre, picaresque tale, which refers specifically in one of its nine chapters to Huckleberry Finn, has a dreamy, stylised quality. This is, in part, due to the fact that over the course of the movie Aviva is played by eight actors of different colours, sizes and ages, in one case an obese male. This evidently has something to do with how we see ourselves, how we are seen by others and how we might effect changes in our lives. For Solondz, palindromes are also some form of metaphor, though I'm not exactly sure for what.
Don Boyd's Andrew & Jeremy Get Married is an affectionate, deceptively simple documentary about a gay odd couple, the 69-year-old retired university lecturer, Jeremy, and the 49-year-old former bus driver, Andrew. Jeremy is intellectual, Cambridge-educated, middle-class, slightly prissy. Andrew is working-class, with rough good looks, bad teeth and an easy charm; he's done drugs and served time.
Their five-year relationship (they first met in a gay bar in Earl's Court) is seen from the perspective of the same-sex, civil marriage ceremony they went through last year at London's City Hall. Their friends are highly contrasted groups and among them is the unequivocally heterosexual Hanif Kureishi, whose father introduced him to Jeremy as a teenager. Kureishi acknowledges his influence in encouraging him to be a writer. An endearing, unsentimental film.
