It is the rare moviegoer who goes to a German film in search of laughs. That may have less to do with our view of the “Teutonic temperament,” though, than with what distributors think American audiences will accept. We’ll happily watch French romances, costume dramas and comedies of bad manners, but typically the only German films that do well here are Nazi sagas (Downfall, Sophie Scholl) or spy dramas (The Lives of Others). Exceptions such as Run Lola Run or Mostly Martha somehow don’t rouse distributors to open the gates for lighter German fare. So the Goethe-Institut, the adventurous cultural office behind the much-loved annual Berlin & Beyond series of new work from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, deserves props for choosing comedy as one of the themes of this year’s program.
I know firsthand that the notion of Berlin belly-laughers is counterintuitive. When I took over as curator and host of the Friday night CinemaLit program at the Mechanics’ Institute two years ago, one of my first series was a month of German comedies. It was an attention-getting and somewhat perverse choice, and I had to watch a lot of movies spanning a lot of years to come up with four excellent ones. But they do exist.
Berlin & Beyond had only last year’s output to draw on, and the films I happened to check out did not brim with hilarity. Farce does not become the Germans (notwithstanding the lingering echoes of the American-conceived Hogan’s Heroes and The Producers), and sweetness isn’t their strength, either. But they are masters of the dryly caustic dig and the cruelly absurd moment, especially when sprung unexpectedly in the middle of a serious drama.
I’m tempted to rank the films I previewed — roughly a third of the program – by laughs, but that’s too perverse even by my standards. So let’s do it this way:
Opening Night Epiphany:
Fatih Akin (Head On), a German-born filmmaker of Turkish ancestry, has made a career of exploring identity, assimilation and coexistence. His latest, The Edge of Heaven, is warm, clever and ultimately optimistic, but it’s no comedy. Three sets of single parents and adult children cross paths and borders trying to right various wrongs in a gripping drama that captures the prevailing winds of interrelationship. As a bonus, it’s a film you can dance to, like all of Akin’s wonderfully soundtracked work.