Bravado Is Their Passport

By RICHARD CORLISS

Germany exports a -wave of taut, topical films to the U.S.

The Germans are coming! The Germans are coming! Coming to financial success in their own movie market, to artistic maturity on theater screens around the world, to terms with a painful historical past. In the past few years the German film industry has become what Variety calls "one of the healthiest box offices in Europe," with annual ticket sales of about $450 million. Much of that business, as in any other European country, went to Hollywood entertainment, especially Disney and James Bond. But in 1981 there were significant local advances. A low-budget expose of youthful degeneracy in Berlin, Christiane F., became the biggest German moneymaker in the nation's history; and right behind Christiane F. was Das Boot (The Boat), a $12 million U-boat melodrama. Now, these two films and three others are entering American release, with hopes high and cinematic intelligence flaring. Make no mistake: the Germans are here.

At the Berlin film festival, which began its annual run last week, 80 German films were elbowing for attention. The rush of local productions is due in no small degree to generous federal and state subsidies for fringe film makers. But even these have started to pay off. Filmverlag der Autoren, the production company that has supported many pioneers of the new German cinema for more than a decade, finally went into the black last year. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders have earned reputations as world-class film makers. These and other directors who restored German film to artistic prominence after 40 years in the Nazi and postwar wilderness are winning dates in U.S. art theaters traditionally receptive only to French movies. Since October, Frank Ripploh's Taxi zum Klo, a sweet-souled, hard-core slice of homosexual life made for $50,000, has tallied $500,000 in only four U.S. cities.

Ripploh is not the only young German film maker to veer sharply from the baroquely stylized work of Fassbinder and Herzog. Four of the five new German films in the U.S. are rooted in headline reality. Christiane F. is based on interviews with a 15-year-old Berlin prostitute and heroin addict that appeared in the newsmagazine Stern. It is a tale to blanch the parental conscience, for here are children barely in their teens who whore, steal, shoot up and, too often, drop dead. Chic-pretty, lipsticked and long-haired, dressed in Annie Hall punk, negotiating puberty on stork legs, Christiane (Natja Brunkhorst) is a caricature of cover-girl womanhood. She comes home from a night of dance and dope, wipes the, blood off her face and goes to sleep with her kitten. She is a young adult who wants a childhood, who waits for her mother's discipline, or for a compelling reason to say no to any sensation. She gets none of it.

As Christiane and her boyfriend Detlev (Thomas Haustein) spiral into the lower depths, the movie becomes as exhausting and repetitive as a reprobate's confession. But this is Screenwriter Herman Weigel's point. There is no drama in this drama--no rush, no reason, no alternative, no future. The junkie's world is not a series of adrenaline highs and remorseful lows; it is one endless anguish. The victims are zombies, gray-faced, living dead. Director Ulrich Edel hews to a semidocumentary style, but his message is out of the classic German monster movies: There is a golem inside us all, and its name is apathy.

Two generations before Christiane F., a boy about her age watched a carnival's grotesque strong man break his chains--and another beast roamed wild and free through Germany. The boy, David Singer (Mario Fischel), is Jewish, and the film David is another small step in Germany's reluctant search for understanding of the Nazi period. Families like David's were forced into public humiliation, then into hiding, then--if they were lucky--out of the Reich. Director Peter Lilienthal adds little to the Holocaust "literature," content to play family ironies against social enormities in a genre that is by now as codified as the western. The frisson comes from hearing the characters speak not English on a Movie of the Week but German--to Germans.

Das Boot takes another plunge into the black pool of memory and finds--surprise!--flinty nobility. Actually, no surprise for anyone who feasted on the submarine movies of the 1950s. Here is the dogged captain (Juergen Prochnow), navigating g the straits of political bureaucracy ""and a bungling high command. Here is the wild-eyed wraith of the engine room (Erwin Leder), who "cracks" during one crisis, then performs heroically in the next. Here are the hide-and-seek battles, the claustrophobic tensions, the respect for a valiant enemy. As with David, the novelty here is getting the inside German view. Das Boot has thrills aplenty; it moves full speed ahead through its 2 1/2-hr. running time. Of the 40,000 U-boat men in World War II, 28,000 were killed, and the film is careful to emphasize the fatal futility of all this derring-do. Still, Das Boot should be instructive for American audiences. It shows that some of the bad guys were good guys too.

But what if you can't tell the difference--if fate or the state or someone else's God is the ultimate bad guy? This is the dilemma faced by a Hamburg journalist (Bruno Ganz) on a war tour of Lebanon in Volker Schloendorffs Circle of Deceit. The film is a Goyaesque vision of hell on earth. Black smoke belches from the orifices of every bombed-out building. Burnt corpses are strewn like fire-sale mannequins in cars, in living rooms, on beaches. A man selling trinkets on the street drops over from gunfire, and no one notices. Sheep graze on the lawn of a scarred mansion; inside, two desperate Germans make love. The film's title refers in part to the affair this married journalist has with a woman (Hanna Schygulla) who, it turns out, keeps a lover of her own. Ganz and Schygulla, two stars of the new German cinema, rivet the viewer's attention as easily as Hollywood stars. Schloendorff (The Tin Drum) orchestrates his disasters of war with the no-nonsense concision of an American director like Sydney Pollack, always careful not to put on a show for the atrocity voyeur, not to truck in the pornography of the righteous. Circle is an austere harrower.

Of all the new German films in the U.S., Sisters or the Balance of Happiness is the odd couple out. Made three years ago by Margarethe von Trotta, Schloendorffs wife (and co-author of the Circle of Deceit screenplay), Sisters is an update of a traditional avant-garde form, the maze movie. Characters wander like laboratory rats through a labyrinth of ominous symbols: iguanas, A-bomb references, castration images, primeval forests and more mirrors than a Caligari fun house. "I dreamed I was facing a mirror," one of the sisters says, "yet I couldn't see my face." It begins to sound like SCTV's recent dead-on parody of Ingmar Bergman movies. It's not quite. Von Trotta has woven an aura of sensuality that never exploits its handsome actresses. Older Sister Maria (Jutta Lampe), the "normal" one, nurses her troubled sibling Anna (Gudrun Gabriel) into doomed dementia and then works the same suffocating consideration on another young woman. By the end Sisters has revealed itself as a radical's metaphor for the modern German state: the liberal as totalitarian.

It is a state Von Trotta's sisters cannot escape. But nearly every other character in the movie talks longingly of bolting for America. The next few months will tell whether Sisters and the other new German films realize that wish. With artistic bravado as their passport and high dramatic tension as their bankroll, they just may make it. --By Richard Corliss

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