Is it Really Burning?
Last night I found myself in a room full of strangers, watching a movie that was too German. And not in that stark Rainer Werner Fassbinder or fun Fatih Akin way. Es Brennt tells the story of a German family, living their German lives, until a very German thing happens to them, only to culminate in an ending that had this viewer’s mouth gaping open for a good couple of minutes. (As a cool New Yorker, I’m never shocked by anything so that was something.) Have you ever found yourself forewarned, yet think ‘nah, that’s not going to happen,’ then it does and you can’t quite believe how shocking it is? Well, that’s what happened when Mrs. Saleh was confronted by Mr. Klaus in the last five minutes of the film. From the first frame of the film, you know something’s going to happen. It’s an inevitable conclusion when you’re first introduced to the family, happily playing and laughing in their to-die-for Berlin flat. What I wondered was how and where the filmmaker was going to take us.
Erol Afsin is a first-time filmmaker, and it shows in his directorial debut. Sufficient funding or not, he falls to many of the first-time filmmaker’s cliché’s, the ones you get out of your system in college or graduate school, and to hear him weakly justify and contradict those bad choices was a tad precious. Yes, I understand this is his first film, but his saltiness at being unable to secure state funding (and that’s hard in a place like Germany), showed that self-awareness may not be one of his character traits. For someone who’s been an actor as long as he has, I scratched my head at his way too long—even for independent foreign films—takes, endless speechifying and just general lack of subtlety in recounting the story; though he took very great care of his actors. Some of the best filmmakers were actors and they are so because they watched, learned and listened between takes. I perplexingly asked myself what was Afsin’s reason for making this film, and walking home down desolate and stench-drenched 14th street, on an oddly muggy September evening, a maybe reason came to my mind.
I’ve been to Germany many times. Over a decade I have watched how the country has and has not changed. The recent election that saw the far-right AfD party gain serious traction in three States was not a surprise. I saw it coming in bright fluorescent lights when I spent the summer in Germany last year. Especially in Munich, where the throngs of brown and black men hang around on every corner with nothing much to do, made me hella uncomfortable. On numerous occasions I was accosted by these men, who I could see felt emboldened because I was a single black woman. And they did not not walk about without a sense of arrogance that I was surprised to see but also very, very concerned by. Every day I’d say to myself, ‘this is not good,’ and nicht gut it became. The world is changing at light speed, leaving those unable to cope behind. Like in the States, France, and England, the disgruntled populace belongs to the cities and towns that were ditched by globalisation. And if you didn’t happen to be hustling in those early years of neo-capitalism, catching up now is going to be super hard. Hence, the AfD’s takeover in former East Germany.
Europe, and Germany especially, is a funny place when it comes to immigration. They desperately need immigrants to keep their economies going, but only want the ones that are like them. Sadly, that’s not how immigration has ever worked. No nation in history has ever been able to pick and choose who crosses their borders, and I rather doubt it’s going to end now. One massive reason for the incredible German recovery post-WWII, are the thousands upon thousands of Turks who came and helped rebuild the nation. That Germany has only until literally 10 years ago allowed these immigrants and their Bundesrepublik-born offspring to have German passports is a shit-stain that no amount of Persil will ever wash off. It is this fact that boils under the surface of Es Brennt and I wish the writer would have explored the complexities of this matter more fully, rather than fall back on the classic tale of a hateful ‘Nazi’ who does something awful to a Muslim family. (Sidebar: Perhaps lost in subtitle translation, and my German is pretty good, but for the Nazi Klaus to constantly call the Saleh family Islamist and say how bellicose they are was an issue. A Muslim is quite rarely an Islamist, just as an Islamist is rarely a Muslim.)
What happened to the little boy in the film--and by extension his family--on that playground is common occurrence in Germany. Like in the United States, the worst offenders of racism are often not the Nazi’s, but the silent majority. They’re the ones who kid with you in the supermarket line, then go and vote for a crony who’ll put Senor Singh in shackles. We minorities know this—at least I hope most of us do—and we don’t need to be reminded of it. The story that needs to be told with power and finesse, is that of a persistent system that allows do-gooders to think that change will come without much sacrifice.
Is it really burning or has it always been? Could the real problem now be that we don’t have enough voices to effectively show the nuances of what caused the fire? An endless minutiae of information is within our finger pads reach, yet is the accessibility making any of us any smarter, more caring, or engaged? People are entitled to their opinions, thoughts and beliefs; Every-fucking-single one of us. Human’s created systems to provide order, even if that order gets a little whackadoo often. That’s when the artist’s come in, the ones who think and live on the periphery, who see the world through an ever-changing lens and can shed light on the unseen facets of the human condition. They’re there to remind the general population that we’re human’s, we make mistakes but can also right our wrongs. Artists educate through disciplines that are hardwired to push our emotions in ways that everyday living does not. Therefore, it behooves them to create responsibly. Mr. Afsin’s film gets halfway there, but spends too much time playing the blame game to get the trophy. Too often it’s not about what you show but what you don’t that gets the cookie.
