NEKROMANTIK 2 — CLASSIC FILM PICK

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In the brainwash of modern ideologies it seems apropos that Jörg Buttgereit’s follow-up to his banned 1987 horror film “Nekromantik” would also be prohibited in his mother country of Germany, as well as in Australia, New Zealand, and a slew of other countries. After all, “Nekromantik 2” exploits the same taboo conceit as the original film, namely the erotic and romantic tension between an attractive girl and a corpse. As with the first movie, a real-life boyfriend just gets in the way.

From a filmmaking standpoint Jörg Buttgereit’s potent stab at transgressive cinema is more in line with the early films of John Waters or David Cronenberg than with the litany of directors associated with torture porn movies of the “Saw” franchise ilk. It would be sad to say that by modern standards, the “Nekromantik” movies are tame by comparison; they are not. Jörg Buttgereit’s consciously low budget approach prods the viewer to question obvious aspects of the film’s production. You might take a believable corpse for granted in a big budget film, but be taken by surprise by the apparent authenticity of the dead body getting all of the attention here. Buttgereit’s convincing Grand Guignol trump card might be one of the oldest tricks in the book, but it works like a charm.

The film’s title tells you what you need to know. Romance with the dead is a heavy burden in every way imaginable. Set in the downtrodden streets and apartments of East and West Berlin the story picks up with Rob, the abandoned boyfriend from the first film, committing suicide with a knife while achieving orgasm. Death and sex are united. Enter Monika; a fan of Rob’s former exploits with the dead, to dig up his decomposing green body for some quality time between the sheets. Still, Monika learns that necrophilia isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Her attempted sex act with what’s left of Rob sends her running to the bathroom to vomit. She chops up the body, bags it up, and returns it to its grave, albeit with one set of naughty bits kept behind in the fridge as a souvenir, or l'objet de fetish if you will, or if you won't.

A chance meeting at a local cinema delivers Monika into the loving arms of Mark, a voice-over talent for cheap porn movies. As romance seems to grow between the couple, so too does Monika’s recurrent desire to make it with a cadaver.

It is one thing to show a Hollywood action hero killing an endless army of nameless people, but widely considered beyond the pale to show a character acting out carnal fantasies with a corpse. Sure it’s gross, but is it any worse or better than other popularized filmic expressions of murder or sexual expression? This is one of the essential ideological questions that Buttgereit wrestles with in an ambitious adult horror movie that is as much about the audiences that will never see it as it is about a commercialized culture of war.

German officials have come around to accepting the “Nekromantik” films as works of art, and have since renounced their ban.

Not Rated. 104 mins. 

METROPOLIS — CLASSIC FILM PICK

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The original three-and-a-half hour version of “Metropolis” was shown to an audience of 2500 guests during the Weimar Republic in Berlin in 1927. It was the most expensive film ever made up at the time. Cited as the first feature-length science fiction film, Fritz Lang’s expressionist silent movie is a dystopian vision of a futuristic Germany in the year 2000.

Impoverished downtrodden masses suffer under an autocratic corporate capitalist system that favors an elite few. Sound prescient?

Sadly much of “Metropolis’s” fragile film stock was lost over time. It wasn’t until 2008 that a 16 mm reduction negative of the original movie was discovered in the archives of Argentina’s Museo del Cine. Another print, discovered in New Zealand’s National Film Archive in 2005, contributed to an extensive restoration process that replaced 25 minutes of missing footage.

Although it is still missing nearly an hour from its original, the restored version functions as a complete narrative.

Joh Fredersen (played by Alfred Abel) is the oligarch who oversees his monolithic empire from high above the city of Metropolis in his skyscraper office. Joh’s son Freder (Gustav Fröhlich) wears the sporty white clothes of a tennis player. He spends his days in an idyllic “pleasure garden” where the rich frolic around a large fountain and exotic birds play.

Women of high class wear outlandish dresses that look like something from a fairy tale. The arrival of a beautiful working class teacher named Maria (Brigitte Helm) — on a field trip with a large group of destitute children — awakens Freder to the disparity of wealth around him even as he falls instantly in love with Maria.

Freder goes searching for Maria only to discover the inhuman working conditions in the city’s giant underground boiler room. He witnesses an explosion that kills many workers and watches as many more are systematically murdered.

Freder reports back to his father, who in turn questions Rotwang, the mad inventor responsible for creating the city’s colossal power-driving machine. In a crucial subplot, Rotwang is busy creating a machine-human incarnation of Freder’s mother who, coincidentally looks exactly like Maria.

Although it ends with an overwrought climax, topped off with a laughably banal cliché that unites the workers with their greedy overlord, “Metropolis” is filled with stunning archetypal imagery and grand-scale spectacle. Its production designers drew heavily from the Art Deco movement for their designs. Cameraman Eugen Schüfftan’s groundbreaking methods — utilizing miniature sets in conjunction with specialized camera techniques involving mirrors — contributes to the film’s lasting effect. Significant too is the design for Rotwang’s female robot that serves as the ultimate vision of a mechanized femme fatale.

LORE

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Co-writer/director Cate Shortland’s brilliant adaptation of a story from Rachel Seiffert’s debut novel, set during Germany’s 1945 downfall, is an audacious depiction of survival and self-discovery. Shortland employs a stark unfettered cinema language to convey the surreality that the story’s namesake protagonist endures. The visual and emotional inertia here touches our central nervous system in a way that few films can.

Saskia Rosendahl gives a mesmerizing debut performance as Lore, a 14-year-old girl charged with leading her four younger siblings across war-ravaged Germany after her SS officer father and pro-Nazi mother are taken away by Allied troops.

Days turn into weeks as Lore attempts to walk her three younger brothers and younger sister from their home in the Black Forest to their grandmother’s house — about 500 miles away in Hamburg. Ashes from the chimneys of nearby Dachau blow burned pieces of photographs carried by Jewish prisoners into the forest. Fresh wounds on rotting corpses, arrayed like carefully posed mannequins, that Lore discovers along her journey tell their own stories.

Barely able to take care of her siblings and herself, Lore learns to trust Thomas (Kai Malina), a fellow refugee she meets on the trek. Lore harbors contempt for the ostensibly Jewish Thomas in spite of her gradual realization of the atrocities that her parents contributed to.

A follow-up to Cate Shortland’s impressive debut film (“Somersault,” 2004), “Lore” is an unconventional war film filled with ambiguity, horror, and despair. It relies upon the intuition of its audience to perceive its finely woven layers of information. At once literal yet nimbly metaphoric, “Lore” condenses its extensive subject into a cinematic poem that is easily, if disturbingly, digested.

Not Rated. 108 mins.

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.

This website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel.

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