BERLINALE 2020 - Berlin Alexanderplatz
70th BERLINALE FILM FESTIVALDirected by Burhan Qurbani, Berlin Alexanderplatz, is a contemporary adaptation of a 1929 novel by Alfred Döblin. It is officially the third take on this book after the 1931 film directed by Phil Jutzi and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1980 miniseries. In fact, one could also count Fassbinder’s 1975 feature Fox and His Friends in this context as he didn’t exactly hide his thematic inspirations and even named the protagonist Franz Biberkopf as well.
Qurbani goes much further in reshaping the original story. Instead of an ex-convict, he centres the narrative around a refugee from Guinea-Bissau named Francis (Welket Bungué) who tries to navigate the treacherous world of the German criminal underworld and desperately dreams of normalcy. However, although the original story is heavily modified with key narrative elements completely rearranged, the filmmaker’s core mission remains symmetrical to that found in Döblin’s original novel as well as its various cinematic incarnations. He uses Francis’s odyssey of despair and toxic dependency on his sociopathic friend Reinhold (Albrecht Schuch) to illuminate relevant socio-political problems in today’s Germany in a similar way to how the novel commented on the rise of Nazism or Fassbinder’s Fox and His Friends emphasized the dangers of the post-WWII carnivorous capitalism that took hold of the country.
It seems that in Qurbani’s view, Germany is about to come full circle and once more succumb to tribalistic nationalism which has spawned as a knee-jerk reaction to the massive influx of undocumented migrants into Germany. As depicted in the film, the world is extremely polarized and clearly divided based on the colour of one’s skin. Black and Arab migrants form a voiceless underclass of people subservient to their white German overlords who treat them like animals and view them as completely disposable. Reinhold's boss, Pums (Joachim Król), often refers to Francis as a gorilla and the film is saturated with racially charged language. This fundamentally unjust world becomes a setting for Qurbani’s seemingly archetypal meditation on love, lust, power and loss.
Unfortunately, the innate potential of Berlin Alexanderplatz aiming to force the contemporary German society to reflect on its current trajectory ends up almost completely diluted by the film’s excessive running time. Qurbani often drags his feet and indulges occasionally in bouts of abstract imagery which hampers the progression of the narrative and disrupts the atmosphere of the experience. Lush, evocative and interestingly photographed as it is, the film would vastly benefit from extensive pruning to give the movie a more defined shape, which would immediately bolster its organically rich thematic potential.
Therefore, Berlin Alexanderplatz is ultimately a difficult piece to recommend to anyone. It likely has a solid ninety-minute long cut hidden somewhere within this five-act behemoth, but it would require a lot of mental gymnastics to isolate its most potent thematic strands from what adds up to veritable white noise. It is perhaps an indication of the reverential respect the filmmaker has for the original text – after all, Fassbinder’s miniseries was almost fifteen hours long – but his inability or refusal to trim the film to size is ultimately what hurts it the most. There is enough material in here to shape the focus of the narrative to comment on the precarious existence of people on the fringe and thus echo such films as Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful or James Gray’s The Immigrant. Alternatively, this sprawling saga could be trimmed to accentuate its Fassbinder-esque dynamics of exploitation and an imbalance of power in relationships. Instead, the filmmaker chose to compromise and committed the movie to stay exactly in the middle of the road.
In consequence, Berlin Alexanderplatz is an underwhelming piece that hides its timely thematic landscape beneath a thick layer of tedium and succeeds most profoundly in giving the viewers bedsores instead of opening their eyes to the problems the film wants to tackle.
