New Wave German Cinema; Run Yella, Run! By JOE SHEPPARD.

CHRISTIAN Petzold’s estranged and troubled young female leads have graced the Paramount theatre lately in The State I Am In and Ghosts, and Yella protagonist Nina Hoss could easily have been celebrated alongside the other Fräuleinwunder in the recent Film Society season of Pool of Princesses, Requiem, and Longing. Here German reunification casts a long shadow over Saxony-Anhalt, the bleak former-Eastern state where economic recession has destroyed Yella Fichte’s marriage and bankrupted her ex-husband Ben. Yella flees west to the opportunities of Hanover, trading the shelter and hard-earned cash of a simple domestic life with her dad for hotel rooms, suitcases, and making money out of nothing. She is also escaping an ex who stalks and threatens her at every turn and whose actions, as they cross the Elbe on a friendly drive to the train station, recall Caesar at the Rubicon in terms of violence, calculation and irreversible consequences.

Yella arrives in Hanover to find her new accounting job has disappeared, but when she meets the charming businessman Phillip at her hotel she is soon flung pell-mell into a fantasy life of venture capitalism. Instead of robbing banks, this Bonnie and Clyde duo get away with daylight robbery in the boardroom, staging brazen traps and bluffing like the best card sharks – and the relationship inevitably spills over into the bedroom. But the cold, impersonal world of German business transactions looms heavily over the pair, as do the menace of the ex-husband and the burden of the past.

Ripples of discomfort and unease lie just beneath the surface, and the oneiric tone and logic, the relentless soundtrack – always ‘Road to Cairo’ or Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ – and the powerful colour and water imagery build up until they are just as gripping, mysterious and unbearable as Yella’s search for independence and security. Hoss is a revelation as an ordinary young woman who struggles to make sense of her fast-moving world, always in reaction to the strange series of events. Although the denouement is bound to have its detractors, the subtleties and consistent attention to detail add up to a very satisfying film that rewards multiple viewings. Big props must go to the Goethe Institute for sponsoring the film and – along with the Germany Embassy – for publishing the second issue of the film magazine Far Away So Close just in time for the Festival (which includes some revealing pieces on Petzold and Hoss).

Next to the clinical and precise German engineering of Yella, The Wave is about as delicate and subtle as a blacksmith’s forge. But the hammer-and-tongs obviousness of the plot, themes and characters is kind of the point, and the revolutionary ideals, youth design aesthetic, and party soundtrack signal with a firebrand that the target audience is German adolescents. Though adapted from a short story, The Wave hits the screen with the attitude, look and freshness more appropriate to the world of underground comics.

Former Kreuzberg squatter and activist Rainer Wenger (Jürgen Vogel) has grown up to be a hip young high school politics teacher. He is disappointed to miss out on teaching anarchism when the radical ideologies are divvied up between staff for a special project week. Wenger draws the autocratic straw instead and initially struggles to connect with his class. In a country where the history of the Nazi party is by law drilled into all kids from an early age – lest we forget or even repeat the evils of the Third Reich – the last thing these apathetic kids want is another dry lesson in dictatorship.

When the blasé students all scoff at the key question Wenger poses – whether another dictatorship could arise in such a self-conscious climate – he decides to take a more hands-on approach and runs the class like a drill sergeant. He is now Herr Wenger rather than Rainer, and if you want to talk, well you’d better be standing at attention. The students quickly dig it, enjoying the increased motivation and sense of belonging, and the class very soon has its own logo, badges, and MySpace page. The class roll swells as other students hear about this new club called The Wave, and a hand sign and uniforms (white shirts, jeans) quickly follow.

It isn’t too difficult to see where this is all going, and The Wave only works if you want to buy in to this experiment – that kids can lose their individuality and be brainwashed into complicit, unthinking fascists inside a few days. But at the same time The Wave serves as a handy reminder to us New Zealanders how segregated and jingoistic many schools in our country are – and not just the uniforms, last-names only and the whole school spirit nonsense, but all the other more subtle modes of manipulation and suppression that operate in the classroom and the playground.

The problem is balancing this real gravitas against the desire to make a modern film that appeals to the younger generation. Many characters are little more than quickly sketched stereotypes – the Turkish student, the Ossi (former East German), the class clown, the jock, the hippy, the no-mates, the spoiled rich kid and the poor but noble everyman. The stencilled street art, skate parks, and webcams start to seem just a little bit naff as shorthand for the young and trendy. Much more interesting was the Sophie Scholl-type whistleblower, who is ostracised for violating the dress code and rejecting the experiment.

There is something seductive and very scary about the power that seemingly innocuous memes quickly assume, and the sell-out crowds at the Embassy for a film without any real big star, auteur or award to advertise it suggest that many people still flock like moths to the searing flame of German totalitarianism. As the traditional economic powerhouse of Europe redefines itself and struggles with fresh issues on the horizon – national identity, immigration, political and economic rumblings – after a highly successful but feverishly patriotic football World Cup, Die Welle arrives as an interesting and modern, if a little clumsy, take on some of the themes that German cinema has wrestled with for two generations now.