Der Skorpion (1997)

Josef Berthold (the inexplicably popular-in-Germany at the time Heiner Lauterbach) heads an anti-drug crime department of Munich police. He’s rather on the zealous side, so his relationships with his wife Lili (Renate Krößner) and his insufferable late teenage son Robin (Marek Harloff) are increasingly strained.

For the local drug lords, Josef is just too damn successful. In what appears to be an attempt to demonstrate certain dangers to him, Lili is drugged in a restaurant and nearly dies in an accident caused by her state. This doesn’t exactly suggests a reason for backing down to Josef. Rather, he’s now out for blood instead of putting people behind bars; at the same time, his relationship with Marek further deteriorates.

Marek flees into a rather sudden relationship with a porn actress (Birge Schade), drugs, and general teenage raging.

While that’s going on, someone appears to begin killing their way up the chain of the local drug business, particularly the parts most probably connected to the attack on Lili. Josef would be the obvious suspect here.

The films of Dominik Graf, with their often somewhat crazed intensity, their intense, rough, brilliant 35mm camera work and their love for maximalist low budget genre filmmaking are a curious fit for German TV, yet still, he’s been making this sort of thing for decades and is somehow still at it, even getting a good number of German TV prizes for material these things would typically not take a second look at. Hell, he even managed to smuggle a very late, nearly perfect giallo into the world of German crime TV in 2011 in  form of the astonishing “Polizeiruf 110” Cassandras Warnung.

This much earlier TV movie made for the ZDF (Germany’s second public TV channel) is Graf at his most intense, featuring a plot that includes general crime business, a giallo-esque serial killing (with a totally not giallo-esque solution), many highly improbable random turns, and heightened family melodrama. Added to this is the most teenage scenery chewing ever to chew scenery by Marek Harloff - who manages to be so improbably annoying his extremity makes him feel like a real teenager again or rather like all of them at once - gratuitous sex and nudity, highly effective suspense sequences, and sudden bursts of quiet nearly as intense as the film’s breathless loudness. It’s as if a bit of worthy, bland German crime TV had been bitten by a radioactive Italian filmmaker or possessed by the ghosts of certain 70s attempts at establishing a German genre film (something Graf made two documentaries about).

It’s the visual and narrative energy that holds this whole thing made out of disparate parts together, a willingness to just follow through with weird ideas, but also Graf’s skill with every disparate part taken separately: he can do the melodrama, the thriller, the arthouse coming of age, the German cop show business, and appears to never have heard you’re not supposed to do them all at once. I’m certainly not going to disagree with the man.

Friends of Friends (2002)

Original title: Die Freunde der Freunde

Gregor (Matthias Schweighöfer) is a boarding school pupil, a couple of months before final exams. To be precise, he’s going to a Gymnasium, the type of school you’d go to in Germany when college is a realistic proposition for you. In combination with the boarding school, and the way the kids in the movie relate to money, there’s a class assumption here – none of these kids has parents working in a factory, that’s for sure. Gregor’s closest friend is his roommate Artur (Florian Stetter), and these two are a study in contrasts – where Gregor apparently carries quite a few romantic notions about life and particularly love, Artur’s the wild one (if not an actual sociopath) who we can well imagine to get into the kind of trouble he won’t be able to slip out of easily in the future.

Right now, he’s just doing stuff like lying rather a lot – and implicitly betraying Gregor’s truancy habits to school authorities early on in the movie, though it’s never going to outright tell us thus – and encouraging threesomes with his girlfriend Pia (Jessica Schwarz) and Gregor.

Gregor’s drawn to Artur’s incipient dangerous life, but becomes distracted when he meets Billie (Sabine Timoteo), a young, single mother, with an evasive air of mystery and the kind of background rich kid Gregor clearly can’t quite comprehend. While Gregor is instantly smitten, Billie is acting hot and cold, perhaps using Gregor for things he’s not worldly enough to understand, perhaps genuinely feeling drawn to his still schoolboyish kind of innocence and having to step back for reasons of her own.

At the borders of the plot, there are elements of the strange: Gregor’s belief that there’s some fated other for everyone seemingly being true, ghosts that have appeared to Billie as well as to Artur at the moments of someone’s death.

Whenever I write about German films, I tend to lament Germany’s deplorable lack of proper genre filmmaking. That’s certainly not director Dominik Graf’s fault, for Graf has made a career out of making genre films wherever he can get away with it, be it in the often much too worthy format of German TV crime movie series like “Tatort” and “Polizeiruf 110”, or in TV movies like this.

Proper genre movies, but not exactly straightforward ones, mind you, for one of the director’s main strengths is a willingness to be strange (or even outright Weird), hopefully causing a maximum of confusion in your typical German viewer of Saturday evening crime.

It has been ages since I’ve consciously watched anything directed by Graf, so I’m not even sure I wasn’t terribly confused or even annoyed by him the last time I encountered them myself.

The film at hand has elements of a crime drama, but these are mostly kept at the borders of what’s going on, suggested to be the parts of Artur’s life Gregor has just learned to ignore or choses not to see, as he choses to ignore or not see rather a lot of things around him.

I rather prefer to see the film as a ghost story, one told sideways and at an angle of the way ghost stories are usually told, but one carrying quite an emotional impact quite beyond the realm of jump scares, an impact that’s entwined with a sense of melancholy and sadness, a feeling of characters drifting in directions quite beyond their grasp, control, or perhaps even understanding.

Which does seem appropriate for something based on a Henry James tale of all things - though I doubt James would have been terribly happy with the nudity and the sometimes realistically coarse language in the film. Nor seems Graf’s masterful treatment of the confusion of being young very Jamesian to me – I am pretty sure Henry James was born middle-aged.

Die Freunde’s impact is carried by two things that stand very much in contrast – highly naturalistic acting by a great cast (young Schweighöfer was quite the thing, but Timoteo, Stetter and Schwarz are on the same level) and an incredibly thick mood of unreality. Graf shoots in the kind of grainy digital video that makes quite a few art-minded films of this era look ugly and cheap as hell, but hits exactly the point where this look turns the world of his film strange and off-kilter even when nothing strange or off-kilter is actually happening on screen. There’s a washed-out quality to the film’s reality that suggests a drift towards something inexplicable, and to my eyes, it’s pure magic, particularly combined with an electronic score by Sven Rossenbach and Florian van Volxem that is at once utterly of its time and perfectly outside of any time.

How Graf managed to get this approved by the never exactly weirdness-affine people in charge of German Publicly Owned TV, I can’t imagine. I’m just glad that he did.