blaakmeer

Heimat is one of the best works of art of the twentieth century. Period. That is really all there is to be said. But the format of these comments forces me to write a minimum of ten lines. Well, lets just say that never before in film there has been as successful an amalgam of epic and lyric qualities. The TV-series depict the troubled history of Germany by focusing on a small community and a handful of families. As the show unfolds they become our family. Also: In art the profound and the entertaining seldom go together. In Heimat they do. Be amazed and cry. Still not enough lines. I have nothing more to say. Heimat is the ultimate television masterpiece.

This documentary should be out on DVD for one reason: Paul Tsongas. Tsongas is one of the best candidates for the presidency that didn't make it. Watch him on stage being asked whether he knows the price of a pack of milk. First he laughs out loud and steps out into the audience to shake hands with the man who posed the question, telling him that he asked a 'great question'. Back on stage he offers a price (can't remember) and when the audience starts to laugh adds: "at your friendly grocers?" Tsongas died a few years later. He would have made a great, if somewhat short-lived president. The man who did make it, Bill Clinton, plays a huge part in the documentary, as if the filmmakers knew what they had in hands. Well, of course they did, Clinton being the best natural politician of the last few decades. But Tsongas would have made a better president. No cigars in his Oval Office.

Yes indeed, 'Blue' is a wonderful movie, containing some of the best film-making of the last decades or so. Binoche's role is as perfect as possible. Lighting is splendid, even though the use of filters is quite obvious. But that music! The score is an integral part of the story, or better, the essence of this film, and it is, in one word, horrible. I'm very sorry. This is very bad music. Like Mozart, as one reviewer thought? No way, Mozart is always light, and when he isn't, like in the requiem, he is profound. The score is neither. It's pretty personal, I know. But imagine what an Alban Berg-like score would bring to this movie. Or any twentieth-century informed music for that matter. Here we are stuck with music as boring as a Gorecki-symphony, endearing for a minute or two, but containing absolutely nothing.