The ambitious German director Burhan Qurbani faced a double legend when he decided to make his ‘Berlin Alexanderplatz‘. The literary starting point is Alfred Döblin‘s novel written and published during the Weimar Republic, a book that is repeatedly included in almost all the Top 100 rankings of the most remarkable novels, whether they are about German literature, about the 20th century books, or simply about the best novels ever written. This is the third transposition of the book on the screen. The second, a 14-episode miniseries, was a television saga from the early 1980s and one of the most important creations of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a visionary filmmaker at the peak but also near the end of a career and of a too short life. Like many other daring creators, Qurbani was not intimidated by the text, extracted its essence, rewrote the lines of action and filtered and re-positioned some characters, creating a film that is undoubtedly his, a film about early 21st century Berlin, about Germany, multiculturalism and its current problems, but at the same time a film about a society in crisis and about characters facing cruel realities, forced to moral compromises. It is a colorful and noisy film, expressive and shocking, multi-ethnic and very German at the same time. Just like Berlin is nowadays.
Franz, the main hero of the novel is in this film, at least at the begining, Francis (Welket Bungué), a migrant from Guinea Bissau. The death of the Ida, which triggers the story and the hero’s attempt towards moral recovery the takes place in the opening scene of the film during an illegal crossing of the Mediterranean Sea. The decadent Berlin of the 1920s is replaced in this film by contemporary Berlin, with its bars and parties, but also with drug trafficking, prostitution and gang-controlled violence. The path to a decent life seems to be closed to immigrants marked by their different looks and cultures. The transformation of the hero from Francis into Franz, sardonic characterized by himself as an example of a German success story, goes through a pact with the devil embodied by his Mephistophelean friend Reinhold (Albrecht Schuch). Francis is one of those heroes who destroys everything he loves. The ties with the two women he meets – the exotic Eva (Annabelle Mandeng) and especially Mieze (Jella Haase), the beautiful high-class prostitute – could perhaps offer a chance of recovery if the two women were not, each in her way, also victims of a world that seems to be living its deception to postpone a catastrophe that seems imminent.
This deeply pessimistic view dominates the film. Döblin‘s novel was written shortly before the rise of Nazism in Germany. The different and open Germany of today is less present on the screen. The epilogue seems to try to balance this approach a bit, but those who have read the book or seen Fassbinder‘s series know that it is a dream. The film has a screening time of three hours, but that was no problem for me because the characters are captivating and the story flows smoothly. The script and Eva’s off-screen voice use dialogue and text from the book, a collage scripting technique that works flawlessly. Welket Bungué creates an admirable Francis / Franz – a statuesque physique, a sensitive and dignified character, a man engaged in a struggle with little hope of success to recover morally and socially. Albrecht Schuch patners in an extremely complex Reinhold, a character of charismatic evil. The relationship between the two is characterized by friendship mixed with hatred, complicity in passions, debauchery and crime. The roles of the two women are a bit stingier in terms of the evolution of the characters, but the two actresses, like the rest of the cast, perform them admirably. The cinematography dominated by black and red of Yoshi Heimrath and the music of Dascha Dauenhauer perfectly serve the director’s intentions. With this film Burhan Qurbani won his place in the front line of the contemporary German directors. ‘Berlin Alexanderplatz‘ 2020 is his Berlin.