Enlarge image
Jannis Niewöhner (Karl) and Luna Wedler (Maxi): Why does someone turn right?
Photo: Tom Trambow / Pandora Film
»Je suis Karl« by Christian Schwochow (director) and Thomas Wendrich (screenplay) wants to tell a lot about new forms of the radical right.
However, the film makes so little assumption of its audience that its enlightening mission turns into its opposite in many moments - namely, to the suspension of independent thinking.
The focus of the political thriller is a new right youth movement similar to the Identitarian Movement (IB), which deals with pop cultural affinities and pseudo-tolerant concepts such as ethnopluralism in order to push through its racist agenda. How powerful the IB really is and how much of its importance was first brought up by the media in their astonished reporting on IB leader Martin Sellner is one of the many questions that »Je suis Karl« leaves out. Instead, the film asks the standard question of the concerned center: Why does someone turn right?
For the Berlin teenager Maxi (Luna Wedler), screenwriter Wendrich has considered this unlikely, action-packed path to the right-wing camp: Her mother and her two younger brothers are killed in a bomb attack allegedly carried out by Islamists. While fleeing from reporters who pounced on her as survivors, she is protected by a young man named Karl (Jannis Niewöhner, also seen in the cinema as Felix Krull), who gives her a leaflet from the political network »Re / Generation Europe «And invites you to a kind of summer academy in Prague.
Because Karl looks good, has lent her his jacket and she is afraid and disoriented, Maxi makes a quick decision to go to Prague.
At the summer academy, the participants tinker with Instagram stories, listen to soft emo-pop, provide Maxi with accommodation and clothes, and because Karl continues to look good, Maxi accepts it almost impassively when he jumps on stage and claims to be the head of the pan-European movement turns out.
From now on she is there, even if she only half sees what exactly.
Exaggerated into the ridiculous
»Je suis Karl« is the story of a seduction that the German themed film so often envisages for female characters: Not convictions, but emotions drive them into the male arms, whatever political force they may be. Out of a misunderstood responsibility towards their audience, the filmmakers do everything in their power to ensure that the seduction remains one-sided and that no one except Maxi succumbs to Karl's charm - so nobody has to ask themselves where he or she could have followed false temptations.
For this purpose, Karl is exaggerated as a villain with a rudeness that borders on the ridiculous. Because it is Karl himself who dumps the bomb with which half of Maxi's family is wiped out. Each of his preparatory steps for the assassination attempt is shown - how he takes the explosives from a contact, how he colors his beard, how he puts on dark contact lenses, how he puts on a parcel service uniform, how he hands the package with the bomb to Maxi's father.
As if there could still be doubts in the audience as to whether this mass murderer really doesn't care about the lives of his victims, the film returns with Karl to the place where he murdered. There are flowers, candles and cuddly toys to commemorate. Does that matter to him - the pity, the grief? As if the character question hadn't already been answered by exposing all the steps in the planning of the assassination, the camera looks at Karl inquiringly. She notes indignantly that he is chewing gum and also, when his eyes wander to the destroyed apartment building, disparagingly blows a bubble with it.
German cinema has not produced a more stupid, empty picture for a long time. The look on Karl's face would only be interesting and therefore useful if a person and not a monster looked back - our picture of Karl would become more complicated and not always clearer. But "Je suis Karl" does everything in his excessive pedagogical zeal to spare his audience from drawing their own conclusions.
As if there was a risk that an independent aesthetic could disrupt the passive consumption of images, Schwochow (»Bad Banks«, »Deutschstunde«) stages it in a cosmopolitan, glossy, attractive people look, with a double feature with a Til Schweiger film suggests. Milan Peschel as Maxi's lovable idiot would even ensure personal continuity between Schwochow and Schweiger. No-ear Nazis, two-ear fascists.
Ultimately, however, it is above all the passivity that pushes »Je suis Karl« as a viewer into what makes the film such a nuisance.
Nothing in the plot or characters extends so much into our present as that it comes close to one in any way.
This is not least due to the crazy initial idea that Karl and Co. kill white, religiously undefined Germans in order to later attribute the murders to Islamists.
Precisely how they succeed in this suppression and they mobilize anti-Islamic resentment, this all other tormentingly spelling out film then leaves out.
Imposed passivity
The murder through political gangs is supposed to raise the horror in the audience that apparently everyone can become a victim of right-wing violence. But under the impression of the racist and anti-Semitic attacks in Halle and Hanau, in which eleven people died, there could hardly be a gross twist: Right-wing violence hits people with a migration history (or whoever right-wing radicals think it is), it hits Jews, Leftists and anti-fascists.
However, through its exchange of victims, »Je suis Karl« does not have to tell about all of these groups; apart from one refugee, they do not even appear on the fringes.
It may have been credited to the film as a plus point in the marketing.
The members of the German Film Academy were already enthusiastic and nominated »Je suis Karl« for the film award as the best film as well as for the best leading roles (Wedler and Niewöhner) and the best supporting actor (Peschel).
Perhaps the saddest thing about »Je suis Karl« is that everyone involved knows better and could do better.
With “Bornholmer Straße” Schwochow has already made a film that danced with ambivalences, together with Wendrich he was responsible for the successful part “The perpetrators - Today is not every day” from the film trilogy “In the middle of Germany: NSU”.
But somehow the fiction seems to prevail in the German cinema industry that there is an audience that has to be played so stupid - that is overwhelmed by ambivalences and cannot recognize itself in non-white, non-Christian people at all. For these fictional viewers, »Je suis Karl« is certainly the right film.
