movie two

First I had to find another German beer.  Somehow, there are fewer in the shops than I remember, but I got me a couple for the rest of the festival.  Andechs is in the better bars, but I don't think I've brought it home.  Andechser Doppelbock Dunkel seems like just the thing for a sort of sci-fi movie, you know, to go with those dark, German twists and turns.  It has the color of a nice red ale, actually, brown but with a ruby tinge.  The smell is not particularly strong, but typical of German beers.  It tastes very much like German lagers at first, but without the sort of grassy aftertaste I often find.  It's a bit sweet, but also very smooth.  It's a happy taste, something I'd have enjoyed in groups around the Kneipe table, yelling out trivia and waving down servers for more onion rings.  It's a lot happier than the second movie, it turns out.

Might be wanting a drink after

Supplier: Cervecissimus
Price: €2.70

spoilers ahead!

My second film was part of the Sci-Fi/Cyberpunk cycle the festival is running this year.  One of the cycle was actually a classic 1920s film, but my schedule just didn't allow me to see it.  Oh, well.  Wir Sind die Flut/Somos el diluvio (there's no English title, apparently) is about a modern natural mystery, in a world where the sea pulled away from a small town on the German coast in 1994.  Nobody can explain why this happened, and even stranger, why all the children but one disappeared from town that day.  Now the town is under military guard at the outskirts, but tourists are allowed in to sea the empty coast and marvel at the strangeness of it.  A physics student at Humboldt University has made up his mind to figure out what happened by taking painstaking measurements and calculating some kind of gravitational anomaly.  He's so set on doing this that he leaves with a forged permission for his study, equipment stolen from the lab, and the help of his advisor's daughter, who was once his classmate.  They find the town quiet and creepy.  The owner of the pension they find a room at is suspicious but takes their cash payments, one man mistakes one of the students for his son, and another man tells them angrily to leave town.  Then they meet the last child, who is now about 20.  She wishes the feeling in the town would change, go back to normal, but she seems to have accepted that the other children are safe in some other place.  The students try to get measurements from a radio tower that was once in the sea but is now in the middle of restricted mudflats.  Somebody smashes the transmitter on the shore so they put on hazmat suits and walk out to the tower like astronauts on a mud planet.  Strangely, they don't seem to leave any footprints, but looking at the photos they took, the determined student sees a barefoot human footprint in the mud.  He runs back to the flats, takes off his shoe and steps in the mud.  Suddenly, a small boy appears in front of him.  He's distracted by people shouting on the shore and the boy disappears, but now he's obsessed with finding out who the boy is and how he can be there.  Meanwhile, his friend is talking to the last child and the man who mistook the student for his son.  She says she understands what it's like to lose somebody before you should, which is later clarified as an unplanned pregnancy, although we never learn if she had an abortion or gave the baby up.  She did go to Portugal, which doesn't sound like the place to get an quick and easy abortion to me, but what do I know, fortunately.  The last child starts filling the old swimming pool in an attempt to make things the way they were, and they notice that the water isn't level, even though the pool is.  This discovery excites the woman tremendously and she's ready to continue the investigation now, when she was ready to leave before talking to the last child.  The other student is now less interested in the water than in the boy and he discovers that the man who yelled at them before was the boy's father.  This boy did not disappear with the others, he died of some long illness the day all that happened.  The student goes to the man's house to get more information and sneaks into the boy's room.  He is shocked and delighted to see that the boy had the same toys and books that he did as a child, and had even made the same calculations about the anomaly as he did, before it happened.  There is some dust-up with the soldiers since they find out the permission he gave them is falsified, the pension owner is afraid they're causing trouble, and the confused old man kills himself.  The student takes off his shoes and walks out into the mud, where he sees all the children waiting for him.  The angry man finds a cassette in his son's room and plays it; the boy says he feels bad that his father doesn't know what to tell him when he asks, "Why?" - why he's going to die, I suppose - and he's figuring out a way to freeze time.  At the end of the tape he says he's going to take all the children to a place where nothing will change and nobody will ever die.  The adults listening to the tape all sit down in the bar and have shots.  Before they drink, the angry man says, "Maybe the children are in a better place now."  The student has disappeared and his friend returns to Berlin with her father, but when she goes to her apartment he is sitting out side the door to the building, where she said he wasn't the day she left for Portugal.  And back in the town, a wave washes up on shore.

I enjoyed most of the movie, but the ending bothered me.  First of all, it seems too magical.  Even though the boy supposedly calculated the way to access a place where time is frozen, now all you have to do is step in the mud with bare feet to find it?  And if he's with the children, how did he get to the woman's building?  Just zapped there?  Maybe he's a ghost, or a hallucination.  Also, despite the glowing treatment the boy is given in the film - he's a mathematical genius, he's a poor, sick boy, he has a heart of gold etc. - the fact that he just up and took all the other children with him without any explanation makes him a little asshole.  To a place where they won't grow up and die?  Little Peter Pan wannabe jerkass!  And the connection between him and the student is never explained, since the student made his calculations before he ever set foot in the town, and is too old to be a reincarnation of the boy.  It's too bad the director cancelled his visit to give us a talk about the film, because I had questions and I'm sure other people did too.