film of the day : Requiem

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Director Siegel's San Francisco-set crime-drama The Lineup [7/10] isn't now ranked among his better-known works (despite David Thomson describing it as "very influential" in his Biographical Dictionary of Cinema.) And judging by the pedestrian opening third, you'd be forgiven for understanding and perhaps even approving of such neglect. These early stretches show, in somewhat plodding perfunctory fashion, the efforts of the San Francisco Police Department - working in (occasionally strained) tandem with the government's customs officials - to uncover an international drug-smuggling racket operating through their city's busy port. The cops - conscientious, avuncular veterans of the Dragnet school - work out that heroin is being sneaked into souvenirs purchased overseas by respectable, unsuspecting tourists. Soon after these innocent 'mules' have arrived back on US soil, they are  relieved of their contraband by representatives of organised crime.
   So far, so so-so: Siegel and scriptwriter Stirling Silliphant focus on the procedural details by which the SFPD go about their business - tried-and-tested techniques including the 'lineup' ID parade of the picture's title. These sequences are very reminiscent of TV shows of the period, and, while they have a certain creaky charm, they've dated about as well as those pioneering small-screen series: as the opening credits indicate, The Lineup - which for a while comes across as a not-so-subtle plea for increased customs funding - is based on one such (now pretty much forgotten) example of the genre.
   It's only half an hour in that things start to become more interesting, with the belated arrival on screen of top-billed Eli Wallach (hot from his breakthrough performance in 1956's Baby Doll) as Dancer, a representative of the Miami mob arriving in San Francisco with his prissy, misogynistic superior Julian (Robert Keith) to supervise the recovery of three freshly-arrived 'consignments.'
      The picture's middle third alternates between the two criminals - who quickly hook up with their cocky young 'wheel man' (i.e. driver) McLain (Richard Jaeckel) - and the flatfoots of the SFPD. There's little character-development when it comes to the cops, but the three criminals are vivid, unusual creations whose interactions (Julian sees himself as an educator/mentor figure for the budding uber-gangster Dancer) provide the picture with much-needed tension, humour and colour.
   The Lineup then shifts up another gear in the last half-hour, the focus shifting decisively to Dancer, Julian and McLain, with the police now relegated to the background. Having effected two 'pickups' with only minor difficulty (apart from an incident of homicidal bloodshed in each case, courtesy of the trigger-happy Dancer), the self-aggrandisingly super-confident trio encounter major problems with the final consignment: a package of heroin hidden inside a child's ornate oriental doll.
   These difficulties lead Dancer (whose mounting exasperation magnifies his hubris to dangerous proportions) towards a fraught encounter with a mob bigwig known only as The Man: a wheelchair-bound, sinisterly saturnine chap played in a movie-stealingly minimal, near-robotically inexpressive turn by Vaughn Taylor. The rendezvous would be striking anywhere, but Siegel sets it in a remarkable real-life location known as Sutro's 'museum': a rickety, cavernous/barn-like hilltop structure (long since burned down), packed full of kids (supervised by nuns!), built around a vast ice-rink and decked out with all manner of noisy end-of-the-pier-style attractions.
   It's a terrific sequence: both drily comic and disturbingly tense, ending on a jaw-droppingly unpredictable and spectacular note which breathlessly segues into a desperate car-chase and gun-blazing climax on a half-completed city freeway. In (unstrained) tandem with the increasingly oddball turns of Silliphant's script, Siegel raises his own game as the picture goes on - along with Frisco-born cinematographer Hal Mohr, he gradually makes more creative and exciting use of real San Francisco locations: the first, cop-bound third of the picture could be taking place in pretty much any American port-city.
   The overall result is a surprisingly offbeat, subversive thriller with a decidedly ambiguous moral: crime may not pay - may, indeed, by a fast route to death and perdition; but the straight-arrow alternative is, if anything, on this evidence decidedly less appealing.

The real-life events behind last year's intriguing courtroom/horror hybrid hit The Exorcism of Emily Rose also inspire Requiem [8/10], a rather more restrained, austere and cerebral arthouse-oriented affair. Whereas Emily Rose was set in the United States at an unspecified point in the very recent past, Requiem unfolds in rural Bavaria during the mid-seventies: the case on which it's based is that of Anneliese Michel (1952-1976) from Klingenberg am Main, a small town in the Bavarian countryside. But director Schmid and writer Bernd Lange - as stated in the opening titles - don't pretend that they are adhering strictly to the facts of the case, documentary-style. This is instead a fictionalised speculation which, much like Emily Rose, doesn't posit any particular point of view to explain its protagonist's problems.
   Michaela Klingler (Sandra Huller) is a bright, mousy, twentyish, religiously-devout Catholic living with her parents and younger sister in a quiet Bavarian village. As the film begins, she learns that she's been accepted to study teaching at the nearby university of Tubingen - an establishment best known for its theology department, and whose professors have included no less an eminence than the current Pope. Michaela's gently-spoken father (Burghart Klaussner) is cautiously pleased; his bad-tempered wife Marianne (Imogen Kogge) has severe reservations, worrying that Michaela is not yet ready to live away from home. Michaela, we learn, has suffered from seizures for some time and requires daily medication to conduct a normal life - but she's determined to take up the Tubingen offer.
   After moving into the town's student accommodations, Michaela makes friends with her former schoolmate Hanna (Anna Blomeier) and embarks on what seems to be her first serious adult romantic relationship, with fellow-student Stefan (Nicholas Reinke). It isn't long, however, before Michaela's "symptoms" return. Exasperated by the inability of medicine to alleviate her suffering and reluctant to try a psychiatric remedy, Michaela turns instead to the Church - and gradually becomes utterly convinced that she is possessed by demons.
   Though the character's experiences are nightmarish in the extreme, Michaela is undoubtedly a 'dream role' for any young actress - albeit one which could easily veer into 'audition-piece' mannerism. Huller, however, is never less than engaging and believable at every stage in what becomes a nightmarish journey into neurosis psychosis - or, to take the character's own perspective and diagnosis - diabolism. Michaela is "inspired" down this path by the example of the woman she calls "Saint Katharine of Bascia" - better known in the English-speaking world as St Catherine of Siena*, whose "patronages" including bodily ills and illness, sexual temptation, and people ridiculed for their piety, and who died at an early age suffering what she herself identified as demonic possession.
   Whereas Katharina became an international celebrity during the 14th century, Michaela finds herself jarringly out of step with an increasingly-secularised mid-seventies West Germany. And whatever the explanation(s) of her woes, she's notably ill-suited to the everyday business of 'modern' living (one of the most disturbing scenes shows her wrestling with the recalcitrant ribbon of a very 1970s portable typewriter), in contrast to the casual dexterity of her boyfriend Stefan - Schmid is very strong at showing how the tiniest of quotidian frustrations can build and build to overwhelm the sufferer.
   And regardless of how little or much you know about the actual facts of the Michel case, Requiem is utterly convincing as a depiction of what might have happened. It helps that Schmid's attention to period detail is remarkably exact, but mercifully unobtrusive. It's also much more than merely a backdrop: the Klingler's home is a miasma of dull browns, beiges and greys, of fussy ornaments, overcomplicated wallpapers, and heavy furniture. No wonder Michaela is so keen to flee these suffocatingly repressive and claustrophobic surroundings, no wonder she "lets her hair down" with such scary vigour on the dancefloors of Tubingen's student union (to the accompaniment of the soundtrack's deafening, well-chosen contemporary music selections.)
   The mere fact that she's so far from her domineering mother's presence is also a liberation: Schmid perhaps goes a little over the top in his presentation of Marianne as a hyper-critical harpy (her strictness making for a wildly dysfunctional family-atmosphere) in the early stages, but it's justified by the way in which the prickly mother-daughter relationship undergoes such a transformation in the final act. The key scene between the pair is one of Michaela's most startling "freak outs" - which takes place amid much breaking of crockery in the family kitchen. This is one of a series of gripping, breathlessly tense, almost unbearably harrowing sequences which come to dominate the action in the second half of the film - building up to a climactic scene between Michaela and Hanna which is all the more shattering for its quiet restraint.
   The actual closing shot isn't a million miles away from the graceful impossibility which concludes Maren Ade's similarly-piercing The Forest For the Trees - another film about a teaching-inclined young woman who finds herself a square peg adrift in German society's smoothly rounded holes. The difference being that Schmid is scrupulously careful to keep the metaphysical very firmly in check: Requiem could be interpreted as an indictment of various institutions in 1970s West Germany, from the Catholic Church to Tubingen University (specifically its pastoral-care functions) to the state's medical and psychiatric representatives.
   From our perspective, Michaela appears to be 'failed' by no single organisation, but by a combination of circumstances - exacerbated by the specific details of her stultifying home environment. But there's much more to Requiem than these prosaic sociological explanations: Schmid's achievement is to make a film shot through with the mysteries of faith and devotion, while keeping his - and our - feet very firmly on the ground. The result is one of the year's strangest, most atmospheric, most troubling releases.

Neil Young
29th October 2006

THE LINEUP : [7/10] : USA 1958 : Don SIEGEL : 87 mins (timed)
REQUIEM : [8/10] : Germany 2006 (copyright-dated 2005) : Hans-Christian SCHMID : 91 mins (timed)

seen 28th October 2006 (public shows)
The Lineup at NFT (paid £8.50)
Requiem at Odeon West End (paid £11.00)

index to Jigsaw Lounge's coverage of LFF 2006                 LFF official site


*
St Catherine of Siena, from the Catholic Encyclopaedia:
Her strength was rapidly being consumed; she besought her Divine Bridegroom to let her bear the punishment for all the sins of the world, and to receive the sacrifice of her body for the unity and renovation of the Church; at last it seemed to her that the Bark of Peter was laid upon her shoulders, and that it was crushing her to death with its weight. After a prolonged and mysterious agony of three months, endured by her with supreme exultation and delight, from Sexagesima Sunday until the Sunday before the Ascension, she died.

Eyewitness account of the death of St Catherine of Siena, 1380:
Finally, making the sign of the cross, she blessed us all, and thus continued in prayer to the end of her life for which she had so longed, saying: "You, oh Lord, call me, and I come to You, not through my merits, but through Your mercy alone, which I ask of You, in virtue of Your Blood!" and many times she called out: "Blood, Blood!" Finally, after the example of the Savior, she said: "Father, into Your Hands I commend my soul and my spirit," and thus sweetly, with a face all shining and angelical, she bent her head, and gave up the ghost.
Her transit occurred on the Sunday at the hour of Sext, but we kept her unburied until the hour of Compline on Tuesday, without any odor being perceptible, her body remaining so pure, intact, and fragrant, that her arms, her neck and her legs remained as flexible as if she were still alive. During those three days the body was visited by crowds of people, and lucky he thought himself who was able to touch it. Almighty God also worked many miracles in that time, which in my hurry I omit.