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Beware novel psychological therapies from Austria: You never know where they may lead.
In the curious case of German director Tom Tykwer’s The Light, which opened the Berlin Film Festival, such a quacky therapy — mostly involving a flashing LED light and an egg-timer — is Syrian refugee Farrah’s comfort, an escape hatch from the horrors of her life and, ultimately, a tool to heal the multiple afflictions tearing apart the German family for whom she is keeping house. The parents are in failing couples therapy, the kids are disaffected, and Farrah appears from nowhere to sort them out. Sort of like Mary Poppins, but with extra lashings of fragrant Orientalism.
At first, a handful of characters are introduced, the connections between them drip-fed, Magnolia-style, over a long series of intercut scenes where we see them at work and play. Milena Engels (Nicolette Krebitz) is working in Kenya on an arts project funded from Germany, all local color and general mismanagement. Her husband Tim (Lars Eidinger) writes blurbs promoting supposedly ethical goods, a job that seems to consist mostly of people meeting on beanbags and talking marketing gibberish. Both he and their relentlessly clubbing daughter Frieda (Elke Biesendorfer) feel overlooked by Milena, not without reason. Nobody, in fact, takes much interest in anyone else.
Frieda’s twin brother Jon (Julius Gause) might not care; he rarely emerges from his room, which is shown in ceiling views to be a kind of rubbish tip with a VR console in the middle of it. There is also, somehow, another child, Dio (Elyas Eldridge), whose Kenyan father drops him off to stay, clearly a frequent scenario. His story is the last to be uncovered; mostly, he jumps around singing Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” reminding us how very difficult it is to sing this song in tune.
Then there is Maya, the cleaner who dies, unnoticed, while mopping the Engels’ kitchen floor. There is a momentary collective crisis of conscience when Frieda points out that nobody knew her surname, but those spillages aren’t going to disappear on their own. Enter Farrah (Tala Al-Deen), whose gracious elegance and literary German suggest that vacuuming is not the lifelong vocation of this magical lady of the East. Mysterious scenes in a gray room with members of her own family, where she assures them that they are on a rocky road but they will walk it together, could be taking place in a prison or — more likely — in a netherworld where the light of a numinous otherness shines through a single window.
Nobody here deserves particular censure. Al-Deen retains a dignified reserve that rises above the silliness of her character’s supposed spiritual gift. Eidinger conveys Tim’s mix of loneliness in his untended marriage and, at the same time, an unsavory narcissism in a performance that is solid and never showy. Krebitz is saddled with the thankless role of a woman who, despite good intentions, gets nothing right: She is the classically patronizing white woman at work while, at home, she is excoriated by her children for a lifetime of time-poor mothering. Tykwer himself seems to have singled her out for particularly punishing scrutiny. Blaming mothers: always a safe bet.
Glitteringly shot by Christian Almesberger through multiple lenses and from many angles, bursting with song-and-dance interludes and a hard-working orchestral score (credited to Johnny Klimek and the director himself) that keeps pumping the film along over its near three-hour running time. Why it has to be so long is as much of a puzzle as the workings of the light therapy, but it is surprisingly watchable. All the magnificent views across Berlin that punctuate the story, however, cannot change the essential fact that this is a farrago of nonsense.
Title: The Light
Festival: Berlin (Opening Night)
Sales agent: Beta Cinema
Director-screenwriter: Tom Tykwer
Cast: Nicolette Krebitz, Lars Eidinger, Tala Al-Deen, Elke Biesendorfer, Julius Gause
Running time: 2 hr 42 mins
