Brasch by name and brash by nature, Thomas Brasch was a literary rock star among the dissident bohemians of Communist East Berlin in the 1960s and 1970s. A charismatic poet, playwright, film director and hedonistic party animal, he rebelled against social and political norms on both sides of the Cold War. Shot in lustrous monochrome, Dear Thomas captures Brasch’s high-voltage charisma in close-up detail, all framed against a handsome period backdrop. Currently on domestic release in Germany, Andreas Kleinert’s crafted and compelling biopic has just had its international premiere at Black Nights Film Festival in Tallinn, where it won the main Grand Prix.
Dear Thomas joins a growing canon of elegant, bittersweet films re-examining the lost bohemian demimonde of Communist Eastern Europe, stories rich in intrigue and betrayal like The Lives of Others (2006) and Cold War (2018). This is a classy and thoughtful work, even if Kleinert seems a little too in love with his subject to fully address Brasch’s more problematic qualities, notably his self-destructive arrogance and callous treatment of the many women in his life. The director has spoken admiringly of Brasch as the kind of “politically incorrect” artist we sorely need today. Arguably true, but that claim needs a lot more unpacking given how much of a bullying, needy egotist he seems to be for much of this indulgently overlong film.
Brasch was actually born in England in 1945 to exiled German-Jewish parents, but raised in Communist East Germany. Kleinert’s film opens with his brutalising boyhood ordeals at a military cadet school. The son of Communist party functionary Horst Brasch (Jörg Schüttauf), he grows up with an ambivalent love-hate attitude towards his new-born socialist homeland. Deepening tensions with his father finally become full-blown generational conflict in the mid 1960s when Brasch (Albrecht Schuch) is a long-haired student radical in East Berlin, excitedly discussing Godard, Dylan and Ho Chi Minh with his bed-hopping beatnik classmates.
An illegal protest against Soviet tanks crushing the Prague Spring in 1968 lands Brasch in jail for subversive activity. In an extra Oedipal twist, he is actually denounced to the Stasi by his own father, who then helps pull strings to get him early release and a factory job. Meanwhile, he is trying to write about gangsters and child-killers, real-life cases that becomes obsessions, depicted by Kleinert as feverish hallucinations. He also has ambitions to direct films starring his younger brother Klaus (Joel Basman) and his actor lover Katharina Thalbach (Jella Haase), the young beauty he finally settles down with after a wildly promiscuous youth.
Banned from publishing his work in East Germany, Brasch initially resists the obvious temptation to defect to the West. Instead he uses his father’s connections to broker an audacious but fruitless meeting with the nation’s Communist premier, Erich Honecker, a real event which Kleinert recreates as minor-key farce. In 1976, Brasch and Thalbach are finally permitted to cross the Wall and settle in West Berlin, where they are feted as dissident heroes, much to the author’s discomfort.
Brasch enjoys breakthrough success in West Germany and beyond, scoring stage hits with Thalbach, partying with literary high society in New York, and making a transition into film directing with the gangster thriller Angels of Iron (1981), which premieres at the Cannes film festival. But he also sabotages lucrative career offers, develops a raging cocaine addiction, suffers from writer’s block and earns a damaging reputation for volatile diva behaviour.
Considering its generous length, Dear Thomas is surprisingly low on political or cultural context. There is no sense of Brasch in relation to bad-boy contemporaries like Fassbinder or Kinski, for example, or to fellow East German artistic exiles like Wolf Biermann, Eva-Maria Hagen and Armin Müller-Stahl. Oddly, the film also barely touches on Brasch’s uneven but prolific later years, electing instead to jump forward two decades to his untimely death in reunited Berlin in 2001. In the process Kleinert overlooks some notable career landmarks, including the film that Brasch directed with Tony Curtis as star, The Passenger – Welcome to Germany (1988). That said, he does at least include a pleasingly allusive nod to this film by recycling John Barry’s haunting theme music for the 1970s playboy crime-fighter TV show The Persuaders, which co-starred Curtis opposite Roger Moore.
Starring as Brasch for the bulk of Dear Thomas, Schuch radiates a potent mix of devilish charm and incendiary self-belief. His energised, committed performance is just convincing enough to excuse Thomas Wendrich’s bumpy screenplay, which too often opts for on-the-nose dialogue and soapy melodrama. Of course, all writerly biopics face the challenge of making a cerebral, largely solitary career look visually interesting. Kleinert mostly solves this problem with stylised chapter breaks and impressionistic tableaux, including hallucinatory dream sequences that serve as recurring motifs, and scenes of Brasch inscribing poetry across a nude female body.
Indeed, there is plenty of naked female flesh in Dear Thomas, most belonging to characters who barely figure in the action except as Brasch’s decorous groupies and casual lovers. Kleinert has no problem in portraying these women as expendable playthings with no agency or back story. Even wives and children are presented as sketchy, nameless shadows. There is no hint here, for example, that Thalbach remains one of Germany’s most respected stage and screen actors even today, two decades after Brasch’s death.
Notionally a celebration of radicalism and critical thinking, Dear Thomas is a fairly conservative and uncritical bio-drama at heart, rooted in old-fashioned romanticised notions about the Great Uncompromising Outlaw Male Genius. Which is not a fatal flaw, just oddly dated and narrow, limiting a story that might have had more political and psychological bite if it paid more respect to the background chorus who help shape the legend of all major artistic figures. Even so, taken on its own terms, Kleinert’s film is an engrossing love letter to Brasch and a deluxe exercise in Ostalgia, from its sumptuous monochrome vistas of Cold War Berlin to its lively retro soundtrack of vintage jazz, rock and disco.
Director: Andreas Kleinert
Screenwriter: Thomas Wendrich
Cast: Albrecht Schuch, Jella Haase, Ioana Iacob, Jörg Schüttauf, Anja Schneider. Joel Basman
Producers: Till Derenbach, Michael Souvignier
Cinematography: Johann Feindt
Editing: Gisela Zick
Music: Daniel Michael Kaiser
Production company: Zeitsprung Pictures (Germany)
World sales: The Match Factory
Venue: Black Nights Film Festival, Tallinn (main competition)
In German
150 minutes
