Digging up the skeletons of 20th century German history and inviting them to a post-modern dance party, Red Stars Upon the Field is a boldly original genre-exploding work from young writer-director Laura Laabs, making her cinematic feature debut after a run of shorts and TV projects. Combining elements of crime thriller and ghost story, surreal comedy and satirical farce, family psychodrama and political lecture, Laabs jumps between past and present, colour and monochrome, using different period-specific film stocks and aspect ratios, all punctuated by poetic quotes highlighted on screen in a wide range of typefaces.
Sprawling beyond the two-hour mark, Red Stars Upon the Field is cluttered and overlong, with a thread of Godard-ian intellectual pretension that may jar with some viewers. All the same, this is an impressively ambitious work, full of witty touches, unpredictable narrative swerves and left-field style choices. Several cast members play multiple roles while Til Lindemann, controversial singer of industrial stadium rockers Rammstein, makes a small but striking cameo as a mythical Teutonic folklore figure. Following its international premiere in Rotterdam last week, this maximalist magical mystery tour should pick up further interest at festivals and beyond. Sales will open at the European Film Market in Berlin next week.
Red Stars Upon the Field opens with a punky explosion of energy. The spirited young heroine Tine (Hannah Ehrlichmann) and her “art terrorist” group Aesthetic Left break into the Reichstag parliament building in Berlin, replacing the rooftop German flag with a red banner. Following this disruptive piece of political theatre, designed to echo a famous propaganda shot from the Soviet capture of the city during World War II, the group members scatter and go underground. Tine flees Berlin and head back to her home village of Bad Kleinen, a real rural backwater which was formerly part of Communist East Germany.
Time stands still in Bad Kleinen. More than 30 years after reunification, Tine’s father Uwe (Hermann Beyer) remains resentful of the rapacious western capitalist carpet-baggers who destroyed the village’s old farming community. Old flames still flirt with her while many of the village’s younger menfolk get their kicks from drink, drugs and neo-Nazi politics. But Tine’s low-profile return home takes a bizarre turn when a university research team dredge a wizened corpse from the depths of a local swamp.
Tine then turns CSI detective, digging into history for clues about the dead man’s identity. One possible candidate is the youngest son of a local farming family who went missing after his two brothers were drafted during World War II, both dying in the battle of Stalingrad. Laabs frames this story in lyrical monochrome flashbacks, often breaking through the thin membrane between past and present. Alternatively, the skeleton may belong to Willi (Andreas Döhler), the foreman of Bad Kleinen’s old Communist-era farming collective, who rallied to oppose the West German capitalists moving in with lay-offs and pay-offs. As outlined by Laabs in another extended flashback, Willi disappeared without a trace soon after this proud mutiny failed, leaving behind hints of suicide that may have been a cover-up for murder.
As her third possible candidate for this heavily symbolic corpse, Laabs draws on a dramatic true event which occurred at Bad Kleinen train station in 1993, when intelligence agents ambushed rogue members of the leftist terror group Red Army Faction, aka the notorious “Baader-Meinhof Gang”. Officially this gun battle left two people dead. But ever since, murky rumours have circulated of a mysterious third death, an execution-style killing and an official whitewash. Laabs keeps her speculative explanation very vague, but she tackles this subplot in an enjoyably playful manner, by having Tine restage the gunfight as a goofy educational home movie starring local schoolchildren.
Despite recurring allusions to feted left-wing philosophers, including Walter Benjamin and Jacques Rancière, Laabs does not push any obvious political message with Red Stars Upon the Field. Indeed, she finds rich comedy from drawing parallels between far right and far left extremists, showing neo-Nazis snorting cocaine with left-wing activists, bonded by their shared contempt for the lukewarm compromises of democracy. In another satirical highlight, a planned leftist attack on wind turbines as emblems of the “morally whitewashed status quo of western capitalism” is postponed when the group realise the Nazi-linked AfD party also oppose these giant eco-friendly windmills for uncomfortably similar reasons. In reality, the AfD are now on the brink of government in Germany, lending extra bite to Tine’s warning: “because of democrats like you, the right will be in power soon”
Ungainly and disjointed, Red Stars Upon the Field would benefit from a sharper edit and more narrative focus. The plot’s key mystery is never fully resolved, although Tine’s investigations uncover some revealing family secrets along the way. The crazy-paving patchwork of different colour schemes, screen ratios, film stocks and typefaces inevitably creates an uneven visual aesthetic, but this can prove surprisingly beautiful, with particularly strong use of drone shots soaring across majestic German landscapes.
A rich jukebox soundtrack of splenetic punk rants, vintage music-hall numbers and socialist folk songs also gives the film a lively heartbeat. The final act climaxes with a gloriously deranged musical pageant featuring police detectives with animal heads, synchronised dancing skeletons and a chorus full of ghosts from history. Whatever political message Laabs intends, she’s clearly with Emma Goldman: if you can’t dance to it, it’s not her revolution.
Director, screenwriter: Laura Laabs
Cast: Hannah Ehrlichmann, Hermann Beyer, Jule Böwe, Andreas Döhler, Jenny Schily, Camill Jammal, Matthi Faust, Simon Mantel
Cinematography: Carlos Vasquez
Editing: Emma Alice Gräf
Production design:Dominik Kremerskothen
Sound design: Till Aldinger
Music: Lukas Lauermann
Producers: Maximilian Haslberger, Balthasar Busmann
Production company: Amerikafilm (Germany)
World sales: The Playmaker
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Bright Future)
In German
133 minutes
