Returning to contemporary big-screen drama after almost a decade working on the prize-winning TV crime series Berlin Babylon, German writer-director Tom Tykwer’s The Light was an obvious choice to open the 75th Berlinale. Not only is this sprawling, socially engaged family saga an emphatically Berlin-centric story, but Tykwer is a long-time festival fixture and key player in the city’s film industry as co-founder of prolific production house X-Filme.
Shot with Tykwer’s typically high-energy visual panache, The Light is a personal passion project with faintly autobiographical undercurrents. In his Berlinale press notes, the director says he aimed to make a “mad, beautiful film” that confronts “the intensity of our present age.” Nobody can fault his ambition, at least. Spanning close to three hours, the story touches on timely themes including immigration, multiculturalism, broken families, white saviour syndrome, survivor’s guilt, corporate green-washing, political activism, complacent liberalism and rampant neoliberalism. Alongside its naturalistic social-drama elements there are flashy visual effects, fantasy musical digressions, and more full-frontal shots of Lars Eidinger’s naked penis than any film realistically requires.
On a socio-political level, The Light asks some of the right questions: about class and race, power and privilege, empathy and solidarity. But it ultimately answers them with simplistic solutions, feel-good platitudes and magical thinking. Some particularly jarring choices in the final act, when Tykwer strains to make a Big Statement about the human condition, almost sink what might otherwise have been a generally engaging and well crafted state-of-the-nation psychodrama. The glitzy Berlinale world premiere should help boost a Warners-backed domestic release on March 20, but this symphonic parade of navel-gazing neurotics will probably struggle to generate much buzz outside Germany.
The Light is framed with sweeping drone shots over central Berlin, where it appears to be perpetually raining, a not-too-subtle allusion to the stormy psychological state of its sprawling cast of characters. Intense and haunted, Farrah (a magnetic Tala Al-Deen) is a Syrian refugee devoted to using the light of the title, a rapid-fire LED device with apparently mystical power to heal past emotional scars. As we will learn, she has plenty of trauma to process. Despite being a trained medical professional, Farrah is seeking menial work with exacting requirements, for personal reasons that Tykwer keeps intentionally murky. With this in mind, she takes a housekeeping job with the Engels family, moneyed bohemians who have plenty of baggage of their own to unpack.
With a name presumably chosen to echo the German word for “angel” rather than Karl Marx’s fellow Communist trailblazer, the Engels family prove to be ideal human lab rats for Farrah. Father Tom (Eidinger) is a middle-aged creative type heavily invested in his left-leaning hipster rebel self-image, despite earning a generous salary for working on superficially “woke” corporate marketing campaigns. Meanwhile, his wife Milena (Nicolette Krebitz) is a well-connected charity campaigner fighting to build a theatre for underprivileged children in the slums of Kenya. Their marriage is just about functional but, as they confess to their relationship counsellor, fairly loveless and entirely sexless.
Tim and Milena have a teenage daughter, Frieda (Elke Biesendorfer), a punky rebel adrift in Berlin’s druggy dance-club demi-monde, confused about her sexuality, dabbling in political protest. Stuck in his bedroom all day, Frieda’s twin brother Jon (Julius Gause) is addicted to VR computer games, in love with a fantasy Manic Pixel Dream Girl he is too shy to meet with in real life. Milena also shares a younger mixed-heritage son, Dio (Elyas Eldridge), with her Kenyan colleague Godfrey (Toby Onwumere), a subplot which Tykwer leaves oddly under-explained.
The Engels clan initially appear atomised, estranged and disconnected from each other. “We’re a typical dysfunctional German family,” Frieda tells Farrah, “everyone does their own thing and doesn’t give a shit about the others.” After an intriguing, ambivalent build-up, it finally becomes clear that Farrah’s secret mission is to fulfil the cliched role of saintly, wise, soulful foreigner gifted with magical healing powers. Of course, by helping the family to repair their inner wounds, she can also cure her own. Thus The Light resolves into a series of glib inspirational poster slogans: all you need is love, sharing is caring, we are all brothers and sisters under the skin, etc.
This is harmlessly banal stuff, in fairness, but with a jarring twist. After keeping its Big Statement under wraps for more than two hours, The Light jumps several large sharks in its final act. Without getting into spoilers, Tykwer appears to imply that the deaths of dozens of desperate refugees are an acceptable karmic trade-off for freeing up a small group of bourgeois Berliners to feel better about their unremarkable First World Problems. This message is infantile at best, offensively stupid at worst. It scuppers an otherwise pleasantly entertaining family drama by overloading it with supernatural humbug and misplaced sentimentality. Tykwer would have been better off keeping us guessing where the ship was heading rather than steering us into these hidden shallows.
Fatuous plot aside, The Light is not without enjoyable qualities as glossy psychodrama. The kinetic camerawork, majestic aerial vistas of Berlin, and sparing use of visual effects are all strong points. As with all Tykwer films, music is a major component. The director co-wrote the film’s cloying score himself, while several key cast members have off-screen sidelines as DJs, singers and composers. Fun fact for rock trivia fans: Krebitz was the cover star on New Order’s 2001 album Get Ready.
Each of the film’s key characters are allotted their own dreamlike musical interlude, which leads to some dazzling set-pieces, notably a date between Jon and his online gamer-babe which becomes a glorious, gravity-defying dance across a docklands waterway. But these song-and-dance numbers feature some cringingly forced moments too, especially young Dio’s obsession with Queen’s classic 1970s rock anthem “Bohemian Rhapsody”. Tykwer turns this unlikely fixation into a recurring motif, unavoidably recalling the track’s famously goofy cameo in Wayne’s World (1992), a film that arguably offers deeper insights into the human condition than this laborious misfire. Is this the real life? No, it’s just fantasy.
Director, screenwriter: Tom Tykwer
Cast: Nicolette Krebitz, Lars Eidinger, Tala Al-Deen, Elke Biesendorfer, Julius Gause, Elyas Eldridge, Toby Onwumere, Mudar Ramadan
Cinematography: Christian Almesberger
Editing: Claus Wehlisch, Alexander Berner
Music: Johnny Klimek, Tom Tykwer
Production Design: Tim Tamke
Producers: Uwe Schott, Tom Tykwer
Production company: X-Filme Creative Pool (Germany)
World sales: Beta Cinema, Munich
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Berlinale Special, opening film)
In German, English
162 minutes
