A noir-tinged crime thriller disguised as a tempestuous queer love story, or maybe the other way around, Till the End of the Night closes the competition section of Berlin film festival with its world premiere today, one of three home-grown productions in the running for a Golden Bear. Once bracketed with the so-called “Berlin school” of younger film-makers who first injected edgy contemporary swagger into German cinema in the Nineties, director Christoph Hochhäusler fashions a stylish, sensitively handled yarn from material that could have been sensational in other hands. All the same, his sixth feature feels less engaging than it should be, devoting too much of its baggy two-hour runtime to generic thriller mechanics and too little to the combustible emotional chemistry between his two damaged protagonists. A modish trans-themed storyline should boost its visibility beyond festival bookings and domestic release plans, but this is a fairly frictionless and oddly passionless exercise in middlebrow melodrama.
Till the End of the Night opens with a homecoming celebration. A gay detective with a boozy, druggy, bohemian lifestyle, Robert Demant (Timocin Ziegler) is throwing a welcome party at his Frankfurt apartment for his trans lover Leni Malinowski (Thea Ehre), who has just been released early from a jail sentence for drug offences. But it soon emerges that their warm, sensual, tactile reunion is just for show. Robert and Leni are posing as a couple so they can go undercover in character to entrap Leni’s former employer Victor Arth (Michael Sideris), a one-time techno DJ turned millionaire nightclub owner with a shadowy side business as boss of a major online narcotics empire. Complicating this role-playing charade further is Robert’s secret history with Leni: they were lovers before she transitioned, creating an awkward, bruising erotic chemistry between them that sometimes erupts into physical confrontation.
In an agreeably camp twist, Robert and Leni begin their slow-motion sting against Victor via the ballroom dancing classes he grudgingly attends with his partner Nicole (Ioana Iacob), who forges an instant gal-pal bond with Leni. But their plans are knocked off course when both couples suffer bumpy tensions and the nosy, pushy, alpha-male Victor assumes the unlikely role of relationship counsellor to Rob and Leni. Meanwhile, Rob’s police bosses are pressuring him for quick results, and Victor faces escalating threats from rival drug cartels with no qualms about using violence. The shifting loyalties of the screenplay create a tense game of truth or dare here, blurring fictional confessions with risky real-life revelations. In classic film noir mode, it all ends in double and triple crosses, and no good deed goes unpunished.
Playing a hot-headed hedonist who is confused and maybe even slightly repulsed by his own sexual impulses, Ziegler is persuasively greasy, sweaty and dishevelled. You can almost smell his character’s pungent aroma oozing from the screen. Ehre is also excellent, code-switching between demure femininity and steely androgyny, fully embodying the notion that gender is a socially constructed performance. Hochhäusler and his cinematographer Reinhold Vorschneider give these broken souls an alluring pop-video gloss with splashy colours and flashy camerawork, repeatedly using lateral panning shots and reflections as visual motifs. A busy, colourful soundtrack is peppered with vintage Europop and dance music, reflecting the clubland milieu.
Decades ago, the tortuous pan-sexual demi-monde love story at the heart of Till the End of the Night would have been juicy material for a Rainer Werner Fassbinder melodrama, with all the accompanying counterculture buzz and sleazy glamour that implies. In 2023, it feels routine, almost predictable, to have a trans-themed crime thriller playing in a mainstream film festival. This is a welcome sign of progress of course, especially with trans rights so often weaponised as a baffling hot-button issue in the culture wars. But arguably something has been lost along the way too, which is European auteur cinema’s mission to provoke us, or at least surprise us. Hochhäusler’s superior genre homage is satisfying enough as pulpy entertainment, but this is not the boldly queer art-house drama it might have been.
Director: Christoph Hochhäusler
Screenplay: Florian Plumeyer
Cast: Timocin Ziegler, Thea Ehre, Michael Sideris, Ioana Iacob, Rosa Enskat
Cinematography: Reinhold Vorschneider
Editing: Stefan Stabenow
Producer: Bettina Brokemper
Production company: Heimatfilm (Germany)
Venue: Berlin International Film Festival (Competition)
In German
123 minutes
