Distant Lights

by Ian Johnston

Ian Johnston is an expatriate New Zealander who's been living and teaching in Taipei since 1991. He has a M.A. in German Language and Literature from the University of Auckland, N.Z.; and throughout the 1980s he was involved in running the Film Society in Auckland.

What are the "distant lights" (in the original German title simply the "lights") of Hans-Christian Schmid's third feature film, Distant Lights (Lichter, 2003)? The lights we see, initially in the distance, in the film's opening shot are those of a truck depositing a group of illegal Ukrainian immigrants in a forest to wait until nightfall. They're told just to follow the "lights" that will lead them into Berlin. But in fact they've been dumped on the wrong side of the border, in Poland near the city of Slubice, separated by the Oder River from the eastern German city of Frankfurt an der Oder.

This group of Ukrainians is only one in a series of sets of different characters, all of whom are defined by the border formed by the river, by where they are in relation to the border (on what side, Polish or German, the East or the West), by the ease with which they can cross the border. And the "lights" are clearly the promise of and hope for a better life and even wealth offered by "rich" Germany, whether the lights are the ones we see of Frankfurt from the Polish side of the river, or the bright lights of Berlin that the Ukrainian Kolja (Ivan Shvedoff) gets to see and which seem to form the endpoint of his journey.

So Distant Lights is one of a number of British and European films of recent years which have taken up the theme of illegal immigration with differing styles and approaches (and differing success, for that matter), including the Dardenne Brothers' La Promesse (1996), Bernardo Bertolucci's Besieged (L'Assedio, 1998), Paul Pavlikovsky's Last Resort (2000), Michael Haneke's Code Unknown (Code Inconnu, 2000), Stephen Frear's Dirty Pretty Things (2002), and most prominently Michael Winterbottom's In This World (2002). Like Winterbottom in his film, although not to the same degree, Schmid makes use of documentary techniques, in particular the use of hand-held camerawork as the principal stylistic structuring device of the film. Cameraman Bogumil Godfrejow was given a lot of leeway to respond to what he felt was the greatest point of interest in a scene, thus positioning the audience as a silent third-party participant and intensifying the feeling of verisimilitude.

Although the Polish-German border does represent a dividing line between a rich West and a poorer East, those of Schmid's characters on the eastern side of the border aren't the only ones struggling for a better existence. In fact, the two sets of German characters we meet after the Ukrainians are left in Slubice, having made the discovery that they aren't even in Germany yet, are doing precisely that.

First, there's the family unit formed by the coarse and unfeeling father Maik (Tom Jahn) and his two teenage sons Marko (Martin Kiefer) and the younger Andreas (Sebastian Urzendowsky), who make a living from smuggling cigarettes across the border. We see Marko tossing boxes of cigarettes out of a train window, to be picked up by teenage runaway Katharina (Alice Dwyer). It's a hand-to-mouth existence, complicated by Andreas's romantic feelings for Katharina, unreciprocated by her - she prefers casually to pair off with his older brother Marko; and it's an existence characterised by the father's general antagonism, aggression and lack of feeling.

Then, there's failing - if not completely failed - businessman Ingo (David Striesow), who we see hiring casual workers for the day to hawk his mattress business by collecting the phone numbers of potential customers on the street. One of those casual workers is Simone (Claudia Geisler), who unwittingly leads to the firing - without compensation - of the woman working in Ingo's office, Milena (Aleksandra Justa), a Pole holding this illegal day job in Germany.

Milena then takes us back to the opening situation of the film, by driving back across the border to Slubice, which subsequently links the chain of stories we've already followed to the original story of the Ukrainian illegals, through the figure of her husband, struggling taxi driver Antoni (Zbiegniew Zamachiwski - best known in the West for his leading role in Kieslowski's Trois Couleurs: Blanc [Three Colours: White, 1994]).

Antoni is desperate to get the money together to pay for a new dress for his daughter's first communion (thus establishing strong similarities in this plot line and in the film's "realist" style with Ken Loach's Raining Stones [1993]), and this leads him to offer to help three of the Ukrainian illegals, Dimitri (Sergei Frolov), his wife Anna (Anna Janowskaya), and their baby, first by letting them stay the night, then by finding a way to get them across the border. Financial considerations are obviously at play here, but Antoni is as much motivated by feelings of kindness and sympathy, emphasised by Zamachiwki's own immensely warm and generous performance.

So, for all the downbeat nature of the subject matter and the sense of the characters' constant struggle for survival, let alone the acts of self-interest, selfishness and even betrayal which take place in the course of the film, there is also room for altruism, individual characters going out of their way to help someone in need. Right from the start, the Ukrainians are helped out by a fellow Ukranian working in a Slubice café, who, potentially to his own physical danger, warns them off taking up an offer from some Bulgarian gangsters and lets them stay in the café. And, over the border in Frankfurt, Simone, one of the casual day workers hired by Ingo, goes out of her way to help out her boss - and continues to do so in later scenes in the film - to no immediate advantage to herself.

An even greater act of assistance comes from Ukrainian interpreter Sonja (Maria Simon), who is employed by the authorities in Germany. She interprets for the police interrogation of Kolya when he is caught after managing to cross the river into Germany (significantly, for the type of film that Distant Lights is, Schmid doesn't show us the crossing itself, but rather what happens after that action) and experiences such a spontaneous feeling of sympathy for his situation that she not only tries to advise him in Ukranian in the middle of the interrogation (it doesn't work - he's deported back to Poland), but then also enlists the help of her German partner Christoph (Janek Rieke) to drive over to Slubice, find him, and help him out.

Young Andreas also commits himself to offer assistance, in his case out of his teenage love for Katharina. Effectively now the girlfriend of his older brother Marko, she is caught by the authorities and returned to a children's home. Marko does nothing, but Andreas steals his father's van - in its own terms, an act of betrayal - and uses it physically to break into the grounds of the home and escape with Katharina. He then contemplates a further act of betrayal, stealing his father's money, which is forestalled by Marko turning up and another betrayal: Katharina's abandoning him for Marko.

So, often an act of altruism is answered by or associated with one of betrayal. After Sonja and Christoph search adjacent apartment buildings in Slubice for the deported Kolja, Christoph conceals from Sonja the fact that he has found Kolja. In his own terms Christoph feels justified in his belief that he's protecting Sonja, but for her it's a profound betrayal, leading to an argument with him when she finds out and a decision to leave Christoph behind and smuggle Kolja into Germany in the back of the car. And when she leaves Kolja in the centre of Berlin, she discovers he's repaid her by stealing Christoph's camera; for his focus is not on her, not on appreciating the lengths she has gone to in order to help him, but on reliving his brother's earlier experience of being in Berlin himself and recording it on film.

Ingo discovers that the mattress company he is franchising for has gone behind his back and set up an alternative franchise; Antoni is tricked out of money by a fellow Pole, a fisherman who promises to guide him to the best place to cross the river by foot and, while Antoni waits for his phone call, sits quite unfeelingly, spending the money in a bar; and this motif of betrayal is developed in a major way through the story of Philip (August Diehl), the young German architect.

Philip has designed a new factory, to be built in Slubice as a joint German-Polish venture, and his story nicely demonstrates how, in answer to the movement of people from East to West, there's a movement of wealth, of capital from West to East; and also how, in contrast to the struggles of the Ukrainians to get into Germany, the Germans cross the border with such ease (arriving in a small plane).

We soon discover that Philip, the idealistic architect, has a less than perfect history on a personal level, having earlier abandoned his Polish girlfriend Beata (Julia Krynke), who, coincidentally, is now working on the Polish side of the joint venture. The scenes between them - and Beata's refusal to allow the relationship to be revived - are a telling exposition of the power relationship that puts Beata in the inferior position, not on the traditional basis of men starting from a position of power over women, but because he is from the West, and she from the East.

Unfortunately, the further development of this story is the weakest in the film, important in a thematic sense, but over-determined and lacking the sense of reality, of real life caught by the camera almost in passing that we get in the other stories. So, Philip is confronted with a near-caricature of the coarse capitalist, who plans to remove the aesthetic innovations of his design; and then he learns that Beata is contributing to the success of the project by prostituting herself to the same man.

This does give the opportunity for a bravura piece of camera work as the camera follows the furious Philip from outside the villa and then back and forth inside; and the morning after scene, with Beata and her friend departing from the villa and leaving Philip behind, still sleeping in a car outside, is a return to the more subtle, underplayed style of the film's narrative. But the whole story here seems an unfortunate lapse, making too obvious, dramatic and thematic "points" in a way that we don't get in the rest of the film.

A film in this linked episodic style has an obvious model in Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993), and in Altman's own self-model Nashville (1975), as well as in the most prominent recent avatar, P.T. Anderson's Magnolia (1999), let alone the many other variations Altman has played on this approach. It's a credit to Schmid, and to fellow scriptwriter Michael Gutmann, that Lichter avoids Altman's superior misogyny and his slippage into caricature - there's nothing approaching the coarseness and the simplifications of a character like Geraldine Chaplin's "Opal from the BBC" in Nashville. All the characters are given their own integrity within the range of emotions that the film displays: hope, yearning, frustration, struggling, anger, despair, love, deceit, generosity. Stylistically, Distant Lights is a superb achievement with its marrying of documentary technique to a mostly low-key narrative format. There are imperfections - I've already expressed my reservations about the Philip story - but this is a fine addition to a growing body (ranging from Wolfgang Becker's interesting Good bye, Lenin! [2003] to Fatih Akin's excellent Head-On [Gegen die Wand, 2004]) of good contemporary cinema coming out of Germany.