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The Day Will Come
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This review is not about a great director (new or
old), a masterpiece, or an important aesthetic breakthrough in world cinema. It
concerns a film that, to tell the truth, is actually not terribly good as a
work of art or drama. But it is a film that captures or crystallises an unusual
cultural trend. It is the kind of film that critics do not spend much time
discussing these days, but maybe they should.
The Day Will Come is a German film I
saw at a very well attended and warmly received “International Panorama”
screening at the Thessaloniki Film Festival in 2009, where director Susanne
Schneider also appeared. It later travelled to venues including the Melbourne
Film Festival. It is scarcely different from a thousand similar “bourgeois
family” dramas full of tears, recriminations and reconciliations. Except for
its central, subject-matter premise: the clash of generations is based around a
mother, Judith (Iris Berben), who was once a
notorious anti-state terrorist (now leading a quiet, married life under a new
name), and her estranged daughter, Alice (Katharina Schüttler),
given to another family as a child when the mother’s terrorist cell went on the
lam from the police. Now a young adult, Alice comes back looking for some kind
of personal acknowledgement, or perhaps even revenge.
This kind of “terrorist family melodrama” has become a
staple of international cinema since at least Sidney Lumet’s intense Running On Empty (1988). A strange genre
that has had its good, complex moments, like Christian Petzold’s The State I’m In (2000) scripted by Harun Farocki, or a marvellous,
Terrence Malick-style screenplay called The Monkey Wrench Gang adapted from
Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel, which Dennis Hopper (among a score of other rumoured
auteur names) was once slated to direct, but has yet to emerge in any form. [Postscript: Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves (2013) bears some vague resemblance
to The Monkey Wrench Gang, and its
producers were in fact threatened with an ultimately unsuccessful legal action
from Edward R. Pressman Film company, owner of rights to the novel.]
The Day Will Come, however, has a
simple, conservative project: it shows a presumed normal, sensible, righteous
generation of modern, young people bringing their wayward left-wing parents
from the 1960s and ‘70s to the bar of truth and justice. Not only did these
parents rob banks, blow up corporate sites or (usually inadvertently) kill a
few innocent bystanders; they also committed the worst sin of all: they
neglected their children! They never gave them a stable home environment!
(Sometimes, as in Running on Empty,
the kids have been on the run with the family all their lives.) They never
accompanied these tender, innocent, apolitical creatures to their first day at
school, or prepared them for their first date!
It is intriguing to observe how this politico-moral
fable for our times – which targets everything from ideological fanaticism to
the irrational fear of home schooling – conjugates two currently popular
narrative film-forms. The first form is a certain Biblical, indeed Old
Testament, sense of thundering ethics, captured in the very fatalistic titles
of The Day Will Come or There Will Be Blood (2007). The second
form is more surprising in this context, because it derives from the politically
impeccable Dardennes: like the Belgian brothers’
brilliant tale of a father facing his son’s killer (The Son, 2002), we are seeing today a wave of films in which an emblematic confrontation of two
characters (usually of different generations) – drawn out with all the suspense
that a quasi-thriller plot and a close-up, hand-held camera can give – serves
also as a wish-fulfilment scenario about putting the world right,
setting the state of things back into its proper place and balance.
I hope my sophisticated readers will forgive an
ultimate spoiler: when the day comes in Schneider’s film, the mother will tearily wave goodbye to her triumphant (and also crying,
but now proud) daughter, and turn herself over to the cops. It was meant to be
a happy ending, but I was fuming.
© Adrian Martin February/July 2010 |
