GRILL POINT/HALBE TREPPE
2002 GERMANY 105 MIN COLOR 35MM (VIDEO)
DIRECTOR: Andreas Dresen
GENRE: Contemporary drama
AWARDS: Berlin 2002, Sydney 2002, Montreal 2002, Warsaw 2002, Chicago 2002, Vienna 2002
In German with English subtitles
U.S. RELEASE: N/A

An Affair to Forget

Did you ever wonder what life is like in the East German backwater town of Frankfurt an der Oder in winter? Neither did I until I saw GRILL POINT (HALBE TREPPE). Turns out, it's cold, dark, gritty, and depressing, with a few laughs now and then — just like Andreas Dresen's film about midlife crisis German style.

Uwe and Ellen caught in the act.

The eastern Frankfurt is a small town on the Polish border, but HALBE TREPPE could have been filmed in almost any part of western civilization. Having an affair with your best friend's wife is generally considered a bad idea in most places, and Frankfurt is no exception.

Chris is a radio announcer (“Dauerpower vom Powertower“) married to Katrin, his second wife. His friend Uwe puts in long hours at his snack stand (Imbißbude) named “Halbe Treppe“ (“half way up the stairs”). He is neglecting his wife Ellen, who works part-time as a perfume sales clerk. Both couples, long-time friends, have fallen into a married-life routine that soon leads to an affair between Chris and Ellen.

When Hans-Peter the parakeet escapes from his cage in Uwe and Ellen's apartment, it's not hard to see the symbolism in the amusing scene of the couple searching for the family's lost pet, desperately calling out Hans-Peter's name in the cold outdoors, amid rows of bland apartment houses of the East German era.

What happens after Katrin discovers her husband Chris and best friend Ellen in her own bathtub is an interesting if somewhat predictable story. This is one of those classic “relationship” stories that German filmmakers love. But Dresen's relationship film is on another planet compared to Doris Dörrie's relationship film NAKED. Dresen's grittier, less colorful, more realistic version was more popular with German critics than Dörrie's more Hollywood-like film. That tells you something about German film tastes, but I prefer Dörrie's film over Dresen's myself.

Yes, Dresen's cast is good. (He also allowed them to improvise dialog.) Yes, I liked this film better the second time. But the story is really nothing new, the film's atmosphere is dreary, and I can get realism walking down the street. Sorry, but I prefer an entertaining film with witty dialog like Dörrie's.

Okay, now for two technical complaints I have related to Dresen's film.

Complaint 1: The original German title, HALBE TREPPE, comes from the name of Uwe's snack bar. The English title GRILL POINT is British (and has almost nothing to do with the original German title). The subtitles for the version shown in America and the English-speaking world are also rampant with Britishisms that throw off an American viewer. My favorite was “codswallop” as a translation for the German “Quatsch!” - which happens to mean “nonsense” or “rubbish,” and even that last British term would have been better than “codswallop,” which means absolutely nothing to most speakers of American English.

I'm ranting about the subtitles because if the Germans expect Americans to appreciate their films, the least they can do is to have them properly subtitled. They complain that Americans won't go to movies with subtitles, and then they offer up a travesty of a translation for U.S. audiences. I know that German students learn British English in their foreign language classes, but that doesn't mean we Americans should be subjected to British codswallop in a German film. Subtitling is an art, but does it have to be a lost art?

Complaint 2: When I go to a movie, I expect to see a movie, not a video. I know HALBE TREPPE was shot on video for economic reasons, but I find big-screen video in a movie theater irritating. The video pixelization and artifacts distracted from an otherwise good film. Dresen will say it was done to reflect the cinema-verité atmosphere he was going for, but the truth is, a film shot on video is not a film. It's a video. I don't want to pay $8.00 to watch a video in a movie theater.

GRILL POINT/HALBE TREPPE
Written and directed by Doris Dörrie
Cast: Steffi Kühnert (Ellen), Gabriela Maria Schmeide (Katrin), Thorsten Merten (Christian), Axel Prahl (Uwe)

Also see > Naked (Nackt)

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