Book Review
Franka Potente
By Klaus Rathje (Ed.) and Ralf Krämer
With photos by Enriko Boettcher and Ali Kepenek
Publisher: Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf Verlag, paperback
In German
Just in case you don't know who Franka Potente is... She's the fiery-red-head in "Run Lola Run" who came to the attention of Hollywood and film fans when she ran along the streets of Berlin in that 1998 German movie (Deutsch: "Lola rennt"), which was the biggest German film success in the US since "Das Boot." With the release of "Lola" in the US in 1999, the film and its star made a much bigger impact than the film's box office of just under $7 million would indicate. Although few mainstream US moviegoers saw Franka Potente - aka Lola - run, many film aficionados and key Hollywood people did see the German film. It was also shown (mostly in art houses) in larger US cities, at some North American film festivals, and the subtitled DVD and video versions have sold well.
The Bourne Supremacy (USA, 2004) |
Soon Potente was offered a supporting role as George Jung's (Johnny Depp) stewardess/drug courier girlfriend in "Blow." But she became much better known after the Hollywood spy thrillers "The Bourne Identity" and "The Bourne Supremacy" were released. Potente co-stars with Matt Damon in "Identity" (on the streets of Prague and Paris) and "Supremacy."
See more Potente in
The Bourne Supremacy
Potente's relative obscurity outside her native Germany means that there are not as yet any English-language biographies about her. Even in Germany there are few books on Potente. I have just read the only "authorized" biography of Franka Potente in German, entitled simply Franka Potente. However, calling this book a biography is not entirely accurate. Written by Klaus Rathje and Ralf Krämer, two German journalists who are about the same age as their subject, Potente is more a collection of interviews and observations concerning her career and her film work. (In the "Vorwort" it does not claim to be more than ein Buch über Franka Potente, "a book about Franka Potente.") Anyone looking for a detailed and throrough biography of the German star, ist hier falsch (is in the wrong place). The fact that Potente is a very private person may also explain why so much about her life is missing in this authorized bio by Rathje and Krämer.
The book does provide a glimpse of Potente's life and her upbringing as a teacher's daughter in the Münsterland region of northern Germany. You learn that Franka was born on July 22, 1974 in Münster. Her brother Stefan arrived three years later. There are photos of Franka as a child growing up in several Westphalian towns (Detmold, Greven and Dülmen) as her father was posted at various schools in the area. You learn that she was the popular class clown, that she was often elected Klassensprecherin (class spokesperson) and that she did not do well in math. The reader also learns that Franka wanted to be an actress when she was very young, and she later attended acting school in Munich. We learn how Franka thanked her high school drama teacher Manfred Molitor live on German TV when she accepted her "Bambi" film award for best newcomer.
Also of Interest:
Lola rennt: Das Buch zum Film
See our review!
But what the reader doesn't learn is considerable. I think it would be interesting to know more about her time in Houston, Texas as a high school exchange student in 1992. This period of her life is barely mentioned in passing: a short reference to an American boyfriend who later cost her lots of money for long distance phone calls. When it comes to her parents, we learn that she sometimes invites them to visit her on location, but we don't really learn a lot about Hildegard and Dieter Potente. You learn more about her make-believe parents in some of her movies than about her real ones. There's also very little about how Potente's relationship with director Tom Tykwer evolved. (They have been living together for some time now.) We learn that they first met in a Berlin café in 1997, and that they were both on the same wavelength from the start, but how their relationship grew, or what keeps them together is still mostly a mystery at the end of the book. Most of what the reader does learn about Franka Potente comes from her own words. What objective reporting or analysis we get (some of it quite good) is more about her films. Out of the book's 280 pages, only a dozen or so are truly biographical (pp. 24-38, not counting photo pages).
The book's strengths lie more in the area of Potente's films - and a nice collection of Potente photos in color and black-and-white by Enriko Boettcher and Ali Kepenek.
The impressive photo collection provides conclusive proof of something you notice after seeing a few of Potente's films. She has an amazing chameleon-like quality, with a face and look that allow her to morph into almost completely different people. The photos show her in various guises - one minute the innocent child, the next a sultry seductress. If you thought you knew her as Lola, you might mistake her Sissi in "The Princess and the Warrior" for another actress. With different hair, different lighting or different roles, there are multifaceted Frankas. The book's photos are a revealing highlight.
For being so new on the cinematic landscape, Potente has a surprising number of films to her credit - over 20, counting her made-for-TV films and shorts. The book goes into interesting detail about the making of all of her films to date, starting with the one she completed in February 2001, but hasn't been released yet. Depending on its ultimate level of success, "The Bourne Identity" could mean a big boost to Potente's career now that Universal Pictures is finally releasing the film. Delayed for various marketing reasons, "Bourne" was for a time a big question mark in Potente's resumé.
Will the third "Lola" be the charm? Will the Potente "legend" actually become comparable to that of Marlene Dietrich, as the book's jacket liner suggests? In one of the book's shortest but best chapters, Ralf Krämer relates "Eine kurze Geschichte der Lola" ("A Short Tale of Lola"). By comparing the three German film Lolas in "Der blaue Engel" (1930, Joseph von Sternberg/Dietrich), "Lola" (1981, Fassbinder/Sukowa) and "Run Lola Run" (1998, Tykwer/Potente) the author illustrates the significance of the name in German cinematic history. We even learn about the real-life Lola who lent her Spanish name to German Europe, Lola Montez. And there's even a Franka connection that I won't reveal here.
Despite some disappointments, I enjoyed this book about today's best-known German movie star. You should be seeing a lot more of her on screen, but with this book you'll gain some interesting insights into the latest potential challenger to the Dietrich legend.
MORE > Review: Lola rennt: Das Buch zum Film
MORE > Lola and Potente Pages (this site)
MORE > Potente in The Bourne Supremacy
WEB > Franka Potente - The German-Hollywood Connection
Franka Potente
Von Klaus Rathje (Hg.) and Ralf Krämer. Bestellen Sie das Buch von Amazon.de.
Also see our review of Lola rennt: Das Buch zum Film. The Lola rennt book (ISBN: 3896023705, Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998) is an annotated and illustrated novelization of the film. It contains the original dialog from the movie and even offers an extra audio CD with dialog excerpts and the song "Wish." - Find out more.
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