Mr. Bachmann, His Class, and Henry Sugar Attend a Haunting in Venice, Weekly Reel #60
Mr. Bachmann, His Class, and Henry Sugar Attend a Haunting in Venice, Weekly Reel #60
For those lamenting the quality of German cinema, you can easily find great stuff if you squint hard, use smaller streaming sites, and trust that a 3.5 hour documentary will be worth it.
News of the Week: the End of Summer has arrived. A limited number of recreational activities will force me inside to write more often (hopefully, we’ll see). xoxo
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Mr. Bachmann and His Class (2021, Maria Speth, Germany) is the perfect documentary. Although it’s eight minutes longer than The Irishman, its level of empathy and emotions far outweighs its highly melodramatic genremates. This Silver Bear winner is about a 6th grade class in a small German industrial town, ranging in ages between twelve and fourteen, coming from twelve different countries, led by Mr. Bachmann. The retirement-age teacher, and school/district in general, focus on integrating children whose parents moved for work (Gastarbeiter) into German society, which is difficult in a provincial town with a majority foreign-born population. (How does one “properly” integrate into German society if there’s no Germans around?) Mr. Bachmann is aesthetically and emotionally a German Bill Murray (even wearing a small beanie), who nonchalantly runs a School of Rock while also teaching valuable interpersonal skills more important than the typical subjects.
What makes the film special are Mr. Bachmann’s abilities. We’ve all had life-changing, amazing teachers at pivotal moments in our upbringing, but none (that I’ve had at least) come close to the universal strength he possesses. This includes the fostering of an environment where the students, some of whom just learned German the previous semester, can challenge themselves and one another. (I’m realizing this all sounds too simple and abstract, but as the section heading reads, watch now!) Mr. Bachmann allows the students to talk openly about their own lives—one girl breaks down after mentioning her grandpa, who recently passed away; several students comfort her—while also being honest about what upsets them about each other, the class, whatever. He treats them like adults, expecting a high level of maturity,;for instance, during the first lesson he has them analyze a story about an anthropomorphized table and guitar using ‘boner’ double entendres. He pushes back when the students are being close-minded or rude or bullying others but also giving them the freedom to decide what those boundaries should be. In short, he teaches a critical reasoning on the social level that makes one wonder if all German schools are like this—they aren’t, they show two other teachers’ classes with the same students, who are good, but don’t animate the children on the same level.
Shot in 2017 and edited for three and a half years, Maria Speth and her small crew posted up in the classrooms over the course of an important semester in the their lives: at this point, the children, and their families, decide what level of high school they will attend (I’ll be brief): Hauptschule is the vocational track, Realschule is the advanced technical trades track, and Gymnasium is the college-prep track. (Americans think choosing a career path between seventeen and twenty is tough.) This decision essentially determines the class level of all German children around the age of twelve, sometimes down to ten. (At the end of the film, the students are placed in their tracks, which is an incredibly emotional and cathartic experience for the viewer more than the students, who don’t know how big this moment is.)
We watch most of the film through long takes during lessons or breaks, none of which edit or move on without conveying a story arc. We watch several jam sessions leading up to a Christmas party for their families, a field trip to a city history museum (farmland turned industrial munitions factory in 1938 using forced camp labor), a reading break (Mr. Bachmann liest natürlich Karl May), one-on-one student-parent meetings, lunches, lessons about immigration and ethnicity, and various gossips and feuds. With each scene we invest ourselves more and more into the setting until we reach an extreme level of empathy that forces our own subconscious memories and projections from that age to assault the poor little amygdala. Through that, we’re able to see them, as well as ourselves during tough moments—sometimes becoming calcified, lifelong grudges—we’re often too hard on ourselves about, as flawed humans making sense of the world.
The film arrived at a consequential time, not only for Covid—of which this film proves why in-class instruction is far superior, especially for children who don’t have a computer in the house or parents who speak German—but also for the Migrant Question, a popular contemporary Euro-discussion without any reference to actual human beings, which media like films and books enforce. Going back to an earlier question, how are these children expected to integrate? At their age, they have almost no reference to what their homeland is like beyond fuzzy family tales. Most of their classmates also exist in this fuzzy state. All while trying to navigate the already shit waters of puberty? Taking language as the synecdoche, most, if not all, speak German fine at the conversational level, but most would prefer to speak their parents’ tongue, in Germany. That’s what they think they ought to know and do. This places their parents, all of whom are presumably working class with their own socio-linguistic troubles, more than half born in difference countries and perhaps a quarter don’t speak German, in an uncomfortable position. The point of Mr. Bachmann, who commands a preternatural ability in teaching, is to be that pivot point of integration. While this isn’t the sole focus of the film, it’s nonetheless extremely prescient for 2021.
Since the film was shot six years ago, Mr. Bachmann is now retired, and the children are all eighteen to twenty years old. (Can some regional film fund grant Speth the resources for a Seven Up! style reunion?)
Mr. Bachmann and His Class is streaming on Mubi.
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The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (2023, Wes Anderson, USA) is the first of four short films by Wes Anderson for Netflix, which bought the Roald Dahl Story Company for 686 million USD. Along with Asteroid City, that’s five Anderson releases this year, three short of a Hannukah miracle! These four shorts adapted from the Antisemite’s stories are his first since Fantastic Mr. Fox fourteen years ago, even though it seems they’ve been working in tandem forever. At thirty-seven minutes, Henry Sugar is exactly twenty minutes longer than the other three, The Rat Catcher, Poison, and The Swan.
Like Asteroid City, the shorts feature the classic Anderson Muted Pastel Palette of Symmetry (AMPPS). Also, Henry Sugar’s plot is a frame within a frame within a frame narrated by the og himself (played by Ralph Fiennes). Because of the film’s length and this plot device, five actors (Fiennes, Ben Kingsley, Dev Patel, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Richard Ayoade) play two roles each. Dahl, after providing a terse tour of his orange room and pencils, tells the story of Henry Sugar (Cumberbatch), a rich man who lives at Gipsy House, the kind of rich man that needs to compound their riches through various methods. Dahl says that “they’re not particularly bad men, but they’re not good men either. They’re simply part of the decoration.” A morally muted decoration is one of the best descriptions of an Anderson character one can find. Henry finds a notebook in the study written by a doctor (Patel) about the extraordinary story of an old man, Imdad Kahn (Kingsley), who can see without his eyes and developed a circus act. When Kahn then tells the story about how he learned such skills, we’re about two stories deeper, which, when resolved, Inceptions back up to Henry Sugar, who, as a rich gambler in need of compounding his wealth, practices and obsesses over Kahn’s method.
Each of the levels’ protagonists are the fourth wall narrators who speed through the dialogue as fast as cinematically possible. Nobody moreso than Dev Patel, the best Anderson addition since Jeffrey Wright, whose hastened and excited performance brings an unusual amount of energy and life into Anderson’s typical marionettes. Patel performs as if in the post-Asteroid City world of characters who successfully rebelled against Anderson’s manhandling, the post-“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”ification that reveals the artifice of the artifice (of the artifice?); for instance, we watch stage-hands wearing Anderson-film-worker-core duck in and out of frame to move props around. With these shorts Anderson is moving deeper and deeper into the creation of films that are harder to adapt in any other medium, even though these are themselves adaptations, which now resemble Synecdoche, New York in form more than Anderson’s previous Baumbach-heavy idiosyncratic dramedies—partially due to Baumbach writing his wife’s films nowadays instead of Anderson’s; although it’s mildly interesting that the last Anderson script Baumbach wrote was Fantastic Mr. Fox: circle complete? This meta-filmmaking stylization further reveals that while everyone is parodying Anderson on social media, he’s always one step ahead via parodying these parodies of his work, which is why his imitations will never come close.
Henry Sugar received a Venice premiere that popped, which prompted Netflix to push up the release date ahead of it’s planned theatrical release a month later. Although not as bemoaned as Hit Man being picked up, the Dahl-Anderson shorts dumped directly onto Netflix reveal an alternative film distribution/exhibition style that works well for short films (and cracks the code on how to easily win a short film Oscar); would they have stitched them all together à la The Ballad of Buster Scruggs for a theatrical release? Netflix is building their own IP empire around Dahl (without Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which Warner Bros. owns), and Anderson is the perfect draw to legitimize that cycle. Rather than following the Disney-producer top-down approach to IPs, Netflix is going for the Apple/Amazon Studios ‘let’s give a lump sum to auteurs because money isn’t an issue’ strategy. We saw the same approach theatrically with Barbie beginning the Mattel franchise using an auteur filmmaker. The conglomerates are smart enough to see that the pump and dump of Disney content, with undeniably flashy results in the short term, doesn’t mean much without good films and filmmakers. They know that to retain a loyal (paying) fanbase—and distract them from the fact that they’re multinational corporations led by MBAs and PR drives without a single creative instinct and only want to party with A-listers—they need to better disguise their product as film-worthy content.
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is streaming on Netflix.
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A Haunting in Venice (2023, Kenneth Branaugh, USA) wouldn’t have been my first or second or last choice for a cinemago—I had seen the aggressively below average Death on the Nile because it was the only détente my mother and I could accomplish and not Murder on the Orient Express—but it takes place in my favorite city (cinematically or otherwise). Though Branaugh and crew made a good try at it, they weren’t fully able to turn Venice into a complete HW-CG nightmare—that award resides with Spider-Man: Far From Home until Marvel’s next go. It isn’t Ken’s fault that just several months ago we witnessed some of the greatest on-screen running down the canals in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (a scene so perfectly executed that it distracts from how boring the enemy of the film is), or that some of the greatest big budget classics (From Russia with Love—my second favorite Bond and favorite Connery Bond film, which used Venice so iconically that the Broccolis recycled the gondolas for Moonraker and Casino Royale—and the third Sissi, which features a cinematic catharsis next to the Palazzo Ducale that the third film of a trilogy will never come close to achieving again) made Venice one of the most beautiful filming locations. Most of the film was shot on a soundstage at Pinewood anyway. It’s not his fault, it’s ours for watching.
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