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BERLINALE 2022 Forum

Review: L'état et moi

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- BERLINALE 2022: Director Max Linz takes it up with the German judicial system in his sometimes biting satire about criminal law

Review: L'état et moi

“Red is a beautiful colour,” main actress and dual role impersonator Sophie Rois sings at one point. Red is all that is left of the once idealistic idea of “liberté, egalité, fraternité,” at least on the German side of the Rhine. In his latest feature L’état et moi [+see also:
trailer
interview: Max Linz
film profile
]
, which premiered in the Forum section at the Berlinale, director Max Linz sets his eyes on German criminal law, its abuse of the high treason regulation in Paragraph 81 and the hypocrisy of a self-titled tolerant and enlightened society.

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Around Berlin Mitte, something extraordinary has happened. The (fictional) composer Hans List (Rois), a musical Victor Hugo stand-in, has suddenly reappeared after going missing in 1871. As an early flashback shows, that same year, the Prime Minister of Prussia Otto von Bismarck passed the new criminal law and the emperor of Prussia, Wilhelm I, was afraid that the Parisian protests would reach Germany. List, who was living in the Parisian commune, was labelled an outlaw and meant to be arrested. But thinking that he escaped sentencing by suddenly reappearing in modern-day Berlin would be too idealistic. Little has changed, Linz wants to say. New faces, same principles.

List immediately gets into trouble, as he accidentally stomps a German flag on fire, a deed that is deemed a terrorist affront against the state. He is put in front of judge Josephine Praetorius Camusot (also Rois), whose resemblance to List is uncanny. This will obviously play a somewhat predictable role later on. But for now, the judge sees little reason to throw List into prison for several years, as Paragraph 81 would allow her to. The prosecution is in dire need of reaching a certain number of sentences, she explains to junior lawyer Yushi Lewis (Jeremy Mockridge).

And she might be right. Coming from a long line of absolutist thinking and civil rights suppression, it is no coincidence that the prosecutor (Hauke Heumann) and the police officer (Bernhard Schütz) share the same actor as emperor Wilhelm I and Otto von Bismarck respectively. For the Minister of Justice Leonhardt (Bernd Moss), Linz didn’t even bother to create a new identity - more of the same since 1871. After escaping his first indictment, List goes to live with a commune in a park close to the state opera. However, trouble does keep finding him, whether in traffic accidents or on musical evenings. The state representatives are sure – List is a future terrorist and communist, providing for an amusing play on the German words “Komponist” (composer) and “Kommunist” (communist).

The acting of Rois for her two characters oscillates between formal restraint and excessive aloofness. Linz elevates the role of List to almost cartoonish absurdity, and not without reason. As one court guard reads aloud in the words of Sergei Eisenstein, who himself is an important voice of the revolution, the state has always had a way of blurring real and fictitious events. The administration of justice is a farce, a stage play in which people come to see a fictitious person being prosecuted.

The simplicity of the reduced camera work and lighting give the whole film the feeling of not unfolding on location, but on a very elaborately furnished stage. The script, however, still derives its strongest moments, its most pointed satire, from the absurdity and hypocrisy of its protagonists. While the state organs are very preoccupied with how to charge List for the next possible crime, they are proud ticket holders to a performance of his rediscovered opera “The Miserables,” a proletarian demand for civil rights. “Art is a placeholder for politics,” the prosecutor later complains, making the wink at the audience a bit too painfully meta.

Where Linz does not succeed, however, is in his effort to add more humour and in some instances clumsiness to his characters. The script and the performances would be more poignant if the audience didn’t have to endure on the nose scenes like a state organ having forced intercourse with a civilian because we all know the saying of what the state does with its people. Even with such a reduced production, less is sometimes more.

L’état et moi is produced by SCHRAMM FILM Koerner & Weber.

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