Peer Raben Movies

Hong Kong-based filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai moves back and forth in time as he reexamines and amplifies the themes from his film In the Mood for Love in this offbeat romantic drama. Opening in the year 2046, in which a man named Tak (Takuya Kimura) attempts to persuades wjw 1967 (Faye Wong) to travel back in time with him, the film soon shifts to the year 1966, in which Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), a struggling author, asks the woman he loves, Su Lizhen (Gong Li) to sail with him from Singapore to Hong Kong on Christmas Eve. She declines, and over the next three years, we return to Chow Mo-wan on December 24 as he finds himself with another woman each year -- lighthearted Lulu (Carina Lau) in 1967, eccentric hotel heiress Wang Jingwen (Faye Wong) in 1968, and Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi), a high-class prostitute, in 1969. In time, Chow Mo-wan and Wang Jingwen become reacquainted, and a love affair blooms, but the fates are not on their side. 2046 had its world premiere at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. A re-edited version featuring an additional 4 minutes of footage, but minus sequences by martial arts coordinator Tung Wai) premiered in late 2004. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

This Teutonic film noir received its first U.S. showing at the Seattle Film Festival. Hansa Czypionka plays Kemal Kayankaya, a Turk who speaks no Turkish. Raised in Germany by German parents, he is virtually man without a country, shunned not only by his fellow Turks but by native Germans. So what's an outsider like Kayankaya to do? He becomes a private eye, of course. Hired to find a missing husband, Kayankaya follows the clue trail to a seedy Frankfurt brothel, where the man he seeks is murdered before his eyes. Refusing to drop the case, Kayankaya sinks deeper and deeper into a morass of drug traffic and police corruption. Happy Birthday, Turke! is based on a Chandleresque novel by Jakob Arjouni. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

The West German Die Venusfalle stars alluring actress Evelyn Rille as...alluring actress Evelyn Rille. The English-language title of this erotic drama is The Venus Trap, which should give one a good idea of its content. No mere sexploitationer, Die Venusfalle is given Tiffany treatment by director Robert Van Ackeren. The film proved quite popular in its native country, and matched that popularity abroad. At present, Die Venusfalle is one of the few German soft-core sex films available on laserdisc. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Agoraphobia (Greek for "fear of the marketplace") is the focus of this drama starring Elliott Gould as Jimmy Morgan. Morgan seems fairly well-adjusted considering that deeply afflicted agoraphobics live in fear and even terror of human relationships and other people; a fear of going outside is only one part of the illness. Yet Morgan controls his finances from home, has sexual partners brought in by an escort service, persuades his relatives to visit him, and gets his drugs via housecalls. This travesty of a seriously sick man is only allayed slightly when he lies to everyone and tries to disguise his inability to step outside his door (a common trait of agoraphobics). As Morgan loses friends, business investments, and a budding relationship with one of the escort women (Jennifer Tilly), he is driven to consider treatment for the first time. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

This entertaining tragi-comedy looks at the contradictions in a nurse's (Kirsten Lehfeldt) personality and how they work against her. Henriette (Lehfeldt) leaves her boyfriend when he makes it clear that he does not want marriage or children, and she transfers her affections to Leowe (Torben Jensen), a surgeon at the hospital where she works. She is leery of showing her true feelings, hiding them by being a little quirky. Leowe is not exactly a perfect companion either and is not interested in marriage. Soon that relationship starts to spell trouble in capital letters, causing Henry to make some radical decisions. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

Wooden acting and limited dialogue undermine this story adapted from a real incident -- two gay lovers convinced a third party to shoot them both to death in a double suicide in Italy in 1980. The setting for this act is changed to Hamburg in the film, but it would require prior knowledge of the real story and its issues before this cinematic interpretation could be understood. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

In another avant-garde, underground film, director Ulrike Ottinger takes up the decadent, self-indulgent character of Dorian Gray (Veruschka von Lehndorff) and uses him/her to explore the seamier side of Berlin night and street life -- for 2 1/2 hours of running time. About half that time would have been more than enough, even for in-house, Berlin-based fans. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

In this period film about the life of an aristocratic family in Munich just before World War I and the end of the aristocracy as such, there are a series of garden parties for the royalty and nobility, Christmas celebrations, an appearance by Eleanora Duse at the local theater, music recitals, and majestic ballroom dances. No strong dramatic content or major story line holds the events in a thematic scheme, but the Lautenschlag family serves as the axis around which events come and go. This fictional family unit and the story, come from the partly autobiographical novel titled The Swing, written in 1934 by Annette Kolb. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

Originally Die Sehnsucht de Veronika Voss, this Rainer Werner Fassbinder spin on Sunset Boulevard stars Rosel Zech as film actress Veronika Voss. Once the toast of Germany, Veronika had allegedly been an intimate of Joseph Gobbels. But the Third Reich is dead...and Veronika may as well be. Playing to an increasingly diminishing fan following, Veronika turns to drugs to cushion her against the cruelties of life. Her self-destruction is accelerated by her "Doctor Feelgood" Annemaire Duringer, who plys Veronika with morphine in order to gain control of the actress's money and property. Well-meaning sportswriter Hilmar Thate tries to save Veronika from herself, sacrificing his own personal happiness -- and the life of his girlfriend Cornelia Froeboess -- in the process. Allegedly an amalgam of several true stories, Veronika Voss is the last of Fassbinder's "postwar trilogy" (the first two were The Marriage of Maria Braun and Lola). ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Gudrun Landgrebe plays a housewife who abruptly leaves her husband for a life of prostitution. At first, she retains her staid, middle-class values, but before long she is one of the most sexually adventurous women walking the streets. Soon she has more business than she can manage, forcing her to learn highly advanced bookkeeping skills to keep her business in order. While Gundrun indulges customers with fetishist inclinations, her AC-DC business partner Mathieu Carriere services both male and female clients. Becoming romantically involved themselves, Gundrun and Mathieu find that they can't manage a private and professional life at the same time. As the title suggests, one of the partners takes very drastic measures to express her discomfort with the conditions that prevail. Woman in Flames was an enormous moneymaker in Germany, where it was released as Die Flambierte Frau (which translates to the curiously gastronomic title A Woman Flambee). ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

A sailor learns to take, and give, it like a man in this surrealistic adaptation of writer and thief Jean Genet's novel Querelle de Brest by avant-garde German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In a colorful brothel in the port of Brest, proprietor Nono (Gunther Kaufmann) is known for wagering with his customers. Win a throw of the dice, and they get to make love with his wife, Lysiane (Jeanne Moreau); lose, and they must take it from behind by Nono himself. One day, Lysiane reads the tarot for her lover, Robert (Hanno Poschl), and learns in the cards of his intense passion for his brother, Querelle (Brad Davis). Querelle himself soon arrives, and the brothers enact a bizarre greeting halfway between a hug and a wrestling match. Querelle, it seems, is looking for partners in a drug deal; Robert points him in the right direction. An argument about the merits of sex between men soon leads Querelle to murder his fellow smuggler, Vic (Dieter Schidor). Back at the whorehouse, Querelle loses on purpose to Nono and finds he has a taste for passive gay sex. Meanwhile, fellow sailor Gil, who looks exactly like Querelle's brother (and is played by the same actor), murders one of his compatriots after the brute publicly impugns his manhood. Wanted by the police for both his own crime and Querelle's, Gil goes on the lam. Querelle soon crashes his hideout, and an intense bond develops between the two murderers -- a friendship that will lead Querelle to the greatest love, and the greatest treachery, of his life. Director Fassbinder was in the process of editing Querelle when he died of a drug overdose in June 1982. Gunther Kaufmann, who plays Nono, was Fassbinder's ex-lover; the film is dedicated to another former lover, El Hedi Ben Salem, the news of whose suicide had just reached the director. Critically derided even by many of Fassbinder's admirers, Querelle earned a Golden Raspberry award for Worst "Original" Song for "Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves," an Oscar Wilde poem set to music by Peer Raben and sung repeatedly by Jeanne Moreau. Moreau had previously starred in Mademoiselle, a Tony Richardson effort co-scripted by Genet. Look for Frank Ripploh, another pioneering German director, in a cameo. ~ Brian J. Dillard, Rovi

In this drama, a young wife leaves her German home to discover the identity of her mysterious late mother who married a Jewish German during WW II. Her mother was French, and soon after she married her aristocratic husband, Hitler came to power, causing the couple to flee to Argentina. Later he abandons the woman. Much of the complex tale is told via flashback, and in learning about her mother's past, the daughter begins to experience an emerging sense of identity and the knowledge of what she must do to avoid the same mistakes her mother made. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi