Hermann Beyer Movies

With his bittersweet, German-language tragicomedy The Elementary Particles, writer-director Oskar Roehler brings to the screen Michel Houellebecq's popular seriocomic novel of two ill-adjusted siblings. Christian Ullmen and Moritz Bleibtreu portray, respectively, Michael and Bruno, half brothers who have each adjusted poorly to adult life, thanks in no small part to a cracked upbringing by their eccentric, social dropout mother. As the story opens, each brother experiences a personal crisis. Geneticist Michael returns to his work in cloning after an extended period away from his Irish laboratory, but suffers in quiet desperation from his intense inner loneliness; he must soon leave the lab once again and head back to his hometown, where his grandmother's corpse is being disinterred from a cemetery. Upon arrival, he reencounters Annabelle (Franka Potente of Run Lola Run), an adolescent crush to whom he was never before able to express his romantic yearnings; they consummate an intense erotic affair, and remain together, but a troubled pregnancy renders her infertile and makes family conception an utter impossibility. Meanwhile, high school teacher Bruno (a married husband and father) is driven completely around the bend by sexual yearnings for his female students, and consequently suffers from a nervous breakdown; he checks himself into a sanitarium, then heads off on a bender at a swingers' retreat with a new lover, Christiane (Martina Gedeck - but their pleasure is all too short-lived. Nina Hoss and Uwe Ochsenknecht co-star. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide

Oskar Roehler's drama Der Alte Affe Angst (Angst) is about the dissolution of a couple. Robert (Andre Hennicke) and Marie (Marie Baumer) have little in common other than their sex life. Since Robert is going through a bout with impotency, they are having a very rocky time. Robert learns that his father, whom he is estranged from, has died. This disturbs Robert so much that he visits a prostitute, and is able to engage in sex with her. Marie discovers the infidelity, and the prostitute has a surprise of her own. Angst was screened at the 2003 Berlin Film Festival. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide

Director Peter Sehr offers here another version of the origins of Kaspar Hauser, one of the most enigmatic characters in German history. According to this film, the title character is the real son of Duke Karl of Baden. Karl's brother Ludwig wants the throne for himself so he secretly orders a dying baby to be exchanged for the newborn heir. The real baby heir is promptly sent with a nurse to the countryside, but then is kidnapped by the Bavarians who are antagonistic to Baden. After Ludwig becomes a ruler of Baden, the young boy is kept in a cellar by the Bavarians, and then in 1828, after 12 years of confinement, he is brought to a square in Nuremberg in the early morning and left there alone. Unable to talk or walk, the young man is given the name Kaspar Hauser and is brought to the home of the kind professor Daumer, who teaches him to talk and introduces him to a civilized life. However, while the tension between the two rival countries increases, Ludwig of Baden sends his spies to seek out and eliminate the missing heir. Unlike Werner Herzog's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, which treated the leading character as a mysterious man of the universe, this is a rather straightforward tale of political intrigue, where Kaspar is merely a pawn in someone else's wicked game, and the film barely rises above the level of a beautifully crafted costume drama. ~ Yuri German, All Movie Guide

Evoking the complexities of life in 1946 postwar Berlin, this detective drama focuses on the efforts of a small group of bank robbers to bring off their heist and avoid punishment for it. Due to the need throughout society to replace active Nazis with politically untainted officials, a large part of the police force working on solving the robbery is composed of amateurs and "civilians." In one ironic scene, the detective interrogating the safecracker reveals that during the war, he was interrogated in the same building by the Nazis for his activities -- as a safecracker. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

The German Das Haus Am Fluss (House on the River) is based on "The Russian Pelt," a 1942 story by Frederick Wolf. The film takes place in an industrial community just outside of Berlin in 1941. Two sisters--unmarried Emmi and married Agnes--live with their mother while their men are off to war. Emmi receives a Ukranian blouse from her fiance, who is fighting in Russia. Her acceptance of what is considered "war goods" upsets the equillibrium of the community. Meanwhile, Agnes is being pursued by the factory boss who arranged with his Gestapo contacts to have Agnes' husband sent to the Russian front. Noting the effect the Ukranian blouse has on the flighty Emmi, the factory boss hopes to entice Agnes by offering her a Ukranian fur pelt. Agnes' seriously injured husband returns from the war with a similar pelt as a gift. Agnes symbolically accepts her husband's gift over that of the boss, who responds by threatening to have the husband imprisoned as a subversive. The boss is killed by Agnes who, despite her subsequent arrest by the Gestapo, feels that she's won a moral victory. As for Emmi, she hangs herself upon discovering that her fiance has been killed. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The true story of a young would-be pilot is fictionalized in this film about flying that has a hard time taking off as it should. Franz Xaver Stannebein (Joerg Gundzuhn), a small child at the turn of the 20th-century, wanted to do nothing more than fly and he carried his dreams into his years at an orphanage and into adulthood as a merchant in Spain. He eventually invests everything he has in his own version of an airship and the airship is a total failure (as most of his experiments in flying have always been). Then the Nazis in Germany ask him to build an airfield in Spain and when he does so, it is used by the Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War and he goes to Germany to protest. At that point, he is thrown into an insane asylum and is never allowed out again. Later on, after the war, his grandson begins to go through his papers to try to discover what his grandfather was all about, and the story of Franz Stannebein emerges. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Franziska (Simone Frost) is an unhappily married university student trying to cope with the difficulties of studying for a degree, and an abusive husband who has an alcohol problem. When she divorces her husband at last, her former in-laws strip her apartment, in an act that completes her slide into depression. Still wise enough to try to right her upside-down existence, she takes a leave of absence from school and goes to work for an architectural firm - a move she hopes will not only bring her some income, but also self-respect. Her boss, however, tells her to keep her opinions to herself. In spite of that discouraging beginning, Franciska is not able to keep her opinions to herself and eventually convinces her co-workers and her boss to accept her plan for building a user-friendly apartment complex. Just as the plan is about to be implemented, the government comes up with a new five-year economic agenda which cuts the funding needed for Franciska's proposal. While she is handling that crisis, a new romantic liaison with a trucker-cum-intellectual hits the skids, and Franciska is looking again at going back to the university. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Mathias' parents have just divorced. His mother is a factory brigade-leader and his father is a journalist. Since he is now eight years old, he really wants to spend more time with his father than circumstances allow. He is not amused by the "uncles" who stay overnight with his mother. He runs away during a free school hour to see his father, and finds him entertaining an "aunt," which he finds displeasing as well. Chastened, his father tells him the story of Daedalus and Icarus. At the same time, he promises the boy an airplane ride over Berlin on his birthday. When his birthday comes, his father is nowhere to be found, and Mathias searches everywhere. When he gets home, he finds that his father has sent him a model train set and has either forgotten or disregarded his promise -- for it is never mentioned. A new "uncle" comes into his life at this time, and Mathias realizes that he can't depend too much on others to do what is important to him. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide