The Farewell (91 mins, PG) Directed by Jan Schütte; starring Josef Bierbichler, Monica Bleibtreu, Jeanette Hain
Me You Them (106 mins, PG) directed by Andrucha Waddington; starring Regina Casé, Lima Duarte, St nio Garcia, Luís Carlos Vasconcelos
Help! I'm a Fish (79 mins, U) Directed by Stefan Fjeldmark and Michael Hegner; featuring the voices of Terry Jones, Alan Rickman, Jeff Pace
For better or worse, Bertolt Brecht is one of the key figures of the twentieth century and its most influential man of the theatre. The difference between Osborne's Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer is the appearance of Brecht's Berliner Ensemble in London between the two productions. Brecht's Trumpets and Drums, a version of Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer, changed the way Restoration comedy is performed in Britain. Oh! What a Lovely War resulted from Joan Littlewood's devotion to Brecht.
He also figures significantly in at least two plays of consequence - Günter Grass's The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, in which Brecht is confronted by striking East German workers in 1953 while he's preparing his version of Coriolanus, and Christopher Hampton's Tales From Hollywood, where Brecht goes his devious way among the exiled writers working in California during the Second World War. Jan Schütte's lowering movie, the slightly fictionalised The Farewell, is set between dawn and dusk on an August day in 1956 at Brecht's simple lakeside dacha outside East Berlin.
Brecht, played with immense conviction by the thickset Josef Bierbichler, is surrounded by the women in his life - his strong, supportive wife and star of the Berliner Ensemble, Helene Weigel; his dedicated amanuensis, Elizabeth Hauptmann; his difficult daughter, Barbara (who'll later marry the great actor, Ekkehard Schall); his alcoholic ex-mistress, Ruth Berlau; and two current lovers, both actresses with his company, Käthe Reichel and Isot Kilian. Two key assistants from the ensemble come to discuss the next season's work. This is not, however, a day like any other, and it begins with Barbara out in the garden burning her father's greasy old cap, a trademark and a symbol of his attempt to identify with working men.
Two sinister secret policemen in ill-fitting suits and broad-brimmed hats lurk outside, preparing to arrest Isot's husband, Wolfgang Harichg, the radical professor of Marxist philosophy, who was leading a campaign to bring down Walter Ulbricht, president of East Germany. Brecht holds the women at bay with his characteristic mixture of cruelty and arrogance, and pretends not to notice the police presence and the danger Harichg is in. He gets on with preparing for the ensemble's forthcoming visit to London, their first appearance before an English-speaking audience, and with writing a poem. His heart is giving him trouble, he's running a fever and taking his own temperature, and his intimations of mortality are well-founded. Within three days, he'll be dead at the age of 58.
The Farewell is a dispassionate, by no means hostile, portrait of a complex man at the point of death, an ironic egotist who exploited everyone around him as ruthlessly as the plutocrats he despised exploited the common people. He was a dislikable genius, as honest in his poetry, his plays and his theoretical writing as he was dishonest in the conduct of his life. This intelligent, studied film assumes considerable knowledge of, and sympathy for, Brecht, and it will be of little interest to those unacquainted with the writer and his times.
Set in the flat, parched, dusty, impoverished Brazilian north east, Andrucha Waddington's Me You Them is a visually striking, dramatically rather dull story of a jolie laide peasant woman, a victim of weak, macho men, getting some kind of grip on life without disrupting the social system. Darlene (impressively played by Regina Casé, a nationally celebrated TV chat show host) is left waiting at the church, heavily pregnant. Like Fanny in Marcel Pagnol's Marseille trilogy, she marries a middle-aged man to get a roof over the heads of herself and her little son.
The idle husband stretches out in his hammock while she goes off to labour in the cane fields. She has a child by a passing labourer, then one by her husband's feeble cousin, and a fourth by a handsome newcomer to the neighbourhood. Her first lover, a well-off landowner whose face we never see, takes the first child, her husband gives his name to the other three, and life goes on with Darlene happily running a ménage-à-quatre . It's a curiously innocent picture, uncensorious and unprurient.
Help! I'm a Fish is a modest, well-drawn animated comedy about the subterranean adventures of a cocky teenager, his little sister and their wimpish intellectual cousin, who are transformed respectively into a small shark, a baby starfish and a jelly fish after drinking a mad professor's potion.
I think I prefer it to the sentimental Disney version of Hans Andersen's The Little Mermaid, though unless you read the credits you'd never know that this film was made in Andersen's native country. The soundtrack 'voice talents', except for Alan Rickman as a villainous pilot fish and Terry Jones as the eccentric ichthyologist Professor MacKrill (geddit?), are all American, and 'Check it out, we're all fish, isn't that cool?' is a fairly typical line.
