Christian Schwochow’s West has an odd ambiguity of form. It is not exactly a noir, not precisely a realist evocation of cold war Berlin, not really a Le Carré-style spy thriller. There is plenty of atmosphere, but the film is heading nowhere; still, there are good performances. Jördis Triebel plays Nelli, who, with her young son, has managed to leave East Berlin for West Berlin in 1978 by posing as the legitimate spouse of someone with an exit visa; her actual partner, a Russian physicist, had left them three years earlier for a scientific conference in Moscow and then vanished, and was declared dead. Now marooned in a refugee holding camp, Nelli faces precisely the kind of bureaucracy and intrusion she thought she’d left behind in the East, with a sinister new strain of suspicion. Is she now being spied upon by Stasi agents lurking behind enemy lines in the capitalist West? The dramatic interest fades a little, but the tattiness and cigarette smoke of the age are shrewdly evoked, and it’s well acted.
