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Volume CXXXIII, Number 2 |
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Best Foreign Film is sehr schön
HANNAH TUCKER
STAFF WRITER
Knowing that the film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film last April, one is arguably validated in worrying that the next 141 minutes of his or her life will be spent watching something very beautiful and very boring. And when, in one of the film's early scenes Owuor (Sidede Onyulo) lifts young Regina (Lea Kurka) from a dusty automobile into the sparkling African sunlight amidst the crescendo of a dreamy score that sounds like Enya chanting in Swahili, your worst fears seem confirmed.
But hang in there. Nirgendwo in Afrika is neither condescending nor reductionist. Owuor, the Redlich family's regal and indispensable chef (recall I said that their existence was only a comparatively grueling one) is not an angelic, faceless African archetype: he is loyal without being servile. The film is about relationships, and the most important one here is the friendship between Owuor and Regina. Writer and director Caroline Link makes it clear that these characters don't simply cling to each other out of racial or cultural curiosity. Rather, they recognize in each other a shared standard of wisdom. Owuor correctly identifies in Regina the hope for her parents' physical and social survival.
The wisdom is, of course, inherently Kenyan and is absorbed instantly by Regina and nearly as quickly by the father Walter (Merab Ninidze). Unlike her husband, Jettel (Juliane Köhler) cannot stifle her homesickness with pragmatism and only buckles down to the task of survival when she discovers the fate of her family who remained in Germany.
At first, Jettel is ungrateful to Owuor and unfaithful to the resourceful husband she claims to no longer understand. The continual sufferings and reconciliations of Herr and Frau Redlich are reasonable and arresting. In one wonderful scene, husband and wife argue and eventually forgive, but the dialogue is all voice-over; the characters never actually say a word. And Link, though in other places too sentimental, here captures the tone of the relationship exactly right.
The first part of the film, which focuses on Regina's coming-of-age and her love of Kenyan life and culture, is exquisite. The second half, which shows Jettel's transformation from homesick refugee into a zealous defender of the family's new life, is less captivating. Jettel, though seductive, beautiful, and complex, remains pretty much a brat. Although she comes to sincerely respect Owuor, she views the Africans as mostly unwitting canvases onto which she can project or illustrate her own emotions. She refuses to leave Kenya in the same naïve manner with which she originally refused to stay. Link's portrayal is not without its subtle acknowledgements of this fact. When a self-satisfied Jettel explains to the now-teenage and even wiser Regina (Karoline Eckertz) about the value of cultural differences, Regina quietly mocks her mother, inviting her to attend a local celebration during which a pig will be sacrificed and eaten raw. "You'll like it, mother," she insists, "it will be really 'different.'"
Along the way, we are treated to some of the more positive stereotypes of foreign films, including the fact that the sex in this movie actually has a purpose in the plot! The Germans learn to speak Swahili rather than the other way around. And, after years of rural farm life, the characters actually start to look tired and sunburned. In the end, Link refuses to make either an overwrought historical epic or a tedious and isolated character study, and her compromise is fascinating.
Nowhere in Africa is now playing at the Eveningstar Cinema.
3 polar bears out of 4.
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