FilmFestivals.com - Cannes 2000

Rejected by the Berlinale, Oskar Roehler's Die Unberührbare (The Unapproachable) follows the same route to the Directors' Fortnight taken by another post-wall Berlin film a year ago Andreas Kleinert's Paths In The Night. Ten years after the fall of the Wall, The Unapproachable is appropriate in helping to redress some of the imbalance in measuring the cross-border cultural significance of that historical event.

For although TV sets the world over were flooded with images of cheerful euphoria on the 9 November 1989, there were some who were sceptical, and others who were bitterly disappointed to see the existing socialist society come crashing down before their eyes. One of these was the West German writer Gisela Elsner (renamed as Hanna Flanders in the film and portrayed brilliantly by Hannelore Elsner), who in real life was writer-film-maker Oskar Roehler's mother.

In 1964, Elsner was acclaimed for her best-selling book "The Big Dwarfs," a searing portrait of West German society. Based in Munich and a member of the Communist Party, she was praised by leftists in the West and saw her novels published in the East. On 9 November, however, her GDR publisher in East Berlin (played by Michael Gwisdek in a memorable cameo) is only interested in toasting the fall of the Wall. When Flanders arrives unexpectedly in East Berlin, he couldn't care less about her existential problems and her suicidal frame of mind. For that matter, neither could her son, nor her ex-husband, nor her parents (whom she visits to beg for money), nor her erstwhile friends and colleagues.

The Unapproachable is both a legacy and a requiem. Shot in stunning black-and-white, the film unfolds psychologically like a dream imploding into the blinding light of a nightmare. It's also a passion play, one with clearly marked dramatic stations in one woman's agony. The viewer accompanies a wounded Hanna on a Bergman-like journey into the self.

Roehler portrays her as a vain woman, a writer too proud to admit she could be wrong, a schizophrenic who smokes one cigarette after another, an eccentric poet with heavily painted eyes under a Cleopatra-wig, a mother who had abandoned her husband and son (three years after his birth) "because they disturbed me at work". But he does so with love, with understanding, with forgiveness.

As a screen-writer and novelist in his own right, 41-year-old Roehler didn't make much of a critical splash with his previous auteur films Gentlemen (1995), New Year's Eve Countdown (1997), and Greedy (1999). No matter, Die Unberührbare will change all that.

Ron Holloway