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Badmovies.org Forum  |  Other Topics  |  Television  |  Babylon Berlin « previous next »
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Author Topic: Babylon Berlin  (Read 2006 times)
ER
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The sleep of reasoner breeds monsters. (sic)


« on: February 07, 2018, 10:26:20 AM »

After a week’s investment of my life, I finished watching Babylon Berlin on Netflix, which was not a small undertaking, since this German-language, English-subtitled, probably NC-17 masterpiece runs to sixteen one-hour episodes, each one dense, fast-moving, overfilled with more characters than a Russian novel, and with multiple plots unspooling at the same time, sometimes within the same scene. Although I enjoyed it, if you can claim to tell what is going on in every moment of every episode, you’re a more astute viewer than I am. (Also you’re a fibber.)

Hint: There is a badly dubbed English-language version available on the settings menu of Netflix, in case you don’t want to spend sixteen hours reading a visual novel onscreen, but personally I hate dubbed foreign films and found the extra effort of the subtitles worth it, but the alternative is there if you look.

Set in Berlin in still post-war 1929 during the height of the doomed, well-meant, fatally flawed Weimar Republic, the series opens with the bloody hijacking of a Soviet train headed across the frontier toward Germany, by a radical Communist group called the Red Fortress. The train has a fortune in gold on it, which the Red Fortress schemes to send to Istanbul to fund Trotsky’s efforts to overthrow Stalin back in Moscow, whom they see as a tyrannical usurper of proper Communist ideals. The forces needed to get the gold to Turkey are located in the boiling cauldron of Germany’s capital, so the revolutionaries behind the murderous theft head there. When these idealistic Communist subversives are betrayed to the Soviet embassy by a mole, the response by Stalin’s henchmen is predictably brutal, and how one man escapes the assassins’ gunfire is downright retch-inducing, and brings to mind a heartbreaking scene from Schindler’s List. (Okay, he leaps down an apparently popular outhouse; there I told.) But much to the Soviet’s pique….where by that time is the train?

Word leaks on the streets about this train filled with stacked bricks of Czarist gold, and everyone wants it, from gangsters to Stalinists to Trotskyites to venal police officials to right wing conspirators still pining away for a return of their decrepit Kaiser, to the proper authorities who seek to follow the law. One of the plotters after the train is even a very determined and connected beautiful woman who claims to be a descendant of Russian nobility, the last living member of a family who originally owned the gold itself in Russia’s past.

Who will end up with the treasure? Maybe no one.

Meanwhile, the plot jumps to a Berlin police raid carried out by vice squad cops on a hard core pornography ring, which attempts to shield its salacious activities under the protection of freedom of artistic expression guaranteed under Weimar law. (An incestuous union of the Virgin Mary and Jesus is at the heart of their…art film. Some things never change.) A shootout and an effectively Hitchcockian chase over a plank between two buildings above a vertigo-inducing alleyway ensues, and we meet several main characters, including a Sipowicz-esque veteran gumshoe straight out of classic noir, and a young police detective on assignment in Berlin from his native Cologne. The younger man is set about taking care of personal business he hides from his colleagues in the capital, but it is quickly revealed to us that his father, a powerful Rhineland politician, is being blackmailed over an apparent lapse in sexual morals that wound up on film. But blackmailed by whom?

We are then introduced to a bright, ambitious young woman determined to care for her ailing, impoverished, dysfunctional family any way she has to, but who still works toward glass ceiling breaking goals in a time when opportunities are rare. Every morning she shows up at police headquarters among scores of women desperate for work as day-hire typists, competing in the depressed economy for a handful of low-paying temporary jobs, and through her the setting shifts to a vast nightclub and brothel in Berlin’s seedy underbelly, run by a really interesting (and totally emotionless) character who is one-part mobster, one-part….well, sometimes it feels like he carries the weight of the Weimar Republic single-handedly. In his first scene onscreen this power-broker may or may not be feeding one cheating black marketeer his own brother’s filleted and grilled tongue as a warning about short-changing him in future.

Intense fellow.

So as the plot swells in so many directions a viewer’s guide would need to be the size of Das Kapital itself, viewers see: the inner machinations of the Berlin police force, the hamstrung workings of the cabinets of the Weimar government, the life in Berlin’s slums and garden districts, homeless war veterans, starving street people, the titled and wealthy, scheming scientists, idealistic writers, widows, orphans, bitter ex-warriors, tragic Jews destined to be future Nazi victims, and sweet young children certain to fill Hitler’s armies a decade hence, all living their lives as radical groups on the left and right vie with the centrist Weimar supporters, each trying to sustain democracy or be the force to take down Germany’s first exercise of true representative government. In among all this the main character, whose final day in the trenches in 1918 included a truly horrible incident, secretly fights off his shell-shocked fits with drugs, as around him and all the others betrayals, lies, schemes and counter-schemes play out, some absolutely stunning sets and settings are featured, and eventually the conclusion (to this season?) comes off with a bang, and a fairly happy ending seems in the bag, when….

Not to spoil anything, but in one final German existentialist kick to the brain, the big question becomes, how literal versus metaphorical are we supposed to assume the ultimate scene is? It doesn’t detract from the previous fifteen hours and fifty-nine minutes, yet….ending there stands as either a disorienting cliffhanger or a fever-dream of a puzzler.

Babylon Berlin is confusing, tough to follow, frustrating, and quicksilver manic, but in its broad scope it’s also unlike anything else that’s ever been done. It is a police story, a spy thriller, a suspenseful potboiler, a tale of many, many relationships, and a tragedy centered on being caught on the wrong side of history. It’s a cinematic TV miniseries that has a cast of thousands, and, I have read, cost more to make than any non-English-language production in history. It might help to know something about German history in the era between the world wars but even without that you’ll get by. Sometime around the fourth episode I had an epiphany about the whole show that got me through, which was: sit back and enjoy the ride, don’t try to follow every tiny splinter. And I think that made viewing it that much better.

Zu asche, zu staub!
« Last Edit: February 12, 2018, 09:59:06 AM by ER » Logged

What does not kill me makes me stranger.
indianasmith
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A good bad movie is like popcorn for the soul!


« Reply #1 on: February 07, 2018, 05:40:12 PM »

This sounds pretty cool, actually.  I wish I had more time to watch stuff.
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"I shall smite you in the nostrils with a rod of iron, and wax your spleen with Efferdent!!"
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