Prinz in Holleland [1993] Michael Stock

http://bayimg.com/faKADAaDm Prince in Hell (1993) Prinz in Hölleland (original title) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107876/ German language with hard English subtitles. Includes German language only trailer. The story of Prince in Hell, set in a gypsy-like caravan soon after the reunification of West and East Germany, is an uneasy mix of simple and would-be complex. The plot involves the disintegrating relationship of political activist and basically decent guy Stefan (Stefan Laarmann – also a co-writer) and East German heroin junkie Jockel (Michael Stock), and their back and forth involvement with the ingratiating but downward-spiraling bisexual Micha (Andreas Stadler). Another storyline involves Micha's young son Sascha (Nils-Leevke Schmidt) and his fascination with the creepy, exhibitionistic jester Firlefanz (Wolfram Haack – also a co-writer), whose grotesque puppets enact a gay fairy tale paralleling the relationship of Stefan and Jockel. Central to the disintegration of these characters is the bloated drug dealer Ingolf (Harry Baer), who 'pulls their strings' with heroin, instead of puppet wires. The film's strongest aspect is the performers, especially Laarmann, Stadler and Stock, but virtually all of the performances feel right – even when the movie's implied worldview, discussed below, feels horribly forced. It is the only motion picture done by the talented Stefan Laarmann. He brought his self-named character to life with fullness and offered a perspective which could have salvaged the entire picture. For most of the cast, Stock relies on an improvisatory approach, using actual residents of West Berlin's multi-ethnic – and defiantly countercultural – Kreuzberg neighborhood (Stadtteil Kreuzberg), along a remote part of the then-recently fallen Berlin Wall. The Kreuzberg stretches along a half mile of the Landwehrkanal, which crosses east and west through the city. The film's primary location was authentic: a so-called Wagenburg (literally 'car castle' – the subtitles translate it as 'caravan'), where people live out of their trucks and cars, sometimes covered in wild graffiti. In the brief German Wikipedia article on this little-documented film, Stock reportedly said that he just shot the people around him. (Speaking of the subtitles, US audiences may find a periodic jolt of double culture shock, as the German slang is Britishized with terms like 'sod' and 'wanker.') The picture offers some solid technical elements, including Moss Fitzpatrick's beguilingly grotesque puppets; Lorenz Haarmann's cinematography – which captures the disoriented feel of this world; Margarete Heitmueller's sound – which is simultaneously naturalistic and symbolic, as when she counterpoints street noises with the characters' shifting emotional states (most dramatic is her use of drumming during the chicken slaughter – don't bother looking in the credits for the standard disclaimer about "no animals were harmed;" it's unlikely that the bird had a stunt double); Uwe Lauterkorn's crisp editing. (Haarmann and Heitmueller have had continuous professional careers in their fields.) All of these elements also work together to create a strong rhythm which keeps this hour-and-a-half film moving. But good editing is not the same as good narrative construction. After its opening five minutes, focused on Jockel and Stefan, film turns to a second intriguing major perspective, that of the young boy Sascha, trapped in the film's chaotic world of broken-down caravans, drug addiction, and sharing your living space with goats and pigs. Viewing adult experience through the lens of childhood is a difficult but potentially rewarding technique, as Henry James revealed in his groundbreaking psychological 1897 novel What Maisie Knew, a tale of a dysfunctional family told entirely from the young daughter's point of view. Such a radical shift in perspective can reveal much about both the young observer and the objects of their inquiring gaze. Cinema offers several rich examples of this insightful strategy, including such otherwise divergent films as Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados (1950), René Clément's Forbidden Games (1952), Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (1955), Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter (1955), and Wim Wenders's Alice in the Cities (1974). If only Michael Stock had boned up on them, instead of Ulrich Edel's grim teen drug movie, Christiane F. (1981), which the main characters in Prince in Hell mention they had recently seen on TV. (Trivia buffs take note: Edel broke successfully into directing US film and television with Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989), based on the novel by Hubert Selby Jr., whose book Requiem for a Dream, as shrewdly filmed by Darren Aronofsky in 2000, is arguably the best picture about drug addiction.) The boy Nils-Leevke Schmidt is very talented in his scenes, but he made no other films, and one can surmise that he was a non-professional actor. Let me respectfully speculate that perhaps it was technically not feasible to use Sascha as the film's defining perspective. A couple of minutes later, yet a third major narrative strategy pops up, as we're forced to see the action from the point of view of the repellant jester Firlefanz, whose eye makeup is a telling cross between that of Klaus Maria Brandauer in Istvan Szabo's Mephisto (1981) and Divine in John Waters's Pink Flamingos (1972 – from the final scene of which Stock steals wholesale for this film's wretchedly unsatisfying end, discussed below in the "spoiler" section). Firlefanz seems intended as a sort of part-Mephistopheles (shades of Mephisto, mentioned above) and part-Shakespearean jester, like the one in King Lear – although Stock might have been more specifically thinking of Ran (1985), in which Kurosawa both expands the Fool, renamed Kyoami, and makes him transgendered. But actor and co-writer Wolfram Haack, who receives top billing in the end credits, lacks the range to bring any credible depth to what should have been the film's most provocative role. What makes Firlefanz so skin-crawlingly grotesque is not so much his garish, and derivative, make-up; rather it's the feeling that here is a person profoundly out of touch not only with the world around him (in costume, he parades his naked groin up and down the crowded streets of the Kreuzberg) but with himself. Haack depicts the extremity of self-loathing – yet his writing and performance seem merely a pose, rather than a thematic device which could have enriched the film by providing an extreme emotional perspective on this world. A richly disturbing – and completely succesful – example of this type of character is Thersites in Shakespeare's deconstruction of the Trojan War, Troilus and Cressida; that play has a worldview as bleak as the one here, but Shakespeare's genius as both psychologist and poet allows his creation both life, as a deformed man (both externally and internally), and philosophical/moral insight into the deluded Greeks and Trojans, not least the romance-besotted couple of the play's title (whose emotional instability would make them feel right at home in this movie's world). Firlefanz stages – for a bunch of wide-eyed but clearly impoverished kiddies – a gay puppet show called "The Prince in Hell," which all too obviously parallels, but never illuminates, the main story of Jockel and Stefan. Even worse, Firlefanz's play is about the impossibility not only of love but specifically of same-sex love, when one of the character finds he prefers "magical mushrooms" to his stalwart boyfriend. Don't these kids get enough gay-denigrating messages from the mainstream culture? In fact, the Firlefanz through-line becomes profoundly distasteful, as he dangles his manhood in virtually every scene, even around his young audience. With the US's Federal Communications Commission now imposing a fine of $500,000 for each "indecent incident," Firlefanz's exhibitionism alone would have cost this film hundreds of millions of dollars, which is rather more than its total budget.

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