The Refugee in the Alex
For the last several months, I have been watching Rainer Fassbinder’s 1980 miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz. I’ve really taken a strong liking to this series despite not really liking Franz as a person. I understand that he’s an antihero, so I don’t have to like him, nor do I have to root for him. But the reason why I stuck this series out is because Franz’s story is very fascinating. So fascinating that I bought the novel that the film is based on, written by Alfred Döblin, in English and in German. It also is why I plan to watch the first film adaptation from 1931, directed by Piel-Jutzi. But the one version I had been the most interested in watching was Burhan Qurbani’s Berlin Alexanderplatz.
In this version of Berlin Alexanderplatz, Franz is named Francis, and he is an undocumented refugee from Bissau. I don’t want to spoil the story for anyone, but to paraphrase the narrative: Francis tries to be good, is knocked down a few times, and suffers great heartache. Along the way he runs into Reinhold, a disabled criminal who is part of a criminal organization in Berlin. He also falls in love with a sex worker named by Eva and befriends a queer couple, Eva and Berta. There is also Pums, the head of the criminal organization.
The original story of Franz has been adapted as a story about life as an undocumented refugee in Berlin. It shows how easy it can be to fall into the world of crime when you’re not afforded many legal options. Francis does work construction at night for a while, but his insistence on doing the right thing results in him losing his job. So how can you really be upset with him for taking the options that will feed him and keep a roof over his head? It is not easy to survive in a new country when you have no papers and haven’t fully learned the language?
The film is visually gorgeous and beautifully framed. I loved the lighting in many of the scenes, especially the use of bright neon colors. It felt like eye candy at times and was very stylized, but in a way that made me want to fall deeper into the scenes that were playing out. I will say that there wasn’t quite enough of the actual Alexanderplatz in the film, and I would have liked more scenes in the city itself. But I won’t complain too much, especially since there were also some sublime scenes of forests in the film, which I can’t go into too much without spoiling things.
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Welket Bungué as Francis/Franz: wow. Just wow. He was fantastic! He dripped charisma and commanded my attention in nearly every single scene he was in. I was really engrossed in his interpretation of Franz and, in a way Günter Lamprecht quite couldn’t for me, he had me often wishing I could be there to console him in his most painful moments. When he suffered, I felt like my heartstrings were being gripped and tugged. I felt like he did a fantastic job overall.
Jella Haas plays a wonderfully dynamic Mieze, far less passive than in the Fassbinder adaptation. It was also cool to see her in something else after first seeing her in Kleo. She’s a fantastic actress and I would like to see her in more stuff. Albrecht Schuh plays a fantastic Reinhold, equally cruel and charming. I feel that he embodied a similar energy as John Gottlieb did in the Fassbinder adaptation, very snaky and morally bankrupt. Yet you can see why he grabbed Francis’s heart the way he did.
For my fellow US Americans: one thing that I will warn about is that there is a bit of casual racism in this movie. There’s racism against Africans and SWANA people, the use of the n-word in German, and a few other slurs. It’s meant to show what immigrants and refugees have to deal with there, but I wanted to at least give fair warning to people who may want to avoid that. I personally found it jarring at times and I think that at one point the message gets a bit muddled, though I think the attempt by Qurbani is to show how people will overlook how their oppressors treat them in return for favors (money, the appearance of a friendship, etc.). There is also racism that a non-German speaker might miss through a scene where Reinhold tells one of the African men to “friss” instead of “iss”. “Friss” is the imperative of “fressen” and “iss” is the imperative of “essen”. Both words mean “to eat,” but “fressen” is used for animals and “essen” is used for humans. It’s intentionally dehumanizing and meant to show that Reinhold is a massive piece of shit.
I’d recommend this film if you’re interested in international cinema and like dramas or crime dramas. It has a lot of English, so it’s probably a bit easier to follow for English speakers. It’s moving, gorgeous, and it left me feeling a bit more hopeful for Francis’s future since the epilogue ends on a far happier note than the original story from the novel or previous film adaptations. It’s certainly worth your time and it’ll keep your attention. I personally forgot that it was a three-hour long film and that’s a rarity for me. I’d definitely recommend it when you get the free time to watch something.
