Could be kitsch. Two hands that have history. Side by side on the coffee house table. Almost touch. move away. Drive down their lifelines at some point. Then a cell phone buzzes. The hands twitch apart as if to apologize for the closeness.
It is night in Leipzig. Yellow light drips from the lamps on the platform. Two women in the station bar that looks like Edward Hopper in bottle green. The women ran into each other. Because they don’t get ahead. Leipzig is a terminal station. Two women with more history behind them than ahead of them.
Christa (Martina Gedeck) clears the rubbish out of the wagons. Birgitt (Nastassja Kinski) washes other people’s hair. Christa has cherry pits with her, and she talked about it with the hairdresser with the impossible hairstyle. She wants to plant them at home in the yard. And then she wants to become a cherry seller.
She says. And they both know that she looks like a child doing it. And is proud of it. A shine is back in their faces. Like stars, like satellites in the night.
The film about Christa and Birgitt is called “The Silent Trabants”. And about Jens and Aischa, about Erik and Marika. And about a few other couples and passers-by.
Thomas Stuber shot it. It is based on three stories from the volume of stories of the same name that was published five years ago by Stuber’s friend and favorite source Clemens Meyer. Three stories of people who run into each other, who are touched by each other, who get involved with each other.
Three stories that hardly touch each other and very rarely cross paths. They orbit each other like satellites. What connects them are the spaces, the light, the faces that sometimes appear like moons out of the darkness around them. What connects them above all is the night over Leipzig. “The Silent Trabants” is a two-hour nocturne.
Stuber and Meyer are doing again what is not actually done in German film, in German literature. If they ever research society at all, they measure the supposed middle class, its crisis, its collapse. German film and German literature are terraced houses. Stuber and Meyer take care of the prefabricated buildings, the fringe groups, the broken ones, the people at the turning hammer.
In the forklift melodrama “In the Aisles” they demonstrated how this can be done. How to tell big stories about supposedly small people. Those that the average medium-sized company doesn’t notice, about those behind the scenes that have to work so that everything works. How they live, how they live with it, how they run into each other. It was playing somewhere in no man’s land outside of Leipzig. Between supermarket shelves. Anyone who has seen it goes shopping differently. Maybe live differently.
“The Silent Trabants” is an episodic drama from the inside of urban mechanics. But start in the country. A wide field guarded by windmills on the horizon. It’s light. It’s summer.
Then a group of road workers heard loud wailing. A child has died. Lies in a group of refugees, mourned by the mother. Autumn crocus had eaten it. Hamed (Adel Bencherif), the refugee among the road workers, translates. Hans, the foreman, can’t believe it.
he says later. Hans (Peter Kurth) is no longer a road worker, he is guarding a refugee hostel. That they went so far, he says, the refugees. And then this girl dies so miserably. That changed him.
Stuber and Meyer clearly have no desire to provide the West German medium-sized company with another clichéd picture of the lost East, which is doomed to sink into the brown swamp.
From the twilight over Leipzig they bring deep-sharp figures. have the dignity And warmth. The longing for and the unconditional but slightly buried ability to change. Who are not lost, but on the way.
Like Bridget and Christa. Like Erik (Charly Hübner), who tells his buddy and security colleague Hans on the walkie-talkie how much the Ukrainian refugee girl Marika (Irina Starshenbaum) touches him. She’s wearing a military coat. She swings in the playground. She makes the tall man, trapped in his (sexual) desires, almost weightless.
Or like Jens (Albrecht Schuch). He grills sausages and steak, sometimes he makes bad jokes about “Arabs”. And then he stands next to Aischa (Lilith Stangenberg) on the balcony of the prefab stairwell. It’s night. The lights in the houses gradually go out like satellites. Aisha used to be called Jana. She is with Hamed, who translated at the dead of autumn crocus. Hamed and Jens almost become friends.
Aisha has terrible scars under her headscarf on her hands. Jens wants to know what happened, what saved her, how she thinks she found happiness in the Koran, whether that might also find him… They almost touch, then move away again. Scare and recognize each other.
The wind likes to blow like in Christian Petzold’s films when things get magical. The characters are alive (which is perhaps not a big surprise considering the ensemble). They stay (which is a beautiful miracle). There is dancing. Not everything is told. Loose ends remain. All is not well. It’s like life.
“The Silent Trabants” is with its unconditional belief in the possibilities of humanity, which does not seem desperate at all, the unconditional belief that people give themselves warmth even in the coldest times, that they can open up like cherry stones in the ground, perhaps the most beautiful Christmas film of the year .
One without Christmas, without glamor and remarkably free from socio-romantic misery, full of weird angels with broken wings. Could be kitsch. But it is not.
