The Drifter as a new handmaid's tale
Tatjana Turanskyj's feature debut The Drifter, which saw its world premiere in Berlin's Forum selection, demonstrates the director's auteur traits and while challenging audiences with an economic fable. The film recently screened in competition at the Crossing Europe Film Festival in Linz.
The film begins with Greta (Mira Partecke) staggering wildly in an empty field before flashing back to a lesson in Marxist theory delivered by a former economist and sex worker. This will be no ordinary entertainment.
Cut loose from her career as an architect in the middle of her life, Greta has no support. Her acquaintances are middle-aged intellectuals know colloquially as Gammelfleisch – old meat. Her son and ex-husband want nothing to do with her. The most supportive men in her life comprise a covey of gay artists. The females are either collaborators with the male hegemony or are slowly being ground down by drink and the slow corrosion of frustrated sexuality.
Greta is kin to Margaret Atwood's Offred (and George Orwell's Winston Smith) but she finds no resistance to join — only the incomplete solace of the bottle.
The story takes place in Berlin of hostile, uninhabited spaces — a no-man's land — where women exist only to fill set roles. For the new breed of successful woman, the city, particularly as an environment for work, is a system, a series of formulas. Greta (and Jenny Barth's camera) still see it as a persisting physical space with a history. Children play in a new park in the shadow of Potsdamerplatz. Greta wanders through an open-air museum on the site of former Gestapo and SS headquarters.
At one point, Greta is corned by an angry, post-modern hausfrau who accuses her of trespassing. She responds with an impromptu critique of the gated community: “A private road, in middle of Berlin. With surveillance. That's paranoid. And symptomatic of the new German mainstream. It speaks of security psychosis, cleanliness and uniformity. And ecologically correct at the same time”.
It is unclear whether Greta is accusing contemporary Berlin's petit bourgeoisie of the kind of conformism that lead to the Nazi state, or if she is parodying such an accusation. Or if she even knows herself (she is drunk much of the time). The Drifter at times approaches Jean-Luc Godard's Week End as an indictment of modern society, but Greta never loses her humanity, even as it becomes increasingly inconvenient.
The Drifter is produced by the director's company Turanskyj & Ahlrichs, which also handles international sales.
Did you enjoy reading this article? Please subscribe to our newsletter to receive more stories like this directly in your inbox.
