Review: Till the End of the Night
by David Katz
- BERLINALE 2023: Berlin School stalwart Christoph Hochhäusler returns big time with this queer neo-noir, a piece of pulp Fassbinder
The City Below [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Christoph Hochhäusler
film profile], Christoph Hochhäusler’s previously best-known feature, famously ends on an enigmatic, apocalyptic note: ensconced in a glassy hotel penthouse, a sleazy banking executive and his mistress gaze onto the lower Frankfurt streets, as a flurry of civilians desperately flee something. There’s no continuity shot: it might be a terrorist attack, but a possible utopian reading is seeing it as a liberatory spin on the Lumière brothers – the workers finally “escaping” the factory. Till the End of the Night [+see also:
trailer
interview: Christoph Hochhäusler
film profile], premiering on the final day of the Berlinale competition, almost entirely takes place at this ground level: an even, rectilinear space of boxy condominiums and floodlit, suburban tennis courts. And we sense the characters would similarly flee if they could.
Initially trained as an architect – something very palpable in his tidy, precise mise-en-scène – Hochhäusler was also a notable film critic, founding the German cinephile bible Revolver, and Till the End of the Night aptly has many echoes from Fassbinder’s trans melodrama In the Year of 13 Moons, just as The City Below contained on-the-nose quotations from Hitchcock, Antonioni and Roeg. It’s an unashamed thriller, or policier, with all the trimmings: pulpy, but not a potboiler. Yet like more thrillers than aficionados of the genre might admit, the plot structure continually doubles back on itself, hastily improvised and affixed together as if with duct tape and staples, and logic is always sublimated for a sense of rhythmic flow.
We’re in a world of small town crime with global repercussions, as narcs, marks, handlers and inside men exchange intel and betrayals, and any sense of guiding morality is gradually moot. Robert (Timocin Ziegler) is an undercover police detective on the trail of major drug traffickers, but is certainly partial to a rail himself; his lieutenant’s ace in the hole is Leni (Thea Ehre), who in her former identity as a man, was Robert’s lover. Leni is granted conditional release from her own prison sentence – for selling speed as a street dealer to fund her transition – to create a sham relationship with Robert, capitalising on a former acquaintance, the dark web drug e-commerce baron Victor Arth (Michael Sideris), from their time in Germany’s famous electronic music scene.
It’s not that a viewer should be cautious of taking the above at face value, but rather that things – and questions of desire, as is the film’s thesis – are always more complicated; it’s more that underlying truths about these events have yet to reveal themselves. Perhaps audiences will find the flimsiness and sketchiness of the portrayal of international crime – the spartan, distilled quality Hochhäusler captures – a threat to the suspension of disbelief a thriller requires. But this is also a tale of complicated queer desire and sexual confusion, perched above and within a labyrinth of vice; can Robert love Leni in her new body, and is this business “relationship” (pun very much intended) a way to further subject her to punishment and submission? A very memorable sex scene late in the film, which could be described as “vehicular frottage”, wonderfully incarnates these contradictions, and crowns a fine comeback for Hochhäusler.
Till the End of the Night is a German production staged by Heimatfilm, in co-production with WDR and ARTE. World sales are courtesy of The Match Factory.
Photogallery 24/02/2023: Berlinale 2023 - Till the End of the Night
21 pictures available. Swipe left or right to see them all.
© 2023 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it
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