PANORAMA SPECIAL Calm At Sea REVIEWED BY JONATHAN ROMNEY


Veteran director Volker Schlöndorff — a pioneer of New German Cinema turned dependable interna- tional classicist — offers a conventional yet affect- ing piece of wartime drama that depicts a bleak incident in Occupied France. The co-production, making uneven use of a German-French ensemble cast, looks at an epi- sode during the Second World War that allows Schlöndorff to bring together some images of


French and German period types — and some real-life figures — that, at their best, are a variation on the usual war-movie characterisations. While this is a strictly old-school production


that verges on the stolid — and at moments is out- right clumsy — nevertheless the sense of new light cast on a little-narrated drama should make Calm At Sea (La Mer A L’Aube) a solid middle-brow export. Based on real-life events, the film is scripted by


Schlöndorff from the writings of journalist Pierre- Louis Basse, German officer and famed author Ernst Jünger and novelist Heinrich Böll, one of whose stories finds its way into the drama through


The Virgin, The Copts And Me REVIEWED BY LEE MARSHALL


The Virgin, The Copts And Me, an alternately hilari- ous, moving and illuminating first-person docu- mentary, ostensibly about miraculous apparitions of the Virgin Mary to Coptic Christians in Egypt, comes on at times like the work of a French-Egyp- tian Morgan Spurlock. But there is less spin and showmanship in the mix here. And in the end, the film overcomes the post-modern games it has been playing to give us a touching insight into the lives and dreams of villagers in a remote area of Egypt. That said, Messeeh is a wonderfully deadpan


centrepiece for a documentary in which the ‘mak- ing of ’ becomes the work itself. And the director is also well aware there is great audience enjoyment to be derived from his stubborn relationship with his bossy, emotional mother, who becomes the most memorable character of a film she is sure will be a failure — “just like your last,” she tells her son. Culture-TV cable action is assured, but The Vir-


gin… could book one or two theatrical slots as well — beginning with its most obvious territory, France — if distributors can work out a way to market to wider arthouse audiences a film that sounds from its title and strapline like an ultra- niche religious documentary. After roping in a French producer, Messeeh


travels to Cairo but comes up against stonewalling and suspicion on both sides of what can be a tense


n 6 Screen International at the Berlinale February 16, 2012 PANORAMA


Fr-Qat. 2011. 93mins Director/producer Namir Abdel Messeeh Production companies Oweda Films, Doha Film Institute International sales Doc & Film International, www. docandfilm.com Screenplay Namir Abdel Messeeh, Nathalie Najem, Anne Paschetta Cinematography Nicolas Duchene Editor Sebastien De Sainte Croix


religious divide. A few witnesses of a 1968 appari- tion of the Virgin in Zeitoun are interviewed — including a couple of Muslims. But frustrated both by his lack of progress and


his own uncertainty about whether he has found the right way into the subject, Messeeh continues on to the remote country district from which his parents hail — despite having been told by his mother, via Skype, she will sue him if he dares to rope the family into his film. Further comic obsta-


cles come when his producer — whose increasingly irritable phone messages we overhear — pulls the funding because Messeeh seems uninterested in making the hard-hitting documentary he expects. So it is a slightly mollified but still combative


mum who takes over the financing of the film, which closes hilariously, and also with a certain throat-catching emotion, with a reconstruction of a miraculous apparition of the Virgin starring a cast of family and villagers.


Fr-Ger. 2011. 89mins Director/screenplay Volker Schlöndorff Production companies Les Canards Sauvages, Provobis Film International sales Provobis Film, office@ provobis.de Producers Bruno Petit, Thomas Teubner, Martin Choroba Cinematographer Lubomir Bakchev Editor Susanne Hartmann Production design Stéphane Makedonsky Music Bruno Coulais Main cast Léo-Paul Salmain, Marc Barbé, Martin Loizillon, Philippe Résimont, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Ulrich Matthes, Jacob Matschenz, André Jung


the character of a young German soldier, Otto (Matschenz). The story begins in 1941, in an internment


camp in Occupied France where, as well as petty criminals, political prisoners — notably members of the Communist Party — have been imprisoned under the guard of French gendarmes. Among the prisoners are Timbaut (Barbé), a committed Marxist and a senior figure among the internees, and 17-year-old Guy Moquet (newcomer Léo-Paul Salmain), a romantically inclined poetry lover who in reality became a symbolic martyr figure for Free France and has a Paris Métro station named after him. In Nantes, three Resistance fighters assassinate


a German officer — and, at German HQ in Paris, occupying commander General von Stülpnagel (Jung) receives orders from Hitler that reprisals must be taken — in the form of the deaths of no fewer than 150 French people. Stülpnagel objects to the measure, as does the fastidious Jünger (Mat- thes), an aesthete with a love of French culture (and French women — see the cameo by Arielle Dombasle). Nevertheless, it is decided that a list of 30 vic-


tims should be drawn up from the camp — the list including, above all, Communists such as Tim- baut, but also Moquet and, in a bitter irony, his young friend Lalet (Loizillon) who is due to be released the next day. The film is undeniably stiff and stagey, some-


times downright corny — notably when we hear the superimposed final thoughts of the characters, as they write their farewell letters. But the final firing-squad scenes, as three groups of men are dispatched in turn, achieve real dramatic and emotional heft, with the young Otto’s reaction giving the episode an affectingly unusual skew.


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