DAS FRÄULEIN (Andrea Staka, 2006)

From Switzerland, Das Fräulein (top prize, Locarno) was written by three women: Andrea Staka, who also directed, Barbara Albert and Marie Kreutzer. Coincidentally, it is a film about three women: Ruza, who came to Zurich from Yugoslavia thirty years earlier, that is, before the Balkan Wars, and who now owns and runs a canteen (“The best view to have is the view one chooses”), and two members of her staff, Mila, who is older, and just-arrived Ana, who may be 22. Both also are former Yugoslavs. We find out later that Ana is dying of leukemia.
     The film opens with one of Ruza’s dreaming flashbacks: set to Balkan folk music, an idyllic scene of a hand, perhaps her father’s, at work on the land. This pre-credit sequence abruptly ends, like a dream, or perhaps a memory one doesn’t quite trust. Mila’s husband, who is driven to return with Mila to the former Yugoslavia, is busy spending money to have a new house built there for them to move into; this would mean leaving behind their two grown children. Ana isn’t sure just where she wants to be. She remarks to Ruza, “Nobody calls it Yugoslavia anymore.” Ruza still does; she has no reason not to. The film ends abruptly as one of the three women is heading back to “Yugoslavia.”
     The warm bond that develops between Ruza and Ana is the soul of this brilliant film that significantly adds to our grasp of the experience of immigrants and their ongoing connection to “homeland.” In its course, Ana asks a remarkable rhetorical question: “Do you know the feeling when you think you’re thirsty, and you stop and think and realize that what you actually feel is longing?”
     None of the women is “representative”; each is herself.

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FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)

The supporting cast is fine, but Joel McCrea and Laraine Day in the lead roles mark Foreign Correspondent as one of Alfred Hitchcock’s weakest films. A loose, farfetched script also contributes to the disappointing result. But as propaganda aimed at U.S. neutrality just before and early on in the Second World War, the film is highly effective. Jonnie Jones, rechristened by his editor Huntley Haverstock, himself initially an innocent abroad in European politics, becomes an American foreign correspondent rallying his countrymen to the cause against Adolf Hitler. Through him, Hitchcock, who had moved from his native Britain to the U.S., is thus able to “feel at home” on both sides of the Atlantic. Haverstock’s new, expanded loyalty, which includes a British sweetheart, becomes a means by which Hitchcock justifies his transplantation and reunites imaginatively with his British countrymen.
     The most interesting and moving character is Stephen Fisher, who heads the Universal Peace Party as a cover for German loyalty and Nazi identity. (As with Jones, his is a “masked” existence.) Herbert Marshall is superb as this character, who ultimately sacrifices his life to save others, including his daughter. Strong also is Albert Basserman[n] as Van Meer, a kidnapped Dutch diplomat; the actor’s own immigration to England as a German Jew fleeing Hitler resonates perfectly in this role.
     Visually, the film includes a number of coups; chief among them is a repeated tableau, in the room where Van Meer is being held, that was inspired by an underground scene in Fritz Lang’s M (1931); by this time Lang, a favorite of Hitchcock’s, had left Hitler’s Germany for Hollywood. Moreover, the initial passage inside the mill, with its grays and eerily diffuse lighting, reminds one that Rudolf Mâté had also cinematographed Carl Theodor Dreyer’s wondrous Vampyr (1931).

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