Sous les ponts

"Under the Bridges", made in the last year of the Third Reich, proves that artistic genius can flourish even under the most difficult circumstances. The film completely transcends its time and presents a simple love story, the themes of which are universal. Through both his settings and his actors, Kautner achieves a naturalism which has seldom been equaled. That he managed to do this in 1944-45 Germany is almost unbelievable. A fortunate and unexpected treasure from a most unfortunate time.

Made in the last year of the Third Reich by Helmut Käutner, one of the major figures of post-War German cinema, UNDER THE BRIDGES decisively shucks off its cardinal historical hallmark and taps into an alternative realm where warfare and defeatism make no trespass in its blueprint. A proletarian love triangle between one woman and two men which predates Truffaut's JULES AND JIM (1962), but in Käunter's head space, ménage à trois is a too risqué cop-out, monogamy is still the keynote and one of the two men must be friend-zoned.

The two bachelors are Hendrik (Raddatz) and Willy (Knuth), good friends and co-owners of a towed barge, who lament that living and working on the Havel river has taken a heavy toll on their chance of meeting a decent woman and getting married. Even their taste for the opposite sex is quite similar, both dally with a waitress called Vera (Grabley), who cannot choose between them because sometimes she cannot tell them apart, so naming a fatty goose Vera is their petty revenge, and Vera the goose will meet a very sorry ending when the suitors move onto their next target.

One night, they accidentally clock that there is a distressed girl leaning on the bridge's balustrade and it seems that she is going to jump but instead, she drops a 10-mark note into the water. And in the quirks of fate, the young girl Anna (Schroth) takes shelter on their barge while they sail toward Berlin where she lives on her lonesome. Both men take a fancy to her, whereas Anna is too defensive to reciprocate hers, and after learning that she earns her 10 marks from modeling, it casts a shadow on their courtship, and strains the bonhomie between the two men, whereupon Willy abandons their Amsterdam freight delivery and stays in Berlin with Anna, but her heart wants what it wants (a little friction is always the best catalyst of romance), three months later, everyone will find his or hers right place, on the barge of course.

Gauged as a progenitor of poetic realism, UNDER THE BRIDGES is visibly eking out its skimpy sustenance but graced with a beguiling silver allure (although the restoration is far from immaculate) through its embracing of both classic stock-in-trade (soft focus, glamorous close-ups, stark chiaroscuro) and unconventional montage choices (Dutch angles, heady editing, rustling flashback shots etc.), and remarkably, Käunter holds the central story tenably empathetic through its rational building of his three protagonists' inscape. Hannelore Schroth comports herself as a melancholic damsel-in-distress, but not without touching niceties; Carl Raddatz gives a convincing turn in solidifying Hendrik's amenable yet skeptical make-up and Gustav Knuth zippily runs away with his avuncular innocuousness.

In a word, UNDER THE BRIDGES is a heart-winning romantic imbroglio level-headedly earns its auspicious ending fair and square, a fitting morale booster and divertissement to its frazzled populace of the time.

This can be considered one of the very last films to be made in Nazi Germany - it passed the censorship in March 1945, but for obvious reasons didn't make it to the cinemas as the street battles were about to commence in Berlin in a few weeks. It's true that at least three new movies had their opening nights in Berlin as late as in March 1945, and reportedly two in April, which seems quite unbelievable. In most of his films Helmut Käutner succeeds in creating a world of his own, a sort of microcosm that holds only the people that we see on the screen. He did also excel in historical costume epics, but his forte was a simple, intimate film about what goes on in the soul. People often wonder, how is it possible that Käutner managed to create his films which are seemingly totally free of any kind of propaganda or references to the war and destruction around him during the time when propaganda was becoming the only remaining weaponry. But I don't think that's quite true: if Under the Bridges were made in a period of peace, it would totally lack the mesmerizing feeling that is attached to this film as we view in proper context. Suddenly it becomes amazingly human, allowing us to realize that even as most of the people in Germany must have thought they were facing total destruction and annihilation literally any day soon, they still kept living and loving and at some point the inner world must have eclipsed the world outside, were death was running amok. Being of the generation that hasn't seen war, I can only imagine how intense one's love or loneliness can grow in the world where there seems to be no tomorrow.

Whatever the story or the genre, Käutner manages to find aspects that make it interesting and wake a lot of human compassion. His storage of empathy and his skills to share it are bottomless. He truly was a great maker of great films about little people.

This truly exceptional film, considered by its director Helmut Kautner to be his best, is even more remarkable in that it was filmed in arduous conditions during allied bombing raids and less than an hour's drive from the ravages of war in Berlin. The director, cast and crew were lucky for in Kautner's words: "We lived dreamily alongside time and distracted ourselves from all the horror through work."

It depicts working-class lives in the poetic realist style of Marcel Carné and echoes the lyricism of Vigo's 'L' Atalante'. Courtesy of cinematographer Igor Oberberg it is an etude of light and shadow whilst the haunting theme tune by Bernard Eichhorn is perfectly suited to the film's elegiac, melancholic mood.

Renowned for his gift with actors Kautner has drawn splendid performances from Hannelore Schroth, Carl Raddatz and Helmut Knuth, all of them familiar to German audiences. There is a simpatico between Schroth and Raddatz which is hardly surprising as they were husband and wife, albeit briefly.

Classified as a 'defector' film, one of those completed at the end of the National Socialist era but not premiered until after cessation of hostilities this masterpiece epitomises Kautner's refusal to use his work in the service of Nazi ideology which enabled him to pursue a highly personal approach to mainstrean cinema. As a result he is one of the true 'auteurs'.

Cinéphiles are obliged to shift tons of **** in order to find a diamond and discovering this beautifully realised, heart-winning film makes the effort worthwhile.

Another comment said that this film "completely transcends its time". That's true, but I wonder how the contemporary audience interpreted this "transcendence". Was not-talking-about-war in the last days of WW2 understood as talking about war in a different way or simply as escapism?