Fräulein Berlin

With almost no rules and no aesthetics, Lothar Lambert captures fragmentary images and scenes that have the amateur sense of a family video.

But through these simple, often delusional scenes, sometimes something emerges. Something that has a taste of tragedy under a cold, neutral surface.

Black and white primitive images convey a force from nowhere and overturn all clichés. Poor images that Ulrike's presence gives them the strange feeling as if someone is being born before our eyes.

An actress trying to escape from the margin but at the same time she has a constant contact with reality.

-Where is Fraulein Berlin, she shallbe asked at the end.

-She doesn't exist any more, is the answer...

This (very) low budget film is certainly not for all tastes; it is a film you either can open up for, or dismiss from the start. What we see is not a linear story, but the images and sound of Fräulein Berlin's experiences of what is happening with and around her. Whether it was shortage of money, done on purpose or just by accident, I do not know, but this film-sensual underground film with its granular and sometimes out of focus and thereby dreamlike image and a-synchronous sound is rewarding viewing, though it should have been much shorter: Lambert was probably too much in love with the results to have the courage to cut some of the boring parts, as he keeps repeating scenes which do not add much: another fortune-teller, another talk with her agent, the S&M fight that never seems to end, etc. He makes excellent use of Ulrike S. photogenic appearance.

The fascination with American culture and particularly its film industry is a leading thread in the German cinema (industry) since the beginning of cinema and this underground film is no exception. It shows underground actress Fräulein Berlin (played by the Ulrike S.) trying her luck first in Toronto meeting Norman Jewison and then in New York meeting Jim Jarmush; all she gets are empty promises. The film also painfully shows that she is not treated - neither by the industry nor her American boy-friend - as a woman, but primarily as a German woman. In a park a man masturbates while she is singing in German the song "Lili Marleen": it is the connotation with the German language that excites him.

But Lambert is not too friendly to the established German culture as well. Fräulein Berlin is not very welcome to the cultural events of the high-brow Goethe institute; she is not asked for a part by any other director than the exploitative one she has worked with.

It has a nice soundtrack with songs accentuating the mood the protagonist is in. When she has enough of New York and says to herself "Scheiß Amerika", the song "Who wants to be a millionaire?" from High Society is heard "True Love" from the same film is heard when she makes love to her boy-friend. These tracks and other ones show Lambert's fascination with the American film industry and his ambivalence towards it.