Die Fälschung" means "the false witness, which is somewhere in the semantic range of the more poetic English-language title "Circle of Deceit" given to the docudrama the great German New Wave director Volker Schlöndorff (Young Törless, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Coup de Grâce, The Ogre, The Legend of Rita) shot in Beirut that -- already in 1981 -- seemed to have been torn by civil wars between Christian and Muslim Arabs for a long time. I was, alas, disappointed both by the movie and by the DVD.

The quite unlikable protagonist of the story is a German reporter named Georg Laschen (Bruno Ganz [Wings of Desire, Hitler in "Downfall"]), who jumps at the chance to leave his strained marriage to Greta (Gila von Weitershausen) and already neglected children for the adrenaline rushes of a war zone (any war zone). He is accompanied to Beirut by a photographer, Hoffmann (Polish film director Jerzy Skolimowski, who recently played Naomi Watts's sour uncle in Eastern Promises), who is frequently irritated by the various irresponsibilities of Laschen as his partner (though it seems to me that Laschen saves Hoffman from serious trouble with various armed men several times).

The atrocities perplex Georg Laschen. Civil wars seem to be his beat and he has taken violence in stride in other stories, but is increasingly seeing himself as living lies and what he hopes is testimony of inhumanity he is coming to believe increases the smugness of those who read his stories over a breakfast in comfortable settings and feel psychologically more comfortable knowing that nastiness is somewhere far away. (Laschen works for a German news service and Hitler casts a shadow that does not go entirely unremarked).

While in Beirut, Laschen has an ambiguous relationship with a woman who works at the (closed) German embassy, the German-born widow of an Arab. Arianna Nassar, played by Fassbinder's muse Hanna Schygulla (The Marriage of Maria Braun, Effi Briest, etc.), wants a child. Catholic orphanage nuns are not going to let someone who has no husband (and, worse, had an Arab one) adopt a Christian orphan and the Arabs, she says, see each child as a future fighter and are not going to give one up to a European, even if she did have an Arab husband.

In addition to bedding Arianna, Laschen gets involved in her attempt to secure an infant. (The mix of journalists and orphans was done better, later in Welcome to Sarajevo, though the two kinds of stories still don't fit together all that comfortably in it.)

I didn't much care what happened to Arianna, and did not care at all what happened to Laschen, either before he shed the blood of another or after he washed it off his body and clothes.

The music by Maurice Jarre (Lawrence of Arabia, Eyes Without a Face) is obtrusive, but effective in heightening the alienation that Laschen feels amidst the horrors he is there to report on. The film gets some credit for being shot in Beirut amidst the carnage (the actors and crew could easily have been shot), but other than the music, there is little in it that registers on me (jaded by too much violence televised from too many points on the globe? unsurprised at how happy many on both side were to pose for photographs...). I don't think the failed marriage and the breakdown of order and any civility in Lebanon have anything meaningful to say to or about each other. The wallowing in despair about anything seems more Fassbinder than Schlöndorff -- and what I most dislike in Fassbinder films! The somewhat operatic staging of domestic discord also seems more Fassbinder than Schlöndorff. Similarly, incoherence is more expectable in Fassbinder than in Schlöndorff films. In Fassbinder's case some of the incoherence can be attributed to the speed at which he churned out movies (and plays). I guess

Adding insult to injury, is that neither the "Making of" featurette nor the interview with Schlöndorff played on the DVD (only the stills gallery in which I had no interest). I was hoping to hear from Schlöndorff what it was that he had been trying to do. Like the other great master of the German New Wave, Werner Herzog, Schlöndorff is fluent in English and provides interesting insights in DVD bonus features.

For movies about journalists under fire, I'd recommend "Salvador," "The Killing Fields," or Welcome to Sarajevo more than "Circle of Deceit."

(For a capsule history of the conflict in Lebanon and indications that Schlöndorff did not deliver his usual insights in the bonus features see the review of the film by metalluk.


© 2007, Stephen O. Murray



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