Fraulein

Director: Andrea Staka

We all have the instinctive urge to escape. Whether it’s to travel to exotic locations for vacation or start over in a brand new place, there’s something undeniably irresistible and inherently human about wanting to get away to try something new, not only to see how life is lived elsewhere but to see who we become in another setting. Although we can neither escape our problems nor our true nature, the desire to hit “reset” is one that exists at all levels, ranging from just wanting to clear your head from the daily grind and lie in the sun or at its most urgent, needing to relocate permanently due to work, hardship or in the case of the main characters in writer/director Andrea Staka’s award winning feature film debut Fraulein, to leave political turmoil and war behind.

As the film begins, we meet the young, attractive, free-spirited Ana (Marja Skaricic) who arrives in Zurich from Bosnia. Although she’s survived the war, the tragedies of the past seem to dance precariously in her eyes, never to be forgotten, even as she dances as quickly as she can to pulse-pounding electronica blasting over the speakers in the city’s clubs, distracting herself with one-night stands until her secrets start to unravel like a piece of yarn from her beaten old sweater.

Everything about Ana seems temporary and transient but after she impulsively accepts a job working in a local cafeteria, her life becomes intertwined by two elder coworkers, including Jovic, an intelligent Croatian immigrant (Mila Ljubica) still trying to decide in which country she hopes to spend her remaining years, and Ruza (Mirjana Karanovic), the strict cafeteria owner who, like Ana, had twenty-five years earlier abandoned her native Yugoslavia when she was just twenty-two.

Initially resistant to Ana’s overtures of friendship, most likely because she reminds her of the homeland she’d prefer to forget, the indifferent Ruza experiences a change of heart as she starts to recognize the woman she once had been, most notably in a gorgeous metaphorical scene where she, much like Ana, begins to dance when surprised by an impromptu birthday celebration.

Although a solemn air hangs over Staka’s picture from the start especially considering the revelation of one particularly heartrending shock early on, Fraulein manages to challenge both a typical cross-generational female bonding structure as well as resist, much like the determined Ruza, any urge to journey into false nostalgia or fall in step with what very well could have been a tearjerker paradigm. However, this emphasis on authenticity throughout no doubt owes much to the care of first time feature director and award winning short Swiss filmmaker Andrea Staka, a former photographer and visual arts student, who drew from her own background as the daughter of two exiled Yugoslavian parents.

With remarkable performances that seem all the more riveting when one realizes that neither lead actress spoke German and instead had to learn their dialogue phonetically as explained by Jay Weissberg in Variety, this award winning foreign favorite which played as an Official Selection at both the Sundance and Tribeca Film Festival, has since been released to discerning film lovers via Film Movement’s prestigious DVD-of-the-month club.

Vitus

Director:
Fredi M. Murer

With an I.Q. so high that it’s incalculable, at age six, Vitus Van Holzen (Fabrizio Bursani) is pulled out of kindergarten. His overwhelmingly intimidating mental capability is one thing but it seems his social skills may have been the major culprit as his instructor tells his British mother (Julika Jenkins) that instead of tackling typical children’s books, young Vitus was reading about global warming and scaring the life out of his classmates.

While the world may not be ready for Vitus, his mother and father (Urs Jucker) have other plans for their son and in promoting his self-education, they begin focusing wholeheartedly on his innate musical ability by bouncing the young piano prodigy from teacher to teacher in his readiness quest for concerto perfection. When asked which career he’d like to tackle as an adult, Vitus doesn’t have a concrete answer yet he seems to have an interest in becoming a vet that goes against his parents strict wishes for greatness. With the guidance of his gentle, supportive grandpa (Bruno Ganz) who-- much like Vitus-- is an equally adventurous dreamer, Vitus grows to rebel against his parents at age twelve (now played by Teo Gheorghiu) as he focuses his attention to stock market revenge and securing the Tina Turner singing babysitter of his dreams while coming-of-age his own way. His decisions on getting by according to his own rules become all the more important when he’s enrolled back in school and, instead of global warming terror, seems to delight in disrupting lessons by making his teachers look incompetent.

Winner of the top prize in its native Switzerland, director Fredi M. Murer’s delightfully quirky film was the country’s official Oscar submission for the Best Foreign Language Film category. Unfortunately, film, much like the music Vitus plays on his trusty piano, depends on rhythm and pitch and Fredi M. Murer’s movie begins to unravel during its second half as the tone changes and the plot goes in an entirely different direction. In doing, so the audience is given little preparation for Vitus’s shift in priorities that come into question as his schemes get harder to believe, making the two hour running time feel much longer and allowing the melody of Murer’s cinematic music to fall completely out of tune as I felt that Vitus the film was in desperate need of one of the hearing aids Vitus’s inventor father makes for a living. Although the notes begin to falter, the film seems to gain its second wind for a stirring coda that manages to reward both the audience and its pitch perfect cast with an earned and truly uplifting finale.