Lauter corpses on the account.

The Bad Bank deserves its name: Tom Tykwer shows the beginning of the Berlinale, "The International", a conspiracy thriller about a criminal money home. That is not begging for help with governments - but instead enslaved entire states.

 

A man waits at the Central Bank of Luxembourg. Behind him huge slices open a view of an office complex. The man looks up and watched as a few bankers in expensive suits on him on a bridge walk, the half-transparent. Your shoes are distinguished clearly. They move to a glass elevator, and enter it.

The man looks like the bankers past him into the depths and slip out of his sight to disappear. Transparent could the building in which the financial guys in Tom Tykwer's new film "The International" work hard to be. But what she was driving is totally unfathomable.

The elevator in which the banker in Tykwer's films go down, however, is no elevator to bankruptcy. The gripping thriller, which this Thursday in glass Berlinale Palast on Marlene-Dietrich-Platz the 59th Film Festival opened, the story of a bad bank, the State does not need help, but in turn controlled states, and for human life has no value because it is not listed on the stock exchange.

If Festival chief Dieter Kosslick, 60, so now claims that the financial crisis had from "The International" "almost a documentary made, the course Dampfgeplaudere. In Tykwer's film does not break the bank together like a glass house, even if it looks like. It must be, and that is really exciting, after all the rules of the thriller art be taken apart? analytically and physically.

"The International" is not a film about the current banking crisis, because even Tykwer said at press conference surrounded by his actors Clive Owen, Ulrich Thomsen and Armin Mueller-Stahl, as well as the producer Charles Roveň.

He wanted his film with the banks not to attack itself, said Tykwer's sovereignty and with good humor by a director who no doubt has a good movie to have done. Rather, he pick up the criminal excesses of a system on which he, after years of research on the project and numerous discussions with bankers no longer have doubts. Almost everything he shows in his film, is in reality possible? or is it already happening.

Picture: DDP
Video: Reuters

In "The International Clive Owen plays the Interpol Agent Louis Salinger, who together with the New York State Attorney Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts), the machinations of a? fictitious? Luxembourg bank and its top managers Skarssen (Ulrich Thomsen) untersucht. The two investigators will find out that the bank was a powerful player in the international arms trade? and goes on corpses.

Even the same in the first sequence must Salinger passively watch as a colleague of him after a secret meeting with an informant dead collapses; also comes shortly after the informant in a car accident.

It begins a hunt around half the world, from Berlin to Luxembourg and Milan travels to New York and then ends in Istanbul. As before the glass facades of Berlin's main railway station with a murder under the open sky begins, which never can be completely elucidated, ends in the catacombs of Istanbul, in which light is brought into the darkness.

Against the Bournifizierung

From the high-tech modernity moves Tykwer in his film back into an archaic world. In the past, the way forward? without doubt this is true also for Tykwer's relationship with the genre. For him, the great paranoia thriller of the Seventies of "witness to a conspiracy" (1974) to "The Marathon Man" and "The incorruptibles" (both 1976) standards. You have Tykwer at "The International" inspired in them, he wants to be measured.

The claim being admittedly quite a few directors. Also promised Marc Forster, with his Bond film "A Quantum consolation" to the seventies-years-thriller's. But then he zerhäckselte concentrated style of paranoia cinema of that time in stakkatohaften cut orgies? influenced by the hysterical style of the immensely successful films at the CIA killer Jason Bourne. In fact, do the spectators in the Bond film difficult to discern who is good and who is evil, but only because they sometimes do not know where the top and the bottom is.

Against these Bournifizierung of the cinema is struggling to Tykwer. "The International" is well below the indicative rate contemporary thriller? and therefore comes at the end much more. The pace of the film was not the cutting table, but the screenplay by Eric Warren Singer, the plot steadily forward.

It is very exciting to follow how Salinger and Whitman for an attack on a politician first, the margin angle determine the position of the shooter close a trail to discover that he has left, and finally find out where he resides. The film runs only every now and then, he has the constant tension and the breath of a long marathon.

Film without frills

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But he raises any superfluous ballast overboard. Like Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as a Watergate reporter in "The incorruptibles" are also Salinger and Whitman so much with the resolution of their case employs, that the film they do not treat life. Once you see Whitman in her New York apartment. It depends on the phone, her husband enters the room and carries the child that is asleep on the sofa is in bed.

Everything that people usually need to survive, eating, drinking, sleeping, having sex? comes in the film not as good as before. In a nice ironic twist manages the investigators who have just hit a wall, a major breakthrough, because one of them coffee goes holen.

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"The International" has something purifies. This also applies to Tykwer's staging, which in its previous independent film occasionally threatened. Its sometimes very hard about design will let the finale of his Patrick Süsskind-adaptation "The Perfume" almost fall over into the ridiculous. "The International" on the other hand, is a film without frills.

Tykwer and his cinematographer Frank Griebe explore the spaces that they show their viewers, mostly in panels and camera movement with quiet. If they Salinger in a shot as a tiny little man in front of the enormous glass facade of the bank show, then tells the kernel image in the whole history of film.

In "The incorruptibles" looks the director Alan J. Pakula in a scene in the Washington Library of Congress from a 90-degree supervision of his two heroes down to just thousands of lending slips scan. Always floats above the camera to get the two can barely recognize the audience and feel like they are threatening to set their searches.

Even with Tykwer raises the camera again and again in often dizzying heights, but not in a grand artistic gesture. But because as Pakula only from God's perspective it becomes apparent how big the task is before the heroes are.