Ambition has a bad reputation. Always has. Lady Macbeth reproached her husband, Mr. Macbeth, for his proven and recognized ambition not being accompanied by a hint of wickedness. The good woman assumed that glory through the path of virtue does not work. Plato, for example, in the same vein, was convinced that both philotimia (love of honor) and philonikia (love of victory) are equally harmful for both the individual and the State. The complications and villainies of both, as the two modes of the passion we are talking about, are much greater, the philosopher maintained, than simple greed, as it is not just about accumulating wealth but doing so above others with a desire that is by definition always unsatisfied. There is an element of humiliating the other that makes it not just bad but even worse. Tom Tykwer disagrees. And the truth is that the Berlin director who had the honor of inaugurating the Berlinale this Thursday and who is always remembered almost as a curse for his dazzling 1998 film Run Lola Run is right.
The Light (called Das Licht in German) is from start to finish, from the first second to the last projected on the screen two and a half hours later, an ambitious film. Even more ambitious than ambition itself. And that's okay. It aspires to tell everything, or almost everything, about the world we live in, in general, and more specifically, about the world that Germans and us Europeans have to live in a week before the party that is the heir of the Nazis from the Holocaust becomes the second most voted. Its protagonist Lars Eidinger tried to summarize it graphically at the press conference: "We live in times of narcissism and, obviously, we are being ruled by people - the most powerful people in the world - who clearly have a narcissistic personality disorder." Pause. "A narcissist is unable to love himself because he is unable to recognize others or recognize himself, so he has to be a stranger to himself... This is the central statement of the film: if we are brave enough to show who we are and allow others to recognize themselves, then we can really change the world." He quoted Bertolt Brecht twice in between. Tykwer, who was next to him, didn't know whether to applaud the one who had best interpreted his work or to cut his veins overwhelmed by the responsibility of what he had done. He may have thought he directed a film, but no, judging by his actor, he has created The Whole. Not everything, but the whole.
And indeed, that is the great problem of The Light, which literally drowns in its excessive ambition. But it would be unfair to blame ambition precisely. Any work that wants to be important, against Plato if necessary, must necessarily be ambitious. And even more so now. The problem with the work of the German director who has spent the last four years dedicated to the series Babylon Berlin is that his "radical political statement" (as he called his work) is overwhelmed and dragged down by good intentions without ever managing to give meaning and shape to the plethora of ideas it presents. Tykwer aspires to turn the city of Berlin into the almost mythical, realistic, lyrical, and magical stage of the abyss we tread. Let's say the city already has a long experience with catastrophes. And he does so hand in hand with a fable that is not afraid to mix musical with melodrama without giving up the fantastic. Little to object to the desire for the whole.
The story is about a family (the Engels family for more clues and to give hints) that common sense has labeled dysfunctional ("Machines are dysfunctional, not people," said the director). The mother is dedicated to international cooperation and fights to build a theater in Africa. The father is an advertiser and creates surprising campaigns that, in truth, only make explicit the moral of the film itself in a somewhat disconcerting metanarrative twist (sometimes sad and didactic). And then there are the children, two teenagers and another from her previous marriage who is younger. One lives in his own virtual world oblivious to everything; the other, in her universe of drugs, and the third, the youngest, sings Queen songs (just like that).
One day, after the sudden death of the woman who attends and takes care of the house, a kind of magician, intruder, and maid (all three things) will arrive to replace her, changing everything. She is a Syrian immigrant, and the trauma that inhabits her ends up being the catalyst for this chaos on the brink of the precipice. It doesn't want to be a remake of Pasolini's Theorem, but by accident perhaps, it could very well be. The title of the film, by the way, is related to a device owned by the woman named Farrah and played by the actress Tala Al Deen. The device emits an intermittent and hypnotic light (The Light, in capital letters) that is supposed to change the way of understanding and seeing the world. A metaphor for cinema itself? Perhaps a play on Enlightenment of all time, of all modern life? We bet on both.
Tykwer, as we were saying, spares no fears or means. Everything is there. The actor talks about the narcissism that can consume us (progressive narcissism would be the complete title of the disease) and indeed, in clear harmony with the recent statements of the Berlinale director herself, it seems that the film aims to propose a manifesto on universal empathy that, like a storm of light, ends the polarization that invades us. Beyond the doubts generated by such forced equidistance, the problem is the lack of subtlety, even pomposity, with which the film advances, completely neglecting what could have saved it: humor. Not a gram. The entire The Light is chained to the weight of its grand gestures, the rigor of its excessive manners, the need to surprise (or rather, overwhelm) at every step it takes. From the reconstructions of virtual worlds to the somewhat unfortunate dance numbers to the impressive and dramatic ending, the film fails to find the tone or the distance always doomed to be up to, indeed, an unattainable ambition.
Lars Eidinger says that the film, his film, exposes "why the world is on the brink of the abyss." And perhaps he is right, but not for the reasons he presents. The mismatch between intentions and realities is also an abyssal and very modern problem.