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Thursday, July 18, 2024

STÜRM: BIS WIR TOT SIND ODER FREI / CAGED BIRDS (2020)

Fact-inspired Swiss/German film about 1980s ‘Jailbreak King’ Walter Stürm, a largely non-violent crook/con man, estranged son of a wealthy industrialist, who’d already broken out of Swiss jail seven times when this film opens on his eighth.  As his story goes public (he seeks not freedom, but dignity . . . and better muesli), he becomes something of a folk hero, a real life urban legend, particularly to the burgeoning anarchist LEFT in 1980s Europe; including fringe elements like terrorists, kidnapers, Red Brigade, rich radical chic types who patronize revolutionary ideas & feral lovers.  That’s the social landscape that brings Stürm (Joel Basman) into the orbit of Barbara Hug (Marie Leuenberger), an uncompromising agitator/lawyer of, by & for the Left.  The sick joke behind this attorney/client relationship, besides Hug’s subsumed yearning for her client, is that Stürm is apolitical on everything except prisoner rights.  Assumed to be part of the radical Left, especially by one young doctrinaire type, she’ll quickly sour on his lack of Party Line principles.  This is all good stuff, though you wonder if director Oliver Rihs knows how unappealing these cause motivated kids now look.  But what makes the film a great watch is not its ideas or ideals, but its style, with Rihs closely following a Rainer Werner Fassbinder æsthetic in its look, from cast, clothes & makeup to lighting & film stock.  All of it held in place by the fierce physicality Leuenberger brings to ‘Babs,’ a woman defined by a refusal to take note of her own body’s betrayal as her one kidney fails & a degenerative bone disease crooks her gait* and has her self-dosing on liquid morphine capsules.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *That broken gait too well copied by the hand-held camera operator.  She’s wobbly enough without the help!

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