Butler's Cinema Scene

Four films screened as part of the recently concluded Kansas International Film Festival will receive a one-week run at the Glenwood Arts and Rio theaters beginning today (Oct. 7).

They are:

Lee Tergeson and Enid Graham in "Silver Tongues"

“SILVER TONGUES”  My rating: B+ (Opens Oct. 7 at the Glenwood Arts)

87 minutes | No MPAA rating

This is one nasty movie.

I loved it.

Two lovers (Lee Tergesen, Enid Graham) travel from town to town, constantly changing identities and playing mind games with those they encounter.

Showing up for Sunday services at a small church, they accuse the pastor of stealing from the collection plate. At a nursing home they attempt to convince an old man with Alzheimer’s that they are family members come to rescue him. Meeting young honeymooners at a resort, they propose a little wife swapping.

Beyond that, there’s a weird dynamic between the two of them. The man shows a proclivity for brutal sex and controlling situations; the woman seems to be looking for a way to escape him.

But which, if any, of these different identities represent who they really are?

Writer/director Simon Arthur will have you scratching your head with confusion even as he hooks you with great, cryptic dialogue and a pair of knockout performances (Tergesen and Graham have a field day playing a half dozen characters). This one is bursting with dark energy.

“BERLIN 36” My rating: B (Opens Oct. 7 at the Glenwood Arts)

100 minutes | No MPAA rating

Desperate to win medals at the upcoming Berlin Olympics (and eager to diffuse charges of anti-Semitism), Nazi Olympic officials blackmail Jewish high jumper Gretel Bergman (Karoline Herfurth) to return to Germany from her safe exile in England. She is ordered to join the Party-run training camp.

Sebastian Urzendowsky, Karoline Herfurth in "Berlin 36"

Gretel is ostracized by her fellow athlestes, but finds a confidant in Marie Ketteler, another high jumper with mannish traits. In fact, Marie is a man raised from infancy to act and think like a woman. The Nazi bigwigs are aware of this, but stick with the deception because Ketteler may be their best chance for  medal.

Kaspar Keidelbach’s “Berlin 36” is one of those stranger-than-fiction yarns that boggles the imagination. Herfurth shows tremendous mettle as the beleaguered Gretel, but stealing the show is Sebastian Urzendowsky as the gender-switching Marie.

Astoundingly, both “women” survived the war (the real-life Bergman, an American citizen since 1942, appears in a documentary epilogue). Dora Ratjen, on whom the character of Marie Ketteler was based, lost his Olympic medals when he was exposed as a man and, renaming himself Heinz, ran his family’s bar until his death in 2008.

“HABERMANN” My rating: B (Opens Oct. 7 at the Glenwood Arts)

104 minutes | Mo MPAA rating

Ben Becker, Mark Waschke in "Habermann"

Set in the Sudetenland, a region of  Czechoslovakia heavily populated by Germans, Juraj Herz’s “Habermann” is the sad, sobering story of a man caught in the middle.

Before the outbreak of World War II, August Habermann (Mark Waschke), the German owner of a successful sawmill, lives in happy harmony with his Czech friends and employs.

But with the Nazi occupation of the Sudetenland and especially the depredations of the district’s new military commander, Sturmbannführer Koslowski (Ben Becker), Haberman finds it increasingly difficult to remain neutral.

He attempts to reason with Koslowski as a fellow German. He tries to acknowledge the sentiments of his Czech workers, even covering for them when they dabble in sabotage. And he learns too late that his beloved wife Jana (Hannah Herzprung), an orphan raised by Catholic nuns, is in fact the child of a Jewish father.

For his attempts to keep the peace both the Czechs and the Germans view Habermann as a traitor.

It’s lonely in the middle.

Extremely well produced and acted, “Habermann” suggests the truth in that cynical old adage: No good deed goes unpunished.

Karoline Herfurth, Florian David Fitz in "Vincent Wants to Sea"

“VINCENT WANTS TO SEA” My rating: B- (Opens Oct. 7 at the Rio)

96 minutes | No MPAA rating

The German road movie “Vincent Wants to Sea” is fraught with peril. Not just for the characters, but for filmmaker Ralf Huettner.

Vincent (Florian David Fitz), a young man with Tourette’s syndrome, teams up with an anorexic girl (Karoline Herfurth…yes, the same actress who stars in “Berlin 36”) and a neat freak with crippling obsessive/compulsive disorder (Johannes Allmayer) to flee their psychiatric group home.

Their destination: the seashore, which represents an opening up of their carefully circumscribed lives.

In pursuit is Vincent’s controlling financier father (Heino Ferch) and the young fugitives’ shrink (Katharina Muller-Elmau).

Director Huettner balances the comic with the near tragic…not always as successfully as I’d have liked.

Still, the three leads bring a  touching conviction to their roles as perennial outcasts finding strength in unity.

| Robert W. Butler