Friends of Friends (2002)

Original title: Die Freunde der Freunde

Gregor (Matthias Schweighöfer) is a boarding school pupil, a couple of months before final exams. To be precise, he’s going to a Gymnasium, the type of school you’d go to in Germany when college is a realistic proposition for you. In combination with the boarding school, and the way the kids in the movie relate to money, there’s a class assumption here – none of these kids has parents working in a factory, that’s for sure. Gregor’s closest friend is his roommate Artur (Florian Stetter), and these two are a study in contrasts – where Gregor apparently carries quite a few romantic notions about life and particularly love, Artur’s the wild one (if not an actual sociopath) who we can well imagine to get into the kind of trouble he won’t be able to slip out of easily in the future.

Right now, he’s just doing stuff like lying rather a lot – and implicitly betraying Gregor’s truancy habits to school authorities early on in the movie, though it’s never going to outright tell us thus – and encouraging threesomes with his girlfriend Pia (Jessica Schwarz) and Gregor.

Gregor’s drawn to Artur’s incipient dangerous life, but becomes distracted when he meets Billie (Sabine Timoteo), a young, single mother, with an evasive air of mystery and the kind of background rich kid Gregor clearly can’t quite comprehend. While Gregor is instantly smitten, Billie is acting hot and cold, perhaps using Gregor for things he’s not worldly enough to understand, perhaps genuinely feeling drawn to his still schoolboyish kind of innocence and having to step back for reasons of her own.

At the borders of the plot, there are elements of the strange: Gregor’s belief that there’s some fated other for everyone seemingly being true, ghosts that have appeared to Billie as well as to Artur at the moments of someone’s death.

Whenever I write about German films, I tend to lament Germany’s deplorable lack of proper genre filmmaking. That’s certainly not director Dominik Graf’s fault, for Graf has made a career out of making genre films wherever he can get away with it, be it in the often much too worthy format of German TV crime movie series like “Tatort” and “Polizeiruf 110”, or in TV movies like this.

Proper genre movies, but not exactly straightforward ones, mind you, for one of the director’s main strengths is a willingness to be strange (or even outright Weird), hopefully causing a maximum of confusion in your typical German viewer of Saturday evening crime.

It has been ages since I’ve consciously watched anything directed by Graf, so I’m not even sure I wasn’t terribly confused or even annoyed by him the last time I encountered them myself.

The film at hand has elements of a crime drama, but these are mostly kept at the borders of what’s going on, suggested to be the parts of Artur’s life Gregor has just learned to ignore or choses not to see, as he choses to ignore or not see rather a lot of things around him.

I rather prefer to see the film as a ghost story, one told sideways and at an angle of the way ghost stories are usually told, but one carrying quite an emotional impact quite beyond the realm of jump scares, an impact that’s entwined with a sense of melancholy and sadness, a feeling of characters drifting in directions quite beyond their grasp, control, or perhaps even understanding.

Which does seem appropriate for something based on a Henry James tale of all things - though I doubt James would have been terribly happy with the nudity and the sometimes realistically coarse language in the film. Nor seems Graf’s masterful treatment of the confusion of being young very Jamesian to me – I am pretty sure Henry James was born middle-aged.

Die Freunde’s impact is carried by two things that stand very much in contrast – highly naturalistic acting by a great cast (young Schweighöfer was quite the thing, but Timoteo, Stetter and Schwarz are on the same level) and an incredibly thick mood of unreality. Graf shoots in the kind of grainy digital video that makes quite a few art-minded films of this era look ugly and cheap as hell, but hits exactly the point where this look turns the world of his film strange and off-kilter even when nothing strange or off-kilter is actually happening on screen. There’s a washed-out quality to the film’s reality that suggests a drift towards something inexplicable, and to my eyes, it’s pure magic, particularly combined with an electronic score by Sven Rossenbach and Florian van Volxem that is at once utterly of its time and perfectly outside of any time.

How Graf managed to get this approved by the never exactly weirdness-affine people in charge of German Publicly Owned TV, I can’t imagine. I’m just glad that he did.