Cast: Ronald Zehrfeld, Mohamad Mohsen, Saida Barmaki
Director: Feo Aladag
Country: Germany
Genre: Drama
Editor’s Notes: The following review is part of our coverage of the 2014 Berlin International Film Festival. For more information on the festival visit http://www.berlinale.de and follow Berlinale on Twitter at @berlinale.
After ’71, the Berlinale’s second International Competition war film, was afforded a solid initial reception, pressure would’ve been on laid on Inbetween Worlds (Zwischen Welten) to similarly distinguish itself but also outdo the former were it to have any chance of converting critics and audiences to its cause. Instead, while the first took the form of a thrilling hybrid between the action-survival flick and the war genre, Feo Aladag’s latest is as cautious, and in many ways conventional, take on Western military intervention in the Middle East as seen through the eyes of one soldier and his allied local interpreter. There’s nothing inherently wrong with taking the classical aesthetic route, but its combination with an uninspired script and a preachiness that blatantly oversteps into jingoistic territory ultimately conspire to condemn it to irrelevancy.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with taking the classical aesthetic route, but its combination with an uninspired script and a preachiness that blatantly oversteps into jingoistic territory ultimately conspire to condemn it to irrelevancy.
Ronald Zehrfeld plays Jesper, a German captain who decides to return to fight, or rather protect the population, although he has been afforded leave after his brother dies in the line of duty there. On arrival, his team are ordered to join forces with a small local unit of resistance to taliban incursions. Tarik (Mohsin Ahmady), a young afghan interpreter, is sent out to guarantee that the two allied factions can effectively team up and strikes one of those “unlikely” friendships with Jesper (hostility between the two literally lasts about six seconds, making it one of the film’s worst non-stories). Through his work with the army, he hopes to be able to help smooth his so far unsuccessful to emigrate to Germany with her sister, in order to evade the insecurity of Afghanistan.
The characters’ interactions lack any real chemistry, and director and writer Feo Aladag can only endeavour to fall back on its political statement, which consists in lightly questioning the effectiveness of foreign military intervention in Afghanistan. Most war films tend to focus on the questionable moral character of those actively willing and excited to engage in the bloody art of war. Inbetween Worlds, on the other hand, offers a surprisingly optimistic view of its army men. The soldiers, and Jesper first and foremost, are depicted as resolutely good-hearted men who never fail to rebel against the cold decisions of their higher ranks in order to take the humane course of action. In a strange reversal, the soldiers are turned into painfully one-sided creatures whose every decision follows a predictably moral code. It appears Aladag doesn’t intend his critique for the good people who partake in war in any way, but rather the disastrous consequences of having a foreign force occupying a land that isn’t their own.
The characters’ interactions lack any real chemistry, and director and writer Feo Aladag can only endeavour to fall back on its political statement, which consists in lightly questioning the effectiveness of foreign military intervention in Afghanistan.
One might yet find validity in the rose-tinted lens employed to observe the soldiers when considering the film’s final shot. Aladag tip-toes around the possibility of a happy-end before settling with a cynical ultimate message: no matter how good-natured the soldiers, war will only ever be dispiritingly tragic. Unfortunately, there is very little elsewhere to suggest the director has intended to purposefully mislead his audience, its po-faced preachiness a festival of boorish platitudes and entirely non-noteworthy execution. The moral questions come very late in the game, at which point the broad strokes with which the characters have painted have all but nullified any emotional identification. For all the validity of the message it conveys, the final shot had almost no impact on me, whereas what it should have done was trigger reflexion and empathy.
Inbetween Worlds isn’t fundamentally a terrible film, but is only just engaging enough to retain our attention from beginning to end, but the noticeable paucity of stylistic audacity and the subject matter’s surface level approach keep it from being anything other than serviceable.
[notification type=”star”]44/100 ~ BAD. Inbetween Worlds isn’t fundamentally a terrible film, but is only just engaging enough to retain our attention from beginning to end, but the noticeable paucity of stylistic audacity and the subject matter’s surface level approach keep it from being anything other than serviceable.[/notification]
