 |
| Frédéric Hambalek with Anne-Katrin Titze on What Marielle Knows (Was Marielle Weiß): “I love it when a film gives me this devilish grin on my face …” |
Frédéric Hambalek’s What Marielle Knows (Was Marielle Weiß), produced by Tobias Walker and Philipp Worm (of Frauke Finsterwalder’s Finsterworld, and her exquisitely bold Sisi & I, plus the currently filming Eurotrash, based on Christian Kracht’s novel, starring Alexander Fehling), premièred at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year and is a highlight in the Viewpoints program of the 24th edition of the Tribeca Festival.
We soon learn what Marielle (Laeni Geiseler) knows in Hambalek’s somewhat supernatural family drama. After being slapped by a schoolfriend she insulted, the young girl can see and hear everything her parents do all day; whom her mother, Julia (Julia Jentsch), flirts with at work and how her father, Tobias (Felix Kramer), actually behaved during a staff meeting at his publishing job, as opposed to the rearranged facts he dishes out during the family dinner that night about his nemesis, Sören (Moritz von Treuenfels).
 |
| Marielle (Laeni Geiseler) with her devilish grin |
What happens when the daughter becomes the re-bodied conscience, a Jiminy Cricket with the limited life experience of a school girl? Good thing there is grandma (Sissy Höfferer) who is pragmatic and the least fazed by this new reality, whereas Marielle’s mother ventures into dangerous, devil-may-care territory in cluing her daughter in about the birds and bees and what she is up to with colleague Max (Mehmet Atesci) during their not so secretive cigarette breaks.
From Mainz, Germany, Frédéric Hambalek joined me for an in-depth conversation.
Anne-Katrin Titze: Good to meet you. Are you in New York already?
Frédéric Hambalek: Hi! Hello! Good to meet you. No, no, not yet. I'm in Mainz, near Frankfurt, in Germany.
AKT: First of all, another Frédéric says hi, Frédéric Boyer, who recommended your film to me!
FH: Oh, yes, I know him.
AKT: He made it a highlight of this year’s festival.
FH: Oh, cool. Well, thank you. I met him in Cologne. Very nice. He’s good, good guy. I like him.
 |
| Julia (Julia Jentsch) und Tobias (Felix Kramer) are flabbergasted at their daughter’s (Laeni Geiseler) new powers |
AKT: Did you ever, as an adult, go back in your mind to childhood and imagine that you could, with your adult mind, see your parents in a different light?
FH: Well all the time, all the time I go back to childhood and try to remember stuff the way I saw it then and the way I would see it today. And a lot of things, obviously, that I thought as a child were strange or unfair now seem pretty reasonable. And that's a big problem, because you don't want to give your kid a feeling that you're doing something unfair to him or her. But you can't figure out a better way in a way.
AKT: That seems to be a part of the structure of your film. It felt very much inspired by this fantasy that I think most adults have of being able to go back into childhood and see “the truth”, discover something that has been hidden. Because there's always double games for parents. I mean, everybody does this, but parents especially have a double life for children, no?
FH: Absolutely. And somebody said something very interesting to me that I hadn't thought of when I made the film, and he or she said, you know, it's kind of like that all children have this power. The power to see more than the parents think. They can see more of their parents than the parents themselves think. And it's also this double game, because, of course, the parents also know more about the child than the child knows. This goes on until in puberty, when you think you know everything and you're 16, and you think you're playing your parents. But of course, also your parents are playing you without you knowing.
 |
| Marielle (Laeni Geiseler) bonding with Dad in the car |
AKT: That's a very interesting dynamic. This makes me think of Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much. The child who knew too much could have been an alternate title. But instead, you went with a variation on Henry James?
FH: That is a total coincidence. I never knew this Henry James story. And even just when we were brainstorming the title again for the release, somebody said, there's this What About Maisie? Or something? Right? I've never seen Maisie. I've never seen the film and never read the story. So I'll have to find out how big the similarities are.
AKT: Well, I interviewed the directors of What Maisie Knew, Scott McGehee and David Siegel, as well when it came out, and it's a beautiful film. The Henry James novel is all based on what the little girl Maisie knew about her parents’ divorce. It's all Maisie's perspective. And that's all we see. I thought, okay, Marielle starts with the same letters. And for Henry James it was about what she knew. It's the past tense. But you are bringing us into the present, which is a different kind of knowledge as well, because, of course, we think about surveillance and about how much we really do know about other people. Social media and all of that you try to keep out of the film, and at the same time you have it hovering everywhere.
FH: Well, I think it's great to have this unknown connection to Henry James. I like that very much, and of course it's in a way unavoidable, because it's not new to have always the question, what do children know about their parents? What do parents know about their children? It's something that bothers us and keeps us awake at night sometimes, and this gets a different treatment each time around with a novel or a film, or whatever. And I think in our film, it's just a step up of the game. The level is intensified way more than it could be in a realist setting. So this is perhaps, or hopefully, the new take on these old questions of how do parents and kids interact with each other. And what secrets are there, and need to be there and shouldn't be there.
 |
| Tobias (Felix Kramer) rethinking his life decisions |
AKT: I mean, you have this devilish look on a German family through the child, because everything is exposed. And you see the dynamics for both parents at work. And sometimes it takes your breath away, this environment that they live in, because it's recognisable. At the same time it's heightened. The sterility of the spaces, the choice of the workplaces, can you talk a bit about that?
FH: Yes, but first of all, devilish, I like that a lot because I love it when a film gives me this devilish grin on my face, that of, you know, I recognise this, and it's treated in a dry way, in a humorous way also. When it comes to the sterility of the places, this is really our world, the world also of this type of class. Maybe that is very modern, very sterile. It's a strange mixture of it's all very open, big open spaces, with glass walls, so we can see everything, but at the same time, of course, still, there's stuff that's hidden. So we wanted to emphasise that. The house that is very, very open, it’s like, actually just one big room. This house and the workplaces with the glass, this is how the modern world looks. And also it's obviously quite fitting to this story where supposedly everything is open. Everybody can see everything and hear everything. But of course that's not really the case in real life.
AKT: The costumes reflect their lives, too. I'm thinking of her cardigans that are perfectly neutral, perfectly boring. He has his little water bottle by his side. Not bad taste, but really no taste at all. Bland, like the cover of the book, the pseudo Magritte. Not standing out at all is the point, not tasteless, but not tasteful either, like the cover of the bird without the head.
FH: Yes, these two things are part of the milieu, because people want to blend in. Also, they want to be recognised as people that are, this is a loaded word, but woke. People who know things about the world who are intellectuals. They recognise how you should behave. This is one thing, and the other thing is, we wanted to stylise this a bit, it's just a stylised form of how this really looks, and how we behave. Because when the couple, for example, when they talk about monogamy, that this is not up to date anymore and, come on, don't be so conservative or whatever - this is exactly that kind of intellectual game they have now to play, because they don't want to be recognised as someone who has maybe outdated views on relationships or whatever. So this is the thinking behind that, I guess.
 |
| Marielle (Laeni Geiseler) in her giraffe pyjamas |
AKT: And inside they are boiling with emotions that are completely different from what they are saying. But the misery shines through as well, and the cruelty also. There's a lot of cruelty.
FH: I think what is funny to me is when this cover of civilisation that we have is penetrated by our brutish, just very barbaric selves. Basically, we cannot come out of these very old emotions that we have. If someone slaps you, we want to take revenge, if someone says something mean, we want to hurt him or her. And this is very funny, because it means struggling all the time with ourselves and our very civilised beings that we are. I just like to see that in action.
AKT: And poke at it. Buñuel's The Phantom of Liberty I just recently rewatched, because of the Monica Vitti retrospective going on here at Lincoln Center. He is brilliant at exposing this dynamic. A character I find interesting that you added to the family in your film is the grandmother, played by Sissy Höfferer. She's very good and has an interesting role here. Can you talk a bit about her?
FH: Yes, you mean the character or the actress?
AKT: Both. Her playing the character.
 |
| Frédéric Hambalek on Marielle (Laeni Geiseler): “It's kind of like that all children have this power. The power to see more than the parents think.” |
FH: Well, the character is, in a way, a bit of a counterbalance to the parents, because she has a more pragmatic and direct way of being, of communicating. She's very open and, in a way, takes the things how they are and is not in a way intellectually so constrained. Not that she's not smart. She's a very smart woman, but she's a character who would say, let's stop the nonsense. All right, let's be honest here. I mean, what are you doing? So this, I thought, is an interesting character. And yeah, she's a staple in the German film landscape, and was very great to work with, and to also get this no-nonsense character out of her. I was saying to her, don't try to play empathetic here, just be very direct and simple, and don't try to ingratiate yourself with anybody.
AKT: Isabelle Huppert at that.
FH: I can see that, yeah.
AKT: The counter-spell is funny. Because it begins with a slap and a slap makes the supernatural happen, they think that the counter-spell has to be another slap. Was the slap spell there from the start and then also the punching slapstick?
FH: What came first was me thinking I need some small incident it could be blamed upon. I didn't want a big accident or a big medical thing or anything. So I came up with the slap. And then, of course, I had this same devilish humor in me when I thought, I can reuse this in the plot, so I like very much that I could try to bend the character in a way they would have a decent explanation of why they should do that. So this is again me poking devilish fun at these characters.
 |
| Was Marielle Weiß poster |
AKT: I like the moment when, instead of fixing what's going on, the parents decide to speak French, to hide their words in the hopes of getting away with it, in other words, that the spell doesn't include a translation from the French.
FH: Yeah!
AKT: What is the rating in Germany for the film?
FH: The rating I believe in Germany it's FSK12, which means for children, aged 12, and over, which I think is a bit strange. But yeah.
AKT: What would you have picked?
FH: You know, the other day I had this mother come up to me, and she told me she watched Deadpool 2 with her 13-year-old daughter and I believe that film is recommended for people aged 18. But she wouldn't watch my film with her 13-year-old daughter, which I thought was very interesting, and I can sort of see why, but it might lead to very interesting conversations afterwards.
AKT: I don't know about that. You send us off with the famous Brahms lullaby.
FH: Well, of course this is in the eye or the mind of the viewer what this may mean. I can only say it felt right. And then I've had different reactions to this, ranging from people saying, this reminds us of a time when everything was simpler. When the children were babies there was no conflict, basically. Now they grow up, they develop their own opinions. And now there's conflict. I think that's beautiful, but it just felt right to me.
AKT: Well, thank you very much for this thought-provoking film. I wish you a great Tribeca!
FH: Thank you. Thank you. Maybe see you then!
