No one quite knows what to do with director Fatih Akin. His explosive early movie Head-On was about the complex convergence of immigration and mental health issues between two Turkish-German punks. It’s one of the most violent and romantic movies ever made and also one of the smartest about intersectional identities. His follow-up, The Edge of Heaven, featured beloved actress Hanna Schygulla as a German mother who must go to Istanbul in the aftermath of a horrible, complicated, misunderstood tragedy. His more recent work has not often found international distribution but in 2017 he directed Diane Kruger against type in In the Fade, which went global. And now he has made Amrum, a squarely German story with Ms. Kruger in a small role, about a small boy on the titular island in 1945. Mr. Akin knows exactly what he wants to do with its message, and the performances within this movie also deserve to go global.
Nine year old Nanning (Jasper Billerbeck, a huge discovery) lives with his younger siblings, his heavily pregnant mother Hille (Laura Tonke, doing excellent work in an ugly part) and his Aunt Ena (Lisa Hagmeister) in the family house the sisters co-own. His father is high-up in the German army and Hille is a devoted Nazi, though his aunt isn’t, and neither is the farmer named Tessa (Ms. Kruger) for whom Nanning and his best friend Hermann (Kian Köppke) work for food. It’s clear to everyone except Hille that the war is about to be lost, which puts Nanning in a difficult position. He loves his mother – she is his mother! – but he is starting to figure out the problems with Nazism for himself. Then Hitler’s suicide shocks the whole nation. Hille takes it so badly she goes into early labour, and while she and the baby both survive she sets her mouth and refuses to eat. All she wants is white bread with honey. Considering there is neither flour, eggs, nor butter in the shops this is an impossible wish. But Nanning is a resourceful child, and he loves his mother.
The quest for the ingredients to make white bread and honey takes Nanning into dealings with adults who make absolutely no allowances for his age. The adult men on the island are either elderly, like the sailor who teaches Nanning some limericks as the boy fishes for him, or disabled like the one-armed baker. The island children are either ‘refugees’ from elsewhere in Germany, or mean to Nanning because he wasn’t born on Amrum. While a friendly and honest child Nanning is also guarded. He knows how disliked his parents are, but he is unwilling to denounce them. He loves them, and he is their little boy. But this is how the little boy grows up.
It’s hard to imagine a modern middle-class child being half this dogged and competent. There’s a sequence where a teenage refugee, who has previously assaulted Nanning and who doesn’t know the dangers of low tide on the island beaches, gets caught in some quicksand. Nanning drops what he’s carrying and with no fuss whatsoever saves his life, then picks up his belongings and continues on his way. Young Mr. Billerbeck is an enormous discovery, a capable actor and who radiates an air of goodness that’s unusual in someone his age. Cinematographer Karl Walter Lindenlaub filmed the location settings with a profound respect for the weather and so the gorgeous visuals help balance the emotional ugliness of the plot. The unusual sea-faring culture of Amrum also provides a global perspective not often reflected in German movies about the war, and the anger expressed about Nazism keeps the unpleasant iconography to a minimum.
The story is based on the childhood of well-known actor-director Hark Bohm, a friend of Mr. Akin’s; they wrote the script together. All of Mr. Akin’s movies have been an exploration of the different ways people are German, with all the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural nuances that allows. And there are little nuances here that glue themselves into the memory: the way Ena sits herself down at the table after an argument with Hille. The yearning looks on the child refugees’ faces when they realise Nanning and Hermann have full pails of milk they will not be sharing. How Nanning tries to coax Hille into being kinder with his child’s limited guile, and how upset he gets when he does not succeed. And the glorious knowledge all the children here have that when they grow up, they will be different from and better than all the adults.
In coming-of-age stories there’s a specific moment where the hero grows up, and when that arrived the Cannes audience gasped in shock, we were so invested in this kind and decent little boy. In a wholly fictional movie, that would have been the end of it, but real life is rarely that clean-cut. Regardless, there is more hope in Amrum than Mr. Akin normally allows his characters, but on the other hand this is the first film he’s made about a child. A child who grew up to tell the truth and shame the devil, so maybe he was right about being different and better all along.
Amrun recently played at the Cannes Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the Cannes site for the title.
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