The Forest for the Trees (Maren Ade, Germany)

by Mark Peranson

Finished in late 2003, Maren Ade’s DV student-film debut The Forest for the Trees is the kind of work that’s rarely programmed at the Toronto International Film Festival, where sensation often trumps everything else. The low-key, slow-burning debut about the mental disintegration of a schoolteacher has underwhelming production values, no stars, and no sales agent in place. (The film was also pretty much ignored by the German Export Union, the state body responsible for promoting the national cinema to foreign festivals, surely due to its perceived unsexiness.) Ade’s film could easily have vanished if not for the tape landing in open-minded hands. Instead, the year-old film was a minor sensation this festival season, and further invitations have rolled in—including one from Sundance, a year after the “trailblazing” American indie festival actually rejected the film.

Mousy Melanie (Eva Löbau, in her first lead film performance) dumps her boyfriend and leaves her small town to start her teaching career, armed with alternative methods and bright-eyed optimism. Soon enough, storm clouds begin to form: She’s consistently tortured by bratty students more in need of a taskmaster than an educational trailblazer. There’s no solace in her personal life, either, as the loneliness of the big city takes its toll. (Melanie is also separated from her surroundings by her Swabian accent, which is—a point Ade makes in introductions—the source of humour for German speakers.) Eager for some kind of companionship aside from the creepy Thorsten, the only co-worker roughly her age—who seems to want more than a professional relationship—Melanie orchestrates a “chance meeting” with her attractive neighbour, Tina, a shopgirl at a trendy fashion boutique. But Melanie doesn’t know where to draw the line, intruding into Tina’s life to the point of stalking—her wardrobe, however, markedly improves.

Things eventually do come to a head, though not in an entirely predictable fashion: the film’s transcendent ending, which some have misinterpreted as a suicide attempt, resonates with hope (crucially keyed by music from Grandaddy). Grippingly raw and truthful, Melanie’s minor quest plays out with remarkable realism; the process of her life’s disintegration is gradual, but inescapable. Ade’s parents are teachers, and she shot at the school where they work (her mother has a cameo); on its most basic level, the film convincingly captures a teacher’s life gone awry. As the woman in the centre of the slowly accumulating mess—she’s pretty much in every scene—Löbau astonishes, tracking Melanie’s emotional changes in subtle modulations, and creating a tragic figure quietly imploding with humanity.

The Forest for the Trees is not a special case. It comes out of a Fassbinderian tradition of tragic female mental instability attributable to social pressures and is similar in nature to many recent films, including Martin Koolhoven’s underseen South, and a gestating, like-minded German cinema that includes equally low-budget films from young directors like Ulrich Köhler (Bungalow, 2002), Henner Winckler (Class Trip, 2002), and Franz Müller (Science Fiction, 2003). These were all films rejected by Toronto, maybe as a matter of taste, but possibly because they showed at the Berlin film festival; by the time TIFF rolls around, these German films are considered too old. (So one might say it was to Ade’s advantage that her film didn’t screen at the Berlinale.) The film provides two lessons. The first, and most obvious, is a moral in the power of exposure at the TIFF (in a positive sense, as distinct from the impact provided by the launch of American Oscar hopefuls and wanna-be Hollywood fare like, say, Whale Rider). But it also shows the intractability of other festivals and distributors to look at untold work from first-time directors without the power structures in their favour and, well, see the forest for the trees. In more ways than one, then, Ade’s film has the best ending of the year.

Mark Peranson

The Forest for the Trees

Fall Festival Highlights

Specious Judgment and Other Oblique Variations of the Word “Casuistry”
by zev asher

Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow
by andrew tracy

Brothers
by jessica winter

The Forest for the Trees
by mark peranson

and in the magazine...

Ryan and Alter Egos
by allan tong

Rois et reine
by jared rapfogel

L’esquive
by jay kuehner

Or (My Treasure)
by martin tsai

Schizo
by jason sanders

Somersault
by lee ferguson

The Soup, One Morning
by christoph huber

À tout de suite
by adam nayman

Turtles Can Fly
by robert koehler

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