After yesterday’s blog on My Best Enemy, a film set during Germany’s fascist past, today’s blog reviews a film set during the country’s communist period, as well as the present-day. The Prize (Der Preis) is about a young architect, Alexander Beck, who has won a competition: a housing complex based on his design is going to replace the communist-era apartment blocks in an east German town. Alexander now has to go to the town to supervise the project, and he appears tense. This is his hometown, and he and his friends grew up in the apartment blocks that are going to be demolished. But the source of his unease lies deeper than this, and the details are revealed over the course of the film through a series of regular flashbacks.
This film must have sounded promising at the concept stage: it explores the question of guilt, and situates it in a specific period of Germany’s history which it contrasts with the present. Specifically, it proposes the surprising idea that present-day guilt for communist-era misdeeds is not restricted to the over-40s: even children could be implicated in betrayals. Like Rudi in My Best Enemy, Alexander betrayed his best friend, with greater consequences than he ever anticipated. In both films, a certain degree of responsibility is placed on the political system: while fascism appealed to people’s worst instincts, communism encouraged an inflexible attitude. Both systems also gave certain individuals a dangerous degree of power over their peers, power which could be used vindictively.
In both The Prize and My Best Enemy the individual is still held responsible for his actions: the audience is ultimately invited to judge Alexander, just as they judged Rudi. Alexander was only a teenager when he betrayed his friend, though, and his betrayal may be seen as a lapse in character rather than the beginning of a change for the worse. Still, the characters in The Prize are more mysterious than those in My Best Enemy, a film more mainstream in its approach. Alexander’s true character arguably remains inscrutable: we see him as a decent kid in the past, and as a haunted adult in the present, but know little about the intervening years. We learn that he has stayed away from his home town for a long time, that he never replied to a letter from his best friend’s sister, and see that he is now acts distant or strangely towards his childhood friends: all of this could be explained by his guilty conscience, but it is not certain. Is he normally as cold, irritable and irresolute as we see him now, and if so, is it symptomatic of a problem with him as a person? Or, rather, is Alexander the scarred a victim of a political system that gave him too much responsibility, too soon?
Although the idea behind The Prize was good, its realisation is unconvincing. In the film’s present day scenes, there are too many lengthy shots of Alexander and the other characters staring into space or at each other, shots which take place against uncompromisingly soulless and dull backdrops: this made The Prize the most trying film I’ve seen at the Berlinale. Flashbacks from Alexander’s past are easier to engage with: more photogenic actors play the teenage versions of these characters, who interact normally with each other. It is also interesting to have a glimpse of what everyday life was like in East Germany: the ideological component of their classes at school, the factory visits of the local Free German Youth club, and the attraction of forbidden Western TV shows and music. Even this component of the film could have been a little better developed in its details. Finally, the narrative progression is too simplistic and predictable: once it becomes clear that Alexander feels guilty about his past, the audience will have no trouble guessing exactly what took place, long before the film reveals it. It is a shame that what started out as such a good concept turned out to be a forgettable film.
