Hysteria

Bluesky

Filmmaking, both on a large and small scale, is a stressful business for various reasons, conceptual and artistic as well as practical ones. Basically, the source of stress is decision-making and the fact that it almost necessarily involves a group of people who all have their own lives, beliefs and identities. Misunderstandings and conflicts occur almost every day of shooting and, in that case, romanticising the “authority” of the filmmaker in charge is not very helpful.

Premiering at Berlinale, in the Panorama section, Mehmet Akif Buyukatalay’s Hysteria is envisioned as a tense, paranoid thriller set within the film crew working on a project that deals with the racism in contemporary Germany, referring to the 1993 Solingen arson attack. It is a project of a somewhat established Turkish-German auteur Yigit (Serkan Kaya) and his producer Lilith (Nicolette Krebitz), but of the kind that favours authenticity over spectacle. This is one of the reasons why the most of extras and less specialised crew members come from the ranks of the local centre for refugees.

The conflict that ensues between the two poles can be described as a class one, but masked as faith-based. It is sparked by filming the sequence that recreates the Solingen arson and its supposed aftermath. Two extras, an aspiring actor Said (Mehdi Meskar) and his more experienced colleague with some theatre-directing experience Mustafa (Aziz Capkurt) realise that, while burning the set, one copy of Qur’an was also burned. It does not sit well either with Mustafa, who is nominally an atheist, but cannot stand provocations regarding the faith of his countrymen, or with the driver Majid (Nazmi Kirik) who gets particularly offended by the act that he refuses to drive the tapes with the “blasphemous” material.

The intern Elif (Devrim Lingnau Islamoglu) becomes tasked with that and the rest of the “conspiracy” in the film is seen through her eyes. The simple task gets derailed by lost – or maybe stolen – keys of an apartment, which puts Elif in a damage control-type of situation. Her lie to a locksmith will eventually get exposed, her attempt to find a finder ends up in text messages by a stranger who might be a fanatic and everything culminates with the tapes getting lost or, once again, stolen. While somebody from the asylum alarms the authorities about the book-burning incident and might hold a grudge against the crew, the filmmaker and the producer may also have their reasons to hide the material.

Until the very end of the film that gets pretty explosive (pun intended!) pretty quickly, Mehmed Akif Buyukatalay does his best to keep the confusion and the tension coming out of a virtually non-issue situation and escalating it through the series of misjudgements that are allowed to simmer. He does so by relying on his key actress Islamoglu – who has to play a complex character in a unique position, which she does in a fierce, naturalistic manner – but also on the short, perfectly timed bursts of Marvin Miller’s nerve-wrecking strings score. The editors Denys Darahan and Andreas Menn also do a fine job in the terms of diverting our attention in order to save the revelations for later, while the camerawork of Christian Kochman, usually in dark tones and often in hand-held mode, also serves the purpose.

However, there is a bit of a TV-aura spreading around Hysteria. It might come from the simple facts that the film was co-produced by the ZDF television and its actors previously did the most of their work on German TV, but there is also a certain lack of elegance regarding the way Buyukatalay writes his dialogue and the way he uses a multitude of languages in a hard-to-buy manner in order to prove a point. It is evident that he is trying to open a discussion about Germany today and Islam in it seen through the perspective of different generations and classes of immigrants, but the question remains how much of it can be explored by the genre language of a thriller-drama.