Film Review | ARTE
P.H. Bloecker | bloecker.wordpress.com Credit phb | Our Planet and AI More on this Photo above later ... This film is on ARTE | released 1981 There is a particular pleasure available only to the exile: watching a film set in a city you once knew well, from a couch on the other side of the world, and catching the filmmakers in the act of truth. Not dramatic truth — visual truth. The tram that really ran that route. The car that really sat outside that apartment block. The particular quality of Bavarian winter light on wet cobblestones. Laurent Heynemann's Il faut tuer Birgitt Haas (1981) — released in the English-speaking world as Birgitt Haas Must Be Killed, and in Germany, with characteristic bluntness, as Der inszenierte Mord (The Staged Murder) — gave me that pleasure in abundance. And then, with almost studied perversity, it threw it all away in a finale so narratively incoherent that I found myself staring at the screen in something close to disbelief. This is a film of two halves. The first half is one of the more atmospherically convincing European political thrillers of its era. The second half is a study in how badly a clever premise can be betrayed by a screenplay that loses its nerve. Let me begin, as the film itself should have, with what it gets right. Munich as Character: The…