Berlinale- Film Review: As We Were Dreaming

As a child Dani had hoped to be a journalist, he won his school’s poetry competition, while Rico dreamed of becoming a champion boxer. As teenagers, the friends open an underground club in a dilapidated building, but a rival gang of neo-Nazi skinheads decide it’s on their patch and start kicking up a storm. Matters are further complicated because Dani is obsessed with Starlet (Ruby O. Fee) the girlfriend of the rival gang’s leader. Refusing to bow to pressure, Rico, Mark and Dani are badly beaten-up. As they grow older, things only get worse. Paul considers working in pornography and Pitbull starts dealing drugs. Dani spends time in a youth correctional facility, Mark becomes hooked on heroin.
The characters’ lives are evidently meant to reflect reality for poorer, disadvantaged East Germans after reunification. For many, newfound freedom inevitably led to excess. Unremittingly high octane and sometimes graphically violent, As We Were Dreaming, won’t appeal to all tastes. Some audience members left during Dani’s brutal beating. As they are all proudly delinquent, it’s hard to feel sorry for any of them. Dani is the most sympathetic but he betrays his two friends when they are being chased by the gang. The zeal with which they steal and smash things up becomes depressing after a while. The narrative is punctuated with snappy chapter headings such as “Gutter Hound”, “Rivalry” and “Thunderstorm in the Brain,” but there is little else to dispel the overriding atmosphere of alienation and despair.
Meyer, born in former East Germany, has described himself as a “child of the street”. Like Dani he spent time in a youth detention facility but put his experiences to good use by penning acclaimed novels. One can’t help yearning for similar redemption for his characters, for there to have been some emotional journey worth taking, but the film’s bleak ending offers little in the way of hope. Superb performances from the young cast and Michael Hammon’s evocative camerawork are the main compensations for a relentlessly bleak story of lost youth.
Originally published by Cine-vue.com