Like all of Maria Speth’s films, Mr. Bachmann and His Class is a sharply observed portrait of people negotiating their way through uncertain, liminal spaces. At the same time, the documentary marks a sharp turn in Speth’s filmmaking approach, something all the more notable given the remarkable consistency of her first four films. The Days Between (2001), Madonnas (2007), Daughters (2014), and the documentary 9 Lives (2011) were all characterized by Speth’s intensive focus on individuals (mostly young women) living on the margins of contemporary German society who actively flout the rules of bourgeois decorum as well as sexist assumptions about how “proper” women ought to behave.
By contrast, Speth’s new film finds her practically reinventing her approach to cinema. Clocking in at 217 minutes, Mr. Bachmann is as capacious as Speth’s previous films were jagged and economical; it has frequently been likened to the work of Frederick Wiseman, and naturally those making the comparison intend to pay Mr. Bachmann the highest of compliments by doing so. However, calling Mr. Bachmann Wisemanesque occludes as much as it reveals, both formally and thematically. And upon closer inspection this nearly four-hour document, observing a year in the life of a middle-school class at the Georg Buchner Schule in Stadtallendorf, bears unmistakable traces of Speth’s earlier artistic concerns.
The films of the Berlin School can be quite divergent in their themes and styles; in fact, it’s often easier to define a given film as “Berlin School” less by what it does than by what it doesn’t do. Nevertheless, we can say that, with some notable exceptions, they tend to be present-tense films rather than tells the story of Lynn (Sabine Timoteo), an aimless 22-year-old who lives with her older brother and his family, despite wanting no part of family life. She works part-time at a university dining hall, where she meets Koji (Hiroki Mano), a Japanese student working on his German. Paradoxically, the language barrier serves to strengthen the bond between the two: Lynn actively resents the idea that her loved ones want to rely on her (or just know that she’s not dead or in jail), and in Koji she finds someone with whom she can simply prowl the empty streets.
