THE SUN IS ZOOMING IN: DJ ICKARUS IS CALLING US TO BERLIN “BERLIN CALLING” Special Screening | American Film Market | 11.5.08 by Noah Barron
As far as I can tell, “Berlin Calling” seems to be a movie about how the problems that people my age face in Europe are totally different than my problems. A side-by-side comparison is warranted: In the film, Paul Kalkbrenner plays DJ Ickarus, a drug-addled, tortured-genius electronic music producer who spends his days fretting that he can’t leave his government-paid-for rehab clinic to party and finish his album. His biggest woes are bad pills and walking in on his girlfriend hooking up with another girl. Mostly he seems to enjoy riding public transit with his headphones on. In my excuse for a life, I play a mostly-sober, mostly miserable tortured-dilettante writer who spent all day today (after the “Berlin Calling” screening) arguing with medical personnel and my HMO about seeing a doctor and having my insurance pay for it. And then there was a goddamned black widow spider in the inpatient lounge. (No joke here, a big orderly stomped.) My biggest woes are lamenting that my state banned gay marriage. Mostly, I seem to enjoy riding my scooter and getting parking tickets because L.A. has no public transit. Translation: we all need to fucking move to Berlin. The movie itself is pretty rad. Structurally, it’s pretty sparse and super morally ambivalent. Kalkbrenner’s heavy-handedly named Ickarus character waffles between the drugs-are-bad and the drugs-are-my-muse poles while never really settling on one. His weaselly bad-pill-giving dealer gets his comeuppance in the form of a cup of €800-worth of squandered drugs that Ickarus pours into some soda. Mostly though, the movie follows Kalkbrenner’s Icka from club night to hospital, to lesbian threesome back to club night and hospital and so on, never really passing judgment, but making rock bottom look pretty fucking fashionable. This is the kind of movie that only works if the music is actually good. If it hadn’t been, “Berlin Calling” would have been an extremely boring, extremely foreign piece of shit. But—and this is my bias because I have been rocking out to the leaked soundtrack for a couple weeks now—the music, all Kalkbrenner originals, some created just for the film, tears the roof off. It’s the absolute best of BPitch Control Berlin thoughtful minimalism, glitchy, somber, but capable of pouring nitroglycerine on the dancefloor when necessary. Kalkbrenner’s tunes sustain the otherwise inert and unfocused film. It’s more like a live concert movie with boring fictional bits in between. If by “live concert” you are okay with me meaning “skinny guy in sunglasses and futbol jersey dancing to his own laptop Ableton Live track.” God knows I’m okay with that. Fake bands in music movies always cop out. Like, you’re supposed to be buoyed along by the characters’ transcendent admiration for the music, but then the band sounds like Stillwater in “Almost Famous” or The Wonders from “That Thing You Do!” Techno movies are even worse—played for lad-laughs like “It’s All Gone Pete Tong” or totally missing the point like “Groove.” This one gets it. This one scene where Ickarus wakes up after taking ketamine, awkwardly kisses his sleeping girlfriend, and then goes to a riverside impromptu rave fucking devastates me. Because dance music’s transcendence never looks believable on screen—it looks scary and harsh and childish—all of which the wrong club can be. But in the dappled disco sunlight of the Berlin morning, with Kalkbrenner’s immensely warm “Square 1” pulsing, it’s real and it makes me want to take 100 days off and go chase the perfect break in the perfect club with the perfect people and the perfect drug. Check it out if you don’t believe me: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM0DYQUAMQk
How much do you want to freak out with little-jacket dudes next to the River Havel? God, color me rainbow-monopoly-money-hued with Euroenvy. Anyway, this Hannes Stoehr-directed movie will probably never get picked up for North American release—I saw it at the American Film Market festival in Santa Monica and the three other people in the screening when the lights went down were gone before the movie ended—but you should probably try to see it if you have any kind of even passing affection for IDM, techno, tech house, minimalism or microhouse or any other pretentious genre name like that. Good luck finding a screening. Or a copy of the album for that matter. Not that I would ever condone something like BitTorrent. Cuz this movie will remind you of the first time you ever heard an electronic track that set the world alight and made every tree and truck and cloud seem like it was dancing to the tune between your headphones. It will probably make you also quit your job and move to one of the capitals of Europe and ride sweet metros and get good healthcare. But maybe after yesterday’s election, we can have those things here. Will techno and soccer get popular? http://www.bpitchcontrol.de/product/446/0 http://www.berlin-calling.de/en http://www.beatportal.com/feed/item/an-interview-with-the-director-of-berlin-calling-hannes-stoehr/