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| Three women: Ery Bos, Asta Nielsen and Ellen Schwanneke |
It looks good from far away, just like me…
It’s no coincidence that the very first thing we see Asta
Nielsen do in her first and only talkie is to put her finger to her lips to
shush the chatter as her daughter gives a music recital. Only Die Asta could be
so knowing and post-modern. She was fifty when she made this film and she looks
great, lovely big smiles and gorgeous fashions, nothing like the rags of
Joyless Street and, as with that film and so many others, she unrolls as
stunning closing section… watching all of these films that’s one thing that
stands out, the actress always left plenty in the tank for a sprint finish of
audacious expression.
So many lines ring beyond the film, not least the one
above and other’s relating to her age that she may well have improvised given
their added poignance. The male characters in the film are mostly boorish and
one constantly complains that a woman of her age with two grown daughters
should simply resign which I took to be a mistranslation of retire but which
the Kennington Bioscope’s Michelle Facey suggested was meant literally, Asta’s
character being viewed by a conservative German man as wrong to still have
personal ambition given her womanly responsibilities.
Maybe it was Asta’s age and her feeling that the parts were just drying up as younger actors swarmed. She made silent five films released in 1927 and headed off to the theatre before being lured back for Unmögliche Liebe (1932) and clearly decided that artistically that was enough and the stage would be where she would carry on before the changes in Germany forced her back to Copenhagen in 1936.
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| Asta Nielsen, Julius Falkenstein and Hilde Hildebrand |
Directed by Erich Waschneck, Impossible Love is a little
deliberate but also a very interesting film that is firmly centred on three
women, sculptor and studio manager Vera Holgk (Asta), her eldest daughter Nora
(Ery Bos) and youngest Toni (Ellen Schwanneke, who’d featured in the previous
year’s Mädchen in Uniform). These three are the centre of the action and
are largely surrounded by odd men.
Nora is, for some reason, in a relationship with the moneyed but foolish Leopold von Möllendorf (Anton Pointner) who, once engaged to his much younger partner, calls Vera Mutter like the man child he is, whilst also attempting to get Nora to give up the cello on the grounds that it is a most unfeminine instrument to play. He also thinks Vera should “resign” and surrender her selfish ambitions, declaring his family as “conservative” but not backward… Toni meanwhile has a relationship with a young man nearer her age, Erwin (Carl Balhaus) who works with her in a photographic studio and how is less intelligent and less realistic than she. Toni may be the youngest but she has insight and some of the film’s best lines.
Daftest of all is the Professor’s man servant Zimmermann
(Julius Falkenstein, who, as Michelle reminded me, was so good in The Oyster
Princess with Ossi Oswalda) but he’s meant to provide comedic relief and
does so with practiced ease, some physical comedy, inappropriate napping and
lots of outspoken lines that still cause a titter.
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| Asta still works hard on the casual details of real character |
Tell me you still believe I can create great work?
The exception to all this appears to be Professor Steinkampp (Hans
Rehmann), a sculptor of repute and, even though younger, a suitor for Vera’s
affections. Steinkampp pursues her with some style and then invites her to his
studio to work on her own sculpture for a competition. At first, Vera, who has
been running a commercial art studio, is doubtful she can still compete but
with the Professor’s encouragement she is soon back in the groove, as it were.
It’s a joy to watch Asta, fag in mouth and singing to herself as her character
works… that’s how to use talkies for narrative continuity, her old tricks of
seemingly casual distractions are accompanied by sound in this new environment.
You can also see/hear the stage experience at play.
Vera has doubts and guilt about her growing feelings for
Steinkampp and starts withholding some information from her daughters, the beginnings
of a distance between them as she, for the first time in a long time, starts to
put herself first. She wins the art competition and has to confess some of her
new relationship but then things take a dramatic turn for the worst as
Steinkampp’s old girlfriend, Martini (Hilde Hildebrand) sells her salacious
story to the newspapers and all Himmel breaks loose…
Amidst the moral outrage, that Vera was seeing and
staying with Steinkampp is the assertion that he helped her win the sculpture
prize. Stuck up Möllendorf insists she responds publicly but Vera has nothing
to say to the stuffed shirt and will deal with this in her manner. Nora is
conflicted and leaves to stay with her man whilst Toni takes matters into her
own hands to visit the newspaper and ask them to retract… she learns far more
than she wants to hear.
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| A woman with agency, managing her life and business |
Spoiler zone: Steinkampp is revealed to be married
but his wife Katharina (Elisabeth Wendt) has lost her mind and is permanently
residing in an asylum. Fair dos to the Professor, he makes sure that she is
looked after and he wants a divorce but he hasn’t told Vera any of this and she
is naturally devastated and, as he talks calmly with Toni about his plans to
divorce and marry Vera, she is visiting Katharina… Wendt is made up like a
supernatural Miss Haversham, golden hair floating around her head, a child’s
mind but with enough left to know that her husband’s love is all the world to
her.
Nieslen finally let’s rip in these circumstances and they
are very powerful moments, it’s an over-egged scenario but she makes it work
through all the years of skilled control and tears flow between the two. Even
if Steinkampp had been completely open with Vera, how can he be forgiven this
abandonment… Later, we see Asta sitting on a bench for a moment, she stands and
walks into the darkness of the forest… out of life perhaps, but certainly out
of film.
It's a perfect ending to her cinematic career and not dissimilar to that she confected at the end of the documentary she would direct about herself in 1968.
In this film, the family’s friends suggest she should
just marry Steinkampp, “after all you can get married at 90 these days…” and, almost forty years later, that’s what Asta did, marrying a 70-year-old art dealer aged 88*. She
didn’t let age deny her, just like Vera perhaps.
So, the end of a stunning season of films covering 22 years when Die Asta was the biggest movie star most people hadn’t heard of… not anymore! Thank you, BFI, programmer Pamela Hutchinson, the accompanists, archivists and all who made this happen. There’s still enough films left for a part two… just saying.
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| Julius Falkenstein and Ossi Oswalda in The Oyster Princes |
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