Hotel Lux (film)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Hotel Lux |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 2011 |
| length | 110 minutes |
| Age rating |
FSK 12 JMK 10 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Leander Haussmann |
| script | Leander Haussmann |
| production |
Corinna Eich , Günter Rohrbach |
| music | Ralf Wengenmayr |
| camera | Hagen Bogdanski |
| cut | Hansjörg Weißbrich |
| occupation | |
| |
Hotel Lux is a German tragic comedy from 2011 by Leander Haußmann , who also wrote the screenplay for the film. Michael Herbig , Jürgen Vogel and Thekla Reuten can be seen in the leading roles . The film title refers to the hotel of the same name in Moscow, where political emigrants were quartered in the 1930s.
action
In early 1933, Hans Zeisig and Siegfried (Siggi) Meyer worked in a Berlin vaudeville theater as imitators of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin . While Siggi is a communist, Zeisig sticks to Tingeltangel and sees the seizure of power only as a temporary episode. His dream is Hollywood .
After the fire in the Reichstag , which led to the “ Ordinance of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and the State ” and served as a pretext for the communist hunt, Siggi was forced to flee. Before that, Zeisig got to know the Dutch communist Frida van Oorten, who comes from a good family and, as a staunch communist, takes Siggi with her. After the November pogroms in 1938 , the comedian Hans Zeisig loses his boss Goldberg (stage name: Valetti). He also learns that his friend Siggi ended up in the Oranienburg concentration camp . In an act of desperation, Zeisig disguises himself as Hitler and takes the stage for the last time; then he too must flee. In the short term he will not get a passport for the USA, but only one that was actually intended for Jan Hansen, Hitler's former personal astrologer in the Third Reich .
Where Siskin got into, he only realized after his arrival in Moscow at the Hotel Lux . The first disappointment comes from the Kafkaesque realization that he needs a "Propusk" (pass) for everything. Likewise, the many rats make it clear to him that this is not a grand hotel . Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov believes it is the person for whom the passport was originally issued. Zeisig meets the Dutch underground fighter Frida, who protects him as his interpreter.
Dissidents and, above all, German exiled communists, who mostly work for the Communist International , live in the hotel . Some of them will later become very popular, but are still quite unknown at this point. Ask him, among others, Wilhelm Pieck , Walter Ulbricht and Kurt Funk aka Herbert Wehner ago. Zeisig quickly realizes that Trotskyists, or those who only had contact with other disgraced communists like Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin , live dangerously. Usually there is a knock on the door at night to pick up the unwelcome guests. Siskin is lucky, on the wing for officials to live, and to the dacha of Josef Stalin down. He wants to ask him whether he should negotiate with Adolf Hitler . The actor Zeisig leaves a good impression and receives the Druzhba Order (Order of Friendship ) for it.
When the actual astrologer Hansen appears, Jeschow and Wassili Wassiljewitsch Ulrich decide to cover up the man known to Stalin rather than admit a mistake. Zeisig begins to paint a convincing picture with the utensils of the real Hansen. He is also learning the Russian language. Just as he gets to know Frida better, his old friend and colleague Siggi arrives. This and Frida are just as staunch communists as all the other guests at the hotel. However, the three are also endangered as part of the “great purge” . The change in the NKVD by Lavrenti Beria saves Frida and Zeisig in the short term.
When Stalin came to visit Zeisig in person at the hotel before the German-Soviet non-aggression pact with escort, Zeisig was again in danger. Stalin had known for a long time that he was just an impostor, but let him go because he found his advice useful. Siggi and Zeisig overpower Stalin and dress up as Stalin and Hitler. They free Frida from the Lubyanka , and in front of Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov , they escape by plane. Your destination is Hollywood.
background
- The credits of the film are dedicated to Ezard Haussmann , the father of director Leander Haussmann. Ezard Haußmann died while filming.
publication
The premiere was on October 25, 2011 in the Lichtburg in Essen , and the cinema release in Germany on October 27, 2011. By the end of November 2011, Hotel Lux in Germany had around 150,000 cinema-goers. The film was screened on October 29, 2011 in Rome at the Festival Internazionale del Film di Roma film festival as part of the competition. The WDR sent on November 4, 2011 under the title Bully special - Hotel Lux , a 45-minute documentary for the film. The film was shown on arte on August 19 in the evening program, with night repetition on September 11, 2013, and on January 31, 2015 on WDR.
production
Helmut Dietl had his first idea in the mid-1990s. Around 2006, producer Günter Rohrbach commissioned an exposé for the film, which the director Leander Haußmann, who had joined, rejected. The screenplay written by Haussmann himself was initially rejected by the leading actor Michael Herbig, until they could finally agree on a script.
Filming began on October 12, 2010 and ended on December 16, 2010. The film was shot in Berlin and at various locations in North Rhine-Westphalia.
Jan Hansen
The film's website names four people who were known at the time and who could serve as inspiration for the fictional character of Jan Hansen:
- Wolf Messing had to flee to Russia as a Jewish communist in 1939 and met Stalin there.
- Karl Ernst Krafft predicted the Hitler attack by Georg Elser , but fell from grace after Rudolf Hess' flight and died in the concentration camp.
- Wilhelm Theodor Wulff worked as an astrologer for Heinrich Himmler .
- Erik Jan Hanussen acted as a sympathizer of the National Socialists, predicted the fire of the Reichstag building in 1933 and was shot in the same year.
Reviews
“The first quarter of an hour of 'Hotel Lux' is a grandiose comedian duo, which ironically reflects on Hitler's different and yet always very similar corruptions. […] With Haußmann, the historical figures remain left-wing cardboard comrades, the legendary 'Hotel Lux' comes across as a kind of ghost train of real socialism. But as a parable about the interplay of disguise and politics, of mask and ideology, the dictator ballet develops a remarkable dynamic. "
“'Hotel Lux' always stares at the drama for a few seconds too long at the crucial moment, which repeatedly destroys the timing that is crucial for good comedy. The sentence: 'If the film gets people to find out about the time, we've achieved a lot' sounds like a dreary alibi. "
“To crack jokes - no matter how subtle - about historical atrocities, murder and torture, that will put off many viewers. And yet: Haußmann and his team understood how to turn the fictional material based on historical facts into an absurd comedy. […] And indeed: the film works on both levels. Crazy scenes alternate with sequences in which the viewer is likely to get stuck in the throat of laughter. […] It goes without saying that not all gags work equally. But the bottom line is that Leander Haußmann was able to build on his strongest film work with 'Hotel Lux' - probably also because he included a piece of his own biography in the film. "
“Where Michael Bully Herbig moves almost dignified through the scenery as a siskin, Haußmann now strings together numbers à la Revue in the usual way. [...] That is all a matter of taste. Interesting, however, is a farce of confusion: due to his false passport, Hans Zeisig is mistaken for Hitler's astrologer, who is supposed to be secretly advising Stalin. How the unfortunate hero squirms, what a spiral of delusions his lie triggers, that is captivating. Yes, by Haussmann standards it is almost ingenious! [...] What would Ernst Lubitsch have made of it! Or Mel Brooks ! Apparently, Haussmann is part of our historic punishment. "
“It almost seems as if director Leander Haußmann wanted to invent his own genre with 'Hotel Lux': You laugh at Hitler, you laugh at Stalin - and most of the time you don't know whether that's okay. [...] So, 'Hotel Lux' begins with some funny dance scenes and gags and the viewer immediately feels as though he is in a typical Bully film. But the first impression is wrong; The seriousness of the situation is already catching up with the cinema viewer, Siggi has to go into hiding, and things are getting tricky for Hans too. [...] Leander Haußmann's film takes place in an era in which there is actually no room for comedies. Between jokes and absurd incidents, people are deported or simply shot. The viewer is put into a quandary in which he often does not know whether it is okay to laugh. Haussmann did not create a simple comedy, rather he tries to master the difficult balancing act between tragic events and the comedy genre. The threat can be felt again and again between humorous and relaxed passages. [...] This alternation between seriousness and fun and the impossibility of assigning the film to a certain genre make it so attractive, but at the same time it is very unusual. "
“The comedy genre used […] (Leander Haußmann) like a 'Trojan horse' to interest the audience in the dramatic historical events in the Soviet Union, about which prior knowledge cannot be assumed. [...] Leander Haußmann never skips a gag. His film works great as a comedy. Almost too good […]. But the film is certain of one thing: great cinema. "
“The film […] seeks this atmosphere of omnipresent paranoia in order to take a closer look at the hotel stay. The model guest is the demonstratively apolitical siskin [...] The film now grabs everything that this milieu has to offer in a beautifully laconic manner - and only exaggerates the nuances. […] Denunciations are forced, mothers arrested in front of their children. These abysses open up so casually that the viewer still giggles while seeing new horrors approaching. [...] So much for history lessons, which of course also take place on the side. You don't have to get annoyed once because of and despite all the floating ideas in 'Hotel Lux'. They seldom ignite in loud laughter, but they are always amused. You can't say that very often about a German comedy. "
“Solidly produced and visually quite impressive, the film suffers from its confused plot, but above all from the fact that it does not know how to balance the bitter seriousness of historical reality and its comedic exaggeration. In this way, the funny and the exciting are put together headlessly and neutralize each other. "
Awards
Hotel Lux won a producer's award at the Bavarian Film Prize 2011. The German film and media rating awarded the film the title “particularly valuable”. In 2012, three nominations for the German Film Award followed (production design - Uli Hanisch , costume design - Ute Paffendorf , make-up design - Kitty Kratschke , Katharina Nädelin and Georg Korpás ).
Web links
- Official site for the film Hotel Lux (Flash only)
- Official film booklet with materials for teaching PDF file (5.1 MB)
- Hotel Lux at filmportal.de
- Hotel Lux in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Release certificate for Hotel Lux . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , October 2011 (PDF; test number: 129 747 K).
- ↑ Age rating for Hotel Lux . Youth Media Commission .
- ↑ Press release Bavaria Film, October 12, 2010
- ↑ Film hit list: November 2011 , Filmförderungsanstalt, accessed on January 21, 2012
- ↑ Competition entry at the international film festival in Rome, Bavaria Film
- ^ WDR: 45-minute documentary on the film on the WDR website.
- ↑ http://www.nordbayern.de/was-michael-herbig-und-co-zu-hotel-lux-sagen-1.1606029
- ↑ Alexander Cammann: "Hotel Lux": Tired pun in the red bunker . In: The time . No. 44/2011 ( online ).
- ^ Christian Buß: Herbig comedy "Hotel Lux": Comrade Rotzbremse asks for ballet. In: Spiegel Online . October 25, 2011, accessed June 9, 2018 .
- ↑ Production data Bavaria Film for Hotel Lux
- ↑ Filmkritik Comrade Rotzbremse asks for ballet
- ↑ Film review When Bully does Hitler
- ↑ Film review laughter about Stalin and Hitler: "Hotel Lux"
- ↑ Film review And Walter Ulbricht practices building the wall with sugar cubes
- ^ Film review Dancing with Stalin and Hitler
- ^ Film review Hotel Lux ( Memento from October 17, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Film review world history through the toilet seat
- ^ Hotel Lux. In: Lexicon of international film . Film service , accessed July 31, 2018 .
- ↑ FBW press release