And Jimmy went to the rainbow (2008)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | And Jimmy went to the rainbow |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 2008 |
| length | 90 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Carlo Rola |
| script | Jürgen Büscher |
| production | Oliver Berben |
| music | Georg Kleinebreil |
| camera | Frank Küpper |
| cut | Friederike von Normann |
| occupation | |
| |
And Jimmy went to the rainbow is a remake of the novel of the same name by Johannes Mario Simmel , which was made in 2008 under the direction of Carlo Rola . The main roles are occupied by Heino Ferch and Dennenesch Zoudé . The television film is the first contribution in a series of remakes of Simmel bestsellers by the production company Moovie-Entertainment by Oliver Berben for ZDF . The first film adaptation of the same name for the cinema, directed by Alfred Vohrer, was published in 1971.
action
Berlin, 1996: Manuel Aranda, an Argentine surgeon around forty, has come to Berlin to organize the transfer of the body of his father Rodolpho Aranda to his homeland in Buenos Aires . Rodolpho Aranda was poisoned with potassium cyanide in a library at the age of eighty by an old lady who was employed there . Then the woman killed herself. Her name was Valerie Steinfeld.
Manuel takes over the father's personal belongings in the morgue, including a wallet with foreign currency . Then he visits the still fresh grave of the murderess Valerie Steinfeld. There he meets a young mulatto woman who identifies herself as Valerie Steinfeld's granddaughter. Her name: Irene Waldeck. Manuel wants to know the reason for his father's murder. Irene has the same interest. She is with the police and introduces Manuel to her mentor and superior, Kriminalrat Groll.
Manuel is in danger. The US secret service, Agent Grant, and the French secret service, Agent Mercier, are pursuing him. He only escapes death by the French sniper because the shooter is liquidated immediately before he can pull the trigger himself. Manuel, who speaks perfect German because he went to a German school in Buenos Aires according to his father Rodolpho's wishes, and Irene go to the crime scene, the library.
At the time of his murder, Rodolpho Aranda was reading a book about Adolf Hitler . Manuel is irritated, but is deeply convinced of his father's innocence. Irene leads Manuel into her grandmother Valerie Steinfeld's book restoration workshop in a room in the library. From there the murderess had fetched the cyanide capsule for Manuel's father.
The first clue is a business card in Rodolpho's wallet: Chez Nora - a brothel and agent's nest. Nora Hill, the owner of the brothel, was a double agent for England and Germany during the Third Reich . She was friends with Valerie Steinfeld. Valerie, married to a Jew who emigrated to London during the Nazi regime, tried to protect her "half-Jewish" son Heinz from the concentration camp through an Aryanization process . The allegation of a previous affair with her childhood friend Willy Schäfer, who had just fallen, made her son Heinz a full Aryan during the Aryanization process and thus withdrew him from the sadistic discrimination of his school teacher Friedjung. Heinz immediately reported to the Waffen SS and died in Hungary in the penultimate year of the war. Friedjung became a chemist and appeared to have died in an explosion in his laboratory after the end of the Third Reich.
Irene Waldeck's mother Martha Waldeck, née Steinfeld, says that as a child she did not know anything about her status as a “ half-Jewish ” because she grew up with an Aryan family called Germer. She thought Maria Germer was her mother and Valerie Steinfeld was her aunt. She never met Heinz. Martha's husband was, according to the photo, an African American soldier. That's why Irene is a mulatto. As Manuel and Irene are about to end their visit, Martha remembers Valerie Steinfeld's diary at the last moment, which Manuel and Irene then find in their workshop in the library.
When Manuel and Irene leave the library, they notice that they are being followed. In the underground car park, Manuel wants to confront the pursuers. At gunpoint, Irene prevents him from running into his death. In the elevator upstairs it becomes clear that the cool young policewoman Manuel is already closer inside than she wants to show.
Manuel, who remembers his father's habit of hiding keys in his shoe, actually finds a locker key in his apartment . Nora Hill had advised Manuel to take care of "AP7". The contents of the locker contain encrypted research results by the chemist Rodolpho Aranda on "AP7", a neurotoxin. It is these documents that the secret services absolutely want. However, without decryption they are worthless. Manuel learns from the prostitute Yvonne from Chez Nora , who “looked after” Rodolpho, from a poem by Rudyard Kipling that Rodolpho loved and which contained the line “And Jimmy went to the rainbows foot” - And Jimmy went to the rainbow . He quickly realizes that this could be the code key. He and Irene are now more and more obviously threatened. Her car explodes in front of her eyes. A strong feeling develops between the two of them, Irene is convinced that their encounter is fateful and that Manuel is the man of her life. Manuel feels the same way, they both hold on to each other and become lovers.
The plain text can be read out with the help of decryption software at Kriminalrat Groll. Manuel has to realize that his father did not, as he, the philanthropist and doctor in a hospital in a poor district of Buenos Aires, believed and hoped, had invented a new drug for the blessing of mankind, but a highly effective chemical weapon of destruction. Seven molecules of "AP7" are enough to kill a full-grown bull instantly, a few kilograms extinguish all life on earth: people, animals and plants. And the formulas are in front of him on the screen. Manuel, whose mission in life is to save human lives, sees the obligation to destroy the documents. He burns them. The secret services are watching him. Manuel is now outlawed . Both secret services can only be sure that the other side will not receive a presumed copy if Aranda is silenced.
Manuel Aranda sees a way out in fleeing via a third country to Buenos Aires, home, to the sea. His passport expires. In the embassy of Argentina he is confronted with the fire sabotage of the Aranda Chemicals plant in La Copelina. The La Copelina chemical plant was built during the Argentine military dictatorship . The ambassador knows, and Manuel now suspects, that military secrets were kept there: chemical weapons. His father Rodolpho, he learns, is not a native of Argentina, but a German immigrant. The naturalization certificate leaves no doubt about Rodolpho's German name: Friedjung. Argentina does not want the country to be pilloried in connection with the Aranda scandal for experimenting with weapons of mass destruction. Manuel is refused entry into his home country, his goods and all his possessions are confiscated. Now he has nothing.
Kriminalrat Groll checks the Friedjung file. The likelihood that the ex-Nazi Friedjung did not burn to death in his laboratory after the end of the Third Reich but immigrated to Argentina under the name Aranda is increasing. Manuel's feeling when he saw an old photo of Friedjung that reminded him of his own father is an additional confirmation. He is the son of ex-Nazi Karl Friedjung. That also explains his blonde hair. The realization that his father was a potential mass murderer is bitter, and it is probably only a matter of time before a bullet from a sniper rifle will hit him himself. Valerie Steinfeld did not murder an anonymous Argentine in the library, but the old identity of Rodolpho Aranda: Friedjung, whose cruel discrimination against Jews ultimately drove her son Heinz into an Aryan elite group and thus into a senseless death on a battlefield in Hungary.
Kriminalrat Groll is Manuel's last resort. He will give him a new identity. His price: Manuel has to release Groll's protégé Irene Waldeck. Irene would be too endangered around him. Manuel meets again with Irene in the hotel where they first made love. When she wakes up the next morning, the bed next to her is empty.
dramaturgy
Main conflict
The main conflict in the 1970/71 film was based on the protagonist Valerie Steinfeld. She had to discriminate against her beloved husband in order to save her son. The time of the release of the film coincided with the sex wave in Germany and so the story in the chapter of the Aryanization process gave the subject of sexually unusual varieties, which the shame-filled plaintiff had to describe in detail. The focus of the presentation was on agent activity in the Cold War , which Manuel ultimately fell victim to.
The main conflict in the remake 2007/08 lies in the person of the son Manuel Aranda, whose research into the death of his father must gradually lead him to the realization that his father was not a good person, but a culpably entangled man. At the same time, the pressure on Manuel increases so much that he loses everything and can ultimately only save his bare existence. The connection of the C-weapon AP7 with the military dictatorship in Argentina updates the subject with the encrypted documents of the murdered father.
language
The screenwriter Jürgen Büscher adapted the language of the remake, as far as the protagonists' investigations into the murder case were concerned, to a much more modern diction than the version from 1970 to 1971. The dialogues pursue the clarification of the case in a factual and topic-centered manner. Everyday language does not take place. Büscher largely assigns reminiscences to the diction of the literary template to the personal-emotional subject area of the love story of the protagonists and quasi- iconic sentences like " Love is stronger than death " or as a reference to the flowery metaphorical language of the literary template in this subplot thread " Truth is a big word ."
Imagery
The figures of the present move mainly in closed rooms, which are mostly weakly lit, dark or dim and thus symbolically on the one hand the hermetic silence about the Nazi past in their closedness and on the other hand in their darkness the search for those involved in the twilight of a "dark past" reflect.
The imagery of the flashbacks in no way represents a return to the past on the same level of reality. Some of the flashbacks to the Nazi era are expressionistically exaggerated, so that what is presented seems like a bad, unreal dream. In part, the flashback is designed like the reproduction of an old film (scratch marks on the film material), so that the reference to this includes another level of reality, that of the filmed.
background
The core story line of the rebalancing of the Simmel film adaptation as a story about Manuel and his father Rodolpho is similar to the plot of the film by Constantin Costa-Gavras : Music Box - The Whole Truth (1989) with Jessica Lange and Armin Mueller-Stahl . In both cases, the adult child of an old father must recognize that the revered and beloved father did not live through the Third Reich without incurring great personal guilt. Manuel Aranda during the investigation into Valerie Steinfeld and his father: “ She is getting more and more innocent, he is getting more and more guilty. “Heino Ferch mentioned the film shortly after the shooting in an interview at the Berlinale 2008.
For the remake, Judy Winter took over her role as ex-double agent Nora Hill. When it was first made into a film, the then 25-year-old actress had to be aged by decades in terms of mask technology for the post-war scenes.
DVD
The film was released on DVD on December 18, 2008 by Highlight.
criticism
“Unlike Alfred Vohrer almost thirty years ago, Carlo Rola directed the film almost cautiously. Indoor and close-ups as well as many dialogues dominate; the characters seem to be in a state of shock. Rola obviously wanted to stand out from the old Simmel films and therefore very deliberately designed the film as a chamber play. "
“… Rola's film tries to square the circle - it seeks to prove the topicality of Simmel through new historical cornerstones, while at the same time incessantly bowing to the work and the first film adaptation. […] As a way out of the dilemma, the film concentrates on the love story and the kitsch-drenched dialogues between Manuel Aranda (Heino Ferch) and Irene Waldeck (Dennenesch Zoudé) as well as on a deliberately modern concrete-steel-glass look. […] 'And Jimmy went to the rainbow' looks like a gray lady who has been forced into sexy glitter hot pants. "
“'And Jimmy went to the rainbow' (5.50 million viewers, market share: 18.1 percent) is a semi-routine agent film that is as antiquated and almost touchingly naive as the encryption method that the film gives us in a key scene as intellectual Wants to suggest high performance. In contemporary cinema, see for example 'The Da Vinci Code - The Da Vinci Code', completely different secrets are now being unraveled. Heino Ferch and Dennenesch Zoudé, to add something positive, have a certain presence. You really enjoy watching them. "
“Today Heino Ferch, as an enlightening son in Berlin, is tormenting himself with the murder plots of the secret services. And the plot is [...] postponed to the 1990s. […] The story from the story that ZDF wants to tell today may be detached from the past. But she doesn't really want to get going. The pictures always try too hard. "
“Overall, director Rola has succeeded in doing a contemporary interpretation of 'And Jimmy went to the rainbow'. Even if the stylistic devices are not always convincing: for example the flashbacks that imitate a yellowed film strip. The viewer shouldn't expect big action cinema either, rather a spy drama of soft tones against oblivion - a profound game about power and powerlessness, guilt and atonement. "
“One-dimensional, visually lackluster, matt remake of the Simmel novel. The origins of the events are no longer located in the Nazi era, but rather relocated to the wildly moving Berlin of the 1960s. "
literature
- Johannes Mario Simmel : And Jimmy went to the rainbow . Novel. World Edition - 25 authors from 60 years (Volume 10). A. Springer, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-941711-09-9 .
Web links
- And Jimmy went to the rainbow in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Detailed presentation of the film on ZDF.de Wednesday film
- Plot based on the Hörzu film archive
- Homepage Moovie-Entertainment
Individual evidence
- ↑ Simmel modified this for his novel. The line of poetry in Rudyard Kipling's poem The Light That Failed reads: "And Teddy would run to the rainbow's foot".
- ↑ And Jimmy went to the rainbow (2008) at jpc.de. Retrieved October 13, 2014.
- ↑ And Jimmy went to the rainbow film review on kino.de.
- ↑ Heike Hupertz: Simmel remakes on ZDF The visit of the old man In: FAZ, September 24, 2008
- ↑ Manfred Riepe: Heino Ferch in the wrong film ( Memento of the original from February 22, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. For: funkkorrespondenz.kim-info.de
- ↑ Josef Seitz: "And Jimmy went to the rainbow" Thoroughly versimmelt For: focus.de Kultur, September 25, 2008
- ↑ And Jimmy went to the Rainbow Criticism Portal of the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
- ↑ And Jimmy went to the rainbow. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed August 28, 2017 .
