The Chilean Fernando and Turkish Timur are pretty much at the end of their rope: sitting around in the hovel they call home, out of work, with stomachs growling and not a penny in their pockets. Rather reluctantly, the demoralised Fernando accompanies his indomitable friend through the “wasteland” of Berlin to donate blood. In return, they get 45 Marks each, enough for a meal, a cab ride, and a night out in a jazz club with Timur’s girlfriend Sema and her co-worker Anna. In the end, Anna and Fernando sleep together—the start of what might be a new love.

This debut work from a graduate of the Berlin Film Academy restores one’s faith in auteur cinema, because—like several other recent films, happily—it harks back to the hopeful beginnings of New German Cinema, which is now further away to the young people of that time than the “papa’s cinema” they were then decrying. With original sound, amateur lead actors, and scenes filmed on the streets, on factory floors, in hospitals, and the like, IN DER WÜSTE tells a simple, realistic story based on personal experience—even if director and cinematographer Rafael Fuster-Pardo, who came to Germany from Spain in 1961 as the ten-year-old son of guest workers, didn’t write the screenplay. This was the work of Horst Stasiak, based on a story by Antonio Skarmeta. And lo and behold: literary adaptations needn’t be dull, as long as the screenwriter is less concerned about the story (Skarmeta’s version being set in New York, for example) than about capturing the spirit of the original.

When it comes to delivering the story, Fuster-Pardo certainly seems to have tried out everything he can—seldom has there been a film in which mood and rhythm vary so frequently. Fernando and Timur come across at times like Beckett characters (from whom the title is borrowed). Then might follow a bit of melancholy, a few minutes of slapstick, a boldly cut musical sequence, then a love story so tender and true to life as perhaps last seen in German cinema in Tressler/Tremper’s 1957 ENDSTATION LIEBE.

But seldom, too, is the film in which all this has been put together so incredibly accomplished, which—precisely because of its disruptions, perhaps—never once bores the viewer and avoids treating problems with pinched expressions and put-on pathos. On the contrary, the greatness of the film comes precisely from its restraint, how it limits itself to a “small” story, in which most things are only hinted at and whose characters are like sketches, of whose lives we see only a brief slice.

At the end of the film, Anna must go to work and barely notices the breakfast for which Fernando has sacrificed his long-guarded 10 DM coin. “Tu casa” (your house), he says to Anna by way of goodbye, then we see her leave via the dingy courtyard. Meanwhile, Timur returns and checks the mailbox, finds the letter from Chile whose arrival Fernando was already dreading the day before, and tosses it back in. This is no solution, of course.

We can only hope that Fuster-Pardo (who, incidentally, was advised not to become a director by public broadcaster ZDF’s programme "Kleines Fernsehspiel" editorial department) remains true to himself after this no-budget film and doesn’t go on to make a film of Ibsen or something for three million, and instead helps to ensure that German cinema finds its way back to reality and to people—including those in the theatre seats.

Jan Gympel

First published in the German newspaper “taz – Die Tageszeitung,” 22. Oct. 1987.