Avis des critiques

The script, co-written by Qurbani with previous collaborator Martin Behnke, is just not as strong or as interesting as Qurbani’s direction of it, and as a result, there are several instances where, without the historical context of the original story, one is left feeling as though something is missing.

Qurbani eschews Döblin’s panoramic view of Berlin and urban montage for a steady low fog of despair (until a tacked-on epilogue lets some sunshine in). His “Berlin Alexanderplatz” is a nice place to visit but you might not want to live there for three hours.

Lit like one of Nicholas Winding Refn’s puked-up pastiches, Qurbani’s depiction of debauchery is so lifeless that it seems to be encouraging puritanical sympathies, an issue compounded by the relatively diffuse element of guilt that motivates Franz, which is only to be taken at the word of the protagonist, so much so that it becomes something of a nonentity in a film that otherwise defers to such culpability as a storytelling fulcrum.

Döblin’s literary innovations become gauche in Qurbani’s cinematic hands, with the film’s attempts at modernising the text coming across as overly forced, and the ending is given a ludicrously sentimental treatment that demolishes the logic of everything that precedes it.

In the revisitation written by Qurbani and Martin Behnke, which clocks in at a serious three hours, the major innovation is to set the story in the present day, among African immigrants in Berlin, jolting it into a very different arena compared to its predecessors. Still, it retains some of the book’s very grandiose ideas about the nature of good and evil and what it means to be a man — heavy concepts that are likely to find more acceptance with German audiences than elsewhere.

Berlin Alexanderplatz works best as a fable about taking responsibility of your own life and shaping your own narrative. Francis shows us the dangers of passivity and abandon.

While undoubtedly very skilful, he [Qurbani] ultimately swaps the story for show, always settling for the “wow” effect instead of aiming for the heart... sometimes it feels like he is ticking off boxes, piling things up instead of going deeper. For a tale about a city that can devour an unsuspecting individual just like those cars that ate Paris, it’s all a bit too clean to fully convince us of its grimness.

Divided into five chapters and an epilogue, it possesses the quality of a fatalistic odyssey, with a structural form that sometimes undermines the narrative’s flow. The highly stylised approach is of a genre that inevitably makes the characters larger than life.

Qurbani’s take starts off confident in the newness of its approach but soon comes to operate as a well-oiled, smoothly functioning machine for the manufacture of bad luck, fatal flaws and tragic, poetic justice. It misses out on the source material’s caustic, messy edge: the way the grime of the very Berlin streets can work itself like grit into the gears of fate.

It’s easy to see why Burhan Qurbani, born of Afghan parents who migrated to Germany, would want to update this urban lowlife epic and recast it as the odyssey of an illegal immigrant in present-day Berlin. The paradox is that in modernising ’Berlin Alexanderplatz’, Qurbani has created an ambitious but also stridently melodramatic moral parable that seems oddly dated.