Cine wanderer: a German interlude

One of the beautiful things about growing older is that, with each passing year, I find myself falling in love with melodramas even more than when I was a teenager. Perhaps such a devotion comes from a growing awareness of life’s uncertainties and the compromises that pave the path of adulthood. Douglas Sirk’s films, many of which are currently screening as a part of a retrospective at the Cinémathèque française in Paris, are often about the crushing reality of wanting too much and the inevitable acceptance that desires are better left unfulfilled.

Sandwiched between the director’s much more canonised Written on the Wind (1956) and The Tarnished Angels (1957), the lesser-discussed Interlude (1957) is nothing short of a masterpiece. As in so many of his films, Sirk uses a love triangle as a prism to view the fragile parameters of feelings. Starring June Allyson as the doe-eyed Helen, who moves to Munich for work, Interlude is strangely reminiscent of David Lean’s Summertime (1955), as it also casts Rossano Brazzi as the tall, dark, handsome foreigner who awakens an American expat to new passions. A famed music conductor with a furious intensity, Brazzi’s Tonio cuts a Mr Rochester-esque figure; he too has a mentally unsound wife who is confined to the couple’s impossibly lavish home. From the ornate wallpaper that lines up Tonio’s chateau to the open fields of Munich, flowers proliferate on screen. Dazzling to the senses, their omnipresence embodies both beauty and impermanence, ideas that run throughout Sirk’s oeuvre.

In Interlude, romantic illusions exist, not only in longing gazes and furtive embraces, but also in the form of cities. Shot entirely on location in Germany, the film marks Sirk’s cinematic return to his home country after emigrating to America in 1937. The move was a politically motivated one – Sirk’s second wife was Jewish – but it also left him estranged from his only child, Klaus Detlef Sierck, who became a popular child star in Nazi cinema. In Los Angeles, Sirk figured out the only way he could see the face of his son again was to sit through Nazi-made films. The pair never reunited; Klaus was killed in battle in 1944, still a teenager.

Considering such heavy emotional baggage, the fact that Interlude opts to see Germany through the rose-tinted glasses of an outsider inspires a strangely moving kind of optimism. Writing in 1972, in the New Left Review, on the film’s depiction of Munich, Sirk aficionado Rainer Werner Fassbinder remarks on how “everything seems false”. Indeed, the opening credits and Helen’s arrival have a postcard-perfect quality, as the camera counts all the sightseeing landmarks in the city, including the monumental Bavaria Statue, a female personification of the homeland, and the world-famous Rathaus-Glockenspiel clock. The streets are full of people walking, shopping, possibly falling in love; it’s a post-war Germany that bristles with sun-drenched vivacity. Interlude’s first glimpse of the city is that of the Angel of Peace. For a director whose home country held so much familial tragedy and grief, the decision to open with such an image is overwhelmingly powerful, yet shattering in its implication.

If Sirk’s view of Munich is a radical act of reimagination, then the sequence set in Salzburg, the Austrian city where Mozart was born, further deepens the fantasy; it is a dream within a dream. As Tonio whisks Helen away on an impromptu day trip there, the pair travel by car, but much of the city is observed from a high vantage point, which accentuates its other-worldliness. From the Winkler Terrace, the lovers cast their eyes across the magnificent sight of imposing mountains, lovely little stone bridges and the Hohensalzburg Fortress, one of the largest medieval castles in Europe. “You know, it’s just like a fairytale,” says Helen with a sigh. It’s the kind of wistful utterance that foreshadows incoming despair.

In the end, beneath the film’s impossibly vibrant Technicolor tableaux, a current of darkness envelops the characters. Contrasting with the open vista of Tonio and Helen’s Salzburg, the chateau shared by the conductor and his wife, Reni, is luxurious yet overstuffed with old-fashioned furniture, evoking doom and psychological claustrophobia. When the tormented Reni runs away from the marital home and attempts to drown herself in a nearby lake, the previously vibrant colour palette turns eerily chromatic, almost like a tinted silent f ilm. As Helen struggles to carry Reni out of the muddy water, the screen becomes infused with various shades of blue. Bound by their love for the same man, the two women are frozen in time. The image betrays the complex layers of Sirk’s observation of Germany. The idealistic beauty of Munich cannot contain the well of trauma that lies dormant beneath its cobblestoned streets. At any moment, the dam might burst.

As a reworking of John M. Stahl’s When Tomorrow Comes (1939), which in turn is adapted from James M. Cain’s 1951 novel The Root of His Evil, Interlude carries great significance in its title. For Tonio and Helen, their romance is a sweet reprieve from the obstacles of living, a contrast to Reni, who is trapped in a love song that has overstayed its welcome. Yet, Helen will not leave unscathed either. While the character mostly dresses in white, when Helen says her final goodbye to Tonio she is draped in a dark navy jacket. She might well be going home to wed a far less exciting suitor, but their affair will forever leave a mark on her psyche. For Sirk, I cannot help but think of this film as a kind of cinematic interlude to his career, one that connects the aesthetics that he had developed in the States to the nostalgia that he felt for a place he once called home. It’s a hymn of hope and remembrance.