BANDITS
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Stratosphere Entertianment Director: Katja von Garnier Writer: Uwe Wilhelm & Katja von Garnier Cast: Katja Riemann, Jasmin Tabatabai, Nicolette Krebitz, Jutta Hoffmann
One of the ironies of fame is that you spend your life trying to achieve it and then, once you've got it, you have to wear shades in the street for fear of being mobbed. Your privacy is gone. Katja von Garnier's film "Bandits" underscores the paradox. Four women, losers all, spend their spare time dreaming of fame but gain it at the oddest time. Just as they succeed in pulling a daring escape from jail, their pictures are plastered all over town and on compact discs in all the music stores. At the very moment they need anonymity, to blend in with the crowd and avoid capture, they become the best known women in the city of Hamburg. Their fifteen minutes of fame could easily turn into several additional years of prison once caught by the polizei.
The title bandits of the picture are four women who are serving time for a variety of offenses. Prettiest is Angel (Nicolette Krebitz), a 23-year-old robber who develops a crush on a strikingly handsome young man during her days on the lam. Luna (Jasmin Tabatabai) is the most volatile, a short- fuse dynamo who is the lead singer of the group. Emma (Katja Reimann) is the most alienated, a red-head whose rimless glasses add to her severity, while the oldest of the group, Marie (Jtta Hoffmann), is a suicidal convict who arsenic-poisoned her husband and who falls under the protection of the women who love her.
The narrative gets under way when a nun who serves as the jailhouse counselor recommends the girls to play a gig at a policeman's ball. (The women pick the name bandits as a combination of the words "band" and "tits.") On the way to the event, the women escape from the van and are pursued by an obsessed cop, Schwarz, a Javert-like character who insists that he has always captured runaways before he can finish his box of cigarillos. When the newly freed women send a tape of their music to a greedy distributor, they gain instant fame, their CDs on sale everywhere. With the mere 50,000 marks which the profiteer hands them, they await a boat which will take them to a life of freedom in sunny Guyana.
The plot is banal enough, serving as mere excuse for a throbbing soundtrack featuring the women in actual performances of their songs. As the four continue to elude the police, they become fast friends, one of them enjoying a brief affair with a handsome American tourist (Werner Schreyer) who goes along with them reluctantly as a hostage. The final scene is both imaginative and appallingly drawn-out, a choppily edited MTV extravaganza in which the band, eschewing a quick getaway to the steamship, first delivers a rollicking impromptu concert by the waterfront to a crowd of cheering young men and women, all of whom wish the best for them and seek to block their capture by the police.
Essentially the whole work is an elongated piece of music TV which can try the patience of the adults, though the women are good to look at as they strum their guitars and smash their drums. This is a minor work by a director who was responsible for the documentary on the making of Clint Eastwood's "In the Line of Fire" and the surprise German success, "Making Up!" in 1992. Not Rated. Running time: 109 minutes. (C) Harvey Karten 1998
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