"Films From Germany"

The Museum of Fine Arts' "New Films from Germany" series kicks off tonight -- Thursday -- with Max Färberböck's Aimée & Jaguar, a sentimental but not saccharine look back at a lesbian love affair in Berlin during World War II. Showtime is 7:45; if you have time to get down to the MFA, it's worth a look. (See "Filmstrips," on page 27.)

Of the five other films in the series, the two I saw were less rewarding. Andreas Kleinert's black-and-white Paths in the Night (Wege in der Nacht; January 28 at 6 p.m.) is about a contemporary Berliner, Walter (Hilmar Thate), who, with a pair of young protégés, travels the Berlin subway system at night beating up racists and bullies. Looks like standard vigilante stuff, but in fact the punishments far exceed the crimes, and eventually it comes out that Walter is a former Communist Party official who's trying to compensate for his loss of power. In the first hour, Kleinert gives his film a disconnected, almost Antonioni-like texture; by focusing on the objects of Walter's meditation, he draws you into the character. In the end, though, Walter's pathological alienation shuts out his wife, the city, and the audience, and the "resolution" is as pat as it is predictable.

Ottokar Runze's The Volcano (Der Vulkan; January 27 at 8 p.m.), on the other hand, is a kind of reverse Casablanca, a movie to make Germans feel better about the war. Based on the novel by Klaus Mann, it's set mostly in Paris, among the émigré community, in 1937. Actress and singing star Marion von Kammer (Nina Hoss) makes her way to France after the Nazis burn her theater; there she's reunited with the young poet Martin Korella (Christian Nickel). Meanwhile her sister Tilly (Meret Becker) is in Zurich awaiting news of her Jewish boyfriend back in Berlin. Everyone congregates at the Berlin-in-Paris kneipe ("local") of Mother Schwalbe, where the clientele quote Heine, Marion sings (lots of) patriotic German songs, and never a Nazi word is heard. Despite this cozy refuge, the strain of exile proves too much: Martin becomes a drug addict, Tilly gets pregnant, and the nasty French destroy our heroes' underground radio station. All of this gets blamed on the Nazis, of course. Some of the lads wind up going to Spain to fight tyranny and Franco; Marion makes it to the USA, where she delivers speeches denouncing Hitler. It's always fun to root against the bad guys, but I found The Volcano a little too self-congratulatory for comfort.

The best German film to screen at the MFA this winter might just be -- from a different series, "Art on Film" -- Wolfram Hissen's Wrapped (January 22 at 12:45 p.m. and January 27 at 6 p.m.), the story of how master wrapper Christo enveloped Berlin's historic Reichstagsgebäude in silver foil and attracted some five million visitors back in June and July of 1995. Just getting permission took more than 20 years and a vote from the German bundestag; some of the controversy is sampled here, along with views of the completed project. I wasn't able to preview this film (no screening from the MFA), but I'd bet the subject matter alone could make it a winner.

-- Jeffrey Gantz