(The She-Rat)
The film version of Die Rättin is apparently something of a cult classic, at least that's how SBS advertised it. I found it an interesting film, but my opinion would undoubtedly collapse if I insisted on an explanation of why. Fortunately I give myself some latitude in such matters: after all, we were at school together.
The male lead is a film director named Marcus. I guess we've all seen this version of "write what you know" before: film-makers making films about film-makers (a friend who watched Barton Fink with me said he thought it was written by someone with writer's block); authors writing books about authors writing books; psychologists evolving theories that apply only to their own bizarre hangups; or popular singers composing songs about singing (ABBA revival, anyone?). Marcus is currently thinking about making a film that involves rats, so he asks his wife Damroka to give him a rat for Christmas, and he finds it in a gilded cage under the tree. It's claimed to be a sewer rat (laboratory rats were offered, but Damroka accepted no substitutes) which probably makes it one of the world's best-behaved examples of wild rodent vermin.
There's a scene here that's obviously meant to be significant: the television camera shows Damroka as a rat-angel hybrid (rat teeth, halo, etc.). Your guess is as good as mine. There's also a short section of rat-cam.
Damroka also has a project in the pipeline, concerning a study of jellyfish in the Baltic to determine why their numbers are so high at the moment. Marcus isn't real happy about his lady-love sailing off without him, but she's adamant. Damroka doesn't seem to be a scientist, more like a professional boat-driver, but she's a principal proponent of the study.
Marcus at home and Damroka on the boat form two of the three important threads in the story. The third one is the world outside, where intelligent rats are taking the world away from human beings. (OK, some of you may consider this the most important event in the big picture sense.) The last thread is Marcus' boss (producer) Oskar.
It's interesting to compare this with the episode Tomorrow the Rat in the British SF television series Doomwatch. In that case the rats were in small enough numbers to have some hope of exterminating them completely (actually, any solution that involves killing every rat in London sounds to me impractical, but the characters seemed confident so who am I to argue). Given rattus sapiens' transient weakness, it sort of makes sense for the humans to kill them before they develop into rivals.
I hope everyone who found that statement reasonable (as I did) is disturbed by their own lack of reaction to the unprovoked genocide of a non-human but sophont species. And that anyone who can't see the moral issues in exterminating intelligent rats never gets into a position of power. But then I'm the one who wanted Fox Mulder up on a murder charge when he destroyed the computer running an apartment block. Carbon fascist.
Getting back to Die Rättin, on the other hand, the rats are obviously out of control. The spokesrat we meet is rather arrogant in describing their intention to supplant humanity, but mostly in a "we will bury you" Kruschev sort of way. That is, the rats see their replacement of humans as inevitable, but don't seem to be doing much to hasten it. Wiping them out is unlikely to be much harder tomorrow than it is today, so why not negotiate? Well, we never see it, but perhaps the rats are intransigent. Still, it bothers me when points like these are glossed over: there's a strong suspicion that the film-maker didn't see the issue, or worse, didn't see it as important. And that's appalling.
The spokesrat is very confident indeed of surviving whatever the humans throw at them. Gas is defeated by "our plugging tactic", which involves getting old (expendable?) rats to fill the tunnels with their large backsides. The spokesrat performed this duty and shows off the new gas-induced tumours in his fundament. The rats are also confident of surviving the nuclear winter that will follow humans using nuclear weapons. (A minor character remarks that there are rats under every city, implying at least to me that nuclear weapons seem of limited application, but this apparently doesn't bother the governments of the world. Was this an accident? Or is the film-maker saying that militarist governments are crazy? Or that all men are crazy, by some analogy with the Vineta (see below) story? Certainly I don't know.)
In summary, a lot of unanswered questions. But perhaps director Martin Buchhorn (or author Grass) knew what he was doing not to give us too many details. The "learn by unreliable news report" technique provided an atmosphere that a God's eye view would not. I suppose what I'd really like is the feeling that it all made sense, without the need or desirability of me actually understanding it. This is probably an unrealistic ambition for European science-fiction cinema, as it is for anyone's science-fiction cinema.
Instead I left with the impression that most of it was kind of arbitrary, but maybe that's the impression everyone has of great events anyway. I'm thinking of the fall of the Soviet Union and associated empire in 1989-90 and it had a similar kind of unreality in some ways. Key difference here is that 1989-90 was a sudden change for the perceived better: every now and then you'd wake up and the morning radio would say that the world's fairy godmother had done another good deed overnight. I've never really lived through a really horrible kind of change (like, say, the start of either world war) so it's hard for me to make a good comparison.
The inspiration for this film is Gunther Grass' novel of the same name. Not having read the novel I can't say how closely the film follows it, but if I had to guess I'd say fairly closely. The presence of Oskar and Bruno, who could, I think have been cut without major sacrifice, is one reason I'd make that guess. Incidentally the name of the actress playing one of Damroka's crew is Helene Grass, I have no idea if this is a coincidence.
The feminist aspect is fairly strong. Damroka's crew is entirely composed of attractive women. The casting or makeup or whatever here is pretty clever: they all look believable, and different in style from each other, they aren't clichés or generic Hollywood movie actresses, and they look beautiful when the director needs them to. That isn't something I can recall seeing done well: most Hollywood television series, for instance, would settle for making one Anglo, one Hispanic, one Asiatic and one Negro, and think that was enough. One of the attractive women is Marcus' ex-model, creating a jealousy on the part of Damroka with which the film does nothing. Perhaps another element from the novel, included out of respect for Grass, but unamplified due to lack of time in a film?
Damroka has a lot of authority within the expedition. Once she reveals her intention to seek out Vineta she needs all of it, as most of the crew are rationalist scientist-types who want to count jellyfish. Despite all having other things they want to do, they make a detour to participate in an animal liberation raid, releasing laboratory rats from a research establishment. This is hopelessly inadequately motivated: very few biologists are sympathetic to ruining the experiments of other biologists so we really needed to know why this is done. In the process two chimaerae, crosses of pig with rat, escape. They will later appear on the boat, frighten a character, and disappear into the dustbin with Chekhov's gun. I took all this to imply that rattus sapiens was a genetically engineered laboratory experiment gone feral. The real reason for the scene is, I suspect, that it was in the novel and the director liked the idea of making some rat-pigs. The rat-pigs do actually look kind of cool, but they're as relevant to the thrust of the film as ... well, half the rest of the film.
The flounder gives Damroka a deadline: find Vineta tomorrow or it will be too late. Given what happens later the deadline makes no real sense to me. The women search, and find Vineta. Sorry: put that way it sounds flat, and it isn't, entirely, but plot-wise that's what happens. There's a makeover scene with lesbian undertones, in which the women beautify themselves before swimming down to Vineta, a bit like Galahad purifying himself before going in to see the Holy Grail. They swim down, and are filled with the wonder of Vineta.
And find it full of rats.
A metaphor for betrayed ideals? It may seem a pointless ending, but I didn't find it so. There's at least some real emotional punch here. If I'd cared more strongly about Damroka's quest it would have been a real blow ... so if there's fault in the film it lies earlier, when I should have been made to care.
Or is the sex of the rat important? My German is weak, but I'm guessing there isn't a word for a rat of indefinite sex. The spokesrat who gets all the lines has a male voice. If the sex of the rat isn't important then maybe The She-Rat isn't a good translation, placing spurious emphasis on something Grass determined only because he didn't have the option of leaving it undetermined. These are the issues that make interpreters earn their pay. They're also issues that most viewers and readers think pointless, so my apologies if that includes you.