The State I Am In (2001)

You won't be disappointed!

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

"Die innere Sicherheit" or "The State I Am In" is a German movie from 2000, so this one is already over 15 years old. The writer and director here is Christian Petzold and he made this one together with his longtime collaborator Harun Farocki (rip). For Petzold, it was the first big screen release of his career after he mostly worked on television before that. He was roughly 40 back then and it is from the days when he did not yet work together with Nina Hoss on a regular basis. At 100 minutes, it is relatively long for a Petzold movie and it was a big success in terms of awards recognition. It was not chosen as Germany's Oscar submission, but it won Best Film at the German Film Awards back then and this was of course a big success for a relatively new filmmaker like Petzold. Since then, he certainly developed into one of Germany's finest and I like many of his works. But I would not say that this one here is among his best. I think Petzold usually really delivers in the realism department and he is never about happy feel-good endings that lack said realism and this is also true here. In terms of the action, it feels credible for the most part. But I had occasionally problems with the dialogues as they sometimes did not feel age-appropriate for the younger characters, including the main character played by Julia Hummer, who was a much bigger star a decade ago then she is now. But still you could argue that her character never grew up with people her age, so she may have adapted to her parents' style. Anyway, the actors overall do a good job I would say and Hummer certainly makes it work for the most part with a pretty good performance, especially for somebody her age. This is the story of a girl who has to grow up in secrecy as her parents are former terrorists living in hiding because they are still searched by the police. As a consequence, she has to move places all the time which keeps her from establishing connections and relationships. Things get a lot more complicated when she experiences love for the first time obviously. One of the film's biggest strengths is the bleakness and atmospheric touch and Petzold is always a master of this particular area. It is one of the main reasons to watch this movie.While I would not say it is among the very best from Germany between 1999 and 2001, it's still certainly worth seeing. Thumbs up.

Formally, "Die Innere Sicherheit" is a road-movie, it shows in a kind of natural suspense the life of a young family, of Hans and Carla and their 15years old daughter Jeanne (who is supposed to have a French name but mispronounces it). The family has never rest, the flight is how they are living. When they sleep, one of them has always to stay awake in order to pay attention if nobody shows up. Although the movie does not give any hints in which time the story plays, it is to assume that it is contemporaneous with the time when the movie was shot, thus in 2000. Hans and Carla are terrorists and work in the "underground". From the commentary of the director, Christian Petzold, we learn that they belong to the RAF (Red Army Fraction) who was responsible for many assassinations and other terrorist acts in the 70ies and 80ies. The RAF itself was convinced that Germany is ruled by the successors of the Nazis and therefore the government is illegal. However, Hans and Carla seem to be decades too late, they appear in their present like lost from their past, more precisely: lost in transition before their enemies who would treat them like normal criminals in order not to glorify the Baader-Meinhof clan. When Hans and Carla need help and contact their former collaborators, it turns out that they are either since long time not in business anymore or turned in their hopelessness into drinkers. (I am convinced that in the character of Klaus a once very famous German publisher is accurately portrayed: He ended on a park bench in the "Tiergarten" with bottles of red wine around him.) For the daughter, however, the life of her parents becomes more and more intolerable. She cannot make any friends, and when she does, she does not see them anymore, because the steady flight is moving them from nowhere to nowhere. She cannot go regularly to school and is taught basically by her mother. Although the parents are supposed to be adherents of the once famous "laissez-faire"-education, they use police-interrogation methods when they want to find out whom Jeanne contacted and with whom she slept. Both parents smoke, but the daughter is not supposed to. Some of the former RAF-adherents have turned into Neo-Nazis.I recommend this movie highly. The story develops out of itself, there are no commentaries, no artificially built-in suspense, no pretentiousness. It is true, the movie is dark and depressive, but also soothingly anti-Hollywood. Christian Petzold has already given us such excellent movies like "Cuba Libre", "Wolfsburg", "Toter Mann", the marvelous "Yella" and, most lately, "Jerichow" which is to appear on DVD. So I am looking forward to the upcoming works of this highly promising director.

With „Die innere Sicherheit" Christian Petzold, German director, brings us an interesting piece of cinema. It's the study of the 15-year-old girl Jeanne (Julia Hummer), whose parents are both living underground, and what this means for her life, mainly in terms of first love or personality development. Petzold is able to create a kind of tense atmosphere. The viewer feels sorry for Jeanne, but at the same time you can understand why she is so loyal to her parents. They are simply the only persons that really know her. Through their constant moving she has no one else, so she has to protect the only relationship she has. For a period of time, she thinks she has found another person to trust in Heinrich, but he can't handle this difficult situation. Julia Hummer delivers an outstanding performance, while there are some flaws throughout the movie in the storyline of the parents (played by Richi Müller and Barbara Auer).

"Die innere Sicherheit" features a family on the run, the parents seeming to be former terrorists and their fifteen year old daughter the involuntary hostage of the state of things she had the bad luck to be born into. Things start getting complicated when its not just the never vanishing state of paranoia which has to be coped with, but when the young daughter starts to revolt against a life that does not allow her to have her own life.When everything´s said and done Christian Petzolds film is an inofficial remake of Sidney Lumet´s much and unjustly underrated "Running on Empty" (1988) from the word go. And though Lumet´s film may be the better executed, Petzold´s is the more intimate one. Its two major strongholds being its bleak style on the one hand (with the family´s car being almost the only place in the world where the three are safe; which is in fact one meaning of the title: the security of the interior) and Julia Hummer´s sensational performance as the terrorists young daughter.