In Exile, a long-term German resident originally from Kosovo appears to be experiencing daily discrimination at work, but is he overreacting and paranoid or is something sinister afoot?
Kosovo/Germany
4*
Director:
Visar Morina
Screenwriter:
Visar Morina
Director of Photography:
Matteo Cocco
Running time: 120 minutes
Original title: Exil
If Franz Kafka had written in anything other than German, perhaps his Josef K. would have been a well-balanced individual and the nameless, overbearing powers that be would have left him in peace.
A bit like Dancer in the Dark, Visar Morina’s Exile is about desperation (for both the central character and the viewer) in the face of injustice, except here, there aren’t any musical numbers to dilute the misery. No, from the very first scene, we have a sick feeling in the pit of our stomachs. And it doesn’t get better or go away, not even once, over the course of a full two hours.
Xhafer Kryeziu (Mišel Matičević) is a man in a country that is not his own and works with people who never accept him. Originally from Kosovo, he works as a pharmaceutical engineer at a big laboratory. His native language may be Albanian, but his life is effectively German: his wife, his mother-in-law, his daughter, his job and everyone working with him. With a name like his, however, it doesn’t matter how well you speak the language. When you introduce yourself and people notice the slight accent, everyone will remind you, often by flashing a quizzical smile, that you are different.
In that opening scene, he finds a rat tied to the fence in front of his middle-class suburban home. The fact that his workplace often uses rats in experiments and that his colleagues know he has a phobia about these rodents is no trivial coincidence. But without any proof, what can he do? What can he accomplish against an invisible enemy?
Xhafer soon realises that he does not receive any group e-mails, which causes him to miss important meetings. He hears others sign up for a weekend trip, but he doesn’t get an invitation. And whenever he wants to speak to the boss, the secretary says there is no way because running the company keeps him so busy.
Does he keep his head down to pretend everything is fine and nothing is getting to him? Or does he confront those he perceives to be the most antagonistic towards him? He opens up to his wife, Nora (Sandra Hüller, playing the same emotionless character here as she did to such great effect in Toni Erdmann, whose director, Maren Ade, co-produces here) about this silent bullying at work, but she comes up with benign excuses for her fellow Germans. Maybe these incidents were all unintentional. Or maybe, she says, he is just an asshole and should try harder to be friends. After all, she says, things could be much harder: “You don’t look like a foreigner. If you were an Arab, it would be different.” Indeed, it might be, but why should it matter?
Understandably, Xhafer’s exclusion leads to loneliness. Without any emotional support, his attention turns to those who are somewhat more similar to him. He strikes up a casual sexual relationship with the film’s only other Albanian speaker, a cleaning lady at his company. But we quickly see that this doesn’t alleviate his problems; it merely pushes them out of his mind for a five-minute quickie in a bathroom stall.
Just like people, the film is much more complicated than it appears at first blush. We gradually come to understand that Morina is not going to offer us any real explanation for the central mystery of what is happening to Xhafer or why. He doesn’t confirm Xhafer’s paranoia but slowly makes us a part of his world. This means we expect other people to behave indifferently towards him because to everyone else, a foreigner is a foreigner is a foreigner. His colleagues all think he’s Croatian. But is this indifference or something darker? Are they behaving from a place of malice or are they just condescending, passive racists?
The film’s inference is that Germans are either racist to your face or racist behind your back. Xhafer says as much during a very well-written and even better-executed altercation with Nora. This may be too harsh a judgment on German society as a whole, but there is an evident, ubiquitous hostility to his mere presence. Because we lack a global understanding of the facts, we empathise with Xhafer, whose point of view we share to the point of witnessing his nightmares. He is far from perfect, but that doesn’t make him any less worthy of respect than anyone else.
But in the film’s final act, a few things happen that seem to contradict Xhafer’s (and our) reading of events. Our precarious explanation slips through our fingers, leaving us with an even more uncertain understanding of what is going on. We cannot read other people’s minds; we can only go by their actions, but these interpretations are almost always tainted by our own perspectives. Do his colleagues really hate him? Does he intimidate them, somehow? Or is their behaviour informed by factors that have nothing to do with him personally? And when they seem to reveal their intentions, can we trust what they say?
The fragmented editing, the hypnotic tracking shots inside his laboratory’s gloomy corridors, the darkness that envelops his marriage bed, the cold blues and nauseating ambers and the eerie music on the soundtrack all make for a disorientating experience as we try but fail, along with Xhafer, to make sense of it all. It all leads to a final shot that – similarly to that of another recent immigrant film, Synonyms – brutally but figuratively conveys the uncertainty of having to wait for acceptance, perhaps indefinitely.
Exile is a film that deserves to be watched a second time, but few in the audience will have the nerve or the stomach to go through this harrowing ordeal again straightaway.
Viewed at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival.