FESTIVAL OF GERMAN FILMS:: The German actress Jessica Schwarz has an angled, chic face, but when she ceases to smile and squares her jaw it not only changes shape, it also communicates her emotional unease without telling you what she’s thinking. It’s private, but never intrusive, and across the course of Florian Cossen’s The Day I Was Not Born, a sombre, careful study of identity, she judges that division of what to make clear and what not to with great skill. The film, in a way, is a mystery, but Schwarz’s performance makes it about deeper truths.
Her character, Maria Falkenmayer, is a competitive swimmer, and when we first see her she’s not quite first to the wall in a race. Cossen barely shows us the other swimmers because Maria isn’t thinking about them – her grim countenance suggests that her disappointment is internalised. But when Maria flies to Chile for a meet, she finds herself in the Buenos Aires transit lounge, where a mother soothes a crying baby with a Spanish-language lullaby. Maria doesn’t speak Spanish, but she instinctively responds to the song, singing along even as bursts of sobbing puncture the simple melody. She’s both surprised at her reaction, bereft as it is of a competitor’s discipline, and excited. This is unknown territory.
Maria misses her connection and decides to visit Buenos Aires, where she has to stay after she loses her passport. When she updates her doting father, Anton (Michael Gwisdek), about her location and the lullaby he’s on the next flight. Cossen, who co-wrote the screenplay with Elena von Saucken, does not dwell on Anton’s revelation, which his furtive behaviour soon signals. He and his late wife, Lilianne, lived in Buenos Aires for his work in the late seventies, and when Maria’s parents were kidnapped by the military dictatorship and murdered – joining the ranks of 'the disappeared" – the childless couple took care of the three-year-old Lilianne taught at kindergarten.
The movie explores the personal and public ramifications for Maria, who had no idea she was adopted. After the initial shock, comes a reassessment of the world. How can an alien city, where she struggles to communicate, be her birthplace? And if she’s not Maria Falkenmayer, why should she live her life? The young woman stops swimming, and finds herself having an affair with Alejandro (Rafael Ferro), a local beat cop assigned to help her fill in forms because he speaks German. Maria even challenges Anton, wondering if he looks at her differently now she knows there is no blood lineage.
Reluctantly, Anton gives her pieces of information, and after halting beginnings, Maria finds herself with a new family, including her aunt, Estrela (Beatriz Spelzini), who weep at her return and her resemblance to those long lost to them. Cossen shows Maria’s journey through her reaction to old photographs and tape recordings – she hears herself as a toddler, singing with her mother. But each new thread frays an old one: Lilianne’s heartfelt memories of her pregnancy with Maria were false, for example, while Anton’s claims of simply caring for a lost child does not match Estrela’s memories of the family’s frantic search for Maria.
Even Alejandro is apprehensive of her situation. He does not want to meet her new family because he’s not only a policeman, but also the son of a policeman. When Maria queries him about what his father did for the military dictatorship he replies that he never asked, because he’s scared he would hate the man who answered truthfully. That option has been lost to Maria.
Without offering cathartic resolution, or definitive outcomes, The Day I Was Not Born allows the crisply naturalistic Buenos Aires light and nuanced performances to show how the notion of family – one either broken or created – can transport you to unsettling new terrain. Discovery or retribution, rage or acceptance, are choices available to Maria, and Jessica Schwarz makes each of them a possibility looming within reach.
