The Tunnel

Based on a true story a group of East Berliners escaping to the West. Harry Melchior was a champion...

The Tunnel (2001)
The Globe and Mail Review
Digging into the Wall's secrets
By RICK GROEN
Friday, February 7, 2003
Genre: drama, family, mystery, thriller
The Tunnel
Directed by Roland Suso Richter
Written by Johannes W. Betz
Starring Heino Ferch, Nicolette Krebitz, Sebastian Koch

Classification: AA

Rating: ***

In the summer of 1961, on the streets of Berlin, the metaphor turned literal, and the Iron Curtain became a concrete reality. There, the Wall stood as an upper-case affront for over a quarter-century, pulling double duty both as the Cold War's most visible fact and its most evocative symbol. Through the years, the symbol only seemed to grow in power, peaking memorably in its final hours -- nothing signalled the war's end more dramatically than the tumbling of the Wall.

But what of its beginnings, those first days of construction, when workers sweated under the watchful eyes of nervous young guards, and when Berliners from East and West gathered to stare at the rising barrier, standing mere feet apart yet disappearing from each other's sight inch by inch, block by block, their perspectives hardening as surely as the drying cement? That's the resonant time frame of The Tunnel, a crowd-pleasing movie with the straight-arrow drive of its title. The story is essentially true, although its reality (like the Wall's) has been embellished for symbolic effect. No matter. The effect is gripping, and any melodramatic excess is altogether forgivable -- this is a film that holds us in its spell.

We begin in the Eastern sector at, of all places, a swimming competition. Harry (Heino Ferch) is an elite athlete who was jailed as a youth for his political beliefs. Now, thanks to his backstroking skills, he's coddled by GDR officials but is no less sullen as a result. Thus, with the Wall on the verge of going up, Harry makes his break, passing through Checkpoint Charlie on a false passport, leaving behind his sister Lotte (Alexandra Maria Lara) along with her daughter and husband. That night, in a West Berlin bar, he and some fellow defectors raise a glass to freedom -- but the toast is melancholy, their thoughts already drifting to their abandoned and imperilled families. When a pushy journalist tries to interview the celebrated swimmer, Harry jabs his finger eastwards and mutters: "We've got enough people like you over there."

Fuelled by booze, the group concocts a drunken scheme to dig a tunnel under the sprouting Wall. An engineer among them (Sebastian Koch) draws up the specs -- seven metres deep, 145 long, connecting two tenement apartment buildings. The next morning, in the sober light of day, the plan seems absurd -- but no more so than the tragic absurdity of the Wall itself. So they get to work too, burrowing down as the others build up, seeking to tunnel from their guilty present to their barricaded past -- to free a pregnant wife, or an aging mother, or a suffering boyfriend.

What follows, appropriately, is a movie divided, alternating between the rescuers digging on one side and their loved ones waiting on the other. There's friction in both camps. Pressuring the families, cultivating informants, the East German police are dangerously close to unearthing the scheme. And not everyone wants to defect. Says Lotte's physicist husband: "We'd have a Wall over there too." Meanwhile, Harry is fighting with the engineer about the pace of construction, falling hard for the charms of a pretty co-tunneller (Nicolette Krebitz) and coming to terms with another strange-but-true twist in the tale: NBC, the American television network, has learned of the operation and is offering to finance it, in return for exclusive footage of the eventual escape. Then, as now, capitalism will happily subsidize freedom, at least as long as there's profit in the picture.

From there, plots and subplots multiply in East and West alike, much as they were wont to do during the Cold War. If the narrative seems theatrically bloated at times (complete with hoary coincidence), don't fret too much -- anything that's over-the-top is counterbalanced by the minimalist approach of the cast and the camera. Director Roland Suso Richter keeps his ensemble on a tight leash. Knowing that the material is dramatic enough on its own, the actors underplay their lines, working against the story's (the era's) inherent hyberbole. Similarly, Richter uses a palette leached of primary colours, turning the screen as grey as the period. But he sure doesn't stint on the suspense, nicely guiding it straight through to the glaring light at The Tunnel's end. It's all a bit reminiscent of Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot -- different war, but a similar stylistic economy and claustrophobic mood.

Better still, the film contains an eerie scene that speaks directly to the Kafkaesque duality of the Wall. Because it existed both as a fact and a symbol, the Wall -- its very presence -- always seemed simultaneously real and surreal. Watch, then, for a moment when Harry and his group, taking a break from their shovels, drive down a street and find the Wall looming abruptly ahead. They're surprised -- it's not supposed to be in that precise location. Getting out to examine it, they spot a note attached to the concrete: "This Is Not The Wall. This Is The Wall For A Movie. Signed, MGM." Yes, that Wall was a fake, but the movie was a real work of fiction. Hollywood released it a year later in 1962, starring Don Murray, under the title Tunnel 28: Escape from East Berlin. Maybe the real tunnellers saw it in a darkened theatre. The absurdities mount, the ironies deepen, the mind boggles.