Mark Reviews Movies: BALLOON

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 20, 2020

A dramatization of a daring escape during the Cold War, Balloon tells the story of two families, determined to reach West Germany from the East, as they race against an enclosing government. The real story didn't happen exactly in this way, but when a film establishes its stakes and creates an enveloping atmosphere of paranoia as well as this one does, accuracy doesn't really matter.

The film, co-written and directed by Michael Bully Herbig, gets the important details correct. There were two families, living in the small town of Pößneck in what was then East Germany, who spent about a year and a half of planning, construction, and executing a nighttime escape, across the secured border into the West, in a homemade hot-air balloon. A first attempt failed, and the evidence of the balloon's wreckage got the Stasi involved. The families had to build another balloon, all while avoiding the suspicion that the failed attempt raised.

The screenplay by Kit Hopkins, Thilo Röscheisen, and Herbig definitely heightens the threat of the government to the two families, since the Stasi never actually figured out the identities of the people involved—well, not until later, probably. Their increased presence, though, is necessary here, both as a means of elevating the already-high tension of the story and as a way to bolster the reasoning behind the escape in the first place.

The two families, in reality and in the film, are the Strelzyks and the Wetzels. Adding to the complications, the Strelzyks, with father Peter (Friedrich Mücke) and mother Doris (Karoline Schuch) at the head of the household, live across the street from Erik (Ronald Kukulies), a Stasi agent, and Frank (Jonas Holdenrieder), the couple's older son, is in love with the agent's daughter Klara (Emily Kusche). Frank also has just come of age in an official sense. He's legally an adult, afforded all of the rights that implies—and also legally responsible for any actions that he undertakes.

All of this hangs over the first act, in which Herbig slowly pieces together the Strelzyks and Wetzels' plan. A child's balloons rise into the air, and Peter notes that the wind has shifted north. They rush home and talk in solemn tones to Günter Wetzel (David Kross), an ambulance driver who wanted to become a scientist (He was prohibited by the state, because his father defected), and his wife Petra (Alicia von Rittberg). The Wetzels have to stay behind, because the basket isn't large enough for the four adults and their four children. Telling their younger son Fitscher (Tilman Döbler) that they're going on an impromptu camping trip, the Strelzyks drive to a clearing, set up the balloon, and rise into the sky.

The attempt fails, of course. The family returns home and tries to act as if nothing has happened, while also getting the Wetzels prepared for another attempt. In the aftermath, a true-believer Stasi officer named Seidel (Thomas Kretschmann), who personally has reasoned—beyond the law's own cold language—why deadly force is required to stop "traitors" trying to escape the country, is determined to find the unknown suspects and bring them to justice. The Stasi have some clues, left behind in the wreckage, and they might be enough if the Strelzyks and the Wetzels wait too long.

The rest of the film, which plays as a paranoid thriller of the reasonably-paranoid variety, documents the great lengths to which the Strelzyks and the Wetzels must go to keep any suspicions at bay. There's a sequence set in East Berlin, where the Strelzyks go on "vacation" in an attempt to contact the U.S. Embassy, that has the family constantly looking back at eyes looking directly at them. Strangers in the hotel lobby stare. Outside the embassy, Stasi agents check the IDs of anyone who went inside, and across the street, undercover agents photograph anyone who goes near the place. Frank devises a spontaneous plan to plant a pack of cigarettes, with a note requesting help inside, in the purse of a passing American official.

The point of these sequences, in which the Stasi are right there or narrow their search toward the families in a way that didn't actually happen in reality, isn't that they really happened in this particular story. It's that they did happen in East Germany, and more to the point, it's that they establish the encroaching authority of a police state and the mentality of people living within it. The primary motive of the two families is, in a most generally established way, to reach and obtain freedom. These scenes—of constant fear and dread for what will happen to them if they're caught—serve as the justification for that motive.

It's also just solid storytelling. The real story was eventful, for sure, and the screenplay details how the families have to buy waterproof material in small quantities from shops in different locales, lest anyone reasonably determine that they're building something suspicious. By the third act, we can tell when and how the screenwriters have changed history, getting Seidel and his agents closer and closer to the protagonists (even going so far as to turn the climax into a game of cat-and-mouse in and around town, complete with roadblocks and helicopters). Because the filmmakers have done the work (mainly, setting up the families' desperation and the step-by-step process of the investigation), though, the seams between reality and fiction hold well enough.

Essentially, we can forgive the alterations to history in Balloon, because they're at the service of a tense thriller. The film captures the terror of this story, and that's what really matters.

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