A heist comedy set in the summer of 1990, where a small, impoverished community in the former GDR ends up playing the incoming capitalists at their own game. A light-hearted affair taking place at a pivotal transitional period in German history, starring one of the country’s most prominent actors (Sandra Hüller) as Maren, one of the many apprehensive residents of a crumbling tower bloc. Facing an uncertain future, whether to stay or go, their fortunes change at the last minute with the discovery of a vault filled with eastern mark banknotes. With just three days till the currency is rendered worthless, they hatch possibly one of the most basic burglary plans in cinematic history.
Maren and partner Robert – a recognisable Max Riemelt from Netflix show Sense 8 – along with childhood friend Volker (Ronald Zehrfeld) receive a tip off the whereabouts of the vault and proceed with unconvincing ease to loot bags and bags of cash. They contain millions, which is worth close to nothing at the time. Volker’s reap-pearance after years in Hungary instigates a loose three-way interplay which backgrounds the whole film. Still carrying a torch for Maren, his presence makes Robert nervous, who attempts to circumvent any encounter between the two. Maren is secretly enjoying the attention. Huller appears to be relishing in an unusually lighter role and still excels in her natural-ness.
Director Natja Brunckhorst takes a farcical, almost slap-stick approach to cover for the unlikely success of such an endeavour. Portraying the perpetrators as clueless, improvising on the spot and to their own amazement, escape unscathed under the noses of incompetent caricature-ish Nazi-looking guards. Further schemes to spend the money, mostly purchasing goods from door-to-door salespeople, they begin to involve the other residents. Tapping into such free-market activities and in possession of cash amounts they could only dream of, starts to breed among them greedy individualistic behaviour.
The sheer volume of banknotes left in mountain heaps conjures images of Scrooge McDuck, swimming through a sea of gold coins and green banknotes. But here the scenes aren’t magical, the money is a remnant of a tightly controlled government system that kept its people impoverished. And now powerless again, against the impenetrable capitalistic take over, which chooses to lock away the soon to-be defunct banknotes to ensure its obsoletion, rather than share the last dregs of it amongst the local struggling communities. Considering the former GDR regions have now become a hot bed of support for the fart-right AfD, the alienation and social decay of such communities seems to not have changed since.
A gloomy tonal shift comes in the later part of the film, where a collective decision to buy a local factory and run it as a cooperative unearths a disturbing finding. The plant was used by Ikea, to make furniture parts using forced labour. A real-life fact, it has since been widely reported that over 6,000 firms profited from forced labour of tens of thousands of GDR prisoners throughout the decades. The comedic momentum never recovers after that.
The film is heavily reminiscent of Goodbye Lenin (Wolfgang Becker, 2003); set in the same period and similarly veers to comedic extremes to express the widespread anxiety of the time in the face of great uncertainty. Two to One however lacks the edge. The efforts to paint realistic depiction of such community struggles should be rewarded, but a thick layer of twee glosses everything here dampens matters. Supposedly funnily one-liners – perhaps lost in translation – and this cat and mouse chase between Volker and Robert is rather trad and formulaic. An entertaining watch nonetheless, with such mid-level comedies proving to be rarity these days, confined to hidden subgenres on streaming sites.
Two To One is out in cinemas on Friday, 2nd May.
