Otomo

A number of German New Cinema auteur filmmakers made great, if not ludicrously left-wing, films about German-foreigner relations, including Rainer Werner Fassbinder with Katzelmacher (1969) aka Cock Artist and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) aka Angst essen Seele auf, Werner Schroeter with Palermo oder Wolfsburg (1980), Helma Sanders-Brahms with Shirins Hochzeit (1976) aka Shirin's Wedding, and Alexander Kluge with Vermischte Nachrichten (1986) aka Miscellaneous News, so—at least cinematically speaking—the Teutons are not exactly new to tackling contemporary social issues like multiculturalism and the (mostly imaginary) reality of race hate, yet if one were to judge by the rather recent kraut melodrama Otomo (1999), it would seem that the contemporary filmmakers of the Fatherland have began to drastically degenerate in their thinking and artistic prowess or lack thereof, as if the vital lifeblood had been drained from their hearts, minds, and souls. After all, Fassbinder hated his countrymen, especially the bourgeois and was a pathological partaker in homo miscegenation yet he realized that, at least if we were to judge by his work Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, that racially mixed romantic relationships are doomed to failure and that a master-slave relationship is the natural order in any sort of so-called 'multicultural' society, no matter how much "tolerance" is thrown down one's throat. Additionally, Fassbinder’s friend Werner Schroeter demonstrated in Palermo oder Wolfsburg that, typically, the foreigner would always be a perennial untermensch in Deutschland, bound to serfdom, subjugation, exploitation, and a sort of mentally crippling culture shock that leads to violent and irrational criminality and the same rabid race hate that leftists, rather idealistically, believe they can exterminate. In Otomo directed by German director/producer Frieder Schlaich—co-owner of Filmgalerie 451 and producer of films by kraut greats like Christoph Schlingensief and Werner Schroeter—one gets a more cultural Marxist friendly message on the need for Aryans everywhere to be more sensitive and sexually inviting when dealing with the Ausländer because, after all, a lack of cultural sensitivity can result in a multicultural pile of dead Aryans and dead Negros if a simple misunderstanding occurs due to the sort of 'lost in translation' communication that occurs in culturally schizophrenic multicultural societies. Loosely based on a true story (virtually all the details and drama of the film were invented in a caculated and propagandistic manner) about a so-called “asylum-seeker” (aka illegal alien) named Frederic Otomo who was shot death after stabbing two cops and injuring three others during one terribly tragic day in Stuttgart in 1989, Otomo is one of those fundamentally formulaic, modern ethno-masochistic and slave-morality-driven cinematic works that attempts to inspire Stockholm syndrome in more weak-minded and emotionally-inclined white viewers, while further instilling a sense of guilt and moral superiority in the sort of wily and wimpy white liberal scum that promote and create such fabricated celluloid feces. Borrowing gritty realistic aesthetic techniques from German lone wolf auteur Roland Klick (Supermarkt, White Star)—who director Frieder Schlaich once made a documentary about—Otomo is the cuckold kraut equivalent to Crash (2004) directed by Paul Haggis, minus the 'passion,' as the sort of patently pointless and socially pernicious cinematic work that accuses everyone, except the noble non-white viewer of course, of being a crypto-racist with the capacity for indirectly killing a good bible-reading and seashell-collecting Negro man.

Sensitive yet stoic illegal alien Otomo (played by Ivorian actor Isaac de Bankolé of Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth (1991) and The Limits Of Control (2009)) lives a rather pathetic and destitute life in Stuttgart, Germany as a jobless wanderer who is on an aimless journey to find meager employment, but it seems not a single kind kraut soul exists to help him as all good, groveling white people should. When Otomo is denied employment at a dilapidated temporary employment agency because has neither an ID nor a proper pair of working shoes (he wears a pair of vintage slippers with holes in them that one of the Germans mockingly calls “Jungle Stompers”), he makes the unwitting mistake of riding in a subway train and is eventually hassled by an ostensibly 'racist' prick of a ticket-collector for not having the right ticket. After the ticket-collector attempts to cite Otomo and stop him from leaving the train, the agitated black man makes the genius decision to headbutt the anally retentive kraut and runs away like a rebel slave on a confederate plantation. Naturally, the ticked off ticket-collector, who now has a broken nose for technically doing his job (even if he is an asshole about it), reports Otomo to the police, thus leading to a super Schwarze mensch-hunt against the angry African. A young and married Nordic cop named Heinz (Hanno Friedrich) and his goofy rapping beta-male partner Rolf (Barnaby Metschurat) hope to be the ones to catch Otomo as they hope to receive job promotions. Meanwhile, a corrupt truck driver offers to smuggle Otomo to the Netherlands if he can come up with the cash, so he hassles a young 46-year-old grandmother named Gisela (ex-Fassbinder Superstar Eva Mattes in a terribly degrading role) and her toddler granddaughter for money in a quasi-threatening manner that makes little sense, but luckily she is a sexually desperate xenophile who is in a weekly African dance class and finds the angry African’s aggressiveness to be rather arousing, so she makes the wise decision to take the fugitive back to her daughter’s apartment. Unfortunately, Gisela’s daughter Simone (Lara Kugler) shows up to find her blonde baby daughter dancing with a strange black man and the police eventually close in on Otomo. Although Gisela, like a true white sugar mama, gets Otomo the money, the truck driver has already left for the Netherlands, thus leaving the hapless African stuck in Stuttgart under the racially-charged radar a bunch of evil Teutonic devils whose Nazi grandparents supported Uncle Adolf. When Heinz, Rolf, and three other policemen finally reach Otomo and try reason with him, he merely stares blankly as a tear falls down his face, only to stab all of the cops when they, rather gently, attempt to take him into custody, thus leaving three men dead, three men injured, and at least one woman widowed; all because a scared foreigner who was illegally in the country in the first place did not want to go to jail.  To top things off, while Otomo's funeral is only attended by Gisela and an obese hotel clerk with a grotesque case of heterochromia who looks like he could be Austrian actor Peter Kern's slightly more slim brother, the fallen policemen are given festive public funerals, thus clearly illustrating the innate 'racism' of Deutschland! (or something). 

 Otomo is surely the sort of film that could have only been made in contemporary Europe as a pathetic piece of minimalistic ‘realist’ propaganda ridden with poverty porn, groveling ethno-masochistic xenophilia, naive ‘noble savage’ worship, innate anti-nationalist sentiment, aesthetic dreariness and deadness, hokey hip hop beats, and a general artistic and philosophical impotence. If it were not for the film's patently politically correct, Negro-martyring message, Otomo would be regarded as just another banal, soulless, and forgotten contemporary German film, if acknowledged at all. Ironically, director Frieder Schlaich included a scene of ‘unconscious racism’ (at least as far as limp-wristed leftists are concerned) in Otomo in an unintentionally hilarious allusion to Frankenstein (1931) directed by James Whale where the black protagonist—standing in for the creature—plays with flowers with a little blonde girl next to a lake. Indeed, it seems Schlaich was guilty of the same pathetic and futile ‘finger-pointing’ that he condemns the everyday German of in his absolutely odious work Otomo—a virtual ‘how-to’ guide in being a cultural commie kraut without cock, balls, and a sense for artistry and logic. The essential message of Otomo is that in every ‘asylum seeker’ is a misunderstood man who can potentially discuss the bible for hours, lovingly dances with little Aryan girls, be a ‘noble savage’ and ‘exotic primitive’ for sexually desperate German grandmothers who are fed up with impotent Aryan men to enjoy, and a morally-endowed man who rightfully puts anally retentive, authoritarian civil workers in their place by headbutting them like an animal, even if he is a coldblooded murderer who kills out of the juvenile fear that he might have to spend the night in one of the many majority non-German jails. Indeed, after watching Otomo, I have come to the natural conclusion that director Frieder Schlaich does not even deserve to lick the postmortem assholes of kraut cinematic greats like Schlingensief and Schroeter, so it baffles me that such a horrendous hack ever had the opportunity of working them. Featuring homely German New Cinema diva Eva Mattes in the decidedly degrading role of a mindless mudshark of a grandmother that is described by her own daughter as being a dreaded “old hippie,” Otomo is a perfect example of the slow and steady decline that is German and European cinema in general by casting a woman who starred in works by greats like Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog as a rather retarded and reprehensible woman who would risk the life of her granddaughter just so she can be manhandled by a muscular Mandingo. Winning such coveted and wonderfully titled prizes as the particularly prestigious “Diversity in Spirit Award,” Otomo is undoubtedly indisputable proof that contemporary German filmmakers no longer have Faustian souls, but some of them, like Frieder Schlaich, wish they had Negro ones, even if they have the artistic swag of an eunuch with autism.

-Ty E