Some films are more interesting to read about than to watch. Leni Riefenstahl's Tiefland is a prime example: shot intermittently between 1934 and 1945, confiscated by French troops after World War II's end, not finished (sans four missing reels) until 1954 - let alone the gypsy extras who went straight from the set to Auschwitz - its fascinatingly convoluted production history belies the turgid result.Tiefland is a loose adaptation of an Eugen d'Albert opera, itself based on a Spanish play. Set in the Spanish Pyrenees, it focuses on Maria (Leni Riefenstahl), a beautiful but outcast gypsy woman. She becomes torn between two suitors: Pedro (Franz Eichberger), a handsome shepherd who lives apart from society, and Don Sebastian (Bernhard Minetti), an oppressive landlord hated by the local peasants. Maria tries convincing Sebastian to alleviate peasant grievances, but he's only interest in love (or sex). When he decides to marry the rich Amelia (Maria Koppenhofer), Maria joins Pedro's struggle against him.
Tiefland isn't promising material to begin with, a love triangle shaded with class resentment and bucolic nostalgia. Critics love reading depth into the story: perhaps it's a coded attack on Leni's sponsors? Teasing meaning out of this mess of clichés is problematic: the story's so rudimentary it could be read as fairytale, a Teutonic Western, a Marxist social critique (workers versus a cruel landowner) or indeed fascist parable (pure rural primitives fighting the bourgeois). The latter interpretation gains credulity with the finale of Pedro and Maria walking into a glowing horizon, which patently smacks of Nazi iconography.
Nor is the cast especially distinguished. Riefenstahl's Maria vaguely evokes her mystical heroine, Junta, from The Blue Light (1932), but she's at least a decade too old for her character, who anyway does little more than dance and react to male aggression. Franz Eichberger is strikingly handsome but bland and uncharismatic; we don't root for him, even after he strangles a wolf with his bare hands. Bernhard Minetti at least gives the Marquis shades of humanity, belying his stock villain status.
The story is bland and characters stiff, but Riefenstahl's direction at least provides fleeting interest. Riefenstahl provides beautiful long takes of mountain ranges and countryside (filmed in the Alps and Italy's Dolomites) and the film often plays silently: it's ten minutes before we hear any dialog. Tiefland's got atmosphere but the thin story and ragged pacing undermines its entertainment value. The striking climactic knife fight sizzles with an energy that the rest of Tiefland utterly lacks.
I'm currently preparing an article tracing Tiefland's tumultuous production, an indisputably engrossing portrait of chaos and artistic amorality. Sad that all the effort Riefenstahl and her collaborators put into it didn't result in anything worthwhile.
