Balloon
It’s remarkable that this is based on a true story. It’s maybe even more remarkable that this is the second time someone has told this story onscreen- the first time was a 1982 Disney production called “Night Crossing.” I’ve never seen that film, but I would reckon co-writer/director Michael Herbig has told it better. There’s tension and dramatic weight to the choice the Strelzyk and Wetzel families are making, and the way Herbig has the world closing in around them, that is palpable and entertaining.
The film begins with a meeting between Peter and Doris Strelzyk (Friedrich Mücke and Karoline Schuch) and Gunter and Petra Wetzel (David Kross and Alicia von Rittberg). They have executed their plan to build a hot air balloon to escape to West Germany in, but there’s a problem- they worry that is will not fit all eight people in both families. Four, it might, though, and so, the Strelzyk family decides they want to try; the Gunter has his parents here, so it’s incentive for them to stay. That night, the winds are right. They drive out to the launch site, and they get off the ground…but crash back to it after less than 15 minutes, just short of the West German border. They cannot get past the checkpoints, and must not be found. They find their way back to their life, but, with the East German military on the case, they know they must try again, or else find themselves in prison, with their youngest son in an orphanage.
There’s a lot of smart storytelling here that makes “Balloon” a suspenseful thriller when it could have come off as absurd. It’s important that we understand the mindset of these parents, who wish to give their children a better life than they have in communist East Germany. We get the stakes established for us, and an idea of why Peter and Doris want to leave the country. If it focuses more on them than it does the Wetzels, it’s because they are the ones on the run after the first attempt crashes. It’s their fingerprints on the basket, Doris’s pills accidentally left behind, and their blue and white car that was seen by a trucker who was on the side of the road that night. You do wonder how the military, led by Oberstleutnant Seidel (Thomas Kretschmann), seems to take so long to put some of these pieces together, although it is only six weeks between the first crash and the deadline the families give themselves for their second launch. If the first balloon took nearly two years to make, how can they get the second one done in six weeks, and it has to be bigger, and they have to figure out the logistics of what went wrong the first time? Even though the film is based on actual events, some suspension of disbelief will be required for this movie to work on you.
“Balloon” is a crowd-pleasing drama. The opening scene, at the Strelzyk’s eldest son’s graduation, is a fun setting of the personalities in the family as we get an idea of the world they live in. The script follows familiar story beats, and Herbig is open to making scenes that feel like they should be suspenseful fun by the way they unfold. At the same time, the movie moves at a pace, and with an energy, that keeps us entertained while we’re on the edge of our seat; at a certain point, you forget you’re having to read the dialogue- the storytelling is so confident, and sucks you in. The ending plays true to how it actually happened, and has a coda that allows us to see the family’s watch history unfold, and their lives to forever be put back together with the downfall of the Berlin Wall, and communist Germany. In a way, you wonder if their rebellion played a small part in starting the cracks in the system.
