Erich Kästner’s children’s book “Emil and the Detectives” was published almost a hundred years ago. Published in 1929, in the last years of the Weimar Republic, the work quickly became a great success and was made into a film for the first time just two years later. In Germany alone, several new adaptations have been made over the years, but the novel has also served as a template in Argentina, the USA and even Japan. Now David Dietl (son of the great Munich romantic and satirist Helmut Dietl) is daring to create a new, modern version.
With “Emil and the Detectives,” the “King of Germany” director and his screenwriter Antonia Scheurlen (“Last The result is a fast-paced children’s film that takes a pointed, over-the-top look at contemporary Berlin.
Unmistakably today’s Berlin: Emil, Pony and Co. on the hunt for criminals.
Twelve-year-old Emil (Nicholas Jonah Peter) grows up in tranquil Bernburg with his single mother (Luise Heyer). Because he has no friends, Emil takes on a test of courage in order to become part of a clique of his peers. But an excavator is destroyed, which brings the police to the scene. Luckily he has a trip to Berlin coming up before the authorities can track him down. Because his mother’s hairdressing salon is under water, Emil has to travel to his grandmother (Ursula Werner) in Berlin alone – on the train instead of in the car.
On the journey he meets the slimy Max Grundeis (Merlin Sandmeyer), who drugs him with knockout gummy bears and steals the 1,000 euros that Emil is carrying with him in order to buy his grandma a modern smartphone. But Emil doesn’t give up so easily: At Berlin Central Station he starts chasing the thief and is soon supported by Pony Hütchen (Lara Toni Lüdders), the clever Gustav (Kilian Kasa) and other children.
Timeless classic in new times
How much times have changed: the fact that a little boy rides the train alone and hordes of children frolic through the streets of a metropolis like Berlin until the evening felt completely normal in the late 1920s. Today, with helicopter parents and widespread anxiety, that seems almost unreal. But that is a central element of Erich Kästner’s classic children’s book “Emil and the Detectives”, and anyone who wants to re-adapt this novel cannot avoid at least adopting this basic structure.
David Dietl goes even further – perhaps out of respect for the original, which is so well known that serious changes would be less disturbing to the target audience of children, but even more so to their parents who are familiar with the novel: This remake follows the original down to the smallest detail. Neither old-fashioned names like Tischbein or Grundeis are modernized nor fine details deleted: Dietl even keeps the small holes in the banknotes, which ultimately prove that the money actually belongs to Emil.
In order to remain unrecognized, you sometimes have to disguise yourself.
This faithfulness to the work could have seemed staid and dry, but the opposite is the case. Dietl and his team throw themselves into modern Berlin with great enthusiasm. The fact that they exaggerate the metropolis to the point of cliché and sometimes stage it like a tourist image film makes the result an apt portrait of the capital. This again comes very close to Kästner’s intentions. After all, the original novel was already characterized by the fact that it located social reality in a realistically described big city and used child-friendly, colloquial language. That’s exactly what Dietl achieves with his film adaptation.
The odyssey begins in the hustle and bustle of the main train station and continues to Schiffbauerdamm, where Grundeis dines in a luxury restaurant. But that is just the start of a varied, deliberately exaggerated representation of the diverse Berlin. We also go to Lichtenberg to the Vietnamese shopping paradise Dong Xuan Center, which looks a bit more colorful and exotic than it actually is. This also applies to the hustle and bustle on Neukölln’s Sonnenallee, which, with its Arabic vegetable shops and barbers, is a popular photo opportunity for visitors from the provinces.
The full cliché program
Hardly a Berlin cliché is left out, and Dietl’s image of the capital is about as realistic as the one in the almost legendary Liam Neeson hit “Unknown Identity”, which looked like a stylish Berlin Instagram account. And yet the almost satirical exaggeration often hits the mark: When you stop by a bar on the Spree (for whatever reason twelve-year-olds would end up there), the service staff doesn’t speak any German – one of those typical experiences in today’s Berlin. Also apt: The sinister Grundeis, as a real estate shark, plans to take advantage of the extreme housing crisis in the capital.
However, all of this would just be nice background if the child actors weren’t so convincing. Here too, the film manages to provide an apt cross-section of Berlin’s demographics: from the brilliant child of divorce, Pony, to the rich Tuesday (Bela Louis Plass), whose parents provide her with a credit card and chauffeur, to the casual Gustav and Anh (Ai Vy Bui) with their Vietnamese roots. Dietl doesn’t just bring together a colorful group, but a real community that you can enjoy watching on their adventure in Berlin. In the end, of course, the children win over the crooks – true to the motto: Parole Emil!
Conclusion: With his new adaptation of the Erich Kästner classic “Emil and the Detectives”, David Dietl delivers a colorful, over-the-top children’s film that remains surprisingly true to the literary original, but modernizes it in a contemporary way and skilfully plays with the clichés of today’s Berlin.