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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
EIGHT MILES HIGH Obermaier’s exuberant freedom with her body first got her plucked out of a local teen dance club onto a magazine cover. That provided her entrée into West Berlin’s Kommune 1 and into the busy bed of its charismatic spokesman Rainer Langhans (shaggy-haired Matthias Schweighöfer, one of the few male actors in the film to join Avelon in full-frontal exposure). While she’s much more interested in following his detailed instructions on how to give better head than his political indoctrination, she flamboyantly joins in the street protests and arrests. Even the group’s pompous intellectuals discover a singular truth when all the media coverage focuses on her—“Sex sells!” She and Rainer travel to swinging London to ask the Rolling Stones to perform at a concert, and she’s quickly smitten with both of the Glimmer Twins. Physically, Alexander Scheer well captures the chain-smoking Keith Richards, and Victor Norén the swaggering Mick Jagger, though their English accents waver.While Obermaier is more than a groupie, she does not seem to have been a muse like Patti Boyd and Marianne Faithfull (though “As Tears Go By,” one of the many period songs covered on the soundtrack, plays while she cavorts with the song’s writers). She seems to have been a template for the beautiful-model-bedding-rock-god formula (though she lacks the sense of humor her California counterpart Pamela Des Barres displayed in her memoir I'm With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie).In addition to costume designer Petra Kray’s extravagantly vintage clothes (when Obermaier does barely cover herself), Eight Miles High is refreshingly different from other ‘60’s nostalgia trips for being told from Obermaier’s point of view and when it spotlights how “free love” men were pretty much jealous, controlling chauvinist pigs with disturbingly violent tendencies that Obermaier seems to have either gotten off on or tolerated to an unexplained extent. (One ex accuses her of being “a lust machine,” while another is surprised that she’d—temporarily—leave him despite being tied up and raped.) When a photographer earlier asks her to look shy or embarrassed as she poses topless, she instead looks at him defiantly and disrobes more, challenging the baby face naïveté of post-war erotica.Her image tantalizes adventurer and club owner Dieter Bockhorn (David Scheller), and he comes back to Hamburg from exploring the deepest Africa to sweep her off her feet (though she’s on top frequently), promising to build a bus just for the two of them to travel the world. Turning down Keith’s drugs and producer Carlo Ponti’s long-term contract for movies, she sets off with Dieter on an endless summer quest, filled with groovy, if volatile, love vibes. Their bucolic odyssey climaxes at a formal Hindu wedding extravaganza that almost rivals any Bollywood imperial nuptials, after they have convinced a local maharani that they are royalty. And for the breathless European press following them, they are.
By the time they, somehow, get the magic bus to a hippie
beach in Mexico years later, Obermaier seems to have crossed paths with
every continental celebrity or trend, with her make-up intact. One
expects to see the surfing Paskowitz family
from the documentary Surfwise to join them around the campfire
before a Stone rolls by again.
While
Eight
Miles High
well
evokes the decade when Obermaier caught the
Zeitgeist, it does finally seem like she, and this
film, travel long and self-indulgently to find out that, even on her own
terms, freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.
Nora Lee Mandel
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