kotzebue
by Douglas Messerli
Percy Aldon and Felix Aldon (screenplay),
Percy Aldon (director) Salmonberries / 1991
Like the German husband and wife team, the
Aldon’s 1987 film, Bagdad Café, Salmonberries was also filmed
primarily in the US in a world on the outskirts of the American society. The
small Alaskan village of Kotzebue is a sorry mess of small houses and squalor
where it is even hard to imagine any excitement outside of the electronic snowmobiles
and the truly overheated and smelly Bingo Parlor run nightly by Bingo Chuck
(Chuck Connors).
Yet this village also contains, when “he”
is working the mines, a young androgynous character named after the village,
Kotzebue (k.d. lang) who claims a Russian heritage and, the greatest surprise
of all, a small comfy library run by a German immigrant, Roswitha (Rosel Zech).
But
when he shows up again, she intuits his needs, particularly when he cuts down
the sign greeting visitors to the village in order to make clear that he
himself is Kotzebue, the town founded by the German Kotzebue, and drags it into the
library. She brilliant recites an entire history of the Russian- German founder and his family, making it clear
to the young “boy” that it has nothing at all to do with him.
Furious for her dismissal once again, he brings in the wrap in which he
was discovered as an abandoned child in the cold on which is scrawled the word:
“Kotzebue.” Roswitha knows the history of abandoned Eskimo children, but none
before have been so protected in order to survive, and clearly this child was
intended to be delivered up to this very village. Moreover, in another yet
stranger moment, the boy entirely strips and appears naked in the library
stacks, revealing that he is actually a female by gender, even if he has
primarily gone through his life so far as a young man.
Roswitha realizes that this individual is desperate simply the learn who
she is and why she has been given the name and location of where she lives, all
questions that she cannot possibly answer.
Despite her fear and distrust of the insistent library-goer, Roswitha,
herself a town mystery, begins to find herself interested in the young androgyne,
particularly when Kotzebue goes ice-fishing and brings her a large fresh salmon
for dinner.
What
Kotzebue discovers her Roswitha’s home is even stranger perhaps that his itinerant
life. All the walls of her bedroom are filled with shelves with various pink
and yellowing colors of bottles filled with salmonberry jellies which she has preserved
over the years. She explains that she at first attempted to give them away, but
when she found no one interest, she began to date collect them, providing her
room with a beautiful glow of gleaming pinkish hues to color the harsh
white-and-dark blue landscape which dominates.
She
hands a bottle to Kotzebue, who begins to spoon them into her mouth, but
suddenly falls into a deep sleep upon the bed, Roswitha, upon smelling the
bottle, realizing that the berries have fermented, turning into a kind of
alcohol that has simply forced the young miner to pass out. Hours later,
Kotzebue awakens, still tottering after the drunken episode.
On
another occasion, Kotzebue, who is clearly developing a crush on the beautiful
librarian, attempts to pick her up near the library to offer her a ride home. He
offers her the backseat, but she stubbornly stands at the back of the machine
as if she were sledding with dogs. Instead of taking her immediately home,
Kotzebue takes her on a long ride through the truly beautiful natural world
surrounding the dirty settlement. And she, it is clear, is lost in a kind of snowscape
dream world which she has never before quite experienced.
Before the day is over Roswitha, almost
inexplicably, but perhaps simply because she has never before been able to
share her story, tells Kotzebue the story of her life, how both she and her
husband were born in Communist Eastern Germany, and, at first, were happy with
the Communist occupation. But quickly both her mother, who realized that her
world was now again closed off and delimited as it had been under Hitler,
become unhappy in their lives. Roswitha marries a young man, and together they
attempt to buy an escape, moving through an East German safe house into the
West. But at the very last moment, they were challenged by the East German
police, and her husband as shot and killed at the very instant she set foot in
the West. Now alien and alone in the free Berlin, she left Germany permanently
for the isolated world where she now exists.
Eventually, as her feet nearly freeze she
allows herself to be sledded back to the town by Kotzebue, greeted with great
mockery. Instead of immediately returning home, even then, Roswitha joins with an
indigenous group of women who together perform tribal songs.
It
is now October 3, 1990 (I remember the day well, since I sat at my favorite Frankfurt
restaurant on that day, sharing a table with a skeptical German journalist).
Even in Alaska, sleeping on a couch at Bingo Chuck’s house, whose wife Noayak
(Jane Lind) helps out in the library, Kotzebue catches the news of the German
reunification on TV. And soon after, she enters the house when Bingo Chuck is
downstairs at the Bingo parlor, to rob him. He returns, catching her in the
act, as she pulls out a knife and threatens him. He is not so appalled by the
robbery as he is by the fact that she is wearing a necklace of turquoise beads.
Soon after, Kotzebue knocks on Roswitha’s door with an envelope in hand:
two return plane tickets to Germany. It is her gift to the woman who now can
return home to find the grave, if there is one, of her lover, a voyage on which
Kotzebue intends to accompany her.
The
movie now shifts to Berlin, a modern day world that is almost as different to
Roswitha as it is to the total stranger to any urban society, let along one
that does not even speak her language.
Yet, just as previously Roswitha seemed to
intuit Kotzebue’s needs, so does the ex-miner now perceive that Roswitha needs
to find her husband’s grave. Yet Roswitha is more than leery to contact her
brother, given that she realizes it was probably he who reported their attempt
to escape, causing her husband’s death.
Together the two women explore the 1990 world of Berlin, at one point
Roswitha also noticing Kotzebue’s necklace, which she recognizes as Eskimo in
origin, Noayak also processing just such a pair of beads. At a party later that evening, as the German’s celebrate and dance, Kotzebue
stands up on a game machine announcing that she is an Eskimo. The Germans,
momentarily confused, all laugh eventually, declaring themselves to also be
Eskimos, obviously not comprehending the true significance of Kotzebue’s
discovery, since the necklace was included in the container in which she was
discovered as a baby.
Roswitha eventually finds the address and meets up with her brother. She forgives him, in a cold manner, knowing that he believed in the East Berlin Communist system and did not want to lose his sister. And he explains that he was able to place her husband’s body in a cemetery and provide him with a decent burial. The wife, meanwhile, hurries to make a grand dinner, but once Roswitha is provided with the burial location, she and Kotzebue make a quick escape.
They find the gravesite covered over with
leaves, which she removes to see the grave. But before she leaves, she recovers
it with leaves as if it is better hidden in a past to which she can no longer
return.
Back in the hotel room, finally, as they chat, they find a moment of
deep rapport, Kotzebue discovering a moment to attempt to deliver a serious
kiss. But Roswitha immediately backs off. In
By
the end, Kotzebue simply explains that she cannot remain in Germany any longer,
and the two return to Alaska.
There they immediately hook up with Noayak, and confront Bingo Chuck.
The truth is obvious to Noayak, who recalls his occasional travels years before
to indigenous villages. At first, Chuck will not admit to the incidents because
of his embarrassment of his past, but finally admits to having sex with young
Eskimo women, awarding them just such necklaces as a prize. We now realize that
Kotzebue’s mother, having become pregnant, was forced
to kill her baby, and instead wrapped her up
with beads and a name to where she should be returned. Kotzebue is not the
child’s name but the location to where she should be sent if found.
We see
in the new few frames the young miner sitting in the cold landscape thinking
all she has discovered through. And we already know to whose door she is headed
after. She knocks once again on Roswitha’s door. Perhaps this time the woman is
ready to love the other with whom both have discovered the sad truths of their
lives.
Although this film is truly very loosely constructed, in the end I find
it far more believable and moving that even the wonderful and unexpected female
bonding of Bagdad Café. In both cases unlikely couples from entirely
different cultures come together in an unexpected manner, bringing new meaning
to both women’s lives. In Bagdad Café it remains just a deep female
bonding; Jasmin will likely marry the artist Rudi Cox. But in Salmonberries there
is at least the possibility of a lesbian love affair.
*I have a rather interesting acquaintance with
both Percy Aldon and Bob Telson, having met them through my friend Lee Breuer
and spent several long hours with them as they attempted to pitch a stage
version of Bagdad Café to a group of New York investors in Breuer’s
Mabou Mines studio.
Los Angeles, May 25, 2026
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(May 2026).
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