The Palace, Channel 4
It’s 1980s Berlin just before the fall of the wall and the division in Germany is represented by twins separated at birth.
They are the same but different, just like capitalist West Germany and communist East Germany.
It’s an interesting concept with much potential but unfortunately The Palace feels like a 1980s made-for-TV movie in the days before the small screen learned how to do it like the big screen.
Although, that’s not to say that there’s nothing interesting here.
It begins in 1961, the year the Berlin Wall was built and just 16 years after the end of the war, with a desperate woman running down a road after a man who has her sleeping baby in the back of his car.
We later learn that he has taken one of his infant twin daughters to West Berlin while his other daughter stays with her mother in the Russian dominated eastern half of the once German capital.
We jump forward 27 years and in 1988 the sisters meet in a chance encounter in the east.
Marlene, the only child of a rich manufacturing family, is on a visit to the other side to negotiate a business deal when she’s taken to the best show in town and spots her doppelganger in the chorus line.
She waits at the back door and introduces herself to dancer Christine. They swap birth dates and circumstances and immediately know they are sisters and that their parents have been lying to them for decades.
Svenja Jung plays both sisters, which means lots of filming over the shoulder when they are in the same scene, but that’s not the main problem with the drama.
The characters are well acted but without much depth and it’s difficult for the viewer to be invested in them.
For instance, tension could have been built with the regular passage through the border crossing where the Cold War nuclear armed foes faced each other, but instead the identical twins regularly cross back and forth on each other’s passports.
The most interesting aspect of The Palace is the impression of East Germany the drama gives to a domestic German audience.
The GDR (German Democratic Republic) collapsed in on itself after little more than 40 years among the wider fall of European communism.
Twelve years after its official formation it had to build a guarded wall across Berlin, such was the scale of defections to the west amid deep unhappiness with falling living standards, authoritarian rule and the hated secret police agency, the Stasi.
This was mirrored across the eastern bloc where the familiar fallings of communism led to the people’s demand for freedom.
In The Palace, curiously, the differences between east and west are hardly noticeable.
There are references to censorship and bullying, but the characters go about their daily lives without much difficulty and shortages seem very limited.
After a successful opening night as the lead dancer, Christine tells her sister that she can’t find Champagne to celebrate with but there’s “plenty of bubbles”.
The lightweight aluminium desired by the set designers is too costly but there’s no sense of a people desperate to get to the west and the consumer goods of the 1980s just one year before they tear apart the wall with hammers and their bare hands.
The Palace could have been so much more but it lacked the obvious tension of the real difficulties of a divided German and the personal joy and pain of finding out in your mid-20s that you have a twin sister.
