Balloon

Not every true story merits two full-scale movie productions, but the 1979 escape retold in the new film Balloon is the rare exception. As the title suggests, it’s about two East German families who attempted to flee to West Germany in a homemade hot air balloon. Not once, but three times. It’s such an unbelievable tale that the film has to eliminate one of the three attempts just to seem credible.

The story of the Strelzyk and Wetzel families’ daring gambit was previously made into a Disney adventure film titled Night Crossing (1982), but the families depicted never really liked that Americanized telling, with John Hurt and Beau Bridges. So they were happy to cooperate with this new German-language production, even if the director, Michael “Bully” Herbig, was a standup comedian who had never helmed such a demanding drama.

Herbig does a phenomenal job. Even knowing how this is all going to end, Balloon is intensely suspenseful, beginning with a first, failed escape attempt and ending with a nail-biting second try as the Stasi (secret police) close in. Some touches — like the teenage son’s unwise infatuation with the daughter of a local Stasi official — strike a melodramatic note, but much of the subplot about the Stasi investigation are based on once-secret files not available to the Disney team. Led by a nicely humanized lieutenant named Seidl (Thomas Kretschmann), those scenes have the ring of totalitarian truth, with a soupçon of ennui.

The German cast is uniformly excellent, entirely believable in part because American viewers are unlikely to have seen any of the actors before. Even David Kross, who plays Günter Wetzel, the young father who sews the balloon together in the Stretzyks’ basement, is unrecognizable, despite his prominent previous role as the teenage boy seduced by Kate Winslet’s Hanna in The Reader (2008).

Some German critics dismissed Balloon because it glosses over the problems of Germany’s 1990 reunification, but such concerns seem misplaced in a movie that’s intended as an inspirational thriller. It’s just an amazing true tale, well told, consistently entertaining, and evidently adhering largely to the facts, right down to the exact look of the balloon itself — which was reconstructed at full size.

Call it “escapism” in the best sense.

Grade: A-minus. Not rated, but PG-13 equivalent. Available April 24 from the Sofa Cinema streaming program of Grail Moviehouse.

(Photo courtesy of Distrib Films)