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trashartandmovies · 3 years

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Berlinale Film Festival 2021, Industry Event, Day 1

We all knew the 71st Berlinale would be different, but who’d have guessed we’d be given a twofer? At this point, the juries for the Competition, Encounters, Shorts, and Generations sections have all handed out their awards. These juries got to watch the films in their respective categories on the big screen. Meanwhile, the press were given the opportunity to screen these movies at home, as well as the films in the Berlinale Special, Panorama, Forum and Forum Expanded sections, as well as the six films making up the Perspektive Deutsches Kino category and episodes from the six television shows included in Berlinale Series. (The always excellent Retrospective section is only screening during the summer.) Altogether, around 150 at-home screenings were made available to the press. We had five days to watch them. I was able to watch 22 of them. This is Part One.

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I’m sure everyone covering the festival is hoping that the Summer Special, in mid-June, will go smoothly and we’ll be able to catch at least a fraction of the movies we weren’t able to see. (For geo-blocking streaming reasons, a few films in the lineup weren’t available at all in my geo-region. Including two in the Competition: the FABIAN adaptation and Daniel Daniel Brühl’s directorial debut NEXT DOOR.) Usually, the press is given a week ahead of the festival to check out the Panorama, Forum and Generations titles. One assumes it’s so that audiences may get some recommendations on these lower-profile movies in the inevitable situation when all the high-profile films are sold out. Will this happen in the summer? Unless I missed a press release, the details around the Summer Special are still a bit vague. Rightfully so, since we’re still living in week-by-week uncertainty as far as lockdown measures go.

All we can do now is cross our fingers and hope for a chance to get a look at some of the these titles, because when presented with the challenge of covering a 150-movie lineup over just five days, you have to make some obvious decisions. I suspect many people did what I did — try to watch all the Competition titles and get in a few Encounters, Specials, some shorts and hold out hope for one or two stray Panoramas or Forums. To make matters more heartbreaking, the press screenings went like this: every morning at 7:00 AM, you’d get an impossibly long list of films to watch until 7:00 AM next morning. You’d get a few Competition titles, a few Encounters and Specials, and a deluge of films from the other categories. For many films, all you could do is look at the title, nod, and say to yourself, hopefully we’ll meet again soon, because there’s no way I can fit a sixth movie in today without losing my mind.

(Now there was a wrinkle added to this plan. Over the weekend of March 6 - 7, the press could screen the award winners that got announced on Friday. But it was difficult to try and take this into consideration in any strategic way.)

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Like most film festivals, Berlinale usually kicks things off with a star-studded opening night movie that’s usually too mainstream for the critics. With no red carpet to be concerned with this year, that wasn’t the case. Instead, on Day One, the closest to a big movie star name was Iain Glen (Game of Thrones). Glen isn’t the lead in Tim Fehlbaum’s TIDES, shown in the Berlinale Special program, but he does play a key role as an astronaut who’s landed back on Earth, generations after human had mostly left the increasingly inhabitable planet. Humans have been living in a space colony called Kepler, but everyone ended up sterile, so missions are being sent back to Earth in the hopes that they can once again live there and get their reproductive groove back.

That’s the underlying story of TIDES, and it’s just one element that will likely feel very familiar to anyone who’s well-versed in post-apocalyptic cinema. The color palette is stark, with muted colors. The landscape is barren, this one with lots of water, rather than the desert locales of Mad Max. In fact, the notorious WATERWORLD came to mind more than once while watching TIDES. There’s even a doll in the film that looks just like Dennis Hopper’s character in that film, eye patch and everything. That little detail may be one of the most interesting things about the film.

The main character of TIDES is another astronaut, played with a committed intensity by Nora Arnezeder. She crash lands on Earth, is held captive by central casting post-apocalyptic scavengers, and eventually tries to track down a McGuffin that will let her contact Kepler and report back that there are people reproducing on Earth. Meanwhile, she also suspects that something might remain of the previous mission that was comprised of her father and Iain Glen.

The main attraction here is Fehlbaum’s use of stunning landscapes and practical locations, like a beached industrial ocean liner that serves as inspiration for one of the primary sets. The art design and costumes are all exceptional, while the acting and photography are all decent enough. But it never does much with the conspiracy it tries to entertain us with. Its attempts at being thrilling look good, but can’t help but feel like pretty standard stuff at this point. It’s worth noting that one of the film’s producers is Roland Emmerich, a man who knows a thing or two about making generic high concept action pictures. Some things, like the art design and the pleasingly diverse and international cast, set TIDES apart. But the story is far less inspired.

Faring better were the Day One Competition titles. I started with MEMORY BOX, a lively picture wherein a daughter gets to better understand her mother when a box of the mom’s old teenage diaries and correspondence ends up on their doorstep. (This mother-daughter connection is essentially the same theme that Céline Sciamma’s PETITE MAMAN covers in a different, more sci-fi, fashion.) As the daughter, living in a nice house in Montreal, digs into her mother’s old journals, scrapbooks and tape recordings, the film travels back to 1980s Beirut through the eyes of her teenage mom. It makes these trips back in time through some pretty cool moments of collage-like animation — putting scrapbook pages into motion and diving into photographs and contact sheets that come alive. Plus, the soundtrack is killer, full of lively 80s post punk like Killing Joke, The Stranglers and Blondie.

There’s romance, the trauma of war, a strong refugee story, and a poignant tale of cross-generational understanding. The kicker is that it’s very autobiographical, with the film mirroring co-director Joana Hadjithomas’s own story of corresponding with her friend in Paris while Beirut was falling down around her. These journals are backed up by old photographs taken in Beirut from the other co-director, Kahil Joreige. Like last year’s fascinating BLOODY NOSE, EMPTY POCKETS, and this year’s A COP MOVIE, Berlinale movies are continuing to find success in blurring the line between documentary and narrative fiction. The movie has a little trouble maintaining momentum all the way through, but I loved the experimentation on display here, and the unique ways it tells its story. It helps that MEMORY BOX really sticks the landing at the end.

Next up was ICH BIN DEIN MENSCH, or I’M YOUR MAN — another film, like many in recent years, interested in the ethics behind artificial intelligence and robots with emotions. Think of it as a romantic comedy version of BLADE RUNNER, or an updated version of the forgotten-by-time Ann Magnuson and John Malkovich vehicle MAKING MR. RIGHT. This one, based on a recent short story by Emma Braslavsky, is directed by Maria Schrader, who recently helmed the popular Netflix series Unorthodox (she’s also a veteran film and TV actress, from Tatort and Deutschland 86 to AIMEE & JAGUAR). Schrader continues to prove that she has a good eye for framing and storytelling. The movie doesn’t always escape the problem that many German movies continue to struggle with, which is that they often feel like a good TV movie rather than a work of cinema, but it manages better than most.

The general idea is that Maren Eggert plays Alma, a researcher who is assigned the task of spending a couple weeks with a new personal companion robot named Tom, played by the dreamy-eyed Dan Stevens. Alma is, of course, a completely rational-minded person who is happy to just get through the two weeks with as little interaction with Tom as possible. In her mind, it’s an impossibility that a piece of technology could fulfill a human being’s needs. Of course, as each day goes by, Tom continues to surprise her and wear down her defenses.

It’s a pretty well-worn story by now. The issues that get raised over the course of the movie are some that Star Trek: The Next Generation was dealing with on a regular basis (Tom is similar to Data, though Stevens doesn’t need any special contact lenses), but there are some interesting wrinkles here. Few movies have looked at this subject from the female perspective. And if there’s one that that this year’s Berlinale truly excelled at, it’s offering a wide variety of movies by female directors and/or with female leads. We’ve covered three movies that fit that criteria already, and many more will come. What’s more, Maren Eggert gives us a character who’s at an age where she’s wrestling with the question of whether or not her child-bearing days are behind her. When’s the last time Hollywood dealt with that subject? So, while Alma starts off as a very emotionally distant, academic type, and the best thing about the movie is uncovering her past and getting to understand why she has put up so many walls. I’m not sure it does much with the subject of AI or robot companions, but it does provide a charming odd-couple story and I don’t have any complaints with Eggert winning the festival’s best actress award.

The nightcap on Day One was INTEURODEOKSYEON, or INTRODUCTION, the newest film by the prolific Korean auteur Hong Sangsoo. At last year’s Berlinale, Sangsoo was also in the Competition with the excellent THE GIRL WHO RAN, and he doesn’t disappoint with INTRODUCTION. Ironically enough, if you’re unfamiliar with Hong Sangsoo and don’t know where to start — understandable given the nearly 30 films he’s directed in the past 25 years — INTRODUCTION ain’t a bad way to start. It’s not his best work, but it’s pretty damn good, and a very accessible entry-point into the man’s style and thematic interests. And it barely cracks the 60-minute mark, so you’re not committing to much.

This one ping-pongs between a young man, Youngho, and a young woman, Juwan, both trying to figure out what to do with their lives. Juwan wants to study fashion in Berlin, Youngho wants to become an actor. Both run into problems with these pursuits — some of which are out of their control. In Youngho’s case, it leads to a hilariously drunken dinner confrontation with Ki Joo-bong, who may or may not be playing a version of himself, since he’s only credited as “Old Actor.” The esteemed Korean actor Joo-bong has appeared in Park Chan-wook films, SAVE THE GREEN PLANET, as well as few of Sangsoo’s other films and some 70 other movies. In INTRODUCTION, his character is revered by every other person he meets. And his advice to Youngho is an eruptive highlight in a movie that’s otherwise pretty subtle.

Subtlety is often Sangsoo’s thing, but the emotions he leaves you with tend to be pretty strong. This is his magic. He writes very realistic, dialog-driven scenes that, on their own, are nuanced and deceptively simple. But these quiet scenes build up to an ending that makes everything come together in a profound way. Even if you’re familiar with Sangsoo’s work, INTRODUCTION may come across as slight, or a minor work in the maestro’s deep catalog, but I found it’s pleasures to be more immediate than usual. To my knowledge, no one is writing screenplays like this. The way he reveals characters, develops them, and draws connections through casual lines of dialog, sometimes nested deep within a conversation, is practically his trademark move, and it’s never not remarkable. It demands your attention and then rewards it at the end. His technique is patient, confident and hugely sophisticated. The only problem I see is that, given his track record of releasing one or two movies a year, his talent is in danger of being taken. Don’t be one of those people.

#Berlinale 2021 #Hong Sangsoo #Introduction #I'm Your Man #Tides #Memory Box

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