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Berlinale Film Festival 2022 (Giant Massive Round-Up)

Against all odds, the 72nd Berlinale International Film Festival not only took place during a period of peak COVID case count, it seems like a pretty successful example of how such in-person events can operate under such conditions. After an odd two-part mix of online and outdoors in 2021, everything went back indoors, even thought the atmosphere around the Berlinale Palast in Potsdammer Platz felt more subdued than previous years. There were more schnelltest centers and COVID security checkpoints than food trucks and festivities. Most screenings also concluded with the odd experience of being shuttled down emergency exit stairways and being dumped onto the sidewalk with disoriented, blinking eyes. And of course, there’s the respiratory challenge of being able to sit through a marathon of movies with an FFP2 mask glued to your face. Still, it’s hard not to be impressed that it happened with so few discomforts. All the checkpoints, test centers, mask-wearing and reduced seating capacity did lend to a sense of low-risk. No doubt other festivals are keeping a close watch on this Berlinale with the hope that, even in the time of Omicron, there may be a way to keep the communal film festival experience alive.

Peter von Kant, dir. by François Ozon

So, what was on the menu this year? Let’s start with the opening night movie, PETER VON KANT (Competition section), the latest from frequent Berlinale guest Francois Ozon. Even though it may not be a favorite, it’s hard to imagine a more appropriate movie to launch this year’s edition. Ozon’s movie is not only a faithful adaptation of the legendary German auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT, it turns the central character into an overt stand-in for Fassbinder himself. Ozon’s decision to turn Petra the fashion designer into Peter the film director, works wonders in a fascinating hall-of-mirrors kind of way, at least for a while. The reason it works at all is thanks to Denis Menochet’s (INGLORIOUS BASTARDS) exuberant and spot-on performance. His Fassbinder is equal parts pathetic and sympathetic, which is perfect since this film, like the original, dives into the murky waters of codependence and the fragility of the artist’s ego.

What’s surprising is that Ozon and Menochet are able to wring a lot of uncomfortable comedy from the material, especially in the early acts. It takes some time before the fascination around how seamless Ozon’s Petra-Peter/Fassbinder merging is, and how well Menochet can highlight the humor, humanity, naughtiness and sadness in the character. Peter’s relationship with his silent assistant Karl (Stefan KCrepon), is funny and disturbing in equal measure, as is his passive aggressive relationship to Sidone (Isabelle Adjanie), a fading actress who got her big break thanks to one of Peter’s early films. these relationships are already a bit fragile, but when Sidone brings young, beautiful aspiring actor Amir (Khalil Ben Gharbia) over to Peter’s apartment, everything is tipped to its breaking point — the jealousies and insecurities that were simmering under the surface erupt, and that’s when the film settles into a more broad and less rewarding melodrama in its final acts. Still, there is a lot to admire in the performances, direction and writing of this adaptation, and for a Berlinale opening night movie, it’s quite solid.

Flux Gourmet, dir. by Peter Strickland

Speaking of fragile artistic egos, another Berlinale alumni, writer/director Peter Strickland, brought his newest to this year’s festival. It’s called FLUX GOURMET (Encounters section), and perhaps more than any other movie, this one was completely on my wavelength. It deals with the psycho-sexual tensions that are brewing between the artists, hosts and other interested parties at a month long artist residency. The artists are a sound art collective comprised of Fatma Mohamed, Asa Butterfield and Ariane Labed. The residency is taking place at the Sonic Catering Institute, which is run by a never better Gwendoline Christie. That’s right, it’s a food-centric sound art affair, and the journalist who’s been tapped to document this residency is a man named Stones (Makis Papadimitriou) who’s got some undiagnosed gastro-instestinal problems.

From the very start of FLUX GOURMET, I couldn’t stop smiling, cringing and laughing, but I understand that some of the humor on display here will be inscrutable to some. All I can say is, as someone who’s been part of a sound art collective, as well as the odd artist residency, I understood every discomforting beat all too well. I would also say that, even though the film is very specific in its subject matter, it’s probably Strickland’s most accessible film so far. This may be a double-edged sword, of sorts. I found two of his most acclaimed films BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO (2012) and THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY (2014) to be the kind of movies I appreciate more than fully enjoy. There’s an iciness to Strickland’s formalism that can keep you at arm’s length. While there’s often been a humor to his films, it can easily get lost under the precision of his sound and vision. This isn’t the case in FLUX GOURMET. The setting and the subject matter not only opens the door for Strickland’s penchant for immaculate sound design (the food-related sound art compositions were created by Strickland’s own Sonic Catering Band), it’s also the perfect place to stage a full-on comedy that’s both absurdist and intellectual, silly and smart. After all, this is a film that turns a colonoscopy into performance art and features rival sound art collectives who are willing to resort to violence in order to resolve their disputes.

Early on we can tell that this sound art trio is already on uneasy terms with one another. And as each member sits down to be interviewed by Stones, the reasons for those internal conflicts are brought to the surface and the fate of the group becomes increasingly uncertain. Adding to the pressure is that with each performance during the residency, they all have to deal with the unmovable will of their host and benefactor, the show-stopping Gwendolyn Christie, whose make-up and wardrobe alone make this movie worth seeing. Christie has eyes in particular for Asa Butterfield, and their hilariously awkward fetish-indulging romance will stay with me for some time to come. This is a special film in my eyes, a one-of-a-kind movie in terms of sound, visuals, mood, and performance, that I don’t think any other director could make. Yet, as with Bertrand Bonello’s film COMA (which we’ll get to later), this was unexpected — a kind of comedy that I didn’t know the director had in him, which makes it even more special and rewarding at this point in time.

Fire, or Both Sides of the Blade (Avec amour et acharnement), dir. by Claire Denis

While French auteur Claire Denis has some transgressive and outré films to her credit (including 2018’s HIGH LIFE), her latest, BOTH SIDES OF THE BLADE (Competition section), also known as FIRE in some territories, is a more grounded relationship drama centered around the impressive talents of frequent collaborator Juliette Binoche and the recent co-star of TITANE, Vincent Lindon. These two have a seemingly idyllic relationship that is quickly put to the test when Binoche’s former lover reenters the picture as Lindon’s new business parter. Secrets and lies pile up, communications break down, and many tears are shed. Some fans might feel like this is a step backwards, especially considering the achievements Denis made in her last few films. But BOTH SIDES OF THE BLADE still packs an impressive emotional punch, and features two bring-down-the-house performances from Binoche and Lindon.

If for nothing else, this movie will be remembered as the one that earned Denis a long-overdue major award, with the M. Night Shyamalan’s Berlinale Competition jury handing her the Silver Bear for Best Director. It’s hard to argue with that, and it’s hard not to see Denis’s confident directorial hand all over the handheld stylings of BOTH SIDES OF THE BLADE. My only complaint is that even though Denis has always been a politically engaged filmmaker, her attempts at raising awareness about Lebanon and systemic racism in France aren’t very graceful this time around. But these are small complaints. In this film, Denis still proves a master a crafting tense scenes that crescendo with emotion and revelation. Her use of close-up shots on faces throughout the film is especially effective. So much in the movie is unsaid, and Denis proves as skillful as ever at getting inside the heads of her characters and peeling back the layers until they’re left exposed, sprawled out on the floor, begging for forgiveness.

Nobody’s Hero (Viens je t’emmène), dir. by Alain Guiraudie

Panorama and Forum sections of the Berlinale aren’t exactly well known for their laughs. Rather, this is where you can expect to find a healthy mix of the personal, political, ambitious, and sometimes downright experimental. Nevertheless, this year, one of the funniest movies at the festival, Alain Guiraudie’s NOBODY’S HERO, was given the honor of opening the Panorama section. It’s something of a French farce. A film that takes the deadly serious subjects of terrorism, racism, nationalism, and bourgeois indifference, and skewers them all in a wildly funny tale about a guy who just wants to spend time with his beloved prostitute but is hampered by a local bombing. Our guide into the fears and preoccupations of the French white male psyche is the character of Médéric Romand, a web designer who likes to jog around the city of Clermont-Ferrand and puff on his big vaping device. As the title suggests, Médéric is no one’s idea of a hero, but as played by Jean-Charles Clichet, he is so fully realized and such a fascinatingly original character that I did end up rooting for him against my better judgement. In fact, NOBODY’S HERO is all about messing with your prejudices and expectations, and it succeeds at every turn.

What’s really enjoyable about NOBODY’S HERO is that there are indeed many twists and turns along the way. Just when you think you may have figured out where the film is headed, it gets a steps up and becomes more heightened, more surreal, more absurdly funny. The real instigating event in the film is the moment when Médéric decides to let Selim, an Arab teenager, sleep in the hallway of the apartment building he lives in. Is this Arab boy one of the suspected terrorists who bombed the tow square during Christmas festivities? The presence of this boy triggers a range of mildly panicked reactions from both Médéric, who second-guesses his goodwill gesture, and his neighbors who also have their casually racist suspicions and doubts. But indeed, through a series of comedic circumstances, Médéric finds himself increasingly tied to Selim, even though he’d much rather be focusing all of his attention on Isadora, an older prostitute he’s fallen in love with, despite the continued threats coming from Isadora’s husband. At first glance, the weird romance between Médéric and Isadora defies all logic. Certainly it’s not something we usually see in movies. And yet, thanks to Jean-Charles Clichet performance, the relationship achieves an unexpected level of believability. I not only believed that Médéric was a real three-dimensional character, I wondered why we don’t see more oddballs like him. The same goes for many of the film’s characters. You think you have them pegged when they’re first introduced, but by the end of the movie, characters who at first seem either confounding or simplistic are made painfully and recognizably human.

Somewhere Over the Chemtrails (KDYBY RADŠI HORELO), dir. by Adam Rybanský

Quite a few films in the 2022 Berlinale lineup deal with nationalism and xenophobia, but no two films were quite as simpatico as NOBODY’S HERO and the wonderfully titled Czech film SOMEWHERE OVER THE CHEMTRAILS (KDYBY RADŠI HORELO) by Adam Rybanský. Like NOBODY’S HERO, this film was also in the Panorama section, and it also involves an incident of violence in the town square that is perceived by the locals as a terrorist attack. This time, the setting is a small Czech village, and the incident involves a white van crashing into an Easter celebration, wounding one of the townspeople. Immediately, and absurdly, the head of the volunteer fire department suspects that the runaway van was the work of foreign terrorists. A manhunt ensues. Lots of beers are imbibed. And while some villagers express their doubts at this terrorism theory, the voice of reason can only do so much against fear mongering and groupthink. It may not sound like the funniest of set-ups, but CHEMTRAILS is ultimately a sweet and kindhearted comedy that isn’t as edgy or progressive as NOBODY’S HERO but will likely put a smile on your face. In particular, a running gag involving the use of vinegar as an antidote against the effects of chemtrails reaches a surprisingly funny climax.

A Love Song, dir. by Max Walker-Silverman

Speaking of sweet, this year’s Berlinale doesn’t get much sweeter than A LOVE SONG, an American film that was also in the Panorama section and features two veteran character actors, Dale Dickey and Wes Studi. If their names don’t ring a bell, you’ll likely recognize their faces from 30 years worth of movies. Yet, throughout all those various movie roles, these two actors have never once kissed another actor on screen. Maybe that’s a spoiler, but really, this is a movie that can’t be spoiled. It’s a simple, thoughtful, and often humorous romantic tearjerker involving two wonderful actors of a certain age. In other words, it’s the kind of movie that you rarely see these days. As an added bonus, writer/director Max Walker-Silverman films the movie like a micro-budget Wes Anderson movie, with pleasingly symmetrical framing, lots of effective inserts, and a meaningful soundtrack. If you’re like me, A LOVE SONG will make you long for the 1990s when the US was still making these kind of small, offbeat independent movies on the regular.

Concerned Citizen, dir. by Idan Haguel

While NOBODY’S HERO touches on the modern day feelings of white, middle-class guilt when it comes to immigrants and race relations, the Israeli film CONCERNED CITIZEN (also found in the Panorama section) dives into this murky water head-on. The story, written and directed by Idan Haguel, is about a gay couple, Ben and Raz (Shlomi Bertonov and Ariel Wolf), who are looking to become parents. They’re also recently relocated to a new neighborhood in Tel Aviv, part of an early gentrification effort for a part of town that makes their friends nervous about visiting. When they first moved in, Ben planted a baby tree outside their apartment building. A couple years later, he calls the cops on a couple of African migrants who keep leaning on his tree. As a result, he witnesses the cops beating one of the men, and suddenly, everything changes. Ben no longer wants to be in the neighborhood, or even Israel for that matter, and is doubtful about wanting a child. Nothing feels right.

CONCERNED CITIZEN is surprisingly honest about the limits of liberal-minded good intentions, and it reveals some pretty interesting fascistic pitfalls in the average online process of finding a surrogate mother. Further emphasizing Ben’s existential crisis is his day job as a city planner, and spends his days designing a mock-up of a new city center plaza, picking and choosing the virtual people who are standing outside the plaza, what they look like, their skin color, who’s holding hands with who, and so on. As he moves people around, playing god on his computer, you feel his queasiness. It’s not all right.

I also had to applaud the film for it’s ending and giving Ben a way out of his dilemma that is realistic and yet not fully kosher. It’s both sad and funny, and in a world where virtue signaling is an everyday concern for some, it’s totally on point and makes perfect sense. Even when you think your heart and your actions are in the right place, you can still be part of the problem just by being part of the system. There’s no easy way out, and no shortcuts to doing the right thing. Part of the strength of CONCERNED CITIZEN is showing how trapped we can feel if we take a small step back to look at the bigger picture.

Convenience Store (Produkty 24), dir. by Michael Borodin

At every Berlinale, you’re bound to come across a few films that can only be described as bleak as fuck. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Far from it. In fact, in the age of streamers and the global Hollywoodization of cinema, I look forward to the Berlinale bummers. My only caveat is that a bummer needs to be balanced out with art. If your downbeat descent into misery is a bunch of shaky handheld footage and semi-improvized scenes that strives for an authentic look but just comes off like you gave zero thought to the technical aspects of your craft, then I’ll probably curse the experience of sitting through it.

Michael Borodin’s CONVENIENCE STORE tested my tolerance for misery at times, but I was also impressed with how well-executed the experience was. The movie offers a glimpse inside a 24-hour Moscow convenience store, staffed by immigrant workers from Uzbekistan. The workers are all at the mercy of Zhanna (Lyudmila Vasilyeva), the mother superior, and one of the most frightening characters I’ve seen in a while. There are a couple moments when CONVENIENCE STORE dips its toe into pure horror movie stuff, showing what happens when one of the workers disappoints Zhanna or tries to get outside help. The front door of the store is where the world ends for these unfortunate souls.

Many complications arise when one of the workers, Mukhabbat (Zukhara Sanzysbay), has a child but is then able to escape, finds a sympathetic lawyer and reunite with her mom in Uzbekistan. These complications ultimately came across as a little too much for me. Will Zhanna be able to lure Mukhabbat back into the fold? What will happen to Mukhabbat’s child? What will happen to her mom? Is there no good option in this woman’s life? What’s the point of it all? I will say, the last image of this movie is possibly strong enough to evoke a recommendation, but it was still a frustrating experience for me.

Happer’s Comet, dir. by Tyler Taormina

Let’s dip into the Forum section, starting with another up-and-comer in American independent cinema, writer/director Tyler Taormina, whose HAPPER’S COMET (in the Forum section) is a remarkable follow-up to his 2019 debut feature HAM ON RYE. Like that previous film, HAPPER’S COMET is a mysterious study of small town American rituals. The biggest difference this time, is that HAPPER’S COMET is completely dialogue-free, relying instead on a sound design worthy of David Lynch, and finding meaning and narrative in gestures, movements, stillness and various diegetic sounds. HAM ON RYE was promising, and HAPPER’S COMET offers a compelling argument that Taormina is quickly mastering the language of film and is a major talent to keep your eye on.

Nuclear Family, dir. by Erin Wilkerson and Travis Wilkerson

Also in the Forum section is the newest from Travis Wilkerson, a filmmaker that’s been making fascinating documentaries and video collages for over ten years now. With NUCLEAR FAMILY, he’s co-directing with his wife, Erin Wilkerson, in a very personal documentary about a family trip wherein Travis, Erin and their two children drive around and visit some of America’s nuclear missile launch sites. Amazingly enough, the Wilkersons neatly tie together the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the US with the genocide of Native Americans. As the tagline for the movie reads: "Seize the land by gun. Turn the land into a gun. Point the gun at everybody’s head.” It’s a bold and strong statement of a film, but it also has a current of dark and angry humor to it that keeps it lively, engaging, and never boring. As someone who shares Wilkerson’s nuclear fears, and agrees that this is an important subject that we need to keep alive, I loved every minute of this one.

The United States of America, dir. by James Benning

One of the most remarkable viewing experiences this year came from an American film called, fittingly enough, THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. This is the the kind of movie I tend to think of when talking about the Forum section of the Berlinale. It’s essentially 50 static shots, each about two minutes long, and each representing one of the 50 states of America. It’s all in alphabetic order, starting with Alabama and ending with Wyoming. Most of the shots are pretty effective and evocative of the state. Every once in a while, the director James Benning will drop in some audio, like a portion of an interview with Malcolm X, but for the most part, the only sound is diegetic and coming from the location being filmed. Some shots feel more meaningful than others, and occassionally your mind will just drift, thinking ahead to the next state in the alphabetic order and wondering what the shot will be. But then comes the end credits and your mind is blown in one of those THIS-CHANGES-EVERYTHING kind of ways. Ya got me, Benning. Ya got me good. It’s a jaw dropper, and yet the reveal seems to be so subtle that many viewers seem to have missed it completely. Even press and movie festival patrons have become too dismissive of end credits.

L’état et moi, dir. by Max Linz

Another unexpectedly winning comedy from the Forum section was Max Linz’s L’ÉTAT ET MOI, an energetic mix of anti-realist slapstick comedy and bookish intellectual jokes about the history of the European judicial system. It’s a short movie, at around 85 minutes, and it has at least three scenes that I found to be wildly hilarious, but it still felt long and awkwardly unfunny for stretches at a time. Still, if you like the idea of a wacky experimental political comedy wherein the plot hinges on the slight difference between the German words for “communist” and “composer,” this might be the film for you. The woman who played the security guard who has to testify about a statue coming to life has my vote for the best comedic performance of the festival.

The Middle Ages (La edad media), dir. by Alejo Moguillansky, Luciana Acuña

What was I saying about this Berlinale being chockablock with unexpected comedies? Fans of Argentine filmmaker Alejo Moguillansky (CASTRO, THE PARROT AND THE SWAN, THE GOLD BUG) will no doubt be unsurprised that he’s made another anarchic comedy staring himself and his wife (Luciana Acuña, also codirecting) and his daughter (a scene-stealing Cleo Moguillansky). But being somewhat unfamiliar with Moguillansky filmography I was surprised by how confident and effective THE MIDDLE AGES was, especially since it’s a homemade lockdown COVID movie — a recent genre that has proven to be less than rewarding. But the Moguillansky-Acuña clan make it work in a number of ways. It gets at the simultaneous working-at-home schooling-at-home tensions, the existential concerns about mortality and the future of a career in the performing arts, and the general reflective concern brought on by COVID of “what the hell have we been up to for the past few decades?”

There isn’t much of a plot to THE MIDDLE AGES, and that’s absolutely fine. It’s a joy to watch this family spiral down three different existential nightmare holes. But there is a pretty funny through-line involving the daughter’s efforts to buy a telescope. First she plays the parents off each other, getting some money from each one, until she begins to make dough by selling off items in the house, one-by-one to a guy on a motorcycle who shows up at the front door every day to see what’s next. The different ways in which the parents pivot from trying to keep it together and wondering what the fuck’s the point is both funny and poignant — which kind of sums up this charming movie altogether.

Coma, dir. by Bertrand Bonello

I promise this will be the last time I mention how odd it was to see so many comedies at this year’s Berlinale. But who knew that Bertrand Bonello was going to come out with one of those aforementioned homemade lockdown COVID movies and that it was going to be laugh-out-loud funny? Yes, this is the Bonello who’s made THE PORNOGRAPHER, NOCTURAMA, THE HOUSE OF TOLERANCE and ZOMBI CHILD — not exactly a purveyor of guffaws, and yet with COMA he’s crafted a uniquely surreal and humorous tale about the psychological toll of being a teenager in lockdown and the tenuous grasp on reality that a lot of us are experiencing these days.

Bonello reunites with ZOMBI CHILD lead Louise Labeque, who spends her time in quarantine Zooming with friends about serial killers and fantasizing some memorably bizarre soap opera-style scenarios for her dolls to act out. That’s when she’s not watching videos featuring an influencer by the name of Patricia Coma (Julia Faure), who delivers increasingly funny and distressing messages about life, pain, the weather, and the importance of buying her handheld electronic device, hilariously called the Revelator. With the Revelator, you can do no wrong.

It’s not all played for laughs, though. Dreams have started to get weird for Labeque during lockdown. She enters a world that looks a lot like the woods of Twin Peaks. Some people seem to be getting stuck there and every time Labeque returns, there’s a worry that she too may end up lost in the woods, unable to find her way back. Sure, it’s not exactly a subtle allegory, but it’s effective. Years from now, the homemade lockdown COVID movies will be dusted off and held up to the light for reinspection, and I have a feeling COMA will be one that has legs to continue to be relevant outside of our current situation.

Urest (Unrueh), dir. by Cyril Schäublin

Like FLUX GOURMET and COMA, the Swiss film UNREST was part of the Encounters section, a program that is relatively new to the Berlinale and has quickly built up a reputation for being a rival to the Competition in terms of both quality and big-name talent. UNREST doesn’t have the later but it was one of the more memorable and subtly powerful films that I caught this year.

The conceit is rather perfect and can be perhaps summed up in three words: Swiss anarchist watchmakers. UNREST is partly the story of the filmmaker’s grandmother, someone who worked at a watchmaking factory, setting a particular part of the watch, the balance wheel, otherwise known as the “Unrueh” or “unrest.” The time is 1877, a period in which there was a significant amount of political unrest in the area, due in large part to a burgeoning anarchist movement that was taking root among the factory workers and townspeople. This unrest was due in part to the odd way in which time was managed in this Swiss town. The town operated on three clocks: factory time, municipal time, and telegraph time. Meanwhile, pressure is high in the factory to be more efficient. Everything is timed, including how long it takes you to make your one part of the watch, and how long it takes you to walk from one part of the factory to the other. New, quicker routes are always being tested, and if you make the mistake of showing up to your shift at the factory on municipal time rather than factory time, you’ll end up being eight minutes late and it’ll cost you.

Entering this scene is the other part of the story, the cartographer Pyotr Kropotkin, whose memoirs also helped inspire the movie. Kropotkin not only falls in with the anarchists, he’s inspired to create anarchist maps — maps that reflect how the people see the region, the names and boundaries they follow, rather than the municipality’s names and boundaries. For this area of Switzerland, where the town is running on three different clocks and the spoken language can flow naturally between German, French, Italian, English and Russian, the idea of anarchy almost seems like common sense. But what UNREST really highlights is how inhuman all of this attention toward efficiency and productivity is, which makes it a highly relevant film for today’s audiences.

The City and the City (I Poli ke i Poli), dir. by Christos Passalis, Syllas Tzoumerkas

The last film I caught from the Encounters section was one that felt more like a Forum selection — a semi-experimental socio-political film that attempts to look at a horrific tragedy in the past in a sort of time-is-a-flat-circle kind of way. That film is THE CITY AND THE CITY, by Christos Passalis, Syllas Tzoumerkas, and it charts the modern history of Thessaloniki, a city in Greece that had been home to generations of Jewish families before the horrors of WWII.

The disturbing details of what happened to the city of Thessaloniki during and after the war will likely be eye-opening to a lot of viewers — it certainly was to me — and I admired the way the film moved through these events. The filmmakers restage historical events in the modern-day city. One event that took place in an old town square that is now a construction site, is staged in the construction site, with vehicles moving around as Nazi officers conduct their routine humiliations upon the townspeople. It’s a technique that’s both budget-conscious and effective.

THE CITY AND THE CITY can be rather disorienting and impenetrable at first. Like a lot of film festival entries these days, it tends to blur the line between drama and documentary and the way it breaks the story into chapters is less helpful than it is confusing. But as the film went on, the message became clearer and the filmmakers began to win me over. There is a lot I admired about THE CITY AND THE CITY, not the least of which is that we have yet to come to terms with the crimes, tragedies and injustices of the twentieth century. As the movie proves, we literally pave over some of the most important parts of our collective history. And until we take a long hard look at our past and learn from our mistakes, we’ll continue to make a mess of things, needlessly hurt more people, and unintentionally keep the door open for another disaster.

Incredible but True (Incroyable mais vrai), dir. by Quentin Dupieux

There were three films in the Berlinale Special section that I was trying to get tickets to this year: Dario Argento’s DARK GLASSES (a reported return-to-form from the old maestro), Andrew Dominik’s new Nick Cave documentary THIS MUCH I KNOW TO BE TRUE, and the newest absurdity from Quentin Dupieux, INCREDIBLE BUT TRUE. Alas, I only managed one of the three.

But it’s a pretty good one. INCREDIBLE BUT TRUE tells the tale of Alain and Marie (Alain Chaba and Léa Drucker), who buy a new home that comes with a warning from the real estate agent. If you don’t want to be spoiled on something that happens in the first ten minutes of the film, skip this review and just know that INCREDIBLE BUT TRUE is about what you’d expect would happen if Dupieux were ever given the chance to helm an episode of The Twilight Zone. The short summary is: there’s a door in the floor of the basement that leads to a duct, and if you go down the duct, you end up upstairs, in the same house, but you’ll emerge both twelve hours in the future and three days younger.

It’s an intriguing set-up and the reveal, delivered by the real estate agent, it perhaps the funniest bit of comedic timing in the whole film. The different ways in which Alain and Marie deal with the presence of the magical gateway in the basement fuel a lot of the intrigue and humor in the film. Less successful, but perhaps more relevant as social commentary, is the subplot about Alain’s boss and his new electronic penis. The penis is connected to a smartphone app, so that “you can steer it.” Alain’s boss becomes obsessed not so much with his new electronic penis, but with how Alain and Marie react to the news about his new penis. Are they suitably impressed? Shouldn’t they be more impressed? This storyline does have some solid laughs, and it does share some thematic connections to the ways in which Marie becomes obsessed with the hole in the basement, but like a lot of INCREDIBLE BUT TRUE, it doesn’t quite resolve itself in the manner I was hoping. The movie is only 74 minutes long, and that can feel like a blessing during a fortnight of non-stop movie watching, but in this case it also feels like Dupieux introduced some compelling ideas and didn’t really find a way to bring them to a satisfying conclusion. The movie is a lot of fun, don’t get me wrong, but by the end I was hoping for something more meaningful.

Beba, dir. by Rebeca Huntt

Another important section of the Berlinale is Generations. This is where you’ll find your coming-of-age movies as well as a wide range of films that will appeal to kids, teens and/or young adults. Rebeca Huntt’s film BEBA, is definitely one of those young adult movies from the Generations section. It’s a bold and confrontational film that could best be described as a docu-diary. Huntt is behind the camera as well as narrating, and for 80 minutes she doesn’t waste a moment in trying to get at some very personal and specific yet widely relatable truths around parents, siblings, generational trauma, trying to break unhealthy patterns and coming to terms with your upbringing.

I use the term docu-drama because watching BEBA feels at times like reading someone’s diary. There’s so much intimacy here that it becomes uncomfortable. In fact, no one on screen appears to feel comfortable when Huntt is talking to them. Yet this friction creates an energy and the movie feels more alive than most. There’s an aim towards enlightenment that is commendable here and you get the feeling that the only way Huntt can get to that truth is to be as open and intimate as she can be.

Sublime, dir. by Mariano Biasin

Who knew that teenage boys in Argentina are still playing indie rock with guitars, bass and drums? As someone who was into doing such things when I was a teenager, it was one of the heartening things I took away from Mariano Biasin’s tender coming-of-age film SUBLIME. Thankfully, there were no Sublime covers played by the band of best friends at the center of the movie. Instead, they’re impressively playing all originals, with their songs sounding endearingly like what you might expect a bunch of songs written by teenage boys to sound like. Except, in this case, they’re not half bad.

In fact, the band is preparing to play a birthday party. It is, of course, a big deal. But, as is the case in these situations, and in this kind of movie, there are some complications. The biggest bit of drama is that the guitarist Manuel (Martín Miller) is in love with the other guitarist and singer Felipe (Teo Inama Chiabrando). The drummer’s sister also drops in to further stir the pot of sexual tension in these kids’ lives. It’s all handled with an impressive amount of sincerity and delicate grace. Director Mariano Biasin knows all the little details, gestures and glances to focus on. The little things that mean everything. It’s all heading to one question: Can Manu confess his true feelings without breaking up the band? I’m not sure the result has the significance it should, but it’s a rather heartwarming tale, well told. I could picture this movie playing well (and perhaps better) at Sundance.

Leonora addio, dir. by Paolo Taviani

Let’s wrap this coverage up by getting back to the big Competition category. Last year’s at home, streaming version of the festival gave me the opportunity to watch all the Competition titles. This meant that I was able to break my streak of not seeing the movie that wins the Golden Bear, which I naturally resumed this year. So, while I didn’t see the grand prize winning ALCARRÀS, I did see LEONORA ADDIO, which was the only movie I felt tempted to walk out on this year.

But this too is something of a tradition. Every year there’s at least one movie in the Competition section that, for one reason or another, I just can’t stomach. Two years ago it was THE SALT OF TEARS, last year it was ALBATROS (DRIFT AWAY). This year, it was the Italian historical curio LEONORA ADDIO, by Paolo Taviani. Taviani has been making movies for sixty years now, having won the Golden Bear in 2012 for CAESAR MUST DIE (which is why, I’m guessing, this movie ended up in the Competition section). This new movie wants to tell a poetic story about the Nobel Prize-winning writer Luigi Pirandello, someone who often wrote poems and stories that fell into the category of tragic farce — and who’s own life story of championing fascism could call into that category as well. Alas, none of the four stories in LEONORA ADDIO do anything to shed new light on the author or make a case for themselves as being all that interesting. Even the black and white photography used for most of the stories feels inauthentic and purposeless. I won’t get into the last chapter of the movie, shot in color and meant to take place in Brooklyn. It’s a legit fiasco.

The Passengers of the Night (Les passagers de la nuit), dir. by Mikhaël Hers

I had a better time with Mikhaël Hers’s latest film, THE PASSENGERS IN THE NIGHT. The title comes from a 1980s late-night radio show, loosely based on the real Radio France radio program Les choses de la nuit. The movie starts with a little prologue, set on the night François Mitterrand won the presidency, on May 10th, 1981. We then proceed to move through much of the decade, following a newly single mom (played by the always compelling Charlotte Gainsbourg) as she gets a job at the radio station and tries to raise her two teenaged kids.

Let’s just say the movie is eighties to a fault. Mikhaël Hers was born in 1975, and while he may have been fascinated enough with the 1980s to want to relive it through this story, his conception of the decade is thoroughly cinematic and sentimental in nature and devoid of any reality. The movie is even shot to look like a movie from the 1980s — rather than the way things actually looked like in the 1980s. This would be fine if it weren’t a movie that was trying to be both a sensitive coming-of-age story and one that deals with a homeless heroin addict no less. Nothing anyone said or did in the movie felt honest, it felt like the kind of stuff only people in movies say and do. Which again, would be fine in the context of a different story told in a different way. I don’t need people in movies to look or talk like people in real life, but if we’re spending so much time concerned about a character who’s living on the streets hooked on smack, I don’t need her to look like she’s just stumbled out of a Givenchy after party when she’s supposed to look half-dead.

It’s not a bad movie, just a frustrating one. Perhaps I should see the choice of shooting an 80’s-set movie with the soft lighting style of 80’s movies as a sort of loving homage. And maybe I should see the choice in making all the characters seem like characters out of an 80s movie, rather than people that actually existed, as an interesting metatexual commentary of some sort. The same goes with making their problems and the plot twists they encounter be completely unreal — the kind of stuff that only happens in 1980s movies. Maybe this is all a loving ode to cinema and nothing else. But instead, I read it all as kind of phony and disappointing.

Everything Will Be Ok, dir. by Rithy Panh

A name that pops up frequently in Berlinale Competition line-ups is Rithy Panh, the Cambodian filmmaker working out of France, who’s been making powerful films that often blur the line between art installations and documentaries. His newest film, EVERYTHING WILL BE OK, might bring back memories of his 2013 film THE MISSING PICTURE, in that it uses handmade figures to help tell his story. Like most of Panh’s films, this story involves taking a difficult look back at our recent past. This time around, Panh evokes George Orwell's Animal Farm by creating a topsy-turvy world where humans are imprisoned by a group of animals that are quickly devolving into a quasi-authoritarian state. Once again, Panh pulls no punches in showing the worst and most hypocritical aspects of 20th century humanity. It’s not an easy watch, and it may be an endurance test for some. But if you’ve been on the fence about becoming vegetarian, this movie might be the final push you’ve been waiting for. I didn’t like it as much as I did 2020’s IRRADIATED, but it’s hard not be impressed by his artistry. You get why Panh’s films tend to win the Berlinale’s special artistic contribution award.

Robe of Gems, dir. by Natalia López

Some people were greatly impressed by Natalia López’s feature debut, the meditative Mexican crime picture ROBE OF GEMS. I can understand why. Few movies at this year’s Berlinale were as well composed as this one. If cinema is all about telling the story visually, ROBE OF GEMS is nearly perfect. Certainly, the jury thought so, awarding the film the Silver Bear Jury Prize. I wish I shared that enthusiasm. While I admired the framing and the meaning in every shot, I also found it meandering and largely devoid of the emotion and tension it seemed to be aiming for. If the point is all about mood, it’s got that in spades. You feel the corruption and the brutality. As a narrative, a story about a kidnapping and the ripple-effect consequences and the many people touched by such acts of violence, I had trouble getting engaged.

I actually want to take a mulligan on this one. I was seated in the front section of the CUBIX movie theater — in theater number nine, which has a screen about the size of a three story building. When you have to turn your head 45-degrees from side to side in order to admire the composition of a shot, you’re not sitting in a good seat. The immensity of the image in front of me was overwhelming, and made the movie all the more difficult to get into. I’m looking forward to seeing it again at some point.

That Kind of Summer (Un été comme ça), dir. by Denis Côté

After last year’s SOCIAL HYGIENE and this year’s THAT KIND OF SUMMER, French Canadian filmmaker Denis Côté is turning into a new favorite. The two movies are dramatically different though. Where SOCIAL HYGIENE was a witty comedy involving actors speaking to each other across the static shot of a landscape, THAT KIND OF SUMMER is a feverishly tense drama, with moments of harrowing revelation and people coming to painfully realized truths about the human condition. There are a few laughs here and there, but even these are rather uncomfortable.

It’s been a few weeks since I sat with this movie, and I’ve kind of been sitting with it since, and I still don’t know how to easily summarize the movie. It takes place at a sort of sexual rehab clinic, where three women (the amazing trio of Larissa Corriveau, Laure Giappiconi and Aude Mathieu) have volunteered to stay, knowing that they need help, or that people who care about them think they need help. Each woman has different ways in which their sexuality is, in some way, interfering or even taking over their lives. Although, for Aude Mathieu’s Geisha, as she see’s it, she just likes to fuck and that’s not necessarily a problem, even though her desires are getting her into more extreme scenarios with the potential for violence.

Nothing is straightforward though. The movie spends 137 minutes constantly shifting the framework of the discussion. There is deep sadness in the past of Larissa Corriveau’s Léonie, especially an experience she details in a haunting monologue that is one of the most dramatically charged moments of the entire festival. Yet, none of these women can easily fit the labels of victims or survivors. They’re simply human stories — the kind of taboo stories that movies often avoid getting into because they’re not easily addressed. Too often movies want to moralize about these issues instead of treating them as another facet of human nature.

Côté has not only made a movie that successfully avoids moralizing, he’s made a movie featuring no small amount of sexual acts being visualized and described and yet he’s never eroticizing, exploiting or leering at his characters or the subject matter. He’s asking, what are we about? Why do we act and think the way we do? It’s a small miracle of a movie. One of the best of the festival and certainly the year. It’s deeply uncomfortable at times, but that’s mostly due to the fact that we’ve been programmed to avoid these kind of questions.

A Piece of Sky (Drii Winter), by Michael Koch

I didn't catch all of the films in this year's Berlinale Competition section, but given the eight of them I did see, DRII WINTER (my preferred title) would have gotten my vote for Golden Bear. It wasn't my favorite, but it is a beautiful piece of work that so perfectly expresses its themes and concerns through visual composition and some unexpected storytelling flourishes straight out classical Greek theater.

What good is a man? In particular, what good is a man who's fallen ill, and who's only sense of purpose has been his strength in working with his hands. Marco is a quiet outsider who's fallen in love with a local barmaid. They get married, but a lot of the local villagers don't really trust Marco, even though he's a reliable, strong worker and farmhand. The thing is, Marco is beginning to realize something's wrong with him. He starts to empathize with the farm animals -- what's their value if they don't live up to the farmer's expectations? Well, they get put down or sent to the slaughterhouse. Is Marco any different? Are any of us? The whole idea of God as the farmer tending to his flock is made literal here, in a way, and it resonates perfectly well as Marco begins to feel resentment toward his employer.

A PIECE OF SKY is beautifully filmed in the Swiss mountains, where everything is at an angle. The landscape seems to defy the laws of physics at times. Bodies of water seem to float in the sky. Clouds merge with rocks. Director Michael Koch and cinematographer Armin Dierolf give the impression that this village is indeed one step away from a sort of heavenly ether. Townspeople even drop in from time to time like a choir of angels to punctuate the film's themes.

It is sometimes painful, sometimes deeply moving to watch Marco take that final step, but the movie avoids getting dragged down into misery -- it's more intellectually curious than that. Instead, we continue to wonder about our own place and purpose in this world. There but for the grace of god, and so forth. How far removed are we from beasts of burden? We're all heading in one direction, and how willing are we to take care of one another when we get there?

My only criticism is that it feels like the movie gets a little too distracted from time to time. It exceeds the two-hour mark and I got the sense that it could have been perhaps more effective with fifteen minutes shaved off. But it's a minor complaint for a movie that will stay with me for some time.

The Novelist’s Film (So-seol-ga-ui yeong-hwa), dir. by Hong Sangsoo

It’s not easy to continue coming up with reasons for why I love Hong Sangsoo movies. At this point he’s become extremely prolific, coming out with a new movie for the Berlinale three years in a row. This time, THE NOVELIST’S FILM allowed him to take home the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize. And once again, I loved the movie, perhaps even more than last year’s excellent INTRODUCTION.

The reason I find it difficult to critique a Hong Sangsoo film is due to how precise a director he is. He shoots in a series of long, often static, takes. His compositions are clearly well thought out and meaningful, as is every line of dialogue. In fact, his dialogue is so considered that something someone says in an off-hand fashion at the start of the film will be made important by a revelation made later on. So, each scene deliberately builds on the last, slowly generating drama and creating a deeply rewarding experience.

With this level of craftsmanship, it feels wrong to try and suggest that something should have been done differently. These are precise movies that couldn’t be any other way than how they are. The scene in THE NOVELIST’S FILM, where the titular novelist is taught a phrase in sign language, and she repeats the phrase again and again — it couldn’t have been any other way. If she repeated the phrase one time fewer, or one time more, it wouldn’t be right. You can’t easily explain the reason for this, but when you watch it, you understand why.

This is the one film I was able to catch twice during the festival. I suppose it was my favorite, though if I was pushed I’d probably say THAT KIND OF SUMMER was the better film, though still, not my favorite. I adore just about every scene in THE NOVELIST’S FILM, and I believe that Hong Sangsoo and Lee Hye-young have created one of his most memorable characters with Jun-hee, the novelist who travels to visit an old colleague and ends up running into more characters from her past, as well as an actress who inspires her to make her first movie. Jun-hee is a truth teller. The kind of person who can’t bite her tongue for the sake of politeness, which in the mannered world of a Hong Sangsoo film makes her something of a tornado. But it also makes her someone who’s difficult to be around, no matter what cultural rules you’re navigating through. With her gloves, her wit and her drive to cut through the bullshit, Jun-hee is a fantastic character to watch, and while she may not be without her own flaws, she’s fun to root for.

I won’t go into too many details, even though I don’t think this is a movie you can spoil, but while the end of the movie is left somewhat open, I think we can see that Jun-hee’s quest for the truth has burned another bridge between her and the actress. It’s kind of a perfect ending to a perfect movie, told with the kind of delicacy that few other directors alive could pull off. My second viewing of THE NOVELIST’S FILM was the last screening of the festival, and the last movie I’ll write about here. If you got to this point, my hat’s off. Thanks for reading.

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Straight to Hell @ Aquarium Drunkard

Follow the link to the internet oasis that is Aquarium Drunkard. There you’ll find a whole bunch of words I wrote about the 1987 Alex Cox movie STRAIGHT TO HELL.

Click the pic:

#movie #straight to hell #alex cox

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trashartandmovies · 3 years

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Half-Cocked @ Aquarium Drunkard

Follow the link to the internet oasis that is Aquarium Drunkard, where you’ll find some words I wrote on a beloved film from 1994 called HALF-COCKED.

Click the poster:

#movies #half-cocked

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trashartandmovies · 3 years

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Berlinale Film Festival 2021, Industry Event, Final Day

There was an added bonus to our originally scheduled plan for five days of press streamings. On the weekend following those five days, the winners of the Competition program would be available on Saturday, and the winners of the Encounters program would be available on Sunday. Winners from Generations and the Shorts programs would also get a second screening.

Since I’d made a point of seeing the Competition films, I decided to focus on the ones from the Encounters lineup that I hadn’t got a chance to see. (In case you’re wondering: here are the lists of award-winners for Competition, Encounters, Generations and Shorts.

First up was Lê Bảo’s Vị (TASTE), a film that cites six countries in helping with the production: Vietnam, Singapore, France, Thailand, Germany and Taiwan. It won the Special Jury Award in the Encounters program, and it’s not hard to see why. The film is legitimately striking; a bold visual poem about a Nigerian who comes to Saigon to play football, breaks his foot, and begins working a mysterious job with four middle-aged Vietnamese women. There isn’t much more plot than that, very little is explained, there’s hardly any dialog, but the film evokes a lot of different feelings through its artfully staged tableaus of bodies at motion and at rest. The color palette is severe — greys, blues, whites and rusty earth tones — but also beautiful. There is the periodic burst of sunshine that enters in through a window or doorway, and small splashes of color that come from the ingredients of the food they spend a lot of time preparing. But mostly, we’re in a chilly underground location that has little else besides a few beds and an old television.

It’s difficult to parse out the meaning of TASTE, but I’m not sure such an endeavor isn’t foolish. You could say there’s something about worker exploitation here, but if you squint and tilt your head, there could also be a message about the transcendence of work as well. Ultimately, this is an art film. It wouldn’t feel out of place in the halls of MOMA or wherever else you find eager minds for the abstract. One of the appealing things about the film is that it is freely open to interpretation and can be read in different ways. The only thing that’s for certain is that TASTE is about connections, those we make with our surroundings, our food, and those we work with. It’s about the ceremonies we create to forge those connections and help us through our days.

It’s not easy to make a film that truly feels like a dream. Sure, TASTE has a lot of unresolved mystery to it, but as a foray into dream logic, it is comfortably consistent in its mood and atmosphere. This is a plus and a minus, because TASTE is also quite effective in lulling you into a kind of heavy-lidded hypnosis. It taps into a very different part of your brain than the average movie.

The last feature film I caught up with was the newest film by Ramon Zürcher, this time co-directing and co-writing with his brother Silvan Zürcher. Ramon’s previous film, THE STRANGE LITTLE CAT, was a hit on the film festival circuit back in 2013. I still need to catch up with that one, and I will, even though I found little to enjoy in the Zürcher Brothers’ THE GIRL AND THE SPIDER.

The set-up is pretty interesting. Lisa, a young woman, is moving to a new apartment and leaving behind a few roommates. One of those roommates, Mara, isn’t taking it so well. In fact, she seems to be rather heartbroken and bitter — and maybe a little self-destructive. But mostly she seems to be intent on making barbed, passive-aggressive comments at Lisa and everyone who has the misfortune of getting close to her. You see, Mara is like a spider. She’s alluring and mysterious enough to draw you in, but once you get close, you just become trapped in her abusive mind games. As I mentioned, pretty solid set-up for a tricky, dark relationship movie. There’s something to it, and the movie kicks around the idea of lonely hurt people hurting other lonely hurt people, but we don’t get very far.

One problem is that as the movie goes on, and we meet the other roommates that Lisa is leaving behind, we start to get the idea that maybe Mara has always been this mean manipulator. Maybe her heartbreak over Lisa leaving isn’t that much of a motivator. Maybe her other roommates are also passive-aggressive emotionally damaged loose cannons. Why can’t anyone say what they mean? Must everyone be so aloof? Must every line of dialog cryptically dance around true feelings? Why must someone be eavesdropping behind a door during every other conversation? To me, it just comes across as sub-par writing. Before long, it felt like the only reason these people were talking this way was because if anyone spoke honestly the movie would be about 15 minutes long. Instead, it slowly drove me crazy over a very long 98 minutes.

Now, some of these choices are understandable. I’ve lived with roommates. I know that these situations can be passive-aggressive nightmares where no one feels comfortable enough to say what they really feel. This too, is a good set-up for a movie, with plenty of interesting angles to explore. But again, we only dance on the surface. None of the characters open up, everyone’s motivations are fuzzy. In the end, these people remain more or less as we found them. Mara comes closest to revealing a little bit about herself, but it’s all very frustrating. On a few occasions, the film takes detours, cutting away to visualize a story being told. Sometimes it involves an elderly eccentric neighbor in the building, other times it’s a fantasy about the previous owner of the piano that sits in the apartment. Immediately, the protagonists of these stories become way more compelling than the dreary twenty-somethings that we’re stuck with the rest of the time.

Aside from my issues with the writing, the movie looks great. The Zürcher’s have a good eye and they know how to observe misery while luxuriating in icy detachment like, say, Michael Haneke. There are also good rhythms going on here. From the little I know THE STRANGE LITTLE CAT, it would appear that Ramon Zürcher is still interested in capturing the details of interiors, and paying attention to the animals that are running around people’s feet. Scene’s often end with still-life portraits of items on tabletops, knocked over bottles, subtle signs of life and little punctuations upon the preceding scene. It’s a nice touch. I only wish those scenes told a more engaging story.

Thoroughly exhausted, with the last remaining hours of the streaming schedule dwindling away, there were a few award-winning shorts left to watch. Feeling like animation might be a nice change of pace, I went for EASTER EGGS, a Belgian/French/Netherlands production, written and directed by Nicolas Keppens. In some ways, it was a perfect little finale.

Even though EASTER EGGS could be a contemporary story, it feels like a tender look back, maybe some twenty years ago, at a painful teenage moment. It’s a story about two kids, Kevin the bully and Jason the enabler, and their woefully unhealthy friendship. There’s a vague plan to capture some valuable birds that were left behind when a local Chinese restaurant closed down — and there are some laughs to be had — but mostly it’s achingly sad to watch Jason pine for Kevin’s attention and approval, while Kevin just walks all over him. But given the gentle hand that this story is told with, that sadness is more poignant than depressing. Keppens shows a love and sensitivity for these characters. They’re way more than just some Belgian Beavis and Butthead. They represent something many of us have gone through in our youth — longing for friendship and someone to share your imaginative, ambitious plans with. It’s not exactly a feeling that goes away, which is why EASTER EGGS still carries a lot of weight.

Let me just add a few more thoughts to this First Round of 2021’s Berlinale Film Festival. Despite my longings for more time to spend with such a quality lineup of films, I’m impressed that everything went so smoothly. The streaming platform worked incredibly smoothly (even if it was a bummer I couldn’t cast that stream onto my TV), and the quality of the films was excellent — both in picture and sound as well as moviemaking craft. It wasn’t ideal, but it was great to be a part of. I’ll also take a sentence here to recommend visiting the Berlinale Meets page, as well as the video section, where there is an impressive collection of conversations with this year’s filmmakers for more viewing enjoyment.

While there’s a lot from this festival that I’m still hoping to see, judging from the Competition and Encounters films that I have seen, this was an exceptionally strong year for female voices and female-led stories. This was clearly one of the most impressive things about the 2021 Berlinale. PETITE MAMAN, A COP MOVIE, MEMORY BOX, I’M YOUR MAN, HERR BACHMAN, WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY, BALAD OF A WHITE COW, BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONEY PORN — each of these films, which are just from the Competition section, were either directed by a woman or told stories about women. In the case of WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY, there were three stories and three female protagonists. (You could probably make a case for adding WHAT DO WE SEE WHEN WE LOOK AT THE SKY?, but I digress...) And you know what, those were the best films in the main lineup. I’ll also throw in the strong entries in the ENCOUNTERS category, Dasha Nekrasova’s THE SCARY OF SIXTY-FIRST and the best film winner of the category Alice Diop’s NOUS (WE). Personally, I especially liked the connections between PETITE MAMAN and MEMORY BOX, which both dealt with making connections between mother and daughter in unique, cinematic ways. I hope this level of representation continues in the years to come.

Now, let’s keep our fingers crossed for Part Two of the Berlinale, the Summer Special. See you June 9th.

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trashartandmovies · 3 years

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Berlinale Film Festival 2021, Industry Event, Day 5

With Daniel Brühl’s NEXT DOOR and Dominik Graf’s FABIAN being geoblocked away from German laptops, that left only two Competition tiles to be screened on the final day of the Industry Event. The first was Alonso Ruizpalacios’s A COP MOVIE.

I haven’t seen Ruizpalacios’s previous features MUSEO and GÜEROS, so I had little expectation going into this one. About the only thing I knew was that A COP MOVIE had already been sold to Netflix — and, given the description in the press materials, that it was, in one form or another, a documentary film.

These two details make perfect sense together. Since Netflix first gained popularity around two decades ago, the documentary film has undergone a renaissance. Films that were once (maybe) seen at select arthouse cinemas in a few cities, but more likely on public television, were now available on demand. The phrase, “Did you see that documentary on…” is now a cliché. Documentaries are so popular nowadays that Netflix announced that every controversial murder since the dawn of the twentieth century is going to get its own five-part series. So yeah, it makes perfect sense that a documentary about police in Mexico City would find a welcome home at the streaming giant.

But as you already may have heard, A COP MOVIE isn’t your standard doc (some mid-point movie spoilers follow). The film starts out as the kind of reenactment-heavy crime film that has been used to effective ends since before Errol Morris’s A THIN BLUE LINE turned it into an investigative tool. At first we’re introduced to a Mexico City cop by the name of Teresa as she’s forced to deliver a baby because all of the city’s ambulances are busy elsewhere. Then we meet her parter in both work and life, Montoya, who’s struggling to keep it together amidst widespread corruption and not drown himself with alcohol. We think these cops are playing themselves in the reenactments (though there are a few clues that this may not be the case). Then a funny thing happens. The lights in the living room go out. The fourth wall collapses. The film crew enters. We’re then introduced to the actors who played the real cops in the reenactments — Mónica Del Carmen as Theresa and Raúl Briones as Montoya — as well as the real Theresa and Montoya. The movie then steps back to learn about the process the actors went through to prepare for their roles and understand their characters. This includes attending classes at the police academy, going on ride-alongs and filming video diaries during the whole experience.

It’s a pretty neat trick. By turning the mirror on itself, the filmmakers reveal the ideas behind the movie: the public perception of Mexico City police, how police offers are represented on film, and the fuzzy nature of reality. One of the points here is nuance, which is something that people today can’t get enough of. Which is to say, they don’t get enough of. The idea that there are both good cops and bad cops, isn’t exactly mind-blowing, but it’s worth making in the context of this film. Theresa and Montoya are good cops, and because of that fact, their story doesn’t end well. There’s a glimmer of hope that good people are still showing up at the academy, as well as a sense of just how much work needs to be done before these people can make a difference. Most of all, it’s a story being told in a way we haven’t really seen before.

Over the past few years, there’s been a small increase in the market for short films on the ever-growing number of streaming platforms. Mubi makes a point of highlighting them on the reg, Netflix is hosting more of them, and the reliable short film depots of Vimeo and YouTube are now easier to stream to your television. But seeing one on the big screen is still something that happens rarely outside of a film festival, which is a shame.

Still, catching the short films at a festival like Berlinale isn’t exactly a first choice for your average audience member, or your lowly press pass holder. Given the five-day arrangement of the Industry Event screenings, I didn’t get to many short films. But I did enjoy a couple. The first of which is DEINE STRASSE (YOUR STREET), by the Turkish-Swiss writer and director Güzin Kar. At under ten minutes, it’s a briefly heartbreaking story, narrated by the German playwright Sibylle Berg. Berg describes the street to some unnamed person. It’s a street on the outskirts of the German city, Bonn. There are businesses and houses. A roundabout. We start to understand that the street is named after the person Berg is addressing. Who is it? An immigrant child who fell victim to a neo-Nazi attack in the 1990s. It’s a quietly powerful piece of work.

The last Competition screening was Maria Speth’s long-awaited return to cinema, HERR BACHMANN UND SEINE CLASSE (MR. BACHMANN AND HIS CLASS). The three-and-a-half hour film is a deep dive into a fascinating subject: a sixth-grade Wilkommen class in a small industrial town in southern Germany. A Wilkommen class is where immigrant children will go, so that they can get the attention they need to learn the language and get what they need to enter the mainstream classes with native German students. To help them achieve this, they have the remarkable teacher Herr Bachmann.

We should all be so lucky as to have a teacher who doesn’t talk down to his students, who encourages openness, honesty, intelligence, individuality, staying true to your dreams, and the power of learning an instrument and playing music in a band. This film has been gaining comparisons, at least among American critics, to the work of veteran documentarian Frederick Wiseman, but this extends to more than just the length and quality of the film. Like Wiseman did in movies like HOSPITAL, WELFARE, CITY HALL and EX LIBRIS, Speth gets herself imbedded in a system to show the difficult work being done, the frustrating limitations the workers have to contend with, and the saintly individuals who try their best to persevere. The portrait of Herr Bachmann and his class is one that says, it is possible to take a difficult situation and do exactly the right thing — this is what it looks like. And given the time the film spends with the students, you also get invested in their improvement and whether or not they’ll get the stamp of approval to move on to the next level.

Herr Bachmann is invested in his students as well. Any teacher will tell you that dealing with kids, especially sixth graders, can be exhausting. And throughout the film, Herr Bachmann doesn’t shy away from learning the details about each kid’s family, or stepping in to help steer them toward a better future. He’s not one of these teachers who doesn’t get emotionally involved because he knows he only has a limited time to spend with these students. He’s going to try to do the best, and the most, that he can do to make them see their potential, open their minds, and instill tolerance and goodwill toward others. It’s more than a moving and inspiring portrait of a guy who’s really good at his job, it also shows just how good our education systems can be if we focus on helping kids become good human beings rather than just pushing them through some standardized machinery.

We’ll wrap things up with the next installment. After Day Five, the winners of the Competition and Encounters programs were made available over the weekend. So I was able to catch up with a couple Encounter pictures and one award-winning short. I’ll also try to provide some thoughts on what I think made this edition of the Berlinale stand-out from past years.

#Berlinale 2021

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trashartandmovies · 3 years

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Berlinale Film Festival 2021, Industry Event, Day 4

Only during a film festival would a three-movie-day be considered cooling it down. After over a dozen movies in three days, you need throttle down, take a deep breath, eat a decent meal, sleep in for at least one long morning. Yet, when your film festival is an online event, many of the symptoms of Festival Fatigue aren’t as readily apparent. There are no long waits in line, no running across town to catch the next screening, you don’t have to rely on junk food so much, the laptop/headphones set up isn’t such an assault on the senses. (And yes, I tried to stream the movies on my television, but the Berlinale media platform wouldn’t abide.) Nevertheless, cramming so many stories into your head in one day taxes the brain — there’s no way around it.

So Day Four was a three-movie-day, and it started with an excellent film in the Competition section: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY. This is another film that relies on the details and intricacies of conversations, that then build into life-changing moments for its characters. Here, Hamaguchi offers three separate short stories, each of which revolve around honesty, coming clean, and unburdening the soul. For better or worse, one or two characters in each chapter makes a life-changing choice to tell the truth, open themselves up, and become vulnerable. By the end, I had tears in my eyes.

Ironically, WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY did what I wanted Day Three’s FOREST to do. It uses its short story structure to indulge in different tones, to move from heartbreak to humor, to take the viewer through a range of emotions. In the first story, a young woman finds out her friend is dating her former lover, so she decides to confront him and say all the things she’s been grappling with since the breakup. It’s a prickly, sometimes bitter confrontation that takes everyone through conflicting emotions and desires. The second chapter is centered around an attempted literary seduction of a college professor that stands as one of the funniest moments of the festival (so far). The final segment features a woman attending a high school reunion and trying to reconcile with her first true love. This closing chapter is a near perfect feat of storytelling, and gives such hope to the power of human connection, that it is truly uplifting without being manipulative or sentimental.

Instead of putting the strongest story first, the film builds upon itself, getting stronger as it goes along. It’s also subtle about its theme. In each story, when the character feels compelled to unburden themselves, it feels like a very genuine and honest moment. Whether the immediate positive or negative results of their confessions outweigh the long-term results is up for debate, but the larger point is clear: we’ll only move forward if we speak the truth.

A tragedy is a difficult genre to pull off. Sometimes, like in Shakespeare’s work, the word “tragedy” is right there in the title of the play. So you know it’s not going to end well. You know that someone, maybe everyone, is going to die at the end. The thrill of experiencing a staged tragedy isn’t in the delivery of an unexpected ending, it’s in feeling those dreaded pieces fall into place. Agonizing over the fateful moments when people make the wrong decision. Recognizing the all too human traits that make people act against their better judgement and precipitate their own demise. Oh, but for the grace of God…

The Competition feature BALLAD OF A WHITE COW, is one of those tragedies. Indeed, it starts with a tragic death that all but assures more suffering will follow. (That said, I won’t spoil the ending but I will get into some plot developments that could be considered spoilers, so consider yourself warned.) We meet Mina (played with incredible conviction by co-writer/director Maryam Moghaddam) as she says goodbye to her husband, right before he’s executed by the state. Not long afterward, Mina gets the horrendous news that new evidence came to light, and yes, her husband was wrongly executed. She’s told there will be money given to her because of this mistake, but what she keeps hearing is that her husband’s death, still, must have been God’s will. Cold comfort.

Then, a mysterious man named Reza (Alireza Sanifar) appears at her door to try and offer some more genuine help. He says he was an acquaintance of her husband’s but it’s soon revealed that he was one of the judges who issued the death sentence. Reza is completely hollowed-out by the role he played in an innocent man’s death. The reasoning of “God’s will” isn’t sitting well with him, either. Reza’s son is disgusted with him, too, and doesn’t understand why Iran insists on continuing to execute people. So, while Reza’s life is falling apart, he tries to redeem himself by putting Mina’s life back together. We all know, this is a doomed arrangement. He can’t hide his real identity from Mina for long, and the longer he tries, the more damaged he becomes.

When the conclusion arrives, it does feel inevitable, but it also comes across a little too neat for the messiness of the situation. The abruptness of what happens may have been intended to leave you feeling gobsmacked, which it does to a certain extent. But it also left me feeling like directors Behtash Sanaeeha and Maryam Moghaddam may have tried to keep the audience from asking too many questions. Prior to these last few minutes, Sanaeeha and Moghaddam film it all with a cool eye and a steely reserve. The framing is practically a how-to course in visual storytelling. It makes a strong impact and a great case for repealing the death penalty in any country that still maintains the barbaric practice. Death only begets more death. Even Shakespeare knew that.

Day Four ended with my own little midnight movie screening of Fern Silva’s ROCK BOTTOM RISER, a film that won a Special Mention award in the Encounters section. Even though Silva has been working nearly fifteen years on a number of short films, this one is his debut feature and it does feel pretty special. It’s hard to classify, but it does fit into a certain category of experimental documentaries. It’s a collage of sound and footage, captured in, around, above and underneath the island state of Hawaii. It probes at its history, its status as a hub for astrology, and its unusual nature as an ever oozing and burbling mass of lava.

From the get go, ROCK BOTTOM RISER lets you know that this will be as much a psychedelic experience as a movie. Just before the titles boldly present themselves, we’re given the image of someone falling down, through the solid ground. That’s us. We’re going underwater, into space, into the volcanoes that are constantly charging the landscape in some bizarre ways. In two of the most memorable moments from the festival (so far), we visit a vape shop for an insane smoke and mirrors performance, and a poetry class that is teaching students about the Simon and Garfunkel song “I Am a Rock.” In terms of greatness, these moments can only be seen and heard to be fully understood.

At times, ROCK BOTTOM RISER reminded me of a more experimental Werner Herzog documentary. Fern Silva is after the kind of ecstatic truth that Herzog spoke about in his famous Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema. Specifically, declaration number five, which states: “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” In ROCK BOTTOM RISER, Silva is, sometimes quite literally, trying to reveal the many strange strata of Hawaii. What’s remarkable is that while a lot of time is spent staring at magma, or at lasers shooting out from observatories, you come away feeling like you have a much deeper understanding of Hawaii than you ever had before. It’s an unimpeachable success.

#Berlinale 2021

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trashartandmovies · 3 years

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Berlinale Film Festival 2021, Industry Event, Day 3

I was hoping to start Day Three off with another shot of highly-caffeinated filmmaking, so I honed in on another genre picture in the Berlinale Special section: Soi Cheang’s LIMBO. Like many other movies before it, LIMBO pairs a veteran cop (Gordon Lam, in good form) with an all-star rookie (Mason Lee) and puts them on the hunt of a serial killer. What makes LIMBO stand out from the rest is that it is shot in beautifully oily, textured black and white.

You can see from the one frame above that the movie is putting in some serious effort on the art design. Every time the cops leave the station, chances are they’re headed someplace that will put them knee deep in garbage. And thanks to the photography and attention to detail, you can practically smell the rotting refuse.

Unfortunately, the story doesn’t quite live up to the imagery. The script, written by Au Kin-Yee (whose previous work includes some co-writing credits on a few Johnnie To films), tries to put a socially conscious spin on the serial killer by making the victims marginalized, societal outcasts. But is this anything new? Aren’t the marginalized always the most vulnerable people? Isn’t an immigrant, junkie or prostitute always on a killer’s most wanted list? What makes it even less compelling is that there’s hardly an interesting motive to the madness. Unlike other grimy, big-city serial killer movies that feint toward social relevance (SEVEN), there’s no clever mastermind behind the killings. In fact, there’s any number of other cases that could have brought a pair of cops into these squalid environments and face-to-face with the city’s forgotten people. And maybe the plight of these people wouldn’t have felt so shoehorned into the story.

More interesting is the movie’s recurring theme of lost limbs. Yes, the title “Limbo” is a bit of wordplay, as many people in the movie are losing one appendage or another — sometimes by accident, sometimes through the use of a rusty, blunt tool. It’s a nice gory little motif that the movie makes hay out of, but again, it doesn’t go anywhere. As it turns out, this amputation fetish is the only interesting character detail that the movie bothers to give the killer. Otherwise, all we have is a standard, anonymous, non-speaking brute out of an 80s slasher movie. Perhaps most frustrating of all is that the film makes a step toward giving the killer a bit of sympathy early on, only to follow it up with some unnecessarily degrading action that stomps out that angle completely. What’s more interesting: watching police chasing after a faceless, voiceless, unsympathetic killer, or watching police being outwitted by a smart murderer who’s revealed to have some sort of messed up moral compass in place?

I wouldn’t go so far as to say LIMBO is a bad movie, just a frustrating one. There are some good intentions in here, and the movie looks fantastic, but if they’d put a bit more effort into creating a killer worthy of all the fuss, we’d be looking at a great addition to the genre. Oh, and the extremely hackneyed ending, which tries to pass itself off as tragic, doesn’t win it any points, either.

The second film of the day brings us back to the Competition section, and it was an extremely pleasant surprise. In fact, it was one of the best surprises of this year’s Berlinale (so far). With his second feature-length film, WHAT DO WE SEE WHEN WE LOOK AT THE SKY?, Georgian writer/director/editor Alexandre Koberidze establishes himself as an auteur with a strong and poetic vision for cinema.

Early on, I couldn’t help but flash on AMÉLIE. The two films have a few things in common: a narrator who gives the proceedings a fairy tale aspect, inanimate objects imbued with special powers, a will-they/won’t-they love story that starts on a chance encounter, a story that is as much focused on a neighborhood community as it is the two central characters… and yet WHAT DO WE SEE is a much different film. For starters, it’s far less manic. This is a very leisurely-paced film. One that lingers on people in cafés and sidewalk kiosks. One that likes to make digressions, like getting into the heads of some local dogs as they make plans on where to meet up during the football match. It also goes to some more supernatural places that other “whimsical” movies only hint at.

Some people will surely find the pace, the two-and-a-half hour running time, and the many diversions to be a problem. But I loved every minute of it. Both the pace and the running time achieve a certain purpose in immersing you in the local rhythms of Kutaisi, Georgia. At one point, we’re treated to an extended slo-mo sequence of kids playing football set to an anthemic pop song. It’s perhaps the most magical moment of the festival (so far).

There are many smaller moments like this throughout the film. They don’t move any plot along, necessarily, but each one feels like an important part of this universe we’re exploring — and that’s more to the point of the film. Alexandre Koberidze achieves something that few movies are capable of, which is making you see the world around you in a different way. More than telling a romantic story about two strangers, this is a film that makes the everyday feel magical, without any special effects or flashy camerawork. With patience, and a masterful yet deceptively simple use of sound and imagery, it turns the commonplace into profound delight. In this way, it’s shares a certain sensibility with Day One’s INTRODUCTION.

I’m not an expert on Hungarian cinema, but it’s safe to say that it can sometimes be described as unrelenting in its bleakness. Certainly, Day Two’s NATURAL LIGHT fits this description, as does FOREST - I SEE YOU EVERYWHERE. In some cases (again, see NATURAL LIGHT, or the films of Bela Tarr), this bleakness can be well-balanced by the poetics of imagery and pacing. In other cases, like this film, the darkness can simply wear you down.

A sequel of sorts to his 2003 film FOREST, this is a collection of short stories dealing with death and despair in Budapest. It’s well-acted and shot in an interesting way. The camera is always on the move, eager to cut to a close-up of someone’s hand, a gesture, a nuance. But it’s all very intense and agitated. There’s very little in the imagery and pacing to balance out the never ending bleakness, and it left me exhausted (and not in a good way).

What bothered me most about the movie, is that I kept wondering why the film didn’t take advantage of its short story structure. Why is each story hitting the same note? Why isn’t it using this opportunity to explore its themes with different tones — to build and release tension — to change things up even just a little bit? (Tomorrow, we’ll get into this again when WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY does exactly this with its short story structure.)

Actress Lilla Kizlinger won the Silver Bear for Best Supporting Actress, and it’s a deserved win. In the first story of the film, she gives what is essentially a harrowingly personal PowerPoint presentation to her father. It leads to an icy argument and a central point to the film: that life has a way of handing you situations where there are no easy answers or good outcomes, just different ways of coping. Without doubt, it’s a strong opening, but I can’t say the film builds or improves upon it during the 100 minutes that follow.

Day Three was put to rest with one of the strongest films in the Competition section, PETITE MAMAN, Céline Sciamma’s follow-up to PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE. Like MEMORY BOX, this is another film about a mother and her daughter, and the unusual manner in which they come closer together. Only this time, instead of a teenager looking at her mom’s old journals and photographs, we have an eight-year-old daughter getting a chance to talk and play with her mom when she was her age. That premise may sound touching and appealing, but the film is even more thoughtful and impactful than you’d expect.

PETITE MAMAN is also like SOCIAL HYGIENE in that it stems from an idea that emerged before lockdown, but is perfectly suited to the restrictions of a pandemic. It takes place in a remote location, there are approximately five actors in the film, two of them are children and the others mostly appear in scenes opposite those kids. But it hasn’t been limited by the restrictions. Sciamma has lovingly handcrafted the movie’s surroundings — the countryside cottages, a woodland hut, the scenery and costumes used when kids put on a show — and every detail feels perfectly right.

I won’t spoil much more about the movie. There is a time travel element to it, but it’s mostly a movie about a child coping with the loss of a family member, and getting a chance to visit the past, spend some more time with the loved one, as well as with her mom, who’s grown a bit elusive in the present day. In doing so, the child gets a better understanding of life and death, how and why people change over time, and the importance of the memories we carry with us. All this, despite being a movie that you could (and maybe should) watch with your own kids at some point. It is perhaps one of the most sophisticated family movies ever made.

None of this would work without Joséphine Sanz, who plays the time traveling kid Nelly, and Gabrielle Sanz who plays her mom as a child. This duo of sister actors are fascinating in their scenes together. They not only seem to have a genuine understanding of the meaning of the work their doing, they’re utterly believable in everything they do, which includes acting out improvised scenes from made-up detective stories. You could look at these play-acting scenes as just two kids having fun, but there are multiple layers going on there as these are the moments when Nelly is really getting closer to understanding who her mom is as an individual. It’s really some beautiful stuff. I wouldn’t be surprised if this becomes a classic family movie that future generations will grow up with and return to time and again. It’s a movie that has some things to teach us.

Ok for now. Tomorrow: a tragedy in Iran, a trifecta in Japan, and a psychedelic trip through Hawaii.

#Berlinale 2021

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Berlinale Film Festival 2021, Industry Event, Day 2

One of the great treats of going to a film festival is getting the chance to wake up and see some transgressive mindfuckery first thing in the morning. This can be either thrilling, like seeing ANTICHRIST at 10:00 AM in Toronto and then being excited to see if the rest of the day’s movies can top that; or it can knock you out for the rest of the day, like seeing IRRADIATED at last year’s Berlinale and needing to process my contempt and hope for humanity.

Of course, part of the thrill of these experiences has been sitting with an audience and going through the mindfuckery as a collective, feeling the energy, seeing people walk out, getting through it together. When things are moved online, and the timing and schedule of your streaming film festival is more or less up to you, many pleasures are lost. But I have to say, there was a thrill in getting up at sunrise to put on some headphones and sit with THE SCARY OF SIXTY-FIRST, an effectively wild and perverse shriek of a movie from first-time director Dasha Nekrasova, and part of this year’s Encounters section.

Shot in New York City, on beautiful 16mm film, THE SCARY is a steep plummet down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole, triggered by the death of Jeffrey Epstein and two roommates moving into a new apartment on 61st Street that may be linked to the man and the sex trafficking ring he was involved with. These details are merely the place setting for an aggressive and sometimes messy assault on good taste and mainstream cinematic conventions. The two roommates descend into different kinds of madness — Addie seems to be possessed by some sort of evil within the apartment, while Noelle is quickly consumed by the conspiracy theories circling Epstein, the royal family, pizzagate, etc. Wedged between the two is Nekrasova herself, playing an amateur sleuth who indoctrinates Noelle with lurid websites, pharmaceutical speed, and sex. From there, the rabbit hole just keeps getting wider and weirder, Addie becomes obsessed with Prince Andrew and creepy tarot cards keep popping up. There will be blood.

I found it all pretty damn intoxicating, but I can understand that others will be put off by its shrillness and lack of subtlety. While the movie is dedicated to Stanley Kubrick, and it gets some inspiration from EYES WIDE SHUT, it’s more along the lines of John Waters crossed with John Carpenter. If you hated FEMALE TROUBLE, you may want to stay away from THE SCARY OF SIXTY-FIRST. Otherwise, this movie sits comfortably next to the kind of outre indie horror movies that got passed from VCR to VCR in the late 80s and early 90s. But what really makes THE SCARY kick, is how directly it speaks to the age of QAnon, the equal parts seduction and repulsion of violence, and the horror that comes from being trapped in a system you have no control over. My only complaint is that the film leans a little too heavily on old horror tropes right at the end, but this couldn’t take away the thrills it provided up to that point. I’m already looking forward to how Nekrasova might follow-up this one.

This year’s Golden Bear for best film went, deservedly, to Radu Jude’s BAD LUCK BANGING, OR LOONEY PORN. Another extremely transgressive film, this one takes a flamethrower to contemporary values in Romania and any other place where racism, sexism and authoritarian fetishism have taken root — meaning, it’s both very specific to Romania and quite universal.

The movie begins with a very graphic and absurdly funny home porno, being shot on a phone. Soon enough, we find out the woman in the video is Emi, a respected history teacher at a private school in Bucharest. The first act of the movie is Emi walking through Bucharest. The city is littered with signs of capitalism run amok, juxtaposed against fervent religiosity. Gambling and wholesomeness. Tastelessness and righteousness. The camera makes these connections with some choice camera panning maneuvers. These movements bring to mind Robert Altman’s style of movement — casual yet smart and impactful.

As Emi makes her way to her destination, the film’s regard for realism begins to deteriorate. Bit by bit, drivers begin showing less regard for the safety of pedestrians. Everyone is foul-mouthed and inconsiderate of others, even while wearing pandemic masks. If you can’t afford a car, who cares about you? It’s not that far from reality, but the pointed exaggerations start piling up and lead us into the mid-section of the film, where we’re treated to an A-Z montage of our most pressing issues and what’s wrong with the world. It both serves as a rundown of the topics that are going to present themselves in the final act of the movie, as well as more visual evidence of our corrupted values and moral decay. It’s a bitter and bleak hoot.

It’s all leading to a confrontation between Emi and her school’s parent-teacher board. It’s one of the most absurd, insulting and cuttingly insightful trials put on film. What are a teacher’s responsibilities outside the classroom? What if the teacher in this situation were a man? What if the teacher is also including lessons about Romanian history that today’s citizens would rather not deal with? All of this and much more is on the table for riotous discussion. More than once, someone cackles the Woody Woodpecker laugh when the debate really goes off the rails. While the visual language in the final act settles into a more conventional groove, the sound editing is something of a tour de force. It’s punchy, freewheeling, obscenely hilarious and brings the movie to an unbelievable final moment.

BAD LUCK is a hard act to follow. If I’d known how ambitious it was, I would have saved it for day’s final screening. But for better or worse, the next film was a very quiet, understated Competition title — this one from Hungary (which was well-represented this year), entitled NATURAL LIGHT. Written and directed by Nagy Dénes, this is a gorgeously shot war-is-hell movie that follows a weathered unit of Hungarian soldiers as they try to round up Russian partisans during WWII. Yes, the title of the movie perfectly describes the golden, autumnal hue of the movie, as it is primarily set in barren forests, small, sooty villages and fields with plenty of mud.

The film is based on a massive book by novelist Pál Závada, but Dénes made the interesting decision to just focus his movie on a few days in the life of István Semetka, who is forced to step up and take charge of his unit early on in the film. Aside from capturing the unrelenting force of their natural surroundings, cinematographer Tamás Dobos also does an amazing job of capturing people’s faces — not unlike the films of fellow countryman, Bela Tarr. Ferenc Szabó, who plays the beleaguered Semetka, has two of the most soulful eyes I’ve seen on screen lately. This is of critical importance since the film has very little dialog until a couple of well-written monologues at the end. Semetka’s eyes say it all.

As mournfully beautiful as it is, NATURAL LIGHT isn’t an easy movie to sit through. It’s quiet and heartbreaking. But this level of sorrow and atrocities is also very familiar to cinema. In a way, it’s unfair because this story, in its way, is unique. But the message of how indifferent war is to soldiers with good intentions, has been told before. Few movies, however, have told it in such a wordless and poetic way.

Throughout the history of film, there’s always been a struggle to turn good theater into cinematic art. When talkies began and TV took off, we turned to the wealth of good theater scripts that already existed as readymade source material that could meet the demand for content. Sometimes it works, and the scripts can be well-adapted into the cinematic language. Other times, it’s like we’re just looking at a filmed documentation of a theater piece, which relies heavily on the strength of the words and performance, and not on any tools of the filmic trade. Denis Côté’s new film does a neat job of adding a new wrinkle to this long tradition of finding ways to turn monologues and long chunks of dialog between two people into an engaging work of film.

Côté has always had a strong experimental streak to his work, and even though he wrote this script and titled it “Social Hygiene” in 2015, it would seem that the current pandemic gave him the final push to turn the unusual idea of long, socially distant conversations in a field into a movie. Aside from a few shots that follow a young woman as she walks through nature, says hi to some livestock and offers an intermission dance sequence, SOCIAL HYGIENE is a series of static shots, framing different sections of rolling Canadian countryside, and containing a couple of people talking to each other across a certain distance. The framing, the sounds, the tone and rhythms of the conversation, are all very stylized. And in its way, perfectly cinematic. Côté pays attention to the ambient noises during these scenes. Birds turn into a cackling audience, construction noises go quiet and resume at just the right moments — it’s all very well-orchestrated.

The story and conversations of SOCIAL HYGIENE have nothing to do with the pandemic. It’s the fairly universal story of a charismatic, smooth-talking guy of unmet potential, who is consistently disappointing the women in his life. This man is Antonin, and we first meet him as he bickers with his sister. While Antonin is married, he’s currently living in a friend’s car, getting by through small-time theft and avoiding plans that might improve his lot in life, like working on that screenplay he’s been kicking around. Both his wife and his mistress try to prod him in the right direction, but he’s such a charmer that he enjoys spinning his destitution as the life of a lovable rogue, who’s morals and values can’t be met by traditional means.

More than any other film seen, so far, from this year’s Berlinale lineup, SOCIAL HYGIENE had me laughing-out-loud the most. And I’m very willing to admit that this is likely due to how much I related to Antonin’s faulty reasoning. But it’s also due to the fact that the script is supremely sharp and its deadpan delivery brought to mind Hal Hartley’s films. Like Hartley, Côté is anti-realist in his staging and delivery, meticulous in his timing, and yet uses humor to get at some very fundamental human dilemmas. I love Hartley and miss his sensibility dearly. So, yes, I loved every minute of SOCIAL HYGIENE.

Even with a press pass, it can be a challenge to sit for every Competition screening. There are simply too many other films that call for your attention. But in this streaming scenario, I was committed to seeing every last one. I felt like I didn’t have any good excuse not to when you can make your own daily schedule. So, Xavier Beauvois’s ALBATROS (or DRIFT AWAY, as it may end up being called in your neck of the woods) got a late Tuesday night home screening. It didn’t go down well.

The only one of Beauvois’s previous films that I’m familiar with is 2005’s THE YOUNG LIEUTENANT, which follows a homicide detective in La Havre. ALBATROS follows a police chief in the much more idyllic region of Normandy. Jérémie Renier plays the cop, Laurent, and just as the movie starts, he’s just proposed to his girlfriend of ten years, with whom he already has a young daughter. In the next scene he’s cleaning up after a suicide on the beach, and then there’s news of child abuse by local resident, and his friend is at the end of his rope dealing with farming regulations. Things are piling up quickly, and the chipper Laurent is soon getting edgy and taking his work home with him.

The beginning of the movie isn’t bad. It’s clearly building to something and it can hold your interest while it does that. But when that shoe drops, the film goes off the rails and descends into a completely ridiculous and phony final act. It doesn’t help matters that Beauvois never really finds an interesting visual language with which to tell this story. From the get-go, his camera is just there, shooting scenes and conversations in a way that makes everything seem slightly off and unnatural. It feels like things are being staged, much as the wedding photo on the beach that gets interrupted by a death at the very beginning. Unfortunately it never shakes this feeling, and two hours later, you can’t believe that you’re watching an ending so clichéd that Hollywood would probably think twice before giving it a greenlight. It’s the kind of denouement that is so cheesy and unearned that instead of choking back tears, you feel completely cheated.

Aside from ALBATROS, Day Two was a rich abundance. The punk stylings of THE SCARY OF SIXTY-FIRST, the anarchic Molotov cocktail of BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONEY PORN, the austere meditation of NATURAL LIGHT, the playful theatrics of SOCIAL HYGIENE — these all had something special to offer. Tomorrow, we’ll visit China, France, Georgia and, once again, Hungary, for two more films with big rewards and two that struggled to transcend their formal trappings.

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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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trashartandmovies · 4 years

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A Look Back at the 70th Berlinale (2020)

Was this year’s Berlinale a mistake? Should it have taken place? Did we all needlessly endanger and expose ourselves to a growing pandemic for the sake of cinema? Perhaps. Do I regret it? Not yet.

This was my first Berlinale as an accredited member of the press (thanks Cinematic Berlin!), so I certainly would’ve been heartbroken had it been cancelled. Even then, the flu was on everyone’s mind. People were finding ways to get past doors without actually touching them, ears finely tuned to pick up any hint of a nearby cough. Even in those waning days of February, which feels like a year ago, I was diligently washing my hands between every film and trying to grab the same seat in the last row at the back of the Berlinale Palast for every Competition screening. Today, I’m still not sure if I’m corona-free. But what I am sure of, as the festival glow dissipates, is that I saw a lot of good to great movies, and very few duds.

Of course, my luck being what it is, I saw around thirty movies and failed to see both the Golden Bear winner (Mohammad Rasoulof’s THERE IS NO EVIL) and the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay (The D'Innocenzo Brothers’ FAVOLACCE). However, I want to start this off by mentioning one award-winner that I did catch. In fact, it was the very first pre-festival screening I went to: Alexandre Rockwell’s SWEET THING, which deservedly won the Crystal Bear for best film in the Generation Kplus section.

Like certain American cinephiles of my age, I have deep admiration for Rockwell’s 1992 film, IN THE SOUP, featuring a cinematic duo for the ages, Steve Buscemi and Seymour Cassell. It’s an utterly charming lo-fi black & white movie about a would-be filmmaker and his aging gangster producer. What is absolutely astounding is that, from the very first frames of SWEET THING, Rockwell’s signature aesthetic transports you right back to 1992, as if the past thirty years of mega-plexes and shitty 3D screenings were but a nightmarish fever dream. There’s the same softly glowing back & white 16mm frames, the same deliberate editing and pacing… I couldn’t have asked for a better first screening as it rekindled a deep affection for cinema that has been stifled from time to time over the years.

SWEET THING is continuing Rockwell’s DIY, family-affair filmmaking of late, casting his teenage kids as the main characters and enlisting friends to fill out the cast. This one features Will Patton as the kids’ well-meaning but severely alcoholic dad. When Patton gets locked up, the kids are forced to live with their mom and her predatory boyfriend. It all sounds rather tragic, but Rockwell handles it with gentle grace. The kids refuse to be victims and end up runaways with a street-smart friend, played by the remarkably charismatic Jabari Watkins. Without spoiling anything, it is feel-good cinema at its charming best.

Since I failed to cover SWEET THING during the festival, I can now segue into an assemblage of my dispatches for Cinematic Berlin, along with some stray thoughts and final impressions…

Berlinale 70 — CB Dispatch I (First Cow, The Intruder, Hidden Away, The Salt of Tears, Undine)

The 70th edition of the Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin, better known around the world as Berlinale, has begun. At this time every year, Postdammer Platz turns into a buzzing, glittering, highly-caffeinated hub for a ravenous collection of film fanatics. I’m sure I’m not alone in considering these eleven days in mid-to-late February something of a high holiday for the cinematically devout.

This year had some added levels of anticipation since it marks the beginning of new leadership, with Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian taking over from Dieter Kosslick, who’d been at the helm of the festival since 2002. Rissenbeek and Chatrian should already be commended for the fact that it still feels like the same Berlinale, in a good way. It’s still a festival that is extremely accessible to the general public and offers people a chance to see some of the world’s best cinema in some amazing kinos.

The most noticeable changes have been around the program sections, particularly the Competition section, which has been rearranged, so that there’s no longer the awkward situation of having Competition titles being classified as “out of competition.” Instead, we have the new Encounters section, with it’s own three-person jury. The Panorama section continues to highlight bold and personal world cinema, and the Forum is still a vital showcase for more experimental and aesthetically adventurous filmmaking.

As far as the official Competition titles go, I’ve been able to catch five of the six that have screened so far. The best of these, by a significant margin, has been Kelly Reichardt’s FIRST COW, a gently heartbreaking tale of two men (John Magaro and Orion Lee) who live on the outskirts of a fort in nineteenth century Oregon. When a new cow enters the community, the two budding entrepreneurs hatch an idea that involves secretly using the cow’s milk to bake and sell goods, which will hopefully earn them enough money to get to San Francisco.

It’s been nearly fifteen years since her breakout film, OLD JOY, but Reichardt continues to prove herself masterful at revealing the subtle dynamics of male relationships. And not unlike her 2008 film, WENDY & LUCY, she also continues to show that she can kill you softly with her love for characters that have the odds stacked squarely against them.

I also found director Natalia Meta’s EL PRÓFUGO (THE INTRUDER) to be a surprisingly fun psychological thriller. If you’re a fan of David Cronenberg’s work, and miss the skewed sensibility he brings to genre films, you may find that EL PROFUGO does a fine job of scratching that itch. The movie stars Érica Rivas as a singer and voice-over artist who may or may not be dealing with extradimensional “intruders” that enter our world through dreams and infect our bodies. Rivas’s captivating performance is reason enough to catch this one. Plus, the ending is a helluva kicker.

Less captivating was Giorgio Diritti’s VOLEVO NASCONDERMI (HIDDEN AWAY), which gives us a look at the life of early twentieth century artist Antonio Ligabue, who settled in Italy after being exiled from Switzerland due to mental illness. The movie is beautifully shot, and we could use more movies about outsider artists, but this one never really finds much to say about art or mental illness.

In the role of the volatile Ligabue, Elio Germano’s acting is turned up to 11 at all times, making it all rather exhausting (yet appealing to the jury, who awarded Germano the Silver Bear for Best Actor) even though the film never really takes us anywhere. Yet I’ll take HIDDEN AWAY over LE SEL DES LARMES (THE SALT OF TEARS), the latest from director Philippe Garrel. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like if Truffaut had directed a feature length perfume ad, look no further. I honestly don’t know why this movie exists, other than as a chance for Garrel to film gratuitous (yet black & white, so, arty!) shots of young women taking showers or stepping out of bathtubs. The premise, of a ridiculously handsome man caught between three ridiculously pretty women, is literally laughable — in that one significant dramatic development was so obvious and unoriginal that it elicited a hearty round of guffaws.

But mostly this movie just made me angry. Even the impeccable black & white cinematography felt phoney, and as a story it is exceedingly stiff and boring. There is one moment when the movie tries to come alive with a bit of choreographed dance, but this is also painfully strained and far too little too late. It doesn’t help that the dance sequence is immediately followed up by a back-alley attempt at relevance that is so hamfisted it bypasses laughable and goes straight to depressing. When critics complain about pretentious bourgeois drivel, THE SALT OF TEARS is what they’re talking about. What purpose this movie could serve is beyond me.

Far more successful is the much anticipated new film from Christian Petzold, UNDINE. This one is, perhaps unsurprisingly, another twisty and enigmatic story from Petzold, whose last two films, PHOENIX and TRANSIT, have positioned him as both an heir to Hitchcock and an international sensation with the critics. UNDINE doesn’t disappoint. It’s refreshingly unpredictable and leaves you with an intricately rendered puzzle to play with, even though its pleasures are perhaps less immediate than Petzold’s previous two.

The story is of the tragic romance variety, between the historian Undine (Paula Beer, winner of the Silver Bear for Best Actress), who lectures on Berlin’s architectural and city-planning history, and an industrial diver Christoph (Franz Rogowski), who repairs the city’s underwater infrastructure. Early on, Christoph takes Undine for a dive in the river and shows us that her name is written on an old wall, perhaps put there a hundred years ago. There are many questions about the mysterious Undine and very little in the way of definitive answers. Nevertheless, as timeless love stories go, this one is pretty satisfying and it is fun to come up with your own theories on Undine’s backstory. My guess is that UNDINE will continue to deepen and reveal itself with repeat viewings.

Berlinale 70 — CB Dispatch II (Siberia, My Little Sister, Hope, Berlin Alexanderplatz, The Woman Who Ran)

There’s only a couple of days left for premiers in the Competition section, while in just the last few days nine films have been screened for critics. I haven’t yet had a chance to catch all of them (there are other sections that demand attention, after all), but I’ll share some thoughts on what I have seen.

Let’s start with one of the more divisive films of the competition, Abel Ferrara’s SIBERIA. The movie starts with Ferrara’s go-to leading man of the past decade, Willem Dafoe, tending bar out in the middle of some snowy wilderness. (His isolated tavern makes Minnie’s Haberdashery look like Cheers.) But we soon realize that nothing in SIBERIA should be taken too literally. What we’re really witnessing is Dafoe’s character, Clint, navigating his way through an emotional Siberia. The basement of the tavern contains nightmarish visions, a biter alter ego, and a bottomless pit of despair. So Clint sets out on his dog sled and begins to confront memories of his father, mother, ex-wife and his own childhood. It’s a heady trip, to say the least, but I found it to be rather fascinating and, at times, disarmingly funny -- not to mention beautifully shot.

I wasn’t expecting Ferrara to suddenly come out with his ERASERHEAD at this stage in his long and storied career, but I'll celebrate it as a minor miracle that this oddity managed to be made and released. One critic has dismissed it as “commercially irresponsible,” to which I say, Amen! Ferrara appears to be exercising his own demons in SIBERIA and I take it as a positive sign that something so personal, artistic, and in defiance of current trends, is being screened at Berlinale -- in the Competition section no less! Long live cinema.

Meanwhile, two more German films have premiered: SCHWESTERLEIN (MY LITTLE SISTER), by Stephanie Chaut and Veronique Reymond, and a new take on BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ by director Burhan Qurbani. SCHWESTERLEIN features two of Germany’s brightest stars: Nina Hoss (a regular in Christian Petzold’s films) and Lars Eidinger (who can be seen in “Babylon Berlin” and some of Oliver Assayas’s recent films). Both of the leads offer strong performances, playing twins who are coping with the fact that Eidinger’s Sven has cancer and may not have long to live.

Unfortunately, SCHWESTERLEIN doesn’t offer much more than a few choice scenes for the actors to dig into. The film's shortcomings are especially apparent since this year’s Berlinale also features a Norwegian cancer drama HÅP (HOPE), playing in the Panorama section, that digs much deeper into the relationship and familial challenges that come with receiving a cancer diagnosis. As good as Hoss and Eidinger are, I preferred the more complex dynamics between HÅP’s unmarried couple, brilliantly played by Andrea Bræin Hovig and Stellan Skarsgård.

Far more surprising is Burhan Qurbani’s BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ, which revises the original 1929 story to the modern day, making the central character a refugee, instead of a German man emerging from a long jail sentence. Cinephiliacs will likely be familiar with Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s monumental 15-plus hour television epic, and Günter Lamprecht’s central performance as Franz Biberkopf. This time we have Francis (Welket Bungue), a West African refugee, who gets roped into selling drugs in a Berlin park by the low-level criminal Reinhold (Albrecht Schuh). Eventually, Reinhold does rechristen Francis as a proper German with a proper German name, Franz.

Despite the unenviable task of being compared to one of Fassbinder’s major works, this three-hour modern retelling is bold, ambitious, well-written, well-acted and visually interesting. Schuh’s version of Reinhold starts off distractingly indebted to Joaquin Phoenix (à la THE MASTER) but he manages to make the character his own and practically steal the show by the time it's over. It’s not exactly an easy movie to get through but it does feel vital and alive. There is no shortage of Berlin-based movies, but few capture the city the way this one does.

Finally, I’ll briefly mention a charming highlight of the Competition section: Hong Sangsoo’s DOMANGCHIN YEOJA (THE WOMAN WHO RAN). Fans of Sangsoo will know to expect a film that leans heavily on dialog and character development. But this one is an especially clever script that breaks the minimal-to-non-existent plot down to a few conversations between Kim Minhee’s character, Gamhee, and three other women that she encounters while on a rare break from her husband. In each conversation we gradually learn about these modern Korean women and their relationships with the men in their lives.

So far, Hong Sangsoo’s film is the only one to elicit a spontaneous round of applause from the audience. And it had to do with a particularly hilarious conversation about cats, and one of Sangsoo’s choice uses of a camera zoom in the film. Indeed, a truly memorable highlight of this year’s festival.

Berlinale 70 — CB Dispatch III (Irradiates, Sow the Wind, The Assistant, The Roads Not Taken)

The 70th edition of the Berlinale film festival wraps up this weekend, and as it always does, it ends with Sunday’s “Publikumstag,” where many of the best films from the different sections will get a final screening at venues across the city. Even after catching over twenty films this year, I’ll be trying to fill in some gaps on Saturday and Sunday as well. So I’ll offer some suggestions in the form of films I can personally vouch for, as well as a few buzz-worthy ones that I haven’t seen.

Of course, the Golden Bear for best film is being awarded on Saturday. I’m terrible at gambling, but if I had to guess which film would take the top honor, I’d go with IRRADIES (IRRADIATES), the latest art-film/documentary from Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh. The movie is a devastating and unflinching look at the atrocities of war in the twentieth century, specifically the mass killings that took place in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge regime, the Holocaust of WWII, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It goes without saying that this is a challenging film, but Panh is a masterful filmmaker and artist, so this isn’t your ordinary talking-head documentary. For much of the time the screen is split into a horizontal triptych -- three symmetrical sections that add to the power of the images and help draw the connections between Japan, Cambodia and Europe. There is also a haunting score and poetic voiceover work from a man and woman who sometimes seem to be communicating with one another, and other times seem to be the voice of Panh, speaking directly to the audience. This is definitely a cinematic experience you won’t soon forget, and likely a film people will be talking about for years to come.

If you’re after something less overwhelming, I also enjoyed the Italian film, SEMINA IL VENTO (SOW THE WIND), from the Panorama section. The movie, by director Danilo Caputo, is about a young woman, Nica (Yile Yara Vianello), who returns home from her studies as an agronomist, only to find that the family’s long-held olive trees are at risk of being destroyed. The problem is, an invasive insect is killing olive trees throughout the area. And while Nica’s father wants to accept government subsidy to have the trees removed, Nica wants to save the trees by finding and introducing the bug’s natural predator.

One of the most impressive things about SOW THE WIND is its sound design, particularly the very special way in which it captures the sounds of trees. There is a deep undercurrent of rural folklore and the spirit world running through the film, and it causes the softly groaning sounds of swaying trees take on new meaning. Plus, there is a very talented black bird in the film (who may or may not be the spirit of Nica’s dead grandmother) that challenges the cat in THE WOMAN WHO RAN for the festival’s best animal performance.

Also in the Panorama section is THE ASSISTANT, a film that is very much attuned to the #MeToo movement in its depiction of the everyday traumas experienced by a female assistant working at a film production company. It captures a single day in the life of Jane (Julia Garner, who you may recognize from the Netflix show “Ozarks”), as she tries to endure an increasing amount of humiliations that are sometimes subtle, and sometimes not. The film, by Kitty Green (UKRAINE IS NOT A BROTHEL), is all about the details, and there is a scene between Jane and a human resources guy that is among the more heartbreaking moments of the festival.

THE ASSISTANT was one of the films to enter Berlinale with a considerable amount of buzz from this year’s Sundance -- as was NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS, which is another film competing for the Golden Bear that I will finally catch up with this weekend. This one, by director Eliza Hittman (BEACH RATS), is about two teenage girls traveling from Pennsylvania to New York in order to get an abortion. From what I’ve heard, this is a powerful character study with a couple of amazing performances at its center.

Over the past week, critics have consistently mentioned NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS as being a favorite. But DAU. NATASHA, on the other hand, has both its champions and detractors -- yet it’s been getting enough buzz that it seems to be another top contender for the Golden Bear. This is, by all accounts, a boldly provocative work that deals with the Soviet brand of totalitarianism, its secret ambitions, and its pervasive, lingering effects. What’s more, this just happens to be one part of a project that includes the nearly six-hour art film DAU. DEGENERATSIA, which is also having its final screenings this weekend.

Finally, if you’re looking for something more mainstream (perhaps something to take mom or dad to), I enjoyed Sally Potter’s latest, THE ROADS NOT TAKEN. This stars Javier Bardem as an author in the grips of dementia, and Elle Fanning as the daughter he left behind when she was just a child. In trying to look after her ailing father, Fanning is caring for and maybe bonding with a man her mother has long written off. What’s interesting is that we’re also uncovering a mystery in Bardem’s past as his character flashes back to a couple of different points in his life, some of which cleverly parallels bits of Homer’s “Odyssey.” Ultimately, this is a brief movie that’s over in less than 90 minutes, but I found the central relationship to be rather touching (I may be a sucker for movies about kids trying to connect with their messed-up dads), and I was also impressed with Potter’s own jazzy score for the film.

Berlinale 70 — Final Thoughts (DAU. Natasha, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Delete History, Shirley, The Trouble With Being Born)

While I didn’t catch up with all the movies I would have liked to, I did pack a significant amount into the last few days of the festival. The highlight was perhaps Effacer EFFACER L’HISTORIQUE (DELETE HISTORY), a brilliantly anarchic French comedy by Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern. I suppose Berlinale has a reputation for being light on comedy. Without a doubt, this year seemed especially heavyhearted — perhaps for good reason — so it is a testament to DELETE HISTORY that it crammed about four movies worth of laughs into one, and yet is also socially conscious enough to fit right in with the rest of the Competition titles.

DELETE HISTORY is almost like an old ZAZ movie (AIRPLANE!, TOP SECRET!) in that it is brazenly anti-realist and goes non-stop in its pursuit of jokes and visual gags. The slim storyline is that we’re following three people as their lives fall apart in the age of surveillance capitalism and the gig economy. Eventually they decide to track down a hacker (who lives in a wind turbine) to help them fight the power, but things of course don’t go as planned.

Yes, the film is absurd, but we are living in a completely absurd time. Throughout Berlinale I was at press screenings filled with people who found it seemingly impossible to spend 90 minutes away from their devices. These people drove me nuts, but rather than mock these people, DELETE HISTORY sympathizes with those who know they’re being trapped, exploited and dehumanized, and finally decide to opt out. At one point, one of the characters dives her car into the middle of a roundabout, climbs on top of it and screams. In fact, the whole film feels like a much needed primal scream in the face of our current absurd reality. As an added bonus the soundtrack to the film is like a greatest hits collection of Daniel Johnston songs. Yes, this movie is fucking punk rock.

There was also some dark humor to be had in SHIRLEY, a fine, bitter pill of a biopic on Shirley Jackson, the author of such macabre books as The Haunting of Hill House. SHIRLEY follows the current trend of such biopics as 3 DAYS IN QUIBERON, SEBERG and JACKIE, by wisely focusing on one particular time in the life of its subject, rather than attempting the old cradle-to-grave approach. Here it’s the time leading up to Jackson’s 1951 book Hangsaman, when the author was living in the college town of Bennington, Vermont, and was inspired by the recent disappearance of a female student.

More than anything else, SHIRLEY plays out like a riff on WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOLF, which involves a young couple getting sucked into the psychosexual dramas of a bitter middle-aged college professor and his boozy wife. This is exactly what happens here, with Jackson (a perfectly cast Elisabeth Moss) and her professor husband (Michael Shulberg) playing host to a young couple newly arrived to town. While this movie doesn’t come anywhere near Mike Nichols’s directorial debut, it' does add some interesting wrinkles about the creative process and the role codependency can play within it. Director Josephine Decker (MADELINE’S MADELINE) continues to show keen insight into the messier aspects of human creativity, and I’m hopeful this one will provide her with more opportunities to further explore these themes.

One of the films to come away with a Special Jury Award was THE TROUBLE WITH BEING BORN, which was in the new Encounters section. Directed by Sandra Wollner, this German film is indeed troubling on many levels. Expanding upon premises that have shown up in the Kubrick/Spielberg mix-up A.I., the recent “Westworld” TV show, EX MACHINA, BLADE RUNNER, and others I’m probably forgetting, THE TROUBLE WITH BEING BORN takes a disturbing look at what might happen if we replaced our lost loved ones with robots. In particular, it asks, what if the person was a dad who lost a daughter and had some seriously messed up ways of coping?

Eventually, our robot protagonist parts ways with her “dad” and finds a new home filling in for a different lost love. But, like some of the robots in “Westworld,” the robot is plagued with nagging bits of data from their past life. This is all interesting enough on paper — what was truly bugging me was that the narrative of the story was chopped and shuffled for reasons that weren’t enlightening or helpful at all. I understand that this may have been in an effort to reflect the disjointed memory of the robot, but really it just made everything needlessly muddled.

But perhaps more frustrating was the dim cinematography — which is especially befuddling since others have praised the camerawork. All I found was one dim, flatly lit scene after another. Particularly head-scratching (or eye-squinting) was a scene at dusk (or dawn?) of our pedo dad searching for his robot, and while we linger on his face all we can make out are a couple of vague shadows of a head and some tree branches. Maybe the featureless face was supposed to mean something but all I could think of is why couldn’t we get someone with a reflector board to bounce some light up into that face? There’s an ongoing problem in German cinema with movies looking like TV shows (see: SCHWESTERLEIN), and with the current trend of American TV shows being dimly lit in a mistaken effort to create “mood,” the accolades being given to THE TROUBLE BEING BORN don’t bode well.

Fortunately, the final weekend also featured two impressive and deeply impactful movies. First was DAU. NATASHA, which didn’t fail to live up to its controversial reputation. It is indeed a difficult movie to sit through, as we spend a lot of time with drunk people yelling at each other, deliberately pushing each other’s buttons, and on one occasion engage in graphic sloppy sex. This is all before the disturbing prison interrogation sequence.

Like SIBERIA and IRRADIATES, this one had a fair amount of walkouts, with one woman turning around on her way to the exit to shout, “This should be happening to him! This is 2020!” It’s an understandable statement, but one that also misses the point, I believe. Another critic complained that the movie felt like intellectual wankery — suggesting that the filmmakers knew nothing of the history of Russian prisons. But to me, it felt all too real. In my limited knowledge on the subject of Stalin-era prison interrogations, what goes down in DAU. NATASHA is relatively tame, yet accurate. To paraphrase the narrator in IRRADIATES, this is some terrible shit that happened quite recently in our history, and we shouldn’t forget about it because it’s all too likely that it could happen again (if it isn’t already).

A month after the fact, I’m still not sure if I would recommend DAU. NATASHA to anyone, but I am deeply impressed with it as a cinematic art project. In fact, I’m sad that I didn’t find the time for the six-hour DAU. DEGENERATION, which sounded like it was more outrageous and less upsetting.

My last movie at the 70th Berlinale was NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS, a beautiful movie that deserves every bit of praise it has been receiving (it took home this year’s Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize). With amazing performances from the two main actors Sidney Flanigan and Talia Ryder, this is realist cinema at its finest and for a good cause. It follows a high schooler, Autumn (Flanigan) and her cousin Skylar (Ryder) as they travel from small town Pennsylvania to big city New York in order to get Autumn’s unwanted pregnancy terminated.

While NRSA handles the subject matter with admirable sensitivity, it also looks at a young female friendship and life in rural America in a way few movies have. Generally speaking, I’m a bit tired of the usual brand of realism that gets shown on film, as it is often focused on familiar relationship dramas between people of a certain relatable age and income bracket. And, when these movies try to sound like “real people” talking, it’s often obnoxious or boring as hell (in its own extreme way, DAU. NATASHA revels in the tedium of realist dialog). NRSA avoids many of these pitfalls by observing people that are often dismissed and focusing more on what isn’t being said than on what’s coming out of the characters’ mouths. It’s a credit to the acting and the directing that so much of the experience of NRSA is in the silent gestures and in the heads of these characters — and there’s a lot going on there.

Until next year (fingers crossed)…

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading! I’ll try to get some reviews up for the few Berlinale films that went unmentioned here (like the amazing BLOODY NOSE, EMPTY POCKETS), and for recent press screenings for films that are now caught in limbo. On the bright side, my productivity seems to have benefitted from this strangeness.

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