The Classics Shelf: The 2013 Berlin Film Festival

Of the three major European festivals (the other two being, in my mind, Venice and Cannes), Berlin seems to consistently get the weakest lists for its Official Competition. This often comes down to its timing: taking place early in the year, usually in February, the Berlinale misses out on continental projects that won’t be ready until a more advantageous release in the summer or fall, and a good deal of American selections in the festival are usually ones that have already succeeded on the awards season circuit the previous fall but are getting a delayed European release, or premiere at Sundance a few weeks earlier.

The jury of the 2013 Berlinale, lead by Hong Kong master Wong Kar-wai (who also had a film playing out of competition), had heavy selections to go through in the Official Competition, a rather grim slate with a number of grim stories behind them. Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain screened much to the annoyance of Iran’s Ministry of Culture, who declared its inclusion in the festival illegal and, according to Zeit Online, “categorised its premiere at the Berlinale a crime.” Panahi had previously been barred from accepting an invitation to be on the jury in 2011 due to a travel restriction imposed upon him, and now couldn’t come to the festival to accept his Best Screenplay prize (and hasn’t been without similar troubles with his government ever since).

All was not gloom, however, as a few of the films this year provided a bit of thoughtful fun (Gloria, On My Way) and good old fashioned Hollywood thrills (Side Effects), while numerous entries presented stories of injustice and the winds of change from countries struggling under past or present repressive regimes. Danis Tanovic had his biggest success after his Oscar win for No Man’s Land in 2002 with the multiple award winner An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker, Pia Marais brought her thoughtful and impactful Layla Fourie and Malgorzata Szumowska’s In the Name of shone a light on sexual hypocrisy in the Catholic church. In a bizarre turn, two films in this competition involved people being caught in bear traps.

The 63rd Berlinale, which ran from February 7 to 17, was a huge success, covered by 3,695 journalists from 81 countries and selling upwards of 300,000 tickets to 965 screenings. The likes of Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight, the animated film The Croods and Wong Kar-wai’s own The Grandmaster screened out of competition, while Shoah filmmaker Claude Lanzmann was given the Honorary Golden Bear and Isabella Rossellini and Rosa von Praunheim received Berlinale Cameras. At the end of the week, the prize went to Romania, for Călin Peter Netzer’s Child’s Pose, which goes back to proving the previous point of not being overwhelmed for quality at this festival, a strong and thoughtful drama that didn’t set the world on fire (when in doubt at a European film festival, choose the movie that says the most about Europe as a troubling concept).  The acting prizes were handed out to Gloria’s (very deserving) Paulina Garcia and Iron Picker’s Nazif Mujic, a daring choice of a non-professional that resulted in tragedy five years later.

The Jury: Wong Kar-wai (President), Susanne Bier (Danish filmmaker), Andreas Dresen (German filmmaker), Ellen Kuras (American filmmaker and director of photography), Shirin Neshat (Iranian visual artist and filmmaker), Tim Robbins (American actor, filmmaker and producer), Athina Rachel Tsangari (Greek filmmaker and producer).

The Official Competition, Reviewed:

 

MUST-SEE

An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker

Danis Tanović

Tanovic won an Oscar for his second feature, No Man’s Land, and went in search of recreating that success with his subsequent projects, though bigger budgets and bigger stars (such as Triage aka Shell Shock starring Colin Farrell) have yet to make the grade. The closest he’s come to that triumph is the prizes he deservedly earned for this brief but potent drama, in which non-professional actors play themselves. Recreating their own experience to lay bare the injustice of opportunities for the poor in Bosnia, it centres on a a Roma family who live in a poor village, father Nazif Mujic collecting and selling scrap iron to earn some money while mother Senada Alimanovic stays at home with their two little girls. When she falls ill with terrible stomach pain, he takes her to hospital where they learn that her unborn child has died and she’ll need surgery to prevent serious illness or death, but the family does not have insurance and the hospital demands they pay before they will perform the procedure on her. Turned down by medical professionals and bureaucrats alike, Nazif eventually comes up with a solution but it’s just one of many fires he has to put out just to keep his family going. Mujic earned a Best Actor portrayal for his wholly unself-conscious portrayal of his own life and family, though the offscreen story isn’t as comforting as the film version; five years after this film’s success and still struggling to keep things going, he sold his Berlin prize for food money before dying at the age of 47.

Awards: Jury Grand Prix; Best Actor (Nazif Mujic); Prize of the Ecumenical Jury-Special Mention

 

Gloria

Sebastián Lelio

A woman in Santiago, divorced for twelve years and living on her own, deals with the mundane realities of her daily life: the neighbour upstairs is always in a psychotic rage that keeps her up at night, his hairless cat creeping her out by frequently finding his way into her apartment, her grown children live their own lives and she has infrequent chances to see them while working her own unremarkable office job. She does get out from time to time, and when Gloria meets divorced Rodolfo, it is another chance at love, as he thinks she is divine and they have good fun together and great sex. He also is a slave to the whims of his spoiled daughters and even his emotionally needy ex-wife, so it is easy to see that things will get complicated as he becomes more vulnerable and she more independent as they progress. Gloria’s life plays out in the manner of the kind of social realism that has become so popular in South American cinema in the last few years, but combining the subtlety of the direction (including realizations that are never overplayed even when they involve dancing to a terrific pop music soundtrack) with Paulina Garcia’s expressive, beautiful face and body turns it into something glamorous. With her dazzling smile and searching, intelligent eyes barely hidden behind oversized glasses, Gloria can’t help but be stunning and charismatic, and it’s very easy to be invested in her early on without needing a good reason. Lelio followed it with his Oscar-winning A Fantastic Woman, after which he remade this film as Gloria Bell, whose quality matches (perhaps even surpasses) this one.

Awards: Best Actress (Paulina Garcia); Prize of the Ecumenical Jury; Prize of the Guild of German Art House Cinemas

 

Layla Fourie

Pia Marais

Rarely is the theme of generational trauma folded so subtly and effectively into a drama with the power and immediacy of Marais’ superb third feature. Rayna Campbell is exceptional in the titular lead role, as a single mother working late nights at a Johannesburg bar who has recently completed the courses qualifying her to work as a polygraph examiner. She gets her first big assignment, to help the hiring of new employees at a casino outside of town, but her path to success is almost immediately complicated by circumstances. She is forced to take her young son with her because the boy’s father is partnered to another woman who won’t allow him to stay with them, and then, late at night, on the dark road to her destination, she accidentally hits a man who has pulled over on the side of the road. Taking him to hospital, then trying to inform the police both turn out to be dead ends in a place where services are never at the ready for emergencies, and it doesn’t help that even this many years after institutionalized racial division has ended, Layla, who is black, has a tenuous connection with seeking help from authority. Her decision to get on with her job is eventually challenged when one of the potential employees she is interviewing (August Diehl) is the son of the man she hit, and her befriending him and his stepmother (Terry Norton) increases the pressure for her to reveal her connection to their search for answers. A society grappling with a dark past that still can’t let previously disenfranchised people get ahead is a message told without any simplified finger-pointing, Marais’ direction is steady, confident and subtle.  The wholly unpredictable turns of the plot are greatly amplified by the crackling suspense in the air between characters who are constantly, unsuccessfully, trying to outrun history.

Awards: Special Mention-International Jury

 

Side Effects

Steven Soderbergh

A few of the films in this collection offer thrills under the most unusual of circumstances, bending genres or provoking us with harsh imagery, but none of them are as exciting as those delivered by this conventionally structured but juicy and thoroughly enjoyable thriller by the often reliable Soderbergh. Reuniting with Contagion scribe Scott Z. Burns and hiring a stellar cast to fill the lead roles, he leads a riveting Jude Law through an experience that sees his professional command as an overworked psychiatrist turned on its ear by one patient. Rooney Mara plays the wife of a recently released convict (Channing Tatum) who was sent to prison for insider trading, happy to have him home before revealing that her depression has returned in greater force than in the past. An attempt at suicide lands her in the hospital where doctor Law examines her and insists she come to him for treatment, which she does, but she soon finds it difficult to live with the anti-depressants he prescribes and asks him to let her try a medication that has only recently made its way onto the market. The results provide some pretty shocking side effects that lead to Law fighting to hold on to his career, roping in the involvement of Mara’s past psychiatrist (a terrific Catherine Zeta-Jones) as he struggles to untangle the mess of trouble he’s in. The film’s marketing team did a great job, at the time, of keeping the film’s secrets out of its promotional material and, unfortunately, this likely lead to its not making an impact at the box office. The secret is well worth keeping, however, and discovering this film’s surprises is one of its chief delights.

 

Nobody’s Daughter Haewon

Hong Sang-soo

Hong’s gentle relationship tales, which have often seen him labelled as the Eric Rohmer of Korea, have a magic that convinces you, deceptively, that their methods are simple. Structures of repetition and restrained but deeply felt performances contribute to the palpable sense of emotional connections being made between a protagonist in a period of turmoil, in this case an aspiring actress, and the various figures they interact with either accidentally or on purpose. Haewon is upset about her beloved mother’s recently moving to Canada to be with her son, and in missing her finds herself drawn back to a disastrous affair with a professor. She runs into friends and interacts with other couples as various scenes and sequences of dialogue are repeated in alternating circumstances, all of it photographed gorgeously and held together almost imperceptibly by a radiant Jung Eun-chae in the lead. Fans of Hong will have a wonderful time reconnecting with his indelibly charming world.

 

 

WORTHY

Child’s Pose

Călin Peter Netzer

The top prize went to this Romanian melodrama about a bourgeois Bucharest architect named Cornelia (Luminita Gheorghiu). She is pulled out of the audience of an operatic performance by her sister, who has come to tell her that her son Barbu has been in a car accident. Barbu is fine, physically, but he was speeding on a country road near a village outside the city, has hit and killed a fourteen-year-old boy, and is now in police custody. Cornelia goes to the station with all the bluster of the wealthy and entitled, instructing her son on what to write on the forms he has been provided, then puts her connections to use, calling a lawyer and getting as many of her own specialists onto the matter to keep her kid out of jail. Barbu comes off an unmotivated ne’er-do-well who has no particular purpose in life, living off his parents’ money and letting them clean up his messes, but as he expresses his disinterest in his mother’s help, we learn that he actually bears an animosity towards her, actively trying to stop her from getting him out of this very serious trouble. Cornelia’s difficult relationship with Barbu’s girlfriend Carmen doesn’t help matters either, but she plugs on with her plans. Even after Barbu insults her and tells her to stop interfering, she meets with a witness to the accident and entertains the possibility of spending a great deal of money on turning the testimony her way. Cornelia’s ultimate act is to visit the home of the deceased young man and meet with his parents, in theory to pay her respects and engender some sympathy from the injured parties, but meeting with them unexpectedly brings up all the contradictions that she has been avoiding, about her own feelings of pride and regret that have been stoking her involvement in her son’s affairs. Taking part in the great tradition of anxious parents overcompensating for ungrateful children that goes all the way back to the glory days of Mildred Pierce, this powerful drama has plenty to say about class warfare and legal corruption, but it ultimately boils down to the very specific story of a woman’s bringing punishment upon herself for her own inability to see things clearly. Audience members expecting things to build to an explosive climax that metes out justice in a clean and satisfying manner will be disappointed, but those who love a good character study will be thrilled. Ruling over it all is Gheorghiu’s inexhaustible performance, a masterful example of intense control that is intimidating and captivating without ever overplaying a single moment of her character’s unexamined entitlement.

Awards: Golden Bear; FIPRESCI Prize

 

In the Name Of

Małgorzata Szumowska

A priest at a youth centre in a rural Polish village aims to help residents transition from juvenile detention and keep them from a lifetime in the prison system. He works hard, spares no discipline on the young men but treats them with kindness and understanding; of course, a break from grace is not far off in the distance. Two elements of change set the good Father on a different path: one member of his troupe is a young man with a deep feeling of sympathy for him, an image of almost Christlike beauty whose physique is blended with no subtlety into the natural surroundings and draws our hero’s heart right up into his throat. Add to that the trauma of discovering two other boys having a sexual affair that leads to devastating drama and pretty soon the priest is unsure of his identity, either as a man or as a man of the cloth. Breaking from the accepted norm has been done in gay cinema many times before, but this one gets points for assured direction, terrific performances and a beautiful visual palette. Szumowska doesn’t manage to rewrite history with a predictable plot, but the heat that the actors have between them makes the familiarity easy to forget.

Awards: Teddy for Best Feature; Reader Jury of the “Siegessaule” Prize

 

On My Way

Emmanuelle Bercot

It’s hard to make a good road movie in our cynical times. They require an open-hearted acceptance of whimsy and a willingness to swallow ridiculous contrivances while, at the same time, trading on clichés that have been done to death and then some. In a selection of films loaded with dark themes, however, it’s a pleasure to take a break from the heaviness and just enjoy the breezy pleasures of this delightful vehicle, one that celebrates Catherine Deneuve’s continued, magnificent charisma in its every frame. She plays a struggling restaurateur running a tavern in her hometown in Brittany who learns that her married lover has taken up with another, younger woman. Sent into an emotional tailspin, she hits the road, at first to find a store that sells cigarettes, but eventually crossing northern France to reconnect with her estranged grandson, attend a reunion of beauty pageant contestants from her youth and go to the home of an in-law where she must face her issues with her bitter, long-estranged daughter. This latter element of the story is one that doesn’t work, pop singer Camille gives an unsympathetic, one-note performance as a woman whose anger is never properly addressed, but the scenery is gorgeous and one simply cannot wait for another spontaneous laugh or witty one-liner to emerge from Deneuve. Her presence is an unmitigated pleasure and the film’s successful moments, which are plenty even if they are not consistent, remain on your mind because of her.

 

Vic + Flo Saw a Bear

Denis Côté

There are eccentricities in films that are forgivable and those that aren’t, and the dividing line often comes down to the cast and the characters they portray.  Côté’s bizarre, disturbing drama begins when a woman (Pierrette Robitaille) recently released from prison shows up at her uncle’s sugar shack deep in the woods of Quebec, discovering on arrival that he is terribly ill and is being looked after by a young neighbour. She moves in and brings her girlfriend (Rohmane Bohringer) with her, but two figures disturb their relative peace in the quiet of nature: Robitaille’s parole officer, played by a terrific Marc-André Grondin, who is concerned about her new living situation, and a threatening stranger (Marie Brossard), who appears to be a figure from Bohringer’s past. The ending of this Canadian entry in the festival has to be seen to be believed, but by the time you reach, it you’ve come to be sympathetic with and intrigued by this collection of people who are unpredictable and often unpleasant but whose inner lives are accessible to the viewer. Côté isn’t showing off his edgy cool with these figures, but coaxes the humanity out of them through superb performances from a uniformly impressive cast. It’s not for everyone, and the bear of the title didn’t turn out to be a Golden one for the festival’s jury, but it is worth checking out.

Awards: Alfred Bauer Award

 

 

FOR THE CURIOUS

Camille Claudel 1915

Bruno Dumont

Dumont seeks to give the viewer a wholly different experience from the celebrated, award-winning biopic of 1989 with this examination of a few days in the life of the famed and, at the time, mostly unacknowledged sculptress. Not long after she was sent to the mental asylum where she would spend her remaining decades, Claudel (Juliette Binoche) suffers the bedlam of surrounding patients and struggles with her creative impulse in the upside-down world she is living in. She is subject to the same rules as other inmates but is permitted to prepare her own meals, perpetually afraid that her ex-lover and collaborator, Rodin, who took credit for a great deal of her work, is trying to poison her in order to take over her studio. Her one ray of hope is the announcement of her brother’s upcoming visit, which she hopes will be the solution to her problems and the path to her freedom. Going against all the archetypes of artist biographies, the film attempts to show the day-to-day mediocrities of life in a place of this kind, but Dumont, ever the image-maker with little else to go on, has no skill for finding the depths of the soul that he is aiming for here. His characters are often vulnerable, usually played by non-professionals with noticeably unwieldy appearances, and always feel like they’re being exploited for shock value thanks to their rarely having any passion or desire for the audience to admire or appreciate.  In this film, we have a masterclass performance by Binoche in the lead, who, despite her remarkably glamorous exterior, fits into Dumont’s world effortlessly, but surrounding her with real people of varying degrees of neurodivergence doesn’t give the film realism as much as it reduces the supporting cast to aesthetic provocations. With a ninety-five-minute running time, it’s neither too long or boring, though a third-act shift of focus to Paul Claudel’s struggle with his soul does feel like an empty excuse to pad out the ending (and with an actor not nearly as charismatic as Binoche to play it, much more obviously exposes Dumont’s inability to pierce the depths of the material). It’s not a bad film, but for all its efforts and the weight of its subject, it is a surprisingly unimportant and shallow one.

 

Gold

Thomas Arslan

Representing the home team is a German film anticipating future modern-day western horror hybrids like Bone Tomahawk or Butcher’s Crossing. A group of Germans show up in late nineteenth-century British Columbia with the intention of heading north towards Dawson City, Yukon, where they plan to take advantage of the gold rush (and if you’ve seen any movie before, you know why this is a bad thing). They have paid a fee to a guide who has promised them an easy route that he is well familiar with, they are accompanied by cooks and have their supplies loaded on a covered wagon, but trouble strikes and it strikes quickly.  The route is treacherous, wheels break and people get injured, and circumstances whittle the party down in number as they move towards a destination that only seems further way with every mile being crossed. Nina Hoss is terrific as the central figure of the cast, a former housemaid who sees the opportunity to change her fortunes in the frozen north, who develops a friendly feeling for a fugitive who has taken on the task of overseeing the well-being of the party’s horses. It’s not a taxing film, its ninety-odd-minute running time feels exactly right, and it manages to remain engaging without ever indulging in ridiculous turns of plot to amp up the violence, but there is something about it that feels too much like an exercise in the familiar. There’s nothing wrong with a director making a genre picture because they have been commissioned to fill a gap in the market, but it stands out more awkwardly in a film festival competition where, theoretically, the idea is to find ways to sell movies that can’t be easily categorized.

 

Paradise: Hope

Ulrich Seidl

Seidl’s films generally concern themselves with dispassionate exposés of human exploitation in its various forms, something he particularly focuses on in the trilogy that began with Paradise: Love and Paradise: Faith. He saves his softest and most tender tale for the final entry, in which a fifteen year-old girl named Melanie is sent to a weight loss camp by her emotionally absent mother who is vacationing (as we saw in Love) in Kenya. Melanie makes friends with her roommates and struggles to survive a gruelling diet and exercise regimen, developing a fascination that, thanks to her burgeoning curiosity for sex, becomes a fixation on the camp’s doctor. He is more than 40 years older than her but he clearly entertains the possibility of initiating her sexual experience, but don’t worry:  despite the fact that Seidl has put some pretty provocative experiences on the screen in the past, this is not a film meant to exploit our dark curiosity about transgressive relationships. There’s a great deal more sympathy here than the filmmaker usually shows for human beings at a loss for how to deal with their emotions in a world that always makes them feel like they’re not good enough. The problem is that his typical remove from his subjects (often expressed through a lack of close-ups) means that the film is also not that interesting, despite being so polished and considerate.

 

Promised Land

Gus Van Sant

Matt Damon, who initially intended to make his directorial debut with this film, reunites with his Good Will Hunting and Gerry director and co-authors another script with a co-star, this time sharing writing duties with John Krasinski.  Sinking their efforts into environmental concern about the issue of fracking (the film’s release was met with protests outside theatres by parties for both sides of the argument), they play opposite sides of an effort to convince citizens of a small, financially struggling midwestern town to lease their farmlands to a Natural Gas company with the promise of riches for all. Damon and Frances McDormand play the representatives of “Global Corp”, who show up with clipboards in hand to start earning signatures, but what they thought would be a cut-and-dry operation hits snags almost as soon as they pick up their car rental: a retired scientist and educator (Hal Holbrook) raises concerns about the devastation to the land before a committed environmental activist (Krasinski) arrives with placards that quickly turn the town against the idea.  No one can blame people who are scared to lose properties that have been in their families for generations for being tempted by a juicy opportunity to ease all the money troubles that have been hanging over their heads for so long, and it’s not at all surprising to learn that campaigning either side of the issue involves a great deal of careful spin and propaganda.  For all its efforts at complexity, however, it all feels a bit too clean and mapped out, and the revelations that come at the end have a whiff of smug satisfaction that chip away at the film’s efforts to not be a lecture. What it results in, ultimately, is something meaningful but not particularly remarkable, and that’s a shame.

Awards: Special Mention: (International Jury)

 

The Nun

Guillaume Nicloux

No-frills adaptation of Diderot’s novel that is respectable and intelligent, but not nearly as passionate or exciting as Jacques Rivette’s 1966 version. Pauline Etienne is sturdy but unsympathetic as a young woman forced into the nunnery after learning that she is not the child of her father and, being illegitimate, must be cloistered to make up for her mother’s sin. Her first Mother Superior is a kindly and caring woman, but she is soon succeeded by a brutal tyrant who inspires our heroine to want to shun the veil as soon as Rome will allow it (which, in case you’re wondering, is not that soon). Isabelle Huppert is hysterically oddball as the succeeding superior who has a tendency to knock on the young woman’s door at night and cry on her shoulder while hugging her just a little bit too long.

 

SKIP IT

 

Prince Avalanche

David Gordon Green

This bland, minimalist drama earned Green an inexplicable Best Director prize at the festival.  A remake of Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson’s Either Way, it’s about a road crew repairing a road running through a forest that has recently suffered the devastation of a fire. Alvin (Paul Rudd), the elder of the two, is harsh and judgmental towards his co-worker Lance (Emile Hirsch), who is also his girlfriend’s younger brother. While Lance seeks to take as many breaks to read comic books as possible and spends his weekends heading to town to have fun with girls, Alvin prefers to camp out in the desolate, burned-out wilderness and spend his free time writing letters to the woman he looks forward to marrying. Twists of fate, a possibly magical encounter and a generous truck driver with a cooler full of booze push these men in different directions that develop their relationship as they move along the road one strip of paint at a time. The opportunity for getting a deep human experience out of something that is constructed so simply is there but Green can’t find it, and it doesn’t help that two L.A. actors overdoing their attempts to be normal people give plastic performances.

Awards: Best Director

 

Charlie Countryman (aka Kill Charlie Countryman or The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman)

Fredrik Bond

Knowledge of Shia LaBeouf’s complicated (to say the least) private life isn’t necessary to feel a sense of palpable, off-putting anxiety in his performances, and the directors least capable of handling him tend to calibrate his vulnerability incorrectly. Following the death of his mother and the revelation that he speaks to dead people (a silly conceit that the open referencing of Sixth Sense cannot compensate for), Charlie (LaBoeuf) takes her dead spirit’s advice and heads to Bucharest to find himself, meeting a friendly stranger on the plane who then passes out on his shoulder and dies.  Skirmishes with the law find him immediately upon arrival, as does an encounter with the dead man’s daughter (played quite effectively by Evan Rachel Wood) who is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl but, because this is Eastern Europe, is self-destructive instead of klutzy and, rather than own a flower shop or work in a community centre, she’s a cellist with an abusive ex-boyfriend (Mads Mikkelsen). Holing up in a filthy youth hostel with two British drug addicts (Rupert Grint and James Buckley), Charlie gets increasingly involved with shady characters in his attempt to help this woman he is suddenly infatuated with out of her conundrum. No doubt the Romanian tourist board wanted to sue the filmmakers over a presentation of the capital city that is basically the worst dangers of Dickensian slums, but there is a terrific sense of excitement watching in this character figure his way out of the insanity he has stepped into, but to what end? It’s hard to know why we are invested in a character who looks like body odour achieved sentience, and we are even less inspired by a romance that has zero passion. The plot ties enough knots to keep you interested in seeing them untied, but for all the effect it has, it might as well be a movie you watch on a plane to pass the time (hopefully not with a dead body resting on your shoulder).

 

These films also played in competition but were not reviewed for this article:

A Long and Happy Life

Boris Khlebnikov

 

Closed Curtain

Jafar Panahi, Kambuzia Partovi

Award: Best Screenplay

Harmony Lessons

Emir Baigazin

Awards: Outstanding Artistic Contribution (camerawork), Reader Jury of the ‘Berliner Morgenpost’ Award



Advertisement