63rd Berlin International Film Festival: Berlinale 2013
By Leslie Weisman, DC Film Society Member
Film festivals are places where people plunge, or are drawn into times and places they’ve never been before; where characters speak languages we don’t understand while having experiences, thoughts and emotions we often, to our surprise, do.
They are also, as demonstrated several weeks ago in Berlin, where the technological wizardry of 3D animation can bring the Stone Age vividly, fictionally and affectionately into the 21st century. And where the simplest, but most tellingly, searingly employed narrative and documentary devices can remind us how the 20th was cast into the moral equivalent of the Stone Age.
Let’s start with the temporal twist of one of the inarguable hits of the Berlinale: DreamWorks’ The Croods (Kirk DeMicco, Chris Sanders, USA, 2013), which had its world premiere at the festival, a film whose wryly familiar family dynamics in a period its screenwriters tell us “fell between the Jurassic Age and the ‘Katzenzoic Era’ ” are as timeless as the simple wisdom of its moving dénouement.
With voices including Nicholas Cage as family patriarch Grug (whose “hyper-vigilance” is the product of his all-purpose credo, “Fear is good, change is bad”), Emma Stone as the rebellious daughter (“Eep has many of the qualities of today’s teenaged girls, like being incredibly annoyed with her family”) and Cloris Leachman as Gran (‘so old she lived through the Ice Age, mostly by
devouring her ex-husbands one by one,” jokes DeMicco), The Croods is filled with stars. Quite unlike the ones Grug won’t let his family – burrowed deep in the safety of their dark and fortified cave – come out to see.
Eep refuses to remain trapped inside the home that seems more like a prison, and meets the first non-family member any of the Croods have ever seen: a guy named Guy (Ryan Reynolds) who will open her eyes, and eventually her family’s, to a world of color, wonder, risk, exploration, and possibility. (Including the possibility of “pets” – in Guy’s case, a sloth named Belt, who
holds his pants up. “So he’s functional and fashionable,” says Reynolds.)
“The animators have their characters alternate virtuosically between realism and caricature,” wrote the Berliner Zeitung; “their bodies seem equally made of skin, flesh and bones, and a pliable, smoothly waxen modeling clay. Their movements are superbly choreographed: when Eep and Guy meet for the first time, they dance an overwhelmingly powerful pas de deux of erotic attraction and fearful rejection.”
The Croods, per the Berliner Zeitung, is “a film that reminds us that movies are not just about telling a story or sending a message, but first and foremost about seeing, about spectacle; about eye-catching, arresting images; about shapes and colors – about the visual astonishment, the terror and beauty of pictures.” It opened this week at DC-area cinemas.
Like this well-received film, which earned nearly $44 million in box-office receipts on opening weekend, the opening night film, celebrated Chinese auteur Wong Kar-Wei’s The Grandmaster, called by Hollywood Review his “first bona fide blockbuster,” had earned a million more in China by the time it opened the festival. Berlinale director Dieter Kosslick told 3sat TV and Culture Magazine that Wong is “one of the most prominent filmmakers of our time” whose “personal cinematic signature and the poetry of his films have inspired us all. Having him as jury president,” as Wong also was this year, “is something we’ve wanted for a long time.”
The Grandmaster, which explores the lives of five martial arts masters – notably Ip Man, played by Wong stalwart Tony Leung, who told the press conference he’d trained in the art of wing chun (kung fu) for four years to prepare for the role – amidst the political turmoil of 20th-century China, may seem at first glance a significant stylistic and narrative departure for the celebrated Chinese auteur. A Cannes favorite, Wong has racked up four Palme d’Or nominations (My Blueberry Nights, 2007; 2046, 2004; In the Mood for Love, 2000; Happy Together, 1997) and one win (Best Director, Happy Together) in just 10 years for films whose thrusts and kicks aim more for the heart and head than for the ribs. (The Berliner Morgenpost credited Wong with “invent[ing] a distinct genre, the cinema of impressions, where the opening of an eye or the heavy smoke of a cigarette can be more meaningful than the entire plot.”)
Unlike those earlier films – which moved 3sat Magazine the month before the fest to fantasize Wong directing a dream in which, for his jury, “Nothing is resolved, nothing is done, changed or steered in a particular direction ... [opening] an entirely new perspective on cinema as global viewing space ... an elegy for universal yearning and the pain of love” – in The
Grandmaster, Wong’s observations on human love and loss are visceral, exhilarating and inventive, both choreographically and cinematographically.
The Grandmaster’s impressive box office did not impress the Berlinale critics and was cause for concern and even carping by some, who saw it as a sell-out by “one of the three most important film festivals in the world. This is not a question of the number of audience members – Cannes has a tenth of Berlin’s – but a question of status” (Morgenpost). For such a giant, shouldn’t the opening night film be a world premiere? (The Tagesspiegel’s cultural satirist Harald Martenstein, ruefully conceding the accuracy of a Süddeutsche Zeitung reporter’s observation that “the Competition has for some time included not just world premieres, but second-hand goods,” noted that The Grandmaster “even has a Wikipedia entry already. It’s almost film history.”)
The festival director would take strong exception to any such contention. When they learned, Kosslick told the journal filmecho | filmwoche, after having seized the long-sought-after prize of Wong as jury president, that his new film, “on which he’d been working for 10 years, could be ready in time for the Berlinale, we immediately seized the chance and invited The Grandmaster” – which Kosslick enthusiastically called “Dr. Zhivago in China” – “as our opening night film.” It was all – as such things all too often are, and in the end, have to be, as any film festival director will no doubt confirm – a matter of timing.
Kosslick proved both shrewd and prescient in other ways, however, not least of all in knowing the public for what is: according to the Berliner Morgenpost, the biggest public festival in the world. A record-setting 303,077 tickets were sold this year, with the number of professional
visitors (including nearly 3,700 members of the press from more than 100 countries) remaining constant, despite the global economic downturn. And one of the films he specifically singled out in his filmecho | filmwoche interview would take home the festival’s highest competition prize,
the Golden Bear.
“The secret of the Berlinale’s success,” Kosslick told the Morgenpost in a joint interview with Bernd Neumann, one of his strongest and most important supporters and Germany’s Minister of State for Cultural Affairs, “is that we don’t think audiences are idiots. We provide them with what they [can’t get anywhere else]. That means films in the original language, no dubbing,
demanding German films, and highly controversial films that will evoke passionate discussion and disagreement.”
He must have been very pleased this year.
Pick a random actor, director or producer and you’ll be swiftly assured that for them, critics’ assessments are just that: individual opinions having little impact on them, their work, or their worth. For those whose films screen at the Berlinale, where papers and journals publish daily grids of critics’ picks and piques in addition to reviews ranging from snapshots to panoramas, it’s a good thing.
This year’s Golden Bear winner, for example, received top marks in the days following its press screening from a mere five of 26 critics, while the future Grand Jury Prix, Silver Bear recipient was deemed average, or less, by a full third. The disparity was borne out by your reporter’s occasional chats with fellow journalists, who often surprised her with their vehemence.
“Passionate discussion and disagreement”? You bet.
And so, for DC Film Society members and readers: a personal “Bear’s”-eye
view of some of the films and special events that made critics come out
roaring, growling, or purring at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival. Drive right on in ... but fasten your seat belts.
Over the last several years, the films of eastern Europe have made steady inroads into awards territory at western European film festivals, from Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or-winning 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) to Hungarian director Bence Fliegauf’s Jury
Grand Prix winner Just the Wind at last year’s Berlinale and Bosnian director Jasmila Žbanic’s Golden Bear-winning Grbavica in 2006. Žbanic, who has become a regular at both the Berlinale and the Berlinale Talent Campus, an academic and networking platform for up-and-coming
filmmakers that runs parallel to the festival, scored a sort of triple play that year, winning not just the Golden Bear for Best Film, but the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury and the Peace Film Award.
This year, in another variety of eastern European triple play, the highest award went again to a Romanian film, the Jury Grand Prix again to a Bosnian filmmaker, and the Best Actor award to the lead actor in the latter film. And this year Žbanic was the only one of five filmmakers selected for Hollywood Reporter’s Berlin Directors Roundtable who did not have a film currently screening at the festival. Her observations in response to to a question about her own work supported, probably just fortuitously, this year’s programming choices, if not always their result. “I don’t want to make activistic films necessarily, but somehow I see that they have more power than just going to James Bond movies,” said Žbanic. And yet: “Entertainment is a word I totally respect. I want to entertain people with my films, but that doesn’t mean they have to be shallow. People have to be entertained, they have to feel energy, they have to feel they are engaged in the film.”
Her Oscar-winning compatriot Danis Tanovic (for No Man’s Land, 2001, which also received dozens of international awards) would certainly agree with Žbanic’s first assertion. His An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker (Bosnia-Herzegovina / France / Slovakia 2011), a quasi-docudrama (“It’s a fiction, it’s a documentary; I don’t know if there’s really a category for this,” Tanovic would tell us) takes a strong stand against the subtle sort of discrimination that keeps minorities – in this case , Bosnian Romas (gypsies) – always on the edge of full participation in society.
The film, which won the Jury Grand Prix, is both particular and universal: an impoverished young minority wife and mother without health insurance is denied life-saving care, despite the unflagging efforts of her husband to obtain it for her.
Now hold on, some may object: that “minority” part is just incidental, a convenient hook for those with an agenda. Nobody without either health insurance or very deep pockets who needs emergency surgery is going to be able to walk into a hospital and receive immediate treatment. That may be true; but it is equally true that there is a difference between being refused with respect and being refused with barely concealed, even conspicuous disdain, adding immeasurably to the suffering of the one who is sick and her loved ones.
It is this disheartening truth that Danis Tanovic seeks to bring home to audiences – people who in the course of their lives may have been subjected to, or exhibited similar behavior – in his fundamentally faithful reconstruction of a story he read about in the papers just over a year before
the film would premiere in Berlin. “I got really angry” reading about the injustices described in the article, said Tanovic, and, after receiving confirmation from an associate that the story was accurate, went to visit the family to propose a film about their experience. They agreed. Senada and Nazif are a thirtyish couple with two adorable little girls we first see watching TV from the sofa, bundles of energy sparkling with grins and giggles, pushing and teasing each other.
The camera pulls back to frame the small, cramped room and simple furnishings, and we see that the television with its mid-size screen is probably a rare indulgence for this couple.
Our impressions will be confirmed when Nazif, after hours of chopping and sawing old cars into pieces for the scrap metal he will trade or sell, stops to share a brew (or two) with his buds – “My wife’s gonna kill me,” he remarks wryly – and meets with both her disapproval and her disappointment: the money he’s brought home is less than she had expected, and they won’t be
able to pay their mounting debts.
Those facing economic hardship are often told, sometimes with the best of intentions but rarely well received, “At least you’ve got your health.” Whereupon something happens to pull that rug out from under them, too. Senada starts bleeding and is in agonizing pain, which she tries to conceal for the kids’ sake.
Nazif helps them into their old rattletrap of a car and drives them to the closest clinic a fair distance away. It’s clean and modern, the medical staff efficient; but the news is bad: miscarriage. The physician in charge refers her to a hospital in another town – there is none where they are – for a full d&c. Told that they have no medical insurance, the doctor shrugs. Next patient.
As the story progresses Nazif finds himself frustrated at every turn by indifferent administrative types or the inability of even the most sympathetic to do anything to help. At one point, his wife’s condition steadily worsening, he drives them all hundreds of miles to the hospital. “I’d like to help you,” a physician in crisp, immaculate white assures them blithely, barely able, or even trying, to conceal the artificiality of his concern. “But orders are orders. I’d help you,” he adds smoothly, “if it were up to me.”
Even the social services agencies are unable to help: Without insurance or thousands of dollars to pay for the life-saving procedure, no medical facility will perform it. What makes the situation not only aggravating and frightening but incomprehensible to Nazif (and to us) is that he was in the Army for four years and wounded, but received remuneration only while he was in uniform, with no pension, no health insurance, no child benefits following him into civilian life.
In another case of things happening when and whence you least expect them, Nazif calls his mother and lays out the whole story for her. Expecting no more than a desperately needed listening ear, he’s astonished when she tells him that his sister-in-law has health insurance, and will gladly lend him her card.
Back at the hospital, out in the corridor, he tries to keep the munchkins under some sort of control, with only moderate success. But they have been through a lot in the last couple of days, and each reacts differently, the elder one dark-eyed and pensive, joining her sister half-heartedly in dancing around the corridor, the younger one a screaming, racing little chimp.
The operation’s a success, but there will be weeks of post-op care. And they return to a cold, dark house: The electric company has cut off power because they haven’t been able to pay the bill. It’s back to the junkyard for Nazif, who sets about his car-chopping with renewed, if unemotional resolve. The film ends much as it began: the kids watching TV, Senada attending to them – this time, though, from the sofa – and Nazif heading out to chop firewood for the stove.
“Nazif Mujic is a hero,” observed the Tagesspiegel, “probably the only hero of the Berlinale Competition. Because he saved a life, not just in a movie, but in reality.” And not just one, but two: At the photo shoot, Najif, Senada and their director introduced the newest member of the family: the baby conceived after Senada’s recovery. His name? Danis, after their new friend.
Another eastern European “child” was the focus of a film whose director, much like Tanovic, was not entirely sure where to place it on the feature film / documentary continuum: “... a slice of life almost as authentic as a documentary,” is where Romanian director Cãlin Peter Netzer ultimately came down on his Golden Bear-winning Child’s Pose. Hollywood
Reporter sums it up even more succinctly – “As watchable as daytime drama” – and tidily provides the premise: “Child’s Pose is an on-target, tragicomic portrait of a domineering mother, who sees a chance to regain control over her adult son when he faces manslaughter charges for drunken driving.”
As the film begins it’s not the son driving but the mother: They’re on their way to the hospital, then to the police station, where Barbu will be questioned – and where they find the family of the teenaged boy Barbu hit and fatally injured. Cornelia’s fur coat with its wide drop collar stands in
stark contrast to their modest dress, as does her queen-bee demeanor to that of the rough-hewn, violently explosive uncle of the dead child.
But Cornelia is forceful in her own way. Pushy, “well-informed and well-connected,” as she describes herself in a subtly threatening tone, left eyebrow suggestively raised, Cornelia is a diva used to obeisance, undeterred by the young but savvy cops, who aren’t in the least bit intimidated – until they Google her. Ah. Cornelia insists that her son erred when he wrote that he was going 100 mph; it was actually 75. A little over the speed limit, maybe, but that was because the car he was trying to pass was going 70, so he had no choice.
Once home, Barbu is pretty numb. Ordered by Cornelia to undress so that she can prepare him a warm bath and clean pj’s, he winces as she starts to remove his shirt: The boy’s family, having arrived at the scene of the accident shortly before the police, used the intervening minutes to mete out some of their own “justice,” leaving him bruised and sore.
Seeing a chance to reclaim the role she had always played in his life – Barbu has just recently gotten his own place, his own car, and a girlfriend who’s obviously not good enough for him – Cornelia’s in her element. Netzer and Romanian New Wave fave Luminita Bunescu here create a chilling portrait of a “mother knows best” at once the worst nightmare of an independent adult
child for whom her exaggerated, demeaning concern is galling, and the dream mommy of an immature, insecure “mama’s boy.” In this rather singular situation, Barbu’s a little bit of both.
Back at the police station, one of the cops asks Cornelia if she knows anyone who can do a favor for his friend. If so, well, one good turn deserves another – an example of “the rampant corruption at all levels of the [country’s] public institutions,” writes the film’s producer. There is
agreement on one point, however: that she should pay for the child’s funeral and visit the family before, to ask if they would be all right with her being present.
Cornelia now meets with the man whose car her son’s overtook, who painstakingly explains with elaborate gestures and drawings how it happened. He then agrees, after negotiation, to take only 80,000 euros to change his story. (That “rampant corruption” decried by the producer is not, apparently, limited to Romania’s “public institutions.”) She agrees.
Cornelia’s next move is to visit Barbu’s SO, Carmen, whom she tells bluntly that, while she’s never liked her, as they’re alike in many ways – most of them unflattering – they should put aside their differences to work together in his behalf. Returning home, Cornelia finds a new Barbu who has established ground rules for their relationship. Number one: she’s not to call him
anymore. “Let me call. It could be in a week, a month, in a year, six years.”
Cornelia looks at him, disbelieving. “People find their fulfillment through their children,” she tells him in a rare miss for the film, coming off as more a writer’s commentary than a character’s comment. “Everything they failed to accomplish in life, they hope to achieve through their children.” She, Barbu and Carmen– who has agreed to come along for support – drive to the home of the dead boy. Barbu remains in the car (“What would I say?”) as the two women get out and tentatively approach the front door. The mother of the dead child greets them politely, giving them slippers to wear (once a common courtesy in European homes, now less so); they join the large family around a wooden table, where the women are weeping copiously.
Cornelia softly explains that her son can’t come in because “he’s suffering, too.” The parents are not vengeful – “What made him cross the street like that?” asks the father, as if seeking an answer that he knows will never come – but they also want Barbu brought to justice, showing Cornelia photos of their handsome son and attesting to his goodness, his talents and his abilities, their fulfillment now forever denied him, and them. Acknowledging that their loss can never be recompensed, she begs them nonetheless to take the money she has brought to help them with their younger son’s education, for summer camp – in short, for his future.
The film ends affectingly: The father accompanies the two women to the street. As they get into the car, Barbu gets out and approaches him. We see them through the rear-view mirror, then reflected in Cornelia’s side-view mirror. The effect is both distancing and intimate, and strangely moving: we see only portions of them, the angle skewed, and we see them third-hand – through the camera’s eye and then, through Cornelia’s – and do not hear their exchange: Netzer respects both the characters and the audience. Barbu extends his hand hesitantly; the father responds slowly, with similar, perhaps even reciprocal reluctance. Their hands touch.
At the press conference, director Cãlin Peter Netzer said the starting point for the film was his own relationship with his mother, and then developed along fictional lines. Screenwriter Rãzvan Rãdulescu agreed: “Had I not been able to identify with my own experience with my mother, I wouldn’t have been able to write such a script.” (An observer couldn’t help but notice the
tonsorial resemblance among the director, the screenwriter, and the actor who plays Barbu, Bogdan Dumitrache – even the cinematographer – all in mustaches with scruffy chin and neck hair or half-beards.)
That title is an odd one. What does it refer to? “ ‘Child’s pose’ is a yoga position,” said Netzer, “but we edited out the scene where [Cornelia]’s doing yoga. But we thought it was still true, because the ‘pose’ of the child in the film” – both Cornelia’s child, and the child he killed – “is still central.”
How was it to play the role of the overly possessive mother? “I liked the script a lot,” said Bunescu. “I have a feeling that I know that mother, and I like her a lot. I happen to know a family or two who have such a relationship, and the mother is still taking care of the son financially. The mother needs to let the son find his own way, but it’s the kind of unconditional love you find ... among mothers everywhere.”
The schedule was grueling. “We filmed for 13-14 hours a day,” said Netzer, making for “a huge amount of tension I managed to transmit to the team.” No complaints from Bunescu: “And that internal tension is necessary, if you [use] it positively.” Netzer smiled inscrutably. “I think Luminiþa may still be trapped in the role.” Bunescu looked at him, then at us, finally coming out with an abrupt “Well, he’s right, you know,” as everyone on the dais laughed, especially her director and her “son.”
It was different for the latter. “It took me about a week to understand the relationship between the two characters.” And yet, it was he who may have been the linchpin that enabled the film to happen as it did. “Bogdan and I met two years ago and developed a friendship. I’m a rather shy, introverted sort of person and Bogdan helped me open up.”
That’s something no one would ever need to do for the unapologetically, irrepressibly, and for many – an hour before start time, the press line for her newest film already wound down and looped around the long corridor of the Berlinale Palast – irresistibly plain-spoken Julie Delpy, returning to Berlin with the third installment of her, co-star Ethan Hawke and director Richard
Linklater’s “Before ....” series, Before Midnight.
A quick recap: In Before Sunrise (1995) Jesse and Celine meet on a Vienna (Austria)-bound train and in the few hours they have before each must be elsewhere, fall in love, explore the city and each other, and decide to meet again after six months. Nine years later, in Before Sunset, Jesse is an established writer doing a book tour in Paris for the book he wrote about their meeting, Celine comes to see him there, and we learn that their rendezvous never happened. They re-establish the connection, which they realize is as strong as ever; but they now have other partners.
Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. (Photo from the Berlin Film Festival website).
It’s now the present. Jesse and his 13-year-old son are at the airport, saying goodbye as the boy prepares to fly home to his mom, reminding him to practice his piano and urging him to play soccer, which the boy doesn’t really want to do. The son has a request in turn: that dad not come to his recital. “Mom really hates you, and I’d be really stressed if you were there.” The anguish in Jesse’s face, framed in close-up, seeing his son leave for another several months is almost palpable as the boy puts his backpack on the conveyor belt.
But Jesse is not alone: exiting the airport, he climbs into a car being driven by none other than Celine, now working for an environmental agency, their twin daughters, offspring of that Paris reunion, long, wavy blonde hair draped across their faces and down their shoulders, fast asleep in the back seat. They resume what we assume was the conversation they were having when she dropped him off: about a new job she’s considering taking, listing its financial, creative, personal and logistical pluses, minuses and implications.
Reminding viewers of her colorful family, Celine starts telling Jesse about a cat she had as a child that had a litter of two kittens every year: a fortuitously manageable number. Only later did she find out – when her father, in an unguarded moment, let it slip out – that he had killed four
or five others each time by placing them in a bag filled with alcohol. “ ‘How did you choose which ones to kill?’ I asked him. And his eyes filled with tears.”
Jesse’s doing well professionally: his books about their ongoing relationship have proven very popular; the latest, the longest and most complex so far. He’s now attending a six-week writer’s workshop in Messinia (Greece), where he hopes they’ll be able to sort out their differences, and perhaps rekindle a small spark of that incredible passion of 18 years ago.
What a different picture of Greece we have here from the one we will have in Thanos Anastopoulos’ Forum film I kóri! Here the blue skies and soft island breezes form a perfect backdrop to the couple’s quasi-romantic ramblings and affectionate conversations. Relaxed, comfortable with themselves and with the world, Jesse, Celine and four friends, seated outdoors around a table, engage in warm and witty repartee about all manner of subjects, sharing jokes and anecdotes, stories and intimacies, teasing each other with graceful or witty comebacks.
One of these evokes a memory from one of the older women, whose mother was an intensive care nurse during World War II. Whenever a woman would awaken from a coma, she would tell her daughter, she would immediately ask whether her loved ones were OK. The men? They would immediately look down. Priorities, you know.
The woman, who is seated at the head of the table, has established her own priorities in the course of her life, learned through love and loss. Although it’s been quite a few years, she observes, she still misses her late husband greatly; but as the years pass, she starts to forget things. So she makes an effort to actively recall them. “We are just passing through life,” she
says softly, framed against the seascape, the waves rolling, rumbling, breaking against the shore. “Everything is finite; everything will end. So we must focus on the Durchreise” (German for the journey, the “passing-through”),” she concludes.
The twins want Jesse and Celine to get married; Jesse’s of the same mind, foreseeing himself and Celine together for as long as his grandmother and grandfather – 74 years. Celine is less sanguine. (And, we are about to learn, more realistic.)
In their elegant hotel room, a second-nine-years “anniversary” gift from their friends, the sense of romance, its intensity, is arresting as Celine and Jesse swiftly, passionately proceed through every level of intimacy. Everything is fine – until their unrestrained passion releases their inhibitions in other ways, and they begin, moving much as their lovemaking did, through a series of steps, from coy indulgence, to tolerance, all the way to out-and-out anger and resentment as they remember never-resolved fights and slights that have accumulated over the years.
A compromise of sorts will be reached; but we sense that it’s a fragile one. There were a few moist eyes here as well as for the thematically dissimilar Child’s Pose, but for some of the same reasons: two people on opposite sides of a deeply emotional issue making peace, coming to an understanding for the sake of something larger than themselves.
At the press conference, Linklater, Delpy and Hawke talked about the continuing fascination with these two characters, for them as well as for audiences, a fascination that has not ebbed as the young lovers have matured into middle-aged adults with adult responsibilities, daily drudgeries, and the inevitable, concomitant loss of innocence.
“Every six years or so we realize these characters are still alive in us,” said Linklater, who that night would receive a surprise Berlinale Camera award for lifetime achievement. “They have something they need to express in their lives. Not only do we have a long-term relationship with each other, but Jesse and Celine have a long-term relationship. It’s really fun, really rewarding.” Will there be a fourth installment? “We talk about it every five or six years, but right now, we have no idea what that could possibly be. We joke about it sometimes, and we realize that Jesse and Celine are maybe going, ‘Hey, I’m at a new phase in my life,’ ” said Linklater. “But who
knows the future?” (The Tagesspiegel’s Martenstein had also contemplated the possibility of a fourth film, but was at a loss for a title after Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight. “What will the fourth one be called?” he asked, answering with caustic humor (in English), “The sun ain’t gonna rise anymore?”)
Hawke, his thick, straight hair a shock (in two senses) of gray-white progressing in an upward sweep, had other ideas. “I try to talk Julie into doing a full-blown erotica film, to push the boundaries of cinema in a pornographic way, but Julie, somehow that doesn't really” – “I resist,” Delpy finished the sentence, adding drolly: “In the seventh part. When I”m eighty.”
What’s your relationship in real life? “When I first met her,” said Hawke, “I’d never known anybody of my generation so knowledgeable and passionate about film. She’d worked with Godard and Kieszlowski and Volker Schlöndorff ... and now, I’ve surpassed her,” he concluded, to friendly laughter.
The film doesn’t side with either character. How did you manage that? “I’m kind of proud of that,” that the film represents both points of view, said Linklater. “And that’s a constant negotiation between all of us. We all write the dialogue for both characters. And we have the luxury of time,” he added.
“Everyone weighed in on what the third film should be,” said Hawke. “I haven’t met a film director in the last nine years who hasn’t told me. So we knew we were up against an agenda of where people thought Jesse and Celine should be, and that agenda is stifling.” So they decided to use their own knowledge and intuition about the characters to craft the third film. “We decided to go with the Brechtian concept of ‘the least rejected idea.’ ”
“We spend most of our time rejecting everyone’s ideas,” agreed Linklater. “If it’s not working organically, it goes. We really trust one another, and I think we’re rigorous with each other. No feelings are hurt.”
How much of yourselves are in the characters?
“One of the joys of working with Rick,” said Hawke, “is that you can really blur the line between character and player, so that it’s almost indecipherable, allowing you to contribute to the shape and structure of the work so that these things can be unlocked. There’s a fusion happening with
all of these characters.”
(Fusion indeed: four days later the Berliner Kurier printed a photo of the two of them on the red carpet, posing for photogs outside the Berlinale Palast and focusing on the flashes directed at them, oblivious to those behind, with Hawke’s hand splayed across Delpy’s. (No, not hand.) Her joking observation at the press conference that “He can’t keep his hands off me” seems to have some foundation.)
Delpy was “surprised at how things that were actually in my journals when I was 18 ended up in” Before Sunrise, the initial film of the trilogy. “This little seed of truth that can now grow to this tree of fiction.”
“Julie and I are very grateful to Rick for giving us that opportunity in the hotel room” to argue and express complex feelings in a way that was very close to reality. Delpy appreciated the fact that the characters are able to convey a wide range of human emotions in a single day, “the way people are.” (In an interview with the Berliner Morgenpost, the always dependably straight from-the-shoulder Delpy lamented that she was “always being asked for relationship tips. Or how to get your love life in order. How would I know?” she asked. “I have three therapists.”) The dialogue seems so natural and unrehearsed. How much of it is scripted?
“You say it feels improvised; it’s not,” replied Linklater. “It’s all meticulously rehearsed and structured, to the gesture. It looks spontaneous, but you can’t just do that spontaneously. I can’t describe to you how much work they have to put in to make it seem that natural. We’re co-writers
of the dialogue, but as we get closer and closer to [shooting], suddenly Julie and Ethan realize they’re going to have to perform this dialogue. And I see this glaze come over their eyes and a little bit of fear –”
“That’s when we hate the writers in us,” said Delpy.
“– because they know I’m gonna want to be able to do it in one take . It’s a lot of work. I don’t think Julie and Ethan will ever be credited for what it takes to perform in a movie like this.”
“And then all of a sudden, we start cutting lines,” laughed Hawke.
The process took Delpy back a few years, reminding her of practicing the clarinet as a kid “until I would bleed from the lips, and when I performed, it was painless, it looked effortless. So I’m used to that.”
How does it feel to look at yourself in the earlier films?
“We think that we’re growing and changing every day,” said Hawke, but looking back at Before Sunrise, “I get kind of amazed at how much the same we are.”
“The reality is we all grow up, and grow and grow and grow,” said Delpy. “The last,” she quipped, “will be [Michael Haneke’s] Amour.”
Do you say things like what’s in the film to your real life partners? “The film is extremely written,” said Delpy. “I couldn’t come up with this level of witty dialogue if it wasn’t written,” adding: “I wish I could argue well like this.”
No argument from the critics, who were pretty universal in their fondness for the film. Although the Süddeutsche Zeitung playfully professed offense at Delpy’s “wishy-washy assertion” at the last Munich Film Festival when she pooh-poohed the possibility of a third in the Before ... series. “[It was] a cold-hearted lie ... a bluff, and even experienced bloggers had nothing to
counter it with.”
Bluffs can be hard to counter, especially when the bluffer is not a disarmingly frank filmmaker, but a despairing, pathologically obsessed teenager. In The Daughter (I kóri, Thanos Anastopoulos, Greece / Italy 2012) we’re back in Greece, but this time in urban Athens, where economic hardship has ravaged the lives und unraveled the security of the middle class and forced once booming businesses into bankruptcy.
One of these is a lumberyard, whose owners are dealing with it – or not – in different ways: One of them has disappeared, the creditors closing in; the other, we are given to understand, is largely responsible for the mess, having badly mismanaged the finances and lined his own pockets with the meager profits.
The missing partner has a 14-year-old daughter, Myrto, who has had to grow up very fast, forced to assume adult responsibilities when the adults in her life have abnegated theirs, and determined to make them pay. Her tactics, however, are as reprehensible as their failures, her motives – given the film’s elliptical narrative – as much a mystery as her father’s whereabouts: Myrto kidnaps the eight-year-old son of her father’s business partner, hides him in a back room of the lumberyard, and proceeds to both torment and torture him.
The film’s stylistic elements range from documentary-like social commentary – in her increasingly frantic search for her father, Myrto runs past street demonstrations by enraged citizens filmed in real time, punctuated by explosions of Molotov cocktails and shrieks of demonstrators and passers-by – to will-they-get-there-in-time suspense, the splendid cinematography of Elias Adamis capturing the immediacy of the crisis in breathtaking shots. It begins with the felling of trees whose severed trunks, seen from dizzying heights in close-up and followed in their inexorable plunge to earth, look like nothing so much as hacked-off human limbs, the toppling tree a body in agony swooning to its final, violent darkness. (Hollywood Reporter astutely notes that this “footage of forest workers felling trees that bookends the main action is both elegant and symbolic.” Indeed, Anastopoulos is more than merely an armchair philosopher, having completed post-graduate work in Paris.)
In a post-screening Q&A, the director was asked whether the burden of the current economic crisis not only inspired the film, but also presented challenges to making it.
“You feel the crisis every day, but it’s really hard to translate into film,” he told us. “Too many shops are closing down,” the consequences of the crisis affecting everyone. “The impact on the fathers was too obvious, so I started projecting the POV of my son. This anarchy, this fear, was translated into the tone of my film.”
There are some scenes that approach the intensity of a horror film, yet there is no blood; it’s more Hitchcock-like, suggested the host. “I tried to avoid blood, because the feeling that you have inside of you is more terrifying.”
Unlike the seemingly freewheeling but closely scripted Before Midnight, Anastopoulos’s film, whose characters tend to be either tightly wound – conspicuously, its teenaged protagonist, Myrto – or carefully following cues, in The Daughter “we practically improvised everything. It’s during the editing” that it all came together, said the director.. Describing the film as a “kind of stream of consciousness,” Anastopoulos emphasized that events are seen through Myrto’s eyes: “We wanted to be more subjective.”
“I always want life – society – to figure in my films,” he observed, noting that The Daughter had opened to very positive reviews in Greece in limited release. Public reaction was more muted, he said, perhaps because the film shows people the truth of their economic situation. “They live with it every day; they don’t have to see it in a film.”
It was the lumberyard, which is not far from Anastopoulos’s home, that inspired the director to make the film, which he also co-scripted. “I like wood, because it ages like people, it changes color, it matures.” And as the program reminds us, “the warm [colors] of wood form a clear contrast to the social egotism of the surroundings.
“The crisis sends its children out into a moral no-man’s land,” it continues. “Yet the suspicion remains that the relationship between the generations was already out of sync beforehand.” The Tagesspiegel goes a step further: “Before [the crisis], these parents granted their spoiled brats’ every wish. Now, conversely, their despairing children seek to save what cannot be saved.” The remarkable young actress (cine-vue.com calls her performance “absolutely riveting from start to finish”) who plays Myrto, Savina Alimani – who, rather than a teen, is every inch a woman, with luxuriant red locks streaming down her back and a sophisticated mien – said she enjoyed the role: “In films, I like to be the bad girl.” In a twist, the actor playing her mother’s boyfriend – whom Myrto hates – is her real father. (Anastopoulos told us he thinks that Aggelos Papadimas, who plays her small victim, “was a little bit in love with Savina, and that added to the film.”)
What about those dictionary words, among them, pointedly, “dissolution” and “responsibility,” that Myrto looks up throughout the film, reading the definitions aloud, as if to draw meaning from them that will bring some to the irrationality of her life experience? Seems the purpose is both metaphorical and personal: Anastopoulos’s first girlfriend used to read the dictionary to him, “and this reminds me of my childhood.”
Which we suspect the avuncular director would not say about the sardonically named Harmony Lessons (Emir Baigazin, Kazakhstan / Germany 2013), which would take the Silver Bear for best camera work.
“It starts with a shock.” In fact, the opening scene is so disturbing for the average city dweller or suburbanite (or compassionate human) that the Tagesspiegel review opens with those words, and goes on for a full paragraph – sixteen lines – describing it in clinical detail, as if articulating the
shock would render it graspable. What is it that he saw?
What we all saw: In just a few seconds, a pastoral scene of a teenaged boy sprinting across an expanse of meadow turns into a cute pursuit of a fluffy sheep, evoking chuckles from the assembled pressies. Which quickly turn to gasps, “ugh”s and stunned silence as the boy catches the sheep, roughly drags the animal across the dirt, brutally trusses, and viciously slaughters it – the animal’s terror, its suffering at every violent slash of the blade across its throat and stomach, its final death agony, displayed with almost pornographic indifference and precision.
This is not your father’s coming-of-age story.
And yet, in a more atavistically elemental way, it just might be.
“One award is already assured,” read the headline in the Berliner Morgenpost, whose jury of twelve readers had determined, on the eve of the festival’s glamorous awards ceremony, that Harmony Lessons was the Competition film that had won over their hearts, minds, and artistic sensibilities. In this first film from Kazakhstan ever to run in the Competition, the jury noted, it was not only the “compelling story” that “impressed” them, but its “compelling pictures.
“In a Competition in which social misery is often captured in a blurry, quasi-authentic aesthetic, this feature-film debut of the young director Emir Baigazin fell outside the frame, with masterly image compositions running to vivid metaphors.” It was these, and more, that would win it that Silver Bear.
One striking scene early in the film shows us exuberant little boys playing, slipping and sliding along a frozen lake, framed by the sharp, skeletal blackness of leafless trees in the foreground and cast against a wintry sky, behind them a pale rainbow arcing over, and at points touching, the stark black and white. Another: the slaughter of that sheep by our young protagonist that prefigures his own power-tripping emotional evisceration and that of other students by some of their teachers, as well as the mental and physical assaults by the gang that runs a protection racket there, and by the cops who use torture against teenaged boys to elicit case-closing (and at
least here, false) confessions.
Aslan, like The Daughter’s Myrto, is a teenager contending with a banefully self-centered world he does not understand. Unlike Myrto, Aslan’s nemeses are not inchoate, but as real as the blood and guts of the sheep he callously disembowels under his grandmother’s watchful eye: gang members who see in him, a newbie naïf from the sticks, a perfect target for humiliatingly sadistic adolescent games.
Easily falling prey to them (anyone who’s survived junior high will recognize the dynamic) he finds himself persona non grata, ignored out of fear by virtually everyone who’s not a member and bedeviled by those who are, so swift to exact retribution – carried out with merciless pleasure by his henchmen – is their leader. But he, too, is answerable to a crew, one composed of seniors, who in turn report to ex-cons whose brutality is even more chilling than his own.
The first to get to class, Aslan is soon joined by another newbie, a friendly boy from the city, emotionally secure (“My parents are separated, but I don’t care. We’re grownups”) and come to live with his aunt, unaware of what awaits him at the school.
So, it seems, are the teachers – we watch one extolling Ghandi’s philosophy of meeting hatred with love, violence with peace, while another treats his students like serfs – none of them aware of the criminal enterprise going on under their noses; or if they are, do nothing. Meanwhile, Aslan conducts “scientific experiments” on cockroaches, stringing them up on a thread across his room when he’s not feeding them to his pet lizard and, as Hollywood Reporter notes, “Even more weirdly, he rigs a tiny electric chair for a death-row roach,” which he accuses of stealing food.
Aslan will fall in love with a beautiful Muslim girl who refuses to remove her head scarf in class, form friendships and alliances with two classmates who join with him in attempting to elude the gang’s voracious maw – and learn that life makes no more sense even when we seek to understand it, and live by its capricious rules.
In a press conference following the screening it was hard to tell the young filmmaker, all of 28, and his cameraman from the film’s teenaged cast members. The questions came fast and furious, with answers that were invariably illuminating, sometimes disturbingly so.
Are boys really tortured in Kazakhstan prisons?
“It’s not possible to speak to prisoners except in their own language: the language of violence,” the heretofore grinning Baigazin asserted, suddenly becoming serious, with a touch of the sententious pedagogue.
That scene showing the slaughter of the sheep is really hard on the audience – you show it very directly, no holds barred – but the violence that Aslan and his friends suffer is shown off-camera. Why?
“I wanted to show how the capacity for violence, the desire and ability to kill another person, is born.” The sheep doesn’t actually die, he assured us (“that’s mainly because my cameraman is a vegetarian”), but “nobody says anything about the cockroaches, the birds, the fish [who are also shown being hunted or caught]. I think there’s some hypocrisy here. It’s all death. Why is it,” he demanded, “that people focus on [the sheep]?”
“What I did not want to show in this film is what I felt inside. I wanted this to be a more intellectual film. I didn’t want to show the murders of the people, but I did want to show that the hero kills a sheep. Why? Because we’re all murderers in that sense.” A brief smile crossed his face as he no doubt considered his cameraman and friend, seated beside him. “Or most of us are murderers.”
Is there any hope that any of this – the brutal treatment of children, the school gangs – could change?
“It’s really hard for me to talk about hope. For me, life isn’t a dichotomy between good and evil. I think there’s just experience. And I always tell my loved ones that it’s important that you live each day to the fullest, and every bad experience as well.” A concept that would find echoes in other films and post-screening comments in the days to come. “It’s experience that will make you greater somehow. It’s all part of who you are.”
Why doesn’t anybody intervene at that school?
Baigazin’s reasons were both creatively and factually based. “Schools in the smaller towns in Kazakhstan are not like schools in the city. And, too, I didn’t want to show adults getting involved. It would have detracted from the focus of the film.”
A final question, if not a plea: Is torture really necessary?
Baigazin is, he assured us, “personally against torture. In the film, one of the jailers says, ‘I should’ve been a history teacher.’ ” (The irony of the line did not cause any visible double-takes.) “I wasn’t trying to be critical of the system. I just didn’t want to lie in that film. That was important to me.
“I was just asking a question about violence. Violence is an inescapable part of life. And we all know it.”
And sometimes the violence is as senseless as it is inescapable. Something the recipient of this year’s Homage and Honorary Golden Bear, the Berlinale’s lifetime achievement award, had seared into his consciousness from an early age. And that of the world that was the agency, or enabler of, or passive witness to his suffering, and that of millions of other innocents who
suffered inconceivable agonies along with him.
Festival director Dieter Kosslick with Claude Lanzmann. (Photo from the Berlin Film Festival website).
Claude Lanzmann’s name will forever be associated with his nine-and-a-half-hour documentary Shoah (1985), an “unparalleled masterpiece of commemorative culture” that screened at the 1986 Berlinale and went on to win more than a dozen international awards. “The preparation and film work for Shoah lasted nearly twelve years,” states the press release. “In the film, Lanzmann shows only interviews with survivors and witnesses of the Shoah [Holocaust], including perpetrators, and visits sites of extermination, vividly calling into consciousness the unfathomable horrors of the Nazi genocide.”
In an interview at the Filmhaus on Potsdamerstraße, Lanzmann spoke at length about the film to the eager attendees filling the Filmathek, describing his experiences in bringing it to fruition and its initial impact on those whose own memories of personal involvement (victim, perpetrator) – or not (bystander, descendant) – informed their reactions.
Following are highlights of the interview.
What was the screening of Shoah at the 1986 Berlinale like for you?
I have a very vivid memory; there were several screenings. The Germans were very much afraid of seeing it, and I was very much afraid of showing it. It was a double fear. The cinemas were packed.
[During the screening] I heard a strange noise: it was their knees, like castanets. Many people would go outside for a few puffs on a cigarette and come back.
The discussion [after the screening] lasted long into the night. The discussions with young Germans were very nice. It was a shock for them.
I had a mailbox at my hotel room at the Hotel Kempinski. It was stuffed with letters. Many of them were very moving. The Jewish community was invited, but they never came.
Is it different showing Shoah now?
You cannot compare it to showing it 27 years ago. I am a “star” now. There are no wrinkles on Shoah, though. It does not age. The core of Shoah remains immortal.
It opens with a text that begins: “L’action commence de nos jours” – action in the sense of [17th-century French playwright Jean] Racine. [In Racine’s plays, “... only the final stage of a prolonged crisis is described. Action on stage is all but eliminated,” according to Wikipedia.] I am sure that in 50 years, it will [still] be possible to see Shoah.
You have said that the film speaks about the past in the present tense. You don’t use documentary footage. Why?
I wrote a letter last year – Shoah has been broadcast by Turkish state TV with subtitles that are beautifully done – and there is a project in France to explain to the Muslim community what happened to the Jews (they say it’s an invention of the Jews). It was broadcast in Iran, translated beautifully into Farsi.
I wrote a letter to the president of Iran, Monsieur Ahmadinejad, who says the Holocaust is a gigantic lie – [but] I did not make Shoah as a proof, as an answer to such people.
Shoah has not a single corpse, not one. The transports, as the Nazis used to say, arrived at the camps; a few hours later, the corpses were burned. The graves are empty.
People need a place to connect, to link with the dead. The best proof of the shoah, I told Mr. Ahmadinejad, is the absence of corpses. They had special commandoes to dig out the corpses of murdered Jews and burn them. Un crime parfait.
The case of Auschwitz is different, because Auschwitz was a concentration camp and an extermination camp, too. So you have pictures taken by the SS of the Jews coming from Hungary, you can see an expression of foreboding in a woman’s face.
They died in the dark, so that nobody could testify.
How did you find the people to interview? How long did it take?
I did not want to go to Poland, but after four years of work, I did.
Poland was a fantastic shock for me. I found that a village called Treblinka did exist, and did still exist. It hit me like a bomb. I was loaded with knowledge, like a bomb. The people [there] were still connected.
In Germany it was completely different. [He was misdirected time and again whenever he asked if there was anyone willing to talk to him.] Often I heard people yell, “Call the police!”
Someone finally agreed, but when I got there, I found a note that “my son-in-law will divorce my daughter if I do this.” Another time I went to the Bodensee to meet someone, and got beat up. Someone else promised me money. I went to Braunau am Ulm – Hitler’s birthplace – and met a man there. “You are my master; I am your pupil,” he told me. “You will tell me the process of
mise à mort [how the killing was done]. You will teach me.” He died four years before the film came out. I did not know that it would be nine hours long, or that it would take 12 years.
He kept asking me, when will you finish; and I could not tell him. Nine hours, 35 minutes, and 21 seconds. I did a completely separate book on him, and a short film: Le dernier des injustes [which would premiere the next evening at the Berlinale].
Lanzmann also gave an extended interview to the Tagesspiegel. Selected excerpts follow.
What does this recognition mean for you?
It means a great deal. It moves me to receive this award from Germany, especially from this city, to which I am so closely bound. Dieter Kosslick visited me in Paris and asked me, and naturally I said yes. At the time I couldn’t yet know that they would show Sobibor, October 14, 1943,
4:00 p.m. after the [award] ceremony – a film in which in which Jews kill Germans! That is gutsy, that has class.
. . .
An entire generation has grown up since [the screening of Shoah at the 1986 Berlinale]. Do you still get letters from young people who are discovering Shoah for themselves?
Yes, the film is like a spring that doesn’t dry up. Today many see it above all as a work of art, and only then in a political-historical connection. They write that Shoah is great cinema.
At the time, the international success of Shoah was huge. In France, hundreds of thousands sat in front of their TV all night. In New York it ran for months. The resonance in Germany – in terms of numbers – was much smaller.
The WDR [West Deutsche Rundfunk, or West German Broadcasting] sent Shoah immediately to the Berlinale, although I implored them not to. I feared, correctly, that that would destroy its later chances in the cinema. But the WDR people wanted nothing to do with it. They probably wanted to put the film quickly behind them.
Behind them?
A little bit, yes. The station had already received a lot of protest letters: “Why are you showing something like this? We don’t want to talk about it anymore!”
In the meantime there have been open debates in Germany about anti-Semitism, more often than not set against the background of Israeli politics, most recently over the poem “What must be said” by Gunter Grass, or Jakob Augstein’s column on “Spiegel Online.”
I haven’t really been following that. But things like that have happened in France, too. Although the French are much less actively involved in – what do you call it? – Vergangenheitsbewältigung [dealing with the past] than the Germans.
Grass wrote, more or less, that Israel is preparing an atomic war of aggression against Iran and the West is knuckling under.
I think Israel is very sensible. It won’t attack Iran, even if Iran’s a real problem. That Grass would write something like that doesn’t particularly surprise me, however. Years ago I politely invited him to collaborate with me on my magazine, “Les temps modernes”; he didn’t even answer. Such rudeness astonished me. Maybe he hasn’t quite managed to handle his Nobel
prize.
Jakob Augstein [German journalist and publisher] was accused by the Simon Wiesenthal Center of the most heinous anti-Semitism. Among other things, because he called the Gaza Strip a “camp.”
The equivalence is stupid and unfair. Gaza is a community structured by class. There are also rich Arabs there who own a lot of land. They make no attempt to help the refugees.
. . .
Currently you’re working on a film about Benjamin Murmelstein, the “Judenälteste” [Jewish elder] of Theresienstadt. As in Sobibor, you use an interview from the Shoah research material.
I just finished it! It wasn’t yet clear to me while I was making Shoah what absolute horror is linked to Theresienstadt, what a perverse linkage of lies and naked power. It [the new one] is a film with three people: Murmelstein, with whom I spoke in 1975; me then, and me now. Such a clever, brilliant man.
In the December 1963 Neuer Zürcher Zeitung he defends himself vehemently against Hannah Arendt’s attacks against the Jewish Councils at the time of the Eichmann trial. He argues that their presence prevented even worse things from happening.
That’s right. The Eichmann trial was poorly prepared, the State’s attorney was an ignoramus, and at the end, it looked like it wasn’t the Nazis who killed the Jews, but the Jewish Council. Of course there were collaborators; they had no choice. Council members even committed joint suicide so as not to have to obey. You only have to listen to Murmelstein talk in my film about
the so-called “banality of evil.”
What do you yourself think of that phrase made famous by Hannah Arendt?
The concept is idiotic. Utterly empty and hollow. Eichmann wasn’t banal. He was totally corrupt. He belonged to a system of brigands and gangsters.
Looking at the Nazi culprits you interview in Shoah, they set themselves up to look totally banal.
Right, but they’re lying the whole time. The SS man Suchomel, for instance, declared that he only took pictures of Hitler’s euthanasia program. An audacious lie. Maybe he did, but he’d already sent men into the gas.
. . .
In your 2009 memoir “The Patagonian Hare,” you talk about the “black sun” of Auschwitz. That sun has accompanied you for decades, it never sets. If I may turn the metaphor to you yourself: Has that sun made your life brighter, or darker?
Probably both. When Shoah came out, it was like a mourning for me. I received thousands of letters, but I had no strength to respond. Even now, with “The Patagonian Hare,” I don’t respond. Yes, I have tried very hard to look directly into that black sun, like a horse with blinders on, always straight ahead. You risk becoming blind that way. But it’s opened my eyes.
A kind of light. And the darkness?
I think about death incessantly, and I don’t enjoy it. I have no wish whatsoever to die. Death is scandalous. It is truly the scandal of human existence. And utterly incomprehensible.
...
But equally inescapable. And while the unfathomable horrors of the Holocaust, and their most honored cinematic chronicler, could have no filmic follow-up, the show – the festival – did go on. And offered its 303,000-plus fans and film lovers much to open their eyes for.
For one, the latest Stephen Soderbergh Competition film, which had the ushers at the Berlinale Palast (who would normally, after a glance at our badge, smile and wave us up the two flights of fire-engine-red-carpeted stairs) fix us with baleful eye, demanding to know if we had a camera. Understandable, though: this was the press screening for the European premiere of what might be the legendary director’s last feature film.
Martin (Channing Tatum) is about to be released from prison for insider trading. Arriving home, he’s warmly greeted by his beautiful wife Emily (Rooney Mara), but can’t perform sexually. She reassures him, but we can see she’s not handling it well. Leaving the apartment, she gets into her
car – and drives straight into the wall of the parking garage.
In the hospital, we see a culturally sensitive, multilingual psychiatrist, Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law) helping a Haitian émigré, which is either a blatantly obvious way to make him appear sympathetic or an almost equally obvious way of throwing us off. (“... something artificially accented sticks out, something trying too hard to be exemplary, that keeps [our] admiration in check,” noted the Berliner Zeitung.)
Banks asks Emily if she tried to hurt herself. She tells him she can’t stay in the hospital; her husband just got out of prison, he needs her, it won’t happen again, she’ll take the meds he prescribes (he mentions serotonin), and all will be well. Of course, it won’t.
Just about everyone she knows or talks to suggests, offers samples of, or prescribes another “wonder pill” that will get her back to “normal”. At one point, she almost steps off the subway platform into the path of an oncoming train, and is pulled back at the last minute by a sharp-eyed policeman.
The side effects are getting worse. And reach a peak (with a very sharp point) when her husband comes home, calls her name, finds her chopping veggies in the kitchen, comes up behind her to affectionately take her shoulders – and she spins around and stabs him in the stomach. Fatally.
Arrested and hauled off to jail to await trial, Emily has no memory of the incident, but cannot sleep. So they give her a pill. But she refuses to take it, saying she never wants to take another one. She can get off, she is told, if she pleads guilty by reason of insanity, but she doesn’t want to be institutionalized. Banks gives her a dose of sodium pentothal to help her remember what happened, hoping her attorney will be able to use it in her defense.
His therapies having minimal success, Banks refers her to a woman colleague, Dr. Victoria Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones) whom, it will turn out, Emily not only knows, but saw professionally. Oh – and had an affair with. And that little accident with the knife? Looks like it may not have been quite the accident we thought it was.
This was Soderbergh’s fifth film to screen at the Berlinale, we learned at the press conference, more than any other festival he’s been to.
Where did the story come from? “There’s a phenomenon in the United States,” said writer and producer Scott Z. Burns, “where we’ve sort of declared a war on sadness,” and drugs have become the accepted way of dealing with it. “That’s not to say these drugs don’t help some people,” he added.
You’ve announced that this will be your last film. Why?
“Coming out of Che, I wanted this to be more fun, before taking a break,” said Soderbergh. (A “break”? So this might not be ...?)
What do you think of ads for drugs in the U.S.?
Law demurred, saying he’d met with doctors and patients to prepare for the role, all of whom testified to the drugs’ effectiveness. Personally, he acknowledged, he feels that we tend to see pills as a cure for everything. Indeed for Law, the drug-dispensing doctor was an ironic role to be cast in. “I don’t even take headache pills,” he smiled wryly, “so I’m not an expert on the subject.” That said, the staff at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York were very welcoming, he told us, showing them everything and answering all of their questions.
In making the film, “I wanted to make something lean, all muscle,” said Soderbergh, and took as his model not another filmmaker, but the painter James Whistler. “It takes endless labor,” he quoted Whistler as saying, “to eradicate all signs of labor.”
The music was gorgeous. Can you tell us something about how you chose the composer?
Thomas Newman “was one of the first calls I made,” said Soderbergh. “He was working on the Bond film at the time, though” – last year’s Skyfall, for which the composer received one of his 9 (and counting) Oscar nominations – so they had to wait.
Burns started writing the movie 10 years ago, he told us, and this version five or six years ago, “well in advance of Contagion,” another collaboration with Soderbergh and Law.
The pressbook included an extensive interview with Burns in which he elaborated on much of what he told us at the press conference. As it was available in German only, what follows is your reporter’s translation-somersault back into English of highlights of the German translation
of the interview.
Ten years ago, Burns, then part of the writing team of the TV series “Wonderland,” which examined physical illnesses from the perspective of doctors and patients, conducted weeks-long research in New York at the psychiatric department of the famous Bellevue Hospital. As part of his research, Burns held long conversations with Bellevue psychiatrists and observed their work with mentally ill patients, many of whom had a criminal past.
“That was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. There were patients who were really terrifying criminals, but also those who were so sick they no longer understood the most basic rules of civilized society, and were no longer capable of following them.”
The experience stimulated Burns’s imagination, becoming the kernel of an idea for a screenplay. “I wanted to write a thriller in the style of a film noir, one that draws the audience into the story and then has lots of twists that make them lose their way. A thriller like Double Indemnity [1944] or Body Heat [1981], but that would unfold in the world of pharmacology. I was inspired by films with clever, skillfully constructed scenarios about deception and conspiracies that played out in a world where the viewer also lived. It seems films like that are no longer being made, but I’ve always loved the genre.”
So Burns began working on the screenplay that would ultimately be the basis for Side Effects. He received support from Dr. Sasha Bardey, who at the time worked for the city of New York as associate director for forensic psychiatry. “I got to know Sasha as I was doing my research for ‘Wonderland’. What he brought to this film was essential, because Side Effects had to be firmly rooted in reality.”
And, too, Bardey was always fascinated with the idea of a thriller in which psychiatry would play a central role. “As soon as we developed the basis for this story, Scott began working on the screenplay, while I contributed the psychiatric know-how. The film illuminates where reality ends and mental illness begins, and the viewer doesn’t know whether what he’s seeing is real or not. In this regard, the film has a Hitchcock touch.”
Burns found evidence in news reports that the same medications used for depression, anxiety disorders and other psychiatric illnesses could also cause unexplained behavior in a small but significant number of patients. Frequently prescribed psychiatric drugs such as Prozac, Ambien and Zoloft were said to be responsible for a number of criminal acts, from vehicular negligent homicide to assault.
No less fascinating to Burns were stories dealing with inappropriate behavior by well-regarded doctors. “In the news there was a report about a psychiatrist who had tried to enlist one of his patients, a convicted criminal, to kill his lover. When the patient went to the police, nobody believed him: he was, after all, a crazy person. The story we tell is fundamentally different from that case, but it’s chock full of surprising turns that have the audience continually asking what’s really happening and who’s telling the truth.”
Apart from the questions confronting the audience is a story of moral ambiguity and human weakness. “Humanity is the quality that draws us into a thriller,” said Burns. “Confusion and disorientation are not only part of the plot mechanism, but its heart and spirit. It’s great to pull the rug out from under the audience’s feet.”
The intention of Side Effects is first, to entertain, and then to stimulate discussion. “We hope the viewer will say after the film: ‘I never saw that coming,’ ” commented the producer. “And we hope that afterwards, he’ll realize how long and how deeply the problem of pharmaceuticals has penetrated our society and our lives.
“Yes, the doctor must save his reputation when it looks like the pills are responsible for sweet Emily’s inexplicable murder of her beloved husband. He has to prove that she only faked her illness. And thus begins, in the best Hitchcock tradition, a destruction of all probabilities that until now have flattered the viewer into thinking how clever he is...”
The Berliner Zeitung wasn’t so sure. “The film has two problems. It isn’t a hundred percent logical. And that is a Waterloo for a perfectionist like Soderbergh. Above all, however, it’s out of place in an era that admires the cinema of truthfulness, that embraces integrity, sincerity and modesty. Soderbergh’s artfulness will give him a rough time.”
Hollywood Reporter put it more bluntly. “... Steven Soderbergh employs his dramatic know-how and superior craftsmanship to initially lure you into a story that you ultimately can’t buy into at all...”
“... has the veneer of a serious exposé...”
“... the filmmakers throw at least one plot-twist sucker-punch too many, leaving the viewer with an ‘Oh, come on’ reaction to the entire film.”
“When the surprises are sprung, there might be momentary gasps of surprise, but the impact is nothing compared to the resentment that stems from being blindsided by major information so carefully held back.”
The German papers’ barbs were subtler, the Tageszeitung opining that “Side Effects, Steven Soderbergh’s allegedly last film, sashays with almost arrogant brilliance through a whole series of genres.” Indeed, “In Side Effects, Soderbergh’s particular idea of mainstream cinema once again finds itself carried through with clinical precision.” The Tagesspiegel was a bit more ambivalent: “... First there’s solid suspense, then the story breaks out in strange caprices.”
As do at times the two isolated highway line painters in the Silver Bear-winning (for Best Director) Competition film Prince Avalanche (USA 2013), David Gordon Greene’s purposeful, personal version of the award-winning 2011 Icelandic film Either Way, the setting transposed to Texas to memorialize the catastrophic fires that destroyed some 43,000 acres of central Texas woodland in 1982.
Prince Avalanche: Paul Rudd, Director David Gordon Greene and Emil Hirsch on the red carpet. (Photo from the Berlin Film Festival's website).
Filmed in Bastrop State Park, where thousands of acres were mysteriously consumed by fire in September 2011, the film opens with a statement relating the circumstances of the as yet unsolved 1982 fires, then cuts to spectacular, spellbinding shots of blazing woodland, the flames leaping from the screen with a blustering ferocity that threatens, certainly visually, to engulf the theater.
Suddenly: stillness. Silence. Cold blackness. It is now 1985. Two figures are slowly revealed, silhouetted against an early morning sky. Dawn approaches; as the morning light begins to spread, we see they’ve packed up their stuff and are walking along the road, pushing it in front of them in a green wheelbarrow. They start to set up camp.
Alvin, the supervisor, and the younger man, Lance, are a very odd couple stuck in a working relationship of convenience and necessity potentially (if not inevitably) impeded by a personal one: Alvin is dating Lance’s sister. Which is how the kid got the job.
Despite the repetitive banality of the work, both men have dreams as different as they are: Alvin has brought along German language tapes because he wants to travel; Lance has a sack full of girlie mags.
Things get off to a rocky start when Lance tells Alvin that his sister – Alvin’s girlfriend – isn’t a virgin, and go from bad to worse when he tells him that he himself made out with Alvin’s former girlfriend. (“Probably everybody’s girlfriend by now,” he sneers.)
Going bananas from boredom (and not overly enthused with the company) Lance leaves for the weekend, convinced that the amorous adventures awaiting him in the big city will fuel him for the drudgery of the week ahead. Blissfully content, Alvin takes full advantage of the sudden freedom, lying down by the side of the road, basking in the unutterable glories of nature that surround him.
It is in scenes like this that “the cinematography of regular collaborator Tim Orr floors you with images of unexpected majesty,” writes Hollywood Reporter.... “And layered on top of it all are the moody mini-symphonies of Texas post-rock instrumentalists Explosions in the Sky,” who with composer David Wingo “create an enveloping sonic landscape.” (Wingo has been
director David Gordon Greene’s go-to guy for sound from the start of his career – they’re even neighbors, the director would later tell us – and the band is becoming much the same: this is the third film they’ve scored for him.)
In Lance’s absence Alvin has an otherworldly experience that may or may not be based in reality; the film wisely leaves it to the viewer’s imagination. In such surroundings, whose dry, stark, inferno-ravaged barrenness is juxtaposed with the tentative lushness of new life (which Orr’s camera has plucked with an awe-struck tenderness and placed in high-def close-up before our dazed, unblinking orbs, ravished by his images), anything is possible.
Exploring the area, Alvin comes across an older woman digging through the detritus of what was once her house, looking for her pilot’s license. She explains to him that she piloted aircraft during the war, and it’s an essential part of her; in a sense, proof of who she is, and was. (As
another older woman reminded us, in Before Midnight: “We are just passing through life. Everything is finite; everything will end. So we must focus on the journey.” And when memory fails have objects, which we rightly minimize when it’s intact, to help bring those days, those people back, and make them real for us again.)
As the story progresses, let us hasten to say, it is humor that predominates (“Competition comedies are rare, and not only in Berlin,” observed the Tagesspiegel. “Making it all the nicer when the Berlinale Palast is filled with hearty laughter”), the unfortunate, fate-driven combination of the two men’s personality differences and personal connections making for an
amusing hodgepodge of slapstick comedy and verbal one-upmanship. Plus the delightful intervention of a crusty elderly gent in a pickup truck who tells them never to sleep with the same woman more than three times in a row. “If you do, you’ll develop” – his mouth twisting with visible distaste as if he’d bitten into a stinkbug in a Happy Meal – “feelings.”
The press certainly developed feelings for the film. At the press conference, the shouts of photographers jostling for space were deafening: unusual for a film without A-list stars or a Hollywood director. And the room was absolutely packed. Even more mystifying, none of the conversations within listening range were in English, so the film’s popularity couldn’t be
construed as home-team support. The camera contingent in front of the podium was seventeen strong, with another half-dozen film cameras on tripods lined up along the platform behind us.
On the podium: director David Gordon Greene, actors Paul Rudd (Alvin) and Emile Hirsch (Lance), and producer Lisa Muskat.
Greene gave us some background, adding that he “wanted to film the rebirth” of the land after the fires “as a character in the film,” which the cinematography accomplished so well. “To me there is a great beauty in rebirth after a great destruction. So I wanted the film to have that as a
backdrop.”
The film is set in the late 1980s, a time “when they couldn’t be Skyping their loved ones,” where they “were more or less alone together,” said Greene. And they were as actors, too, intensifying the relationship between their characters. “Sometimes it happens that you begin to relate to one
another as the characters do,” said Paul Rudd, “and I began to relate to [Hirsch] like an older brother” and “felt protective of him in a way.”
Hirsch agreed. “We couldn’t help but relate to one another,” he said, adding that he tried to needle Paul like Lance did. “I just let the annoying side of myself out more.” Rudd liked the idea of his character trying to learn German, because “where he is, clearly is not a fit for him.” But then, he reflected, maybe Alvin is never comfortable where he is.
The mysterious woman was not in the original Icelandic movie directed by Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson but a serendipitous addition stemming from a real-life encounter with a woman named Joyce as film staff were scouting locations. Joyce had lost her home and all of her possessions in one of the fires, and was sifting through the ashes for pieces of her belongings,
including her pilot’s license. The episode “brings an emotional level that I thought was very essential” to offset the “comedic elements” of the film, said Greene. For Paul Rudd, meeting Joyce was “pretty powerful.”
But what about her place in the film? Does the woman really exist? She seems rather phantomlike.
Greene wouldn’t go there, allowing only that he had “no explanation.” (Another melancholy, enigmatic aspect to the film is that the actor who played the truck driver who doesn’t see her sitting next to him in the passenger seat, Lance Legault, was also not in the original Icelandic film – and died shortly after shooting for Prince Avalanche wrapped.)
A questioner observed that for Emile Hirsch, the role is quite different from anything he’s done before. Indeed: Hirsch’s most recent roles have been in films such as Savages, The Darkest Hour, and Killer Joe, while his most famous portrayal was as Emory University graduate Chris McCandless in Sean Penn’s 2007 multiple-award-winning Into the Wild. “Because I’m so identified with that role, I wanted to take on a role as the complete opposite. It’s nothing for people to come up to me and say, ‘Hey man, I gave up my job and went “into the wild.” I’m gonna kick your ass!’ ”
For Paul Rudd, the role of Alvin was a hard one to get into because the character is so uncomfortable with himself. “To me, it sounds like he’s almost speaking the subtitles of a foreign film” – perhaps fitting, in view of Alvin’s travel plans – so that’s the way the actor approached the role.
The music was a class act. “And we’re neighbors,” said Greene, who would tell an interviewer, “I feel like the three main characters in the movie are the performances, the camera work and the music.” As to the camera work, d.p. Tim Orr has shot all of Greene’s films “and dozens of my commercials.” Greene met Orr, as he had Wingo, at film school in North Carolina. Paul Rudd is another fan. “When I look at his shots, I feel like I’m looking at a painting.”
Not a statement one would make about French director Bruno Dumont’s Competition film, although its subject is an artist – unless the painting were by a caricaturist. One who could have drawn the inhabitants of the asylum in which the sister of poet Paul Claudel, herself a gifted painter and sculptor, would spend the last 30 years of her life, deprived of family, friends – and hope.
As she sits in the small tub into which the sisters have placed her, the woman’s eyes are not alive, but not quite dead, either: there’s a clear resentment there. The camera focuses insistently and unflatteringly on her pale, parched, angular face, her uncombed rats’ nest hair, an uncomfortable dichotomy forcing us to decide whether casting Juliette Binoche in the role is a tour de force or a tour de cartes (card trick): an exploration of an actor’s expertise, or an exploitation-cum-explosion of an audience’s expectations.
It is a question that will continue to vex us, and will be joined by a concomitant discomfort with the exploitation – or inspired utilization? – of those who inhabit the place with her, played by real patients at a psychiatric hospital.
In Camille Claudel 1915 (France 2012) Binoche portrays the gifted painter and sculptor, once described by novelist and art critic Octave Mirbeau as “A revolt against nature: a woman genius,” who was condemned by her mother and famous (younger) brother to spend what would be the last three decades of her life in a psychiatric hospital in southwestern France. Yet the film covers but three days. “You don’t have to tell someone’s whole life,” said Dumont in a press interview. “You can tell the truth in a few seconds.” In what Variety called a “measured, moving account,” that is what Dumont does.
Clamille Claudel 1915: Producer Muriel Merlin, Actor Jean-Luc Vincent, Actor Juliette Binoche, Director Bruno Dumont. (Photo from the Berlin Film Festival website).
And a bitter truth it was. We watch as Camille prepares food against the clamorous backdrop of three older women patients awaiting their meal, asking to be allowed to take hers outside, away from their gargoyle countenances, their ceaseless, cacophonous spoon-banging, gibbering, face-pulling,
snorting, shrieking, groaning, and wailing. Once outside she begins sketching on a drawing pad with obvious skill, then suddenly bursts into sobs, the camera focused on her distorted face with disturbing proximity. Difficult to take in, for the viewer as well as for the character. And, too, as Binoche would later tell us, for the actor. But also rewarding.
“[W]hile many may wonder whether Dumont has crossed the line from art to exploitation -- in his favor, the closing credits cite several mental health associations and professionals involved in the production -- the choice ultimately serves the narrative,” concluded Hollywood Reporter, “underlining the chasm separating Claudel from the other patients, and the fact that she clearly never should have been interned at all, at least in such a facility.”
Meeting with the doctor in charge of the hospital, Camille tells him vehemently that she’s been abandoned there by her family at the instigation of the painter Auguste Rodin, with whom she had an affair, on the flimsy pretext that she was single and lived with cats; thus, nothing more
than “different.” Begging the doctor to release her, she is puzzled as, rather than react to her plea, he stares at her for several interminably long seconds. But your affair with Rodin, he finally says, ended 20 years ago. And she has been there just a few months.
Trying to preserve whatever sliver of sanity and civility she has left, she walks into a room and sees a play rehearsal in progress. Here, in one of several scenes in which Dumont, Binoche and cinematographer Guillaume Deffontaines join forces to make Camille’s unbearable distress almost palpable, she smiles tolerantly like a mom at a kindergarten play as the two patients, playing Don Juan and one of his innocent targets, forget their few lines again. And again. And yet again.
Suddenly – as if a veil has been ripped from her eyes, and she only now realizes where she is, what it all means – she utters a terrible, dark, soul-rending cry, leaps to her feet, and tears herself from the room. “I can’t take it anymore!” she yells, her body wracked with sobs. “I’m no longer a human being! I can’t stand being locked up with these creatures!”
Cut to Paul, who, we are given to understand, is an unforgiving, self-righteous religious fanatic who’s condemned her because she had an abortion: Rodin’s child, which, in a bitter irony, she had wanted to keep, but aborted for the sake of the painter’s (and probably her family’s) “honor” and reputation. Rather than listen to his sister, he complains about his own troubles: his four kids, his expenses, his career challenges. Desperate to shift the discussion to the urgency of her situation, Camille accuses Rodin of trying to poison her so that he can take over her studio. Making the obligatory visit to the doctor, Paul remarks how sad it is for creative minds to become unhinged. The doctor replies that she’s doing much better, is bored out of her skull, and would like to move closer to Paris. Not being what Paul wanted to hear, he leaves, but will return, a regular visitor, until her death.
Camille, the end credits tell us, will remain at the asylum for the rest of her life. “Buried in a communal grave, her body will never be found.”
At the press conference, director Bruno Dumont was joined by Juliette Binoche, Jean-Luc Vincent (Paul Claudel) and producer Muriel Martin.
The first thing to strike someone having just emerged from the film, all gloomy and teary-eyed, is how bright, bubbly, brunette (actually, raven-haired) and cute as a button Binoche is in person. (Still cosmetic-free. And dressed all in cardinal red, with a flowing chiffon scarf, to boot.) Lest
we get the wrong impression, perhaps, she quickly got down to business: Her creative antennae, she told us, are attuned to the existential. The physical plainness of the character, the unrelieved bleakness of her situation appealed to her aesthetically: “I like having the camera fixed on the
emptiness, on the nothingness.”
For his part, Dumont was struck by the similarities between Camille and Juliette, including the fact that Binoche, too, is a painter. “Juliette’s fame corresponded to, and therefore served, Camille’s.”
In preparation for the role, Binoche read all the books on the painter she could find – “I steeped myself in this woman’s writings” – and came away struck by the “nothingness there,” but also believing that having her ability to create, and the people she loved, taken from her made Camille Claudel stronger. “At the end of her life there was a lightness about her, despite having to bear up under such untenable conditions.” For the actress, Camille’s smile at the end of the film was “a kind of deliverance, a kind of redemption,” a sign that she had found the strength to get through what lay ahead.
Binoche wasn’t the only actor in the film whose appearance and demeanor utterly belied his character’s. Jean-Luc Vincent, the cold, calculating Paul, struck us with his gentleness, his youthful light-heartedness. “I didn’t want to pass moral judgment on him, or any other judgment on him, either,” he said. “They were both artists, and very close in that way. [The nature of their relationship is] something that’s very obscure, and will remain obscure.”
Binoche had read about Camille as a teenager, and was interested in her life even then. When Dumont proposed that she play her, though, she was unsure whether she would have “the courage” to immerse herself in such a role.
“Here was a woman with an amazing talent – at seventeen, eighteen she was already an artist – who was punished in this way, twenty years [after the affair]. It’s incomprehensible,” and hard to portray. Too, one of the cruel dichotomies Camille had to live with was that “the man she had loved passionately was also the man she hated passionately; the two went hand in hand. When you’re onstage, though, in the cinema, you’re just carried away, like on a wave,” and it becomes possible to inhabit the character.
The next question went to the jarring opening scene. Why did you begin the film with all these people banging spoons? It really grates on you.
Dumont’s reply was instructive, and not altogether unexpected. “To bring the viewer into her world, to show you the grace she must exhibit to live in it. Cinema is like that. You take the audience and plunge them into brutally hard conditions, then elevate them to grace.”
Why didn’t she commit suicide, or attempt to escape?
“That wasn’t part of her agenda,” said Binoche. “Escape for her was in writing, in her letters. You can feel her freedom in her sculpture, in her art. She was a woman who was crushed, broken; almost everything she wrote was burnt at the end of her life, so we have no traces of her life. She wanted to escape, she wanted to resist till the bitter end. But they didn’t listen to her.” Dumont reminded us that the film is set in 1915 – just a year into her 30-year captivity. “She couldn’t have known that she would be there for 30 years. She still had hope.”
As would the heroine of another French film, this one set not in an asylum, but in a convent. Not the story of a middle-aged woman, but that of a young girl. And yet: while the stories are set a century and a half apart, the operative paradigm is fundamentally the same: a woman has her freedom taken away for daring to go against the prevailing (and repressive) norms of a
patriarchal society.
There is a critical difference, though. As Guillaume Nicloux, director of The Nun (La religieuse, France 2013) told an interviewer, the 1796 book by Denis Diderot on which his film is based (the most prominent film version is from 1966, by Jacques Rivette; it was banned at Cannes upon its premiere, the Tagesspiegel tells us) “is less about imprisonment and more about freedom.”
And the torments of the heroine end not with her death, but with the beginnings of a new life. (Not the way the novel ends, but then... “When I adapt a book, my approach is inspired by Hitchcock’s method: I read it, I close it, and I allow my imagination to work.” The Berliner Morgenpost was having none of it: “At the end he releases his character into a cautious ‘happy end.’ Denis Diderot would flip his wig.”)
Still, the Morgenpost allows, the themes are remarkably akin to those of his fellow countryman’s film. “The themes dealt with in ‘The Nun’ are extremely modern ones. A young woman’s rebellion in the face of authority, her relentless battle for her freedom, the right to justice, the refusal to give in, the struggle against imprisonment.” Another link: Just as Juliette Binoche was intrigued by Camille Claudel after reading her story as a teenager, so Nicloux was “marked for life” by “The Nun,” which he read as he was “discovering punk and anarchy.” As he’d seriously considered entering the seminary before that, the book was nothing less than a game-changer.
A French château, 1765. A young aristocrat reads “The Memoirs of Suzanne Simenon” by candlelight. As he reads, her words become the narrative, sometimes in voice-over, sometimes implied, of the story we will see.
A beautiful, fine-boned young woman (Pauline Étienne) seated at a harpsichord is the subject of intense scrutiny by a young man. Unnerved, she hits a wrong note. “I had a feeling, that wrong note sealed my fate.” Her fate: to be shipped off to a convent.
We see her in a group of young women dressed in sky blue gowns, long white capes and white veils flowing down their backs, each with a crown of small flowers, leaves and berries and carrying a huge white pole with candles. (At this point, several members of the press decided to carry their poles elsewhere. “If it weren’t for the luminous face of Belgian actress Pauline Etienne ... the pic would be a snoozefest of epic proportions” opined Variety.)
The priest asks Suzanne if she’s there of her own free will. She does not respond. He asks again; again, no response. Do you promise Jesus your lifelong obedience? At last a reply, if not the one he was looking for: “No.”
“I promised God to tell the truth, “ she says simply and clearly. :He’d never forgive me if I lied.” Back home, Suzanne learns she’s the offspring of an extramarital affair. Her mother begs her to “help me expiate the only sin I’ve ever committed” by joining a convent. She agrees. However, the only convent that will accept her, as luck would have it, is the one she left.
It isn’t long before we see her lying in the infirmary, having fainted after taking her vows. Asking for the mother superior, a kindly older woman who had been the girl’s confidante, she is told that the lunatic sister who attacked Suzanne on her first day (yes, another coincidental quasi-connection to the Dumont) pushed her down the well, where she’d been meditating.
Suzanne suddenly becomes very religious. Unfortunately the new sisters-in-charge, who had been seething with jealousy from the start, assume power and make Suzanne’s life a living hell (see: Mean Girls), inflicting torments and punishments large and small. One tells her that wagging tongues say the mother superior jumped into the well. (Louise Bourgoin, who plays the leader, would be asked at the press conference how it felt to do the role. “Well, I’m cruel. I actually enjoyed it,” she would tell us archly, then add, “I tried to play it in a very kind way.”)
Dressed in a burlap sack, Suzanne is thrown into a cold stone cell, dark, dank, and airless. A tiny shaft of light illuminates her desperate prayers. (How did you prepare for this difficult scene?Pauline Étienne, whose cropped dark hair and winsome smile recalled the fetching, gamine allure of the young Audrey Hepburn, would be asked at the press conference. “I didn’t. I was thrown into the dungeon, and that was that.” And Bourgoin? “I’m trying to redeem [Suzanne], to save her soul, forcing her to undress and putting her in a scratchy burlap sack.” All in all, she concluded with a grin, “It was a real pleasure playing this role.”)
At the next convent, everyone’s really nice to poor Suzanne; the mother superior (Isabelle Huppert) even tells her that her chief tormentor was one of her own students, and was vile to everyone there. There’s nice, however, and there’s ... too nice. Coming into Suzanne’s room in the middle of the night, pleading cold, she begs the girl to allow her to crawl under the covers with her, and tries to kiss her. (As Isabelle Huppert, who plays the role, would comment at the press conference: “She’s a mother superior, but what she feels for this young girl is not very superior, but makes her very human.”)
The mother superior’s confession horrifies the rector, who arranges for Suzanne’s escape. Her lawyer takes her home. “The world awaits you,” he tells her. As would a good many of us. Asked about his own religious beliefs, Nicloux said he has “a rather pantheistic view of the universe, much like Diderot ... I don’t have anything against the church and religion, but don’t
like it when people [are forced to think in a certain way].” And reiterated what he had earlier told a reporter: that the film, and the issues it presents, are timeless. Religious repression is alive and well in many parts of the world.
As a Berlin-based, Iran-born journalist would note. “I found the film so moving, so impressive because it made me think of my compatriots in Iran and elsewhere in the world,” where freedom of thought is subject to the hegemonic authority of religion-based repression, much like in the film.
Ah, Iran! Was it just two years ago that the Berlinale honored Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, imprisoned by the regime for daring to speak out against it, today still under house arrest and a 20-year filmmaking ban?
“The interest in Partovi and Iranian film is enormous,” said the Berliner Zeitung, in one of probably a dozen or more feature-length articles appearing in Berlin papers alone about the Competition film Pardé (Closed Curtain, Iran 2013) and its co-directors, Kamboziya Partovi and his longtime friend and collaborator, Jafar Panahi.
The interest was only heightened by the film itself, which would win the two filmmakers the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay and cause seasoned film journalists on both sides of the Atlantic, and no doubt beyond, to revisit their own longtime (or long forgotten) philosophical and metaphysical “friends” from film and grad school, putting them into play in reviews that would not seem out of place in a master’s thesis.
Iron gates; unpaved roads; a few trees and bushes; behind them a large, long, flat building, institutional and even prison-like. Two people get out of a car; we see them in long shot. Faint sounds of birds, water rushing; the sky is gray. Where are we?
Not where we thought (if we thought at all). It’s a home, the “iron gates” its windows, seen in close-up in the opening shot, one of several salutes to great films and filmmakers that will be threaded throughout. The inhabitant, an older man, has just arrived with a travel bag. He opens it; out pops a cute little mutt, whom he greets affectionately, and who follows him everywhere, carrying a small colored ball which he puts down expectantly whenever he catches the man’s eye. The house is large and well-appointed. Yet there are large swatches of white material – bed sheets – hanging from the ceiling. And the large windows overlooking the courtyard have been blocked with fabric.
He and the dog, “Boy,” are inseparable; they even shower together. One thing the dog would prefer not to do with him, of course, is his business, and runs to the front door, jumping excitedly against it and looking back at him. When the man instead summons him: “Do it here!” we at first think it’s because he’s still dripping from the shower and wrapped in a towel. That may – or
may not – be the case.
“Boy is a clever dog,” noted the Tagesspiegel. “He can open unlocked doors and has mastered the TV remote control.” The news tonight, however, is not good for any dog, or anyone with one: Pooches have been declared “impure under Islamic law.” Boy, sitting upright on a red sofa cushion, regards the TV with increasing indignation, the press audience regarding him in turn
with chuckles that turn to “awww... ”s. Which quickly fade as the dog turns his head, his eyes questioning: “... and can now be burned in public.” The TV screen fills with shots of dogs being viciously dragged up from the streets and thrown like sacks of garbage into vans; the dog’s demeanor has assumed the agony of a Pietà. There is silence in the cinema.
The rain is torrential. A young man and woman suddenly enter the man’s house, telling him the door was open. He demands that they leave, and tell him who they are and what they want. They respond obliquely; suddenly there’s a loud banging at the door: police. The two of them hide; the man convinces the police he hasn’t seen anybody.
The young man comes out, tells him to watch over his sister – “she has a knack for suicide” – and leaves.
The girl tells the man she knows him from somewhere. The papers? Ah, yes: he got in trouble for protecting this very dog, who’d gotten into a fight with another. He notices the scars on her wrists. “Everyone has his reasons,” she says (another tribute, of course). He tells her it’s his brother’s house: “I borrow it sometimes to come and write.” For that is what he does. A dangerous business in Iran.
It’s now late at night. We are up on the rooftop balcony. He tells her to come down: he doesn’t want to be there if she kills herself. “Depressed people don’t kill themselves,” she replies. “Life and death are the same to them.” (Number three?)
The next morning, she’s gone. Fearing that she’s committed suicide – or that she never existed and he hallucinated the whole thing – the writer reconstructs the night before from his iPod, which had been filming everything, trying to piece it all together, step by step, and make some
sort of sense out of it.
Suddenly the perspective changes. We see Jafar Panahi, who, it appears, inhabits the downstairs of the house – and a different world. All is light, bright, fresh, modern. “They were thieves, but not real,” the girl, who moves between the floors, which are more like two planes of existence, tells him. “Not the way you think.”
Back upstairs, she strides in, announces to the writer peremptorily: “You’re going to have to be dealt with differently,” forcefully draws open the drapes and rips them down, along with the white sheets. Destruction is everywhere.
Downstairs, Panahi is making tea, pouring it into tall, clear glasses with party-ready polka dots, and spots the writer’s iPod. “I kicked out the writer and his dog,” she tells him. “There’s another way out. Follow me.” She heads towards the water, walks into it – and disappears. The next day a friend comes by to tell him his window’s been broken, his house ransacked. The
girl appears on the stairs, observing.
Panahi takes out his iPod – yes, the same iPod, the writer’s iPod – and watches one of the early scenes of the writer and his dog. The girl is now upstairs with them. “No. He mustn’t do that,” the writer tells her. The camera pans to the water: Panahi is approaching it. He walks into the sea ... and disappears.
He will return. Outside, the black iron gates close behind him. And the opening scene – two people getting out of a car, seen in long shot – is now shot, and seen, from the perspective of the house.
“Pardé changes from an allegorical tale into an essay on filmmaking, with several self-reflecting images,” asserted the Tageszeitung. “So, for example, the writer filmed with his iPhone his attempts to clarify whether the front door was locked or open when the intruders came. When Panahi watches this iPhone video, he sees himself and his cameraman filming that attempt with a handheld camera and microphone... In breaking, no, shattering the fiction set before us, Pardé is exceedingly bold aesthetically.”
Bold, yes; but for the Tagesspiegel, not an entirely new storytelling technique for Panahi. “In The Mirror (Golden Leopard, Locarno 1997) the child actress protests her role as a six-year-old who gets lost in the traffic chaos of Tehran. She’s not that stupid, and besides, she’s seven, and feels herself trapped in a bogus fiction [she says]. In the same way the actors [in Closed Curtain] burst out of the frame and rebel against the story whose protagonists they are... “Fiction or reality? Is this a feature film, or a documentary for its own sake? The genres intertwine like a Möbius strip.”
The Berliner Morgenpost tried unraveling the strip a bit: “As the film proceeds, everything will have a double meaning. The young woman, for example, who bursts into his house begging for refuge from her pursuers and declared to be suicidal by her brother” is “the embodiment of free thought, and as she rips the curtains from the windows and the sheets from the Panahi posters on the wall, the meaning is clear: It’s useless to hide away; you have to [openly engage risk]... “It is therefore at once a film about courage and cowardice under oppression and a self-analysis by Panahi. That he allows an alter ego of himself [i.e. the writer] to appear has the effect of a
final layer protecting him from complete exposure. But then, after a good half of the film, a man we haven’t seen before but know suddenly runs through the house: it is Jafar Panahi. His alter ego disappears, and the hide-and-seek comes to an end, the onus is now completely on him to make it work...
“Pardé is an extremely intimate film, a psychograph made under extraordinary pressure. And it is a snapshot from the life of an artist who finds himself in his most highly creative period with many of the instruments of his craft denied him. Even ten years ago that could have rendered him mute. The digital revolution at least gives him a weak voice – and a festival like the Berlinale amplifies it for the whole world. So far, no reaction from the regime in Tehran.”
In an interview published a few days later the Berliner Zeitung asked Dieter Kosslick for an update on the situation. Kosslick had phoned Panahi the day of the screening, he said, and “he was a little depressed because he couldn’t be here. But the good news is that nothing has happened to him yet.”
He made the film in contravention of the prohibition imposed on him by the regime, which meant taking a great risk. “We wouldn’t have shown the film without his agreement. We don’t want to put him in danger,” said Kosslick. “We do, however, want to create a public space for artists who are not permitted to express themselves. And not just Panahi.”
The first question at the press conference, featuring actress Maryam Moghadam and actor / codirector Kamboziya Partovi, was the most pressing: How did you get around the filming ban? And what could be the consequences?
“It’s difficult to work,” he acknowledged, “but not being able to work is even more difficult. You become depressed. And I’m sure this comes through in the film.”
I wrote the screenplay while undergoing a depression that led me to explore an irrational world far from logical conventions, Panahi tells us in the pressbook. However, because I suddenly had recovered during the shoot, I had to try very hard not to let reason take over what my melancholic state had helped me to achieve.
Melancholy haunts this story, where each character reflects another and the line between fiction and reality is blurred.
Does Panafi actually have thoughts of suicide? “If he were thinking of suicide, he wouldn’t have been able to make the film.” That said, “If I were in his position, the thought would certainly come up.”
How does Moghadam see her role? While in some ways “this girl could be anywhere, in any country,” she replied in fluent English, its accent a blend of mid-Atlantic American and Iranian, she also “represents the dark side of his mind. The part of him that doesn’t hope anymore, that wants to give up.”
Partovi and Panahi have been friends since 1979, he told us, when Panahi was a student assisting Partovi on his first film. For this one, they had to find a cinematographer who’d be willing to take the risk, “within the framework of friendship. It took a long time to find him.
“And we had to find an actor who had a dog, and who would be willing to train with the dog, who in turn would be willing to train with the actor.” They found a dog “by accident, really.” (Of course, “the actor” wound up being Partovi. One was tempted to ask whether he adopted the little heartbreaker / scene-stealer.)
At one point the writer misplaces his keys. What is the significance of that? “The question is. ‘Did I lock myself in? Did I lock myself out? Was it me? Is it something I brought on myself? Who was the intruder in my life? I closed the door, I was on my own. There was no one else there.’ So in the film everything was closed in; everyone was closed out. (“A more agonizing,
more categorical self-questioning can hardly be imagined. Pardé tells of how art atrophies when robbed of its freedom,” observed the Tagesspiegel.)
“So within the film there were these individuals who entered, who penetrated into my world. It could be a dream. It could be somewhere where your thoughts are creative, but the way you think about something is not going to control you completely, so that others are able to intrude through those ideas. The keys symbolized that.”
Closed Curtain uses shifting genres and stories within stories to highlight why filmmaking is a necessity in a filmmaker’s life, writes Partavi. It is the imperative need to show the reality of the world we live in.
Which is not – in any way, shape, or form, philosophical, metaphysical, filmic or otherwise – the world that French film star Catherine Deneuve’s Bettie lives in. On My Way (Elle s’en va, France 2013), the latest directorial effort of Emmanuelle Bercot (perhaps best known for her role as Sue Ellen in Maïwenn’s multiple-award-winning Polisse, 2011, which Bercot also co-wrote) casts Deneuve as the divorced owner of a restaurant in Brittany whose life is going up in smoke – in more ways than one.
A road movie with nicotine for fuel, On My Way brings us one of the universally recognized grandes dames and great beauties of French cinema in a role that renders her at once unmistakable (“The lion’s mane, the wonderfully large eyes, their lids curved like Atlantic waves – it’s all still there,” raved the Berliner Zeitung) and “playing largely against type, slumming it up with trashy country bumpkins” (Hollywood Reporter).
It all begins at the restaurant. Bettie lives with her feisty mother (whom we all, observed the Berliner Morgenpost, “would have long since drowned in the lobster tank”) who tells her her lover has taken up with a 25-year-old beautician-in-training. If that weren’t bad enough, she’s out of cigarettes.
It’s beginning to look like this just isn’t her day: In hot pursuit of that nicotine fix, it’s not long before she hears a strange noise in the engine. The next thing we see, she’s standing on the shoulder of the road, trying to cadge smokes (and a tow; but, hey, priorities) from passing motorists.
The first town she reaches is quiet (another bad break: it’s Sunday, and nothing’s open). There is, however, an elderly man standing outside, enjoying a smoke; turns out he hand-rolls his own. The ravenous intensity with which Deneuve’s Bettie watches the kindly old gentleman fill, roll and seal the cigarette shouts louder than any words either she or the screenwriter could have come up with. But the story he tells her as he proceeds – that of his first love – is gentle, and engagingly told. He will be the first of a series of bit-part characters (“unknown regulars, whose Breton accents are thick enough to cut with a chainsaw,” per Hollywood Reporter) who will cross paths with the increasingly desperate Bettie.
At a bar, a group of sixtyish women spot her and invite her to join them. A more tempting invitation – and opportunity – comes from a young guy who tries to pick her up. Dark hair, cropped beard, charming manner. Hmm, why not?
That may be the only good thing to happen to her. Heading back to her car the next morning, she finds her cell battery’s died and calls home from a borrowed phone, only to be told that her mother’s been going crazy wondering where she is and her daughter’s been trying to reach her: creditors are demanding payment, and she’s needed back at the restaurant to help sort things out. Arriving at her daughter’s house, she finds it a roaring mess, but agrees to take her 11-year-old “lively and badass” (Hollywood Reporter) grandson Charly to his paternal grandfather in the southeast. On the road again, her credit card keeps getting rejected; Charly calls her a loser,
disappears when she stops for a bathroom break, mouths off some more, and settles down only (if only briefly) when she finally hauls off and slaps him. (Variety may have summed up the situation best, saying the two are “forced to drive several hundred miles together without killing each other.”)
Next stop: a lakeside hotel where she’s been invited to join a reunion of other former beauty queens (several of whom have that je ne sais quoi of former film stars; the only one your reporter could identify was A Man and a Woman’s Valérie Lagrange as Miss France 1969).
There are other adventures – Variety liked “some of Bettie’s more out-there moments, as when she ends one night in a bar, drunk and wearing a huge pink wig” – and it all ends well, “Everything’s in here,” marveled the Tagesspiegel. “Emmanuelle Bercot has mixed a wild cocktail out of road movie motifs, silver-ager comedy and mother-daughter drama.” Similarly, it
seemed to blow the Hollywood Reporter’s mind: “A bumpy and boisterous road trip / family dramedy / whatchamacallit ...”
No surprise then that at the press conference, the laughter, commentary and sotto voce back-and-forths across the podium were so plentiful and lightning quick, it was almost like being at a family reunion. But first: the photo call, held a few steps from the press room.
“You have to listen carefully to grasp what distinguishes the photo call for On My Way, with Catherine Deneuve in the leading role, from all the others till now,” reported the Berliner Zeitung. “With the exception of camera clicks, there is total silence. That our colleagues from the photo-press could be so cultivated is something we never would have thought possible; normally, it’s like the Hamburg fish market out there.” (And, one would hasten to add, when it comes to names, inside the press room, where the photogs assemble to snap shots before being shot down by the moderator, who has to watch the clock.)
“This year Catherine Deneuve will be seventy,” noted another BZ scribe. “Deneuve has of course become more space-filling, but she has remained enchanting.” Indeed: an intriguing combination of diva and earth mother, at turns drolly humorous, serious, and mock-imperious. Noting that Deneuve looked “really relaxed; and yet somehow not,” the writer hypothesized that
maybe it was “because she couldn’t smoke up there on the podium. She didn’t even have any with her, which demonstrates how hard it’s become to smoke in Europe.”
There was, however, “as a precaution, an extra fireman in the adjacent room who, in the event of endangerment by a smoking diva, could surely have taken action.” (Well, not quite: the fireman bit was just the opening joke of the moderator.) “How little evidence there is of the 69-year old’s nicotine addiction,” he added, “is to be envied.”
The film perhaps, not so much. “[With its] sentimental happy end,” complained the Berliner Zeitung, “... On My Way is the opposite of the much-praised movie Gloria, which similarly offered the Competition the portrait of an attractive divorcée, just short of sixty and hungry for life. Gloria is more sober, less sentimental, nearer the everyday, more realistic.” The Morgenpost was all of those things and more in its acidulous appraisal, rating the ending “a full nine” next to “the ten-on-a-scale-of-ten-ranked The Descendants” – the 2011 Alexander Payne movie with George Clooney, which, it must be noted, won an Oscar and 50 other international awards – “for hypocritical family-film finales.”
“That reality has become such a precious commodity in the digital age,” concluded the BZ, “gives the Chilean film a better chance.”
A better chance indeed. And one that Sebastián Lelio’s Gloria (Chile 2013) took hold of fourfold, taking home the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, the Prize of the Guild of German Art House Cinemas, a Best Director nomination for Lelio – and the Best Actress Silver Bear for Pauline Garcia. (Critic after critic called it immediately, not just among themselves or at the press conference, but in print. For Screen International’s part, Garcia “should snag best actress awards at every festival the film plays.”)
“The critical hit of the festival,” so anointed by Hollywood Reporter the day after its press screening, Gloria won praise not only for García’s portrayal, but for the sensitivity and astuteness with which the young director handles this tale of love, loss – and most significantly, reinvention – for those at an age and in an age when, in sharp contrast to the tropes that confined his mother’s generation, “a new chapter of your life can begin.”
For Gloria it begins at the Santiago dance club that has become her frequent after-hours haunt. At once subtly and uncononsciously sending and seeking signals, she finds an old friend / flame, but otherwise finds her sangria glass fruit-less. At the next night’s event she meets an attractive
older man who tells her he’s a lawyer and gives her his card. (Hollywood Reporter precisely encapsulates him as “a soft-spoken gent with a puppy-dog air,” the “owner of a small funpark offering paint-gun battles and bungee jumps” – which Gloria doesn’t find out till later – who’s “in the process of restarting his life after gastric bypass surgery and dramatic weight loss.”) They spend the night together, find their sexual attraction complemented by similar interests and life experiences, and look to be on the way to becoming a couple.
One of their similarities is a couple of grown children each, in Gloria’s case a married son with a baby boy he conscientiously consults mom about and a daughter who teaches yoga and has a Swedish ski-enthusiast boyfriend. Where they differ is in the level of their kids’ dependency on them; it is Rodolfo’s inability to cut the apron strings that will be the first snip to the ties that bind her to him.
In addition to the story of two people seeking a connection they may have once, in earlier relationships, had and lost, or perhaps never had to such an extent, the film also offers a rare peek into Chilean society. At a dinner Gloria enjoys with friends, one comments that they don’t have Facebook or twitter there, which throws a new light on the otherwise comfortable, modern,
middle-class life we’ve been shown. Later at the press conference Lelio would tell us that “the movie offers [an] encounter between the individual story ... and the collective demands for change, and for justice, and for recognition that Chilean society is living right now.”
In this “individual story,” says Hollywood Reporter, lies “a gently humorous melodrama that’s refreshingly grownup, which is a rare thing.” Quite: as Variety reminds us, “Were this an American film, the situation of a middle-aged woman refusing to give in to loneliness would likely be fashioned into a comedy starring Meryl Streep or Maggie Smith, but Lelio refuses to adopt the industry’s ageist slant, presenting a woman (magnificently played by Paulina Garcia) of undisguised sexuality seeking to be the center of life for the man she loves.”
About that “undisguised sexuality”: How will that play in conservative Chile? Sergio Hernández, who plays Rodolfo, acknowledged that “It may be shocking for some, because I think we live in a hypocritical society. But I don’t think people should be shocked, because this is reality and it’s always been there. There’s nothing new about it.
“We are showing it now – adults who are passionate, and who make love as they never did before. Perhaps better than they ever did before.” (Scattered but enthusiastic applause from the pressies.)
Lelio picked up the thread. “We live in a culture that is overly fixated on youth, in an unhealthy way. And what we wanted to say was: There is also – even more – life here than there is in youth.”
What about the character of Rodolfo? “There have been huge changes in recent times for women,” said Hernández. “And some men have got left behind, haven’t been free enough, mature enough, emotionally intelligent enough and so on to find ways of keeping up with these changes in terms of their own relationships with women. So I think this is something that is very hard for him. And it’s very hard for a lot of men.
“It’s very hard for us to show the reality of our emotional life, our passions, in our relationships. And that leads us very quickly to contradictions, because we’re trying to be all grown up and mature about things, and then this other, very childish, very peevish side comes out... We are cowards. I’m not talking about myself, of course,” he added.
The themes of disappearance and loss run through the film, said an Argentinian journalist, listing several examples and noting the well-known desaparecidos of his country. Can you comment on that?
“It’s my feeling that what she feels is not a gradual disappearance, but a gradual revelation,” said Pauline Garcia. “She is pursuing the peacock of the film,” a magnificent white creature that appears on the balcony outside the dance club at the end. “It’s a bright light: in the middle of the night, something extraordinary and bright and crystal clear appears to her, and opens its wings.”
“We are all facing what Gloria faces; some of us just face it sooner than others,” said Lelio. “And I think we all face crossroads in our lives where we can go retreat into ourselves, or we can hit the dance floor with our head held high. And I think Gloria is like Rocky [Balboa, from the 1976 film] in that regard.”
“I think we’re beginning to see a new society emerging in Chile, “ added García. “And I think this is linked to what happens in Gloria. I think that the way people look at life is sometimes gloomy and cynical. And I think there is a way of looking at the light, rather than the dark.... “What we wanted to show in Gloria is that not only can you survive those bad times – anything you go through, including a coup – you can reinvent yourself in the way you deal with life.”
As did character after character at this Berlinale; be it:
Greta Gerwig’s Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, USA 2012), whom Variety called “entirely disarming ... embraceable, unpredictable,” and for whom, Gerwig told us, taking a desk job is “heroic,” but she does it; on a personal note, Gerwig observed that “sometimes I think that if you give in too much to who you are, it can be paralyzing”;
Nobody’s Daughter Haewon (Hong Sangsoo, Republic of Korea 2013), a college student who wants to end her secret affair with her professor, but finds her dreams and her waking life increasingly indistinguishable from each other;
Director, screenwriter and lead actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s title character in the crowd-pleasing Don Jon’s Addiction, (USA 2013), a hunk who prowls the bars for action with his buds, but finds real satisfaction only in the ones between his legs – till he meets Scarlett Johansson;
The zaftig teens in the the third installment of Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise trilogy, Paradise: Hope (Austria 2013), sent to a military-style “fat camp” by parents who hope to achieve a pounds-and-paradigm shift in their kids’ junk-food, hormone-driven minds and bodies;
The computer-programming nerds at an early ‘80s convention in Andrew Bujalski’s “profoundly idiosyncratic and offbeat” (Screen International) Computer Chess (USA 2013), which “deposits the viewer into a cruddy-looking monochrome world of bad hair, hideous fashions and enormous, tanklike computers” (Variety) whose denizens see the world as being reinvented and themselves as the vanguard of a new way of life whose “coups” would be technological, but profoundly change the world as they (and we) knew it;
and others, from the indigenous cinema of the NATIVe series; to the elegant Retrospective, “The Weimar Touch,” a cooperative venture with the Museum of Modern Art which will screen those films in Manhattan April 3 to May 6; to this year’s delectable recipe for the Culinary Cinema section, “Dig Your Food,” with everything fresh from the garden accompanying food-themed films. Lots to satisfy the cinematic appetite.
Hope this report’s helped stimulate yours for the Berlin International Film Festival!
See the website.
We Need to Hear From YOU
We are always looking for film-related material for the Storyboard. Our enthusiastic and well-traveled members have written about their trips to the Cannes Film Festival, Karlovy Vary Film Festival, London Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival, Austin Film Festival, Edinburgh Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, the Palm Springs Film Festival, the Reykjavik Film Festival, the Munich Film Festival, and the Locarno Film Festival. We also heard about what it's like being an extra in the movies. Have you gone to an interesting film festival? Have a favorite place to see movies that we aren't covering in the Calendar of Events? Seen a movie that blew you away? Read a film-related book? Gone to a film seminar? Interviewed a director? Taken notes at a Q&A? Read an article about something that didn't make our local news media? Send your contributions to Storyboard and share your stories with the membership. And we sincerely thank all our contributors for this issue of Storyboard.
Calendar of Events
FILMS
American Film Institute Silver Theater
"L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema" is a series at the AFI and the National Gallery of Art. Titles in April include Emma Mae and Bless Their Little Hearts. Two special engagements Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1977) and Nothing but a Man (Michael Roemer, 1964) have multiple showings. More in May; see also the National Gallery of Art.
"Visionario: The Films of Guillermo del Toro" begins this month with Cronos, Mimic and Blade II with more in May.
"Ten Years of Film Movement" is a series of 15 international films beginning with Ben X, with the rest in May.
Mel Brooks is the subject of the AFI Life Achievement Award Retrospective. April's films are The Producers and The Twelve Chairs with more in May.
Robert Gardner is a anthropologist, ethnographer and filmmaker and was awarded the James Smithson Bicentennial Medal. A few of his documentaries are shown in April Dead Birds, Forest of Bliss, Rivers of Sand plus he will be attending in person for a program of short films on April 27 at 4:30pm.
The "Silent Cinema Showcase" films for April are Safety Last! with music by Donald Sosin, Street Angel with music by Ben Model and a program of short films starring Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy with music by the Snark Ensemble. More in May.
The "Loretta Young Centennial" continues this month. Titles in April include Man's Castle, Zoo in Budapest, Born to Be Bad, Call of the Wild, The Stranger, Midnight Mary, The Farmer's Daughter and Rachel and the Stranger.
The AFI takes part in the Korean Film Festival which concludes in April. Titles for April are A Company Man, JSA: Joint Security Area, Confession of Murder, and I'm a Cyborg But That's Okay,.
"Quentin Tarantino Retro and the Roots of Django" looks at some of Tarantino's earlier films and also some of the Spaghetti Westerns he cited as inspiration of Django Unchained. Just two films remain in April: Grindhouse and Inglourious Basterds. Only one of the spaghetti westerns remains in April: The Mercenary starring Franco Nero.
"Reel Estate: The American Home on Film" is a series co-presented by the National Building Museum. The series ends in April with Strangers When We Meet, The Landlord, Real Life, Slums of Beverly Hills, Over the Edge and Poltergeist.
"Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcock" focuses on a selection of Hitchcock films with screenplays credited to Alma Reville. The series ends in April with Strangers on a Train.
A series of films by Howard Hawks which began in February continues in April with Only Angels Have Wings, Sergeant York, Ball of Fire and the silent films The Cradle Snatchers shown with Trent's Last Case and Fazil. Both shows have live music accompaniment. Other titles in Part 2 include To Have and Have Not, Airforce, and The Big Sleep in a restored "pre-release" version. More in May.
The "Opera on Film" for April is Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin" performed by the Royal Opera House of London on April 14 at 5:00pm.
The "Ballet on Film" for April is "La Fille Mal Gardee" performed by the Royal Ballet of London on April 8 at 6:45pm.
On April 2 at 7:15pm is a one-time show of the documentary In Your Dreams: Stevie Nicks (Dave Stewart, 2012). A one-time show of Where the Trail Ends (2012) is on April 14 at 8:00pm, a documentary following the world's top mountain bikers.
Freer Gallery of Art
The 9th Korean Film Festival DC 2013 continues in April. On April 5 at 7:00pm is the re-scheduled Nameless Gangster (Yoon Jong-Bin, 2012); on April 12 at 7:00pm is a program of experimental films from Seoul's Experimental Film and Video Festival with Park Donghyun, director of the festival in attendance; on April 19 at 7:00pm is the 3D "Weird Business" (Veronica Chung and others, 2012), a trio of stories "The Suicidal Assassin, The Witch and "The First Love Keeper"; on April 21 at 1:00pm is Sleepless Night (Jang Kun-Jae, 2012) and on April 21 at 2:30pm is Juvenile Offender (Kang Yik-Wan, 2012).
On April 3 at 7:00pm is Sanguivorous (Naoki Yoshimoto, 2009) with live accompaniment by Japanese percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani and saxophonist Edward Wilkerson, Jr.
Also see AFI Silver Theater and Angelika Film Center for more films in the Korean Film Festival DC 2013.
An anime marathon "Samurai Champloo" will be shown in 26 episodes over two days starting April 13 at 11:00am and continuing April 14 at 11:00am. Shinichiro Watanabe’s landmark animated television series Samurai Champloo is a story of three eccentric outcasts traveling across Edo-era Japan in search of “the samurai who smells of sunflowers.” The program incorporates playful anachronisms, such as hip hop music and graffiti, while touching on actual elements of the era, such as ukiyo-e painting, historical figures, and Japan’s interactions with the Dutch East India Company.
"The Revolutionary Cinema of Ritwik Ghatak" begins on April 28 at 2:00pm with The Cloud-Capped Star (1960), a story of refugees from India's partition and set in East Bengal; considered Ghatak's masterpiece.
National Gallery of Art
"Universal at 100" is a series celebrating Universal Studios' 100th anniversary. On April 6 at 12:00 noon is The Mummy (Karl Freund, 1932) shown with The Murders in the Rue Morgue (Robert Florey, 1932). On April 6 at 2:30pm is The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934). On April 7 at 4:00pm is a cine-concert Traffic in Souls (George Loane Tucker, 1913) shown with Where Are My Children? (Lois Weber, 1916) with music accompaniment by Andrew Simpson. On April 13 at 2:00pm is Showboat (James Whale, 1936). On April 21 at 4:00pm is Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (Edward Cline, 1941). On April 21 at 5:30pm is Cobra Woman (Robert Siodmak, 1944). On April 27 at 2:00pm is The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1953) and on April 28 at 4:00pm is High Plains Drifter (Clint Eastwood, 1973).
"L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema" which began in March continues in April at the Gallery with three shorts programs and at the AFI. On April 6 at 4:00pm is the first set; on April 13 at 4:00pm is the second set and on April 20 at 2:00pm is the third.
Special events in April include the Washington premiere of Museum Hours (Jem Cohen, 2012) on April 14 at 4:30pm; the Washington premiere of David Driskell: In Search of the Creative Truth (Richard Kane, 2012) on April 20 at 4:00pm with an introduction by Dr. Johnnetta Cole of the National Museum of African Art. Jonas Mekas will be present in person on April 27 at 4:30pm to introduce his new works Out-Takes and Reminiscences from Germany.
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
On April 4 at 8:00pm is Gerhard Richter Painting (Corinna Belz, 2011), a documentary about the German painter. On April 11 at 8:00pm is Almayer's Folly (Chantal Akerman, 2012) loosely based on Joseph Conrad's first novel. On April 25 at 8:00pm is Turning (Charles Atlas, 2012).
National Museum of the American Indian
Shown at 11:00am and 3:00pm on most Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays in April is Sousa on the Rez: Marching to the Beat of a Different Drum (Cathleen O'Connell, 2012), a documentary about a little-known Native music scene.
On April 13 at 7:00pm is Smokin' Fish (Luke Griswold-Tergis and Cory Man, 2011). The filmmakers will both be present for discussion.
On April 25 at 6:30pm is 1932, Scars of Memory (Jeffrey L. Gould and Carlos Henriquez Consalvi, 2003), about an incident in the history of El Salvador. Jeffrey L. Gould will be present for Q&A.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
On April 17 at 6:30pm is Andersonville (John Frankenheimer, 1996), shown in conjunction with the exhibit "The Civil War and American Art."
On April 24 at 6:30pm is the second of three programs of films by Nam June Paik.
National Museum of Women in the Arts
A series of Danish films includes Italian for Beginners (Lone Sherfig, 2000) on April 7 at 1:00pm; Academy Award Winner for Best Foreign Language Film In a Better World (Susanne Bier, 2010) on April 14 at 1:00pm; and This Life (Anne-Grethe Bjarup Riis, 2012) on April 21 at 1:00pm.
Washington Jewish Community Center
On April 3 at 7:00pm are the last three episodes of "Arab Labor, Season 3," from the popular Israeli TV show.
On April 8 at 7:30pm is Six Million and One (David Fisher, 2011), a documentary about the director's family.
On April 21 at 3:00pm is The Island President (Jon Shenk, 2012) about the Maldives Islands and global warming.
Israel's Foreign Language pick for the Oscars was Fill the Void (Rama Burshtein, 2012) on April 23 at 7:30pm, about an ultra-orthodox Hasidic community.
Cast a Giant Shadow (Melville Shavelson, 1966) dramatizes Israel's struggle for independence, shown on April 29 at 7:30pm, starring Kirk Douglas and Angie Dickinson.
Goethe Institute
On April 5 at 6:30pm is a film in German (no English subtitles) Ostpreussenland (Andreas Voigt, 1995) a documentary about the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, once called Königsberg. This screening is the opening event for a symposium on "German-Polish Border Regions in Literature and Film" which is held at Georgetown University.
On April 8 at 6:30pm is Jörg Ratgeb, Painter (Bernhard Stefan, 1978) about the painter, a contemporary of Albrecht Dürer.
"Reconciling Lives" is a new series of three documentaries shown in conjunction with the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace's annual conference. On April 15 at 6:30pm is Refuge: Stories from the Selfhelp Home (Ethan Bensinger, 2012). On April 22 at 6:30pm is The Flat (Arnon Goldfinger, 2012), about the director's startling discovery when he cleaned out his grandmother's flat. On April 29 at 6:30pm is Two or Three Things I Know About Him (Malte Ludin, 2005), about the director's father, a Nazi war criminal.
On April 25 at 6:30pm is A Different World: Poland's Jews 1919-1943 (Raye Farr, 1986). Raye Farr and producer Martin Smith will be present for discussion.
On April 27 at 2:00pm is "Shorts-Courts-Kurz," a program of international short films from the 2013 Clermont-Ferrand and the 2012 Dresden festivals, two of the most significant short film festivals in France and Germany.
French Embassy
The last film in the "Francophonie" series is Saint Louis Blues (Dyana Gaye, 2009), a musical journey through Senegal, on April 9 at 7:00pm.
The Japan Information and Culture Center
On April 17 at 6:30pm is Samurai Rebellion (Masaki Kobayashi, 1967) starring Toshiro Mifune.
The National Theatre
"Montgomery Clift: Hollywood Enigma" is the subject of the newest series of films at the National Theater. On April 1 at 6:30pm is The Search (Fred Zinnemann, 1948); on April 8 at 6:30pm is The Heiress (William Wyler, 1949); on April 15 at 6:30pm is I Confess (Alfred Hitchcock, 1953); on April 22 at 6:30pm is Suddenly Last Summer (Joseph Mankiewicz, 1959) and on April 29 at 6:30pm is Wild River (Elia Kazan, 1960). One more in May.
National Archives
On April 12 at noon is a program "From the Vaults: the 1970s," a selection of films including Curious Alice (1971), an anti-drug film and We Belong to the Land (1975), a US Forest Service production.
Interamerican Development Bank
On April 8 at 6:30pm is Real Women Have Curves introduced by director Patricia Cardoso.
On April 16 at 6:30pm is Seven Boxes (Juan Carlos Maneglia and Tana Schembori) from Paraguay.
The Avalon
This month's Greek film, Nicostratos the Pelican (Oliver Horlait, 2011), is on April 3 at 8:00pm. The "Czech Lions" film for April is Gypsy (Martin Sulik, 2011) on April 10 at 8:00pm. The French Cinematheque film is My Worst Nightmare (Anne Fontaine, 2012) on April 23 at 8:00pm and the April film for "Reel Israel" is Not in Tel Aviv (Nonny Geffen, 2012) on April 24 at 8:00pm.
Italian Cultural Institute
On April 16 at 7:00pm is Our Life (Daniele Luchetti, 2010), about a construction worker who finds the remains of an illegal immigrant.
Anacostia Community Museum
On April 7 at 2:00pm is "Master Builders," a documentary featuring African American architects and their contributions to DC's architecture. A panel discussion follows the film.
On April 18 at 11:00am is Carbon for Water (Evan Abramson and Carmen Elsa Lopez, 2011), a documentary about the scarcity of safe drinking water in Kenya, with discussion after the film.
International Spy Museum
On April 17 at 6:30pm is "Cyber Terror on the Silver Screen: Skyfall's Raoul Silva," a talk by Dave Marcus who will put Silva's technology into a real world context. In addition Mark Stout will discuss how Silva's actions mirror Julian Assange and today's cyber struggles.
The Hill Center at the Old Naval Hospital
On April 7 at 12:00 noon is a film and panel discussion. Golden Slumbers (2012), a documentary about Cambodian cinema's golden age. Filmmaker Davy Chou will be present for discussion along with other panelists.
For "Documentary Fridays" is Inside the Vatican on April 5 at 7:00pm; Inside the Louvre on April 12 at 7:00pm, and Inside the Metropolitan on April 19 at 7:00pm.
Bloombars
On April 16 at 7:00pm is A Thousand Roads (Chris Eyre, 2004) about four Native Americans; a Q&A discussion follows.
Alden Theater
On April 3 at 10:00am is Dr. Strangelove, as part of the Morning Movies series.
Angelika Film Center
The Angelika Film Center takes part in the Korean Film Festival during March and April. On April 5 and 6 at 11:45pm is Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2003). See also AFI Silver Theater and Freer Gallery of Art.
Workhouse Arts Center
On April 5 at 8:00pm is "Dinner and a Movie" with Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window.
University of Maryland, Hoff Theater
A documentary Women on the Front Line (Sheema Kalbasi) is on April 2 at 5:30pm, about the struggles of Iranian women over the past 30 years. A panel discussion and Q&A follows the film.
On April 19 at 5:00pm is Funeral Parade of Roses (Toshio Matsumoto, 1969), an adaptation of Oedipus Rex set in the underground gay counterculture of 1960s Tokyo. Discussion follows the film.
Busboys and Poets
The Central Park Five is shown April 2 at 6:30pm at the 14th and V location. This documentary examines the 1989 case of five teenagers who were accused of raping a woman in Central Park. Discussion after the film.
On April 2 at 6:00pm Delicious Peace, a documentary about coffee farmers in Uganda, is shown at the 5th and K location.
Alliance Francais
On April 2 at 7:00pm is The Sugar Curtain (Camila Guzmán Urzúa, 2007) a documentary aBout growing up in Cuba during the "golden years" of the Cuban Revolution. Location: Bloombars 3222 11th Street, NW. Q&A after the film.
Solutions pour un désordre (Coline Serreau, 2010) is a documentary about agricultural practices in Brazil, India and Ukraine. Location: 2142 Wyoming Avenue, NW, April 26 at 7:00pm.
George Mason University
Rescheduled. For the Film & Media Studies Visiting Filmmakers Series on April 10 at 6:00pm is Bernardo Ruiz's Reportero. The film follows veteran reporter Sergio Haro and his colleagues at a Tijuana-based independent newsweekly as they ply their trade in one of the deadliest places in the world for the media--in Mexico more than 50 journalists have been killed or have vanished since December 2006. Bernardo Ruiz will be present for Q&A.
FILM FESTIVALS
The Washington DC International Film Festival
The 27th Annual Washington DC International Film Festival takes place April 11-21 at various locations in Washington, DC. See above.
The Korean Film Festival 2013
This festival takes place at three locations during March and April. See Freer Gallery, also the AFI Silver Theater and Angelika Film Center.
Appalachian Film Festival
The 10th anniversary festival is held April 12-13 in Huntington, West Virginia. Twelve films will be shown including documentaries and features.
The Baltimore Jewish Film Festival
Eight films will be shown in the 25th anniversary of the Baltimore Jewish Film Festival, April 4-25. They are Jews in Toons, I Shall Remember, Orchestra of Exiles, Room 514, My Best Enemy, The Fifth Heaven, Paris-Manhattan and Melting Away.
The 13th Annual Northern Virginia Jewish Film Festival
Thirteen films will screen from April 18-28, all at the Angelika Film Center except for the Opening Night film Hava Nagila: The Movie which is at the JCCNV. Other films are Life in Stills, Dorfman in Love, The World is Funny, A Bottle in the Gaza Sea, An American Tail, Hitle's Children, Kaddish for a Friend, Kinderblock 66, Koch, Let My People Go, Orchestra of Exiles and Portrait of Wally. See the website for dates and times. Passes are available.
Banned! by Communist Governments: Films They Didn't Want You To See
The V4 film series (Visegrad Four) is presented by the embassies of Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary April 4-25. On April 4 at 7:00pm at the Embassy of the Republic of Poland is Interrogation. On April 11 at 7:00pm is The Witness at the Embassy of Hungary. On April 18 at 7:00pm is I>Birdies, Orphans and Fools King at the Embassy of the Slovak Republic and on April 25 at 7:00pm is The Ear at the Embassy of the Czech Republic.
Landmark E Street Cinema
"The Studio Ghibli Collection: 1984-2004" is a program of films from Japan's famed animation studio, all of which will be shown in 35mm prints. Titles remaining in April include Porco Rosso and Spirited Away. Films are shown on Saturdays and Sundays.
FILM-RELATED LECTURES, SEMINARS & CONCERTS
Strathmore
On April 11 at 8:00pm is "Bond and Beyond," a concert of music from 50 years of James Bond films, performed by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.
The Library of Congress
"The Role of Jews in Indian Cinema" is the subject of a film talk on April 18 at noon in the James Madison Building of the Library of Congress. While the Indian cinema industry known as "Bollywood" is a global phenomenon, few people know about the formative role Indian Jews played in the development of what has become the world’s largest film industry. Filmmaker Danny Ben-Moshe will talk about the role of Jews in the Indian film industry, with clips from his new documentary film, "Shalom Bollywood: The Untold Story of Indian Cinema." Ben-Moshe is a documentary filmmaker based in Melbourne, Australia, whose films explore global issues of culture and identity and is the co-editor of "Israel, the Diaspora and Identity." His research and publications focus on Israel-Diaspora relations, anti-Semitism and Jewish identity.
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Mr. Dodd said: Two years ago if you had told me I'd be standing before you talking about film and television, I'd have wondered what you were talking about. As a father of two very young children, now seven and eleven, my movie selection was somewhat limited. In the last two years I've become almost passionate about this subject matter and industry. So today I thought it might be worthwhile in my maiden speech, if you will, to talk about this job. I've become the Irish version of Jack Valenti. Jack held this job for 38 years. Then followed Dan Glickman, my friend for seven or eight years, at the MPAA. I'm very grateful to the (MPAA) staff for their help in educating me about the industry and how important it is.
Wayne Blair: Deb[orah Mailman] who plays Gail in the film was in the original stage show with myself. She played Cynthia. We went into production in August 2011. Seven months prior to that we auditioned lots of indiginous girls in Australia. We went everywhere. We could download all the auditions from the major cities, but there are places that are not on the map. So we went and saw everyone. For instance, the girl who played Kay and the girl who played Cynthia are both Darwin girls. We saw 120-150 auditions to get down to these four. And for the role of Dave Lovelace, Chris O'Dowd, he came into it very late, a couple of months before we started pre-production. Famous actors hang onto scripts a long time before they say yes or no. With this script, it was not at that really great stage which may have affected their choices. Some people said yes, some said no straightaway. Others said can we re-think. The producers flew to LA, Bridesmaids had just come out the weekend before. I was told, "Why don't you go see this film, you might like this guy Chris O'Dowd." I saw the film and the rest was history. We tried to get this guy and we got him of course. So that's five leads. It wasn't easy at all. But once that happened everything else fell into place.
Disconnect is a film that discusses how we connect and disconnect with others including our use of the internet and social media. Reminiscent in style to the films Magnolia, Crash, and Babel, the film has three interweaving stories that deal with some teenage pranksters on a social media site, identity theft or fraud through use of chat rooms, and a reporter who thinks she can help teenagers escape a life of involvement in on-line sex. Director Henry Alex Rubin's earlier films include documentaries such as Murderball (2005) which won the Oscar for best feature documentary. This is his first fiction feature film. The film is scheduled to open April 12, 2013 in the DC metro area.
The Place Beyond the Pines is Derek Cianfrance's third film and follows his critically reviewed 2010 film Blue Valentine for which Michelle Williams received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. The Place Beyond the Pines had its world premiere at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival and is a triptych of stories. The first story stars Ryan Gosling as a motorcycle stunt man, Luke, who finds a reason to stay in the Schenectady, N.Y. area where he last performed. Eva Mendes plays Romina, a woman Luke has seen when he comes into town with the carnival. When he ends up on the wrong side of the law he runs into ambitious rookie cop Avery (Bradley Cooper). The second story deals with Avery and police and political ethics. The third story deals with their sons. The film opens in the DC metro area on April 5.