Berlinale
This was my first film festival, and it was a very interesting experience. Movies varied greatly in quality, form The Dust of Time to Baraka, passing through things like The Pink Panther 2 (which I did not see, my dad’s exhortations on its behalf notwithstanding). An online order system was available, which you absolutely had to use if you wanted tickets for some of the most wanted showings, like the reissues of 2001 (no, I didn’t get to see it for about 30 seconds, my connection at the hotel was slow). Here’s a brief summary of the films I saw:
Miao Miao was the first movie, and a very good start. It’s Hsiao-tse Cheng first film, and it can easily be described as younger eyes looking through Kar Wai Wong’s glasses (you’d probably like it, Annie). Both lead actresses are perfect for their parts, and while the actor playing Chen Fei mopes around a bit too much, his is a secondary role – it’s the two girls who define and carry the movie.
Baraka I’ve already spoken about, as I have about The Dust of Time.
Meotjin Haru, which was translated as My Dear Enemy, was charming. This time we move from Taiwan to Korea, for a bittersweet movie that has just a couple of dashes of Woody-Allen-when-he-doesn’t-suck for flavor. The two hours went by in a flash.
Adam Resurrected should probably be called Goldblum Resurrected, since it gives him his first brilliant part since The Fly in a movie that is so odd that its closest spiritual cousin is Naked Lunch – only that in this case the oddness comes only from behavior and character, not environment and sphincter-bugs. Willem Dafoe is also great in a very subtle mix of cruelty and weakness, and for a specific scene, an inversion of his role in another movie involving a desert. Goldblum is in general not a great actor, but I do wish he would get these perfectly tailored parts more often.
The Casuarina Cove was a well-done short from Singapore about police entrapment of gay men. Recommended for its focus – director Boo Junfeng (when they said his name I thought he was named like the central character from Ashes of Time) stated before the screening that his intention was to bring to light the entrapment and homophobia issues in Singapore and that’s exactly what the short does, without taking two hours retreading the same ground until nothing will grow on it. Contrast that with End of Love, a 95-minute movie that felt like I was watching Ben-Hur in slow motion – and dubbed to Dutch. When you have little to say, you should be brief about it.
The Turkish production Mommo was very refreshing. It’s a straightforward look at the lives of two very young brothers in a village in Turkey going through a difficult period, and doesn’t make any attempt at shoehorning this into a current plot structure. The movie comes in, shows you the characters, makes you care for them, kicks you in the stomach, and then it’s over – no major turning points every 30 minutes, no grand resolutions, no initially dislikable foils turned allies, no initially likable characters with ulterior motives. It was very refreshing to see a movie that doesn’t attempt to push the same worn-out buttons.
The director and two of the main adult actors were on hand to answer questions, of which I didn’t understand a single word since it was held on Turkish and German.
The Korean Members of the Funeral is well acted and competently photographed, but otherwise pedestrian. Nothing to see here, carry on.
It was amusing to see a reissue of Basil Dearden’s Khartoum, a 1966 movie about manipulative figures using religious zealotry and faced against myopic colonialists convinced of their own righteousness, which if anything tells us that the world never changes (except for the official I will not take it upon this country to police the world bit). Heston is great, but Olivier as The Mahdi felt stilted and fake – funny that I didn’t remember perceiving it like that when I first saw it.
Finally came a presentation of Blindsight, a 2006 documentary about a group of blind Tibetan kids climbing the Himalayas. These are not former athletes who lost their sight, but six random children out of a small support center. Not only are they completely, absolutely blind, but you have to see the way blind people are treated in Tibet, even by their own family. I can only imagine the effect on your self-esteem of having been told throughout your life that you’d better have died, or that you are supposed to take whatever abuse is thrown at you – you deserve it, or you wouldn’t be blind in this life. I should get a copy, stick it in a plank of wood and use it to beat over the head anyone who says something like I can’t stop smoking, it’s too difficult or exercising is hard.
Oh, but they have time, it’s not like they have a job and family… SMACK!
The festival was a great experience, and one that I’m looking forward to repeating. Maybe the next time I won’t take a detour to Hamburg in the middle of it and get to see more films.
I just wish they didn’t hold it in winter.
