IN 1978, American suspense novelist Patricia Highsmith was invited to be jury president at the 28th Berlin International Film Festival. As noted in Andrew Wilson’s biography, Beautiful Shadow, problems rapidly ensued “They were terribly unhappy with her and she was not happy with the festival.” Discontent with the Berlinale has been expressed for a long while and I’ve heard it every year since I started attending in 2002 – which was also the debut of the current festival director, Dieter Kosslick.
The 60-year-old from the southern German town of Pforzheim, who recently had his contract extended until 2013, is a jovial figure and popular among film-makers. As Paul Thomas Anderson – who won the Berlinale’s Golden Bear for Magnolia in 2000 and Best Director for There Will Be Blood last year – put it: “Kosslick runs a film festival as if he’s having a party in his living-room”. Kosslick’s own philosophy is that he wants the festival “to have glamour, business and young people” – presumably in that order, with outstanding cinema implicitly some way further down the pecking-order.
As befits an event originally part-funded by Hollywood to provide drab post-war West Berlin with some diversionary cultural escapism, Berlinale 2009 certainly didn’t lack glitz. Red-carpet attendees included Steve Martin, Demi Moore, Keanu Reeves and Kate Winslet – plus Clive Owen and Naomi Watts from the festival’s opening film, Tom Tykwer’s not-that-bad-actually banking thriller The International.
The Berlinale’s perennial concentration on paparazzi fodder is just one source of the grumblings to be heard all over Potsdamer Platz – the very central, very modern, somewhat soulless concrete-and-glass urban intersection which plays host to the majority of the festival’s screenings and events. The byzantine ticketing structure is another. An even bigger gripe is the paucity of noteworthy pictures on view, especially in the competition section.
Then again, it was a near-identical situation last year, when the Golden Bear candidates included – in addition to There Will Be Blood – such subsequent art-house notables as Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky, Philippe Claudel’s I’ve Loved You So Long and Erick Zonca’s initially much-derided Julia, starring 2009 Berlinale jury president Tilda Swinton. There was also Lance Hammer’s fine American indie Ballast (which remains, one year on, inexplicably without British distribution) and the ultra-controversial Bear-winner from Brazil, Jose Padilha’s Elite Squad.
Joining Swinton on this year’s jury was the man some view as the closest thing Europe has got to a contemporary Patricia Highsmith figure. Sweden’s supposedly “reclusive” Henning Mankell is the bestselling creator of the taciturn detective Kurt Wallander (incarnated by Kenneth Branagh for the BBC last year.) I saw this formidable figure – who resembles a more business-like cousin of Willie Whitelaw – storm out of a screening of Peruvian competition movie The Milk of Sorrow with a thunderous countenance.
Having attended the same screening, I sympathised with his apparent displeasure. The film is the second feature from Lima-born, Barcelona resident Claudia Llosa, who made such a promising debut with Madeinusa two years ago. The Milk of Sorrow tells the story of a meek young woman born as a result of rape during Peru’s terror-filled 1980s. Desperate to avoid such a fate – despite the relative calm that now prevails in the nation – she has taken the drastic measure of inserting a potato into her vagina. In one of the film’s numerous magical-realist touches, the potato has taken root and started to “grow”. While impeccably well-intentioned and sensitively acted, The Milk of Sorrow – taking its title from a mammary infection which, according to local superstition, is passed to daughters born of violation – ultimately founders on the weight of its poetic and political conceits.
Based partly on my own lukewarm reaction, partly on Mankell’s stormy visage, I was happy to have a bet on The Milk of Sorrow winning the Golden Bear. The buzz was actually stronger for Katalin Varga, a Hungarian/Romanian drama of rural revenge by little-known British director Peter Strickland, and Germany’s Everybody Else, a Sardinia-set relationship-analysis movie from Maren Ade (solid, but a letdown after Ade’s outstanding debut, The Forest for the Trees).
Nevertheless, the 32-year-old Llosa – niece of the novelist and arch neo-liberal politician Mario Vargas Llosa – was duly named the “surprise” winner of the Golden Bear. The result was viewed as a testament to the fact few competition titles seemed to attract much critical or audience enthusiasm.
The only other contender I saw was also inflected (some might say “infected”) with magical realism. This was François Ozon’s Ricky, in which a baby born to a working-class mother in northern France turns out to be very special indeed. To say any more would be to spoil the fun of a film – freely adapted from a short story by British author Rose Tremain – that relies for much of its impact on a single big “reveal” and which, while not without its charms and diversions, ends up running out of inspiration some way before the end.
Regular Berlinale attendees soon learn that it best to sample the competition only very lightly and that more attention should be devoted to the lower-profile, non-competitive sections. This year proved no exception and saw an unusually strong sampling of retrospective material from the archives. There was a rare chance to experience classics from the Soviet Union archives, including Igor Talankin’s siege-of-Leningrad reverie, Stars of the Day.
It was also great to see two films by the Canadian-born “but Viennese by choice” John Cook: Slow Summer (1976) and Clinch (1978), both via prints immaculately restored a couple of years ago by the Austrian Film Museum. Superb encapsulations of life among Vienna’s bohemian and proletarian strata in the mid to late 1970s, they identify Cook as an unusually warm, instinctive film-maker and one who emphatically deserves a much higher profile.
My biggest delight and discovery of the entire Berlinale was lurking in the sidebar entitled “After Winter Comes Spring”, comprising a selection of seldom screened features made in the old Eastern bloc during the two decades leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Poland’s Grzegorz Krolikiewicz isn’t a household name even among hardcore cineastes. However, on the evidence of The Dancing Hawk, his 1977 mindbender, he’s greatly overdue a spell under the spotlight.
A deliriously-fragmented journey into the memories, subconscious and fantasies of a Communist Party apparatchik as he rises through the ranks to an eventual position of wholly unearned power and responsibility, this wickedly subversive exercise in deadpan agitprop disproves the misconception that cinematic masterpieces should be slow and sensible affairs.
A refreshingly bold approach to pacing and storytelling was also to be found in Mariano De Rosa’s Green Waters, the most impressive of the two dozen or so new features I caught at this year’s Berlinale and a typically adventurous choice by the programmers of the festival’s reliably consistent and provocative parallel section, the “Forum”. Green Waters distinguishes itself with an audacious combination of genre techniques – some of them not entirely “reputable” in current art-cinema circles – with a deceptively sharp psychological study.
Owing as much to lurid European horror and suspense pictures of the 1970s as the respected antecedents dutifully cited in the press notes, this deft study of a middle-aged father’s paranoid crack-up during a disastrous beach holiday is only a tweak or two away from broad mainstream comedy. It’s those crucial tweaks, however, that mark De Rosa out as perhaps the most promising young Argentinian director since Lisandro Alonso.
In the “Panorama”, the most unwieldy and hazardous segment of the whole jamboree, Julian Hernandez’s excruciatingly pretentious, 191-minute Mexican fable of desire and rebirth, Enraged Sun, Enraged Sky, was an early but perhaps unbeatable candidate for the title of 2009’s worst movie.
However, there was also Sung-Hyung Cho’s German documentary Home From Home – the bland English title for Endstation der Sehnsucht (“Final destination of longing”). This utterly beguiling and disarming film follows the fortunes of three elderly couples – the husbands German, the wives Korean – as they retire to a “German” village on South Korea’s southernmost tip. This is a textbook example of observational, humanist, non-fiction film-making – moving and hilarious by turns and of such universal appeal that it deserves a shot at theatrical exposure. Cho’s crowd-pleaser would appear to boast rather more plausible distribution possibilities and commercial prospects than the more lauded The Milk of Sorrow. But I’m not betting on it.
