Serendipity plays a big role – not all the films will be equally relevant or interesting - and sometimes just luck, or buzz or even a hunch will make you discover a gem.
The lights go off, the screen lights up and you surrender to the delights of an imaginary world. The ‘tabula rasa’ approach is one way to keep your impressions and thoughts as free as possible from expectations. Reviews and interviews, press kits and promotional materials are best left for after the viewing, to keep a sense of wonder. This 60th edition of the Berlinale - running from February 11 to 22, 2010 - is no exception.
The delights of seeing works by established directors are many – mainly, the conversations among the films themselves and the connections the viewer can trace. Discovering a new filmmaker – or one known only by reading about his reputation – is a treat that often happens in a festival.
A few examples about well-know directors who contributed to an exciting launch of the Berlinale. Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island impresses as a commercial project undertaken with gusto by an enthusiastic kid with a big box of tools.
This horror story staring a haggardly-looking Leonardo Di Caprio as a marshall with a traumatic secret is a triumph of style over content, a thrill ride about another beleaguered male at odds with the world, a muted version of taxi drivers and boxers, with a somewhat predictable narrative twist.
If Scorsese is all melodramatic flourishes – with echoes of Bernard Hermman and Hitchcockian touches – Roman Polanski’s doom and gloom The Ghostwriter, with Ewan McGregor and Pierce Brosnan, is a timely reminder of how character, story and logic function at the hands of a master at the top of his game. Based on a British novel about a thinly disguised Tony Blair, out of power and writing a tell-all memoir, The Ghostwriter is a return to the political thriller. Even though the central contention of the film comes across as silly – the British Prime Minister of the Bush second era is a puppet of the CIA – it is fun to see in McGregor a variation of Polanski’s concern with characters searching for the truth and paying dearly for it … The ghosts of Rosemary’s Baby and Tess float in the background, as does Hitchcock and his haunted houses, ugly guilts and innocents hounded by evil. Polanski himself was an absence deeply present on the red carpet of the Berlinale Palast.
Zhang Yimou’s refreshing period comedy A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Soup – his first in an international career that started in the Berlinale 20 years ago – is a funny take on the Coen brother’s own cinematic debut Blood Simple. Marrying noir elements to slapstick, bright colors, spectacular scenery and jabs at the westernization of China, the film has the potential to be an international crowd-pleaser. At the heart is the typical Zhang Yimou conflict, a woman struggling against oppression – in this case an old, rich and mean husband. But the director has strayed far from Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern and his other metaphorical critiques of the Chinese history and politics on which he built his international reputation. The anthological moment in this story of greed and revenge is a beautifully choreographed kitchen scene where the making of noodle dough is given a graceful and swift Hong Kong sword play treatment.
Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s Howl, about the writing of the Allen Ginsberg poem does not compete with these films at the level of spectacle, but it is a worthy contender for the finely crafted performance of UCLA alum James Franco.
Imaginatively combining four narrative threads and breaking up the chronology, the film illustrates the struggles of an unknown poet struggling for recognition in the 1950s. The obscenity trial to the publishers of the poem (using court records) is interspersed with a reading of Howl by Ginsberg (Franco in the trademark thick glasses of Ginsberg) in San Francisco in 1955, alternating also with a psychedelic animation of the poem and Franco again in a long interview, using a collage of published materials.
Berlin offers other film-related delights even though squeezing them between screenings is no easy task. Of interest to the academics and film buffs is the exhibit on Fritz Lang's Metropolis at the Filmmuseum, showcasing the saga of its most recent reconstruction – the 2010 restored version premiered last Friday at the Berlinale. Also not to be missed is the homage to Universal founder Carl Laemmle on the centennial of Hiawatha, the first production of his Imp company. It will be at the UFA Fabrik, a cultural center functioning in the buildings where the UFA studios had their sound labs. The UCLA Film & Television Archive provides the print.
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