Not Borat's Kazakhstan - Harmony Lessons and other films in the Berlinale

What is so remarkable about Harmony Lessons, the Kazakh entry in the competition, is its maturity of form and astute handling of content.  The team behind it - writer/director Emir Baigazin, producer and cinematographer - is under 30, and its young teenagers in high school. 

Set in a small provincial town at the edge of the steppe, the story unfolds meticulously around a quiet kid, bullied at school by a fiendish gang, into which is planted the idea to kill.  His face a cipher, the motive behind the brutal experiments with bugs is survival.  The slaughtering of a sheep in the opening sequence, shot in observational documentary style, is a clever capsule of what is to come, and the psychological explanation of the kid’s obsession with cleanliness and control.  The audience’s sympathy never once leaves the boy.  Tightly controlling the mise-en-scène, with long takes, sparse framing and a naturalistic sound design, the film elides two carefully anticipated scenes in order to thrust the narrative into a metaphorical ending, made all the more powerful by its handling of emotions – the characters’ and ours.  Harmony Lessons depicts a faraway world made familiar by tapping on recognizable human experiences – the pains of  growing up - while draining the geographical environment of any distracting local color.  I’d love to see the film recognized by the Berlinale’s Bauer prize to emerging directors.

Another intriguing use of genre and plot is the deceptively simple Neorealist drama An Episode in the Life on an Iron Picker, a film from Bosnia, shot in five days by Danis Tanovic with a skeletal crew on a budget of 17,000 euros.  Based on an incident read in a newspaper, the film is the reenactment of a dramatic episode: a Roma family, barely making ends meet in the countryside, is forced to scrape its battered car into iron and sell its parts to pay for the pregnant mother’s surgery. 

The film begs a central question: Is it a documentary, like Nanook of the North, with the filmmaker a present-day Flaherty observing the will to survive in a harsh environment – punctuated almost poetically by recurring shots of a nuclear power plant?  Or are we dealing with the fictionalized scenario of Bicycle Thieves, an update of the unsolvable moral conundrum of people outside of the economic system?   An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker cleverly poses the issue in a way that incorporates simultaneously these mutually exclusive answers.

The gypsy couple came to the Berlinale – a study in glamour contrast and red carpets - and recounted their plight to the journalists attending the press conference.  It was a stunning experience, as if one had the chance to see Lamberto Maggiorana and family agonize again over their stolen bicycle.

Another intriguing narrative experiment was seen out of competition , Bad Blood, by the Dutch filmmaker George Sluizer.  He put together and scored the unedited footage of the project he directing when River Phoenix died suddenly in 1993.  A thriller set in the Southwest against a background of Hopi mytholohy, principal photography was three fourth done, with some key scenes still to be shot.  The film follows a Hollywood couple (Jonathan Pryce and Judie Davis) stranded in what looks like Capitol Reef in Utah, slowing falling in the hands of a disturbed angelic-looking young man of partial Indian ancestry, the then-23-year-old Phoenix with raven hair and sharply delineated features.

Not unlike Eisenstein’s unfinished Que Viva Mexico, a device outside of the diegesis gives the picture structure and meaning – in this case the director narrates the missing parts and plugs the plot gaps.  What emerges is not a remarkable film, perhaps not even a good one, but a two-fold experiment bound to satisfy the viewer looking for something different.  On the one hand, it is a horror story pitting reason and science against Indian mysticism (interestingly, the slant is far from PC).  On the other Dark Blood embodies the romantic European view of the American West – vast, majestic, dangerous –  the way Werner Herzog has shown it in Grizzly Man.  However, the logic of the box-office dictated that Sluizer followed the tropes of the horror genre and its Hitchcockian ending.  Ironically, Dark Blood became the opposite of what it was born to be:  it is a modernist work that comments on itself.  We can see why it found a slot in the Berlinale …

Jafar Panahi: To be or not to be in Berlin

The Berlinale has steadfastly taken up the cause of this Iranian filmmaker banned by the clerical regime of his country from making film for twenty years.  In 2011 Cannes showed his video diary This Is Not a Film, and yesterday the competition screened his remarkable piece of reflexive filmmaking Closed Curtain.  Panahi’s  2006 Offside, a clever comment of the status of women in Iran, shot in the guise of a documentary, had started his troubles; one cannot help but wonder what this intriguing piece –a plea of sorts to the Iranian authorities – will do to him and his collaborators in the project.

The first part of Closed Curtain works as not very subtle metaphor for his confinement – it begins with an extremely long take of a metallic curtain, seen from inside of a house by the sea.  It concerns a writer (Kamboziya Partovi, credited also as co-director), hiding his dog from extermination while receiving the unexpected visit of two fleeing siblings from a certain but mysterious danger.  Before the allegory becomes too trite, there is an unexpected narrative twist: Panahi enters the story as himself, directing a three-person crew behind the camera.  He takes over the role of the writer, while retracing his same steps and engaging in the ordinariness of daily life.  What came into sharp focus then was the ambitious nature of Closed Curtain: it is Panahi’s 8 ½, a film that reflects both the personal and creative crisis of the director, making the form of the work imitate its content. 

This is the beauty and limitation of Closed Curtain: not just a film that telegraphs its intentions  to the sympathetic audiences at the Berlinale (how can it ever be shown in Iran?) but also a gallant attempt to shape its form to express artistic repression.  It also reflects the price the director pays in a world of closed doors.

When this modernist strategy became evident, I could not help but think that the beautiful Maryam Moghadam is an Iranian rendition of Claudia Cardinale’s muse in 8 ½.  With a pinch of Pirandello thrown in the mix.

The co-director and actress came to Berlin.  As was to be expected, they were guarded and gave well-rehearsed answers to the obvious questions. 


Outside of the Berlinale Palace, a small group of human rights activists reminded those passing by, including television crews, what is at stake.   

 

In sharp focus: the films of the 63 Berlinale

The ten days of the Berlinale - this year from February 7 to 17, 2013 - are the best crash course on new works and industry trends as well as a lovely revisit of film history.  For a film professor, a gift to look forward to the rest of the year.

 Below are capsules of some of the films in the Official Competition.

 Wong Kar Wai's The Grandmaster opened the Berlinale, with the direcctor as president of the jury.  Four years in the making, this kung fu biopic tells the story of Yip Man, the martial arts teacher of Bruce Lee in Hong Kong.  It is baroque unleashed  with slow motion fury - the style and emotions of Wong Kar Wai's films strained to a curlicue.  The tumultuous history of China from the twenties to the seventies is an opulent canvas where the filmmaker and his French cinematographer embroider a series of set pieces, suffused in romanticism and nostalgia. The freshness and whimsical narrative of Chungking Express - always a hit with the students - is replaced by a highly stylized visual and sound design, dynamically punctured by split-second shots of kungfu fights captured from impossible angles. 

 The Grandmaster is a delight to watch, more candy than substance, ultimately (as per the flmmaker's comments in the press conference) a celebration of a Chinese culture.  A case, it seems to me, of  "when the legend becomes fact, print the legend  ..."

The Polish drama In the Name of ... by Malgoska Szumowska carefully builds the crisis of conscience and identity of a Catholic priest. His first sermon relays what seems will be the the core of his pastoral care among youth at risk, "there is a spark of holiness in each one".  Intriguing to me for its initial implications about broken humanity in a documentary-style shoot in rural Poland, the film becomes a study of homosexual tendencies finding an outlet.  The portrait of a good man wrestling with his demons avoids open denunciation of Church tradition as well as sensationalism;  its perspective, however, is unmistakable, made clear in the First Communion procession, shot with a hand-held camera to the effectively incongruous lyrics of the pop song "Some broken hearts never mend".  

The film is most effective in combining a seemingly improvised style dictated by the needs of location shooting with a sophisticated mise-en-scene that shows the priest as a Christ-like figure, complete with sacrificial lamb touches.  It is a finely textured portrait of  "la noche oscura del alma" , the dark night of the soul, so eloquently described by San Juan de la Cruz, but unlike Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest it won't take you to the  "tout est grace" of the ending ... just an image of the priest shot as a Caravaggio scorzo of a dead Christ.

In  Promised Land, directed by Gus Van Sant, and produced by Matt Damon, also co-writer and star of the film, we have Frank Capra revisited with a twist.  Damon begins as an Edward Arnold villain and ends up like Jimmy Stewart, complete with a public confession scene in front of the little people - in this case a small community that may become Pottersville if they give in to corporate greed and "fracking".  It was fun to see the still potent effect of the Capra narrative. 
 The Berliners went of course crazy with Matt Damon, who announced would be back in town shortly to begin shooting a film directed by George Clooney. His infectious smile won over even the most-hardened critics of this sweetly old-fashioned film.

 The contrast could not have been more brutal between this optimistic picture and the mordant take on humanity in Austrian enfant terrible Ulrich Seidl, Paradise: Hope.  The third installment of a trilogy  turning the three theological virtues upside down, the film takes place in a camp for obese teenagers.  In this savage critique of a physical concept of beauty, one can understand not only Freud in Austria, but also how alive Bunuel's surrealism is today.
 

The Romanian entry Child's Pose explores the Freudian territory of the repressive mother in a gripping story set in present day Bucharest, among the new elite of the post-Soviet era. There are knockout performances in a tightly written screenplay that weaves the moral implications of involuntary manslaughter with a nuanced description of a maternal instinct unleashed on a grown up son.

 


The German Western Gold was the most fun to watch for his  fan of the Western.  The story of a group of German immigrants lured to the Klondike for gold, is half Karl May's romantic infatuation with the American West and half Robert Altmann and Arthur Penn.  But  director Thomas Arslan really wants to be  ... Budd Boetticher, as per the press conference.   Like Meek's Cutoff , the most recent encarnation of the anti-Western, Gold favors characters  (but mercifully no mumblecore)  at the expense of action and story.  The vast expanses of British Columbia do the trick in conveying the harshness of the elements against which the beauty and pluck of the luminous Nina Hoss stand out.

Denis Diderot's rabidly anticlerical novel" La Religieuse" trades its political critique for a sexual update down a foreseeable path - convents breed you know what.   It keeps its anti-Church slant intact, becoming too explicit for its own good.  It was screened on Sunday. 

 Films about relationships find themselves with a good slot int he Berlinale. Such is the case of Before Midnight, Richard Linklater's third installment in the fictionalized portrait of a Franco-American couple (Ethan Hawkes and Julie Delpy, who also co-wrote the story), now forty-somethings facing parenthood and assorted obligations, who cannot stop whining.  Lightweight with some insights into life, couples and conflicting desires, this Woody-Allen wannabe is nicely shot on location in Greece, using long takes and credible but mostly pedestrian dialogue.  Truffaut's Antoine Doinel series comes to mind, except that the French cultivation of "le bon mot" is not part of the package. 

Steven Soderbergh's Side Effects is built on time-honored Hitckcock strategies: the innocent man wrongly accused, plot twists and turns, and the changing of the spectator's alliances. It disappoints, however, since its moral logic is severely diluted by turning a story of pharmaceutical greed into a lover's spurn.

 Finally, the post-Tarantino effect is alive and well in  The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman, by Swedish commercials director Fredrik Bond, starring Shia LaBeouf and Evan Rachel Wood, with Danish Mads Mikkelsen a super meanie.  Mixing MTV techniques with a surrealist approach to storytelling, this dishevelled  Run Lola Run set in Bucharest is so lightweight that one wonders about its selection for the competition.