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.