The fullness of life: 3 films at the 67th Berlinale

Unfolding from February 9 to 19, the 67 Berlinale hit the ground running on Thursday.  Already by day three, there are plenty of films to write about, from the Competition and Panorama sections I have attended so far. Two films have made a strong impression On Body and Soul (Hungary), directed by Ildikó Enyedi, and Félicité (Congo/Senegal/ France/Germany), by Alain Gomis. We teach our students that cinema, as a medium rooted in the material world, can reproduce photographically and in movement what we perceive through our senses.  The supreme challenge, we hammer in also, is to create the intangible world of the spirit through the materiality of images and sounds.  This is done, as Paul Schrader described in his study of Ozu, Bresson and Dreyer, through the ‘transcendental style’.  I should add a third film to these comments, the Austrian comedy of manners Wild Mouse, written, directed and starring Josef Hader, because in the tragicomic escalations of a lies told out of embarrassment, much is said about a more abstract topic, the state of the self in times of flux, as rendered by plot, staging and dialogue, and the rhetorical device of the synecdoche.

I watch the competition films as a tabula rasa: before the light goes off in the spectacular Berlinale Palast in Postdamer Platz, I don’t know the title, the director, the country of origin, and I haven’t read any reviews.  The film has to win me over by its formal merits and by the manner– paraphrasing Lillian Gish in the 2008 Brownlow documentary on Griffith – it deals with the human experience.  Interestingly, all three pictures, On Body and Soul, Félicité and Wild Mouse are concerned with the fullness of life, and how pain, suffering and loss are factored in the equation.

Body and Soul poetically connects the animal world – in its natural beauty, seen in a winter forest, but also in its subjugation to man, a slaughter house clinically observed  – with the realm of human interactions.  It does so in an unexpected way, mysteriously hinted in the eye-catching opening sequence. The deer and the doe in the woods stare at us, and their recurring presence is explained as a dream, uncannily shared every night by a restrained, rational middle-aged manager in the slaughter house (Géza Morcsányi), and a younger, emotionally damaged, semi-autistic new beef quality control employee (Alexandra Borbély). Their quirky, tentative courtship and romance blossoms in a wickedly funny and imaginative handling of the plot, with a sense of humor that is both dry and poignant.  The director talked about her goal of depicting the  ‘fullness of life’ , the complete picture of a person’s existence, in the well-attended press conference after the press screening. It is through the lingering close ups of the protagonists'faces that the full connection between beauty and a love that accepts flaws and pain is finally established, allegorically through the repeated dream, and dramatically in the climax, a little jewel of timing and nuance. 

Shot in verité style in Kinshasa with two simultaneous hand-held cameras, Félicité is a slow-burning portrait of a fierce woman, who ekes out a living singing in a rowdy café, reacting to the motorcycle accident of her teenage boy, with shock and numbness. There is a fully developed and class-conscious world around the proud Félicité, with the cameras capturing the chaos of Congo’s capital. The director Alain Gomis, an auteur whose art house work has been made possible through European sources, like the World Film Fund, attached to the Berlinale, roots this woman (Véro Tshanda Beya) in the realistic environment we have seen in previous generations of African filmmakers. But his contribution - à la Apichatpong Weerasethakul I thought - is to place her in a background of animistic beliefs, shown but not explained, coexisting with a French cultural and linguistic varnish.  It is proposed as a recurrent dream set in a primordial river and a strangely patterned zebra, that the protagonist embraces at the end as a source of vital strength. This surreal encounter, beyond the physical reality and reminiscent of Uncle Boonmee, triggers Felicité’s acceptance of life’s limitations.  Like On Body and Soul, the uncanny is the bridge connecting the material and the spiritual realms.  To further the connection, Gomis intercuts through the film a choir singing with great beauty; it is a Greek chorus outside of the action but integral to it. The human experience has been illuminated by the weaving of the real, the magical and the impact of musical beauty.

Wild Mouse is a comedy of manners and matrimony built on an escalation beginning with the white lie a well-established music critic in Vienna (Josef Hader) tells his wife (Pia Hierzegger), to avoid disclosing that he has lost his job in a prestigious newspaper.  The lie grows unmanageable when the protagonist – a volcan of pent-up rage underneath superb manners – embarks on a path of revenge against the newspaper publisher. The comedy is so well planted on the everyday of a well-put together intellectual that unravels, and the acting so well timed, that the absurdities piling up seem to flow effortlessly. The comedy goes beyond marital troubles to offer a satirical description of all Austrian society grappling with an unstable world that destabilizes identity and vital purpose.  The current political anxiety gripping Europe is present, but kept in the background, on television.   The matrimonial crisis of two sophisticated professionals in Vienna brings up a memory of Freud – the wife is a therapist – and is resolved at the end in a lovely metaphor of cars blocked in traffic finally able to move. Manners and what they cloak is what the film tackles with dry humor, and the ending brings a breath of optimism.

For these three very different films the common point of departure is that we are truly ourselves when we accept our warts and imperfections.  They are works of philosophical optimism.