Women Talking: the 2023 Berlinale

The Berlinale is back after a 2-year pandemic hiatus, with the foot on the pedal, and a solid selection of films spanning its many sections and industry-related events.  The Competition has 19 titles, of which 6 are directed by women – some established figures like Margarethe von Trotta; others well known in the international festival circuit such as the German Angela Shanelec and Emily Atef; and newcomers making quite a splash, including the Korean-American playwright Celine Song, the Mexican Lila Avilés and the Spanish Estibaliz Urresola.  It’s not difficult to see why the three last ones could very well win awards for writing, directing and acting.

Are there common threads woven into these films?  Do they fulfill the promise to be diverse as the festival proclaims? To gauge this, just check the ads for Mastercard, “proud sponsor of diversity and inclusion”, splattered in the publicity screens around the city.

I attended all those six screening as a tabula rasa, deliberately avoiding reading about the films, so that each title would have an equal opportunity to work out its magic through the tools of cinema. They were Scheherazades at 9am, 12 noon and 3pm spinning their stories with gusto.  It was a rewarding experience.

 Except for one – Music, by Shanelec – these stories are firmly planted in a woman’s point of view. Two of them may exceed the perspective of what little girls can fully comprehend – Tótem, by Avilés, and 20,000 Species of Bees, by Urresola – but they do not cross the boundaries of the female world.

 

Margarethe von Trotta’s universe is anchored by strong women, firmly planted in their political, social and historical contexts, from The Lost Honor of Katarina Bloom in the mid-70s to Rosa Luxemburg, Hannah Arendt and Hildegard von Bingen in Vision. Ingeborg Bachmann. Journey to the Desert, also written by the director, adds one more such captivating protagonist, beautifully rendered by Vicky Krieps (The Phantom Thread). Von Trotta approaches the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973), through a few years of her life, to tackle her complicated personal and artistic relationship with the Swiss novelist Max Frisch. It’s a terrific narrative treatment, alternating two timelines, skillfully edited, exploring the clash between the creative life, fidelity to a vocation and a man, and the needs of a time of one’s own. An icon for German feminists in the 1960s and 70s, the poet comes to life in the film, mercifully devoid of buzz words and ideological simplifications. It invites you see her through what the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset summed up as “yo soy yo y mi circunstancia, y si no la salvo a ella no me salvo you” (I am myself and my circumstance, and if I don’t save it, I don’t save myself).  Here, Bachmann is given those circumstances, so that the intellectual and literary European world of the 1960s illuminates her quest to be fully and tragically herself.    

 

In Music, Angela Shanelec, a filmmaker of the 1990s Berlin School, proposes another journey, this time cryptic, elided in time to retell the myth of Oedipus, unfolding in Greece and Berlin, slowly pieced together from various clues, including babies found and parents killed.  Made up of long takes, capturing the rock and sea landscape of the Peloponnesus and the woods around Berlin, and benefitting from understated topnotch performances (Aliocha Schneider and Agathe Bonitzer),Music does not make for easy viewing in the era of Tik-Tok. But the unhurried pace and initial puzzle about the story reward patience; and once it clicks that the stunning choice of Baroque music and modern songs are the sensual vehicle to explore the power of art to redeem life, the enjoyment is complete.  In the press conference, the director alluded to Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (1967) but noted the differences.  I would have liked to ask her about references to the films of Theo Angelopoulos, who makes myths and history the fabric of many of his key films, using virtuoso long takes and ellipses in time. The very complete Angelopoulos retrospective last fall at the UCLA Film and Television Archive can help make the point.

 

Emily Atef, an Iranian-born actress and director, educated in France and Berlin, who attended film school in the UK, adapted the 2011 novel “Some Day We’ll Tell Each Other Everything”, by the German writer Daniela Krien, who also wrote the film version with the director.  Keeping the original title and et in a small village in Thuringia, East Germany, in 1990, one year after the collapse of the communism, the story unfolds the sentimental education – an established literary genre that made its way to cinema – of Maria (Marlene Burow), a sensitive young woman and avid reader of Dostoevsky. The catalyst of this journey is Henner (Felix Kramer), an eccentric farmer, twenty-years her senior, also a reader full of yearnings. It is initially a sensual, and brutal, encounter that progresses over a summer. The background surrounding this complicated relationship is finely etched – the perspective of the rural Germans left behind. The title comes from the ending of The Brothers Karamazov, and brings a measure of hope to the tragic ending.  The logistics of shooting the erotic scenes were discussed in the press conference, an exchange that triggered insights into the film by the director and novelist, once again, about the power of art to navigate the wrecks of life.

 

The Mexican Totem and the Spanish 20,000 Species of Bees share a Hispanic context: the center is the family, as seen and lived through the lens of very young girls. Their observations and experiences build a portrait of a family in crisis, in the first case, and a social critique plus “trans” advocacy, as the ending makes explicit in the second. They are both works directed by newly established filmmakers, produced with financial support from private and public organizations, from their countries and internationally. The directors coax very natural performances from their young protagonists, and the use of hand-held cameras, shakily moved throughout the film, becomes a visual signature to capture the fragmented worlds these children inhabit, and the horror that shapes them.  Luis Buñuel’s legacy of throwing bombs at the family is alive and well – minus his ironic touch. 

There is, however, a a female sensibility capturing the modern zeitgeist: the mothers of these girls are ineffectual, mired in their own existential crisis, and not fully adult.  Both directors tread the path opened by the Argentine Lucrecia Martel, where disorienting soundscapes reflect psychological horrors. Interestingly, in Tótem we can see what fascinated Sergei Eisenstein in his trip to Mexico in 1930, the indigenous world and its cult of death.  It is here rendered through the clash between an elderly patriarch, unable to speak, and his grown-up children, one of whom is about to die. They adhere to beliefs of the pre-Hispanic world, and chant with their friends, in the party that marks the climax of the film, to the Aztec gods of the underworld. I cannot see the commercial prospects of these film, whose reward may be confined to recognition in the festival circuit. 

 

In the opposite side of the spectrum there is an intelligent crowd-pleaser, Past Lives, written and directed by Celine Song, a Korean-American playwright based in New York, whose debut film this is.  It’s a gripping love story spanning twenty years, through a cleverly rendered flashback, about the changes shaping the life of a Korean woman when she moves as a child from her native country to Canada and New York.  The central device framing the flashback are the protagonist and two men – one Korean, the other American - as observed by a couple, not seen but heard in voice over wondering about the possible relationships among these three.  Past Lives develops the trope of the romantic triangle in ways that will surprise and move the audience, as it effectively captures the experiences of immigration and assimilation.  The director noted in the press conference that in her first work, strongly autobiographical, and spurred by the true bar incident, she was interested in writing and directing a film about choices and the life in between.

 
Past Lives also captures the zeitgeist but from an angle different from the Hispanic films; it delves on characters focused on their careers and the emotional connections they help establish.  It never loses sight of its center: showing the compelling and devastating encounters of the protagonist with her past – rendered by Greta Lee, a stage actress, with Asian restraint.  This cliché of emotional restriction was mentioned in the press conference. 

 

Can there be a closure for a life not lived? For what may have been? In one way or another, these six films ask and respond to questions attached to the business of living.