The 75th Berlinale - February 13 - 23, 2025

Thanks to an invitation from filmmaker Manuel Antín, then the director of the Argentine Film Institute, who had appointed me to the federal film rating commission, I attended the Berlinale for the first time in February 1985. Berlin was still divided, and the festival was an instrument of West Germany’s soft power in a Cold War that had no end in sight: the Berlin Wall was a stark, brutal reality. I saw it for the first time from a platform in West Berlin.  It was the site, though not the filming location, where Wim Wender would set Der Himmel über Berlin / Wings of Desire (1987) two years later, in present day Potsdamer Platz, then a mined no-man’s land separating the outer and inner walls of the Mauer.

Long introduction to note that I have been coming to the festival as accredited press since its 35^th edition until today, the 75^th.   I missed a handful of times. If it were not for the hundreds of films from all over the world seen over more than three decades, my teaching would have been provincial.

Every year it is the same viewing routine: each day, three films in the Competition, and one or two in the other sections, plus press conferences with filmmakers in attendance. Film heaven.

The lights go off in the theater, the screening begins, and I am a tabula rasa ready to be won over by the magic of the movies. It is the best crash course in film esthetics that I can recommend, to actually see how film techniques work and how the dialogue with life unfolds in the dark (paraphrasing Scorsese’s 2013 essay “Persisting Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema”, a staple in all my classes).
 

It never fails that very soon the films begin a conversation with one another, or engage genres, auteurs, national cinemas, and the best case of all, with film history. 
 
One thread in half the 19 titles in the Competition is a focus on the nature and function of womanhood, as it relates to the protagonists themselves, their duties and desires, but also to their role as wives and mothers.  
 

In some cases, it is literally a case of paging Dr. Freud. Based on a novel, the British Hot Milk, about a domineering mother, afflicted by a mysterious illness(Fiona Shaw), and her caregiver daughter (Emma Mackey), written and directed by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, traces the self-awareness process of the latter, through a trip from Ireland to Spain. The changes are triggered by a lesbian attraction to a bisexual beauty (Vicky Krieps). The climax is a showdown between mother and daughter that leaves the audience in the dark (literally a black screen is the final image) about the success or failure of their separation. 
 

In the Swiss - German Mother’s Baby, Johanna Moder explores the increasing hysteria of Julia (Marie Leuenberger), a young orchestra conductor who conceives a child via IVF and is unable to take care of the baby (she forgets to feed him, drops him to the floor), to the alarm of her loving husband (Hans Löw).  Mother’s Baby systematically manipulates the relatable fears of any new mother into a horror story from the perspective of a protagonist becoming increasingly paranoid. The turning point in this descent to madness is Julia’s belief that the baby has been switched at birth; and the climax, the fantasy that it died at birth, is stored in a refrigerator and needs rescue. The last image is the ultimate nightmare: Julia carries the dead baby in her arms. That she is an unreliable narrator does not soften the emotional impact of this unflinching description of post-partum depression carried to its extreme.
 

If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, a U.S. drama written and directed by Mary Bronstein, effectively mixes the conventions of horror with melodrama. It is a psychological thrill ride about a therapist (Rose Byrne) whose husband is away on a business. She is taking care of their young daughter (heard but not shown on camera) whose mysterious illness may kill her. A dizzying crescendo of complications, including the testy confrontations with a fellow therapist, played with relish by Conan O’Brien, lead to another hard-hitting climax, but a split-second intervention of providence makes the case for motherhood as a redemptive force. 

 

Interestingly, two small scale family dramas – the German Was Marielle weiss/ What Marielle Knows, written and directed by Frédéric Hambalek, and the Argentine El mensaje / The Message, co-written and directed by Iván Fund, are stories about young girls whose mysterious spiritual powers impact their families in unforeseen ways.  

What Marielle Knows is based on the conceit that as a result of a punch, the daughter (newcomer Laeni Geiseler) of sophisticated bourgeois parents can “see” and “hear” what they are doing at all times (excellent the renowned Julia Jentsch and Felix Kramer). Briskly plotted and edited, the film asks the question: is transparency in a marriage 100% desirable, or should there be a space for the “noble lie”?  The film works partially as a morality tale with an edifying ending, and also as the portrait of a couple functioning in a sterile environment, nicely conveyed by sets and locations.  

 

In the Argentine El mensaje, directed by Iván Fund, the conceit is that 12-year-old Anika (Anika Bootz, also a newcomer) can speak to animals and her two guardians (veteran actors Mara Bestelli and Marcelo Subiotto), travelling in a modest motor home through provincial towns, set up a business delivering messages to owners about their dead or missing pets. Shot in exquisite black and white, with a lovely jazz score, the film provides no context, avoids social commentary and eschews an ethnographic approach. It slowly reveals who these people are, keeping the question, "Are they con artists?", unsolved until the revealing last line.  This road movie is in conversation with Fellini’s La Strada (1954), not only in the trope of the journey – geographical and symbolic – but also for the role played by love and grace in the road of life.
 

The Brazilian entry O último azul / The Blue Trail, co-written and directed by Gabriel Mascaro, is also a road movie, and, remarkably, one that sidesteps the legacy of Cinema Novo.  Unlike Walter Salles’ Central Station (1998), rooted in an understanding of Brazil shaped by that legacy, O último azul’s point of departure is a science fiction premise:  the government (slight jabs at the Bolsonaro administration of a few years ago) confines the elderly in a housing colony to save economic resources. In her late seventies, Tereza (Denise Weinberg), a resilient factory worker in the Amazonia, is forced to retire and ordered to check into the facility, far from family and friends. Her final wish is to fly in an airplane, so she defies the government edict and flees.

What follows are picaresque self-contained episodes, unfolding along the Amazon and its tributaries, providing a mosaic of the Brazilian society. At the end, Tereza meets a free-spirited preacher her age (Cuban actress Miriam Socarrás), the owner of a boat, who knows how to beat the system, and invites her to share the adventure. It’s a fairy-tale happy ending, a utopian solution for two feisty old women who have lost none of the zest for living. In old age ... carpe diem.

 

In a flight of historical imagination, I can picture Sigmund Freud at the Berlinale Palast this festival, scratching his forehead, still wondering: "Was will das Weib?"