Two films in the Competition section of this year’s
Berlinale offer an interesting exploration, explicit and tacit, about the state of
Europe today. This may sound
grandiloquent, even farfetched, but viewing them back to back made for an
intriguing comparison.
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| Director Danis Tannic |
Death in Sarajevo,
a Bosnian French production directed by Danis Tanovic, whose Neorealist-style drama An
Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker won the jury and actor prize at the 2013
Berlinale, is a breezily laid out exploration of the political fate of the
Balkans since the summer of 1914, when the assassination of the heir to the
Austro-Hungarian empire plunged Europe into a brutal war, until the equally
bloody breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The film posits the Balkans as a
synecdoche for Europe, and a summery of its current state of affairs. Building
on a play by the French philosopher and media celebrity Bernard-Henri Lévy, the
symbolically titled Hotel Europe,
Tanovic wrote a screenplay developing the external events and characters
orbiting around the central event of the play – an actor rehearsing a monologue in a
Sarajevo hotel.
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| Philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy |
This Bosnian French
production follows the three rules of classic theater: unity of action,
location and time. It’s a tour de force, like Victoria, a Berlinale entry last year, made up of one long take unfolding
in real time. In Death in Sarajevo, long takes prevail, with the camera trailing in
and out of corridors, offices, kitchen and dining rooms behind the key players,
in a show of Birdman’s dexterity (This
is the new international film style).
Several crises unfold in the labyrinth of the hotel (a piece of
Socialist architecture in downtown Sarajevo), two of which frame the politics
of the film. One is the making of a news show in the terrace where a sharp
Bosnian reporter is talking to historians about the events of 1914 on a
location right below them, and the radicalized Gavrilo Princip – a hero or a terrorist? – whose two pistol
shots triggered WWI. The second is the
original play by Lévy, in which a French actor rehearsing his monologue, an
argument about 20th century Europe beginning and ending in
Sarajevo.
These and other story strands – the calling of a strike by
the employees, who have not been paid for a while, since the hotel is on the
brink of bankruptcy; a mother-daughter relationship; the thugs running a strip
club in the basement; a wife pestering a coke-snorting policeman to buy a couch
- come together in the climax sequence
outside of an elevator. It is a key
moment that simultaneously replicates and turns upside down the 1914
assassination and its meanings. It makes the audience ponder the fateful chain
of events deriving from the two bullets, and what would have happened if chance
had played its cards differently: the open car driving the heir and his wife
made a wrong turn after having escaped a failed assassination attempt
earlier.
Tightly edited, with strong performances and nimble camera
work, Death in Sarajevo is a
thought-provoking film that shows the Europe of 1914 not so different from that
of today, torn by conflicts where politics and religion are interwoven . (I
think a viable literary analogy is Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 novel Soumission). There might be no single event today capable
of triggering its collapse, like the bullets of the Bosnian Serb Princip. But the
parallels and questions – as laid out in the Lévy play and born out by the
events of the film – are worth examining in light of Europe’s current state of
affairs.
An intriguing counterpoint to Death in Sarajevo is Fuocoammare/Fire
on the Sea, an Italian documentary directed by Gianfranco Rosi. Eschewing narrator and exposition, except for
a brief written preface, the film shows how migrants crossing the Mediterranean
from Africa, at immense peril, reach the island of Lampedusa (population 6,000)
in Southern Italy. This is the first of
two stories and has the looks of a procedural documentary – à la Frederick
Wiseman – with the camera following the Italian authorities dealing with the
crisis at sea, the migrants themselves traveling in harrowing conditions, and
the administrative processing of the survivors.
The second strand, along the lines of La terra trema’s Neorealism, quietly follows the lives of the folks
of Lampedusa: a DJ taking calls on radio, two elderly couples cooking,
cleaning and eating, and a lively ten-year old kid, Emmanuele, who roams the
island with slingshots, b.b. guns, learning to become a fisherman, the
centuries-old occupation of the islanders.
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| The young protagonist |
The two story lines run on parallel tracks, and do not
connect, except for the symbolism we can read in the patch the kid is
prescribed to stimulate his lazy eye. (It was a fortuitous metaphor, the
director noted in the press conference).
The only other link is the island’s doctor, whom we see tending to a
migrant pregnant woman, and also the little boy, suffering from anxiety. The physician describes the lethal dangers of
crossing the sea– oil burns, dehydration, drowning – in a heart-wrenching
monologue to the camera (“no matter how many times you see dead children, you
still feel the hole in your stomach”).
As an expository narrator at that point, he carries the moral conscience
of the film. The doctor came to Berlin
and in the press conference pointed out the solidarity of Lampedusa with the
waves of migrants. He must have sensed
the objection of many journalists, disturbed by the two-track story, where it
is possible to read the Lampedusans as indifferent to this ongoing tragedy.
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| Gianfranco Rosi |
An Italian colleague pointed out that a recent documentary
on the subject, Lampedusa in Winter
(2015), shown at Locarno last summer, succeeds in rendering a clearer picture
of this catastrophe. The first official
visit of Pope Francis was to Lampedusa in July 2013, a cri-de-coeur that had a profound media impact.
Death in Sarajevo
and Fire on the Sea reminded me in
different ways about the soul of Europe today. On my way to the Berlinale from the hotel these past days, I
walk by a building on Stressemann Strasse that has been reconditioned to host Syrian refugees. The words of Chancellor Merkel resonate in
Berlin: ‘We can do it’.
