February 15, 2005
Berlin Dispatch. 5.
Before catching up with another day at the Berlinale, two other sources of full coverage need to be mentioned. Contributors to the English-language magazine Exberliner are blogging daily from the festival; and thanks to a hook-up with with the festival's Talent Campus, indieWIRE is able to supplement its own coverage with reports from the Talent Press.
Meanwhile, a quick rundown of the day at the Competition and then more after the jump:
Like The Twilight Samurai, The Hidden Blade is based on selected tales from the popular historical fiction writer Shuhei Fujisawa. Once again, we're in the mid-19th century, the colors are subdued (yet subtly gorgeous) and the samurai warriors are coming to terms with their suddenly fallen status and shrunken incomes. For all the similarities to Twilight - and it's hardly surprising that Yamada and his producers would return to the world Fujisawa conjures, considering the tremendous box office success of Twilight in Japan as well as the Oscar nomination - there are certainly more than enough differences to justify Blade.
For one thing, Yamada plays up the effects of the edict from Edo demanding an embrace of certain western innovations; for the samurais, this means learning to handle guns and canons, march in formation and even pick up an English word or two. It's particularly through these scenes that Yamada adds a healthy dollop of humor, some of it even bordering on slapstick. At the same time - action fans beware - there is even less actual swordplay in Blade than in Twilight. Much less. We see Munezo Katagiri (marvelously played by Masatoshi Nagase) learn two swift moves, the "Devil's Claw," and of course, the "Hidden Blade," and then, he just might get a chance to use them. Once. That's it.
But obviously, swordplay is not the point here. Via the overarching love story and a bit of political intrigue towards the end, what we're offered is a window, occasionally frosted, onto a fascinating world undergoing irreversible changes.
As Ghosts opens, Nina (the worryingly fragile yet somehow haunting Julia Hummer, probably best known among German cinema fans as Jeanne in Petzold's Die innere Sicherheit [The State I Am In]) is picking up garbage in the giant park in the center of Berlin. This is evidently some sort of public services program, and later, we learn that Nina must be some sort of problem child, having been passed along from one pair of foster parents to the next.
There in the park, she sees a young woman being attacked; walks over to her. This is Toni, furiously (and winningly) played with clenched fists by Sabine Timoteo, and she doesn't have much to say about what's just happened to her. Even more than Nina, she's completely immersed in the immediate present, with seemingly no memory of any past, even that of just a few minutes ago, and no foresight or even desire for foresight into the future (though she does have a plan to catapult her life to the next level, namely, to be cast in what's probably some sort of reality show about girlfriends). Unlike Nina, she's in perpetual overdrive, most of it spent on getting herself out of the mess at hand she's created. When the girlfriend Toni was planning to audition with falls out of the picture, she taps Nina to fill her place. And since Nina's convinced that Toni is, quite literally, the girl of her dreams, she follows.
Meanwhile. A French couple of few words and many long pauses drives through the city listening to classical recordings (they have excellent taste, by the way) or haunts their hotel room. Pierre (Aurélien Recoing) is trying to ease Françoise (Marianne Basler) back into social life, but she's determined to carry on her quest for the daughter who was stolen from them in a supermarket fifteen years ago. When she spots Nina, she's convinced she's her long-lost Marie.
Nina is the only plane on which these two stories meet and she seems torn between two very iffy possible lives: with Toni as her lover or with François as her mother. But this outline barely does justice to Petzold's delicately unconventional approach to these stories (the second one inspired by his reading the Brothers Grimm tale, "The Shroud," to his daughter; a woman sees her dead child who tells her she cannot move on to the next world until she ceases her mourning). This is a film in which, at any given moment, it seems like not much is happening, really, and yet, not only is each scene engaging in multi-faceted ways, there's an odd suspense to the whole as well. It is a film on European time, not Robert McKee's.
I'm beginning to think that, having read and seen so many treatments of the rise and fall of the Third Reich, World War II and the Holocaust, I may have become overly harsh on films addressing this period that don't show me something new or reveal a unique aspect or argument that hasn't been considered a dozen times before. As Holocaust films go, Fateless is not exactly bad by any means. If you're looking to introduce a young person to history's darkest chapter, you could do a lot worse than Fateless (starting with Life is Beautiful), but you could also do better (Shoah might be a bit much all at once - or not - but in general, a doc is surely a healthier choice than any fictionalized retelling).
Based on the book by Imre Kertész, who also wrote the screenplay, Fateless tells the story of Gyuri Koves, a teenaged Hungarian Jew who's ordered off a bus, led to an area where a hundred or so other local Jews have been rounded up, very few of them aware of what lies ahead, the trains, the camps, the deterioration to the point that he's presumed dead, the gradual recovery and return.
The film's strengths: Kertész's passages read as voice-over narration; the specifically Hungarian point-of-view, and remarkably, within that narrowish angle, the clashes between Hungarian Jews who differ considerably when it comes to the question of what it means to be a Jew; the liberation itself is especially poignant in that, because we're experiencing this through Gyuri and because he's so close to death by this point, we're not sure when it actually happens. Without any tangible turning point, things simply start to get better, albeit slowly. And then, at the end, the reminder that, for survivors, returning home meant facing a wall of misconception, misunderstanding and even resentment from those who'd experienced an entirely different set of hardships - and for Hungarian and other eastern European Jews, an almost immediate confrontation with another form of persecution from the Soviets.
For all these plus points, the film's problems are a bit more essential. Pathos does not need to be underscored by Ennio Morricone. In the same vein, director Koltai, an accomplished cinematographer who's worked extensively with István Szabó, has Gyula Pados manning the camera here. Following the overlong opening in Budapest bathed in oranges and sepia, colors are sapped out for the actual core of the film in the camps, leaving black, white, green and hint of flesh tones. This overly aestheticized approach reaches its apotheosis in one shot burned in my own mind now of a prisoner, sihouetted against a barbed wire fence, the rain splashing on the mud at his feet, the sky behind him a dark and murky soup of greens and grays. And piercing it is a slice of bright orange, the low sun. It's beautiful. But I'm sorry, there's something just plain wrong, even offensive, about a beautiful shot of Buchenwald.
Posted by dwhudson at February 15, 2005 3:14 PM
Subscribe to GreenCine Daily RSS
Subscribe to GreenCine Daily by email
