Berlin Dispatch. 6.

For the second time during this year's Berlinale, I've been walloped and walloped hard at 9 o'clock in the morning. Of course, in the case of The New World, I was more or less braced for the experience; but Der Freie Wille (The Free Will) snuck up from behind and waylaid me. If I were on the jury, I'd begin lobbying now in earnest, but of course, we still have films from Pen-ek Ratanaruang, Michael Winterbottom, Claude Chabrol and Jafar Panahi to go, to name but a few.

Speaking of which, we're now at about the halfway point through the festival and as of last night, according to informal polls taken by Screen Daily and Der Tagesspiegel, international and German critics are really going for that Prairie Home Companion. To which I say, Really?! I mean, it's fun and all, but...

Well, to the films at hand. Director Matthias Glasner says he spent six years working on Der Freie Wille and the characters are mapped so deeply that this hardly comes a surprise. There was a screenplay, co-written by Glasner, Judith Angerbauer and Jürgen Vogel (who plays the lead), but the team, a tight little cast and crew, also filmed chronologically and allowed themselves to take the story where they felt it needed to go. Which, evidently, they did.

Theo (Vogel) is a dishwasher. Seaside restaurant. The others are slacking off. Theo explodes, gets fired. Stomps off to his car, races down the road. Passes a woman on a bicycle. Turns around, stops the car, prepares himself, gets out, knocks the woman off the bike and rapes her. The scene, played out in real time, is simply one of the most excruciating I've ever sat through. Theo is ferocious, methodical, cruel. This is not fantasy violence. It is not thrilling. It is pure horror.

Cut to a few years later. Theo pleads his case to a board. He looks different now, but having just seen what you've seen, you hope they'll deny him. But he is released to a sort of halfway house, a communal apartment where, with the help of an overseer who becomes a friend (André Hennicke, excellent, as always), he will try to begin a new life. At this point, the storytellers don't necessarily need us to like Theo; they just need us to want him to succeed, even if only for the sake of any woman he might meet. The storytellers have time - the film is just over two-and-a-half hours - and they take it.

Jürgen Vogel, Sabine Timoteo and Matthias Glasner

Theo seems to be winning the battle against himself, but you're not sure, and to Theo's credit, he admits he's not either. Eventually, he meets Nettie (Sabine Timoteo, an absolutely unique actress who turned heads in last year's Gespenster [Ghosts]). This brings us to the point I consider a highlight of the press conference. In separate, private conversations, Glasner asked Vogel and Timoteo, Can love save a life? Vogel shook his head, no. Timoteo answered, Sure! Of course!

These are the parallel tracks we follow along Theo's struggle toward redemption (a critic this morning said Wille is like the best of Ferrera, only without the coke; hm, sort of), all the way to the end station, where he's either achieved it or not. You know that either way, there will be one camp or the other that will object. Can rapists be rehabilitated? Glasner insists that the film does not seek to answer that question, but rather, tell the story, specifically, of Theo and Nettie. Right as he is, the arguments will flare up regardless.

Let me approach Rodrigo Moreno's El Custudio like this: Imagine it's a joke. I don't mean this to come off as belittling in any way. But imagine it's a joke with a single punchline, punched in the last few minutes with a 90-minute build-up.

With effective understatement, Julio Chavez plays a bodyguard who quietly, and invisibly to just about everyone but us, shadows Spain's Minister of Planning. Not much of a life to speak of and not much of one at home for him, either. The camera, the compositions, excellent. But might the film be more suited to a length of, say 20 or 30 minutes? Or is the full feature treatment part of the point? I'm not sure. I'm glad to have seen it, though. Once.

I skipped V for Vendetta, which will be around and isn't competing (and besides, the trailer really doesn't do it for me), and chose instead, based on Adam Hartzell's review here and at Koreanfilm.org, Shin Dong-il's debut feature, Host & Guest.

The poster reads, "Host believes in Humans, Guest believes in God." It isn't quite that simple, and the film's better for it, too. There's a lot more than a realist vs idealist, pessimist vs optimist conflict going on here; it's the story of a friendship between two very different sorts who, you might say, meet cute, but very creatively cute, and recognize immediately that they need each other. Yet Host & Guest is neither corny nor predictable.

One's a film professor, which opens the door to a slew of cinephile jokes that naturally went over very well for this festival audience; the other's a young tutor and evangelical Christian (and certain tenants of his sect may be as new to you as they were to me). Again, you know we're working towards the point where each spills a bit of himself into the other in a positive way, but Shin Dong-il has taken a fresh and entertaining route.

Posted by dwhudson at February 13, 2006 2:17 PM