Berlin Dispatch. 10.

As this year's Berlinale enters its final days, one sign that the festival was satisfying is that I find myself making lists of the films about which I heard good things, but never ended up seeing. The list isn't finished yet - another good sign.

Looking through the catalogs of a week or more that has been dominated by glamour and by the issues raised in Michael Winterbottom's extremely valuable and timely The Road to Guantanamo (more about that one in a final dispatch), I also find myself noting films that were surprises, like Babooska, an Austrian documentary in the Forum about a family of nomadic circus performers in Italy.

Babooska is a thirty-ish woman who holds three generations of the family together as they tour towns that you've barely heard of which seem to have missed much of the beautification of Italy for the last three thousand years. She looks like a harlequin straight out of Picasso's Blue Period. When Picasso drew and painted these figures, the mood of the pictures stressed their loneliness and poverty. There wasn't much romance.

Yet in this bare-boned documentary by Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel, there's nostalgia for a kind of life that seems destined for extinction. The fringes of Italian society are not supporting these troupes as they once did, thanks to cars and television. You get the sense that the children of Babooska will have another life when they are adults.

Another character in the documentary is the landscape of a foggy cold Italy in winter. The landscape was also a character in Nights of Cabiria, which followed an androgynous young woman through episodes in a country that was stumbling to recover from the horrors of war, in which people were living in caves dug out of the ground, eating whatever they could get from charity. It was a struggle then to get to one's knees, much less one's feet. It looks magical now, more than fifty years later.

In Babooska, the landscape is mostly grey and surprisingly empty. Everyone must be inside watching television, except for the lucky few who come to see the traveling show. We're lucky that this film has preserved some of that vanishing experience.

Another work of preservation on the margins of center-stage is The Last Communist, Amir Muhammad's documentary about Chin Peng, the Malayan communist leader who led an insurgency against the British for decades in the jungles. He now lives in Thailand because he hasn't been permitted to live in Malaysia. We never see him, although we hear about the years from 1930 to the present from his peers, from those who live in the same locations now, and from singers who perform musical numbers that bring a satirical tone to nationalistic boosterism. It's an odd mix, but it suggests that they all might be better off if the communists had won.

The documentary is not alone in raising the issue of just how one goes about making a documentary today. At the core of this film is an absence. The leader who devoted most of his life to winning independence is excluded from the building of an independent country. The former "insurgents" don't seem to have all the vices that we ascribe to terrorists. How would we know them if it weren't for this film?

The same could be said for Au Dela de la Haine, the French documentary in the Forum by Olivier Meyrou about the brutal killing of a gay man, François Chenu, by skinheads and the toll of that killing on the Chenu family. François is killed by thugs who start out the evening wanting to kill a foreigner but settle for a homosexual. They beat him, and then throw his body in the river; he drowns.

The filmmaker talks to everyone but the killers as the family and lawyers on all sides prepare for the trial, which put the three skinheads in prison, and also punished the parents of one of the thugs, who was a minor. This is a film about pain and punishment, but also about the feelings of the aggrieved, dignified family as they suffered through the reconstruction of the crime and François's own suffering, a reconstruction that is necessary for any trial.

Ultimately, the Chenu family wants to ensure that a crime like this never happens to anyone else, but they see that the cultish worship of violence could easily lead another such killing. Although it ends as the parents of François write to the prisoners, hoping that prison will be a time of reflection for them and proposing future correspondence about those reflections, the sense of loss remains. Had the three not decided to throw François in the river as their punishment for his calling them cowards as he resisted them, François would be alive today. The randomness of the killing suggests that it could happen to you; the extended scrutiny of the Chenu family asks how you might respond to such a tragedy.

As spotlighted events go, Raúl Ruiz's Klimt, with John Malkovich as the Viennese painter, seems to have stayed on the margins, playing as it did in the market, although the screening that I attended was quite full. If any time was right to make and distribute a movie about the life, works and loves of Gustav Klimt, the time should be now, given the high profile now being given the Austrian Gallery's return of some of Klimt's best-known paintings to the Jewish family from whom they were confiscated ("aryanized") during the Nazi era. The paintings, including the shimmering gold Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, belonged to a wealthy family which included a woman, the subject of that portrait, who had been a patron of Klimt and is rumored to have been one of his many intimates. Nazis seized the family's real estate and art collection, as they did with the property of all Jews. Eventually some of that war loot turned up on the walls of the Belvedere, a branch of the Austrian Gallery. After years of opposing claims brought by the heirs in Austria and in the US (which went all the way to the Supreme Court), the Austrian government agreed to enter arbitration, and the arbitrator ruled that the paintings should be returned to the Bloch-Bauer heirs.

The understandable excitement about Klimt has not made a smooth transition to Klimt, although the production design does recreate an aesthete's fin-de-siecle Vienna (complete with the stuffed-shirts whom Klimt was out to shock), and John Malkovich looks very much like the Klimt that we have seen in well-traveled photographs. It's another drama set in Europe - whether and where it was made there I don't know, since the sales agent was too busy to talk to me when I dropped by his booth. All the actors speak Euro-English with varying "European" accents. Much of the story focuses on Klimt's prodigious love life and seed-spreading which resulted in lots of children. During one discussion with smirking top-hatted bourgeois, Klimt notes, "I'm on my way to a romantic assignation." The film is full of pronouncements like that one to nude models and shocked patrons. It's hard for us to know from this film what was so shocking about Klimt then. Let's assume that it's his brazen sexuality and the even more brazen sexuality of his work, since most of the women he meets do take their clothes off for him. Klimt doesn't give us much more than that, despite Malkovich's efforts to play him as a witty irresistible rebel. Perhaps that's why no one is distributing it.

Posted by dwhudson at February 18, 2006 7:33 AM