February 18, 2006
Berlin Dispatch. 11.
Chatting over coffee with all sorts of folks who might not be in town again for while has taken precedence over dispatching in the past couple of days, so there's a lot to catch up with now that the Berlinale Competition has wrapped. The bullet points for what follows after the jump:
In case you've missed just how elegantly simple the tale told in Sehnsucht is, Valeska Grisebach takes us to a playground at the end, where we find children retelling it as if it were already a local legend. Man loves wife. Man falls in love with another woman, too. Man can't deal with loving two women at once; takes drastic measures.
The "local" here is a small town in Brandenburg, the vast and mostly rural state in eastern Germany with, oddly enough, a city-state - Berlin - plopped right in the middle. But there's no hint in the film that Berlin is anywhere near. It's out on these flat green fields that Markus, a locksmith, discovers a wrecked car by the side of the road. Because Markus is also in the volunteer fire brigade, he knows who to call. When his buddies arrive, you marvel at Andreas Müller's performance as Markus relates what he's found, at Müller's ability to convey a spontaneous confusion of disbelief and fascination when he hears that it looks like a husband-and-wife suicide pact and that the husband, who was driving, has survived.
And here's the thing: Neither Müller nor anyone else in the film is a professional actor. Every member of the cast is appearing in a film for the first time in their lives. And yet, thanks to Grisebach, her casting director and evidently just the right balance of rehearsal and improvisation, the three leads in particular are perfect. This is not a Bressonian exercise, though; they truly inhabit their characters. At the same time, while this approach does wonders for this film, it probably wouldn't work in just about any other genre or if the story called for the characters to display any sort of emotional state foreign to these novice actors' real lives. But within this deliberately paced telling (and this certainly isn't the only time during the fest this year that I thought, Who knew festival programmers, who see who-knows-how-many films a year, had so much patience?), Griesebach's method slices her story to its hard, realistic core and you leave the theater knowing you've just seen something unique.
The same can't be said for Romanzo Criminale. Kids, about the same age as the boys in Once Upon a Time in America, steal a car, race through a roadblock and, hiding out, choose nicknames for themselves: Lebanese (like the hash he smokes), Ice, Black, Dandy and so on. The police find them, the chase is on, and we'll be flashing back to this scene periodically over the next two-and-a-half hours. Cut to the gang as young men, moving from kidnapping to narcotics to the ruthless wiping out of all rival gangs in Rome over a period stretching from the late 70s to the early 90s. Along the way, entangled and mutually exploitive relations between the Italian Republic, the Mafia and the Red Brigades are strongly implied without ever being specifically exposed. Within the context of the Berlinale, the film unreels like a widescreen made-for-TV movie, which isn't to say, for all its clichés, that it's not without its mildly engaging passages here and there.
Particularly at a festival, and particularly when awards and first reviews and all are at stake, you (or at least I) begin each screening really rooting for the film up there. During the first ten or fifteen minutes of Candy, I was getting excited. The music, the camera, Ledger, Cornish, Rush - things were meshing beautifully. All too soon, though, you realize that this story of a pair of junkies trying to shake their habit has nowhere to go, or rather, thinks it has nowhere to go. After all, as Trainspotting and Requiem for a Dream have proven, there actually are fresh things to be said about the one-way downward spiral of heroin addiction. Sadly, though Candy is based on the novel by Luke Davies, all Armstrong has to add is a dose of maudlin sentimentality.
At least the soundtrack is bearable, which is more than can be said for the grating and repetitive and loud violin and piano nonsense in Isabella. Kind of strange for a movie that serves more or less as a vehicle for a pop star. Interestingly, the Macau of Isabella has the drenched palette - if not the otherworldly beauty - of Christopher Doyle's work for Wong Kar-wai, whereas the Macau of Invisible Waves, for which Doyle actually was behind the camera, is drained and drab by comparison. Nothing wrong, really, with the decisions in either case, but it does suggest why the German papers have taken to calling Isabella "Wong Kar-wai Lite."
Chapman To plays a corrupt cop, a womanizer, a downright lecher, as he himself admits not too far into the story. Takes home a teenager but conks before he gets around to sleeping with her. Good thing, too! Once he sobers up, she tells him she's the daughter he never knew he had. Flashback: Sure enough, as a kid, he impregnated a girl and unceremoniously dumped her. It's one of the few flashbacks that actually serves the story.
So. What do you think happens? Can Isabella make him a better man? Might he finally grow up to be the father she never had? Can they be father and daughter and fast friends? Right. Even so, there are a few genuinely fun scenes and, like I say, Isabella looks terrific even if it sounds terrible.
Well, one friend doesn't care for Isabelle Huppert to start with and a few others argue, sure, she's great, but we've seen this before, and that goes double for Claude Chabrol. Perhaps if Chabrol's technique were more extreme or if he had a flair for extravagance, the critical refrain might be different. Rarely do you hear, for example, Wong Kar-wai and Tony Leung again? Scorsese and De Niro? Been there, done that.
But A Comedy of Power (originally the French title as well until it was changed to something like "The Drunkenness of Power") is a brisk and, yes, dammit, refreshing outing, even if the directorial moves ring a bell and Huppert has done balls-to-the-wall before. It opens with a long shot of Paris, over which you read, "Any resemblance to persons living or dead is, as they say, coincidental." As Chabrol was quick to point out at the press conference, that's meant to get you immediately connecting the dots to the Elf Aquitaine affair, which, in 2001, the Guardian's Jon Henley called "perhaps the biggest financial scandal in a western democracy since the end of the second world war." Enron, a scandal of a very different nature, might have it beat, but in Europe, anyway, this is still the big one.
Huppert plays Jeanne Charmant-Killman (this is a comedy and nearly all the characters' names are puns), a judge determined to unravel this mess and bring down its players all but single-handedly, if she has to, and all for the sake of the nation. She says. This toppling of the high and mighty is actually a personal obsession, an almost deranged drive which, though she's willfully blind to its side effects, threatens her marriage, her health and, for a moment or two, you suspect, her life.
The French legal system grants her the power to subpoena just about anyone or anything and conduct her own private hardline of questioning. It's in these verbal cat-and-mouse chases that Jeanne - and Huppert - excels and nearly always triumphs. The string-pullers strategize: How to stop her? She turns each of their challenges into her own advantage - until they come up with the lowest, dirtiest trick of all: Give her more power.
All the while, you're in sure hands with Chabrol, even if they do seem familiar. The opening credit sequence, for example, follows a CEO from a power call at the top of a glistening corporate building through his arrest, his escort down to the bottom floor of a penitentiary, where's he told to undress ("Do you know who I am?!"), coat off, and now the pants, please: They drop, revealing flowery underwear, fading (and as with all his fades, a second or two before you expect it) to: "A Film by Claude Chabrol." I had a marvelous time.
By yesterday evening, festival exhaustion was beginning to set in, so the formulaic and utterly undemanding Find Me Guilty was just fine. What, did you sleep through it? a friend asked the next morning. No, not at all. What separates this courtroom drama ever so slightly from all the rest certainly isn't the narrative structure but the circumstances. Based on the actual longest criminal trial in US history, Guilty compresses 21 months of "Your witness" and "No more questions, your Honor" into a couple of hours with few excursions elsewhere. And yet things bump along pretty smoothly.
The real question at the heart of the project is, Can Vin Diesel pull it off? As Giacomo "Jackie Dee" DiNorscio, the only one of 20 members of the Lucchese family who decides to forgo an attorney and defend himself (putting the other 19 at considerable risk, since the verdict on all 76 charges will turn on whether or not they've conspired to commit various crimes), the film rests on his doughy shoulders. You sense it's not much of a stretch for Diesel, but yes, he pulls it off. Jackie's robust gut tells him to win the jury over with his corny and slightly racy humor and then, what d'ya know, slip just enough smarts out from under the just-a-guy act to outwit the prosecution. Three performances, though, are particularly worth mentioning: Alex Rocco is chilling as, basically, the godfather; Peter Dinklage, as the first on the family's team of lawyers to realize that, while Jackie's a loose cannon, he may also be their best shot; and Ron Silver is so winning as the judge he had me forgetting all about the Republican Convention. For a few minutes there, anyway.
As with Sehnsucht, the cast of Jafar Panahi's Offside is strictly non-professional. The difference, frankly, is that, here, the seams are showing. No matter. Panahi and fellow screenwriter Shadmehr Rastin have come up with such an uplifting story laced with comedic lines that hit you so unexpectedly, it's difficult to imagine a more rejuvenating way to begin the final day of Competition screenings.
That said, the first sequence is a little pedantic, though it does get us up to speed quickly enough: Women aren't allowed to attend soccer matches in Iran. The line of reasoning seems to be that men get so caught up in the game, they curse and generally behave in ways women shouldn't be exposed to, a line called into question in various amusing ways later in the film. We're following a young woman trying to smuggle herself into the stadium, disguised rather unconvincingly as a guy, and soon learn that other women have been more creative in their get-ups. The best at it, in fact, we never see, because we can assume they're in that stadium, watching the face-off between Iran and Bahrain, a game that'll determine who gets to go to World Cup in Germany later this year - and a game we catch only distant glimpses of, because we're sticking with the drama in a different sort of face-off, that between the women who've been caught and the soldiers in charge of arresting and holding them until they're brought to downtown Teheran to face charges. Saying much more would give too much away, but the payoff is as unexpected and welcome as the humor.
Questions in the press conference naturally focused on the film's prospects in Iran, but Panahi couldn't say more than that he'd tried to keep the production as quiet as possible, that its first screening was right here on Friday, so we'll see, and that the Berlinale is the most suitable forum for its premiere. Otherwise, the record is hit and miss. The White Balloon and Crimson Gold, two of the most internationally lauded of his films, have yet to screen in his home country.
Interestingly, though Panahi insisted he would never cut a single scene from any of his films to satisfy Iranian censors, when the question of the current protests in some Muslim countries against political cartoons run in a few western papers came up, he insisted that such offensive drawings "should not be allowed." Hm. While I'd agree that most of the offending cartoons are unnecessary, unfunny and just plain stupid, "should not be allowed" is hardly the appropriate response.
With Requiem, the Competition ended on a rock solid note. Intentionally or not, it was as if the festival were punctuating its program with an anti-Hollywood exclamation. The film is loosely - very loosely - based on the case of Anneliese Michel, the same case on which last year's The Exorcism of Emily Rose is based but the approach and results could hardly be more different.
In Michaela Klinger, screenwriter Bernd Lange, director Hans-Christian Schmid and the astounding Sandra Hüller have simultaneously created an amalgam of competing forces in German society at a crucial point in its history and a full-blooded, living, breathing, empathetic character whose choices might be the last we'd make ourselves even as we see perfectly well that they seem to follow the only logic available to her.
Michaela has been struggling with epilepsy all her life and, at 21, sees a shot at breaking out of her stifling family home when she's accepted at the university in Tübingen. Her mother is over-protective and in the worst possible way, throwing a cold wet blanket on Michaela's every attempt at transitioning into adulthood; her father secretly supports Michaela when he can. Early on, a pilgrimage to northern Italy establishes the family's strict Catholic faith.
The actual case took place in the 70s and Lange and Schmid never seemed to have considered setting their story in any other period. All the better. The impact of the 60s was felt immediately in American and European cities, of course, but we tend to forget that it took a while for the effects of that social upheaval to seep out to the burbs and even longer to the small towns of the rural countryside, and the film captures the look and feel of that moment perfectly without ever drawing undue attention to the set design or costumes. At any rate, as a university town, Tübingen is a whole new world for Michaela.
She arrives a bit late for her first class and, as she searches for a seat, the lecturer asks, "You - What do you believe in?" A little thrown off, but without hesitation: "In God." The entire hall breaks out laughing. The lecturer addresses all the students: "Alright then. What do you believe in?" Silence. "You see, that's the problem."
I very much appreciated that, in the press conference, Schmid gave voice to what I sensed while watching, namely, that the film is not a harangue against the Church. Whether her specific faith, with its emphasis on the martyred saints as role models, has been a help or hindrance to Michaela all her life is debatable, but it is certainly not the cause of her epilepsy nor of the resulting mental and physical instability. That said, faced at a crucial moment with a choice between seeking psychiatric help and exorcism, Michaela - herself - makes the infamously fatal wrong decision. Even so, Schmid says he respects the consolation faith gives the family when they do lose their daughter, perhaps inevitably.
And by the way, we are spared the histrionics and green soup of the exorcism itself, an admirable decision which focuses us entirely on the conflicting tensions leading up to Michaela's choice. She is, in a way, a battleground on which Germany's tight-lipped postwar conservatism and the ripples of a secular humanist revolution from afar meet.
So Requiem turns out to be the third strong entry from Germany in the Competition (along with Der Freie Wille and Sehnsucht). No one is more critical of German cinema than the Germans themselves, yet over and again, I heard, "I can't really believe it, but I'm really liking the German films this year." And not just in the Competition. There's been positive buzz for Detlev Buck's Knallhart (Tough Enough) and Vanessa Jopp's Komm Näher (Happy As One), among others.
At the same time, there seems to have been widespread disappointment in the entries from Asia, and again, not just in the Competition. Hard to say how much this reflects overall trends, but I would guess that German cinema really is in a lively and healthy state right now while the lack of news from Asia may be due to bad timing or simply the Berlinale programmers not knowing where to look.
One last note about Michael Winterbottom's The Road to Guantanamo, an example of the very opposite of bad timing, what with the UN report just out. A reader sent email suggesting that I was too harsh on Britain in my comments on the film, pointing out that Tony Blair had "damned" the camp early on. I can get pretty riled up at the mere mention of Blair and sent back a firm (yet, hopefully, polite) reply. In the constructive exchange that followed, I became convinced that the reader does have a few very good points and I feel compelled to mention that the British government, which, of course, never set up the camp in the first place, did indeed strive to get the Tipton Three released as well as five prisoners before them.
Meantime, we'll see tonight whether the jury blows even more wind in Winterbottom's sails. For myself, it'd be my second choice for the Golden Bear. My first is still Der Freie Wille.
Posted by dwhudson at February 18, 2006 8:12 AM
Subscribe to GreenCine Daily RSS
Subscribe to GreenCine Daily by email
