Berlinale 08. A chronology.

Festivals pit the moviegoer and the media junkie in me against each other. The day begins with movies. Three or four, a modest number by the standards of many. I rarely have a computer with me, never a cell phone. The moviegoer is resolutely undistracted, blissfully out of the loop. By the time I get home, the media junkie is ravenous.

Year after year, I learn over and again that the best laid plans - in the case of this year's Berlinale: write just a little about each film, blog only the most essential news items, stay on top of both, because, after all, 24 are more than enough hours for any day - well, those plans, they go awry. I started off just fine, Dispatch 1, covering Martin Scorsese's Shine a Light and honorably mentioning Isabella Rossellini's Green Porno shorts and Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg.

I kept my viewing of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood to a mere mention, too, bowing out on trying to think up anything fresh to say about it after tracking other critics' thoughts for about three months straight - especially after having seen it just once.

Even while keeping up with news here at the Daily - the barest essentials! - I wrote briefly about Wang Xiaoshuai's Zuo You (In Love We Trust), then some more on Petri Kotwica's Musta jää (Black Ice). But the entry on Fernando Eimbcke's Lake Tahoe was the last I managed. In other words, I didn't last long.

I caved. The "Shorts" entries bloated back up again. Surely once the festival was over I could write, say, one or two entries a day and catch up within a week. But then came magazines and Oscars, not to mention the next festival. Spirits sank, guilt mounted. Then I remembered the example set by Jonathan Marlow. That's the way to go. And so, let this entry serve as a cross between a Berlinale 08 index for the Daily and a brief personal record of the films I caught in the order I saw them.

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To begin where we left off, Auge in Auge: Eine deutsche Filmgeschichte (the going festival translation is Eye to Eye: All About German Film) has an inviting premise: eight German directors, a screenwriter and an actor each choose one German film that's meant something to them and explain why. Their talking heads are livened up with clips from the films, the occasional montage (smoking in German movies, German men, German women, German kisses and so on, all nicely selected and edited) and split-second snippets of each of these filmmakers simply naming names that conjure whole swaths of German movie history. Expectations deflate in the first few seconds with the hokey music and voice over ("What is German film?"), but the bulk of the collage that follows more than makes up for the writing and directing team (Michael Althen and Hans Helmut Prinzler) putting us off like that.

The organizing principle is the chronological order of the films discussed. So we begin with Tom Tykwer recalling how Nosferatu (1921) terrified him - even long after he'd seen far "harder" horror. He's followed by Wolfgang Kohlhaase on Menschen am Sontag (People on Sunday, 1929), Wim Wenders on M (1931; and unlike my esteemed fellow blogger, Thomas Groh, I was perfectly happy with his comments - and I'm a bit of a Fritz Lang nut), Christian Petzold on Unter den Brücken (Under the Bridges, 1944), Hanns Zischler on Abschied von Gestern (Goodbye to Yesterday, 1966), Dominik Graf on Rocker (1971; a new one on me, and my curiosity's piqued), Doris Dörrie on Alice in den Städten (Alice in the Cities, 1973), Michael Ballhaus on a film he shot himself, Die Ehe der Maria Braun (The Marriage of Maria Braun, 1978), Andreas Dresen on Solo Sunny (1979) and Caroline Link on Heimat 1 (1984).

The mix - east and west, classics and obscurities - makes for a bouncy and entertaining 106 minutes, but: Gegenschuss: Aufbruch der Filmemacher (Reverse Angle: Rebellion of the Filmmakers) also screened at the festival and, by comparison, makes Auge seem pretty fluffy. I missed it at the fest but was able to catch it a week or so later at the Babylon. This excellent documentary does two things extraordinarily well. First, it tells the story of the founding and eventual dissolution of the Filmverlag der Autoren, a collectively owned and run distribution company; in other words, its subject isn't even as broad as what would come to be known as the New German Cinema, but instead smartly sticks to one vital chapter - which is complex enough, what with all the friendships and alliances, egos and rivalries among the 13 filmmakers involved.

Second, Gegenschuss impresses upon us the depth and breadth of the loss we suffered when its co-writer and co-director (with Dominik Wessely), Laurens Straub, died last April. Not only is he simply one of the funniest interviewees in the film, he also displays a razor-sharp insight into the characters he was hanging with 30 years ago. While the recent interviews are terrific, my own favorite looks as if it were taped (probably for Alexander Kluge's ongoing television program) maybe ten years or so ago when he recalled how each of three filmmmakers - Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders - behaved during the premiere screenings of the films they took to Cannes. His recollections are perfect portraits in miniature of these three radically different personalities.

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Erick Zonca's Julia feels like two films prefaced with a short that might have been called "Portrait of an Alcoholic." Tilda Swinton, who claims to drink very little when at all, plays rip-roaring drunk and maintains her American accent throughout. And that's precisely the sort of thought I found difficult to shake all through the film. I wonder: Is it because I've been such a Tilda fan for so long that, seeing her take on a role so different from the characters she's played in the past, her performance is distracting me from the film itself? Or is there something slightly off about the performance after all? Salon's Stephanie Zacharek holds that "Swinton plays down to her character, which isn't nearly the same as playing it" - but I don't think that's quite it. Maybe what I was doing instead of watching Julia the film was looking for Julia under all the staggering and rebalancing, morning-after blech-ing and underarm wiping.

But then come the two kidnapping stories and we're not going to get through them at all if she doesn't sober up at least a little; she does, and by the time the American kidnapping story literally crashes through the border and becomes a Mexican kidnapping story, the tables are turning so fast and the stakes are so high Julia forgets to juice up entirely.

I was surprised to hear and read so many dumping on this film. There is something sloppy and unfocused about it, but that's partly what makes it work. Julia's wobbly voice matches Julia. Tilda Swinton admirers, and our number is growing in the wake of her recent acceptance speeches at the Baftas and Oscars, will want to catch it regardless of any critical verdict. Favorite moment: Julia's friend (Saul Rubinek), scolding her but with barely concealed love, calls her a big giraffe of a woman. I'll never look at Tilda quite the same way again.

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I need to pick up the pace here or I'll never finish this before SXSW. Please pardon the rush:

• I don't want to belittle the window-on-the-world value or broad appeal of films like Children of Heaven or The Color of Paradise, but Majid Majidi's The Song of Sparrows is very much in the same vein, which I know will be wonderful news for many. For me, it was a pleasant morning screening and soon forgotten. The Jury didn't forget it, though, and awarded the Silver Bear for Best Actor to Reza Najie.

• Going into Elegy, I was sure Penélope Cruz would be the weakest link in the chain that's dragged Philip Roth's The Dying Animal to the screen. Isabel Coixet directs; the cast also features Ben Kingsley, Patricia Clarkson, Peter Sarsgaard and, in smaller roles, Debbie Harry and Dennis Hopper. Cast as a woman about ten years younger than she is, surely Cruz would be all wrong? No, I was all wrong. While everyone else is just fine (except for Hopper, who looks as if he's just wandered onto the set unaware that he's been cast in the film as well), Cruz is in control throughout - and is actually quite moving in several scenes of a film that, overall, will most likely not be remembered as one of Coixet's best.

• I was neither as impressed nor infuriated with Golden Bear-winner Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad) as, respectively, the Jury and just about everyone else. For me, oddly enough, its greatest faults were not political but aesthetic. I understand that the going approach to action these days is to pretend that the camera can barely keep up with it all, but not everyone, José Padilha included, is Paul Greengrass. I also understand that depicting police raids on drug-dealing gangs in the favelas from the police's POV is more than problematic. But I have to admit that Padilha softened me up a bit when he told the press that Brazilians accused him of being a radical left-winger who sympathizes with criminals after he made Bus 174; and now that he's told another story from another angle, he's supposed to be a quasi-fascist. On the one hand, he should be more careful about whose shoulder he's shooting over. On the other, the film is instructive as a backgrounder on the corruption that runs rampant among Rio's police. What's more, anyone looking for evidence of the tragic futility of the "War on Drugs" might consider Elite Squad.

• Doris Dörrie's Kirschblüten - Hanami (Cherry Blossoms) is one of a handful of films in the Competition lineup that you could easily run across zapping through TV channels on any fine European evening. Tellingly, the whole handful is European, and I suspect that each of the films in that handful has some television money behind them. I've certainly got no objections to their playing in theaters first; but what are they doing at a major film festival, much less in the Competition? At any rate, Kirschblüten features a few fine performances (as do most European television productions), particularly from Hannelore Elsner and Nadja Uhl, and the first act, nodding to Ozu, in which an elderly couple travels to Berlin to visit their kids, only to discover that the kids have no time for them, is okay. Once we're off to Japan, though, the film becomes everything Filmbrain (who opted out of sitting through it) feared it would be: an embarrassing European ode to the mystical powers of the magical Orient.

• Graceful, light-footed, Johnnie To's Man Jeuk (Sparrow) seemed strangely out of place in the Competition lineup, though it was certainly among the best of the main section's offerings - which may say something about what festival director Dieter Kosslick and his fellow programmers consider a Berlinale Competition film to be. At any rate, Daniel Kasman conveys the film's pleasures better than I ever could, so please, click.

• To anyone who subscribes to any sort of belief system, be it political, religious, aesthetic, what have you; to anyone who's a member of a team, a node in a network or a force, however strong or weak, within a group dynamic; in other words, to just about anyone who is not such a loner as to rival the Unabomber's loner-ness, I would highly recommend Koji Wakamatsu's United Red Army. If I were drawing up a Berlinale 08 Top Ten, this would top it, hands down. The film is clearly divided into three parts: a brisk history of the two groups of Japanese leftist radicals who joined to form the United Red Army, told in a standard but swift docufiction mode; a claustrophobic second act in which the URA, holed up in one mountain retreat after another, prepares for "all-out war," purifies itself by having its members practice a merciless (and often fatal) form of "self-critique," and goes collectively insane; and finally, a hopeless, almost poetically absurd last ditch effort to arouse the masses by taking over a holiday lodge at the foot of Mount Asama. See also: Tom Mes's interview with Wakamatsu for Midnight Eye.

• Bam Gua Nat (Night and Day) is the first film by Hong Sang-soo I've seen. As with the films of Pedro Costa, it's been frustrating reading so much about them without having had the chance to catch even one, but there it is, and, as a blank slate, I was something of an oddity in our little group. Everyone else was a well-versed admirer of Hong, so once the lights went up and we were outside, I felt like a specimen in a bell jar. First, I was shocked at the time. I had no idea two and a half hours had passed; I'd thoroughly enjoyed myself in there. I thought of Adam Hartzell's piece: "Hong's films are not pleasurable in the sense that we feel good watching these characters fuck-up. They are pleasurable in the sense that they get us to mull over their missed opportunities." Su-jeong Hwang plays a Korean artist in Paris who does indeed fuck up and miss opportunities. He's lonely, feels out of place, but does little about it - in an entirely believable, even somewhat understandable way. Filmbrain talked about the many ways Night and Day resonates with Hong's earlier films, but of course, I wouldn't know. It may have been Daniel Kasman who mentioned Rohmer, and yes, that would be one way in. I have some mulling to do on this one, a definite favorite of the Competition films.

• Happy-Go-Lucky is not one of Mike Leigh's most important works, and I'm not saying so just because it's a comedy. It's perfectly enjoyable; the characters may grate for the first few minutes, but they're easy to warm up to; and I have no objections to Sally Hawkins's Silver Bear for Best Actress. As Poppy, a grade school teacher, she bumbles along, taking the movie with her wherever she goes, which is nowhere in particular, until she meets a nice guy and things are probably going to be okay. In other words, Happy-Go-Lucky is not about the story, but rather, yes, the characters and the repartee and, to an extent, about making a case for borderline-neurotically cheerful people: they may actually be a lot healthier than you think. You might say Poppy is the polar opposite of Daniel Plainview. Performances across the board are pretty damn fine, and particularly worth mentioning besides Hawkins would be Eddie Marsan as a paranoid, bigoted driving teacher and a brief turn from Karina Fernandez as a flamenco instructor who, in one scene, builds to a comic crescendo you've seen a thousand times but does it so well she earned the only outbreak of applause in any press screening of a Competition film this year.

• Expectations work hard against Standard Operating Procedure. Many will walk in, as I did, thinking that this will be Errol Morris's take on Abu Ghraib. It isn't. It's Morris's take on the photographs that broke the scandal. Who took them, and why? Why are US soldiers smiling and giving the thumbs-up next to naked prisoners with bags or panties over their heads? How many different angles on the same scene were shot at nearly the same moment? How did discrepancies between these pictures, plus cropping and editing impact both the public perception of what actually happened and the trials of the soldiers that followed? It's not that these are uninteresting questions - not at all. But I had the uneasy feeling throughout that SOP ought to be a supplement to the documentary we needed instead from one of our greatest living documentarians. The larger, more obvious questions - Why is America torturing indiscriminately, never mind at all? How unique was/is Abu Ghraib? How is it possible that a nation so outraged by the photographs, which first appeared on 60 Minutes and in the New Yorker in late April 2004, went on to re-elect Bush, and by extension, Cheney and Rumsfeld, in November? - these questions are addressed only briefly and peripherally. And then there are a few stylistic missteps. Danny Elfman is a terrific composer, but his tinkling soundtrack for SOP is so wrong. Even so, taken on its own limited terms - and alongside Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, The Prisoner, or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair and Taxi to the Dark Side - SOP is a fascinating addition to what is surely only the beginning of our collective investigation into an event that has rendered null and void any American claim to moral higher ground in the ongoing "global war on terror."

• Takahashi Izumi's Musunde-Hiraite is, by far, the worst film I saw at the Berlinale. It's not that I wasn't warned. Friends told me they'd walked out. Those same friends used that time slot to catch Madonna's Filth and Wisdom, but I wasn't about to do that to myself. Surely the follow-up to the widely acclaimed The Soup One Morning, which I haven't seen, would be the better bet. Nope. I lost.

• Just as Sally Hawkins carries Happy-Go-Lucky, Nanni Moretti carries Antonello Grimaldi's Caos Calmo (Quiet Chaos), only he takes the opposite tack. As a wealthy media exec who's just lost his wife to a freak accident, his feelings do not race from his heart to his sleeve and his mouth is not stuck on overdrive. Instead, he directs all the rage and sorrow within him towards caring for his daughter, which means taking her to school and waiting in the park out front until she comes back out again. Every day. Turns out, the world comes to him. Business partners, family, they come for advice, to unload or just to be with him for a while, take a break from their own lives, too. The premise seems silly, but it works, thanks in large part to Moretti. What's more, it all leads up to a nifty cameo from Roman Polanski.

• Robert Guédiguian's Lady Jane begins promisingly, holds our attention for the first half or so, and then dissolves into standard, flashback-ridden tale of Revenge: Don't Do It. Not only does crime not pay, once you think you're out, they pull you back in. It's a shame because the cast, led by Ariane Ascaride as a boutique-owner whose son is kidnapped and Gérard Meylan and the always watchable Jean-Pierre Darroussin as her former partners in a tight little gang of Robin Hoods, would have been up to a better story.

• Similarly, in a way, Philippe Claudel's Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (I've Loved You So Long). Like Jürgen Fauth, I admire Kristin Scott Thomas's slo-mo blossoming from the lowest depths of grief to, well, coping at least. And Elsa Zylberstein is very fine as well. But if you can't see the big revelation coming by, oh, about a third of the way in at the latest, and sense, too, that this big revelation is going to be the big pay-off of the very last scene, then you haven't grown up watching TV.

• Amos Kollek's Restless semaphores its dramatic climax right from the beginning, too. Moshe (Moshe Ivgy) is a disaffected Israeli who's been bumming around New York City since leaving his wife and young son back home umpteen years ago. The son (Ran Danker) is a soldier in the Israeli army, well-regarded for his sniping skills. Which is to say, he's a professional assassin. Just as Moshe's life starts coming together (his bawdy political poems, laced with bile, are a big hit in a local bar), his son's starts falling apart. The army's noticed he's pretty tightly wound - father issues, don't you know - and then there's a fatal accident. Once he's discharged, guess where the son goes. New York City! I'm sure you can take it from there.

• Andrzej Wajda's Katyn's been covered in a dispatch from David D'Arcy, followed by comments and pointers. And Stefan Steinberg has a piece on the film today at the WSWS.

• As the same friends who wisely chose Madonna's movie over Takahashi Izumi's went off to catch The Other Boleyn Girl, I decided it was time for another gamble. Surely I couldn't go wrong with Luis Buñuel. Of course, I knew that El Río y la muerte (The River and Death), shot in Mexico in 1954, wouldn't rank with the landmark Buñuels, but the story of a rivalry between two families in a small village is curiously involving. The men of each family have been knocking each other off for generations; a young doctor in Mexico City tells his girl the tale in a long flashback, contrasting his modernity with the village's, shall we say, folkloric flavor. His number is up, and he aims to go back home and not kill the reigning male of the other family. Let them all call his manhood into question; he'll show them what real courage is. Buñuel tells it straight, but you'll find his signature in the almost comic nonchalance of the killings.

• Lance Hammer's Ballast was so rapturously received at Sundance by so many (and yes, naysayers, I heard you, too) that expectations were high. Very high. Too high. Don't get me wrong; to a limited extent, it does live up to the elevator pitch description many have dropped in conversation: the Dardennes in the Mississippi Delta. But this film alone cannot be the standard-bearer of a new hope for American independent cinema; rather, I'm guessing that it should be seen in the company of the films Manohla Dargis has identified as signaling "the emergence of a new American realism." Ballast is a good film, not quite unique enough to be a great film, but arriving at a significant moment - and welcome.

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The roundups:

• 2/8 and 2/9.

• Dispatch 2: David D'Arcy on Juan Manuel Sepulveda's The Infinite Border and Dror Moreh's Sharon.

• 2/10.

• Dispatch 3: David D'Arcy on Julian Cole's With Gilbert & George and a special presentation of work by Jack Smith.

• 2/12, 2/13, 2/14 and 2/15.

• The "Bears and other awards."

• A week's worth of "Wrapping Berlinale 08."

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For all the grumblings about the Competition lineup this year - and there were many, and most were justified - festival director Dieter Kosslick did choose reasonably well when it came to the opening and closing films. There's an inviting, let's-party atmosphere to both Shine a Light and Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind; but as with many parties, watching both movies, you kind of have to will yourself to have fun.

I'm hoping in the coming months to see stories in the German papers about Kosslick & Co rethinking the selection process for the Competition. Many have remarked that the lineup for this year's edition actually looked pretty good "on paper." But too many of the films, once seen, didn't measure up the names behind them. Thing is, Kosslick and his selection committee did see them and deemed them worthy. There's nothing wrong with unremarkable fare like, say, Lady Jane or Restless seeing a modest theatrical run and then finding an audience on DVD. But they really have no place in what should be a showcase of some of the best cinematic work of any given year. The calculation behind a lineup like this year's is easy to see and understand, balancing as it does the often clashing demands of critics, audiences and the red carpet crowd, while at the same time, dealing with Sundance's growing appetite for international titles and Cannes's constant dibs on first pickings. But a curatorial hand is less easy to make out here.

I'd like to see Kosslick carry on overseeing the overall direction of the Berlinale, which has become quite a cultural juggernaut in the dead of winter, what with the booming European Film Market and the thriving Talent Campus. But it may be time to consider taking on an artistic director of some sort to tend to the heart and soul (not to mention the core business) of any film festival: the films.

Posted by dwhudson at March 5, 2008 8:59 AM