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Dispatch from the Berlin International Film Festival
An online exclusive
The Rolling Stones with director Martin Scorsese before the premiere of Shine A Light
Monday, February 11, 2008
By Patrick Z. McGavin
BERLIN—
When a German copywriter for one of the daily newspapers noted the arrival of Mick Jagger for the premier of Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Stones’ concert film documentary, Shine a Light, which opened this year’s Berlinale, or Berlin Film festival, he transposed John F. Kennedy’s great 1963 speech, "Ich bin ein Berliner."
“Mick ist ein Berliner.”
History is both crucial and cruel in this fabulously evocative ghost town. All angels are terrifying, Rilke wrote. The city that provided the inspiration for one of Wim Wenders’ finest achievements, Wings of Desire, is more beautifully rendered in the German title: Der himmel uber Berlin, or "The Sky Over Berlin."
“When the Wall was up, the festival was more interesting,” a Swedish festival programmer said to a small party traveling from Tegel to Potsdamer Plotz. “I came here the first time in 1977. The festival was much smaller, held in probably one or two [theaters]. Back then, everybody came to the festival just to see the Wall, because it was right in the middle of the festival.”
Geography and landscape are central to all festivals, especially the preternaturally cool and serene Berlin. It’s the first of the three major European festivals that, following the lead of Sundance and Rotterdam, helps establish the tone and tenor of the new year. Last year proved an exceptional one for international cinema.
Like all major festivals, the Berlin festival has many shapes and fronts, encompassing the surreal and perverse to the provocateur and obscure. The festival has three primary programs: Official Selection, encompassing the approximately 22 features that vie for the top honor, the Golden Bear; the Panorama, an alternate festival that sprang up out of dissatisfaction with the standardized, culturally approved official selection; and the Forum, which tends to focus on smaller and more stylistically adventurous titles.
Sundance ended two weeks ago, and it yielded three absolutely superb features: Sugar, by the wonderful young filmmakers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (the makers of Half Nelfson); Ballast, a first feature by the exceptionally gifted Lance Hammer; and Mama’s Man, by Azezel Jacobs, the prodigiously gifted young son of the major avant-garde figure Ken Jacobs. Ballast made the leap from the Sundance competition to Berlin official selection, which rarely happens. Mama’s Man premiered internationally at Rotterdam, and it is not showing here. Sugar, which astonishingly was passed over for any awards by Quentin Tarantino’s jury, is also not here, but the filmmakers are probably waiting on Cannes to launch their beautiful and transporting work about the social and cultural experiences of a Dominican baseball pitcher playing for a Kansas City farm team in rural Iowa.
Ballast plays on the penultimate full day of the festival, a curious and unfortunate programming decision because many journalists and critics are expected to be gone by then. It deserves a better placement, something in the middle. The film is set in the Mississippi Delta, shot using only available light, and achievies a lyrical intensity that is both chilling and profound. The movie begins with a death; from there it progresses brilliantly and unexpectedly through a series of wary encounters between the surviving members of a splintered family. Remarkably, it is Hammer’s first feature. It has a range, but more importantly, it has an emotional authenticity and an organic and novelistically shaped sense of character, action and behavior.
“The Mike Leigh is excellent,” a British colleague told me. We are all waiting until Tuesday, when the festival’s three most anticipated titles, the Mike Leigh (this one called Happy-Go-Lucky), the new film by the South Korean director Hong Sang soo (Woman on the Beach) and a provocative and ambitious new work by American Errol Morris about Abu Ghraib titled Standard Operating Procedure.
Berlin is essential, but the festival programming is erratic. Some films, like Jacques Doillon’s Just Anybody, a fascinating marriage of Eric Rohmer’s restoration comedies with the darker edged, grubby regionalism of Bruno Dumont (Flandres), are better served in the competition. Festivals like Berlin are under pressure to generate coverage and media attention, and they know the best way to do that is by the recruiting of American stars. The Doillon is a deluxe art film, composed in fluid, nervy long takes and working with talented though entirely unknown young French actors.
The quick turnaround from Sundance to Berlin often accounts for an actor’s rise. This year the performer in question is Gillian Jacobs, a 25-year-old Juilliard-trained actress. At Sundance, she had a small though critical part as an exotic dancer in the adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's cult novel Choke. Jacobs has the central role in British director Damian Harris’ new feature, Gardens of the Night, a bifurcated story about sexual exploitation and slave traffic. The film shuttles between an eight-year-old girl’s abduction and the contemporary story of her experiences as a streetwalker in San Diego at age 17. Damian Harris, the son of Richard Harris, worked for years doing painstaking research. “I spent 17 years trying to get the money to do the movie,” he said.
Jacobs is sensational. “I was cast two weeks before the start of production, and originally I was going to be up to the challenge,” she said. The film needed her intuitive, assaultive interpretation of the damaged and wounded girl’s survival instincts. The film is both too studied and thought-out, and the drama is constantly forestalled by a structure that never finds the right rhythm. The director never decides whether he’s a filmmaker, a sociologist or an ethnographer. More damaging, the sections involving the young girl are so undeniably creepy and ungainly; the movie feels “unclean,” as James Agee used to write of films he particularly detested.
Elegy is Spanish filmmaker Isabel Coixet’s adaptation of the Philip Roth novella The Dying Animal. Nicholas Meyer adapted the book; this comes after his previous adaptation, with Robert Benton, of the author’s magisterial The Human Stain. The Zuckerman books are virtually impossible to adapt because of the dramatic and literary structures Roth imposes on the material. It’s minor-Roth transformed into a very watchable film, burdened by some awkward transitions. Penelope Cruz, who is revealing, sexy and disarming, plays an impossibly beautiful young Cuban who both transfixes and shames a star literary professor, sharply played by Ben Kingsley. The friendship, camaraderie and sexual jousting enacted between Kingsley and a Pulitizer Prize-winning poet (Dennis Hopper) achieve the closest Rothian moments of inspiration and heightened revelation.