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Thursday, February 21, 2008

By Patrick Z. McGavin

Click here to read Part Four of Patrick Z. McGavin's dispatch from Berlinale

BERLIN—

The major film festivals that land earliest on the calendar — Sundance, Rotterdam, Berlin — offer the first sense of national movements, attitudes and, perhaps most important, a sense of the planet. “The state of the world right now is in a very bad place,” British director Mike Leigh said at the press conference for his film Happy-Go-Lucky. “But I think something you take from our film is that in spite of it all, people do get on with their lives.”

All festivals are about choices: aesthetic, personal, even ideological. The Berlinale has four major programs: competition (or official selection); the forum; the panorama; and generation, or kplus. This year also featured two fairly exhaustive retrospectives of two essential artists: Spain’s Luis Buñuel and Italy’s Francesco Rosi. (Tried as I might to catch something fairly rare or obscure from their individual outputs, I was defeated each time.)

The press screenings of the competition titles follow one after the other — three in a row with about an hour’s break in between screenings. The problem, as I discovered with Erick Zonca’s first English-language film, Julia, is that if you miss a screening — as I did because of an assignment to review a film playing the same time — you have almost no chance to catch it again. You miss one film, and you submit yourself to all manner of questions of whether your impulse was the correct one.

Being in a time zone seven hours ahead of where I live, everything appears more accelerated. You’re in a constant sense of trying to play catch-up. I’d hoped to see several titles of interest I missed at Sundance, or catch a couple of works that played at Rotterdam. Because critics and press attending festivals tend to see the same screenings, a herd mentality develops, where publicists and sales agents try to instantly gauge the response to the movie. (At Berlin, the English-language trade publications Variety, the Hollywood Reporter and Screen (the London-based business and film journal for which I contribute reviews) publish satellite daily print editions. On its back editorial page, Screen publishes a daily critics’ form list that charts the individual responses of 10 international critics.)

Berlin is in a tough position. Most top international filmmakers, even if they have a film ready, hold off submitting to Berlin in anticipation of premiering their work at Cannes. As a result, Berlin tends to be stronger in the parallel programs, like the forum and panorama. Like Venice, there are very few Americans here. The nature of beast is that American companies — what they buy, what they pursue, what they unveil — establishes the tone and rhythm of a festival. For instance, the art of the deal has become so central to the mythology of Sundance that it invariably eclipses discussion about the artistic merits of the films. Because Sundance is an avowedly American festival, it’s strange to go to a festival and see almost exclusively English-language cinema. Being exposed on my first full day of screenings to a Swedish, French and Mexican film was intensely liberating, because it ruptures the solipsism that Sundance often inculcates.

Festivals become the best and surest means to rediscover those directors or actors whose work stands outside the typical apparatus of the American distribution system. The nervy and exceptionally talented French director Laetitia Masson made a strong impression with her first feature, To Have (or Not), in 1994. Her films are a bit mannered, but she is a strong stylist with a distinct point of view. Her movies are roundelays arranged musically around a group of characters. Her new film Coupable (Guilty) is superficially a murder mystery steeped in noir about the death of an arrogant and supremely discomfiting French industrialist, the primary suspects are his wife and their female chef. The film’s real subject is marriage, and the more significant movie references are screwball farces — from Sullivan’s Travels to Bringing Up Baby — where marriage is viewed suspiciously as anti-art, anti-hedonistic and reactionary. It doesn’t always work, but as a mosaic, Coupable has some of the most beautiful and sustained movements of bodies flowingly lyrically against each other.

In I've Loved You So Long…, the first feature by French novelist Philippe Claudel, two powerfully dark, rapturous actresses (Kristin Scott Thomas and Elsa Zylberstein) portray sisters brought together following a long separation. The staging is sometimes too direct and square, but the performances are worth savoring. Claudel sharply plays into Scott Thomas’s sharp, cold perfectionism. Zylberstein is typically the playful provocateur and muse, especially in her work with Raul Ruiz. Her natural vivaciousness is subdued, and the contrast between the two is often riveting. The byplay of these exquisite women, moving from wariness to anger and rapture, is something to behold and overcomes the melodramatic contrivances of the material.

The Masson and Claudel films feature some nice offhand work with secondary characters, where small, almost private gestures are built around their faces, or a look or an ineffable glance. In Robert Guediguian’s Lady Jane, a story about how a past act of violence has deeply personal repercussions in the present, the film’s most interesting image is the craggy, deep-lined face of the terrific character actor Jean-Pierre Darroussin. That face is both suggestive and closed off, indicative of a furtive life spent in shadowy, probably illegal activity that sharpens the movie‘s sense of assessing the consequences of moral action. The Marseille regionalist Guediguian is best in the working class projects. Like his previous work, the protagonist is his wife, Ariane Ascaride. She’s not the most expressive or intriguing of French actors, but she at least is respectful of her collaborators, and she allows the more interesting Darroussin and Gerald Meylan the space and opportunity to register their own quirky, offbeat actions.

The great French director and actor Jacques Tati (Playtime) is the guiding spirit animating two very different competition titles: Iranian filmmaker Majid Majidi’s The Song of Sparrows and Hong Kong director Johnnie To’s Sparrow. Unlike the more formally rigorous Abbas Kiarostami or Jafar Panahi, Majidi (Children of Heaven) is the Iranian director most palatable to Western audiences. His story about the comic and existential duress befalling a rural man (Reza Najie, winner of the best actor prize) trying to negotiate the rapidly changing social and capitalist order has some quiet and affecting moments of recognition. Majidi is a derivative artist; the long takes and formal structure borrowed from Tati was first evident in Kiarostami’s work. Majidi lacks that master’s ease of motion and poetic use of ironic counterpoint. One of the most evocative images of the film, underlying the man’s comic plight, finds him transporting on his back across a desolate landscape a door. The only problem is that image is taken verbatim from Mohsen Makhmalbaf's short film that was his contribution to the 1999 portmanteau Tales of Kish. Majidi’s cinema is a bit too disingenuous, framed around the viewer’s alleged ignorance of Iranian movies.

After the furious and majestic Election cycle and Exiled, Johnnie To works in a very different register with Sparrow. It’s a lark, a divertimento, from a very talented director. It’s another musically inflected roundelay following a professional team of pickpockets and a mysterious beautiful woman (Kelly Lin) thrown between them. The story and characterization are fairly inconsequential. The pleasures are To’s beautifully precise and framed mise-en-scène, showing the pickpockets at work, or a brief, lovely moment of the four riding in tandem on a bicycle. I just wish To would hold off a musical score that’s waxed on like wallpaper, or other smaller bits that sentimentalize the material to the point of risking the banal.