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Dispatch from the Berlin International Film Festival: Part Four
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Clockwise: Paul Thomas Anderson, Francesco Rosi, Wang Xiaoshuai, Sally Hawkins
Thursday, February 21, 2008
By Patrick Z. McGavin
Hours after returning home, I heard of the prizes awarded for this year’s competition works. The jury president, Costa-Gavras — as is his wont from his own politically urgent thrillers (Z, State of Siege) — went for the work closest to his own signature style.
Brazilian director Jose Padilha’s Elite Squad captured the Golden Bear. The director’s narrative documentary Bus 174 sharply and brilliantly captured the extreme social, class and cultural divisions rolling Brazil. The new film is fast and propulsive, but it’s also fairly empty and decorative. The Weinstein Company is distributing it in the United States, and they put up some money for its production. It’s similar to City of Men (in all the wrong ways) for the explicit manner in which it makes a fetish of Third World poverty. Even the normally bottom-line only, politically uninformed Variety slammed it for its rightwing pandering.
It ends with a moment of catharsis — or repulsion — that could have ended any number of Stallone or Schwarzenegger films. Padilha is something of a stylist, and he knows how to capture movement and mayhem in restricted spaces. He draws out the same labyrinth of space as a substitute for the social hierarchies, but he tries for the speed and buoyancy of a Scorsese film, and you’re never allowed a moment to think or breathe on your own. People die, or are tortured and roughed up, but there’s no sense of a life extinguished, of consciousness destroyed. It’s an excuse for one more spectral image.
The effervescent and shapely Sally Hawkins won for her work in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky. Reza Najie captured the best actor performance for his stark struck, unsophisticated rube in Majid Majidi’s The Song of Sparrows. Paul Thomas Anderson won the best director prize for the majestic and haunting There Will Be Blood, a work that requires no justification, not even that ending.
Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure was the first narrative documentary ever featured in the Berlinale competition. It won the silver bear, or runner prize. (Perhaps now the famously combative Morris is going to be less confrontational and defensive about his own techniques.) The film about the Abu Ghraib tragedy opens here in April. Sometimes seeing a film in a festival, especially one like Berlin is far from ideal. Perhaps I’ll be more disposed to its questionable aesthetic and political techniques on a second viewing, away from here.
Berlin has many facets, and it also has many awards. The parallel sections also have separate award consideration. The International Federation of Film Critics group, FIPRESCI (of which I’m a member in good standing), awarded one of the prizes to Revanche. This Austrian work by Gotz Spielmann is one of the major discoveries. On a certain level, it shares plot points with Ulrich Seidl’s Import/Export and Tom Twyker’s Run Lola Run. An ex-convict makes a dangerously calculated attempt to liberate his tragically beautiful Ukrainian girlfriend from the local gangster who has trapped her. The operation goes dangerously wrong, and the man retreats into severe isolation of his grandfather’s rural farm. His path runs into that of the man who inadvertently caused him great harm, and his “revenge” takes a wholly unexpected, sexual and even moral course. The film explores the extent to which both characters are guilty of something far greater than they are willing to acknowledge. Unlike the Padilha film, Revanche offers no easy way out, nor does it offer simple act of violent grace. The sense of loss and violation is far more acute, and all the more troubling and terrifying.
On my final morning in Berlin, I saw Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn, the frequently devastating account of the roughly 15,000-22,000 Polish officers assassinated by Stalinist secret police for reasons that remain politically murky. It is the film’s first screening outside of Poland, where the film has been exceptionally popular and highly contentious. What feels authentic about the work is that Wajda never attempts, like Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust film also shot in Krakow) to find some sense of salvation.
The deeper the story goes, the more pessimistic and dark the conclusions become. Every moment of light or resistance is pummeled by officially sanctioned state efforts to suppress the truth. Wajda’s father was among those killed and buried in a mass grave near Smolensk. “I remember my mother, and how she refused to believe my father was dead,” he said. Shot by the superb Pawel Edelman, this movie is an artist engaged with the world, a man still vigorous and alert. “My film is not about recreating history. It’s an elegy.”
The Wajda film played in the official selection, but outside the competition. As much as the exclusion of Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days from the Academy Award foreign language competition has occasioned justifiable outrage, the fact that Katyn is a finalist partially restores faith in the system.
In a festival that rarely lived up to expectations, the sepulchral and chilly conclusion of Katyn was the right way to end. It was a moment of gravity that caused one to sit back and fully consider the power and drama of the movies.