Best of the 2011 Berlin International Film Festival

Details

Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Wednesday, 23 February 2011 17:52

Written by David D'Arcy

It wasn’t the best Berlinale, but it should have been better. Beginning with opener True Grit, there were stars -– Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Stanley Tucci, Demi Moore and company in Margin Call, the latest financial saga, straight from Sundance Film Festival; and Ralph Fiennes directed himself and a corps of military-clad fighters in Coriolanus, one of Shakespeare’s most difficult plays to stage, much less to film. (Fiennes and company shot it in Belgrade, Bosnia.)

There was also controversy, and it wasn’t limited to the griping of critics. The Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi was set to be on the jury, but he’s been in jail in Iran, where he’s now officially banned from making films.  The ban seems a bit superfluous, since Panahi is locked up. The Berlinale kept his name on the jury list, and kept an empty chair to signal his absence.

And there was comedy, in the form of the Turkish-German immigrant farce Almanya – Welcome to Germany by Yasemin Samdereli, which probably won’t travel beyond Turkey and Germany.  You won’t be missing much.

Yet the consensus was that this year’s programs in Berlin were weak. Not everything, however, was. So, here’s a selection of films from the 2011 Berlin International Film Festival to watch...

Nader and Simin, A Separation
Directed by Asghar Farhadi
Iran, 123 minutes
Family life gets complicated and hopeless in this realistic drama where husband and wife (Nader and Simin) file for divorce when Nader reneges on a plan to leave Tehran and go abroad with Simin. He stays to care for his Alzheimer’s-afflicted father. Simi also remains in Tehran, living apart. Frustrated, Nader finds his ill father roped to a bed and fires an inexperienced uneducated young woman whom he’d hired to attend to the feeble man. A shoving match between them leads to her falling and suffering a miscarriage.

It isn’t enough that Nader runs afoul of the woman’s wildly religious husband. He’s charged with the murder of the unborn child, and the train wreck follows. Every detail in this tautly conceived superbly acted saga of pain among ordinary people builds the drama. Asghar Farhadi’s latest film deserved its awards for best film and best actor/actress at the 2011 Berlinale.

Honoring a view of real life under a surreal regime sends an urgent message to the Iranian officials who imprisoned filmmaker Jafar Panahi, preventing him from sitting on this year’s Berlinale jury. Festival director Dieter Kosslick brought an empty chair onstage at the awards ceremony, to make sure everyone got the point. How will the regime deal with Farhadi and his cast when they return?

Khodorkovsky
Directed by Cyril Tuschi
Germany, 111 minutes
Tuschi’s documentary retraces Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s path from membership in a communist youth group at school toward becoming one of Russia’s richest men as head of a privatized oil company and then facing arrest, trial and imprisonment by the Putin regime. Khodorkovsky made what turned out to be a fatal mistake. He became a philanthropist, opening a foundation that operated private schools. Being Jewish didn’t help, either. It was enough to trigger a campaign that would put the oligarch on trial in a courtroom cage –- first in metal, then in glass -– and put Russia’s super-rich on notice that making money is tolerable, so long as one’s ambition doesn’t venture into politics.

It also reminds you that it doesn’t take much to threaten the Kremlin. Cyril Tuschi, who narrates,  shows that Khodorkovsky’s hands may not have been entirely clean –- he did benefit from a rock-bottom insider purchase price for Yukos, which then appreciated exponentially -– yet the charges that have now put him away for 14 years couldn’t be more political. One of those charges is that he stole oil from the company that he owned. “Where did I put it,’ Khodorkosky asks with a smile in a brief interview that Tuschi grabs through an opening in the glass under the eyes of courtroom guards. It sounds like Kafka, but it’s Putin. Did it work?

A Russian woman who investigated the case (and remains alive) notes on camera that you don’t have to kill the entire wolf–pack to silence the wolves. You only need to show how one prominent member can be neutralized. As always, lots of people aren’t talking, including Mikhail Gorbachev. The prevailing silence forced Tuschi to be opportunistic as he gathered information on the run. Just as the film was playing at the Berlinale, the news came that the assistant to the judge who added 6 years to Khodorkovsky’s sentence said her boss was under pressure. Anyone familiar with the case could have told you that. The judge has denied it. What a surprise.

Tales of the Night
Directed by Michel Ocelot
France, 84 minutes
Ocelot’s beguiling animation in 3-D is set in a film studio where a boy, a girl and an elderly technician meet at night, dress up and imagine stories from another world. Each imagining is a tale in which the characters in silhouettes journey to places where they are tested – two princesses in love with a werewolf, a boy trapped in the land of the dead, an Aztec setting in which a visitor battles to save a young women from human sacrifice.

Fans of Ocelot’s earlier films (Princess and Princesses (2000), Azur et Asmar (2006)) will recognize familiar shapes and techniques. The imagery is dazzlingly inventive, all the more so for its simplicity. Can Tales of the Night break the hold of American animation on the American audience? There should at least be room for it in the mix. If not, I could suggest that the American artist Kara Walker, who works with silhouettes, might take a look. It was one of the rare delights in a dreary Berlinale.

Pina
Directed by Wim Wenders
Germany, 106 minutes
Wender’s evocation of Pina Bausch is his first feature in 3-D, and his first performance film since The Buena Vista Social Club (1999).  This isn’t a systematic biography (and certainly not a critical study). For that you can go to the archives of German television, which observed and documented Bausch from the beginning. Instead, Wenders’s doc memorial takes you through productions like the autobiographical Café Muller from 1985 (the first performance that Wenders saw by Bausch, which led to a deep admiration) and the tactile earthy Rite of Spring.

Wenders stays out of the dancers’ way in Pina, and the 3-D captures the power of those performances. Interviews with dancers who worked with Bausch for decades are grounded in a cult-like devotion.  Outdoor performances in Wuppertal, where Bausch’s group was based, are emotionally banal, reminding you that technology doesn’t necessarily give form to real feelings. Pina Bausch remains a huge star for the glam glitterati in the US, and Pina should play well wherever that crowd goes to see films. Look for it eventually on PBS. If you want more depth, you’ll hope that another documentary is in the works.  

My Best Enemy
Directed by Wolfgang Murnberger
Austria,109 minutes
The Nazi looting of art was vast, and it offers an endless number of stories for feature films. People have been threatening to make one for years, and now Wolfgang Murnberger has. If you know anything about Nazi Era pillaging, stop now. My Best Enemy is preposterous Marx Brother material. Its script seems intended for actors to ham it up, and they do shamelessly. Its back-lot production design smells like fresh paint, when it should reek of the rot of history.

Yet it’s a guilty pleasure, even though its Inglorious Basterds ambitions won’t take it to much of an audience outside of Germany and Austria and Jewish film festivals in the US. The film tells the story of the Kaufmann family. They are Jews who own an art gallery in Vienna in the late 1930’s. Moritz Bleibtreu (the German heart-throb who has been fitted for more Nazi uniforms than Hermann Goering) is the son, Victor, who shows a childhood friend where his family keeps a priceless Michelangelo drawing, only to have the friend, Rudi (Georg Friederich), now a Nazi, notify his superiors.

Against the background of the war, the two men vie for the Michelangelo, and for the same girl, Lena (Ursula Strauss). Then, if you can believe it, Hitler gets the idea that giving the Michelangelo to Mussolini would help cement the lagging Axis alliance. The Nazis always seem to have a fake on their hands, rather than the original, and there’s a mistaken-identity gag in which Victor (in a camp in Poland) trades his concentration camp stripes for an SS uniform. It seems inspired by Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 classic with Jack Benny, To Be or Not To Be.   Who survives the war and gets the Michelangelo? I did say that My Best Enemy had taken a cue or two from a Hollywood movie.   

Lost Land / Territoire Perdu
Directed by Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd
France/Belgium, 78 minutes
The Western Sahara, seized by Morocco in 1979, is a disputed territory. 100 thousand of its people live in refugee camps on the eastern side of a 1,500-mile wall that Morocco built in defiance of the United Nations. This is a wall that you don’t hear about. It’s the land that everyone who’s not involved in this dispute has forgotten. Vandweerd, who has made several documentaries about Africa, tells the history of the last forty years in black and white Super 8 images and in the voices of the refugees who speak of their abandonment and of the land that many of them barely knew.

There’s no color here, and none of the clichés of the landscapes, but Lost Land has an austere poetry set against a soundtrack that seethes through like a merciless wind.  (For better or worse, the Western Sahara hasn’t been forgotten by filmmakers. Last year, the Australian documentary Stolen (Toronto, 2009) investigated and observed the practice of slavery that still exists in the territory. It’s a helpful companion to Lost Land. )  

The Bengali Detective
Directed by Philip Cox
UK/USA/Austria, 91 minutes
Rajesh Ji is a private detective in Kolkata (Calcutta) who investigates crimes that the indifferent local police just ignore -- from murder to trafficking in counterfeit shampoo. When he’s not fighting criminals and helping victims in this colorful city, he and his crew of detectives compete in televised national dance contests.

A Sundance premiere, this doc was bought for a remake by Fox Searchlight.  You’ll see why Fox thought that was good investment. Let’s hope someone still distributes the doc.

The Guard
Directed by John Michael McDonagh
Ireland/UK/Argentina, 96 minutes
In The Guard, Brendan Gleeson plays a policeman who’s guilty of a bad attitude, pot-smoking, philandering and fashion victimhood. But Sgt. Gerry Boyle is honest, and writer-director John Michael McDonagh’s debut feature takes off when an FBI agent (Don Cheadle) arrives in this remote Irish town and the two begin a campaign against a drug gang composed of a dream team of Irish character actors.

The Guard also premiered at Sundance. Every performance by Gleeson is a treat. This is one of his oddest, and best. 

The Green Wave
Directed by Ali Samadi Ahadi
Germany, 80 minutes
The Green Wave, which examines the crushing of Iran’s mass demonstrations after the tampered elections of June 2009, was classified as a New German Film by the Berlinale. Its director, Ali Samadi Ahadi, is an Iranian who lives in Germany.

His previous movie was a comedy. If you see this unsettling film, you’ll know why he won’t be going back to Iran too soon. An IDFA premiere which also played at Sundance, the doc mixes live action filmed on mobile phones and flip cameras with interviews and elaborate animated reenactments. It’s a prophetic film, given the way crowds in Arab countries took to the streets and toppled regimes. The Iranians didn’t fare so well, as this grim film shows.  

The Forgiveness of Blood
Directed by Joshua Marston
USA/Albania/Denmark/Italy, 109 minutes
The crucial thing to know about this revenge saga is its back-story. Joshua Marston made Maria, Full of Grace in 2003, and the immigrant story made mostly in Spanish and set in Colombia and New York took off at Sundance and in Berlin.

After that success, Marston got offers, but struggled to make another film. A $20 million project set in Iraq never got produced. Nor did a lower-budget drama set in Brooklyn. Marston and his producer seized on the chance to make this movie in Albania, which tells you something about the financing prospects for independent American films today.

The Forgiveness of Blood is the story of a killing between two feuding families, and the traditional custom of demanding accountability from the family of the killers. Revenge in the Balkans? Who knew? Marston brings some new life to the story with young kids in the cast and an anti-romantic landscape that’s driving people out of the country every day.

It wasn’t the only film set in Albania at the Berlinale. Amnesty (Amnistia) by Bujar Alimani is a bare-boned look at an affair between a man and a woman who meet when visiting their spouses in prison.  It’s another clash with tradition.

For the Berlinale’s awards, see: http://www.berlinale.de/media/pdf_word/pm_1/61_berlinale/61_IFB_Awards_2011.pdf.

• < Prev
• Next >