The Auteurs

Harun Farocki’s Zum Vergleich (By Comparison) is a cross-country, cross-industry look at the production of bricks.  It’s a pithy collection of process, material, labor, and industry in various construction sites and factories in Africa, India, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland—each location separated by a simple titlecard featuring a small graphic of the shape and amount of bricks being produced on a scale that ranges from the standard single rectangle to elaborately geometric factory productions.

There is no direct documentary lesson drawn from the survey of techniques, but we draw comparisons anyway, and without pressure from Farocki, who shoots simply, with minimal coverage, and mostly static frames with the occasional camera pan.  We see, of course, the human presence in the labor fade away as the production process increases in scale and industrial technology.  The impressive, exact movements of routine of the most hands-on brick layers in Africa and India (a woman in the latter able to grab exactly the amount of clay from a huge pile needed to fit in her mold every-single-time) lose their grace in the midst of early 20^th century factory production, but eerily regain it as computer controlled robotic arms take over in the 21^st century.  (These leave humans nothing more to do than wait around, walk past the machines indifferently, or discard the rare faulty brick.)  Connection between the bricklayers and the earth gradually fades away as well, with the film starting with bricks literally made out of just dirt and water, until we eventually see an industrial product manufactured so far away from its source that we have no idea what actually composes the final creation.

That being said, the film impressively remains non-judgmental—the gasps and laughs from the audience at a worksite routine in Africa of a man filling a shovel full of dirt and then tossing it, dirt intact, to a man standing on a scaffolding one story above him is similar to the reaction we had to the comically precise movement of the robotic arm in a new factory.  We do see things become easier—factories that produce entire walls full of bricks, pre-assembled—but never get a hint what this ease means in terms of the earthly impact, human labor, or even constructive process.  A punch line in this regard comes from the awe-inspiring creation of a wall of bricks artistically stuttered to give a curling, wave-like effect on the exterior of a building.  This effect is paradoxically created by the seemingly pixel-perfect imprecision of the computer bricklaying arm, its ability to make sure the bricks do not line-up just so.  Zum Vergleich has an inviting energy to it, one of the curious and the impressed, far away from the Berlinale’s other documentary of labor, the beautiful but troublesome Araya, whose attitude towards its subject were ambiguous to say the least.  Farocki, on the other hand, modestly, pointedly collects, observes, and offers for thought, creating an open-ended treatise on work around the world.

Above: Sabine Timoteo in Kill Daddy Goodnight, coaxing the film's hero out to New York City.

So it’s 1962, during the shoot of The Birds, and Hitchcock meets a man who claims to be him, but older, from the future.  Okay.  Then we have Khrushchev and Vice President Nixon, meeting in front of television cameras in 1959 at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, the two squabbling, bullying, and ad-libbing, all transmitted to audiences through the new technology.  On one side, the short and fat Khrushchev, on the other, the wiry, anxious Nixon.  Doubling again, in some strange way?  Khrushchev and Nixon, meeting under the auspices of a new technology; carry this thought through to the pinnacle of the this new televisual era: the JFK/Nixon televised presidential debates just one year later.  JFK, Cold War tension, technology—logically we jump to the space race, and what came from above before the birds than the Soviet’s triumph of Sputnik?  Meanwhile, unspoken, we know that Hitch—the older Hitch, that of the late 70s—has no more movies in him, and that television, to a considerable degree, is to blame.  Circle back around: while countries moved to the brink of war over scientific achievements, Hitchcock momentarily taps into the zeitgeist of fears through a terrible onslaught of nature, abstract and wonderful with The Birds; but history—moon walks, color TV, the Cuban Missile Crisis—leaves him in the dust, helpless and befuddled at the height of his success by this vision of a double from the vague future.  Connect the dots—I wish I could.  Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take, playing in the Berlinale’s Forum Expanded section, is one long montage connecting personal love for Hitchcock with political, technological, and cultural evolutions in the 1950s and 60s.  It is energetic and compelling as it swerves from one historical and cultural milestone to another, but only to the point you might have realized reading the above: the thoughts are fraudulent, the connections vague and tangential, perhaps even pompous.  Something is definitely there, but it would take a film both far more allusive and far more sophisticated (a mash-up of Guy Maddin and Thom Anderson, perhaps) to tease out the connections and the mirroring and let then slip by, tantalizing, promising, provoking, but inconclusive, the way such broad surveying must be to make sense.  Grimonprez, instead, tries to force a non-existent epiphany, runs short on ideas both cinematographic and intellectual, and Double Take flounders in an edited mess of promise.

***

A prime counter-example to this result is Kill Daddy Good Night, which played in the usually less-risky Panorama program, a film that purposefully provokes puzzlement.  An Austrian videogame designer (Helmut Köpping) who has turned his pathological hatred for his politician father into a life’s mission to create a father-killing videogame, ends-up, through a set of curious circumstances, renovating the basement hideout in Long Island of a Lithuanian Nazi.  The plot may sound implausible, but Michael Glawogger (known for his 2005 documentary, Workingman’s Death) pitches the story at a very precise level of cinematic wanderlust, where developments from one scene to the next are charted out by a cryptic pattern whose lines can just barely be discerned.  Of course, the correlation between this programmer who hates one man and simulates his killing with the old man who admits to murdering thousands without remorse during the Second World War are very much in existence—it’s just that Kill Daddy Good Night doesn’t have a point to make through this correlation.  The way the plot seems to just-quite-not-jibe, the way the motivations and decisions of all the characters from, our sullen hero to the silent old man and his gorgeous granddaughter (Sabine Timoteo), whose past with the programmer indifferently draws him out to New York, go unexplained and only partly guessed—all add0 up to the best thing about Kill Daddy Good Night, its concrete materials but its irreducibility.  It simply doesn’t seem to fit together, pieces from a similar but slightly different puzzle unable to connect, and if the film did come together, it would immediately crash into a heap of tacky and trite observations about media, the past, and morality, driven by a half-drawn, insipid drama.  Instead, and unlike Double Take, there is something to Glawogger’s handling of the material (and careful adaptation of Josef Haslinger’s source book) that makes the gaps, the awkwardness and the brazen allusions strange and challenging rather than ignorant or ham-handed.  Though destined to be set aside and shrugged off because of this unusual and very fine sense of puzzlement it creates, Kill Daddy Good Night also remains the most interesting movie of the 2009 Berlinale.

Above: Claudia Llosa's Golden Bear winner, The Milk of Sorrow.

By Comparison (dir. Harun Farocki) – A nearly wordless study of how bricks are manufactured in several countries suggests something like the 2001: A Space Odyssey of documentaries, though starkly devoid of the sense of “progress” as technological efficiency replaces human community. Whether showing villages in Africa where the entire community participates in brickmaking, or plants in Europe where unmanned robots make customized bricks with chillingly beautiful, inhuman precision, Farocki utilizes a deceptively simple framing and montage technique, a refreshing directness of representation that stimulates a flood of interpretations.

The Milk of Sorrow (dir. Claudia Llosa) – Winner of the Golden Bear, and deservedly so, this is a sharply realized take on a young woman’s coming of age while internalizing the legacy of wartime rape and abuse suffered by her family. For the most part it just grooves on a lucid stream of vivid images clustered on themes of marriage, sex and music (the soundtrack of this film, with some crazily lyrical a cappella performances by the lead, is stunning). There’s just that one central conceit about the lead’s use of a potato as a prophylactic that seems like magical realism taken too far. God help us if this starts a trend in third world prestige pictures with vegetables occupying bodily orifices…

Land of Scarecrows (dir. Roh Gyeong-tae) – Similar to The Milk of Sorrow, equally evocative in its imagery but more disjointed, riffing on themes of migration, pollution and sexuality. Main narrative thread concerns a woman whose upbringing on a landfill may have affected her hormones, leading her to Manila to bring home a bride. The film breaks down the boundaries that separate nature and pollution, native and foreigner, man and woman, though it leaves a disturbing suggestion that homosexuality is a corruption of nature.

Factory of Gestures: Body Language in Film (dir. Oksana Bulgakowa) – An astounding work of film scholarship, this 166 minute study of the meanings behind body language in Soviet and Russian cinema is up there with Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself among recent films that bring brilliant new understanding to other films.

Dr. Ma’s Country Clinic (dir. Feng Cong) – A four-hour portrait of a rural clinic is really a structuring device that allows its subjects, poor rural farmers, to tell the audience everything they could possibly want to know about life in rural China. As such it manages to be both sprawling in content and evocative in delivery, and ultimately earns its extended running time.

When It Was Blue (dir. Jennifer Reeves) – I was enjoying this groovy, psychedelic meditation on nature processed through dual projections (digital and film) and tons of post production effects, until the person next to me whispered, “What kitsch.” The thing is, she’s somewhat right. Not so much due to the visuals (which are often amazing, if heavily indebted to Brakhage) as to the gratuitous soundtrack of music and nature audio that shades the experience towards being in a spa.

Katalin Varga (dir. Peter Strickland) – Watching this Romanian rape-revenge tale, I kept thinking, “What would Christian Mungiu do?” Mostly because the film is shot in a pretty but stylistically impersonal arthouse style that adds little to the proceedings. Except for one extended monologue on a river where the camera achieves an amazing dream effect, the virtues of this compelling story of the side-effects of retribution seem mostly locked in the script.

London River (dir. Rachid Bouchareb) – An almost offensively inoffensive take on the London bombings of July 7, 2005, positioning itself as a politically correct tale of healing and tolerance between two parents (Brenda Blethyn as the silly prejudiced Christian, Golden Bear-winning Sotigui Kouyate as the noble Muslim) who discover that their children, missing since the attacks, were a couple. If the parents had ended up in bed together, now that would have been interesting.

Forever Enthralled (dir. Chen Kaige) – The proof in the pudding with this stuffy biopic about the most famous Peking Opera performer of the 20^th century is that it doesn’t inspire any interest in Peking Opera. Chen’s style is reminiscent of Hong Kong prestige pictures circa 1989, calcified into artless academicism. Some interesting stuff with art and gender proves to be as much of a cocktease as it was in Farewell My Concubine. All the same, the international critics seemed enthralled by the exoticism on display.

Best of the fest (refer to this entry and the previous two round-ups for details):

1. Everyone Else
2. By Comparison
3. Beeswax
4. The Milk of Sorrow
5. Treeless Mountain

Was it so long ago when it seemed directors attacked cinema with their cameras?  Why is it I have to find artistic hunger and cinematic verve in a film festival's retrospective and not its main program? Grzegorz Królikiewicz's Tanczacy jastrzab (The Dancing Hawk, 1977), playing in the “Winter Adé” retrospective, has the energy and invention of a hundred Berlinale films.  This tale of totalitarian surrealism, of expressionism not as an exterior expression of the inner state of an individual but of an expression of a whole regime, an entire generation of young men, was made in a supposedly censored national cinema?  The Dancing Hawk is one of the freest films ever made, bullyingly insane as it practically hurtles at the audience its rank-climbing bureaucratic hero’s birth and childhood in a montage of cryptic flurry.  

Stomping feet (shot upside down), an axe placed on a woman's head, milk squirting from a breast, and an obscure image of genitalia—our hero is born in the strangest of circumstances (and by that I mean images and sound; each foley effect, exaggerated and humorous, is an event in the film).  His life, up to the jump start of his career when he rolls around an expensive carpet in orgasmic ecstasy with a woman whose father will give him a job, is The Dancing Hawks’ delirious highlight and surely thirty of the most handspringingly inventive minutes in cinema: handheld camera, cameras strapped to tree branches, to corpses, to the head of bulls, to the shoulders of dueling bicycle riders as they yell and approach each other head on, finally crashing twice-over in first-person cyclistic absurdity—the camera as, literally, the insane vision of a banal man's upbringing.  Dig up a frozen corpse (it's war), bypass your company director (it's peace), struggle to work, only for work, where everything, your wives (!), your sons (!!), your family, your war, your Party, young village, all are forgotten and the camera sees only how you've forgotten everything in the generic fervor of getting on in your job. It is a shocking surprise to see the dark, humorous post-expressionism on display here, which one can trace directly from Królikiewicz's film to those of David Lynch and Terry Gilliam.

Shot gratuitously, freewheelingly, erratically and ingeniously by the multi-talented Zbigniew Rybczynski, The Dancing Hawk sees in the collision of Poland's brutally informing, horrific, and raucous historical past and its bone-dry, and Lynch-surreal bureaucratic present the opportunity to create a cinematic tidal wave of virtuosity, energy, and high-on-life, high-on-cinema aggression.  The very personalness of subjective cinema rapidly expands to deliriously encompass the sheer baffling fact of living in Poland after all that came before 1977.

Above: Mariano de Rosa's Aguas Verdes.

With just Clinch (Schwitzkasten; John Cook, Austria 1977) to come (1930 tonight at Arsenal—the cinema, not the footy stadium), the festival score-card looks like this:

1. Films seen in their entirety from start to finish : 32
2. Films walked out of: 3 (Material after 115m; Mental after 90m; Ghosted after 20m)
3. Films walked out of and back into : 1 (Jadup and Boel—missed less than 5m near the end. Long story as to departure and re-entry.)
4. Total films "seen" in whole or part: 36 (average rating out of 10: 5.5)
5. Best new film: Green Waters (Aguas Verdes; Mariano de Rosa, Argentina 2009) 8/10
6. Runners-up: Home From Home (Germany) 8/10 ; then My Dear Enemy (South Korea); Deep in the Valley (Japan); Letters to the President (Canada/Iran), all 7/10.
7. Best film from any era: The Dancing Hawk (Tancazcy jastrzab; Grzegorz Krolikiewicz, Poland 1977) 9/10.
8. Next-best from the archives: Slow Summer (Austria) 8/10, then Little Valentino (Hungary); Stars of the Day (USSR) both 7/10.
9. Worst film: Enraged Sun, Enraged Sky (Rabioso Sol, Rabioso Cielo; Julian Hernandez, Mexico 2009) 1/10
10. New films which I didn't manage to see but am particularly keen to do so: In the Electric Mist from Competition; Ander and The Bone Man from Panorama; Encirclement from Forum; When It Was Blue from Forum Expanded; Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl from Berlinale special. (Most negatively buzzed: Absolute Evil and Human Zoo.)
11. Celebrities glimpsed: 2 (Henning Mankell [grouchy]; Joe Dallesandro [tiny])
12. Non-filmic highlight of the festival: (Der) Bruno S in Stadtklause, Bernburgerstrasse, Friday 6th February 2009. Public performance followed by impromptu "private" rendition of a "poem" (?), in German, about the Tower of Babel.
13. Non-filmic lowlight of the festival: getting into a childish argument about exit-doors with two cinema staff at the International after the screening of Enraged Sun, Enraged Sky, Friday 13th February. I'd wanted to ask some cutting questions of the director (and, if possible, the Panorama representative) at the Q&A but circumstances (director didn't speak English, too many people on stage) meant this wasn't feasible. In a classic case of what psychiatrists call "transference", I thus got into an argument with the first folk I happened to have any kind of friction with. Idiotic and immature stuff. Why do we live but so seldom learn?
14. Predicted winner of the Golden Bear: Everyone Else (Alle anderen) by Maren Ade (Germany).
15. Dark-horse danger: Mammoth by Lukas Moodysson (Denmark etc).
16. Most unlikely headline of the week: regarding The Pink Panther 2, in today's Berliner Zeitung : Dialektik des Serialismus (yes, they're kidding—a sub-headline refers to the film as "Grosse kinokunst" i.e. "Great cinematic art").
17. Best atmosphere at a screening: Home From Home at CineStar, Friday 13th: packed out, with patrons sitting three and four deep all the way up the stairs for this finely-calibrated crowdpleaser.
18. Worst atmosphere at a screening: Enraged Sun, Enraged Sky—see above. To program the film at all was bad enough, but to put it into the International, one of the world's great temples of cinema, was an insult.
19. Best pieces of fabric at the festival: not having glimpsed jury-president Tilda Swinton at any point, it would have to be the curtains at the International. Vast, two-tone shimmering things of milky-white stripes and spangles. If world cinema needs a flag, then these colossal drapes in this superb cinema will surely do the job.
20. Excerpts from a notebook (specifically 200 Blatt sheets feuilles vel kartek lap listu folhas, HerlitzPBS AG-Berlin):

Mental: "they get space to explain maladies"
The International "UN-building as citadel of sinisterness"
The Exploding Girl: "wonderment at cobbled-2gether little gadget"
Marin Blue: "horror-muzak!"
Burrowing: "Malickian feel in domestic surroundings, with kid-poetic v/o"
Ricky: "convincingly shitty nappy"
The Happiest Girl in the World: "thudding irony of title"
Araya: "siren-regulated bosses' paradise"
Slow Summer: "delicacy of touch / quite ruff-n-ready"
The Beast Stalker: "grey-eye awakes!!!"
Ghosted: "amateur hour"
Distance: "social + emotional fuckup—lowboiler"
My Dear Enemy: "Korea's gone from his attitude...to hers?"
Beeswax: "kitschy bric-a-brac + knickknax"
Stars of the Day: "hypno regressions to past lives"
Mr. Governor: "unflappable diplomatic charm, discretion, tact, self-effacement, reserve"
Deep in the Valley: "moan @ progress"
Kill Daddy Goodnight: "handy that he keeps the birthmark even after fleeing to USA!!"
Everyone Else: "bubbling to a kickoff"
Green Waters: "grinning satyr Roberto"
Material: "disgruntlement with party bosses"
Naked of Defenses: "lettuce-chop crackup"
Little Valentino: "laidback, unsmiling youth"
After Winter Comes Spring: "not so grim"
Soul Power: "all for benefit of Mobutu!"
Members of the Funeral: "slooow"
Letters to the President: "vox-populism"
The Dancing Hawk: "shot like 3-D!"
The Milk of Sorrow: "Dol.Claiborne"
Little Joe: "naked among t/vestites"
Sweetgrass: "terrain is overwhelmed"
Jadup and Boel: "softened spikes"
Short Cut to Hollywood: "like hero, goes to bits"
Enraged Sun, Enraged Sky: "enraged audience"
Home From Home: "tonguerolling cows?!"

There are no examination rooms in Dr. Ma's clinic in Huangyangchuan, a town in rural China: just one space that serves as waiting area, examination room, and pharmacy.  Thus, magically, private chambers of physical maladies and ill complaints by the circumstances, by necessity, become public ones.  With peasants from the town and the mountainous countryside surrounding it gathered in the small room, telling the doctor where it hurts is practically part of the same conversation as whose crops are failing, the health of a son-in-law, and local labor issues.  Is life, lifestyle, and livelihood not a crucial part of one's health?  Cong Feng's nearly four-hour documentary Doctor Ma's Country Clinic may be named after the locally renowned practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine, but the film itself is interested not in the practice but rather its atmosphere allowing freedom of complaint, introspection, and social, economic, and emotional comparison.

The film is a no-nonsense, modest monument to the destitute plight of country peasants in this part of China, finding a place (and the time) for them to talk about everything from cheating bosses and deaf officials to brides bought for money who fled the terrible local conditions, and the existential fatalism of the area's ailing elderly population.  In fact, youth and young adults barely seem to show up in Ma's clinic, presumably working or living elsewhere (many must travel away from home to find work), too healthy or busy to complain.  It is an older generation, one that worked through the 1960s and 70s (and is still working today!), that is now feeling the repercussions of their decades-long labor for the meagre reward of a destitute livelihood full of anxiety, constant uncertainty, and constant "ailments," whether they are physical, emotional, or economic.  The clinic and the step outside it becomes like a cafe, saloon, or barbershop, a social place for the community to gather and voice complaints, to tell their stories as if to themselves—like proper patients, they came to complain, even if no one is listening.  The clinic is like a secret outlet, a sactioned area for confession and complaint; Dr. Ma provides the stage, Cong Feng, in unfussy and unpretentious long-take camera coverage gives the time, and the Chinese peasants perform a terribly forlorn drama of a countryside's infirmity.

Above: Dominique Thomas (left) and Lola Creton (right), as Bluebeard and his young bride.

Would you expect Catherine Breillat to have something in common with Manoel de Oliveira?  Surprisingly, Breillat's new film Bluebeard shares the same vital interest in the chaste strictures of an older society as Oliveira's romance in Berlinale, Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl.  The affinity is especially strong because the classic Bluebeard fairy tale is far from being subverted by Breillat; if her last film, The Last Mistress, proved anything, it was that this famously provocative director is tempering her explicitness in favor of straight dramas which allow contemporary viewers to confront older forms of social, shall we say, intercourse.

Like the Oliveira, Bluebeard has a framing story as well: two young sisters in the 20th century are reading the fairy tale, the younger one, provocative and precocious (a director stand-in, perhaps?), needles her more "sensitive" older sister by reading her the uncomfortable tale of maidenly murder.  That tale is of a young girl (Lola Creton) who is married off to Lord Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas), rumored to have murdered his previous wives.  Yet with love and respect, the couple miraculously seems to get along, ignoring, at least for a while, the horror that lives within a story that demands a moral.

That horror is necessary.  Indeed, the utopias of fairy tales and times past are fragile; and what would we learn if they did not break?  One gesture, one breach of faith, one defect in character—in this more chivalrous and unforgiving time—is sure to forever ruin this romance (that we root for a murderous ogre and his preteen bride—why, it must be ruined!).  Breillat, ever the provocateur even inside this surprisingly calm drama, makes sure that there are severe repercussions to these seemingly small things.  So alien to our own time and significant to theirs, Breillat makes sure these gestures of the past effect our young storytellers who have share the same skepticism of old stories as we do.  By framing the story as a story—a fairy tale told inside the film itself—Bluebeard unpretentiously shows that while the behavior of the past may be long dead, that behavior channels something universal, something true, and something disturbing to our own time.  Fairy tales aren't only fantasy and imagination if they still get under our skins, and still have the power to kill.

Related Films

The Last Mistress

Dir Catherine Breillat

2007 France

"Romance," says Ricardo Trêpa in Manoel de Oliveira's Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl, "begins in art and reality."  Begins...and ends, you might say, as his reality is an economic reality.  Like a character in a 18th century novel, Trêpa is bound by social rules dictating just what kind of young man may be, how shall we say, romantic; that is, propose marriage.  And when Trêpa falls in love with the blond girl (Catarina Wallenstein) he spies in the window across the street, he is certain that while the image of the girl may be art itself, his unemployment makes the reality of romance impossible.

Adapted from a short story by Eça de Queirós—whose caricature is humorously honored when Trêpa visits to an exclusive literary club—Oliveira's Blond Hair Girl is a simple and precise 64 minutes, as pure as rain water and just as lacking in pretension.

As in The Letter, Oliveira's 1999 adaptation of Madame de La Fayette's 17th century novel of social dictum, Blond Hair Girl honors the sublime ardor and mystery of love by making its modern characters live in and play by the rules of a social age long past.  Trêpa's voyeuristic courtship of the maiden across the way has none of the guile of modern cinema stories of such obsession—deep sincerity of character and action define Blond Hair Girl as they do all Oliveira's films.  Actorly stiffness and precise diction in opulently lit and exquisitely framed shots are a powerful measure of the forcefulness of belief of these characters, as well as the underlying depth and richness of such simple drama within such strict social mores.

Yet Blond Hair Girl is far from dry and humorless, or held back by its subject; on the contrary, even in such a short film, Oliveira is a master of it all.  A man loses his hat, a poker chip slips through the cracks in the floor of a palatial mansion, and Trêpa, upon realizing his friend knows the beautiful girl's family, dances a merry jig—the film is as deliciously droll about its romantic quest as the light rustle and the subtle transparency of the layers of curtains covering the young girl's window are simmering and sensual.  The simplicity on display is a relief, and the mastery effortless.  Even considering this, the rug is pulled out from under us: finally learning to empathize with these characters so old fashioned, Oliveira, as tragic and droll as ever, shows us the possible consequences of such morals.  The forlorn—strange, terrible, deadpan, and surreal—rips through the end of de Queirós like a terrible, human punchline, in what is without a doubt the single most breathtaking shot of an film in the Berlinale—showing that even these people from bygone eras can shock.

Ever hear of Slow Criticism? It's a new movement in film criticism launched into the festival-world's public consciousness at Rotterdam last month, when a special edition of the Dutch magazine Filmkrant, edited by Dana Linssen, came out. The idea is to counterpoint the rush to instant, snappy judgments from film reviewers worldwide, who find themselves increasingly harried by knuckleheaded editors.

According to Dana: "The following pages are a refuge for wayward articles that too seldom find their way to print, because they are considered too philosophical, personal, political or poetic."

Might be a goer. Especially if Slow Criticism champions what I'd like to dub Fast Arthouse. Because, just as the mighty Vern (http://www.geocities.com/outlawvern/) keeps telling us that "poems don't got to be soft," I firmly reckon that good movies don't got to be slow, especially those showcased at festivals such as the Berlinale.

Exhibit A : Green Waters, aka Aguas Verdes, an unheralded, so far not-much-talked about (except by me!) Argentinean picture tucked away in the Forum.  The lurid debut from writer-director Mariano De Rosa is about a paranoid dad on holiday with his two kids—one of them a jailbait teenage girl—plays like Pasolini's Theorem, if the latter had been remade as a Spanish horror film circa 1975. Formally and tonally audacious, it's the only new movie I've seen here that I've been able to get particularly enthusiastic about (though I've liked My Dear Enemy, Deep in the Valley and the Ahmadinejad documentary Letters to the President), and it goes like the proverbial clappers. This means that it'll be trashed as unserious and unartistic in certain quarters, but so be it. Then again, it's a real slowcoach of a picture compared with...

Exhibit B : The Dancing Hawk, aka Tanczacy jastrzab, 1977, Poland, by Grzegorz Krolikiewicz, whom I'd never heard of before arriving here.  The film is part of the “After Winter Comes Spring” section of movies made behind the Iron Curtain in the 10-15 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it's the only masterpiece I've seen here (after 24 films). Jagged, impressionistic and relentlessly inventive (visually, sound-wise, thematically) biography of a mid-ranking Communist apparatchik (think Terry Gilliam remaking Mirror, on amphetamines) plays like a wild, hilarious avant-garde short - for a full 98 minutes. The pace and invention do dip a little here and there, but in the end I was reminded about the mighty American racehorse Secretariat, about whom it was said he could sprint for a full 12 furlongs.

Otherwise, not much to write home about. My dark-horse Katalin Varga has proved popular and looks a plausible candidate for the Golden Bear, alongside Iranian About Elly, Moodysson's wildly polarizing Mammoth, the near-universally popular Everyone Else from local heroine Maren Ade, plus perhaps Bouchareb's London River. Hard to see much else getting into it at this late stage.

Delights for today: The Milk of Sorrow (big 9am press show at the big Berlinale Palast), maybe the Dallesandro documentary Little Joe, the 2 hour sheep doc Sweetgrass (which I keep wanting to call Sweetmeat) and, tonight, one of two After Winter pictures, either Jadup and Boel or The Grass Is Greener.

Meanwhile, from the big screen to the small. This just in:

Vanessa Redgrave and her daughter Joely Richardson are among the star cast announced for the BBC's new version of sci-fi classic The Day of the Triffids. Actor Dougray Scott will play hero Dr. Bill Masen, while Eddie Izzard, Brian Cox and US star Jason Priestley will also take roles in the drama.

Also from BBC.co.uk, a little news-story that would have been a rather bigger deal back before Winter had become Spring:

Russian and US Satellites Collide. A satellite owned by the US company Iridium hit a defunct Russian satellite at high speed nearly 780km (485 miles) over Siberia on Tuesday, Nasa said.  The impact produced a massive cloud of debris, and the magnitude of the crash is not expected to be clear for weeks.

…sounds a bit like the Berlinale.

Above: Maren Abe's Everyone Else.

Everyone Else (dir. Maren Ade) – Five years ago the Berlinale unveiled one of the most uplifting relationship films of the decade, Before Sunset; this year’s competition film to beat is also a sharp observation of a couple who share an uncommonly wacky rapport, except here their amorous vibe is threatened by the looming specter of adult respectability. A twenty-something answer to Voyage to Italy, it recalls Rossellini’s investigation of how environments sculpt emotions, though Ade and her remarkable actors (esp. free-spirited Birgit Minichmayr) achieve this not through Rossellini’s stripping of personal masks, but by presenting a mirror in the form of a rival couple whose confident aura of bourgeois respectability inspire both contempt and insecurity. The Berlin jury may deem this not “high concept” enough to snag a best picture Golden Bear, but the film’s willingness to flesh out a scene to its fullest and its vivid awareness of the little gifts and pinpricks that people give each other in gestures and words is exactly what’s missing from a slog of competition films about global issues that have as much insight and authenticity as an article in Newsweek.

Beeswax (dir. Andrew Bujalski) – It seems that not a few critics were ready to pounce on this film as the Alamo of Mumblecore. Leaving Mumblecore out of this, this is Bujalski’s most ambitious and richest effort, adding new layers of relevance to his trademark milieu of conversational awkwardness among young adults living day to day by depositing them within the creeping walls of grown-up responsibility.  Whereas some reviews have found this setting emblematic of the shallowness of Bujalski’s world view, I find it to be a starkly honest and self-knowing depiction of the infantilizing effects of contemporary American culture. To this end, Bujalski’s job isn’t so much to judge his characters as to depict them with discernment and accuracy, and he does this with ethnographic precision. This is especially the case with his main character, an uptight, wheelchair-bound store manager who has to be one of the most sympathetic yet unpatronizing depictions of disabled life onscreen.

The Fish Child (dir. Lucia Puenzo) – The follow-up to Puenzo’s gender-bending debut XXY is an unlikely marriage of teenage lesbianism, telenovela melodrama and discombobulating narrative strategies à la Mulholland Dr. and fellow Argentine Lucretia Martel, and for the most part it works powerfully. A mystery plot resting on multi-layered flashbacks manages to remain compelling thanks to Puenzo’s ability to anchor scenes on one or two details that linger in the mind and provide pieces to a puzzle of secrets that devastate two families.  Once the narrative fog clears, the plot goes for the jugular, piling guns, tears and corruption onto its top-heavy climax, but there’s no denying the mood of sexy hauntedness that lingers after the credits.

Deep in the Valley (dir. Atsushi Funahashi) – This beguiling blend of documentary and fiction starts by patiently chronicling the placid lifestyle in Tokyo’s Yanaka district, home to acres of temples and gravesites, then shifts almost imperceptibly into a historical mystery tale involving a pagoda that burned down decades ago, complete with period scenes depicting the tower’s construction. Conceptually ambitious yet calmly executed, the film switches between multiple modes of narration probing through space and time, fact and fiction. The result is something new: a documentary ghost story that exists in a melancholy memory zone connecting the living with the dead.

Bluebeard (dir. Catherine Breillat) – Five years ago one might have shuddered with dreadful anticipation at what Breillat version of a children’s fairy tale might look like, but following The Last Mistress the sexual provocateur seems to be focusing her subversive impulses squarely on the contradictions within the source material. Despite being filmed with clinical flatness in unflattering low-fi digital, Breillat’s interpretation of the story becomes a complex celebration and critique of feminine will.  An initially awkward framing device in which two girls read the story to each other proves to add a valuable layer illuminating the contradictory impulses of delight and repulsion that bind a girl to her fantasies, and the dynamic of feminine empowerment and servitude that’s reflected in Perrault’s fairy tale.

Yang Yang (dir. Cheng Yu-Cheih) – Countless films implicitly objectify their actresses; few make objectification their central theme like this rangy chronicle of a French-Chinese high school athlete whose exotic charm keeps getting in the way of her relationships with everyone around her. Cheng’s second feature is heavy on the Dardenne brothers’ handheld long takes that do as much to obfuscate the action as reflect a narrow consciousness coming into its own.  But after the rattling camerawork subsides, a number of interesting insights into how personal identity is formulated and commodified begin to take hold.

Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl (dir. Manoel de Oliveira) – Oliveira’s first effort in the second century of his life can work as a distillation of his legacy, bookending his lifespan by adapting a short story by 19th century Portugese writer Eça de Queiróz to a setting that vaguely resembles the present day. The result is an intriguing amalgam that reaches for a timeless truth to love and honor, with box-filled compositions and plenty of quirky line readings that have become emblematic of this latest epoch of Oliveira’s storied career. If this ends up as his swan song, at least he’ll have left us with one of the most stunning final shots of a woman ever captured on film.

Kill Daddy Goodnight (dir. Michael Glawogger) – A film whose ambitious attempt to juggle the legacy of the Holocaust, generational resentments and video game violence fires off all kinds of unexpected tones and moments. It swings from single-take Shoah-like testimonial monologues to CGI bloodbaths along the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, with a sexless, hairless nude scene thrown in for good measure. Frustratingly irresolute but intermittently fascinating, at minimum it’s a fresh kick in the pants to the stale genre of Holocaust prestige flicks.

Double Take (dir. Johan Grimonperez) – This retro found footage whirligig mashes up one part Alfred Hitchcock television clips, one part Cold War newsreels and one part half-baked themes on doublings and theories of how TV and global telecommunications superficialized our lives forever. For a good half of the runtime there’s much nostalgic fun to be had in seeing the TV version of Hitch at his cheeky best, as well as precious footage of Nixon debating Khrushchev about the comparative values of space rockets and color TV sets. By the end all the clever splicing and dicing of footage amounts to a post-modern McGuffin.

Gigante (dir. Adrian Biniez) – Hefty supermarket security guard spies on cleaning lady via surveillance cam and ends up stalking his way to a romantic coming-of-age. Basically a Judd Apatow movie that substitutes mannerist humor for gross-out jokes, it works much more than it has any right to thanks to winning performances and good if conventional comic timing.

Mammoth (dir. Lukas Moodysson) –  I walked out when Gabriel Garcia Bernal, wracked with first-world guilt, tries to buy freedom for a Thai hooker and Michelle Williams tries to quell her malaise with gourmet pizzas and humpback whale recordings, thus missing out on joining the boos that reportedly showered the film at the end of the press screening.  There isn’t a single credible scene in this generic litany of globalism’s ills; the film itself is as preoccupied with its own importance and pathetically disengaged from anything resembling reality as the poor little rich family whose shallow existence it strains so seriously to condemn.

Above: a relaxed but aggrevated vision of young adults in 2009...

Relaxation infuses the filmmaking of both John Cook's Slow Summer and Andrew Bujalski's Beeswax; only, the first was made by the Canadian filmmaker in Austria in 1976 and the other shot in Austin, Texas last year.  When filmmakers are working on a slim budget and making movies about their friends and about what they know, a style emerges that perhaps has little allegiance to countries and eras, and instead sees a universality in the minute details of the  local slangs of speech and the rhythms of haphazard lives.

Cook's is a semi-autobiographical work shot on 8mm, a film about him and a friend watching a (semi-autobiographical) film Cook shot several years earlier, using friends as actors, trying to exorcise some meaning from his breakup with his girlfriend.  Intentionally or not, Cook exhibits a slackness in terms of characters, story, and theme which seems to derive from the hodgepodge, low-budget shoot of Slow Summer.  With just sketches of ideas and erratic access to time and funds, the resulting film has a leisure to it that seems most unlike the early 1970s languor of something like Celine and Julie Go Boating, which relishes its sense of vacation.  Slow Summer,  like Bujalski's new film (which is probably much more scripted), admits immediately to be finding itself as it goes.  Beeswax is a far more polished production, but its rather lame framing device of small-claims legal action between two partners in a vintage clothing store in Austin is about as arbitrary as Cook's distracted quest to understand women, finish his film, or simply to just do something in life.  Both conceits provide an excuse for the filmmakers to delve into their milieu of youths turning into adults and navigating the world, whether it is sexually, creatively, and existentially as in John Cook's film, or more in terms of the minute, un-stated rules governing human interaction—the kinds that lead to success in love and career—in Beeswax.

For Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation), this plot contrivance focuses the film, allowing his characters get under one another's skin.  Even if the central relationships between two twin sisters and one sister's relationship with a lawyer-in-training are fundamentally friendly, practically each scene and sequence between people exudes a passive-aggressiveness, a stress, a worry, and an anxiety which makes the cumulative effect of Beeswax unusually uncomfortable and exhausting.  This is within the atmosphere of relaxation, because despite the mannerism of Bujalski's script, the story moves at life's rather dull and sidelong pace, which makes for a particularly odd atmosphere of a film that is evocatively is casual in all things as it moves from person to person and place to place, but exudes a subtle energy of irritation throughout every minute of it.  Yet this irritation, somewhat paradoxically, is evoked through a particularly lovely example of filmmaking, Matthias Grunsky's photography a terrific example of someone who chooses to shoot in color for aesthetic reasons and not by default, and Bujalski's sense of editing and staging in Beeswax being some of the sharpest I've seen in some time.

John Cook's approach is a far less pristine, benefiting what looks like the slipshod nature of the film shoot itself.  Yet Slow Summer seems to have a similar impression of its bohemian Viennese youth as Beeswax does of its  sublimated squabbling: people playing around and butting heads as they try to figure out what is important to them in adulthood.

Above:..and a relaxed but wandering vision of young adults in 1976.

4.0: PREAMBLE

So, after four days and nine attempts, I finally discovered a new film that I can more than luke-warm enthusiastic about. Near misses have included The Exploding Girl from Wednesday, Burrowing, Ricky and The Happiest Girl in the World fron Thursday, and Distant from Friday. But then Saturday morning kicked off with a press screening of the film reviewed below.

4.1: REVIEW

My Dear Enemy (Meotjin haru; Lee Yoon-Ki; South Korea 2008; 123m), Berlinale Forum

Ex hits the spot in My Dear Enemy, a winningly deadpan comedy of love and social awkwardness from Korean writer-director Lee Yoon-Ki (best known for 2004 hit This Charming Girl) Poor word-of-mouth was blamed for its disappointing showing at domestic box-offices last October, but this is a classy, well-observed affair that deserves the warmer reception it will receive around the international film-festival circuit.

There's also distinct remake potential here: it's easy to imagine, say, Reese Witherspoon and Colin Farrell in the central roles of uptight Hee-Soo (Jeon Do-Yeon) and Byoung-Woon (Ha Jung-Woo), the jack-the-lad former boyfriend whom she pesters, over the course of a long day and evening in downtown Seoul, over repayment of a long-standing debt. Any Stateside remake would need a tighter focus, however: as is often the case with commercial Korean cinema, the material is stretched thin to reach the local market's standard two-hour running-time.

But even if the pace flags from time to time, it's never a chore to hang out with this ill-matched duo—Jeon's breezy, live-for-the-moment dreamer Byoung-Woon makes particularly good company (the appealing actor is near-unrecognisable as the meek-mannered psychopath from last year's thriller The Chaser). A glib charmer with an eye for the ladies and a stream of ready patter (captured nicely via the slangy English-language subtitles), Byoung-Woon initially comes over as a slippery heel, especially when—in the course of calling in numerous small debts in order to give Hee Soo the hefty sum she's owed—he places his ex in some humiliating positions.

While Ha's nuanced performance poignantly reveals her superficially tough character's sensitivity and vulnerability, the situations she ends up in with Byoung-Woon are essentially comic—some of them, indeed, are laugh-out-loud hilarious, all the more so for being presented with the straightest of faces. As the day shades into night, it becomes apparent that she realises that her cash-obsessed lifestyle is much less of a recipe for happiness that Byoung-Woon's jauntily happy-go-lucky approach—but the picture thankfully doesn't go overboard on its life-lessons theme. Serious-minded audiences may even interpret the contrast between Byoung-Woon and Hee-Soo as a sly critique of Korea's mercantile, money-oriented culture—a running subtext illustrated by the lively range of urban locales visited over the course of the movie.

4.2: GOLDEN BEAR UPDATE

At the halfway point, it's looking like a five-way race between [1] Moodysson's Mammoth (booed and cheered at the press screening, and thus has the makings of a succes de scandale along the lines of last year's winner Elite Squad), [2] Farhadi's About Elly from Iran, [3] Bouchareb's London River (which I plan to get up and see tomorrow first thing) and the German duo of [4] Ade's Everyone Else (perhaps the most universally liked of the competitors so far unveiled) and [5] Schmid's Storm. Latest odds: 4/1 Moodysson, 9/2 Farhadi, 11/2 Bouchareb, 8/1 Ade, 10/1 Schmid, with the remainder headed by as-yet-unscreened dark-horse Strickland (Katalin Varga) alongside veteran Wajda (Sugar Rush). Still, pretty open, with no consensus masterpiece either present or expected.

4.3: BRUNO S. UPDATE

He's back in the Stadtklause on Friday night, apparently. I've been calling in each evening for research purposes, with consumption of beer and sausages (cheap, good value) purely incidental. Across the street is a church which I'm intrigued by. I normally have no time for churches, but this one—looks late 19th, early 20th century—is an exception. I finally realised why today: it looks a bit like the disused house-of-worship in downtown Los Angeles that is the main location for John Carpenter's terrific 1989 Prince of Darkness. It's officially the St Lukas Church, Kreuzberg—that Germanized form of "Luke" surely a tip from above that my Moodysson hunch may well prove correct. The location opposite the Stadtklause is also evidence of a divine plan: among other celestial duties, St Luke is the patron saint of brewers.

More anon.

Images © Fabrizio Maltese / fabriziomaltese.com

Sharon Lockhart pushes her camera on a dolly down a factory hallway during eleven minutes of the workers' lunch break, and creates a kind of cinematic magic we all wish we could conjure in real life: slowing down those precious eleven minutes of your break until they stretch out to eighty-three.  It may be a dream—and the employees certainly do seem to enjoy taking their time napping, making popcorn, glancing at the camera, and snacking, in the luxury of the slow motion—but the effect of Lockhart's exploration of closed space (the camera pushing endlessly into the z-axis) and elongated time is very ambiguous indeed.

The unease comes most powerfully from the remarkable fact there is almost no sense of off-screen space to this slo-mo tour of what feels like a mile stretch.  The hallway is rather unique in that it seems to be very long but offer no extensions of space or openings to its sides—to the right are lockers and benchers, to the left a dense mess of pipes and confused industrial architecture.  There's not an open space or door-to-somewhere to be seen.  Workers seem to enter the frame and exit as if magically; the receding perspective of the hallway hides cubbyholes along its sides that the employees are resting in, so that often we aren't aware anyone is in the space until the camera practically passes them.

There literally seems no escape from this "break," the camera lugubrious but voracious, the hallways a conveyer belt into the mouth of the camera.  (A wry joke could be made of conceptualizing the camera as the point of view of an employer viewing his workers taking the world's longest break.)  All in the camera's way flows in with nothing coming out; the hallway is an endless length that negates any sense of a world outside of it.  (The type of work this is a break from, for example, is a mystery until the closing credits.)  The sound of Lunch Break is in real time, but created and timed so that it travels at the same locational speed of the camera; even ambient noise seems to come not from all around the factory but rather from what is directly near our mobile camera view.  The cubbyholes and the singularity of the space gradually suggest the weary linearity of sailors in submarines and soldiers in the trenches, both hanging onto every last second of the present, both moving or waiting impatiently for action.  A paradise of time may in fact have turned into a trapped space in hell.

Above: A highlight of the 2009 Berlinale, So Yong Kim's Treeless Mountain.

Treeless Mountain (dir. So Yong Kim) - This premiered at Toronto last September, but so far I’ve yet to see a better film than this subtle, carefully observed semi-autobiographical story of two Korean sisters struggling to get by without their parents. After the laudable DV debut In Between Days, Kim switches to film, which does wonders in clarifying her vision: utilizing long lenses that make masterful use of deep staging within a naturalistic, almost documentary environment. Kim places tremendous faith in telephoto long shots that train for nearly the whole time on the faces and gestures of her two tiny protagonists as they react to the half-seen, half-comprehended grown-up world that engulfs them. What could easily play for cutesy melodrama instead becomes a stolidly cinematic depiction of childood growth and resilience.

About Elly (dir. Asghar Farhadi) – One could dub this “The Iranian L’Avventura”; like Antonioni’s film it uses a woman’s disappearance to expose the nature of those left searching for her. Elly’s eponymous character vanishes from a family beach party to which she was invited to be matched with one of the sons. Whereas Antonioni’s use of this narrative device revealed yawning chasms in his ensemble’s existential and moral fabric, here it leads to a narrative contest waged across sexual lines. The missing girl’s character is hotly debated between the men and women in the family, exposing numerous prejudices that persist even in this progressively middle-class Iranian household. Shot in conventional handheld but well performed, the film suggests a post-Kiarostami Iranian cinema capable of achieving much within a mainstream idiom.

Mental (dir. Kazuhiro Soda) – As Neil Young has already indicated, this film may test the patience of some, but for me this observational documentary about a Japanese mental health facility is worthy of the mantle of Soda’s idol Frederick Wiseman.  The film extends itself to its subjects, allowing them to express themselves in their own time, making up for the gross neglect paid them in a society where the mentally disabled are kept well from view. This cinematic act of generosity eventually reaps ample rewards as the patients’ oddly lucid musings on the purpose of their lives and their struggles with happiness and compulsive thoughts of suicide lead to a startling universality. If the Berlinale gave awards for the “performances” of documentary subjects, surely one would go to Sugano, a brilliant but fragile ex-social worker who directs his own scenes and whose poetry provides the script for one of the most emotionally affecting scenes of the festival so far.

The Exploding Girl (dir. Brad Rust Grey) – While not a self-acknowledged member of the Mumblecore movement, Grey takes their milieu of inarticulate, emotionally fragile youths and applies a supreme technical competence that’s generally been missing from those films. Like his wife So Yong Kim, Grey trains long lenses on his characters to evoke a voyeuristic, life-in-the-moment realism, following two childhood friends going through phases of love that threaten to upset their kinship.  Low-budget urban filmmakers should study this film to learn how to achieve intimacy even in the midst of noisy Manhattan intersections.

Ricky (dir. Francois Ozon) – A family fable whose online trailer is worth watching in itself, this fantastical drama centered on a baby that mysteriously sprouts wings and flies has an audacious concept that ultimately is underserved. There’s great acting across the board, especially the baby, whose cherubically ripe face and physical expressiveness seems as much a CGI creation as its airborne appendages. Ozon sets up the premise with Shamalyan slow-burn efficacy, but it’s debatable what the film is really about. The film doesn’t do enough to make its premise plausible, which wouldn’t be an issue if it had a stronger sense of what’s at stake.  If it’s about the parental need to “let go” as its supporters claim, Ozon could have done a better job developing that theme; as it is, it feels slapdash. Nonetheless, the wondrous early scenes with the baby are where it truly takes flight.

The International (dir. Tom Tykwer) – I didn't expect to like this as much as I did. It doesn't work as a conventional action thriller (there really is only one action scene, though it's a stunner), seeming more preoccupied with detailing the innumerable obstacles facing Clive Owen and Naomi Watts, playing a pair of ineffectual investigators, well, ineffectually, as they try to take down a bank that illicitly deals arms to the third world, profiting from a world of endless war. It's a bold and timely premise for a mainstream film, and it takes itself seriously enough to conclude with a deeply cynical view of global capitalism. The film's failure to offer closure or satisfy most entertainment expectations are precisely what makes it interesting.

Storm (dir. Hans-Christian Schmidt) – Basically as socially serious as The International but with better acting and no action scenes, this courtroom drama inspired by the Serbian War crimes trials has the mainstream polish and respectability of a Euro-Soderbergh. It does well at suggesting the political gamesmanship between governments and international law enforcement that prevents war criminals from truly facing justice, though it ultimately opts for a melodramatic crowd-pleasing climax. Kerry Fox is outstandingly understated as the morally-conflicted prosecutor; Anamaria Marinca (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) plays a rape victim reluctant to testify.

Dongbei Dongbei (dir. Zou Peng) – debut feature has one of the most horrifying movie posters I’ve seen this week: the lower torso of a woman lying with blood soaked through her pajama’s crotch region onto the sheets of her bed.  Needless to say, the screening was standing room only. The film feels like a compendium of Chinese 6th Generation tropes (naturalistic long takes, sardonic social commentary) though Zou ups the ante in the sex department with depictions of female masturbation and cunnilingus. Despite a certain luridness in its concept, the film makes some startling narrative movements and invests its familiar milieu with an engaging energy.

Skirt Day (dir. Jean-Paul Lilienfeld) – Isabelle Adjani came out of a five-year hiatus to overact her way through this puerile version of Laurent Cantet’s The Class—with gunfights! At best this makes for a good TV afterschool special, what with every social issue afflicting the youth of France crammed into its 80 minutes. There’s somewhat interesting configuration of racial and sexual politics going on, but pitched to such hysteria that it amounts to a wash of Gallic noise.

Little Soldier (dir. Annette K. Olsen) – Worst pseudo-lesbian Iraq War vet-meets-African sex worker global allegory movie EVER.

Related Films

Treeless Mountain

Dir So Yong Kim

2008 South Korea