... Just for being sure
I shall go straight to Inferno,
at night the various parties of the Berlinale
allowed
me to meet a large bunch of friends
from all over the world.
All drunk.
Like my shootings
adventures partners
the guys from Noe
and AMPM and Gaumont
and other parisian production companies,
Bono Ristori, the theoretician of the living dead,
or L.,
who is always
everywhere and always drinks.
From one drink to
another,
I managed also to see the not yet legal copy
of an italian film on Eva Braun, by Simone Scafidi,
alongside the Archangels that made it possible...
A mature and spungent film,
a
sort of “Salo” but in a black comedy key.
This would be enough to make you go crazy,
but
what if I told you there is soooooo much sex in it?
If I told you it has a lot
of Bunga Bunga?
....And soon you might get news about my first film, too...
I mean based on my total story...
If you want to
invest on it send me a message...
I’ll send you my IBAN...
It will be a masterpiece! Suspiria will be just a pale copy of it.
...And then so many other
people
I have NOT met...
I have NOT met...
....And then I saw that
pseudo doc on Nick Cave…
where he sees a psychiatrist … 20,000 Days on Earth.
The scene with the shrink was revealing:
Are we witness to a
confession of vulnerability?
Or the performance of such?
The key of the entire film is
only one:
does it matter?
does it matter?
We get a
journey through the past,
through Berlin
(how he kept all his crap
together over his tumultuous life, I have no idea).
Cave, who had once given
himself
so totally
over
so totally
over
to drugs and religion,
appears here incapable of
entirely letting go
of his private being…
A man who wrote a classic
song
about a woman as a boat
about a woman as a boat
is incapable
of releasing himself...
During the film’s press
conference,
co-director Jane Pollard pointed out
that though the film
works as a documentary,
it isn’t really true…
…that it was edited, with
Cave’s approval,
to make him appear more troubled
than the actually was …
...or appearing more melancholic
than reality.
“Nick is a real person,”
Pollard noted.
“But the film isn’t very real.”
Both the press screening
and conference
were only half-attended...
... though Cave’s music is played in every
bar
from Potsdamer Platz to Friedrichshain
(I guess he lives in
Friedrichshain).
His life, today,
is one of the bourgeois bohemian.
is one of the bourgeois bohemian.
He eats,
he watches TV (Scarface with the kids)
and “mostly, I write”
(by
typewriter, of course).
Art can provide the rest.
Cave explained, “I think
cinema was invented
to show violence.
That’s why I got interested in cinema,
really.”
And then we all moved on to
the next film...
As the Berlinale is also about the sense of community
in the auditorium and the venues,
the shared reactions
with hundreds of strangers. ..
Or about the annoying idiot
who carefully unfolds a coat across four seats
to reserve for friends,
who never show up,
and gets into a bitter altercation with the stressed neighbors...
... Or it's about the
awkward Q&As with directors who do not speak any language…
…Or about the applause after
each screening,
the sense that this screening
the sense that this screening
was an event of significance,
that we were all here together
and we shared it…
and we shared it…
This is, after all,
the one
major film festival in the world
that takes place in a city
where actual people
actually live.
… Rather than some remote,
exclusive resort in the Mediterranean,
where the film industry
commits its
annual incest...
But the Berlinale is also
the place
where I enter parties
for films I haven't seen,
smoke some Gitanes,
have some alcooohoool…
…and talk to actors and directors and film
producers,
making sure to leave the
vague impression
I have seen their film
and
thoroughly enjoyed it…
…Now THAT'S the true
Berlinale feeling (too)...
Now enter the Greeks…
With a central character called Antigone
(and
she has the face for it),
Na Kathese Ke Na Kitas
(Standing Aside, Watching),
directed by Yorgos Servetas,
(Standing Aside, Watching),
directed by Yorgos Servetas,
picks up on Sophocles’ fearless,
proto-feminist heroine.
proto-feminist heroine.
She is here
re-presented as a young woman
who returns to her home village
to radically revenge
on the male manipulation.
Servetas’ film plays with fable and myth.
He creates
everyday situations
that are both archaic and contemporary,
marked by moral compromise.
But if you have to make a choice, though,
Sto
Spiti (At Home, Forum, directed by Athanasios Karanikolas—Berlinale 2013)
is an even better matching
of means and substance.
It tells the story
of Nadja,
a migrant worker from Georgia.
Set up with rigor, Karanikolas’ camera
works with a maximum of three takes per scene,
towards a sense of
inevitability
inevitability
in three acts:
exposition, change and consequence.
From up North now…
Norwegian director Hans
Petter Moland
brought at this Berlinale
a hilariously dark crime epic:
In
Order of Disappearance.
Stellan Skarsgard
plays a darkish, introverted guy,
who goes crazy when
his son turns up dead.
He chases a Norwegian Mafioso,
the super hype hipster criminal Greven
(Pal Sverre Hagen),
(Pal Sverre Hagen),
in this work half way
between a Bronson-
movie and the Italian policiers of the 70’ies.
The Mafia boss
is the best character seen so far at this Berlinale,
a cruel and hectic dandy,
vegetarian,
with the hypest blond reddish beard,
an art and design curator.
Mountains of bodies here,
mountains of bodies
there,
whose names are shown by the director
under the sign of their religion
under the sign of their religion
(a
sober cross for Lutherans, slavic cross for the Serbians, star of David for the
jews, etc.).
....just that I prefer
the american noirs (and from LA),
or some good french policiers...
Someone here has to work...
With the exception of
Berlinale hero
Lars von Trier,
you don’t see many modern directors concerning
themselves
with the dynamics of the office
(fantasies where everyone
is an architect or a baker
don’t count)…
is an architect or a baker
don’t count)…
…and the critics too treat films
on this subject
as if they were deciphering
the religious rituals of the Incas…
Lee Yong-Seung’s “Ship Bun” follows a student intern
in a Korean office environment.
But it’s mostly about his great initial
failure,
which imprints the future
as surely as a loss of virginity.
Jong-hwan,
whom at first
seems
too conventionally handsome
for the role,
does well with a character
whose inner life is so opaque.
He possesses a face
which
can quickly shift
between geekiness, arrogance and rage.
between geekiness, arrogance and rage.
Of course, for many,
this
is simply life in the 21st century...
Re: von Trier… if they
should ever consider preceding Nymphomaniac
with an educational documentary,
Claudia Richarz and Ulrike Zimmermann’s
with an educational documentary,
Claudia Richarz and Ulrike Zimmermann’s
Vulva
3.0 would work perfectly.
The film’s general approach
is one of
post-1968 Leftist German feminism, and you’ll never see so many stuffed vaginas!
instead of getting depressed
at the end
with
female genital mutilation…
...it’s like bringing up the SS
during a VH-1 special
on David Lee Roth...
There’s sexuality, but no
sex here;
The subject may be sensual,
But the filmmaking is not.
One could hardly argue that
the vulva is very,
Very important for a lady.
Very, very important.
It’s her penis!
But Vulva 3.0
is a
little dry...
And yet another party…
At the Berlinale Retrospective
reception
there isn't normally
there isn't normally
a lot of blood on the walls…
You don't see academics
pulling each others hair.
And if you visit the
toilet,
there's also an absence
of film archivists
feverishly
wrestling
over crumbs of ketamine
on the floor.
What you get here
is a
crowd of middle-aged,
long-haired,
cardiganed film historians.
They all seem to
live
under a strict prohibition
on male cosmetic products!!!
They debate here
on the latest digital enhancement
of The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
and smash the free wine.
Many of them
(for some
reason)
smell of carrots.
But this year,
I sensed a
discontent
in the herd of the fourth floor
of the Film Museum.
The assembled
academics
wouldn't serve the available pretzels.
They kept glancing at the
poster
with this year's theme:
“Aesthetics of Shadow. Lighting Styles
1915-1950”.
Hm.
Now what the hell does that
mean?
Living with the STASI…
The Stasi
legacy is not exactly
fresh flesh, cinematically speaking.
But Annekatrin
Hendel’s documentary Anderson
has
definitely turned it
into something new.
In a Proustian
attempt to unfold memory,
Hendel recreated the East Berlin kitchen
from which Stasi
IM
(confidential informant)
Sascha Anderson,
himself a rock-star
moving in
dissident circles,
betrayed his dissident hosts
to East German authorities.
Despite this approach,
Anderson remains gloomy
in his rejection not of guilt,
but
of his inability to confront it.
Is there a
difference?
There is.
And Hendel, the
conscious German,
puts her finger on it.
Hendel’s persistent questions
and
Anderson’s persistent evasions
form a strange moral vacuum,
at the centre of a
disturbing document.
...The Hong Kong bizarre feature “The Midnight After” (Panorama Special)
is a sort of “Lost”,
scrambled with “Stagecoach”,
and sprinkled with “Scream”.
Here subtlety is not strong.
Its ensemble cast features a Cantonese Joey Ramone manqué,
named Jan Curious,
whose karaoke version of Bowie’s "Space Oddity”,
sung into a toilet brush,
is the high point
of the film.
Its plot is relatively
simple:
the guys board a mini-bus.
The bus passes through a tunnel.
Weird shit happens.
Everyone checks their
phones.
More weird shit happens …
…that doesn’t seem to have
any connection to the previous weird shit.
any connection to the previous weird shit.
So…Is it a ghost story?
A horror film?
An environmental
parable?
Everything’s played for
laughs
– even rape –
but the tone will quickly shift
into sentiment,.... and out again,
as Hong Kong films often do…
…………………….
