They showed us war and apartheid and dictatorship. They debuted actors as directors, and they scored top prizes for filmmakers in countries known for hardly winning any, like China, Israel and Argentina.
Many films at February’s Berlinale got a cold shoulder from German critics and audiences who say the event is becoming more celebrity-driven than film-driven with each passing year. Granted, this was no bumper crop for haute-cinema, which might explain why Robert De Niro and Clint Eastwood, J-Lo and Cate Blanchett and Sharon Stone were there providing the bounce at red-carpet premieres on Marlene-Dietrich-Platz. But that’s no reason to diss or dismiss the genuine performances and the handful of gritty, hard-told stories that shined through the cold, ten-day spectacle.
For starters, anyone familiar with Berlin knows its 57-year-old film festival has made what amounts to a tradition of tackling heavy political and historical themes. This year was no exception.
The most conceptually stunning of the competition films, Stefan Ruzowitzky’s The Counterfeiters, tells the true story of Solomon (“Sally”) Sorowitsch and several dozen Jews who survived Sachsenhausen concentration camp by forging millions of dollars and pounds for the Nazis, who intended to cripple the Allies’ economies to win World War II. Karl Markovics as the shrewd, tenacious Sorowitsch along with rising German stars Devid Striesow (playing the SS chief Herzog) and August Diehl, who plays the camp prisoner Adolf Burger on whose autobiography the film is based, carry this tightly written, morally complex drama about the biggest counterfeiting operation in history.
It was one of a list of films focusing on weighty subjects, such as Bille August’s Goodbye Bafana, which stars Joseph Fiennes as the real-life South African jailor James Gregory, whose values and beliefs evolved over the two decades he spent guarding the prisoner Nelson Mandela. In The Year My Parents Went on Vacation, Cao Hamburger portrays elation and fear in 1970 Brazil through the eyes of a young boy who watches as his country wins the World Cup and his parents go into hiding to escape the military dictatorship. Armenian genocide was the central theme of two films–Canadian director Gariné Torossian’s visually rich debut feature about identity and homeland, Stone Time Touch, and the Taviani Brothers’ sentimentalized The Lark Farm, a love story set amid the Turks’ slaughter of Armenians in 1915.
But what stirred as much talk here as anything was the surfeit of films made by those we normally recognize standing in front of–not behind–the camera. Big studio films by Robert De Niro (The Good Shepherd) and Clint Eastwood (Letters From Iwo Jima) had less business showing up in Berlin than subtler indie performances like Canadian actress Sarah Polley’s directorial debut Away From Her, a touching drama starring Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent as a couple coping with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.
That wasn’t all. Distributors snatched up foreign film rights to French acting dame Julie Delpy’s humorous if rambling 2 Days in Paris, about a couple’s unromantic sojourn in the City of Light that threatens to doom their relationship. Fargo and Reservoir Dogs veteran Steve Buscemi paid homage to slain Dutch director Theo Van Gogh with a remake of Interview, focusing on one torturously drawn-out conversation between a journalist (played by Buscemi) and a beautiful actress (played by a captivating Sienna Miller). Last but not least, Hollywood’s adopted Latin icon Antonio Banderas took the helm in Summer Rain, telling the drifting story of a man who confronts his parents’ identities while making the rocky transition from adolescence to adulthood. All of which begs the question: Will these actors keep on with their day jobs or have they found a new vocation in directing?
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“I’ll always continue to act,” said Buscemi, who shot his film in just nine days in a penthouse–which is four days longer than it took Van Gogh to make his. “I love it and that’s how I make my living; it affords me to do films like this. I wanted there to be an acknowledgment of Theo’s style of filmmaking. If we can expose an American audience to his work, I think that’s a really good thing.”
When it came time to give awards, the seven-member jury–led by director Paul Schrader and including actors Willem Dafoe and Gael Garcia Bernal–sprung a few surprises. The Golden Bear for best film went to Chinese director Wang Quan’an’s Tuya’s Marriage, which follows the troubles of a young farming woman in Inner Mongolia trying to resist pressure to leave her pastures and move to the city as China’s industry expands. Argentina’s Julio Chavez won best actor for his role as Juan, a man who takes on a sudden new identity in Ariel Rotter’s The Other, which also scored the prestigious Jury Grand Prix award. Thirty-one-year-old local favorite Nina Hoss took the Silver Bear for best actress playing an East German accountant who tries to escape her traumatic past in Christian Petzold’s Yella. And Israeli filmmaker Joseph Cedar won best director honors for his gripping portrait of a harrowing final chapter in Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, Beaufort.
David Mackenzie’s darkly intriguing Hallam Foe, about a teenager’s obsession with sex and spying in Edinburgh, won for best music, while star Korean Wave director Park Chan-wook took the Alfred Bauer Prize for innovative film with his surreal romance occurring in a psychiatric ward, I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK. Other flicks in competition worth mentioning include François Ozon’s bedecked period piece Angel, about a successful English woman writer confronting the darker sides of success, fame and love; Jiri Menzel’s I Served The King of England, adapted from the novel by Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal about a young waiter climbing in comical and bitter episodes through the ranks of the Prague restaurant business; and Olivier Dahan’s La Vie en Rose, in which a dazzling Marion Cotillard portrays the legendary and tragic life of French singer Edith Piaf.
Cotillard said she’d never played a role that so absorbed and temporarily changed her personality. “For four months I behaved like Edith Piaf. I spoke differently, I acted differently,” declared the 31-year-old actress after the film’s applauded world premiere which opened the Berlinale. “It’s like if you walk around on your hands and feet for four months, it takes a while to remember to walk again. I needed a few weeks to get rid of all of [Piaf]’s idiosyncrasies.”
A few documentaries also made a special mark at the festival. Ric Burns’s four-hour bio Andy Warhol (which aired as a two-part series on PBS last fall) paints a sympathetic portrait of the pop artist’s rise from a poor, sickly childhood among East European immigrants in Pittsburgh to become king of the New York commercial and pop art world and an emblem of the tumultuous change of the 1960s. Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Strange Culture, featureing Tilda Swinton and Peter Coyote, recreates the harrowing experience of artist and university biologist Steve Kurtz, who was arrested by the FBI in 2004–and whose trial is still pending–on trumped-up charges of bioterrorism. Shifting back to the Holocaust, Richard Trank’s I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life and Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal, shows remarkable, never-before-seen footage as it explores the story of the famous Nazi-hunter who spent six decades helping track down and prosecute more than 1,000 war criminals. Finally, Miss Gulag, the debut film of 30-year-old Maria Yaskova (born in Moscow, living in New York), follows the lives of three women imprisoned in Siberia through the narrative of a yearly beauty pageant they put on there.
Jennifer Lopez may have been booed by Berlin audiences for her role in the absurdly contrived Mexico murder mystery, Bordertown. Sharon Stone could have skipped coming here altogether to present her film that was roundly panned by press and public alike, When a Man Falls in the Forest. But for those with more than celebrity-spotting in mind–and gripes about what the Berlinale should or should not be–the ten days in February opened eyes and opened doors into different important worlds. Which is what any world-class film festival is supposed to do.