Berlin may not be as glitzy as the other big European festivals, Cannes and Venice, but it knows how to make the most of what you might call “ethical starpower”. Hence Steven Spielberg, present this year to accept the Golden Bear for lifetime achievement, who made an eloquent and imposing speech about longevity, healing and – as befits the locale – the weight of history. And hence serious-minded Hollywood actor Kristen Stewart heading a jury including Iranian-French star Golshifteh Farahani and previous Berlinale-winning directors Carla Simón and Radu Jude – a lineup that seems highly likely to make some daring awards choices.
But there’s also that long-standing Berlinale tradition of combining red-carpet prestige with a certain earnestness that doesn’t always flourish on the screen. A prime example this year was Golda, a solemn, sluggish drama about Israeli premier Golda Meir and the Yom Kippur war, with Helen Mirren giving a solid, thoughtful performance, only to be upstaged by her uncanny prosthetic makeup. And then there was Sean Penn’s documentary about Ukraine, Superpower, co-directed with Aaron Kaufman, in which an understandably starstruck encomium to Volodymyr Zelenskiy was overshadowed by much narcissistic hyperventilating about what an amazing thing it was to be Sean Penn caught up in the Whirlwind of History. It was a phenomenally gauche, ill-advised piece; by contrast, Eastern Front, from Ukraine itself, was the real deal, a sober, urgent, profoundly troubling documentary by Vitaly Mansky and Yevhen Titarenko, based substantially on the latter’s footage, shot on duty with a volunteer medical crew.
Meanwhile, the festival began on a crowd-pleasing note, even a facetious one. Rebecca Miller’s opening film She Came to Me was a souffle of a comedy about a blocked opera composer (Peter Dinklage) who recovers his mojo thanks to a romantically addicted tugboat skipper (Marisa Tomei). It awkwardly mixed urbane sophistication with wilful goofiness, but was tartly acted – not least by Anne Hathaway as a repressed shrink – and hardly unlikeable.
Berlin has often been seen as programming too earnestly, its regard for cinematic art often eclipsed by its sense of political responsibility. These days, however, under the directorship of Carlo Chatrian and Mariette Rissenbeek, the festival is fearless about foregrounding cinema with a capital C, with an eye to adventure. This year’s competition included some films that were as challenging as we’ve seen here in a while, along with others that were hugely accessible. There was an all-out crowd-pleaser in the form of Suzume, from Japanese anime maestro Makoto Shinkai (Your Name, Weathering With You). Existing at a bizarre juncture of YA romance and race-against-time apocalypse drama, it requires a certain tolerance for visual kitsch and kawaii cuteness, but there’s no denying that the adventures of a teenage girl, a demonic cat and a talking chair had deranged invention to spare.
A more muted competition highlight came direct from its Sundance premiere: Past Lives, a debut film by Korean-Canadian playwright Celine Song. It’s about two Korean children who go their separate ways but reunite years later when the boy (played as an adult by Teo Yoo) travels to New York to visit the girl, now a writer (Greta Lee, enjoying a major breakthrough moment). This beautifully acted, richly nuanced film muses on time, identity and a Korean concept called in-yun, concerning destiny and the layers of connection between people. Past Lives proved that a commercially appealing drama these days can still combine adult intelligence and emotional delicacy. It was probably Berlin’s most widely admired, indeed adored film – and, whether or not it wins prizes here, it’s sure to conquer the awards circuit a year from now.
It was certainly the most emotionally direct film in competition, along with Tótem, a family drama by Mexican director Lila Avilés, following her debut The Chambermaid. This bustling ensemble piece covers one day in the life of an artistic Mexico City family, as they celebrate the birthday of their terminally ill brother; it’s all largely seen through the eyes of his seven-year-old daughter, beautifully played by newcomer Naíma Sentiés, and again, carried real emotional charge without crossing into sentiment.
In general, though, the competition was defined by its confrontational edge. Disco Boy, a French-made debut by Giacomo Abbruzzese, starred German actor Franz Rogowski and depicted the parallel lives of an African activist and a recruit to the French Foreign Legion; it’s a film of steely intelligence and hard-edged, dislocated style that promised much but didn’t quite reach a satisfying finishing line. And Manodrome, by South African director John Trengove, is the latest in what will surely be a long-running cycle of “toxic males in crisis” movies. Jesse Eisenberg stars, atremble with barely suppressed rage as a taxi driver who comes under the influence of a misogynistic maleness cult, led by a smoothly sinister Adrien Brody. It’s intense as hell but again, doesn’t quite know where to go.
Other films, though, knew exactly where they were heading, but had the additional confidence to keep the audience guessing. One that entirely created its own world and its own rules was The Survival of Kindness by Australian veteran Rolf de Heer. This is a beyond-dystopian drama without dialogue – or rather, with speech only muttered in barely unidentifiable tongues. A middle-aged heroine, listed in the credits as “BlackWoman” and played by newcomer Mwajemi Hussein, frees herself from captivity in a metal cage, then wanders across a wilderness before arriving at a hellish industrial site governed by a ruling people wearing gas masks that make them resemble human aardvarks. Partly a parable about race, colonialism and resistance, partly a dream vision with a touch of Jorge Luis Borges, it was one of the most original and imposing films here, although hardly the easiest to like.
It was one of two audacious Australian films in competition: the other was Limbo by indigenous director Ivan Sen, which will surely have no trouble finding a wider audience. Set in the lunar landscapes of a Queensland opal mining territory, and dazzlingly shot in black and white by the director himself, it’s a pared-to-the-bleached-bones existential thriller about a heroin-addicted cop (a taciturn Simon Baker) reviewing the cold case of a missing Aboriginal woman. It works entirely in its own terms and at its own leisurely pace, hollowing out the detective genre to coolly thrilling effect.
But no competition title was quite as radically sui generis as Music, by hardcore German experimenter Angela Schanelec. She was here in 2019, with her mesmerisingly inscrutable I Was at Home, But, which did very odd things with chunks of Hamlet. Her new film is an almost wordless modern variation on the Oedipus myth, set initially in Greece before abruptly and inexplicably jumping to Berlin (including scenes set just a stone’s throw from festival hub the Palast). A young man, born in the Greek mountains during a storm, grows up with chronically sore ankles, then is imprisoned for manslaughter. He forms a couple with one of the female prison guards (French arthouse regular Agathe Bonitzer), later becoming a singer in Berlin – by which time, any obvious correspondence with the original myth has become obscured by a dense network of symbols, echoes and enigmas. Music is less like narrative cinema – even of the artiest, most Godardian variety – than it is conceptual art, or a cinematic form of opaque modernist poetry. It may be near-hermetic but it’s utterly transfixing. It proves that the Berlin selectors aren’t afraid to stick their necks out, and if Kristen Stewart’s jury follow suit, Schanelec’s film could be the boldest Golden Bear in years.
The best of Berlin
Best feature films Music (Angela Schanelec); Limbo (Ivan Sen); Past Lives (Celine Song).
Best documentaries Eastern Front (Vitaly Mansky, Yevhen Titarenko); and On the Adamant, Nicolas Philibert’s film about a Parisian day centre for psychiatric patients which offers a social – and for some, artistic – refuge to the people that use it.
Best performances Congolese-Australian newcomer Mwajemi Hussein in Rolf de Heer’s The Survival of Kindness; Greta Lee in Past Lives; Mia Goth as a pampered hedonist from hell in Brandon Cronenberg’s fresh-from-Sundance nightmare fantasy Infinity Pool.
Best music Chris Taylor and Daniel Rossen from US band Grizzly Bear, for Past Lives; Doug Tielli (plus Handel, Vivaldi and co) in Music
Weirdest speech Bono’s onstage tribute to Steven Spielberg, as the director was awarded the Honorary Golden Bear. The U2 singer revealed his admiration for Spielberg’s 1974 film The Sugarland Express: “The mother is played by the great Goldie Hawn, but all I see is my own mother, as I saw her as a child, gigantic, imperfect. I cry though my heart is full of joy because I know that my own mother will always come looking for me. That is pure cinema. No, that is pure Spielberg.” Please God, no one get him started on ET.
