The Joy (and Pain) of the Physical in a Berlin Movie


BERLIN — What is your strategy during nasal swab antigen testing? Personally, I look up and to the right as the technician inserts the small wand, either influencing a complacent air or pretending to be struck by some highly original thought. I know others are chatting and at least one critic friend started looking deeply into the tester’s eyes. It’s a pandemic: you get your kicks wherever possible.

At the Berlin International Film Festival — Announcing the award winners on Wednesday however, the public screenings continue until 20 February – the participating press members had ample opportunity to improve their swabbing techniques. Mandatory tests every 24 hours – even for the empowered – was part of a restriction package The organizers of the festival, known as the Berlinale, agreed to make it a physical event.

There were complaints. But whenever someone whines about the new ticket reservation system or gets fed up with Escher-inspired exit routes that always seem to involve more than one uphill staircase, I find myself thinking: “Deal with this.” Or sometimes, less benevolently: “Sigh.”

Complainers’ category error is to compare this underrated edition with the Before Times Berlinales. with real comparison online version of last yearAn introduction to a stronger selection of films, but one that doesn’t feel like a festival at all. Alternatively, consider the experience alone and the stairs, sitting hassles, and scuffs become a small price to pay.

And no matter how deep your tester’s probes are, they can’t be as invasive as public colonoscopy, which Peter Strickland willingly performed on “Flux Gourmet,” one of the event’s first moving titles. Certainly the most resolute evocation of the discomfort of suppressing gas bloat to obtain a major festival ground, Strickland’s film only competes with François Ozon’s festival opening film, “Peter von Kant,” for the fun, pompous aesthetic that embellishes a strangely disposable story. was able to. Ozon’s film quite amusingly lays out the overlay gimmick on the gendered rework of Fassbinder’s 1972 classic, “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant,” from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s biography.

The one-location “Peter von Kant” is one of the few Berlinale films to feature filming in pandemic conditions. Another is “Fire,” which brought Claire Denis (unbelievably) her first best director award at a major film festival. Here, Juliette Binoche plays a woman torn between two lovers (or, as the film’s more evocative international title puts it, “Both Sides of the Blade”). If it falls short of Denis’ highest watermarks, it’s at least notable for how he accepted the pandemic without making it the subject of the movie.

Quentin Dupieux’s delightfully delightful “Unbelievable But True” takes an indirect approach, not by referring directly to the coronavirus restrictions, but actually creating unmissable parallels to a time travel movie. Humorous and unassumingly deep, it contrasts markedly with Bertrand Bonello’s chaotically indulgent “Coma”, which involves staring locked in the belly, of a borderline, incomprehensible nature. It got a wildly divided reception, parted in a rage represented by the man next to me, and the man in front of me jumped to his feet and shouted, “Bravo!” Yell. finally.

Two low-key Asian games are also coming out in times of coronavirus, without being overwhelmed by pandemic paranoia. Hong Sangsoo’s “Novelist’s Movie” is another deceptively breezy slice of the life of the Korean director, a recurring Berlinale winner. The idea that this makes M. Night Shyamalan, the festival’s jury president, a de facto member of “Hong Hive” is noteworthy to anyone familiar with his work. your nose is blown and you want to look up high.

The aptly named Japanese jewelery “Small, Slow But Steady” also contained masks, but here we realize the challenges they present for lip readers. The beautiful and gripping tale of a deaf female boxer whose beloved gym is about to close, Sho Miyake’s compelling drama is miniature in every way except emotional impact. The bittersweet gist of a precious place facing its imminent end is written in larger, bolder colors in Carla Simón’s “Alcarràs,” which won the festival’s top prize, the Golden Bear.

“Alcarràs” chronicles the windy, sun-drenched fortunes of the Solé family from Spain’s Catalonia region during the last harvest of the family peach orchard before destruction. It’s a nice, chatty, lively play that delivers irresistible performances from a non-professional ensemble cast of all ages. The victory here marks the third consecutive year that the highest honor of a major European festival has been awarded to a woman for her second film, after Cannes and Venice.

But for all its sunshine and its sad, gritty wisdom, “Alcarràs” stood out to me for a much more wintery competition title. Ulrich Seidl’s “Rimini” is an award-winning, uncompromising, cold-bloodedly provocative drama, which is embarrassing. But it’s more or less a crime not to be privately known for star Michael Thomas, who plays a worn-out club singer in an off-season Italian beach town. My other competition favourite, Natalia López Gallardo’s official debut feature film, “Robe of Gems,” received the Jury Prize. But otherwise, most of the more interesting games ended up there instead of the main competition, as has been the case since the Encounters sidebar opened in 2020.

In particular, Jöns Jönsson’s “Axiom” is an astute examination of the psychology of a compulsive liar. And best of all – in this episode, at this festival, and for me so far this year – there is Cyril Schäublin’s totally singular “Unrest,” a film that is absolutely uncategorizable, unless you have a designated category of “fun, otherworldly watchmaking stories.” and anarchism in Switzerland in the 1870s.”

“The Restlessness” was the most gripping movie I’ve ever seen in Berlin, at least until I physically took myself to the city’s planetarium to watch Liz Rosenfeld’s experimental “White Sand Crystal Foxes.” The movie itself is a pretty tedious piece of overwritten art, but the experience was a bit far from transcendent. Lying under a domed 360-degree projection suspended in the middle of the stepped images, I felt pleasantly disembodied. Then it occurred to me how strange it was to yearn to go back to the real world, to better escape from it.

To that end – getaway – the most cylinder-fired episode of this year’s Berlinale was undoubtedly the terrific retrospective “No Angels,” made up of 27 Golden Age Hollywood comedies, each starring Mae West, Rosalind Russell or Carole Lombard. The actresses’ big hits like “My Little Chickadee,” “His Girl Friday,” and “My Man Godfrey” were there, but this smash hit has also spawned lesser-known but less-pleasing titles. As in “Four’s a Crowd” with Russell opposite Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, and “Lady By Choice” as a showgirl who “adopts” a fake mother as a Lombard commercial stunt. Retreating to an empty comedy world may be the best way to unwind from the real world.

Then again, as the days passed and the stairs got longer, it became clear that the irritations of real life were an integral part of what we missed so much in last year’s distant edition. In a public screening, a couple started arguing loudly with a contractor when he told them they should leave an empty seat between them. I got angry with them. And then I remembered that I could be bothered by other physical people who were physically uncomfortable in a physical place. “Fuck it,” I wanted to tell them. But also “I love you.”



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