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AMERICAN
CINEMA PAPERS
1999 |
BERLIN - OUT OF THE SHADOWS - 1999
49th INTERNATIONALE FILMFESTSPIELE BERLIN
by
Harlan Kennedy
IT WAS THE last
Berlin Film Festival of the tausendjahr and
everyone had the millennium bug in the best possible sense. Determined to make a
snazzy farewell to an old century and locale next year the Zoo Palast is swapped for Potsdamer
Platz, gleaming symbol of New Europe Berlin made
sure that every creature was on parade. In the zoo the flamingoes were out
every day, even when snowfall made them resemble walking pink candy topped
with icing sugar. In the high-flying Interconti
Hotel there were daily air-misses involving Bruce Willis, Meryl
Streep, Terry Malick,
Shirley MacLaine, and the late Otto Preminger (just retrospecting
through). And The Thin Red Line and Shakespeare in Love proved
that Oscar night takes place in Germany a month before downtown L.A. Shakespeare, the
master of travestie, would have loved
Academy nominee Nick Nolte in drag in Breakfast of Champions: "I designed the dress myself,"
Nick growled to the press; "my line will be out this fall." The
Bard with the love and identity problem (as Preminger
once said to me, "Nobody even knows that Shakespeare voz
Shakespeare how could they know how he lived or loved!") would have
appreciated the 11-times-Oscar-nominated Streep
thanking Berlin with "At last some recognition" on receiving a Berlinale Kamera
award. And admiring the fest's most popular early film, Denmark's Mifune, the author of Hamlet
would have cried, "Faith, a princely Baltic drama. With much to say
of madness, hypocrisy, and familial guilt. Hand me the quill, I too will sign
up to Dogma 95." That Von Trier-Vinterberg charter that gave us Idiots and The
Celebration at Cannes proclaiming the virtues of a plain style with no
artificial lighting, sets, or even camera tripods is now threatening to
colonize the world. Next up are French- and American-directed Dogma flicks,
the latter from Paul Morrissey. Denmark's Golden Bear contender was a whiny
comedy with a rough, apache charm. In Mifune,
writer-director Soren Kragh-Jacobsen
sends a freshly wedded youngster (Iben Hjejle) into the country to tidy up after his pa's death.
Once there he goes native, bonding with a retarded brother, a housekeeper-cum-callgirl,
and a lot of wild scenery. His rich and spoiled bride, meanwhile, is demoted
to minor comical interruption. Back to nature is
the plot, back to nature the style. There's a danger that the dogma oeuvre
could repeat itself: Mifune,
titled after the bridegrooms habit of dressing in rags and saucepan headgear
to imitate the hero of Seven Samurai, could be seen as a blend of Idiots
and Celebration, a toast to derangement combined with a malediction
on class and money. But the movie has a bleak, idiosyncratic vivacity, never
better or more convincing than when suggesting that all the world's a
lunatic asylum and all the men and women merely inmates. It copped the
runner-up Silver Bear, the Golden going to The Thin Red Line. (Foreign
audiences had the advantage of being able to gasp at Malick's
stupendous visuals without understanding his often groanworthy
verbals.) As hinted, Dogma
stylistics are getting infectious. Or perhaps plain-and-moody canvases of
human madness are par for a year with three nines in it. Turn the numbers
upside down and you know what you get. Devil's Digits! Germany's Night Shapes (Nachtgestalt) is a dusk-to-dawn
portrait of the fest's host city, probing Berlin's weltschmerz
with three tragifunny tales of disorientation.
Homeless woman with gypsy boyfriend; country-mouse farmer falling for
city-mouse tart, a girl with so many piercings she
would explode an airport metal detector; distraught businessman saddled for
reasons unexplainable (unless you have an hour) with a young black boy
seeking his dad. Imagine a game of outdoor chess played in fog at midnight,
then take away the existential quark you first thought of. Director Andreas Dresen shows a real, offhand comic talent. The tales unspool during a papal visit, so the lower-depths images
cheap hotels, garbage-slushy streets, end-of-world bierkellers
are intercut with teleflashes
of God's gaudy spokesman strewing blessings like bread to ducks. This debut director
has an eye for the picture that is worth a thousand numbed silences: a
vandalized Merc in flames, a man beaten up for
absolutely no reason. Yet Dresen can also be
perversely optimistic. He knows that the right occasion for making love can
sometimes be a fleabitten hotel room over a noisy
building site with a Pole in a jeweled cape preaching chastity on TV. THE BERLIN MOOD
"feelgood-while-feeling-bad" was caught
by old-timers, too. Chabrol and Tavernier in the
competition, Mike Figgis (well, oldish)
in the Panorama section, and Dariush Mehrjui in the Young (?) Filmmakers Forum all made grim
stories seem salutary, even funny. The ex-pillar of
Persian neorealism (The Cow, The Postman), Mehrjui made The Mistress (Banu) six years
ago. But it was Ayatollah-banned for its portrait of a rich housewife who
walks out Ibsenesquely on her weak-minded husband.
Though previously walked out on by him in scene one he leaves for a brief
elopement with his mistress it is less his infidelity that alienates her than
his leaving her to the mercy of her own loneliness-dictated good deeds. The
house fills up, Viridiana style, with
charity-abusing waifs and scoundrels, looting from the gentle hand that feeds
them. Mehrjui
proves that before the New Iranian Cinema there was a pretty good Old Iranian
Cinema. His pic's daring lies not just in the
denouement, the slammed door of female self-determination, but in venturesome
style riffs like the fades to a single blaring color now red, now yellow,
now blue or the geologically surreal closeups of
a mildewing bowl of soup, cracked and mantling like a congealed swamp. The
best rotting-food imagery since Repulsion's rabbit stands nicely for a
rotten society. (Please send all fatwas to
the editor.) From Gallic buskers Claude and Bert came, respectively, a peak-form
thriller and a rollicking impromptu on the French education system. No,
seriously, it does rollick. In (Ηa Commence Aujourd'hui
Tavernier ups the anti anti-bureaucracy/authoritarianism/philistinism
on his prior education flick Une Semaine des vacances. For
Nathalie Baye read Philippe Torreton,
a young head teacher Pyrrhically battling parents,
drug-prone pupils, and purblind town councillors.
We expect a sermon. We get instead a brisk, deeply intelligent Steadicam satire. Au coeur du mensonge (The Heart of the
Lie) is Chabrol's
best noir since Que
la bete meure. Picture
Sandrine Bonnaire and depressive artist husband
Jacques Gamblin on a pretty Brittany cliff. Picture
the house across the bay newly leased by a top media smoothie (played by real
walking hair-gel Antoine De Caunes, compere of the sex telemagazine
"Eurotrash"). Blend in eroticism,
jealousy, food, and Bulle Ogier
as the town gossip, then stir to the thickness of blood pudding. Yet it isn't
the thriller aspects that thrill finally. It is Chabrol's
terrific slyness: his knowing color schemes (nearly all variants on
despair-blue) and his taste for visual paradox. One scene and one line
"How do you walk into a trompe-l'oeil in
the dark?" sums up in an audiovisual hieroglyph the entire spiritual
tangle of these characters. British cinema at
Berlin continued its trend of being all things to all moviemanes,
or trying to be. Figgis's The Loss of Sexual Innocence, a
title as toe-crushing as an exam essay topic, deals with original sin in a
multilayered fable. The bravely experimental structure first planned for a
stage play has a black/white Adam and Eve in modern Africa, a hero at three
stages of growth (kid, youth, man), Julian Sands in multiple epiphany, and a
preference for symbolic bits and pieces over actual storytelling. No wonder Nic Cage passed on it, soon after Leaving Las Vegas rocketed
him from $200,000 per Figgiswork to $20 million per
blowing-up-the-world for Woo or Bruckheimer. Innocence is a failure,
but fascinating: a film not so much exploiting, more exploring and
deconstructing sex and violence as both staple movie fare and doorkey to psychic revelation. The last scene especially
is a humdinger. This horror vignette in the desert a jeep accident
resulting in a native boy's death and a white woman's ceremonial slaying
could have been the linchpin sequence to a whole movie about life, death, and
apocalypse in the land of unsheltering skies. Britain also won
friends and an award with the novel-based incest drama The War Zone, though Tim
Roth's directing debut seemed to me heavy on the shadows and light on the schadenfreude. In the Nonconformist Sex
Handicap as many runners and riders as ever in Berlin Lukas Moodysson's Fucking Amal (feelgood teen lesbians in Sweden), Anne Wheeler's Better Than Chocolate (feel-anything-going-including-edible-dildos
lesbians in Toronto), Thom Fitzgerald's Beefcake (priapic rise
of the male physique mag), and Ventura Pons's Amic/Amat (talky gay
university profs, Spanish Disquisition style) were all weirder, wackier, and
more piquant. In addition to sex
races, Berlin's countercultural mandate demands each year the Political
Revisionism Steeplechase. This involves a large number of documentary
directors jumping on nags that look like Adolf
Hitler mane swept across forehead, postage-stamp moustache and riding
their beasts into the ground. Competitors attracting particular attention in
'99 included Israel's A Specialist,
two hours of archive footage on Adolf's other Adolf, Eichmann, and Switzerland's Closed Country, about the
cuckoo-clock nation's complex and penumbral wartime stance, broadly summarizable as "You send us the Jewish loot and
we'll go on pretending to be neutral." My personal docu-favorite was Kurt Gerrons Karrussell.
This is all about the title burlesque artist
who popped up in over 50 prewar Krautflicks,
including The Blue Angel, and who also baptized the "Mack the
Knife"-singing stage role of Tiger Brown in The Threepenny
Opera. Gerron died in Auschwitz after a spell
at Theresienstadt, where under duress he directed
the now-infamous PR documentary on this "showcase" concentration
camp. Smiling kids, lots of bread and butter (swiftly removed, we are told,
between takes), and kindly nurses moving around like Florence Nightingales,
though this exercise in glitzy showmanship more suggests Florenz
Ziegfeld. It's a small but
perfect movie, made by Dutch filmworm Ilons Ziok. She had the great
idea not just of rounding up witnesses, those who knew Gerron
before and after he was thrust into the gray stripes, but of sitting them
down for a Thirties-vintage cabaret of German songs sung by top practitioners
(Ute Lemper, Max Raabe).
The songs and audience reactions rueful, smiling, or tearful punctuate
the Gerron narrative. It's as if we're on a cattle
car to historical horror, the trip made more poignant by stops at stations of
hope, pathos, and defiant affirmation. Since then, Nazism
has itself fed into burlesque. Top retrospective honoree Otto Preminger, unable to appear in Berlin for reasons of
mortality, poked black fun at the Reich as the prison-camp commandant in
Billy Wilder's Stalag
17 and made a German accent demonizable for a
new generation in TV's "Batman." Betweenwhiles he directed some
movies. These were paeans to liberalism made by a man who could chew actors
to pieces as effectively as any Reichskommandant. Life's a puzzle and
then you die. Some troupers, happily, never seem to. Shirley MacLaine came to Berlin complaining that she couldn't
raise her right leg as high as her left any longer. Who was asking? Shirley
is still triumphantly Shirley: a girl who combines true star quality with an
insight into other astral verities. If her friends could see her now, they
would have observed a glamour-pixie putting in a morning's shopping at Ka De
Me, Berlin's Bloomingdales, before accepting a lifetime achievement award. This brings us to
Katy Jurado, another Hollywood trouper, who plays a
clairvoyant in Stephen Frears's The Hi-Lo
Country. "You wan' de cards or de crystal?" is her only line,
but it summed up America's presence in Berlin. If you wanted the cards you
could sit and be dealt Berlin's usual flush of stars, showcasing their iconic
immanence in Playing By Heart, One True Thing, or 8mm. If you
wanted the crystal you could gaze into deeper, dippier U.S. wares like Robert
Altman's Cookie's Fortune (I loved it, some didn't), Alan Rudolph's Breakfast
of Champions (I hated it, some didn't), or the aforesaid Frears neo-Western. This last takes a long time to go
nowhere much, but perhaps its stubborn, even heroic lentissimi
explain the Best Director prize. Also from America
and points multilateral drifted the annual mega-floe of gay movies, of which
a mere tip is mentioned above. Germany, on behalf of Europe, is now joining
the world. And who knows but that Berlin's pre- and post-Hitler tradition of
laissez-faire morality and life-affirming culture may yet infect the globe;
may yet start to atone for what was done by the creature with the sub-Chaplin
moustache or by later Berlin-oppressing ogres with a fondness for gulags and
wire-topped walls. Out in Potsdamer Platz the new hotels
and cinemas are rising. They make gleaming Metropolis canyons from the
once drab and sprawly streets near the ex-East/West
border. A giant poster of Andie McDowell,
advertising L'Orιal, smiles amid the building
cranes. Near the newly named Marlene-Dietrich Platz,
Marlene's own photo, blown up to hoarding size, bedecks the new Young
Filmmakers Forum building. And if you wipe the snow from building-plot fences
you can read signs saying NEUE FILMFESTSPIELHAUS. It is an exciting
time to be alive in Germany even in a place so near, so very near, Adolf's ex-bunker. Perhaps by standing on him in great
numbers we can, come the millennium, exorcise him for good. COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS. THIS ARTICLE APPEARED IN THE MAY-JUNE 1999 ISSUE OF FILM COMMENT. ©HARLAN KENNEDY. All
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