The skies are typically gray and gloomy at the Berlin International Film Festival, but this year’s edition, which runs through Sunday, began with snow for days. The wintry weather gave the event — known as the Berlinale — a magical glow at first, but it wasn’t enough to keep the demons at bay. Looming over the festival were anxieties over the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, as well as the upcoming German elections. The films also radiated an air of shame, despair and powerlessness, asking: How to trust ourselves to make the world better when we’ve already screwed up so spectacularly?
Tom Tykwer’s visually dazzling, but comically misguided liberal drama, “The Light,” opened the event last week, submitting festivalgoers to 162 minutes of angst and attrition (and one too many “Bohemian Rhapsody” needle drops) about a German family spiritually cleansed by their Syrian housekeeper.
For many of us on the ground, however, the first real epic-of-interest was the “Parasite” director Bong Joon Ho’s science-fiction caper “Mickey 17” — a film that induces nervous laughter about society’s abysmal moral standards. In this high-concept action movie with a zany dark heart, labor exploitation hits a new low when workers, or at least their physical forms, become literally disposable. Robert Pattinson stars as one such “expendable,” a dopey spaceman whose co-workers treat him like a lab-rat, knowing that his body can be reprinted.
Bong’s bids at timeliness are staler than usual. (Mark Ruffalo plays a grandstanding demagogue whose followers wear red caps.) But the film’s dull political edge doesn’t diminish the joy ride’s momentum, nor the flashes of genuine weirdness that keep us guessing. If, god willing, superhero movies are destined to go the way of the dodo, “Mickey 17” is a reminder that directors like Bong keep the dream of the blockbuster alive.
President Trump’s ramped-up campaign of mass deportations infiltrated my viewing of Michel Franco’s “Dreams,” a competition entry that filled me with much ambivalence, but also moved and infuriated me. This intentionally provocative psychodrama by one of Mexico’s most divisive directors sees Jessica Chastain as a tightly wound philanthropist from San Francisco who has a tempestuous relationship with an undocumented ballet dancer from Mexico — whom we first see, like the survivor at the end of a brutal horror film, emerging from a van full of smuggled migrants.
Unfolding with a tense, uncanny rhythm, the film knocks you over the head with its cynical ideas about class, privilege and the hypocrisies of white guilt. As a smaller portrait of intimacy, however, I found its depiction of vulnerability — the kind found under stony displays of feminine strength — to be startlingly honest. Chastain’s ticking-time-bomb-of-a-performance beautifully demonstrates how passion can curdle into addiction and abuse.
Ice queens are also at the center of two other highlights from the competition, whose winner will be announced on Sunday. Marion Cotillard seems to be carved out of diamonds in Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s intriguingly lugubrious dark fairy tale “The Ice Tower.” More an assembly of eerily seductive images and wordlessly tense interactions than a straight narrative, the film follows an orphaned girl who stumbles upon a film set and becomes obsessed with its cruel and beautiful star.
Cotillard’s diva is well aware she’s deranged, but the conscience-stricken heroine of “Kontinental 25” stews in her delusions. The last time the movie’s director, Radu Jude, was at the Berlinale, his tripartite dramedy “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” (2021) won the festival’s top prize. “Kontinental 25” is low-key compared to that film, and begins with the suicide of a homeless man, whom a bailiff named Orsolyo (a squirrelly Eszter Tompa) forces to evacuate the room he’s been squatting in. Orsolya is apparently wracked with feelings of complicity, though the film, which is made up mainly of extended shots of her conversations with other people, questions the sincerity of her self-reproach against a backdrop of ethnic tension and neoliberal sprawl in Romania.
If Jude’s previous two fiction films were Molotov cocktails of indignation, his latest secretes a kind of scentless poison that gets at the banality with which social injustices are processed and rationalized. There’s something toxic in the air in Ameer Fakher Eldin’s mesmerizing (if sometimes drearily symbolic) drama “Yunan,” too, in which a depressed Syrian-German man suffering from suffocation-inducing panic attacks retreats to an isolated island. Likewise, in Kateryna Gornostai’s documentary “Timestamp,” increasingly unsettling (if not entirely hopeless) vérité-style scenes of public school operations in wartime Ukraine show the tension between the younger generation’s vigor and naïveté and the reality of the country’s crumbling infrastructure and war recruitment effort.
Existential unease permeated the festival program, though the Forum — the section dedicated to more experimental works — conjured this mood at the most forceful, and visually transportive, register. Whirling camera movements and frames with misty, blurred edges make up Christine Haroutounian’s “After Dreaming,” a grim, elliptical drama from Armenia that mirrors the perturbed psyches of characters dogged by memories of war.
In “Punku,” a chaotically ambitious mystery by the Peruvian director J.D. Fernández Molero, the spirit of David Lynch lives on with bursts of body-horror and gallows humor, and constant pivots to different camera formats and color schemes; think “Twin Peaks,” and its ideas about male-on-female-violence, transported to an Indigenous community in the jungles of Peru.
Urska Djukic’s “Little Trouble Girls,” the opening film of the newly inaugurated Perspectives section — a competitive sidebar showcasing debut films — was another favorite, a Slovenian riff on Powell and Pressburger’s classic “Black Narcissus” (1947) for the Generation Z set. Shot in quivering close-ups, this coming-of-age film follows a reticent teenager from a religious household, and her all-girl choir’s trip to a convent. The film’s delicate eroticism plays its late-blooming heroine off the more sexually experienced girls in her clique, using Catholic mysticism to deepen — not counter — the profound confusion of her nascent desires. It does this without pinning down the exact nature of her sexual orientation, privileging her process of doubt and exploration.
Ultimately, the best film of the festival, per my humble opinion, seemed at first glance to be a mere exercise in style. Stick with “Reflection in a Dead Diamond,” a dizzyingly inventive spy thriller by Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet, and you’ll eventually feel the weight of its hero’s regrets, nestled within a mournful meditation on the ghosts of film history. Layering the past and the present with a dynamic editing style and lurid, sensorial images (like a diamond-pierced nipple, or steel fake nails tearing through flesh), the film is a Eurotrash spin on James Bond, inflected by vintage Italian comic book stylings. An ex-agent living in the French Riviera, John (Fabio Testi, a cult icon in low-budget genre films of the ’70s), is suspected of a murder that resurfaces memories of his past life, loves and nemeses, specifically a female masked vigilante called Serpentik.
Surely alienating to some viewers (plot coherence and realistic dialogue aren’t huge priorities here), the film is nonetheless an illusionistic tour de force, constantly finding new and surprising ways to convey action — and it’s not often, in the C.G.I.-reliant action movies of today, that I ask myself, “How did they do that?” By the end, the film’s glittery delirium funnels into a meta-inquiry of cinephilia itself, and the gender politics that run through it. Maybe, it suggests, the good guys were the bad guys all along.
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