di Abigail JONES WALTERS

- programma

- PREMI

> A Woman, A Gun And ... di Zhang Yimou
> submarino di Thomas Vinterberg

> caterpillar di Koji Wakamatsu

> parade di Isao Yukisada

> kosmos di Reha Erdem
> howl di Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman

> Jud Suss - Rise and Fall di Oskar Roehler

submarino

di Thomas Vinterberg

Danimarco 2010, 110’

Orso d'Argento per la miglior attrice

18/30

Scandinavian cinema has always excelled in raw, austere realism. The director of Submarino, Thomas Vinterberg, may have taken it too far though, as his new movie seems to literally indulge in sorrow, despair and grief. The final effect is not realistic, but “over-realistic” - a pornography of sadness, which implies that life is nothing more then a series of traumatic disappoinments.
Submarino tells the story of two derailed brothers, who stem from a broken home and got separated somewhere along the way. One of them was just released from prison and the other is a drug addict trying to bring up his son after his wife died. They feel defeated by life and still have no other choice, but to carry on. It’s clear from the start (and they both know it as well) that their only chance for salvation is holding on to one another - yet they aren’t able to break the ice, is it because of their hardheadedness or maybe the fact that each reunion reminds the brothers of the horror that was their childhood.
This relationship is depicted skillfully and without any sign of kitsch. The trouble is it lacks even the slightest bit of humor and seems to be in denial of every positive aspect of the human condition. Whenever there shines a light of hope for the protagonists, it is instantly wiped away by cruel circumstance or their own errors. Life is bleak and the toll of death is heavy, as Submarino can pride itself with a corpse-count worthy of Rambo III – this is the list of people who died during or preceding the events of the movie: one of the brothers, his wife, the brothers’ alcoholic mother, the third baby brother, a white trash nymphomaniac. Actually, funerals are stepping-stones for the entire plot of Submarino.
To sum it up: I came out of the cinema more depressed, but not even a bit wiser.

howl

di Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman

Stati Uniti 2009, 90’

Concorso

28/30

To be honest, I’ve never really managed to embrace the legend that grew around the beatniks. Since I recall, the “hipsters” and “cool cats” of the counter-culture seemed to me pretentious and ultimately oblivious of the fact that “rebellion” can also have a prize-tag attached to it. Needless to say, I didn’t put my hopes up. And then I was blown away.
Needless to say, Howl has many drawbacks. One third of the movie follows the famous obscenity trial which ironically put Ginsberg’s masterpiece on the map. What we get here is a typical American courtroom-drama, including heart-breaking final speeches over pompous background music. Moreover, it’s clear from the beginning who the directors are rooting for, so at one point you actually feel sorry for the prosecutor (David Strathairn), who has to face the contempt and nasty laughs of the whole cinema audience. Ginsberg’s life is portrayed in a telegraphic flash (most outrageous shortcoming: no William Burroughs!) and the animation over portions of Howl, although in sync with beatnik aesthetics and the atmosphere of the times, seems cheap and unoriginal.
And yet, Howl is one of the best movies I’ve seen at the Berlinale. James Franco’s stellar performance gives insight into the life of a person so sensitive and honest, that you can’t help immediately feeling bound with him - especially in regard to the courage it takes to live your own life in spite of all the biblical recipes for happiness our world seems to offer: you don’t have to build a house and plant a tree to be happy; you don’t have to find a wife and have an offspring to feel loved. Sadly, the howl of the beat generation has in the last decades been outshouted by the moral majority and corporate agenda - at the same time counter-culture has become a t-shirt logo. Howl isn’t going to change a thing; it’s not going to inspire rallies or revive old sentiments. But it’s more than a Che Guevara t-shirt, it’s real, devoted to what it says and that is more than I could ever expect.
The quasi-documentary part of the movie (based on transcripts of Ginsberg’s past interviews), the best one, reminds us of the directors’ background - both specialize in documentary pieces. Here Ginsberg/Franco lays out the outline of his poetry, an ingenious fusion of every-day language and jazz music. His work was never meant to read, but to be performed in front of an audience. In this sense the movie and its entire idea is true to Ginsberg’s vision - it’s poetry performed in public, only the jazz club has been replaced by a screening room.

And the jazz didn’t suffer.

A Woman, A Gun And A Noodle Shop

di Zhang Yimou

Cina 2009, 90’

Concorso

23/30

Zhang Yimou’s new film is just like instant noodles. Take a foolproof plot (the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple), apply your signature visual style, add some classic slapstick and Voilà! - you have a movie…or at least something similar.
It’s beyond me, why a man, that has crafted one of the best motion pictures of all time (see: Raise The Red Lanterns), devotes his time and talent to beautifully shallow kung-fu flicks or, as of late, silly and completely unambitious comedies. Because it has to be pointed out from the start: A Woman, A Gun And A Noodle Shop has none of the artistic qualities that skyrocketed the Coens to stardom with Blood Simple - like the obscure, almost Kafkian atmosphere or the dark, unobvious humor. Instead we get a movie that is more slapstick than black comedy, where the humor is based on daft, unoriginal gags rather than witty dialogue. It’s sad, but it seems the giant financial backing Zhang receives from his homeland is gradually spoiling him as a moviemaker.
The same goes for the visuals, which are at points too beautiful, too obnoxious. This is in fact the same problem I had with Hero or House Of Flying Daggers, where the director repeatedly crossed the border that separated virtuosity from just plain showing off. It’s a pity Zhang drifted away from his subtle, poetry-like aesthetics which carried his stories without overshadowing them.
To be honest though, A Woman, A Gun And A Noodle Shop wasn’t all that painful to watch (which you can’t say about many films premiering at the Berlinale this year) and I would lie, if I said it didn’t squeeze out a few laughs. Yet, at the end of the day, me and Zhang Yimou seem to have a different opinion on what it means to make a funny movie…or a good one.

parade

di Isao Yukisada

Giappone 2009, 118’

Panorama

22/30

Parade is a movie packed with truisms, symptomatic of the disease that has been infecting Japanese cinema for the last decades: the film never even tries to be more than what it says or shows. What saves it from going down as an utter disappointment though is a fair load of humor and sincere emotion.

Parade starts off as a quirky little story about four young eccentrics, who share a two bedroom apartment in Tokyo. The movie is divided into interweaving story arcs, each one dealing with the dilemmas of a different protagonist. The quality of these chapters is terribly uneven. The first story features Ryosuke, a son of a fisherman, who studies in Tokyo and who happens to be an incurable romantic. To this point the movie is on target, since it manages to gracefully balance the lightness of a classic sitcom with “heavier” problems, such as alienation and solitude in the big city. Because this is what life ultimately is like: lukewarm, sweet-sour.

                Sadly, Parade gradually shifts towards an obnoxious existential message, which turns out to be nothing more than deadwood. The initial lightness gets replaced by pretentious monologues (cleverly masked as dialogues), as we are being introduced to the rest of the gang: unemployed actress Kotomi, obsessive jogger Naoki, cynical half-alcoholic illustrator Mirai. And then we have Satoru, an 18-year old male prostitute, who insinuates himself into the apartment and is the chemical ingredient that triggers the mutual interaction of all its occupants.

And what pearls of wisdom does Parade finally offer the viewer? No one can ever know a different person completely; no one is really “ordinary”, we all have our own personal demons. But this is nothing new, as the concept of “The Other” has been approached from every possible angle by modern philosophy and psychology. Then again, maybe I’m doing the film injustice - during the press conference of The Killer Inside Me Michael Winterbottom replied to a journalist, who accused his film of unoriginality, with a question: “So what in your opinion is a totally original idea for a movie?” Maybe everything has already been said and all we can expect from a movie is that it’s well made and entertaining. And most of Parade is.

kosmos

di Reha Erdem

Turchia 2009, 122’

Panorama stampa

26/30

For me personally Kosmos had plenty of things going for it before the first images even appeared on the screen. This is linked to my particular interest in the Balkans and magical realism, which often go hand in hand in film (Kusturica) or literature (Kadare). Marginalized and isolated for centuries, Balkan art has developed a language that blends gritty realism with fables and fairytales amplified by a multi-cultural heritage. Kosmos proved to be a worthy follower of that tradition.
We see a man running through a snowy plain, as if he’s trying to shake off an angry mob that’s going after him. When he finally arrives in a small city, the first thing he does is save a little boy from drowning. In light of this feat he is welcomed by the local community despite being a stranger. Kosmos speaks only in riddles, so he is soon envisaged by the others as a travelling dervish. Yet, this dervish turns out to be a healer and a thief, who seeks passion more than spiritual enlightenment and soon becomes involved in a peculiar relationships with local women. Collective mistrust builds up and in the final scene we see Kosmos banished from the city, an image that clearly spans it with the opening shot - as if our hero is doomed to be running forever.
Why was Kosmos exiled from the city? Because, contrary to the townspeople, he doesn’t feel the undying urge to establish what is “good” and what is “wrong”. Still, he isn’t a rebel. He just is. Just like a child or an animal (the recurring images of slaughtered cows might point out to that), he does what he feels is right without giving it second thoughts. Kosmos doesn’t fit in with the local community, where reality is dictated by religion, history and indelible prejudice. The movie shows how ductile morality is, since immoral actions, like thievery, can often do good, while those considered ethical, like healing, can bring pain to others (a motive reminiscent of Bunuel’s Nazarin). But this is just one of many possible interpretations, as Reha Erdem’s doesn’t peddle easy answers. It’s like its protagonist.: it just is.

caterpillar

di Koji Wakamatsu

Giappone 2010, 85’

Concorso

24/30

Tadashi returns to his home village with three medals for bravery, but without most of the things that used to make him a human being: his limbs, his ability to hear and speak. In the midst of a fanatical war effort his wife, Shigeko, has no other choice but to the bear the “honor” of being married to a decorated war hero.
Caterpillar is Japan’s answer to Johnny Got His Gun and possibly even exceeds the later in shock value. However, it doesn’t limit itself to a fierce anti-war agenda, but also turns the tables on traditionally male dominated Japanese society. To a substantial degree, it explores the spectrum of emotions which Shigeko gradually builds up towards her mutilated husband: from despair, through genuine compassion, to the cold assertion that after years of physical abuse, she now has the upper hand. Either way, there’s always a distinct division between what she really feels and what she wants the rest of the village to believe. Being woman in a patriarchal society she can’t speak up, she’s always been as mute and helpless as is Tadashi. This brings us to the paradox that propels the movie: the husband, who is the center of all unfolding events, has no means to express himself, especially the memories of war that come to haunt him.
As you can see, Caterpillar had lots of potential. Most of this potential has successfully been harnessed by Koji Wakamatsu, but at the same time he employed many solutions that didn’t do the movie any good or were simply annoying. The film, meant to be brutal and behavioristic, is ironically full of theatrics. Each of Shigeko’s emotions is immediately verbalized and handed to the viewer on a silver platter. This seems to be the problem with most Japanese movies though - maybe it has to do with the strong tradition of Japanese theater? It’s hard to say. Additionally, the movie suffers from repetition and somewhere in the middle one feels he’s watching the same scene over and over again, as if Shigeko’s feelings were a perfect sinusoid.
Apart from that, there isn’t much one could complain about. The movie is well-crafted and skillfully shot. Most importantly, it can’t leave any viewer indifferent – and not only because of the shocking visual content.

Jud Suss - Rise and Fall

di Oskar Roehler

Austria 2010, 114’

Concorso

10/30

Oskar Roehler’s film is able to inflict more damage on an unsuspecting cinema audience than any Nazi propaganda movie would ever hope to. Just like the 1981 classic, Mephisto, it deals with an artist, who in exchange for fame sells his soul to Hitler’s apparatus of terror - yet this is a movie Szabo would have done if he were blind or brain-dead.
First and foremost, the characters, especially the hard-core Nazis, are as cartoonish as their Jewish counterparts portrayed in Jud Süss (1940) or other propaganda movies of the time. Goebbels, depicted by Moritz Bleibtreu, resembles his own caricature, employing antics more suitable for comic book villains or the Nazi exploitation flicks of the 70s. Also: where is the fucking war? For a world that is tormented by cruelty and violence it’s pretty neat and tidy, as even the Jews in the Polish ghetto seem well-nourished and virile.
Most of the scenes that were meant to shock or impress the Berlinale audience were punctuated by awkward laughter, like the one where the protagonist has sex in the midst of an air-raid, while simultaneously uttering lines of poetry he knows by heart as an actor. Generally speaking, the film has some of the most pathetic and unconvincing erotic scenes I’ve ever been exposed to. And this is just a sneak peek of the mediocrity this movie literally reeks of. It’s eclectic (in the bad sense), trivial and foreseeable in every possible aspect. Nazism is bad. But that we already know.

Jud Süss – Rise and Fall is undoubtedly the worst movie of the competition section, if not the worst movie of the whole Berlinale.

SITO UFFICIALE