The private beats the public

Accordingly, there was a red-carpet show: Angelina Jolie, who presented an out-of-competition movie on the Bosnia war, In the Land of Blood and Honey, Clive Owen, and Isabelle Huppert proceeded to premiere their films to the exclamations of photographers and admirers.

As a matter of fact, of all the well-known film forums, the one in Berlin is very far from the dazzling extravaganzas that accompany Cannes or Venice: it is a festival not so much about cinema as about encounters and clashes between different cultures, civilizations, and ideologies.

Yet the main competition is so far dominated by private-life stories. For example, the plot of the German movie Barbara (directed by Christian Petzold) is full of political bombast: set in the late-time GDR, it features a Berlin doctor, Barbara (Nina Hoss), who is at odds with the communist authorities and was banished to a small town, is in love with a West German, works at a local hospital, brushes off the advances of a well-mannered chief doctor, who is also in internal exile, and has an intention to flee to the West. Shot laconically, simply and accurately, the film rivets the audience to the end. The film magazine Screen’s hit parade ranks it 3.3 on a 5-point scale, and this movie is very likely to scoop of the festival awards.

What can be called an ambitious, if unsuccessful, attempt to make a topical film is Captive by the Philippines’ Brillante Mendoza who won the Best Director award in Cannes in 2009 for a gloomy and shocking picture Kinatay (Slaughtered). In the movie based on real-life events, Isabelle Huppert plays a French social worker kidnapped in 2001 together with other hostages, including Filipinos and Western missionaries, by Abu-Sayyaf Islamist terrorists. The attempts to introduce visual poetry into a monotonous narration are thwarted by very clumsy techniques, such as computerized pictures of birds, fires, and snakes. In general, big names do not guarantee quality: for example, such renowned Italian realists as brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani have turned an a priori effective plot about prisoners who stage Shakespeare’s tragedy Julius Caesar into a set of platitudes and artificialities in their film Caesar Must Die.

Coming Home (directed by Frederic Videau, France) also deals with kidnapping: a stern and embittered marginal man (Reda Kateb of A Prophet fame) abducts a girl and keeps her under lock and key for years and then suddenly sets her free. Unfortunately, the director shows too much mawkishness and leaves a number of characters unattended.

So far, the concurrent competition Panorama creates a more favorable impression. What suddenly became a success was Elles made in Paris by the Polish director Malloska Szumowska. The picture’s three points of support are the three female parts: Juliette Binoche as Anne, a journalist for Elle fashion magazine, who writes an article on call girls, and the objects of her study: Charlotte (Anais Demoustier) and Alicja (Joanna Kulig). All the three actresses are very organic and impart so much multifacetedness and depth to their heroines that the three’s social status becomes no longer important. Szumowska managed to find a fresh angle to show an unhappy family – always unhappy in its own way – as well as the girls ousted by society onto the far fringes of bankrupt morality.

The Panorama showed a two-hour-long non-fictional Marley, a biopic of the prominent reggae musician Bob Marley directed by a Briton, Kevin McDonald who won praises in 2006 for the political drama The Last King of Scotland.

Yet non-fictional is a bit wrong definition of this movie because the screen is filled, from the very first scenes, with extremely artistic and breathtaking – in terms of both looks and behavior – characters. Still, McDonald sticks to quite a traditional form of a narrative documentary: he successively shows the places of Bob Marley’s birth, life, and death; interviews with his relatives and friends alternate with concert numbers, news items, archival photos, and panoramic views of Jamaica. McDonald found rare, if not invaluable, footage as well as people with whom Marley’s biographers admittedly had never spoken. This results in a full-scale portrait of not only the prominent musician but also his epoch.

Another notable Panorama documentary, The Reluctant Revolutionary, was made by not a professional filmmaker but an ordinary tourist, an Irish teacher, Sean McAllistair, who found himself in Yemen right in the heat of the uprising against President Saleh who had ruled the country for over 30 years (incidentally, “The Arab Spring” is one of the festival’s key themes). McAllistair found himself where not a single journalist had ever been, he filmed fierce clashes, bloodshed, and burials, but the film is interesting not only with its unique material but also because the teacher discovered a director in himself and managed to tell the story of his hero, businessman Kais al-Qalisa, who at first took a dim view of the revolution but then, under the influence of what he had seen and heard, he radically changed his opinion. All revolutions are doomed to end up in tyranny unless private life is in public focus.

Unfortunately, all the three latter films are out of competition. There still is a hope there will be a breakthrough in the main competition before the end of this week.