CARTAS DA GUERRA_20160221_The Guardian [en]

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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/feb/21/berlin-film-festival-2016-observer-roundup

Berlin film festival 2016 roundup: serious gems and stylish risks Jonathan Romney

Sunday 21 February 2016 10.00 GMT

There are many things that distinguish Berlin from the other major European festivals – not least the sheer militant unprettiness of Potsdamer Platz in February. And there’s the way that when critics argue about the festival, it tends to get personal: you’ll see them rolling their eyes and muttering, “Ach, Dieter…” With his actormanager fedora and incorrigibly impish flamboyance on the red carpet, Berlinale director Dieter Kosslick has managed to brand the festival pretty much as a one-man show. The price is that he gets to take the flak: people tend not to think of a dud line-up as Berlin’s fault but as Dieter’s.

This year, however, you have to admit that Kosslick (and his team) got it right – or at least, took some stylish risks. For a start, here’s a festival that asked its international jury, headed by Meryl Streep, to watch a competition film lasting eight hours (in black and white! In Tagalog and Spanish!). Rumours circulated on the morning of the screening that Meryl had been up all night planning the jury’s toilet break rota.

And it was a nice, jolly cinephile flourish to open the festival with the Coen brothers’ comedy of 1950s Hollywood, Hail, Caesar!. It features Josh Brolin as a careworn studio troubleshooter and George Clooney as the star of a biblical epic who gets kidnapped. It has the characteristic Coens undertow of dark seriousness but, above all, it lets the brothers indulge in utterly gratuitous movie pastiche, giving us a bit of western here, a splash of water ballet there (Scarlett Johansson in a mermaid’s tail) and some boisterous Gene Kelly-style hoofing, with Channing Tatum leading a flotilla of tap-dancing sailors.

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On to the serious stuff – and the Berlin competition does tend to be serious. I only saw two misguided inclusions, but ach! were they solemn. Alone in Berlin is Vincent Perez’s adaptation of the Hans Fallada novel about antiNazis in the 40s, its dramatic weight resting on the careworn shoulders of Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson. Hamstrung by the decision to have the actors speak in English but with German accents, it was about as light and satisfying as a triple portion of Kartoffelknödeln.

It’s a road thriller and a sci-fi dazzler with its roots in the 'cinema of wonder' practised by Spielberg in his prime

Scarcely better was Genius, the debut film by theatre director Michael Grandage, about the relationship between novelist Thomas Wolfe (Jude Law) and editor Maxwell Perkins (Colin Firth). Law hyperventilated poetically, Firth internalised more tautly than ever, and Nicole Kidman offered some knowingly imperious grace notes – all in 1930s visual tones not so much sepia as old tobacco.

But there were gems as well. A surprise genre treat was Midnight Special by US director Jeff Nichols. The less I reveal, the better, but this audacious oddity stars Michael Shannon and Kirsten Dunst as the parents of a young

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boy with very strange talents, and it’s at once a road thriller and a sci-fi dazzler with its roots in the “cinema of wonder” practised by Spielberg in his prime. If you were prepared to go with it, this trip led you somewhere really unexpected.

There were classic art-house numbers by two French directors, both essentially top-class novelists who happen to do it in shots rather than paragraphs. Being 17 is André Téchiné’s Pyrenees-set drama about the tense relationship between two teenage boys: acute no-frills psychological realism, with superb performances by young leads Kacey Mottet Klein and Corentin Fila. L’avenir (Things to Come) is Mia Hansen-Løve’s follow-up to her epic of the French techno scene, Eden. Hansen-Løve looks at a different generation here, with Isabelle Huppert as a philosophy teacher looking at her students with rueful eyes, and coming to a crucial point in her relationship with her husband (André Marcon, an under-celebrated French actor often described as “stalwart”, for which read: unfailingly good). No festival should be without a superb Huppert performance, and Hansen-Løve’s insightful, literate and moving drama gives her sterling material to work with.

Facebook Pinterest ‘Extraordinary docudrama’: Miguel Nunes in Cartas da guerra (Letters from War). Photograph: Berlin International Film Festival There were two documentaries in competition – Alex Gibney’s arresting but needlessly breathless Zero Days, an apocalyptic scarer about cyber-warfare, and Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea, about migrants on Lampedusa (I missed it, but many critics are tipping it for the Golden Bear). Then there was an extraordinary docudrama of sorts: Ivo M Ferreira’s Cartas da guerra (Letters from War), an evocation of the Portuguese army’s last days in Angola, through the letters home of a military doctor. You hear the letters, read in voiceover by his wife (Margarida Vila-Nova), while you see black-and-white reconstructions of the images they evoke. Painstakingly created, this may be the most beautiful film about war since Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line. It doesn’t aestheticise its subject, however, but rather evokes the power of words to make sense of horror and to cut through the bombast of empire.

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Here’s a director who can make your heart stop just by holding at length on a shot of a bouquet of flowers…

Outside the competition, there was a major disappointment in the Panorama section with War on Everyone by writer-director John Michael McDonagh. He made a boisterously cheeky debut with a comedy thriller The Guard, then followed it with the superb, theologically resonant Calvary. By contrast, War on Everyone is a pastiche of American bad-cop comedies, with Michael Peña and Alexander Skarsgård as corrupt, wise-ass Albuqerque lawmen; it all feels like an extended remake of the Beastie Boys’ 70s-styled Sabotage video.

McDonagh knowingly goes all Tarantino in the script, only with high culture references (typical line: “He ran a strip joint – he’s not like Diaghelev at the Ballets Russes”). Aggressively facetious stuff.

Facebook Pinterest ‘Volleys of crisp badinage’: Cynthia NIxon and Catherine Bailey in A Quiet Passion. Photograph: Johan Voets/Berlin International Film Festival Meanwhile, in an altogether more rarefied sphere, Terence Davies returned with A Quiet Passion, about the life of Emily Dickinson. Essentially a hyper-austere chamber piece (it rarely leaves the Dickinson house in Amherst), it stars a delicate yet furiously intense performance by Cynthia Nixon as the famously reclusive poet, showing a side of Dickinson we never suspected. In early stretches, she and her friend Miss Vryling Buffam (a fabulously arch Catherine Bailey) merrily fire off volleys of crisp badinage as if they were about to go off and found the Algonquin Round Table. Then things get claustrophobically bleak in the signature Davies manner, but subtly and movingly so – here’s a director who can make your heart stop just by holding at length on a shot of a bouquet of flowers. Davies habitually films as if his soul depended on it – here as much as ever.

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Read more As for that eight-hour Filipino epic competition – it was crazy but it was worth it. Director Lav Diaz is a specialist in Demandingly Long Cinema (he recently made that mere four-hour bagatelle Norte, the End of History), and A Lullaby to The Sorrowful Mystery is his latest contemplation of the history of the Philippines. Head-spinningly confusing, this multi-strander is set in the 1890s (allowing for some strikingly anachronistic poetic licence) and involves an idealistic poet, a woman searching for the body of revolutionary leader Andres Bonifacio, and three tikbalangs, mythical half-human, half-horse demons.

With its decidedly Shakespearean dimension (not least because it mostly plays out in a vast forest), Diaz’s hypnotic Lullaby has its slow stretches (well, duh!) but this mesmerising, perplexing and often operatically emotive film follows its own path with radical single-mindedness. It may not win the Golden Bear, but Meryl and co might consider giving Diaz a one-off award as best magician.

The best (and worst) of Berlin 2016

Facebook Pinterest Amal and George Clooney at the Hail, Caesar premiere. Photograph: Matthias Nareyek/WireImage

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Best competition film Ivo M Ferreira’s Cartas da guerra (Letters From War).

Best competition comeback Iranian director Rafi Pitts (2006’s It’s Winter), with US-set Soy Nero, about a Mexican trying to secure US citizenship by joining the army. Final stretch plays like a hyperminimalist remake of The Hurt Locker. Dreamlike and very individual.

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Best genre films In competition, Jeff Nichols’s Midnight Special. Out of competition, Creepy, a deranged chiller by Japanese cult favourite Kiyoshi Kurosawa: starts as a psychological police drama, then gets a lot weirder. Even Norman Bates would worry about having these nervy neighbours.

Best performances Cynthia Nixon in A Quiet Passion; Isabelle Huppert in L’avenir; Kacey Mottet Klein and Corentin Fila in Being 17.

Best cameos Tilda Swinton as a Hedda Hopper-like gossip columnist in Hail, Caesar! and Tilda Swinton as her Louella Parsons-like twin sister.

Best ‘tough but worthwhile’ contender Tomasz Wasilewski’s United States of Love: an unrelentingly severe but fascinating (and narratively devious) drama about four women’s travails in Poland in 1990.

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Best cinematography It was a black-and-white year: A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery, Cartas da guerra – and United States of Love, shot by eastern European star DoP Oleg Mutu: not quite black-and-white, more like colour bleached within an inch of its life.

Most infuriating Rebecca Miller’s arch comedy Maggie’s Plan, about the romantic woes of New York’s uptown and highbrow: starring Ethan Hawke, Greta Gerwig out-ditzing herself something rotten. Worth seeing only for a funny Julianne Moore (with Swedish accent). Otherwise - don’t get me started.

Silliest moment Ernest Hemingway (Dominic West) swaggers on halfway through Genius, freshly caught marlin hanging in the background, and declares, “I’m telling you – Spain is where the action’s gonna be.”

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Best animal appearances The little owl with an unusually mobile neck in A Lullaby for the Sorrowful Mystery. And the bear on this year’s classy Berlinale posters. Word balloon seen felt-tipped on one: “Wo ist Leonardo DiCaprio?”

This article was amended on 21 February to correct the spelling of Willkommen

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