by alex deleon for <filmfestivals.com>

Berlin or bust ... The Grand Budapest Hotel

The Berlin Film Festival was established during the height of the Cold War in 1951 and this year is the 64th edition of this major event on the international film festival calendar.  Some 300,000 tickets are sold each year. Last year 16,000 film professionals from 120 different countries gathered here for this annual interchange of motion pictures, industry networking, and cross-fertilization of film ideas. This year around 400 films of all kinds will be screened, twenty of them in competition for the gold and silver bears awarded at the end of an eleven day fully packed cinematic daze.

The big opening film is the world premiere of the much ballyhooed "GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL" which has nothing to do with Budapest or Hungary but is set in a mythical European country that could be Hungary, and is populated with a prestige all star cast: Ralph Fiennes as a hotel concierge in a thirties full buttons outfit like Johnny the bellhop who used to sail through the Philip Morris hotel lobby shouting "call for Phil-lipp  Maw-aw-rey", Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray, and a staggering lineup of other names ...Adrien Brody (The Pianist), Jeff Goldblum (The Fly), Ed Norton, Harvey Keitel, Jude Law, Willem Dafoe,  F. Murray Abraham (remember him from Amadeus, 1984?) --  plus French stars Mathieu Amalric and Léa Seydoux -- wow! How'd he get 'em all to sign up?   Directed by Wes Anderson who can be counted on for absurd comical romps and is a favored son of this festival with previous entries such as "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" (the biggest bore of 2004)  and "The Royal Tennenbaums" starring an obviously disgruntled Gene Hackman.

Another big name film with big name stars on the agenda is "Monuments Men", a World War II drama about a special elite force dispatched to the continent to save priceless works of art from the hands of rabid Nazi plunderers -- directed by George Clooney and starring whom else but ... Gorgeous George in the leading role -- ably supported by Matt Damon and, again, Bill Murray. Both of these films were shot in the Babelsberg film Studios in Potsdam on the edge of this sprawling capitol city which is, naturally, of automatically special interest to locals.

Probably the most talked about film of the year is maverick uppity Danish director Lars von Trier's allegedly hard core sextravaganza "Nymphomaniac: Volume 1" staring French actress Charlotte Gainsbourg (daughter of infamously famous singer composer Serge) as the insatiable sex freak of the title, with another prestige cast; the likes of Uma Thurman,  Shia LaBoeuf, Willem Dafoe, etc.  The print has been "modified" in most commercial versions to spare viewers the unspeakable heresy of unadulterated fucking on screen in a so-called proper mainstream picture. However, in accordance with a long standing tradition of absolute auteurial integrity here, Berlin audiences will be treated to the Full Monty -- an unexpurgated 20 minute longer director's cut, presumably showing all the slishy stuff that has been cut out. Viva La Gainsbourg!
and La-dee-dah...


Charlotte Gainsbourg likes chocolates for breakfast in Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac: Part 1.

Still another breathlessly awaited new prestige glossy is the French biopic, "Yves Saint Laurent",  the rags to riches story of a gay boy who became the leading international designer and purveyor of glad rags for  rich and famous females, otherwise known as "Haute Couture".  YSL is portrayed by Pierre Niney, a well known actor of the prestigious Parisian theatre company,  La Comédie Française, but not very well known in cinéphile circles: The film has been gathering rave reviews in the french press, especially  for the sensitive interpretation of the title role by a theater actor little known to film buffs. YSL is the directorial debut of 37 year old Jalil Lespert, until now a busy screen actor of Algerian background. As an actor Jalil was impressive playing the journalist biographer of an aged president Mitterand in "Le promeneur du Champ de Mars", a noteworthy Berlin competition entry in 2005 up against a fantastic Michel Bouquet. Guillaume Gallienne, also of the Comédie Française, plays Pierre Bergé -- Yve's significant other (gender masculine) and Nikolai Kinski, the 37 year old son of fabled German actor Klaus Kinski, is Karl Lagerfeld.



"American Hustle", an American comedy up for ten Oscars, stars Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Renner, Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence in a seventies tale about sharpie hustlers forcibly enlisted  by the CIA to entrap some corrupt politicians at the top of their shit list.  One German review calls it "an absurd puppet show in which, you don't know who's pulling the strings until the end".  Sounds like fun.  David O. Russell directed.


Jennifer Lawrence, is slightly seductive in American Hustle

Legendary outspokenly gay and very prolific German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who led a German film revival equivalent to the French New Wave in the sixties and died 22 years ago at the tender age of 37, will be seen on screen here as an actor in a 1968 film, "Baal", which was regarded by some as an excessively radical adaptation of the Bertold Brecht theater piece. The film was squelched by the heirs of Brecht who saw it as an insult to his memory and used their influence to have it pulled from circulation. Now, 45 years later this forcibly forgotten work is resurrected by indefatigable Berlinale film archeologists. Young Fassbinder rides again-- only in Berlin.

This is merely a foretaste of some of the featured titles in a festival that promises to be one of the most interesting in years. Among a veritable cascade of stars expected here in the next few days are Clooney, Damon, Ethan Hawke, Bruno Ganz, Uma Thurman, and fetching French seductress Léa Sedoux who is in both Budapest Hotel and Yves Saint Laurent -- and that's just for openers. 


Léa Sedoux at Cannes 2013 where she picked up a Palmares for "Blue is the Warmest Color"

And finally, a most unusual twain of festival guests fresh from the Gulag, will be Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyoshina, of the Russian feminist punk rock protest band "Pussy Riot". The young activist musicians were imprisoned by Putin for uncomplimentary musical references to Kremlin authority, but were released in December along with Jewish billionaire Khodorowsky as an apparent show of liberalism leading up to the winter Olympics about to start in Sotchi. The duo of Pussy Rioters will take to the stage at the festival sidebar "Cinema for Peace" Gala.
Alex, Berlin, Wed. 5 February