ALL BERLIN 2019 REVIEWS up to midpoint

By Alex Deleon photographed here below with  filmfestivals.com co founder Bruno Chatelin

The 69th edition of the Berlin Film Festival will be the last one under the auspices of director Dieter Kosslick, 70, who has run the event since 2002 with a certain flamboyance and an occasional flub.

Inevitably seen in the company of the big Hollywood stars while sporting various floppy hats Kosslick has been accused of catering too much to the Hollywood mainstream at the expense of the festival's long established emphasis on art and intellectual fare during his eighteen year reign,  but he has definitely transformed the festival into one the world's most important cinema events.  In addition to being the world's largest public film festival selling nearly half a million tickets per year to ordinary film fans Berlin also   hosts the European Film Market (EFM) the world's second-largest film market which is, In effect, a parallel film festival in its own. 

Aside from this Berlin continues to screen many art films from around the world in its Panorama and Forum sections, with a a strong political flavor always in the air.

This year the emphasis will be on the feminine side of filmmaking with no less than seven of the 17 titles in competition helmed by female directors.  Among them are two regular Kosslick favorites, Agnieszka Holland of Poland and Isabel Coixet from Spain who is back this year with Elisa & Marcela, a black-and-white period drama about the first lesbian couple to get legally married in Spain.  Apart from the subject matter, the fact that the film was backed by Netflix has attracted attention in Berlin. Elisa & Marcela will be the firsts Netflix film ever to screened in competition at the Berlinale. 

As the debate over TV streaming versus big screen projection heats up Kosslick's optimistic view is as follows: "This question of streaming is one that has just started. The audiovisual world is in a state of great upheaval,  but I'm convinced that cinema will stay, streaming notwithstanding. Despite opinions to the contrary, I think that film festivals will become more, not less, important in the future and that there will be a coexistence between the festivals and the streamers."

The panorama section dedicated to alternate and independent cinema from around the world, now in its Fortieth year, will present a selection of significant films over this period of time chosen by founder and former Panorama curator Wieland Speck.

The festival opener will be The Kindness of Strangers, by Danish femme director Lone Schefrig,( born 1959).  Described as "The story of four people suffering through the worst crises of their lives" we can only hope this will not set the tone for the entire festival.

Turkish-German ace helmer Fatih Akin will present his latest work, Der Goldene Handschuh, (The Golden Glove), the story of a serial killer active in Akin's native Hamburg in the seventies. Oddly enough Fatih has not been at Berlin often since his Golden Bear winner Gegen dir Wand, in 2004, preferring Cannes and Venice in recent years.

Two German ladies round out a strong German presence in the competition lineup.  

Angela Schanelec makes her debut with "Ich war zuhause, aber" (I was home but) and  Nora Fingscheidt’s first feature, "System Crasher" is a film about a child:  "On her wild quest for love, 9-year-old Benni's untamed energy drives everyone around her to despair".

French veteran François Ozon will present "Grâce à Dieu"  about three childhood  friends who meet and discuss their experiences.

Norwegian Hans Petter Moland is back after his spectacular black comedy 

" In Order of Disappearance", which should have won a Bear in 2014 with "Out Stealing Horses", his fourth stab at the Golden Bär top prize. Hope he makes it this time.

Three Chinese entries are on the agenda topped by China's leading filmmaker Zhang Yimou's "One Second" (Yi miao zhong).

Zhang took home a Golden Bär for his very first feature "Red Sorghum" in 1988,

 Films from Austria, Turkey, and Israel round out the competition lineup.

Iconic French actress Juliette Binoche will add a touch of glamour as head the international competition jury.

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Ps: She didn't look too glamorous at the Jury press conference (above) but looked much better at the photo call for her own film!

Photo call for "Celle que vous croyez"

New Binoche film ar Berlin

Opening Night film at Berlin 69 The Quirkiness of Kindness

by Alex Deleon  <filmfestivals.com>

Dieter Kosslick's Departure after 18 years as festival topper continues to be the talk of the town and the opening film, "The Kindness of Strangers" was more kinky than kindly, not the best choice, to say the least.  (Haven't  I heard that song somewhere before?)

The opening film of the festival is a prestige slot and usually goes to a filmmaker with a track record of awards at Berlin. This year the director was Lone Scherfig of Denmark, a 59 year old veteran of talky arty type films and  a Golden Bear recipient in 2000 for her post Dogma Danish success "Italian for Beginners".  Her latest film made in English as a Canadian Danish coproduction seemed to have all the ingredients of a winner with an elite international cast and Manhattan locations, but "The Kindness of Strangers" turned out to be an opening night dud panned by most reviewers, even those who were trying hard to find reasons to praise it, and squirmed through by viewers who were equally unimpressed.  

Although not yet a big star but nevertheless a big name is lead actress Zoe Kazan, merely because she is the granddaughter of legendary star director Elia Kazan. The film, billed as "a love letter to the city that never sleeps" nearly put me to sleep in spite of the presence of an actor I really like, the handsome Algerian French star Tahar Rahim, who played an Armenian genocide survivor dynamically in Fatih Akin's "The Cut" (2016) and some nice comic shtik by senior British character actor Bill Nighy whose fake Russian accent (he owns the Russian restaurant where most of the film takes place)  provides occasional chuckles to alleviate the burden of a heavy handed script with a forced story about a driveaway wife with her two teenage boys  hitting town from Buffalo while trying to elude a psychotic husband who is a cop, of all places, guess where, in New York.  

Zoe Kazan and Tahar Rahim, nose to nose in The Kindness of Strangers

The story centers on the gradually growing romance between Rahim who manages the restaurant and Clara, Ms. Kazan, who sports the most prominent proboscis of any lead actress around today. When the car in which she and her boys have been living ( mainly from her skills at shoplifting and other forms of larceny). is towed away and the trio is now literally homeless Rahim takes them in and, ho hum -- one thing leads to another.  I found it for one thing hard to believe that an extremely good looking dude like Rahim could be so enthralled by a basically unattractive loser of a  woman with a big nose like Zoe. There is a lot of business in the film about shelters for the homeless and a  group therapy angle that is thrown  in to tie the tangled threads of the story together but the phoniness of the whole deal is best exemplified by the band at the restaurant where all these strangers are so kind to each other, when they play a totally Russian version of "The House of the Rising Sun"  which is the best joke in the movie. It took me a while to realize that "Hey, I've heard that Russian Song somewhere before" was not a Russian song at all!

On stage at the opening ceremony with Dieter  Kosslick receiving protestations of praise from every angle and every celebrity in sight  for  his energetic eighteen year tenure as head of the festival the jolly impresario (now seventy) could not hold back a couple of tears but a good time was had by all as usual.

Dieter Kosslick, jovial to the Bitter Sweet end.

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System Crasher/Systemsprenger In Competition at Berlin

by Alex Deleon            <filmfestivals.com>

Nine year old actress Helena Zengel in her fourth film

World Premiere screening Viewed at Berlinale Palast, Friday 15:30.-- Original title refers to a minor who breaks all the rules wantonly and recklessly.

Amazing !

Forget about all other contenders.

   In my book this tremendous study of a very troubled child and various concerned  adults who are trying to save  this lovable but uncontrollable kid from self destruction should easily take Best Film, Best Director, and the youngest Best Actress award  ever, for amazing  nine year old Helena Zengel.

   This movie kept me totally engaged and emotionally charged up all the way while identifying with both the violently rebellious child heroine and the understanding young guy, 

Micha, a social worker specializing in Anger Control, who takes her under his wing, but at high risk to his own budding family of wife snd small children.   Benni, (Bernadette, and she hates the name!)  whose own mother keeps rejecting her tries to force herself on her new caretaker and his family with mixed success when her natural charm keeps giving way to unpredictable outbursts of violence. This is a picture bursting with mixed feelings, positive and negative, love and exasperation, acceptance and rejection, and ultimately one of the most engrossing motion pictures I have seen in the last ten years.

Rarely does the first picture you see in a long festival blow you so totally away that you feel like you don't need to see anything else. The pic received an endless ovation as the end titles rolled and then another long ovation for the directress, Nora Fingscheidt, and the stars of the film introduced one by one by her on stage.

Fingscheidt is 35 but looks younger and this is her first feature film after a long string of acclaimed prize winning shorts and documentaries.

Floating on a feeling of perfect cinematic satisfaction as I was exiting the premises I was thinking of not using the other film tickets I had and  just calling it a day  after this total film experience but, alas, It was an egregious mistake to follow it up at a different theater (the horrible Friedrichstadt palace) with a reprise of the opening film, "The Kindness of Strangers", by another woman director with a name hard to remember, Lone Scherfig , 59, of Denmark.  Scherfig's biggest success to date was "Italian for Beginners" which won a Silver Bear at Berlin in 2000.  This one, however, was a tedious bore set in an overly obvious New York City with stick figure characters and an unconvincing plot that would have been a walkout after ten minutes if I wasn't squeezed into a middle row seat I couldn't escape from.  The moral ~~ when you see one really fantastic film do not dilute the experience by watching another piece of crap immediately afterwards.

I will be very surprised (and very disappointed) if SYSTEM CRASHER does not become an international hit this year and make an international star out of Helena Zengel, now aged all of  ten!

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Systemsprenger ist ein deutscher Spielfilm von Nora Fingscheidt aus dem Jahr 2019. Das Drama stellt ein 9-jähriges Mädchen (gespielt von Helena Zengel) in den Mittelpunkt, das als titelgebender Systemsprenger einen Leidensweg zwischen wechselnden Pflegefamilien und Anti-Agressions-Trainings durchläuft.

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Max mon amour

Charlotte Rampling in the Festival Spotlight

By Alex Deleon

The first film seen at the festival in the homage to Charlotte Rampling retro was somewhat of a disappointment. I had seen this picture when it first came out in Japan and was favorably impressed at the time by its outrageous sense of the absurd, especially as made by a serious A level Japanese director like Nagisa Oshima.(died 2013 at age 80).  This time around the humor, at least for me, did not hold up and I was rather bored most of the way.

Today it is of little more than passing historical interest

There is, however, an interesting background to this very offbeat franco-Japanese co-production from the year 1986 by which time Oshima was regarded as a first class Japanese iconoclast.  Outside of Japan he was highly regarded in France where his mainstream hardcore porno films In the realm of the senses (1976) and Empire of Passion (1978j were screened at Cannes and had created a sensation.

His next Cannes entry 1983, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence

(戦場のメリークリスマス) about a Japanese POW camp in WW II took the Grand Prix at Cannes and firmly established Oshima's reputation in France. French producer Serge Silberman who was a long term backer of controversial Buñuel films and selected Japanese films helped set up Oshima's first and only French language piece starring Charlotte Rampling an outstanding British actress fluent in French.  With a script written by Oshima (and Jean Claude Carrière) this film was his bid to gain wider general acceptance and it almost worked. It certainly earned him a bit of notoriety if not much else.

The film itself is based on the absurd premise that the elegant bored wife (Rampling) of a handsome diplomat (Anthony Higgins) falls in love with a zoo chimpanzee, buys him from the zoo, and sets him up in an apartment as her regular lover. Higgins plays her blasé diplomat husband who invites the ape to live with them in their ultra fancy Paris pad in a most sophisticated menage à trois.  Talk about broad mindedness!  Higgins himself is carrying on an extramarital affair so this ridiculous film might be interpreted as a wry comment on so called open marriages.  The problem is that although played for straight faced laughs it isn't really very funny, mainly because the fake chimpanzee simply doesn't have the charm of Tarzan's real chimpanzee pet Cheetah and just bungles around disjointedly. The end result is a classy looking piece of self indulgent self mockery that fails to hit the marks intended. Almost fun to watch anyway simply for its unabashed absurdity, but John Waters it isn't.  (Though it might have been really funny if made with Divine).

Other Rampling classics coming up include "The Night Porter" (Caviani, 1974), The Damned (Visconti, 1969) and Stardust Memories (Woody Allen, 1980).

Charlotte Rampling, 73, is the recipient this year of a Career Achievement award at Berlinale '69 with a retro of some of her Landmark films

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The Ground  beneath my Feet,   

(Der Boden unter den Füßen) 1h 48 min.

Austria,  World premiere, Competition,  directed by  Marie Kreutzer (fourth feature) and starring slim, austerely sexy, Valerie Pachner is a lesbian tale disguised as a workaholic drama that grinds the viewer down into submission, little by little.  It would have been better placed in the LGT Teddy section although it is as strong overall as many other competition entries. If you've wondered how lesbians get it on one of the bedroom scenes demonstrates that the Missionary Position is at least one favored technique.  The two lovers, both slim blondes, look so much alike I couldn't quite tell who was on top but it was definitely a hot scene that ended in a screaming orgasm for the supine member that looked totally authentic and not the least bit faked (as it were). 

Of course there is lots more to this movie than the all female sex but, like it or not, it is the relationship between these two women, one an ambitious workaholic supporting a suicidal sister, the other a cold hearted manipulative boss, that drives the intent of the story. One does not get the feeling that there is any tender affection between the two beautiful lovers, just plain sex and manipulation value. It looks as though director Kreutzer wanted the sexual aspect to be just one of those things woven into a tale with more  important issues at stake, but I personally found the other issues (obsessive devotion to job and insanity in the family with an extremely strained sister relationship) not only secondary but pretty repetitions and ultimately boring. The picture only came to life with the first languorous kiss between the two women and the subsequent in bed scenes.  An Austrian professional sitting next to me was of the opinion that the film is highly personal and reflects issues in the directors own life.  The cinematography with facial closeups prevailing was very crisp and the acting of all  principles very intense.  In other words a rather tedious story very well done. The press screening audience gave it a solid round of applause. I was personally relieved when it was over.