A Look Back at the 70th Berlinale (2020)

Was this year’s Berlinale a mistake? Should it have taken place? Did we all needlessly endanger and expose ourselves to a growing pandemic for the sake of cinema? Perhaps. Do I regret it? Not yet.

This was my first Berlinale as an accredited member of the press (thanks Cinematic Berlin!), so I certainly would’ve been heartbroken had it been cancelled. Even then, the flu was on everyone’s mind. People were finding ways to get past doors without actually touching them, ears finely tuned to pick up any hint of a nearby cough. Even in those waning days of February, which feels like a year ago, I was diligently washing my hands between every film and trying to grab the same seat in the last row at the back of the Berlinale Palast for every Competition screening. Today, I’m still not sure if I’m corona-free. But what I am sure of, as the festival glow dissipates, is that I saw a lot of good to great movies, and very few duds.

Of course, my luck being what it is, I saw around thirty movies and failed to see both the Golden Bear winner (Mohammad Rasoulof’s THERE IS NO EVIL) and the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay (The D'Innocenzo Brothers’ FAVOLACCE). However, I want to start this off by mentioning one award-winner that I did catch. In fact, it was the very first pre-festival screening I went to: Alexandre Rockwell’s SWEET THING, which deservedly won the Crystal Bear for best film in the Generation Kplus section.

Like certain American cinephiles of my age, I have deep admiration for Rockwell’s 1992 film, IN THE SOUP, featuring a cinematic duo for the ages, Steve Buscemi and Seymour Cassell. It’s an utterly charming lo-fi black & white movie about a would-be filmmaker and his aging gangster producer. What is absolutely astounding is that, from the very first frames of SWEET THING, Rockwell’s signature aesthetic transports you right back to 1992, as if the past thirty years of mega-plexes and shitty 3D screenings were but a nightmarish fever dream. There’s the same softly glowing back & white 16mm frames, the same deliberate editing and pacing… I couldn’t have asked for a better first screening as it rekindled a deep affection for cinema that has been stifled from time to time over the years.

SWEET THING is continuing Rockwell’s DIY, family-affair filmmaking of late, casting his teenage kids as the main characters and enlisting friends to fill out the cast. This one features Will Patton as the kids’ well-meaning but severely alcoholic dad. When Patton gets locked up, the kids are forced to live with their mom and her predatory boyfriend. It all sounds rather tragic, but Rockwell handles it with gentle grace. The kids refuse to be victims and end up runaways with a street-smart friend, played by the remarkably charismatic Jabari Watkins. Without spoiling anything, it is feel-good cinema at its charming best.

Since I failed to cover SWEET THING during the festival, I can now segue into an assemblage of my dispatches for Cinematic Berlin, along with some stray thoughts and final impressions…

Berlinale 70 — CB Dispatch I (First Cow, The Intruder, Hidden Away, The Salt of Tears, Undine)

The 70th edition of the Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin, better known around the world as Berlinale, has begun. At this time every year, Postdammer Platz turns into a buzzing, glittering, highly-caffeinated hub for a ravenous collection of film fanatics. I’m sure I’m not alone in considering these eleven days in mid-to-late February something of a high holiday for the cinematically devout.

This year had some added levels of anticipation since it marks the beginning of new leadership, with Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian taking over from Dieter Kosslick, who’d been at the helm of the festival since 2002. Rissenbeek and Chatrian should already be commended for the fact that it still feels like the same Berlinale, in a good way. It’s still a festival that is extremely accessible to the general public and offers people a chance to see some of the world’s best cinema in some amazing kinos.

The most noticeable changes have been around the program sections, particularly the Competition section, which has been rearranged, so that there’s no longer the awkward situation of having Competition titles being classified as “out of competition.” Instead, we have the new Encounters section, with it’s own three-person jury. The Panorama section continues to highlight bold and personal world cinema, and the Forum is still a vital showcase for more experimental and aesthetically adventurous filmmaking.

As far as the official Competition titles go, I’ve been able to catch five of the six that have screened so far. The best of these, by a significant margin, has been Kelly Reichardt’s FIRST COW, a gently heartbreaking tale of two men (John Magaro and Orion Lee) who live on the outskirts of a fort in nineteenth century Oregon. When a new cow enters the community, the two budding entrepreneurs hatch an idea that involves secretly using the cow’s milk to bake and sell goods, which will hopefully earn them enough money to get to San Francisco.

© Alysson Riggs/A24, FIRST COW

It’s been nearly fifteen years since her breakout film, OLD JOY, but Reichardt continues to prove herself masterful at revealing the subtle dynamics of male relationships. And not unlike her 2008 film, WENDY & LUCY, she also continues to show that she can kill you softly with her love for characters that have the odds stacked squarely against them.

I also found director Natalia Meta’s EL PRÓFUGO (THE INTRUDER) to be a surprisingly fun psychological thriller. If you’re a fan of David Cronenberg’s work, and miss the skewed sensibility he brings to genre films, you may find that EL PROFUGO does a fine job of scratching that itch. The movie stars Érica Rivas as a singer and voice-over artist who may or may not be dealing with extradimensional “intruders” that enter our world through dreams and infect our bodies. Rivas’s captivating performance is reason enough to catch this one. Plus, the ending is a helluva kicker.

Less captivating was Giorgio Diritti’s VOLEVO NASCONDERMI (HIDDEN AWAY), which gives us a look at the life of early twentieth century artist Antonio Ligabue, who settled in Italy after being exiled from Switzerland due to mental illness. The movie is beautifully shot, and we could use more movies about outsider artists, but this one never really finds much to say about art or mental illness.

In the role of the volatile Ligabue, Elio Germano’s acting is turned up to 11 at all times, making it all rather exhausting (yet appealing to the jury, who awarded Germano the Silver Bear for Best Actor) even though the film never really takes us anywhere. Yet I’ll take HIDDEN AWAY over LE SEL DES LARMES (THE SALT OF TEARS), the latest from director Philippe Garrel. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like if Truffaut had directed a feature length perfume ad, look no further. I honestly don’t know why this movie exists, other than as a chance for Garrel to film gratuitous (yet black & white, so, arty!) shots of young women taking showers or stepping out of bathtubs. The premise, of a ridiculously handsome man caught between three ridiculously pretty women, is literally laughable — in that one significant dramatic development was so obvious and unoriginal that it elicited a hearty round of guffaws.

But mostly this movie just made me angry. Even the impeccable black & white cinematography felt phoney, and as a story it is exceedingly stiff and boring. There is one moment when the movie tries to come alive with a bit of choreographed dance, but this is also painfully strained and far too little too late. It doesn’t help that the dance sequence is immediately followed up by a back-alley attempt at relevance that is so hamfisted it bypasses laughable and goes straight to depressing. When critics complain about pretentious bourgeois drivel, THE SALT OF TEARS is what they’re talking about. What purpose this movie could serve is beyond me.

Far more successful is the much anticipated new film from Christian Petzold, UNDINE. This one is, perhaps unsurprisingly, another twisty and enigmatic story from Petzold, whose last two films, PHOENIX and TRANSIT, have positioned him as both an heir to Hitchcock and an international sensation with the critics. UNDINE doesn’t disappoint. It’s refreshingly unpredictable and leaves you with an intricately rendered puzzle to play with, even though its pleasures are perhaps less immediate than Petzold’s previous two.

The story is of the tragic romance variety, between the historian Undine (Paula Beer, winner of the Silver Bear for Best Actress), who lectures on Berlin’s architectural and city-planning history, and an industrial diver Christoph (Franz Rogowski), who repairs the city’s underwater infrastructure. Early on, Christoph takes Undine for a dive in the river and shows us that her name is written on an old wall, perhaps put there a hundred years ago. There are many questions about the mysterious Undine and very little in the way of definitive answers. Nevertheless, as timeless love stories go, this one is pretty satisfying and it is fun to come up with your own theories on Undine’s backstory. My guess is that UNDINE will continue to deepen and reveal itself with repeat viewings.

Berlinale 70 — CB Dispatch II (Siberia, My Little Sister, Hope, Berlin Alexanderplatz, The Woman Who Ran)

There’s only a couple of days left for premiers in the Competition section, while in just the last few days nine films have been screened for critics. I haven’t yet had a chance to catch all of them (there are other sections that demand attention, after all), but I’ll share some thoughts on what I have seen.

Let’s start with one of the more divisive films of the competition, Abel Ferrara’s SIBERIA. The movie starts with Ferrara’s go-to leading man of the past decade, Willem Dafoe, tending bar out in the middle of some snowy wilderness. (His isolated tavern makes Minnie’s Haberdashery look like Cheers.) But we soon realize that nothing in SIBERIA should be taken too literally. What we’re really witnessing is Dafoe’s character, Clint, navigating his way through an emotional Siberia. The basement of the tavern contains nightmarish visions, a biter alter ego, and a bottomless pit of despair. So Clint sets out on his dog sled and begins to confront memories of his father, mother, ex-wife and his own childhood. It’s a heady trip, to say the least, but I found it to be rather fascinating and, at times, disarmingly funny -- not to mention beautifully shot.

I wasn’t expecting Ferrara to suddenly come out with his ERASERHEAD at this stage in his long and storied career, but I'll celebrate it as a minor miracle that this oddity managed to be made and released. One critic has dismissed it as “commercially irresponsible,” to which I say, Amen! Ferrara appears to be exercising his own demons in SIBERIA and I take it as a positive sign that something so personal, artistic, and in defiance of current trends, is being screened at Berlinale -- in the Competition section no less! Long live cinema.

Meanwhile, two more German films have premiered: SCHWESTERLEIN (MY LITTLE SISTER), by Stephanie Chaut and Veronique Reymond, and a new take on BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ by director Burhan Qurbani. SCHWESTERLEIN features two of Germany’s brightest stars: Nina Hoss (a regular in Christian Petzold’s films) and Lars Eidinger (who can be seen in “Babylon Berlin” and some of Oliver Assayas’s recent films). Both of the leads offer strong performances, playing twins who are coping with the fact that Eidinger’s Sven has cancer and may not have long to live.

Unfortunately, SCHWESTERLEIN doesn’t offer much more than a few choice scenes for the actors to dig into. The film's shortcomings are especially apparent since this year’s Berlinale also features a Norwegian cancer drama HÅP (HOPE), playing in the Panorama section, that digs much deeper into the relationship and familial challenges that come with receiving a cancer diagnosis. As good as Hoss and Eidinger are, I preferred the more complex dynamics between HÅP’s unmarried couple, brilliantly played by Andrea Bræin Hovig and Stellan Skarsgård.

Far more surprising is Burhan Qurbani’s BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ, which revises the original 1929 story to the modern day, making the central character a refugee, instead of a German man emerging from a long jail sentence. Cinephiliacs will likely be familiar with Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s monumental 15-plus hour television epic, and Günter Lamprecht’s central performance as Franz Biberkopf. This time we have Francis (Welket Bungue), a West African refugee, who gets roped into selling drugs in a Berlin park by the low-level criminal Reinhold (Albrecht Schuh). Eventually, Reinhold does rechristen Francis as a proper German with a proper German name, Franz.

Despite the unenviable task of being compared to one of Fassbinder’s major works, this three-hour modern retelling is bold, ambitious, well-written, well-acted and visually interesting. Schuh’s version of Reinhold starts off distractingly indebted to Joaquin Phoenix (à la THE MASTER) but he manages to make the character his own and practically steal the show by the time it's over. It’s not exactly an easy movie to get through but it does feel vital and alive. There is no shortage of Berlin-based movies, but few capture the city the way this one does.

Finally, I’ll briefly mention a charming highlight of the Competition section: Hong Sangsoo’s DOMANGCHIN YEOJA (THE WOMAN WHO RAN). Fans of Sangsoo will know to expect a film that leans heavily on dialog and character development. But this one is an especially clever script that breaks the minimal-to-non-existent plot down to a few conversations between Kim Minhee’s character, Gamhee, and three other women that she encounters while on a rare break from her husband. In each conversation we gradually learn about these modern Korean women and their relationships with the men in their lives.

So far, Hong Sangsoo’s film is the only one to elicit a spontaneous round of applause from the audience. And it had to do with a particularly hilarious conversation about cats, and one of Sangsoo’s choice uses of a camera zoom in the film. Indeed, a truly memorable highlight of this year’s festival.

Berlinale 70 — CB Dispatch III (Irradiates, Sow the Wind, The Assistant, The Roads Not Taken)

The 70th edition of the Berlinale film festival wraps up this weekend, and as it always does, it ends with Sunday’s “Publikumstag,” where many of the best films from the different sections will get a final screening at venues across the city. Even after catching over twenty films this year, I’ll be trying to fill in some gaps on Saturday and Sunday as well. So I’ll offer some suggestions in the form of films I can personally vouch for, as well as a few buzz-worthy ones that I haven’t seen.

Of course, the Golden Bear for best film is being awarded on Saturday. I’m terrible at gambling, but if I had to guess which film would take the top honor, I’d go with IRRADIES (IRRADIATES), the latest art-film/documentary from Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh. The movie is a devastating and unflinching look at the atrocities of war in the twentieth century, specifically the mass killings that took place in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge regime, the Holocaust of WWII, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It goes without saying that this is a challenging film, but Panh is a masterful filmmaker and artist, so this isn’t your ordinary talking-head documentary. For much of the time the screen is split into a horizontal triptych -- three symmetrical sections that add to the power of the images and help draw the connections between Japan, Cambodia and Europe. There is also a haunting score and poetic voiceover work from a man and woman who sometimes seem to be communicating with one another, and other times seem to be the voice of Panh, speaking directly to the audience. This is definitely a cinematic experience you won’t soon forget, and likely a film people will be talking about for years to come.

If you’re after something less overwhelming, I also enjoyed the Italian film, SEMINA IL VENTO (SOW THE WIND), from the Panorama section. The movie, by director Danilo Caputo, is about a young woman, Nica (Yile Yara Vianello), who returns home from her studies as an agronomist, only to find that the family’s long-held olive trees are at risk of being destroyed. The problem is, an invasive insect is killing olive trees throughout the area. And while Nica’s father wants to accept government subsidy to have the trees removed, Nica wants to save the trees by finding and introducing the bug’s natural predator.

© JbaOkta, SEMINA IL VENTO (SOW THE WIND)

One of the most impressive things about SOW THE WIND is its sound design, particularly the very special way in which it captures the sounds of trees. There is a deep undercurrent of rural folklore and the spirit world running through the film, and it causes the softly groaning sounds of swaying trees take on new meaning. Plus, there is a very talented black bird in the film (who may or may not be the spirit of Nica’s dead grandmother) that challenges the cat in THE WOMAN WHO RAN for the festival’s best animal performance.

Also in the Panorama section is THE ASSISTANT, a film that is very much attuned to the #MeToo movement in its depiction of the everyday traumas experienced by a female assistant working at a film production company. It captures a single day in the life of Jane (Julia Garner, who you may recognize from the Netflix show “Ozarks”), as she tries to endure an increasing amount of humiliations that are sometimes subtle, and sometimes not. The film, by Kitty Green (UKRAINE IS NOT A BROTHEL), is all about the details, and there is a scene between Jane and a human resources guy that is among the more heartbreaking moments of the festival.

THE ASSISTANT was one of the films to enter Berlinale with a considerable amount of buzz from this year’s Sundance -- as was NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS, which is another film competing for the Golden Bear that I will finally catch up with this weekend. This one, by director Eliza Hittman (BEACH RATS), is about two teenage girls traveling from Pennsylvania to New York in order to get an abortion. From what I’ve heard, this is a powerful character study with a couple of amazing performances at its center.

Over the past week, critics have consistently mentioned NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS as being a favorite. But DAU. NATASHA, on the other hand, has both its champions and detractors -- yet it’s been getting enough buzz that it seems to be another top contender for the Golden Bear. This is, by all accounts, a boldly provocative work that deals with the Soviet brand of totalitarianism, its secret ambitions, and its pervasive, lingering effects. What’s more, this just happens to be one part of a project that includes the nearly six-hour art film DAU. DEGENERATSIA, which is also having its final screenings this weekend.

Finally, if you’re looking for something more mainstream (perhaps something to take mom or dad to), I enjoyed Sally Potter’s latest, THE ROADS NOT TAKEN. This stars Javier Bardem as an author in the grips of dementia, and Elle Fanning as the daughter he left behind when she was just a child. In trying to look after her ailing father, Fanning is caring for and maybe bonding with a man her mother has long written off. What’s interesting is that we’re also uncovering a mystery in Bardem’s past as his character flashes back to a couple of different points in his life, some of which cleverly parallels bits of Homer’s “Odyssey.” Ultimately, this is a brief movie that’s over in less than 90 minutes, but I found the central relationship to be rather touching (I may be a sucker for movies about kids trying to connect with their messed-up dads), and I was also impressed with Potter’s own jazzy score for the film.

Berlinale 70 — Final Thoughts (DAU. Natasha, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Delete History, Shirley, The Trouble With Being Born)

While I didn’t catch up with all the movies I would have liked to, I did pack a significant amount into the last few days of the festival. The highlight was perhaps Effacer EFFACER L’HISTORIQUE (DELETE HISTORY), a brilliantly anarchic French comedy by Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern. I suppose Berlinale has a reputation for being light on comedy. Without a doubt, this year seemed especially heavyhearted — perhaps for good reason — so it is a testament to DELETE HISTORY that it crammed about four movies worth of laughs into one, and yet is also socially conscious enough to fit right in with the rest of the Competition titles.

DELETE HISTORY is almost like an old ZAZ movie (AIRPLANE!, TOP SECRET!) in that it is brazenly anti-realist and goes non-stop in its pursuit of jokes and visual gags. The slim storyline is that we’re following three people as their lives fall apart in the age of surveillance capitalism and the gig economy. Eventually they decide to track down a hacker (who lives in a wind turbine) to help them fight the power, but things of course don’t go as planned.

Yes, the film is absurd, but we are living in a completely absurd time. Throughout Berlinale I was at press screenings filled with people who found it seemingly impossible to spend 90 minutes away from their devices. These people drove me nuts, but rather than mock these people, DELETE HISTORY sympathizes with those who know they’re being trapped, exploited and dehumanized, and finally decide to opt out. At one point, one of the characters dives her car into the middle of a roundabout, climbs on top of it and screams. In fact, the whole film feels like a much needed primal scream in the face of our current absurd reality. As an added bonus the soundtrack to the film is like a greatest hits collection of Daniel Johnston songs. Yes, this movie is fucking punk rock.

There was also some dark humor to be had in SHIRLEY, a fine, bitter pill of a biopic on Shirley Jackson, the author of such macabre books as The Haunting of Hill House. SHIRLEY follows the current trend of such biopics as 3 DAYS IN QUIBERON, SEBERG and JACKIE, by wisely focusing on one particular time in the life of its subject, rather than attempting the old cradle-to-grave approach. Here it’s the time leading up to Jackson’s 1951 book Hangsaman, when the author was living in the college town of Bennington, Vermont, and was inspired by the recent disappearance of a female student.

More than anything else, SHIRLEY plays out like a riff on WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOLF, which involves a young couple getting sucked into the psychosexual dramas of a bitter middle-aged college professor and his boozy wife. This is exactly what happens here, with Jackson (a perfectly cast Elisabeth Moss) and her professor husband (Michael Shulberg) playing host to a young couple newly arrived to town. While this movie doesn’t come anywhere near Mike Nichols’s directorial debut, it' does add some interesting wrinkles about the creative process and the role codependency can play within it. Director Josephine Decker (MADELINE’S MADELINE) continues to show keen insight into the messier aspects of human creativity, and I’m hopeful this one will provide her with more opportunities to further explore these themes.

One of the films to come away with a Special Jury Award was THE TROUBLE WITH BEING BORN, which was in the new Encounters section. Directed by Sandra Wollner, this German film is indeed troubling on many levels. Expanding upon premises that have shown up in the Kubrick/Spielberg mix-up A.I., the recent “Westworld” TV show, EX MACHINA, BLADE RUNNER, and others I’m probably forgetting, THE TROUBLE WITH BEING BORN takes a disturbing look at what might happen if we replaced our lost loved ones with robots. In particular, it asks, what if the person was a dad who lost a daughter and had some seriously messed up ways of coping?

Eventually, our robot protagonist parts ways with her “dad” and finds a new home filling in for a different lost love. But, like some of the robots in “Westworld,” the robot is plagued with nagging bits of data from their past life. This is all interesting enough on paper — what was truly bugging me was that the narrative of the story was chopped and shuffled for reasons that weren’t enlightening or helpful at all. I understand that this may have been in an effort to reflect the disjointed memory of the robot, but really it just made everything needlessly muddled.

But perhaps more frustrating was the dim cinematography — which is especially befuddling since others have praised the camerawork. All I found was one dim, flatly lit scene after another. Particularly head-scratching (or eye-squinting) was a scene at dusk (or dawn?) of our pedo dad searching for his robot, and while we linger on his face all we can make out are a couple of vague shadows of a head and some tree branches. Maybe the featureless face was supposed to mean something but all I could think of is why couldn’t we get someone with a reflector board to bounce some light up into that face? There’s an ongoing problem in German cinema with movies looking like TV shows (see: SCHWESTERLEIN), and with the current trend of American TV shows being dimly lit in a mistaken effort to create “mood,” the accolades being given to THE TROUBLE BEING BORN don’t bode well.

Fortunately, the final weekend also featured two impressive and deeply impactful movies. First was DAU. NATASHA, which didn’t fail to live up to its controversial reputation. It is indeed a difficult movie to sit through, as we spend a lot of time with drunk people yelling at each other, deliberately pushing each other’s buttons, and on one occasion engage in graphic sloppy sex. This is all before the disturbing prison interrogation sequence.

© Phenomen Film, DAU. NATASHA

Like SIBERIA and IRRADIATES, this one had a fair amount of walkouts, with one woman turning around on her way to the exit to shout, “This should be happening to him! This is 2020!” It’s an understandable statement, but one that also misses the point, I believe. Another critic complained that the movie felt like intellectual wankery — suggesting that the filmmakers knew nothing of the history of Russian prisons. But to me, it felt all too real. In my limited knowledge on the subject of Stalin-era prison interrogations, what goes down in DAU. NATASHA is relatively tame, yet accurate. To paraphrase the narrator in IRRADIATES, this is some terrible shit that happened quite recently in our history, and we shouldn’t forget about it because it’s all too likely that it could happen again (if it isn’t already).

A month after the fact, I’m still not sure if I would recommend DAU. NATASHA to anyone, but I am deeply impressed with it as a cinematic art project. In fact, I’m sad that I didn’t find the time for the six-hour DAU. DEGENERATION, which sounded like it was more outrageous and less upsetting.

My last movie at the 70th Berlinale was NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS, a beautiful movie that deserves every bit of praise it has been receiving (it took home this year’s Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize). With amazing performances from the two main actors Sidney Flanigan and Talia Ryder, this is realist cinema at its finest and for a good cause. It follows a high schooler, Autumn (Flanigan) and her cousin Skylar (Ryder) as they travel from small town Pennsylvania to big city New York in order to get Autumn’s unwanted pregnancy terminated.

While NRSA handles the subject matter with admirable sensitivity, it also looks at a young female friendship and life in rural America in a way few movies have. Generally speaking, I’m a bit tired of the usual brand of realism that gets shown on film, as it is often focused on familiar relationship dramas between people of a certain relatable age and income bracket. And, when these movies try to sound like “real people” talking, it’s often obnoxious or boring as hell (in its own extreme way, DAU. NATASHA revels in the tedium of realist dialog). NRSA avoids many of these pitfalls by observing people that are often dismissed and focusing more on what isn’t being said than on what’s coming out of the characters’ mouths. It’s a credit to the acting and the directing that so much of the experience of NRSA is in the silent gestures and in the heads of these characters — and there’s a lot going on there.

Until next year (fingers crossed)…

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading! I’ll try to get some reviews up for the few Berlinale films that went unmentioned here (like the amazing BLOODY NOSE, EMPTY POCKETS), and for recent press screenings for films that are now caught in limbo. On the bright side, my productivity seems to have benefitted from this strangeness.