Berlinale Film Festival 2021, Industry Event, Final Day
There was an added bonus to our originally scheduled plan for five days of press streamings. On the weekend following those five days, the winners of the Competition program would be available on Saturday, and the winners of the Encounters program would be available on Sunday. Winners from Generations and the Shorts programs would also get a second screening.
Since I’d made a point of seeing the Competition films, I decided to focus on the ones from the Encounters lineup that I hadn’t got a chance to see. (In case you’re wondering: here are the lists of award-winners for Competition, Encounters, Generations and Shorts.
Vị (TASTE), dir. Lê Bảo, photo © E&W Films, Le Bien Pictures, Deuxième Ligne Films, Petit Film, Senator Film Produktion
First up was Lê Bảo’s Vị (TASTE), a film that cites six countries in helping with the production: Vietnam, Singapore, France, Thailand, Germany and Taiwan. It won the Special Jury Award in the Encounters program, and it’s not hard to see why. The film is legitimately striking; a bold visual poem about a Nigerian who comes to Saigon to play football, breaks his foot, and begins working a mysterious job with four middle-aged Vietnamese women. There isn’t much more plot than that, very little is explained, there’s hardly any dialog, but the film evokes a lot of different feelings through its artfully staged tableaus of bodies at motion and at rest. The color palette is severe — greys, blues, whites and rusty earth tones — but also beautiful. There is the periodic burst of sunshine that enters in through a window or doorway, and small splashes of color that come from the ingredients of the food they spend a lot of time preparing. But mostly, we’re in a chilly underground location that has little else besides a few beds and an old television.
It’s difficult to parse out the meaning of TASTE, but I’m not sure such an endeavor isn’t foolish. You could say there’s something about worker exploitation here, but if you squint and tilt your head, there could also be a message about the transcendence of work as well. Ultimately, this is an art film. It wouldn’t feel out of place in the halls of MOMA or wherever else you find eager minds for the abstract. One of the appealing things about the film is that it is freely open to interpretation and can be read in different ways. The only thing that’s for certain is that TASTE is about connections, those we make with our surroundings, our food, and those we work with. It’s about the ceremonies we create to forge those connections and help us through our days.
It’s not easy to make a film that truly feels like a dream. Sure, TASTE has a lot of unresolved mystery to it, but as a foray into dream logic, it is comfortably consistent in its mood and atmosphere. This is a plus and a minus, because TASTE is also quite effective in lulling you into a kind of heavy-lidded hypnosis. It taps into a very different part of your brain than the average movie.
DAS MÄDCHEN UND DIE SPINNE (THE GIRL AND THE SPIDER), dir. Ramon Zürcher, Silvan Zürcher, photo © Beauvoir Films
The last feature film I caught up with was the newest film by Ramon Zürcher, this time co-directing and co-writing with his brother Silvan Zürcher. Ramon’s previous film, THE STRANGE LITTLE CAT, was a hit on the film festival circuit back in 2013. I still need to catch up with that one, and I will, even though I found little to enjoy in the Zürcher Brothers’ THE GIRL AND THE SPIDER.
The set-up is pretty interesting. Lisa, a young woman, is moving to a new apartment and leaving behind a few roommates. One of those roommates, Mara, isn’t taking it so well. In fact, she seems to be rather heartbroken and bitter — and maybe a little self-destructive. But mostly she seems to be intent on making barbed, passive-aggressive comments at Lisa and everyone who has the misfortune of getting close to her. You see, Mara is like a spider. She’s alluring and mysterious enough to draw you in, but once you get close, you just become trapped in her abusive mind games. As I mentioned, pretty solid set-up for a tricky, dark relationship movie. There’s something to it, and the movie kicks around the idea of lonely hurt people hurting other lonely hurt people, but we don’t get very far.
One problem is that as the movie goes on, and we meet the other roommates that Lisa is leaving behind, we start to get the idea that maybe Mara has always been this mean manipulator. Maybe her heartbreak over Lisa leaving isn’t that much of a motivator. Maybe her other roommates are also passive-aggressive emotionally damaged loose cannons. Why can’t anyone say what they mean? Must everyone be so aloof? Must every line of dialog cryptically dance around true feelings? Why must someone be eavesdropping behind a door during every other conversation? To me, it just comes across as sub-par writing. Before long, it felt like the only reason these people were talking this way was because if anyone spoke honestly the movie would be about 15 minutes long. Instead, it slowly drove me crazy over a very long 98 minutes.
Now, some of these choices are understandable. I’ve lived with roommates. I know that these situations can be passive-aggressive nightmares where no one feels comfortable enough to say what they really feel. This too, is a good set-up for a movie, with plenty of interesting angles to explore. But again, we only dance on the surface. None of the characters open up, everyone’s motivations are fuzzy. In the end, these people remain more or less as we found them. Mara comes closest to revealing a little bit about herself, but it’s all very frustrating. On a few occasions, the film takes detours, cutting away to visualize a story being told. Sometimes it involves an elderly eccentric neighbor in the building, other times it’s a fantasy about the previous owner of the piano that sits in the apartment. Immediately, the protagonists of these stories become way more compelling than the dreary twenty-somethings that we’re stuck with the rest of the time.
Aside from my issues with the writing, the movie looks great. The Zürcher’s have a good eye and they know how to observe misery while luxuriating in icy detachment like, say, Michael Haneke. There are also good rhythms going on here. From the little I know THE STRANGE LITTLE CAT, it would appear that Ramon Zürcher is still interested in capturing the details of interiors, and paying attention to the animals that are running around people’s feet. Scene’s often end with still-life portraits of items on tabletops, knocked over bottles, subtle signs of life and little punctuations upon the preceding scene. It’s a nice touch. I only wish those scenes told a more engaging story.
EASTER EGGS, dir. Nicolas Keppens, photo © Animal Tank, Miyu Productions, Ka-Ching Cartoons
Thoroughly exhausted, with the last remaining hours of the streaming schedule dwindling away, there were a few award-winning shorts left to watch. Feeling like animation might be a nice change of pace, I went for EASTER EGGS, a Belgian/French/Netherlands production, written and directed by Nicolas Keppens. In some ways, it was a perfect little finale.
Even though EASTER EGGS could be a contemporary story, it feels like a tender look back, maybe some twenty years ago, at a painful teenage moment. It’s a story about two kids, Kevin the bully and Jason the enabler, and their woefully unhealthy friendship. There’s a vague plan to capture some valuable birds that were left behind when a local Chinese restaurant closed down — and there are some laughs to be had — but mostly it’s achingly sad to watch Jason pine for Kevin’s attention and approval, while Kevin just walks all over him. But given the gentle hand that this story is told with, that sadness is more poignant than depressing. Keppens shows a love and sensitivity for these characters. They’re way more than just some Belgian Beavis and Butthead. They represent something many of us have gone through in our youth — longing for friendship and someone to share your imaginative, ambitious plans with. It’s not exactly a feeling that goes away, which is why EASTER EGGS still carries a lot of weight.
WHAT DO WE SEE WHEN WE LOOK AT THE SKY?, by Alexandre Koberidze, photo © Faraz Fesharaki/DFFB
Let me just add a few more thoughts to this First Round of 2021’s Berlinale Film Festival. Despite my longings for more time to spend with such a quality lineup of films, I’m impressed that everything went so smoothly. The streaming platform worked incredibly smoothly (even if it was a bummer I couldn’t cast that stream onto my TV), and the quality of the films was excellent — both in picture and sound as well as moviemaking craft. It wasn’t ideal, but it was great to be a part of. I’ll also take a sentence here to recommend visiting the Berlinale Meets page, as well as the video section, where there is an impressive collection of conversations with this year’s filmmakers for more viewing enjoyment.
While there’s a lot from this festival that I’m still hoping to see, judging from the Competition and Encounters films that I have seen, this was an exceptionally strong year for female voices and female-led stories. This was clearly one of the most impressive things about the 2021 Berlinale. PETITE MAMAN, A COP MOVIE, MEMORY BOX, I’M YOUR MAN, HERR BACHMAN, WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY, BALAD OF A WHITE COW, BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONEY PORN — each of these films, which are just from the Competition section, were either directed by a woman or told stories about women. In the case of WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY, there were three stories and three female protagonists. (You could probably make a case for adding WHAT DO WE SEE WHEN WE LOOK AT THE SKY?, but I digress...) And you know what, those were the best films in the main lineup. I’ll also throw in the strong entries in the ENCOUNTERS category, Dasha Nekrasova’s THE SCARY OF SIXTY-FIRST and the best film winner of the category Alice Diop’s NOUS (WE). Personally, I especially liked the connections between PETITE MAMAN and MEMORY BOX, which both dealt with making connections between mother and daughter in unique, cinematic ways. I hope this level of representation continues in the years to come.
Now, let’s keep our fingers crossed for Part Two of the Berlinale, the Summer Special. See you June 9th.