Berlinale 2024 - The Top 5 Moments
From the start, this year’s Berlin Film Festival was an odd one. A behind the scenes shake-up had caused the festival artistic director, Carlo Chatrian, to be fired by the Ministry of Culture months before the Feb 2024 festival was underway. The reason was supposedly related to budgetary concerns. Chatrain intended his final program to be a celebration anyway, but it never escaped the shadow of the day’s divisive politics.
Then again, the Berlinale has always been the one festival in the Big 4 that most fully embraces and reflects the current political landscape, no matter how controversial. So maybe it was to be expected that issues like disinviting right-wing populist politicians and navigating anti-Israeli sentiments would be hallmarks of the 2024 edition. The problem is when these controversies overshadow the movies rather than stem from them.
This being my fifth Berlinale with a press pass, I can understand those who felt a little underwhelmed by this year’s offerings. But while the highs weren’t quite as high as past years, there were plenty of good films on display, as well as at least one instant classic. If you want a straightforward ranking of the screenings I managed to attend, I gesture in the direction of this Letterboxd list. But this time around I wanted to do things a little differently.
The thing that has really stuck with me in the weeks after the festival were brief cinematic moments. Many of the films, even if they weren’t rising to the level of greatness, had at least one scene that captured the true power of cinema in a way that immediately puts them in rarified air these days, when most films are marked more by efficiency than visual storytelling technique. So this is a list of my favorite moments from the 2024 Berlinale — the hair-raising ones that made me sit up in my chair, made me grin like a fool, and reminded me of what great moviemaking is all about.
1. The Crawl in I Saw the TV Glow
Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine in Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow.
Given the festival schedule, Berlinale often plays runner-up to a few titles that got their premier at Sundance a couple weeks earlier. Such was the case for Nathan Silver’s wonderfully off-kilter Between the Temples, Rose Glass’s zeitgeisty Love Lies Bleeding, and Jane Schoenbrun’s dark and narcotized I Saw the TV Glow.
If there’s one movie that has risen in my estimation in the weeks following the festival, it’s I Saw the TV Glow — Schoenbrun’s strange ode to blurred lines, as they relate to fiction and reality as well as gender and identity. On initial watch, I had trouble getting past the twenty-somethings playing teenagers and the exaggerated nature of the performances by Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine.
Maybe it was due to the fact that I remain oblivious to Schoenbrun’s previous debut film We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, which, as of this writing, remains unrentable/unstreamable in Germany by any legal means. But by the end, those stylized, exaggerated vibes were making their point (and it helped that after a while I didn’t have to buy into the idea of these actors playing high school teens).
The tipping point came during a scene where Maddy (Lundy-Paine) explains to Owen (Smith) what happened since they left. The story goes, after the two misfit high-schoolers bonded over their favorite sci-fi teen soap “The Pink Opaque,” Maddy suddenly vanished. They mysteriously reappear years later only to tell Owen that the TV show wasn’t just fiction after all. This explanation is something of an expositional monologue, but it’s unlike anything I’ve seen before. It all takes place under a colorful parachute, where Maddy is literally crawling on all fours towards a freaked-out Owen while delivering their lines. It’s entirely gripping and presented in a way that had me giggling with a transfixed joy.
This scene has stayed with me like a powerful dream that contained some message I’m still trying to unlock. And, in a way, that’s kind of I Saw the TV Glow in a nutshell. It’s very dreamlike, with a story that could be read in a variety of ways. Like a lot of sci-fi, the story is deeper than the characters. In this case, this issue — of Maddy and Owen being more caricatures than real three-dimensional characters — still bugs me perhaps more than it should. But there’s no denying the power this movie generates and wields with great purpose.
Jane Schoenbrun understands that cinema is an ideal medium for addressing the themes of obsession and identity. What makes I Saw the TV Glow special is that she digs into these themes with a heavy, druggy shovel. It’s like a hyper-focused film-noir-at-half-speed, taking place under twitchy, suburban halogen lights that leave fuzzy, colorful shadows. It reminds me of reading some of the stranger comics from Daniel Clowes, which in my case was an activity often accompanied by a mind altering substance that added a pleasingly methodical nature to the process. Schoenbrun’s captured a very specific mood in a very compelling way, and in a short amount of time I can imagine her style becoming as distinctive as what Nicolas Winding Refn’s doing. Already, I can’t get it out of my head.
2. The Bike Ride in Cuckoo
Hunter Schafer and the killer in Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo.
Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo is the kind of midnight movie that you don’t necessarily expect to run into during Berlinale, a festival that doesn’t have any program sections devoted to horror or pulp genre pictures. It’s a picture that is thoroughly devoted to recreating some of the gothic creepiness, and silliness, that Dario Argento specialized in decades ago.
In particular, I was picking up on a lot of similarities to Argento’s Phenomena. Both movies feature an American girl who ends up alone in the Germanic wilderness of middle Europe only to find herself in the middle of some inexplicably strange and murderous happenings involving animals and psychic powers. Kudos to Singer, though, because he runs with this premise in his own spirited way, helped in large part by a idiosyncratic and fully committed performance from Hunter Schafer in the lead role of Gretchen.
Like I Saw the TV Glow, Cuckoo fell just outside my top ten favorite of this year’s Berlinale, but it also contains a pivotal bravura scene that immediately generated all kinds of bubbly, cinephilic admiration within me. Around about the one-third mark of the film, Gretchen is riding her bike back home from the hotel she works at. We already know something is going to happen. Her boss has warned her not to be out at night — especially this night, it would seem — but Gretchen is pretty stubborn and doesn’t trust her boss (rightfully so, it turns out).
Cuckoo parses out the reveal of its mysterious killer in a wonderfully effective manner. We catch some well-lit glimpses early on, but the design is clever enough that we’re still not sure what we’re seeing. And as Gretchen is riding her bike along the dark winding streets of this woodsy German village, we see this witchy, supernatural being running alongside her, off in the distance. Naturally, Gretchen has headphones on as she’s pedaling along, but there doesn’t seem to be much sound emanating from this fast-moving, fully-clothed creature anyway — the music she’s listening to is instead providing a nice soundtrack for this suspenseful set piece.
It should be said, what makes this scene so appealing is that I’m not sure how Singer pulled it off. The camera floats along, tracking both Gretchen on her bike and the creature moving along in an eerily inhuman way. The way it’s shot and edited, it’s clear these two trajectories are going to coincide, with Gretchen being oblivious to the encounter. And the way these two trajectories meet is the real showstopper, with the reveal being the shadow of the creature somehow hovering just behind Gretchen and reaching out toward her as she continues to pedal up the street. Again, I’m not sure how this was pulled off. It’s a seemingly honest-to-goodness practical effect that is so good — one of those movie-magic moments — it reminds you of why horror stories are the perfect fodder for cinema. Manufacturing this suspense, the dread, and then nailing the payoff in a gravity-defying way — it rarely gets more satisfying than that.
Unfortunately, Cuckoo doesn’t get a whole lot better than that, either. There are a few times when similar sparks emerge, but it ends up being a little too silly for its own good. Mostly, my frustrations stemmed from the miscasting of Dan Stevens as Mr. König, Gretchen’s German boss and the guy that is obviously up to something that would qualify as no-good. Stevens can excel at mustache-twirling, but it’s inexplicable why Singer didn’t cast a real German, with real Teutonic menace, in the part. It’s never not distracting.
Going back to the Phenomena comparisons, I believe Singer wanted someone with Donald Pleasence energy — which is to say, someone who can chew the scenery with gleeful abandon. Stevens makes sense in that way, but (without getting too much further into spoiler territory) the context of his role in the movie is all wrong. Stevens has his niche and can do it well, but he ends up providing too much humor where a dose of authentic deviancy would have served the film far better.
Still, me griping about this bit of miscasting is just a way of saying, ain’t it a shame that the movie is currently a seven could have been a nine. With Cuckoo and 2018’s Luz, Tilman Singer is making a case for being one of modern horror’s more cinematically proficient and formally ambitious filmmakers. Blessedly, he isn’t taking himself too seriously, which will also go a long way to distinguishing him among the current generation of festival-worthy genre directors. While there’s the Argento influence, there’s also some De Palma in Singer’s fun-loving attention to the fine art of a suspenseful set piece. Plus, the creature in this feature kinda looks like the killer in Dressed to Kill, doesn’t it?
3. The Mother & Son Chat in Sterben (Dying)
Corinna Harfouch and Lars Eidinger in the scene — in Matthias Glasner’s Sterben (Dying).
It really had to do with a string of performances in recent years that included Noah Baumbach’s White Noise and Olivier Assayas’s rejiggering of his own Irma Vep. Since then, I’ve added the name Lars Eidinger to the shortlist of actors whom I look forward to seeing even if the movie doesn’t necessarily look like my kind of thing. Eidinger has got that same capricious, eccentric charm that caused me to put people like Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe on that same list decades ago.
In Matthias Glasner’s excellent Dying, Eidinger isn’t giving a big, White Noise kind of performance. Rather, he’s playing Tom Lunnies, a struggling, mid-level music conductor living in Berlin with a couple of unstable, fluid relationships he’s trying to manage with mixed results. His primary one is with a woman who just gave birth to a child that wasn’t conceived with Tom, though Tom is very eager to embrace the role of father anyway. His other relationship is with his friend Bernard, the manic depressive composer of the piece that Tom is struggling to prepare.
But Dying isn’t about Tom’s job. It's about the fact that Tom’s father, who’s already struggling with dementia, is about to die. Complicating this event is the fact that Tom has terrible relationships with the other members of his family: his mom Lissy (Corinna Harfouch) and his sister Ellen (played with captivating verve by Lilith Stangenberg). Dying is split into a few chapters, each focusing on a different member of the family, and the structure wrings some hefty drama by building up to the moments when these damaged people are forced to encounter and begrudgingly communicate with one another.
The most powerful of these epically understated confrontations happens at the midway point when Tom finally drives out of the city to meet his mom. The passive aggressiveness is palpable as Tom sits at the dining room table for a perfunctory chat over Kaffee und Kuchen. What follows is a conversation that neither he nor the audience could ever have expected. The dry, unsentimental Lissy proceeds to dump a truckload of terrible information upon her son. It’s a scene wherein a mom tells her aloof son: it’s okay that you don’t love me, it’s been a long time since I loved you. Let me tell you the moment from your childhood when I stopped loving you. (Coincidentally, a similar theme is explored in the number one entry on this list.)
What is remarkable about this pivotal moment in the film isn’t just the emotional wreckage that’s going on between these two characters, it’s also an impressive display of acting. It’s like Lars Erdinger and Corinna Harfouch are happily feasting on a lost chunk of Chekov. The two couldn’t be more perfectly cast — they even resemble each other in uncanny ways (and have been cast as mother and son in at least one previous movie) — and they’re tuned into each other in that impeccable, thespianic, lightning-in-a-bottle way. It reminds you that, if done correctly, a scene between two people sitting at a table can be one of the most exciting things to watch on a big screen.
4. The Soda Flood in La Cocina
Not that I want to turn this piece into a screed against modern, mainstream cinema, but there’s a reason I look forward to the Berlinale. Every year, it’s a reminder that there are still films being made with artistry, and not just perfunctory craft. Across most of the streaming platforms, there’s a Hollywood house style that has taken over — one that emphasizes efficiency over just about everything else. It’s not limited to American features, either. If it’s a widely available movie with a recognizable cast and significant budget, there’s a good chance it was shot in a very nondescript, uninteresting fashion that resembles television more than cinema.
The short description of this style is lot of coverage shooting; a lot of flatly-lit multi-camera scenes where people aren’t moving. Scenes and daily shot lists are scripted and designed with an eye toward getting the point across with the minimal amount of setups possible. Conversely, the world of indie film has begun to rely on the slow cinema model of using a handful of long, unbroken takes, with minimal camera movement and, again, as few setups as possible.
This efficiency-forward approach to filmmaking has become so popular that only a select few directors get to flex their muscles and push the cinematic language to its exciting extremes. If you’re a fan of the kind of bravura set-pieces that defined the many of the most acclaimed movies of past decades, pickings are indeed slim. This is why the bicycle scene in Cuckoo ranks so high for me — that kind of intricate, carefully designed and executed filmmaking is so rarely seen these days.
I still look forward to movies by marquee directors like Spielberg, Nolan and Tarantino because they’re among the only American filmmakers who are granted the time and money needed to make something special in that grand, elaborate, cinematic fashion. But festivals like Berlinale are a great way of keeping in touch with the international auteurs who remain uncompromised by Hollywood trends. Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s dark and disturbing The Devil’s Bath was a good example from this year’s Berlinale, as was Thomas Arslan’s fantastic bit of crime fiction, Scorched Earth (Verbrannte Erde). But so too was La Cocina, the latest film from the thrillingly ambitious Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios.
La Cocina is the fourth movie from Ruizpalacios, following the genre-bending A Cop Movie that was in the Competition section of the online 2021 edition of the Berlinale. Over the course of four feature films, he’s built a unique brand of unpredictable, playful, yet socially-conscious storytelling. While A Cop Movie deals with the systemic and institutional corruption at the heart of the Mexico City police force, La Cocina shrinks its scope — but not necessarily its aspirations — by looking at a single day-in-the-life of a crew of immigrants and misfits who are keeping a big, corporate Times Square restaurant afloat.
The movie hardly leaves the confines of the restaurant, and it’s not hard to see the setting as a microcosmic stand-in for America at large. Ruizpalacios has his eye on the greedy, exploitative nature of capitalism and how it rots away at the gears (read: people) that keep the machinery running — but he avoids being didactic about it. As much as Ruizpalacios-the-writer cares about each of the characters in the kitchen, Ruizpalacios-the-director is an entertainer who loves some razzle-dazzle. The movie is filmed in eye-popping black and white, and the camera is often floating through backrooms and corridors, following characters as though they’re mice who’re stuck in a maze that has no cheese. It’s as if the director wondered, what if half the movie was like the Copacabana scene from Goodfellas?
The inner workings of a restaurant, big or small, is an inherently cinematic thing. There’s an endless supply of tension and drama baked in to its very nature, as anyone who’s watched "The Bear" can attest. The way the cameras, microphones and editing capture the rhythmic, synchronized intensity of the line-cook stations is nerve-jangling stuff. While the script is technically an adaptation of an old stage play, there’s a operatic element to the way the film’s emotions ebb and flow. You can feel Ruizpalacios waving the conductor’s wand as the tension is built and released at just the right moments.
Most of the storylines in La Cocina come to a climax at a disastrous dinner rush, where everything that can go wrong does go wrong, to the extent that the floor of the kitchen becomes a shallow swimming pool thanks to a story device that could be called “Chekov's broken soda machine.” This all unfolds in one of those audaciously long, unbroken takes that requires precision choreography. Even in this era of digital editing, which allows filmmakers to fake long takes with Frankenstein-esque techniques, the flooded kitchen sequence in La Cocina still inspires awe. It’s exhilarating and, even if there is some trickery involved, it never feels like a cheat because it’s 100 percent earned. This is the crescendo that everything has been building to, not just whiz-bangery for the sake of whiz-bangery. Like all of the other moments in this list, it’s a joyously cinematic one that highlights the power of the medium. Busby Berkeley would be proud.
1. The Square Dance in Janet Planet
Julianne Nicholson and Zoe Ziegler in Annie Baker’s Janet Planet.
Annie Baker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (as well as a MacArthur Fellow) but that doesn’t guarantee a smooth transition into moviemaking. The list of playwrights becoming successful film directors isn’t very long. You’ve got Aaron Sorkin, David Mamet, Kenneth Lonergan, and John Patrick Shanley, but even these guys tend to be hit-or-miss — and when they do connect, they aren’t necessarily the most cinematic of auteurs. At their worst, whether it’s a stage-to-screen adaptation or someone like Neil LaBute trying to bring a screenplay to life, these films can fall victim to being “stagey.” They rely too much on the script, and not enough on the tools of the moviemaking trade, like sound mixing, editing, camera movement, and so on.
Baker isn’t a typical playwright, however. Her accolades came from her ability to play with the format and the medium in ways that subverted audience expectations. She used the medium to highlight the limitations of language as a sufficient means of expressing what we’re going through and properly communicating that with one another. For that very reason, Baker, with her minimalist approach to dialog, may be the one playwright perfectly suited to being a cinematic, visual storyteller.
Still, it’s surprising just how strong Annie Baker comes out of the gate with her debut film, Janet Planet. As to be expected, it has a very deliberate, meditative pace. But it also shows a mastery of the form by being as much of a sensory experience as it is a narrative one. Shot on 16MM film (blessed be), it’s a wonderfully tactile film. In the same vein, the movie is tuned into to the sounds of rural Massachusetts. The birds, the crickets, the oscillating fan pushing a breeze through the humid air. The music in the film is all diegetic, it’s being played on the car stereo, performed by a theater troupe, or by 11-year-old Lacy as she practices the piano. In short, it's a marvelously lived-in movie that arrives fully thought-out, with every detail perfectly placed.
Janet Planet feels so perfectly realized, in part, because it takes place in a milieu that Baker is deeply familiar with: the woodsy Berkshires of Massachusetts, circa 1991. Baker herself grew up in Amherst, MA, and would have been pretty close to the 11 years of age that Lacy is in the film. I’m sure there are many difference between Lacy and Baker, but the main one is that Lacy is being raised by a single mom who runs an acupuncture practice out of the house (the practice is named “Janet Planet”), while Baker was raised by a couple of parents with careers in academia.
The film takes place over a couple months — the end of summer and the start of a new school year for Lacy. It’s broken up into chapters named after people who come into the orbit of Janet and Lacy. The first being a troubled man with mysterious ailments played by Baker veteran Will Patton, the second being an old bohemian friend of Janet’s with a struggling career in the arts played by Sophie Okonedo, and the last being a charismatic guru played with a wonderfully sketchy panache by Elias Koteas.
But the real stars are the newcomer Zoe Ziegler, who plays Lacy, and Julianne Nicholson as the mom Janet. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Nicholson give a bad performance, but I’ve also never seen her give a better performance than this one. Janet Planet is very much about mother-daughter dynamics, and theirs is such a specific one that much of the success rides on Nicholson’s portrayal of a liberated, New Agey mom who loves her daughter, means well, but is distant. On the warm-cool spectrum, Janet is a little cool.
Zoe Ziegler is one of those remarkable casting stories, where the filmmakers looked at countless kids, and then just when it seemed hopeless, the perfect child appeared. A lot of the movie feels like it's being captured from Lacy’s perspective, and there’s a curious, big-eyed, bird-like quality to Ziegler that perfectly suits the character. Her performance is both wonderfully understated and heartbreakingly expressive. There’s an intelligence to Lucy that has to come through without any words, and it’s absolutely there. You couldn’t imagine this movie with anyone but Ziegler at its center, but kudos should also go to Baker for getting such a tonally harmonious performance out of this young, untested actor.
There’s a lot going on in Janet Planet, and there are two heart-wrenching scenes — one in which Janet comes to understand something about being a mom after Ari reads her a poem, and one in which Lacy comes to understand something about Janet after watching her mom take part in a square dance. Either scene could take this top spot, but I have to go with the later because, both times I watched this movie it absolutely wrecked me.
In what I suppose could be called “true Baker fashion” both of these scenes feature the characters realizing something without saying much of anything. It’s kind of an astonishing trick, but that’s the power of the movie in being able to establish all the context you need for these moments to ring true without any explanation or dialog needed.
The square dance scene could be considered perhaps too obvious, but it also encapsulates the whole movie in one precise moment. It’s hugely effective and efficient filmmaking. Everything starts to speed up, the editing becomes more rapid as we see Janet spinning around, going from person to person, man to man, and Lacy can only look on, forlorn, understanding that this is probably how it’s always going to be. Her mom likes it. She attracts people. She has that kind of gravitational force. Lacy isn’t enough for her, and we can’t really blame her, but we also feel for Lacy, sitting off to the side, wishing her mom would stop dancing, at least for a little while.
Baker has said that the movie is, at least in part, about a girl falling out of love with her mom, and this is the moment it happens. Is there anything more heartbreaking? Even replaying the scene in my head, months afterward, gets me choked up. Most movies would have this play out with big, performative moments, complete with shouting, tears, and a few other emotional fireworks displays. In Janet Planet, the music being played on stage is boisterous and fun. Janet is smiling. It’s a square dance. Everyone is having a good time — except one person. When a man asks Lacy, doesn’t she want to dance? It’s pretty much the one question the whole movie’s been building to. Lacy pauses. She looks at her mom. We see her spinning. She says, no, and it’s pretty much the most emotionally honest and genuinely touching moment in the entire festival. Brava, Baker.