Reality check
Pope Pius XII, John Nash, Iris Murdoch, Wilhelm Furtwängler,
Andreas Baader, the French Resistance, and Bloody Sunday at the
Berlinale
BY JEFFREY GANTZ
Costa-Gavras's Der Stellvertreter
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Is it real or is it Hollywood? That's the question that popped up unexpectedly
-- and perhaps unintentionally -- at the 52nd Berlin Film Festival. This was
the first Berlinale under new director Dieter Kossick (his predecessor, Moritz
de Hadeln, was abruptly shown the door last year after 22 years in charge), and
apart from the "German Film Perspective" program, a laudable attempt to
encourage the home product, the only "new direction" in evidence was the
relative absence of American films. Just three -- Monster's Ball, The
Shipping News, and The Royal Tenenbaums -- screened in official
competition for the Golden Bear, plus Oscar nominees Gosford Park and
A Beautiful Mind out of competition. The European and Asian films were,
as always, a mixed bag, but midway through the festival Costa-Gavras's
Amen. -- an adaptation of Rolf Hochhuth's 1963 play Der
Stellvertreter ("The Deputy"), which asks why Pope Pius XII did nothing to
save the millions of Jews murdered by Hitler -- went off like a Roman candle.
And from then on the theme of this Berlinale -- as attested to by Paul
Greengrass's Bloody Sunday, Bertrand Tavernier's Laissez-passer,
Richard Eyre's Iris, Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind, Christopher
Roth's Baader, and István Szabó's Taking Sides --
became the ways in which film reinterprets reality. As for the Golden Bear, the
buzz from both the critics and the public made it clear which three movies were
in the running, but the jury, headed by Mira Nair (Mississippi Masala),
had other ideas, reaching one of the oddest and most intriguing decisions in
the history of film festivals.
One of the European big three, with Cannes and Venice, the Berlinale has always
been beset by bear traps. Until 1978 it was held in June, and you could sit
outdoors all night under those beautiful lindens (Berlin's signature tree) and
argue film. But Cannes, in May, kept getting the better movies, so the
Berlinale moved to cold, rainy February. And though the hotels were happy (why
else would you go to Berlin in winter?), February is much too early for
Oscar-hopeful movies to be coming out (the Academy voters have short memories),
so the only big-name American films that make it to Berlin these days are
Christmas leftovers hoping that a festival award will improve their Oscar
prospects the following month. If you're Dieter Kossick, that means you spend
your year trying to round up non-American films whose connections wouldn't
rather be basking on the Riviera in May or the Lido in September.
Berlin is, nonetheless, the most Hollywood-conscious of all film-festival
cities; Berliners love their Hollywood films, and even more their Hollywood
stars. Cate Blanchett turned up for Heaven (Tom Tykwer's disappointing
opening-night film is practically a remake of The Princess and the
Warrior) and stayed for The Shipping News, where she was joined by
Lasse Hallström and Kevin Spacey; Halle Berry (named Best Actress) was
there for Monster's Ball, Maggie Smith and Robert Altman for Gosford
Park, Ron Howard and Russell Crowe for A Beautiful Mind. But no
Billy Bob Thornton or Puffy at the Monster's Ball press conference, and
only Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson for The Royal Tenenbaums, no Gene or
Gwyneth or Ben or Anjelica, and no energy in the questions from the press. (The
Berlinale press corps, myself included, are seldom what you'd call probing:
Halle Berry was asked what it was like to be naked in bed with Billy Bob
Thornton and whether she'd had much time for shopping. "In New Orleans?" she
asked [that's where Monster's Ball was shot]. "No, in Berlin.") Claudia
Cardinale, radiant as always, dropped in to receive a lifetime achievement
award, but when I asked her why she had never worked with Michelangelo
Antonioni, she replied, "Unfortunately I never did, but we're very close." It
was all summed up by the press conference for Iris, where the principals
were director Richard Eyre and actor Hugh Bonneville, who plays the young John
Bayley. Midway through the proceedings, word came that the three absent
stars -- Judi Dench, Kate Winslet, and Jim Broadbent -- had received Oscar
nominations, but nothing for Richard, or Hugh, or the film.
One big difference between Berlin and Cannes or Venice is that Berlin has
public screenings. This sends shock waves of enthusiasm through the festival,
but it can be hard on critics, especially if you're not there opening night.
Despite going straight from the plane to the Berlinale press center, I wasn't
able to get a ticket for sold-out Heaven, so I raced back across town to
the Royal-Palast and waited in line for a half-hour in hope that a ticket would
be returned (it was). I saw two films before seeing my hotel room, and the
second day, still trying to catch up, I watched Ivan Sen's Beneath
Clouds, Tavernier's Laissez-passer, and William Klein's Mr.
Freedom (part of the festival's "European '60s" retrospective), took a
breather with Claudio Abbado and Maurizio Pollini and the Berlin Philharmonic,
then caught the 11:30 screening of Bloody Sunday. In bed by 2, up,
jet-lagged, at 7 for another day of endless screenings. Among the films I
should have seen and didn't: Moisès Kaufman's The Laramie
Project, the documentary Hitlers Sekretärin (whose subject,
81-year-old Traudl Junge, died during the festival), Tony Gatlif's
Swing, Claude Lanzmann's Sobibor, 14 Octobre 1943, 16 heures, and
the Wilhelm Furtwängler bio Taking Sides.
François Ozon's 8 Femmes
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Some of the movies seemed endless. As the festival got under way, Germany's
most prestigious daily, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, observed
that the average length of the competition films was two hours. And at first it
appeared they were all going to tell us about self-centered children with less
than perfect parents. Zhang Yimou's out-of-competition Xingfu
Shiguang ("Happy Times") is about a man who tries to create happy times
for the blind daughter of his worthless girlfriend; tougher than The Road
Home and Not One Less, and perhaps less accomplished, it was still
one of the best films I saw. Ivan Sen's Beneath Clouds treats
racism in Australia as it follows two troubled runaway teenagers trying to get
back to their parents; like many of the entries here, it turned out to be a
high-class TV-movie. Silvio Soldini's Brucio nel vento has those
dreaded poetic French voiceovers, à la Godard, except that Soldini is
serious in his story of an illegitimate Czech émigré who, haunted
by the memory of his prostitute mother, finds peace with his half-sister.
François Ozon's 8 Femmes, Berlinale 2002's runaway popular
hit, is a campy musical/soap opera/country-house murder mystery that stars
eight legendary French actresses, including Catherine Deneuve (reports that she
was responsible for the press conference's starting 45 minutes late didn't
endear her to the media), Fanny Ardant, Isabelle Huppert, and Emmanuelle
Béart, in a hilarious story that encompasses three generations and
embraces incest. Incest is also suspected in Danish filmmaker Annette K.
Olesen's debut, the Dogme-like Små ulykker ("Minor
Mishaps"), in which the family's mother is hit by a bus and the father and
three grown children have to come to terms with their loss and one another;
it's a good back-to-basics film that would have been even better had Olesen
forgone the reassuring background music. Set on Corsica, Dominik Graf's
Der Felsen ("The Cliff") follows a woman whose holiday is cut
short when her married lover learns his wife is pregnant; Katrin gets picked up
by an obsessive 17-year-old delinquent, and their ambivalent relationship
spirals downward before she winds up with the son figure of his younger
brother. The shiftless computer hacker of Hungarian director Zoltán
Kamondi's Kísértések ("Temptations") forces
his mother to choose between him and her boyfriend, and his own girlfriend is
no bargain; more intriguing is his relationship with a 10-year-old Gypsy girl
(the astonishing Julianna Kovács) who could be his daughter but
considers herself his wife. There's more incest in The Shipping
News, of course, and I don't need to elaborate on how parent-child
themes run riot in Gosford Park and The Royal
Tenenbaums.
But the real tone for Berlinale 2002 was set, unnoticed, on the first morning
by Paul Greengrass's Bloody Sunday, which details the horrific
events of January 30, 1972 in Derry City, when the Brits shot 27 unarmed
civil-rights marchers, killing 13. I have Northern Irish ancestors on both
sides of my family, and a distant relative, William Orr, was hanged by the
English in 1797 merely for administering the United Irishmen oath. Greengrass's
film, which reduced me to tears, paints a chilling picture of British racism
regarding the Catholics in Northern Ireland; I don't doubt its veracity. And
credit Greengrass and actor James Nesbitt with a three-dimensional portrayal of
Protestant activist and march leader Ivan Cooper, who seems not to understand
that some of his hotheads are sure to start trouble by throwing rocks at the
British soldiers. But the bottom line here, as in virtually every fictional
film that purports to depict real life, is that the cinematic version is less
complex, and less true, than the real thing. The real-life Brits portrayed here
by the likes of Nicholas Farrell and Tim Pigott-Smith deserve the opportunity
to speak for themselves. They don't get it.
The mirror image of this issue cropped up in Bertrand Tavernier's
Laissez-passer ("Safe Conduct"), a three-hour valentine to the
French Resistance and the wartime French film industry. I kept getting lost in
this based-in-fact costume drama, perhaps because the two protagonists look
somewhat alike and are both named Jean, but the idea is that these French film
people fought to maintain the integrity of their industry, and their country,
and that hardly anyone collaborated. I'm not in a position to suggest that the
two Jeans have sugarcoated their reminiscences; all the same,
Laissez-passer reads like a French translation of Ron Howard.
Which brings us to A Beautiful Mind. I sat spellbound through
this film, struck especially by the way Howard presents John Nash's
hallucinations as real -- if John can't tell the difference between a real
person and an imagined one, why should we presume we can? But in the end,
either A Beautiful Mind is true to Nash's actual life or it's just an
uplifting Disney fantasy -- and as anyone who's read Sylvia Nasar's book knows,
Howard's film isn't anywhere near true to Nash's life. Christopher Roth's
Baader also takes liberties with its subject: the real Andreas
Baader committed suicide in prison, as did the other leader of his terrorist
collective, Ulrike Meinhof, but in the film he's gunned down in a
Frankfurt-am-Main garage à la Bonnie and Clyde. More of a problem
is Roth's TV-movie hit-and-run style, which ensures that he won't have to dig
too deep into his subject. When at the press conference I asked him what
Baader tells us about Andreas that we didn't already know, there was
laughter and a woman whispered, "Fein" ("Right"), and Roth got flustered.
Iris is an innocuous example of this phenomenon, Kate Winslet and
Judi Dench expertly turning British novelist Iris Murdoch into Masterpiece
Theatre material. Amen., on the other hand, is a film that
matters -- it produced the first genuine press conference I have attended in
four years at the Berlinale, with booing, hissing, applause, and bitter anger.
Father Ettore Segneri, from Vatican Radio, took exception both to Hochhuth's
play and to Costa-Gavras's film; afterward he complained to me that the
treatment was selective and that much had been left out. A very long drama,
Der Stellvertreter nevertheless tries to cover too much in too little
space, and the film, which some dismissed as a costume drama (they should have
sat through Laissez-passer), betrays the same weakness. Hochhuth's Pope
Pius XII is more interested in using Hitler to stop Stalin than he is in saving
Jews; what's odd is that though Hochhuth has endorsed the film, it's not clear
what Costa-Gavras's Pius could have accomplished. (Were he to say, "Killing
Jews is unacceptable," Hitler seems set to reply, "We esteem the pope, but his
Holiness has been misinformed as to what is happening to Jews in Germany.")
Costa-Gavras also suggests that had Hochhuth's SS officer, Kurt Gerstein,
chosen not to follow orders, he would have been shot. Again, though, the bottom
line is that Pius -- who unlike Jesus's Good Shepherd did not leave his flock
to help the endangered Jewish sheep -- is not allowed to speak for himself.
Amen. is nonetheless an essential film; I hope it finds an American
distributor. Already it's made an impact; two days after the Berlin screening,
the Vatican announced that archives for 1922-'39 will be opened to researchers
next year and those for 1939-'58 in 2005, in the hope of refuting accusations
that Pope Pius didn't do enough.
The most enthusiastic crowd I saw at Berlinale 2002 was at the locally made
Planet B: Detective Lovelorn, a (deliberately) trashy midnight
movie about Pharaoh Thutmosis, who after 3469 is about to return to life and
wipe out the laws of nature. I went to see it because Josseline Glowacki, the
12-year-old daughter of Pam, friend of my Berlin friends Joanne and
Günther, was playing Thutmosis's sister, Ptah Ana Ha; she was good. As for
the Golden Bear, it looked to be a toss-up between Monster's Ball and
8 Femmes, with some support for the local favorite, Halbe
Treppe ("Half Steps") -- Andreas Dresen's Frankfurt-an-der-Oder-set
story of two couples in which the husband from one and the wife from the other
fall in love is honest cinema but would work better if the characters were less
shallow and more likable. Halbe Treppe did indeed get the Silver Bear,
but the top prize was shared by two rank outsiders, Bloody Sunday and
Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi ("Spirited Away"), an anime
adventure from Hayao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke) about a 10-year-old
named Chihiro who tunnel-travels into a witch world where her parents have been
turned into pigs. I passed that one up in order to have dinner with a friend
and hear Eliahu Inbal conduct the Berlin Symphony Orchestra in Mahler's Fifth
Symphony, so I'm hoping it too will come to Boston. In any case, Mira Nair and
the rest of the competition jury made sure the 52nd Berlin Film Festival didn't
go out with a whimper.
Issue Date: March 8 - 14, 2002
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