Halfway through many film festivals, I inevitably begin to see patterns, echoes, omens, invisible threads woven through the very fabric of the festival. Nothing so great as a Zeitgeist, what I experience is only a sense of the uncanny, the sensation of unrelated things feeling inexplicably
familiar. Some connections suggest a sort of cultural currency that I don't yet trade in. Take, for example, the fact that the idea -- rather than the country -- of Switzerland pops up in two Korean films. In
Dasepo Naughty Girls, the dreamboat teenage boy (who is clearly Korean) hails from that European hideaway, and then a female inmate in Park Chan-
wook's nuthouse comedy
I'm A Cyborg, But That's Ok imagines herself
ala Heidi singing in the Swiss alps. Does Switzerland mean something to the Koreans like what Japan meant in 80s New Wave music?
Then there are the unsettling echoes that speak between films. Such a moment occurs halfway through Rodolphe Marconi's fashion documentary
Lagerfeld Confidentiel, a unsatisfying French-language portrait that proves Chanel's onetime design leader to be an even more arrogant artiste than you
might've hope him to be. Acknowledging his rather brutal breaks with friends,
Lagerfeld describes how relations (friendships, lovers, et
c.) need to be evolutionary, need to evolve and change. No more than a hour later, and two stories up in the
CinemaxX theater, I hear nearly the same argument offered again. This time by a Nazi concentration camp commandant trying to convince a prisoner to betray a confidence in Stefan
Ruzowitzky's The Counterfeiters. The film dramatizes the real life story of how the Nazis hand-picked artists, printers, engravers and even counterfeiters from different concentration camps to form a special unit to forge plates to print the English Pound and American Dollar, thus enabling the Nazis to flood those national economies. Fascinating but somehow all too
familiar. It seems a sad irony that stories about the event that we should never forget seem so often
forgettable themselves? The actual history of this plot is documented in Lawrence
Malkin's recent history
Krueger's Men: The Secret Nazi Counterfeit Plot and the Prisoners of Block 19.
Then later in the afternoon in the Internet cafe above
Dunkin Donuts that looks down on festival crowds piling into
Potsdammer Platz, I spy two boys on computers in front of me, completely unaware of each other, scrolling through the listings on
GayRomeo.com. How strange it would be if they, sitting only two seats apart, we also connecting online. I notice this as I go off to see two gay films about disconnection. In Israeli filmmaker
Eytan Fox's fourth fil
m at the
Berlinale,
The Bubble, the title refers to the cloistered world of left-leaning, free
swinging, young hipsters in Tel-
Aviv. In the film, the cozy circle of Lulu and her two gay
roommates, Noam and
Yali, is suddenly broken when Noam falls for a
Palestinean whose family lives in the occupied territory. Like with his earlier films, Fox mixes gay and Middle eastern politics to create a fascinating, albeit never quiet satisfying, stew. In
The Bubble the star-crossed gay Romeo and Juliet tale of two lovers whose countries hate each other comes to the same
inexorable conclusion the story has been reaching since Shakespeare originally penned the drama. British director Paul
Oremland's debut feature
Surveillance uses the device of
ubiquitous surveillance as a way to tell his gay tryst. The concept seems provocative. A thriller about a closeted private school teacher who finds out that his last trick was not only found mysteriously drowned, but is also the son of a powerful media magnate and may have been having an affair with a male member of the royal family. And the story gets told through two
competing sources of surveillance video, that of television news and its minions and the other by the state installed cameras that follow
public spaces and transportation lanes. Unfortunately concept and execution, unlike so many other things today, never seem to come together.
Comments (2)
Hey Peter, thanks for the report. Hope you'll take in Esther Robinson's "A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory" in the Forum section. She's one of Filmmakers' "25 Filmmakers To Watch" for a good reason.
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posted by Doug Block @ 2/11/2007 4:07 PM
Dear Peter. In relation to Paul Oremland's Survellance, I would like to add that I agree with your overall judgement. I find this film highly construed and the poor acting didn't do the film any favours either. However, this was not his debut feature film as you claim. His first was Like It Is, released in 1998, which is also one of my favourite films of the so-called gay interest.
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posted by Andrejs @ 4/18/2007 7:20 AM
