BERLINALE 1: FRANCE VS. GERMANY
The festival starts in perfect German style — cold, grey, snowy and with the brisk slap of controversy. Many of the current barbs are along the German/French border.
In his homeland, according to Der Spiegal , Festival director Dieter Kosslick is being criticized for the number and type of German films at this year´s festival. Last year´s German class (including such dark pyscho-sexual fare as The Free Will and Longing) fared poorly both in the marketplace and in the critical community, while the film most notably not selected for Competition — The Lives of Others — was an international hit and took home nearly every European and German film award. This year, according to David Gordon Smith at Der Spiegel: “Observers have been critical of what they say is an under-representation of German films this year.” Only two homegrown productions are in the official competition: Stefan Ruzowitzky´s period war film Die Falscher (The Counterfeiters) and Christian Petzold´s corporate thriller Yella — will unfurl in the official competition.
On the French border, Kosslick is under fire from the French financing group Wild Bunch. Claiming years of poor treatment, Wild Bunch felt the final straw when the festival rejected their recent entry, Moliere, but did not tell them directly. Wild Bunch learned of their exclusion from Unifrance. To retaliate, Wild Bunch has pulled out from the European Film Market, and set up a trailer in an empty field close the the Martin-Gropius-Bau, the historic market structure that now houses the EFM. 
But if Wild Bunch is disgruntled with their treatment, Unifrance does not feel the same. The festival not only opens with La Mome (La Vie En Rose), a long — very long — pic of the French national treasure, Edith Piaf, but is set to close with Francois Ozon’s first English-language picture Angel. And lots of other French fare in between. Sadly the La Mome fell into the same maudlin bio-pic melodrama in which their talent is a consolation prize for a life of misery. To be sure Piaf’s life was no bed of roses: abandoned by her mother, raised in whore house where she went blind for several years, then left to the care of her alcoholic abusive dad, her childhood was the stuff of the songs she would later sing. The film, which moves back and forth in time in a way that is more akin to the sci-fi time shifting of a Slaughterhouse-Five than some proustian memoir, seems to quite carefully sidestep crucial historical moment while over romanticizing others. Much time is spent in New York, repeating her romance with a boxer and her collapse on stage, while the whole period of the occupation during WWII is conventiantly dropped from the time line. Part Ray, part Lady Sings the Bues, part A Star is Born, this tribute to one of France’s greatest singers seems to lack the same restraint, talent for story-telling and unique style that makes Piaf’s talent so worth remembering.
