BERLINALE: ODD CONNECTIONS

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, etc.) 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 film 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.