BERLIN FILM FESTIVAL: MASTERS & masters
It’s more than a little odd that The Ghost Writer, Roman Polanski’s best film in 30 years, is in the official Berlin competition. Yes, the 76-year-old veteran is up against a few other prolific filmmakers such as Zhang Yimou and Michael Winterbottom, but many of the others have only one or two features under their belts. And, at the end of the day, as beautifully executed as The Ghost Writer is by Polanski and his cinematographer, fellow Polish native Pawel Edelman, it is a conventional genre film—a fusion of classical Hitchcock and the Bourne series–about a Tony Blairish British former Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan), now residing in the U.S., whose in-office participation in a nasty scandal becomes public knowledge, thanks to the sleuthing of the ghost writer nicely downplayed by Ewan McGregor.
The film’s moving camera and its mild jolts are, however, a pleasure to experience. Unfortunately, Martin Scorsese proves with his out-of –competition Shutter Island that you can surround yourself with Dante Ferretis and Robert Richardsons and still end up with a heavy-handed load of clichés. Once the film takes a turn from cop thriller into horror territory, the director just accelerates the speed of his tracking shots and the pounding on the sidetrack. Giving a remarkable double-edged performance, Leonardo DiCaprio looks like he’s acting in a vacuous collage of extrasensory stimuli.
Some lesser known and less experienced directorial talents registered with well integrated films that perhaps lacked the expensive polish that comes with a Polanski- or Scorsese-helmed project. The Norwegian filmmaker Hans Petter Moland, best known in the States for Aberdeen and Zero Kelvin, made a splash with A Somewhat Gentle Man (competition), starring Swedish jack-of-all-trades actor Stellan Skarsgard. Moland directs this dark comedy in a deceptively simple fashion, the film’s subtle use of sound and image forcing the slightest door creak or fade to take on special resonance.
And in the Mexican portmanteau Revolution (Berlinale Special), the two finest of the 10 assembled shorts are by Fernando Eimbcke (Duck Season, Lake Tahoe), who impressed with his black-and-white, minimalist segment featuring an out-of-tune tuba player who persists in puffing away while others in the village orchestra give up on a welcoming reception that never happens; and L.A.-based Rodrigo Garcia (Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her, Nine Lives), who opted for a 180-degree opposite approach. He made his section in rich color and, with a Phantom camera shooting at 450 frames per second, haunting slow motion. With a melancholy look in their eyes, rebels on horseback from the 100-year-old Mexican Revolution gallop through a contemporary Los Angeles barrio, with people walking past discount stores, cell phones in hand. The fighters appear horrified as they observe the legacy of their battle against dictatorship and theocracy.
The American indies were a mixed bag. The best was Lisa Cholodenko’s Sundance entry The Kids Are All Right, in competition here, its comic observation of a lesbian couple and their two teen children inspired. Cholodenko has come a long way since the amateurish High Art. The only problem this writer has with it is ideological: The film comes across as enlightened and inclusive, but then the kind if awkward heterosexual male played by Mark Ruffalo, who is the biological father of their offspring and who becomes the lover of Julianne Moore’s gay mommie, is unceremoniously dispensed with before a denouement in which the couple decides to repair their marital problems. It feels like he is being punished not only for being a nice guy but for possessing a large penis that clearly wowed Moore’s Jules.
Debra Granik’s Sundance winner Winter’s Bone (Forum) was politely received but without the hoopla that greeted it in Park City. It’s an interesting study of a messed-up family occupying the lowest rung of society’s ladder, with Jennifer Lawrence’s performance justifiably applauded. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s Allen Ginsberg biopic Howl, which got savaged by many critics at Sundance, did stand out in the competition for its formal chutzpah, although many here felt the animation extraneous (I don’t agree). James Franco’s portrayal of the poet was strongly praised, deservedly so.
As was Greta Gerwig’s spacey twentysomething in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg, also in competition. It was probably the only element of the film that was appreciated. Baumbach is a consummate New Yorker, but he unwisely locates this film in Los Angeles. Casting Ben Stiller as a typical New York neurotic who moves back to L.A. (one doesn’t become that way by spending a few years in the Big Apple as Stiller’s character did) might be an attempt to leaven the inert L.A. proceedings with an infusion of Manhattan mania, but it doesn’t work. Greenberg lacks the veracity of Baumbach’s earlier New York-set work, especially The Squid and the Whale.
All around, however, despite its lack of any budget to speak of, Colombian director Oscar Ruiz Navia’s Crab Trap (Forum), a first feature, is more organic than any of the films described above, with the possible exception of A Somewhat Gentle Man. Ruiz Navia lived for three years with a community of black ex-slaves on the coast. These people have been ignored by the larger society, and certainly not been made into the subject of any films. He brought in two relatively inexperienced white actors, but all except one of the locals are nonprofessionals.
The plotline: For an unexplained reason, a city fellow desperately needs to leave the country. He ventures to this remote region to find a boat. While waiting for the fishermen to return, he witnesses an interloper’s attempt to exploit these people, gets involved with the girlfriend of the community’s leader, and befriends her sweet young daughter. Shooting in super-16, with just the right dose of handheld camera, over a long period of time as he waited for funds to come his way, Ruiz Navia achieves a level of intimacy with his cast rare in cinema. Crab Trap is as successful as cultural anthropology as it is as cinema at its purest.
Howard Feinstein
