What if they gave a film festival and nobody came? Even as recently as a few weeks ago, that nightmarish scenario looked perilously possible for the 72nd Berlinale as Covid cases surged in Germany, and festival bosses appeared to change their panic-stricken pandemic rules by the day. Ultimately, the Berlin bash went ahead in physical form last week with all screenings compressed into six days and limited capacity in theaters. After much anguish and confusion, the festival’s executive director Mariette Rissenbeek and artistic director Carlo Chatrian elected to make a bold but controversial statement about the importance of in-person gatherings following last year’s fully virtual festival.
Reactions among film-makers, critics and media commentators to this decision have been decidedly mixed, with German newspaper editorials condemning the event’s Covid super-spreader potential. The choice to return to purely physical screenings instead of the hybrid format adopted by most major festivals in recent years felt a little tone-deaf, especially to film industry workers burdened by underlying health issues or Covid-imposed travel restrictions. Others have highlighted some programming flaws, notably the narrow, NGO-style selection of titles in Berlin’s Generation Africa section, which The Film Verdict covered extensively.
But for those of us who braved an unusually empty Potsdamer Platz last week, the quality of the Berlinale program was mostly a pleasant surprise. The festival’s mandatory but free daily Covid testing system was also impressively smooth, if a little punishing on the nostrils, while the new online ticket-booking system for press screenings was actually a great improvement on the uncertain scramble of pre-pandemic times. If Rissenbeek and Chatrain learn any future lessons from this human lab-rat experiment, advance ticketing would be a good start.
Covid was certainly a motif in some of the bigger Berlinale premieres, either as text or subtext. Festival opener Peter Von Kant, a mischievous gender-reversal remix of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s classic camp melodrama The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972) from French maestro François Ozon, was widely interpreted as a response to the pandemic climate with its single-room chamber-drama setting. Many critics found this arch cineaste homage an enjoyably pointless folly, but Ozon’s sweeter take on Fassbinder’s sour original felt like a quietly powerful statement about the advances in LGBT rights and positive depictions of queer love that have emerged during the half-century gap between the two films.
Building on recent trends across the major festivals, several generations of women film-makers dominated the Berlinale awards. A lyrical celebration of home, family and hard-scrabble pastoral life, the big Golden Bear prize-winner Alcarràs felt like a film designed for pandemic lockdown reflection. Young Spanish director Carla Simón’s gutsy ensemble drama about the financial struggles of a Catalan farming clan was bursting with warm-blooded humanity and great non-professional performances. Meanwhile, the Silver Bear prize for Best Director went to veteran French auteur Claire Denis for her solid but unusually straight love-triangle drama Both Sides of the Blade (Avec amour et acharnement), which features powerhouse performances from Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon as a warring middle-aged couple.
Mexican first-timer Natalia López Gallardo won the Jury Prize for her poetic, elliptical, visually ravishing depiction of Mexico’s bloody drug wars, Robe of Gems (Manto de gemas). A slyly subversive hymn to female friendship, Indonesian writer-director Kamila Andini’s low-key but elegant period piece Nana: Before, Now & Then earned a best supporting actor award for co-star Laura Basuki. Emerging German film-maker Nicolette Krebitz also won plaudits for her delicate two-hander AEIOU – A Quick Alphabet of Love, which stars Sophie Rois as an older actress who enjoys a life-changing affair with a handsome young juvenile delinquent.
Even the male-directed films in Berlin were driven by strong women characters taking control of their political and sexual agency. Picking up the festival’s Grand Jury prize, prolific Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo’s slender monochrome meta-drama The Novelist’s Film (So-seol-ga-ui yeong-hwa) makes great comic sport out of Lee Hye-young’s uncompromising anti-heroine, while Quebecois director and fellow Berlinale regular Denis Côté’s sunny, playful That Kind of Summer (Un été comme ça) celebrates female sex addiction as a kind of rule-breaking liberation from patriarchal convention.
Away from the main competition, Berlin’s increasingly prominent left-field cult-movie strand Encounters threw up some of the festival’s finest hidden gems. Austria’s Ruth Beckermann took the section’s top prize with Mutzenbacher, a tricksy documentary about shifting attitudes to pornography and female desire, based on a clever conceit which some critics nevertheless found manipulative in its questionable treatment of unwitting interviewees. Switzerland’s Cyril Schäublin won Best Director for Unrest (Unrueh), a delightfully quirky political fable based on an unlikely true story about anarchist watch-makers in 19th century Switzerland. Determinedly eccentric British auteur Peter Strickland’s uneven but intriguing Flux Gourmet won no prizes, but deserves a special mention here for its inspired blend of avant-garde noise-punk music, cookery and colonoscopy.
The most delightful Encounters discovery was Kurdish-Austrian former refugee Kurdwin Ayub, winner of Berlin’s Best First Feature prize for Sonne, a lively portrait of young immigrant women growing up in Vienna under the exposing lens of social media. Ayub’s film is produced by veteran Austrian mischief-maker Urich Seidl, who also competed in the festival’s main competition with Rimini, a cheerfully gross docu-drama about ageing playboy lounge singer Richie Bravo, who learns to reconnect with his long-lost daughter through a potent combination of sex work, blackmail and bribery. By the Viennese director’s grim standards, this represents an unusually happy ending. As we bid auf weidersehen to Berlin for another year, it feels oddly heart-warming that pandemic panic has softened even savagely bleak nihilists like Seidl, who are moved to share their own twisted brand of life-affirming family values.
