It sounds like the setup to a tasteless joke: a Peruvian woman keeps a potato in her vagina to guard her chastity. It’s the premise to the Golden Bear Best Picture winner at this year’s Berlinale, Claudia Llosa’s La Teta Asustada aka The Milk of Sorrow. The biggest joke of all may be that this strange, vivid portrait of a village girl’s induction into the mysteries of adulthood has more poetic moments to match its audacious ideas than just about any of its competition.
This year’s Competition field was cluttered with global issues movies whose collective overreaching far exceeded their grasp. The worst culprit was Lukas Moodysson’s Mammoth, starring Gael Garcia Bernal and Michelle Williams as a comfortably numb Manhattan yuppie couple with the world’s most symbolic refrigerator, packed as it is with provisions neglected in favor of home-delivered organic pizza. Bernal, on a biz trip to Thailand, tries to save a prostitute from her plight, while Williams stews at home as their daughter spurns her for their soulful Filipino nanny (trend takers note: Pinoy is the new Black). The two threads are eventually connected by one of the most insulting plot twists conceivable, one which left the press screening bathing with boos. Cheers greeted another shallow take on saving third-world hookers, Annette K. Olsen’s Little Soldier, possibly because it had a more ironic take on the subject (the hooker-saver this time being an Iraq War Veteran, not so subtly symbolizing first-world sanctimony). Of the many Competition takes on global ills, the most interesting one was also the most commercial: Tom Tykwer’s The International, whose failings as an action crowd-pleaser (ineffectual protagonists and complicated plot twists) are also what make it an honest though deadly cynical take on the elusive tyranny of international banking.
Among this company, The Milk of Sorrow deserves its prize, because its ideas are not an end in themselves, but a starting point for a lucid image stream full of both the grit of poverty and the poetry of personal perception. Think Carlos Reygadas with more historical grounding and a distinctly feminine subjectivity (the title references the psychological effects of war crimes inflicted on Peruvian women during the Shining Path campaigns). Even better, and possibly the best film I saw at the festival, was, like Llosa’s, a female director’s second feature: Maren Ade’s Everyone Else. Sort of a contemporary hipster update to Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy, it follows the disintegration of a couple’s relationship during an idyllic excursion to the Italian countryside. The film captures the strange, joyful moments that can only be shared between lovers, then chronicles a series of pin-sized but painful betrayals that inflict near-fatal damage to that fragile intimacy. Fortunately, the film’s numerous jewels of observation contained in small scenes weren’t lost on the Jury, which bestowed the Best Actress Golden Bear to Birgit Minichmayr, Germany’s free-spirited answer to Renee Zellweger. The film’s success marks another victory for the New Berlin School, a label that’s been attached to low-budget indie filmmakers like Ade and their modest but precisely executed examinations of contemporary German life.
The American indie scene was represented in Competition by the likes of Owen Moverman’s The Messenger (which nabbed the Best Screenplay Golden Bear) and Mitchell Lichtenstein’s quizzical Happy Tears; elsewhere, the festival’s more adventurous Forum section yielded a couple of standouts. Some of the most remarkable camerawork of the festival was found in The Exploding Girl by Bradley Rust Grey (married to So Yong Kim, whose Treeless Mountain premiered last year in Toronto but was another Forum highlight). Inspired by Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Café Lumiere, Grey uses telephoto long takes to achieve an incredible sense of private experience between his young, emotionally unsettled protagonists, even in the midst of noisy Manhattan street scenes. Then there’s Andrew Bujalski’s third feature, Beeswax, which somehow inspired no small measure of ire, matched with equal degrees of admiration. Shane Danielsen at indieWIRE walked out of the film after less than an hour, yet somehow generated four paragraphs detailing how Bujalski “says nothing of even the slightest interest, displays no care or forethought in its conception, and positively revels in its slipshod amateurishness.” Others have invoked the standard comparisons to Rohmer, Cassavetes, etc. in Bujalski’s defense.
One thing that’s apparent with Beeswax is that Bujalski has graduated from the phase of requiring comparison to established auteurs. By now he has established his own distinctive sensibility, where stumblingly funny conversations amidst the bric-a-brac interiors of people’s homes barely conceal a fundamental sense of fear. This fear is embodied in wheelchair-bound Tilly Hatcher (one of the most authentic and multi-dimensional portrayals of disability in cinema history) as she struggles to run her thrift store with help from her flaky twin sister and pseudo-boyfriend. Like everything else presented in the film, Bujalski doesn’t dwell on the fact of Hatcher’s disability but lets it inform the theme of interdependency that’s at the heart of this comic drama. The film’s quirky title is a tip to the film’s depiction of life as a hive, where people passive-aggressively fall on each other for support in the face of life’s overwhelming choices, and in doing so both limit and enable choices to be made. While this year’s Berlinale was overloaded with breast-beating efforts to show the interconnectedness of the world population, this film truly delivered on that promise.
The festival may have yielded a bumper crop of disappointments (Sally Potter’s Rage and Rebecca Miller’s Private Lives of Pippa Lee were two other films that received no small degree of spite), but the embarrassing number of journalists that have written the festival off as a disaster betray their own profession. There were plenty of films scattered between the different sections and sidebars to make for a worthwhile experience, which is the job of the film writer to discover and share. Here are several more films worth keeping an eye out for should they come your way:
By Comparison - Harun Farocki’s hour-long, nearly wordless study of how bricks are made around the world has more tactile cinematic artistry and insight into globalization than the entire competition lineup.
About Elly (dir. Asghar Farhadi)
The Fish Child (dir. Lucia Puenzo)
Deep in the Valley (dir. Atsushi Funahashi)
Mental (dir. Kazuhiro Soda) – playing Feb. 22 at the MoMA Documentary Fortnight.
Bluebeard (dir. Catherine Breillat)
Yang Yang (dir. Cheng Yu-Cheh)
Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (dir. Manoel de Oliveira)
Land of Scarecrows (dir. Roh Gyong-tae)
Factory of Gestures: Body Language in Film (dir. Oksana Bulgakowa)
Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek has filed a long dispatch from the Berlin Film Festival, where she’s seen and loved two films that have been widely derided by the bulk of the press corps: Tom Tykwer’s opening night flick The International, and Lucas Moodysson’s Michelle Williams-starring Mammoth. Being on the wrong side of the angry mob has led Zacharek to contemplate what she perceives as a pronounced anti-Hollywood bias among critics at the festival. First, w/r/t The International:
In his post on the Berlin Film Festiva’s jury prizes, the bulk of which were handed out on Saturday night, David Hudson predicted that some of the selections “will not sit well with many of the people I spoke with or the critics I read throughout the festival,” and man, was he right. The Golden Bear went to The Elite Squad (or Tropa de Elite), Brazilian filmmaker Jose Padilha’s action drama about drugs and military police in mid-90s Rio, and to say that this film was not a critical favorite would be an understatement.
Noting that the “overwhelming ugliness of [The Elite Squad] has stayed with me,” Shane Danielson at indieWIRE was one of many to cite the film’s “genuinely fascist sensibility…Since when did Mike Huckabee start scripting action-thrillers?” And that was published before the award was announced––Jurgen Fauth’s post on the matter seems to sum up the thoughts of many in the wake of the announcement: “From where I’m sitting over a Hefeweizen, the Berlinale’s top award couldn’t have gone to a worse film.”
So why, and how, did it happen? Filmbrain is calling conspiracy:
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Jurgen Fauth has nothing but praise for Heavy Metal in Baghdad (we felt pretty much the same when we saw it in Toronto), the screening of which, Jurgen says, “was so oversold that I ended up in the front row, effectively watching a distorted fun house mirror version of Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti’s documentary.”A giddy-seeming Madonna leaked details of her future filmmaking plans, in an interview with indieWIRE posted yesterday:
“I have other ideas swirling in my head,” Madonna said coyly when asked what else is on tap. For now she also has a new doc, “I Am Because We Are,” that will make its way around the festival circuit this Spring (apparently with stops in Tribeca and Cannes). She is also prepping another feature that she hopes to direct. It will “take place in New York, London and Paris,” she said of the new project, before quickly turning to her publicist, and smiling, “Oops, I don’t know if I should have said that.”
See also: the Spiegel interview above, in which Madonna comes precariously close to making a “Like a Virgin” reference when assessing the rush of bringing her directorial debut to market. If I was Madonna, I’d unleash direct “Like a Virgin” references in interviews all the time––not only would it be good for back-catalogue sales, but I think I’d feel the need to remind everyone that my whole career, the whole reinvention gambit, is all about being “touched [as if] for the very first time.”
I don’t actually sit around and think about what I would do if I were Madonna. Really. I swear.
They’re calling it an exclusive, which we’re sure won’t be accurate for long, but for the time being the Times Online has the first full review of Madonna’s directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom. Again, this seems like a case of a filmmaker winning by vaulting over an extremely low-set bar, but as far as three-star reviews go, this one’s damn near hyperbolic. Unless we’re just talking about everyone in the same sentence as Robert Altman these days? Here’s the nut graph:
Yet despite its many shortcomings and an ending so mushy and neat it would embarrass Richard Curtis, Madonna has done herself proud. Her film has an artistic ambition that has simply bypassed her husband, the film director Guy Ritchie. She captures that wonderfully accidental nature of luck when people’s lives intersect for a whole swathe of unlikely but cherishable reasons. Altmanesque would be stretching the compliment too far, but Filth and Wisdom shows Madonna has real potential as a film director.
You can check out some of Madonna’s, um, potential, in the clip above. I have no idea what the announcer is saying (and yet us know if you do), but you can make out a bit of Filth and Wisdom behind it. Meanwhile, if you were Guy Ritchie––and had run your once-promising (I mean, some of you like Snatch, right?) career into the ground by first remaking a socialist/misogynist classic with your pop star wife in the lead, then by allowing said pop star wife to infuse your next generic gangster picture with Kabbalah bullshit––how many reviews like this would you stick around for?
UPDATE: You can watch a more complete, foreign voice-over-free clip at indieWIRE. And this one has strippers! Also, I added a question mark to the headline of this post, because after watching the new clip, I think Filth and Wisdom’s Altman cred is truly up for debate.
The biggest news of the day thus far coming out of the Berlin Film Festival? Madonna’s directorial debut screened…and it wasn’t that bad. Let’s go to the Twitters:
IDrinkYourMilkshake.com mastermind Jurgen Fauth manages to squeeze a headline and a rating into 140 characters: “Berlinale Shocker: Madonna’s Filth and Wisdom not awful at all! ***” And Andrew Grant of Benten Films/Filmbrain fame more or less concurs. “Madonna’s directorial debut Filth and Wisdom could use more of both, but surprisingly it aint half bad!”
Of course, there could be some crazy festival alchemy in the works here––as we know, the critical crowds have been somewhat underwhelmed by the competition offerings thus far, and it would be hard to imagine a film for which expectations could have been any lower. But still, it’s rather heartening to hear that an aging, walking punchline of a pop star can still swoop in to an international film festival and steal attention away from an apparently mediocre issue film directed by a name-brand, Oscar winning filmmaker. Hooray for meritocracy!
Above: a sample of Madonna’s recent musical output. I saw the title and really hoped it was a cover of the Van Halen song, but alas…
Juno is honored as a work of “Cinema For Peace” on the same night a Czech party runs out of beer. Mike Jones enumerates those, and other signs of the apocalypse.
The Circuit has pictures from The Weinstein Company’s party, which was held in “a strange concrete bunker” outfitted with a bumper car dance floor. Also, Patti Smith is apparently going around telling people she is “beyond gender,” which cleverly preempts any joke we could have made.
Spout is, sadly, not at the Berlin Film Festival, where screenings began this morning. But we’ll be trolling the blogs for scraps throughout the course of the fest.
Steven Boone has published an a-ma-zing interview with film critic Armond White. There’s almost too much good stuff here; at one point, White deflates Boone’s theory that digital video has allowed filmmaking to transition from “aristocratic medium…to one where poor people make films.” White says: “Poor people don’t make films. They’ve got other things to do.” Also, check out Boone’s companion piece at The House Next Door: Ten Armond White Quotes That Shook The World.
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We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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