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)
