Tag: Berlin Film Festival

The ugly face of female violence, from the horse’s mouth

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

We first meet the hero of Askar Uzabayev’s latest film, Happiness, standing in front of the mirror. Pulling down her bathrobe to reveal her naked chest and shoulders, illuminated only by candlelight due to regular power outages, she inspects her many bruises. Played by actress Laura Myrzakhmetova, but named archetypically as just “Wife”, she is one of millions of women across Kazakhstan living under the brutal spectre of domestic violence.

This issue is of epidemic proportions. As producer Bayan Maxatkyzy tells me, “Every year, about 400 women die from domestic violence. Only seven per cent of victims report domestic violence, despite nearly one in two women in the country suffering some sort of abuse. And this is just the official data. There could be more.” And with no official law for the protection of victims, “thousands of abusers get away with this crime on a daily basis.”

Maxatkyzy suffered intense domestic abuse herself, but counts herself as one of the lucky ones. She’s a genuine movie star in Kazakhstan, talking to me across Zoom while wearing large sunglasses and sitting on an opulent couch with an expensive-looking handbag in full-view. Rising to fame for her role in the popular 1993 Kazakh melodrama Love Station followed by a successful journalism and acting career, she has four million Instagram followers, more than any other celebrity in the country. So, when her first husband, Bakhytbek Yesentayev, beat and stabbed her four times in 2016, the story became national news, eventually leading to his 9-year imprisonment.

Happiness

Maxatkyzy’s fame give her case widespread attention, but the woman at the heart of Happiness, which recently won the Panorama Audience Award at the Berlin Film Festival, has no such protection. The first half is utterly drenched in sadness and desperation, a culture of misogyny permeating almost every scene. Her daughter (Almagul Sagyndyk) is getting married, yet nobody seems to be celebrating. The perennially drunk Husband (Yerbolat Alkozha) tells the bride-to-be in an embarrassing liquor-sodden speech to “never raise your voice” if she is to be a good wife, displaying a cycle of submissiveness and shame handed down from generation to generation.

When he later rapes his own wife on his daughter’s wedding night, a cardboard cut-out of a beautiful woman wrapped in clingfilm lingers in the background; an ironic contrast of feminine perfection that perhaps represents the ideal, voiceless woman. Despite her tragic home life, the Wife works as an influencer, selling perfume that she promises will give other women happiness.

In her posts, the Wife lays out a rehearsed theory, underscored by Antonio Vivaldi’s “Winter”. She says that happiness is 50 per cent nature, 10 per cent living conditions, and 40 per cent a result of free will. But the reality of the film, imbued with endless beatings, police corruption and sexual menace, lives within that middle 10 per cent, resulting in a horrifying, hard-to-look-away portrayal of living under the fear of death with little chance of state protection.

Both Maxatkyzy and director Askar Uzabayev, who adapted a script co-written with journalist Assem Zhapisheva, avoided state financing models when finding funding for the film. Maxatkyzy crowdfunded $20,000, with many women “sending one, two dollars” to the cause. “As many rich producers are men, and this was [Kazakhstan’s] first movie about domestic violence, they didn’t want to take part. Because they are men,” Maxatkyzy says. “Maybe they just didn’t believe in this project.” Uzabayev also believes the crowdfunding was the right choice. “When the government pay, they tell us what to do, like not showing police corruption,” he says.

The film takes a freewheeling turn by the end, anchored by Myrzakhmetova’s performance. The actress both empowers and teases out the nuances of her unnamed hero, who is neither victim nor a stereotypical “strong woman”. But Myrzakhmetova was not the first choice for the role. In fact, according to Uzabayev, “six candidates before Laura rejected the role. Our last candidate refused to take it two days before we planned to start shooting. In the beginning [the actresses] were inspired, but after discussions with their husbands, they were prohibited from taking this role.”

The film’s overwhelming atmosphere of shame and fear, coupled with the wider, grim context, is a far-cry from stereotypical Hollywood portrayals like The Invisible Man or Promising Young Woman, which can lean more poppy, revenge-laden and digestible. Happiness is so powerful because it doesn’t borrow inspiration from genre cues, such as the meticulously-planned revenge or a final belief in the police to fix the problem, and pursues its own uncompromising, highly distressing path. As Maxatkyzy says, “We didn’t take ideas from American or European movies because our mentality is completely different. Our society is totally patriarchal.” Her hope is that the movie will be widely-seen in order to start a conversation, both in Kazakhstan and further afield: “My intention is that people will remember situations that happened among their own families. I hope the inconvenience that they feel will lead to the realisation that they could take action to change the situation.”

Happiness premiered at the Berlinale. Stay tuned for a wider release.

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All images in this article are stills from ‘Happiness’.

The weakest Berlinale I’ve ever attended announces its winners…

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Trust my luck: despite having seen 15 of the 18 entries in the Berlin Film Festival competition, I missed Alcarràs, Carla Simón’s second feature and the Golden Bear winner. Congratulations to her, although I cannot possibly pass judgement on the victory considering I have not seen the film. Having also missed Synonyms (Nadav Lapiud) in 2019, Touch me Not (Adina Pintilie) in 2018, Body or Soul (Ildiko Enyedi) in 2017 and Fire at Sea (Gianfranco Rosi) in 2016, I am obviously cursed.

Perhaps Alcarràs is a masterpiece, but the buzz around it didn’t suggest an unequivocal five-star film. In fact, throughout my entire foray through the Competition, there was only one film that will stay with me forever: Ulrich Seidl’s Rimini, a fantastic, multifaceted, debate-provoking work that naturally went home without a single award. I thought it might at least win best performance for Michael Thomas, who remains constantly compelling and larger-than-life throughout. But he lost to a worthy winner, the fantastic Meltem Kaptan, who simply transforms Andreas Dresen’s Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush (pictured below) through sheer force of personality alone.

Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush

It’s a strange year when, despite severe dialect differences between North Tyrol and Bremen, the two best competition entries are in the German language. Carlo Chatrian, in his third year as the artistic director, and generally doing a good job shaking the Festival up while sticking to its experimental roots, promised less politics and more love stories this year.

Despite this, the politically-minded tales were invariably more interesting than the preponderance of middling to bad French and Franco-German romances — films like Claire Denis’ Both Sides of the Blade, Nicolette Krebitz’s A E I O U – A Quick Alphabet of Love and François Ozon’s Peter Von Kant (pictured at the top of this article) -that dominated the competition this year. Occasionally, these safe middle-European choices resulted in Mikhaël Hers’s lovely Passengers of the Night (no awards, pictured below), but most of these picks would have felt more comfortable for the less provocative Special Gala section.

Further afield, francophiles worldwide have had a field day, considering that Rithy Panh’s Everything Will Be Ok (the rare entirely political film that fell apart in its ponderous narration), Ursula Meier’s The Line (feature image) and Denis Côté’s That Kind of Summer were also in French while being from Cambodia, Switzerland and Quebec respectively. Honestly, what’s left for Cannes?

Passengers of the Night

Along with an overall ARTE-sanctioned, EU-friendly aesthetic, whiteness, middle-age and heterosexuality was the name of the game: over and over again. I’m not usually the one to care too much about film festivals being diverse just for the sake of it, but I felt the lack of worldwide perspectives here in favour of a particularly played-out white, straight sexuality. Films that tried to do something a bit different like Isaki Lacuesta’s One Year, One Night, looking at the after-effects of the Bataclan attacks, barely interrogated the current political situation in Europe, aiming instead at pop-psychology and banal romantic drama.

In this respect, Rimini, which actively confronted the ugliness at the heart of the continent, or Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush, which forthrightly criticised the issues of American imperialism across the world and how that can even be felt in Europe, felt far more honest, and heartfelt.

The few Asian exceptions, like Indonesia’s Before, Now & Then (Kamila Andini), China’s Return to Dust (Li Ruijun) and Korea’s The Novelist’s Film (Hong Sangsoo, pictured below) were often more psychologically fascinating and aesthetically innovative than their European counterparts, but I can’t claim to even truly love those films either. Then from North and Central America was Natalia López Gallard’s indecipherable Robe of Gems and Phyllis Nagy’s Call Jane (which I missed), neither of which dominated critical conversation at the festival. Eastern Europe, Central Asia, South America, Africa and Australasia were completely absent.

It’s sad to say, considering how much I love the Berlinale, and how I actually consider myself to be rather generous, but this year was probably the worst I’ve attended. Perhaps the pandemic has made it difficult, perhaps the Franco-German alliance is a little too strong, perhaps I am particularly cynical this time round, but the festival might do well to ditch the love stories next year. Failing that, maybe they can just find better ones instead.

Hong Sangsoo

Full List of Awards:

Golden Bear

Alcarràs (Carla Simón)

Silver Bear: Grand Jury Prize

The Novelist’s Film (Hong Sang-soo)

Silver Bear: Jury Prize

Robe of Gems (Natalia Lopez Gallardo)

Silver Bear for Best Director

Claire Denis (Both Sides of the Blade)

Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance

Meltem Kaptan (Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush)

Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance

Laura Basuki (Before, Now & Then)

Silver Bear for Best Screenplay

Laila Stieler (Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush)

Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution

Rithy Panh (Everything Will Be Ok)

Silver Bear: Special Mention

A Piece of Sky (Michael Koch)

That Kind of Summer (Un Été Comme Ça)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

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Set in a retreat for the sexually obsessed, That Kind of Summer sees Quebec auteur Côté create a reverie on desire, addiction and the possibility of changing eventually one’s ways. A challenging yet relatively conservative work, Côté is relatively more ambitious than in his last few features, creating a work that actively interrogates the multifaceted nature of sexual desire.

Three women enrol in a retreat for the sexually addicted. It’s hard to say whether they were forced to go on purpose or they are are willing to enrol just to get a free holiday. They are asked to stay for 26 days, with a one day off in-between. They are looked after by visiting Germany professor Octavia (Anne Ratte Polle) and social worker Sami (Samir Guesmi), who resist their own desires to help these women find a way of living without having to think about sex.

Unlike many Hollywood movie, where rehab is presented as an opportunity for radical change, never mind the unrealistic nature of such radical changes within such a short time offered, That Kind of Summer deliberately eschews conventional character development in favour of a more realistic depiction of people trying to think beyond sexual obsession. People aren’t solved within a single retreat. Whatever neurosis you have, it’s going to take more than one trip to finally figure out what’s wrong, if anything is actually wrong at all.

While the women in this stay are well-rendered when it comes to their sexuality — shown through solo scenes and interaction with other men, as well as giving time to explain their feelings — the lone male character draws a blank. He is tempted throughout his stay — with all three women temping him at one point or another — but his internal psychology is left strangely alone, making for a weirdly feminine only experience. Considering the amount of scenes we encounter with women pleasuring themselves, including Octavia, the lack of inclusion of the male perspective fails to round out this tale in an egalitarian way.

The cinematography is handheld, and seems to bob up and down as if the camera is lost at sea, creating a sense of unease throughout. Côté remains a supreme stylist; favouring huge close-ups, long, almost silent takes and ambiguity through camera movement, never settling on a single character or style, making for a film that viewers can interpret in various different ways.

I have watched several Denis Côté films now (mostly at Berlinale) and I still can’t quite figure out his style. This is a director who trods his own dogged path, following his whims throughout various successful and unsuccessful ventures. There is an absence of conventionality throughout his filmmaking, which avoids traditional filmmaking structures in favour of a more observant and subtle style. The Quebec filmmaker seems to watch and watch his characters as if they aren’t scripted (even if they are). Rarely passing judgement, his films present a situation without ever settling on a side. It makes for a fascinating watch, but it rarely feels urgent: he’s kind of filmmaker that remains a pleasure to experience, but rarely makes you feel despite his surfeit of style. Here’s hoping his next film has something a bit more engaging to latch on to.

That Kind of Summer plays in Competition at the Berlinale between February 10th to 22ndÉ.

One Year, One Night (Un año, una noche)

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A tale of two performances: Noémie Merlant as Céline, fresh off A Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019) and Jumbo (Zoé Wittock, 2020) with a credible, affecting portrait of trauma denial; and Nahuel Pérez Biscayart as Ramon, suffering severe panic attacks right from the start without enough depth to properly pull it off. A tale of a couple, navigating the aftermath of the 2015 Bataclan attacks together, with the finer and cleverer performance being dragged down by a messy one.

One Year, One Night is based on the true recollections of two French-Spanish couples who went through unimaginable horror when escaping from the horrific terrorist attack, where 130 people were brutally killed by Islamist terrorists. Using a back-and-forth narrative technique, starting in the aftermath before giving us piecemeal cutbacks to the attacks themselves — tastefully shot so as to avoid any depiction of the gunmen — the result is a touching portrait of trauma and the pains of trying to live within its shadow.

The film works best when explaining the ways that life goes on even when you have suffered a severe event, with Ramon and Céline going back to their jobs; Ramon is in some kind of financial services while Céline is a social worker at a foster home, mostly working with Black and brown kids. With a manner reminiscent of Jean-Marc Vallée, edits come through these scenes like intrusive thoughts, showing us the difficulty of trying to move forward. But while Céline’s arc, telling no one what happened and hoping the negative feeling just goes away, seems more fascinating, Ramon’s everything-on-the-table reaction, vacillating between grief and encounter and moments of strange enlightenment, required subtler execution from Biscayart, who can’t quite pull it off.

Naturally, their relationship, told over the course of a year, comes under great scrutiny, whether they have drunk too many beers in Spain, stressed from work, or try and plan the future together. At times the attack itself fades from view and we are left with a handsome-enough relationship drama. But the dramatic line of the film is left severely wanting, with little shape given to each character’s development or conflict: arguments in rooms and cool dancing scenes can be fun, but they have to actually mean something; instead it just feels like padding.

And at 130 minutes, what could’ve been a neat Panorama film is given the bloated self-importance of a competition entry. While the experiences of the Bataclan survivors deserves a fair telling — with their input and consent, of course — One Year, One Night doesn’t live up to the importance of the task.

One Year, One Night plays in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, running from 10-20th February.

A E I O U – A Quick Alphabet of Love (A E I O U – Das schnelle Alphabet der Liebe)

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A stands for Anna (Sophie Rois) and Adrian (Milan Herms).

E stands for Elocution: troubled teen Adrian has a problem with pronunciation, so it’s up to the past-it, middle-aged actress Anna to teach him how to project his words on stage for his high school play.

I stands for Inhibitions: while working together, they slowly lose them, resulting in a delirious, oddball romance.

O stands for “Oh My God”: words I uttered regularly as the film constantly engaged in cringe-worthy storytelling techniques.

And U stands for Udo Kier: Anna’s landlord and confidant who provided the biggest laughs simply by looking and reacting at things. He’s a great screen presence, but was mostly underused.

This is a quick alphabet of love, with only the vowels needed. It makes sense when you think about it: with one fricative notwithstanding, they are the vowels most commonly used while in the throes of love-making. But this is a talky, playful film, filled with consonants too, as the young boy and the older woman slowly navigate their sort-of inappropriate romance, taking them from the streets of Berlin to the beaches of southern France. At once enjoyable, pleasant and easy-going, as well as occasionally dipping into unearned, hands-over-eyes sentimentality, Alphabet of Love, or Licorice Flammkuchen, is unlikely to set the world on fire, but still is an interesting take on spring-autumn romance.

Y isn’t a German vowel, and it isn’t much of a question in the film either, which starts off as a conventional navigation of social mores before moving into pure fantasy territory, finally dipping into one of the most amiable of genres: the Cote D’Azur criminal con-man genre; glittering hotels and casinos galore. Director Nicolette Krebitz starts by the idyllic Mediterranean, Anna looking at a police-line up of five guys, each holding up one of the five German syllables. Adrian is in the line-up but Anna is giving nothing away, before the film cuts back to how they first meet, the young lad mugging her outside of Paris Bar, Berlin.

He’s a troubled child — although a psychologically vacuous one — and she’s an intemperate former star, once a marquee name but now forced to work as a speech therapist. Adrian comes from a foster family, with his odds stacked against him from the beginning, whereas Anna once had it all but suffered the same fate many women do once they go past a certain age. It makes for an interesting coupling, but the conversations and actions are more focused on quirky details — like where Anna hides her cigarettes, or Adrian’s pickpocketing skills — than bringing this conflict into view. I can’t say that I minded, with the film often working best in its final, more fantastical sequences than during the staid, clichéd parts earlier on. Ending on the use of one of my all-time favourite songs, this is the kind of love story that won’t change your life, but makes for a fun date night watch. Just don’t take your mother.

A E I O U – A Quick Alphabet of Love plays in competition at Berlin Film Festival, running from 10-20th February.

Return to Dust (Yin Ru Chen Yan)

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China might have made massive economic advances in the last few decades, but what of the people caught between the cracks of the country’s huge economic achievements? Li Ruijun looks at a simple farmer couple in northernmost Gansu, creating a poetic tale that unfolds with the simplicity of a fable.

Ma (Wu Renlin) and Guiying (Hai Qing) didn’t have much say in their marriage, arranged by their respective families, but slowly warm to each other anyway. She is severely disabled, unable to hold her bladder, while he is very taciturn, happiest when working the field. Their relationship is sweetly rendered by Ruijun, whether it’s the way they cook for each other, keep one another warm or imprint the shape of a flower on each other’s skins with individual grains. You won’t hear phrases like “I love you” or see them making love or cuddling, yet the love they have for each other is self-evident. But they are hopelessly, bitterly poor, their poverty viewed by others in the community as more of a hindrance than a problem to be solved. This pride and passion eventually clashes against a world that seemingly has no more use for them.

This is a sad yet dignified story, buoyed by slow cinema techniques that rarely cut away. Shooting with a boxy frame, the beauty and toil of working the land gains epic dimensions, the characters often dwarfed by the sky behind them. The pain and reward of their lifestyle is rendered in unwavering detail, the camera utilising long takes in showing the process involved in farming. With so many films using computer generated effects almost without thought, there is something epic about the physicality and realism of the landscapes and the way they are transformed here.

Both Renlin and Qing turn in fine performances — there is a real skill in being able to play people with so little without delving into caricature or moral simplicity. Ruijun doesn’t have any grand speeches or wider sociological screeds, but seems to simply observe, allowing the audience to draw their own conclusions.

The film asks: who are these rapid changes for and why are people being left behind? When offered an apartment Ma points out that there would be no space for his trusted donkey, pigs and chickens. But when you’re proceeding on a so-called Grand Plan — the likes of which the Chinese government loves to implement — considering every individual’s problems simply isn’t an option. With so much Western focus on China on its huge population and staggering technological advances, Ruijun invites us to zoom in and focus on the minutiae of rural life, with people kept in a trap of poverty through no fault of their own. The final result is quietly devastating; there’s no bang, but a long sad whimper.

Return to Dust plays in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, running from 10-20th February.

Both Sides of the Blade (Avec Amour et Acharnement)

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To borrow the same metaphor, Both Sides of the Blade is a double-edged sword. On the one hand we have a finely-acted drama minutely detailing the ins and outs of marriage and infidelity; on the other, we have an overwrought and sentimental tale that doesn’t ever compel the audience to sit up in its seat the way the average Claire Denis film usually does. This is a half-baked, disappointing effort from one of our great living directors, all the more of a letdown due to her normally high batting average.

The radiant Juliette Binoche, returning with Denis after Let the Sunshine In (2017),stars as Sara, a woman seemingly secure in her relationship with Jean (Vincent Lindon). The film opens on an idyllic scene, the middle-aged couple swimming in the sea, cuddling and kissing before returning to their Paris apartment and making love. But the music, courtesy of Tindersticks, suggests an erotic thriller; a mash of discordant trumpets and strings portending confusion ahead. For Jean has entered into business with Sara’s former flame François (Grégoire Colin), alighting a moody marital drama that never settles on a consistent and engaging tone.

Denis is known for her highly stylish approach to filmmaking, even when making a so-called “domestic drama”: from Sara’s first sighting of François to a frantic agency opening to the endless arguments with her husband, the camera gets inside her head and creates an appropriate sense of disorientation, further complimented by Denis’ mixture of camera formats. From moment to moment, the dialogue is smart: while on the nose throughout, it allows the couple to test each other, as they debate what François means to them and how he will dominate their lives.

Binoche typically excels in the main role, portraying a woman who knows what she wants, but is afraid of what happens if she gets it. She’s both smart and cunning, sexy and brave, afraid and manipulative, often within the same scene. Even when the story falls short, she finds new dimensions to her character throughout. Lindon rises equally to the game, moving between magnanimity and jealousy, pragmatism and anger, with ease. Together, they keep the lockdown-light drama engaging — with reminders of the coronavirus pandemic throughout and endless scenes shot within their modern Rue D’Amsterdam apartment — throughout each scene despite the failure of the plot, co-written with novelist Christine Angot, to give them any shape to their respective destinies.

But what of François, occupying the Count Vronsky-role in this modern-day Anna Karenina? Wearing a Le Coq Sportif jacket and riding a motorcycle, he’s criminally underwritten; giving us little sense of why he’s such a big deal. Other supporting players, including Jean’s black son and white mother, or a friendly pharmacist, are equally tokenistic, making me feel that the film would be better without them taking part at all. The whole thing is filled with unearned moments, even if the individual craft is fairly sturdy. While by the end you can see from both sides (of the blade) now, it’s that crucial third side that needs further sharpening. Or even better, a much sharper knife.

Both Sides of the Blade played in Competition at the Berlin Film Festival, running from February 10th to the 20th. On all major VoD platforms in December.

Before, Now & Then (Nana)

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A once stylish yet reserved, opulent yet modest, Before Now & Then creates a reflective portrait of a country in turmoil through the romantic experiences of one women. More of a contemplative character portrait than a traditional romance, it offers rewards in its resplendent filmmaking while smartly examining the nuances of the feminine experience.

Nana (Happy Salma) has a comfortable life. She lives on a large Dutch colonial estate alongside her husband Mr Darga (Arswendy Bening Swara) and children, hosting gatherings of women where they listen to music, eat food and talk about family. But her dreams suggest otherwise, reminding Nana of her violent past escaping the coups and genocides that characterised 60s Indonesia. Having lost her first husband and child in the coup, she remembers the war in vivid detail, unable to move forward in a country that’s on the cusp of rapid change.

The role of women in this patriarchal society seems yet to be defined. While men are free to go and do as they want, as seen through Mr Darga’s dalliances with other women, Nana gathers the small pleasures while she can, like smoking a cigarette on the terrace or playing with her children. At the meat market she meets the mysterious Ino (Laura Basuki) — with a kind smile, she simply radiates empathy, allowing Nana to figure out how to navigate this new reality.

It’s not only Nana who seems stuck between past and present; the film itself has little concern with traditional narratives, instead giving us a full sense of who Nana is. A lot of the time, we simply watch her thinking, captured against the gorgeousness of her house and almost always impeccably dressed. Her daughter asks her why women’s hair has be kept up: the answer is “to keep secrets”, the likes of which are slowly revealed to us piecemeal throughout this carefully crafted story.

A great sense of romanticism and unspoken longing comes through the music, mixing contemporary 60s songs, traditional and a lush score that moves between waltzes and playful string movements. The music, bringing to mind In The Mood for Love (Wong Kar Wai, 2000), is almost constant throughout the film, almost acting against the slowness and consideration of the characters themselves. Credit must go to Salma herself, able to command the camera and allow us to see her perspective even when it seems like she’s not doing much at all.

It’s likely that many of the cultural and feminine nuances of the story eluded me — it’s not particularly illuminating for anyone learning about mid-twentieth century Indonesian history for the first time — yet once I settled into its rhythms, I found it to be a fine, absorbing aesthetic experience, even if I was never fully enraptured by its style.

Before, Now & Then plays in Competition at the 72nd Berlin Film Festival, running from February 10th to 20th.

Rimini

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Ritchie Bravo (Michael Thomas) is the kind of loveable, broken rogue that you can’t help but love. He calls his casa a pirate ship; he dons a huge “sealskin” jacket; and he always provides a bon mot on the right occasion, especially in front of the ladies. But beneath the armour, the persona, the legend, is a man, adrift in a miserable seaside town, covered in snow and blanketed in cloud.

Ritchie Bravo is a schlager singer, crooning the kind of cringe-worthy songs that make Tom Jones sound like an opera singer. He lives in Rimini, a far cry from the warm, sunshiny city of its most famous son Federico Fellini. Unlike Fellini, who actually recreated the town on set in Cinecittà Studios, Ulrich Seidl shoots firmly on location, finding the kind of places so cringe-worthy — like an oldies bar named 007 Dancing (3.6 stars on Google Maps) — you simply couldn’t make them up.

Bravo navigates these wintry spaces with ease, sliding between shoddy slot casinos, beachside boozers and shuttered hotels, breezy and easy in public, desperately alone in private; drinking vodka to hide the stench of booze on his breath, and covering his pouchy belly with tape to look better when singing dreadful, sentimental belters in front of coach-loads of elderly Austrians. To supplement his income, he sleeps with some of the visiting ladies, these sex scenes shown in almost all of their unadorned glory.

In these scenes, Seidl shows a part of human life others may shy away from: normal people have sex; old people have sex; fat, ugly people have sex. It’s a part of what people are, no matter who they are or how they look. In this way, his sex scenes, however awkward they look — and using minimal cuts — are somewhat revolutionary in conventional, non-pornographic cinema.

But watching all this, it’s hard not to wonder: what does Ritchie think? What does he actually want out of life? In Ulrich Seidl’s characteristic style, borne from a seasoned documentary career before moving to features, he shoots almost exclusively in medium and long-distance frames, favouring planimetric compositions and still camerawork over flashy inserts or rapid cuts. It’s almost like he’s following a real guy called Ritchie instead of creating a story about him — which starts in North Tirol at his mother’s funeral before taking us back to his life in Rimini, where a sudden blast from the past requires him to rapidly (and perhaps unethically) increase his income.

In this manner, it’s not too different from Sean Baker’s Red Rocket (2021), also featuring a sex-adjacent hustler that toes the line between good and evil, relatable and awful at the same time. The most satisfying part is how cleverly the dramaturgical line snaps into focus: despite looking like a shabby character portrait, this is a neatly plotted story with a beginning, middle and end, simply composed of the kind of longer, more contemplative, enigmatic and interesting scenes that many other screenwriters would choose to leave out.

Touching on themes of race, identity, belonging, sexuality and more within its runtime, it nestles various ideas within its simple seeming style; resulting in a touching, intellectually rich and at-times hilarious portrait that I would simply love to watch again. Thankfully for us, Ulrich Seidl has already wrapped on a continuation of that same world. I will be first in line: Ritchie Bravo is too big for just one film.

Rimini played in competition at the 72nd Berlinale, when this piece was originally written. It premieres in the UK in October as part of the BFI London Film Festival. In UK cinemas on Friday, December 9th. On BFI Player on Monday, September 4th.

Stop-Zemlia

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Is there any stronger feeling in the world than the flush of first love? There probably is, but try telling that to a teenager who finds themselves awkwardly infatuated, unable to hide the blushing in their cheeks? Masha (Maria Fedorchenko) is one such teenager, who has developed a crush on the quiet and sensitive Sasha (Oleksandr Ivanov) — in a pivotal scene, simply walking by this boy and trying to say “hi” is a moment of stress seemingly on par with living in a war zone.

A teacher explains how the stress activator in your brain turns on and admits that falling in love can create much the same effect. Stop-Zemlia has a similarly forensic approach to both the psychological and physiological emotions of being a teenager, when your hormones are rampant and your emotions impossible to fully explain. Masha finds comfort in the kind presence of her friends Yana (Yana Isaienko) and Senia (Arsenii Markov), who form a trio based more on platonic love than any potential for romance.

Coming in at an unwieldy two hours, Stop-Zemlia uses a longer-than-normal runtime for this genre to fully explore the contours of teenagehood, dipping in and out of musical sequences, magical realism and intersecting storylines; even allowing Masha’s love interest full autonomy instead of mere idealisation. Fictional scenes are intercut with documentary-style interviews, with characters asked questions by an unseen director, allowing for further development of their feelings and more mature development of their emotions. Characters’ names are almost the same or simply diminutives of their actors (Masha for Maria, for example), blurring the lines between performer and character to excellent effect.

Coming at a time when coming-of-age dramas are so saturated with copious smoking, drinking and shagging — such as Russia’s Everybody Dies But Me, UK’s Skins and USA’s Euphoria — Stop-Zemlia offers a far more thoughtful and sober take on the messiness of growing up. In this respect, it owes as much to recent trends in French documentary-making — the films of Sébastien Lifshitz and Claire Simon’s Young Solitude — than stereotypical coming-of-age films. There’s a great eye for dialogue that genuinely apes that way that generation Z teenagers talk — and not the way that many adults assume they talk — showing off the patient and workshopped approach of first time feature director Kateryna Gornostai.

The fluidity is sexuality is explored here with real sensitivity, showing the rise of a generation far more nuanced and mature than even my generation; in fact, what seems to matter more than sexual expression is simply being honest with yourself and understanding what you want to be. There is the larger context of growing up in Ukraine, one of the poorest countries in Europe, where opportunities are scarce and men have to join the army once they turn 18. In one touching scene, Senia recoils when he attends a class explaining how to load an AK-47, remembering his traumatic upbringing during the conflict with Russia. It’s a difficult place to be an adult, with these teenagers — thoughtful, kind, confused, learning as they go along — under no false impressions about what the future might bring. Stop-Zemlia captures them at this most precarious age with great empathy and precision.

Stop-Zemlia plays in the Generation section of the Berlin Film Festival, running from 1st to 5th March.

Cryptozoo

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN

I‘ve pre-booked a ticket for the Zoo in a couple of days. I would never normally go but there’s basically nothing else open these days. Now after watching Cryptozoo — a reverie on mankind’s relationship with exotic animals refracted through the acid trip imagination of the ambitious cartoonist Dash Shaw — I’m going to look at those pandas rather definitely.

Cryptos, misunderstood by the world around them, are mythological creatures living in hiding that span everything from your usual standards like Unicorns and Centaurs, to legendary folkloric animals from countries like Poland, Russia and Japan. This might like the plot for a lame X-Men movie, but Cryptozoo has a far more mature sensibility, opening with two young, horny and very naked adults finding themselves at the wrong end of an angry animal.

Based on the initial scene and early audience reactions on Twitter overplaying the timid sex scenes, you might be forgiven for thinking this is a slice of bizarro arthouse smut, but Cryptozoo actually has far more lofty aspirations. They two horny adults have stumbled into the eponymous zoo itself, a place where, apparently, the cryptos can finally be free from those who want to use their power as bio-military weapons. Fighting against these nefarious elements is army brat Lauren Gray (Lake Bell), who seemingly survives the trauma of growing up in post-WW2 Okinawa, Japan thanks to a cute, purple and blue creature called a Baku that eats her dreams. But this initial black-and-white perspective is complicated once we come to the Cryptozoo, which offers the animals a safe haven in return for providing visiting humans a tourist attraction.

Shaw, in collaboration with animation director Jane Samborski and lead animator Emily Wolver, creates a fantastic world ablaze with colour and ancient elements, where humans and cryptos could live in peace, if only they had the chance. But like Tiger King last year, which pitted big cat exploiter Joe Exotic against “sanctuary” owner Caroline Baskin, Cryptozoo asks the key question: is there any real difference between zookeepers and those they claim to fight against? Or are we all doomed in a world where one cannot survive without making profit?

With Jurassic Park never too far from the back of our minds, Cyptozoo invigorates disaster movie convention with its original style of animation. While the trope of the “gentle-creature-that-only-attacks-when-it’s-wounded” has been done to death over the past few years — most notably, and most confusedly, in the terrible Godzilla: King of the Monsters — Cryptozoo makes it feel fresh through sheer visual panache alone. In fact, the images are so arresting, one only realises how conventional the structure of the film is right at the very end.

As I’m so used to watching animated movies made within the parameters of a certain house style, so even their most glorious sequences seemed sanded-down to fit within the overall aesthetic, it’s glorious to watch something as diverse as this, a strange collage of styles that seems to run the entire gamut of 20th century drawing. While the flat 2D planes can feel a little off-putting, especially when watching otherwise unmoving characters’ mouths move, there is so much to love once you get over the initial strangeness. Zoos will never look quite the same again.

Cryptozoo plays in the Generation programme at Berlinale, running digitally from 1st to 5th March.