The After Effects of Finlandia and Curried Sausage;
Plus Impressions of Gardens of the Night, Chiko and Transsiberian
Saturday morning found me sleeping off the Finlandia, and I missed the competition screenings of Lake Tahoe and Julia (luckily, there will be repeats.) Damian Harris' Gardens of the Night, also in competition, tells the sordid story of an abducted girl in beautiful images. On her way to school through a sun-dappled Pennsylvania suburb, eight-year-old Leslie (Ryan Simpkins) -- blonde, blue eyes, adorable in her school uniform and pink backpack -- is lured into a car by two strangers. Tom Arnold and Kevin Zegers play good kidnapper/bad kidnapper, manipulating the confused and increasingly desperate child. Behind the locked doors of their San Diego house, Leslie befriends Donnie, a boy who was also taken from his family. In scenes that seem innocent enough, they build tents and play Jungle Book, but when Leslie is led to a hotel room where another man is waiting, fellow critics started to leave the theater in droves. I didn't find Gardens of the Night impossible to watch. The film does avert its eyes at the most horrifying moments, and something about its gorgeous surface made it hard for me to turn away. In the final section, the story leaps ahead ten years to find Leslie and Donnie on the streets, taking drugs and turning tricks. The older Leslie, played by Gillian Jacobs, looks like she ought to be in movies rather than prostituting herself at truck stops, and it's precisely this disconnect between surface and shocking reality that betrays everything she has lost.
At the Zoo Palast, the public premiere of Chiko was sold out, and I snagged one of the last seats for Özgür Yildirim's assured fourth film, a gangster story that stands out for its witty, slangy dialogue. Two friends (Denis Moschitto and Volkan Özcan) try to get ahead in Hamburg's drug dealer scene, starting out slinging marijuana and soon moving on to the harder stuff. Moritz Bleibtreu (Run Lola Run) has a blast as the city's filthy-mouthed underworld kingpin. The problem with Chiko is that in the movies, these kinds of stories always end the same way, slowly spiraling into tragedy to prove that, as Rick James suggested, "cocaine is a helluva drug."
The night ended with another genre piece, the Brad Anderson thriller Transsiberian, starring Emily Mortimer, Woody Harrelson, and Ben Kingsley. A Midwestern couple takes the epic train trip from Beijing to Moscow, presented in marvelous location photography. On their way, they meet suspicious cabin mates (Kate Mara and Eduardo Noriega) and a threatening Russian detective (Kingsley.) As the golly-gee Iowan with a dorky train fetish, Harrelson keeps a wide-eyed innocence even when the journey turns into a white-knuckle affair. Like the Russian Dolls that play a crucial part in the story, Transsiberian keeps on revealing new layers, adding up to a relentlessly suspenseful ride. The film has no U.S. distribution as of yet, but I would be surprised if it takes long before it gets picked up.
Three days in, the Berlinale has hit its stride, and I'm starting to get the hang of things, too. My continually mutating schedule still only reaches half a day ahead at best, but at least I've figured out which pages of the festival bible to consult for which program or sidebar. The jet-lag has given way to a heady brew of borderline exhaustion and giddy excitement, and my tales of woe -- diverted trains, hurried meals of curry sausage, the serious lack of wifi hotspots -- could fill pages. But as soon as I sink into my chair and the lights go down, I'm wide awake again.
Movies in This Entry
- Black Ice/Musta jää. Petri Kotwica, 2008. *** 1/2
- Auge in Auge -- Eine Deutsche Filmgeschichte. Michael Althen and Hans Helmut Prinzler, 2008. ***
- Shiver/Eskalofrio. Isidro Ortiz, 2008. **
- Gardens of the Night. Damian Harris, 2007. ***
- Chiko. Özgür Yildirim, 2008. ***
- Transsiberian. Brad Anderson, 2008. *** 1/2
