Penelope Cruz Bares Herself to Ben Kingsley in Elegy, Acrassicauda Rocks Baghdad
The Great Berlin Movie Binge of 2008, a.k.a. the 58th Berlinale, is now peaking, leaving my head blurry with overlapping images, suspended in a dreamlike state where the rush from theater to theater seems to be part of just another art film where I am always late, always on the verge of losing scarf, wallet, phone or accreditation badge, and stuck between the gleaming buildings of Potsdamer Platz. By now, none of it seems any more or less real than the images on the screen.The truth is, Sunday turned out to be rough. General wear and tear began taking its toll, and many of the films I saw were disappointments. I walked out of three films that failed to move me (Yasukuni, Divizionz) and in one case simply put me to sleep (Asyl - Roof and Park Hotel). The Palast competition screening of Isabel Coixet's Elegy was a success, but my favorite of the day, the European premiere of Heavy Metal in Baghdad, 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.
But let's talk about Elegy first. Isabel Coixet (My Life Without Me) adapted Philip Roth's The Dying Animal with Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz. Among the film's themes: aging, death, family, fear of commitment, and what a poet played by Dennis Hopper calls the invisibility of beauty.
"We're not all descended from the Puritans," writer and teacher David Kapesh (Kingsley) explains to Charlie Rose in the opening scenes, and yet his shameless hedonism hasn't made him happy. Long-time lover Patricia Clarkson seems content with their arrangement, but when Kapesh falls for Consuela Castillo, a gorgeous student played by Penelope Cruz, his cynical façade begins to crack. He woos the young woman with charm, culture, and compliments, and soon begins to reconsider what his estranged son (Peter Sarsgaard) calls his "serial tomcatting."
I vastly prefer Kingsley the villainous creep (as he was on display in Friday's Transsiberian), to Kingsley the suave seducer of beauties thirty years his junior. Witnessing his stale Casanova routine -- Goya, contemporary plays, a little tinkling on the piano -- is painful, especially because it works. But it's Cruz, with a shy smile beneath black bangs, who makes the film come alive. She is more generous with her skin than ever before, and eventually, her breasts even become a plot point. When she sheds a single tear while displaying them for Kapesh's benefit, his late conversion to true love becomes almost convincing.
It's a far cry from Kapesh's coddled Upper West Side existence to the dark reality of Heavy Metal in Baghdad. "You want to know where we get our inspiration?" one of the members of Iraq's only metal band asks early in on in the film. "Take a look around. We're living in a heavy metal world."
Founded near the end of Saddam Hussein's regime, Acrassicauda continued to play gigs during the war and U.S. occupation, drawing the attention of the editors of VICE Magazine. Their documentary begins as a celebration of the liberating power of rock'n roll -- see Acrassiacauda rock out, powered by generators, while bombs and gunfire explode outside! -- but soon turns into a much darker portrait of the reality of life in Baghdad and beyond.
Visiting the band in 2006, Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti quickly discovered that life outside the Green Zone was nearly impossible, with lethal danger, unspeakable levels of fear, and upwards of 300 dead every day. Equipped with flak jackets and a security detail of twelve shooters, they found that the band's practice room and instruments had been destroyed by a SCUD missile. More recently, they caught up with Acrassiacauda in Damascus, where they had become Syria's first heavy metal refugees. VICE Films and VBS.tv help them to put on a show and record a demo, but life as they knew it, their dreams, and their music, had become just another victim of the Iraq War.
