Golden Bear Buzz for Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky
Halfway through the festival, the word in the lobbies, cafés and screening rooms around Potsdamer Platz was that this year's Berlinale was still missing a revelatory movie that was guaranteed to sweep the Bears on Saturday. The omnipresent question "Seen anything good?" was usually answered with a shrug or the fluttering hand that is international sign language for "so-so." Did I really fly all this way just to find out that There Will Be Blood is still the strongest movie around?The tenor changed yesterday with the screening of Mike Leigh's comedy Happy Go Lucky, which had critics buzzing about its "brilliant" script and sophisticated laughs. I wouldn't know, because I was too caught up writing my previous dispatch to watch the clock, and the ushers at the Palast are proper Germans who can't be talked into opening the doors once the movie started -- they have their orders, and that's that. Repeat screenings filled up quickly, too, and now I'm really hoping for an even stronger contender before Saturday, lest I managed to miss the winner.
Night and Day
Speaking of strong contenders: Tuesday started with Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo's (Woman on the Beach) latest, which is every bit as ineffably profound and amusing as his previous films. Night and Day is Hong's first movie to be set outside of Korea and follows the escapades of Kim Sung-nam (Kim Yeong-ho), a young painter who flees to Paris after he is accused of smoking marijuana. He stays in a guest house, cries on the phone with his wife, and falls in love with a pixie-like Korean woman who also has artistic aspirations."You have real talent," Kim tells her. "The world is full of people without talent who are successful because they push through to the end, but all they can do is repeat clichés."
It's obvious that Hong works hard to avoid clichés at every turn: when Kim climbs Montmatre, the camera looks out over the city without turning to show us Sacre-Coeur, and there isn't a single shot of the Eiffel Tower in the movie. Instead, the film's loose, half-written, half-improvised feel expands on themes of fidelity and selfishness with a smattering of religion.
Beautiful grace notes, often caught in trademark zooms and pans, add mystery and whimsy: Kim finds money on the street, catches a bird, or dreams of kissing his lover's feet. He meets a North Korean and the two arm wrestle. When Kim wins, his opponent suggests they try the other arm. At 145 minutes, Night and Day is Hong Sang-soo's longest film to date, but I would gladly have followed him through Paris for another hour or two.
Standard Operating Procedure
Standard Operating Procedure, the new film by Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris (The Fog of War), is a much more difficult film to embrace. A detailed investigation into the infamous photographs of atrocities committed by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison, the film's narrow focus is both its point and its weakness. Anybody who has been following Morris' New York Times blog knows that he has been obsessed with the close reading of photographs -- what they seem to say, what they prove, and what they leave out. With reenactments, animations that line the photos up on a timeline, and testimony by many of the soldiers directly involved in the scandal (Lynndie England, Janis Karpinksi, Sabrina Harman), the film tries to reconstruct the events behind the images: prisoners forced into stress positions, attacked by dogs, sexually humiliated, tortured, and killed.At the press conference, Morris made it clear that he was quite conscious of the limitations of his approach. Standard Operation Procedure does not attempt contextualize the events. The political impact of the pictures, questions of culpability by higher ranks, and more widespread torture not caught on film are at best hinted at and lie safely outside Morris' purview.
Contentious journalists also asked pointed questions about his use of dramatic reenactments and a strangely inappropriate score by Danny Elfman. "Consciousness is a reenactment," Morris countered, and reassured us that he was in search of truth. He defended the music -- which inadvertently puts one in the mind of a Tim Burton film -- by pointing out that he pictured Standard Operation Procedure as a "non-fiction horror movie." There can be no doubt that S.O.P. offers a meticulously detailed account of a very dark chapter of American history, but it stands to reason that Ghosts of Abu Ghraib and Taxi to the Dark Side tell more accessible, wide-reaching, and all-out infuriating stories about the same topic.
Jesus Christ Savior
The day ended with a late-night screening of Peter Geyer's Jesus Christ Savior (Jesus Christus Erlöser), a document of Klaus Kinski's infamous 1971 performance at Berlin's Deutschlandhalle. The one-man show featuring Kinski's own adaptation of the New Testament was frequently interrupted by hecklers, prompting the easily provoked actor to fly off the handle in ways familiar to anybody who has seen Werner Herzog's My Best Fiend (which also contains a short scene from the performance.) After several abandoned attempts, Kinski -- wearing red boots, purple pants, and a wildly patterned shirt -- made the "riff-raff" leave the hall, only to give a complete late-night performance for a few hundred remaining hard-core fans. The text of the Gospel according to Klaus itself, trying to reclaim Jesus for the "hippies, junkies, prostitutes, outcasts, and underdogs," seems tame today, but Kinski's furious, emphatic performance and magnetic on-stage presence have lost nothing of their power.Tune in tomorrow for Madonna's directing debut Filth and Wisdom and more.
Movies in This Entry
- Night and Day. ****
- Standard Operating Procedure. ***
- Jesus Christus Erloeser. ****
