Walking On His Gums, Jürgen Continues:
Restless, I've Loved You So Long, Katyn, The Other Boleyn Girl, and Ballast
German gets a lot of ridicule as a language of runoncompoundwords and achs and dochs, but as anybody who's read their Thomas Mann knows, it's also capable of extraordinary beauty. As the 58th Berlinale winds down, the phrase that's been popping into my mind is "auf dem Zahnfleisch gehen," -- literally, "walking on one's gums," a striking metaphor for the extreme state of fragility and exhaustion I've been feeling and observing in those who are still hanging on and trying to cram in a few more screenings before Saturday's awards ceremony.With a steep drop in temperature and a disappointingly thin schedule, I was most definitely walking on my gums on Thursday. I left the competition screening of Amos Kollek's Restless early to forage for chicken soup and take heroic doses of vitamin C. The story of Mosche, a down-and-out schlemiel living in New York (Moshe Ivgy) and his estranged sharp-shooter son (Ran Danker) was no match for my burgeoning cold.
Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (I've Loved You So Long)
I returned to Potsdamer Platz later for Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (I've Loved You So Long), a drama by novelist-turned-director Phillipe Claudel. The first time we see Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas), she is sitting in a desolate airport café and looks like complete wreck: haggard, ashen, with a thousand yard stare. Her younger sister Lea (Elsa Zylberstein) picks her up and Juliette moves in with her husband and family -- but it takes a while before the backstory trickles out through halting, awkward conversations: Juliette spent fifteen years in prison for killing her own son.Juliette's slow reawakening and eventual redemption through the help of Lea's adorable adopted daughters, her mute father, the family's kind friends, and a parole officer with a heart of gold may sound like the stuff of a Lifetime movie, but Kristin Scott Thomas's performance kept me from fleeing. Twenty years ago, her eyes did wonderful things in Prince's wildly under-appreciated Under the Cherry Moon, and I've Loved You So Long is worth seeing just to watch Juliette recover from that desperate thousand yard stare.
Katyn
In Katyn, screening out of competition, Andrzej Wajda revisits the infamous massacre. In 1940, the Soviet army executed 20,000 Polish prisoners of war in the forest of Katyn, but after the war, the Nazis were blamed for the murders. In cold grey and brown images and with a brooding score by Krzysztof Penderecki, Wadja portrays first the run-up and then the aftermath of the massacre, telling the story of several families. Eventually, in a harrowing climax, he takes us into the forest itself, where we witness the horrifying events from the point of view of those who were killed.The opening scenes, where families are separated, scholars arrested, prisoners deported, and fascists come knocking in the night, are proficiently executed but familiar from the scores of movies already made about World War II. I was much more intrigued with the Orwellian second half of Katyn, in which history is rewritten by the victors. Under Soviet occupation, the official version of the massacre is mercilessly enforced, and anybody who dares to say otherwise or puts the "wrong" date on a gravestone won't be heard from again.
The Other Boleyn Girl
Friday afternoon brought the last big celebrity hoopla before the awards ceremony: Scarlett, Natalie, and Eric were in town, and anybody who wanted to catch them at the press conference or photo call had to skip the movie to line up in time. The Other Boleyn Girl is a lurid costume drama that lacks both the earnestness of Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth and the go-for-broke delirium of its sequel. The film's main goal seemed to be to stick Johannson and Portman in catty scenes together, undress them in soft focus, and show them bathe or be bedded by Bana, who doesn't have much else to do as glowering King Henry.Not that there's anything wrong with that -- and director Justin Chadwick works hard to dress up the historical triangle with everything we expect: the common folk dance, horses thunder, banners flap in the wind, clouds move swiftly above battlements, Johannson's bosom heaves, Portman's lips tremble, and finally, heads roll. A trashy pageant that delivers what it promises, The Other Boleyn Girl is also the perfect prequel to Elizabeth; the final image of the former seems custom-made to line up with the first scenes of the latter.
Ballast
I can tolerate capable entertainment dressed up in historical costumes, but I found the affected minimalism of Ballast difficult to sit through. Lance Hammer's film arrived in Berlin with glowing reviews from Sundance, but as somebody who has spent some time in rural Mississippi and the Delta, I found that this bare-bones story of poverty rang hollow and affected.Shot in a minimalist, handheld style replete with poor focus and jerky jump cuts, Ballast concerns monosyllabic Lawrence (Micheal J. Smith Sr.), whose twin brother commits suicide. After a failed suicide attempt of his own, he grows closer with his brother's son (JimMyron Ross) and the kid's mother (Tarra Riggs). The film trades in small-town clichés -- poverty, drug abuse, convenience store jobs, a gang of criminals who disappear half-way through the film -- but seems know or care too little about its characters to illuminate or empathize with their plight.
- Katyn. ***
- I've Loved You So Long. ***
- The Other Boleyn Girl. **
- Ballast *
