Berlin Round Up III: “Rage,” “Mammoth” Surface, “Treeless” The Fest’s Best So Far?, More

The magazine wasn’t much nicer to Sally Potter’s “Rage,” which features a performance by Jude Law as a transsexual. “It’s just as well Jude Law looks good as a transsexual,” Screen said. “Because there’s little else on offer for the audience in Sally Potter’s amateurish and self-indulgent fashion-industry satire and murder mystery, except perhaps the emotion that gives the film its name.” Variety felt the film’s main offering wasn’t only Law’s aesthetically pleasing transexualism, but both the “novelty of seeing Jude Law in drag and Judi Dench smoking a spliff.” Otherwise, “‘Rage’s’ absurd story about murder on the catwalk, told entirely through straight-to-camera monologs, reps a tiresome 94 minutes.”

indieWIRE‘s Brian Brooks was at the film’s press conference, where Potter explained in regard to “Rage”: “I don’t think [the film] is about the camera, it’s about the person behind the camera. We live in a society that fetishizes appearance.” “For her inspiration, Sally looked internally when creating the film’s characters utilizing a somewhat esoteric method in developing the film,” Brooks said. “‘I don’t know where [the characters] come from. I suppose I met thm in the solitary process of writing the relationship of thought which is anarchic in addition to experiences in life.’”

As for the dozens of other films that have premiered, The Auteurs offers a list of ten films from the first days of the festival, arranged in order of preference.  Their best bet is So Yong Kim’s “Treeless Mountain,” which many have already seen: “[The film] premiered at Toronto last September, but so far I’ve yet to see a better film than this subtle, carefully observed semi-autobiographical story of two Korean sisters struggling to get by without their parents.”

The Auteurs’ second choice, Asghar Farhadi’s “About Elly,” didn’t impress Variety‘s Alissa Simon to quite the same degree.  She noted that “while not equaling the depth of characterization of Farhadi’s previous films, ‘About Elly’ takes the complexity of his storytelling to a fascinating level. However, the variable quality of the thesping also prevents the pic from being his best work.” Screen‘s Lee Marshall begged to differ, calling “About Elly” “one of the most remarkable Iranian films to surface in the last few years.” 

Other films that screened include Catherine Breillat’s “Bluebeard” (which Screen called “an austere, low-budget video-shot venture, this quietly surreal Freudian fable is an elegant exercise of style with a sly humorous undertow”), David Lee Miller’s “My Suicide” (which Variety found was an experiment that’s “results are exasperating and yet feel genuine (barring one major slip-up)”), and “Bellamy,” which The Hollywood Reporter‘s Honeycutt calls “a surprisingly flat-footed film from the master of French cinema, Claude Chabrol.”

Check back with indieWIRE for more coverage from the festival, which continues through the weekend.