Berlinale’s Mixed Bag, and then Some Diamonds in the Rough: Berlin Critic’s Notebook

A scene from Ivy Ho’s Claustrophobia. Image courtesy of the Berlin International Film Festival.

Outside, moments after that screening, came reports that Berlinale director Deiter Kosslick had, at a meeting the previous day, declared himself “infuriated” by the general negativity of the press this year - by all accounts, a Variety mid-fest report had especially riled him - and wondered why these pesky critics bothered to come, if only to make the same carping complaints every February?

For the record, we were mostly asking ourselves much the same question (More than one journalist had told me they were frightened to write too negatively on the festival for a second or third time, for fear their editors would decide, next year, that it was a waste of resources, and not send them). The fact is, those criticisms remain the same each year because they’re valid each year. The Competition IS too big. It DOES lack a sense of direction or purpose. The solution is not simple, but some steps can certainly be taken: were Kosslick to cut the number of films in contention for the Golden Bear - to, say, sixteen - and make more of the “Berlinale Special” section (or alternatively, devise another, altogether new strand), he’d be doing much to counter the most persistent complaints.

As a result, I have great fondness for the Panorama section of the Berlinale. By far the gay-est section in an already gay-friendly event, its glittery fabulousness stands as a spangly corrective to the po-faced acetisicism of the Forum, the mercenary zeal of the European Film Market. Venturing into Panorama is a little like finding Truman Capote holding court among a convention of bank managers.

As a result, however, one occasionally has a feeling more typical to gay fests - that the sexual orientation of the work too often takes precedence over its actual worth. I remember being astonished, when the section premiered Giuseppe Piccioni’s backstage drama “La Vita che Vorrei” a few years ago, that the film charted the lifespan of an exclusively heterosexual relationship. You almost expected longtime section chief Weiland Speck to introduce it apologetically. (“Meine damen und herren… I’m not sure how this one sneaked through. I’m so sorry. But, to make you feel more comfortable, we’ve spliced some fisting into the third reel…”)

This year, however, the straights mostly let us down. Julie Delpy’s “The Countess” was stymied by some uncertain acting - not least, Delpy’s own - pedestrian plotting, and a Europudding muddle of accents. Sophie Fillieres’ “Un Chat un chat” (AKA “Pardon My French”) started very well, with Chiara Mastroianni as a kind of female Buster Keaton, a morosely impassive neurotic at odds with the world, but lost momentum as it went on. A pity, because the first half-hour was hysterically funny, in a deadpan sort of way.

And “Claustrophobia”, the debut feature from Hong Kong director Ivy Ho, boasted an intriguing premise (albeit one borrowed wholesale from Harold Pinter’s drama “Betrayal”) as a clandestine office romance between a married executive and a bright young woman is told backwards, from their recriminatory breakup through to their flirtatious beginnings. But in place of torrid passion, we were treated to endless scenes of awkward silence between these two badly mismatched people, who never seemed to generate any onscreen chemistry, much less actually fuck. The film looked ravishing, thanks for the most part to the camerawork of the great Taiwanese cinematographer Pin Bing Lee, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s longtime DOP. But rarely has extra-marital sex seemed so perfunctory or unrewarding.

But Panorama’s real highlight was the film perhaps truest to its own, outsider nature: Julian Hernandez’s “Raging Sun, Raging Sky,” a 191-minute, B&W Mexican reverie on homosexual desire that rewarded those with the patience to submit to it. Recalling, at times, such queer landmarks as Genet’s “Un Chant d’Amour” and Ron Peck’s “Nighthawks” and even Gus Van Sant’s “Mala Noche,” it demonstrated with almost every scene not only its maker’s fluent command of the medium, his unerring compositional eye, but also a remarkable sensuality, a feel for the textures of flesh and fabric and concrete, and for the quiet, hidden places in which desire may be sated. At once urgent (sex is very much the engine of this drama), and weirdly endistanced (courtesy of its capital-A arthouse technique), it offered a kind of meditation on what the American novelist Samuel R. Delany once called “the splendor and misery of bodies and cities” - one that built by slow stages to a devastating final hour. If there was a discovery to made at Berlin this year, this was it.