That Kind of Summer
They did it: With red carpet walks, screenings exclusively in cinemas, director and star Q&As, et cetera, and so on, the Berlin International Film Festival happened for real.
Well, okay, most people strutting their more or less deluxe wardrobes weren't exactly the kind of celebrities one would expect on that special strip of fabric, in the same way the talent talks were rarefied affairs as they usually happened only after the premiere screenings—pre-recorded messages were the more common way for the filmmaking teams to say Hi! to the audience. Which is to say: The Berlinale might have happened in the real world, but how real a festival it was is open to discussion.
For many, it felt more like a ghost event, with the Berlinale's center, the Potsdamer Platz, looking post-apocalyptically empty from start till finish, even when audiences were queuing to get into their screenings. But: People indeed came en masse for the movies, and the venues felt always as packed as it gets with 50% occupancy. Nevertheless, no festival feeling—not so much because there was comparatively little to fête on offer (there was enough to make the trip worthwhile, and yet not much), but because everything seemed to make human interaction impossible.
In terms of locale, the Berlinale remained screwed, as the Potsdamer Platz Arkaden, the main space for a quick bite as well as key provider of cafés galore to meet and talk, was still under reconstruction, which meant that there was barely a place left for some socializing, with the remaining options more on the dire side. Tellingly, the supermarket in the Arkaden basement was always empty—normally, it's teeming with people buying snacks or going shopping for their breakfasts, as they stay maybe with friends or in some apartments instead of a costlier hotel. This telling detail suggests that not only was there nary a space to socialize, but also few people to socialize with—not only absent were the hordes of buyers and sellers and national film institute representatives and what have you that would normally attend the simultaneous European Film Market (the EFM, unlike the festival, was moved online), but also masses of critics, cinephiles, et cetera. Some friends from the film club circles didn't even bother to think about attending, saying that with their accreditations it was already difficult enough to get tickets under normal circumstances, suspecting that this year it would be almost impossible.
One also wonders how many journalists passed on this year's edition, especially after a very late change in the access regulations: Critics had to present a fresh COVID test every day if they wanted to attend the press screenings; the reason given for this questionable decision was the assumption that critics would run around more than anybody else and were therefore a bigger danger than the rest. The reality is that critics tend to remain where the press screenings happen, which is usually for most sections the Potsdamer Platz (the main section for which they would have to leave that space is Generation, which is a sidebar sad to say few care to look at). If one would have kept the press screenings in a somewhat structured way at the Potsdamer Platz (which means essentially at the CinemaxX multiplex as the CineStar is still out of commission), the press would barely have moved around. Probably, the festival's scheduling had already been done by the time this decision was made based on the then-current COVID-developments. That a lot of journalists felt threatened by this probably didn't matter to the security bureau of the KBB, the Berlinale's organizing entity—expediency did. But what did this mean in practical terms? Because critics had to be tested daily, even triple-vaccinated ones (who could otherwise enter other screenings without a test), it meant that a critic could arrive in Berlin and get tested positive on day one or two, resulting in a quarantine she or he had to pay for while being cut off from her or his means of making a living—not to mention that daily publications, for example, would then have to come up with an idea of how to replace that person. Writers not working for a daily (paper, blog, whatever) often skipped the press screening and went to the public screenings, as those could be attended sans problems with proof of a boostered full vaccination—becoming in turn potentially the problem the KBB security bureau tried to prevent. The Berlinale therefore made yet another example of the FRG's widely failed COVID-politics which were rarely developed with a longer view on matters and communicated in a way that always felt arbitrary and riddled with contradictions.
A telling detail about the organizing entity's general attitude came courtesy of the ticketing system, which didn't allow for anybody to select a specific seat—one had to take what one was given. That people for various reasons might have specific seating needs (e.g. people with leg problems) was something nobody either thought or simply cared about. Which, again, resulted in something that as a mere thought should have freaked out the security bureau: once the lights went down, quite a bit of moving around through the venues began, ranging from people seated far to the sides moving en block more towards the middle where the view was better, to people moving somewhere else altogether, to couples going against the only-every-other-seat-rule to sit together. By taking away the chance at a choice by getting the tickets the organizers created the Omicron-friendly commotion they tried to prevent. And, no, usually the ushers at the venues didn't say too much. It was, in short, the opposite of the Venice Film Festival where one could select one's seat but where even during the screenings the ushers kept even an eye on people staying at their seats and wearing their mascherine ffp2. These problems also pestered the Berlinale's creative team. To give but one example: Despite also getting tested every day they were for example not allowed to attend a press screening in case they might need to refresh their memory of a film.
Everything Will Be OK
But for all these complaints about uncaring organizational aspects: Yes, the Berlinale 2022 could happen because political entities ranging from federal to communal took an active interest in the matter and developed with the creative team (which had to present a safety concept) a way for the festival to happen (the KBB is actually owned by the German State). Which is why the Berlinale 2022 did happen in cinemas and with a red carpet and Q&As, however hampered, and why the other major winter festivals didn't: because they happen in countries where the state does not show a similar interest in an art event, and the economics connected with it.
Let's be optimistic and trust in the way these viruses tend to develop, which means that pretty soon COVID-19 should turn from pandemic to endemic, with life getting back to more or less what we tend to deem normal, and the Berlinale 2023 happening as it always did in recent decades, give or take some small adjustments.
Then there still will be the problem of the festival's programming.
In the third year for artistic director Carlo Chatrian it feels more and more like a desert of sameness where strong contrast would be desirable—something that has now been noted by others, in a good part due to the widely perceived mediocrity if not outright irrelevance of the 2022 Competition. Its films, once again, looked grosso modo as if they came from the same arthouse qualité shelf. The gems, like Ulrich Seidl’s autumnal exercise in melancholia and the horrible ludicrousness of age, Rimini, and Mikhaël Hers' gently utopian vision of people finding ways for their broken lives to get mended in kindness and love, Les passagers de la nuit. The also-rans, like Phyllis Nagy's likeable Call Jane, a tribute to the Abortion Counseling Service of Women's Liberation made depressingly timely by recent development in places ranging from the United States to Poland; Andreas Dresen's fundamentally decent, saccharine-grim Guantanmo tale about a spunky mother trying to get her son out of the US's torture facility, Rabiye Kurnaz gegen George W. Bush; and Michael Koch's vérité-rooted Catholic death melodrama in Heimatfilm garb, Drii Winter. And the horrors, like François Ozon's latest bit of Fassbinder dumbing-down, Peter von Kant, and Hong Sangsu's Sosŏlga-ŭi yŏngwa, which looks and moves like yet another Hong Sangsu film on the threshold of self-parody.
The lone exceptions were also the Competition's sole masterpieces, works both that counter any preconceived genre notions, opting instead for pure formal freedom. Ban Ritthi's Everything Will Be OK is a spiritually loaded, philosophical tract on Evil and how to overcome it, realized as a free-floating narrative in which clay figurines in dioramas straight from the mind of Orwell are mixed with split-screen-heavy appropriated footage collages, making for a form that infuses a fairy tale with multi-channel installations. Leonora addio, Paolo Taviani's mix of historical reconstruction and literary adaptation, is a paean to his late brother Vittorio and 64 (!) years of making films together, done as meditation on death, late works, and all that follows here on earth after someone has passed on, apropos the strange fate of Luigi Pirandello's ashes and two stories of his dealing with death—one about the strange games time plays while one dies, the other the last story he finished. (Let's mention here only in passing if lovingly another Pirandello-adaptation screened in Berlin, albeit the Forum: Éric Baudelaire's Une fleur à la bouche, whose artistic virtues are surprisingly similar to those of Taviani.)
That the Competition's standout titles were its formally boldest, most inventive, audio-visually most enchanting, seductive, and sumptuous works doesn't preclude the one question the Berlinale wasn't able to answer in hands-on terms: What's the problem with having films in the Competition that are more classical in their aesthetics, more popular in their tone, as they add variety and complexity to the whole, not to mention that they might delight and enlighten those bored by or indifferent to the treats deemed more refined by their apologists.
Gangubai Kathiawadi
Let's be very clear about one thing. This is not some quixotically reformist thought—this is merely an act of remembrance, a return to a time when the festival (festivals as such?) mattered more. The year Jean-Luc Godard won the Golden Bear for Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965), the competition featured also such rustic treats as Elliot Silverstein's Cat Ballou (1965), Gunnar Höglund's Kungsleden (1964), and Giuliano Montaldo's Una bella grinta (1965). Godard's was an avant-garde deemed necessary at that moment and was thus supported, controversial discussions included. If the Berlinale's 2022 Competition entires that some might consider especially edgy, avant-garde, or relevant to the general zeitgeist had a broader basis in a more general discussion of cinema and aesthetics today (as had Antonioni, Godard, et cetera, back in their days), they'd have won their accolades even if their competition included treats like Sañjaya Līlā Bhansālī's comme d'habitude glossily resplendent true crime epic on a Bombay brothel madam turned gangland figure with a proto-feminist agendum, Gaṅgūbāī Kāṭhiyāvāṛī (Gangubai Kathiawadi), or Quentin Dupieux's surreal essay on time, fate and human foible, Incroyable mais vrai, to mention but two titles relegated to the Berlinale Special sidebar. And it's not as if there hadn't been other films around to premiere, as some folks suggested: Patrice Leconte's absolutely staggering crystallization of Georges Simenon's universe in a single film, Maigret, screened in January at Unifrance Rendez-vous in Paris, a quite festive market for French films, and would thus have been easily available for Berlin—instead, it simply opened in late February in French theatres; also, it's difficult to imagine that Wojciech Smarzowski and his team wouldn't have wanted to see Wesele (2021) have its world premiere at the Berlinale, considering that this full-frontal assault on the lies and delusions of PiS-Poland talks a lot about the shared past and present of Poland and Germany, ranging from the Holocaust to current economic dependency and corruption. This should have been a must-have title for the festival, but instead, it opened already last autumn back home to rave reviews, serious box office, and massive controversies. Who knows what else one would have been able to find...
One suspects that the current attitude towards popular cinema as well as formally more classical films is encapsulated in an especially embarrassing moment of Alice Agneskirchner's Komm mit mir in das Cinema – Die Gregors (Come with Me to the Cinema: The Gregors), an homage to the founders of the Forum section, Erika and Ulrich Gregor, that went very wrong on just-about every level. Let's not get into all the problems the film has and mistakes it makes; instead let's stay with one moment towards the end. Almost out of nowhere, the film starts talking about the legendary Midnight Screenings at the Forum back in the 80s and 90s when the latest in action and comedy often from Hong Kong but also from India and other places were greeted with screams of delight and thunderous applause in an invariably packed Delphi theatre. A spirited Erika Gregor compares a then-current Hong Kong action star with a Hollywood action star of the same period (and of little repute among the film cultural establishment of the day), and says that they also thought about showing these films in order to offer something for the local Chinese audience, of which many seem to have worked in restaurants, making the late hour of the screenings a necessity—cut to masses of people storming up the stairs of the Delphi, with an interviewer stopping a Chinese man who indeed works in a restaurant and says all the appropriate things with the expected accent. All of which makes one of the Forum's most memorable aspects—that Erika and Ulrich Gregor had a broader, more diverse and inclusive idea of cinema than most people working at the festival today—look like a benevolent joke, as if the elites were offering the lower classes some doltish entertainment. That's how the likes of Agneskircher today look at popular cinema and the general audience, but this is not how the Gregors looked and look at it.
All of which is to say but this: Right now, one gets the feeling that the current Berlinale, like so many other festivals, is protecting a zeitgeist or avant-garde that few deem relevant to the popular or for the populace.
Miloš Pušić's Heroji radničke klase comes to mind here, suddenly, with its laborer who has enough of the exploitation and disdain he experiences day in day out in turbo capitalist Serbia—and drops a slab of concrete weighing a few tons unto his cheating and murderous employer.
Flux Gourmet
Which was not the only film that in a bizarre way invited readings of absurdist festival culture (self-)reflection. Even closer to the matter were Denis Côté's Un été comme ça and Peter Strickland's Flux Gourmet—two frivolous fantasies, one kinkily thoughtful and one comically bleak, both about retreats for people of a more particular kind: women with sex urges the conservative consensus can't deal with, and sound performance artists too off for anything but the residency paddock. Both films talk about shamelessly bourgeois constructions, even if the participants are sometimes from society's lower strata.
In Un été comme ça (That Kind of Summer), three women are invited to deal in a curiously unspecified fashion with their sexual predilections under the guidance of a substitute therapist and a social worker-factotum (the set-up's lone male figure). In one case, the extreme sexual drive is connected to a story of abuse; with the rest, it is what it is. They talk. On their day off, the women all go for the kind of adventures they crave. In the end, little has changed, which in many ways is a good thing. It's all about enjoying the time and rest, and learning to accept that one is not a lesser person just because one enjoys blowing a whole football squad. Sure enough, Côté got accused of pandering to male fantasies—an argument that makes the actresses and every woman involved in the film's making look like imbeciles (things get especially nasty when it's men making that argument).
Maybe the question of gender and sexuality is more complicated than many nowadays would like it to be? Ruth Beckermann's smartly opaque bit of ultra brainy casting porn, Mutzenbacher, which sports men on a huge pink sofa reading excerpts from Josefine Mutzenbacher oder Die Geschichte einer Wienerischen Dirne von ihr selbst erzählt (1906), followed by highly intimate discussions of the texts, was with disturbing regularity read as an exposé on “toxic masculinity”—and not so much as a collection of pleas for an unreasonable love, as the film's working title has it. Sure, that the film's source, an anonymously published Viennese classic of pornographic literature, has an underage girl as its sometimes naïve and othertimes wily heroine doesn't make anything easier, especially these days. One cannot save the book from the possibility of being read as a pedophile fantasy by pointing out that it is a pretty powerful satire on the corrupted core of Viennese culture during the twilight years of the Austro-Hungarian empire, as well as a valuable document of the period's language and mores (something Beckermann mentions). It is thanks to Beckermann's curiosity and refusal to judge anybody (the man do that themselves) that one does get a sense of sexuality's vastness—because, in some ways, it's also about Beckermann's own power trip as the invisible director telling her casting subjects what to do while never protecting them from their own demons and angels.
Curiosity combined with a delightful sense of 70s Golden Age porn's textual sensuality also makes Un été comme ça such a wilfully difficult to digest treat. Both therewith suggest what a festival should also be: a dangerous playground for the mind. Which is also to say that a good part of the films' somewhat simplistic readings are due to the cozily unchallenging, intellectually operose surroundings in which they were presented. Flux Gourmet, all the while—and all the way another fabulous example of Stricklandian porn-pulp-camp Baroque—offers a glimpse at how probably quite a few of the festival’s films (particularly in the Forum) got made. Three artists seemingly chained to each other for life work as a collective creating sound-catering performances—crazy stuff with food happens on stage whose chuckdihack brouhaha hymns get blasted unto the audience. The trio were accepted for a residency during which they're supposed to create a new piece whose different development stages are to be present weekly (followed by an orgy during which the attendees turn fuckers in order to express their appreciation for the art consumed). Matters get only too brutally realistic once the curator of the whole affair wants to be critically creative and gets insulted when those pesky and ungrateful artists simply ignore her sound advice, as she does know what's best for any given artwork created on her behalf. That everything ends well in a carnivorous ecstasy of merry murder seems utterly logical.
At the latest when the Curator gets obsessed the subject of using a flanger and tries to cajole the trio into following her will, the film can profitably watched as a documentary about all the things that happen in all those film labs and campuses, and that also happen at certain festivals where the programmers know best (Berlin, one has to say, being not one of them—so far, no nasty stories about re-edits to satisfy this or that person's demands). This is, of course, not as such what Strickland's elegant allegory is about, but it's difficult to miss that dimension. It also seems almost unkind to get hung up on such slightly petty thoughts apropos a film that's so bombastoliciously boisterous and gleefully garish, such a pleasure to behold, such rollicking fun. Imagine the heavenly hellish havoc it could have wrecked in the Competition!