The Teachers' Lounge (İlker Çatak).
Following a year that was widely seen as lackluster for major premieres at the big film festivals—though certainly many excellent films found their ways to local theaters and living rooms—2023 has had an unsteady start. After a mostly forgettable Sundance, the marquee titles at February’s Berlin International Film Festival did not remedy this lack of excitement, though its limited number of headliners is possibly attributable to the impact of the COVID pandemic on film production. Industry coverage frequently elevates the sales potential or news of these higher-profile movies, projecting a discourse that these festivals are, above all, marketplaces for commercial cinema. But to prioritize the market in a space intended for variety, quality, and curation—that is, a showcase for a cinema of diverse makers, subjects, genres, and formats—is to poison the most visible platforms for the art with the insidious and reductive logic of the box office and streaming metrics.
This year’s Berlinale bucks this trend of merely premiering big films that will be prominently released with or without a festival spotlight. Many major films choose to wait for Cannes, Venice, or Toronto to start their public lives, closer to the summer and fall lead-up to awards campaigns. That can prove an advantage for Berlin, perhaps positioned too early in the year to premiere some titles, but which is also liberated to program mid-level and smaller films more freely across its many sections. So suffice it to say that some of the best films at the festival this year—and there were many good ones, but, continuing the sense of a wider drought, few great—may not be coming to a theater (or streamer) near you. But for this reason they are all the more important to highlight and seek out. They speak for a vitality of the medium at a moment when it seems like its productivity and overall quality is at a winded, recuperating lull.
Our Body (Claire Simon).
Extraordinarily clear-eyed and heartbreaking, Claire Simon’s Our Body, a nearly three-hour documentary surveying the astonishing range of women’s health issues treated at a Parisian hospital, was far and away the best film I encountered. Along with İlker Çatak’s nervy, pressure-cooker drama of school policing, The Teachers’ Lounge, it was a work of such strength that I wish that it had been programmed in the festival’s main competition rather than in a sidebar (Our Body in the Forum, and The Teachers’ Lounge in the Panorama). Starting with an anonymous teen questioned for an abortion, then going through reproductive challenges, births, and cancer—including the director’s own, as Simon puts herself in the same position as her subjects and is filmed receiving a devastating diagnosis—the film means to compassionately identify the life-risking challenges faced and endured by the female body. Locating the core of her film in observed doctor-patient consultations, Simon emphasizes the communication and receipt of life-altering information. Underlined throughout is the empowered, routine, and dutiful humanity of the doctor’s role and the highly individual consequences for the patient. A scene of a young Spanish woman learning from her doctor’s halting, inadequate explanation in her own language—assisted by phone translation—that her cancer will very likely prevent her ever having children is but one of this essential film’s many scenes of rich empathy and almost unbearable sorrow.
In Mad Fate, director Cheang Soi explores the fissures of the human mind in an entirely different, extravagantly elaborated type of film. Well-being isn’t only the domain of humanist documentaries—the cinema has room for all shapes and sizes, including this thriller of frantic, comic morbidity. Cheang takes for his heroes two men on the precipice of self-destruction: a fortune teller (Lam Ka-tung) beset by foresight that keeps his nerves ragged and his sense of responsibility and guilt off the charts; and a mentally unbalanced young man (Yeung Lok Man) with a history of violence drawn closer and closer to murderous impulses. “Fate wants you to murder,” exclaims the fortune teller, “fate wants me to go insane.” He tries to alter the young man’s fated narrative by directing the mise-en-scène, reenacting fears and frantically redecorating his home with charms. Throughout, Cheang’s picture pirouettes unevenly, if boldly, from shambling, desperate comedy to the edge of fatalist darkness. In the dimming luminescence of Hong Kong genre cinema, Mad Fate is a rare shining light: The MilkyWay logo that precedes it—the film is produced by Johnnie To, with whom Cheang has had a long relationship—now feels like a mark of nostalgic longing for when this kind of movie was the norm.
Mad Fate (Cheang Soi).
Sundance-style independent cinema also seems to be in a state of uncertainty. Though the American festival finished a few weeks ago, its traces could still be felt in Berlin, where The Adults showcased the kind of indie-film roots—the return of the prodigal child, oddball character behavior, the slow excavation of a buried family history, small-town setting—that feels like a throwback, if not retrograde. But Dustin Guy Defa’s second feature has two very strong things going for it. First is a quietly tragic and subtly funny Michael Cera performance, particularly as his character chases a gambling high, and the other is a millennial family dynamic that is so intentionally broken that it feels like a self-reflexive dramatization of the failings of this very type of American movie. In their youth, three siblings (played by Cera, Sophia Lillis, and Hannah Gross) used to engage in insular performative games of dance, song, accents, and mockery. Now partially estranged in the years following their mother’s death, they find their bonds broken and their antics a hollow shell of what they used to mean and achieve. Performances that once entertained now come off as abrasive attempts at intimacy and an escape from emotional vulnerability.
In the center of Defa’s conventional setup is a withering portrait of something that once worked and now barely works, that may not ever really work again—the poignant, playacted routines of what once was. This saw a haunting, personal echo in The Plough, by Best Director-winner Philippe Garrel, which is about the dissolution of a family-run puppet troupe after the patriarch and leader dies. Since each of this character’s children are played by Garrel’s own, the film modestly and without insistence reflects on the legacy and (dis)continuation of the cinema and the director’s multigenerational relationship to the art. His love for the medium is especially evoked by Renato Berta’s 35mm photography, which marks the director’s first color film in over a decade. Not on par with the Garrel’s other recent novelette-style movies, though not without lovely grace notes, The Plough still feels surprisingly at peace despite its obvious and fragile self-reflection. After suffering personal losses and the troupe breaking up, the characters find lightness through acceptance, and hope after a trail of hardships.
Order (Sohrab Shahid Saless, 1980).
While Garrel’s film reflected on whether cinema’s past will be carried into the future, a strong case for such continuity was made by the Forum section’s retrospective, which revives difficult-to-see films programmed in past editions. One such film was Korhan Yurtsever’s Black Head (1979), the story of a Turkish worker bringing his wife and young children to join him in Germany, only to find that his enthusiastic embrace of the Deutsche Mark cannot counteract the alienation and ostracization the rest of his family faces. Bare-bones production values and an ever-increasing didacticism (pro-union and women’s political empowerment, but also pro-patriarchy) lend the film a naive, yet unabashed, insistent force—it’s possibly most compelling as an artifact of its time. It was banned by the Turkish government upon its completion, and Yurtsever moved to West Germany in exile and didn’t make another film for nearly a decade. Sohrab Shahid Saless, an Iranian director who made two beautiful features at home before working in exile in the FRG, was also featured in the Forum retrospective. His 1980 film Order is a bone-dry portrait of an out-of-work civil engineer (Heinz Lieven) whose extreme apathy results in insomnia, feeble attempts at the employment office, disaffected interactions with his wife, and banal dreams of riding the bus with a grocery checkout girl. Is he severely depressed or a bravely impassive rebel in a deadening, capitalist West Germany? Likely both, as Saless’s earlier film, Far from Home (1975, restored and presented at least year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato), a coolly observed story of the isolation and sorrow of Turkish guest workers in West Germany, makes clear. In its admirably precise and uncomplicated style, Order wavers between evoking the alienated routines of a film by Chantal Akerman and the deadpan comedy of early Jim Jarmusch. Like so much in life, sometimes you don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.
Of course, the Berlinale being Germany’s preeminent film festival, one should also expect a heaping serving of the nation’s new films. Notable at this year’s edition was the simultaneous premiere of work by several of the directors associated with the “Berlin School”: Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, and Christoph Hochhäusler. Schanelec’s Music, which won Best Screenplay, is a film whose simultaneously crystalline and diaphanous connections to the Oedipus myth, if receptively embraced, could liberate rather than frustrate viewing. My mileage varied—I find this filmmaker speaks a cinematic language I don’t quite understand, yet feels part of the same language group I speak conversationally, that of Bresson and post-’70s Jean-Luc Godard. The mysteries Schanelec poses are often for me less generative than simply evocative and harmoniously presented, an abstract pleasure perhaps alluded to by the film’s title. I leave the interpretation of Music to others, but the sculptural beauty of leads Aliocha Schneider and Agathe Bonitzer, the film’s bracing ellipses, and constantly unexpected choice of what movement, image, and sound (particularly Doug Tielli’s stunning original songs) will express a moment’s essence are without a doubt an encounter with cinema’s great capacity for approaching the unknown.
Till the End of the Night (Christoph Hochhäusler).
While neither Music nor Christian Petzold’s Silver Bear-winning Afire—a slender, impeccably directed, and quite funny character study of a morose, socially and creatively stymied author—will surprise fans of the filmmakers, the newest film from Christoph Hochhäusler, his first since 2014, is refreshingly far less of a known quantity. His Till the End of the Night was one of several genre films blessedly balancing Berlin’s competition. Its premise is reminiscent of Maurice Pialat’s Police, also using a crime-movie framework to present a pressurized relationship study. In an emotionally convoluted setup, Leni (Thea Ehre, who won Best Supporting Performer) is a trans woman let out of prison early in order to get close to an old friend (Michael Sideris) who’s running a black-market e-commerce service. As part of the sting, Leni lives with Robert (Tomicin Ziegler), a cop working undercover on the case, but who also was previously in a relationship with her. Their fake relationship mirrors their actual one, and this blurring generates tension and intriguing emotional messiness, much more than the film’s genre side, whose pleasures are unexpectedly, disappointingly downplayed. Compellingly dense in story and style, it also has a tight-fisted atmosphere created by the gorgeous, gray-shaded, and layered cinematography. This is a reminder of what a cinema-steeped director like Hochhäusler—who co-founded and co-edits the film magazine Revolver—can do: You can't but feel the norms of cinema being tweaked and torqued under his sharp gaze.
Though not part of the Berlin School, its cinematic uncle (if I can dare to call him that) Dominik Graf was also around town. The prodigious genre master had a new film, Melting Ink, in the ambitious and self-contained Critics’ Week, which intends to serve as an alternative to the Berlinale. This counter-festival stance finds an echo in the selection of Melting Ink, which serves as a reverse-shot to Graf’s last film, the Erich Kästner adaptation Fabian: Going to the Dogs (2021). The long and engrossing new film is a documentary about the writers like Kästner who stayed in Germany during the Nazi era, each with varying degrees of activity ranging from silence to benign creativity to regime endorsement. As can be expected from a director whose feverishly active, densely plotted works in both fiction and nonfiction recognize with cynical sobriety the grayscales of human morality, Melting Ink is not a mere chronicle of cowardice and collaboration. Instead, through its examples it finds deep ambiguities: The unknown interiority of the authors, the traces of depression and self-admonishment for those who survived the war, the vanished motivations and thoughts of those who died earlier. The artists who remain and work within authoritarian regimes leave behind unsettled legacies and unresolved questions that prevent easy judgment and the presumptive arrogance that the past is sealed off from the more enlightened present.
In the Blind Spot (Ayşe Polat).
Indeed, one could find a contemporary atmosphere of anxiety in the shadow threats of repression in German-Kurdish director Ayşe Polat’s In the Blind Spot, a chillingly successful staging of a fictional investigation into Kurdish disappearances in Turkey. It is told in three chapters and with three perspectives: that of a German documentary crew filming the story; a secret police agent following their source; and the police state apparatus itself. Each is mediated by and interwoven with a particular filming technique: documentary, vlogging, and surveillance. The stakes are heightened by the living memory of those who have been killed, and an understanding of the crimes required to eradicate that memory. In the Blind Spot is a work of ruthless construction that starts ominously and with each pivot grows more desperate and despairing. Perspective changes at the outset of each chapter variously echo the uneasy omniscience of watchers: here, there’s always someone filming, and someone filming that, and that—a recursion which posits a paranoid world trembling between voyeuristic control and suffocating and unremitting surveillance. The direction of that recursion seems to head not to revelation but towards death—the body count of the film is surprisingly high. Yet the film ends with a hauntingly ambiguous suggestion that two young women, a Kurd and a Turk, might together escape violence by fleeing off camera, finally out of sight. But, one wonders, can they ever escape a camera’s gaze? And without a camera to film their faces, to record their stories, can memories be transmitted and justice performed?
Polat gets at a central tension that permeates our daily mediated existence: The same tools used to witness, remember, and celebrate can also be used to track, falsify, and control. That is but one of many reasons why a film festival exists: To show the many ways in which the tools of moviemaking can be used to observe rather than to judge, to create rather than destroy, and to liberate rather than repress.