Bear on the run

The 49th Berlin Film Festival is a movable feast

by Jeffrey Gantz

BERLIN -- The 49th Berlin Film Festival has a New Year's Eve feel, not just because it's the last Berlinale of the millennium, but because it's the last one to be based at the Zoo Palast and the area around the Zoo Station, what for 40 years was the center of West Berlin, with the swanky Ku'damm and the symbolic sacred ruin of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche and, of course, the zoo. Berlinale 2000 will move to the new megacomplex in Potsdamer Platz, which, near the old Wall, is central to the reunited Berlin and is being projected as the heart of the new city.

It won't be quite the same -- for one thing, if a film at the new Berlinale Palast is bad, you won't be able to sneak out and visit the hippos. And then the Berlinale itself has always been a kind of zoo, especially for a film-festival rookie. Some 360 movies, the innumerable (and interminable) press conferences, the European Film Market screenings, the parties at the Schauspielhaus and the Colosseum and Planet Hollywood (where Bruce Willis turned DJ), the star-spotting at the Paris Bar and Quasimodo's and Café Einstein, snatched stand-up lunches of currywurst and Schultheiß (the ubiquitous Berlin pilsner -- you can actually grab a can and drink it on the run), and, for the press, the deluge of free daily newspapers (Berlin has some half-dozen, including Die Welt, the Berliner Morgenpost, the Berliner Zeitung, and the Tagesspiegel) and festival updates. Not to mention the deluge of movies -- by the second day the papers were already running humorous articles like "How many films a day can one endure without risking permanent damage? What doctors advise."

I missed the opening-night offering, Max Färberböck's locally made Aimée & Jaguar, after reaching London at 5:30 in the morning and discovering that British Air had cancelled my flight to Berlin ("Well, somehow the aircraft didn't show up"); I walked off a later flight straight into a press conference (Manuel Gómez Pereira's Entre las piernas), a screening (the Shoah Foundation's The Last Days), and then another press conference (The Last Days), all before getting to test the mattress in my room at Berlin's venerable Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza (actually the old Berlin Penta on Nürnberger Straße, right behind the Europa Center). It took me a day to apprehend that there are special press screenings in the morning -- I'd like to blame jet lag, but the Berliners have a better explanation: "Doof bleibt doof, da helfen keine Pillen!" ("Stupid is stupid, and there are no pills for it"). It also took me a day to catch up with the translation cassettes, with the result that I saw Entre las piernas ("Between Your Legs") and Søren Kragh-Jacobsen's Mifunes sidste sang ("Mifune's Last Song") with German subtitles. And I think there must have been a more discreet press entrance into the Zoo Palast, but I never found it; instead, I'd march down that big red carpet while TV cameras pointed in my direction and a thousand or more hopeful star-searchers tried to convince themselves I was Woody Allen with a beard. Those thousand film fanatics would still be there when I came out, waiting for the next show, straining to catch a glimpse of Bruce Willis or Nick Nolte, holding up "Suche Karte" ("Need Ticket") signs (the going rate for Shakespeare in Love was 20 marks, about $12).

If you can organize your day to catch the morning press screenings, you're okay, but throw in one press conference and it's back to lining up for evening tickets at the Pressezentrum at 9 a.m. the previous day -- otherwise you risk seeing the dreaded "ausverkauft" ("sold out") plastered across your choice. Steven Spielberg was scheduled to appear at the press conference for The Last Days (for which he was executive producer), but he confined himself to introducing the film at the Zoo Palast. A second, simultaneous screening had been set up at the Royal Palast, in the Europa Center, and that's what I had a ticket for, so I had to choose between hearing Spielberg and seeing the film (I went for the film). The press conference itself started 40 minutes late and had director James Moll on the rack with thumbscrew questions like "Would you agree that Schindler's List helped get people to address the Holocaust?" Moll was up to the challenge: "I appreciate that question a lot." It had been rumored that Terrence Malick might attend the Thin Red Line press conference, and he was in town, but only to appear at the opening and thank everyone for coming. I showed up at that press conference half an hour late and was still way too early for Nick Nolte and company -- after 45 minutes an apologetic spokesperson told us, "You know how bad Berlin traffic is at this time of day." (The woman has obviously never seen Boston at any time of day.) When things finally got under way, a rattled (or maybe just miffed) journalist addressed the first question to the absent director.

For the American film critic, the excitement at a festival like Berlin's is in the "foreign" films, which may not reach the Western Hemisphere for months, even years (many, of course, won't arrive at all). Europeans, on the other hand, see these all the time; they're fascinated by the American films, big-budget Hollywood releases whose obsession with romance and the Big Questions seems a distant luxury. The buzz at Berlinale 99 centered on two 1998 Best Film Oscar-nominated American releases, The Thin Red Line and Shakespeare in Love -- whose presence here explains why at every Berlin Film Festival at least one newspaper runs an article asking, "Why Is Berlin Not Cannes?" Cannes, of course, has the calendar, the weather, and the Mediterranean on its side. Scheduling the Berlin Film Festival in February ensures that the press and a horde of visitors will come in an otherwise unattractive month (complete with snow this time around); the downside is that few American studios are willing to release serious Oscar contenders this early in the year (the Academy members have short memories), so they send late-breakers from the previous year. If Berlin really wants to take on Cannes -- and as the new capital of Germany it might just have the economic muscle to do so -- it'll have to bite the bullet and move the Berlinale to a confrontational summer date.

Every competition movie I saw had merit but nothing was a knockout. My favorite was out of competition: The Last Days (which opened in Boston last week) should be required viewing for anyone who thinks Roberto Benigni's sugar-coated Life Is Beautiful is a legitimate take on the Holocaust. The Golden Bear went to The Thin Red Line, Malick's ambitious would-be masterpiece whose flaws (the sophomoric voiceovers) and cynicism (you can't tell the players without a press kit) have been catalogued by everyone from Peter Keough (in the January 8 Phoenix) to Colin McCabe (in the February Sight and Sound). The Silver Bear went to the third Dogma 95 release (after Lars von Trier's Idiots and Thomas Vinterberg's The Celebration), Søren Kragh-Jacobsen's Mifunes sidste sang, which in its story of a Copenhagen yuppie who has to move back to the sticks to care for his retarded brother fulfills the Dogma precepts of simple and straightforward but eventually gives into sentimentality, the yuppie finding happiness with a sophisticated city hooker on the lam.

Berlin audiences, to judge by the Tagesspiegel's reader poll, went for romance (see box). Aimée & Jaguar (which I wound up seeing in a regular theater, without subtitles, so I didn't get all the nuances) is the true story of two German women, one Jewish and one not, who fell in love during World War II; Lily Wust is still alive and was there for the opening, but Felice Schragenheim was taken away by the Nazis and never heard from again. Maria Schrader and Juliane Köhler shared the Best Actress award, perhaps deservedly, but the movie is a character-thin, lovers-bicycling-through-the-woods effort that merely proves the Berlin film industry can turn out second-tier Masterpiece Theatre stuff. Shakespeare in Love was the other audience favorite, a silly and unhistorical but hard-to-resist tale that soars on the chemistry between Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes.

On the European front, Bertrand Tavernier's Ça commence aujourd'hui ("It All Starts Today") describes the efforts of a schoolteacher to make a difference in northern France. It was well regarded by the critics (it got the FIPRESCI prize); I found its angelic kids and down-and-out parents hard to accept. The second big local entry, Andreas Dresen's Nachtgestalten ("Night Shapes"), is a Berlin-by-night anthology movie (complete with linking cabbie) that melds easy sentimentality (the Berlin businessman and the kid from Angola) with easy cynicism (the drug-addict hooker, the punk car thieves) -- a well-executed but not exactly original effort (Jim Jarmusch, anyone?). Eschewing both sentimentality and cynicism, Thomas Vincent's Karnaval does better with its Dunkerque-set story of a garage mechanic who gets entangled with a young wife during Carnival season. Fernando Trueba's La niña de tus ojos ("The Girl of Your Dreams") offered a local angle: in 1936, a Spanish film company travels to Berlin to make a movie about the Spanish Civil War and discovers what Nazi Germany is really like. It's a funny, sobering, worth-seeing movie; but the cardboard Goebbels (brilliantly portrayed by Johannes Silberschneider) reminds us that, in the cinema, the Nazis are still Them, not Us. The Hitchcock-derivative Entre las piernas, an all-talk no-action no-sense study of sexual obsession, got a lot of buzz before it screened, less after.

The big American films that haven't yet opened in the USA were Robert Altman's Cookie's Fortune (which finished first in the Tagesspiegel's critics' poll but got nothing from the jury) and Alan Rudolph's Breakfast of Champions (25th out of 25 and ditto from the jury). I wasn't able to stay for Cookie's Fortune (or for Claude Chabrol's Au coeur du mensonge -- "The Color of Lies"), but Rudolph's over-the-top adaptation of the Kurt Vonnegut novel about a Middle America car dealer had an energy and a sense of outrage I didn't find elsewhere, plus hilarious performances from Bruce Willis as the car dealer, Barbara Hershey as his wife (despite a seriously underwritten part), Nick Nolte as a lingerie-fetishist car salesman, Omar Epps as an American Dreamer, and Albert Finney as the hack sci-fi writer/prophet. This black comedy was too cartoonish for European tastes -- it'll probably be too cartoonish for American tastes, but at least it's alive and kicking. Not so David Cronenberg's DOA eXistenZ, by the end of which game players Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law are stumped as to whether they exist in reality or virtual reality. You won't be able to figure it out either -- and given how little chemistry Leigh and Law create, you may not care. Tony Bui's Saigon-set Three Seasons summed up Berlinale 99: an anthology format (can't anyone tell a two-hour story anymore?), rain, gritty surfaces (lots of violence, usually against women) but soft-focus sensibilities (cute kids, hookers with hearts of gold), concern for the disenfranchised, more rain, wistful but feel-good finales.

And so, on to Berlinale 2000, for which a lavish 60-page booklet has been prepared to reassure the industry and the media that nothing will be lost in the move to Potsdamer Platz. Something will be lost, of course: West Berlin, its culture, its scene, its history. The Berlin Film Festival does need bigger quarters; one can only hope that the corporate atmosphere of Potsdamer Platz won't compromise the independence of an event that this year promised Nikita Mikhalkov's The Barber of Siberia (presumably now reserved for Cannes) but instead delivered less-than-earthshaking American fare like The Hi-Lo Country, Playing by Heart, and The Faculty. My own suggestion for Berlinale 2000: a Best Animal Actor award. This year I would have split the prize among three dogs: Piecz, who plays the long-suffering Whiskas in Nachtgestalten; the uncredited canine who gives the Nazi salute in La niña de tus ojos; and the Alsatian mix who's crushed when he learns the Bard has written no part for him in Shakespeare in Love.