If nothing else, the color of this years Berlin Film Festival tote bag should have been a tipoff: solid black. Of the 21 festival movies I saw, there were seven with a terminal illness and seven with one or more suicides. Death figured in 17 of the 22 Competition entries. Even the festival opener, Chicago (screening out of Competition), served up three murders. But nothing I witnessed on screen prepared me for what I saw while standing outside the Berlin Hyatt at 3:15 on the afternoon of February 11: a white-haired man, his face shrouded, was stretchered out of the hotel and into a waiting ambulance. Daniel Toscan du Plantier, the president of Unifrance Film International, was later reported to have died at a local hospital, though he appeared to be dead when they brought him out. The cause of death was given as a heart attack; he was just 61. Although his productions included Madame Butterfly and Tosca, my first thought when I learned his identity was the brouhaha that erupted at the 1997 Berlinale when a Belgian company tried to screen the short film "Cream and Punishment at the 49th Festival of Cannes," which shows anarchist comic Noel Godin hitting Toscan du Plantier with a cream pie at Cannes 1996. Toscan du Plantier threatened to withdraw Frances pictures if "Cream and Punishment" screened; the short was cancelled. I saw no black poetic justice in the cream-pie-white sheet that covered his face; I only reflected that life is not a movie. Two days after Toscan du Plantiers death, one of the Berlin Zoos most popular residents, the gorilla Knurke, followed, as if out of respect.
At first it appeared that Berlinale 2003 would be the year of the Yank, what with Chicago opening the festival, Gangs of New York closing it, and a high-profile quintet of American films Adaptation, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, The Life of David Gale, Solaris, and 25th Hour being joined in Competition by My Life Without Me from Canada (plus The Hours and In This World from England). The festival was front-loaded with the serious Oscar candidates, Chicago, Adaptation, and The Hours all screening well before February 11, when the nominations were announced; and the studios Miramax and Columbia delivered for this star-struck city: Rob Marshall, Richard Gere, Rene Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, John C. Reilly, Spike Jonze, Nicolas Cage, Charlie Kaufman, Stephen Daldry, Nicole Kidman, and Ed Harris (no Meryl Streep or Julianne Moore, however) all showed up, along with Kevin Spacey, Laura Linney, George Clooney, Sam Rockwell, Spike Lee, and Edward Norton. Of the 30 nominations represented by the six major Oscar categories, the Berlinale Americans snagged 17. Perhaps festival director Dieter Kosslick, in just his second Berlinale, is figuring that since the best European films tend to be reserved for Cannes, in May, he needs to go after the best America has to offer. This year, at least, he succeeded.
But though Chicago offered the kind of glitz and glitter that Berlin loves, it didnt razzle-dazzle the media (Die Welt, for one, opined that the real puppeteer is Rob Marshall). And both the opening Competition entry, Michael Winterbottoms Afghan-refugee-focused In This World, and the Berlinale 2003 motto, "Towards Tolerance," suggested that the Americans the festival organizers were really after were George W. Bush and Colin Powell. Not even Nicole Kidman, who got the most media attention (and justified it with her articulate press-conference performance), made as many headlines as embattled (for his anti-Iraqi-war position) German chancellor Gerhard Schrder. And none of the American stars (the contingent included Dustin Hoffman, in town for a Panorama screening of Moonlight Mile) gave their home administration any support; speaking at the 25th Hour press conference, Edward Norton said, "It must be good to be in Germany and France, because I have completely forgotten what it is like to be proud of your government."
Berlinale 2003 also appeared beset by economic problems. The usual 10 full days of screenings shrank to eight, Dieter Kosslick explaining that he wanted to make the festival more compact. Seven of the Competition films, including some high-interest entries (Zhang Yimous Ying xiong/Hero, Wolfgang Beckers Good Bye, Lenin!, Solaris, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, 25th Hour), press-screened in the 300-seat CinemaxX 7 because the 1700-seat Berlinale-Palast was hosting the public (i.e., moneymaking) screenings of Competition films. I showed up a half-hour early for the press screening of the Dutch comedy Ja zuster, nee zuster/Yes Nurse, No Nurse and barely got in. Even the public screenings were oversold: one young man stood in line for an hour and half to buy a ticket for Confessions, then arrived a half-hour early and was turned away, much to the festivals embarrassment. Doors to a sold-out 9 a.m. public screening of Good Bye, Lenin! didnt open till 9, leaving a long line of ticketholders standing in sub-freezing temperatures; the film didnt start till 9:40. And the buses that use to ferry the press to the morning screenings were replaced by VW mini-vans. Was it just two years ago that the Berlinale had Mercedes as a sponsor?
Reality of the most basic sort dominated the festival offerings. In This World follows two young Afghani refugees as they attempt to travel from their camp in Peshawar (Pakistan) to London via the black market. A chilling and manipulative story of deceit and death, it flings its gage at the feet of British PM Tony Blair. Set on the border between Frankfurt-an-der-Oder in Germany and Slubice in Poland, Hans-Christian Schmids Lichter/Distant Lights weaves six different stories, some of them involving the attempt of a group of Ukrainians to emigrate from Kyiv to Berlin; but it has too many characters to cut very deep. Set in the border town of Krsko, Damjan Kozoles Rezervni deli/Spare Parts focuses on Slovenian smugglers who funnel emigrants from Croatia into Italy; its the black market with a sort of human face.
Not that those who live where the rest of the world would like to werent threatened by the specter of mortality. Alan Parkers The Life of David Gale starts out as a murder mystery with Kevin Spacey as a University of Texas professor who winds up on death row and turns into something more; I liked this movie better than Chris Fujiwara did (his review is in the February 21 Phoenix), but it didnt do well with either the German or the international film critics, and the serious issues raised by the surprise ending are compromised by its tilt against capital punishment (despite Parkers press-conference claim to have sought balance, the Texas governor comes off as an idiot) and an anti-death-penalty strategy that makes use of entrapment. In Isabel Coixets My Life Without Me, Sarah Polley is a 23-year-old mother of two who discovers she has incurable ovarian cancer. It was a hit with the international critics; for me, Polley is so strong and so sweet, it felt more like a high-class TV-movie. Based on the bestselling novel by Niccolo Ammaniti, Gabriele Salvatoress Io non ho paura/Im Not Scared is set in the impoverished Italian Mezzogiorno, where an 11-year-old boy wonders whether his parents arent involved in a kidnapping-and-ransom scheme. Thin for its length, with an ending thats a stretch, it didnt do well with any group of critics; Miramax bought it all the same.
Speaking at the Confessions of a Dangerous Mind press conference, Miramaxs Harvey Weinstein told us, "You dont ask whether its commercial, you only ask whether its good." If he really means that, he should put Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfigs Wilbur Wants To Kill Himself on his shopping list. Two years ago, Scherfigs Italian for Beginners took the Silver Bear awarded by the International Film Critics Association and was bought by Miramax. Wilbur is set in Glasgow, where one of two brothers is indeed suicidal, but then a terminal illness rewrites the equation. Scherfig treated this movie to a full symphonic score, but her real concern is always character; I imagine Liv Ullmann has influenced her work. This was the best film I saw at the Berlinale (Id already seen The Hours back home); why it was relegated to a "special screening" instead of being accepted for the Competition mystified Screen International as well as me.
Life was no better in the Berlinales France. Claude Chabrol could take some lessons from Scherfig; his La fleur du mal/The Flower of Evil, which details the fortunes of a evil-starred family, is slick and cynical, a mystery that doesnt pay off. Chabrol opened his press conference by saying he wasnt anti-bourgeoisie, but before it was over hed got around to his usual bashing of the middle class. Patrice Chreau won the Golden Bear two years ago with Intimacy; this time he brought Son frre/His Brother, in which older brother Thomas wastes away from a lack of blood platelets while younger brother Luc watches helplessly. Chreau is a serious and intelligent filmmaker, but the brothers seemed to me whiny in the time-honored tradition of bad French film. More terminal illness and self-indulgence marred Pascal Bonitzers Petites coupures/Minor Injuries, where after a lot of effort and surviving the murder attempt of a jealous husband, Daniel Auteuil learns to say no to gorgeous neurotics like Kristin Scott Thomas.
Li Yang provided Chinas contribution to the gloom-and-doom with Mang jing/Blind Shaft, where two miners make a living by killing fellow workers, then pretending to be relatives and demanding compensation from the mine owners; its sobering but simple. Zhang Yimous Ying xiong/Hero, on the other hand, marries slow-motion martial-artistry to a Rashomon-like story about an emperor and three assassins in ancient China. It has starpower with Jet Li, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung, and Zhang Ziyi, but its slow development divided the critics. The screening I attended started late and I couldnt stay for the last 25 minutes; what I saw made me think of John Ford trying to do Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. More in the Zhang Yimou tradition was Yoji Yamadas Tasogare Seibei/Twilight Samurai, which could have been called "Twilight of the Samurai," though its looking-back voiceover from the samurais younger daughter makes it perhaps too comfortable, and the story of how he finally marries his childhood sweetheart gets short shrift.
Then there was Pieter Kramers Ja zuster, nee zuster/Yes Nurse, No Nurse. Yes, we needed something to make us forget George and Saddam and Osama, but this has to be the silliest film ever to grace an official Competition. Based on a 60s TV show that as far as I could make out is a Dutch version of Are You Being Served? set in a rest home, it opened with a lengthy written-out acknowledgment/apology apparently meant to keep the Red Cross from dragging it down to the Hague. Far funnier and even moving was Good Bye, Lenin!, the story of a dedicated East Berlin party member who suffers a heart attack and falls into a coma just as the wall is coming down; her son, Alex, is told that any shock could lead to a second and fatal attack, so he tells her that the German Democratic Republic is flourishing and goes to absurd lengths to maintain the illusion, including taping news programs for her to watch on TV (when she glimpses evidence of Westerners in her city, the news program reassures her by showing actual footage of people pouring through the wall and explaining that West Berliners sick of the chase for cars, TVs, and VCRs are now fleeing to the East!). In the process, Alex "creates" the kinder, gentler GDR that should have been.
But this wasnt a kinder, gentler year. In the end, the Competition jury which was headed by filmmaker Atom Egoyan and included American filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow (K-19: The Widowmaker), German actress Martina Gedeck (Mostly Martha), and Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako gave the Golden Bear to In This World. Maybe I was prejudiced by The Claim, the glossy version of The Mayor of Casterbridge that Michael Winterbottom brought to Berlin in 2001; in any case, I was uncomfortable with the pseudo-vrit of this one: its heart is in the right place, but its politics are simple and its characters all surface. The jury balanced its "ticket" by giving the Silver Bear to the artsy Adaptation. (For what its worth, Id have balanced The Hours with Good Bye, Lenin!) Best Director went to Patrice Chreau, Best Actor to Sam Rockwell; Best Actress was shared by Kidman, Moore, and Streep for The Hours. The International Film Critics Association voted for Lichter. Chicago, being out of Competition, was not eligible for any of these honors, but given the real-world ambiance of Berlinale 2003, its hard to believe either jury would have awarded it anything. Come March 23, well see whether the Oscar electorate got the message.
Black bear