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Loach and Akin both deal with young love; the best film I saw in Competition, Rohmer’s Triple Agent, is one of the few great films on the subject of love between long-wedded partners. If most critics at Berlin appeared indifferent to this supremely elegant and intelligent work, perhaps it was because they had really imagined that Rohmer, at age 83, had decided to launch a new career as a director of spy thrillers and were confounded by what he offered instead: a further examination (following 2001’s L’anglaise et le duc/The Lady and the Duke) of the intimate exchange of language between a man and a woman. Set in France during the period of the Popular Front and the Spanish Civil War, the film takes as its main character the extraordinary Fyodor, second-in-command of the White Russian organization in Paris, who seems all too well informed about the stakes and the objectives of both the Soviet Union and the French Communist Party. As Fyodor gradually unfolds his mysteries to his astonished wife, Triple Agent becomes more and more a reflection on words and on what and how they mean. It’s a film about understanding and, finally, a very moving love story. In every way, Rohmer’s film is the antithesis of Angelopoulos’s The Weeping Meadow, a meditation on 20th-century Greek history as seen through the misfortunes of an accordionist and his wife. Never have Angelopoulos’s long-take camera movements, orchestration of extras, and amassing of detail seemed so fussy and inert; this is art cinema at its most bloated and leaden, in which the most pressing question the filmmaker poses to his audience is something like: why do the musicians stand there playing their instruments between rows of white sheets hanging to dry? Outside the Competition, more challenging fare could be found. Chantal Akerman’s Demain, on déménage/Tomorrow We Move is a brisk, stylized burlesque in which various strangers come to the aid of a writer (the superb Sylvie Testud) who’s laboring on a pornographic story. Fernando Solanas’s Memoria del Saqueo/A Social Genocide is a hard-hitting account of how Argentina’s democratically elected governments, in collusion with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, have sacked the country to help the rich. A more oblique attack on globalization, Jem Cohen’s Chain sets two anti-narratives of alienated women against a humdrum background of malls, hotels, and billboarded highways. After Cohen’s thin and facile film and Brad Anderson’s grotesque The Machinist, a heavy-handed psycho thriller starring Christian Bale, I was glad to find in Jennifer Reeves’s personal narrative The Time We Killed a film from the USA that explores the relationship between private space (that of a reclusive writer) and society (post–September 11 America) through imaginative work with image and sound. Another highlight was John Cale’s live performance of his frightening and beautiful score for C.S. Leigh’s Process, a lush and grueling study of a woman (Béatrice Dalle) bent on suicide. I caught two great revivals in the Berlinale’s Forum section. Li Han Hsiang’s outrageous The Love Eterne (1962) is a ShawScope Chinese opera in which a woman dresses as a man to attend college and falls in love with her male traveling companion (played by a woman!). Notes of an Itinerant Performer (1941), by the neglected master Hiroshi Shimizu, brings humor, Brechtian incisiveness, and dazzling visual style to the Mizoguchian story of an actress who becomes the protégée of a tea merchant and, in the face of snobbery and resentment, sacrifices herself for his family. It edged out Triple Agent as the best film I saw at the Berlinale.
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