Festival coverage is a bit like Wordle scores: everyone’s interested in their own, less so anyone else’s. Since subscribing to this here newsletter implies a certain degree of willingness (if not eagerness) to indulge my flights of fancy, however, do humor me as I share a brief dispatch from my most recent cinematic soirée: the Berlinale, which has long eluded me for the rather mundane reason that it takes place on a continent many thousands of miles away from my own. Considered one of the “Big Five” alongside Sundance, Venice, and Toronto (which I’ve had the pleasure of attending) as well as Cannes (which I haven’t), its appeal lies not only in the quality of its selections (my favorite film of last year, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, had its world premiere there) but also in its charming bear logo and the fact that “Berlinale” is fun to say out loud. With an assist from the fine folks at Variety, my freelance home for the last year, I finally made it this year — and found it very much worth the wait.
It was also, I can only imagine, unlike any prior edition of the festival. One hopes it’s also the only edition to require both vaccination and a daily COVID test to be allowed into screenings — not because those aren’t reasonable safety measures (they are) but because one also hopes this will all be “over” by next year (it won’t). I was lucky enough to have a test center in my hotel, which led to a morning routine that this creature of habit found most conducive to a day at the movies: wake up a few minutes before tickets go live at 7:30, receive a second wakeup call in the form of a nasal swab right as the testing center opens at 8, await the email revealing my fate while eating cereal from the breakfast buffet. That fifteen-minute interlude, fairly leisurely for the first few days, became increasingly dread-inducing as my week in Berlin neared its end — had I not tested negative my last day at the festival, I wouldn’t have been able to board my return flight home the following morning. I can think of worse places to be stranded, but a week away from the cats was already more than they (by which I obviously mean me) could bear.
Those who know me IRL are well acquainted with my general aversion toward going places and doing things, but film festivals have always been an exception. They seem to exist parallel from the real world, especially when attending, say, the premiere of Claire Denis’ new film in the 1,600-seat Berlinale Palast — an awe-inspiring venue that makes even disappointing work from world-class auteurs feel grand. And while festivals are in one sense the ideal setting to see a movie, time and geography sometimes conspire against those of us with unshakable biological clocks — by which I mean to say that I more often than not experience acute jet lag when traveling abroad. That’s never been truer than it was here, with many a midday screening finding me battling to stay awake against my body’s wishes, and while my sleep schedule’s hard-fought victory was pyrrhic it was a victory nonetheless.
No festival is ever exactly what you expect it to be, both because it’s unlikely a single person has ever kept to their meticulously planned screening schedule and because it’s impossible to predict which films will surprise and which will disappoint. Case in point: Axiom.
Writing about a movie like Jöns Jönsson’s second feature presents a challenge. On one hand, you really can’t touch on what makes it great without giving a good deal away; on the other, Axiom won’t be quite so compelling if you know anything about it in advance. Suffice to say that the initial feeling you have about something being off with Julius (Moritz von Treuenfels) is not unfounded. The film constantly gestures toward something sinister, and though it never quite goes that far it’s almost always uncomfortable to watch a man refuse to accept the fact that he is not and never will be the person he presents himself to the outside world as. I reckon that few of us grew up to be the person we thought we would; I also suspect (or at least hope) that most of us have reconciled the different versions of ourselves in a more healthy manner than Julius has.
Luck of the draw being what it is, I was fortunate enough to review my next two favorites, Convenience Store and Before, Now & Then, for Variety. I don’t have much to add to those assessments other than to say that I’m still thinking about both movies more than a week later and look forward to seeing them again with a clearer head. Also quite lovely in a way befitting its modest title was Shô Miyake’s Small, Slow but Steady, a low-key character study of a deaf boxer in Tokyo that I found quietly moving. And while I wouldn’t call Dario Argento’s first film in a decade good, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy Dark Glasses for what it is — as my editors allowed me to make clear in the headline of my review, its increasingly ridiculous plot includes water snakes as one of the many dangers our heroine must overcome. (The other three films I reviewed were, in descending order of my enjoyment, The Passengers of the Night, Robe of Gems, and Coma.)
Then there were the disappointments. Despite having only truly loved one of the three Peter Strickland films I’ve seen (with apologies to Berberian Sound Studio and In Fabric, that would be The Duke of Burgundy), I was more excited to see his Flux Gourmet than any other title in the lineup. The result was oddly similar to something Yorgos Lanthimos might make, just not in a good way — Strickland is much more compelling when forging his own path. Even worse was Coma, Bertrand Bonello’s inward-facing lockdown project that could charitably be described as a pandemic-era mulligan. Some people got into sourdough starters; others made bad movies.
Even the worst film I saw at the festival, A Little Love Package (whose dubious synopsis I was willing to overlook because it stars Dogtooth’s Angeliki Papoulia), is somewhat redeemed by the fact that it introduced me to Black’s melancholy 1986 single “Wonderful Life.” A little reminiscent of Talk Talk’s “It’s My Life,” which inspired an inferior No Doubt cover you may remember from the radio circa the early 2000s, it’s the kind of thing you might listen to at the beach on an overcast day — seemingly upbeat the first time you hear it but increasingly downcast as the sunless day goes on. As is my wont upon discovering a new song that resonates with me in such a way, I have since listened to it on repeat enough times to drive innocent bystanders mad. Black, real name Colin Vearncombe, would later reflect on the difficulties of writing new material as the specter of becoming a one-hit wonder loomed: “Once you have had a hit, it’s hard to write another song without having that in the back of your mind. For a long time, I would find myself hearing, ‘I like it but it’s not ‘Wonderful Life.’” Following a car accident in early 2016, he died having had that fear confirmed.
Most festivals themselves feel like one-hit wonders — experiences you’re glad to have had but don’t feel the need to repeat or revisit once you’ve moved on to the next. Berlinale didn’t feel that way, and I hope this was my first visit rather than the only one.