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Berlinale 2004: The Talent Press
Monday, February 9

"Lost Embrace" (Daniel Burman):
   Pamela Biénzobas / Andrei Gorzo
Övgü Gökçe on "The Far Side of the Moon"
    (Robert Lepage)
Violeta Kovacsics on "L'Esquive" (Abdellatif Kechiche)
Saul Symonds on "Me and My Brother" (Robert Frank)
Gabe Klinger on "Zebraman" (Miike Takashi)
Claire Chabat on ”Process – Performing John Cale”

"Lost Embrace" (Competition)

Argentina, 100 min. Director: Daniel Burman. Screenplay: Daniel Burman and Marcelo Birmajer. Camera: Ramiro Civita. Cast: Daniel Hendler, Adriana Aizemberg, Jorge D’Elia, Sergio Boris.

1. Pamela Biénzobas

"Grandchildren are the reward we receive for not having killed our children", the rabbi tells young Jewish-Argentinian Ariel (Uruguay's notable Daniel Hendler) in "El Abrazo Partido" (Lost Embrace). Daniel Burman wrote his fourth feature film with successful young writer Marcelo Birmajer (unsurprisingly also of Jewish origin and whose acute but light-hearted production includes revealing titles like "Being Human and Other Disgraces" or "Tales of Married Men").

The line fits perfectly into this movie which confirms the maturity reached by the young Argentinian cinema, with traceable formal, thematic and writing styles. Along with the relaxed camera, the fresh dialogue and the simple production, a main feature of this "new wave" is that its characters, settings, stories and concerns are absolutely everyday. And there are few existential questions as ordinary and widespread - especially from baby-boomers on, and perhaps even more in a continent formed mainly of immigrants - than "where the hell do I come from?"

That does not refer simply to the land of our ancestors, our traditions and national identities, but to much more immediate origins. No one seems to come to terms with their parents, whether they are absent or too present. Side-effects include not just unsolvable identity problems, but also - in a vain attempt not to repeat their progenitors' mistakes - a conflicted approach to matrimony and parenthood (and overbooked and overpaid shrinks, of course.)

This key issue of modern sensibility is at the heartof "Lost Embrace" told through a series of vignettes depicting the daily life of Ariel and his milieu of middle-class small immigrant traders in Buenos Aires. As he tries to flee the lack of perspectives in his country by getting a European passport, he is haunted by the incoherent explanations of his father's departure when he was a baby –supposedly to fight in the Yom Kippur war - and the idea of meeting him again.

Pamela Biénzobas

2. Andrei Gorzo

At first, it feels like the familiar story of the sensitive young man (often an aspiring artist) trapped in a pedestrian life and looking for a way out, but the Argentinian director Daniel Burman does a delicate job with it, creating a small world – a shopping mall in downtown Buenos Aires, complete with noisy Italians and feng-shui-selling Koreans – that is limiting and frustrating, but also funny and cosy. Ariel, a Jew whose family came to Argentina to escape from occupied Poland, dreams of going back to Poland (in preparation, he learns the names of famous Poles), in order to escape now from this world: the mother with her lingerie shop, her suitor and her version of traditional Jewish dancing, the neighbor who has to shut down his business but goes on introducing himself as "Osvaldo from Osvaldo Stationery", the lazy brother, the voluptuous older woman with her old boss who is also her father, but only "sometimes".

There's someone missing in Ariel’s world: his father, who went to fight in Israel and stayed there, leaving nothing for his son to remember him by, apart from a very illuminating home movie made at the boy's circumcision (which is shown in lavish detail, while the father is nothing more than a blur), and a mythical shopping mall story (the father smashing a mayonnaise jar in a fit of anger). Details like this are typical of the film's deadpan style. There is melancholy in it, but no despair. Burman is generous towards his characters, and he has a true, rare gift for provincial joys, for the charms of all that is inconsequential and insignificant. For all their lack of ambition and energy, there is nothing depressing about the characters in "Lost Embrace": their lives are anything but empty and one can almost envy their contentment with their lot. When his grandmother suddenly rediscovers her joy in singing, Ariel remarks, with characteristic and affectionate dryness, "now she is thinking of becoming a professional singer".

Andrei Gorzo

Övgü Gökçe
The Far Side of the Moon (Panorama)

Canada 2003. Director, screenplay: Robert Lepage. Camera: Ronald Plant. Cast: Robert Lepage, Anne-Marie Cadieux, Marco Poulin, Celine Bonnier. 105 min.

In his latest film, shot and projected in HD, Robert Lepage looks at the dream of young Philippe who has been obsessed since his childhood with voyages to space. Adapted from Lepage's own play, the film asserts a whimsical style through many inventive moments. This style suits the imaginary voyages Philippe takes into space, into his past and present, and into his relationships with his mother and his brother.

Lepage introduces the story with the image of the moon, his voice-over (as Philippe) telling us that people have conceived the moon as the reflection of the earth for many centuries, until they discovered its other side. Taking off from this initial scene, the entire film tries to picture the idea of two sides of the same thing, constantly pointing out how it is possible to cross between worlds (a point which recalls the director's previous film, "Possible Worlds"). Making extensive use of graphic matches (e.g. the round window of a washing machine and the window of a spaceship), the editing illustrates the passage between worlds: between past and present, earth and universe.

At the end of the film, however, Lepage turns away from the idea of a possible passage. While on his way home from the only actual voyage he makes during the film, Philippe floats up into the air. In this final image, Lepage, by leaving his character floating in space, subverts the mutual dependency between reality and fantasy that he has maintained throughout the film.

Övgü Gökçe

Violeta Kovacsics
L’Esquive

France, 2002. Director: Abdellatif Kechiche. Cast: Osman Elkharraz, Sarah Forestier, Sabrina Ouazani, Hajar Hamlili, Rachid Hami.

Sweet and delicate portrait of the life in Saint Denis, a Parisian proletarian suburb, where teenagers wander, gossip and try to find their way to social relationships. Abdellatif Kechiche makes a tactful film, a fresh look to present youth, far from judgments or moraine. The conflicts shown in "L'Esquive" are the day in day out problems: friends and their fights, couples that broke up and new dates that are proposed. Difficulties, bad times stay far from becoming a tragedy and life is shown naked.

The action starts with a simple idea – how young Krimo tries in a shy way to go out with the slippery Lydia - but moves forward nimbly with humor and vitality. The wandering of Krimo, the main character, might be this of any boy from a proletarian suburb. Dead time, the friends that yell or their silences, all these slices of quotidian are shown by Kechiche by a camera that insists in following the characters closely, getting their faces when they fight, cry, laugh or just listen. Not for nothing, the director worked for two months with a cast of unknown young actors, to achieve a language and a gesticulation which spontaneity just hurts.

Kechiche proves owning the same human touch as Mike Leigh, another creator of social portraits. Both have the same care for their characters, a care that offers a clean look to human condition. Thought the Kechiche introduces with subtlety the condemn of the social class through the piece of theatre plaid in the school, what remains at the end is still a deep vitality, that bittersweet flavor of the day by day.

Violeta Kovacsics

Saul Symonds
"Me And My Brother" (Retrospective)

Director: Robert Frank. Screenplay: Robert Frank, Allen Ginsberg, Sam Shepard. Camera: Robert Frank. Cast: Robert Olovsky, Julius Olovsky, Allen Ginsberg. 91 min.

Robert Frank's "Me And My Brother" was made during the era of the beats, the hippies and free love, a time when it was possible, or at least people believed it was possible, that the only sane man in America could be a catatonic schizophrenic. This man is Julius Orlovsky, who is being taken by his brother and by Allen Ginsberg across Kansas on their poetry reading tour and on a journey into the wild and free-wheeling heart of 60's American culture. In a time when people wanted to get back to nature, to peel away the suffocating layers of civilization, Julius is shown as someone who despite his mental illness, or perhaps because of it, is able to see life in all its atavistic mystery and glory – someone who lives in an arena where everything is strange and beautiful and where death is still the greatest mystery of life.

"Me And My Brother" has a rambling, free-association structure that moves with ease between different moments, places, years and characters. This has as much to do with a rebellion against linear narrative structures as it does with Frank's desire to make the audience aware of his own cinematic manipulations. An awareness he wants to use to transcend the limitations of the film medium and to move to a realm where he is merely one person on life's cosmic path who wants to convey to others on the same path something of what he has discovered or been taught through spending time with Julius Orlovsky.

Saul Symonds

Gabe Klinger
"Zebraman"
Directed by Miike Takashi (Market)

Who does Miike Takashi make films for? Howard Hawks made films for Hollywood audiences. Robert Bresson did not have anyone in mind. Miike – who is by no means a master to be spoken of in the same breath as Hawks and Bresson – is a director who started making films for the straight-to-video market and has subsequently created a comfortable niche for himself with cult and art-house audiences alike. Like Hawks, he always works in genres, but each new film has the tendency to cancel and contradict the themes and style of the previous, barely making claims to the so-called auteurship Miike fanatics have bestowed upon him. It's useless to attempt to segment his work, but one can try to analyze his most recent, "Zebraman", as a sister-piece to "Gozu", an existentialist parable about a middling Yakuza whose brother is transformed into a woman, who in turn attempts to have sex with him. "Zebraman" is the story of a substitute teacher who is seduced by the non-existent television superhero of the title, even replicating the character's tacky outfit, before he finds himself possessed with Zebra-like powers. "Gozu", which translates as "Cow Head", uses nightmarish images of mixed human and animal anatomy, which is repeated in "Zebraman" (one villain possesses a crab head of sorts while our lead apologizes for his "bad head" which resembles a strip of Zebra hair). The words "anything goes" are superimposed over the film's first images; one expects the film to veer into the unexpected, but "Zebraman" pans out as Miike's most conventional film – a superhero story that would make a fresh addition to the genre, but which ultimately takes its cues from the fictitious and admittedly ridiculous television model. In the end – and perhaps we will only find out with the next Miike – this might be where his true subversion lies.

Gabe Klinger

Claire Chabat
Sound as a Smokescreen

The special screening of ”Process – Performing John Cale”, showcased on Sunday night in the House of World Cultures, struck an unconventional note. Written and directed by C.S. Leigh, ”Process” records the agonizing regression of a human mind in only 29 shots. One might call it an exercise in cross-art filmmaking.

The controversial film (starring Beatrice Dalle and Guillaume Depardieu) has an artsy counterpoint in the form of a special ”mise en scène” consisting of the live performance by John Cale, along with two big screens and eight small screens.

Images of war viewed through the crosshairs of a bombardier, on one hand, and split angles of a man speaking into a mike, on the other hand, seem to mirror the centre-stage screen featuring the film itself.

However, protracted, complacent scenes sometimes obscure the unsettling feeling of lingering grief and desperation. Moreover, the way Leigh uses inter-titles, literary quotations and sound effects feels both tentative and pretentious.

It is no secret that Leigh wants to shock and move the audience. The film scholar-turned-director aims to bring down the boundaries between so-called conventional cinema and unconventional cinema.

Inspired by the likes of Godard and Haneke, he is keen on playing with form and substance and so seems to paint a deconstructed portrait of a suicidal lady with crude strokes and abstract overtones.

"That's Entertainment!", performed by The Jam and heard over the end credits, might serve as an ironic self-comment on the part of the filmmaker.

”Process – Performing John Cale” was presented by Paris Classics Productions, the Berlin International Film Festival, and Volkswagen.

Claire Chabat

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