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Berlinale 2004: The Talent Press
Tuesday, February 10

Saul Symonds on "Primo amore" (Matteo Garrone)
Gabe Klinger on "Tomorrow we Move" (Chantal Akerman)
Övgü Gökce on "A Bride of the Seventh Heaven"
   (Anastasia Lapsui, Markku Lehmuskallio)
Andrei Gorzo on "Samaritan Girl" (Kim Ki-duk)
Violeta Kovacsics on "Me and My Brother" (Robert Frank)
Pamela Biénzobas on "B-Happy" (Gonzalo Justiniano)

Saul Symonds
Primo amore (Competition)

Italy, 2004. Director: Matteo Garrone. Cast: Vitaliano Trvisan, Michela Cescon. 100min.

Humankind has always been obsessed with perfection, with a search for perfection, for some ideal or object which exists in their minds and which they want to find with physical, emotional or psychological concreteness. "Primo Amore" is a film whose central relationship revolves around one man's desire for a thin woman. Vittorio constantly and consistently convinces Sonia that her 55 kilos is 10 too many. He puts her on a strictly minimalist eating regime. It is destructive to her not only physically, as she wastes away and loses all energy from lack of sustenance, but psychologically and emotionally, as her desire to satisfy her hunger is constantly questioned by Vittorio, and in turn by herself. And in the end we realize that this search is a search that is always doomed to fail - that our ideas of perfection will never match their reality.

Werner Herzog is one director who returns again and again to humankind's obsessive desire to give reality to their dreams. But whereas Aguirre's search for El Dorado or Fitzcarraldo's attempts to bring Grand Opera and the Great Caruso to the jungles of Brazil encapsulated something about the human condition, something about where we are and where we’re heading, Vittorio's desires seem petty. They are too idiosyncratic to be able to connect with them in any larger sense. And the deeper the film descends into the whirpool of these destructive desires, and moves towards its tragic conclusion, the more distant we become from the characters.

Saul Symonds

Gabe Klinger
“Tomorrow We Move” (Panorama)
Directed by Chantal Akerman

"You think it’s funny?" the young Charlotte (played by Sylvie Testud) in "Tomorrow We Move" asks disconcertingly as her mother and a group of disparate apartment-seekers giggle at the double-entendres of her latest pornographic novel. "Because I think it’s rather sad," she replies and hence reveals her hopelessly naïve attempt at Bataille-like perversity. Charlotte takes to coffee shops to bank in on the chatter of Vuitton-clad Parisian 30-somethings, and her wordplay is arranged and rearranged from fugitive phrases taken from these third party sources, most of the time not referring to sex at all but to furniture, or plumbing, or chicken.

"Tomorrow We Move" is Akerman’s most lighthearted film in years, but its precision in staying true to an imaginary world of impossible happiness and simple joys — a world where every passer-by plays the piano as skillfully as the next — leaves the viewer breathless, but always anticipating an uneasy situation to creep its head and take the story to its dramatic conclusion. Instead Akerman leaves us with even more uneasiness: the film is perfectly content on its own terms and originality, and never takes the easy road towards the strawman situation. Like Georges Bataille, Akerman is an artist without wearing it on her sleeve.

Gabe Klinger

Övgü Gökçe
"A Bride of the Seventh Heaven" (International Forum)

Finland, 2003. Director: Anastasia Lapsui, Markku Lehmuskallio. Screenplay: Anastasia Lapsui, Markku Lehmuskallio. Camera: Johannes Lehmuskallio. Cast: Angelina Saraleta, Viktoria Hudi, Ljuba Filipova, Jevgeni Hudi, Gennadi Puikka. 85 mins.

"A Bride of the Seventh Heaven" is a serene film, lucidly narrated in a deliberate and meditative style that enhances the simplicity of its story. An old woman in the tundra narrates her life story to a little blind girl. At her birth, the narrator was designated by a shaman to become, after seven years, the bride of God. This destiny became a load she carried through life, preventing her from having normal social relationships. Her marriage (to a mortal) went unconsummated; her longing for a child went unfulfilled. After completing her reminiscences, she arrives at the gate of death, where she completes her original destiny: to be united with God.

The film combines elements of both documentary and fiction. The documentary aspect is attained through the casting of native Nenek people in all the roles, and through the lingering visual portrayal of life in the Tundra — a portrayal that one might consider as anthropological. Yet the narrative is clearly marked as fictional, through the flashback structure and the unfolding of the story through the old woman's subjectivity.

Finally, "A Bride of the Seventh Heaven" is an example of a still surviving mode of cinemathat gives priority to the act of storytelling, and that passes the experience of a far, foreign land to the audience, producing an authentic experience in itself.

Övgü Gökçe

Andrei Gorzo
Sin and atonement: "Samaritan Girl" (Competition)

"Samaritan Girl" (Samaria). South Korea, 2004. Director: Kim Ki-duk. Cast: Lee Uhi, Seo Min-jung, Kwak Ji-min.

Kim Ki-duk's meditation on sin and redemption, turmoil and peace, starts with two school-girls playing around the statues in a park, hugging teddy-bears, talking of saints and miracles, while trying to raise money for a trip to Europe; the money comes from the men who sleep with one of the girls, while the other arranges the meetings. There's a radiant serenity about the little prostitute – it could be the glow of amorality, it could be something else, much richer and stranger – and the film seems to take its cue from her expression. It is visually beautiful with an air of autumn sadness and a soft rhythm which seems to envelop the emotional violence, and in the end to soothe it.

Scene by scene you don't know where the director is leading you. When the police comes into the room in which she meets her customers, the girl jumps out of the window to her death (it doesn't look like a desperate act: she smiles), and the film follows her friend, a policeman's daughter, as she goes after the customers, returning their money and also giving herself to them in atonement. Then it turns to the stricken father, sitting very still in his car after sighting his daughter with one of the men, dead leaves gathering on the windshield. Later there's an extraordinary moment, in his kitchen, when he puts his hand on a boiling cauldron, as though he wanted to check what burns most, the fire or his anguish. He doesn't say a word to his daughter, but he starts following her, scaring off the men she sees, and his quiet rage is genuinely frightening. The film has an alluringly secretive manner: the characters keep to themselves and Kim Ki-duk doesn't explain too much – there's no big let's-have-it-all-out confrontation between father and daughter, no clearly stated moral position. It simply comes to rest somewhere in the countryside, where the father takes the daughter, teaches her to drive and leaves her on her own... And Kim Ki-duk leaves us with no conclusive answers.

Andrei Gorzo

Violeta Kovacsics
Me And My Brother (Retrospective)

USA, 1965-1968. Director: Robert Frank. Screenplay: Robert Frank, Tom Shepard, Allen Ginsberg.

"Everything in this film is true, all that's not true is purely my imagination". This epigraph for photographer Robert Frank's documentary about catatonic and schizophrenic Julius Orlovsky is an absolute declaration of intent.

In the late sixties, Julius went with his brother, Peter Orlovsky, and Peter's partner, beat poet Allen Ginsberg, on tour through the USA to read their poetry. Frank accompanied them on the tour, shooting documentary footage that served merely as the first stage for this complex work. The director builds his vision of Julius' mind by intercutting images of the real Julius with fictional passages about the making of a film about Julius Orlovsky.

The strength of the film lies not just in the fragmentation of fiction and reality, or in the blurring of the line between them; Frank manages the fiction passages so that they become a reflection on cinema and representation itself. The several sequences in front of a movie screen show the relationship Frank establishes between Julius' imaginary world and cinema. In one striking composition, a director (played by Christopher Walken) stands in front of the actor playing Julius, who in turn stands in front of the screen on which is projected the image of the real Julius: a clear illustration of the process of art creation, a straight line from the author to his work.

Violeta Kovacsics

Pamela Biénzobas
"B-Happy" (International Forum)

Chile (co-production Spain, Venezuela), 2003. 90 min. Director: Gonzalo Justiniano. Screnplay: Gonzalo Justiniano, Fernando Aragón, Sergio Gómez, Daniela Lillo. Camera: Andrés Garretón. Cast: Manuela Martelli, Lorene Prieto, Felipe Ríos,
Eduardo Barril.

Chilean cinema in the past two decades is well reflected in Gonzalo Justiniano's career: intermittent, with moments of great inspiration followed by huge disappointments, struggling to achieve a certain continuity and a style of its own. And "B-Happy", his latest feature, is a good example of the strengths and weaknesses of local production.

Through this technically proficient and quite honest coming-of-age film, Justiniano seems to be finding a balance that does not spare social comedy clichés or certain aesthetics of poverty. Nevertheless, it tries not to indulge in the discouraging inclination of recent Chilean films to caricature popular characters. The filmmaker remains faithful to the motivation that he announced when the project was launched: to depict how certain people, the most anonymous and neglected, are strong enough to endure tragic existences with surprising acceptance and still keep the faith.

In a noteworthy performance, newcomer Manuela Martelli plays 14-year-old Kathy, who after a succession of misfortunes flees her home in a poor rural area of Chile (far from the postcards of the economic miracle that northern media love to show), though she's neither in search of something in particular nor running away from anything; simply drifting to survive.

The film offers a sincere and fairly fresh look at the social issue. However, the huge distance between the filmmaker and the world he is trying to show is clear. You can actually feel that same awe he says he experienced when he met a teenager whose story inspired the movie. But due to this irretrievable gap we don't really understand what Kathy is going through and we cannot share her feelings, but only Justiniano's point of view.

Pamela Biénzobas

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