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Berlin 2006 - Daily reports
Tuesday, February 14th
The House that Altman Built. Katie Kohn on Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion (competition). 
Invisible Sense. Oleksiy Radynski reviews Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Invisible Waves (competition).
It's Only Rock and Roll. Maria Antonia Velez-Serna reviews Brothers of the Head (Panorama).
The Other Side of Bombay Nightlife. Leo Mirani reviews Ashim Ahluwalia's John and Jane (Forum).
Take Your Fiction Seriously! A Crash Course on Script Writing. Tamás Bella on the Script Clinic workshop.
One Second of Fame. Anne von der Goenne on the Talent Nirvan Mullick who conceived the "One Second Film" concept.
A Very Sugary Event. Vera Brozzoni continues to explore the "food and film" theme.
Open Sesame, Close Encounters. Soumaya Beltifa on the Talent Campus debate about the various challenges faced by filmmakers in the MEDA countries.
Violence on Duty. Olya Aylarova on the "Sympathy for the Devil" panel with the acclaimed South Korean director Park Chan-wook.
Home Is a State of Mind. Laurence Reymond met two famous cinematographers: Anthony Dod Mantle and Christopher Doyle.
The House that Altman Built
Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion (so-called after the beloved folk and country radio show) opens and closes on Kevin Kline as Guy Noir, a walking pastiche of the eponymous genre. Noir self-narrates his life and paints himself right into "an Altman picture", that is, a delicately written ensemble piece set in an exclusive and often private world. This time, that world is the midwestern anomaly of radio broadcasted variety shows staged before a live audience. In this world, Noir is no longer the center of the filmic universe; he is but one more wacky character in the 2006 vintage of an Altman cast.
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For your enjoyment, A Prairie Home Companion also brings you Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin as senile folk singing sisters who live and breath their longing for times past, subsequently suffocating Streep's teenage daughter, played adimirably by the "It Girl" du jour, Lindsay Lohan. All three of them sing beautifully, though Streep in particular who is a hard act to follow, singing or not. Coming up next is Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly as Lefty and Dusty, cowboys with material straight from old vaudeville who sing with mouths as dirty as their clothes.
Center stage, however, is the "Home Companion" king himself, Garrison Keillor as Garrison Keillor, who as it so happens, also wrote the film. Keillor is perhaps the greatest "character" in this showcase of good-old-fashioned-American-spirit, in part because he has had a lifetime to shape his role. Keillor belongs neither to the heartland folk nor the "suits" who lurk backstage (Tommy Lee Jones makes a late and thankless appearance). Keillor is Keillor both on-air and off and his charm rides on the ease and consistency of his manner which blends seamlessly with any trace of performance.
The story is built around the show's final broadcast and the ominous presence of "the axe" haunts the lively scene. Enter the dangerous curves of Virginia Madsen, a femme fatale to Noir's comical thirst for intrigue, a curiosity to the oblivious Keillor and a guardian angel (or psychotic) to everyone else. Altman gives us Madsen as a phenomena to make sense of as we wish, and Madsen gives us an equally enigmatic performance. Within the incredibly elegant structure of the film itself, this open- ended character, who is the lynch-pin of the film's plot ,bespeaks both mental and narrative laziness. That said, "A Prairie Home Companion" is shaped and shaded by American culture and ideology so if the ending's ploy is a cheap one, it is also very familiar.
Like that annual trip home for the holidays, whether or not you enjoy A Prairie Home Companion (as opposed to merely appreciating its elegant form and seasoned directorial talent) will depend on how sentimental you are for this hyper-idealized slice of Americana that serves only sweet corn and apple pie and sweeps all its demons under the rug. Given the U.S.'s current identity crisis, American audiences may be desperate for it.
Invisible Sense
In his competition movie Invisible Waves director Pen-ek Ratanaruang totally deconstructs the genre of Asian thriller.
It´s pretty easy to explain the exoticism and cruelty of Asian movies by saying it is typical of the Oriental mentality, as if this justifies the events which take place in movies by Kim Ki-duk or Tsai Ming-liang. Still, it's not a secret that this concept of "the Oriental Mind" was invented in the West and is actually preventing us from a deeper understanding of Asian culture, and Asian cinema in particular. Asian thrillers and horrors are acknowledged primarily because of their unusually sensitive background which lets them speak on the most important issues of modern life without falling into the sin of highbrow intellectual cinema which has turned European cinema into almost total collapse. The questions raised by Invisible Waves, as well as the very fact of its participance in the Official Competition of the Berlinale, mark a dangerous point in the development of Asian cinema. The originality of its remarkable genres starts to decompose under the influence of European tradition of auteur cinema, specially admired by the A-class festivals.
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Invisible Waves is a film of wonderful shape which overshadows the obvious lack of drama in its contents. The story of the hitman Kyoji who has an affair with the wife of his yakuza boss but is forced to kill his lover and run away from Japan is told in an extremely slow yet fascinating manner. One of its prime virtues is the outstanding cinematography by Christopher Doyle, whose static shots as well as complicated panoramas turn the screen into a mysterious surface which puts the illusion of meaning into the film. The world as seen by Ratanaurang is full of trap doors which hide nothing but danger. Every object in Kyoji's surroundings seem to have th intention of punishing him for his sin. The director keeps his hero in the state of increasing paranoia. Being attacked by the killers hired by his boss, Kyoji still finds motivation to fight for his life and manages to survive in a totally desperate situation. The attempt to have a revenge over his betrayor fails as Kyoji suddenly understands that he has no more reason to live. The masculine vitality of an Asian criminal film is being destroyed by the essential weakness of the main character performed by Asano Tadanobu. Still the hallucinogenic atmosphere and purely surrealistic gags are the undoubted advantage of a movie whose waves of sense remain invisible.
It's Only Rock and Roll
A pair of cojoined twins from a little town rise to rock stardom in the seventies, passing from glam to punk as they get lost in substance abuse. As a mockumentary, Brothers of the head does not really thread on new ground, even though it is much more ellegantly shot and edited than most of its kind. Its structure is still pretty much on the Almost Famous / This is Spinal Tap side. It conjures every rock cliché at hand - sex, drugs, groupies, Yoko, managers, record company moguls, ruthless female journalists, and so on. Rock flics use to include also a mounting tension between singer and lead guitarist, here assuming the form of sibling rivalry as epitomised by the Gallagher brothers.
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The only difference, in terms of plot, is that these rowding rock stars cannot literally split; however, this bizarre twist does not have as much weight as it could. The basic plotlines of corporate exploitation and physical intoxication leading to mental breakdown are left unscathed. The question about how can two people who have had exactly the same experiences end up having such different minds could lead to some interesting speculation, but perhaps that is just why the movie does not address it.
The movie, then, goes from average to brilliant because of visuals, not screenplay. Anthony Dod Mantle's cinematography achieves richness of textures and rhythms, making the film breathe and tremble with a distinct heartbeat. Since the "documentary" is made up with mixed footage, Mantle goes from a heavily filtered gold-and-violet 35mm to hand-held 8mm to biopic talking heads to 16mm reportage, making the most of each format. 8mm parts are intimate, complete with hushed sound from a tape recorder. 16mm has a sense of urgency, and its grainy emulsion seems to reveal a certain despair and mystery of the twins' skin and eyes.
But those are only technicals facts and empty attempts at rationalisation. Truth is the rocking soundtrack, British accent, and punk attitude are programmed to be seductive. The sexual magnetism of the Treadaway twins reminds us of Jonathan Rhys Meyers in Velvet Goldmine; in fact, the whole style of the film is reminiscent of (if not as flamboyant as) Todd Haynes' tale about one of the last exciting moments in musical history - the raucous birth of punk. In the bleak atmosphere of 1975 Britain, a pair of siamese rock stars did not really seem out of place.
The Other Side of Bombay Nightlife
Ashim Ahluwalia's John and Jane is set in Bombay but his characters inhabit a very different space from the rest of the city's residents. They live in a twilight zone of sorts, travelling to their offices in far-flung industrialised suburbs to sit under bright lights and speak to pensioners half a world away while their own city sleeps. In parts heart-breaking and in parts sanguine, the film takes no stand, political or commercial, on the global issue of out-sourcing. Told sans voiceover, it makes no judgement about its protagonists. Instead, "John and Jane" focuses on six Indian men and women whose lives have been changed, for better or worse, by the phenomenon that is the call centre.
Ahluwalia finds them all: the angst-ridden pot-smoking, foul-mouthed youth who is only in it for the money, the slightly effeminate man who would rather make a living dancing and the enterprising and eternally optimistic entrepreneur who listens to motivational tapes and knows, not thinks or hopes but knows, that he will make it big. Soon.
Then there is the working class hero who met his wife at the office, the honest and hard-working middle class girl who finally finds a family at work, and perhaps the saddest of them all, the blonde young Gujarati woman who says she's comfortable being herself, except she's already someone else.
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The film comes full circle in many ways. One of them is the way it's photographed, beginning with shots of New York, moving on to inner city bombay - crowded, noisy, polluted - and ending with Bombay's bleak suburban wasteland of identically grotesque highrises, dusty roads to nowhere and stacks upon stacks of industry, all churning out smoke in slow motion. The other is the development of characters, for John and Jane is as much the story of one person as it is of all six, going as it does through a whole range of emotions from hating the job to becoming the job.
Ahluwalia also admirably manages to weave in a visual narrative on the call centre itself through each of his vignettes without ever boring or judging. Call centre employees, or agents, work in an office the size of a football field, segregated by the American state they're calling. They attend voice training, where they sit like pre-schoolers repeating phrases with the "correct" intonations. They attend seminars on the American way of life, learn American values and are quizzed on American culture. Brainwashing on an Orwellian scale.
John and Jane is not without its faults. There are some mood-building shots that go on too long and appear too often and there are sequences that seem a little pointless in the scheme of things, but nothing takes away from the melancholic sense of emptiness that Ahluwalia manages to create simply through the day to day lives of his characters. This, along with the intense, almost Blade Runner-like mood, is the film's greatest achievement.
Take Your Fiction Seriously!
A Crash Course on Script Writing
Running over three days from February 12 to 14, the Script Clinic is one of the busiest workshops of the Berlinale Talent Campus, where 15 writers from all over the world get a chance to talk over their finished scripts or treatments/plot outlines with internationally acclaimed specialists of script doctoring, getting instant feedback. Reporting on the event, I had a chance to attend the first session between a German first-time screen writer, Dorothe Beinemeier, and one of the most renowned Hungarian film directors of the seventies, Gyula Gazdag, who is currently teaching screenwriting at UCLA, California.
Unfortunately, this was not a typical workshop episode at all. To my surprise, it turned out that the wannabe did not have a finished script at all; in fact, she seemed to have only a faint notion about her characters and the more detailed development of the book. That is why the session became step by step an intelligent monologue by Gazdag about the tricks of the trade. However, his thoughts are well worth your while, so I am going to try to summarize the essence of what was said.
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First, the basics of character elaboration: do not let the story turns govern you while writing, because if you do, your narrative might easily become contrived and forced. Instead, think over the traits of your characters thoroughly. You have to create the minutiae of the emotional and everyday life they live until the point that you can tell what they would do in stereotypical situations even off-screen. Being able to empathize with your dramatis personae, you will not treat them as some chess figures in a recreated game of masters any more and when you put them in definite but unusual and/or challenging situations, the outcome might even surprise you.
Gazdag's second piece of advice is that you should not regard your story as a fixed succession of occurences or twists; always remain open to possibilities other than you thought of first. Keep searching for the most effective story options.
And finally a small, though tremendously practical pointer concerning your daily routine: do not continue working until drying up completely. Jotting down all of your thoughts about a certain part of your book could cause a minor writer's block the next day--sitting in front of your computer and waiting for inspiration. It could take annoyingly long until the first new idea occures. So you better wrap up the day at some point where you still have a background reserve of unrecorded concepts in your head. Dealing with the stuff still unwritten you will able to find your way easier into composing the next day.
One Second of Fame
Did you always want to be a producer? Did you have a secret wish to be on IMDb sometimes? Did you ever dream about being named in one line with Roland Emmerich, Spike Jonze and Tom Green? Well, here comes your once in a lifetime opportunity.
Berlinale Campus Talent Nirvan Mullick conceived the totally new concept of "The One Second Film" six years ago while studying Experimental Animation at the California Institute of the Arts. He came up with the idea "to create the biggest shortest film ever made". The movie itself will be more like a still, being only one second long. But Mullick's aim is to create "the perfect moment". When the second is screened, there'll follow the approximately 90 minutes long credits, continuing with a documentary about the making of the movie.
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To be a producer the only thing you've got to do is to donate at least 1$. Then you can call yourself an associate producer. If you decide to donate more than 100 bucks you are allowed to consider yourself an executive producer. The range of who could be a producer couldn't be wider, from Mullick's grand-grandmother to celebrities. People from 28 countries already back the project.
Nirvan Mullick's secret goal is of course to create film history with his project and not to make big money. All profits raised will be given to the Global Fund for Women. Mullick is an award winning animator and burgeoning social-entrepreneur whose animated short films The Box Man and The Three of Us, have screened in film festivals worldwide, from Cannes to Slamdance, winning numerous awards, including the AFI Fest 2003 Audience Award. The very promising talent is recently preparing his feature long writing and directing debut which is going to be produced by Michael Besman, who is responsible for About Schmidt and Seven Years in Tibet. The estimated date of production of "The One Second Film" is September 11, 2007.
A Very Sugary Event
German director Sandra Nettelbeck and director/food guru/activist Sarah Waters met yesterday at the Auditorium with Davia Nelson as a moderator. The three women not only exchanged information about their work, but also fill the air with pleasantry and kindness.
Sandra Nettelbeck presented a few clips from her 2001 film Mostly Martha, the story of a chef who suddenly has to take care of her 8-year-old niece; moreover, she has to cope with Mario, an Italian chef who "occupies" the kitchen in Martha's restaurant and wants to run it his own way. As we can see from the clips, Nettelbeck has a very feminine skill in depicting the character's psychological nuances, but also she puts a great attention to the way food is presented and to its function in changing the characters' lives. "My parents were dedicated to food", she said, "my father even helped me to edit the script; in fact my film deals with the two most important things in my life: food and family".
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Alice Waters' approach to food is less poetic but equally gentle; she showed clips from a documentary that testified her hard work in order teach American children to eat properly. As she stated, "Nowadays 85% of American kids don't eat at home; and when they eat by themselves, they are eager to fill their bodies with junk food, crisps and Coke". An impressive clip showed Waters examining the content of a trash bin outside the a school in Berkeley: it's full of fast food boxes and Coke cans. "I came here to beautify this school in a more general way, but I ended up in setting a program of Nutritional Education for kids: I teach them how to savour different kinds of food and as a result they are more lively and attentive". The importance of her action is supported by F. Schlosser, author of the best seller "Fast Food Nation", who warns the audience about obesity spreading all across the US.
Both Nettelbeck and Waters proved to take a good care of the "human" side of food: Nettelbeck stressed that in order to have an effective script you have to talk not only about food, but about "food and people", while Waters insisted to explain that her work is intended to help people gaining a better nutrition therefore a better life. An aura of friendly, sugary goodness fill the air as the meeting came to an end - and then the public rushed to the next buffet...
Open Sesame, Close Encounters
Taking part in the Talent Press programme offers a unique opportunity for young critics to hone their craft. With the help of our mentors we're trying our best to make good articles. So it came as a bonus when I was invited to take part in "Open Sesame", the Talent Campus debate about the various challenges faced by filmmakers in the MEDA countries.
The panellists included Mohamed Bakrim (Centre Cinématographique Marrocain -- the CCM), the Noury family (the father and his two sons with their first feature film Heaven's Doors, which has opened to great acclaim at this year's Panorama) and Marwan Hamed (the Egyptian director of Yacoubian Building, also in Panorama, and equally well-reviewed by the international press).
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It was difficult for me to describe Tunisian cinema by comparison with the Moroccan and Egyptian film industries. First of all because the realities are quite different from one country to another and also because so many changes have occurred in recent years. In Tunisia, movie theatres are closing and national film production is still languishing. Fortunately, Morocco has succeeded in giving a fresh impetus to the local film industry.
Mohamed Bakrim's speech about the CCM's financial aid and the co-production with other North African countries offered hopeful signals to young film directors. But Swel and Imed Noury, the irrepressible young Moroccan brothers, haven't profited unduly from the CCM. They were lucky in that their Spanish mother is an established film producer in her own right. It was important for them to have as much freedom as possible to shoot what they really want to show to the audience. Marwan Hamed agreed even if he admitted that it remains difficult to shoot a film with total freedom because of money issues in Egypt. It's hard to find sources of investment for this kind of enterprise.
The audience was curious to know more about the censorship in the Arabic countries and if there are established guide-lines. As a film critic, I think that there is always a way to bypass the law. Probably the only thing one should take into consideration is the audience.
Violence on Duty
One of the most anticipated panels at the Berlinale Talent Campus was "Sympathy for the Devil" with the acclaimed South Korean director and screenwriter Park Chan-wook. The winner of the Grand Prix in Cannes is famous for his "Vengeance Trilogy" - Sympathy for Mr.Vengeance, Old Boy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. Presenting a contrast to his extremely violent, passionate and colourful thrillers, the Campus audience was confronted by a very calm, impassive man in a strict grey suit, choosing his words with care, giving laconic answers and avoiding politically controversial topics.
One of the key points of the discussion was the filmmaker´s approach to scenes of violence, which in his films often appear somehow beautiful. But that's not what Park intended. "Certain violent scenes just happen to look like that in the finished film", he responds after watching yet another clip from Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. But it seems that nothing happens by chance in cinema, and scrutinising the screen is probably the best way of entering an artist's mind.
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Park Chan-wook is sometimes accused by his countrymen of giving the wrong image of South Korea in his dark and cruel films. But in his opinion, cinema is one of the ways of expressing the hatred and rage that people all over the world have to conceal deep within themselves. Being suppressed in modern society, these emotions grow rather than dissipate, and it such conflicts can never result in a happy ending. So Park Chan-wook's films differ radically from the rest of the Korean cinema - he just doesn't believe in "happy endings" for his characters.
The questions from the audience were pertinent for young filmmakers dreaming of future sucess. How does the director get his inspiration? From many different sources - newspapers ,conversations, thinking... As for the films, Park Chan-wook has been inspired by the cinema prior to the 1970's, especially by Alfred Hitchcock. He also admits to an admiration for him Shakespeare and Franz Kafka. How does he work with his actors? The secret seems to be that prior to shooting he needs to get to know them well, and to achieve this they go drinking together. That, in all likelihood, is when he persuades them to undertake the often dangerous and disgusting things his script requires.
After the Q & A session, Park Chan-Wook spent some time with his audience. As a non-English speaker, he gave autographs in elegant silence and posed stoically for cameras with a light smile of someone on duty - for as long as it took.
Home Is a State of Mind
For those whose main interest lies in the visual art and the aesthetic of films, meeting such talented and famous cinematographers as Anthony Dod Mantle and Christopher Doyle at the Berlinale Talent Campus proved a unique and invaluable opportunity. The craft of creating, lighting and framing images is an absolutely crucial issue in the making of a film. Being real artists in the shadow of directors, cinematographers don't often emerge from the darkness to talk about their work and their visions, even though they create, in film after film, a personal style. That is clearly the case with Anthony Dod Mantle, who is part of the Dogma wave from Denmark, and worked recently on Dogville and Manderlay by Lars von Trier, and for Christopher Doyle, who invented the now famous Wong Kar-wai world of gorgeous slow-motion. As we could see, those two masters already know and appreciate each other's work. In fact they are clearly friends, for they rapidly transformed the event into an exhilarating, free-wheeling jam-session of ideas.
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Walking in all directions across the stage (with Doyle reeling around in a genially tipsy mood), the pair started this erratic discussion by referring to each other's latest films, which rapidly led to Dod Mantle evoking his work with Lars von Trier, who in characteristically dictatorial fashion changed all the balance of his lighting during the editing stage. Hence the question of the division of power between the director and cinematographer, specially with such strong personalities on both sides. For Dod Mantle, shooting with someone like von Trier, as difficult as it may be, finds its reward in the exhilarating experience it involves. Rather more on the poetic side, Doyle compared his partnership with Wong Kar-wai to a dialogue, giving him the necessary distance to go further into his own world. To explain that paradoxical but artistically vital idea, he compared himself to a painter, who sometimes needs to step back from his painting, in order to achieve perspective. In that sense, the more demanding a director may be, the more accurate and intimate the cinematographer can become.
Urging every young director in the audience not to rely only on good professional skills, Doyle launched into a wonderful drunken solo, explaining how being true to yourself is the only means of accolmplishing something in art, no matter what the filming medium (both he and Dod Mantle are satisfied with the digital evolution), no matter how big or small the budget, and no matter what the language differences. Doyle, who lives in Hong-Kong, strongly believes that being a foreigner gives you a different and richer outlook on things. After all, as he said, "home is a state of mind".
© FIPRESCI / Berlinale Talent Campus 2006
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