All the Fine Young Brammibal's
I am entirely new to how film festivals work, and in this particular instance the Berlinale. A ticket rush not unlike a stock market in its early morning frenzy was announced upon a Tuesday. Myself and a co-conspirator paused work activities to try and snag screenings. You underestimate, or at least I do, how much time studios spend baking anticipation into you before you see an actual movie. Months in advance, the trailer lets you bookmark a weekend afternoon in the very distant future, then a trailer 2 and maybe even 3 announce the entertainment as imminent. You know what you’re getting into, sometimes a little too well.
With a festival like the 2024 Berlinale, which you knew for months, sure, was on the horizon — because you told everybody you could that Martin frigging Scorsese would be in town — everything is whizz-bang before you settle into your seat. You are picking a movie by concept, every now and then spotting a name you recognise, but trying not to give in to your cinematic biases and predilections. Your adoration of anything French, your comfort with English dialogue, that familiar manner in which New York’s grit and greyness will tint just about any lens. I made four reasonably informed decisions, with the help of aforementioned co-conspirator, and then learnt from colleagues that there is no popcorn sold at festivals (presumably so there is no munching and crunching during screenings), and that people try to applaud when the movie ends. I have always applauded at the movies, sometimes solitarily, even to commend largely computer-generated scenes.
The last day of the festival was a crisp and balmy morning, a perfect complement to what slivers of sunshine played off the various architecture in the square at Potsdamer Platz. Iterations of a quite gorgeous Berlinale poster, each showcasing a different part of the festival’s iconic bear, hung all about the air. I’d missed two movies the previous Sunday, for illness and solidarity reasons. I had doubts about the fun-fair effect, the specialness, of a carnival that was taking place even at kinos we frequented weekly — that it would feel genuinely like we had escaped everyday life for a time, to pause the daily hustle and actually celebrate film. I got the feeling immediately, in line at Potsdamer Platz, that I was to inhabit a slightly better version of the world for about half a day: with a tote bag full of Oreos, melting Lindt, and Haribos, which I couldn’t find the courage to dip into once inside.
I have broader comments to make, and for which I am mostly unqualified, about how we are in the end-times of a certain spirit of creativity; in literary and cinematic endeavour, for sure. But you see a couple things, watch a couple directors really go for it, and it’s hard to imagine that anything so exceptional, so peculiar, could represent a trade in its death throes. I want more all of a sudden, perhaps for finally living in a city where eccentric entertainment is so readily available; but I realise I might be part of a generation witnessing the end of something. I don’t know. I can’t tell for sure.
Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott in All of Us Strangers
A week or so before the festival I’d been to see All of Us Strangers, whose deeply sentimental marketing I was highly suspicious of at first. Andrew Scott is Adam, a man that has clearly and comprehensively been broken in half by something, and who lives in a super-modern, high rise apartment building in a rather nondescript London. There is a missed opportunity with location, since place is so integral to a life unlived that Adam seems to be mourning. His building doesn’t seem to inhabited by other people, and his apartment doesn’t bear any personal hallmarks. He visits a park, gazes meaningfully into space, shortly before he undertakes the first of what appear to be regular visits to a couple who appear economically to live on another side of town — perhaps even of England. It is unclear for long periods what Adam’s relationship to this couple is, before we finally learn they are the ghosts of his dead parents.
By then Harry, a friendly and conveniently sexy neighbour, has already stumbled into Adam’s life, and been accompliced into the troubling ritual of his cross-town visits. Even less endearing than sentimental marketing to me is the brand of visual trickery that intertwines drug highs with flashbacks and dreams. Sometimes you’ve just got to do little things, no matter how much passion you invest into a project: let your characters network; hold up actual conversations between them; let events conspire with circumstances. An increasing lack of sequence undermined some a powerful idea about the invisibility of queer identity, which only really settled into me long after I’d left the theatre.
Gabriel García Bernala in Another End. Image courtesy of the Berlin International Film Festival.
Another End, which I saw at the festival, shares a cinematic kinship with All of Us Strangers. It too is defined by tragedy that has come before us, in a world where people can transfer the memories (and I suppose intellect) of their loved ones into host bodies — their original bodies, for a limited time, and then those of strangers who volunteer theirs before they die. The first half-hour of the movie stumbles around this construction, insisting you locate its instruction manual and assemble the conceit yourself.
Sal (Gabriel García Bernal) just so happens to have a sister at the memory factory who more than once helps him bend the rules. The movie tastes an awful lot like aeroplane food, because the director believes the stakes are high enough emotionally that its dialogue need only imitate real life. Another End also has a lead whose eyes are deliberately never quite dry, and it also has that familiar menagerie of sets for when a movie implies capitalism exacerbates the problem but not really: the loner apartment, a futuristic skyscraper here and there, and of course the dingy nightclub where everything starts to fall apart.
Another End is trying to say something about a world where we just prompt things we shouldn’t into existence, but doesn’t even begin to get there for a disinterest in rational argument. Even the science fiction of it, how one person’s memories for instance overlap smoothly with entirely new, rented faces, doesn’t hold up.
Rooney Mara and Raúl Briones, in La Cocina. Image courtesy of the Berlin International Film Festival.
We took a timeout for doughnuts at the nearby Brammibal, who do vegan delights, and then marched back upstairs for La Cocina. (The very name of this establishment, Brammibal, makes me think of sweet-toothed cannibals, and I wonder if that was always the intention.)
In the moment, perhaps because I’d skipped breakfast, I thought I was witnessing something of a revelation. La Cocina is The Bear on steroids, centering on one eventful day in a kitchen at a diner in New York. The plot is simple enough. Here is the circumstance (immigration, capitalism, the American 9-to-5), and here are the events (a pregnancy, petty theft, a secret abortion, a meltdown). Once you have the ingredients down, your characters can bristle with life and do all the speaking for themselves.
La Cocina is probably too damn stylish for its own good. Its shot in black-and-white, which in my experience serious people tend to find pretentious. Its frames elasticate like sheets of chewed bubble-gum, turning very tight spaces into rich war zones. Speaking of frames, La Cocina’s are wildly ambitious: portraits of minimum-wage/maximum-rage workers are rendered in the little windows on doors as they converse, and in between shelves and trays as orders are rock-n-rolled onto pans, plates, tables. Maybe La Cocina didn’t win the Golden Bear, for which it was nominated, because it tries to get away with a little too much artsy shit. It was never going to win an award for being so electric and also ironically American. It may not be remembered one day, for simply having and acting upon a real sense of taste.
Sandra Hüller holds it together, in Anatomy of a Fall.
By now I trust my two kinos, at the Filmtheater Am Friedrichshain and the International near Alexanderplatz, and I’m generally reluctant to venture beyond them. It’s nice to get home and still have a couple hours to eat something decent or catch the end of a game. But I would like to stay even remotely aware of cinematic excellence in languages besides English — so I’ve learned to enjoy the long trip out to the Passage and the Rollberg theatres in Neukolln, which geographically borrow sugar from each other. The Passage does a plush impersonation of an opera house and goes up two floors. It wanders down one too, into an eerie red cube of a room that dispenses of lasers on its walls to comfortably seat about 25 people. (Here I saw Sydney Sweeney do commendable work in Reality, which is noble but unremarkable.) The Rollberg is tucked into the corner of an abandoned mall, with lighting that implies the hour is always past one’s bedtime. Karl Marx Strasse, bustling with film stars of its own, is restless even on Sundays.
Anatomy of a Fall stuck around long enough for me to finally see what all the fuss was about. I’m not sure where to put my hands when a film dismisses the lyrical opportunity in everyday life, because supposedly bigger things are afoot plot-wise. Anatomy does this for about 45 minutes, abstracting precious little, and honestly I had to shake myself awake a couple times — but we could blame some of that on the Rollberg, I suppose. The rest on performance marketing.
The undoing of a small family is accelerated when a middling writer plummets to his death one morning, from atop a cabin on a snowy French hill. Before and after the film kickstarts its much-vaunted courtroom drama, Anatomy labours through the process of making its domestic exchanges seem real. Sandra, our German protagonist abroad, at first gives few indications of the prickly and precarious mind that will be cross-examined mostly metaphorically in court. Anatomy’s first language is French by a nose-hair, because more characters speak it, but outside of a pretty routine investigation they mostly trade in banalities that lack both rhythm and thrust.
To be fair, the plot has to launch Samuel, Sandra’s husband, through a window so that we can work backwards to establish why. This shift towards legal drama allows director Justine Triet to discuss the power of storytelling: how relationships are essentially conflicts between and reconciliations of narrative, and how a novel of all things (as a matter of emotional record) could function as a lethal marital artefact. Are we actually making up fiction all the time, to sustain truths that no longer hold? Triet has the self-awareness to keep revisiting and resetting the tension, shunning a temptation I think most directors would struggle to resist if they had a judge and jury to retreat to.
I probably won’t think to stream Anatomy next time I’m on leave, even though it does achieve that uniquely European feat of wearing one’s protagonist down scene-by-agonising-scene. The movie, and a process-driven performance by its lead actor, render quite the spectacle of one woman’s uncertain negotiation with crisis.
Several people have asked for my take but I’m still not sure what to make of The Zone of Interest. I have not known what to make of its trailer the past few months, except to presume that, like Killers of the Flower Moon, it tells a story that ought be seen by as many people as possible.
Rudolph Hoss, a real-life Nazi commander, is a family man rising in rank within the SS. For just under two hours we witness his wife and children leading a serene, pastoral existence in and outside a large house neighbouring a concentration camp. Many of the film’s frames look like family photos a friendly uncle might take, with everyone — not just the children — blissfully oblivious of the torment that is faintly audible in the distance.
Something’s always a little hard to grasp at exactly, even as a film-goer. Your attention is placed on the mundanity of children at play, or a mother and her maid hanging laundry, while black smoke fills the air somewhere and gunshots rattle off in the distance. It sounds like there’s a war close by, a massacre, but why isn’t anybody running? You know exactly why — but director Jonathan Glazer just shuffles the cards around every so often, planting clues in chilling, administrative dialogue as your lone assurance you’re not misinterpreting or missing anything.
As as a cultural document The Zone of Interest runs for just about the right amount of time. Any longer and it becomes easy to accuse Glazer of a callously showy touch instead of an acutely sober one. His warning isn’t against fascism itself or even genocide — it’s the scale of what normalcy can carpet if you look away for long enough.
