As the Berlinale ends, the Berlinale begins! (The blogging, that is.) Have you been looking forward to my our coverage of the Berlinale this year? It was a very split up business. 6451 came to visit and saw a bunch of films that Pixelmatsch and I couldn’t see. I also ended up seeing a lot of films with Loris while Pixelmatsch had a bigger focus on other Japanese films. (Between the two of us, we saw every single movie from this list except for “Wonderful World End” and “Little Forest” which we expect to be able to see later on anyways.) Finally, Pixelmatsch and I went to different screenings of some films (“Koza”, “End of Winter”) because of his work scheduling. All in all, we all went to the Berlinale but sadly didn’t see each other that much. Also, since O was sick and Pixelmatsch and 6451 went to see Lucia di Lammermoor on Friday, technically this Berlinale started on Saturday and will therefore have 9 instead of 10 days.
This time, my Berlinale did not start out with an exceptionally good film (it was a decent copy of French Nouvelle Vague at best) nor was it Japanese. That is OK, because it meant the Berlinale only got better afterwards.
Jahrgang 45
German Democratic Republic 1966/1990, Jürgen Böttcher, 94′
Idle young dude has a boring steady job, got married at 21 and now that he is on vacation from work, he wants to leave his boring wife again. Actually she isn’t even that boring, she just matured and took a genuine interest her profession of being a nurse. The entire world (his mentor, his parents, his friends who also are hot for the wife) advise him against divorcing, even at work his boss meddles into the affair. After a bunch of immature affairs (moving out, trying to seduce his ex-girlfriend, making a jealousy scene at a club and fighting afterwards), dude has a moment of epiphany when seeing another couple being lovey-dovey together and reconciles with his wife.
You can probably tell that I wasn’t particularly enamored with the story nor with its characters. In a relationship movie, I am especially not fond of these stories where clearly one party is in the wrong whereas the other one just deals with it. Antoine Doinel is a prime example for that, and if I think about it, most of those French Nouvelle Vague films have the same problem. In this case, however, the relationship is the main focus of the story and it kind of missed its mark for me. It lacks both the passion and the seductive light-heartedness that I know so well from films like “Jules et Jim” or “Une femme est une femme”. Only the exceedingly pretty ex-girlfriend kind of exuded that air, but she was such a stupidly one-sided character. I am also not much into the portrayal of these people. I don’t have much love for that bored, idle youth of the time, especially from today’s point of view: that is the generation who easily got jobs after lazing around forever, wasted money like crazy and is now making the younger generation pay taxes for their convenient retirement, so no thank you. Nevertheless there is one thing to be said about this film – it’s so darn good-looking! I think I’m just jealous of that generation which was free, politically naive and so effortlessly stylish. I drooled over those 60s hairstyles and dresses, over their lives in their pretty tiny apartments and the fun at their dance clubs. The film may be a shameless copy of Godard and Truffaut’s early work almost a decade earlier down to their camera angles, jump cuts and styling, but it was a good copy. I simply liked how it looked, and the humorous scenes in the film were much fun.
Oh yeah, before the film started the director also held a long-winded, annoyingly sappy speech about how he touched he is and how never thought the movie would ever come out after it failed to pass censorship in 1966 etc. etc. Can’t they save that for after the movie? Younger directors all have the decency to first show the film before going on about themselves. So embarrassing.