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Berlinale 2014, Day 2 (Doshaburi)

Originally our plan was to see 4 movies today (yes, that’s right), but we didn’t get into “The Docks of New York” because we were too convinced we’d get a ticket for an old, obscure film at the Zeughauskino. Well, we were wrong. Incidentally this was the only time we didn’t get a ticket for something, and so “Doshaburi” was our last film for the day.

The director’s son was present with his wife, all dressed up in a kimono. He seemed extremely proud of his father’s work and delighted to present it at the Berlinale. It was rather cute how they were standing at the exit bowing at the audience passing by, so I bowed as well.

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Doshaburi (When it rains, it pours)
Japan 1957, Noboru Nakamura, 105’

Because her family runs a love hotel, the main character’s boyfriend dumps her. On top of all that, her mother and father are not married but they hide that from the children – the older daughter and (mostly) protagonist of the story, a younger brother who takes his rather miserable social position with a grain of salt, and a younger daughter, who starts out being a very cheerful girl. After the protagonist runs away from home to work in a cabaret and that man finds her there, the family crumbles slowly.
Death count: 2.

On the one hand, the film is a somewhat cheap melodrama. The storyline is rather over the top, and at times you feel like watching a soap opera. I also have a personal disliking for the ending, because it suggests that the parents are carrying some sort of guilt, when (from today’s standards) they absolutely did nothing wrong. They were in love but an unfortunate situation made him marry somebody else. That doesn’t make the family “bad”. Apart from this personal reservation, the strangest thing about the film was how un-Japanese everybody was acting. For some reason, everybody always spoke their mind! Especially that youngest daughter did, which shocked me the most. In what society can children tell their parents “Mom, dad, please break up”? I couldn’t say such a thing in my fairly open family from 2014, let alone in the 50s in Japan. Of course this kind of openness is necessary for the melodrama to take place, and one could of course also argue that the family in the story is far from normal, hence their relative openness to each other. Even so, a little suspense of disbelief is necessary here.

If you can ignore how incredibly in-your-face this movie is, then it’s a masterpiece. The story is told in a very gripping manner, all the actors are pros and well-cast, but most importantly the story made me care for its characters. I am fascinated by the family’s struggle with its problematic social situation and subsequent downward spiral. It’s a film about how everybody in this family loves each other, but society’s judgement on them weighs so heavily that they cannot be happy despite that. I thought that was beautiful.

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Berlinale 2014, Day 2 (We come as friends)

Today I have been to the Haus der Berliner Festspiele for the very first time. While it looks rather lovely from the outside, with the Berlinale decoration and all, the venue itself is just incredibly ugly and you are damned to neck pain for most seats. It’s almost as bad as the Friedrichstadtpalast, where the problem is a different one – most seats are too far to the side. After this one time, we actively avoided this venue and if possible, I would like to never return.

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We come as friends
France/Austria 2013, Hubert Sauper, 109′

Hubert Sauper makes a documentary on South Sudan, mostly depicting how the world’s bigger forces such as China and the US are colonizing the country in a modern way while at the same time large parts of the population are suffering under malnutrition and soiled water sources.
Death count: Uncountable.

Shii and Pixelmatsch predicted that the film may be the worst one we would be seeing at the Berlinale. To be honest, I knew from the beginning that this would not be the case for me. This is not because I liked the film so much, but rather that the film managed to do what it should – transport information on the political situation in South Sudan and provoke my ire against its colonizers. Especially the part with the American missionaries was positively painful. When they call South Sudan “New Texas” and say “oh yeah, they didn’t like it when we took the land and put a fence around it, but at some point they got over it”, I wanted to throw up and trash the seats around me. In certain parts, the film is pushing all the right buttons with me, and I think that has some merit.

On the other hand, “We come as friends” is just so, so superficial. For the most part, it’s essentially a ploy from the French and Austrian governments to say: “Look at the US and China and how evil they are. They are colonizing African countries like we did 100 years ago!” Hey, France, the war in Algeria was merely 50 years ago. A lot of people involved with it are still alive, but somehow it’s fine to point the finger to others now. The other thing that bothered me with the film was how the majority of the film was spent showing the atrocities the Chinese and Americans are committing, the ones by destroying their land with industrialization and the others by destroying their culture by forcing them to throw it away. But the film never shows this culture, and rarely even shows the people besides the traditional “Look at how poor they are and how primitive it all is” shots. There are some hints at a rich culture in Sudan, but the way the film almost brushes over them only creates pity but never respect with the Sudanese people. The film does not seem to depict them in a good manner, rather as these primitive, poor people who need help.

All in all, I thought the film was worthwhile. I have never cared much for what happens in Africa and know almost nothing, so the way the film analyzes modern colonialism was worth a look for me. Other than that, this is an unpleasantly politically loaded film where way too many people from the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung were sitting in the audience wallowing in self-adulation.

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Berlinale 2014, Day 2 (Love is strange)

Pixelmatsch usually blogs the Berlinale by days, putting all the films of one day into one posting. But now that we are blogging them separately, and considering the fact that my blog posts are so much longer, I will stick to my old one-post-one-film habit. I think this is a little easier to read but of course there will be no funny movie-mixing posting titles.

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Love is Strange
USA 2014, Ira Sachs, 98’

Alfred Molina and John Lithgow play an old gay couple (George and Ben) living in New York City, where one is retired and the other one lost his job after the catholic school he was working out found out that they married. Now they have to move out of their apartment, Ben moves in with his nephew and George moves in with a younger gay couple. Unfortunately Ben and his nephew’s family have a hard time adjusting to each other and George’s friends have loud parties every day.
Death count: 1.

This movie is essentially “Make way for tomorrow” in a modern, intellectual, gay setting. I was immediately reminded of the film in the way Ben and George suffer under their separation, and how they have trouble adjusting to living with other people. It was very moving to see how Ben was being a nuisance to his nephew’s family, but without really doing anything wrong at all. If anything, his nephew’s son is immensely immature in his latent homophobia and irrational emoness. Besides the obvious tear-jerkers and the beautifully crafted characters (to be honest, Marisa Tomei’s character was my favorite), another thing I really liked about the film was its blatant intellectualism. The film itself wasn’t all that intellectual, it was straight-forward and told in an unpretentious, simple way. It was fighting homophobia without the annoying activist touch. But the characters were living in a little dream world in which everybody goes to concerts and art galleries, the characters teach music or write novels and kids steal old French books from school. To be honest I loved that little dream world.
The film’s only weakness was that it was a little bit too much at times. Was it really necessary for someone to die in this movie to put its point across?

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Berlinale 2014, Day 1 (Tsuruhachi Tsurujiro)

The Berlinale begins! Okay, technically the Berlinale is over, but for this blog, it is the beginning. This time, I will be covering it myself, just like the 2009 version, while Pixelmatsch will blog only the films that I didn’t see. Overall, the beginning of the Berlinale was very tedious; we couldn’t get tickets for some of the films we really wanted to see (namely “Grand Budapest Hotel” and “Snowpiercer”), but as soon as it began, we saw the promise of an exceptionally good Berlinale, which it was until today.

As always, the first days started slowly and there was a huge run on the tickets, so we only saw one older film on the first day. It seems to be a pattern: Every Berlinale (out of two) I have been to started with a fantastic Japanese film, incidentally my favorite of the entire festival.

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Tsuruhachi Tsurujiro
Japan 1938, Mikio Naruse, 88’

Jiro and Toyo are a popular artist couple who who grew together, Jiro studied shinnai singing with Toyo’s mother and Toyo is an expert shamisen player. Not only are they made for each other on stage, of course they are also in love. However, true to any romantic comedy, they have a hard time showing this love and misunderstandings pile up. He feels insecure about her love for him and lashes out on her, while she refuses to put up with his jealousy. Even though everybody is trying to help them get together, the two cannot stop getting into humorous arguments.
Death count: 0.

The film made me go onto Hulu as soon as I got home to see what Naruse movies they have to offer. Luckily, there is a whole 15 of them, but Tsuruhachi Tsurujiro is not amongst them. In fact, I am surprised how underrated this movie is. There are virtually no screenings of the film in the world, no way to get to it on home video (unless I am mistaken) and almost no reviews of the film out there. It appears nobody knows about the film.

I think this film is a masterpiece of repetitive humor. After the third time Jiro said “I think you played badly today”, a big part of the audience was laughing. Furthermore, the characters develop over the years shown, and the bittersweet ending was heart-wrenching, because we see Jiro finally maturing and making a thoroughly selfless decision. It’s so beautiful. This is an unpretentious little film, a perfect romantic comedy with sad undertones and an ultimately tragic ending. Words cannot describe how much this film was able to hit all the right buttons with me, but it certainly helped was the Jiro and Toyo were equals. They were of similar age, they had the same profession and finally, they fought on equal footing, with Toyo saying “no” and insisting on her own style whenever she wanted. For a Japanese film from the 1930s, that is quite something! The secret feminist in me is very happy with this film.

On a side note, you can see “Tsuruhachi Tsurujiro” on Youtube, albeit in absolutely terrible quality. Sadly it does not do justice to Naruse’s soft touch at all, so I am hoping for better copies to show up.

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Berlinale 2013, closing comments and ranking

In an unusual twist I have no comments or scathing remarks about this year’s jury or prizes except of course the blatant cross-promotion of the opening movie so let us move on to the ranking as we all know that my reviews not always make it easy to tell how much I enjoyed the movies:

  1. Senzo ni naru
  2. Will you still love me tomorrow?
  3. Narco Cultura
  4. Before Midnight
  5. Yi Dai Zong Shi
  6. Sakura namiki no mankai no shita ni
  7. W imi?…
  8. Kujira no machi
  9. Kashi-ggot
  10. Mo sheng
  11. Sieniawka

Again, my criteria stay the same. This year we do have a cut-off. Can you guess where it is? Yes, directly above the last film of course. Also, I have nothing, absolutely nothing bad to say about the first place and any issues in the following three are not worth mentioning. The next three after that were also hard to rank and the only really big gap in enjoyment really is between the last two. Essentially it has been a very condensed experience this year. Thank you for your time, I shall now give back the reigns to our Queen and hope I inspired a new item or two on your watchlists.

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Berlinale 2013, day 7 (the value of family)

drrt

Mo sheng (Forgetting to Know you, ??)
China 2013, Quan Ling, 89′

TL;DR not really good people doing not really intelligent things. However loli.

The film shows, through our usual low-budget independent festival movie from Asia style, a slow spiral of a couple from an unknown small city (give or take a million people) somewhere near Chongqing from regular life with their incredibly cute little daughter who is the hidden star of the film, to distrust, lies and fundamental estrangement. Both of them have their flaws. They do not respect each other, they search through each other’s phones, the man visits cabaret clubs, the woman provokes his jealousy all the time with a young cab driver and of course there is his mother whose birthday is forgotten by the wife, which is the trigger to most of the following dissolution of their marriage. While it does not obviously employ the techniques of a soap opera it pulls you in like one and you start to wonder how low will they fall and if there is any solution for them to stay together and be happy.

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Will you still love me tomorrow?
Taiwan 2013, Arvin Chen, 104′

The quiet glasses salesman Weichung has been married for nine years to Feng, his plain childhood friend. They have a son and life rolls along smoothly until Feng decides together with her parents that she wants another child. While at the engagement party of his younger sister Mandy and San-san he meets through a chance encounter with gay wedding planner and old friend Stephen who encourages him to take up “being gay” again so he slowly starts considering it until he actually falls in love with a flight attendant who visits his shop.

TL;DR embrace the gay

While I did not watch his first movie “Au revoir Taipeh” which was shown in 2010, I have seen the very cute “Lane 256” (the one about the couple with the incompetent moving crew), which was a part of 10+10. I seem to have a new tradition: romantic comedies from Taiwan at the Kino International. A very nice tradition because both films have turned out very good so far. While the main characters occasionally are quite cliché gay it does not really hurt because as someone who has grown up in the Bay Area Chen knows the diversity of the community and most of his gay characters are “regular” people. Most importantly no one in this movie takes themselves too seriously and the dialogues are full of witty one-liners and most of the main characters get lost in wonderfully shrewd short delusional segments. There is also a hilarious subplot about Mandy not wanting to marry the timid but loyal San-san and Weichung’s gay friends trying all kinds of stuff to get them together again. Besides being a warm portrait of Weichung and his friends it also shows the painful way of life for many gay Taiwanese: While in the quite progressive Taipeh you can be openly gay in your 20s it is expected that you wind down, get settled and start a family for your parents when you reach thirty. In this case, with the now platonic love and understanding between Feng and Weichung after tensions they manage to find an agreement to both live comfortably while being parents to their son.
On a side note the movie is also hilariously current with Mandy watching Korean dramas and imagining the flower boy giving her life advice in Korean while she talks back to him in Mandarin or the gay bar playing Korean idol pop.

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Berlinale 2013, day 6 (the value of perseverance)

drrt

Senzo ni naru (Roots, ?????)
Japan 2013, Kaoru Ikeya, 118′

Naoshi is an 80-year-old lumberman and farmer, living in Rikuzentakata, one of the towns completely swept away by the Tsunami of 2011. Having lost his son, but not the house he built himself 55 years ago, even though it was flooded until the second floor, he toughs it out and perseveres against almost everyone’s wishes trying to rebuild his house so he can spend his last years there, remembering his lost son.

TL;DR most wonderful stubborn old man ever. I’m not crying, there must be onions hidden nearby.

He is old, he is stubborn, but at the same time he is also incredibly determined to not let the Tsunami win. Naoshi tries all he can to convince his neighbours and family to not give up the town and fights for rebuilding together with some friends and acquaintances even though the city and prefecture try to dissuade them. One incredibly moving moment is Tanabata of 2011 (July 7th): the city celebrates their traditional festival on this day and is known for its demonstration of giant wooden floats crashing into each other in a reverse tug-of-war. Three of the four floats representing the districts have been swept away so it looks like there will be no festival, however Naoshi succeeds in motivating the local youth to try and with his help (he is still a very skilled lumberman at his age) they manage to repair the remaining float and to hold the festival. At the end one of the young residents, after thanking everyone for coming, cries out that they will not be defeated and that they will rebuild. Cue everyone on and off screen crying. The film alternates between those stories of little achievements and setbacks (especially when dealing with the government) and little tidbits about Naoshi who is just wonderfully witty, especially when he explains how he once did “research” while bathing so he could carve a big wooden penis for a local fertility shrine: “Now it’s not as magnificent and hard as this wooden one anymore.” Unfortunately he does not reveal where he got his “inspiration” for the giant wooden vulva on the other side of the shrine.

For the Q&A we had the director and cameraman. Both were overjoyed about the long applause (I suppose it will be the longest I witnessed at this Berlinale) and the director read a message from the “stubborn old geezer” as he called himself, because he could not come to Berlin due to his health. In a very teary moment (I guess the director just cries easily) he explained that his cameraman lost his son too, a few months before the earthquake so that is probably the reason why Naoshi was able to relax around them so they could get him to talk and get this wonderful portrait of a simple, but proud and witty man.

drrt

Sieniawka
Germany, Poland 2013, Marcin Malaszczak, 126′

Docufiction about the homeless and residents of a mental asylum in Sieniawka, a little village in Poland’s weird southwestern Appendix bordering massive open-cast mining of brown coal.

TL;DR just don’t watch it

If a movie does not have plot it can somehow save itself by having a great atmosphere or style, or the way round. If it lacks both, screens at night and I am tired then I just walk out halfway. Dialogue and plot were nearly nonexistent and the mood shots of the open-cast mining and the mental asylum were neither interesting nor “beautiful” So I did the unthinkable and just like many others fled the scene.

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Berlinale 2013, day 5 (the value of continuity)

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Before Midnight
USA, Greece 2013, Richard Linklater, 108′

9 years after their last encounter, Jesse and Céline are married with adorable twin girls and spending the summer in Greece. Much talking is done.

TL;DR Just watch it, it’s what you expect.

Of course, most of the time they talk. The first third is banal middle aged banter with their Greek friends over dinner, which even though it is banal is absolutely enjoyable as they all are wonderfully candid and just like in any movie with at least one French/Italian/Spanish/Greek/etc. person everything devolves into talk about sex and gender. The second third is extremely reminiscent of the first two movies: after they have learned that their friends have gifted them one night of freedom from the kids at a hotel they walk through the beautifully cliché village to the hotel. Doing what? Talking of course. Then for the remainder, just when they are about to have sex they get into a really big fundamental argument. It seems a little strange that they argue about things like her doing the housework on top of working, etc. That is so last century. Or at least it should be for civilised Europeans. So even though the dialogue sometimes seems a little dated it is exactly what you expected: Another great entry in the row of “Before…” movies. Let’s see what they will come up with in 9 years.

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Berlinale 2013, day 4 (the value of working days)

So this day was great for getting tickets as people finally went back to work.

drrt

Narco Cultura
USA 2012, Shaul Schwarz, 103′

The documentary follows the lives of two people, one living as a crime investigator in Ciudad Juarez, one of the most dangerous cities in Mexico right along the border next to El Paso and the leader of a band profiting among others of the rising wave of Movimiento Alterado, a glorification of the cartels that has spawned in recent years.

TL;DR drugs (or rather cartels) are really really really bad, m’kay?

I am thoroughly disgusted by the matter documented. I mean that in the best possible way. The documentary is shot in a very modern photographic style (the director is a professional photographer after all) with tilt-shift and the like and in an attempt to stay balanced switches between the two main themes. One is the crime scene investigator living in Ciudad Juarez. It shows how the whole town and especially what is left of law enforcement is either paid off by the cartel or has to live in fear for their lives, a feeling that has completely crippled all recreational and business activity in Juarez which in turn fuels the ranks of the cartel with young jobless men. The other is the very successful young leader of BuKnas de Culiacan, a group writing and performing Narco Corridos which are basically cartel-glorifying folk songs. After watching this, it is nauseating to look at their very real myspace page, you kind of want to believe that all this surreal “culture” around the cartels does not exist in reality. I also wonder how many fans of their facebook page are dead due to cartel violence, that would the juiciest irony. It is so surreal to watch the part about BuKnas because you have this guy in his mid-twenties with a wife and two small kids sing about cartel life and killing while he is sitting in L.A. and being safe. Then you see their concerts all over the U.S. and Mexico where loads of people just adore them and sing the lyrics as if it is “Barbie Girl”. The level of hypocrisy in those people was indescribably revolting. Of course after those scenes the director cuts back to Juarez to show the practically dead city which is kind of cheap as a technique but you wonder if it is even possible to further embellish the tragedy and idiocy going on. Definitely watch this if you get a hold of it, it shook me up quite a bit as you can see.

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Sakura namiki no mankai no shita ni (Cold Bloom, ?????????)
Japan 2012, Atsushi Funahashi, 119′

Kenji and Shiori are a young married couple working together in a small factory near the Touhoku coast, not very far from the place where the tsunami and nuclear accident happened in 2011. Due to the situation the small supplier of automotive parts struggles together with the bigger companies. One day after the quite skilled Kenji has helped land a big deal with another company he is accidentally killed by Takumi, a coworker and the deals falls through. Almost everybody including Shiori hates Takumi from this point on and blames him for the decline of the factory. The more cruel and lazy workers actually start bullying him but slowly Shiori falls for the man who killed her husband.

TL;DR love in the strangest places

Regular Asian art cinema at its best. The director has become really good at creating moods and choosing great shots, other than that there is really not much to say about the technical aspects. It feels very refreshing that the story does not have cheap cop-outs, I would call it both the saddest and most drama-free love story ever, the dreary mood is sometimes suffocating, but the hopeful and beautiful moments are done wonderfully and have a nice contrast to the rest. Definitely recommend it both as a story and as a document to sentiments of small-town Touhoku post-3/11.

Christoph Terhechte, the section chief of the Berlinale Forum must be a weeaboo. Not only is he able to pronounce all the Japanese names correctly, he has also made sure that Atsushi Funahashi premieres all his movies at the Berlinale. Last year we had Nuclear Nation, the cancelled love story mentioned there is actually this movie and earlier I watched Yanaka Boshoku. Funahashi said that he loves coming here and it somehow feels homey with the audience and their strong interest in his small movies, as he calls them. As was already said, in 2011 he had to cancel the movie because the location was literally gone and funding for all filming in Japan was stopped. Only after he made Nuclear Nation he was able to scrape together funding again and do the movie he planned. He says that the basic plot, which is about the inexplicable 180-degree-turns we sometimes make with our feelings towards people, stayed unchanged however most of the dreary and dark atmosphere in the movie only appeared during this attempt of making the film while trying to convey the situation people in northeast Japan have to face after the catastrophes.

drrt

Kujira no machi (The Town of Whales, ??????)
Japan 2012, Keiko Tsuruoka, 70′

Machi, Tomohiko and Hotaru are childhood friends, attending high school together somewhere in the rural outskirts of Tokyo. One day while they try to decide what to do through summer break, Machi receives peaches from a friend of her missing brother. They decide to go to Tokyo to find her brother. That Hotaru loves Tomohiko who loves Machi does not really help though.

TL;DR Kids. Not the ones from Brooklyn doing drugs and fucking around, though.

Stylistically unremarkable but for a first feature (it was the director’s graduation work) very solid cute little coming-of-age movie. Though it may not be too refined the atmosphere and characters are nicely fleshed out and though they are typical kids in puberty and sometimes a little annoying and childish you can easily feel sympathetic with them and enjoy their little adventure in Tokyo.

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Berlinale 2013, day 3 (the value of violence)

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Kashi-ggot (Fatal, ???)
South Korea 2012, Lee Don-ku, 103′

Sung-gong and his high school “friends” (read: bullies) rape a girl and get away with it. Ten years later he leads a modest life working I a small factory in Seoul. Still hung up on what happened he starts to attend a local evangelical church where he meets the victim who is seemingly happy but struggles with life. As she does not recognise him, they slowly getting closer and his desire for penance leads to an explosion of violence.

TL;DR Kim Ki-Duk meets Park Chan-Wook on a budget.

While ultimately a piece on sin and revenge/repentance it was, although supposedly not deliberately, a good, sometimes funny and always very human of a simple boy who made a horrible and about the effects it had on the life of another person. Most of the time it is easy to feel sympathetic towards him and their subtly evolving relationship but we’re always reminded of what he did and what scars he caused so there is a healthy balance which makes him all the more human, just not a prime example of the species. Stylistically it is mostly unremarkable, often hand-held typical Asian art cinema. The Q&A was quite… interesting. Basically the young director said that if you commit a crime such as rape and do not repent you deserve to die. Starting from this concept the whole story was written: Sung-Gong is such a simple man, so he can become the perfect tool and to become that he must come into contact with a religion, one which highly values repentance and both concepts of revenge and sin, so there you have Evangelical Christianity. He even stated that it is not so much about the sex crime but about the necessity of punishing sins. Not a very charming fellow, people tried more or less subtly to get an answer out of him that was less black-and-white but every answer really boiled down to his extreme view of the matter. It would be interesting to know how he arrived at such a place. As I referred to in the TL;DR he also thanked the two Korean directors for sin and revenge in his credits as they have been both and influence and actually helped him get the movie funded and promoted. Even though I have rather negative feelings about the director and his vision I think his movie was time not wasted and if you like those themes and have run out of films by the directors mentioned above, you might want to look at it.