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Berlinale 2017, Day 3 (Letters from a Dead Man)

The best thing about having two films back to back at CinemaxX 8 is that they let you stay in the theater, and you just show them your ticket for the next film while inside. That way you are guaranteed to get your preferred seat because each time, only around 5-6 people end up staying. Actually I have never had a chance to try this at any other venue, but whenever I can, I jump at the chance to catch two Retrospektive films in a row. I almost went for four of such films, but realized that this may be too crazy after all (though “Strange Days” seems to be an interesting movie).

This is the first film I saw with somebody this year (if you don’t count that random meeting with Danish dude). Pixelmatsch didn’t really have much time nor the energy to attend, and neither Shii nor 6451 came to Berlin. As a result, this Berlinale was sadly not its usual social event for me, although I did end up catching a total of 6 films (I think?) with Loris this year.

Let me preface this review with a disclaimer: I am really eager to stick to my “4 postings per evening” rule this time (for those evenings where I am home and able to blog), because normally “Letters from a Dead Man” is the typical kind of film that sends me into a writer’s block. This year, however, I am trying to avoid spending a month blogging the Berlinale by not over-thinking the blogging. Even though I want to spend time reflecting upon the films, I don’t want to write my afterthoughts after all those fresh feelings are over and I only remember half of what had happened. And hey, I can still add things to the postings later after all.

drrt

Pisma mjortwowo tscheloweka (Letters from a Dead Man)
USSR 1986, Konstantin Lopuschanski, 87′

A nuclear catastrophe made the world unlivable. The main character, a professor ridden with guilt because his research contributed to the catastrophe, lives with a bunch of co-workers in the basement shelter of a museum. Soon, people are being moved to the central shelter but they won’t take the old and sick, so the professor is left behind with a few orphaned children. During all this time, he writes letters to his missing son reflecting upon what is happening around him.

I want to say “OK this was the most depressing film of the Berlinale ever”, but that was before I saw “O-bi, O-ba”, which was even more devastating because I inexplicably expected a black comedy with more funny scenes and less, uh, desperation. Truth to be told, “Letters from a Dead Man” is totally unbearable, even though it clocks in at less than 90 minutes. (Pip’s rule that films tend to be crappy when they have a runtime of 1 1/2 hours instead of 2 hours do not typically hold for films running at the Berlinale for sure.) I’m pretty sure that somewhere between minute 60 and 80 I could not stand the film anymore, though I decided not to look away (unlike when I saw “Snowpiercer”) because I found it worthwhile to experience the film as a whole. Nevertheless, the film consists entirely of a world that has turned bad, and it only gets worse, and worse, and worse. You can sense how strong the fear of a nuclear winter must have been at the time the film was made, whereas from today’s perspective it baffles my mind that anyone could even imagine the decline of humanity to look like this.

Overall, the film was one of the most visually striking Berlinale films I have seen and also the most thoughtful and carefully crafted. You can tell that the director has worked with Tarkovsky before, and the script, even down to the way the dialogues are written, just screams Strugatsky at you. Just thinking about it gives me goosebumps, and I am not sure I could handle another film based on something by the Strugatskys. I may even have chosen not to see the film if I knew what was awaiting me.

The film’s most devastating and most interesting aspect is its treatment of children (notably almost completely absent from “O-bi, O-ba”). Perhaps one of the hardest scenes to watch was the one where the professor tries to get into the sick children’s ward to find his son. On the other hand, I noticed immediately that the orphans were very pretty. Considering that everything and everybody else is old and ugly, the orphans are dressed cutely (as much as it is possible to look cute in dirt rags) and all have beautiful faces. It seems like a non-sensical unrealistic choice for a bleak film like this and at the end we finally learn that these children were crucial to the film’s ending. Because those children were so beautiful, I would interpret this ending as a hopeful and positive one, while the film overall is not exactly supposed to be realistic but an allegory of humanity itself.

In many aspects I think this film is a masterpiece, but its bleakness makes me reluctant to recommend it to anyone. I definitely did not enjoy it, not in the usual sense of enjoyment (hence you will see it relatively far down on my ranking despite my claim that the film is a masterpiece), but this is definitely the kind of film that makes me glad the Berlinale exists and gives you the opportunity to see something like this on the big screen.

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Berlinale 2015, Day 5 (Pod electricheskimi oblakami)

Yesterday, I actually felt a lot of energy for writing blog postings, but I was generally tired and the thought of writing this particular one was just too daunting. I cannot predict what is going to happen, but it’s entirely possible that I will fall asleep exhausted after writing this one. We will see.

We saw the film under harsh circumstances: It was a late screening at the International, I was horribly sick and I drove there in the cold, then drove Loris and then myself back. I almost didn’t go (in which case I would have given my ticket to Pixelmatsch instead), and while watching the film definitely did not help my sickness, I am glad to have seen it. Where else to watch a Russian movie than at the International?

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Under Electric Clouds (Pod electricheskimi oblakami)
Russia/Ukraine/Poland 2015, Alexey German Jr., 138′

In 7 chapters and an epilogue, the film tells the stories of different people all somehow related to an abandoned construction site of a modern high-rise building: An immigrant who does not speak Russian who used to work on the site, the heiress whose late father held onto the building like a pet project, a girl who gets kidnapped and taken to a place on the construction site, a museum tour guide whose historical workplace is being destroyed by the workplace, the architect who designed the building oh and I almost forgot that real estate lawyer (mostly because his story is the most remote from the others, or so it felt to me). Their stories only loosely come together at the very end, but also not really. More than anything, the film is some sort of parable on life or society or existence itself.

The movie is amazingly slow, but I found myself mesmerized with its wintery photography (much fitting the weather we had in Berlin these days – the cold and the mist in the film mirrored Berlin’s perfectly), and not for a moment I was in actual danger of falling asleep. Especially in the first part, before I had a feeling for what the film was about, I was mostly confused and had a hard time understanding how the film worked. Even by the end, I don’t think I really ‘got’ the film, mostly because it simply has too many layers despite its slowness. This is definitely the kind of film I would want to watch again in order to catch more details, but it’s also not really going to be a joy to revisit. Just like how I rarely re-read Chekhov’s plays (though I have) because some of them are simply too tragic to bear, “Under Electric Clouds” is also rather apocalyptic, gloomy and ultimately depressing. Nevertheless, the film is beautiful, deep and wonderfully constructed – it’s definitely not for everyone, but it was for me.

I personally find myself revisiting the film in my mind over and over again, and I doubt I have spent as much time reflecting upon a Berlinale film ever. The beauty of its cinematography is absolutely stunning, and I thought it was a nod not only to Tarkovsky but also to Zvyagintsev’s “The Return” (I have not yet seen “Leviathan”, but I definitely plan to). Critics say the film is all about Russian society, but the Russianness of the film is much deeper than that. It’s like an exercise in film and literature history, and the spirits of some of the greatest Russian artists continue to live in these characters, especially Sasha and the tour guide. That is how I see it, without knowing all too much about those great Russian artists.

Speaking of Sasha and the tour guide, they were definitely my favorite characters. I was very amused that the architect appeared (I kept expecting that he would) and he was certainly interesting, but there was something so beautifully Chekhovian about how both Sasha and the tour guide are facing their own fall, the former in the form of her father’s death and the disappearance of the glory of her previous life, the latter in the form of losing his job which was pretty degrading to him to begin with. Both are also lovably smart and deadpan people, and I thought they were weirdly attractive too. (Mr. Tour Guide also looks like a Russian Stannis Baratheon, that litte detail made him somewhat comical.)

There is also another scene in the film that somehow continues to haunt me, which is Sasha’s scene with her horse. I kept wondering why she didn’t check on her horse first thing coming home (probably because narratively it doesn’t really make sense, so I will suspend disbelief), but other than that, this scene was absolutely terrifying. To me, it was emblematic of the tragedy she is going through, and I was deeply touched by how she cried over her dying horse. It is because of these kinds scenes that “Under Electric Clouds” feels more true to me than most other films, and which made the film one of my most memorable Berlinale films.