Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Mexican rave… Gael García Bernal, Bernardo Velasco and Ilse Salas at the Berlin premiere Alonso Ruizpalacios’s film Museum: ‘a gem”.
Mexican rave… Gael García Bernal, Bernardo Velasco and Ilse Salas at the Berlin premiere Alonso Ruizpalacios’s film Museum: ‘a gem”. Photograph: Stefanie Loos/AFP/Getty Images
Mexican rave… Gael García Bernal, Bernardo Velasco and Ilse Salas at the Berlin premiere Alonso Ruizpalacios’s film Museum: ‘a gem”. Photograph: Stefanie Loos/AFP/Getty Images

Berlin film festival 2018 roundup

This article is more than 6 years old

There’s animated doggy fun from Wes Anderson and a bold take on the Anders Breivik massacre, but the Berlinale needs a new script

Attending an international film festival, you can sometimes feel you’re on a distant planet, adrift from the universe of cinema as we usually know it. This year’s Berlinale has been like that. Over the past year, discussion in the film world has been dominated by particular issues – gender politics, representation of race – and has tended to be led by the way those issues have emerged in the US mainstream. In the year of Wonder Woman, Get Out and Black Panther, festivals highlighting the non-anglophone world can look less exciting – as if it was all a matter of earnest artisan directors quietly tending their own small, uncontroversial patches of ground. Berlin often feels like that anyway – the festival tends to specialise in the kind of work that won’t get the world’s champagne flowing. But there are films here that matter; the question is whether there are enough of them.

Berlin 2018 has been a tricky one. It’s the penultimate year for Dieter Kosslick, festival director since 2001, and questions are hanging in the air following last November’s letter in which 79 German film-makers called for a post-Kosslick overhaul of the fest, so that it can compete seriously with Cannes and Venice. This year certainly proved that Berlin needs to raise its game: the competition offered some gems, and a respectable amount of red-carpet glamour, but the overall sparkle was thinly spread.

A joy: Isle of Dogs, Wes Anderson’s cartoon about a canine rebellion in Japan. Photograph: PA

The opener, though, was a joy: Wes Anderson’s aesthetically brilliant animation Isle of Dogs, about a group of talking dogs fighting anti-canine oppression in a future Japan: the voices include Bryan Cranston, Greta Gerwig and the perennial Bill Murray. In a goofy, melancholic mode, there was sweet bagatelle Damsel by US cult duo the Zellner brothers, with Robert Pattinson courting Mia Wasikowska in a grotesque Old West. Gus Van Sant made a moderate return to mainstream form in upmarket tearjerker Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, starring a charismatically abrasive Joaquin Phoenix in the true story of a quadriplegic cartoonist. And there was Steven Soderbergh’s Kafkaesque psychological thriller Unsane. It stars Claire Foy, a universe away from The Crown, as a woman committed to a mental hospital against her will; it’s over-ingenious and barely believable, but Foy’s conviction and tough-cookie spikiness carry it through.

Berlin never likes to make the going too easy for audiences, and this year offered two challenges in particular. One was Season of the Devil by Lav Diaz, the Filipino specialist in testingly long films. This one, at only four hours, felt more arduous than some of his works of twice that length, mainly because its story of paramilitary brutality in the Marcos years is almost entirely sung, in lugubrious a cappella style. Even harder going was the three-hour My Brother’s Name Is Robert and He Is an Idiot, by Philip Gröning. It starts as a German answer to Terrence Malick, as two teenage siblings mooch around in fields musing on philosophy and time, then takes a brutal turn, like Michael Haneke’s Funny Games slowed to a crawl and laced with quotes from Heidegger. It’s beautifully, brilliantly executed, and largely mystifying.

Claire Foy and Steven Soderbergh at the Berlin premiere of Unsane. Photograph: Franziska Krug/Getty Images

Among the best competition films was Aleksey German’s Dovlatov, about a Russian poet’s struggles in the bohemian scene of early 70s Leningrad – a rambling, jazzy, involving recreation of a lost world in which literary passions mattered as a lifeline to sanity. Then there was Transit, German director Christian Petzold’s film about refugees in occupied France – but with the drama transplanted to present-day Marseilles, to subtly disorienting effect.

And there was a blast of exuberance and originality in Mexican competition entry Museum, by Alonso Ruizpalacios, the up-and-coming director who made a mark with his debut, Güeros. The follow-up stars Gael García Bernal as one of the perpetrators of a theft of several priceless Mayan artefacts. Ruizpalacios shows equal audacity and invention in his directing, and beyond the heist sequence the film has plenty to say about Mexican society, the contradictions of the archaeology trade, and the pressures of family life. Simon Russell Beale has a piquant cameo, and the film’s a gem.

Out of competition, The Happy Prince proved a surprising pleasure, with Rupert Everett directing himself as post-prison Oscar Wilde, on the loose in Europe and enjoying a rebellious decline. Unashamedly a paean to Everett’s own faded beauty – he looks defiantly raddled – it’s shamelessly show-offy, but has genuine brio and imagination.

The Green Fog by Guy Maddin and Evan and Galen Johnson.

An absolute delight was The Green Fog, made by Canadian eccentric Guy Maddin and the Johnson brothers, Evan and Galen. Essentially a conceptual art piece, it’s a “remake” of Hitchcock’s Vertigo assembled from a myriad of movies and TV shows shot in San Francisco. This means that the James Stewart character is variously played by Vincent Price, Rock Hudson, Dean Martin et al, while Kim Novak’s stand-ins include Joan Crawford and Sharon Stone. Liberally garnished with in-jokes – and a bizarre standalone section that fixates weirdly on Chuck Norris – it’s both the funniest and the most beautiful film here.

Not enjoyable by any means, but certainly Berlin’s most confrontational and controversial offering, was Norwegian drama U – July 22, a reconstruction of the rightwing fanatic Anders Breivik’s massacre of 69 people on the island of Utøya in 2011. Filmed in a single continuous take, the narrative is filtered through the real-time experience of one young woman, played vividly by newcomer Andrea Berntzen. It follows her over two hours, as she tries to survive amid the chaos and terror.

Directed by Erik Poppe, the film started arguments here about the purpose of such an evocation, and the ethical implications of treating the subject in such a virtuoso immersive style. But U – July 22 comes across as a genuine gesture of solidarity with Breivik’s victims, and made sobering viewing in the week of the Florida school shooting. Here was one film, at least, that reminded us that festivals aren’t just cinephile snowglobes, but places where the world comes to talk about itself, sometimes very urgently indeed.

Andrea Berntzen as Kaja in U - July 22, a single-take reconstruction of the Utøya rampage. Photograph: Agnete Brun/Paradox

Best of Berlin

Best films
For youthful verve and style, Museum. For timeliness, intensity and cinematic audacity, U – July 22. For beauty, inventiveness and sheer entertainment value, The Green Fog and Isle of Dogs.

Worst film
José Padilha’s 7 Days in Entebbe: the 1976 airport rescue raid interspersed with interpretive dancing. Yes, interpretive dancing.

Best performance (female)
Newcomer Andrea Berntzen heads a young ensemble cast in U – July 22.

Best performance (male)
Milan Maric in Dovlatov.

Best supporting cast
Gus Van Sant’s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot: cameos by indie music grandes dames Kim Gordon, Beth Ditto and Carrie Brownstein, a surprisingly zen Jonah Hill as a hippie AA mentor, and Jack Black getting back his obnoxious mojo in style.

Joaquin Phoenix (left) and Jonah Hill in Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot. Photograph: Sundance

Best animal performances
Daisy as Butterscotch the miniature horse in Damsel; and the swimming grasshopper (name unknown) in Philip Gröning’s My Brother’s Name Is Robert and He Is an Idiot.

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed