Berlinale 2023: Long Live the Film Festival!
Not so long ago, there was good reason to believe film festivals might not survive. At least not in the way we currently understand them: geography- and time-bound events where people jostle into overcrowded screenings. Given the speed with which those same movies are being hurled onto screening platforms, such narrow exclusivity can feel anachronistic. Just look at how much Sundance, previously the definition of exclusivity — hard to get to, really hard to get into — now seems to be embracing the concept of a streaming festival (whatever that is) for everyone who does not want to truck out to Park City.
But if the just-concluded 2023 Berlin International Film Festival (better known as Berlinale) is any indication, these nomadic gatherings of filmmakers, business people, and movie nerds are making a strong play for relevance. This is a welcome surprise in the era of solitary streaming.
Held as ever in the grey February chill, this year’s Berlinale showed what the heavy-hitting European festivals have long known: Exciting premieres, celebrities, acres of red carpet, and a slate of movies so dense nobody could see everything on their list, can convince people it is worth showing up for a collective movie-going experience. Even when that meant navigating brigades of phone-pointing fans, lanyard-garlanded press, vaping industry hangers-on, and all those distributors hunting for the next sleeper hit to snap up on the cheap.
The venues ranged from beautiful old jewels like the Delphi Filmpalast to the more generically modern Verti Music Hall, which varied in architectural style but shared a stark aversion to food or beverage in the theater. Crowds packed the screenings, many of which sold out in seconds. At some festivals, the early or late slots are more sparsely attended. For Berlinale, a late Monday night screening of a movie from a first-time director could reliably sell out a venue seating roughly 1,800 people.
The movies themselves were good, too.
Although Past Lives already picked up scads of positive notice at its Sundance premiere in January and is destined to be one of the year’s more eagerly-awaited releases for distributor A24, it still caused excitement in Berlin. Playwright Celine Song’s debut feature is an elegantly composed and intimate epic that just so happens to be one of more purely romantic movies of the past several years. The story is seemingly simple: a young Korean woman (Greta Lee) reconnects in adulthood with the man (Teo Yoo) she was best friends with a child before her parents emigrated. But Song’s execution is complex, layered, funny, consistently surprising, and suffused with an earnest and yearning heartache that recalls Brief Encounter. Watch for the release date on this one.
There were a plethora of slightly-under-the-radar movies with recognizable stars that will hopefully gain traction when being released later in the year. Matt Johnson’s BlackBerry stars Jay Baruchel and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Glenn Howerton as (respectively) the nerd and the suit in a surprisingly winning comedy about the rise and fall (and fall, and fall) of the BlackBerry smartphone. In Vasilis Katsoupis’s smartly done but underwhelming Inside, Willem Dafoe brings his usual overwrought commitment to play a master art thief who gets trapped in a bunker-like penthouse after his attempted heist of some Egon Schieles goes awry; think Panic Room by way of Cast Away and an abstract video installation. In a kind of Taxi Driver update for the Uber and incel era, John Trengove’s riveting Manodrome features Jesse Eisenberg as a rudderless guy already spiraling into destructive toxic masculinity before he falls in with a men’s rights cult run by a curiously sympathetic Adrien Brody.
Though Berlinale makes good on being “International,” it is also a recognizably German event. Two of the German dramas provided harsh but electrifying views of roiling tensions in a society often assumed by outsiders to be a model of uniformity. Sun and Concrete is a punchy and overstuffed story of kids trying to survive in Gropiusstadt, a cluster of stark public housing towers balkanized by ethnic gangs (the Turks, the Arabs, the Poles). Aiming for less kitchen-sink social realism than early-2000s hip-hop video signaling, David Wnendt’s hyperactive style dumps as much incident as possible on its teenage protagonists— skipping school, avoiding gangsters, plotting heists, partying. Ilker Çatak’s The Teacher’s Lounge is by comparison almost austere in style. But its closely-observed story of a middle-school teacher navigating an escalating series of calamities is many times more dramatic.
As ever, documentaries ran the gamut. Alex Gibney — who seems like he gets the jitters if not working on five projects simultaneously — brought the first half of his two-part Apple TV+ documentary Boom! Boom! The World vs. Boris Becker. Workmanlike but fun, it renders the world of tennis as populated with Wild West gunslingers; Gibney even scores some of the matches to Ennio Morricone. One of the more hyped but disappointing documentaries was Sean Penn and Aaron Kaufman’s Superpower (the premiere screening featured a video message from its subject, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky). The hook is inarguably attention-grabbing: Penn and his crew were filming in Kiev and trying to arrange an interview with Zelensky the night Russia invaded on February 24, 2022. The result is a gleaming portrait of Zelensky as hero of democracy. Penn and Kaufman do a nice job of sketching the calamitous history of Ukraine from the Orange Revolution to now. But they lose the string, delivering an achingly well-meaning movie that is a repetitive, structural mess.
Patric Chia did what most of us wanted to do but never got around to: take a Henry James novella like The Beast in the Jungle and set in a Parisian nightclub. A dedicated club goer (the always magnetic Anaïs Demoustier) becomes transfixed by the sallow-faced man (Tom Mercier) she spots hanging around and never dancing. Learning that he believes he is meant for some unspecified great thing in the future, rather than moving away quickly, she ends up abandoning her life to follow his quest to … something. Decades pass with little incident in this curiously hypnotic rendering of wasted lives.
Interestingly, Giacomo Abbruzzese’s Disco Boy is another high-concept confection that gives a nightclub prominent placing. It’s a story of displacement, following two men’s geographically separated but spiritually linked pathways to a similar end. Belarussian refugee Aleksei (Franz Rogowski) joins the French Foreign Legion in a bid for French citizenship. Meanwhile, in the Niger Delta, Jomo (Morr Ndiaye) leads a band of rebels against despoiling oil companies. When they take French citizens hostage, who do you think comes to the rescue? After a high-strung first half, the movie falls apart with an inexplicable nightclub-set conclusion that is as insultingly silly as The Beast in the Jungle’s club scenes were arrestingly silly.
Of the movies about relationships at Berlinale, Sacha Polak’s pungent and poignant Silver Haze was among the most agonizing. It is plainly apparent that Franky (Vicky Knight), a nurse with physical and mental scarring from a childhood trauma, is too good for the flighty and selfish Florence (Esmé Creed-Miles). But Polak’s Andrea Arnold-style grit portrays the punishingly toxic pull of their relationship with such organic realism that it feels not frustrating (“leave her!”) but tragic. Though also well-grounded in people’s working lives, Susana Nobre’s quieter Cidade Rabat is less eventful but still absorbing: a divorced film production assistant (Raquel Castro) reexamines things after her mother’s death, finding no great revelation but numerous small epiphanies along the way in richly detailed moments that add up to more than the sum of their parts.
Which is really not a bad way to describe this year’s Berlinale (and most of the better film festivals still making their mark in the post-lockdown era): A collection of moments which, taken together, add up to something more than just a series of movies beamed onto screens in front of throngs of people happy to be inside and out of the chill February drizzle. What that something might be is unclear. But it’s a communal experience that at the moment beats nearly every other way to watch a movie.
