The first aspect of the Berlin International Film Festival that leaps out of a veteran of the film festival circuit is the youth of its participants. Both the press corps and the ticket buyers are heavily skewed towards those in their 20s, or college age, and divided 50-50 by gender. Taken alone, the press corps includes a large 30-something contingent and a brigade of the even older (ahem), but the normal divisions and battalions of greyhairs hanging out at cafes and clogging up the lines as if they were so many arteries are largely absent.
No offense to the people who have kept the idea of a true international cinema alive in the face of yawning indifference, especially the U.S., but the sight of youth so engaged with film augers well for the art. And while I thought at first it must be a European phenomenon, I was soon disabused on my first evening when a welter of American accents flew ceilingwards from the seats just in front of me.
The press screenings began with an auspicious start: Patrice Leconte’s INTIMATE STRANGERS (Confidences trop intimes), the latest from this most prolific of French filmmakers. This film is in the style of the director’s tales of reserved men who become infatuated, obsessed, or perhaps just bedazzled with beautiful women (thing Monsieur Hire or The Hairdresser’s Husband).
Leconte begins with a remarkable flourish. The opening shot tracks along with a woman’s high-heeled shoes, the action lit with a sense of dark foreboding. The suspenseful atmosphere is continued with a panning shot that starts with what looks like a dark interior wall and ends on a symmetrically framed corridor, a door with yellow windows at one end and, halfway between the door and the camera, an open door allowing more yellow light to bisect the distance.
These shots clearly mimic Alfred Hitchcock’s style, the first so specific as to evoke the beginning of Strangers on a Train. But from this classical start, Leconte suddenly shifts to bleary, lined video of a soap opera. The television screen takes up the entire film image until Leconte tracks back and pans – finishing off the opening shots – to reveal the building’s concierge happily watching her soap.
If you don’t get what Leconte is up to right away, the story to come will. Strangers on a Train, of course, starts with a psychopath confessing his intimate hatreds to a stranger. The narrator of the soap clues us in on the recent revelation by one of the characters – a philandering priest – that rocks the other characters.
These are two distinct ways of handling secret confessions dramatically; as suspense or as melodrama. In INTIMATE STRANGERS, Leconte gives us yet a third.
The feet turn out to belong to a glamorous woman named Anna (Sandrine Bonnaire, too little seen in the U.S.). She enters one of the offices in that previously seen corridor and says she has a 6 o’clock appointment. The secretary can’t find the listing, but her boss, Faber (Fabrice Luchini), has her shown in anyway. Anna sees the couch in Faber’s inner office, but chooses an upholstered chair to make unload her secrets.
She’s in a loveless marriage. Her husband Marc hasn’t made love to her for months. After a miscarriage, she has become unable to have children. In terms of her emotional state, these are just the springboards for a psyche in danger of disintegration.
Seeing a psychiatrist was a wise move on the part of Anna. Unfortunately, Faber isn’t a psychiatrist; he’s a tax attorney. His acquaintance the psychiatrist is a few doors down. Faber didn’t mean to lead Anna down the garden path. It’s just that in his profession, people usually make deep, dark confessions --- if only about money – in the course of doing business.
Faber is sure he wants to tell Anna the truth. But after a few visits, he can’t bear the prospect of not seeing Anna again. Topping that off, his psychiatrist friend tells him he’s doing pretty well as an analyst.
About half the film’s action occurs in Faber’s office, and I say “action” deliberately. INTIMATE STRANGERS is all about talk, gesture and glances. To catch these subtle shifts, Leconte moves his camera and changes lenses constantly. Yet his technique is so closely tied to the intellectual and emotional attitudes of Anna and Faber, that all you may notice is the dramatic rhythm.
INTIMATE STRANGERS isn’t a chamber drama. Plenty goes on outside the office; Faber has an old girlfriend with a new, gym-rat lover, and the accountant isn’t sure how to handle that. And his relationship with Anna takes a somewhat dangerous turn. But these subplots aren’t inserted to “open up” the action. They are integral components of a provocative and highly watchable film.
Japanese filmmaker Genjirou Arato’s AKAME 48 WATERFALLS (Akame Shijyuyataki Shinjyumisui) is reminiscent of a Shohei Imamura film in its set-up: A middle-class young man, Ikushima, flees Tokyo for a shabby suburb of Osaka where he takes up with a colorful collection of low-lifes.
There the similarity ends, though. For whereas Imamura sees such turns of events as an opportunity for his protagonists to connect with Japan’s outlaw, earthy culture, Arato seems to see such a move as, at best, a vote for anomie.
Ikushima takes a job slicing cheap cuts of meat and shoving them onto small bamboo skewers for Seiko, a former hooker who now owns a lunch stand. Seiko doesn’t allow the former university student to work in her restaurant. She rents him a tiny apartment in a filthy building and has the meat delivered by a scowling, taciturn employee about the same age as Ikushima.
At 160 minutes, Akame 48 Waterfalls is filled with incident, many of them featuring Mayu, a 60ish tattoo artist with long gray hair the hangs below his shoulders. In the most hair-raising episode, Mayu has Ikushima deliver a mysterious package, which turns out to have a gun, to a couple of Yakuza. One of them at least has the perspicacity to tell the ad-hoc delivery boy to “stay out of trouble.”
But the central drama, which emerges only after a while, is a growing romance between the young man and Aya, a pretty prostitute who lives next door and who is part of Mayu’s loose band of acquaintances. Their relationship is problematic to say the least. Aya seems obviously in love with Ikushima and Arato wants us to think so. But when the two go on a trip to a temple she tells him, apparently without guile, that mostly she is in love with his penis.
Is Aya nuts? Perhaps. The question eventually is answered, though with enough ambiguity to leave the situation open, if you prefer. AKAME 48 WATERFALLS gets by more on its considerable formal achievements than anything perceived within them. In other words, it’s a real “film festival” film, though no less intriguing for being so.
A DAY ON THE PLANET (Kyo No Dekigoto) is from Isai Yukisada who, based on the spoken introduction to the film’s screening, must be the most prolific director in Japan. Given the festival setting, one was inclined to read much of the movie as subversive.
For example, one string of this three-plot movie involved a bunch of graduate students having a party. Two of them are silly, giggling, boy-crazy girls who take the phenomenon of the Japanese “cute teenage girl” to almost ridiculous extremes given the context.
Another strand, which involves a man trapped between two buildings, involves his discovery that he and one of his rescuers went to the same junior high. As is always the case at such moments, the two immediately start singing the school anthem with choked-up voices. The third bit is a parable about a beached whale and the Japanese short attention span in the age of television.
Lest you think any of this amounts to much, try and imagine Neve Campbell of Matthew Broderick (depending on your age) starring in the same movie, allowing for minor cultural differences. That’s all A DAY ON THE PLANET amounts to. What looked like Yukisada’s anarchic explosions of clichés was simply his all-too-enthusiastic embrace of them.
The film does teach an important lesson, though. Despite the fact that it is strictly commercial fare, it has been made with a care that such material would never, ever get in Hollywood. The symmetry, lighting and coloration of the images, the precise editing – none of this would be applied to the shoot ‘em and cut ‘em approach Hollywood reserves for youth pictures (hell, for practically everything).
That’s why it’s worthwhile even to see a “bad” film at a film festival, especially one of the Big Four, like Berlin. You always learn something.