Es ist ein Kreuz mit diesem Kirschgarten: Kaum ein Stück scheint so sehr in diese Zeit zu passen wie dieses Portrait einer Gesellschaft, die über ihre Verhältnisse lebt und nicht wahrhaben will, dass es so nicht weitergehen kann. Kein Wunder also, dass landauf landab derzeit Kirschgärten aus dem Boden schießen – allein in Berlin ist es in dieser Spielzeit bereits der dritte. Nachdem Thomas Langhoff in seiner letzten Regiearbeit eine bereits untergegangene Gesellschaft in einem Beckettchen Nirgendwo verortete und Hein / Lensing eine lärmende Hysterikergruppe auf die Bühne stellte, ist Stephan Kimmigs Interpretation wohl die heutigste und gleichzeitig die uneinheitlichste. Dabei ist es keineswegs so, dass ihm nichts einfiele – ihm fällt im Gegenteil vielleicht zu viel ein, er verfolgt zu viele Ansätze, die er nicht ganz zusammenbringt.

Zu Beginn ist Kimmig ganz bei Tschechow. Der hat den Kirschgarten immer als Komödie betrachtet, die zuweilen gar farcenhafte Züge trägt, und gegen allzu sentimentale oder gar tragische Auslegungen verteidigt. Kimmigs Kirschgarten ist zunächst voll und ganz Komödie. Da schreckt Lopachin mit einem Knalleffekt aus dem ungewollten Schlaf, wird die (traurige) Erinnerung an den prügelnden Vater mit Kunstblut illustriert, warten Lopachin und Dunjascha auf die aus Paris zurückkehrende Ranjewskaja mit der nervösen und ein bisschen ängstlichen Hibbeligkeit, mit der Kinder ihre nach hause kommenden Eltern erwarten. Der Auftritt der Reisegesellschaft ist grandios: Eine Tür geht auf und da stehen sie, wie gemalt, eine Mischung aus Staatsbesuch und Ankunft im Exil. In einer fantastischen Zeitlupenpantomime wird das alte, neue Zuhause mit stummfilmhaft überzeichneter Mimik und Gestik in Augenschein genommen. Hier zählt nichts als der schein, ist nichts wichtiger, als die überkommene Bedeutung, den traditionellen Status zu betonen, auch wenn beide längst nicht mehr akzeptieren. In Lopachins Warten und Ranjewskajas erscheinen offenbart sich das alte System in einer furiosen Schmierenkomödie der Selbstbehauptung. Kürzer, eindrücklicher und präziser lässt sich eine selbstvergessene Gesellschaft nicht darstellen, auch ganz ohne griechische Fahnen.

Das Thema der Überschuldung, der Widerspruch zwischen hehren Werten und solidem Wirtschaften ist ein zentrales Thema des Stücks. Kimmig betont diesen Aspekt stärker als die anderen Berliner Inszenierungen. Das beginnt schon bei Katja Haß Bühnenbild: die weißen, mit Ornamenten verzierten Wände und die wallenden Vorhänge verkünden Eleganz und Status, während gleichzeitig das Gerüst sichtbar ist, das dieses Potemkinsche Haus aufrecht erhält. Geld ist hier ständig ein Thema: beim ständig schnorrenden Pischtschik, der finanzielle  Unabhängigkeit ersehnenden Warja, dem Geld ablehnenden Trofimow, dem den Primat des Geldes als neuem Wertesystem vertretenden Lopachin und natürlich bei Ranjewskaja: Selten wurde die Rolle mit einer derart kontrastierenden Mischung aus Geldverachtung und Geldbesessenheit angelegt wie von Nina Hoss. Als das Gut verkauft ist, gilt ihr Interesse zwar zunächst dem namen des Käufers. Als die jedoch die Kaufsumme erfährt, fällt sie fast in eine Art Trance, verfällt sie dem Rausch der märchenhaft erscheinenden Summe. Es sind vor allem die über dem Ökonomischen stehen wollenden Ranjewskaja und Gajew, bei denen sich hier alles ums Geld dreht. Das satirische Potenzial, das darin liegt, deutet Kimmig zwar an, lässt es jedoch zu sehr ungenutzt.

Und hier liegt die größte Schwäche des Abends: seine Unentschiedenheit. denn neben der Komödie der Realitätsverweigerung liegt hier das Melodram von aus der zeit gefallenen tragischen Figuren. Allen voran natürlich Ranjewskaja: Nina Hoss spielt sie als verlorene, nach menschlichem Halt suchende, in ihrer Entwurzelung durchaus heutige Figur. Sie ist keine resignierte, wie Cornelia Froboess in Langhoffs Inszenierung, sondern eine sich ans Leben klammernde, der jede Orientierung abgeht. Das gilt auch für die anderen zwei Figuren, die sich in den Vordergrund schieben und die in anderen Interpretationen gern vernachlässigt werden. Da ist der Trofimow von Elias Ahrens – ein ernsthafter, grundehrlicher und gar nicht lächerlicher, sondern bemitleidenswerter Idealist, vielleicht eine Art One-Man-Occupy-Bewegung, möglicherweise sogar ein echter, ernstzunehmender Gegenentwurf.

Zum Ereignis wird jedoch vor allem Jochen Huths Pischtschik: ein komplett im eigenen Universum agierender, fast roboterhafter Beckettscher Clown, dessen Welt jeglicher Fesseln von Plausibilität und Logik enthoben ist. Ein trauriger Held des Irrationalen, den Glaubens daran, das alles irgendwie gut wird, wenn man nur die Augen fest genug vor der Realität verschließt.

Das geht alles in die richtige und weitgehend gleiche Richtung und passt doch nicht recht zusammen. Es will keine einheitliche Stimmung oder Atmosphäre aufkommen, das komische steht neben dem Tragischen, das Traurige neben dem Grotesken und bleibt weitgehend Stückwerk, Fragement. Kimmig will vom Untergang einer überholten, bankrotten Gesellschaft erzählen, die sich verändern muss, auch wenn das neue nicht wie das Paradies erscheint. Nur tut er das auf so unterschiedliche Weise, ohne dass es ihm gelingt, das zusammenzubringen, dass am Ende der Eindruck entsteht, hier hätte ein Zeichner ein paar Skizzen aufs Papier gebracht, in denen er das gleiche Sujet in unterschiedlichen Stilen ausprobiert, ohne einen Gedanken an das Gesamtbild zu verschwenden.

Dieser Eindruck wird noch dadurch verstärkt, dass die Inszenierung tatsächlich stellenweise unfertig wirkt. Das gilt leider gerade für einige der eigentlich stärksten Szenen: Die berühmte Rede Gajews an den Schrank wird ebenso hastig abgehakt wie die Schlussszene des kaum in Erscheinung treten dürfenden Firs. Das wirkt wie Pflichtarbeit, schließlich dürfen die Szenen nicht fehlen, aber eine Bedeutung gibt ihnen Kimmig nicht. Auch etliche Figuren lässt er weitgehend verpuffen, weil ihm nichts zu ihnen einfällt oder weil er noch nicht dazu gekommen ist. Am schmerzhaftesten ist das bei Warja: Meike Droste darf ein bisschen keifen, findet ansonsten aber kaum statt. Übrig bleibt eine durchdachte, das Heutige im Blick behaltende Sicht auf Tschechow, die jedoch zu unausgereift bleibt.

Das kann auch nur einem Pianisten einfallen: Bachs “Wohltemperiertes Klavier”, dieser Durchgang durch alle dem Klavier möglichen Dur- und Moll-Tonarten, dieses Mammutwerk musikalischer Ordnung, als Grundlage für einen Theaterabend zu wählen. David Marton ist seit jeher ein Grenzgänger zwischen Sprech- und Musiktheater, der beide einander aufladen, hinterfragen, aufeinander prallen lässt und in der Kollision eine eigene Theatersprache findet. Um es vorwegzunehmen: Dies gelingt ihm an diesem Abend nicht. Zu sehr stehen Musik- und Sprechtheater nebeneinander, zu sehr fällt auch Letzteres gegenüber Ersterem ab. Die Symbiose gelingt genauso wenig wie der Konflikt, stattdessen stehen beide weitgehend unabhängig nebeneinander. Die Auseinandersetzung mit Bachs Werk und dem, wofür es steht, ist überaus spannend, ein gelungener Theaterabend ensteht daraus jedoch nicht.

Foto: Thomas Aurin

Solange das “Wohltemperierte Klavier” Ausgangspunkt der dramatischen Auseinandersetzung ist, funktioniert Martons Theaterexperiment erstaunlich gut. Bachs mathematischer Durchlauf der Tonarten von Halbton zu Halbton ist ein Manifest wissenschaftlicher Ordnung in der Musik, eines aller Musik zu Grunde liegenden Systems. Und doch ist das “Wohltemperierte Klavier” alles andere als trockene musiktheoretische Übung, befreit sich die Musik aus dem Korsett, erkämpft sie sich ihr eigenes Leben. Der Ordnungsgedanke ist auch Ausgangspunkt von Martons Auseinandersetzung. Immer wieder pickt er sich Präludien aus Bachs Zyklus heraus und klopft sie auf mögliche Brüche in der Ordnung ab. Zu Beginn wiederholt Pianist Jan Czajkowski immer wieder eine Phrase, horcht ihr hinterher, auf der Suche nach ihrem Geheimnis oder ihrem Trick. Violinistin Nurit Stark reißt die Musik aus dem gewohnten Umfeld heraus und zwingt sie auf ihr Instrument, immer wieder wird aus Bachs Präludien Chorgesang – mal als inniger Choral, mal löst er sich in Lachen aus. Schließlich endet der Versuch Czajkowskis, ein ohne Füße auf dem Boden liegendes, gleichsam amputiertes Klavier zu stimmen, in ohrenbetäubendem Lärm.

Keine Ordnung, kein System ist ohne Brüche, jede Struktur auch immer Kompromiss, Musik auch nie zu bloßer Mathematik reduzierbar. Und so bietet der Abend überraschende Hörerlebnisse, offenbaren sich neue, andere Möglichkeiten, alternative Aufbrüche in Bachs vermeintlich so perfektem System. Musik ist immer auch Entscheidung zugunsten einer Variante aus einer Vielzahl von Möglichkeiten, Ordnung immer auch fluktuierend, kaum fassbar, wie der Teppich, der wiederholt zur Musik glattgestrichen und in Form gebracht wird, ohne diese je zu behalten. Alles ist immer im Werden und Vergehen begriffen – Marton macht das in den besten Momenten des Abends fühl-, greif- und vor allem hörbar.

Das Problem liegt darin, dass er dem von Bachs Werk ausgehenden Experiment nicht vertraut. Und so fügt er eine zweite Grundlage hinzu: den Roman “Melancholie des Widerstands” seines ungarischen Landsmanns László Krasznahorkai – eine aus dem Jahr 1989 stammende Parabel einer sich auflösenden Ordnung, die ebenso fantastische Satire wie düstere Vision ist. Dabei bietet der Roman einen logischen Anknüpfungspunkt in der Figur des ehemaligen Musiklehrers Eszter (Ernst Stötzner), der an der Unmöglichkeit musikalischer Ordnung verzweifelt. Der Grund liegt in dem, was Bachs Werk erst möglich machte: die Erfindung der wohltemperierten Stimmung durch Andreas Werckmeister Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts, die darin bestand, die reinen Intervalle leicht zu verändern und damit die musikalische Welt, wie wir sie kennen, erst ermöglichte. Für Eszter ist diese Abkehr von der reinen Ordnung der musikalische Sündenfall und alle Musik seitdem verseucht, Bachs musikalische Mathematik damit nur Blendwerk.

Dabei hätte es Marton belassen können. Stattdessen versucht er das Bild zu erweitern und den Diskurs über Ordnung und Chaos ins Grundsätzliche auszudehnen. Und so spricht das zuweilen deplatziert wirkende Ensemble Romantexte nach, die selten über bloße Rezitation hinausgehen. Jule Böwe darf Eszters Gattin geben, die gesellschaftliche Ordnung totalitaristisch interpretiert, während Bettina Stucky als Ruhe liebende Mutter eines Aufbegehrenden Sohns ihr Zwischen-die-Fronten-Geraten als Wechsel zwischen Lächerlichkeit und Hysterie anlegt. Über hastig skizzierte Karikatur gehen die Figurenzeichnungen nicht hinaus, eine Geschichte erwächst daraus ebensowenig wie irgendeine Form von Stimmung. Die Texte plätschern ziellos dahin im opulenten bildungsbürgerlichen Bühnenbild von Alissa Kolbusch – das führt nirgendwo hin, weil es nicht weiß, was es sagen will.

Vor allem aber findet kaum eine Interaktion zwischen den beiden Vorlagen – Bach und Krasznahorkai – statt, wenn gesungen und gespielt wird, pausiert das Romangeschehen und umgekehrt. Macht die musikalische Auseinandersetzung die Fragilität, ja, vielleicht die Unmöglichkeit von Ordnung fühlbar, bleibt dies im gesprochenen Text bloße Behauptung. Letztlich werden hier zwei Stücke gespielt, die nicht zusammenpassen wollen. Und so bleiben die durchaus spannenden Ansätze des Abends eben nur Ansätze. Eigentlich schade.

What remains from this year’s edition of the Berlinale? It has been a political festival, both the “Arab Spring” and Fukushima were featured as was Islamist terrorism, the Genova summit riots and the fate if child soldiers. What was striking though was how many films explored the political in the everyday. The question how “big events” affect the ordinary person was discussed most remarkably in Csak a szel, the overlooked Kazoku No Kuni, which dealt with families divided between North Korea and Japan, and Barbara.

Apart from the obviously political, many films revolved around the fragile state of today’s world in the middle of a global crisis which in many ways and areas is also an identity crisis. The most remarkable phenomenon was that of the parentless child, the absent or incapable adults in films such as L’enfant d’en haut, Á moi seule or Kid-thing. Families fall apart (Was bleibt, Toata lumea din familia noastra, For Ellen), social structures dissolve. Again, the Berlinale has been at the pulse of today’s world, closer and more diverse than Cannes or Venice. It has found and proven its place and reasserted its function as giving a voice to the voiceless.

It has been a good year which leaves me with only two things I still have to do: to thank you for reading and to give you the final two reviews. See you next year!

Electrick Children (Generation 14plus / USA / Director: Rebecca Thomas)

The 15-year-old Rachel has grown up in a fundamentalist Mormon community in rural Utah. One day she comes across a tape of rock’n roll music which turns out to be a revelation in more than one way. When she discovers that she is pregnant shortly afterwards she is convinced that God got her pregnant through the tape. So she sets out on a journey to find the singer which leads her to some teenage drifters in Las Vegas and a veritable clash of cultures. The film tells the story of a girl’s awakening to the fact that there is a larger world out there. While some of her beliefs - and her brother’s who follows her in the hope of getting a confession which would exonerate him as he is suspected t be the child’s father – are tempered they are not lost. In the end one of them will even decide to return home. Not only their views of the world are tested and expanded – also those of the people they meet. The film doesn’t take sides either way – growing up, maturing is not a one-way street as there is not only one way of living. Visually and technically, the film is not very exciting, the story has its glitches, feels a little forced at times and does not completely avoid clichés but it works because of its openness as well as the finely balanced and well-rounded characters. Not a great film but one offering an unbiased look into a very foreign world.

Gnade (Competistion/ Germany / Director: Matthias Glasner)

Niels is an engineer who has just taken a job in Norway, in Hammerfest, 1,000 kilometers north of the polar circle. In summer it never gets dark, in winter it remains night for about two months. It is a harsh land, cold, windy, covered in ice and snow. The marriage is in trouble, Niels has started an affair, not his first, his relationship with his introverted son, who prefers to watch the world and his family through the camera of his mobile phone, is almost non-existent. There is an oppressive atmosphere as if all relationships, all people, all faces are frozen, covered by an invisible layer of ice. Outwardly a happy family, they have nothing to say to each other. Then something happens and everything changes. This is where the actual film begins as director Matthias Glasner observes, with surgical precision and the refusal to look away, what happens in those faces, with those bodies, to the way they function and communicate. This is painfully slow, it hurts and is meant to. He charts and measures the often unwanted changes which occur as people try to deal with speechlessness, numbness, guilt. Each one have their secret but revealing them is rarely cathartic. Claustrophobia takes hold, it is as if people are buried underneath feet of snow, they cannot breathe, maybe they are already dead. Glasner’s film is harsher, more radical, less polished, uncompromising, more brutal than the other two German Competition entries. Yet its climax is more cathartic, there is a sense of liberation or at least the possibility, one that might be fulfilled in the suddenly brighter, more colorful epilogue seen through the lens of the son’s phone. Maybe there can be redemption? There is a lot of hope in this film’s “maybe”.

Since Viktor Orbán’s right-wing government took power in 2010, its main objective has been to curb democratic and human rights in Hungary. Especially the press and the arts have been under increasing threat. Magyarorszag 2011, produced by last year’s Silver Bear winner Béla Tarr, is a testament to the resistance of some of Hungary’ leading film makers who refuse to give up their artistic freedom and want to show that the art of film making is still alive in Hungary even though the film industry has been effectively stopped. In eleven episodes eleven directors present their views of the current situation in their country as well as the versatility and the diversity of Hungarian film making. The subjects range from social issues such as poverty and homelessless to film making itself and the possibility of free speech. Styles vary, too: There is the black and white of András Jeles and Simon Szabó, the documentary camera of Ferenc Török and Bence Fliegauf, Jeles and Andras Salamon show faces in close-up. Some episodes stand out: one is Péter Forgács’ satirical and poetical essay on politics, another Fliegauf’s film in which he just keeps the camera focused: on a rundown house, a swimming pool, faces in a children’s home. Török combines impressions of the recently renamed former Moscow Square in Budapest with a speech by Orbán while László Siroki contrasts the richness of Budapest with the poverty of a Roma village – using animal sounds as the backdrop for the urban scenery and street noise for the rural. The most poignant statement on the threat of silencing a country’s culture belongs to György Pálfi: He shows elaborate opening and closing credits – and empty, scratched celluloid in-between.

La Mer à l’Aube (Panorama / France, Germany / Director: Volker Schlöndorff)

Volker Schlöndorff’s 30th film tells a story with personal significance to te director. The first he heard about it were a few vague hints when he, 17 years old, went to boarding school in Brittany, ten years after the war. 50 years later he has made this film because, as he says before the screening, it was a story that had to be told. It is the story of another 17-year-old, Guy Moquet, a young communist who was shot as one of 50 hostages killed in reprisal for the assassimation of a German officer in Nantes in 1941. Schlöndorff tells the story from beginning to end – from the assassination to the shootings. And he has chosen a multi-perspective approach. We see it unfold in the internment camp, the Paris headquarters of the Wehrmacht, the local administration. It is not a hero’s story. Guy is depicted as little more than a boy, playful, enthusiastic, with a full-blown schoolboy crush on a girl from the women’s camp, pretty much still a child.  Not only Guy moves into focus, so do other condemned, with their own dreams, beliefs, fears. It is a strength of this film, which esthetically and in storytelling is unashamedly old-fashioned and at times overdoes the sentimental a little, that it gives the victims a voice and a face. The same goes for the other side though. These are no monsters, on the contrary: everybody is very concerned, scrupulous, opposed to what is going to happen. Nobody is responsible and no-one takes responsibility. The figure who symbolizes this best is Ernst Jünger who actually wrote a report about this. He does not want to interfere in the course of history, he says at one point only to be told that he in fact does exactly this – as does everyone who simply obeys orders, the Germans and their French collaborators. Nobody wants this – yet in the end there are 50 people dead. And this is the story that needs to be told.

Al Juma Al Akheira (Forum / Jordan, UAE / Director: Yahya Alabdallah)

Yousef is a taxi driver in Amman who has seen better days. Before he has to undergo surgery he has to do two things: first, raise the money for the treatment, secondly, sort out his life, especially the relationship with his teenage son. Director Yahya Alabdallah tells the story in a laconic way, using a stationary camera to produce the long shots that have become a trade mark of many films at this festival. For a long time we just see Yousef, mostly sitting, his face as immovable as the camera. However, the dense, melancholic or even claustrophobic atmosphere other films create with such means and similar stories are absent here. The film never takes off, the characters remain flat and uninteresting, the story is a little forced, the sequences in which a stone-faced character does nothing are drawn out much too long. The faces do not tell stories, they hide nothing. Even when, apparently after a successful surgery, Yousef wanders searchingly across a cemetery in the film’s final scene, there is no mystery. Or if there is, we don’t really care anymore.

Fon Tok Kuen Fah (Panorama / Thailand / Director: Pen-Ek Ratanaruang)

Tul is an ex-cop who was framed and thrown into prison after investigating somebody too influential and refusing to be bribed. Now he works as a hitman for a mysterious organization professing to target the criminal, traitorous and corrupt. When he is shot in the head, Tul suddenly sees everything upside down – and literally begins to see his life in a different way. But leaving it behind is not easy. Fon Tok Kuen Fah is a mixture of film noir and gangster thriller with a quiet, sad-faced hero who never seems part of any crowd he is in. Another lost soul not allowed to find himself. It is a dark world, drenched in a cold blue light, with a hero who is fond of darkness: When the lights are out, Tul works and fights best. The film noir aspect is strongest in the esthetic: cold, dark, sleek, stylised images convey a world that is a perfect setting for a man’s journey through the darkness of the human soul. There are many, sometimes surprising plot twists, which manage to keep suspense up but the most interesting part is Tul’s strggle between desperation, stoic acceptance of the inevitable and a stubborn persistence to start again. The film uses the great initial idea way too little, it never becomes central to the story. Little about the film is new, neither with regard to the story nor when it comes to its esthetic, the philosophical and psychological aspects remain at a kitchen sink level. But the film is well enough made and the hero interesting enough to at least keep the audience awake. Not a simple task near the end of the festival.

Somewhere there must be a factory turning out scripts lile this on an industrial basis: a beautiful young woman, an alcoholic mother, a selfish boyfriend and a best friend who is secretly in love with her. She goes away, ends up in the porn industry, meets the dream man who turns out not to be so great after all. So far so bad and seen many many times. Everyone is fairly beautiful, everyone disagrees with the porn job, providing points of conflict and food for plot twists throughout. Again and again we see her alone, crying, suffering, the usual fast edited shots of a face in turmoil. Esthetically the film is as uninteresting as its story, both being pure routine. However, there are two at least partly redeeming features: First a novel look at the porn industry. There is nothing sleazy about this here, all are friendly and highly professional, the atmosphere and look is that of a high quality advertising agency. The second aspect is the ending: director Stephen Elliott refuses resolutions, none of the open issues are closed, and there is no turning away from her job. This is her life and she calls the shots. The last five minutes of the film are more interesting and honest than the entire rest of the film.

Xingu (Panorama / Brazil / Director: Cao Hamburger)

Xingu tells the story of the Villas Boas brothers who, in 1943, set out on an expedition into the uncharted territories of central Brazil, seeking little more than adventure. Decades later they were heralded as well as vilified as those who had created Xingu National Park as a safe haven for the indigenous population of Brazil. Today, the park is run by its inhabitants and a 50-year success story. Xingu tells the story of these brothers’ journey, their fight against ignorance, racism, greed and colonial views and sometimes even against each other. These are flawed, vulnerable, haunted heroes who have their own demons to fight on what is a trip in to the heart of darkness as they make contact with people who have never come across a white man before. As they travel on the Xingu river and feel more than they see the presence of those living there and the inevitable clash of culture is postponed as long as possible, there is a sense of the Conradian horror in the air and it will return repeatedly. Director Cao Hamburger tells the story as a modern epic as he moves from the personal to the political, the whites to the indigenous population, from claustrophobic entrapment in huts or makeshift camps to the great mass of widely untouched nature. There is nothing folkloristic in the depiction of the tribes they meet – in Xingu they are shown as individual human beings rather than as an anonymous mass. There is conflict, there is the danger of distinction, there is the certainty that everything will change but there is also hope that a way can be found for these people to survive with dignity and their culture intact. And it’s not one-sided: When one of the brothers is close to giving up, it is some of the natives who take the initiative and convince him to move on. A well-told film made for larger audiences with as much of a non-colonial point of view as seems possible.

Francine (Forum / USA / Director: Brian M. Cassidy, Melanie Shatzky)

Francine is getting out of prison. Why she was in there and for how long we do not get to know, they wanted the film to remain in the present tense, says co-director Brian M. Cassidy. She is not exactly talkative, more than single words do not often leave her mouth. People are not her favorite company, her attempts at building relationships are short-lived and abortive. There is a pained expression in her face when she is around other people, even when she attempts a smile. Only for a short time she lets go, but it does not last. Where she finds solace is in animals. She starts filling her house with them, in their company she opens up, learns how to give affection. As her contacts with the real world get increasingly strained her dealings with the animals become more and more obsessive. This is Melissa Leo’s film. Her face conveys the increasing desparation, the inability to fit in, the desire to escape through the most subtle of means.  It is Leo who makes the film bearable as the forced pseudo-documentary style, the painfully prolonged sequences, the pointed drabness and bleakness atmosphere loudly scream hopelessness and desperation where Leo’s face would have sufficed. Francine is a film in which the means the directors employ are always at the forefront and actually counteract the intended effect they were meant to achieve.

For Ellen (Forum / USA / Director: So Yong Kim)

This Berlinale is the festival of the absent parents – although there are some who are trying to come back into their children’s lives. Joby is a rather unlikely example of the latter variety. He has not seen his daughter Ellen in years while his marriage self-destructed and he was busy pursuing his rock star dream. Only when he is expected to sign the divorce papers which include his giving up the rights to his child, does he try to build a relationship with the daughter he doesn’t know. Joby is a big child, selfish, narcissistic, irresponsible. When he finally has two hours with his daughter, he has no idea what to do with her. There is a great scene in a toy shop: Ellen, asked to pick her present, slowly, uncertainly, not sure what to do, walks from shelf to shelf, Joby, as cluelessly, trots behind her. It is Ellen who breaks the ice by finally deciding on a toy. Paul Dano plays Joby in a mixture of self-pity and real desperation, selfishness and blossoming love for his child, infantile outbursts and moments of self-doubt. In a way he grows up before out eyes although his maturity remains fragile. Here is a man who craves to be a father but doesn’t know if he can be. There is no obvious drama, everything is very civilized, it all happens in Joby’s face, in his slow, insecure way of speaking, his clumsy, helpless way of moving. The camera stays on him, closely but gently, follows him on his journey, giving the film a searching, floating feel. A tender and honest little film.

Rachid and Mo are brothers of Egyptian descent living in London’s troubled Hackney district.  Rachid is the gangster, Mo the good little brother who adores the older one. Of course, he tries to be a gangster, too, while Rachid, prompted by a tragic event, wants to get out. As if that wasn’t enough, director Sally El-Hosaini adds a few more twists to make sure there will be a violent escalation. The ending is, of course, optimistic, everyone has learned their lessons and, of course, crime doesn’t pay. Everything about this story is cliché, many dialogues copied straight from the textbook, some plot twists bordering on the ridiculous. Added to this is a well-tested style for films of this subject matter, complete with fast editing and swelling sound whenever something dramatic is about to happen. Inner turmoil is represented by fragmented images, hip hop music is never far (one of the brothers writes rap songs, of course). What keeps this thoroughly uninspired and conventional film a little interesting, at least for a while, are the two actors who lend their roles the credibility and plausibility their director largely denies her film.

Toata lumea din familia noastra (Forum / Romania, Netherlands / Director: Radu Jude)

“Are you going to Heaven when you die?”, a little girl asks her father. Yes, he says, adding: “Everyone in our family.”  When the film ends his conviction should at least be question. Toata lumea don familia noastra (Everyone in our family) is a brutally honest assessment of what can happen when a family falls apart. Marius is going to take his daughter from a divorced marriage on a long-planned holiday. After a short visit at his parents which already ends up in a fight, things escalate quickly when his ex-wife’s new partner refuses to let Marius’ daughter leave with him. What happens next has the relentless logic of desperate man seeing his entire life collapse around him. The handheld camera follows Marius closely in a documentary-style fashion, the images have the coarse-grained and unpolished quality of a documentary. We see the family drama unfold as if in real-time. There are no forced outbursts, no overdone emotions, no cathartic moments or turning points. This is meant to be as close to the real thing as possible. Toata lumea din familia noastra just keeps looking, refusing to turn away – whether from the unbearably painful or the absurdly banal. If film is interpreted as an  art form showing life as it is, this film does the job in the most uncompromising way. Realism is a word thrown around too often, director Radu Jude shows us what it can mean.

Csak a szél (Competition / Hungary, Germany, France / Director: Bence Fliegauf)

Hungarian director Bence Fliegauf’s Csak a szél is loosely based on a series of attacks on Roma in 2008 and 2009 in which six people died. In Csak a szél five Roma families have already been murdered when the film starts. We follow three members of one Roma family. In the long opening, they get up from bed, one after the other, leaving separately. Mother, daughter, son. The camera gets really close, focusing on parts of the face, hands, feet, moving along sleeping bodies. It will close in on them again and again, as the unseen and never openly acknowledged threat closes in. Everyone goes about their daily business, we accompany the mother to her various jobs, the daughter to school, the son as he roams around. Nothing happens, what we see are the most boring of day-to-day activities. Yet somewhere in all of this, constantly present, there is the sense of dread. Faces are closed, heads low, words few. These are people under siege, people who crave to be invisible. They have no allies, all the local cop complains about is that the murderers spoil their “message” by killing “good” Roma, too. With the nervous camera, the extreme close-ups, the reduced light, Fliegauf creates an oppressive, suffocating atmosphere, a growing density, a sense of paralysis taking over, an intensity that gets increasingly hard to bear and that leaves the viewer numb. They have to come in the end and they do. There will be shots in the house as we’re running away with the boy and the camera, there will be corpses getting dressed, there will be coffins in what is a chillingly matter-of-fact epilogue. Business as usual. The film ends with its first music, a lone voice singing, hardly audible as if from far away. A faint sign of life from the distance that says: We’re not dead yet. If only one film if the festival stays in mind, this might be it. And it should be.

A teenage girl disappears. Her father who has not seen her in seven years goes searching for her. This made for TV film starts out as a family drama albeit a rather cool, bloodless one. It is shot in the pointedly realistic way that has become the style of choice in contemporary German cinema. It is a decidedly gray world, everything screams decay. Halfway through the film takes a turn into the (pre? post?) apocalyptic but the film never takes off or rather it never wakes up. There is no intensity of any sort, the contrast between the story and the realistic style fails to create any atmosphere and the dialogues are embarrassingly formulaic. There is no direction, it seems like someone had what seemed to be a good idea but nobody knew what to do with it. An utterly forgettable film.

Westerland (Perspective German Cinema / Germany / Director: Tim Staffel)

A young man is walking on fields of ice. As the camera zooms out we see nothing but ice as far as to to the horizon. In the middle of this cold desert a lonely figure, walking. Tim Staffel’s adaptation of his own novel opens with what may be this Berlinale’s most memorable image of loneliness. Later the young man sits on a bench and pulls a plastic bag over his head. From the distance we see another man come up to him and it looks like they talk. Loneliness, distance, fragile closeness. These are the motifs Westerland revolves around and keeps returning to. These two lonely souls are bound to come together, to keep the other up for a while. First Cem will try to get close to Jesus, then it will be the other way around.  There will be short moments they will share. They cannot last. The film is a sequence of images symbolizing this fragile state, these fleeting moments of togetherness that is fuelled mostly by a fear of being alone. Repeatedly one or both are walking, across dunes, the beach, along empty streets. They stare out towards the sea, again and again they sit next to each other watching TV. They seldom look at each other, conversations often end in someone running away. They are in a state of paralysis, autist-like figures who cannot come together but need to try. In what may be the film’s key scene they roll around on the bed. Are they playing? Are they making love? Are they fighting? Maybe all of it. And maybe none. Does it matter?

Chocó (Panorama / Columbia / Director: Jhonny Hendrix)

Chocó brings the European viewer into a world completely unknown to most of them: those of the black people of Columbia. Descended from slaves they are still ver much second class citizens. The few white men in the film are, of course, the bosses and exploit the blacks as much as they can. The only black “boss” is a gold mine owner who works in an environment-friendly way where the white mine owner uses mercury. In the middle of all of this is Chocó, a young mother of two with a lazy, permanently drunk and violent husband. The film starts end ends on long scenes of people singing: mourning music at the start, a celebration in the end. There is singing again and again throughout the film. The music, it seems, is meant to provide the film’s backbone and probably also represent these people’s culture. The story, however, is painfully simplistic: Chocó tries to get her family through, gets abused by her husband and her white employer, sells herself to get a birthday present for her daughter and later takes revenge on her husband. There is a hint of what might be the supernatural and that’s it. All characters are at best tw-dimensional, there is no distinctive esthetic or atmosphere to the film, no emotional depth. Between the opening and the closing scene this could be told anywhere in the world in exactly the same way. At the beginning of the screening, director Jhonny Hendrix says this was the first time someone made a film about this – this world, these people. Unfortunately he hasn’t really done so.

If there was a construction kit for films about disturbed teenagers, Dollhouse would be built from it. Pick a few teenagers, preferably from the lower social spheres, get an aggressive boy and an upperclass girl, give them an empty house, throw in alcohol and drugs, Add a big secret or two, finally some hip music and stir. And outcomes a film like Dollhouse, a wild housewrecking party with its fair share of stereotypically hallucinatory scenes a big surprise near the end and a long drawn-out ending that totally destroys the tone if the film. Dollhouse is entertaining at times, has one great sequence as one of the rooms get devorated by putting all furniture upside down. Nothing in Dollhouse is upside down though, this is a routine movie with nothing of its own. In Disco Pigs, her directorial debut, Kirsten Sheridan demonstrated how to portrait teenage angst in a creative, truly original, visually fascinating and intellectually challenging way. Dollhouse is none of these things.

Was bleibt (Competition / Germany / Director: Hans-Christian Schmid)

A family reunion. The father has sold his publishing company and the mother who has been fighting depression for 30 years also has an announcement to make. Both sons have grown into – more or less – responsible adults with seemingly successful private and professional lives. Already on the first evening cracks appear and all falls apart when the mother suddenly disappears. At the end, months have passed and everyone tries to pretend that all is normal. But normal it cannot be because it never was. Hans-Christian Schmid refuses to play the Hollywood keyboard of dysfunctional family life. There is no big drama, no shouting matches, no dramatic showdowns. Outbursts are short, mostly everyone tries and keep up the show. Everything is smooth, polished, faultless on the surface – the family image just like the cool, quiet images the film creates. It is a septic atmosphere in this house to which most of the film is confined. The mostly motionless camera gives it a lab-like atmosphere in which we’re watching something like a chemical experiment. The trick of the film is how everything that seems warm and friendly at first later becomes cold and soulless. There is no visible change, it’s just that the beautiful surface is revealed to be nothing but surface. And yet the film does not end on an entirely pessimistic note, rather on an ambiguous one. All lies are on the table and there is nothing else to do than to try and move on, accepting what needs to be accepted. Everything is broken but not everything is lost. Or maybe the show just needs to go on. Maybe.

Two Little Boys (Generation 14plus / New Zealand / Director: Robert Sarkies)

These “two little boys” are no longer little boys but grown man, although in appearance only. Nige and Deano are best friends sind childhood and they have never stopped being children. their approach to the world and each other is highly infantile, Nige’s helplessness and failure to deal with reality as well as Deano’s jealousy and childlike tempers. Reality hits as Nige runs over and kills a Norwegian backpacker and they set out on a journey to get rid of the body. The cluelessness and clumsiness of these two big kids is told with so much black humor that it is hard not to laugh throughout the film. Robert Sarkies has created a relentlessly funny story on two people’s journey into darkness without realising what darkness is. Especially Deano sees this as a game that gives him a chance to establish their friendship after Nige has moved in with a new friend. Although these losers are anything but loveable at first side, the film allows enough room for their often miserable attempts to establish human closeness that the viewer in a way adopts these lost kids. Two Little Boys is a hilariously funny and even at times quite touching road movie carried by two wonderfully quirky characters. Throw in some beautiful scenery and this is excellent entertainment.

The Iron Lady (Out of Competition/ UK, France / Director: Phyllida Lloyd)

Films about controversial political figures seem to be a new fashion in Hollywood and beyond. After Clint Eastwood’ film on J. Edgar Hoover, Phyllida Lloyd has now taken on Margaret Thatcher, one of the most divisive political leaders of the twentieth century. The first remarkable thing is how much Meryl Streep not only looks like Thatcher but also speaks like her. At times it’s hard to remember you’re not seeing the real thing. Fortunately, this is not the film’s only strong point. Lloyd tells the story from its end: The old Thatcher reminisces about her life, her rise to power and fall from it. Although her husband Denis died some years previously she still sees and talks to him. Their “conversations” are the backbone of this film as their relationship is interpreted as the foundation of her life. It is in the private life The Iron Lady searches for the answer to how Margaret Thatcher became the first female head of government in the UK. Her admiration for her father, a shopkeeper and local politician, her un-Tory-like upbringing as a grocer’s daughter, her love for the down-to-earth and clownesque Denis are accentuated while her negative sides, her ambition, her greed for power, her need for dominance, the way she treated even close allies and especially her policies are not absent but relegated to the second row. It is a sympathetic portrait of a politician whose drive and relentlessness are derived from the conviction to do the right thing. One need not agree with this portrait of a human being with flaws as well as strong beliefs to acknowledge that the story is plausibly and consistently told. this is a solid biopic with no experiments but a fantastic twosome of Meryl Streep and Jim Broadbent who are allowed to carry the film. They say that a man has to do what a man has to do. In the case of this “Iron Lady” it goes for women, too.

Denis is dead. Aged 41, he died in 2011 while serving with the German army in Afghanistan. Since 1999, he had been a soldier but before that he was the leader, the centerpiece, the inspiration or just the chief jerk of something that should never have existed in the first place: the East German skateboarding scene before the fall of the wall. This Ain’t California is a testament to that forgotten episode of the other German state, a tiny, unimportant one, but the core and backbone of those who were part of it. The film starts out with Denis’ death, bringing together former friends long scattered in many places. They reminisce about their youth and go out in search of Denis, who everyone remembers under his pseudonym: Panik. Building on this reunion and using loads of privately footage, the film, piece by piece, brings this impossible movement to life before our very eyes.  Mixing original footage, the reunion, narration from several of those involved and beautifully drawn animations it recreates a little of this strange miniature universe these kids created for themselves – totally unpolitical but, in its aimless pursuit of fun, its focus on individuality set against everything the East German state was about. The freedom they sought was not ideological – but it was an alternative to the utilitarist doctrine which was at the heart of all of East German life. Everything needed to have a purpose, the collective was everything, the individual nothing. This Ain’t California is funny, entertaining, but also deeply moving. Its distinctive rhythm wonderfully symbolizes the lifestyle these kids made up from scratch. The film allows us to dive into a lost world – and a lost soul: Denis who went further than anyone, Denis who got lost somewhere along the way, Denis who is brought back to life for a moment because what he represented, what he was looking for, what he was living never died. A miracle of a film that makes you laugh and cry and everything in between.

L’enfant d’en haut (Competition / Switzerland / Director: Ursula Meier)

Simon is another one of this Berlinale’s parentless children. And a professional thief: Everyday he makes his way up the ski slopes in the Swiss Alps and steals everything he can later sell: skis, masks, gloves, glasses. And food which he then takes home. An industrious kid, a successful miniature entrepreneur. And the adult in his home: The young woman who lives with who is allegedly his sister but turns out not to be, is the child: Drifting through her days as if in a daze, more interested in meeting a man who will “rescue” her than to earn her family’s living, she is supported – practically, emotionally, financially – by Simon. Ursula Meier’s second feature is a small film – in the best possible way. It completely eschews sentimentality, there is nothing big about this. The camera plays a wonderful game of closing in and moving away again from Simon, from his small dismal world to the bigger more glamorous one, in both of which he is alone but fighting. It is an actor’s film: Kacey Mottet Klein’s stubborn determination to live is as haunting as Léa Seydoux’s almost childlike longing and sulking. There is nothing heroic about Simon though, he remains a child, as overwhelmed by his situation as he should be. There are haunting scenes in which he craves closeness, affection, even pays for it, and those in which his facade breaks. The film refuses any kind of resolution. The fleeting glimpses Simon and his “sister” through at each other as they pass in gondolas going in different directions, may well the greatest  ending of this year’s Berlinale.

Jayne Mansfield’s Car (Competition / USA / Director: Billy Bob Thornton)

1969: The protests against the Vietnam war are at  their height, US society more divided than ever since the Civil War. This is the background to Jayne Mansfield’s Car in which the body of an Alabama patriarch’s ex-wife is returned to be buried in her childhood home – accompanied by her new English family: her widower and his two adult children from a previous marriage. for twenty years Jim Caldwell has hated this man he has never met – now they must face each other. It is the difficult and slowly, gently growing relationship between these two men – a veritable giants’ match between Robert Duvall and John Hurt – that provides the center of the story and the heart of the film which features all the stalwarts of a Tennessee Williams drama: the clash of generations, an oppressive and repressed patriarch, apparently totally incapable of feelings and affection, shattered hopes, damaged souls, destroyed lives. It is all there and well mixed with the social turmoil of the late 1960s. Of course, long hidden tensions and conflicts surface, skeletons leave their closets and walk around freely. Often such revelations feel a little forces, the dialogues stale and at times this is a pure cliché fest. What keeps the film afloat is director Billy Bob Thornton’s (who also plays Jim’s strange, traumatized son Skip) light touch. throughout, the tragic is balanced by the comical, family drama is turned into satire and back, it is all a bit over the top – just as old Caldwell whose main hobby is looking at car wrecks. This is as comical as it is serious, as is the entire film which keeps walking this edge creating an ambivalence in which one is less and less sure whether one should laugh or cry. Maybe both is the answer in this film which digs deep into the lies behind a family’s face, the difficulty of the old and young to see eye to eye and which also exposes the absurdity of many of those conflicts. Life, it says, is serious, but never just that.

Highway (Panorama / Nepal, USA / Director: Deepak Rauniyar)

A bus is on its way to Kathmandu. On board a wide mixture of passengers: a gay man at odds with his family, a husband trying to get his wife pregnant, a woman with a secret boyfriend who is going to get engaged to the man of her parents’ choice. The bus is stopped at a wild strike on the road when one of the passenger has an idea: as the only vehicles allowed through on such occasions are wedding buses they should pretend to be a wedding party. So they select and dress a “bride” and “groom”, decorate the bus and as they have a festive band on board they walk ahead of the bus playing the instruments. It works and it will two more times even though resistance gets stronger at each strike. This story, however, is little more than a vehicle which enables the real narrative level of the film which is more concerned with the individual fates of the travellers and those  they are travelling to who they can only communicate with via phone which keeps breaking down and who we meet in sequences that keep interrupting the bus journey. They,too, have their secrets and their load to carry. However, it is this that leads the film to fragment and lose its drive. In the end, it unravels into little more than more or less interesting episode connected by a forced narrative ploy. What is left is an interesting but rather superficial glimpse at Nepalese society and its conflicts between tradition and modernity.

Yang Yonghi’s first feature film goes back to the topics of her previous documentaries: the story of her family, divided between Japan and their native North Korea. A young man who repatriated to Pyongyang at the age of sixteen is allowed back for medical treatment but the visit is cut short for no apparent reason. For a very short time lives completely separate try and come together only to be torn apart again. A family refinding itself  before falling victim to a faceless irrational Big Brother – the gentle, quiet, unsentimental way this story is told, how voices, mutual languages must be rediscovered is as moving as it is at times almost unbearably painful. The handheld camera lends the film an instability that corresponds well with the state of limbo portrayed. The story is told in short, quiet moments: the father’s deafening speechlessness, the son’s slow shedding of his robot-like facade, the utter incomprehension of the decision to call Sungho back after just one week, the sister’s literal inability to let her brother go. The human is pitted against that unseen power trying to root out individuality and even though it seems to win, these moments tell a different story. The film’s quiet, almost documentary-like realism gives it an intensity that is hard to bear at times – and impossible to forget.

Kid-Thing (Forum / USA / Director: David Zellner)

At the beginning, there is dirt track, damaged race cars bump into each other. As they hit they make no sound. For minutes, the camera stays on them, mostly close to ground. Dirt, bumpers, wheels. Cut: a girls face, void of expression. Meet Annie, an angry young girl who throws gravel at children in a playground, shoots a paintball gun at dead cattle. A parentless child although there is father but like all adults, here he is absent even when he is there. One day she finds a hole in the forest from which she hears a trapped woman’s voice crying for help, willing Annie to get someone to get her out. In the end they will come together, but in a different way. The film is done mostly on long steady shots, often staying for what feels like minutes on scenes of inertia, giving it a stark naturalism as well as an atmosphere of doom. The hole and the disembodied voice symbolize the abyss threatening to swallow this  girl on her own and also provides a sense of mystery: Is this a voice from hell or a way to be rescued? A fairy-tale element both counteracting as well as intensifying the bleakness of this world. This is a dark film that has moments of humor, unsentimental, truthful without being optimistic. On a realistic level, the end could be called tragic. On the other hand, if this really is a fairy tale, who knows?

Metéora (Competition / Greece / Director: Spiros Stathoulopoulos)

A scenery like a painting: bare rocks in a remote mountain landscape, slightly out of focus and washed over, made to look like picture, late Romanticism or early Impressionism maybe. As if in Caspar David Friedrich painting misty clouds roll over them, giving the land an archaic, mythical feel. Fittingly, there are two monasteries right on top of those rocks. In them a monk and a nun who  fall in love. There are secret meetings, light signals from window to window, regretful prayers, self-hurt and ultimately sex. At the end, they hold hands on a meadow. In between issues are illustrated with well-done animations, even hell comes into play here. That’s it. Metéora is at times stunningly beautiful, but as the novelty value of its visual language wears off there is not much left. No emotional depth, no conflict, no real topic. And not much of an idea: When the monk is in emotional turmoil, the sounds of the monastery disintegrate into noisy cacophony. This is as subtle as it gets. The emptiness is accentuated even further by the film’s deliberate slowness. The animation seems more important than any kind of substance. This is mere surface, great to look at for a while, and then, for a much longer time, very tiring.

Captive (Competition / France, Philippines, Germany, UK / Director: Brillante Mendoza)

Philippine director’s Brillante Mendoza’s new film takes us back to 2001, when Islamist terrorism became regarded as the chief threat to what we once liked to call the free world. an almost forgotten event was the kidnapping of a group of tourists in the Philippines by Abu Sayaf terrorists which lasted for almost a year. Mendoza has tried to turn the events of this months into a gripping and haunting film. Apart from the first twenty to thirty minutes he has failed to do so. Early on, Captive feels almost like a documentary, well capturing the frantic, fearful and unstable atmosphere of the kidnapping’s early phase. From the dense opening in which two arrivals – that of two social workers and that of the terrorists – are contrasted we follow the group in its meandering journey, getting glimpses of the different ways in which fear can manifest itself before everything calms down in a collective state of exhaustion. As long as Mendoza uses the handheld camera to just watch what is going on, the film keeps an intensity that almost allows the viewer to touch the state of emergency these people are in. Unfortunately, he does not trust this style to carry the film. So he starts to try telling stories – the nurses forcefully married to the, of course hypocritical, Islamists, the 12-year-old, social worker Thérèse (Isabelle Huppert) becomes friendly with, and pretty much everything else connected with Thérèse who is pushed into the center of the film. For the first time in her career, Huppert may be completely miscast, her star appeal certainly hurts the authenticity the film has built up in its first part. Later it converts to conventional story-telling, full of clumsy Hollywoodesque effects (animals symbolizing the threat), constant gun battles which are filmed and told in the same way and an ending that so much lacks inspiration (the counter-editing that works well in the beginning is now nothing but stale) that it even loses most of its drama. A wasted opportunity.

Shadow Dancer (Out of Competition / Rep. of Ireland, UK / Director: James Marsh)

Collette Mc Veigh, a young Belfast mother, member of a prominent IRA family, fails to carry out a bomb attack in the London Underground, is captured and forced by a smart MI5 agent to spy on her family in order to avoid prison and keep her son. They make a deal that soon puts her life in danger. An operation goes badly wrong and someone will have to pay. The only question is: Will it be her? Shadow Dancer takes us back to 1993, to the early days of the peace process, just before the first IRA ceasefire. It quickly develops a peculiar atmosphere of paranoia and matter-of-fact professionalism – on both sides. The drab interior of the MI5 offices and the backrooms in which the IRA brass meet are not fundamentally different. Neither are the distrust and the behind-the-back scheming. It is a world in which secrecy is the most important thing, in which even the closest relatives are light years away, kept distant by their secrets. It is a claustrophobic world whose dominant color is gray. The film’s paleness reflects the inability to escape from well-learned rituals, the cool and quiet photography the deadly and unthinking efficiency of both sides. It is a male world but the film focuses on the women, trapped in the webs of loyalty while at the same time trying to create a normal family life. They are strong women, stronger than the men because they understand what really matters. The contrast with their lives lets the men’s war appear absurd and meaningless. But there is no easy escape and no avoiding suffering. The story lacks plausibility at times, is a little too simplistic and there are a few empty clichès thrown in. Yet it does not matter for the film works through its atmosphere, its nearly suffocating density – and this closed, quietly suffering, subtly desperate face of Andrea Riseborough. It is to the film’s credit that it does not take sides – it shows rather than judges. as horrible as some of the things they’re doing are, they are all just humans, plain and simple. It’s a monstrous world without monsters.