François Ozon’s Fassbinder homage “Peter von Kant” opens the Berlinale, along with Ulrich Seidl’s “Rimini” and Natalia López Gallardo’s “Robe of Gems”.
The feared crowds have not yet materialized on the festival mile, an hour before the opening gala on Thursday evening it is almost eerily empty here. The Christmas tree decorations, a year-round curiosity in front of the arcades at Potsdamer Platz, make the scene even more inhospitable. Even those who get their daily nasal swabs in one of the buses that have been converted into test centers don’t have to wait long.
People don’t like to talk about it, but it’s not just the corona-shy people who are missing. The exclusion of the unvaccinated is also noticeable; almost everyone knows filmmakers here who, for whatever reason, do not want to be vaccinated. The Berlinale bear is not one of them; under the slogan “vaccination protects (cinema) culture” he displays a small band-aid on one of the posters.
Claudia Roth, loud and serious
This is how times are changing: How rarely did politicians use this word during the lockdowns, now culture is on everyone’s lips again. “Without culture, everything is mute, culture is the voice of democracy,” says Claudia Roth’s pithy opening speech, which she reads loudly from neon signs behind the cameras. In the other speeches, too, the spirit of cinema is invoked as forcefully as one would otherwise only do with those who are absent. No joke, no song interrupts the seriousness of a ceremony in which nothing is reminiscent of the whimsy of the Kosslick era. François Ozon could only win with his opening film “Peter von Kant”: In it he rewrote Fassbinder’s melodrama “The bitter tears of Petra von Kant” into a tragic comedy.
The only venue is under a digital cathedral panorama, a luxury apartment in Cologne from the early 1970s. This is where the title character, played by Denis Ménochet, resides, a famous film director who is becoming more and more like Ozon’s idol Fassbinder.
In his original, Margit Carstensen played a fashion designer who falls madly in love with a young woman played by Hanna Schygulla, who shamelessly exploits her. Here that role falls to the handsome son (Khalil Gharbi) of his former muse, a diva-like singer named Sidonie, played by an equally gorgeous-looking Isabelle Adjani.
What is a real ozone film can also take a second diva: Hanna Schygulla can look forward to an almost devoted homage in the role of the director’s mother. Fassbinder himself does not fare so well; not that Ozone exaggerated the child tyrant’s manipulative genius. But he overlaid his production with something Fassbinder would have loathed: fake smoothness and genuine nostalgia. Christoph Schlingensief understood him better in his homage. After all, Fassbinder made full use of the full arsenals of glamor and pathos in Hollywood and Ufa. But beneath it shone a raw, deeply human imperfection seldom guested in François Ozon’s cinema.
The human flaw is in turn a good friend of Ulrich Seidl. “Rimini”, the Austrian’s competition entry, shows the Italian bathing resort as one rarely sees it – in the dead of winter. Once there is even snow on the Adriatic Sea. This is where the aging hit star Richie Bravo (Michael Thomas) resides, who would also have what it takes to be a Fassbinder character. His last source of income are busloads of aging fans, for whom he gives concerts in run-down hotels and a miserable disco. In addition, he offers himself to the ladies as a gigolo. His way of life only begins to falter when he visits his neglected daughter, who wants money from him that he doesn’t have.
This wonderful setting makes “Rimini” a film that you don’t want to miss at all costs – until you’ve seen the 114 minutes. As an actor, singer and former heavyweight boxer, Michael Thomas is perfectly cast, and the hit numbers are gorgeous in their own right. Also, none of the characters are exposed to ridicule. Many individual scenes work wonderfully on their own, but unlike other Seidl feature films, they don’t want to fit into a story or at least a dramaturgical balance. Ultimately, they line up like Richie Bravo’s hit numbers.
A similar impression, albeit in the style of a lavish family drama and crime film, is made by the Mexican contribution “Robe of Gems” by Natalia López Gallardo. This ensemble piece about the demise of a bourgeois country villa, about family and gang feuds and unsuccessful police investigations seems to consist of only individual scenes. Admittedly, the technically sophisticated tableaux are increasingly opposed to the enlightening intention: they aestheticize the real horror that underlies the desired portrait of society.
