Before the award ceremony: Hong Sang-Soo and Paolo Taviani close the Berlinale competition with thoughtful films.
In the USA, where film critics also like to sort artistic films into genre drawers, the Korean Hong Sang Soo can usually be found in the same place: His latest work, “The Novelist’s Film”, will also be classified under “walking and talking films”. The last competition film immerses the half-full hall after the checkerboard pattern caused by the pandemic in Hong’s proven magic of smiling thoughtfulness. Walk and talk, if the recipe were that simple, his dialogue films, which appeared in rapid succession, about the mostly artistic sensibility at festivals did not always occupy a place of honor.
The focus this time is on an aging writer (Lee Hye Young) who, unsurprisingly, meets a successful film director who once wanted to make one of her books into a film. But something bothers her about his noncommittal compliments, and during the following chance encounter with an actress who has disappeared from the public eye, she throws all Korean politeness overboard.
How did he come to accuse the screen abstinent star of wasting his talent? After all, she is no longer a small child and can decide for herself what to do. The surprising tirade has threefold success, for the protagonist as well as for the story: We’ve got rid of the slippery director, in the amazed ex-star the author has won a friend and at the same time introduced the actual topic: It’s her own writer’s block that she recognized by the unknown counterpart as a creative crisis. However, further walks and encounters offer a way out: both women want to make a film together.
The Novelist’s Film has therapeutic power
Even in happier times, the therapeutic power of Hong Sang Soo’s films can be used, but now he’s putting his finger on the pandemic’s cultural legacy – the virus of stagnation. You don’t have to say more about it: As soon as life allows us more chance encounters like in the Korean’s films, creativity comes back.
The prizes will be awarded here in Berlin this Thursday after a competition shortened to 18 entries. Seeing her in six days, and at least a few others as well, kept me busy. But what was missing above all in the course of test centers and barriers was the exchange. What is a festival without the opportunity to follow spontaneous tips?
An oasis here was the parallel program of the “Week of Critics”, organized by the Critics Association along the lines of Cannes. Here the film talks are a fixed part of the programming. A discovery here was the French Pascale Bodet, if you will also a master of “walking and talking film”. Her intellectual gem “Edouard et Charles” is inspired by the friendship between the painter Edouard Manet and the poet Charles Baudelaire, but is set in the cultural locations of contemporary Paris. It is a playful parcours of word and picture puzzles and creative misunderstandings, which also rediscovers cinema at the interface between the arts. And sun-drenched Paris even brings in its own Impressionism.
The Italian doyen Paolo Taviani was less fortunate with his essayistic feature film “Leonora Addio” in the dialogue between the arts. Based on the transfer of author Luigi Pirandello’s ashes from Rome to Sicily, the filmmaker reflects on his influence on Italian film culture and the work he created with his brother Vittorio, who died in 2018.
In the sequence of many film excerpts, it is not just the author’s relationship to fascism that remains strangely underexposed. The far more moving narrative level, the homage to Vittorio, cannot be discerned either. And a new short film based on Pirandello’s last story “The Nail”, which was incorporated at the end, is far removed from the poetry of the Taviani classic “Kaos”. The inclusion of Paolo Taviani’s first solo work in the competition can only be explained as a mark of respect.
In any case, other names should come up this evening when the Golden Bears are awarded. No film was artistically more original than the Swiss mountain drama “Drii Winter”, no screenplay sharper in its highly emotional dialogue than “Both Sides of the Blade” by Claire Denis and Christine Angot. No actress was as captivating as Charlotte Gainsbourg in Mikhaël Hers’ 80s self-discovery story Les passagers de la nuit. It wasn’t a big competition, but there was enough big stuff in it.
