The best films in the Berlinale competition to date come from great female directors: contributions from Claire Denis, Nicolette Krebitz and Ursula Meier.
Somehow everyone here looks a bit like a Berlinale bear with his FFP2 mask. A member of the security team explains to me that you also have to wear them on the street between the festival cinemas, “unless you want to smoke or drink.” There is no trace of the feeling of freedom of the first major festivals in the pandemic in Venice or Cannes. Spontaneous encounters with colleagues are rare, and there are no neighbors in the cinema. Unlike even small festivals, the Berlinale didn’t even have a practical ticket app. There is only one website that gives out fixed seats, but often forgets the necessary QR codes that the cinema staff need to check. So the system thinks you’re skipping the visit, and the third time you’re going to be blocked.
Of course, great cinema is above these things, it still finds you. And if the glasses fog up again over the mask, it can feel romantic like rain at the drive-in cinema.
As in the previous year, the best contributions so far have come from female filmmakers. First and foremost Claire Denis, who amazes with every work. Her virtuosity is fed from the basic ingredients of cinema, be it the light, the music (here again from the Tindersticks) or this time highly emotional dialogues that she wrote with the writer Christine Angot.
Both Sides Of The Blade is the international title: Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon, two of France’s finest actors, inspire Claire Denis on an emotional tour de force as a married couple thrown back to the dramatic beginnings of their liaison: she was previously with together with his best friend, now he has returned in both lives, as the man’s business partner and the woman’s lover.
Lindon, who most recently helped Cannes-winning Titane achieve amazing emotional grounding, is back in his element. When it comes to the suppressed emotional world of established men, he is the specialist. Juliette Binoche’s character keeps scratching at its surface in vain. And then it’s her who lies when he finds out about the affair, who also lies about bending the beams. How many grandiose love triangles has French auteur cinema produced – and yet this film seems without precedent, with Denis directing all the driving forces of her love drama so lightly.
In contrast, drama is only a passing guest in Nicolette Krebitz’s new film. “AEIOU – The Fast Alphabet of Love” is as easy as the title promises. Sophie Rois plays a 60-year-old actress who, as a language coach, is supposed to drive a student away from mumbling. However, she had noticed him before – as a pickpocket. What follows is a romance that is predictable in its direction but surprising in its execution. The history of film is full of male fantasies, while Krebitz sets the concept of a female fantasy against it – voluptuous and yet repeatedly broken when longings and role models become a direct topic. Again and again her female Pygmalion story calls the clichés by their real names – and in turn gives them their own magic in disenchantment.
The third in the remarkable trio of the competition weekend is the French-Swiss filmmaker Ursula Meier. The eponymous marker in “La Ligne” separates a daughter (Stéphanie Blanchoud) who has become violent from the house of her mother (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi). A 100-meter barrier is in place by court order, but the young woman will keep making contact from the border drawn in blue on the meadow. With a tangible attack in super slow motion, the film takes us almost surreally into a household of musicians: records are flying around, the attacker injures herself when she hits the keyboard of the grand piano. The mother suffers the most lasting damage, however, as she loses part of her hearing.
But this unusual look at domestic violence is just one of the many unusual perspectives of this intense family drama. It’s a compellingly dense film about unequal love and the outlet art can sometimes provide for the talented. Only gradually does it become clear that the unloved daughter must also be the unrecognized genius of the family.
Three films that are really worth seeing are indeed a fair compensation for some unusual obstacles at this 72nd Berlinale.
