The Herald (Glasgow)
February 19, 2005

And heaven knows I’m miserable now

HANNAH McGILL

IT’S bone-chillingly cold, with sleet pounding cheerlessly out of a
slate-grey sky – so it must be Berlin in February.

It’s hard to believe fewer deals aren’t struck at Berlin than Cannes
simply because of the negative psychological effects of the weather.
One imagines moguls pondering: “Shall I make this promising young
film-maker a star and a millionaire overnight, or drag myself back to
my hotel over slush-covered pavements and go to bed with some heiss
schokolade and a grumpy disposition?”

Still, it’s more than just the weather that gets a poor press this
year. Regis Wargnier’s festival opener Man to Man gets as good a
response as any film featuring Joseph Fiennes can reasonably expect
these days – it’s universally panned. There’s more interest in David
Mackenzie’s third feature, Asylum, a doomy, enigmatic love story
based on the novel by Patrick McGrath. Natasha Richardson is a
psychiatrist’s wife who moves on to the premises of a mental
hospital, falling into a passionate and inevitably destructive love
affair with an inmate. Ian McKellen is excellent as a creepy doctor
whose interest in his patients seems to extend beyond the
professional: “My particular interest is sexual pathology and the
associated problems.”

The same might be said of Mackenzie, director of The Last Great
Wilderness and Young Adam, and screenwriter Patrick Marber, who
penned Closer. At the press conference, however, Mackenzie claims his
desire to work with Marber was, in fact, triggered by the discovery
they shared a passion for Joy Division.

“We’re all miserable people and we hate ourselves, ” the director
cheerfully notes of cast and crew.

It must be catching. Faces proceed to fall – along with the
temperature and snow – over the next few days as a distinctly
uninspiring selection of competition films reveals itself. Andre
Techine’s Changing Times features the iconic pairing of Catherine
Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu and is diverting enough, but the
strongest impression it leaves is that Deneuve needs to lay off the
collagen.

Broadly, the competition films are notable for their solemnity, their
conventionality of form and their lack of obvious commercial
prospects. There’s acclaim for Julia Jentsch’s performance in the
German Second World War drama Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, the
story of an anti-Nazi activist; but the film itself is talky and
staid.

The Holocaust is examined in harrowing Schindler’s List-style detail
in the two-and-a-half hour Hungarian epic Fateless. Two films – Terry
George’s Oscar-nominated Hotel Rwanda and Raoul Peck’s Some Time In
April – deal with the Rwandan genocide. Hany AbuAssad’s Paradise Now
follows the fate of two Palestinian suicide bombers. Robert
Guedeguian’s The Last Mitterand is an oppressively respectful
portrait of the late French president.

Mike Mills’s charming Sundance prize-winner Thumbsucker provides a
rare moment of good cheer, but Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with
Steve Zissou leaves disappointment and indifference in its wake.
Christian Petzold’s Ghosts is a highlight of a small-scale kind –
subtle, enigmatic, beautifully performed – but I stomp out of
Taiwanese director Tsai Mingliang’s The Wayward Cloud after as many
yucky, flip, misogynistic minutes as I can stand (about 45) .

As is often the case, there’s better material to be found in the less
prestigious sections. Ravishingly shot by the living legend that is
Christopher Doyle, Fruit Chan’s daring horror Dumplings is a
remarkable conjunction of stunningly elegant imagery and
extraordinarily sick content. At certain points, I feel in genuine
danger of vomiting.

Tickets, a three-parter with sections by directors Ermanno Olmi,
Abbas Kiarostami and Ken Loach, is patchy but entertaining.

Kiarastami’s section is brilliant and the Loach part, which stars
some young actors from his Greenock-set Sweet Sixteen as Celtic fans
on an eventful train ride to Rome, has copious foul-mouthed Weegie
charm. In Love + Hate, British director Dominic Savage revisits the
Romeo and Juliet territory that Loach covered in Ae Fond Kiss; it’s
straightforward stuff, but brilliantly performed by an unknown cast.
I’m hugely taken with the lively, forceful underworld drama Gamblers,
from French/Armenian director Frederic Balekdjian, and with Malgosia
Szumowska’s ravishing and original Stranger, from Poland. Beyond the
confines of the screening rooms, I get cheered up by a dinner with
Brazilian directorWalter Salles.

The idealistic, egalitarian, peasant-hugging ethos of The Motorcycle
Diaries is all very well, but Salles is a living, breathing reminder
that some people are just more equal than others. At 48, the man
looks like a Levi’s model, has a young wife, Maria, so beautiful you
want to genuf lect, and talks about cinema with the knowledge of a
scholar and the passion of a fan.

Elsewhere, a chat with Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, the directors
of the documentary Inside Deep Throat, proves similarly illuminating.
They reveal that their original plan was to make a Linda Lovelace
biopic, starring Mariah Carey. “We think she has one good performance
in her, ” they claim.

Now, that’s the sort of thinking outside the – ahem – box that this
rather staid and chilly festival could have used more of . . .