The Berlinale has always had a reputation as a festival that takes its politics seriously, but this year the politics were bound to be a little more urgent than usual. This was, after all, the first A-list European festival to happen since the Trump inauguration. As competition jury member Diego Luna, the Mexican star of Rogue One, pointed out: “There’s no better place to send a message than Berlin” – a city that knows its fair share about the futility of walls.
The jury – headed by director Paul Verhoeven and including Maggie Gyllenhaal and artist Olafur Eliasson – may or may not choose the most political films in contention, but they will have noticed how many films seemed to use the metaphor of a social event to make a point about the state of the world. The strategy worked beautifully in The Party, by British writer-director Sally Potter. Simple and concise, this chamber comedy, shot in black-and-white, is set at the London house of a woman (Kristin Scott Thomas), who has just been named shadow health secretary. As her husband (Timothy Spall) mooches around ashen-faced, friends – played by, among others, Emily Mortimer, Cillian Murphy and a supremely acidic Patricia Clarkson – arrive, and the revelations start pouring out. It’s brittle, intelligent stuff, like Pinter crossed with Feydeau farce, and one of the most enjoyable things here.
The same metaphor, however, creaked appallingly in The Dinner, Oren Moverman’s US adaptation of the bestselling novel by Herman Koch. Steve Coogan plays a troubled history teacher venting his agony over a gourmet dinner with his wife (Laura Linney), politician brother (Richard Gere) and sister-in-law (Rebecca Hall). It’s a bloated, laboured, state-of-bourgeois-morals drama, just about made watchable by some sharp acting (barring, of course, Gere’s usual lacquered inertia).
Also on a similar theme was In Times of Fading Light, a German drama in which the final moments of the GDR are enacted at the 90th birthday celebration of a diehard communist patriarch (a superb Bruno Ganz, seen in jollier mode in The Party). It’s somewhat theatrical but rich in strong characterisation, steeped in historical complexity, and quietly compelling.
Overall, the official selection was extremely mixed. Opening film Django, about Gypsy guitar god Django Reinhardt, was stodgy prestige drama: not quite Django Untuned, but it didn’t exactly swing. And there was a handsomely mounted dud – Return to Montauk, by the veteran Volker Schlöndorff. Stellan Skarsgård is an anguished, middle-aged author, German art-cinema diva Nina Hoss (from Phoenix) is his one that got away. It’s scripted by the novelist Colm Tóibín, and while there’s some finely turned dialogue, the result is essentially a coffee-table weepie.
The most opulent movie at this year’s festival was Viceroy’s House by Gurinder Chadha, a behind-the-scenes story of the partition of India. Hugh Bonneville and Gillian Anderson, as Lord and Lady Mountbatten, lead a squadron of character notables including Simon Callow and Michael Gambon, although the film’s emotional centre is the Muslim-Hindu Romeo-and-Juliet romance played out by Huma Qureshi and Manish Dayal. The script sometimes struggles to transcend the required history lesson, although it’s a sumptuous film, and never boring. But its account of the nightmare of partition sometimes states the obvious. As the contents of Delhi’s Viceroy House are split between the two new nations, even the library has to be divvied up – Pakistan gets Wuthering Heights, India gets the complete Jane Austen. “But this is absurd!” protests Lady M, with Anderson doing her crispest Celia Johnson voice.
This was perhaps the least starry Berlinale in years, although Hugh Jackman was due to flash his claws for Wolverine movie Logan, while Robert Pattinson was here for Conradesque exploration story The Lost City of Z. But the best Berlinales give a boost to newcomers, and this year showcased quite a few. The competition’s standout performance was from Daniela Vega, star of Chilean film A Fantastic Woman by Sebastián Lelio, whose Gloria was a hit here in 2013. Vega plays Marina, the transgender lover of an older man, who finds herself treated with suspicion by his family when he dies of a heart attack. It’s an angry and a tender film but also, like Gloria, deeply enjoyable and life-affirming. I suspect that, on the arthouse circuit, it will be huge – and it’s my bet for Golden Bear.
Then there was Véro Tshanda Beya, lead in Alain Gomis’s Félicité. It’s about a Congolese single mother and singer who faces financial crisis following her son’s injury in a bike accident. A strange, over-stretched film, it’s something like an African version of the Dardenne brothers, punctuated with impressionistic dream passages, plus interpretations of Arvo Pärt by the Kinshasa Symphony Orchestra. It was the most challenging title in competition, but it was hard to ignore and often mesmerising.
The other newcomer to watch was Sherwan Haji, playing a Syrian asylum seeker in Helsinki in The Other Side of Hope. The director is Aki Kaurismäki, these days rarely seen but much loved on the festival circuit. People associate Kaurismäki with deadpan gloom but he’s one of cinema’s great humorists, and his films are getting ever more committedly humanistic. His latest is partly a realist study of the challenges faced by migrants in Finland, partly a lugubrious comedy about a shirt salesman who misguidedly buys a restaurant (the sushi sequences had us rolling in the aisles). Somehow the two strands come together, mixing the sombre and the downright silly to magical effect.
But the absolute discovery of the competition came right at the end of the festival. Have a Nice Day is a Chinese animation by Liu Jian, with the surface of a Tarantino-esque pulp thriller and the heart of a postmodern political art project. It’s about a group of venal lowlifes in a small town in southern China chasing a bag of money – for once not dollars, but yuan, emblazoned with the image of Mao Tse-Tung. Liu’s cool wit and dispassionate eye for social squalor result in a caustic analysis of modern China’s place in the capitalist world picture, and the film is so up-to-date it even contains a gag about Brexit and a Donald Trump soundbite. This deserves to be an animation arthouse hit to equal Waltz With Bashir, and it was the most politically trenchant and artistically fresh thing here.
Finally, an unmissable documentary. Chavela, by Catherine Gund and Daresha Kyi, is a portrait of the late Mexican singer Chavela Vargas, a near-forgotten artist whose career underwent a dazzling late-life revival in the 1990s, not least because she became a muse to Pedro Almodóvar. We learn that the young Vargas discovered her performing self when she shocked Mexico City by wearing a masculine combination of trousers and poncho, and her ranchero-style ballads of pain and desolation seem to have made her irresistible as a lover to half the married women in Mexico’s beau monde – as well as, she claimed, to Ava Gardner. The songs are wonderful, testimony to a pioneer who is probably Donald Trump’s ultimate nightmare – a Mexican lesbian diva who can wring your very soul.
The best (and worst) of Berlin 2017
Best competition films
Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman; Liu Jian’s Have a Nice Day.
Best performances
Daniela Vega in A Fantastic Woman. And the ensemble cast of The Party, including Bruno Ganz – also terrific in In Times of Fading Light.
The 2017 Same-but-Different award
On the Beach at Night Alone by South Korea’s Hong Sang-soo, whose propensity for making the same film over and over again, with fine variations, is so proverbial that it was the subject of a Downfall parody on YouTube. This was the same again, except slightly more surreal than usual, and partly set in Berlin.
Worst performance
Geoffrey Rush, playing a shambling, madcap Alberto Giacometti in Stanley Tucci’s Final Portrait. Not very painterly, just terribly, terribly actorly.
Worst performance (ensemble)
The goofy ensemble of friendly townsfolk who befriend a fugitive hitman turned noodle chef in dud competition entry Mr Long, from Japan.
Arthouse one to watch
Georgian drama My Happy Family, by the team now just known as “Nana and Simon” – no doubt because Nana’s surname, “Ekvtimishvili”, proved too hard for international audiences to get a grip on.
Film most in need of retitling
Insyriated. What was that again? Insyriated. You know, Insy.., oh never mind. If they can come up with something a bit more memorable, and with obvious meaning, this Damascus-set siege drama could be an international winner.
And a TV treat
The first two episodes of German TV series The Same Sky, written by Paula Milne and directed by Downfall’s Oliver Hirschbiegel. It’s a 1974-set espionage thriller about an East German “Romeo” spy sent to seduce a woman in the west (Sofia Helin, AKA The Bridge’s Saga). Roughly, Apple Tree Yard meets The Lives of Others.
