Any significant film festival has its own style of organization and process, its own profile if you will. The most outstanding feature of the Berlin festival is its origins: it began in the midst of the Cold War and was designed as an event that would bring together films from the First, Second, and Third Worlds. The Berlinale has preserved this philosophy, that of the “Festival-behind-the Wall.” The social and political issues presented in the films there are sometimes more important than their quality. The middle of the festival was Russian and Ukrainian: in one day they showed three films either by post-Soviet directors or concerning issues that are very important for the post-Soviet space.
The second film by Aleksandr Mindadze Innocent Saturday (a joint production of Ukraine, Russia and Germany), eagerly awaited by our film critics, opened the fifth day of the festival. The film takes place in the town of Prypiat. It begins on the Saturday morning of April 26, 1986, and ends on the morning of April 27. It tells the tale of the terrible Chornobyl Saturday. The main character, the party worker Valerii (Anton Shagin) is one of the first people to learn about the catastrophe at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant on the night of April 26, when the local authorities were still denying the whole affair. The plot departs from the inconstancy of the main character, torn between his duty to keep the secret and his desire to save beautiful Vera (Svetlana Smirnova-Martsinkevich), despite the fact that he has no relations with her. Those who have seen The Break-Away, Mindadze’s first film, can easily imagine what Innocent Saturday looks like. The camera keeps jumping around, the people are running, falling down and colliding. At the beginning it looks quite deliberate but very soon the feeling of an inner need for this decision appears. It’s like Chekhov: the people on the screen drink, fight, dance, kiss, and share, while their lives are being silently destroyed behind the scenes. The film culminates with a truly devastating apogee of destruction.
The film Khodorkovsky (presented within the “Panorama” section), was also eagerly awaited. It was also a case of when the topic itself trumps the execution. Cyril Tuschi is an average film director, but he did a lot of work, which is necessary for a high-quality documentary. He travelled all over Russia and Europe, interviewed everybody he could: politicians and officials (those who agreed), Khodorkovsky’s ex-colleagues at Yukos, his relatives, and Khodorkovsky himself. At present it is the first and only such interview with the disgraced oligarch — the film crew received the permission for the interview by miracle.
The film starts and finishes with a long panorama of a snow-covered plain, with a church on one side and an oil rig on the other. The snow, orthodoxy and oil is what the proverbial “autocracy, orthodoxy and the national spirit” have turned into. The film has a traditional composition: interviews and commentaries, news films and pictures, and the director’s monologs off screen. The weak point of the film are the tacky animated insertions, probably intended to compensate for a lack of materials. The main character is presented from different points of view, allowing the director to offer his answers to the main questions: why was Khodorkovsky imprisoned, who benefited from it, and why did Khodorkovsky come back to Russia knowing that he would be arrested? The film made people think and produced an impression that was strong enough to make the press-conference with the film crew scandalous at times.
Another “Panorama” participant, Target by Aleksandr Zeldovich, based on a script by Vladimir Sorokin, is a dystopian tale about modern Russia. The Chinese expansion in culture and business, videophones and road signs in Chinese, cooking, political talk-shows and glamor are easy to recognize. Corresponding to the spirit of this reality, a few people want to become eternally young and even find a source of the necessary energy, but they only manage to be immortal, not happy.
The bright and glossed-over picture is bearable, and Zeldovich found an unclaimed visual form. There’s also a problem, typical for all the films on Sorokin’s scripts, resulting from the specificity of his creative work: his texts focus on constructs and not people, who are found in artificial situations.
The festival is coming to an end. There aren’t any obvious leaders in the competition. The film The Turin Horse (Hungary, France, Germany, Switzerland and US) is likely to grab a major prize. It’s a new film by a famous yet secretive European director, the Hungarian Bella Tarr. The plot is based on a true event: on
January 3, 1889, in Turin, Friedrich Nietzsche saw a coachman hitting his stubborn horse. The philosopher, a former cavalryman, went out and stopped the beating by hugging the horse’s neck. He then lost his mind and didn’t say a word du-ring the next ten years. The horse’s destiny is unknown, as Tarr shows in the film.
The film is black and white. A storm, a piebald horse, the old silent coachman with a paralyzed arm, his miserable hovel, his daughter doing everything at home, boiled potatoes, the moonshine to sell and the water from the well. The film is visually perfect, however, the stylistics of the film is slightly out-dated. In any case, Tarr’s film clearly shows his talent.
The drama Nadir and Simin, a Separation (Iran) also has high chances to win. In it the director Asghar Farhadi is trying to present the whole Iranian society through a conflict between two average Iranian families. Religious restrictions act as a screen for personal interests, the necessity to lie serves to protect personal well-being and li-berty, violations of women’s rights are shown through everyday situations, putting the characters in awkward positions. The film doesn’t offer anything new in terms of film language, however its topical content, highly appreciated at the festival, works well. As the current Berlinale is held under the sign of solidarity with the repressed Iranian director Jafar Panahi, the oppositionist Farhadi is likely to get a price just out of sympathy.
In any case, the film critics’ rating, published by the competent international film revue Screen gave the highest marks to Nadir and Simin (3.6) and The Turin Horse (3.5). The teenage drama Yelling to the Sky by Victoria Mahoney (US) got the lowest mark with 1.4.
