Andrey Plakhov about the few films at Berlinale 2024 that met expectations

The closer the finale of the Berlin festival is, the less inflated expectations there were so many at the beginning. He talks about the few films that corresponded to them Andrey Plakhov.

Overloaded with unnecessary work, the competition, although it created illusions, gave the opportunity to choose. Someone likes it sentimental fantasy of “The Other End” Italian Piero Messina: a man finds contact with his deceased wife, whose consciousness is implanted into the body of another woman using technology. To someone – sentimental realism of “Dying” German Matthias Glasner: old parents are preparing to depart to another world, already middle-aged children suffer from dysfunctions and depression. In the first case, Gael Garcia Bernal is responsible for the emotions, in the second – Lars Eidinger; both artists are capable of melting the audience’s hearts.

The other pole is represented by the so-called agenda films. She was considered a favorite here “Dahomey” Mati Diop is a documentary saga about the return of cultural property, once taken out of Africa by French colonialists, and now returned in its microscopic part. The wooden idol representing the Dahomey king comes to life in the film and acquires a mystical voice. Mati Diop made ritualistic voodoo mysticism the vehicle of her previous work, Atlantics, which won her a Cannes award. Here the mastered technique would also be appropriate and even suggested itself, but the director, carried away by the debate about the successes and difficulties of decolonization, did not give free rein to her poetic imagination, and the film turned out to be too straightforward.

In an artistic sense, it is surpassed by the docu-fiction film, made in a collage style. “Pepe” Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias, director from the Dominican Republic. Here the hippopotamus, another victim of colonization in the broadest sense, a symbol of violence against nature and man, is given its own voice.

Another conditionally documentary film included in the main Berlin competition is “Architecton” Victor Kosakovsky. This director is able to create a piercing spectacle about the water cycle (the film “Watercolor”) or about the life of one individual sow (“Gunda”). This time he also sets a difficult task: to hear the voice of the stone. And we really hear how the mountains that are torn down by dynamite groan, how the ruins of cities destroyed by wars and earthquakes cry. How a stone rises from its geological slumber and collapses in a rockfall reproduced in slow motion. In contrast is the proud silence of the monuments of ancient architecture, preserved in majestic monumental fragments that amaze us with their strength and incredible scale. Among the shots taken in different countries, some of the most impressive are from the temple ruins of Baalbek in Lebanon.

Making stone speak has been the ambition of architects from ancient times to the present day; Italian Michele De Lucchi speaks on their behalf in the film. He owns many works of modern architecture – both in his native Milan and in Georgia.

Throughout the film, Michele and two assistants lay out a magic circle of stones in the garden of his house. And in the finale he admits to Kosakovsky that he is haunted by the thought of the future of humanity, which preferred cement and concrete to stone.

And in a few decades, the most spectacular futuristic buildings will turn into mountains of garbage.

“Architecton” also affects feelings. To a huge extent, thanks to the music of Evgeny Galperin: he created a real symphony of “otherworldly” sounds that intertwine with the natural melody of the stone. A literal materialization of Schelling’s metaphor that architecture is frozen music.

Music sounds much less often, but is also extremely important in “Needs of the Traveler” Hong Sang-soo. Sitting on a bench in the kindergarten, the strange heroine Isabelle Huppert plays a children’s recorder, a Frenchwoman who was somehow carried by the wind to Korea. According to the plot (if we can talk about a plot at all), the heroine Huppert gives French lessons, but these are strange lessons: she teaches them in English and finds out from her students what feelings they experience when they play music. And then he writes each summary in French, translating the banal, same-type answers into a poetic, philosophically sophisticated language.

This is how she earns money, although she only needs money for makgeolli – rice wine, which she drinks in hefty doses. Well, for the night, but for now her young friend provides her with shelter – to the bewilderment and indignation of his mother, because the son warmed up a foreigner about whom nothing is known at all.

But the viewer knows everything about Huppert, and this knowledge complements the picture with a range of delightful nuances.

Over fifty years of tireless acting, she has embodied herself in revolutionaries and parricides, in masochists and courtesans: it seems impossible to come up with anything new. But, having found herself in the deceptively naive world of Hong Sang-soo, the actress, in one masterful movement, throws off her train of decadent images in order to appear, as at the beginning of her career, as a young, infantile, defenseless creature. And not necessarily a victim, but just a wayward girl who loves to walk barefoot, lie on rocks, drink and flirt. At the same time, the film is full of sadness and melancholy. Yes, the girl is already many years old, but in her soul she has never changed.