Berlinale starts with a smile

The 73rd Berlinale, one of the top three major European film festivals, opened with Rebecca Miller’s romantic film Come to Me Baby. From Berlin – Andrey Plakhov.

The first participants and spectators of the Berlin Festival are greeted by an unusually empty ticket office. Not a single person. The lines used to fill up in the morning, and some fans seem to have even spent the night there. Now at the box office they give a viewing program for free, and tickets are sold only online. But everything around is hung with festival posters, which depict smiling animated characters. Smiles, however, are sad, a little forced. One of the posters says: “You must be joking” – “You must be joking.”

Perhaps this is a hint at a larger than usual presence in the program of animated films, only there are two of them in the main competition. But rather, it is an attempt to smile and cheer up the festival audience, which will have to be saturated with often not the most cheerful screen impressions for almost two weeks. Polish documentary to be screened very soon “In Ukraine” directed by Piotr Pavlus and Tomas Volski. Ahead of the premiere “Eastern Front” Vitaly Mansky and Evgeny Titarenko. And another documentary promises to be a high-profile event of the first festival weekend – “Superpower” Sean Penn and Aaron Kaufman, one of the main characters of which is Vladimir Zelensky, who delivered a video message at the opening of the Berlinale.

Against this background, the infantile-comedy film of the opening looks like another attempt to distract and smile before plunging into the darkness of the problems of the modern world.

Painting “Come here baby” best suited to this task. Her plot seems designed only to make you laugh, but at the same time he manages to contain many of the paradoxes and absurdist absurdities of modern life, full of neuroses and prejudices. For example, young heroes, an eighteen-year-old boy and a sixteen-year-old girl who fell in love with each other, are threatened for “underage sex” by punishment according to puritanical American laws. And launching a campaign against teenagers in love is an ultra-conservative court official who is obsessed with historical reconstructions. Well, in the center of the plot is another, much more bizarre love story that connected a dwarf opera composer experiencing a creative crisis and a sexually anxious blonde, a tugboat captain by profession, in which the composer suddenly finds his muse.

All this rubbish is played out in a bravura, almost operatic vein, brought to complete implausibility, but at some moments, nevertheless, it causes not only a smile, but even sympathy. The film was directed by Rebecca Miller, daughter of the famous writer Arthur Miller. Her mother worked as a photographer on the set of the film “The Misfits” according to his script, and the main role was played by Marilyn Monroe. It was on this set that the matrimonial ties of the goddess of sex and the Jewish intellectual guru finally broke up. And Rebecca herself was born on the fortieth day after the death of Marilyn Monroe. The girl grew up, tried to be an artist, but then she spat on this occupation, especially since the family already had an artist, and what one: Rebecca married Daniel Day-Lewis.

Even if, as envious people say, nature rests on the children of geniuses, Rebecca Miller still inherited something important. In addition, she is intimately familiar with the American cultural elite, and her films usually feature first-class actors. This time, Marisa Tomei, Anne Hathaway and Peter Dinklage are also in the lead roles.

The curators have compiled the festival program not only from heavy politically relevant films, but also from radical art-house films, which will also require great tension from the public.

So, apparently, the right decision was to deceive the audience’s expectations a little by offering them an easy spectacle at first – a story in which even the biggest problem is solved by the romantic flight of young lovers in tow from New York to Delaware, where early marriages are legal.