On the way to imperfection – Newspaper Kommersant No. 31 (7476) of 20.02.2023

As expected “Kommersant” (see “Kommersant” dated February 17), after a romantic opening film, the Berlin Festival turned to painful themes of the imperfection of the world. From Berlin – Andrey Plakhov.

The black woman in the film Survival of Kindness is locked in an iron cage under a hot sun in the middle of a desert infested with scorpions: the work of some rascals in gas masks. With incredible efforts of body and spirit, a powerful woman manages to escape and even reach the centers of civilization. But the free world is not much better than a cage: it has degraded, leaving crazy individuals that bear little resemblance to people, and dead mannequins.

The director of this opus, Rolf de Heer, a Dutch by birth, longtime Australian by life, makes disturbingly idiosyncratic films. The most famous of them is “Bad Boy Bubby” – about the victim of incestuous love of a mother who locked her son in the house, but when he reaches thirty years old, he finds himself free in a terrible, incomprehensible society. Thirty years have also passed since the appearance of this iconic painting; the world has become even crueler, and the cinema has developed moralizing clichés in the dystopian genre. They are right there, starting with post-colonial discourse and allusions to the pandemic. Even the name of the picture is raised to the universal scale, given in addition to English in three languages. In the credits and on her poster, it is written in Arabic, in Chinese and in Russian “Survival of kindness”, which, however, in the Russian version sounds rather ambiguous.

The film “Someday we will tell each other everything” was shot by the German-French cinematographer of Iranian origin Emily Atef. A passionate, painful romance is played out between a nineteen-year-old high school student and a forty-year-old hermit farmer who lives in a hut with two ferocious dogs. All this takes place against the background of the reunification of Germany, but the historical background is drawn concisely and tritely. The film, usually by the skilful Atef, is somehow clumsily made, and the sex scenes that filled it provoked laughter in the journalistic hall. However, the energy talent of the young actress Marlene Berow, who has already been compared with Kristen Stewart of the Twilight period, is not in doubt, and it is she who heads the Berlinale jury.

The persistent Russian trace in the German picture draws attention. On the one hand, the hero talks about the trauma of his mother, who was raped by Soviet soldiers (is this supposed to explain his penchant for sexual sadism?). On the other hand, the film is full of reverence for Russian culture: the heroine is read by Dostoevsky, and the title of the film is a direct quote from The Brothers Karamazov.

The Belarusian trace is traced in the film “Disco Guy” (directed by Giacomo Abbruzzese). Alexey makes his way from Belarus through Poland to France and enrolls in the Foreign Legion – for the sake of the French citizenship promised in five years. His new reality is ferocious training and a senseless war in the Niger Delta. But the director does not cope with the plot and replaces it with visual exercises in the jungle and African rituals that put the bodies into a trance. The parallel between the fate of a fugitive Belarusian and a local partisan fighting colonialism does not work at all. The expressive actor Franz Rogowski, as Alexei, completely spoils the case with a monstrous accent when he tries to speak Russian.

The theme of sectarian masculinity is at the center of the film Manodrome, directed by John Trengov. And this is where good artist Jesse Eisenberg runs into a helpless script. The protagonist Ralphie, a humiliated Uber taxi driver, goes to the gym and looks with envy at the black, buff, impudent guys. Even the fact that his girlfriend, a supermarket cashier, is about to give birth to him does not help Ralphi to feel his male self-sufficiency. The way out is in joining the sect of Dan’s dad (Adrien Brody), who heals such insecure guys with spirit-uplifting spells. And when a gun appears in the frame, there is no doubt that it will shoot, and more than once. Halfway through, the film drifts into Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver territory, then onto another trodden path where machos turn into latent gays, and then the film just loses itself and falls apart.

The only painting in the competition that showed both the art and the originality of the concept is the Chinese “Tower Without a Shadow”. Zhang Liu, a director with Korean roots, shows Beijing and its people with a loving aesthetic: this is not at all like traditional Chinese cinema. The main character Gu is a poet at heart, but earns money by restaurant criticism, maintains a culinary blog. Some of his peers succeeded, but most, like him, turned out to be failures, quietly drinking too much, everyone did not have a family life. But Gu does not lose his human appearance: he adores his little daughter and politely, but without much enthusiasm, responds to a young fellow photographer’s obvious interest in him.

Actually, excessive politeness does not allow the hero of the film to build stronger relationships, common among ordinary people. It is lonely, like a white pagoda-tower in one of the districts of Beijing, known for casting no shadow. Gu and the girl flirting with him see this tower from the window of the hotel, as the heroes of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Eclipse saw the Roman TV tower. The same lack of communication skills, only adapted to the realities of the 21st century. At some point, the film delves into the story of the hero’s reconciliation with his outcast father, once accused of indecent behavior and expelled from the family. This part of the picture is less interesting and more typical of modern cinema, keen on searching for childhood trauma. However, here too Zhang Liu finds a way to maintain an attractive melancholy intonation.