Berlin Film Festival 2013

Our critics review the hot films premiering at this year's Berlinale
Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Midnight
14 February 2013

The Spirit of '45

****

Ken Loach's first documentary for over a decade does what it says on the tin. It explores the national psyche of Britain directly after the war when Winston Churchill was surprisingly turned out of office and replaced by a Labour government under the mild-mannered Clement Attlee which proved one of the most radical of the century. 

For Loach, this was a time of hope despite Britain's impoverished state after the war. The Labour landslide enabled the party to establish the health service and the welfare state, quite apart from nationalising many key industries and services.

The film, using plentiful amounts of archive footage and many interviews with those on the left who remember the time with nostalgia, also regrets the passing of an era the director regards as providing Britain with a sense of community it has lost today. 

He blames Thatcher for that, and this is where the film is controversial. It is very definitely a Socialist's view of the time. But that doesn't prevent it being a film which summons up the past with great skill and affection.

DEREK MALCOLM

Lovelace

***

Two versions of the Linda Lovelace story — the freckled innocent from Florida who became the world’s best-known porn star, and the abused wife brutally exploited by the adult movie industry — battle it out for our attention in this somewhat formulaic — and, given its subject matter, decidedly prim — biopic which had its European premiere in Berlin at the weekend.

Lovelace, the star of 1972 porn flick Deep Throat, was hailed by Playboy as the symbol of the new decade’s sexual freedom. But the story told in her ghosted autobiography Ordeal was an all-too-predictable saga of drugs, prostitution and abuse by husband Chuck Traynor.

Directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman tell the story through flashes back and forward between cheesy fantasy and harsh reality. The task of holding all this together falls to Amanda Seyfried, who gives a gutsy, career-best performance in the title role, with Peter Sarsgaard suitably scary as Traynor. Equally good is a barely recognisable Sharon Stone as the star’s unloving mother.

What the movie lacks, as it coasts into its final section with Linda now a happily remarried New Jersey housewife, is any real key to the Lovelace conundrum: how one woman could have moved with such apparent ease from suburbia to hell and back again — and what that journey might have told us about Nixon’s America.

NICK RODDICK

Before Midnight

***

When Richard Linklater made a small independent film called Before Sunrise in 1995 he could never have expected that, two decades later, he would be making Before Midnight with the same two stars. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are, of course, a good deal older now than when they were fresh-faced youngsters in love in the first film and more obviously adults in 2004’s Before Sunset.

But that is the whole point of the final part of this popular trilogy, and it is audiences which have grown up with the three films who will doubtless be most fascinated by this fluent and sometimes provoking dissertation on male-female relationships. Now Jesse and Celine are paired up with twin girls and a son who lives with Jesse’s ex-wife. They are not married but still in love, even if the bickering is more pronounced than it used to be.

A Greek summer holiday is ended by a final dinner at which the couple and their friends mull over romantic commitment and ideals which seem to change from generation to generation, particularly in a strange digital age. Then ,leaving their hotel for the last time after having sex, Jesse and Celine somehow get into a major row. But you feel that they will still stay together and that the pent-up resentments inevitable in any relationship will not cause a permanent break.

Linklater and his two stars collaborated on the screenplay, which has the flavour of being either made up on the spot or at least not written down for actors to speak. That is clearly what people like about the trilogy. It seems very real.

But whether you find Before Midnight insightful or irritating depends very much on how you view these particular characters whose odds-defying relationship has lasted so long. What you can’t deny is Linklater’s skill in keeping their story going for so long and the way Hawke and Delpy never for a moment seem to be bored with their respective parts.

Maybe one day we’ll see them bickering in a care home. But it’s unlikely. Linklater says enough is now enough.

DEREK MALCOLM

The Look Of Love

****

Michael Winterbottom and Steve Coogan are a formidable partnership as director and actor. But Coogan's challenge in their fourth film together is his toughest yet. He has to play Paul Raymond, the man dubbed the post-war King of Soho or Britain's answer to Hugh Hefner.

Raymond became fabulously rich with real estate deals and erotic stage shows and magazines, but a failed marriage, troubled children and the tragic death of his favourite daughter led him away from anything like real happiness.

Coogan imbues Raymond with charm and panache while suggesting a complex character so self-absorbed that he found it difficult to express genuine emotion. It's a fine performance even if Raymond was almost certainly a darker, more sleazy character than he is portrayed here.

There's great playing too from Imogen Poots as his daughter, Anna Friel as his wife and Tamsin Egerton as his lover. But what the film summons up best is the Soho of the fifties and sixties with its clubs, bars and cafes attracting some of the most disreputable as well as the most attractive denizens of the capital.

DEREK MALCOLM


Promised Land

***

There's no more determinedly liberal Hollywood star around than Matt Damon who produced and wrote and stars in this thoughtful drama about a poor farming community in rural America fighting a big corporation's fracking operation (a controversial method of extracting oil or gas from the ground). The corporation is prepared to give the community substantial sums of money to move off their land but its their home and they don't want to leave it. Some of them also fear than the land itself will be poisoned by the fracking despite the assurances given them that it won't be so.

Damon plays Steve, a salesman for the frackers, appointed because he grew up in a similar area himself and can thus more easily persuade the locals. But when he and his sales partner (Frances McDormand) arrive, they find themselves opposed by a local high school teacher (Hal Holbrook) and by John Krasinski's environmental activist.

Damon, though nominally the villain of the piece, gives a sympathetic performance as a man who genuinely believes the money offered will save impoverished farming communities already decimated by the worldwide economic crisis. And McDormand, playing someone who thinks fracking is the answer to a good many prayers, is as watchable as ever.

The film was to have been directed by Damon himself. But he thought better of the idea and hired Gus Van Sant, an unusual choice for this kind of ecological thriller. Van Sant made Milk and Good Will Hunting, and this is hardly his natural territory. Consequently the film never comes fully alive and remains more of an obvious message movie than outright drama. Fracking may be in everyone's thoughts these days as a way out of high energy prices, but Promised Land, with its unexpected and unconvincing ending, is only moderately successful as an awful warning.

DEREK MALCOLM


The Grandmaster

****

You don’t expect a kung fu spectacular to open an international festival, but this is the work of Wong Kar Wei, the Hong Kong director who has made a very different animal from the usual chopsocky epic.

Five years in the making and trimmed by its fastidious director to 130 minutes from a four-hour rough cut, the film sets out to be a biography of Ip Man, the martial arts master who trained Bruce Lee.

But, in fact, after a first hour of all-out action during which the various schools of martial arts are on display, the film gradually turns into territory more familiar to the director’s fans — the melancholy and largely unrequited romance between the already married Ip (Tony Leung) and Er (Zhang Ziyi).

She is the daughter of another grandmaster, killed by a jealous protégé, and at first fights Ip before a mutual attraction develops.

The pair drift apart during the long Sino-Japanese war and come together again only at the end of the film to ruminate on what might have been. Here Zhang is superb, with the director orchestrating an almost poetic and regretful finale.

The film is always very beautiful to look at, if sketchy as anything like an orthodox biography, but the fight scenes are shot with imagination and flair.

Ultimately The Grandmaster is as much about Chinese culture as it is about its myriad characters. That, and the director’s romanticism, gives the film its unique kick.

DEREK MALCOLM

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