The London Times
by James Christopher
February 12, 2001
A Stalingrad epic opens the Berlin Film Festival with bloody flair
This is Moritz de Hadeln's last year as director of the Berlin Film Festival and they are booting him out in style. An entire section is devoted to his favourite movies. That's 22 years worth of very, very strange celluloid: Philip Glass and Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi, Derek Jarman's Caravaggio... the oddities are collector's items. Moritz has always looked the part — tall, diffident, silver, and podgy. But the old buffer has never really endeared himself to Berliners. Berlin ought to be grateful. Moritz has never been hung up about German cinema. He's a closet populist, and he's never knowingly turned a decent slice of hard-core glamour down. His last festival is prickling with stars. There are predictable hits like Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, and Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, but the new gambles are fascinating.
Jean-Jacques Annaud's festival opener, Enemy at the Gates, is the biggest rumble of Annaud's career. After ten minutes of solid carnage you no longer wonder why this is the most costly film made in Europe. You gasp at the documentary horror. Set in Stalingrad at the height of Germany’s offensive on the Soviet Union, the film hones in on an extraordinary piece of propaganda fleshed out by scenes of graphic violence. Jude Law plays a Russian sharpshooter, who is turned into a badly needed Soviet hero by a trench correspondent, Joseph Fiennes. The city is in bits, the population is decimated, and the war is being won and lost by a handful of professional incompetents. But the only significant drama is the battle of wits and wills between the Russian peasant, Law, and a ruthless upper-class Nazi, Ed Harris. It's a classic cowboy duel: a face-off between Harris's ice cold blue eyes and Law's chilly green stares. Pride, as ever, is the mad stake.
A lengthy scrap between Fiennes and Law over who gets to sleep with comrade Rachel Weisz is the improbable romance at the heart of the film. The boys go for it with their filthy fingernails, and odd working class accents, but it's the bleak context that triumphs: the eerie authenticity of a city raped by shrapnel. The arbitrary madness is brilliantly captured by Bob Hoskins as the Soviet commander, Nikita Khrushchev. Asked why he thought he was cast as the bloodthirsty proto-tyrant at the subsequent press conference, Hoskins coolly responded: "Most of the world's despots were short, fat, and bald. There's only me and Danny DeVito left to play them."
It's a breathtaking piece of cheek to open a festival with a film that casts the host nation in the role of unconscionable villains and someone was bound to notice. A ginger-haired German journalist was most put out. "For most young Germans it's a lot of bridge under the water," argued Rachel Weisz with admirable conviction. And she's right. Offence is not a word to describe this film. This is a movie about compromised heroes, albeit in the most abject of circumstances. Not a condition Law is likely to suffer much longer if the rumours of $17.5 million for his next big movie are true.
Berlin doesn’t have the same mad glamour of Cannes but it's mad enough. Even the Irish, led by Jim Sheridan's daughter, Kirsten, the young director of Disco Pigs, agrees. She, and her entire cast, may have lost all their luggage en route to the festival but at least they didn’t have their credit card stolen and maxed out at a Berlin strip club as your trusty correspondent did. Disco Pigs has gripped festival-goers. It's one of the most unusual films I've ever seen, and it features two sparkling performances from Elaine Cassidy and Cillian Murphy. They are teenage delinquents whose eerie closeness makes them seemingly invincible. They dream of growing up as king and queen in a fairytale world. Their common enemy is reality: school, shops, parents, others. What makes it such a powerful piece is the incestuous bubble with which Kirsten Sheridan encloses her leads. It's a deranged piece of film poetry.
Violent, but strangely moving.
The feelgood hit of the festival is no less surprising. Lone Scherfig's Italian for Beginners is the first Dogme film shot by a female director, and it’s also the best. It's a priceless romance that flits around the fringes of a small Danish town. The new pastor is stalked by the old mad priest. The local restaurant chef routinely abuses his clients. The hotel manager is impotent. And two middle-aged sisters try to escape their ghastly parents. A weekly class learning Italian is the major social diversion. Improvisation, spontaneity, the sheer lack of fuss makes this an absolute delight. That, and incredibly mischievous performances.
Berliners liked the new Mike Nichols film, Wit. Emma Thompson delivers the most sobering performance of her career as an academic dying of cancer. The big risk is allowing her to talk direct to camera with gruesomely unwitty consequences. Establishing an intimacy with a camera is entirely different from establishing an intimacy with an audience. Nichols doesn't get this. We, unfortunately, do in great big worthy chunks of "There but for the grace of God". However good Thompson is as the droll loner — and she is damn good, maybe even her best performance — she cannot turn the camera into anything other than what it already is: a lifeless documentary eye. The uneasy feeling is that it should be something more. It isn't.
The most overrated film in Berlin has been Giuseppe Tornatore's Malena. For 94 minutes the director of Cinema Paradiso dribbles over Monica Bellucci. The world’s most perfectly proportioned actress plays a war widow in a gossipy Sicilian town where every male wants to sleep with her. She wafts through the film like a perfume advert. She wafted through Berlin like a perfume advert. Tornatore ogles. We all ogle. But we all know there's more to festivals than this. Don’t we?
