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Film-festival juries are consistently inconsistent, and often arbitrarily assembled. Each year, several largely unacquainted, disparate-minded luminaries from across the film world—directors, screenwriters, actors, and, on occasion, critics—are brought together to manufacture the illusion of consensus. Even so, certain organizing principles can help nudge that consensus along. At an event such as the Berlin International Film Festival, better known as the Berlinale, the main competition typically includes well-established auteurs and up-and-coming talents alike—an arrangement that, at the risk of generalizing, I’d say often favors the newcomers. Familiarity with a veteran filmmaker doesn’t breed contempt, but it can put a damper on excitement or prompt unflattering comparisons with earlier efforts. A lesser-known artist arrives with no such baggage, and the thrill of making a bold discovery can be accordingly hard to resist.
The Norwegian writer and director Dag Johan Haugerud, who was awarded the Golden Bear, the top prize, at this year’s Berlinale, certainly counts as a discovery—though, at sixty, and with several shorts and features to his name, he is hardly a newcomer. He won over this year’s International Jury, led by the director Todd Haynes, with “Dreams (Sex Love),” a lyrical, moving, gently provocative comedy about the pleasures and the perils of a teen-age infatuation. The movie, whose original Norwegian title is “Drømmer,” is the third entry in a loosely interconnected trilogy; the first two installments, “Sex” and “Love,” screened at the 2024 Berlin and Venice film festivals, respectively. I haven’t seen either of those two films, and I don’t know if any of the jurors did, but I suspect it wouldn’t matter. Though “Dreams (Sex Love)” left me impatient to catch up with the rest of the trilogy, it sweeps you up, assuredly and indeed dreamily, all on its own.
Much of the story is narrated by Johanne (Ella Øverbye), a quietly perceptive seventeen-year-old who develops an intoxicating crush on her French teacher, the similarly named Johanna (Selome Emnetu). In voice-over, she lingers on and amplifies all manner of striking details: Johanna’s worldly bearing and otherworldly beauty; the unbearable stirrings of jealousy aroused when her teacher bonds with other students; the deeper bond that forms when Johanne impulsively pays a visit to Johanna’s apartment. Such interior monologue is often dismissed as an inherently uncinematic device—an assumption to which “Dreams (Sex Love)” provides an absorbing corrective. Haugerud, who’s also a novelist, has an exquisite ear for dialogue, and Johanne’s words, crucially, never seem to be doing, or duplicating, the work of the images. The film’s precise juxtapositions of sight and sound produce brilliant flashes of insight, cascading specifics of texture and emotional coloration, and a cumulatively seductive, almost musical flow.
The narration is also key to a playful yet rigorous literary conceit. Before long, we learn that we have been listening, in part, to excerpts from a manuscript that Johanne has written about her relationship with Johanna—a project that she appears to have undertaken in the spirit of an exorcism. Did Johanne’s love remain unrequited; if not, how far did it go, and what legal or ethical boundaries, if any, were crossed? Exactly how much of the manuscript should be believed in the first place? We are not the only ones pondering these questions; in the film’s most inspired stroke, Johanne shows the manuscript to her grandmother (Anne Marit Jacobsen) and her mother (Ane Dahl Torp), in that order. Their reactions show a remarkable complexity of range: shock and concern, of course, but also fascination, confusion, and justified admiration of Johanne’s writerly gifts.
When the possibility emerges that the manuscript might be published, the characters’ responses, including an amusingly abrupt about-face on the mother’s part, develop into a wry and surprising commentary on the age-old practice—sometimes sincere, sometimes mercenary, and sometimes both—of mining one’s experience for art. It’s typical of the characters’ forward-looking wisdom, and Haugerud’s as well, that, although they consider the differentials of age and power at play, Johanne’s attraction to another woman, in and of itself, is not treated as something especially remarkable or as a fixed point of identity. At heart, “Dreams (Sex Love)” understands that desire, in whatever form it manifests, seldom conforms to clean, expected boundaries. In placing three generations of women in such warm and revelatory conversation, it collapses more than a few boundaries of its own.
“The Blue Trail,” by Gabriel Mascaro.Photograph by Guillermo Garza / Desvia
Attend enough festivals and you’ll give up any expectation that the prizes handed out will mirror your own taste to any degree. And yet, despite having seen only nine of the nineteen competition films during my five days at the Berlinale, I found myself nodding in agreement with Haynes’s jury remarkably often. The Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize, or second place, was bestowed on “The Blue Trail,” an engrossing and often ecstatically beautiful drama, from the Brazilian director Gabriel Mascaro, about a seventy-seven-year-old woman (Denise Weinberg) trying to escape a nation in the grip of a systemic and increasingly draconian ageism. And it surprised no one when Rose Byrne won the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance for her astounding work in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” Mary Bronstein’s relentlessly tense and darkly funny snapshot of maternal anxiety in overdrive.
The Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance was given to Andrew Scott for an exquisite, emotionally full-bodied turn as the great musicals composer Richard Rodgers, in Richard Linklater’s sparkling new period comedy, “Blue Moon.” Like many Linklater works, the movie sets precise spatial, temporal, and conceptual limitations for itself: it unfolds almost entirely on March 31, 1943, the night that “Oklahoma!,” Rodgers’s first major collaboration with Oscar Hammerstein II, opened on Broadway. The story is relayed from the perspective of Rodgers’s previous creative partner, Lorenz Hart, as he drinks the night away at the bar at Sardi’s. He is played by Ethan Hawke, a mainstay of Linklater’s movies, in a remarkable amalgam of bitterness, exuberance, drollery, tenderness, frustration, and tremendous artistic passion. Presented here, through some visual trickery, as a diminutive schlump with a hideous comb-over, Hawke doesn’t exactly disappear into the role, which strikes me as fortuitous and perhaps deliberate. When Hart lobs a withering attack on insipid dramaturgy and pandering sentimentality in the arts, you can hear Hawke’s own voice in more than one sense—a voice that the actor has raised, over the years, in impassioned defense of the unfashionable and uncommercial.
On the occasion of its seventy-fifth birthday, the Berlinale found itself at a significant point of transition. Last year’s festival marked the swan song of the widely respected artistic director Carlo Chatrian, who had announced that he was stepping down because a new management structure imposed by the federal-government entity that funds the event, would compromise his curatorial freedom. Before the festival even began, it drew intense criticism because the politicians invited to the opening ceremony included members of the far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany) party; the Berlinale defended its decision on the basis of “invitation quotas” for democratically elected politicians, but it eventually retracted the invitations. Further tensions erupted at the closing ceremony, where several award winners expressed support for the Palestinian cause, notably the Israeli filmmaker Yuval Abraham, a co-director of the acclaimed (and now Oscar-nominated) documentary “No Other Land.” The speech drew death threats and charges of antisemitism—an imbecilic response, and also a pointed reminder of Germany’s relentless crackdown on criticism of Israel.
All of this placed the festival’s incoming artistic director, Tricia Tuttle, and her programming team in an unenviable position. They had not only to deliver an artistically vital, commercially viable program but also to usher in some spirit of optimism and renewal, while judiciously addressing points of contention that had scarcely cooled a year later. Weeks before the Berlinale began, Tuttle noted the festival’s commitment to protecting its guests’ free-speech rights, within the bounds of German law. Even so, there were calls to boycott this year’s Berlinale, in a show of solidarity with Palestinians; during the festival, the Hong Kong filmmaker Jun Li, while introducing a screening of his feature “Queerpanorama,” read aloud a letter written by one of his actors, Erfan Shekarriz, which accused the Berlinale and other German institutions of being complicit in the “genocide and brutal killing and erasure of the Palestinian people.”
The Berlinale has been no stranger to political disruption in the past three-quarters of a century; it has faced protests and shutdown threats, and, for three decades, it had to operate within—and represent the cinema of—a divided city. Most of all, the festival has embraced such upheaval as a necessary corollary of its programming; the most urgent headlines of the day have seldom been far from the festival’s screens, and Tuttle’s inaugural program proved no exception. The lone documentary selected for the competition, Kateryna Gornostai’s “Timestamp,” is a roving, heartrending portrait of Ukrainian schools and how they have dealt with the chaos and violence of Russia’s prolonged assault on their country, their faculty, and their students. Gornostai’s filmmaking is panoramic in scope, but intimate in effect; she finds her story on the ground, in the luminous faces and kinetic bodies of these students, the living embodiment of an embattled nation’s future.
Eszter Tompa in “Kontinental ’25,” by Radu Jude.Courtesy Berlinale
It was bracing to emerge from a screening of “Timestamp” and immediately be confronted with the message “Fuck Putin + Trump”—scrawled, by the Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude, at the bottom of a large portrait of himself that hung in the Berlinale Palast, the festival’s main venue. It wasn’t Jude’s only laudable piece of writing; the jury gave him a richly deserved Silver Bear for Best Screenplay for his superb latest film, “Kontinental ’25.” (Accepting the prize, Jude noted the unease of Germany’s looming elections with a quip: “I just hope that next year’s festival doesn’t open with ‘Triumph of the Will,’ by Leni Riefenstahl.”) “Kontinental ’25,” whose title nods to Roberto Rossellini’s “Europa ’51” (1952), is leaner and more formally and dramatically concentrated than Jude’s two rambunctious recent dark comedies, “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” (2023) and his 2021 Golden Bear winner, “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn”; in its own way, though, it’s no less expansive.
The story follows a Romanian bailiff, Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), who attempts to evict a homeless man who has been squatting in her basement; he dies by suicide, sending Orsolya on a gripping, infuriating, and finally useless odyssey of moral self-flagellation. In a series of conversations with a friend, her mother, a priest, and others, Orsolya emphasizes her feelings of guilt, but also her lack of legal responsibility; she makes a spectacle of her anguish, but also of her virtue. We watch in a ghastly state of slow-dawning recognition, stoked by pointed references to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, that Orsolya’s moral predicament—and her attendant sense of futility and despair—is also very much ours. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
