bumping uglies

Film Comment, May, 2001 by Harlan Kennedy

Some cities, like some people, are always recognizable, however many facelifts they've had. "Glad to be in Berlin again," cry festivalgoers each February, though you'd think they'd pause for bewilderment in a city that since the war, and even more since the Wall, has gone through nonstop architectural surgery, ideological liposuction, and re-mapping of veins, arteries, and festival venues.

Yet the word "Berlin" is still an invocation without equal. We were hit with it daily in this year's movies. In the opener, Jean-Jacques Annaud's Enemy at the Gates, Nazi Berlin's doomed hand is seen puppeteering the disaster of Stalingrad. In Thirteen Days it's Berlin that Khrushchev will wreak revenge on if President Kennedy attacks Cuba. In My Sweet Home, a Greek-German comedy about a fixed-nation wedding party, Berlin is both setting and main conversational football. In The Tailor of Panama Cold War novelist John le

Carre finds a substitute Berlin in Central America, while assuring Berliners at the press conference that there will never be a city divided to match this one. (Something like saying "You're still the world's top schizophrenic.")

Meanwhile, the gay hit of the Panorama Section, John Cameron Mitchell's musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch, had a Berlin backstory and Berlin-raised writer-director: Mitchell grew up as the son of the American Sector's commander (and now look at him). Even another prodigal child who soared to festival fame as the star of a documentary about how to survive drugs, obesity, and Andy Warhol had a name made for the occasion: Brigid Berlin, ex-diva of The Chelsea Girls.

As a film festival Berlin is still out there at the barricades, promoting the new and sometimes jaw-dropping. The early attention-grabbers in the Competition were Catherine Breillat's A Ma Soeur! and Patrice Chereau's Intimacy, both taking sexual candor to new lengths/heights/breadths. In the latter everyone got an eyeful of naked Mark Rylance and Kerry Fox, bumping uglies as graphically as in any modern feature film. Less arresting, in a tale of anonymous sex that resembles Last Tango in Paris teleported to an ill-defined South London, were the script, plot, handheld camerawork, and Europudding casting. (This is a London teeming with heavy-brogued Scotsmen and impenetrably accented Frenchmen.) The film won the Golden Bear, perhaps for its sexual out-there-ness, plus a Best Actress prize for Fox.

For me A Ma Soeur! outstripped it completely, with Breillat baring far more than her protagonists' bodies. If she cast a cold anatomist's eye on male-female relations in Romance, where the nudity was as cheering as in a mortuary, here she combines visual candor with a new warmth and depth. We care about these two sisters on a family vacation, one a fat, ice-cream-guzzling 12-year-old (Anais Reboux), the older a sultry stunner (Roxane Mesquida) carrying her virginity around like a charity donation in search of a taker. The taker turns out to be a handsome Italian drifter who, in two long and brilliantly unnerving bed scenes poised between seduction and date rape, doubly deflowers Mesquida. Redoux looks on through the half-dark, a churning conflation of horror, fascination, and romantic arousal.

Breillat has the unfussiest style in modern European cinema. She's a forensic scientist for whom the only interesting compositions are the slides containing clear samples of human pathology that she can fit under her microscope. There are subtle interventions of color (a perfidious Edenic green in contrast to the whites and reds of Romance) and some cleverly skewed narrative rhythms (a menacing climactic motorway sequence that goes on so long we almost know it will end in horror), but mostly A ma soeur! seems the more Bazinian movie. You could be looking through a window. You could swear it was two hours of accidentally witnessed reality, even though there is art and sympathetic wit in scenes like the family meals, where summer jollity wars with wintry generational tensions, or the funny-poignant swimming pool vignette where we spy on Reboux hugging and murmuring make-believe romantic chat to a wooden diving-board support, and then swimming to the pool's metal ladder to murmur jealousy-making sweet nothings to it.

Love, says the movie, means taking every chance to make someone else feel sorry. (Or jealous.) And sex is a contingent world where guilt and innocence are interchangeable, where "seduction" can be a polite word for virtual rape, where "rape" -- in the extraordinary final scene -- can be indistinguishable from mutual fulfillment. For a director so obsessed with a clinical fidelity to surface reality, it's amazing that Breillat can step back at the end to reveal an abyss that seems, in hindsight, to have been perfectly planned from the beginning.

Like Germany itself, land of schadenfreude, the Berlin fest has an appetite for the simultaneously fascinating and appalling. Several movies laid on agony as art and outrageous behavior as spectator sport, lent extra watchability by ironic protagonists. Don's Plum is the film Leonardo DiCaprio wanted banned from U.S. screens because it was made before he and co-actor Tobey Maguire were stars and meant only "as an actor's exercise." Hey, America's loss is Europe's gain. Berliners could enjoy R. D. Robb's raw, grainy, obscenity-spiked movie about kids kibitzing in a midnight bar, where they toss political incorrectness around like Molotov cocktails. DiCaprio is the blond sloucher and chief troublemaker, so sly, limber, foulmouthed, and smashed-of-mien that he could probably have ruined his Titanic audition by showing but a single take. Yet the film proves that a good actor is a good actor, never mind how sink-or-swim his vehicle.