filmpost

The cultural escapism that is regularly scheduled towards the end of Berlin’s grey winter has once again been more than successful. Germany’s most important film festival celebrated its 75th anniversary in both glamour and groundedness. What might sound paradoxical at first is, and always has been, the crucial blend of the festival’s identity: in its long history, this has been as much a serious branch meeting for the film industry as it’s been a clear audience favorite. This year, it sold over 330.000 tickets, hitting a new personal record. Walking the balance between staying true and connected to Berlin’s lively Kiez culture and its core public, on the one hand, and holding onto the status of being an important hub for the industry, on the other, will probably be of great continuing concern for newly elected festival director Tricia Tuttle, who has already stressed the importance of creating more capacities in the coming years. The Berlinale has always been a film festival with a rare political reach, especially when compared to its French, Italian, or American counterparts. After providing the stage for a thorny debate on the Middle East conflict last year, this year’s edition seemed rather guarded, and only managed to stir German journalists’ tempers on the occasion of Tilda Swinton’s acceptance speech for the Honorary Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement, a love letter to cinema that delightedly morphed into a political statement. The turn that Tuttle’s Berlinale will take in the question of political participation remains to be seen. What certainly persisted during the first year of her term, however, were the diversity, colors, and surprises that the Berlinale has always held for its audience. Join us on our short and beautiful run through its 75th lineup.

Annika Gebhard, Panagiota Stoltidou & Iliana Tsachpini

Drømmer (Dreams), dir. Dag Johan Haugerud

To experience love for the first time can feel wondrous, or horrible, or both. The pain of rejection is visceral, but the hopefulness of the beginning stages can also be too intense to physically bear. One enters a perilous half-existence, wherein the pull of fantasy rises victorious over the demands of a dull reality, and one’s time is put to much better use dreaming about what could be rather than making do with what is. This is all very gloriously scripted and performed in Dag Johan Haugerud’s Drømmer (Dreams), the Norwegian novelist and director’s final installment in a trilogy about emotional and physical intimacy in modern-day Oslo (after Sex and Love, which premiered at Berlinale and Venice respectively last year). Drømmer is also this year’s Golden Bear-winner, an honor that Haugerud —staying on-theme with his film— described as being “beyond [his] wildest dreams.” I would not rush to brush off his surprise at the win as a mere expression of the humbleness dictated by acceptance speech etiquette: out of the 19 films that premiered at Berlinale’s 75th Competition, very few could have thought that the coveted statue would indeed go to the talky drama about the ambiguous relationship between the underage student Johanne (Ella Øverbye) and her new high school teacher Johanna (Selome Emnetu). Yet it was Todd Haynes leading this year’s International Jury, and it’s easy to see how an elegantly written story driven by the tense power dynamics of female relationships would have such appeal on the Carol (2015) and May December (2023) director.

Drømmer is as much about Johanne’s increasing infatuation with her teacher as it is about its creative aftermath. Here, experiencing a first major crush marks an identity-defining moment unlike most, as it turns into an honest and accomplished memoir. It’s now been almost a year since Johanne poured it all on paper and, as it happens, her need to share what she’s written overpowers her shame at what’s happened. She goes to her grandmother (Anne Marit) first, a published poet, who then shows the manuscript to Johanne’s single mother (Ane Dahl Torp). The two women struggle to reconcile their admiration for the book’s literary merits with their frustration at some of its more explicit parts. Did everything Johanne wrote actually happen? Haugerud smartly resists letting the voiceover-heavy scenes between Johanne and Johanna either confirm or contest the memoir’s contents. Ultimately, his film thrives on the ambiguities of its format, as the audience is invited to trace the elusive line between reality and fiction that the script purposefully muddles. It’s a funny and sensitive coming-of-age story, though perhaps Johanne —who in one scene memorably winces at the designation of her memoir as ‘queer’— would not find my praise to be any less pigeonholing.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, dir. Mary Bronstein

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You had its international premiere as part of the 75th Berlinale Competition lineup. Linda (Rose Byrne) is a Montauk psychotherapist, whose life is crashing down around her. Navigating her daughter’s mysterious illness and a full-time job while her constantly judgmental husband is absent, Linda is on the verge of a nervous breakdown; when her ceiling finally collapses, leaving a huge hole, she finds herself unable to distinguish a minor inconvenience from an apocalypse, living in a relentless chaos. Her child’s illness dictates her life, her patients seem unmanageable and all in all, “it isn’t supposed to be like this,” she admits reflecting on parenthood. The film weaponizes sound design and frantic editing, trapping the viewer in Linda’s spiraling mind and making every moment feel suffocatingly personal, while capturing the feeling of being responsible for everything but in reality being capable of nothing. But more than that, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a brutally honest, brazen portrayal of motherhood, showcasing each and every one of its dark corners without the usual sentimentality attendant to parenthood representation in mainstream cinema. Linda’s desperation, exhaustion and fear offer a refreshing and more representative alternative. Rose Byrne deservedly won the Silver Bear for best performance: she was staggering in embodying the rawness of what it is like to be a mother while trying to have a life of your own (and dealing with an apartment that plays cosmic jokes). Needless to say, Bronstein’s film is not an easy watch; it feels like a ticking time bomb, inducing anxiety and building pressure that bursts into a painful catharsis. Nonetheless, it is extremely crucial that such stories make it to the big screen, as they help debunk the stereotype of the loving, always-present mother and expose the societal indifference towards her.

Hot Milk, dir. Rebecca Lenkiewicz

Monday evening, quarter to ten. The Uber Eats Music Hall that normally accommodates singers like Parov Stelar or Tokio Hotel is fully booked. Over 2,000 people are queuing to see Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s directing debut called Hot Milk and starring a refreshingly international cast: Emma Mackey, Vicky Krieps, and Fiona Shaw are the stars in this stirringly hot yet confusing drama that is based on a novel by British author Deborah Levy. The story sets off as protagonist Sophia and her mother Rose arrive in a sleepy village on the Spanish coast. Rose is bound to a wheelchair due to a bizarre condition she seeks to treat at a costly medical resort located in the middle of nowhere in this arid and always windy landscape. Both mother and daughter are suffering: Rose under the constant pain in her limbs as well as her looming past that is smouldering under the present like a sleeping dragon; and Sophia under her inability to take her life in her own hands and her frustration in abiding to the status of being her mother’s caretaker whilst not being able to escape her judgments. What could have become a delicate reflection on physical and emotional dependencies between parents and children, unfortunately turns into a tangle of loose ends. The plot gets more and more confusing as soon as Vicky Krieps’ character enters the stage and is completely lost when Sophia spontaneously visits her Greek father in Athens. Although the cast is delivering stunning performances and Christopher Blauvelt’s images as well as Rana Eid’s astonishing sound design are serving to create an ominous atmosphere despite the bright summer sun, the film loses its audience several times and increasingly evokes the impression that this story would have best been split in at least two separate movies. But still, for those who loved Emma Mackey’s character in Sex Education and continue to lament the series’ end, Hot Milk might give some solace as Mackey’s new role seems to be an older version of her Maeve in SE (a smart young woman not living to her full potential due to difficult family circumstances, that is, a complicated and ill mother). After the curtains fall, the 2,000 people pave their way out of the giant venue that still feels improper for an indie-arthouse movie screening but at the same time recalls Berlinale’s magnitude. On the cold and dark way to the nearest U-Bahn station, one question imposes itself with a certain suddenness: After all, where was the milk in Hot Milk?

Dreams, dir. Michel Franco

The title is, of course, mordantly ironic in Michel Franco’s latest, a gripping tale about the racism, greed and hypocrisy of upper-class arts patronage in Trump’s U.S. The story sets off with a man crossing the U.S.-Mexico border under cover of darkness. He is an illegal, and therefore forced to depend on the kindness of strangers to reach his final destination: San Francisco, or, to be more, precise, the sleek-looking, two-story house at its outskirts that he breaks into some nights after his arrival to the country. This is the property of Jennifer McCarthy (Jessica Chastain), the daughter of an uberwealthy arts sponsor who is herself involved in managing some of her father’s development projects across the continent. Her uninvited guest is the ballet star Fernando (played by real-life dancer Isaac Hernández), a former lover from her time overseeing a dance school initiative in Mexico City. He’s come to try and become a performer at the San Francisco Ballet, and Jennifer is to help him. The two reunite, and the moonlit shape of their naked embrace is hypnotizing, at once beautiful as a painting and imposing as a statue. Yet its perfection also seems a bit off-kilter, almost surgical in its sensuality: can this night vision really carry on into the day?

We are given no room to even consider this possibility. There is a rotten core to the clean lines and marble surfaces of the modernist buildings that the McCarthys frequent, and Franco exposes it with narrative dexterity and stylistic flair. When Jennifer refuses to acknowledge her relationship to Fernando in public, he storms off and quite successfully manages to make do on his own, spurring his ex into a desperate attempt to get him back. Jennifer is not used to not having what she wants, and the second half of the film radically undoes any remaining illusions about Fernando ever having had real power over either his relationship or his professional future. Dreams delivers a brutal conclusion, a scream of powerlessness and despair that soon tips over into visceral anger. It is bleakness that lingers.

Our Wildest Days, dir. Vasilis Kekatos

Kekatos’ Our Wildest Days premiered during the first festival weekend with the full cast in attendance, competing in the category Generation 14+. It is a coming-of-age drama that follows Chloe (Daphne Patakia), a 20-year-old woman from Greece who decides to leave her dysfunctional, male-dominated household. Wandering alone, she finds herself tangled in a dangerous situation; luckily, she’s rescued by a group of young people who are travelling around Greece on a motorhome. She soon finds out about their mission: helping the less privileged, the ones living on the outskirts of society. The collective introduces an alternative way of living—one rooted in solidarity, mutual aid, and the rejection of capitalist ideals. She decides to join them and travel across the country to meet her sister in Evros. As the days pass, Chloe discovers aspects of her country and herself she had never seen or known before; but most importantly, she experiences a new sense of belonging. She falls in love, dives deep into her own identity, and discovers the strength that comes from collective resistance. The film has beautiful cinematography and a poignant soundtrack to pair it with (special mention to the scene in the woods), while posing the question of identifying the political with the personal; when the weight of systemic oppression and the brutal reality of economic disparities naturally dictate the reality of the next generation, survival itself becomes a radical act. In the end, Our Wildest Days leaves us with a haunting, yet hopeful message: existential pain is inevitable, but solidarity makes it bearable.