by Helen Barlow
As always, the Berlin Film Festival has delivered some surprises. Perhaps the moment that has gained most traction was at the premiere of Rosebush Pruning on Saturday night when Callum Turner stood for photos with his fiancé Dua Lipa who was braving the cold in a black lace body stocking. It was Valentine’s Day after all. Turner had also made headlines early in the day when he was asked if the rumours were correct that he would be the next James Bond — and he refused to acknowledge it.
Certainly, Turner is impressive in Rosebush Pruning as the rich kid son of a blind Traci Letts as he guides us around his eccentric ways and those of his wealthy self-indulgent siblings played by Jamie Bell, Lukas Gage and Riley Keough. Their now deceased mother, played by Pamela Anderson, had moved the family from New York to Catalonia six months earlier before she was killed by wolves. Although she only has a small role, if anyone rivalled Turner and Lipa on the red carpet it was Anderson, who is revelling in her second blast of fame.
Director Karim Ainouz co-wrote the screenplay with Yorgos Lanthimos’s collaborator Efthimis Filippou. Although the initial premise was inspired by Marco Bellocchio’s 1965 film Fist in the Pocket, the film veers into Lanthimos-style weirdness and perversity, as the siblings are riled when the eldest brother Jack (Bell) brings home a new girlfriend, played by Elle Fanning and wants to leave the family behind.
Despite some fine performances, The Hollywood Reporter says that the film is “too glib to work”, while IndieWire calls it “a visceral, often entertaining social satire without purpose”.
Looks like there will be no prizes there. The strong favourite for the festival’s sole best actor award is Sandra Huller, who plays a woman passing herself off as a man in Rose. Rose lives in a Protestant community in rural 17th century Germany, where she has taken ownership of a property owned by a fellow soldier who died in the Thirty Years’ war. But will she be found out, especially after she is forced to marry her neighbour’s daughter? Beautifully shot in black and white, the film is directed by Austria’s Markus Schleinzer, who had worked as a casting director on Michael Haneke’s 2009 masterpiece The White Ribbon – and there is a clear lineage.
Of course Huller, who broke out internationally in the German comedy Toni Erdmann, made huge waves when she was Oscar-nominated for Anatomy of a Fall and starred in Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest a few years ago. She is about to have another very big year, starring alongside Tom Cruise in Alejandro G. Inarritu’s dramedy Digger and with Ryan Gosling in the upcoming sci-fi Project Hail Mary.
Another strong candidate is Sundance major award winner Josephine, starring Channing Tatum as a dad dealing with his daughter who has witnessed sexual assault. Strangely, the film screens in Berlin at the very end when many people have left.
Critics have also loved Yellow Letters, Berlin-born Turkish filmmaker Ilker Catak’s follow up to The Teacher’s Lounge. It focuses on a celebrated artistic couple, who after the premiere of their new play, are targeted by the Turkish state.
The opening film No Good Men screened away from the competition and was more pleasing than expected. Shahrbanoo Sadat wrote, directed and stars in the film (co-written and also starring Amwar Hashimi, above) as an Afghan camera operator trying to deal with leaving her cheating husband and keeping her son as she falls for a famous TV journalist, who has enlisted her to work with him. Could there be a good man out there after all? The film culminates with the Taliban imposing increasing restrictions on women and the 2021 American airlift of Afghans out of the country.
Hiam Abbass has two films at the Berlinale. In the poignant Only Rebels Win (cast & crew above), which is set in Beirut though was shot in France, her Suzanne character, who is of Palestinian origin, has an unexpected love affair with Osmane, a young Sudanese man without papers, who is half her age. Even if he is essentially searching for a better future, they are truly in love. But can it last?
Abbass also features in the competition film In a Whisper (above) directed by Tunisian-French Leyla Bouzid. The story follows Paris-based Lilia, Abbass’s onscreen lesbian daughter, who returns to Sousse in Tunisia for her uncle’s funeral and must deal with the attitudes of three generations of women in her family. She also fearlessly tries to discover how her uncle died and must deal with homophobic Tunisian laws.
Being gay in 1810 in Scotland wasn’t easy either, if The Education of Jane Cumming by German director and co-writer Sophie Heldman is any indication. When two women teachers at a girls’ boarding school become involved, one of their students, the Indian granddaughter of Fiona Shaw’s imperious Lady Cumming Gordon, out them because they have shunned her. Ultimately, the women struggle to clear their names in the courts, even if the male authorities recognise that women supposedly cannot have sex. The film is based on a real-life case and is fascinating. The Guardian notes that the film “is exhilaratingly candid”.
