by Helen Barlow
At the 75th Berlinale awards ceremony last Saturday night, Rose Byrne triumphed, winning the Silver Bear for best performance for her gut-wrenching turn as an exhausted mother and therapist struggling to cope as her life spirals out of control in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. There’s only one best performance prize in Berlin, which makes her win all the more significant.
“I’m so flattered to even be here,” Byrne said as she accepted the award. “I really share this with our writer and director Mary Bronstein, who really set fire to the page writing this character of Linda and trusting me to bring her vision to life. I treasure this and my children can’t wait to meet the bear when I come home.”
“It’s almost a koala bear,” the moderator added. “She’s from Australia!”
Byrne’s partner and father of her two sons, Bobby Cannavale, will surely also be happy to embrace her bear. The New York actor did not attend Berlinale, though was impressive as the bartender to Ethan Hawke’s heavy-drinking Lorenz Hart in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, a chamber piece resting on the talents of its actors. Specifically, Andrew Scott, who won a Silver Bear for his supporting performance as Richard Rodgers as he moves away from his partnership with Hart to work with Oscar Hammerstein. The film is set in the bar of the Broadway restaurant Sardi’s on the night of their Oklahoma! premiere.
The other major Aussie winner was Emma Hough Hobbs’ and Leela Varghese’s animated film Lesbian Space Princess, which won for best feature the previous night in the Teddy awards and was also voted second in the Panorama section’s Audience Awards. The lively Aussie filmmakers and their sizable contingent went wild at the news of their Teddy win, as did the audience at the film’s world premiere.
The top Berlin prize, the Golden Bear, presented by jury president Todd Haynes, went to the Norwegian film Dreams, the story of a teenage girl’s infatuation with her female teacher told through a novel she has written about the experience. The queer coming-of-age story completes Dag Johan Haugerud’s Sex, Love, Dreams trilogy. “This was beyond my wildest dreams,” director Haugerud [above] said of winning the award, the first ever Golden Bear for Norway. He noted how writing and reading are very important, advising listeners to “write more and read more – it expands your mind.”
The runner-up Silver Bear Grand Jury prize-winner was Gabriel Mascaro’s popular Brazilian dystopian fantasy The Blue Trail. It follows a spirited 77-year-old woman, who lives in an industrialised town in the Amazon and when she is ordered to move to an isolated settlement for seniors, she finds a way to escape. The film also focuses on the Amazon’s beauty and its decay.
French director Sebastien Betbeder’s The Incredible Snow Woman, another environmentally-inclined film screening away from the competition in Panorama, was one of the best. Blanche Gardin plays Coline Morel, an adventurer and Far North specialist, who after years of living in Greenland, is in crisis, not unlike Rose Byrne’s Linda. (Women’s stories dominated in Berlin this year.) Coline has been dumped by her partner, lost her job and is in poor health and returns to France where she visits her estranged brothers and then goes back to Greenland where she has forged strong relationships with the locals who are endearing and all-embracing. Without giving too much away, it’s a poignant film with stunning footage of the country that Donald Trump wants to claim.
Lucile Hadzihalilovic was awarded a Silver Bear for artistic contribution for another icy French film, The Ice Tower, which boasts outstanding lead performances from Marion Cotillard and newcomer Clara Pacini. Though here the action is set during the shooting of a movie, an adaptation of the fairy tale, The Snow Queen, when Pacini’s Jeanne, after wandering onto the set, becomes fascinated by its mysterious star.
French filmmaker Michel Gondry’s first animated feature, the 61-minute French stop-motion animation Maya, Give Me a Title, screened in the Generation Kplus section, where it was awarded a Crystal Bear by a jury of young viewers. The film is a compilation of short films Gondry made for his daughter Maya over a period of six years. Pierre Niney, the star of Gondry’s previous film, The Book of Solutions, narrates the words originally read to Maya by her mother. Just don’t ask the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind director about his upcoming American film Golden, inspired by Pharrell Williams’ childhood in Virginia Beach. He would not breathe a word.
Italian actor Luca Marinelli was at the festival to promote Paternal Leave [above], directed by his wife Alissa Jung. The film follows the impressive Juli Grabenrich as a teenager who travels to Italy to meet her biological father, when Marinelli’s Paolo doesn’t know she exists. One of Italy’s top stars, Marinelli won the best actor prize in Venice for 2019’s Martin Eden and now plays Benito Mussolini in Joe Wright’s miniseries Mussolini: Son of the Century.
Not to be confused with the festival’s winner, Michel Franco’s new film Dreams also screened in the competition. After his 2023 film Memory, the Mexican director [above, second from left] re-teams with Jessica Chastain for perhaps the sexiest film in Berlin. Chastain plays a wealthy American socialite who supports the career of her young Mexican ballet dancer lover (actual ballet star Isaac Hernandez) who is desperate to live and work in America. The film is set against a background of political, economic and class difference and ultimately packs quite a punch. One not to be missed.
