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The Rolling Stones and Madonna caught the headlines, spring weather made it feel unreal, symbolic sparrows abounded, but nothing could mask the lacklustre programme. Nick James, Geoff Andrew, Tony Rayns and Jonathan Romney report
That such an over-explanatory, super-macho shoot-'em-up as José Padilha's Elite Squad (see box, opposite, for a more approving view) won the Golden Bear for Best Film says much about the quality of this year's Berlinale. You could attribute this sad decision from a jury chaired by Costa-Gavras to any number of factors. The weather was astonishingly springlike, for instance, encouraging perhaps a touch of mischief. Still, I couldn't help feeling that the two jurors who ducked out at the last minute - director Susanne Bier and actress Sandrine Bonnaire - smelled something other than blossom on the wind. Elite Squad did what elite-cop action films tend to do, mixing lashings of favela sleaze with slick militarist posturing. At the risk of being essentialist, having two more women on the jury might have saved Berlin this embarrassment. But then again, with the competition slouching from one underwhelmer to the next, who's to say the jury wasn't just fired up by the jolt of Elite Squad's editing.
To be fair, the Berlin competition rarely carries more than a few outstanding films, though a spread of intriguers and curiosities usually washes up across the Panorama and Forum programmes. This year, however, proved weedier than most. Petri Kotwica's Black Ice, for instance, is a tortuous Finnish revenge thriller that starts on the edge of likelihood and wrong-steps itself into silliness as a psychologist (Kaurismäki regular Outi Mäenpää) goes incognito to woo her husband's mistress into friendship - and soon all Freud is let loose.
Gardens of the Night, directed by Damian Harris, is a US indie identity tale about two young survivors of paedophile abuse. It speaks earnestly to an important issue, but its footage of the protagonists as children in abusive situations craves sensation in a deeply repugnant manner. Another weak US indie, Fireflies in the Garden shows that the sins of an overbearing father (Willem Dafoe) have marked the son (Ryan Reynolds) - and where do we discover this but at the funeral of the beloved but passive mother (Julia Roberts)? The son, naturally, has written a coruscating novel about the family. But feelings will out, and so, as if controlled by a software programme whose jackpot is hugs all round, they hit their cue at decent intervals.
Yamada Yoji's baleful Kabei - Our Mother is based on a memoir by Kurosawa's regular script-continuity assistant Nogami Teruyo. It tells the sentimental early-1940s tale of a Japanese mother keeping her family together after her husband is arrested for anti-war writings and its only virtue is its relatively rare, albeit precious, description of wartime Japan. But the competition's low point was Amos Kollek's Restless, a tedious portrait of Moshe, a self-aggrandising New York-Israeli, and his rapprochement with his Israeli-army sniper son. Moshe, a baby-boomer ne'er-do-well, is supposed to be a poet and great stage raconteur, yet we see no trace of either talent, rendering the applause of the East Village bar crowd utterly perplexing.
This plenitude of duds suggests that some of the films were selected for what their directors have done in the past. And in that respect, perhaps the biggest letdown was Robert Guédiguian's crime drama Lady Jane. Guédiguian and his tough Marseilles acting troupe have enjoyed a strong run of community-based issue dramas and one would have thought Lady Jane - a Melville-like revenge thriller about a woman and two men all haunted by their criminal past - would suit the director's resources perfectly. But for all its noirish coats and solemn alleys, the script is weak and the shooting style self-indulgently clumsy.
No one present on the festival's first day could have expected such a trudge ahead. Hoping for some miraculous alchemy, the world's media crammed into extra screenings of the opener Shine a Light, Martin Scorsese's concert film of the Rolling Stones - and the sight of the director and musicians grinning side by side was almost enough. Shine a Light is an expertly marshalled record of what this venerable band now looks and sounds like. What we might have hoped for - a raucous celebration of the cherubic rock dandies the Stones once were - was never likely. Jagger's frontman antics are astounding for one of his age and the backing band and special guests provide just enough energy to distract us from the sloppiest of Keith Richards' knotty-fingered licks. What's missing becomes clear when Buddy Guy takes the stage - a charisma the Stones no longer have. You can't always get what you want, as the man said.
Rock music remained the bright side of Berlin's moon. Patti Smith's charisma proved as intact in Steven Sebring's intense personal portrait Patti Smith: Dream of Life as it was during her press conference, when she recited 'Because the Night' and sang. An amiable behind-the-scenes film about the animated band Gorillaz called Bananaz also brightened things up. Some even liked Neil Young's film CSNY, about his recent tour with old adversaries Crosby, Stills and Nash. He shot it under his film-making pseudonym of Bernard Shakey, but another pop star-turned-director made his efforts look smoothly professional by comparison. This, of course, was Madonna, whose unremarkable romcom directorial debut Filth and Wisdom was not quite the insult some hyped it up to be.
If one were looking for reasons to explain why certain films made the competition list, the answer might be sparrows. Not only were Majid Majidi's The Song of Sparrows and Johnnie To's Sparrow included, but both Hong Sangsoo's Night and Day and Lady Jane have scenes of sparrows trapped indoors. We knew how they felt. Majidi's film is a neorealist fable about an ostrich-farm worker who loses one of the birds and is fired, only to rediscover himself as a Tehran motor-scooter taxi driver. Craggy actor Reza Naji wrings the pathos from his daily struggles, but a too-even pace, a precious symbolism and a too-ordinary series of events make it all seem sentimentally inconsequential.
Unlike the speedily choreographed gangster films that made Johnny To's reputation, Sparrow is only tangentially generic to crime. Swept along by lush music, we meet a charming gang of four male pickpockets, or 'sparrows', on the streets of Hong Kong, led by besuited smoothie Kei (Simon Yam). When Kei photographs runaway beauty Chun-Lei (Kelly Lin) he becomes entranced and soon Chun-Lei dazzles the whole gang with her own pickpocketing skills. A number of caged birds appear, but the one on the loose here was a finch - a sparrow in gaudy clothing, perhaps.
Though made with great sensitivity of tone and shot with a lovely eye for a wintry Beijing, In Love We Trust couldn't find the dramatic tension in its tale of a remarried mother whose young daughter by her first husband develops leukaemia. Brave though Wang Xiaoshuai (of Beijing Bicycle fame) is to focus on a quartet of people (wife and new husband, old husband and new wife) who all prove to be selfless, it makes for a morally even universe on which it's hard to get any emotional purchase.
The keen eye for an exquisite frame and deadpan sight gags that made Duck Season such a success has not deserted Mexican director Fernando Eimbcke in Lake Tahoe. A young man's attempts to get help after crashing his mother's car into a lamppost offer a decent handful of wry moments, but an overuse of a dissolve to black while the soundtrack continues and the shoehorned treatment of the serious theme leave the film stranded.
There was encouraging word-of-mouth for novelist and screenwriter Philippe Claudel's directorial debut I've Loved You So Long, a humanist middle-brow drama in which Kristin Scott Thomas gives a 'look-no-make-up' performance as a woman released from prison to move in with her long-estranged sister and the latter's wary husband and kids. But rather over-praised by the trade press for me was Isabel Coixet's Elegy, a softened adaptation of Philip Roth's provocatively misogynistic novel The Dying Animal. It has good performances from Ben Kingsley as the ageing professor who succeeds in seducing Penélope Cruz's elegant student but loses her through his own lack of faith. But the script is littered with clunky dialogue, much of which forces Kingsley to explain everything to his poet pal, played by Dennis Hopper, in increasingly desperate locations (café, squash court, sauna, etc).
By contrast Erick Zonka's Julia was undeservedly roughed up in reviews. Zonka wowed arthouse audiences with his emotionally intense The Dream Life of Angels and Julia is pitched in the even higher key of Cassavetes. Its story about a lady booze-hound (Tilda Swinton) - whose solution to being on her uppers is to kidnap a rich man's grandson because his disturbed mother asks her to - is an obvious tribute to Cassavetes' Gloria.
Somewhere inside the insistent flow of high-anxiety scenes on the road from California to Mexico is a great film fighting to get out. A shorter length and more variance of tone would have helped it emerge.
The most artistically successful films amounted to a handful. In Standard Operating Procedure Errol Morris interviews the military police officers who were depicted in the photographs of prisoner humiliation taken at Abu Ghraib. The meticulous accumulation of testimony takes time, and flashy close-ups of keys falling into dust sometimes rob concentration, but the final impression is of a better understanding - only the lowliest were punished, and yet more vile crimes remain secret.
Hong Sangsoo's enjoyable Night and Day follows a Korean married man who dodges a potential marijuana rap by flying to Paris. Though at first he keeps to his hostel, eventually the delights of the city and its Korean women entice him to explore and so complicate his life. The film's Rohmeresque feel was matched in some ways by Mike Leigh's terrific comedy Happy-Go-Lucky - or maybe it's just that both have a breezy, relaxed way with characters. Leigh's film follows Sally Hawkins as Poppy, a primary-school teacher whose daily banter is upbeat and personal and who has a close-knit support group of friends and family. But her world is shaken when she begins to take driving lessons from Scott, an uptight martinet who finds her cheeriness infuriating. So seemingly effortless is this film that it runs the risk of nobody noticing how well made it is. The scene showing a Spanish flamenco teacher trying to instruct Camden ladies will be endlessly shown in TV comedy round-ups.
If Leigh's film was, for me, the most impressive, none moved me so much as Antonello Grimaldi's sentimental fairytale of deadpan grief Quiet Chaos. Its star turn is Nanni Moretti, playing a man who rescues a woman from drowning and then goes home to find his own wife has died. His reaction is to promise his ten-year-old daughter that he'll sit outside her school all day. Of course, he soon gets to know the eccentric life that revolves around this square, including a beautiful girl with a dog and a boy with Down syndrome. So far, so treacly. But so carefully does Grimaldi evoke the humanism to be found among parents and children at school gates that the whimsy seems forgivable.
I wish I could say the same for the whole event. Berlin needs to pay closer attention to its programming. The impression given most of the time is that it cares rather more about the European Film Market than it does about the festival of films it is showing. Given that some American sales- company heads have called the EFM's full market status into question, arguing that it happens too soon after November's AFM for enough new 'product' to be ready, there's good reason for a shift in emphasis. Already Berlinale head Dieter Kosslick is planning for the market to start later, a good sign that next year things might be better.