REVIEW OF THE ARTS
Festal virgins
Philip Bergson
Film feskivals are weird but wonderful gatherings, regularly developing lives of their own, quite independent of the films they are meant to be promoting. Colonies of columnists and photographers, stars and producers descend en masse, and the selected site, be it Cannes or Locarno, goes movie mad for the duration. Amid all the hustling and bustle, the wheeling, dealing, and unreeling of films at almost every hour of the day and night, the dizzying round of cocktails and conferences, the fixed smiles and camera-conscious glances, one can nevertheless detect a genuine enthusiasm for the cinema which cuts across language barriers and makes the concern for bigger, faster profits seem as nothing. At festivals, art and commerce go hand in hand, and all that glisters can be gold, given sufficient imagination and publicity.
The major festivals always have an air of the unreal. Films from divers lands compete for prizes, monetary or ornamental, before a global audience that can not discern between their right wing and their left, and also much press. Speaking in tongues becomes a commonplace necessity and trilinguals sound inadequate as the delegations of 76 countries meet, murmur greetings, and pass, like ships in the night, on to the next reception. Insatiates could spend a fabulous, if unearthly existence, flitting, like vampires, from festival to festival around the world. The season opens in March, in San Remo, and continues from one exotic locale to another — Cork, Moscow, Tehran, Harrogate — this year threatening to climax fittingly in the Virgin Islands, a new and enticing addition to the festal circuit. A press pass provides the 'open sesame' to a thousand and one sub-Pasolini delights — Italian films in English with Spanish subtitles, Spanish films in French with English subtitles, English films in English with French and German subtitles, Greek subtitles in Latin with earphone commentary, and there are always the myriad, mystic hand-outs that gain immeasurably in translation. ("It is a romantic love story who occurs in the thritties and is sorrownded by the luxe and sofistication of the high society of the United States in the belle epoque, showed to the spectator may be withnostalgia" — sic —Gatsby Spanish-style), Forsaking Sydney and
Thessalonika, I set out this month for my first experience of Berlin, whose international film festival is now considered second only to Cannes. The neutered zone of•West Berlin, a cosmopolitan oasis behind the Iron Curtain, provided the perfect setting — smart, modern, brightly lit, and horribly expensive, (I felt like a refugee from the 'twenties — with sterling sinking, meals went up in price as I ate them). The Berlinale reached its 25th anniversary this year, still dynamically directed by its founder Dr Bauer. It was meticulously organised, on an apparently bottomless budget — excellent accommodation, a jolly boat-trip, and a biggish splash on closing night with a farewell-celebration given in all the public rooms of the Schweizerhof Hotel, as the coveted invitation specified. Mine hosts were always most attentive, answering every request with a sincere "You're wilkommen." But in spite of all the funds, there was little spectacle, few crowded premieres, and none of the old-style glamour that makes a smaller festival like San Sebastian so memorable and so much more festive. Festivals need stars as much as films, and Berlin only saw Gina Lollobrigida, opening an exhibition of her work as a photographer (which was good, revealing unexpected talents behind the camera, though she spent all her time posing before other people's — but if you've still got it, you're entitled to flaunt it, I suppose), and Kirk Douglas, who gave a lavish junket in the Hilton for his grotesque Western Posse, and apart from Claudia Cardinale, presenting the prizes, and Sylvia Syms, heading the jury, that was your lot,
Fortunately, some of the films, though no masterpieces, were passing fair, and taken as a crosssection of new world cinema suggested that the medium is on the mend, that intelligent productions treating difficult themes sensitively and with an infinite compassion for humanity are gradually countering the more callous and sensational. works that have lately been in fashion. Most encouraging discovery was a flowering of new talent — young directors, players, scriptwriters, whose promising work should not be left to blush unscreened. Films such as Lars G. Thelestam's A Stranger Came By Train, which offered a penetrating, if provocative study of a fascist, evangelising movement begun by
an American gangster in a Swedish small town, or the British entry Overlord which was written by The Spectator's former film critic and literary editor Christopher Hudson, and won a special Silver Bear. Only the second feature of Stuart Cooper, with excellent performances from young unknowns Brian Stirner, Julie Neesam, and Nicholas Ball, it is a haunting reconstruction of the fate of a 21-year-old caught up in the second world war machine. Shot in black and white with sequences brilliantly matched to documentary footage taken from the Imperial War Museum, it is a marvellous achievement, uncannily blending history, fiction and fantasy. The Swiss Konfrontation, out of competition, contained a splendid first performance by Peter Bol lag, as the Jewish student who shot the Nazi gauleiter Gustloff in 1932. The events flawlessly recreated are capped by an inspirational ending, where the actual assassin, now released and residing in Israel, takes over the actor impersonating him.
An East German entry, Jacob the Liar, also dealt with anti-Semitism, with an award-winning role for Vlastimil Brodsky as an aging Jew torn between his dreams of the past and the horrors of the present as deportation to the camps empties his ghetto. The unsentimental melange of quiet humour and shattering personal tragedy captured the attention completely. Captivating in different ways were The Balance, by Poland's Krzysztof Zanussi, about a wife's bitter-sweet fling with an old flame before returning to her family to pick up the pieces of her life, Yves Boisset's cleverly constructed racial thriller Dupont Lajoie, and Melancholy Tales, a delightful Dutch four-part film of thoughtfully observed scenes, the finale moving out of the ordinary as a shop-keeper unwittingly paddles into the sunset with Death. Woody Allen's meditation on such topics, Love and Death, proved to be a mock-Tolystoyan romp, closing on the comic dancing off with the Reaper, to Prokofiev, after a succession of dazzling jokes, literary and philosophical, have sent the senses reeling. In contrast, Hungary's Adoption, a grey portrait of a widow's desperate desire for children, immaculately acted, but dully directed by Marta Maszaros, stole the Grand Prix — more for political than artistic reasons, it was whispered.
Separate from the competition for features and shorts, the Forum of Young Cinema presented a season of innovatory works that included the stark but worthy Winstanley, directed by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo. An earthy, non-professional cast reenact some 1649 socialist movement, with lovingly sculpted dialogue and commendable camerawork. The other face — if that's the word — of British cinema was represented in the commercial Fair by Eskimo Nell, a bawdy but deft and amusing satire on film-making. Having seen films borrowed, new and blue, I turned to something old — the Garbo Retrospective which was the most popular section at
Berlin. Grand Hotel, with its colourful stereotypes and priceless " asides, seemed to pass the sharpest comment on film festivals in general. "People come, people go: nothing ever happens."
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