Berlin Review: Charlotte Gainsbourg In ‘The Passengers Of The Night’

Paolo and Vittorio Taviani directed films together from the early 1950s until Vittorio died in 2018, leaving his now 90-year-old brother to carry on alone. Leonora Addio, the second film Paolo has made without Vittorio, is not only dedicated to him but picks up many of the themes that ran through their earlier work, including their enthusiasm for theater in general and the writings of Nobel laureate Luigi Pirandello in particular. The Berlin Film Festival competition entry looks and sounds sumptuous, but its two stories — both of which raise questions about what the living owe the dead — are disappointingly slight.

The Sole family grows peaches. Round white peaches ripen first; then the flat white peaches that supermarkets like; then yellow cling peaches. Their farmhouse is surrounded by the plantation they have tended for three generations, promised to them in perpetuity by the current owner’s great-grandparents during the Civil War. Memories are long in their corner of Catalonia. Nobody remembers a time before peaches. Harvesting determines the rhythm of their rumbustious family life. When the fruit ripens, it’s all hands on deck.

Here’s another walking-and-talking film from festival favorite Hong Sang-soo, encapsulating a sliver of Korean life with his customary elusive delicacy. Shot largely in creamy black and white, Berlin competition entry The Novelist’s Film centers on the meeting between two artists who, for different reasons, have simply stopped working.

Brother in Every Inch definitely offers the world something it’s never seen before — the training of Russian air force pilots on an actual Russian air base — but guess what: It looks exactly flight training in any other country. All the same, this second feature from director Alexander Zolotukhin (after his debut three years ago with A Russian Youth) does take you somewhere new as it examines the progress of twin brothers as they undergo the rigors of learning to fly jet fighters, even if it’s presented in a semi-arty way that is both aesthetically pleasing and dramatically skimpy. This visually entrancing short feature (just 80 minutes long) premiered in the Encounters section of the Berlin Film Festival.

Fêted and eternally fabulous, Isabelle Huppert is this year’s Berlin Film Festival honorary Golden Bear laureate for her life’s work so far, with an accompanying program of some of her most celebrated films. About Joan is her newest, screened out of competition as a Berlinale Special gala (though Huppert was unable to make the trip to Berlin after testing positive for Covid). That is quite a lot of weight to carry for Laurent Larivière’s slender story about the malleability of memory. That subject in itself, broad and deep as it is, may be too much for this rickety film to bear, even with Huppert’s flickering brilliance in the title role.

Heroism, obsession, sheet ice and huskies. It’s a winning combination, the stuff of stories that show men – because these were stories about men – reaching beyond themselves to survive the elements. Sometimes, even in stories, they didn’t survive because they sacrificed themselves for their comrades, finding their best selves in tough situations. Before imaginary superheroes took over, these tall tales and true of derring-do used to fill children’s annuals.

Michael Nordine authorIt’s May 10, 1981, and Paris is celebrating. French political junkies might know the cause for this revelry, but for the rest of us, the reason seems to matter less than the electric atmosphere enveloping the streets as people dance to the sound of honking car horns.

An isolated house in the country, a small tribe of peculiar characters mostly keeping a wary distance from each other: That Kind of Summer (Un Ete Comme Ca) is a film set up perfectly for the pandemic era. The bonus zinger is that the house is a live-in retreat for supposedly, or maybe just possibly, recovering sex addicts. Nobody leaves, and everyone talks dirty. Denis Cote, the prolific Quebecois provocateur, must have been hugging himself when he thought of that one.

The streets outside her window are dripping with hope, and yet Élisabeth (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is lost. It is Paris, 1981, a new president has been elected, and Élisabeth’s husband has left, claiming the thrillingness of motion by moving in with a new girlfriend while his ex is left with the stagnance of remaining, the apartment where they’ve raised their children, Judith (Megan Northam) and Matthias (Quito Rayon-Richter), at once comfortingly familiar and dreadfully new.

A couple struggles to process the aftermath of the Bataclan terrorist attack in One Year, One Night (Un Ano, Una Noche), an affecting Berlin Film Festival competition title from Spanish director Isaki Lacuesta (Between Two Waters). Inspired by a book from Ramón González entitled Peace, Love and Death Metal, it’s based on recollections from real survivors of the 2015 attack in Paris, and the level of detail is compelling.

“Do you believe in God?,” Julia asks her stepfather on his sickbed. He looks down at her little face. Not much captures his interest these days. “I think so,” he mumbles. Julia continues, undeterred. “I believe in something else,” she says firmly. “The sun, mountains, animals, trees. And snow.” Marco says nothing — he never said much, even at his most hale and hearty — but his big body seems to soften in acceptance. She’s talking his language.

Of all the unsolved mysteries in Claire Denis‘ new Berlin Competition film, the biggest may just be its U.S. retitling to a generic and not particularly representative “Fire.” The film’s English title in the rest of the world, “Both Sides of the Blade” — a line from the terrific Tindersticks track that ends the film —is not just cooler and more compelling.

Since her Sundance hit An Education in 2009, Denmark’s Lone Scherfig has become something of an honorary Brit, specializing in prestige adaptations of best-selling English novels (or, in the case of 2014’s The Riot Club, critically acclaimed stage plays). Surprisingly, none of these ever quite tipped in the way An Education did, and after a mixed reaction to One Day (2011), which mostly rounded on Anne Hathaway’s Yorkshire accent rather than her performance, Scherfig’s first real attempt to tap into the American market — 2019’s The Kindness Of Strangers — was an uncharacteristic misfire and pretty much vanished into the ether after opening the Berlinale that year.

Rapper Machine Gun Kelly plays a self-destructive musician in Tim Sutton’s Taurus, premiering in the Panorama section of the Berlin Film Festival. Going by his real name, Colson Baker, he puts in an authentic turn as his character Cole flits between the studio, his expensive apartment and an array of seedy bars and strip clubs. Adding to a sense of impending doom is a disturbing opening scene involving a child with a loaded gun. The significance of this is later revealed, but it could also be considered a symbol of Cole himself: an immature person who has great power, and an attraction to danger.

The real star of Mutzenbacher, an austere Austrian documentary screening in the Encounters strand at the Berlin Film Festival, is a gaudy but once elegant settee that has seen better days, and likely even service in a 1970s pornographic movie (it is described early on as looking like “a former erotic sofa”). Fittingly, it is literally a casting couch for director Ruth Beckermann, who entertains a parade of men aged between 16 and 99 — her specific criteria — as she holds an open audition for a role in her latest film.

It’s not your regular meet-cute. Anna Moth (Sophie Rois) an actress recognized by people in the street but apparently unable to get work — “everyone knows she’s mental,” says a fellow actor after she extracts herself from his grip during the recording of a clearly low-rent radio play — gets mugged in the street outside a smart bar by a young man. He takes her handbag while a spunky young woman who sees the whole incident chases after him and gets the bag back, minus the wallet. Anna, meanwhile, is recovering her composure inside the bar, diva-style.

A tender love story set in rural China, Li Ruijun’s Return To Dust is a wonderfully atmospheric entry to the Berlin Film Festival competition. It opens with the arrangement of a marriage between Ma Youtie (Wu Renlin) and Cao Guiying (Hai Qing), by two families who are patently keen to get rid of them both.

Juliette Binoche puts in another tremendous performance in Claire Denis’ drama Both Sides Of The Blade (aka Fire, and also aka Avec Amour Et Acharnement). The Berlin Film Festival competition title is an intimate slow-burner that sets a credible scene, but doesn’t quite deliver on the mystery it promises. 

A determined Turkish mother takes on the authorities in Rabiye Kurnaz Vs. George W. Bush, Andreas Dresen’s drama that takes a light approach to a moving true story. 

An imaginative insight into an 18-year-old’s mind, Bertrand Bonello’s Berlin Film Festival Encounters strand entry Coma comes with a preface: it’s dedicated to his teenage daughter. It aims to both reflect the concerns of her generation and to reassure her that some kind of rebirth will come after the pressures of lockdown during the Covid pandemic. Coma stars just two actors in-camera, with voice work from Gaspard Ulliel, who died tragically earlier this year. Bonello’s introductory comments about loss feel particularly poignant after the death of his Saint Laurent star.