'Charlatan': Film Review | Berlin 2020

A Jewish prisoner pretends to be Iranian to escape being shot and is then forced to teach Farsi, a language he doesn’t speak, to a Nazi superior inPersian Lessons, the new film from Ukrainian-born, Canada-based director Vadim Perelman (The House of Sand and Fog).

A small but splendid Indian tale inspired by poems written by Lalleshwari, a 14th century woman mystic from Kashmir, as well as a Rajasthan folk story, Pushpendra Singh’s The Shepherdess and the Seven Songs(Laila aur satt geet) takes the viewer deep into the heart of northwest India, where a young nomadic bride plays with her desires and toys with the lust of a young ranger.

Lois Patino consolidates his reputation as a leading European exponent of poetic moving images with his second feature length effort, Red Moon Tide (Lua vermella). A challenging work which punctuates taxing stretches of austere stasis with interludes of sublime beauty — including a ravishingly spectacular underwater finale — it uses a slight fable of a story as framework for some extravagant sensory stimulations.

Arriving between Pawel Pawlikowsi's Cold War and Limonov — the award garlanded second and eagerly anticipated third segments of the boxy-monochrome trilogy begun with Oscar winner Ida — Ivan Ostrochovsky's steely drama Servants somewhat bravely adopts a very similar approach in terms of style and editing.

It’s a brave young director who has the gumption to revisit Alfred Doblin’s 1929 Weimar Republic classic Berlin Alexanderplatz. A 1931 film version directed by Piel Jutzi was notably followed by Rainer W.

In the moody French policier Night Shift (Police), three officers are tasked with escorting an illegal immigrant to Charles de Gaulle airport, where he will be forced onto a plane and sent back to his homeland. According to statistics, this is something that happens all too frequently in France, where nearly 24,000 people were deported last year alone.

Banned from filmmaking in Iran but still active, screenwriter and director Mohammad Rasoulof returns to the great moral themes that underlie all his work in There Is No Evil(Sheytan vojud nadarad), a German/Czech/Iranian co-prod competing at the Berlin Film Festival.

Award-winning filmmaker and video artist Tsai Ming-liang continues to move toward cinema that looks more and more like a video installation inDays (Rizi), which recounts the everyday lives of a middle-class man and a poor boy who gives body massages. Their relatively innocent professional encounter in a hotel room stirs unforeseen emotions, which will probably lead nowhere.

Filmmaker Rithy Panh’s numerous documentaries, and handful of fiction features, have often been built around the depiction of his native Cambodia under the deadly reign of the Khmer Rouge, during which the director lost his parents and several other members of his family.

Probably the most unusual entry in this year's Berlinale competition, and certainly one of the most hotly anticipated, DAU. Natasha is the first theatrical feature to emerge from Russian director Ilya Khrzhanovsky's wildly ambitious, mildly notorious multimedia project DAU.

The fertile fantasy of writer-director-composer Sally Potter, memorably on display in her adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s multi-lives tale Orlando,comes disappointingly close to straight family drama in The Roads Not Taken, in which a working daughter spends a difficult day caring for her senile father.

Twin siblings from a German theatrical family get more than their fair share of drama at home in the Berlin competition entryMy Little Sister (Schwesterlein) from Swiss directorial duo Stephanie Chuat and Veronique Reymond. As in their feature debut, the Michel Bouquet-starring French-language dramaMy Little Room—they seem to have a thing for little things —a sterling cast makes up for screenplay weaknesses.

Running a concise 70 minutes,Last and First Men remains the only feature-length film directed by Johann Johannsson (1969-2018), the Icelandic composer who received Academy Award nominations for The Theory of Everything and Sicario. It was first presented at the Manchester International Festival as a symphonic performance with a live BBC orchestra, and made its official film bow as a Berlinale Special.

“If he only repeats himself, how can he be sincere?” wonders a woman about her famous novelist husband whose TV appearances are all starting to sound alike. For anyone familiar with the work of Korean writer-director Hong Sang-soo, there’s a fascinating tongue-in-cheek quality to this remark, uttered in his latest work, the Berlin competition titleThe Woman Who Ran (Domangchin yeoja); repetitions with infinitesimal variations are basically Hong’s entire modus operandi.

The dehumanization of life under Communism reaches into the most intimate spheres of the relationship between husband and wife and parents and child in Polish animator Mariusz Wilczynski’s terrifying first animated feature, Kill It and Leave This Town(Zabij to i wyjedz z tego miasta).

Willem Dafoe’s character Clint is not going to be the only one struggling to find meaning in Siberia, the latest rumination on life from agent provocateur Abel Ferrara. Not only does the screenplay, which Ferrara wrote with Christ Zois, seem like a highly personal exploration of the director’s own psyche, but it is peppered with dreamlike/drug-like encounters with pregnant women, naked dwarves, shamans and magicians who pop out of nowhere, are questioned and disappear a few minutes later.

The latest work from scrappy French iconoclasts Benoit Delepine and Gustave Kervern (I Feel Good,Near Death Experience) is at once a dramedy that dips into yellow-vest sentiment in suburban France; a farce about the digital world that surrounds us and seems to command us more than actually help us; and an all-round, utterly depressing movie about the world we live in today.

The hallowed feminist message that women’s bodies belong to them is exotically dramatized in the German-Mongolian coprodBlack Milk (Schwarze Milch). Set among nomads living on the Mongolian plains, but seen through the eyes of a Westernized local woman, the story of two sisters plays with cultural expectations in a tale of sexuality and the limits of female empowerment when it jostles tradition.

Sometimes, as a critic, you really love the film that the filmmakers were trying to make —even though they failed, perhaps even spectacularly, to actually make it. Brazilian Berlinale competition titleAll the Dead Ones (Todos os mortos)is one such film.

A revisionist Outback Western set in early 20th century Australia, High Ground draws on genre conventions but also transcends them with some unusually thoughtful elements, notably its meticulous and respectful depiction of Aboriginal culture. The result is a gripping, visually spectacular revenge thriller that makes superb use of stunning landscapes while also addressing the lingering scars of colonial-era racism.