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Berlinale Film Festival

We Too Are Heroes

By Lars-Olav Beier, Christoph Dallach, Romain Leick and Martin Wolf

At the Berlinale Film Festival in Berlin, which begins Thursday, the US film industry is making an uncharacteristically weak appearance. European filmmakers, on the other hand are coming on strong with fresh confidence. In so doing, they are conjuring up the identity of the new Old World.

The German tourist standing by the side of the road in downtown Istanbul waves his arms wildly, desperate for help. It comes quickly. He is promptly rescued by a sympathetic Turkish taxi driver who speaks fluent German -- the driver even has a distinctive southern-German accent. The tourist breathlessly tells the taxi driver that he's been robbed and begs to be taken to the police. But the audience knows better: The man is committing insurance fraud.

After an intense interview with an officer, the supposed crime victim leaves the police station with the friendly taxi driver. Only then does the German-Turkish driver insolently reach out his hand, palm up. He smelled the German's scam right from the start; now he wants his cut.

There is a slough of funny, adventurous and even apalling stories to tell from both old and new Europe. At least that's what the program organizers at the Berlinale Film Festival in Berlin, which begins on Thursday, seem to have set out to prove. Hannes Stoehr's episodic film "One Day in Europe," for example, which will be screened as one of the German entries to the competition, presents four amusing stories portraying Europeans in neighboring countries who become real or supposed victims of robberies and muggings. In his film, Stoehr also celebrates Europe's varying cultures in sumptuous urban and rural scenes.

There are many more such examples. Indeed, European cinema makes an uncharacteristically self-confident showing at this year's Berlinale. For the first time in years, the festival opens with a purely European work, Regis Wargnier's "Man to Man." In the film, British stars Joseph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas portray two anthropologists who discover a pigmy tribe in Africa in 1870, then take two of the natives with them to Scotland to prove that human beings are descended from apes.

The presumed highlights of the competitive program include the French romantic drama "Les temps qui changent," ("Changing Times") with Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu, directed by Andre Techine, the Danish family drama "Anklaget," ("Accused") by Jakob Thuesen, and two film biographies that prove that the genre, currently flourishing in Hollywood, of the large-scale biographical epic known as the biopic is by no means purely an Americans phenomenon. As it happens, Europeans also have their heroes. In "Le promeneur du Champ de Mars," ("The Late Mitterrand") French director Robert Guediguian tells the story of the last phase in the life of mortally ill French President Francois Mitterand. German director Marc Rothemund devotes his film, "Sophie Scholl - Die letzten Tage" ("Sophie Scholl - The Final Days") to the life and death of the Munich student who became a resistance fighter against the Nazis with the so-called "White Rose" group.

Controlling fate

Berlinale festival director Dieter Kosslick believes that "the current global popularity of the biopic and the cult of stardom both derive their strength from the same source. They signify the condensing of a complex set of circumstances into a single person. Because reality is becoming ever more complicated and increasingly threatens to go beyond our horizons, we latch on to individual characters in the hope that they can somehow control our fates."

"Sophie Scholl - The Last Days" depicts a young heroine who believes that she can change things through her individual actions. The film, one of three German entries in the competition, tells the true story of the Munich university student who, in February 1943, was caught distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets and were then arrested, sentenced to death and executed.

Director Rothemund and his screenwriter, Fred Breinersdorf, carefully reconstruct a scene in which Sophie Scholl (played by Julia Jentsch) is interrogated by Gestapo official Robert Mohr (Alexander Held) and for a time manages to convince Mohr, a skilled interrogator, that she was not involved in the incident. The dialogue develops into a verbal duel revolving around life and death, which Rothemund effectively stages as a theater-play within the film -- and without resorting to action-packed scenes as in his earlier film "Untergang" ("Downfall") about the last days of Adolf Hitler. Like the real Sophie Scholl, the film relies on the power of words. Indeed, the courage Scholl displayed in using that power to voice her opposition -- after it's become clear that she has no hope of surviving, she even manages to cause the ranting, bloodthirsty judge Roland Freisler (Andre Hennicke) to lose control during her show trial -- remains powerful to this day. Rothemund consistently portrays the events of the film, right through to the end when Sophie is executed, from the perspective of the young resistance fighter.

Death is also omnipresent in Robert Guediguian's film about Francois Mitterrand. The film tells the story of the last days of Mitterand, the socialist president who ruled France longer (from 1981 to 1995) than any other French head of state since Napoleon III. Really, though, the director portrays the haunting end of political power and of a human life as Mitterand unavoidably loses his last battles -- against cancer and against the mercilessness of fate. In the film, a passionate young journalist named Antoine tries to coax confessions, convictions and lessons about politics and history, love, women and literature out of the old man. But the dying Mitterand, for whom the past, the present and the vanishing future meld into self-doubt, is only interested in conducting a dialogue with death, using Antoine as his middleman.

"I am the last of the great presidents"

Actor Michel Bouquet, 79, best known for his roles in the films of Claude Chabrol, personifies this baffling and cryptic Mitterand with amazing intensity. "I am the last of the great presidents," the always ambiguous Mitterand proclaims at the end of his cryptic game in the Elysee Palace, divulging how he hopes to be remembered. "There will be no others after me. Nothing will ever be the same as it once was -- because of Europe, because of globalization. Only financiers and accountants will remain."

One of the ironies of the film industry is that even the few biopics about American heroes that will be screened in Berlin this year could not have been made without the help of European financing. "Kinsey," which recapitulates the life of the famous sex researcher Alfred Charles Kinsey, was financed with German capital. And "Beyond the Sea," which celebrates US pop legend Bobby Darin and his hit songs, was filmed, for the most part, in Berlin and the German state of Brandenburg.

Indeed, "Beyond the Sea," made by Kevin Spacey, was viewed skeptically by Hollywood from the very beginning and the film was ultimately financed by Germans and Britons -- with the help of a bank guarantee from the German state of Brandenburg. Large portions of the movie were filmed last winter at Babelsberg Studios.

The film was inspired by Spacey's mother, who idolized Darin during his 1950s and 1960s heyday and for years kept telling her son that Darin's turbulent career, which included such hits as "Splish Splash," was worth making a movie about. In light of the film's disastrous showing at the box office in the UK and the United States, Spacey could well be asking himself whether grown men should in fact listen to their mothers. Generously, he blamed Hollywood instead. "Everyone in Hollywood allows themselves to be terrorized by idiotic fashions and trends," said a visibly crushed Spacey after the film -- in which he was the director, the main character, the producer and the screenwriter -- opened in England. "Four years ago, everyone agreed that no one would be interested in watching filmed biographies."

Hollywood staying at home

Spacey will be one of the few Oscar winners making an appearance on the red carpet at this year's Berlinale as Hollywood, which has dominated the film festival in the past, is barely making a showing this year. In addition to "In Good Company," a comically derisive satire about the American working world, the most spectacular US film in the competition is, oddly enough, an homage to a famous European. Wes Anderson's new film "The Life Aquatic" was inspired by the life of French deep sea researcher Jacques-Yves Cousteau.

Unfortunately, the lack of American films also means the lack of major American stars, a situation not entirely to festival director Kosslick's liking. Since assuming his position four years ago, he had enjoyed a good run at attracting big names to Berlin for the festival.

The producers of the Berlinale blame the absence of Hollywood glamour figures partly on the fact that the Oscars have, for the second time, been pushed forward by a month, so that they will be taking place in Los Angeles already on Feb. 27. They believe that this has discouraged actors and directors from making the trip across the Atlantic. Many Hollywood stars prefer to spend their time charming the Oscar judges in California rather than freezing on the red carpet in a wintry Berlin. Indeed Leonardo DiCaprio chose January to present his new film, "Aviator," in Berlin. Dustin Hoffman was also recently here, but elected to head back home prior to the festival's kickoff.

However, Europe's strong showing at the Berlinale is not solely attributable to Hollywood's absence. Many European markets have experienced box office growth by up to 10 percent in the past year, an increase that has a lot to do with the quality of European productions. In fact, even the most successful US films were outdone at the box office by "(T)Raumschiff Surprise" ("Dream/Spaceship Surprise") in Germany and by "Die Kinder des Monsieur Mathieu" ("The Children of Monsieur Mathieu") in France. And now an eastern European blockbuster is also set to make a spectacular debut in Berlin. There will be a special showing of the Russian vampire and fantasy spectacle "Night Watch," which shattered box office records in Russia.

Raiding Grimm

German director Christian Petzold used material from a Grimm's fairy tale to concoct his new film "Gespenster" ("Ghosts") -- and in doing so has laid claim to a successful recipe used by Hollywood's studio heads, who have looked to the canon of Europe's rich history of myths, sagas and fairy tales for years. Petzold's latest work is loosely based on a relatively obscure Grimm's fairy tale, "The Shroud." It's the story of a mother who is unable to overcome the death of her child.

Petzold's film tells of the friendship between two girls in present-day Berlin. Toni (Sabine Timoteo), a semi-criminal drifter, and Nina (Julia Hummer), a reticent orphan, meet at Berlin's Tiergarten Park on a summer's day. As the two girls gradually become closer, a Frenchwoman (Marianne Basler) suddenly shows up and claims that Nina is her daughter who disappeared many years earlier.

Using gently gliding camera movement, Petzold follows his talented young actresses on their strange odyssey of emotions, and odyssey that takes them through the urban no-man's land of Berlin's Potsdamer Platz, which also happens to be the site of the Berlin Film Festival.

"This square is single projection surface," Petzold claims. "When my film 'Wolfsburg' was playing at the Berlinale two years ago, I spent hours wandering around the square and the Tiergarten, and hit upon the idea of using these areas as the setting for a film: precisely at this urban interface between futuristic architecture and wildly overgrown nature. As far as I know, nothing like this exists in any other city in the world."

Petzold uses scenes from Berlin's Mitte district to assemble his own urban mosaic. "When a character in an American film sits down in a diner, he's taking a seat in his own culture," says Petzold. "That's the kind of thing I'm looking for in "Ghosts." Typical German places."

Which is what, it seems, this year's Berlinale is searching for as well. Typical European places. Indeed, as this year's film festival entries show, the current European cinema doesn't just reflect on the traditions of the continent and its historic personalities, but also attempts to express a sense of life in present-day Europe. And it's a highly varied perspective.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan