Did You See This?

Berlin and Beyond

Hanna Schygulla and Margit Carstensen in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972)

The Berlinale got off to what Deadline’s Andreas Wiseman calls “a bumpy start” last night. Covid protocols led to the delay of the opening ceremony, and then during the screening of the competition opener, François Ozon’s Peter von Kant, the screen blacked out twice due to what the festival says was “a server problem.” Covid also kept two of the film’s stars, Isabelle Adjani and Hanna Schygulla, from attending. “Omicron is at its peak in Berlin and I am a person at risk,” Schygulla tells Wiseman in a message from Paris. “I am well now and would rather stay like that.”

Fortunately, Peter von Kant has been met with a first round of respectable reviews. Denis Ménochet plays a director modeled on Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1972, the year he made The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. “Both homage and critique, Peter von Kant astutely gets under the skin of the lesbian-themed original, ekes out new resonances, and proves both authentically Fassbinderian and altogether Ozonesque in its ironic sensibilities,” writes Jonathan Romney for Screen. The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney finds that the film’s “skewering of celebrity is mischievously enjoyable and its declaration of love for a queer-cinema forefather disarmingly sincere.”

With Nobody’s Hero, the film that opened the Berlinale’s Panorama section, Alain Guiraudie “appears to be unfurling an overt and acerbic political screed about the discontents of life in modern France, with most characters harboring a full bingo card of racism, misogyny, hypocrisy, and knee-jerk recourse to violence,” writes Little White LiesDavid Jenkins. “And yet, against all odds, the director manages to imbue his rogue’s gallery of misfits and malcontents with a level of sympathy that it would’ve been very easy to deny.” In Variety, though, Guy Lodge finds that “this heavily plotted but oddly low-energy film winds up too distracted and diluted to score as a vital political satire.”

Jessica Kiang, in the meantime, has written up a terrific overview for Variety of the retrospective spotlighting comedic turns by Mae West, Carole Lombard, and Rosalind Russell. She observes that “what comes through is the actresses’ individuality and the delightful contrast between—respectively—the brassy, classy, and sassy modes of prewar femininity they represent.”

Back in the U.S., New York sees the opening of three tantalizing series today. Film Forum is staging a four-week, thirty-three film tribute to Toshiro Mifune. Programmed alongside sixteen Akira Kurosawa classics are 35 mm rarities and discoveries from the Japan Foundation and the National Archive of Japan. Through March 6, the Museum of the Moving Image is celebrating The Legend of Woody Strode, the six-foot-four athletic actor who starred in John Ford’s Sergeant Rutledge (1960) and Valerio Zurlini’s Black Jesus (1968).

Triple Canopy and the Brooklyn Academy of Music are marking the anniversary of the 1922 Modern Art Week in São Paulo with Brazilian Modernism at 100, a series running through Tuesday. Writer, translator, and programmer Katrina Dodson tells Valentina Di Liscia at Hyperallergic that she “wanted this series to highlight questions that Brazilian artists and writers continue to ask about history and the effects of colonialism, which connect to the 1920s modernist movement, when artists were trying to expand their ideas of how to represent Brazil and what it meant to be Brazilian by looking beyond the dominant European or North American aesthetics and incorporating rural folk traditions, Indigenous cultures, and African influences.”

Before we turn to the highlights of the week, we need to note the passing of three unique figures who have left their marks in three disparate fields. Douglas Trumbull, the visual effects innovator who worked on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), died on Monday at the age of seventy-nine. Trumbull directed Bruce Dern in Silent Running (1972) and Christopher Walken and Natalie Wood in Brainstorm (1983), a film that was nearly shut down when Wood died in a tragic—and to this day, mysterious—incident during production.

Having soured on the business, Trumbull turned away to develop new technologies on his own. Nearly thirty years later, Terrence Malick asked for his help on what would become the enthralling creation sequence in The Tree of Life (2011). Shunning CGI, Trumbull experimented with what he called “organic effects” because, as he told Phelim O’Neill in the Guardian, “Terry wanted to create the opportunity for the unexpected to occur.”

French actor André Wilms, who passed away on Wednesday at the age of seventy-four, appeared in Patrice Leconte’s Monsieur Hire (1989) and Agnieszka Holland’s Europa Europa (1990), but he will most likely be remembered first for his work with Aki Kaurismäki on such films as La vie de bohème (1992) and Le Havre (2011). You can watch Wilms discuss their collaboration on the Criterion Channel.

Singer Lata Mangeshkar, often called “the nightingale of Bollywood,” recorded an estimated 25,000 songs featured in more than a thousand Hindi films. With a voice that could fly up and down four octaves, she sang in more than twenty different Indian languages. Her music “was heard constantly across India, in shops, restaurants, taxis, or on the radio, and she became known as ‘Didi,’ or sister, because so many people identified with her often emotional songs,” writes Robin Denselow in the Guardian. On Sunday, Mangeshkar passed away at the age of ninety-two, following complications brought on by Covid.

  • Though it didn’t win any awards, one of the strongest films premiering in competition at last year’s Berlinale was Dominik Graf’s Fabian: Going to the Dogs, a three-hour adaptation of Erich Kästner’s 1931 novel about an aspiring writer in Weimar-era Berlin. Fabian opens today in the U.S., and Daniel Kasman interviews Graf, “one of contemporary cinema’s most vigorous and engaged filmmakers,” for the Notebook. “I wanted to have Kästner’s language in the film, hear him speak (the male narrator sounds a bit like him), and listen to his funny, witty way of bringing things to a mostly surprising point,” says Graf. “All this takes time in film. I am awfully glad they gave me that time . . . Film is more than tightly told drama. Film tells the whole world—not only stories.”

  • The nine silent features directed by Julien Duvivier and collected in the Flicker Alley box set Cinema of Discovery are “very impressive for revealing the diversity and ambitions of mainstream French cinema of the 1920s,” writes David Bordwell. “Moreover, Duvivier was prepared to carry a commitment to pictorial storytelling to striking extremes.” Bordwell examines the ways Duvivier combined sweeping spectacle with intimate revelations of the thoughts and feelings of his characters.

  • Set in 1954 France, Louis Malle’s Murmur of the Heart (1971) is “an enormously entertaining picture, presumably the gentlest and most endearing movie ever made about a boy who has sex with his mother,” writes Sean Burns at Crooked Marquee. “Malle was already no stranger to controversy, as his 1958 Dominique Vivant adaptation The Lovers prompted an obscenity case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, and twenty years later his notorious Pretty Baby featured a nude, twelve-year-old Brooke Shields having her virginity sold off at an auction. In the company of such provocations, this mild-mannered Oedipal romp appears almost tame by comparison.”

  • The new issue of photogénie gathers essays by the promising writers who took part in the Young Critics Workshop mentored by Nick Pinkerton last October. Two of them take on analyses of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, while another examines the interplay of memory and identity in Florian Zeller’s The Father, Viggo Mortensen’s Falling, and Gaspar Noé’s Vortex. Jack Seibert probes the juxtaposition of “human time” and “universal time” in Miguel Gomes and Maureen Fazendeiro’s The Tsugua Diaries, and Hanne Schelstraete argues that while Annette may be Leos Carax’s “first full-blooded musical,” it’s more “an accumulation of his long-lasting interest in theatricality and musicality. The musicality that, so far, had been repressed is now fully expressed.”

  • “Want eighty-seven minutes of something bright and beautiful with a cool kind of ‘hotness’?” asks Amy Taubin in Filmmaker. “Try Kimi, a minimalist thriller in which Steven Soderbergh’s camera and an electric-blue-haired Zoë Kravitz move in sync like two rare birds in flight.” Taubin is among the many getting a rejuvenating kick out of what the New York TimesManohla Dargis calls “a story of survival in the face of rational and irrational fears, those triggered by the pandemic but also by ordinary life. I haven’t felt so seen by a movie in ages, at least until the knives and guns come out.”

For news and items of interest throughout the day, every day, follow @CriterionDaily.

You have no items in your shopping cart