Berlin Report Part One

Intrepid reporter Geoff Andrew speaks with 'The Motorcycle Diaries' director Walter Salles and also manages to catch two cinematic gems.

Feb 15 2005

The Berlin Film Festival may not have got off to an auspicious start for those who were at the opening gala – Régis Wargnier's 'Man to Man', which in apparently unanimous opinion was execrable even by the already legendarily dismal standards of opening films – but for Time Out, turning up on Sunday, things looked bright even before we got on the plane at Heathrow.

There in the check-in queue we touched based with Walter Salles, tired but happy the day after his BAFTA triumphs for 'The Motorcycle Diaries'.

I had the good fortune to have my first dinner in Berlin with Salles – who had also won the prize for best foreign-language film at the London Critics' Circle Awards a couple of nights earlier, and who is visiting the Berlinale as one of the leaders of the Talent Campus – and he was able to confirm that, when the publicity grind for 'Diaries' finally wraps in a couple of months, his next film will be a rather less epic effort, about a group of soccer-mad kids in the favelas.

The first couple of movies this writer caught in Berlin were winners, too. 'Tickets', a portmanteau film directed by Ermanno Olmi, Abbas Kiarostami and Ken Loach, charts the fortunes of various characters travelling on a train from northern Italy to Rome.

Despite misgivings about the uneven quality of most such projects, it's actually far better than the vast majority of compilations, and even succeeds as a feature of sorts.

The Olmi is an old-fashioned but affecting little study of the effects of age upon desire; the Kiarostami – the most consistently imaginative of the three – is a typically quizzical comedy-mystery about a young man and a domineering elderly woman, which muses obliquely on memory, love, truth and falsehood; and the Loach is a mostly very funny, sometimes poignant look at an encounter between three Celtic fans and Albanian migrants. Not major, by any means, but full of pleasures.

'Paradise Now', by Hany Ab-Assad, the upcoming Palestinian already noted for 'Rana's Wedding', is a more stirring experience, a suspenseful drama charting what looks set to be the last 24 hours in the lives of two young guys who agree to become Tel Aviv suicide bombers.

It's a well-acted, well-balanced affair, surprisingly comic at times, and suffers only from bouts of over-extended cross-cutting in the solidly linear narrative.

It's obviously a very timely film, too, so it's likely to turn up in the UK. And it raised temperatures sufficiently to counteract the effects of the Berlin snow.

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