Berlin Film Festival part one

Geoff Andrew takes in screenings of 'V For Vendetta' and 'A Prairie Home Companion'.

Feb 14 2006

Hot-tailing it to the Berlin Film Festival from last week's Kiarostami-Erice gig in Barcelona (more on that here) by way of a brief stopover in London, this writer was very pleased at Heathrow to bump into and have a chat with Robert Altman, who was travelling on the same plane (together with Woody Harrelson) to attend the premiere and press conference for his latest film 'A Prairie Home Companion'.

The director too was having to squeeze his visit in to a busy schedule, given that he's currently rehearsing his version of Arthur Miller's 'Resurrection Blues', soon to open at the Old Vic, and will also have to head over to LA for the Oscars, where he will receive an honorary lifetime achievement award.

Time Out, of course, had beaten the Academy hands-down by celebrating Altman's 80th birthday last spring, but we can only applaud the organisation's belated but otherwise wholly justified acknowledgement of the extraordinary body of work Altman has built up over the years.

And thankfully, 'A Prairie Home Companion' does nothing to diminish his achievement. As ever, there has inevitably been some carping from the press, but others, including this writer, find this latest movie entirely wonderful. I arrived too late in Berlin to attend the press screening, and there were no tickets left for the official premiere screening, but I did manage to get into the first screening attended by the public, who responded to the movie with huge enthusiasm, much laughter, and very lengthy applause.

It's one of Altman's largely plotless ensemble pieces, written by and starring Garrison Keillor and depicting a (fictional) last night in the famous series of live-variety radio shows he's been hosting in a theatre in St Paul, Minnesota, for well over three decades. Some of what we see is the performance for the audience, some of it backstage action, and there's a sort of narrative framing device involving a clumsy private eye (Kevin Kline) and a mysterious woman in white (Virginia Madsen).

But most of it's just banter and songs, played to perfection by the likes of Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin, Harrelson, John C Reilly, and Keillor himself. It's funny, affectionate, touching, lively, jam-packed with distant but fascinating echoes of Altman's work, and – most movingly – imbued with a slightly melancholy but sweetly accepting attitude towards death. 'The death of an old man is not a tragedy,' insists one character, and you get the feeling that Altman is not merely giving us a gloriously positive 'the show, like life, must go on' take on the disappearance of a once hallowed and very popular form of entertainment, but making a gentle admission that, for all his very evident and undiminished creative vigour, he is finally entering upon what may be called 'old age'.

'Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,' seems to be his particular take on things – and I for one am happy to take advice from someone still, in his ninth decade, able to make movies as enjoyable, intelligent and devil-may-care about mainstream expectations as this quiet marvel.

The same, sadly, cannot be said for 'V for Vendetta', by James McTeigue, a former assistant to George Lucas, Alex Proyas and the Wachowski Brothers, who wrote the script for this dumb adaptation of Alan Moore's graphic novel. It's perhaps hardly surprising that Moore's name is nowhere to be found on the credits, since the dialogue for this tale of a Guy Fawkes-inspired superhero taking on the totalitarian forces of a Britain some time not too far into the future, is laughably clunky: to paraphrase one character, the Wachowski's have really 'bollocksed it up'.

But it's not merely the script that's to blame; the acting – Natalie Portman, Stephen Rea, Stephen Fry, John Hurt, Sinead Cusack, et al – also suggests that few of the older performers involved took the film very seriously (why would they when its political allegory, pitched somewhere between '1984' and 'The Phantom of the Opera', is so naive and simplistic?), with the result that most of them remain as inexpressive of genuine emotion and thought as the mask Hugo Weaving's vengeful terrorist hero wears throughout.

Teenage boys might get off on Portman, the pretensions to political sophistication and the gratuitous bloodletting, and might not notice absurdities of visual rhetoric like the massive screen blaring out the High Chancellor's repressive ideology to Piccadilly Circus at night – entirely empty of people, as it happens, as of course there's a curfew – but others are unlikely to be so easily taken in by such bombastic nonsense.

And as for the flashbacks to a lesbian love story that seems to have occurred entirely within a place inspired by shampoo commercials, even the most devout fanboys might find their suspension of disbelief taxed a little. Heaven knows how this particular movie made it into competition.

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