Berlin Festival Part Two

Geoff Andrew reports on an intriguing re-working of Romeo and Juliet and a sexually explicit effort from Tsai Ming-Liang.

Feb 16 2005

As the Berlin Film Festival continues, it's fair to say that while the overall standard of movies is middling-to-good, there have been no absolute stand-outs, although at least the unusually explicit depiction of sexual activity in Tsai Ming-Liang's 'The Wayward Cloud' – something of a follow-up to the Taiwanese auteur's 'What Time Is It There?' is raising a few eyebrows.

Your writer has yet to see the movie – which reportedly makes big with music and watermelons – but he's looking forward to something which should at least be more unusual than most of the relatively conventional fare he's seen in the last couple of days.

Not that there haven't been ambitious or exciting movies here in Berlin. With 'Stranger', for example, Poland's Malgorzata Szumowska has come up with something truly fresh for the follow-up to her excellent debut, 'Happy Man': a visually ravishing, dramatically freewheeling study of a young woman whose response to a surprise pregnancy veers between despair and elation.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, there's cool, cerebral pleasure to be had from 'Ghosts', by Germany's upcoming Christian Petzold. Also concerned with parenthood and the travails of early adulthood, it's stark, minimalist, intentionally unyielding narrative is perhaps a little too clever for its own good, though many were impressed by the performances and the elegant cinematography.

Disappintments include Yoji Yamada's 'The Hidden Blade' – virtually a carbon-copy of his 'The Twilight Samurai', which confirms he can be seen as the Merchant-Ivory of martial arts movies – and Alain Corneau's 'Words in Blue', a drama about the encounter between a specialist teacher of deaf children and the mother of one of his pupils which boasts an implausibly wayward script, a singing mynah bird, yet another lovely performance from the great Sergi Lopez, and some agreeably tacky French pop from yesteryear.

At least Corneau uses music more intelligently and sparingly than Dominic Savage, who plasters his feature debut, 'Love + Hate' with wet pop from beginning to end. Sad, really, because this follow-up to 'Out of Control' is otherwise a pretty decent reworking of the Romeo and Juliet story, with racial tensions between whites and Pakistani Brits coming to the boil as young folk in a northern town explore their most fundamental emotional drives.

Again the performances are mostly very fine, though the script does occasionally give off a whiff of dramatic contrivance. Still, Savage shows himself another young British talent to keep an eye on.