Berlin Film Festival part two

Geoff Andrew passes comment on Michael Winterbottom's controversial new feature 'The Road to Guantanamo'.

Feb 15 2006

Now over halfway through, Berlin is proving to be a festival of few surprises, still fewer masterpieces – none to date, actually – but quite enough good movies to be going on with, thank you.

Since Robert Altman's lovely 'A Prairie Home Companion' (see previous report here), this writer has managed to catch a very engagingly droll comedy-drama from Korea ('Host & Guest'); a fascinating, moving if somewhat over-extended Japanese documentary about an expat family still deeply devoted to North Korea
('Dear Pyongyang'); a risibly pretentious Argentinian film ('La Prisoniera'); Pen-ek Ratanaruang's very disappointing follow-up to 'Last Life in the Universe', 'Invisible Waves'; and Michael Winterbottom's 'The Road to Guantanamo', a worthy, ultimately affecting but often surprisingly flat account of how the Tipton Three came to end up in the US prison camp.

The film mixes straight-to-camera talking-heads accounts from the men concerned, bits of TV newsreel footage, and dramatic scenes recreating events as related by the three. Inevitably it's a stirring tale that amply demonstrates the brutally inhumane form of incarceration being perpetrated by the Americans, and it's impossible not to be impressed by the trio's apparent determination to make the best of their terrible experience and move on.

At the same time, however, it must be said that much of the docudrama material is as shapeless and dramatically uninvolving as the kind of stuff seen daily on TV current affairs programmes, while the fact that Winterbottom simply presents the story as told by the three men, and apparently expects us to accept it as the truth, tends to lend the movie more than a whiff of facile propaganda.

More adventurous and more satisfying was 'It's Winter', by Rafi Pitts, an Iranian who was raised and educated in Britain before embarking on a film career in France. This, his third feature, is a striking blend of raw realism and poetic lyricism, charting the determination of a faintly irresponsible young mechanic to win the heart of an attractive young woman whose husband has gone abroad in search of work but failed to return.

At times the film looks as if it's about to turn into an Iranian village version of 'The Postman Always Rings Twice', but the movie is more concerned with the effects of poverty, unemployment, rootlessness, shame and commitment than with the deadly consequences of sexual desire.

It looks a dream, features some quite stunning music, and displays a quiet but bold directorial assurance that's been in short supply in the festival.

Still, that quality was certainly to be found in 'Longing', which along with the Altman currently stands as by far the finest film I've yet seen in Berlin this year.

The first full-length feature by Valeska Grisebach (whose likewise impressive hour-long graduation film 'Be My Star' played for a couple of weeks three years ago at the NFT), it centres on a very happily married fireman living in a quiet German farming village. When he goes away with his colleagues for a training weekend, he gets drunk and wakes up the next morning in the bed of a waitress, setting in motion a series of small but inevitably painful deceits and betrayals that end up having unexpectedly serious consequences.

The movie has a subtle but beautifully direct naturalism that imbues the film with an absolute authenticity in its observations both of social behaviour and of inner psychological and emotional upheaval. Nothing is overstated or made explicit, but everything is wonderfully lucid.

The performances are superb, and Grisebach exhibits the sort of intuitive precision which means that even a shot of a character's back speaks volumes about what they are thinking and feeling. Superb stuff; let's hope it finds UK distribution.

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