Festival Coverage : BERLINALE (2010)

The Berlin International Film Fest commenced on Feb 11 .The festival's opening film "Tuan Yuan" (Apart Together) was attended by the festival’s jury president Werner Herzog plus a starry guest list from across European and Asian cinema.The fest concluded on 21 February. Here are the list of winners in major categories......



1. Golden Bear for Best Film

" Honey "

Dir : Semih Kaplanoglu

Country:Turkey

Honey is the last installment of director Kaplanoglu's autobiographical "Yusuf Trilogy",The trilogy runs in reverse chronological order and Honey explores Yusuf's early childhood. In the remote and undeveloped eastern Black Sea region, a six-year-old boy (Yusuf) wanders through the woods searching for his lost father, trying to make sense of his life. His father is a beekeeper whose bees have disappeared unexpectedly, threatening his livelyhood.A bizarre accident kills the father.


2.Silver Bear - Grand Jury Prize

"If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle "

Dir : Florin Serban

Country : Romania

The film focuses on an incarcerated young man who finds himself in love with a Sociology student, Ana, working in the penitentiary as an intern.He takes her as a hostage shortly before he is to be released from the youth detention center.


3.Silver Bear for Best Director

Dir :Roman Polanski

Film: "The Ghost Writer "

Country :France


Synopsis:When a successful British ghostwriter, The Ghost, agrees to complete the memoirs of former British Prime Minister Adam Lang, his agent assures him it's the opportunity of a lifetime. But the project seems doomed from the start because his predecessor on the project, Lang's long-term aide, died in an unfortunate accident.a former .Also a British cabinet minister accuses Prime minister Lang of authorizing the illegal seizure of suspected terrorists and handing them over for torture by the CIA.As The Ghost works, he begins to uncover clues suggesting his predecessor may have stumbled on a dark secret linking Lang to the CIA—and that somehow this information is hidden in the manuscript he left behind.Based on Robert Harris Novel 'The Ghost'.


Trivia :

Director Polanski, who could not come participate in the awards ceremony for reasons by now known to all, sent an ironic message through one of his producers: "Even if I could come, I wouldn't. Because the last time I went to a festival to accept an award, I ended up in jail."
Earlier due to Polanski's arrest, the film's post-production was briefly put on hold, but he resumed work from house arrest at his Swiss villa.


4.Silver Bear for Best Screenplay

"Apart Together"

Dir : Wang Quan'an

Country : China

The film touches on the themes of autumnal romance, bittersweet memory and self-sacrifice. Ling Feng , a civil war veteran who fled to Taiwan after Mao’s Communist revolution half a century ago. Now a newly widowed pensioner, he returns to the mainland with a Taiwanese tourist group with a secret scheme to rekindle his youthful romance with Qiao Yu’e , his great lost love and the mother of the son he has never met. The low-key family drama that follows finds history repeating itself, more as farce than tragedy, with flashes of lyricism and dry humour. Set in an increasingly globalised and modernised Shanghai.


5.Silver Bear for Best Actor

Grigory Dobrygin

Film: "How I Ended This Summer "

Country :Russia

Synopsis :One place. One day. Two men. The place is a polar station on a remote island in the Arctic Ocean. A day up here in the far north lasts weeks, since the sun never sets during the summer at this high latitude. This used to be an important research station but, Sergei, an experienced meteorologist and Pavel, a high school graduate, are now the only inhabitants. Soon a ship will arrive to pick up the two men. For Sergei this will mean the end of a sojourn that has lasted several years. He is anxious about returning to his wife and child on the mainland. And then one day Pavel picks up a radio message that he daren’t communicate to Sergei. Pavel does everything he can to keep the message from Sergei, in the hope that the ship’s arrival will relieve him of this particular task. Fear, lies and suspicions start poisoning the atmosphere.....


6. Silver Bear for Best Actress

Koji Wakamatsu

Film : "Caterpillar"

Country :Japan

Synopsis :Durin the Second Sino-Japanese War, in 1940, Lieutenant Kurokawa returns home as a honoured and decorated soldier... but deprived of his arms and legs lost in battle in mainland All hopes, from the villagemen and women to close family members, turn to Shigeko, the Lieutenant's wife: she must honour the Emperor and the country in setting an example for all by fulfilling her duty and taking care of the 'god soldier'.But the war hero turns out to have been a wife-beater and rapist when wearing civilian clothes.


sources: Wikipedia,the guardian.

Monthly Review :The Double Life Of Veronique (1991)

HAVE YOU EVER felt like you have a double in the world? Have people seemed to recognize you, or have you ever lapsed into easy, intimate conversation with a stranger? How did that feel? How would you translate it to the screen? “The Double life of Veronique “presents this typically Kieslowski-an situation of parallel lives, allowing us to experience the elements of connection, chance and fate that direct our lives.




Synopsis:

Weronika, a sensual Polish choir girl with her head in the clouds and her feet in the wet puddles of Krakow. Weronika unsuccessfully explains to her father the feeling that she is not alone in the world. We later learn of Veronique, a French woman with uncanny parallels to Weronika. The two look identical and share (almost) unique personal mannerisms, yet are distinctly different. Their intuitive bond shapes them both, and leads Veronique to a deeper understanding of love and life.

Review:

The Double Life Of Veronique is a film about taking heed of the world around you as well as the messages that find their way to you through dreams & insights of spirit.The story begins in Poland, where we find the adolescent Veronika singing opera with her school choir. After getting caught in a rainstorm she goes home and makes love to her older boyfriend... so already we have themes of sex, music and the passage into womanhood, three very important factors that will resurface throughout the course of the film.

The film also explores how our lives are affected by more than we can ever understand and how we affect others the same way, it is a call for care for ourselves and our fellows. It creates a kind of continuity between the example of the life lived by Weronika and the changes that Veronique is motivated to make. This quality of continuity is emphasised through the use of circular images and reflections and we are often shown views of the world through windows or objects like a glass marble. The story itself delights in chance and mystical motivation, inserting images from Weronikas life into Veroniques dreams and using daring juxtaposition.

Though The Double Life of Véronique revels in the unexplained, it's never pretentiously obtuse. The master's touch that Krzysztof Kieslowski gives to the film is to invoke our power of intuition. He is an expert at showing us in a way that makes us feel the events rather than intellectualize them. The final shots of The Double Life of Véronique are only a couple of snatched, silent moments. It doesn't put the entire picture into a little box and hand it back to us, telling us everything that the story meant, but yet we somehow walk away with a full sense of those things anyway. It's an experience you never forget

Kieslowski summarised the message of his film to be "to live carefully".Attempting to define La Double Vie de Véronique down to any single understandable reading however is not recommended and probably impossible – and you should distrust anyone who attempts to provide a commentary to “explain” this film. This is not a film to be rationalised, but simply felt. Every single scene in Kieslowski’s films is designed to provoke a response in the viewer, but that response is not predefined or predetermined. The director knows there are as many ways to view the film as there are people to watch it and La Double Vie de Véronique consequently touches people in an indefinable and deeply personal way.

Shot half in Polish and half in French, Véronique occupies a unique position in Kieslowski’s career, straddling the director’s early Polish work, where in films like Blind Chance, No End and his groundbreaking Dekalog series, he explored various themes of chance, fate, freewill that draw people together and the social, moral and political circumstances that bind them together– and leading towards his later French work in the films of The Three Colours Trilogy, where he reworked many of those themes, refining his complex ideas and filmmaking techniques to a remarkable level of precision. In between those two periods of Kieslowski’s tragically brief filmmaking career lies La Double Vie de Véronique, and it sees the director at his most challenging, demonstrating the rigour and attention to detail that we would come to expect from his later films.


Irène Jacob is luminous in the picture. She and Kieslowski were amazing for each other. Just like other famous actor/director couplings like Gong Li &Zhang Yimou, Godard&Anna karanena ,Fellini&Giulietta Masina or even De Niro &Scorsese, they draw performances out of each other that no one else can get. As both versions of Véronique, Jacob manages to make them distinctive while giving the two women enough crossover to make it clear they are of the same spirit. It extends beyond the simple change of hairstyle or langauge. It's in how she emotes, how she carries herself.She has an uncanny openness and vulnerability to the camera. She's beautiful, but in a completely unconventional way, and she has such changeable features that our interest is never exhausted. What's remarkable about her performance is how quiet it is; as an actress, she seems to work almost off the decibel scale. And yet she is remarkably alive on screen, remarkably present. She's a rare combination -- a sexy yet soulful actress.


Photographed quite distinctively by Slawomir Idziak, Kieslowski’s DoP on A Short Film About Killing and Three Colours Blue (and subsequently on films as visually striking as Black Hawk Down), La Double Vie de Véronique has a beautifully composed and stylised look, dominated by golden glows and luminous greens in which red is the only colour that stands out.The use of yellow-green filters gives the film a unified air of mystery and spiritual warmth. Images are nothing without sound to complement them. Zbigniew Preisner's score can only be described as haunting. (Well, "mesmerising" works too I suppose.) If you don't love music, you will after th is. Describing music is even more futile than describing cinematography.

Conclusion:

The Double Life of Véronique is why I watch movies. It is once in a lifetime movie going experience. This is a film you must watch alone. Why alone? Perhaps this is odd to say but the loneliness that haunts this film is surprisingly comforting. Only Kieslowski, the magician knows what he intended for the viewer when he made this. For the true answer, go ahead and drift into the unique world that this film offers and allow yourself to be a part of CINEMA'S GREATEST LULLABY.


Title : La double vie de Véronique (1991)

Country :France / Poland

Language :French /Polish

Cast: Irène Jacob ,Aleksander Bardini,Philippe Volter ,Sandrine Dumas

Rated R for sexuality and nudity

DVD Features :Commentary by film scholar Annette Insdorf
Three short documentary films by Kieslowski
Interview with actress Irène Jacob ,cinematographer Slawomir Idziak ,composer Zbigniew Preisner
Documentary on Kieslowski

Trailer Link :www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihZ1TB9KzGQ

Torrent File Name:The Double Life of Veronique *1991* [DVDRip.XviD-FRAGMENT]

Review of the Month : THE WRESTLER (2009)

"I don't want to be alone ."
This is a hard truth for many of us when we find ourselves alone and facing the possibility of ending our days alone and broken. Nobody knows how much time we have left . That is one of the horrible uncertainties of life. And when faced with the prospect that our time has become painfully short, the fear of loneliness and the desire to be wanted becomes just as terrifying as the thought of dying. Anyway in my case,I don´t ever want to be alone. But if I am, I know there are times when I´ll be watching "The Wrestler".



synopsis :

Drama about an aging professional wrestler named Randy "The Ram" Robinson, decades past his prime, who now barely gets by working small wrestling shows and as a part-time grocery store employee. As he faces health problems that may end his wrestling career he attempts to come to terms with his life outside the ring by trying to reconcile with the daughter he abandoned in childhood and forming a closer bond with a stripper he has romantic feelings for.


Review :

The wrestling industry can launch soaring careers and it may destroy careers in a heartbeat. As a fan of the business, I would watch television shows as a kid, falling in love with the various characters on the card. You would see a new personality and tell all your friends that you wanted to get their merchandise gear like trump cards ,action figures... A few days, weeks, months, later that wrestler had disappeared from the broadcasts, without a single mention thenceforth from the commentators.When you are younger the only answer is that the wrestler had time off to heal injuries. Now, with this movie , i have finally understood some devastating truths.


Functioning primarily as a character study of a wrestler named Randy, the film that shows character's fall from glory into a truly pitiful state, his pumped up body steadily withering away, and his life reduced to solitary shambles, while still coasting by on his glory days from twenty years ago. Randy "The Ram" lives in the shadows of his once glorious wrestling career. He has no family ,save a daughter that hates him. He has no true friends .He has nothing but a van and constant struggles with landlords to keep from sleeping in it.The movie explores the harrowing outcome of what to do when the one thing a person knows how to do is no longer possible when their body gives out on them, and the pitiful search for scraps of meaning afterward.

The film's 2 other subplots try to divert our attention from the physical violence only to endure pain of a different sort, the kind in which the bleeding comes from the heart. One features a stripper and lap dancer named Cassidy who, in spite of Randy's persistence, refuses to treat
him as anything other than a paying customer. Trying to raise a nine-year old boy by herself, Cassidy is another example of someone who knows that she should quit but is forced by economic circumstances to go on.The other sub-plot revolves around Randy's estranged lesbian daughter Stephanie who is most unwelcome to Randy's overtures for reconciliation. Understandably bitter over her father's abandonment of the family when she needed him the most, Stephanie softens enough to go on an outing with her dad but any attempt at a new
beginning is squashed when Randy does not show up for a lunch date. Although the offense does not seem that grievous to us, given the extent of Stephanie's anger, if it wasn't this incident, it would probably have been another.

Another absorbing aspect of this powerhouse drama is the backstage nuance of low-rung pro-wrestling. In the dreary snow of New Jersey, Randy and his challengers make the rounds of dingy union halls, school gyms, community centers, using whatever they can find for makeshift dressing rooms, duct-taping their wounds, priming their pumps and agreeing minutes before a match on its script.The movie doesn't just deconstruct the mythical image of wrestlers' performances. It's clear that these guys are friends--they care about and respect each other. The film respects them and their world, and demands the same from the audience.

The Wrestler is without a doubt Darren Aronofosky's most straightforward films to date and proves that he is the talent to handle a wide range of genres and styles.With the wintry coastal New Jersey setting as his backdrop, director Aronofsky lets the drama unfold at a seductively leisurely pace, letting us get to know each of these characters and the rhythm of their lives in finely-drawn, intimate detail.Screenwriter Robert D. Siegel keeps the story spare and simple, not cluttering it up with fancy narrative flourishes or overblown melodramatics.One of The Wrestler's greatest assets is its camera-work . Fluid and almost documentary style, it also manages to be a commentary on theme and character. Often when Rourke is walking to a new location, the camera follows close behind, hand-held. This deliberately apes that oft-used shot of a fighter on the way to the ring.The fine title song by Bruce Springsteen must not be forgotten, either. After "Streets Of Philadelphia" and "Dead Man Walking" this is his third soundtrack contribution that captures the feel of a movie beautifully.

The Wrestler" wouldn't be half as good if Mickey Rourke hadn't given the main character a face and a heart. Rarely does an actor get the chance to inhabit a role quite as fully as Rourke does here. With his bulging muscles and greasy, long-flowing hair, Rourke brings an amazing physicality to the character, making us feel every ache, pain and body blow the man suffers, both inside the arena and out, as he hauls his massive, badly bruised carcass through life.With Rourke it's not so much an actor memorizing lines and delivering them convincingly, it's like watching a guy having gone through hell and now showing his scars. One look at his face reminds us of all the hits and punches he must have taken in the past.Marisa Tomei brings a touch of understanding to her role, that of a stripper with a heart. It's been done many a time before but there's a grace to this performance that makes an impression, the way it complements Rourke's interest in her.Evan Rachel Wood is also devastatingly believable as Randy's cast away daughter, with Wood providing an achingly wounded soul underneath her character's mask of indignant fury towards her father.

How to conclude ;

There has been a lot of discussion about the conclusion of "The Wrestler." Some people are quite bitter and put off by the abrupt manner in which Aronofsky ends his film. Does Randy live ? Does he die? What happens to Randy? There is no closure to the ending and many people simply cannot grasp the beauty of this ending.To understand the ending ,look inside yourself and think about your own mortality. Ponder whether or not you would want to be alone and broken or if it would be better to absolutely love your last moments on Earth? Do you want to die alone or die happy? How do you want to go out?.....That will be your own conclusion of this movie.


Title : The wrestler

Director : Darren Aronofsky

Cast : Mickey Rourke , Marisa Tomei , Evan Rachel Wood

Rated R for sexuality , violence ,drug use

Country :USA

Language :English

DvD Features :Behind-the-Scenes Documentary and Bruce Springsteen Music Video

Trailer Link :www.youtube.com/watch?v=61-GFxjTyV0

Torrent File Name :The Wrestler ((2008)) DvDrip(divx)BigbrO