Berlin International Film Festival 2023

Part 1: The Good, the Bad and the Meh

The Bad

Bad Living (Mal Viver)

Directed by João Canijo, Portugal 2023

The opening scene of Mal Viver tells you everything you have to know about this dreary movie.

It is a cold overcast morning at a hotel pool; in a static wide shot from the bird’s eye view we’re introduced to two of the main characters. Angela (Vera Barreto), the good-natured cook and odd-job woman at the hotel, is cleaning the pool, while chipperly humming a tune. Meanwhile Piedade, the oldest daughter and our main point-of-view character (Anabela Moreir), is lying on a lounger, after an early swim, while cradling and talking to her dog.

Several other chattering figures enter the static shot and Angela joins the group, hugging one of them. We zoom in on the group and meet Sara (Rita Blanco), the stern (and as we later find out highly abusive) matriarch and owner of the family hotel, in which the entire movie will be taking place, Salome (Madalena Almeida), Piedade’s estranged daughter, who, up until now, lived with her father in Lisbon and was invited to the hotel by Sara, and lastly Raquel (Cleia Almeida), the youngest daughter and perpetual people-pleaser.

Piedade, stands up and stiffly walks over to her family. Her eyes wide, looking as though she is about to start crying, she awkwardly hugs Salome, without releasing her dog and then walks away saying “I don’t like surprises”. Salome looks after her on the verge of crying herself: “Will this dog never die?” – “It did. She got a new one.”

If you’ve guessed that the lighting will remain as bleak as this misty morning, you’ve guessed correctly. If you’ve also guessed that the relationships in this movie are as cold as the awkward hug Piedade gave Salome, you’re also correct. In the course of roughly two hours, we will witness Piedade being abused by everyone but her beloved dog (her relationship with the dog is the only loving relationship in the movie) and a family that forgot how to talk to each other normally a long time ago. Every conversation in this movie devolves into accusations of abuse, physical and mental, and then into subsequent gas-lighting. It will go on for so long that, I promise, you’ll be relieved that someone dies at the end. Death being the only feasible escape from this hellish place (and viewing experience).

Although the themes of the movie are unbearably bleak, I have good things to say about the direction and cinematography. As the movie progresses to its inevitable conclusion, the director masterfully tightens the shots, from the relatively loose wide angles at the beginning to ever more uncomfortable close-ups and weird angles, which isolate the characters from each other, even if they appear together in one scene. This gives the movie a noose-like tension and, despite its lofty interiors, a chamber play feel. This tension also never releases, as the movie closes on a midrange low angle shot, suffocating the audience while credits roll. A beautifully shot and paced, but highly uncomfortable experience.

Mal Viver fully lives up to its name, as all of the people on-screen and off are miserable during this torturous bleak film. I can’t recommend this to anyone, but if you’re a HUGE fan of tight chamber-plays and family melodramas (or female suffering), give it a try.

Bonus Content: Mal Viver’s companion piece Living Bad (Viver Mal) (João Canijo) is a carbon copy of the former, but without the tight pacing and cinematography. Split into three separate stories, starring the guests of the hotel, it tells the same story over and over again (same abusive mother figure, same abused children and their long-suffering partners), relentlessly torturing all of the characters, while the torturing of Mal Viver goes on in the background. As it lacks the tight direction of its sister, Viver Mal turns out to be a loose mess of horribleness. It’s terrible, don’t watch it.

Ugh, even the poster sucks!

The Meh

All The Colors of The World are Between Black and White

Directed by Babatunde Apalowo, Nigeria 2023

All The Colors is a queer coming out story set in Lagos, the biggest and most important city in Nigeria.

Bambino (Tope Tedela) is a gentle soul, who is always happy to help and never asks anything in return. As a delivery driver, he frequently explores the city on his scooter, before going home and having the same humble meal every day at the same food stand. Due to his good nature, he is always on the verge of being exploited – by his boss, by a woman that behaves like his girlfriend, although he has no interest in her, and other random people who solicit money from him.

At one of his delivery spots, he meets Bawa (Riyo David), an assertive young man, who, despite being relatively well off, with his own betting shop, dreams of being a photographer. Bawa immediately takes a shine to Bambino and starts photographing him, which makes Bambino uncomfortable, but he, being soft-spoken as he is, doesn’t object. The next day, when Bawa delivers the photos, he asks Bambino to show him the city, as, due to his job, he knows it better than anyone. They start to bond, and a relationship that could go the exploitative route, as a lot of Bambino’s other relationships did, instead turns into a tender friendship and then much more.

Bawa photographing Bambino, while caring for him after the latter was beaten. By the way, he never (ever) asks for consent, when photographing him.

The visuals and soundtrack of the movie are heavily inspired by Italian cinema, specifically by “pink neorealism”, the successor to Italian neorealism, which was, like All the Colors, sporting a yellow-ish sun-soaked image and sweeping romantic music juxtaposed with a bleak post-war partially destroyed or otherwise trashy environments as a backdrop. Thematically, “pink neorealism” movies had a slightly lighter tone than neorealism, highlighting social issues like class disparity as well as personal tragedies like unhappy marriages and love in general.

And so, the city of Lagos is shown from all its angles, flattering and unflattering, while Bambino and Bawa fall in love, to epic music, while riding a vespa-esque scooter.

Throughout the movie, we’re confronted with the unfeeling society the two men find themselves in, as Bambino watches people getting mugged or beaten on the street several times, as the camera rests on his calm face, watching, but never intervening. His transformation and acceptance of himself and his sexual identity within this society, as well as his attempts to leave the safety of the invisibility he built for himself with his soft and unassuming demeanor, are at the core of the movie.

Although the movie is a compelling exploration of identity and sexuality in a hostile environment, it failed to grab me. For me it turned out to be a mediocre coming out story, bogged down by a brutal “will they – won’t they” dynamic and a repetitive back and forth, as Bambino tries and fails to crawl out of his shell time and time again, until it culminates in a very uncomfortable, borderline intrusive scene at the end.  

However, I’m aware that I’m looking at it from the perspective of a European cis white lady, so I wholeheartedly admit that I might not the right audience for this movie. Therefore, I would still recommend it if you’re in the mood for sweeping visuals and (very) soapy melodrama.

The Shadowless Tower (Bai Ta Zhi Guang)

Directed by Zhang Lu, People’s Republic of China 2022

Gu Wentong (Xin Baiqing), a morose middle-aged food critic, is in full-on mid-life crisis. Having been divorced for a long time and only seeing his daughter sporadically, because she lives with his sister and her husband, he drinks and smokes his loneliness away as he goes through the motions of life. This all changes when his brother-in-law slips him a note with the number of his estranged father, whom Wentong hasn’t seen since his mother threw him out for, allegedly, groping a woman on the bus. To prevent bringing public shame on the family, Wentong’s father Gu Yunlai (Tian Zhuangzhuang) never contacted his children ever again, even after the charges were long forgotten.

Hello darkness my old friend……

With this number and a new flirtation with his much younger colleague Ouyang Wenhui (Huang Yao) on his mind, Wentong now has to face his middle age, his inability to look forward, and the fact that he might be turning into his father, who left his family and stayed away even after their mother died, held back by his politeness and understanding of social norms.

This movie is beautifully shot and supremely paced. Every moment of Wentong’s journey is plotted like a quest for self-discovery, with certain objectives to be overcome, in order to progress to the next level. Younger girlfriend (check), better relationship with family (check), closure with ex-wife (check). This feeling of immense control is highly satisfying to experience, I admit.

Unfortunately, the movie failed to engage me otherwise. The relationship between Wentong and Ouyang Wenhui is very surface-level and feels gross at times, as he energizes his own inert life with her youthful energy, only for her to get unceremoniously dropped from the movie once she’s served her purpose for the quest. And, indeed, every character feels like an NPC, forgotten or dropped as soon as their role in Wentong’s epic midlife-crisis adventure is done.

In the end, he sits alone, smoking, having learned that relationships are good actually and that he will become his father in the near future.

If you like coming into old age stories and are out of satisfying compilation videos on Facebook (IYKYK), give this film a shot.

Remembering Every Night (Subete No Yoru wo Omoidase)

Directed by Yui Kiyohara, Japan 2022

This movie is best described as a sound- and landscape film. In Tama New Town, a dull residential area built in the 1960-s, three women traverse its monotone architecture with its never-ending green spaces and alternating uniform housing units, in search for some kind of human connection.

While the oldest (Kumi Hyodo) tries to find a friend who moved there, the youngest (Ai Mikami) dances in the park to rekindle a memory of a high school friend, who killed himself when they were teenagers. The first scenes of the movie feature the oldest lady, who, after a trip to the unemployment center, decides to make a detour into Tama New Town. While she tries to help some children to retrieve a ball stuck in a tree, we switch POVs to continue with a new character (Minami Oba), whose job it is to wander the housing units and to read and report the status of the power meters. And so, the point of view changes from woman to woman as they go about their daily goals.   

Slow cinema has always fascinated me. The shots that linger far too long on a presumably uninteresting scene and the weird music or even the complete lack of a soundtrack, instead opting for a soundscape of quotidian sounds are staples of the genre; but it’s biggest staple and what it does exceedingly well is the overt hands-on approach to time. Making the audience acutely aware of time passing in a movie, making it go slower or faster or even move laterally, makes for  a different viewing experience than conventional cinema, as the you’re not supposed to notice time manipulation in say an action movie or a romcom, except it’s a montage of some kind.

So, depending on what the director wants you to sit in for an uncomfortable amount of time, there are different flavors of slow cinema. Here Yui Kiyohara opted for the vibe of the first sunny day in months, where it’s absolutely fine to walk instead of taking the bus, and even to smile at strangers once in a while. A day where everything seems to be in flowing languid motion and rigid routines are unimportant.

So, why is this movie in the “meh” pile? As slow movies go, this one doesn’t come together quite as satisfyingly as other examples of its brethren, one of which will be in my Top 3 (Part 2 of this Berlinale write-up). Although the soundtrack, mostly consisting of weird bing-bong and phwoot noises, amazingly fits the atmosphere described above, I still couldn’t completely vibe with the movie; mostly because it was just too long. As soon as the atmosphere settled in, there was nothing more to look out for, and so, at some point, what began as a relaxing spa-day experience became a chore to watch.

If you like slow cinema, though. Check it out, maybe it’ll pass the vibe check for you.

Superpower

Directed by Sean Penn, Aaron Kaufman, USA 2023

Sean Penn (left) during his first interview with Volodymyr Zelenskyy (right) on the night of the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022.

Superpower tells the story of a coincidence of historic proportions. Actor and director Sean Penn and his co-director Aaron Kaufman attempt to make a funny little documentary about how and why the actor and comedian Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected president of Ukraine, a country they know very little about. After their first visit to Ukraine they learn about its history and the 2014 Maidan Revolution, which led to the ousting of the elected corrupt president Victor Yanukovych and the beginning of the Russo-Ukranian war, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Taken aback by the Ukranian people’s fight for freedom, the triumph of democracy and the high cost of achieving it, Penn and Kaufmann arrange for a second visit, this time to interview Zelenskyy himself. Staying at a hotel in Kyiv, the night before the interview, they find themselves in the midst of the Russian incursion into Ukraine on February 24th 2022.

From then on the movie turns into a diary of the war, from Penn’s and Kaufman’s perspective. They decide not to cancel the interview and meet Zelenskyy the same night, as the first missiles strike Kyiv, and are highly impressed (almost enamored) by his resolve. After a somewhat risky journey out of Ukraine, they immediately start an information campaign about the country, its people and the war back in the US, by giving interviews and going on any television show that will have them.

Superpower is a fascinating time capsule and important piece of media from the beginning of the war, and it can be used as educational material for people who know next to nothing about Ukraine or the war. The Western, especially, American point of view on the matter might even make it more palatable for Western audiences, with Sean Penn, a weathered authority figure, as their guide.

However, his emotionality and reverence for Zelenskyy put me off, as he is clearly not an expert on geopolitics and sometimes says some exceedingly dumb stuff.

Nevertheless, I would absolutely recommend the movie, if you want to know what’s going on in Ukraine and/or want to help.

The Good

In Water (mul-an-e-seo)

Directed by Hong Sang-soo, South Korea 2023

Seoung-mo (Shin Seok-ho), a first time director, travels to Jeju Island, a popular vacation spot, with Nam-hee (Kim Seung-yun), an actress, and Sang-guk (Ha Seong-guk), a DP, to scout for locations for his movie. They rent a seaside apartment, where they eat pizza and any other cheap snacks that they can afford and talk about moviemaking, acting and the potential to make money or at least earn some kind of recognition with both.

From left to right: Nam-hee (actress), Sang-guk (DP), Seoung-mo (director)

At the beach they observe the tourists laughing and eating, and generally doing touristy things, in hopes of getting an idea for the movie, as it seems that the director came to Jeju without a script. He sees a local woman collecting trash at the beach, and finally gets inspired. Then they make the movie. The end.

Hong Sang-soo is one of the weirdest auteurs working in modern cinema today, and this film is certainly no exception. Shot entirely out of focus, with various degrees of picture clarity, this movie tells a visual story of a search for meaning in the brutal world of movie-making and the experience of working in a medium which people use for recreation. How much is good cinematography worth, if more and more of the audience watches movies on a tiny screen, as a background to various household chores? How much of yourself are you willing to sacrifice as a director or actor?

All these questions are asked, but not answered in In Water, which instead shows us a blurry image of a sun-soaked island and a woman collecting inordinate amounts of trash left behind by hordes of faceless tourists. Do with that what you will.

In Water is a magical little moment, suspended in time and space. It doesn’t demand anything from you, not even an analysis, beyond what you’re seeing on-screen. A weird little movie, from a director I came to adore. Just watch it and let yourself be adrift in it’s cinematic landscape.

Suzume

Directed by Makoto Shinkai, Japan 2022

The movie starts, as many animes, with our 16-year-old heroine Suzume (Hanoka Hara) having a recurring dream of a mysterious door and a starry world beyond, where she sees her child-self roaming a bleak winter landscape calling for her mother.

After waking up, she dons the iconic school girl uniform, exchanges some snarky dialogue with her aunt and cycles to school. On her way, a man (Hokuto Matsumura) stops her to ask for directions to the nearest ruins. She points him to an abandoned leisure village nearby and resumes her way to school, but soon can’t help herself and turns around to follow him, partly because she finds him very attractive and partly because she felt a weird connection during their brief encounter.

She doesn’t find the hot guy at the ruins, unfortunately, but to her astonishment encounters a familiar door in the middle of a room with nothing attached to it. When opened, it reveals the same starry sky, she saw in her dreams, but when she attempts to enter it nothing happens; and after some more supernatural (cat-related) shenanigans, she flees the village and goes to school.

At school, she tries to communicate what’s happened to her classmates, when she sees a terrifying red pillar of smoke emanating from the ruins she just visited and has sent the stranger to. Alarmed, she points at, but no one else seems to see it, and as soon as her phone goes off with an earthquake warning for her region, she knows one thing: whatever she did at the door must have caused this. With the earthquake getting worse around her, she rushes to the village, and thus begins her foray into adulthood and world-saving.

Suzume tells a coming-of-age story in the midst of a buddy road trip to save the world from a cataclysmic earth-shattering event. We follow Suzume and her companion Sōta (the hot guy from before), as they travel Japan, get to know and learn to trust all manner of people, and, of course, slowly fall in love. Pretty much all of the relationships in this movie are heart-warming and very cute, and this also goes for the budding relationship between Suzume and Sōta.

I was quite bummed that they made it a love story, though, as they had excellent friendship vibes going on, and this decision takes the story into the “creepy older guy taking advantage of a school girl” territory. This is typical for animes, but could’ve been easily avoided, if Shinkai’d kept it platonic. This is my only gripe with the movie, however, and it didn’t dampen my enjoyment of it too much.

The visuals are stunning, especially the large apocalyptic set pieces and the voice acting was on point. All in all, a very enjoyable experience about getting older, opening yourself up to other people and (most importantly) cats.

A definite recommend on my part.

Kill Boksoon

Directed by Byung Sung-hyun, South Korea 2023

The second (much more enjoyable) mid-life crisis story on this list stars Gil Bok-soon also known as Kill Boksoon (Jeon Do-yeon), an internationally renowned killer for hire and a suffering single mother to Jae-yeong (Kim Si-a), her surly and secretive teenage daughter. With her daughter turning seventeen, Bok-soon feels her age slowly descending upon her – making her question how long she can continue her physically and mentally taxing job, as well as how long she can continue to lie to her daughter, which makes their relationship actively worse. After a particularly showy and celebrated kill, and with the day of her contract extension coming up, Bok-soon decides to retire and finally make amends with her daughter.

With just a couple days to retirement left, her boss Cha Min-kyu (Sol Kyung-gu), the CEO of MK. ENT., the assassination agency that corporatized killing for hire in Korea, sends her on her last assignment, which he seems to understand she’ll have difficulties fulfilling. He has been infatuated with her since he hired her at 17-years-old, and he wants to keep his best assassin at the company but, more importantly, Bok-soon by his side. As he expected, she fails, which sets in motion a string of events where she eventually can’t outrun the question of who she is and who she wants to be in the future.

Min-kyu and Bok-soon having a nice calming tea party.

First of all, Kill Boksoon is just fun to watch if you’re into bloody highly stylized action flicks, and it came at a time when I was already weary of watching self-effacing suffering (or worse) on screen.

The story is very simple, and the underlying mother-daughter relationship is very similar to the one we’ve seen in Everything Everywhere All At Once, down to the plot beat of Jae-yeong at some point revealing to her mother that she’s gay and Bok-soon reacting poorly to it. Nonetheless, the storyline is well executed and quite believable as the emotional core of the otherwise bloody action movie going on around it.

The action is fast-paced, and the stunt-work paired with the cinematography is creative and dynamic. But what got me personally was the genuine fun Bok-soon had while slashing and dicing her way to the top. She seemed genuinely inspired by her work, and almost every bloody murder scene showed her smiling while jumping around and slashing throats left and right – we stan a queen who loves her job.

The most unsettling thing about Kill Boksoon, however, and also why I liked the movie so much, is that the movie doesn’t condemn killing as a profession. At no point, except one brief moment, does Bok-soon regret being what she is, and instead tries to focus on important things like being a good mother, despite being a fallible human being. By leaving out the hand-wringing and the bad conscience, we’re left with a peculiar film that bends the rules of the genre just a little to achieve an interesting and disquieting outcome that construcs a narrative in which killing (for hire or not) is good actually, as long as you’re being true to yourself.

Kill Boksoon is fun and just weird enough to warrant a watch (or three).

The Fabelmans

Directed by Steven Spielberg, USA 2022

Despite the names and some of the events being changed for cinematic effect, The Fabelmans is for all intents and purposes an autobiography, in which Steven Spielberg recounts his formative years from the age of 6 into young adulthood.

We open with the eponymous Fabelmans, Mitzi (Michelle Williams), Burt (Paul Dano) and little Sammy (Mateo Zorian), on their way to Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show. Sammy is understandably nervous and afraid of the huge people on screen, but is soon sucked in to the movie and especially into an action sequence containing a train barreling into a car at full speed.

Little Stevie Sammy with parents Burt and Mitzi at the movies.

At this moment the movie diverges into two layers of perception: The reality that adults perceive (the aforementioned collision being achieved by switching to a toy train ramming a toy car) and a child’s perspective (Sammy being afraid and stunned by the very real collision he just witnessed). This dichotomy of perception will be an important device, until a pivotal moment later in the movie, in which they’ll converge again.

At home, Sammy is so stunned by the movie that he soon wishes for an electric toy train for Hanukkah, specifically that he can crash it into his toy cars as many times as he wants. Burt, however, ever the pragmatic scientist, forbids Sammy from playing with the train until he can learn to take responsibility for expensive things. Mitzi notices how much distress the collision on-screen has caused her son and proposes he film one crash, so that he can watch it over and over again, without damaging his new toy. Sammy agrees and, when he gets the developed reel, rushes to his room to watch what he’s created with his mom. They’re both mesmerized by what Sammy’s created, and this clumsy little home movie is what, according to Spielberg, launches his titanic movie-making career. Quite romantic.

I must admit the actor playing Sammy creeped me out … a LOT!

When we meet up with teenage Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle), he’s still in love with movie-making and films everything in his wake. He makes movies with his friends and shows them at their boy scout meetings, he films family gatherings and trips, and he obviously wants to make movies when he grows up, despite his father not taking this desire seriously. Indeed Sammy doesn’t have any other hobbies or interests in life, except filming, directing and editing his movies. And so, while editing a recent family camping trip, he discovers a family secret, which was obvious for the adult viewer from the beginning of the movie, but becomes painfully clear to him at 16 years old, welcoming him into adulthood.

This discovery starts the second part of the movie, which feels grittier and more real than the first one, which mostly contained happy childhood memories, with the adults confined to incomprehensible, but benevolent loving beings.

The Fabelmans is a great movie and one of the best Spielberg has made in the last decade and it’s an extraordinary autobiography. A living legend telling us the myth of his creation. A distant myth veiled in perpetual fog of memory, through which characters are sometimes allowed to poke through, before being swallowed up again. Due to this very personal and myopic framework, every scene feels like an actual memory, sometimes unreliable and changed over time to fit into a personal narrative. His sisters, for example, are but a glimpse on Sammy’s radar, and so we only sporadically see them aiding him in his moviemaking, sitting silently in the background or distraught over the inevitable family tragedy that occurs near the end of the movie. The same goes for Mitzi and Burt, who also don’t really feel like real people, but rather faint memories, imbued with adult regrets and “couldhavebeens”. This is brilliantly executed and feels so very human – we forget, we erase or change our memories, but all of us can make a hell of a story out of those we choose to remember.

A beautifully shot and scored movie about the very human habit to make a narrative out of our own lives. A definite recommend from me.