Berlinale Diary 2: Love's a bitch

[I began this days ago, but haven't found the time to give it a proper edit. NB: Prose might be even clunkier than usual.] Day four of the festival, and though I've yet to see anything truly outstanding, fortunately nothing has been outright awful. Well, maybe the Doillon film. At the moment I'm sitting in the Cinemaxx cafe, the sole location for free WiFi, though it's flaky at best. To my immediate left sits David Hudson, diligently working on a GreenCine post, as we await a screening of Wonderful Town, the Thai post-tsunami drama that was this year's winner at Rotterdam. Longer reviews will have to wait until the fest is over, but here are some brief comments on several films, all of which are centered around problematic relationships. Most of the European critics came down pretty hard on Petri Kotwica's Black Ice, a film in competition from Finland, but I found this deliciously dark drama about dangerous deceptions to be a good bit of trashy fun. Saara, a gynecologist, learns on her birthday that her husband Leo, a university professor, is having an affair with one of his students, the beautiful (and far younger) Tuuli. Pretending to be somebody else, Saara and Tuuli form a friendship. Though it begins to approach the ridiculous in the third act, the film maintains an unpredictability throughout, while growing continually darker as it progresses. Though there have been many films with a similar dynamic, Black Ice offer a truly unique and uniquely Scandinavian twist on the husband-wife-mistress drama. Outi Maenpaa's performance as Saara is one of the strongest I've seen so far in competition, and I wouldn't be surprised if she walks away with the Bear. I doubt this will ever find its way to the States, though I wouldn't be surprised if we soon hear about an American remake.

Also in competition is the tremendously disappointing In Love We Trust, from director Wang Xiaoshuai (Beijing Bicycle). Beginning with a schmaltzy plot line right out of a Lifetime movie-of-the-week, Wang attempts to strip away most of the melodrama and leave us only with a detailed character study. It's a brilliant idea that unfortunately fails on execution. Hehe, the five year-old daughter of Mei Zhu and Xiao Lu is dying of leukemia. Their only chance at saving her is for the couple to have another child, who can act as a donor for a bone marrow transplant. The only problem is that they are divorced, and have both remarried. Naturally, there's anger, bitterness and jealousy from the new spouses, even though the cause is just. Though Wang focuses more on the moral dilemma that faces the four adults (as opposed to the child's illness), the film continually fluctuates between soap-opera and art film, and it succeeds as neither. With heavy-handed symbolism and a embarrassingly obvious plot device, In Love We Trust ends up being an uninspired drama that even its strong lead performances can't save.

Daniel Kasman and I violently disagree about Jacques Doillon's latest, the pretentious Le Premier Venu (Just Anybody). Twas a time I would have loved this film, but I guess I'm losing patience for French films where characters speak and act in ways that have no connection whatsoever to the real world. Dig the plot: Camille (the pouty Clementine Beaugrand, in her debut performance) is a bored twenty-something who, seeking a bit of zest in her life, decides to fall in love with just anybody. Enter Costa (Gerald Thomassin) a Neanderthalic homeless criminal who has (perhaps) date-raped her on their first meeting. This of course means true love, and she follows the guy back to his hometown, where he has an ex-girlfriend and a child he hasn't seen in three years. (I should have walked out then and there.) Enter village cop Cyril (Guillaume Saurrel) who seemingly has nothing but free time on his hands, as the third leg in this ridiculous triangle, and you've got two hours of characters who lack any genuine connection exhibiting a wide range of emotions like clockwork every few minutes. In fact, they're less characters than they are vessels for Doillon's dialogue, which goes on endlessly but says very little. Filled with dozens of false starts that go nowhere and pointless spur-of-the-moment actions, Le Premier Venu is little more than an endurance test.