The 73rd Berlinale was never likely to go down as one of the festival’s more memorable editions, but consensus on the ground was that it was a weaker year than most. There were of course good films. But there was a dearth of excitement—and certainly no bolt-from-the-blue discoveries. The Competition, especially, was stacked with relative newcomers, programming risks that didn’t pan out, and established names who didn’t quite live up to expectations. Those more invested in the film festival ecosystem as a confluence of market forces will likely have more to say on the matter. For myself, it meant that my regrettably unadventurous viewing schedule comprised familiar names who, for the most part, delivered lesser variations on previous successes.
I haven’t yet caught up with Soi Cheang’s divisive Limbo (2021), but his latest, Ming On (Mad Fate), operates in the vein of his earlier Accident (2009). In that film, a hitman responsible for Rube Goldberg death-traps engineered to look like freak accidents, becomes paranoid when he suspects that his own team is coming after him. The concept exploits the strict causal connections that all action movies depend on: because every element, no matter how improbable, may be part of the assassination attempt, every shot radiates with potential significance. Thus it becomes impossible to distinguish between the indifferent workings of nature, an obscure hit job, and the hand of god. Mad Fate puts a literal—and literally deranged—spin on the concept, centering on a fortune teller (Lam Ka-tung) for whom the world likewise presents an endless surface of readable signs. The main drive of the film sees him help his clients—chiefly a disturbed delivery man with homicidal tendencies—outrun the invariably grisly fates he predicts for them. Some exciting early sequences play in the manner of Accident, with literally every shot clicking into the fateful workings of the world-machine. But the built-in extremity of Mad Fate’s basic setup, which screenwriters Yau Nai Hoi and Melvin Li are only too willing to exploit, leaves little room for the formal balance the earlier film allowed for.
I had similar problems with how M. Night Shyamalan uses the zero-or-infinity odds of Pascal’s wager to explode his genre framework in Knock at the Cabin (2023), a film I bring up mainly because I unexpectedly found myself thinking about it while watching Roter Himmel (Afire), Christian Petzold’s follow-up to Undine (2020). The film opens with a stocky writer Leon (Thomas Schubert) going with his friend Felix (Langston Uibel) to a vacation cabin on the Baltic coast, though he is so absorbed in finishing his next book that he pays scant attention to the apocalyptic forest fires threatening the area. In much of his work, Petzold tends to sacrifice psychological interest for allegorical heft—a trade-off that works well enough in Dreileben: Beats Being Dead (2011) and the high-concept Transit (2018), but less so in Phoenix (2014) and now Afire. In this latest, Petzold goes for consistent laughs at Leon’s expense, displaying little concern about piling up confusing behaviour. These infelicities are justifiable as in keeping with Leon’s solipsism, but they diminish the character mystery that the film’s finale explicitly hinges upon. As in Undine, Paula Beer plays an alluring, untouchable enigma whom the protagonist becomes enamoured with, and Afire’s coda includes a signal image of her staring out to sea, her back turned to the camera. Though clearly meant to radiate with an aura of unknowable mystery, it comes across, in context, as merely coy.
More poorly received than Petzold’s film, though to my mind far more successful, was Christoph Hochhäusler’s Bis ans Ende der Nacht (Till the End of the Night). The basic concept plays like a Fassbinder set-up fused with that of a German policier: A controlling, abusive relationship between a gay man and a trans woman doubles as the power dynamic between an undercover cop and his asset. Conditionally released from a men’s prison, where she is serving a drug-related sentence, Leni (Thea Ehre) is to help Robert (Timocin Ziegler) get close to a former contact who is now running an online platform for dealing drugs. The precise details of the crime plot remain obscure throughout, and though Hochhäusler doesn’t violate the rules of the genre, his interests lie mainly in the opportunities it affords to play with performance, theatricality, and improvisation. The film opens with a timelapse of an empty apartment being decorated in the manner of a stage set, and the following scene sees Leni and Robert acting as partners for the benefit of her friends. As soon as the guests leave, of course, the masks drop. (“Do you see an audience anywhere?” Robert chastises her.) In Till the End of the Night, then, we constantly move from action to situation: Our larger sense of the crime procedural flows from how we read even the smallest gestures of this core relationship, whose precise nature becomes only more undecidable as the film wears on.
In Hochhäusler’s superb second feature, I Am Guilty (2005), we have both a fixed starting point (a young man at the scene of a crime) and a fixed ending (the young man’s arrest). But by removing anything that would permit us to form causal links from scene to scene, Hochhäusler creates a kind of bounded infinity in the manner of Last Year at Marienbad (1961): The film allows us to put together its images in so many ways that we are, by the end, unable to say what, exactly, the protagonist is guilty of. Despite its obvious differences of subject and setting, Till the End of the Night does something similar. It presents two fixed story points, opening with one character exiting prison and ending with another getting arrested, but in between allows roles and masks to multiply and proliferate as in a hall of mirrors. The handler–asset dynamic between Leni and Robert, further complicated by the fact that Robert fell in love with Leni before she transitioned, creates innumerable relational possibilities. And Hochhäusler’s highly discontinuous presentation, which prevents us from resolving the precise nature of their relationship, works to keep as many of these possibilities alive as possible. From scene to scene, the sense of a drama unfolding in time is secondary to the impression of Leni and Robert taking on and shedding contradictory, even incompatible roles and poses.
As compelling as I found the film’s central concept, however, the range of improvisation it allows the characters (not the actors) eventually felt rather limited. Before the festival, I caught up with 2/Duo (1997), in which director Nobuhiro Suwa uses a variety of formal ruptures—mid-conversation cuts to black, documentary-like interviews with an unseen interlocutor—to continually recast our sense of its central relationship. There, the openness of the drama allows Suwa and his actors arguably too much latitude, and the result, while compelling from moment to moment, borders on incoherence. Till the End of the Night has something of the opposite issue, and despite some attempts to break out of the genre framework—such as a memorable sex scene mediated by a car window—Hochhäusler gives up too much to its constraints by the end.
Playing in the Panorama section, Ira Sachs’s Passages centres on a temperamental film director Tomas (Franz Rogowski), who starts a relationship with a young schoolteacher (Adèle Exarchopoulos) after completing his latest shoot, throwing his 14-year marriage to Martin (Ben Whishaw) into jeopardy. Sachs and co-screenwriter Mauricio Zacharias only pile on more melodramatic material as the film goes on—but they also obscure the behavioural baseline from which we might see any development as melodramatic to begin with, thereby undercutting its emotional charge. When Tomas tells Martin of the affair, the latter remarks that he always forgets himself after finishing a film. This dramatic pattern, in which we are asked to assimilate an extreme action into a larger cycle of behaviour—familiar to the characters but not to us—recurs throughout the runtime. In this regard, the initially puzzling fact that Sachs and Zacharias do not establish a sense of the central couple’s long-term marriage is strategic: Befitting its title, Passages plays like a relationship drama in which only the inflection points have been retained. Such an approach does have its limits. The scene where the director and his new girlfriend have dinner with her parents is a standout. But it also reminds one of how depopulated the rest of the film is, especially in comparison to earlier films like The Delta (1996), where Sachs struck a finer balance between unfolding a central relationship and populating the social environments that surround it.
Passages is Sachs’s sixth film in Panorama, making him something of a veteran of the Berlinale. James Benning, here with ALLENSWORTH, has an even longer history with the festival, though he almost invariably plays in the Forum or Forum Expanded sections, whose sensibilities, I am told, typically skew more “experimental” and “political.” I’ve only managed to see one other Benning film, L. COHEN (2018), properly projected, so I was looking forward to the prospect of watching one of his later digital works in a theatre. As luck would have it, though, ALLENSWORTH is one that would probably work decently well at home, as it plays less like a durational exercise than a structural game. Composed of twelve fixed-frame, five-minute shots, the film documents different locations in the eponymous Californian locale, which a title card informs us was established in 1908. With the exception of one shot, in which a young Black woman reads selections of Lucille Clifton poems, we see only exteriors—mostly facades of buildings that look uncannily picturesque, as if untouched by time. Apart from appreciating Benning’s sure-handed compositions, and the canny way visual and aural information was parcelled out across the frames, encouraging us to puzzle out the space, I never quite resolved what ALLENSWORTH was really after. In the post-film Q&A Benning remarked that with this film, he simply wanted to get people interested in this town, which has the distinction of being the first Californian municipality to be governed by African-Americans. Much more revealing was his stated interest in the fact that, since Allensworth collapsed within a decade of its founding, we are seeing not original buildings but reconstructions built when the town was memorialized as a state park in 1974. Benning’s engagement with this fact feels somewhat unresolved, all the more as he is clearly not opposed to using actors or human figures to transform how we take his compositions. (Apart from the poetry reading, one of the frames shows a person presumably directed to enter a building.) But he does enough to suggest a version of the film that I might come to embrace—something along the lines of Kiarostami’s 24 Frames (2017), in which judicious manipulation of scenic elements encourages the viewer to imagine the original reality that the images represent.
ALLENSWORTH is not, in any case, likely to win Benning many new converts. Perhaps the only film less likely to do that at this festival is Hong Sang-soo’s mul-an-e-seo (in water), which succeeded in alienating even some longtime admirers. By now, anyone with even a passing interest in Hong will know that the film comprises shots that are, for the most part, not in focus. This basic violation of cinematography standards is something of an affront to the paying viewer, but I don’t think Hong is out to alienate. And though I’m not prepared to rank in water among his best work, I think he manages some compelling effects.
For one thing, the blurring has the odd consequence of straining the eyes during Hong’s usual long-take conversations, where there is the expectation of interpersonal drama, but not during landscape compositions or shots of scenery. As if recognizing this, Hong has slightly modulated his découpage, and here includes establishing shots that are unusually pleasing for a director who has kept to a policy of avoiding clichéd “beautiful images.” (The shot pictured above, of fish in a shallow stream, and shimmering neon-green patch of light, borders on the picturesque.) For another, the blurring allows Hong to omit facial expressions without having to resort to conspicuous blocking, in the way that Sachs does throughout Passages, or, say, Godard does in his later films. In one notable composition, three young characters line up along a cliff facing the sea, two of them carrying an entire conversation as the third, his back turned to us, quietly gazes into the distance. Finally, the out-of-focus compositions have the related effect of decoupling image and sound. in water’s obscure images may recall those of Let the Summer Never Come Again (2017), which Alexandre Koberidze shot entirely with a Sony Ericsson W595 cellphone camera, whose low-res frames likewise blur facial expressions and negate conventional acting values. Accentuating the disjunction between image and sound, Koberidze uses this aesthetic template to motivate bursts of on-screen text and illustration, silent physical comedy, and extended narration, thereby engaging with the aesthetics of silent cinema without falling back on overt anachronism. Hong does not resort to similar stylistic ruptures in in water: The film’s conversational rhythms are indistinguishable from those of his recent period. But this surface similarity, coupled with its conspicuous visual difference, only makes in water’s soundtrack more uncanny—more ghostly and insubstantial for being so easily detached from the image.
What all this adds up to I am not yet clear on. Some defenders have brought up Cézanne, whom Hong has long cited as a key influence, and the reference has its merits, even if it risks restricting the connection only to explicit formal distortions, whether visual or structural. Others have simply chosen to see in water as more of a sketch than a finished film—a tendency that predates this particular work. In considering the latter, one might think of André Malraux’s remark that the sketch, which for him “records the artist’s direct, ‘raw’ expression,” is an index of their vitality. Then again, perhaps it’s more appropriate to say that the artist’s vitality lies in their ability to make us question our judgement of a work as being “only” a sketch to begin with. The vital artist, then, is one who transforms our standards of what a “finished” work can be.
I say this less to defend in water than to suggest that when faced with works like it, we need not be so quick to make judgements of either fraudulence or radicality. If ours is the age of the unknown masterpiece, then that is all the more reason to see criticism not as the conferring of value judgements—as the act of committing oneself to this or that artist—but as the development of a framework through which we might make explicit the grounds of those commitments. By their very nature, film festivals confer value by selection, and are thereby powerless to deal with such matters; but what would criticism be if it could not do otherwise?