It is a strange time to be in Berlin. Germany’s capital, for decades known as one of Europe’s social hubs of inclusivity, affordability, and artistic freedom, has been bent into a gentrified, “expat” rather than “immigrant” Mecca with $6 lattes and casually right-wing attitudes. Immediately preceding the hotly anticipated federal elections in which (far) right Christian Democrats would go back into office, with the extreme-right Alternative for Germany winning a staggering 20.4% of votes, the 75th edition of Berlinale, the first major European festival of the season, came with its own political guns blazing.
Running from 13th to 23rd of February across 15 venues, this year’s edition of Germany’s biggest cinema event (finally) kicked up some fuss of its own. Following a too-long stretch of market weakening in Europe and dwindling promotion, last year’s Berlinale caught some hits, such as a visit from Oscar-winner-to-be Cillian Murphy with Tim Mielants’ Small Things Like These or the promotion of Sebastian Stan’s Golden-Globe-winning performance in A Different Man. This season, however, things revved up majorly with the arrival of the new festival director, Tricia Tuttle, who brought major fame to the BFI London Film Festival between 2018 and 2022.
Tuttle, an American film journalist and curator, is known for attracting A-listers to her events and for her crisp political commentary. Ahead of the festival frenzy, she said that the perception of Germany being overzealous in its policing of speech about the war in Gaza deterred some artists from coming to the Berlinale from fear that any comments on the Israel-Palestine conflict would be interpreted as antisemitic. The statement followed last year’s local controversy regarding No Other Land, an Israeli-Palestinian-directed documentary examining the hardships of Palestinians displaced by Israeli settlements.
The film’s creators, Yuval Abraham and Basel Adra, won an award for Best Documentary but were labeled as “antisemites” by the German officials for their acceptance speech, centered around the struggles of Palestinian civilians. Abraham’s family, who is Israeli, received numerous death threats as a result. No Other Land is now nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film.
In Tuttle’s fashion, the 75th Berlinale Jubilee started and stayed outspokenly political and star-studded throughout. Red carpet struts from Timothée Chalamet (joined by girlfriend Kylie Jenner on Valentine’s Day), Robert Pattinson, Jacob Elordi, Jessica Chastain, Tilda Swinton, Benedict Cumberbatch, and many more drew hordes of fans but also loads of tabloid flashes, TikTok influencer videos, and gossipy columns. It’s not exactly typical European highbrow “culture” content, but a fine PR job nevertheless.
On the “auteur” side, in a more typically European vein, art and politics collided from the opening day on 13th February. The International Jury, presided by Todd Haynes, hit out at Donald Trump, the Argentinian neoliberal president Javier Milei, and other statesmen in a fiery press conference. Their criticism was then intensified by Tilda Swinton, this year’s Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement recipient and a 26-time (!) Berlinale veteran. Expounding on her acceptance speech in which she decried the “efforts of occupation and colonization” globally, Swinton, a long-term supporter of Palestinians, added that she supported the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement against Israel in her press conference on 14th February.
The films themselves left us with plenty to discuss, too. Psychological drama and historicities of social turmoil dominated a relatively strong but undoubtedly impressionable lineup. Stories of the oppressed or otherwise ailing individuals and communities stood out the most. Following are the most talked about releases from the first three days.
A Complete Unknown – Director: James Mangold
“There are many Bob Dylan’s, there’s always room for more,” said Todd Haynes, Berlinale International Jury President, at a press conference. Haynes, who directed 2007’s captivating I’m Not There, a non-linear fable exploring Dylan’s many identities as a cultural icon through six different actors, certainly knows a bit about how challenging it is to pin the musician down. Revered over more than half a century as one of the greatest lyricists of all time, Dylan, the only musician to ever be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, remains camera-shy, reticent, and outright elusive.
Therefore, It is no surprise that James Mangold, who brought us the famed 2005 Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, would be interested in tackling another aspect of Bob Dylan’s complicated character. A Complete Unknown, Mangold’s take on Dylan’s beginnings in the 1960s, which culminated in a controversy over his switch from acoustic to electric instruments, is an interesting, if somewhat muted, story of this seemingly unknowable man.
Based on the 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald and starring a fascinating Timothée Chalamet, A Complete Unknown invites us into Bob Dylan’s happenings and leans into his quirks, not his mind and thinking. As a period piece nostalgically reviving a pre-gentrified New York, home to vagabonds and bohemians, it’s like clockwork, reminding us of the many idealist youngsters who stood up against systemic oppression through art. As a biographical film and a look into a subject’s psyche, A Complete Unknown leaves much to be desired, not bringing us nearer to the “great” Bob Dylan than we were before.
Chalamet, however, astonishes as he makes Bob Dylan his own, disappearing into the role without comical imitations or uncanny mimesis. His Dylan is razor-sharp but aloof, zealous but footloose, undoubtedly on his way to artistic “greatness” but – and this is the good part – sorely lacking as a human being.
Perhaps the most striking angle of Mangold’s feature is that he and Chalamet are unafraid to make Dylan unlikeable, emotionally manipulative, and offputting. These unfavorable traits are nowhere more evident than in his relationships with fellow musician Joan Baez (a wonderful Monica Barbaro) and Sylvie Russo, a fictionalized version of his then-girlfriend Suze Rotolo, embodied with fierce empathy by Elle Fanning. Equally human is Edward Norton’s tender portrayal of Pete Seeger, another folk singer-songwriter and social activist.
Among these and many other fascinating personalities, Bob Dylan remains a standout artist but proves to be an inadequate peer, too obsessed with (hiding) himself to ever truly actualize into a person. By deftly meshing these pieces together, A Complete Unknown succeeds in a way that most formulaic biopics don’t: it celebrates the cultural significance of its protagonist without idealizing him in the slightest.
Hot Milk – Director: Rebecca Lenkiewicz
Unlike A Complete Unknown, which had been screened across continents for weeks or even months before getting its German debut, Hot Milk, the newest feature effort from British playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, had its world premiere at the Berlinale. Typically for Lenkiewicz, Hot Milk is a complex drama about complex women, in this case, an ailing mother and her suffering daughter.
In Hot Milk, based on the 2016 novel of the same name by Deborah Levy, we follow the story of Rose (a commanding Fiona Shaw), a wheelchair-bound, aging woman who travels to Spain to seek a cure for her paralysis, and Sofia (a moving Emma Mackey), her daughter and companion. A potentially soppy “healing” plot thickens quickly as we learn that Rose is a menace, an outright abusive mother who demands that Sofia, who was just four when she became ill, set aside everything and provide unconditional, around-the-clock care. Just as worrisome is that Rose’s ailment is evidently psychosomatic, making her pursuit of treatment a curious one and her motives dubious.
The eye of this storm of neurosis is Sofia, a 25-year-old anthropologist-to-be, who deferred her studies to care for her demanding mother. Quiet and avoidant, she fully subdues herself to her mother until she meets Ingrid (a playful Vicky Krieps) and becomes obsessed with her. In Sofia’s rare but explosive bouts of aggression, we learn the most about this intriguing character, portrayed with a refreshing lack of sentimentality by Mackey, who brings to life with her face what the bland, winding screenplay cannot.
Despite a stellar cast and one of the most mind-blowingly abrupt, ruthless ends in recent memory, Hot Milk comes across as a missed opportunity. The theme of unhealed trauma begetting trauma and the trope of women being invisible in their needs and desires are clear and poignant. However, the unfocused narrative with too little dialogue (and way too much staring into the distance) hinders crucial character development in the protagonists.
A too-strong focus on vignettes and retelling of (alleged) events in the place of cohesive flow interrupts the arcs of personal growth we hope for. Hot Milk also mostly omits the accounts of economic turmoil in Spain and Greece that the novel richly explores; Sofia’s visit to her estranged Greek father, rather than being a resolution of sorts, ends up deflating the story. While the overall impression fails to match the feral intensity of the many important things it tries to convey, Hot Milk is still worth seeing for Shaw’s and Mackey’s unflinching performances and that insane ending.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North – Director: Justin Kurzel
Yet another miniseries about war based on a novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, set to premiere on 18 April on Amazon Prime Video globally, is a somewhat different beast from what you might expect. Adapted from Richard Flanagan’s 2014 Booker Award-winning novel of the same name, The Narrow Road to the Deep North juxtaposes the atrocities of war with the horrors of lust and personal pride.
Jacob Elordi and Ciarán Hinds are mesmerizing in their portrayal of the Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans across decades. Through a startlingly varied, often dichotomous, non-linear narrative, a picture is painted of a man plagued by harrowing memories of World War II and his shortcomings later on in life.
Elordi, as young Dorrigo, is a torpedo of quiet charisma and resolve. He falls in love with his uncle’s wife and indulges in a passionate affair before being shipped off to war and ending up a prisoner of the “Far East”. Hinds is another boiling pot of charisma and ego as older Dorrigo, many years on. He is esteemed in his field but scarred by what he and his peers endured as Japanese prisoners.
In the first two episodes of the five-part series screened at the Berlinale, several timelines coalesce around identity and experience in wildly different circumstances. We see the once carefree and enamored young Dorrigo literally fade before our eyes as the emaciated forced laborer digging the Burma Death Railroad in 1943. Unspeakably terrifying sequences of labor camps, including Dorrigo’s mostly failed attempts at saving his mates from cholera and infection, stick with us just as they do with Dorrigo himself, who, decades on, still grapples with the consequences of his dreadful experience.
Despite several storylines revolving around infidelity, the first two episodes of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, like most of Kurzel’s work, are primarily about male relationships and allyship. Visceral and brutal, it is a fully corporal experience that transforms the soul, both individually and collectively. I’m curious how Kurzel will wrap up the many threads in the remaining three installments.
There are, however, some issues with the story itself. Despite Kurzel throwing in a couple of lines about colonialism and “liberation”, the Japanese are again portrayed as ritual-obsessed aggressors thirsty for blood, while the Whites are mostly heroic, innocent figures. Flanagan faced criticism for portraying the overwhelmingly Asian victims of the Death Railroad labor camps as primarily white (Australian) heroic soldiers, and Kurzel seems to willingly succumb to the same erroneous stereotypes of the Whites being the heroes and the Asian “others” just villains.
Nevertheless, the story packs an emotional punch. If The Narrow Road to the Deep North stands the test of time, it will be more for its nuanced examination of a complicated, imperfect man than for its Band of Brothers-like simple lessons of friendship under extreme circumstances.