In Contention

Tag: Caterpillar

  • Berlinale prizes for ‘Honey,’ Polanski

    Roman PolanskiWell, I warned you I wasn’t keeping up with the Competition films at Berlin. I’d love to give you some first-hand perspective on the winners that have just been named by Werner Herzog and his jury, but the truth is, I haven’t seen a number of them.

    That includes the top prizewinner, Semih Kaplanogu’s “Honey,” a Turkish tale of a six year-old boy who falls into muteness following the disappearance of his beekeeper father. It was kindly regarded at the festival, though I didn’t encounter any critics insisting it was a must-see, either. (I heard more critical buzz around two runner-up winners, Romania’s “If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle” and Russia’s “How I Ended This Summer.”)

    The jury’s one concession to the mainstream was a Best Director award for Roman Polanski, whose thriller “The Ghost Writer” opened in the U.S. yesterday to warm reviews. I suppose some might view this as controversy-mongering — and they’d probably be right — but Polanski’s film was one of the few in Competition that genuinely exceeded expectations.

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  • Seconded

    From Telegraph critic (and Berlinale buddy par excellence) Tim Robey’s neat festival roundup:

    Maybe they’ll bestow a specially bonkers Golden Bear to mark the occasion [of their 60th anniversary] – for instance, to the one film I walked out of, the Japanese hopeful, Caterpillar, in which a mute war veteran with no arms or legs gets frisky with his unduly appalled wife. As a friend quipped, once we’d snuck out of this mangily shot and edited exercise in Lars von Trierian erotic masochism, “Spare us the whole paraplegic Kama Sutra, already.” Then again, Werner Herzog is presiding over this year’s jury, so all bets are off.

    That friend, I’m pleased to say, is me. (And I somehow share his fear that the jury will disagree with us tomorrow. I say that in lieu of any predictions.) Tim also joins me in the, shall we say, select club of “Gentlemen Broncos” fans. Read the rest here.

  • BERLIN: ‘Please Give,’ ‘Red Hill,’ ‘Submarino’

    Ryan Kwanten in Red HillFilm festivals have a curious way of either dulling one’s critical faculties or provoking them to an impolite degree. I almost never walk out of a screening under normal circumstances; at a festival, while compressing five-odd films into one day, it’s almost life-affirming to do so.

    Such was the case yesterday, halfway through “Caterpillar,” a Competition entry from widely admired Japanese veteran Koji Wakamatsu. An apparent Oshima knockoff combining catatonic narrative inertia with visual dinginess, it centers on a mute, limbless Sino-Japanese War vet rebuilding his relationship with his wife: “rebuilding his relationship” being a euphemism for working his way through the paraplegic Kama Sutra.

    After a sufficient number of po-faced sex scenes, interspersed with shots of cherry-blossom to indicate the passing of seasons — the film, it seems, was edited with a blunt axe — Tim turned to me and whimpered, “I can’t take it anymore.” We bailed and headed for “Gentlemen Broncos” instead; and you know now how that worked out.

    The film has its champions, mind. And I’m now convinced it will win something on Saturday just to spite me. After the cut, however, are three films I happily sat through in their entirety.

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