In Contention

Tag: Ingmar Bergman

  • Off to the Berlinale

    In a couple of hours, I’m jumping on a crack-of-dawn flight to one of the coolest cities on earth for a week at the Berlin International Film Festival — or, to use the name that rolls more luxuriously off the tongue, the Berlinale.

    I probably should have mentioned this earlier and posted some sort of festival preview. The truth, however, is that I’ve been so preoccupied with other business that I’ve barely read through the festival programme myself — the date rather snuck up on me. I’ve never done so little homework ahead of a festival — yet after my first Berlinale experience last year, that doesn’t feel like a bad approach.

    Berlin prides itself as being a festival of discovery, with more of an emphasis on rising talent than the lofty auteur names that tend to favor the sunnier festival climes of Cannes and Venice. True to form, my favorite finds of last year’s festival were ones I knew little about in advance (like Arvin Chen’s “Au Revoir, Taipei,” which wound up in my 2010 Top 10) or ones I wasn’t aware would show up until the last minute (like “The Illusionist,” buried so deep in last year’s programme many critics missed it altogether).

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  • REVIEW: “The White Ribbon” (***1/2)

    The White RibbonLondon Film Festival

    With apologies to Pete Townshend, the kids are most certainly not alright.

    Such is the message we seem to be gleaning from the cinema of 2009, as a vast range of unrelated titles – “Precious,” “Coraline,” “Dogtooth,” “Antichrist,” “Fish Tank,” even “An Education” – appear united in visiting the physical and/or psychological damage wrought upon children by either obliviously or maliciously neglectful parents, in some cases planting the seeds of trauma for further generations.

    No film this year, however, addresses the matter with more thematic exactitude and near-scientific scrutiny than Michael Haneke’s grimly riveting “The White Ribbon,” a film which differs from the ones previously mentioned by taking an entire community, as opposed to a solitary family, as its allegorical subject. More expansive in its focus than any previous Haneke work, it nonetheless surprises with the intimacy of its gaze and the social responsibility of its treatise.

    Eternally fascinated by human behaviour, yet never a director much associated with the humane – his trademark chilliness reaching new heights (or depths, if you prefer) with last year’s “Funny Games” remake, which treated its papery characters with even more diagrammatic dispassion than the 1997 original – Haneke finally marries these two approaches here, empathizing with its considerable ensemble of characters even as it dissects them.

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