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Fake notes, French jokes and a funny Hitler
By Derek Malcolm, Evening Standard 15.02.07
Man for hire: Kristin Scott Thomas with Woody Harrelson as her gay escourt in The Walker
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Berlin's enormous film festival, now the biggest in Europe, is one huge movie bonanza for Berliners.
Practically every screening - of the good, bad or just moderate - is full from nine in the morning until well after midnight.
The 57th edition this year, which culminates in the award ceremony on Saturday, is crammed with retrospectives, children's films, an international competition, a large market and the more outré movies of the Forum and Panorama sections.
The international jury, boggle-eyed from watching three competition entries each day, has a difficult task deciding on whom to bestow the Golden Bear.
Not one film stands out above the others and some of the best, such as Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima (out in London next week), decided not to run for the prize.
One of the best surprises in the competition is the Austro-German The Counterfeiters, which tells the true story of Saloman Sorowitsch, the brilliant Jewish counterfeiter who was sent to a concentration camp and then given special privileges to fake the British pound and the American dollar.
The plan was that millions of the notes would then flood the market and destroy the economies of the Allies.
Fortunately, though, the Bank of England passed the fake pounds as real, the war ended before the Nazi plan could be realised.
The film is about the dilemma Sorowitsch faced. Should he do a good job and help the Nazis or face his own certain death?
Karl Markovics is excellent as Sorowitsch and The Counterfeiters is both honest and well-made.
One of the best new movies outside the competition is 2 Days in Paris, a sharp romantic comedy written, directed and starred in by Julie Delpy.
She plays a ditzy French photographer stopping off in Paris with her neurotic American-Jewish boyfriend (Adam Goldberg) on their way home to New York.
If this sounds like Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise, in which Delpy also appeared, her script is sharper, more satirical and something like a Gallic version of Woody Allen.
The sequence where the pair have lunch with her parents (Albert Delpy and Marie Pillet, Delpy's real parents) is one of the best.
"He's not like the morons you usually bring home," says dad to daughter in French.
Delpy's film is a small but perfectly formed delight, but Paul Schrader's The Walker, made substantially in the Isle of Man, is more of a puzzle.
The American writer-director, who is head of the international jury so isn't allowed in the competition, casts Woody Harrelson as the bewigged and very gay escort to a series of rich Washington women.
Dressed like a Southern beau, he struts and minces around the women (who include Kristin Scott Thomas and Lauren-Bacall) until he is suddenly pitched into a murder that threatens his whole comfortable lifestyle.
It is not a part that fits Harrelson well and some of his acting sticks out like a sore thumb.
But Schrader, like an upmarket Agatha Christie, gives his cast some good lines and satirises the Washington political establishment as if he knows its perfidies well.
Among the real disappointments at Berlin is Oscar-winner Bille August's ponderous Goodbye Bafana, which recounts the true story of prison guard James Gregory (Joseph Fiennes) who guarded Nelson Mandela (Dennis Haybert) for 20 years.
Similarly banal is When a Man Falls in the Forest, which has Sharon Stone as an unlikely Midwestern housewife trapped in a bad marriage and relieving her crushed feelings by shoplifting.
Finally, we got to see Jewish director Dani Levy's Mein F¸hrer: The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler.
This farcical comedy, hugely successful in Germany and Austria, and the first German film to dare to make jokes about Hitler, has its moments as a Jewish actor (Ulrich Mule) is pulled out of concentration camp to coach the F¸hrer for a morale-boosting speech in the dark days of 1945.
Hitler is played by the popular comic Helge Schneider as a damaged and infantile idiot.
The film is undoubtedly a provocation but not actually a very sophisticated one, though it occasionally strives to point out that Hitler was adored by a great many Germans at the time.
Even if it were in competition, it wouldn't be a likely winner. But there's no denying it would be an interesting one.
• www.berlinale.de
