Cinema is larger than life

The main themes of the Berlin Festival were identified almost from the first days. One of them is the opposition: freedom and bondage. The most important pictures of the competition gathered around it, which is widespread in the space of world culture.

"Camille Claudel, 1915" by Bruno Dumont, the subverter of the canons and festival favorite, is an ascetic, severe tragedy. Three days of imprisonment from the life of a talented sculptor and muse Auguste Rodin, who never became his official wife. At the insistence of her family, she was exiled to a psychiatric hospital at the monastery, where she spent almost 30 years. Throughout the whole time, she unsuccessfully begged her family to take her away. The director uses a “sculptural” style, plays with volumes with chiaroscuro, focusing on Bosch or Caprichos-like super-close-ups of insane patients. Lively portraits of the unfortunate "monsters" contrast with Camilla's emphatically restrained, frozen in a motionless "sleep of the mind". Previously, the director ("Humanity" and "Flanders") preferred to work with non-professionals. And from the French star Juliette Binoche, as if with an invisible stack, he cuts off all the "superfluous", familiar - leaving the essence: insecurity, torment and almost decayed hope. Binoche plays "alien", "stranger" in the world of madness. In order to survive, she has to dissolve herself inside the prison. The rituals she invented (cooking, writing a diary) are simulacra of unattainable freedom: in this way she creates a cocoon of detachment for herself.

In Notes from the House of the Dead, Dostoevsky wrote that a convict absolutely cannot accept his fate as something final, a part of real life: "Every convict feels that he is not at home, but as if visiting." Three days in the martyr's life of the mental convict Camille Claudel is a close-up of her endless misery that lasted until her death...

Screen adaptation by Guillaume Nicloux of Diderot's textbook novel in France, The Nun, reproduces the diary of the young captive of the monastery Suzanne Simonin, her suffering life: merciless punishments, vicious attraction to the young maiden of the Mother Superior performed by Isabelle Huppert. I remember the scene of initiation into a nun. The bodies of young maidens stretched out on the stone floor are slowly covered with a white shroud with a fiery cross in the center. Like "Camille Claudel ...", Niclou's film is an uncompromising anti-religious statement (it is no coincidence that France today occupies a firm first place in Europe in terms of the number of atheists).

A whole series of films of the main program, most diverse from an aesthetic point of view, demonstrated the hostility towards the individual of the main institutions: the state, the church, the school (Kazakhstan's film "Lessons of Harmony") - the entire distorted way of modern reality. Yellow trade unions protect the rights of employers, the church - the interests of the highest hierarchs, the media - the rulers, mass culture and entertainment - dissolve the individual in the crowd, the obedient electorate. Neither the family nor the beloved profession, judging by a number of paintings, is no longer a defense.

The screening of "Closed Curtain" by Jafar Panahi caused a lot of media attention. Let me remind you that a well-known Iranian director and screenwriter was arrested in 2010 for "propaganda against the Iranian state system" and sentenced to imprisonment, as well as a ban on shooting "any film." Once again, he neglected excommunication from the profession. The new work was created by Panahi together with the Iranian director Kambuzia Partovi.

The first long shot: the bars, behind which the sea splashes peacefully. This is an allegorical parable about a forbidden author (the author is played alternately by Partovi and Panahi). He takes refuge alone in the villa, tightly curtaining the spacious windows, blocking himself from the police world, along with the smartest dog Boy (the Boy convincingly suffers at the sight of a television picture of the killing of unscrupulous, from the point of view of Islam, dogs). He is writing the script for a banned film. The beautiful phantom “muse” of the creator leaks into the house “illegally” ... It is clear that the curtains will be torn off, the windows broken, the sound of the sea will burst into the claustrophobic author’s world ... The screenwriter himself will think and decide to drown himself: “Life is more than work” ( with the help of reverse shooting, he will quickly run out of the sea). In the finale, the author will plunge into the car with the Boy. Last frame: the sea without bars.

Overly theatrical, not the best film of a wonderful director, however, commands respect. At a press conference, Partovi assured journalists in every possible way that their picture had nothing to do with politics. Nevertheless, "Closed Curtain" is a film-act true to Rodin's testament "A true artist expresses what he thinks, not afraid of the counteraction of age-old prejudices." On the day of the screening, a group of journalists came out with posters and cardboard portraits of the director, on which it was written: "Jafar Panahi was supposed to be here." In theory, the jury should, at least out of professional solidarity, note the Iranian film. Risking his future, the director, contrary to the postulates stated in the film, asserts a different truth: "Cinema is larger than life."

Throughout the festival, it was interesting to see how critics' opinions polarized about almost every film. Not accepted by many aesthetes, the benign Chilean love drama "Gloria" came out on top in the rating of the festival magazine Screen. Gloria (Paulina Garcia) is in her 60s, the kids are long grown. But the optimistic lady is not going to give up on herself, and escapes loneliness by attending dancing parties. (Let me note in brackets: the theme of the crisis of adulthood is one of the central ones in modern world cinema. True, in Russia, such films, regardless of their quality, are barred from the screen - the audience does not go to see them.) Director Sebastian Lelio tells the story of difficult age-old love. On the shoulders of the elderly chosen one of Gloria, the owner of the penball club - a pound of responsibility for the former (here you should always put a question mark) family. The film's best visual metaphor: Two bodies on a sofa in an empty living room: a decrepit Gloria and a neighbor's hairless cat that comes "of its own accord" without asking. Two drooping tattered cats are a symbol of hopeless loneliness. The film is absolutely spectator-friendly, without a festival swing, but critics are people too. When Gloria, offended by the cowardly escape of the mossy Romeo, shoots him on the threshold of the "former" house with pentballs, the audience applauds.

Bear, an extravagant playful tragedy by the famous Canadian documentary filmmaker Denis Cote Two middle-aged, unattractive lesbians share a bed in Vic + Flo Saw a . In their past - a prison, in the present - fear, in the future - the unknown. Their ideas about the family and personal happiness are unsteady, their dreams are hopeless.

The Romanian "Child's Pose" by Kalina Peter Netzer is a family portrait in the interior of trouble. The 34-year-old son of the heroine of the film Cornelia (Liminita Georgiou) knocks down a child at high speed. Cornelia's family belongs to the establishment. For the "new Romanians", as well as for the new Russians, nothing is impossible. Cornelia turns on the mechanism of saving her "child" at full power: lawyers, connections, money - everything goes into the "course of closing the case." The climax of the film: Cornelia comes to the house of the heartbroken parents of the dead boy, ordinary poor people. He sincerely cries with them over a common misfortune. But the internal "mechanics" continues its work. Pleading for indulgence, she insists: “After all, you have two children, and I have one ...” And yet the main theme of the film is an insurmountable gap between children and parents. The selfless maternal love of Cornelia, who educates, saves, sacrifices herself for her son (“I am ready to give not only my hand, but my life for him”) is like the love of an octopus strangling a child in its arms. “Let me be the first to call you at least once in my life! - throws her downcast "only child" in the face of an unhappy mother. Cornelia is not given to understand why he hates her. Major benefit performances by Paulina Garcia (Gloria) and Liminita Georgiou (Child's Pose) were equally worthy of Best Actress. However, whatever the decision of the jury led by Wong Kar-wai (the text is being written before the judges' verdict), the selfless Juliette Binoche, in my opinion, has no competitors in this show.

At the 63rd Berlin Film Festival, another feature emerged. The hardest thing was to get to the shows of the classics: films by Elia Kazan, Alfred Hitchcock, Hans Heinz Evers, Yasujiro Ozu. It seems that the news about the death of film cinema was premature. In the world of total hegemony of numbers and entertainment, the fashion for classic cinema of all times and peoples comes. Of course, this fashion will not reach millions. Just auteur cinema will turn into an exquisite chamber pastime for selected admirers, like attending classical concerts or listening to vinyl records. In the end, the free choice of this minority of individuals will determine the possibility of the future of cinema as an art.