February 15, 2007
The New York Times
A.O Scott

Whimsy, Pessimism and 'Lady Chatterley' in Berlin

Filmmakers, film-industry types and the journalists who love them often refer to something called the festival circuit, a sequence of hectic, semi-glamorous events that crowd the calendar and circle the globe. But it might be more accurate to speak of a festival system: a complicated, ever-expanding web in which the interests of commerce, art and criticism converge, sometimes in harmony and sometimes at cross-purposes.

Any festival is contingent, ephemeral, something of a pseudo-event. When it is over, there is a brief flurry of evaluation -- Toronto was strong this year, Sundance was disappointing, whatever -- but those judgments tend to fade as the movies themselves, the ostensible point of the whole enterprise, make their way in the world, or into oblivion, or onto the next festival.

So the 57th Berlinale, as the festival here is known, might best be thought of as an average festival. Not only because the films were generally so-so, with a few outright disasters balancing some high-quality work, but also because it seemed to typify what a film festival is these days. Once a bastion of difficulty and high seriousness -- an identity that suited an event held in midwinter in a city with a vexed, often grim history -- the Berlinale, which began last Thursday and concludes with awards on Sunday -- has grown into something bigger, more varied and perhaps less distinctive.

At the start of this century its center of gravity shifted into a gleaming complex of shopping malls and corporate towers in Potsdamer Platz, previously the no-man's land between East and West. More recently the festival itself has taken place alongside (and sometimes in the shadow of) the European Film Market, a bazaar of buying, selling and deal making that takes place a few blocks from the Berlinale Palast, where the competition screenings are held.

The festival itself also serves as an important steppingstone for Hollywood films seeking entree into the lucrative European marketplace. ''The Good German,'' ''The Good Shepherd'' and ''Notes on a Scandal'' -- all released in the United States in the December Oscar rush (where none of them found much traction) -- were shown in competition. ''Letters From Iwo Jima,'' a best-picture Oscar nominee, was a noncompetitive official selection, as was ''300,'' a special-effects-heavy rendering of the battle of Thermopylae directed by Zack Snyder. That film will open in America soon, and so will the festival's opening choice, ''La Vie en Rose,'' Olivier Dahan's warmly received biography of Edith Piaf.

It is customary to sort commercial movies into genres: the thriller, the biopic, the romantic comedy and so on. But there are also films, often playing the sidebar sections like Panorama and Forum in Berlin, that belong to genres peculiar to the festival system. These are sometimes easier to recognize than to describe.

In any given festival there is usually at least one movie that chronicles a time of political trauma from the point of view of a child. ''The Year My Parents Went on Vacation,'' a Brazilian competition film directed by Cao Hamburger and set in 1970 (when Brazil, ruled by a military dictatorship, won the World Cup), fits the bill nicely. In addition to politics and soccer, it has gentle sentiment, the stirrings of youthful sexuality and a grouchy, warmhearted old man.

You will also tend to find instances of the stubborn-peasant landscape film, with stately rhythms and long silences, in which natural beauty compensates for harsh stories of deprivation and struggle. ''Tuya's Wedding,'' shot in the steppes of Mongolia and directed by Wang Quan'an (and shown in the Berlinale competition) is a perfect specimen. It tells the story of a woman, Tuya (Yu Nan), whose husband has been disabled while digging a well, leaving her to tend their flock of sheep by herself. Economic necessity forces her to seek a second husband, and her courtship is both gently comical and, ultimately, wrenchingly sad.

The current blossoming of Asian cinema -- in China, in South Korea and now in Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia -- has led to some interesting cross-pollinations. Quiet, oblique dramas of urban alienation, something of a Taiwanese specialty in the 1990s, have become a hallmark of the resurgent Korean cinema.

Hong Sang-soo, whose ''Woman on the Beach'' landed in the Panorama here after stops in Toronto, New York and other festivals, is perhaps the master of this style, and something of his influence was evident in ''Ad Lib Night,'' directed by Lee Yoon-ki and shown in the Forum. In it a young woman is approached on a Seoul street by three young men who, after some initial misunderstanding, persuade her to accompany them back to their village, where she pretends to be the long-lost daughter of a dying man.

But all is never quiet on the South Korean front. Park Chan-Wook, the critically beloved author of superviolent spectacles like ''Oldboy'' and ''Lady Vengeance,'' arrived here with a movie called ''I'm a Cyborg, but That's O.K..'' I guess it is O.K., and in any case it represents something of a departure for Mr. Park, a foray into whimsy set in a mental hospital populated by charming nuts.

''Cyborg'' is -- sometimes delightfully, sometimes gratingly -- a determinedly crazy movie, which may constitute a genre of its own. Mr. Park's was hardly the craziest Korean movie in the festival. That would have been E. J-Yong's ''Dasepo Naughty Girls,'' a frenzied high-school romp described by its director, in remarks before a packed house at the Zoo Palast, as ''a teenage movie, a comedy, a musical, a mystery, a horror movie, all in one film.''

The European offerings were on the whole much more sober. (Though to be fair, just about any movie this side of ''Borat'' could be described as more sober than ''Dasepo,'' which is like a less restrained ''Strangers With Candy.'') Quite a few of them were concerned with the social, economic and cultural divisions that trouble this recently, and still incompletely unified, continent.

A kind of pessimist realism, holding on to the old humanist faith of the postwar years, but far less confident in the possibility of progress, has become something of a default style in Northern Europe. Maria Speth's ''Madonnas,'' a German-language film about an aimless, reckless young mother of five trying to get her life back together, might have been a Sundance film (it has some resemblance to ''SherryBaby'') but for the English subtitles and the decidedly nonredemptive ending.

A film from Croatia, ''Armin,'' directed by Ognjen Svilicic, also fits the mold of downbeat European realism, though its story of a father accompanying his son from their hometown in Bosnia to a movie audition in Zagreb is funny and warm as well as sorrowful.

My point is not that these movies are interchangeable, or that their similarities betray a lack of imagination on the part of their makers. A genre is not a formula but a paradigm, an endlessly variable model that can be adapted to different temperaments and circumstances. Directorial acumen, agile screenwriting and sensitive acting distinguish the run-of-the-mill from the genuinely interesting.

In the films I saw in Berlin this year -- the ones I liked enough to write home about, in any case -- the quality of the acting often made the difference. Thus Sam Garbarski's film in competition, ''Irina Palm,'' about a British woman who turns to sex work in order to finance a lifesaving operation for her grandson, would have been yet another British naughty-granny comedy were it not for Marianne Faithfull's enigmatic, deadpan and remarkably funny lead performance.

''The Counterfeiters,'' a German-language Holocaust movie by the Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky, would have seemed much more glib without the banty, combative charisma of Karl Markovics, who plays a Jewish counterfeiter conscripted into a Nazi plot to forge large quantities of British and American currency. And the bracing pleasures of Andre Techine's imperfect but powerful ''Witnesses'' owe a great deal to the work of a cast that includes Emmanuelle Beart and Sami Bouajila.

Every constituency in the festival system has its own needs and desires. The distributors want products to fill out their release slates; the sellers want buyers; the stars want privacy (or else attention); the jury (led this year by Paul Schrader, whose new film, ''The Walker,'' was shown out of competition) longs for a masterpiece and hopes for consensus. And the critics? We want above all to be surprised, to feel a sense of discovery.

The Panorama obliged this critic with ''Lady Chatterley,'' a French-language adaptation, directed by Pascale Ferran, of an early version of D. H. Lawrence's once-scandalous novel. At first glance the movie, nearly three hours long, seemed likely to belong to yet another familiar genre: the tasteful literary costume pageant. But Ms. Ferran and her two lead actors -- the relative newcomer Marina Hinds and a complete unknown named Jean-Louis Couilloc'h -- do more than merely honor Lawrence's preoccupation with sex, class and the natural world. They refresh his spirit and restore his modernity.

Every frame of the movie seems alive: with risk, with pleasure, with a sensuality that is both wild and intelligent. Already acclaimed in France, ''Lady Chatterley'' should, if there is any justice, break free of the festival circuit, even as it is precisely the kind of movie you come to a festival hoping to see. The kind that restores -- at least until the next festival -- your faith in the system.

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