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31ª Mostra > 17/02/2008
Text: Leon Cakoff, from Berlin, to ‘Jornal da Mostra’
PADILHA’S AWARD MUFFLES DETRACTORS
With the humanist militant Costa-Gavras as the president of the international jury of the 58th Berlin Festival, it couldn’t be different. Gavras marked cinema with denounces of lack of freedom of expression and injustice. His films were censored and forbidden in many countries, including Brazil. Costa-Gavras gave the Golden Bear to Brazilian film by José Padilha TROPA DE ELITE/ THE ELITE SQUAD. The president of the jury must feel revenged of the persecution he indirectly suffered in Brazil, when his films Z, STATE OF SIEGE and MISSING were part of the military dictatorship’s index.
What the jury in Berlin really consecrated was the good action cinema with strong power of critic and political contents. The award was an excellent “shut up” to obtuse critics that saw in Padilha’s film extreme right wing messages. And to one specifically mean review, by Jay Weissberg, published by Variety during the festival, accusing the film of being fascist, saying that the Weinstein brothers had joined the production only during the readings of the script, and that all had been changed by the director afterwards, and that its narration manipulated intelligent viewers.
José Padilha, as he said in the final interview at the festival, shoots while documenting, as if he was still working in documentaries, for this is his debut in fiction. Thus, when we see elite military squads executing drug dealers on the Rio de Janeiro’s hills, he isn’t inventing anything, and he is not making his characters up Rambo style, which was also mentioned by the prejudiced Variety review. The critic literally uses the word “elevated”: elevating its combat characters to a Rambo-style hero level. First of all, no character of an instigating movie as THE ELITE SQUAD can be elevated to such comparison. It would be downgraded. Secondly, Rambo is a typically fascist character. But it is not for Variety to say. Its business is to protect American cinema and reduce the cinema produced in the whole world outside to a destination “limited to a festival circuit”, as it always “dictates” in the reviews it publishes.
I had the opportunity to talk for a long time with Padilha during the TV show Roda Viva at TV Cultura, last November. I told him it was good that we hadn’t rushed in nominating THE ELITE SQUAD as Brazilian candidate to the best foreign film Oscar award. I was part of the commission. And I was right to foresee that its international career was about to begin, and that the film would go far, very far. It is already going.
The Jury Grand Prix (Silver Bear) was fairly given to an American documentary – STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE, by Errol Morris – which denounces the nazi-fascist methods used by American occupation troops in Iraq, where presumable Rambos have nothing of heroes. Errol Morris made THE FOG OF WAR, studying from a distance the opinions of American super-secretary of defense Robert McNamara (1961-1968) who acted since the bombing of 67 Japanese towns at the end of the II World War, to the missile crisis in Cuba and the awful Vietnam War.
Errol Morris uses the same distant method to personally interview all the involved in the humiliating tortures of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, whose pictures were seen around the world and shocked everyone. Some statements are cold and cynical, especially the ones by Lynndie England, always on the pictures on her boyfriend’s side, Charles Graner, of whom she got pregnant. He was one of the intellectual mentors of the tortures. He is not on the film for he has been convicted for 10 years. The weird thing is that higher graduated military have never been convicted.
Even more shocking than the pictures seen again in the film is the way they are named by one of the interviewed: Standard Operating Procedure is what he calls most of the torture pictures. Morris broadens the specter of his frogs of war (Fog of War). The American Empire soldiers have such cold blood.
The favorite by the press – German and foreign, the excellent film by Paul Thomas Anderson (THERE WILL BE BLOOD – Jornal da Mostra nº 556) got two awards: Silver Bear for best direction and Silver Bear to Jonny Greenwood for the music.
British Sally Hawkins as a school teacher in the sensitive and fun HAPPY-GO-LUCKY, by Mike Leigh, was a predictable choice for best actress. And the surprise was the best actor award granted to Iranian Reza Najie for AVAZE GONJESHK-HA/ THE SONG OF SPARROWS, by Majid Majidi. With the child element still well used, the film deals with the sortileges lived by an unemployed father after he loses his ordinary job in an ostrich farm. For the ones who want to see it...
LAKE TAHOE, by Mexican Fernando Eimbcke (Jornal da Mostra nº 557) received the well deserved Alfred Bauer (founder of the Berlinale) Prize, for his special inventive character.
Finally the highlight of the jury for ‘best script’ went for Chinese Wang Xiaoshuai for ZUO YOU/ IN LOVE WE TRUST. Modern China in Xiaoshuai’s (BEIJING BICYCLES) film is in the intimacy of two couples. A woman, in her second marriage, has to save the daughter who has leukemia. The most feasible procedure is to get pregnant again, with her former husband, so the baby’s medulla can be transplanted. What would you do? This question is in the medulla of all these good films that fill us with emotion and reflexion.
More Berlin Festival at http://www.berlinale.de
English version: Laura Rebessi