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Tuesday at the Berlinale was a day for women who run. Not necessarily fleeing. And we don't talk about physical as well as metaphysical exercise. Political even.
Beyond the stellar presence of the documentary about Hillary Clinton signed by Nanette Burstein, the important thing was in an official competition that directly touched the sky. Or almost. On the one hand, Eliza Hittman presented 'Never rarely sometimes always ' and flooded with turbid realism the murky, unjust and obsessed odyssey of a woman who aborts. Of course, and with the permission of Kelly Reichart, the strongest candidate for the Golden Bear . At his side, the Korean Hong Sangsoo continued, in which he makes his film number 24, with its detailed approach to the gravity of the weightless, to the most intimate human condition. Increasingly refined, more minimalist, more intense. The title, how could it be another, 'The woman who ran' (the woman who ran).
It would be said that the day was flooded with the spirit of, why not, the 'Angelus Novus' of the painter Paul Klee who so obsessed the philosopher Walter Benjamin. As the German author wrote in 'Thesis on the philosophy of history', what drives us to rebel against injustice has never been the dream of freeing our grandchildren from all our mistakes, but the memory of the slavery of our elders . "From paradise," wrote Benjamin apocalyptic, "a hurricane blows that is entangled in the wings, and is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This hurricane pushes him irresistibly towards the future to which he has turned his back, while the mountain of rubble in front of him grows towards the sky. "
That 'Angel Novus' are women who run and do so driven by the inevitable hurricane that strives to leave behind an impertinent and very patriarchal mountain of injustices. Amen.
Eliza Hittman continues with the argument that leads her to complete in her last work a kind of hurt and scared trilogy. 'It felt like love' (2013) and then 'Beach rats' (2017) captured in full bloom the uncertainty of two teenagers in the limit of all doubts, of each one their confusion. Now, one step further, it is placed in the gaze of a 17-year-old girl who aborts in silence, in the dark and in absolute solitude. Or almost. The protagonist (Sidney Flanigan) and her friend (Talia Ryder) flee their native Pennsylvania to New York. It will be just two nights.
The director turns this minimal argument into an authentic and superb trip to the bottom of the night. Of all the possible nights. With unusual precision, without underlining a line, letting pain breathe through all the innumerable wounds, Hittman manages to compose a rare, absent and very deep symphony of pain. The photograph between saturated and only broken, the necessarily fractured soundtrack, and the broken-apart look, make up a strange universe and very close at the same time. Deeply emotional or, better, emotional inside. They are the ruins that the angel contemplates while being dragged into the future, which Benjamin would say.
It is not so much about denouncing anything in particular but about questioning everything in general. It is not whether it is prohibited or not; it's not if the forms about abuse (that's what the title refers to) are poorly or worse designed; It is not if society in general is more or less permissive. No, it's all about everything designed and built for the most obvious humiliation in the most vulnerable of bodies. The result is the closest thing to a pagan miracle, to a secular cantata, to pain, to injustice. A woman who runs.
The serialized parts of Hong Sangsoo
Beside him, Hong Sangsoo insisted on his ideology without moving a single comma from the style book. As has been the norm in his last works (with two masterpieces such as 'On the beach alone at night' and ' The hotel on the banks of the river') , the director insists on composing his stories as serialized pieces. This time, there are three stories that are ' repeated '. A woman with her husband on a business trip meets or visits three friends. And from there arise the conversations that are really there to hear the background noise. Or, to continue with the simile of the angel, the ruins of all this.
Always at the ternary rhythm of long shot, zoom and the memory of an old drunkenness. The rest is the soul that, like the faces of Hittman's movie, is torn apart. What is seen through is nothing more than that which time, mystery and simple dismissal have called the human condition. The woman who ran.
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