Berlinale: The future belongs to women. The past too

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At this Berlinale, women build and explore old rooms and new times so often that one could almost get dizzy.

It starts with: An eight-year-old meets another eight-year-old in the forest, and it turns out that this is her own mother - as a child.

Sounds like a mystery, and actually the signs in “Petite Maman” initially even point to horror: a death at the beginning, a hut made of branches, animal-like shadows on the wall in the mother's childhood house that needs to be cleared out.

“How old am I”, one child asks the other, and the other one answers: “31”.

If you didn't know about the magical twist that Celine Sciamma's film erects as effortlessly and stably as the children build their hut in the forest, you would say: role-playing games.

Children do something like that, ask: “Who am I?” Because they can still be anything.

Why not?

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The fact that two people “recognize each other” doesn't just mean sex.

But also the luck to understand each other.

For this process, the French director created “Portrait of a Young Woman in Flames” two years ago, an immortal, beautiful love story between a painter and a noblewoman.

In her new film, too, she tells, like an echo from the past, of recognizing each other.

The film is about mother and daughter, but without any maternal cult pathos that so often wafts around in thematically related films.

Instead, Sciamma asks emotionally and unsentimentally whether you can know something and at the same time believe what you know: That your own mother was once a young woman, a girl, who would doubt that?

Mother and daughter of the same age in the forest: Joséphine Sanz and Gabrielle Sanz in "Petite Maman"

Source: © Lilies Films

And yet, if you are honest, it is hard to imagine.

“Petite Maman” makes himself an accomplice and playful serious proof of such a loving imagination that transcends times and spaces.

The affirmation of the existence of the other appears so limitless that past and future are also included when one calls out the name of the other.

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There has been constant talk of a changed perception of space and time for a year now.

We all knew, but actually still didn't really believe in this pandemic, says Sciamma's Canadian colleague Denis Côté in an interview about his new film "Hygiène Sociale".

From this finding, however, he does not filter sarcastic complaints about isolation and boredom and marital problems, but conjures up a low-budget comedy about the stoic endurance of social expectations.

Social hygiene

Antonin (Maxim Gaudette) puts the patience and courtesy of his wife Eglantine (Evelyne Rompré) to the test at every opportunity.

His sister Solveig (Larissa Corriveau) is particularly disappointed by this.

Source: Denis Côté

In a green, hilly summer landscape that looks as if it was made for standing around in long lockdown tableaus, five women in costumes from different epochs stand alternately around the same man.

They keep a hygiene-compliant distance of several meters and shout the words to each other, with changing light and a lot of noise.

The comedy is a fundamental one, due to the simultaneity of escape from reality - the costumes, the natural scenery - and the literal screaming out of the pandemic-related reality-bondage.

Although the director himself is a little scary that he had already completed the script in 2015.

One of the actresses urged him to make the film right now.

A woman with a flair for the right time.

Helpers, mothers, neighbors

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Ramon and Silvan Zürcher build their images of space and time in “The Girl and the Spider” just as strictly as Côté.

Except that here standstill and centrifugal forces are constantly struggling with each other.

As in their celebrated debut “The Strange Kitten” (2013), they use an apartment as a laboratory for a geometry of desire that crumbles over and over again and is interwoven over and over again.

The focus is on two young women, one moving out of the shared apartment, one even more attached to the other.

Unspoken disappointment and much for which there are no words anyway hang in the air.

Mothers and neighbors come as helpers and troublemakers.

A couple of men also lend a hand.

The idle time of no-longer and not-yet is perforated with needle-fine monologues and shot-up dialogues until another wallpaper, another reason comes to light: “What's your name?” - “Here is really mold.” - “Astrid . "

Things develop a life of their own in "The Girl and the Spider"

Source: Beauvoir Film

People seem uninvolved, but things develop a will of their own: clothes that pour red wine “want to get drunk”.

There is a traumatized washing machine, “some windows don't want to be closed”, and an old down jacket becomes the vehicle of a disturbing tale by the mother about dead birds that are supposed to be stored in her daughter's jacket.

As with Côté, this film is also aware of its artificiality, ironically it lets formal minimalism and subliminal Wagnerian roar collide: during a nightly thunderstorm, an old neighbor dances like a witch on the roof, and the piano that was left behind once belonged to a chambermaid who has disappeared and now haunts a ship through the seas and times.

Is your longing still in the room?

Of course, you don't have to interpret the damned virus out of every film.

But the much-cited feeling of being thrown back on oneself in one's own four walls almost inevitably leads to the opening of a long-locked “memory box”, as in Joana Hadjithomas' and Khalil Joreige's competition entry of the same name.

Here, too, the focus is again on women, a mother and her daughter.

While the mother, who went through the civil war in Beirut in the 1980s, initially refuses to accept a package full of memorabilia, the daughter plunges into the painful alternation of teenage life and fear of death that is stored in it.

Time is almost physically felt here, in the pain of the stolen light-heartedness, in the breathless fear for relatives.

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In Danis Goulet's dystopia "Night Raiders", which is not too distant in the future, a young mother hides herself and her daughter in a hut in the forest for six years.

Because the state, a tyrannical regime, lays claim to all children in order to train them to be fighters in camps called “academies”.

It goes without saying that the girl - an indigenous peoples - will become a liberation icon.

Even if the appeasing of nasty swarms of drones may seem a little flowery, the film unfolds a force as a parabolic warning for the present.

This is by no means the end of liberation.

The documentary by Dan Lindsay and TJ Martin about Tina Turner, the goddess of the century, also initially enters an eerie house, that of the marriage hell of Ike and Tina Turner in the 70s.

All the more triumphant then the take off as a solo artist.

In the film you are not only blown away by Tina Turner's energy, but also by the storm of time that she ignites: From her appearances on blurred black and white pictures in the 1950s to the premiere of the “Tina” musical in New York Turner pop history spanned almost seven decades.

And with her dance style, she is the mother of those who we now call rock grandpas - Mick Jagger is said to have copied the movements from her.

Timelessness is feminine.