• Inauguration The most Spanish Berlinale starts lost with an exhausting romantic comedy

  • Interview Michelle Williams: "I left home at 15 and didn't finish high school: succeeding as an actress was a matter of survival for me"

  • Meetings Paul B. Preciado launches a dazzling and beautiful trans bombshell in the heart of the Berlinale

What was there before the iPhone?

Probably a better life.

But it is not so much about the ugly vice of complaining about the comforts, as about returning to the even uglier mania of '

thrillers

' around new technologies.

Since David Fincher set

the rules of the genre in

'The social network' , the temptation is great.

After all, few stories are as attractive as those of the digital world and its ability to concentrate in a few years (perhaps months) a complete cycle of excessive ambition and success, betrayed friendships, souls rented out to the devil himself and unappealable failures.

It's not crazy (or yes, who cares) to think that if Shakespeare were alive now he himself would be much more of

a '

nerd'

' in flip flops than, for example, a hunchbacked king or a sleepless prince.

Matt Johnson

's

'

BlackBerry

' is exactly that.

Or, better, he wants to be exactly that.

About the book

'Losing the signal',

by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, the expert director in farces that seem like tragedies (or the other way around. That was

'Operation Avalanche'

, from 2016) proposes a journey inside a great idea, a great idea that explodes.

The device that made us call the phone '

smartphone

' (except my mother, of course) is also an archetypal story with all the elements that people like those mentioned above (Shakespeare and Sorkin, mainly) like.

Like Jason and his Argonauts, our hero searches for the Golden Fleece.

Until she finds him unaware that all achievement carries with it a curse.

Little can be blamed for a story that carries out exactly what it proposes from the first moment.

Except, precisely, that he does not propose anything.

Or very little.

And there the problem.

It seems impossible during all that '

BlackBerry

' lasts to get away from the idea that what is being contemplated has already been seen.

The director replaces nervousness with nervousness, intrigue with confusion, and even epic with horse riding.

Shot as if it were a documentary because of verismo, the film actually repeats all the tropes of the 'subgenre' but faster and in a much more rowdy way.

All this without counting how tiring it is, whether to criticize it or to praise it (it doesn't matter), the insistence on rancid masculine heroism.

The actress Mwajemi Hussein in a moment of 'The survival of kindness'.

The apocalypse is still there

At his side, the Australian

Rolf de Heer

brought the most interesting proposal, if only because of its peculiarity.

'The survival of kindness'

is an apocalyptic tale that rhymes with desolation, dystopia, environmental degradation... Nothing that doesn't appear on the menu every day on and off the platforms, with or without zombies.

However,

the director's ability to paint fairy tale with an almost youthful adventure story brushstroke so much desolation places the film in another place.

The fact that it doesn't have dialogues adds up.

The story of a young black woman abandoned in the middle of the desert by the authorities of a racist and white society in full degradation of everything is told.

And so until she runs away.

What follows is a feverish journey to the bottom of the fever itself.

And finally, perhaps the most relevant film on paper and, for that very reason, with the saddest result.

The German

Emily Atif,

previously responsible for films as simple and brilliant as

'Plus que jamais'

and as spectacular as

'3 days in Quiberón'

, insists on her desperate heroines.

'Someday We'll Tell Each Other Everything'

(Someday we will tell each other everything) is a story thrown into the void of a woman installed in it (in the abyss).

In Germany, in the summer of 1990, a family lives the moment of the reunification of their country after the fall of the wall in all its stark desolation.

The director, in a risky move, encloses in the body of her young protagonist all the contradictions of the moment that are also a great disappointment due to a promised future of splendor that does not arrive and, worst of all, a past of communist glory that, suddenly, it is discovered inane.

She, the protagonist, acts as a metaphor in her own flesh.

She could flee to the West, but she prefers to remain delivered to a passion by definition suicidal.

Her salvation, the director tells us, can only be her punishment in a masochistic-romantic turn that is as valid to describe the state of the young woman as of an entire country.

The risky thing was not to say.

The problem is the tone.

Rarely does Atif manage to get rid of a gesture

that is always puffed up, always sick of his importance.

And that ends up weighing down the result to considerable levels.

At times,

'Someday We'll Tell Each Other Everything

' seduces;

at times, it intrigues, but, most of the time, it just overwhelms.

If the question is what was there before the iPhone?

One of the possible answers is this.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • iphone

  • Germany

  • theater

  • cinema

  • berlin festival