Luis Martínez Berlin
Berlin
Updated Saturday, February 17, 2024-18:29
Berlinale Rooney Mara and Ruizpalacios crash in the first failed big bet
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What is beauty?
Or in another way, something more entertaining,
can ugly be beautiful?
In the Platonic universe of ideas, as is known, the true contradiction is the formless, the deformed, the amorphous. Negativity is experienced as aggression. What reasons are there to be enthusiastic about something that does not respect proportions? The Nazis, for example, decided that there are none, that there are no reasons for such anti-Platonism. And, consequently, they labeled the non-beautiful as "degenerate" (out of gender). They were bothered (how ironic) by the vision of the horrible because it was profound. Parmenides, on the other hand, a resourceful Greek, distrusted purity. "Is there any idea of things like hair or dirt?" he asked Socrates. And the finest of discussants doubted. The question, only apparently paradoxical, was simple:
Is there an idea of ugliness?
And one step further:
Isn't the ugly the crudest way of teaching the other, the beautiful?
We have arrived.
Adam Pearson
would be on the side of the sophists. And to prove it, he appeared at the
Berlinale
with his neurofibromatosis perfectly visible and with the help of the festival film so far.
A different man
, by
Aaron Schimberg
, does not star him but
Sebastian Stan
; It is not a drama because it makes you laugh; It is not a comedy because, at times, it disturbs and clouds the mood, and, despite what can be deduced from the advertising, the first paragraph and even the photo that adorns the article, is not ugly because it can be overshadowed by the most obvious of the beauties
A different man
is, in the genuine sense, the most virtuous and dazzling of contradictions.
It is exactly what it is not: ugly but purely beautiful
. Or vice versa.
The story is told of an actor with a face ravaged by tumors who, after undergoing a revolutionary operation, achieves the desired normality. With his legitimate dream fulfilled, he will soon come face to face with the worst of nightmares: everything he aspired to in life (the woman and the profession he loved) will be taken away from him by a man of exactly the same condition before be intervened. With this budget, the director weaves together a fine fable without a moral and without more pretensions than those that burn about, in effect, beauty; beauty as a commodity; beauty as a commodity; beauty as imposture. In another way, about our ugliness.
Renate Reinsve, Adam Pearson and Sebastian Stan, stars of 'A different man'.RONNY HARTMANNAFP
With the references in sight (the spirits of
David Lynch
from
The Elephant Man
,
Cocteau
from
Beauty and the Beast
,
Cronenberg
from
The Fly
,
Charlie Kaufman
are stirred up in any of his meta-reflections...),
Schimberg
gets it right. convert into a delicate and very acute delirium as funny as it is devastating what on paper could be a horror story or an educational metaphor or even a hurtful farce.
Renate Reinsve
, the breakout actress from
The Worst Person in the World
, dazzles;
Stan
, amuse; and
Pearson
, simply, falls in love.
We had seen this actor before in
Under the skin
, by
Jonathan Glazer
, alongside
Scarlett Johansson
. And then in
Chained for life
, by the same director, where a blind love story was told. Until she regained her sight.
Pearson
surprises because she surprises. But, above all, his poise, grace, courage and intelligence draw attention. That and the ease with which he places any of the spectators (all of us) in that uncomfortable space and moment in which each of our prejudices, beliefs or, if applicable, miseries are exposed. That is to say, we are facing the crudest way of teaching beauty.
Assayas, in top form and out of time
For the rest, the rest of the official section half fulfilled what was expected. The Frenchman
Olivier Assayas
returns to his personal description of himself thanks to
Hors du temps
, a minor approximation to the major of his obsessions; The Italian
Piero Messina
approaches in an irregular and imprecise way in
Another End
(with
Gael García Bernal
and again,
Renate Reinsve
) a dystopian future full of traffic in feelings, minds and bodies, and the German
Andreas Dresen
turns his
From Hilde, with Love
in a reflection on time, guilt and the past of her country as supposedly original as it is unassisted.
Hors du temps
(
Out of Time
) is one more in that now extinct genre of pandemic films. The title itself in French warns it with irony: yes, a film is known to arrive late. Or not, because what the director wants is to vindicate and remind us of all those promises that we made to ourselves then and that we have already forgotten. In fact, the film is different from all the others on the same subject.
Assayas
manages to take that confinement (remember?) to his territory and, as he already began to do in
The Summer Hours
(2008), transforms the screen into an introspective exercise where what is elucidated is the very matter of time. and, in a hurry, from the same cinema.
The French director Olivier Assayas, on the shoulders of his protagonists, Micha Lescot and Vincent Macaigne.HANNIBAL HANSCHKEEFE
Perhaps far from the depth of previous works, the film advances with a slight gravity, raising dust of memories in its wake. Neither the noble life of the director of Hungarian descent is ours, nor is his country house ours, nor were we ever in love with the person the filmmaker did fall in love with, but, in some way, his nostalgia, wounds and achievements (which there are) They are ours. To continue with what was said before,
Hors du temps
is a film that is perfectly beautiful in its sadness.
The other two works are not as fine-tuned.
Messina
's proposal
in
Another End
is brilliant in its approach (what would happen if we could occupy someone's body with the memory and feelings of our dead loved ones?) and extremely confusing in its development. The Italian is forced to interrupt the story from time to time so that a character can explain to us what is happening. And that is disheartening. The final twist, on the other hand and purely miraculous, doesn't help either. Be that as it may, the atmospheric production and
Reinsve
, always her, make us forget, even for a moment, that
Black Mirror
is already commonplace.
Dresen
's case
is different, but not that different.
From Hilde, with love
tells in two parts the story of a couple who enthusiastically resisted Nazism. Until death itself. One part of the narrative moves into the future; the other, towards the past. Again, the starting point is promising. The idea is to match the beginning of love with the end without further ado, to find the texture and depth of, once again, the same time that
Assayas
told us about . He regrets that the schematism of the story and the protocol staging stifle many of the possibilities of a story that is necessarily larger than life itself. And beautiful like few others. Beauty is the cruelest ugliness of him. We have arrived.