This is how the last pagans must have felt at the Christian end of antiquity: the temple is open, the sacrificial altars are smoking, but the ritual doesn't feel like it used to.

At this year's Berlinale, you're sitting in the cinema, the curtain rises, the festival fanfare sounds, but the rows are empty.

Only in every third or fourth place does a figure with a breathing mask duck from the aerosols in the hall.

Andrew Kilb

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

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Tents have been set up outside, in which, upon presentation of a negative corona test result, you can get an orange wristband that entitles you to enter the day's performances.

Citizen tests are offered in white buses and site trailers, and queues form in front of the entrances during rush hour in the morning, otherwise the vehicles seem like sausage stands that have forgotten to stock up on sausages.

All around Potsdamer Platz, the center of the action, there is a hustle and bustle that is not quite sure of itself, as if a police car could turn the corner at any time and declare the whole hustle and bustle to be over in one fell swoop.

Gala performance plus skating

As in every year except the last, this Berlinale begins with a gala screening plus a show on the red carpet.

Some medium-sized German film greats such as Maria Furtwängler and Heike Makatsch have announced their attendance, and later Sandrine Bonnaire and Isabelle Huppert also want to drop by the festival - although Huppert could hardly refuse the invitation, because she is awarded an honorary bear, the prize for lifetime achievements and long-standing appearance.

But the film festival doesn't feel really festive, which is also due to the fact that this time its awards are being presented after seven days instead of ten.

The pandemic is breathing down the Berlinale's neck, it is in a hurry to bring in its harvest before the omicron wave hits, which of course has long been there,

The mixture of fear and defiant determination that speaks from the organizational framework makes the cinematic experience itself a hectic and nostalgic pleasure.

You take what you can get, but at the same time you suspect that things will never be the same again.

The film that opened the festival fits this emotional mix like a calf compress fits fever flu.

François Ozon filmed Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1971 play "The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant" in such a way that it became both a story by and about Fassbinder, a film-historically reflected remake and an unrestrained homage.

Both perspectives meet in the main character, whose gender Ozone has changed according to his purposes: Peter von Kant.

The women take care of his heart wound

“Peter von Kant” begins with a view of a luxurious loft from outside.

The film was shot in Paris and is set in Cologne, although Fassbinder's heroine was in Bremen and he himself was at home in Munich - but perhaps it is precisely this transfer to neutral cinema territory that opened up Ozone's access to his material.

The cars, phones and vinyl are from the 1970s, and the story is also classic analog, a melodrama devoid of dating apps and psychotherapeutic escapes.

Peter (Denis Ménochet), a successful film director, has just been dumped by his lover and is looking for a new one.

When he meets young Amir (Khalil Gharbia), his inner winter gives way to a second spring.

The overlay “Nine months later” announces that this blossom will also wither.

When Amir sets out to reconcile with his wife who has been flown in from Australia, the disappointed auteur filmmaker, drunk on gin and cocaine, smashes his apartment to pieces.

Luckily, three women are on hand to tend to his heart's wound: his girlfriend Sidonie (Isabelle Adjani), his daughter Gabrielle and his mother Rosemarie.

The mother role, played by his mother Liselotte Eder in Fassbinder's own film, is played by Hanna Schygulla, who fifty years ago was the lover of fashion designer Petra von Kant at Fassbinder.

In this cast and gender reversal, if you will, you can see a double decoding of a key film.

But something else happens on the screen when Hanna Schygulla performs.

The laboriously constructed experimental arrangement, in which Ozon projected his idea of ​​Rainer Werner Fassbinder onto his barely masked self-description in the form of a woman, collapses.

Because with Hanna Schygulla, an actress enters the room who brings with her what the film as a whole lacks: aura.

Suddenly Fassbinder's world, in which fiction drew its truth from life (and vice versa),

not far away.

Except that it has no place in this film, which is at once over-smart and under-exposed.

For Fassbinder there was no doubt that the private was political.

The directors of the Berlinale competition will also have the opportunity to prove it.

Only two films deal with politics in the narrower sense: Andreas Dresen's court drama "Rabiye Kurnaz against George W. Bush" and the Spanish film "Un año, una noche" about the terrorist attack on the Bataclan in Paris.

There are many stories of couples, girlfriends, parents and children, mothers and daughters.

What happens outside in the world is reflected inside the cinema.

But sometimes this space also offers a refuge from reality.

You have to think about that more often right now, because it's threatened from so many sides.