It looks wrong, literally wrong, when masked people sit in the cinema and stare at the screen – and naked faces look back from the screen.

It should be the other way around, so that those on screen wear a mask, at least a bit of lipstick and make-up.

And the audience, under cover of darkness, dares to stick their heads out.

When you sit masked in the cinema, it seems as if the game of reflections, projections and identifications has come to a standstill, or even been completely interrupted, as long as you hide behind the mask from the impositions and challenges that emotional outbursts and disgust.

Claudius Seidl

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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In fact, in the Mexican film "Manto de gemas" (which the Berlinale is running under its English pseudonym "Robe of Gems"), which is as beautiful as it is difficult to understand and sometimes also a bit awkward, there were always images and scenes that showed how serious and existentially they were meant.

And they still didn't manage to hit and touch the viewer.

It was the scenes in which one would have liked to tear the mask off one's face in the hope that the feelings would then make themselves understood.

Natalia López Gallardo's film is set in those areas of Mexico where series and thrillers are otherwise set - but because the director wants to tell about other people, all questions of form raise the question of power at the same time.

Gangsters and police officers, intrigues and betrayal, conflict and showdown: That's how it works, and rightly so, in the "Narcos" series, for example.

“Manto de gemas” wants to tell about drugs, corruption and violence from the women's point of view.

And comes to the conclusion that he can't tell anything at all, because all narration of these things is male charged.

This surreal country

So they are fragments of scenes and images, often willfully cut out of the world, rarely generous panoramas, whose connection is not always recognizable.

Three women each wanting to be on the right side of the law;

and who simply don't make it, because once one of the family has gotten into the world of drugs, an outside is apparently no longer visible, indeed no longer even conceivable.

The heroines of the film just don't see through anymore;

and that is exactly the film's strategy, which is sometimes consistent when action and violence only play on the soundtrack because new images of it cannot be found and staged.

And what remains incomprehensible when Natalia Lopez Gallardo just falls in love with her own poetic ideas.

The whole country is surreal, the director said at the press conference, so his description has to be surreal.

And that was the moment when one would have wanted to invoke Saint Luis Buñuel for consolation.

Whereby the incantations at the start of the Berlinale, all the warm words about the cinema, which is finally back and so important for the intellectual well-being of the people, complains so friendly and dignified, as if times long past were invoked.

As if Claudia Roth, for example, believed that when the plague was finally over, Luis Buñuel and Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider and Federico Fellini would walk across red Berlinale carpets.

A gigolo from Austria

Ulrich Seidl staged a nasty comment on such illusions, a film about a pop singer who had a bit of glamor decades ago.

And who, with ridiculously pompous performances in front of pensioners, with sex and alcohol and cigarettes, tries to suppress the realization that the times of his shabby little glory are becoming ever further away.

The film is called "Rimini" because it takes place on the Adriatic Sea in winter.

He could also be called "Austrian Gigolo" because the hero earns his money by coming to the pensioners' rooms at night.

The hero is called Richie Bravo, he has a beautiful voice and a body that is degenerating - and Ulrich Seidl, who in his earlier films looked at the naked, ugly bodies so intensely as if he hoped that the beautiful soul would then show itself,

The film's answer is that it can no longer believe in the great love that forgives everything.

Only the somewhat smaller reconciliation with his own daughter, for which the hero commits a crime.

As a viewer, one would like to postpone the answer: It remains unfair and unrealistic to judge the exposure of this hero from the protection of the mask.