The Druid from the small Gallic village asks the two returnees from Switzerland what Helvetia is like, and Obelix answers with a sweeping movement of his arm: "Flat." Just as absurd is the answer given to the question how the Berlinale was this year: It was short.
Because the Berlin Film Festival was never short and rarely entertaining.
They dragged on, they got out of hand, and with almost four hundred films on offer, they overwhelmed even their most receptive viewers.
But their quality lay in this excessive demand.
In Berlin, one felt, almost everything that mattered in the world of cinema could be seen, with the possible exception of the dozen masterpieces that were later shown in Cannes or Venice.
The fullness, the breadth and the length were the prerogative of this festival,
Andrew Kilb
Feature correspondent in Berlin.
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Everything has changed since then.
After the Berlinale had been lucky in 2020, it was de facto canceled the following year - even if a Golden Bear was awarded after the "industry event" in March - while its two competitors returned in their usual splendor.
The fact that it is allowed to take place at all this year is a cultural policy gamble that has apparently paid off, because the film festival has not become a corona hotspot.
How much the virus still determines the everyday life of the festival is shown by the cancellation of Isabelle Huppert.
On Tuesday she was supposed to receive the Golden Bear for her acting lifetime achievement;
on Monday evening the news came that she had to stay in Paris because of a corona infection.
The gala at Potsdamer Platz took place without her.
At the same time, one of only two films in this year's competition in which the actors wore respirators as a matter of course was running diagonally opposite in the multiplex cinema.
The Korean Hong Sang-soo is represented with a directorial work at the Berlinale for the sixth time, which speaks for the attraction, but also for a certain aging process of the festival, because Hong will no longer reinvent cinema.
In "So-seol-ga-ui Yeong-hwa", the story of a writer who, through a visit to an old friend, meets an actress with whom she is working on a film project, he again balances on the border between the banal and the mundane Sublime, and perhaps the best thing that can be said about his film is that it doesn't look like a piece of auteur cinema from the day before yesterday,
One of the reasons why people in Berlin had to think about Switzerland more often was that its mountains were featured in two of the strongest films in the competition.
After Ursula Meier's “La Ligne”, Michael Koch's “Drii Winter” once again proved the superiority of a cinematic storytelling that invents its subject matter instead of just wrapping it up.
The tragedy of Anna and Marco, who struggle through in a remote village without their own farm, until Marco is mentally and physically crippled by a brain tumor, has often been acted out in the cinema with other names and locations, but Koch gives it one with his pictures new shoot.
He literally digs them into the landscape, its rocks, its meadows, its light and its frost.
Everyone is so alone up here that it hurts.
No one has ever heard of a love that survives three winters.
At the 72nd Berlin Film Festival, "Drii Winter" was incomprehensibly empty-handed.
Instead, the jury, chaired by American director M. Night Shyamalan, awarded the Golden Bear to Carla Simón's “Alcarràs”, a film that tells of the existential crisis of a Catalan peasant family with the same seriousness but in brighter colors.
The other awards correspond to the watering can logic of all major festivals, even if one wonders why not Phyllis Nagy's "Call Jane", but the hopelessly muddled Mexican contribution "Robe of Gems" won the Silver Bear and Hong Sang-soo at the Grand Jury Prize was preferred to Indonesian director Kamila Andini ("Nana").
The screenplay prize for Laila Stieler, the author of Andreas Dresen's “Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush”, is unlikely to convince every festival viewer, while the award for Dresen's leading actress Meltem Kaptan doesn't really surprise anyone.
The director's award for Claire Denis, on the other hand, is a double gift: it honors a film as well as a director who, on her way through the cinema, does not allow herself to be misled by any political or aesthetic fashion.
The Berlinale has asserted itself.
She has risen from the abyss of the past year, albeit with injuries, loss of aura and meaning.
But their structural problems have remained.
World cinema, especially that from America and the Far East, is no longer a natural guest in Berlin.
Even the streaming services, which dominate an ever larger part of the market, do not show their best productions at the Berlinale.
The managing director Mariette Rissenbeek and the program manager Carlo Chatrian have been in office for three years now.
They will soon have to reorganize the film festivals to maintain their position among the festivals.
With or without a pandemic.