The Berlinale is how the Berlin Film Festival is known here, don’t ask me why. The Cannesale would risk sounding like a magret sale or the Veneziale like a blind trademark. But the Berlinale sounds ok, although you might still mistake it for some German pub quaff, except that it’s pronounced Berlinaaaaaale, not Berlinayle. As you see, I’m beating about the bush, probably because I have decided to write about events taking place outside my usual field. But I can’t resist saying a few words about this new experience, after all, I missed the two first Berlinales I could have gone to, and I decided that it is a must have Berlin experience.
So I accepted the invitations to attend the opening ceremony, one of the movies in competition, and the awards ceremony, whence the title of this commentary. I did read a few things in the local press and I saw pictures of celebrities I had no idea were in town, and even saw one or two giving TV interviews, but I did not take part in what must have been the feverish activity involving the stars, the competition, the buying and selling of movies, the forums, the market for new talent, the gossip, in short, everything one, especially one not too familiar with the issues, imagines goes on at a film festival.
Then on the evening of February 7th, all dressed up (the invitation requested “festive evening wear”), clutching my red bear decorated set of tickets, one for general admission to the ceremony, one assigning a seat for the movie, and one to gain access to the Mayor’s party after the show, I got into my black chauffeur-driven Mercedes, on time to be allowed to tread the red carpet, a chance I wouldn’t have missed for anything in the world, considering it would probably be a once in a lifetime occasion. Actually, I did get a second shot at it, on the closing night. Meanwhile, after making my totally unnoticed entrance, I stood at the top of the balcony overlooking the Berlinale Plaza, watching the likes of, among others I can’t remember and a bunch of less famous stars I didn’t know anyway, Goldie Hawn, Penelope Cruz, Martin Scorcese and the Rolling Stones making their own grand entrance, to the shouts of the cheering crowd. The latter were the subject or object of Scorcese’s documentary, Shine a Light, which was slated to open the festival. To bad for me. I found the movie so devastatingly uninteresting that I left before the end, mainly because it was also so noisy I couldn’t sleep it out to attend the ensuing reception .
Apart from the horror-movie physique and contortions of the protagonists, the emetic music (this not mere rhetoric, it actually makes me want to vomit), and the sickening self-centeredness of the exercise (Scorcese managed to make a movie as much about himself as about the Rolling Stones, as he constantly appears in it, a sort of Scorcese movie about Scorcese making a movie about the Rolling Stones), it was also a glorification of, believe it or not, the Clintons, who were also ubiquitious in the movie. So it was also probably intended as a pre-campaign push for Hillary, but we know now that it was to no avail.
I was almost forgetting that I actually paraded on the red carpet three times, as I went to the screening of the Brazilian movie Tropa de Elite, a good but very unsettling and violent film, the merits of which I will not discuss as socio-politics are not what I want to talk about on these pages.
The third time I sashayed over the scarlet strip was to attend the closing ceremony,an exact repeat of the opening, plus of course the award ceremony, a cheap version of the Oscars, and with a different movie, pretty bad too, really silly, in spite of some really good ideas and good actors, entitled Be Kind Rewind.
My own closing remarks – the Berlinale is a marginale festivale.