Special envoy to Berlin
An Irish drama about mistreating nuns (Small things like these), a portrait of a woman in Iran (My favorite cake), a chronicle of confinement by Olivier Assayas (Hors du temps), a historical film about a young German resistance victim, victim of Nazi barbarism (From Hilde, with Love ), a futuristic Europudding on the impossibility of mourning with Gael Garcia Bernal (Another End)… The Berlinale purrs.
Fortunately, A24 shakes up a serious and unsurprising selection with two less predictable films, A Different man and Love Lies Bleeding. The American production company confirms that it is a refuge for filmmakers who don’t shoot like everyone else. In recent years we owe him productions that escape formatting: Uncut Gems, by the Safdie brothers, First Cow by Kelly Reichardt, The Whale, by Darren Aronofsky, The Zone of Interest, by Jonathan Glazer or even Everything Everywhere All at Once ( EEAO), by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (known as the Daniels), triumphs at the Oscars in 2023.
A Different man, by Aaron Schimberg, in the running for the Golden Bear, looks like a remake of Elephant Man by Woody Allen. He imagines Edward, an aspiring New York actor, suffering from an illness that distorts his face. As he prepares to undergo surgery, a nice and sexy neighbor moves into the apartment next door. She is played by Renate Reinsve, Julie in 12 chapters by Joachim Trier. Edward is played by Sebastian Stan, unrecognizable under the makeup. But Adam Pearson, actor and activist, really suffers from neurofibromatosis. He appears in the second part of the film and brings a fierce irony to this subverted version of Beauty and the Beast. Aaron Schimberg settles accounts with beauty, its dictates and its privileges.
Love Lies Bleeding, presented out of competition after being unveiled at Sundance, goes even further in the affront to decency. Its director, Rose Glass, is no stranger. The Briton won the Grand Prix at the Gérardmer fantasy festival in 2020 with Saint Maud. Here it features Kristen Stewart as the manager of a gym in a remote place in New Mexico in the 1980s. Mullet and tank top cut, the heroine of Twilight, president of the jury in Berlin last year, continues to break her starlet image. Lou survives between a sister beaten by her husband and a father who is the owner of a shooting club and a beetle collector. Ed Harris portrays him with an improbable look, half redneck, half hippie. Lou falls for Jackie (Katy O’Brien, pretty face on a muscular body), a hitchhiker on her way to a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas. The two women barely have time to experience a torrid passion, between two steroid injections, when the first corpse in a long series complicates their romance. Rose Glass dares everything, gore and bad taste, to tell the story of female empowerment thwarted by a perverse patriarchy and a degenerate sorority. Under its guise of a sticky B series, Love Lies Bleeding is the most enjoyable film seen in Berlin in these early days.
