63rd Berlinale Roundup!

The 63rd Berlinale finally came to a close at the weekend and now that the dust can begin to settle on the red carpet for yet another year it becomes clear just how prominent women were throughout the festival lineup. The Competition section poignantly featured narratives that depicted the plights of women at odds with a harsh, unsympathetic, and prejudiced world. Race, religion, sexuality, and old age were the central issues on the menu in this diverse selection of films with female protagonists. Layla Fourie by Berlin-based director, Pia Marais, is a tense and tightly-wound drama set in Johannesburg that follows the titular characters efforts to deal with and conceal her accidental hit and run killing of a white man whilst on her way to begin work as a polygraph operator in a casino. The film masterfully builds tension and even gets away with the unlikely scenario in which Layla unknowingly finds herself at the dinner table of the white mans family, until it seems to realise its own running time and disappointingly rushes to an unsatisfying end. We were waiting for a Shakespearean climax, instead we were left with blue balls. Winner of the Silver Bear for a feature film that opens new perspectives, Vic and Flo Saw a Bear is a bleak but realistic portrayal of two lesbian ex-convicts coming to terms with life on the outside and their own tumultuous relationship. This was certainly an intriguing and well-shot film, with fully developed characters and a slow yet mysterious plot, but the tragic ending seemed a little pointless and we were left trying to work out what exactly the film was trying to say. Combining destitution and suffering in the first half and a little eroticism and light-humour in the second, The Nun manages to question religious fanaticism and hypocrisy whilst remaining entertaining throughout. Pauline Etienne steals the show as the ever-suffering, coerced nun (her parents cant afford a dowry for her, so naturally shes thrown into the world of religious servitude), even in the face of our favourite French actress, Isabelle Huppert, who plays the sexually-repressed mother superior infatuated by the visage of her disciple. Following the relatively recent shift towards engaging leading roles for women of a certain age (for which perhaps Meryl Streep is arguably the torch-bearer), On My Way and Gloria are relevant and realistic character studies of women who feel discarded by their husbands, families, and society, and so decide to defy old age and loneliness by whatever means they can. Featuring stellar performances from Catherine Deneuve and Paulina Garca (who won the Silver Bear for Best Actress) respectively, these films confront universal fears of aging and loneliness in a way that is accessible to any audience, regardless of age or gender. Lastly, winner of the much-coveted Golden Bear award, Childs Pose is another film which relies on the strength of its female protagonist, the mother of a man who accidentally knocked down a 14-year old boy whilst speeding. This Romanian film is complex in its ability to ease the audience into a kind of sympathy for the mother, for whom the prospect of losing her son to a lengthy prison sentence is too much to bear. She embarks upon a morally vacuous parade of bribery and manipulation in an attempt to save her son from imprisonment, but in doing so infuriates her son provoking him to seek his own liberation from her maternal clutches.