The Forum bills itself as the Berlinale’s most daring strand – a home for the programme’s more avant garde, challenging and uncategorisable work. A clear standout among this year’s line-up is Casa Roshell, Chilean filmmaker Camila José Donoso’s sensitive, deeply atmospheric fly-on-the-wall portrait of an underground club in Mexico City for trans women and their admirers.
When we interviewed the Forum programmers in preparation for our February issue, they seemed confident that this was the frontrunner for this year’s Teddy Award. While I’d be surprised if that were the case, given tough competition from crowd-pleasers like Call Me By Your Name and God’s Own Country, this is nevertheless a mesmerising exploration of the gender and sexuality spectrums, centred around an eclectic group of individuals who oscillate somewhere around the middle of each. One of the club’s most forthright patrons wades straight into the heated topic of whether trans people should attempt to “pass” as cisgender, insisting that club visitors shouldn’t affect a higher-pitched female voice. But as the film deftly illustrates, trans identity is a deeply personal and complex affair – there are no hard and fast rules about how one should outwardly express one’s inner self. It’s also fascinating to watch the club’s male regulars, most of whom seem to have wives or girlfriends at home, struggle to come to terms with the notion that their interest in trans women might make them anything other than straight. Donoso’s use of 16mm and CCTV footage lends the film a grainy, washed out texture that feels totally appropriate for a work that’s all about the blurring of boundaries. And throughout, the tone deftly skips between melancholic and tantalisingly romantic – the point of reference I kept coming back to was the hypnotic Club Silencio sequence in David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr.
Alas, the Forum is also harbouring a few duds. On paper, Werewolf sounds fairly appealing and accessible – a lo-fi Canadian indie drama about a pair of photogenic young junkies trying to get clean via a state-sponsored methadone programme. Director Ashley McKenzie has made the laudable decision to deliver a film about addiction devoid of the histrionics and dark glamour that often accompany the subject. But while there’s a certain elegance to the way she evokes the spirit-crushing daily routine of the two protagonists, the film is hampered by a distractingly awkward central performance from Andrew Gillis as Blaise. Dialogue scenes are few and far between, but virtually every time he opened his mouth, I was snapped out of the world of the film, and immediately felt like I was watching an inexperienced actor struggling to improvise under pressure. Beyond this, McKenzie has little to say about the plight of her characters, beyond the fact that their lives suck. Consequently, utter boredom set in early on for me. On exiting the screening I was shocked to learn that the film’s running time was a brisk 78 minutes – if someone had told me it was over two hours, I would have believed them.