Having been utterly underwhelmed by Golden Bear contenders Django and The Dinner, I was somewhat heartened yesterday to encounter a Competition title almost worthy of its billing, in the form of the wry Austrian comedy Wild Mouse. Making his directorial debut, comedian Josef Hader casts himself as Georg, a veteran newspaper music critic who in the opening scene is abruptly fired as part of a cost-cutting exercise. Finding himself unable to break the news to his younger wife Johanna (Pia Hierzegger), who is desperate to have a child, he embarks on an unlikely secret business venture with an old school acquaintance, whilst plotting revenge on his smug former boss (Jörg Hartmann).
The early scenes seem to promise a descent into much darker territory, but this is for the most part a gently acerbic affair. Its greatest strength is the way in which Hader plays the long game with certain gags – without giving too much away, a seemingly tangential subplot is slowly absorbed into the main narrative in masterly fashion, all in the service of one immensely satisfying laugh-out-loud moment. Meanwhile, as Johanna finds herself looking elsewhere for romantic fulfilment, she winds up in a couple of absurdly hilarious entanglements. While it’s unlikely Wild Mouse would have made the cut for the Competition were it not for Hader’s popularity as a TV star in Germany, it’s a slick, fully-realised first feature.
It’s laudable that the Berlinale programmes a strand specifically for children and young people, but the Generation line-up at times seems targeted primarily at precocious aspiring cinephiles, rather than anything approaching a mainstream audience. While I’ve heard great things about Those Who Make Revolution Halfway Only Did Their Own Graves, I can’t quite imagine teens queueing round the block for a three-hour Quebecois political diatribe. But one film that might succeed in drawing a broad crowd is Neil Triffett’s exuberant debut feature EMO the Musical. Cut from the same gently subversive cloth as Pitch Perfect and Glee, it tells the tale of Ethan, who arrives at a new high school desperate to ingratiate himself with the alternative crowd and pursue his dreams of rock stardom. But as he finds himself romantically entangled with squeaky-clean, chastity-fixated Trinity (Jordan Hare), he risks losing both credibility and his spot in the school emo band Worst Day Ever. While the film is a little rough around the edges, and sags in the middle, sublime comic flourishes abound, with highlights including a gay Christian kid who administers electric shock therapy to himself, and a teacher’s attempts to honour the terms of a bizarre school sponsorship deal with an antidepressant brand. If you’re keen for a light palate-cleanser after a stint of more demanding festival fare, you could do far worse.