Covering the Berlinale as a journalist, it’s all too easy to let cynicism take hold, as you sit through screening after screening surrounded by increasingly sleep-deprived colleagues, gorging together on an all-you-can-eat buffet of cinema out of obligation rather than for pleasure. But last night I was positively bursting with renewed enthusiasm for the festival after attending my first ever public Generation screening. For the uninitiated, Generation is the Berlinale’s youth strand, which serves up an eclectic mix of kid-friendly fare alongside considerably edgier films for teens. Kissing Candice, which I checked out last night, belongs firmly in the latter camp. It’s an ominous coming-of-age thriller about a teenage girl (Ann Skelly) living near the Irish border, who gets caught up in the mysterious disappearance of a young boy whilst experiencing debilitating seizures and prophetic hallucinations. Donnie Darko is the most obvious reference point, but the film occasionally veers into the altogether more nightmarish territory of Under the Skin.
It’s a promising feature debut for music video director Aoife McArdle, rather than a flat-out great one, but it was the whole Generation experience that really won me over. The strand definitely benefits from having the festival’s most striking venue – Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Tiergarten – as its home, and the enthusiasm of the huge young audience, no doubt partially lured out by dirt-cheap ticket prices (€4 a pop), was extremely infectious. Generation programmer Maryanne Redpath is often criticised for selecting ‘unsuitable’ films, but Kissing Candice is exactly the kind of film I would’ve lapped up as a burgeoning cinephile – dark, foul-mouthed and sexy but grounded in the mundane reality of teen life. I had such a good time, I’m planning to head back to HKW tonight to check out Fake Tattoos, which my fellow blogger David has already waxed lyrical about. PO'C
Commissioned by the San Francisco International Film Festival for its 60th anniversary, directors Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson have taken the Master of Suspense at his word when he stated that “Drama is life with the dull bits cut out”. They have cut, mashed and spliced together an homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which plays out as a love letter to both the city of San Francisco and a celebration of the often-undervalued art of editing. Screening in the Forum section, The Green Fog is the mesmerising fruit of their labour, a mischievously self-reflexive vivisection that is a must-see for cinephiles.
Named after the eerie emerald haze that shrouds Kim Novak’s Judy in Vertigo, this avant-garde mosaic is composed exclusively of segments from films and TV shows filmed in the Golden Gate City. The filmmakers giddily genre and era-hop and mine a treasure trove of celluloid clips, from Bullitt to The Towering Inferno, via Murder She Wrote and McMillan And Wife. There’s even a cheeky NSYNC music video clip thrown in for good measure. It starts as a silent film of sorts: the dialogue has been excised, meaning you witness wordless exchanges that are comically punctuated by audible breath intakes, anticipatory speech tics and heavy sighs. The effect initially yields some laughs, as it creates an original narrative from a collection of reaction shots. Tantalisingly, the film progressively achieves a certain level of profundity, as these standoffs become a commentary on communication breakdowns in relationships.
As gimmicky or one-note as it may sound, the directors get an impressive amount of mileage from a concept that never once runs out of steam. There are many thematic call-backs and the hiccupping visual motives (betrayal, chases, falling, flower shops…) create an oneiric rhythm that is heightened by the terrific score courtesy of Jacob Grachik and performed by the Kronos Quartet.
As if Hitch wasn’t already grinning to himself from his vantage point in the big multiplex in the sky, Maddin and Co. have not only accompanied their cinematic collage by a 10-minute single-shot tribute to Rear Window, but further applied the director’s wisdom by making The Green Fog a brisk 62 minutes long. “The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder”, the legendary director famously asserted. Job done, gentlemen, and perhaps you can have a quick word with Competition-selected directors Lav Diaz and Philip Gröning, who self-indulgently seem to care little about toilet breaks. DM
Finally, tickets are now on sale for Saturday (Feb 24). Here are a couple of top picks you can still book for.
An edgy teen pregnancy drama with some amusingly explicit dialogue.
A last chance to see this deeply atmospheric arthouse thriller, set deep in the Polish countryside.