Off-screen glamour, on-screen blandness - that was this year's Berlin Film Festival, reports Derek Scally.
Film festivals can be crowded marketplaces with jostling for the pick of films and the stars to promote them. The Berlin Film Festival, the Berlinale, battles with Venice for the coveted number-two spot, behind Cannes. Each year, eccentric festival director Dieter Kosslick tries a different formula. This year it was the old MGM approach, offering festival-goers "more stars than there are in the heavens".
Madonna, the Rolling Stones, Scorsese, de Niro, Ben Kingsley, Penelope Cruz and Tilda Swinton all popped up in Berlin. And who on earth invited Goldie Hawn? Emphasising the star factor had a mixed effect. It drew crowds and media coverage, but at a film festival it's what's on screen that counts, particularly in Berlin, with grey skies, a winter wind and none of the Cannes glamour. Sadly, the star factor led to a lot of bland offerings, proving again that star wattage is no guarantee of a good film. But more of Madonna later.
Jagger and the boys rolled down the red carpet on opening night with Shine a Light, a film of the Stones's 2006 Beacon Theatre concert. Martin Scorsese claimed to be a huge Stones fan, but merely turned out a loud, generic concert that should nevertheless do well on DVD. The Golden Bear for best picture was not, as many expected, awarded to There Will Be Blood, but to the controversial Brazilian film, Elite Squad, about a street battle between troops and a drug gang, a film so violent it makes City of God look like British farce. Daniel Day-Lewis was passed over as best actor in favour of Iran's Reza Naji as a long-suffering ostrich farmer in The Song of Sparrows.
Sally Hawkins charmed audiences - and picked up a Silver Bear as best actress - in Happy-Go-Lucky, Mike Leigh's winning new film. A pompous Ben Kingsley cancelled out some fine acting from Penelope Cruz in Elegy, the film version of Philip Roth's The Dying Animal. A special award was given to the chilling documentary, Standard Operating Procedure by Errol Morris (Fog of War) who interviewed soldiers who posed for pictures as they humiliated prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison. The dead-eyed answers of Lynndie England are a depressing indication that nothing was learned from the experience. Alongside Daniel Day-Lewis's scorching performance in There Will Be Blood. Tilda Swinton was a standout in Julia, joining Ray Milland and Jack Lemmon in the annals of great cinema alcoholics. Kristin Scott Thomas finally ascended into the Dench/Mirren stratosphere with a tormented performance in the French film, Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (I've Loved You So Long).
Harrowing on another scale was the best foreign picture nominee, Katyn, by Andrzej Wajda, the story of the 1940 forest massacre of Polish soldiers by Soviet troops, which was suppressed during the communist era.
Flying the Irish flag was 32A, written and directed with class by Marian Quinn. Set in 1979 Raheny, the film takes its name not from the 32A bus but the 32A bust of our heroine Maeve (Ailish McCarthy) in this utterly charming coming-of-age drama. Irish audiences will revel in the spot-on recreation of 1970s Irish suburbia, from demonic nuns and gossipy shopkeepers to lost nights in the Grove disco. International audiences will also relate to the teenage awkwardness at the film's warm heart. After a screening for local schoolchildren, headscarved Turkish girls had a shine of recognition in their eyes.
Two Irish shorts were shown. New Boy, Steph Green's smart and touching tale of an African boy's first day in an Irish primary school, got a special mention from the shorts jury. Meanwhile, director Darren Thornton won the Prix UIP for his superb Frankie. The judges raved over his "simple and powerful" tale of a teenage father-to-be. Thornton said the award was recognition for his production company's youth film project, from where he drew his ideas for the script. "Berlin is so well-recognised that I hope this will make it easier to get phone calls returned now," Thornton added.
And finally to Filth and Wisdom, Madonna's directorial debut, an unlikely, unlikable tale of three room-mates juggling their dreams with reality in a barely recognisable London. With its untidy narrative, clumsy voiceover and prologue/epilogue shoe-horned into place, you have a film that resembles a shaky film-school final project.
Madonna earned a few snorts at the press conference for confessing that she too, like on of the film's room-mates, is at heart a gypsy. This after a 25-year career as a tramp and thief.
