Cinema historians may one day call this the Covidist period: when films were made in secret during lockdown, scripts were written that did not require actors to come within two metres of each other or they were filmed remotely, with directors sitting a couple of rooms away.
For many film fans, it felt last year as if cinema had simply stopped. In fact, the new crop of films emerging at Europe’s big winter festivals – Rotterdam, Gothenburg and Berlin, all of which were accessible online – show how resourceful people can be in the face of rules, limitations and endless hand-washing.
Language Lessons was a success at the Berlin International Film Festival, and despite playing out like a Zoom conversation, never felt flat. Credit:Jeremy Mackie
Take Language Lessons, written by Mark Duplass and Natalie Morales, which traces the growing friendship between a widowed gay man and his Costa Rican Spanish teacher over Zoom. To the extent that an online festival can have hits, this was a slam dunk for The Berlin International Film Festival, or Berlinale, as it’s often called.
Shot in Duplass’ house over five days for virtually nothing, Language Lessons’ story of trust being hesitantly extended, then withdrawn, then extended again was a perfect match with Zoom’s uncomfortable tension between distance and intimacy. And despite being essentially a dialogue between two small laptop screens, it never felt flat or enclosed. This is our normal now, after all.
Or consider Petite Maman, directed by Celine Sciamma, whose last film Portrait of a Lady on Fire was the closest thing arthouse cinema had to a blockbuster in 2019. Sciamma began writing this story of childhood grief before lockdown, but was able to go ahead and make it because it was “very
COVID compatible”, as she said in an online interview.
The 8-year-old girls at Petite Maman’s centre are twins, so were already in a bubble. The movie is set largely in a wood, so it could be filmed outdoors. And the story itself – about a child mourning the loss of her grandmother while dealing with her mother’s enduring depression – was poignantly of the moment.
Turns out, Petite Maman was the perfect film to shoot during a pandemic. Credit:Lilies Films
The Gothenberg and Rotterdam festivals were in January; the Berlinale, which was held entirely on camera with public screenings of the films delayed until July, finished on Friday. Freed from the need to bring stars to the red carpet, Berlinale director Carlo Chatrian was at liberty to pick the most stimulating program in years.
The festival even managed, despite having no audiences, to generate a scandal by awarding the top prize – The Golden Bear – to a film that starts with six grindingly graphic minutes of hard-core porn. Even watching at home on a laptop, Radu Jude’s social satire Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn felt like a hard slap across the face.
