Long established as one of the three leading European film events, the Berlin Film Festival - now in its 50th year - opened on Wednesday night with The Million Dollar Hotel.
The 20th feature from the German director Wim Wenders, it originated in a story devised by Bono, is set in Los Angeles and features the American actor Jeremy Davies, the Russian-born Milla Jovovich, the Australian-raised Mel Gibson, and the Swedish actor Peter Stormare in the leading roles. And it is strikingly photographed by the Greek lighting cameraman Phedeon Papamichael.
The setting is March 2001 in a rundown hotel in downtown Los Angeles. It begins at the end, when the most child-like and innocent of those residents, Tom Tom (Jeremy Davies), leaps from the roof of the building and the movie cuts to extended flashback and explores the events of the previous fortnight.
Those events hinge on the interruption of the residents' lives by the arrival of a hardline FBI agent, Skinner (Mel Gibson) to investigate the death of a junkie occupant who, it transpires, was the son of a media multi-millionaire. The hotel's eccentric residents include an introverted young prostitute (Milla Jovovich) who is the object of Tom Tom's affection; the volatile, Machiavellian Geronimo (a long-haired Jimmy Smits); a faded Hollywood agent (Bud Cort); and a strung-out character who claims his songwriting for the Beatles remains uncredited and who's played with panache and a thick Liverpool accent by Peter Stormare.
Ostensibly a murder mystery, The Mil- lion Dollar Hotel gradually reveals itself, rather ponderously in its establishing sequences, as a series of inter-connected and stylised character studies. It pivots on the inarticulately expressed and unrequited yearnings of its most guileless creation, Tom Tom, who's played with an edgy, all-consuming intensity by Davies, in marked contrast to Gibson's amusingly deadpan playing as the detective whose uptight demeanour is emphasised by the elaborate back brace he wears. The movie's mood is enhanced by a vibrant score that includes five new Bono songs, and by its quirky sense of humour, which offers director Wenders a welcome opportunity to lighten up after several more portentous exercises.
In the first overtly gay screen treatment of a Highsmith novel, Anthony Minghella, the Oscar-winning director of The English Patient, addresses subject matter which even French cinema dared not address in 1960, in his riveting new version, The Talented Mr Ripley, which has its European premiere in Berlin tonight.
This handsome and gripping suspense drama of duplicity and deception features Matt Damon in a revelatory performance as Tom Ripley, an insecure but ambitious young American who re-invents himself chameleon-like to appease his social-climbing and sexual desires. "I'd rather be a fake somebody," he says, "than a real nobody."
It opens in the summer of 1958 when Ripley, mistaken for a Princeton alumnus, is despatched to Italy by a wealthy shipbuilder to persuade his indolent son, Dickie (Jude Law) to return. As the gauche, toothy Ripley inveigles his way into the lives of Dickie and his American girlfriend (Gwyneth Paltrow), he finds himself irresistibly attracted to Dickie.
The more Ripley lies, the greater the accumulating risks he sets for himself in this fascinatingly drawn picture of a compulsive, perfectionist liar whose greatest fear, it emerges, is in facing himself. An excellent cast also features Philip Seymour Hoffman, Cate Blanchett, Jack Davenport, James Redhorn and Philip Baker Hall.
More from Berlin next Friday
