THE award of the Golden Bear to Milos Forman's The People vs. Larry Flynt provided a controversial finale to this year's Berlin Film Festival, almost obscuring the fact that it was one of the dullest festivals in years.
Germany's economic problems contributed to the mood of gloom, with budget cuts forcing the cancellation of all official festival parties. But the main problem lay in the festival's delicate balancing act between fulfilling its role as a forum for serious film from all over the world and the lure of Hollywood glamour.
More than one third of the 25 films in competition were Hollywood productions, among them Nicholas Hytner's The Crucible, Spike Lee's Get on the Bus and Anthony Minghella's The English Patient, all of which have been running in the US for months.
The People vs. Larry Flynt, which will be screened in the Dublin Film Festival, has already attracted its share of controversy in the US on account of its uncritical attitude towards Flynt, who founded the pornographic magazine Hustler. He became an unlikely champion of free speech in 1988 when he won a case against the Christian leader Rev. Jerry Falwell.
Falwell sued for damages after Hustler ran a spoof advertisement suggesting that the preacher's first sexual experience had been with his own mother in an outhouse. Flynt, who has been confined to a wheelchair since he was shot by a sniper in 1978, took the case to the Supreme Court, claiming that the advertisement was an exercise of his right to free speech under the First Amendment.
The film is just as finely crafted as one might expect from Forman and it features strong performances by Woody Harrelson in the title role, and Courtney Love as Flynt's wife, Althea Leasure, a heroin addict who contracted AIDS. But Forman appears to accept Flynt at his own evaluation, as something of a rogue, with a heart of gold and an unsophisticated yearning for justice and freedom.
Yet this is a man who made his fortune from producing grotesque and often violent images of women, including a front cover picture of a naked woman being fed into a meat mincer. His idea of humour is to portray the Rev. Louis Farrakhan holding a water melon while two white women have sex at his feet. One does not need to oppose Flynt's right to publish such material to question whether he is a suitable subject for hagiography. After all, more significant First Amendment cases have been won by American neoNazis, but nobody is tempted to glorify them as champions of free speech.
THE festival opened with Billie August's version of Peter Hoeg's Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow. Hoeg's book is powered by its captivating characterisation of Smilla, a strange, solitary Greenlander living in Copenhagen, who uncovers a conspiracy by politicians and businessmen to cover up the murder of a six year old boy. Julia Ormond captures little of the complexity of Smilla's personality and August allows the detective story to dominate the film at the expense of emotional and psychological texture.
No such criticism could be levelled at Tsai Ming Liang's He Liu (The River), a study of urban alienation in Taiwan that won the Special Jury Prize in Berlin. MingLiang, who explored similar territory in Rebels of the Neon God and Vive L'amour, uses images of illness and leaking water to symbolise the decay of family life. Chronicling the fate of Hsiao kang, a young man who lives with his parents in a Taipei apartment block, the film powerfully evokes the bleakness of a society in which the cult of individualism robs individual lives of human warmth.
The treats of the Berlin festival are often to be found in the non competitive Panorama and Forum sections, where small, serious films have a chance to shine. The Forum's organisers made much of their screening of Krzystztof Kieslowski's, A Short Working Day, which the director would not allow to be shown during his lifetime. Shot in a hurry during the heyday of Solidarity in 1981, the film portrays a confrontation between a crowd of workers and a local party chief.
Despite its curiosity value, the film's weaknesses are all too obvious and the director's reluctance to show it becomes more explicable as each minute wore on.
The Panorama section had, as usual, a strong representation of gay and lesbian films but this year saw a sharp change of tone. As lesbians become more confident about documenting their experience on film, gay filmmakers are confronting an unexpected dilemma. After more than a decade dominated by the destruction caused by AIDS, new medical treatments have kindled the hope that a corner has been turned in the fight against the disease.
Films like Marc Huestis' documentary Another Goddamm Benefit, about a gay theatre in San Francisco, have until now been seen as elegies for lost friends. As hope dawns, they are becoming documents of a terrible time that should not be forgotten.
The Berlin festival needs to think about its future too, and to find a way to return to its role as a thinking person's alternative to Cannes and a forum for world cinema. If action is not taken soon, Berlin will become little more than a cheap marketing platform for Hollywood product, with the best of the rest kept firmly in second place.
