Berlinale #1: “Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die” and extra… – Weblog

No Good Men
The Berlinale has not opened with one thing this emotionally persuasive in years. With No Good Men, Afghan filmmaker Shahrbanoo Sadat delivers a movie that seems modest in scale and method but proves unexpectedly buoyant. Its visible language is spare, at instances virtually elementary, however the lightness is deliberate. In a narrative about gender inequality in Kabul, hope turns into a quietly subversive selection…

Drawing as soon as once more on tales by her longtime collaborator Anwar Hashimi, Sadat builds the movie round a deceptively easy query: do good males exist in Afghanistan, or has the tradition made that chance almost unthinkable? Because filming in Afghanistan was unattainable, Kabul is recreated in Germany, a displacement that subtly reinforces the sense that what we’re watching already belongs to a misplaced previous.

Sadat performs Naru, a tv camerawoman relegated to directing patronizing daytime applications for girls. When a petty skilled slight sends her right into a market to assemble Valentine’s Day interviews, she discovers that girls will communicate to her in methods they won’t to her male colleagues. Nearly all insist there aren’t any good males within the nation. The movie treats this chorus much less as accusation than as a generational prognosis, observing how boys develop up surrounded by fashions of informal humiliation and normalized violence. Qodrat, a colleague who respects Naru’s work and hints at real emotional intelligence, complicates the thesis with out resolving it.

The tonal mix of romantic comedy and social chronicle is just not all the time narratively refined, and a few dialogue leans towards the didactic. Yet Sadat sustains a fastidiously calibrated optimism even because the historic backdrop darkens towards the Taliban’s return, which reframes the ladies’s fragile freedoms as already endangered. As an opening-night movie, No Good Men feels unusually heat for Berlin, and disarmingly honest in its perception that tenderness can survive even in hostile terrain.

A Prayer for the Dying 

John C Reilly and Johnny Flynn in A PRAYER FOR THE DYING © Lukasz Buk

Adapted from Stewart O’Nan’s 1999 novel, A Prayer for the Dying is about in 1870 in Friendship, a small Scandinavian settlement in Wisconsin. For director Dara Van Dusen, whose household was straight affected by COVID, the story of Jacob Hansen, a Civil War veteran supplied a fragile second probability in a railroad city, carries unmistakable up to date weight. What begins as a contained postwar drama step by step reveals itself as an anatomy of management below epidemiological risk.

When an undefined sickness begins spreading by the neighborhood, Jacob’s uncommon civic position sharpens the ethical stakes. He is sheriff, pastor, and gravedigger directly, a convergence of authority that forces him into selections with no precedent and no dependable info. When does quarantine start. How do you forestall worry from accelerating contagion? What occurs when the wants of 1’s household collide with these of the city, and by extension the nation? The movie’s most compelling dimension lies in filtering these questions by a veteran whose wartime trauma resurfaces below strain, suggesting that disaster administration isn’t summary however formed by buried wounds and survival instincts.

Visually, Van Dusen demonstrates putting assurance. Shot in Slovakia to recreate Wisconsin, the movie opens in a haze of orange ash from which Jacob seems and disappears like a person already half claimed by historical past. The digicam strikes with deliberate, exploratory precision, usually observing him from an exterior vantage level that evokes the spatial logic of video video games and subtly shifts the tone from frontier drama towards psychological horror. Yet because the narrative scale expands, the movie’s ambition begins to outpace its management. The last act grows repetitive and pushes past credibility in its escalating stakes. Even so, as a debut it stays memorable for its visible rigor and for the audacity of tackling communal disaster by an intimate, morally claustrophobic lens.

Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die

GOOD LUCK HAVE FUN DONT DIE

Nearly a decade after A Cure for Wellness, Gore Verbinski returns with a movie that feels formally old fashioned but thematically wired into the current. Written by Matthew Robinson, Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die operates as a pointy inner critique of web tradition and social media dependency. It is just not a simplistic name to unplug or retreat into pastoral nostalgia. Instead, it dissects the ethical evasions and aesthetic distortions produced by a life lived completely on-line, focusing on the self induced compulsions that form how we communicate, look, and even think about disaster.

There is an deliberately generational edge to the satire. Teenagers seem virtually feral when pressured to lookup from their telephones, talking in a hybrid dialect stitched collectively from promoting slogans and algorithmic shorthand. Verbinski pushes this exaggeration towards horror, suggesting that the actual violence lies within the flattening of language and empathy. The movie is undeniably too lengthy and ultimately leans on a well-recognized techno dystopian twist that feels extra dutiful than impressed. Yet at its greatest it captures the grotesque texture of the current with unnerving readability. A intentionally grotesque CGI feline creature, hovering between cuteness and menace, crystallizes the purpose: a complete on-line aesthetic constructed on the collision of sweetness and brutality is, in itself, horror.

What finally elevates the movie is Verbinski’s craftsmanship. The digicam strikes with muscular assurance, compositions are fastidiously managed, and using diners, getaway automobiles, and cyclical narrative mechanics evokes American style cinema of the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties. That tactile sensibility grounds the digital anxiousness in one thing materially legible. For all its extra, the movie demonstrates that an quaint directorial hand can nonetheless render the web current unusual sufficient to be seen anew.

Yellow Letters

YELLOW LETTERS

Like the pageant opener, Yellow Letters transforms Germany right into a stand in for an inaccessible elsewhere. İlker Çatak reconstructs Istanbul and Ankara by twenty one days of taking pictures in Hamburg, supplemented by Berlin areas, overtly signaling the artifice with daring crimson chapter titles that announce the substitution. The gesture is just not merely sensible however thematic, reinforcing the movie’s preoccupation with displacement and political estrangement.

Drawing on up to date tensions starting from assaults on universities by Trump Administration to the Israeli Palestinian battle and the continuing diaspora of Turkish intellectuals in Germany, the movie facilities on Derya and Aziz, a few artists who obtain so known as yellow letters from the Turkish state. The notices accuse them of criticizing the federal government after an incident throughout one in all their performances, abruptly collapsing the precarious stability between inventive dissent and institutional recognition that had sustained their careers.

Çatak is most persuasive in his portrait of the couple earlier than their fall. They are oppositional intellectuals who nonetheless profit from prestigious platforms and relative consolation, figures whose ethical authority is difficult by their embeddedness inside the very techniques they critique. Exile fractures them alongside revealing strains. Aziz retreats into principled austerity, driving a taxi and writing in isolation to protect a way of integrity. Derya, more and more suffocated by dependence and home compromise, begins considering a softer technique. The movie pointedly interrogates how feminine autonomy stays conditional, not solely inside conservative spiritual frameworks but in addition inside liberal inventive milieus that profess equality. At instances the development feels overly deliberate, its political parallels virtually too neatly organized, and it lacks the sharpness of Çatak’s earlier work. Still, its examination of pleasure, compromise, and the price of dissent resonates properly past its instant context.