Jeffrey’s Berlinale box score Days in Berlin: 9-1/2 Films seen: 28 Press conferences attended: 16 Films left early: none Press conferences left early: many Notebook pages covered: 179 Museums: 5 Concerts: 3 Cafés in Kreuzberg: 2 Film-star parties: 0 Film stars interviewed: 1 (12-year-old Josseline Glowacki, who played Pharaoh’s sister in Planet B: Detective Lovelorn) Film-star autographs collected: 1 (Josseline) Best film: At Dawning, a 10-minute short from Martin Jones that stars Jenny Agutter and has a flabbergasting sight-gag reference to Walkabout, the 1971 Nicolas Roeg film in which Agutter had her first major role. Best performance: Daniel Libeskind (see "Der Tod in Berlin") Best performance on screen: Julianna Kovács in Kísértések Biggest disappointment: last year the tabloid Berliner Kurier gave us a front-page photo of Monica Bellucci (Malèna) wearing nothing but caviar; this year the best it could do was an inside shot of Anna Thomson (Bridget) in a net body suit. Biggest film disappointment: Wim Wenders’s Viel passiert — Der BAP Film, a 96-minute ode to a mediocre Cologne rock band whose best number, a cover of Dylan’s "My Back Pages," twists the hook into "That’s when I was a much older man/A lot has happened [viel passiert] since then." Buena Vista Social Club it isn’t. Der Tod in Berlin No film in this year’s Berlinale evinced anything like the genius that’s manifested in Daniel Libeskind’s just opened Jüdisches Museum, so it gets my own Golden Bear. You can even think of it as a film, though one whose narrative lines intersect and sometimes end abruptly, just like the lives of Hitler’s victims. Libeskind’s design is a lightning bolt of a building (or perhaps a fractured Star of David) clad in zinc, the yin to the orange-and-lemon yang of the neighboring Berlin Kammergericht, the Court of Appeal (what appeal was there for Europe’s Jews?) where E.T.A. Hoffmann once worked. (All great Berlin architecture is yin-yang.) Its outer surface is slashed, vandalized, like Jewish shops; the exception is the Holocaust Tower, which stands naked in its concrete. One narrative line leads outside to the Garden of Exile (or the E.T.A. Hoffmann Garden — everything here seems to have two names), 49 (for the creation of Berlin in 1948 plus one for Berlin) concrete columns that enclose 49 willow oaks whose branches form a Sukkoth bower overhead. Another takes you to the Holocaust Tower, a stark, cold, empty enclosure that makes you wonder whether the gas mightn’t go on at any moment. Inside, those slashes of window are disorienting, you lose your sense of what’s straight and what slopes (and in fact the columns in the Garden of Exile do slope — have you seen Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari lately?). Spiny locust and thorny rose enclose this wonder. Too bad Libeskind isn’t a filmmaker. — JG

Is it real or is it Hollywood? That’s the question that popped up unexpectedly — and perhaps unintentionally — at the 52nd Berlin Film Festival. This was the first Berlinale under new director Dieter Kossick (his predecessor, Moritz de Hadeln, was abruptly shown the door last year after 22 years in charge), and apart from the "German Film Perspective" program, a laudable attempt to encourage the home product, the only "new direction" in evidence was the relative absence of American films. Just three — Monster’s Ball, The Shipping News, and The Royal Tenenbaums — screened in official competition for the Golden Bear, plus Oscar nominees Gosford Park and A Beautiful Mind out of competition. The European and Asian films were, as always, a mixed bag, but midway through the festival Costa-Gavras’s Amen. — an adaptation of Rolf Hochhuth’s 1963 play Der Stellvertreter ("The Deputy"), which asks why Pope Pius XII did nothing to save the millions of Jews murdered by Hitler — went off like a Roman candle. And from then on the theme of this Berlinale — as attested to by Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday, Bertrand Tavernier’s Laissez-passer, Richard Eyre’s Iris, Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind, Christopher Roth’s Baader, and István Szabó’s Taking Sides — became the ways in which film reinterprets reality. As for the Golden Bear, the buzz from both the critics and the public made it clear which three movies were in the running, but the jury, headed by Mira Nair (Mississippi Masala), had other ideas, reaching one of the oddest and most intriguing decisions in the history of film festivals.

One of the European big three, with Cannes and Venice, the Berlinale has always been beset by bear traps. Until 1978 it was held in June, and you could sit outdoors all night under those beautiful lindens (Berlin’s signature tree) and argue film. But Cannes, in May, kept getting the better movies, so the Berlinale moved to cold, rainy February. And though the hotels were happy (why else would you go to Berlin in winter?), February is much too early for Oscar-hopeful movies to be coming out (the Academy voters have short memories), so the only big-name American films that make it to Berlin these days are Christmas leftovers hoping that a festival award will improve their Oscar prospects the following month. If you’re Dieter Kossick, that means you spend your year trying to round up non-American films whose connections wouldn’t rather be basking on the Riviera in May or the Lido in September.

Berlin is, nonetheless, the most Hollywood-conscious of all film-festival cities; Berliners love their Hollywood films, and even more their Hollywood stars. Cate Blanchett turned up for Heaven (Tom Tykwer’s disappointing opening-night film is practically a remake of The Princess and the Warrior) and stayed for The Shipping News, where she was joined by Lasse Hallström and Kevin Spacey; Halle Berry (named Best Actress) was there for Monster’s Ball, Maggie Smith and Robert Altman for Gosford Park, Ron Howard and Russell Crowe for A Beautiful Mind. But no Billy Bob Thornton or Puffy at the Monster’s Ball press conference, and only Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson for The Royal Tenenbaums, no Gene or Gwyneth or Ben or Anjelica, and no energy in the questions from the press. (The Berlinale press corps, myself included, are seldom what you’d call probing: Halle Berry was asked what it was like to be naked in bed with Billy Bob Thornton and whether she’d had much time for shopping. "In New Orleans?" she asked [that’s where Monster’s Ball was shot]. "No, in Berlin.") Claudia Cardinale, radiant as always, dropped in to receive a lifetime achievement award, but when I asked her why she had never worked with Michelangelo Antonioni, she replied, "Unfortunately I never did, but we’re very close." It was all summed up by the press conference for Iris, where the principals were director Richard Eyre and actor Hugh Bonneville, who plays the young John Bayley. Midway through the proceedings, word came that the three absent stars — Judi Dench, Kate Winslet, and Jim Broadbent — had received Oscar nominations, but nothing for Richard, or Hugh, or the film.

One big difference between Berlin and Cannes or Venice is that Berlin has public screenings. This sends shock waves of enthusiasm through the festival, but it can be hard on critics, especially if you’re not there opening night. Despite going straight from the plane to the Berlinale press center, I wasn’t able to get a ticket for sold-out Heaven, so I raced back across town to the Royal-Palast and waited in line for a half-hour in hope that a ticket would be returned (it was). I saw two films before seeing my hotel room, and the second day, still trying to catch up, I watched Ivan Sen’s Beneath Clouds, Tavernier’s Laissez-passer, and William Klein’s Mr. Freedom (part of the festival’s "European ’60s" retrospective), took a breather with Claudio Abbado and Maurizio Pollini and the Berlin Philharmonic (see "Live and on Record," on page 15), then caught the 11:30 screening of Bloody Sunday. In bed by 2, up, jet-lagged, at 7 for another day of endless screenings. Among the films I should have seen and didn’t: Moisès Kaufman’s The Laramie Project, the documentary Hitlers Sekretärin (whose subject, 81-year-old Traudl Junge, died during the festival), Tony Gatlif’s Swing, Claude Lanzmann’s Sobibor, 14 Octobre 1943, 16 heures, and the Wilhem Furtwängler bio Taking Sides.

Some of the movies seemed endless. As the festival got under way, Germany’s most prestigious daily, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, observed that the average length of the competition films was two hours. And at first it appeared they were all going to tell us about self-centered children with less than perfect parents. Zhang Yimou’s out-of-competition Xingfu Shiguang ("Happy Times") is about a man who tries to create happy times for the blind daughter of his worthless girlfriend; tougher than The Road Home and Not One Less, and perhaps less accomplished, it was still one of the best films I saw. Ivan Sen’s Beneath Clouds treats racism in Australia as it follows two troubled runaway teenagers trying to get back to their parents; like many of the entries here, it turned out to be a high-class TV-movie. Silvio Soldini’s Brucio nel vento has those dreaded poetic French voiceovers, à la Godard, except that Soldini is serious in his story of an illegitimate Czech émigré who, haunted by the memory of his prostitute mother, finds peace with his half-sister. François Ozon’s 8 Femmes, Berlinale 2002’s runaway popular hit, is a campy musical/soap opera/country-house murder mystery that stars eight legendary French actresses, including Catherine Deneuve (reports that she was responsible for the press conference’s starting 45 minutes late didn’t endear her to the media), Fanny Ardant, Isabelle Huppert, and Emmanuelle Béart, in a hilarious story that encompasses three generations and embraces incest. Incest is also suspected in Danish filmmaker Annette K. Olesen’s debut, the Dogme-like Små ulykker ("Minor Mishaps"), in which the family’s mother is hit by a bus and the father and three grown children have to come to terms with their loss and one another; it’s a good back-to-basics film that would have been even better had Olesen forgone the reassuring background music. Set on Corsica, Dominik Graf’s Der Felsen ("The Cliff") centers on a woman whose holiday is cut short when her married lover learns his wife is pregnant; Katrin gets picked up by an obsessive 17-year-old delinquent, and their ambivalent relationship spirals downward before she winds up with the son figure of his younger brother. The shiftless computer hacker of Hungarian director Zoltán Kamondi’s Kísértések ("Temptations") forces his mother to choose between him and her boyfriend, and his own girlfriend is no bargain; more intriguing is his relationship with a 10-year-old Gypsy girl (the astonishing Julianna Kovács) who could be his daughter but considers herself his wife. There’s more incest in The Shipping News, of course, and I don’t need to elaborate on how parent-child themes run riot in Gosford Park and The Royal Tenenbaums.

But the real tone for Berlinale 2002 was set, unnoticed, on the first morning by Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday, which details the horrific events of January 30, 1972 in Derry City, when the Brits shot 27 unarmed civil-rights marchers, killing 13. I have Northern Irish ancestors on both sides of my family, and a distant relative, William Orr, was hanged by the English in 1797 merely for administering the United Irishmen oath. Greengrass’s film, which reduced me to tears, paints a chilling picture of British racism regarding the Catholics in Northern Ireland; I don’t doubt its veracity. And credit Greengrass and actor James Nesbitt with a three-dimensional portrayal of Protestant activist and march leader Ivan Cooper, who seems not to understand that some of his hotheads are sure to start trouble by throwing rocks at the British soldiers. But the bottom line here, as in virtually every fictional film that purports to depict real life, is that the cinematic version is less complex, and less true, than the real thing. The real-life Brits portrayed here by the likes of Nicholas Farrell and Tim Pigott-Smith deserve the opportunity to speak for themselves. They don’t get it.

The mirror image of this issue cropped up in Bertrand Tavernier’s Laissez-passer ("Safe Conduct"), a three-hour valentine to the French Resistance and the wartime French film industry. I kept getting lost in this based-in-fact costume drama, perhaps because the two protagonists look somewhat alike and are both named Jean, but the idea is that these French film people fought to maintain the integrity of their industry, and their country, and that hardly anyone collaborated. I’m not in a position to suggest that the two Jeans have sugarcoated their reminiscences; all the same, Laissez-passer reads like a French translation of Ron Howard.

Which brings us to A Beautiful Mind. I sat spellbound through this film, struck especially by the way Howard presents John Nash’s hallucinations as real — if John can’t tell the difference between a real person and an imagined one, why should we presume we can? But in the end, either A Beautiful Mind is true to Nash’s actual life or it’s just an uplifting Disney fantasy — and as anyone who’s read Sylvia Nasar’s book knows, Howard’s film isn’t anywhere near true to Nash’s life. Christopher Roth’s Baader also takes liberties with its subject: the real Andreas Baader committed suicide in prison, as did the other leader of his terrorist collective, Ulrike Meinhof, but in the film he’s gunned down in a Frankfurt-am-Main garage à la Bonnie and Clyde. More of a problem is Roth’s TV-movie hit-and-run style, which ensures that he won’t have to dig too deep into his subject. When at the press conference I asked him what Baader tells us about Andreas that we didn’t already know, there was laughter and a woman whispered, "Fein" ("Right"), and Roth got flustered.

Iris is an innocuous example of this phenomenon, Kate Winslet and Judi Dench expertly turning British novelist Iris Murdoch into Masterpiece Theatre material. Amen., on the other hand, is a film that matters — it produced the first genuine press conference I have attended in four years at the Berlinale, with booing, hissing, applause, and bitter anger. Father Ettore Segneri, from Vatican Radio, took exception both to Hochhuth’s play and to Costa-Gavras’s film; afterward he complained to me that the treatment was selective and that much had been left out. A very long drama, Der Stellvertreter nevertheless tries to cover too much in too little space, and the film, which some dismissed as a costume drama (they should have sat through Laissez-passer), betrays the same weakness. Hochhuth’s Pope Pius XII is more interested in using Hitler to stop Stalin than he is in saving Jews; what’s odd is that though Hochhuth has endorsed the film, it’s not clear what Costa-Gavras’s Pius could have accomplished. (Were he to say, "Killing Jews is unacceptable," Hitler seems set to reply, "We esteem the pope, but his Holiness has been misinformed as to what is happening to Jews in Germany.") Costa-Gavras also suggests that had Hochhuth’s SS officer, Kurt Gerstein, chosen not to follow orders, he would have been shot. Again, though, the bottom line is that Pius — who unlike Jesus’s Good Shepherd did not leave his flock to help the endangered Jewish sheep — is not allowed to speak for himself. Amen. is nonetheless an essential film; I hope it finds an American distributor. Already it’s made an impact; two days after the Berlin screening, the Vatican announced that archives for 1922-’39 will be opened to researchers next year and those for 1939-’58 in 2005, in the hope of refuting accusations that Pope Pius didn’t do enough.

The most enthusiastic crowd I saw at Berlinale 2002 was at the locally made Planet B: Detective Lovelorn, a (deliberately) trashy midnight movie about Pharaoh Thutmosis, who after 3469 is about to return to life and wipe out the laws of nature. I went to see it because Josseline Glowacki, the 12-year-old daughter of Pam, friend of my Berlin friends Joanne and Günther, was playing Thutmosis’s sister, Ptah Ana Ha; she was good. As for the Golden Bear, it looked to be a toss-up between Monster’s Ball and 8 Femmes, with some support for the local favorite, Halbe Treppe ("Half Steps") — Andreas Dresen’s Frankfurt-an-der-Oder-set story of two couples in which the husband from one and the wife from the other fall in love is honest cinema but would work better if the characters were less shallow and more likable. Halbe Treppe did indeed get the Silver Bear, but the top prize was shared by two rank outsiders, Bloody Sunday and Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi ("Spirited Away"), an anime adventure from Hayao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke) about a 10-year-old named Chihiro who tunnel-travels into a witch world where her parents have been turned into pigs. I passed that one up in order to have dinner with a friend and hear Eliahu Inbal conduct the Berlin Symphony Orchestra in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, so I’m hoping it too will come to Boston. In any case, Mira Nair and the rest of the competition jury made sure the 52nd Berlin Film Festival didn’t go out with a whimper.