Berlin Film Festival 2023 | #1
In Yui Kiyohara’s Remembering Every Night, three women separately spend a quiet summer’s day wandering the streets of Tama New Town, a 1960s housing development built quickly on the outskirts of Tokyo to provide homes for people flocking to the city for work, with apartment blocks, green spaces, and public amenities repeated over and over for miles on end. Chizu, in her forties, tries to find the house of an old friend she’s long since lost touch with; Sanae, in her thirties, helps an elderly man find his way home as she does her rounds as a gas meter reader; and Natsu, in her twenties, dances in the park and goes to a museum, before tracking down some photographs taken by an old friend. These relatively mundane but nonetheless important day-to-day activities are conducted independently, but in fleeting moments throughout the day the women cross paths, wordlessly seeing each other from afar before moving off again in a different direction, and their separate lives continue without interruption. The idea of a long and frustrating search is one that Kiyohara seems interested in exploring here. Deep, typically static wide-shots frame these women firmly in the context of their surroundings and the languid editing keeps them in the same place for a long time, with occasional panning to follow them as they move around the town’s many pathways. The town itself, virtually deserted on this particular day, is something of a labyrinth given its endless uniformity, and its residents comment that it can be hard to find things. There’s a sense that each of these women is stuck in one way or another, and trying to find some way to move forward with their life. And it’s only ever a sense, a barely perceptible shift in tone inferred by gestures, glances, spaces; small moments that barely break the surface before fading away again. The great subtlety of Kiyohara’s filmmaking is in the quiet and beautiful accumulation of these inferences. Time passes, and everything and nothing has changed. Life goes on.
Set entirely within a secluded hotel in northern Portugal over the course of a chilly weekend, João Canijo’s double-feature Mal Viver and Viver Mal, two different but complementary angles of the same time, the same place, and the same characters, observe a variety of bitter and destructive relationships as they begin to unravel under the pressures of living in close proximity to one another. Mal Viver focuses on five women from different generations of the same family who live and work in this hotel, while Viver Mal follows three separate sets of guests whose own conflicts come to the fore during their stays. Each film has a different focal point, yet most of the events are shown in some way in both, but from different perspectives. An argument presented in detail in one film might be overheard from afar in the other, and characters regularly appear in other people’s stories. After all, this hotel is both a private and public space. A place in which people are either pulled together in small rooms or pushed out into the semi-privacy of communal swimming pools and dining rooms. There’s nowhere to escape from each other in this hotel, and the forced intimacy inflicted upon these people creates a perfect storm in which any and all problems are magnified and exacerbated, permeating outwards in such a way as to feed to the overall culture of hostility that lingers over the building. Mirrors and windows often reveal shadowy figures lurking in the background, watching and listening in places they shouldn’t be occupying. Balconies, open doors, and thin walls, architectural devices designed to provide a semblance of privacy in a public space that are prone to the threat of prying eyes and pricked ears. Even if there’s nobody around, the possibility of being watched or overheard can never be discounted, and so the anxiety builds and builds. Canijo, a truly great architect of space and tone, constructs a location that catalyses the breakdown of these already fragile relationships, and observes as everything between these people is laid bare and weaponised. A balloon that keeps inflating, far past the point of no return. Bad living, indeed.
Christian Petzold’s Afire follows four young people thrust together by chance for the summer in a holiday home in northern Germany. Leon, a writer, is trying to finish a novel, while his friend Felix, whose parents own the house, is working on a photography portfolio. Nadja, a colleague of Felix’s mother, is staying in the house too, and spends her nights with Devid, a local lifeguard. As time passes, Leon becomes increasingly irritated by the others and struggles to write as his deadline approaches, never able to satiate his desire for solitude, while everyone else enjoys their time together, even as the spectre of wildfires burning nearby grows larger and larger. Leon is a person who looks without seeing, stuck inside his own head. He never asks questions that he doesn’t think he knows the answers to and he has no desire to spend time with his housemates, preferring to be left alone to write. Petzold repeatedly creates images of the ideal summer and finds ways to restrict them, focusing on their potential dangers as opposed to their capacity for relaxation. The picturesque path from the cottage to the beach runs along a crumbling cliff-edge. A night sleeping under the stars is made impossible by bug-bites. A quiet drive along an empty country road is disrupted by engine trouble, forcing the passengers to take a shortcut through the forest as night descends. All of this reflects Leon’s inability to comprehend the world as it really is, and sits in contrast to how the others live their lives. Where Nadja could listen to a song on her earbuds and whistle the tune when she’s not, Leon wears black jeans and a heavy backpack to the beach. He never sees life on anything but his own terms, and nothing plays out as he expects it to. By shutting down the possibility for surprise, Leon is oblivious to everything that he wants to find. Petzold finds great sadness in Leon, a writer looking for life while simultaneously ignoring it, and ultimately Afire is a film about the need to confront life head-on. To find a way to let life in before it’s too late, not just for the creation of meaningful art, but for the sake of the connections we have with the people in our lives, and the relationships we one day wish to forge.