THE award of the Golden Bear to Ang Lee's Sense And Sensibility on Monday was a fitting end to a Berlin Film Festival that was dominated more than ever before by Hollywood glamour.
A small chorus of protest was raised by From Dusk Till Dawn, a spoof thriller cum splatter movie written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by Robert Rodriguez. Rodriguez captured Berlin's heart three years ago with his low budget comedy western El Mariachi, but his latest film enters darker territory, making murder and torture the targets of "his parody.
From Dusk Till Dawn begins with two criminal brothers, played by George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino, attempting to escape justice by crossing the border into Mexico. The film lacks substance and is almost swamped by special effects, but Tarantino's script is so stylish and witty and the central performances are so strong that it ultimately survives its own excesses.
For John Schlesinger, whose film Eye For An Eye was shown in the non competitive Panorama section of the festival, the violence of contemporary American society is no laughing matter. Sally Field plays a mother who devises a plan to avenge the rape and murder of her teenage daughter after the killer is acquitted by the courts on a legal technicality. The only objections to vigilante action raised in the film are practical ones concerning the risk of being caught, and Field's character finally discovers a way of murdering her daughter's killer without imperiling her own freedom.
This brutally simple view of crime and punishment finds a refreshing antidote in Dead Man Walking. Tim Robbins's dramatisation of a true story of the friendship between a Catholic nun and a convicted murderer on Death Row. Sean Penn won a Silver Bear in Berlin for his remarkable performance as Matthew Poncelet, an arrogant, unrepentant killer who steadfastly resists any consideration of the consequences of his actions and the suffering he has caused to his victims' relatives. Much of the success of Robbins's powerful argument against the death penalty lies in its steady focus on the pain Poncelet has inflicted on others and its refusal to present the condemned man as a powerless victim of circumstances.
Dead Man Walking was the popular favourite in Berlin, followed by Sense And Sensibility and Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, starring Bruce Willis as James Cole, a man sent back to earth from the future in and effort to save the human race from destruction. The villains this time are fanatical animal rights activists, led by Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), the mentally unstable son of a leading virologist.
The Chinese director Wong Kar wai has no need to step into the future in search of the extraordinary - it is all waiting for him on the streets of Hong Kong. He captivated with Chungking Express and his latest feature, Fallen Angels, was the hit of this year's Forum, the most adventurous category at the festival. The film examines the underbelly of Hong Kong life through three young people on the edge of society.
Kar wai's camera is seldom quiet, forever zooming, swooping and dancing across the cityscape of Hong Kong, always finding new angles to study his isolated, loveless subjects and to make their empty lives compelling viewing.
Despite Hollywood's domination of this year's festival European films scooped most of the awards, with Ho Widerberg's Swedish wartime love story Lust Och Faegring Stor (All Things Fair) winning the Silver Bear Special Jury Prize and Richard Loncraine sharing the director's award for his 1930s version of Richard III. Anouk Grinberg was named Best Actress for her role as a kind hearted slut in Bertrand Blier's Mon Homme, and Andrzej Wajda was given a special award for his lifetime contribution to the cinema.
There was a prize too for the only Irish film at the festival, My Friend Joe, directed by Chris Bould, which won First Prize in the Children's Film Festival. Based on a German novel by Peter Pohl but set in Ireland the film tells the story of a friendship between Chris (John Cleere), a slightly inadequate member of an all boy gang, and Joe, a new arrival who can outdo all the others in feats of physical daring. What none of the gang knows is that Joe is, in tact a girl, a member of a circus family whose brutal father insists that she dress as a boy when she is on the trapeze to avoid reminding him of her dead mother.
