How many stories are possible? Borges, always he, left him in four. The fenced city, the return of the hero, the search and, finally, the sacrifice of a God. And yet, and if we trust what the two most relevant films of a day for the memory of Berlin on Sunday, one would add a fifth: that of the story that tells itself. As is. Perhaps, and without refuting the Argentine, the only possible story is none other than that of the exercise of the narrative. That is what the prodigious talk about both Reflection in a dead diamond (Reflex of a dead diamond), of the Belgian directors Hélela Duto Forzani, This refers to almost sacred subtlety The ice tower (The Ice Tower), of the French Lucile Hadzihalilovic. The two are two major works that are offered to the viewer in a prodigious loop in which the cinema is taught naked with the only argument of the cinema itself. And they do it in an exercise as transparent as vertiginous, as motley and baroque as diaphanous. Cinema that devours cinema.
The ice tower (****)
The first in relevance both in shape, photo and red carpet was (and is) Lucile Hadzihalilovic starring Marion Cotillard. Again, as is the norm in the director of films such as Evolution (2015) as Earwig (2021) Everything runs in a strange place enclosed between delirium, sleep and imagination poisoned itself. A girl (another of the director’s constants: childhood) flees from an orphanage to take refuge in the filming set of a film. There it is filmed The Snow Queen, that not by chance (or yes) is the story that feeds the insomnia nights of the flight. Soon between the star of the film (Cotillard) and the orphan (Clara Pacini) a relationship of mutual dependence, submission and even shared fascination will arise. Let’s say that what unites reality with fabulation is the same golden thread that sews a life with another.
Hadzihalovic composes a beautiful fable stopped in pure feeling and in this case icy of seduction. What arises from the screen, in addition to a rare and fascinating frozen breath, is a sleepwalking fairy tale; An absent hypnotism session that awares the mystical elements of pure fiction, free of any other argument as not the same exercise of the narrative. Cotillard looks in a majestic hieratism that would be said as magical as slightly ill. And there, in that feeling between poisoned and only drunken, a film that returns to the cinema the virtue of the hidden, the ineffable, the tremendous. It is cinema stopped at an instant of endless film.
Reflection in a dead diamond (****)
Reflection in a dead diamond It is something else. Less unfathomable, just as labyrinthine and much more fun. The tape continues if you want the metacinematographic exercises that literally drown the filmography of its directors. Again, the giallo Italian is summoned in a kind of liturgy so invasive and apparently disruptive (or incoherent) as only fetishist. The story speaks of spies in the French Riviera at a time when secret agents mixed with dangerous women, poisoned diamonds, runaway sports cars and Martinis, many martinis. A man who gives life to a Fabio testif Passively until the last corner of the imagination.
From the outset, it would seem that the directors who presume the cult label have done nothing more than a new job for the very onanists of the Pulp image. And yet, already measured, the film acquires the privilege of the surprising, of the only one, of the exciting even. Soon, the viewer will realize that what appears on the screen approaches a prodigious ritual in which two enemies (spy and masked serpentik) are pursued over time, space, their own bodies that mutate and The image support itself. Every lie and everything, somehow, true because of the fact of counting. Each of them is one and one hundred thousand characters and are in the role of the comic, in spoken narrative and in the infinite mirrors of an image that miraculously mutates in front of the viewer’s eyes.
At one point, he enlishes a scalpel and she a Catana. He starts the skin of his enemy and mutilated body all women in the world are free, powerful and, it has already been said, with Catana. She, on the other hand, annihilates and curtains her opponent and of the cheerful game Gore are born infinitely mutilated spies. And thus in a secular celebration of the Film Eucharist that, in effect, devours cinema, of stories that tell themselves until the exhaustion.
Actually, the story that is told is nothing more than the accurate account of a myth at the moment of telling itself. It is a story that he tells himself, it is cinema that is made and undoes in the viewer and imaginary of the viewer as the dark vapors of the most murky memories. In part, something similar to what happens in The night mouthJulio Cortázar’s story that stops in history perhaps dream of a man who dreams of being another man. Two stories run at the same time halfway between deception, lighting, fear and cold; Two stories that are needed, refuse and dream each other. A man who travels by motorcycle suffers an accident and in the shock sleeps he imagines inside an ancient civilization. Or vice versa. The two stories are true with the same clarity with which they lie. Only the possibility of being a narrative makes sense of them, it makes them real, that does not true. Or yes. Well, the same in Reflection in a dead diamond, But with a lot of blood.
The last blue (***)
But the day, hence the memorable, did not stay in the brilliant self -referential games above. The Brazilian Gabriel Mascaro also wanted to arrive at his share of glory with a fantastic adventure between futuristic and only dazzling. In a society that separates the old and encloses them in colonies, a woman (superb Denise Weinberg) decides to look for her own destiny in the depth of the Amazon. What follows is a road movie willing to celebrate old age, women’s old age, with a grace, self -confidence, depth and intelligence that the young people from the Kerouac themselves would like for themselves. Beyond that the interpretation award (with permission from Rose Byrne) already owns, surprises the measured tone of a drama that does not give up anything: neither comedy or acid social comment or colored fish (which There are), why not, to the musical in the middle of the jungle.
Ari (***)
The last production worthy of being mentioned and also in competition would be the work of the French Léonor Serraille Ari. Your previous movie, My little brother, It was presented in Cannes and inhabited that crowded space of daughters of the Dardenne brothers where the camera, always in tension, pursues neck with an almost sick devotion because of the unfocked verism. Now the record, grammar and it would be said that the attitude. A teacher in a children A precise and energetic drama that is also a portrait of a harassed generation, humanist epic, black comedy and sincere delirium. Everything together. Ari It chases its protagonist only pending fever. The story fractures over time and lets the spectator mount the pieces of a puzzle that is much more than a simple game. It is also the best representation of a broken guy who is recomposed. He and with him, the viewer’s own look and even the same story in the very exercise of telling himself. Again. Day for memory, no doubt.