The gulf between us and them

Jamie Bell is surprisingly sympathetic at the Kleine Nachtrevue bar at 2am. He fizzes eloquently about the lack of grace of certain Hollywood peers who wouldn’t shift seats to accommodate his friends at a festival screening. One could never accuse Bonneville of this. But it was reassuring to discover that one of our brightest prospects isn’t entirely immune to the bizarre comedy of manners that dictates the pecking order at festivals.

It’s this jagged edge that makes Dieter Kosslick’s reign over the Berlin Film Festival so interesting. He has a vested interest in youth that puts a lot of competitors to shame. Even if his competition picks don’t come up to scratch, you can’t but appreciate the gambles.

Thumbsucker, an impressive first feature from Mike Mills (also shown at Sundance), is a classic example. The urban malaise is as familiar as breakfast. But the culty finale is impossible to predict. Justin (Lou Pucci) is a 17-year-old pasty face with a curtain of lank hair. His father (Vincent D’Onofrio) is a redneck loser who thinks he’s winning. And his wife (Tilda Swinton) can’t come to terms with the horrifying thought that she might have to live with this family for the rest of her life. It’s a low-key film with a sharp eye for the absurd. The struggle to cope, let alone achieve, cripples every character.

Pucci is marvellous as the teen who suckles his anxieties by sucking his thumb. But it’s the adult cameos that are the outstanding pleasure. Swinton becomes infatuated with a fabulously messed up TV personality (Benjamin Bratt) at the luxury rehab clinic where she works. Vince Vaughn is a wonderfully tactless teacher who lives out his craven ambitions through his pupils. And Keanu Reeves has never been more alarming or believable as a New Age orthodontist.

Years of reshaping Justin’s teeth has given him an avuncular influence over the hapless youth. During one session he hypnotises Justin and persuades him to reach for his inner “power animal” when- ever he needs help. This off-the-cuff therapy works only too well. Justin turns into a monster. He is diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, and put on a course of Ritalin. He starts wearing ties to school, his results soar, and he propels the school debating team to the state finals where he has a nervous breakdown. The punchline is that there are no magical fixes for real fears. The flat and improvised way the film unravels exposes the absurdity of even trying.

Régis Wargnier’s Victorian melodrama Man to Man tries to be noble but it’s an embarrassing stretch. “I am Christopher Columbus and you are my America,” says Joseph Fiennes, after he’s netted a couple of pygmies in Central Africa. He ships them back to Scotland and presents them to his two best friends. The origins of man are at stake, and a place in the history books for these enlightened gents if they can prove to the Royal Scottish Academy of Science that they have discovered “the missing link” within two months.

They cage their victims, Toko and Likola, in a Perthshire barn and spend weeks measuring the slope of their foreheads. The scientific fervour boils under stiff collars. “Did you ever see them fornicate?” pants Hugh Bonneville. “Purely academic, of course.”

Meanwhile, the locals mutter and hang around a peaty pub like the unemployed Ku Klux Klan. Kristin Scott Thomas is the most interesting villain. She is the tough-as-nails entrepreneur who has vested interests in renting the pygmies to zoos. But a poisonous rivalry develops as Fiennes discovers “signs of intelligence and emotions similar to our own”. Pifflesticks, grunts Iain Glen, who would like nothing better than to stuff and mount the pygmies on the nearest wall.

Bonneville totters rather badly between his two chums. The drama is wildly overcooked. The moral point is as queasy as the racism.

Mercifully, Bonneville is better used in David Mackenzie’s third and best feature, Asylum. The heat surrounding this film caught up with the director around midnight at his opening party. The poor chap looked as if he was about to melt. But his film, based on Patrick McGrath’s novel about madness and sexual obsession, is a dark and chilly gem. Natasha Richardson’s Stella is the enigmatic heartbeat, and she has never acted so well in her life. She plays the distracted wife of a thrusting psychiatrist (Bonneville), who takes over a grim mental institution in Yorkshire in the early 1960s. While Bonneville marches around snapping out orders like a prison governor, his wife falls in love with the surly gardener (Marton Csokas), a sculptor best known for chopping up his wife.

Wild sex in the greenhouse seems to be the only way that Stella can remain emotionally alive. The stakes are appalling. Ian McKellen’s long-serving second-in-command, Dr Cleave, is the creepy Iago to Bonneville’s sexless and suspicious authoritarian. “I might remind you that I’m your superior,” barks Bonneville. “In what sense?” asks Cleave with a smooth waggle of the eyebrows. He monitors the illicit passion of his boss’s wife like Frankenstein with erring patients. Mackenzie is good at taboo sex. McKellen is even better at manipulating the screen. Richardson is simply magnificent. The film has every chance of lifting one of the main prizes.

Berlin’s reputation for hard-core is not an idle boast. Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey’s documentary Inside Deep Throat is a documentary about one of the most notorious pornographic films yet made. You couldn’t buy a seat at the Berlin screening for love or money. Which is why I ended up sitting in the aisle wondering what all the fuss was about. The truth is simple: a ten-second shot of a woman who could swallow a cucumber — and pretend to enjoy it — superimposed over pictures of Nasa blasting a rocket to the moon. How sweet is that? The original 1977 flick was shot in six days for peanuts and grossed $600 million. The “actress”, Linda Lovelace, became an instant star and a long-term tragedy. The directors, and their “leading man”, Harry Reems, never did a sensible thing with the rest of their blighted lives. The Mafia took charge of distribution, the government banned the film, and no one can speak a sensible word about either without sounding truly deranged.

Every rich fogey in this documentary wears extremely tight trousers whether they’re 90 or 3. It’s a revealing and telling comedy about censorship, and the brief lifespan of respectable porn. The contributions from Peter Bart (Variety), Wes Craven, Erica Jong, Larry Flint, Norman Mailer, Camille Paglia, Gore Vidal and Dr Ruth cover all the usual bases. The real mystery is what Jackie Kennedy made of it when she pitched up for a ticket.

Terry George’s film Hotel Rwanda is a worthy effort by Hollywood to make romantic sense of a genocide that butchered a million innocent people. The acting is superb. Don Cheadle is the manager of a posh hotel with a Schindler’s List duty to save as many lives as he possibly can when the Hutus start laying into his relatives, hotel guests and neighbours. No wonder he and his wife (Sophie Okonedo) have been tipped for Oscars. The panic, as their money and influence runs out in Kigali, is tear-jerkingly real. Nick Nolte as a prevaricating UN peacekeeper is a ham too far. The swooning orchestra is preposterous. But the dignity of Cheadle’s hotel manager, when his Rome is burning, is crazily inspiring.

The South African township version of Bizet’s opera, U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha (aka Carmen in Khayelitsha) by Mark Dornford-May is a piece of arthouse genius. Poor old Carmen has been pimped around the world from her native Seville since 1875, but I doubt she’s ever been more rudely or tenderly interfered with than in this Xhosa version, complete with glottal tics and baseball sneakers.

Pauline Malefone’s chubby siren works in a cigarette factory. The local guards hide under baseball caps and sing the most beautiful barrack-room tunes along the lines of “all we have to do is check out the girls, and rate their butts”. But Carmen has eyes only for the new policeman called Jongi (Andile Tshoni). He’s got a village past to lose and everything to gain if he falls in with Carmen’s corrupt friends.

The way Dornford-May places the story smack-bang in the middle of dusty streets and corrugated iron shacks seems positively reckless. But he doesn’t leak a single note, and it makes marvellous political and cinematic sense.

BERLIN HIGHLIGHTS STILL TO COME

Sometimes in April

Raoul Peck’s latest explores the Rwandan genocide from the point of view of a Hutu soldier who wants to put the past behind him.

De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté (The Beat That My Heart Skipped)

A criminal tries to turn his life around but finds his path strewn with emotional obstacles in Jacques Audiard’s haunting thriller.

Hitch

Will Smith stars as New York’s suavest dating agent, capable of matching extraordinary women with average men. But can he resist Cupid’s darts?

Anklaget (Accused)

A family tears itself apart in a Festen-like tale of recrimination, abuse and reconciliation in an average Danish household, directed by Jacob Thuesen.