In Berlin, Anxious Movies for Dark Times
Tom Tykwer's visually dazzling, but comically misguided liberal drama, 'The Light,' opened the event last week, submitting festivalgoers to 162 minutes of angst and attrition (and one too many 'Bohemian Rhapsody' needle drops) about a German family spiritually cleansed by their Syrian housekeeper.
For many of us on the ground, however, the first real epic-of-interest was the 'Parasite' director Bong Joon Ho's science-fiction caper 'Mickey 17' — a film that induces nervous laughter about society's abysmal moral standards. In this high-concept action movie with a zany dark heart, labor exploitation hits a new low when workers, or at least their physical forms, become literally disposable. Robert Pattinson stars as one such 'expendable,' a dopey spaceman whose co-workers treat him like a lab-rat, knowing that his body can be reprinted.
Bong's bids at timeliness are staler than usual. (Mark Ruffalo plays a grandstanding demagogue whose followers wear red caps.) But the film's dull political edge doesn't diminish the joy ride's momentum, nor the flashes of genuine weirdness that keep us guessing. If, god willing, superhero movies are destined to go the way of the dodo, 'Mickey 17' is a reminder that directors like Bong keep the dream of the blockbuster alive.
President Trump's ramped-up campaign of mass deportations infiltrated my viewing of Michel Franco's 'Dreams,' a competition entry that filled me with much ambivalence, but also moved and infuriated me. This intentionally provocative psychodrama by one of Mexico's most divisive directors sees Jessica Chastain as a tightly wound philanthropist from San Francisco who has a tempestuous relationship with an undocumented ballet dancer from Mexico — whom we first see, like the survivor at the end of a brutal horror film, emerging from a van full of smuggled migrants.
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