A festival is not just a collection of films. It is a group picture, a mosaic, a mirror in which the cinema of the future emerges dimly. That's why it's surprising that so many of the films screened in the Berlinale Competition are more about the past than the present, setting their stories in confined spaces instead of vast landscapes.

Andreas Kilb

Feuilletonkorrespondent in Berlin.

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In Zhang Lu's "The Shadowless Tower", a restaurant critic travels with his girlfriend from Beijing to the province to reconcile with his father, who has been rejected by the family. In Celine Song's "Past Lives", a Korean woman who emigrated to America meets her childhood sweetheart again after twenty years in New York. And in "20,000 Bee Species" by Estibaliz Solaguren, a boy who feels like a girl finds his new identity on a family holiday. What has become of the great upheavals on which the cinema of the late twentieth century lived? If it leaves the stories that lead from the interiors to the outdoors to the series producers, it actually becomes a form of yesterday.

Angela Schanelec's "Music", on the other hand, reaches far back into the day before yesterday to tell a story of today. The film is, at least in the imagination of its director, an update of the myth of Oedipus: an infant is abandoned in the Greek mountains and raised by foster parents. The young man, called Jon by Schanelec, accidentally kills another man and goes to prison for it. Iro, his guard, falls in love with him and they have a daughter. But then Iro discovers that Jon is the murderer of her childhood friend and throws himself off a cliff. Jon takes his daughter with him to Berlin, where he makes a career as a singer and gradually goes blind.

What Oedipus means in Greek

Anyone who recognizes the mythical model in this story has paid close attention at school. And those who know that Oedipus means "swell foot" in Greek will also be able to interpret those scenes in which Schanelec's main actor Aliocha Schneider can be seen with sore feet. Incidentally, the question arises whether the film can also be understood as a pure narrative without such prior knowledge. After the Berlinale screening of "Music" you have to answer the question in the negative. As always with Angela Schanelec, the spaces between the camera images are just as important as the images themselves, but this time the images sometimes seem like blanks. They claim something that cannot be seen: love, cruelty, dismay, self-knowledge, happiness. In "Music", music steps in for this invisible: arias by Handel, Pergolesi, Purcell and songs by the Canadian Doug Tielli. But the connection between what is sung and what is shown remains vague, the sounds are placed more in the mouths of the figures than they flow out of them. For Angela Schanelec, the myth resembles an ancient clay jug that someone dug out of the ground and turned into a vase of flowers.

The problem of recognizability

Robert Schwentke's film "Seneca", which is shown in Berlin in the "Special Gala" series, does not have the problem of recognizability. Here it is clear from the beginning that it is about the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the educator of the bloodthirsty Emperor Nero, and if you do not want to believe it, a narrator's voice will hammer it unmistakably. "Seneca" looks as if Christoph Schlingensief had filmed a screenplay by Peter Greenaway: theatrical blood, touched with bon mots, screams and sighs, a beautiful blonde woman (Lilith Stangenberg) and a ruined building in the Moroccan desert that serves as a philosopher's villa. And John Malkovich.

The fact that Malkovich plays Seneca is basically the whole idea of the film. But it works. For Malkovich, driven by Schwentke, does not think of giving the noble Roman. He is an opportunist, a cynic with a guilty conscience, a Hanswurst of venal thinking. And he knows it, he pronounces it. He texts us with his cowardices, his life lies, his love-than-another-compromises, he talks until you think you can smell the ink on his fingertips. When the messenger arrives, whom Nero has sent to deliver his death sentence to him, he does not want to admit that he is now deprived of the word, that the power he has nurtured does not want to hear anything more from him. He fights for one very last word, a dying word, and then for another and another until his guests run away and with them the woman he loved.

Finally, he is alone with his executioner. No blood comes from the veins that he has opened to glide more easily into the afterlife, only the words continue to swell out of his mouth, sometimes as curses of humanity (which Schwentke unnecessarily illustrates with current news images), sometimes as a swan song to the beautiful, wasted time. The camera can't get enough of Malkovich's face while he sings the final chorus of his life, it gets intoxicated by this performance like a drug, and the viewer is drawn into this intoxication. "Being John Malkovich", the title of a long-forgotten film, is not an empty promise.

Then the fight is over. The philosopher's mouth grows tired, his eye rigid. His last words, more howling than spoken, are "Mom, it hurts." Maybe there is something to the family films after all.