Berlin Film Festival may have been the first place to screen Fifty Shades of Grey but there’s been plenty more intriguing prospects than the admittedly intriguing prospect of Jamie Dornan with a whip on show. One of the best-reviewed films at Berlin so far has been 45 Years. It’s a switch in sexuality and age range for Looking director Andrew Haigh and stars Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay as a couple preparing for their 45th wedding anniversary. Marriage as an institution goes under the microscope when the husband gets unsettling news: the body of his former girlfriend, who died in a skiing accident years previous, has been found.
In her proper big screen debut, Mad Men’s Sally Draper, Kiernan Shipka, steps out of the 1960s and into an altogether weirder, Amish like world for the thriller One & Two. She plays Eva who, along with brother Zac, is homeschooled by mom and pop, made to do chores and can’t go beyond the great big wall that encircles their house, stopping them from leaving. The film looks great and the spooky reveal is that these kids can teleport.
Of Berlin’s big hitters, Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups is already being talked about as a prizewinner. It’s about a Hollywood scriptwriter [Christian Bale] who meanders through a series of sexual encounters and movie star moments in a style similar to Malick’s most recent To the Wonder and The Tree of Life. So big on atmosphere, less heavy on that thing scriptwriters do: plot.
Elsewhere in big hitter territory, Nicole Kidman stars as British explorer Gertrude Bell in Queen of the Desert, Werner Herzog’s biopic of the intrepid adventurer who set out in 1892 to the Middle East, defying expectations of her gender. James Franco plays one of two love interests, though Gertrude’s real passion clearly lay in trekking.
Perhaps one of the more exciting prospects to emerge from Berlin is not a new film at all. The director’s cut of 54, an ode to NYC clubland and celebrity excess, is about righting a wrong. The film was heavily sanitized before release in 1998 after executive producer Harvey Weinstein insisted on cuts and reshoots to make the characters less morally ambivalent and sexually avaricious. This director’s cut sounds like it’s put the real, notorious Studio 54 on screen with Ryan Philippe as the shirtless wide eyed New Jersey boy who shags his way around 54 with both sexes and Mike Myers as Steve Rubell, co-owner of the club, hell bent (and perhaps bound) on bedding his employees.