Berlin Film Festival

Then there’s the Sony Center, a circular arrangement of buildings that, viewed from the courtyard inside (which is covered by a dome resembling an Origami flower), looks both sleepy and forward-looking, as if it had decided to nap until the future arrives. (A Berlin acquaintance tells me that most of the office space facing this courtyard languishes unoccupied, since most professionals would much rather overlook the greenery of Tiergarten, the park nearby, than be locked in an anonymous-looking futuristic nest.) But the Center does house a film school, several theaters, and a film museum with an excellent shop, stocked with an intriguing assortment of film books (most of which are, unfortunately for me, in German) and postcards. There I saw a hot-water bottle with an image of the German poster for “Streetcar Named Desire” printed on it. It’s nearly 20 euros, but I’m afraid that if I leave Berlin without it, I’ll someday think I only dreamed it.

Near the Berlinale Palast is an undistinguished shopping mall, not much different from the type you might see in any U.S. city: This is where the locals queue up to buy their festival tickets, since one of the purposes of festivals like these — lest we critics should forget — is to bring movies to real, live moviegoers. But of course, most of the people I see wandering around during the day aren’t real, live moviegoers at all, but festival schmoes like me, wandering around with our various assortments of passes dangling from our necks. As efficient as the festival complex is, it has a not-quite-real quality — it’s a kind of Eurodisney for film geeks. Still, this is an extremely well-organized and welcoming festival, as I learned when I got shut out of the only press screening of the Madonna movie, “Filth and Wisdom,” on Wednesday: I waited among a group of about 100 who hadn’t gotten into the theater, as a festival person tried to see if another screening could be arranged. It couldn’t, but at least someone bothered to make it appear as if she’d made an effort to accommodate us. (When this sort of thing happens in Toronto, the general response of festival staff is “Tough luck.”)

Because we are here, after all, to see movies. I’ve been in Berlin for a week, not strictly to cover the festival, but to participate in the Berlinale Talent Campus, a program of lectures, workshops and panels for filmmakers, composers, screenwriters and even critics: The Berlinale has brought me here as a mentor in the Talent Press program, in which eight young critics from around the world — most from countries in which English is not the primary language — are invited to attend the festival and, under the guidance of four “older” mentors (this is where I come in) file one review or article per day. The participants come from countries including Peru, Nigeria, Poland and Turkey (you can read their work here), and in six days of talking with them and reading their pieces, I’ve learned more from them than they probably even know.

So for that reason alone, the 2008 Berlinale has meant more to me than just the usual assortment of festival movies. The consensus among my colleagues — both those that I’ve spoken with and those whose reports I’ve read in the press — is that this Berlinale hasn’t been particularly impressive. One of the movies in competition is Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood,” and despite the fact that most American critics love it (note my foxy use of the word “most”), it’s old news to those of us who wrote about it in December. But you can’t walk away from a festival of this size without having seen something that excites you, or at least intrigues you. Following are a few highlights — and some lowlights.

Martin Scorsese’s documentary about the Rolling Stones, “Shine a Light,” opened the festival on Feb. 7, and while the picture’s glamour quotient may be high — these are the Rolling Stones we’re talking about — the movie itself is self-serving and mechanical. Scorsese filmed the Stones over two nights of live performances in 2006 at the Beacon Theater, the rock-’n'-rollers’ old folks’ home on New York’s Upper West Side. (Hoping to catch that “Ten Years After” reunion tour? This is the place.) Actually, I have a soft spot for the Beacon, and for old rock-’n'-rollers: Not even Elvis could stay young forever, and it’s a challenge for any of us to not fade away.

But while I’m glad Mick Jagger is healthy and seemingly happy, I’m not sure I want to watch two hours’ worth of his leaping and twisting through songs that I actually love for their, oh, emotional content? Structure? Pure animal expressiveness? I’ve never seen the Stones live, but friends who have always come back with glowing reports of how much energy Jagger still has. That’s clearly what Scorsese seeks to capture here. Working with an A-team of cinematographers (including Robert Elswit and Ellen Kuras), with documentary-god Albert Maysles lending a hand as well, Scorsese seems preoccupied with celebrating the wishful thinking of his (and, increasingly, even my) generation. Every frame of “Shine a Light” is an exhausting shout: “Look at how old these guys are! And yet they’re not really old!” Scorsese also rustled around in the attic and found some old interview footage of the young Jagger responding to bland questions about how long he’ll go on doing this rock ‘n’ roll thing, to which he responds, honestly if with a bit of feyness, that he’ll go well into old age.

That’s all well and good, but Jagger’s leaping and prancing comes off as a kind of “Red Shoes”-style obsessiveness, and Scorsese treats that as a good thing — with this movie he has bottled it for the ages, an elixir from which we all want to drink. But no one wants to think about how all that jumping around affects Jagger’s phrasing. As I listened to him recite his way through “As Tears Go By,” like a schoolboy proud that he has memorized all the words, I felt as if he were reading the text from the side of a box of bran cereal. The song’s poetry seems to mean nothing to him. And sue me: While I love Keith Richards enough to listen to him sing (as he does here, though thankfully just one number), I still wanted more of Ronnie Wood and Charlie Watts, who don’t move around so much but who always captivate me regardless. There’s lots of running and jumping in “Shine a Light.” Just not enough standing still.

Errol Morris’ “Standard Operating Procedure” is a detailed — though, in the end, somewhat limited — examination of the Abu Ghraib scandal told largely in the voices of the soldiers who took, and appeared in, those haunting and horrifying photographs. As a document if not as a movie, “Standard Operating Procedure” is useful and edifying for the way it pulls together a timeline of what happened at Abu Ghraib (the film provides an overview that’s impossible to grasp by looking at the pictures alone) and for the way it confirms that the members of the military who were punished for the scandal, the underlings, couldn’t have been the only ones involved: They were participants in the prisoners’ torture and humiliation, but they weren’t the architects of it. If nothing else, Morris’ picture raises the question of who those architects might be — a question he can’t and doesn’t attempt to answer, although he at least opens the door to it.

Yet I can’t help being appalled at the way Morris applies such relentlessly tasteful filmmaking to such a horrific subject. He turns his camera on many of the principals involved in the scandal: the baby-faced Sabrina Harman; the inscrutable Megan Ambuhl, who comes off as simultaneously bland and calculating; and Lynndie England, who, after serving a portion of her three-year sentence (she’s now out on parole), betrays so little about what’s going on in her heart and in her brain that she barely registers as a human presence. (Charles Graner, the ringleader of this not-so-merry band, is still serving his 10-year sentence; the military wouldn’t allow Morris to interview him.)

Plenty of people respect Morris’ tactic of turning the camera on his subjects and letting them talk, largely unfettered by the presence of an interviewer. (Morris does interject in a few key places here.) But the result is a kind of faux objectivity, a disingenuous, who-me? statement from a guy who wants us to believe he has done nothing more to shape this material than just turn the camera on. Morris does believe he’s giving these players a fair shake — he said as much in a press conference here: “These guys are not the culprit and these photographs are not the entire story of what happened there,” he said. “We are looking at a very dark and disturbing chapter of American history and something that does reflect deeply on my entire country.”

But if Morris really feels that way — and I’m not even questioning his sentiments — then what’s wrong with a little subjectivity? Why should he — or we, for that matter — feel we have to be objective about England, as we gaze into her flat, dead eyes and listen to her flat, dead voice? Perhaps Morris believes he’s letting some of his interviewees hang themselves, but it’s his very lens that hands them the rope. The gist of their explanations for their behavior basically amounts to “Um, well, we kind of knew it was wrong, but we did it anyway. And now we see how bad it was.” It may be edifying, but it’s not vindicating.

I’m not crazy about Morris’ penchant for fictional re-creation of events (a tactic he uses frequently here). But I have much more difficulty with his arty visual interjections. A soldier describes appearing on the scene as one of the Abu Ghraib prisoners is dying. The soldier says a drop of blood fell on his uniform — and I’ll be damned if Morris doesn’t show us a beautifully lit, semitranslucent droplet of blood, magnified a bajillion times, falling in slo-mo on a crosshatching of uniform cloth. (When you’re Errol Morris, this is what you keep a great cinematographer — in this case, Robert Richardson — around for.)

What on earth is that heavily art-directed droplet (and the movie includes plenty of other similar visual touches) doing in a documentary about such a horrific crime against humanity? The most effective and chilling elements of “Standard Operating Procedure” are the Abu Ghraib pictures themselves. No matter how many times we’ve seen them, they retain their power. Against those, Morris’ photography-exhibit blood droplets mean nothing. A picture is worth 1,000 words — but it all depends on the picture.

Before I get to my favorite movies of the Berlinale so far — the festival continues for three more days, although today is my last day covering it — I need to send up a giant red flag to everyone who loved French filmmaker Erick Zonca’s 1998 debut “The Dreamlife of Angels”: His new film, “Julia” (his first in English), a sort of remake of John Cassavetes’ “Gloria,” stars Tilda Swinton as an alcoholic kidnapper who finds redemption — and it’s insufferable. Many of my colleagues have noted that while they dislike the movie, they think Swinton is terrific. It is the sort of performance that people look at and marvel, “She can do anything!” when in fact it’s simply a role that’s all wrong for her. Cast as a woman who’s blowsy, selfish and usually sozzled, Swinton plays down to her character, which isn’t nearly the same as playing it. If Satan appeared at the door of my hotel room and offered me, for some outlandish price, the two hours of breathing time “Julia” took from me, I might be tempted to take it.

Then again, even though Blanche DuBois wasn’t the type to hang around film festivals, she did inadvertently coin the festival slogger’s motto: Sometimes there’s God so suddenly. I found him, first, in Mexican filmmaker Fernando Eimbcke’s “Lake Tahoe,” one of those quietly miraculous little pictures that manage to be both minimalist and rich at the same time. At the beginning of “Lake Tahoe,” a young man named Juan (played by Diego Catano) crashes his car somewhere on the outskirts of a Mexican town. He then sets off on an odyssey to find the single part that will get the car going again, in which he meets a grizzled old mechanic whose only companion is a sweet-tempered bruiser of a dog (who goes by the name “Sica,” perhaps a reference to the great Italian neorealist filmmaker, or perhaps just a name); a young woman who’s far more interested in punk music than in car parts; and a young man who can actually fix the car, but who would rather spend his afternoon in the dark watching a Bruce Lee picture. He invites Juan to join him, one of those simple gestures that represent a tiny yet immense act of kindness, something we don’t realize until we learn that Juan is trying to deal with — and seems to be buckling under — enormous grief.

Eimbcke — who made his debut in 2005 with the lovely “Duck Season” — tells his story with a series of still shots. Characters move into and out of the frame, going about their business as if unwatched. Eimbcke’s camera doesn’t track; it only captures, keeping so still that it seems to be listening as well as watching. This is the kind of modest, unassuming filmmaking that doesn’t win giant prizes. But it’s the sort that can keep you going to the movies, and in the current climate — one in which big Hollywood pictures, in particular, are becoming so increasingly and desperately facile — that’s more valuable than ever.

Even though no one actually sings in Johnnie To’s “Sparrow,” it’s more a musical than an action movie, borrowing the mood, color and vitality of pictures like “Singin’ in the Rain” and “The Band Wagon” and “An American in Paris” — and maybe even “The Young Girls of Rochefort.” In “Sparrow,” a group of rapscallion pickpockets led by Kei (Simon Yam), a smoothie who dresses like an old-Hollywood matinee idol, make their way through Hong Kong. With moves that might have been choreographed by Michael Kidd, they lift the wallets of unsuspecting passersby, but these are principled petty criminals: After removing the cash, they conscientiously drop the wallets into a mail slot. (At one point Kei removes the bills and then replaces the wallet in the victim’s back pocket, all in one smooth move.)

These guys take great pleasure in their craft; for them, stealing is artistry, as well as a way to make a living. And then a knockout femme fatale, Chun Lei (Kelly Lin, who appears in Olivier Assayas’ “Boarding Gate”), infiltrates their circle and upsets their routine. The picture’s beautifully orchestrated finale — one that harnesses all the visual poetry of twirling umbrellas and rain-slicked streets — is, again, more a dance routine than an action sequence. “Sparrow” is lighter, more buoyant, than To’s last feature, the extraordinary (and moving) “Exiled.” But it may be the better film: To uses plenty of standard film references here, and still, what he has come up with is quite unlike anything I’ve seen before. “Sparrow” is so pleasurable that I can’t wait to see it again.

Face it: The idea of crossing an ocean to look at movies for six or eight or 10 days isn’t just luxurious; it’s absurd. Even so, a purely enjoyable picture like “Sparrow” can make you feel you’ve crossed that ocean for good reason. And it reminds you that Blanche DuBois was right.

In the end I said no to that (nonexistent, by the way) movie and instead got myself out to the recently opened Neues Museum, on Berlin’s “Museum Island” (or Museumsinsel), a large cluster of grand museums and galleries instituted in the mid-19th century to honor the arts and sciences. The Neues Museum is not exactly neue: Originally a magnificent neoclassical structure (it was built in the 1850s), it was heavily damaged by Allied bombs and lay in semi-ruins for decades. Attempts to reconstruct it over the years, including one by the East German government in the years before the Wall came down, crumbled away to nothing. But under the guidance of English architect David Chipperfield the building, reconstructed and reimagined after 11 years of planning and building, was reopened last October.

The project was somewhat controversial in Berlin: One contingent wanted the building to be restored to its former glory, as if bombs had never touched it. But Chipperfields’ design is far more in tune with Berlin’s anxious conscience, its sense of duty in remembering its not-so-distant past without whitewashing its uglier and more painful aspects. The result is a glorious building in which the new gives way to the old, and vice-versa. In a New York Times piece last year, Michael Kimmelman described it as “a modern building that inhabits the ghost of an old one.” The “new” building houses, as the old one did for so many years, a selection of antiquities including some extremely fine Roman statuary, cases full of forged-metal Viking diddly-doos and Egyptian relics that look so crisp and pristine they might have been carved yesterday.

What does an afternoon spent at the Neues Museum have to do with movies? I’ll get to that. In the meantime I could spend a lot of time telling you about the flawed but interesting Bosnian film “Na Putu” (“On the Path”), in which a young Muslim woman realizes she’s losing her boyfriend to religious extremism. (I’ve heard some people here decry the film for its failure to depict Islam in a fair light, though I think what the director, Jasmila Zbanic — who won Berlin’s Golden Bear in 2006 for “Grbavica” — has really made, whether she realizes it or not, is more a horror film than a treatise on the nuances of religious beliefs: It’s “Invasion of the Bodysnatchers” with burqas.) Or I could outline the numerous flaws of Rafi Pitts’ parched, minimalist exercise “Shekarchi” (“The Hunter”), a fictional drama about an Iranian man who resorts to violence after his wife and daughter are caught in a crossfire between police and protestors in the run-up to the 2009 election in Iran.

Instead, I’d rather focus on a picture that a greater number of people will actually have a chance at seeing, one that premiered at Sundance and has been picked up for distribution by IFC. Michael Winterbottom’s “The Killer Inside Me” is an adaptation of Jim Thompson’s grim 1952 noir classic, and so when I heard that it had provoked some outrage in Utah — specifically over two scenes in which characters played by Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson are brutally beaten by Casey Affleck’s psychotic Texas sheriff — I knew I had to wait and see for myself before I could parse the controversy. I’m not sure it would be admirable to mount a Thompson adaptation in which the violence is kept tasteful; sometimes brutality is simply what’s needed.

“The Killer Inside Me” is, at least to a certain point, extremely well-crafted. Shot by Marcel Zyskind (who has worked frequently with Winterbottom), it has a deceptively bright, decidedly un-noirish look: Its colorful vibrancy only adds to the aura of dread Winterbottom builds here. The performances are solid: Affleck, an actor I’ve never much cared for, uses that watery-decaf voice of his to great effect — he’s coolly, breezily unnerving. And Alba is both gloriously sensual and deeply touching, a distinctly human presence in a world gone wrong: Winterbottom seems to recognize that, and it’s safe to allow that his intention is to make us feel the full weight of the horrors that befall her.

Intentions are grand things to have. But my assessment of Winterbottom’s choices here — which I’ve had to make, under deadline pressure, just a few hours after watching Alba’s face being beaten into what one character describes as “stewed meat, hamburger” — is that he’s gone too far. Those of you who find bliss in remaining ignorant of every plot detail until you’ve seen a movie should stop reading here, although those of you who are particularly sensitive to movie violence might want to know what you’re in for if you venture into the unsettling, wormy tunnel that is “The Killer Inside Me.”

When I say that Winterbottom shows Affleck’s Sheriff Lou Ford beating Alba’s Joyce Lakeland in the face repeatedly, with closed fists, I don’t mean that he shows one blow and then cuts away, filling in the blanks with sound effects. And when I say that he shows her face, before, during and after the beating, I’m not indicating a few quick shots to give us an idea of the pain she’s suffering. The nutso sheriff throws perhaps some 20 punches; we see about six or seven of them land. (I’d have to see the movie again to give you an actual count, and that’s not something I’m looking forward to.) We see Joyce’s face, in lingering shots, at various stages of the beating. By the end, her head is lolling on her shoulders, and her face — which Winterbottom again shows us in shots lasting more than just a few seconds — is nearly unrecognizable. The point here isn’t that Winterbottom is courting sicko moviegoers who might get their jollies from a sequence like this (and a later one in which Kate Hudson gets a less horrific, but no less disturbing, beating). I’m not out to make the “People will get off on this! Sound the alarm!” clarion call. The movies don’t exist to police the behavior of the masses, and they can’t be tailored to the tastes of those who might potentially misread them.

But Winterbottom — a director whose work I greatly like and respect — has made a calculated misstep here. The camera has no conscience: You can point it at anything, and it doesn’t know by itself when to stop looking. Someone needs to tell it when to look away. A filmmaker has to find that point, even if he’s depicting unconscionable violence and cruelty, where “enough” jumps over the line to “too much.” Winterbottom sails past that point without giving us enough in return. There’s something irresponsible, almost arrogant, in the way he puts his craft above his character’s suffering.

But the scene with Alba isn’t the one that really tips Winterbottom’s hand. I’ve mentioned that later in the movie, Casey’s Ford also beats Hudson’s character. Yet, strangely but somewhat tellingly, her fate is barely mentioned by any of the characters, nor is it alluded to, even in some subtle way, by the filmmaking. After Hudson’s character serves her purpose, she’s dropped — the subtext is that she’s not as integral to the plot, or to the movie’s upcoming climax, as Alba’s character is, so what’s the point? The last time we see her, she’s lying unconscious on a kitchen floor in a puddle of her own urine. I’m still wondering what happened to her after that. Why does Winterbottom think it’s not important to tell us?

“The Killer Inside Me” isn’t a piece of junk; Winterbottom is a director who cares deeply about the quality of what he puts in front of us. But that doesn’t mean he’s above lapses in judgment. As well-made as “The Killer Inside Me” may be, it neither honors nor builds on the noir tradition. Its wayward violence, and not its twisted, melancholy soul, is what it’s likely to be remembered for. To conjure an image from “The Big Heat”: Winterbottom is so hung up on the scalding-hot coffee, he’s lost sight of Gloria Grahame.

——-

This is my last day in Berlin, and as I write this, propped up before me is a postcard of one of the most beautiful works of art in the word. The bust of Queen Nefertiti — supposedly made around 1340 BC by a royal Egyptian sculptor known as Thutmose — is a delicately colored little figure whose effect is almost mystical, and it’s one of the treasures of the Neues Museum. Nefertiti has her own little room there, and in the time I spent with her, I shared space with a considerable crowd that had gathered around her protective glass case. The queen’s gaze — not imperious, though certainly assertive — had pretty much intoxicated us all. I hated to leave her, but eventually, I had to. And though I thought she might reemerge later in my dreams, I saw her even sooner than that: Her image popped up in the very next movie I saw, “Rompecabezas” (“Puzzle”), a sweet but extremely dopey film by Argentine director Natalia Smirnoff about a married housewife and mother who, just as she turns 50, discovers her love of jigsaw puzzles. The movie is about as exciting as I’ve made it sound, but what astonished me is that the first puzzle the heroine assembles is an image of Nefertiti adapted from the very same work of art — or witchcraft — that I’d been looking at not two hours earlier. Nefertiti had followed me into the movie theater, not just from the outside world, but from more than 3,000 years in the past.

There has been some recent debate about Nefertiti’s true age: A Swiss art historian has charged that she may have been made many years later — specifically, in the early part of the 20th century. But even if that’s true, then Nefertiti — a figure of unquestionable star quality, regardless — is still only slightly younger than the movies themselves are, and I’m glad I saw her in person. Unlike most celebrity sightings, she didn’t disappoint. And she reminded me that you sometimes need to step outside of movies in order to find your way into them.

But Berlin is hardly a cheerless place. Coming in from the aiport, I noticed a Hooters not far from the Victory Column, in the section of the city known as Tiergarten. The Victory Column is, as you may recall, the spot in Wim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire” (filmed, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, in a Berlin that’s far more somber-looking than today’s) where angels congregate as they look over, and after, the city. I can’t say the Hooters typeface exactly enhances the landscape. But I do think a city that has has put so much conscientious and cautious effort into remembrance, restoration and atonement deserves to have some fun, too. I could never begrudge Berlin its Hooters.

There’s much more to Berlin nightlife than Hooter’s, anyway — not that I’d know. I’m here to see movies, and because a snowstorm in New York last week delayed my departure by several days, I missed several of the festival’s marquee features, most notably Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island” and Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer.” (My colleague, Andrew O’Hehir, will be covering them later in the week.) I also missed Mat Whitecross’s “Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll,” a biopic of the strange and wonderful Ian Dury (of Ian Dury and the Blockheads) starring Andy Serkis — it is, I hope, something to look forward to at another time.

After getting such a late start — I’m here as a guest of the Berlinale, attending in conjunction with the festival’s Talent Campus program — the only thing to do was to hit the ground running and attempt to see a reasonable portion of the 20 films in competition. I checked out “The Robber” (based on a Martin Prinz novel, which is in turn based on a true story), a German drama directed by Benjamin Heisenberg about an ex-con who, after some heavy in-prison training, becomes a marathon champ upon his release, but who also can’t stop robbing banks. The picture is well-crafted and well-acted (with a nicely wrought lead performance by Andreas Lust, who appeared in the arthouse hit “Revanche”); the drag is that it takes its “I run, therefore I am” meta-theme far too seriously. But immediately following “The Robber,” a very strange thing happened: Norwegians cheered me up. Hans Petter Moland’s “A Somewhat Gentle Man,” from Norway, stars Stellan Skarsgôrd as (yet another) recently released con who also faces plenty of frustration adjusting to the real world, including having to deal with a grumpy landlady who first plies him with tasty home-made dinner and then begins demanding sexual favors. This marks the first time I’ve ever seen nylon knee-highs, worn with terry houseslippers, as a seduction tool. And I hope it’s the last. But the picture is lively and congenial, and Skarsgôrd gives an easygoing, pleasingly subtle performance. This one also happens to stand a good chance of appearing sometime in an arthouse cinema near you, or barring that, showing up on Netflix.

But the one picture I’ve seen thus far that has truly surprised me is Noah Baumbach’s “Greenberg.” I’ve found Baumbach’s more recent films frustrating. “Margot at the Wedding,” in particular, made me wonder if we’d lost Baumbach for good — I found it hard to care about a group of characters so rapturously in love with their own quirks; they, and Baumbach, were more fascinated by their own problems than I was.

“Greenberg” features more characters with problems: There’s Ben Stiller’s fortyish Roger, the Greenberg of the title, who’s just been released from a mental hospital in New York and who now finds himself housesitting at his brother’s tony digs in L.A. While he hangs out there, acting strangely and often irresponsibly, spending his numerous spare moments writing kvetching letters to Starbucks, the New York Times, and American Airlines, Roger meets his brother’s assistant, Florence (played by mumblecore veteran Greta Gerwig). Florence, insecure but strangely forthright, takes a liking to Roger, even though he does everything in his power to rebuff her, often treating her cruelly, or at least thoughtlessly.

I know this sounds like one of those “damaged people fumbling toward love” movies and, well, it is. (The script is by Baumbach, from a story he co-wrote with Jennifer Jason Leigh.) And for much of the movie I couldn’t tell if these characters were driving me nuts or affecting me deeply. But in the end, “Greenberg” got me. For the first time in a long time, Stiller actually gives a performance instead of simply clamoring for attention. His Roger is skeletal, enervated; his eyes, hollowed out and pleading, look both dangerously intelligent and desperate. But Gerwig is the marvelous surprise here. Her Florence is one of those seemingly lost girls who wanders through the world looking gangly and awkward and who is yet, strangely, wholly at home within herself (even though she herself doesn’t know it). Her spaciness is the down-to-earth kind. “Greenberg” is self-conscious and knowing, and, as we’d expect from Baumbach, sharp-witted. But its self-involvement is capacious enough to include us. “Greenberg” has a soul, a heart, and most importantly a sense of humor — not just about the world, but about itself.

One of the great things about film festivals is that they offer a chance to get away from Starbucks-style movies — that is, products that have been tested, packaged and marketed to make you believe that everyone in the world naturally ought to like the same things, and if you don’t, you’re out of step (which is pretty much how I feel about Starbucks coffee, the taste of which I loathe). Into the non-Starbucks category I’d put “Katalin Varga,” a Romanian/U.K./Hungarian coproduction directed by a British expat, Peter Strickland. In “Katalin Varga,” a young woman who we suspect has a troubled past (she’s played by a restrained, intense actress named Hilda Peter, who looks a little like a dark-haired Anne Heche) takes her 10-ish son and leaves her home on a horse-drawn cart, rumbling through the scrubby, rock-strewn terrain of the countryside. The peasant alarm went off in my head when I saw that cart. As I said afterward to my esteemed colleague Derek Malcolm, of the London Evening Standard, I usually have a low tolerance for simple stories about peasants. “I have a low tolerance for complicated stories about the middle class,” he said. But we both liked “Katalin Varga,” which may start out as a simple story about peasants but which ends up as something rich and dark and surprisingly invigorating, a movie about revenge and redemption that has the qualities of both a fairy tale and an all-too-real nightmare — it’s like a countryside noir as imagined by David Lynch. (The movie’s eerie, shivery electronic score reinforces the movie’s Lynchian qualities.) Strickland and his cinematographer, Mark Gyori, obviously working with a slim budget, make the most of their resources. In long shot they show us a herd of sheep grazing in a field, but they hold the camera there for so long that this otherwise typically dull pastoral image takes on a surreal quality: As the sheep root about in the grass, they begin to look like vibrating molecules seen under a microscope — perhaps a way of reminding us that even when a story about “peasants” seems faraway and remote from most of our lives, up close, we’re all made of the same stuff.

And then Stephen Frears’ adaptation of Colette’s compact but lush novel “Chéri,” which I was greatly looking forward to seeing, left me longing for the good, solid dirt of the Eastern European landscape. Michelle Pfeiffer stars as Lea de Lonval, the aging courtesan who takes up with a much younger lover, nicknamed Chéri (Rupert Friend), the son of one of her former rivals (played, with too much comic eye-rolling, by Kathy Bates). The production values are high: Shot by Darius Khondji, the movie has a satiny, candy-box look. But even though “Chéri,” was filmed partly on location in France, it’s the most un-French adaptation of Colette I could possibly imagine.

The problem isn’t that Frears is English: His “Dangerous Liaisons,” in which Pfeiffer also appeared, is perfectly, acceptably Gallic in tone, albeit with an English twist. But Pfeiffer plays Lea’s confident self-sufficiency with too much crispness; she needs to be flirtier, more devil-may-care (in the French way) and less “Let’s get on with it, shall we?” (in the English way). Her line readings are stagy and forced, though when she’s not speaking, she’s at least expressive enough around the eyes (if not, ahem, between them) to convey Lea’s emotional fragility. Still, this “Chéri” could have, and should have, been so much more. It left me feeling très bummed.

One of the strongest, most resonant pictures I’ve seen here in Berlin is Oren Moverman’s directorial debut “The Messenger,” which played at Sundance and, after its well-received appearance here in Berlin, will probably start getting the attention it deserves. Ben Foster stars as a wounded Iraq war veteran recently returned to the States. In his new assignment, he’s teamed with Woody Harrelson — a veteran of the “cushier” Gulf War — and entrusted with the difficult job of notifying the next of kin (or NOK, for short) that their loved ones have been killed in the line of duty.

In the autumn of 2007, when we saw the first rush of war-related pictures like “In the Valley of Elah” and “Rendition,” writers across the land (including me) were asked by their editors to grapple with the significance and meaning of these movies. The problem was that, with the exception of Brian De Palma’s passionate and disturbing “Redacted,” most of them were mediocre at best and gutless at worst. In terms of filmmaking, “The Messenger” marks a new beginning for the real work of dealing with the Iraq war mess. Moverman co-wrote Todd Haynes’ extraordinary Bob Dylan un-biopic “I’m Not There”; he also co-wrote Ira Sachs’ wry (if a bit too mannered) “Married Life.” Although Moverman doesn’t have a particularly strong visual sense, “The Messenger” is still a confident and effective directorial debut, partly because Moverman has good narrative instincts, but also because he shows a graceful touch with his actors. Maybe that’s no surprise with an actress like Samantha Morton, who plays a widow befriended by Foster. I’ve never seen Morton give a bad, or even a merely adequate, performance — she’s the only contemporary actress who can break my heart with nothing but the curve of her smile. But Foster, whom I found distressingly hammy in “3:10 to Yuma,” dials it way down here: He doesn’t show suffering on his face; he carries it in his bones, as if he realizes that the suffering after the fighting is the greater part of his duty. Moverman has made a tough, compassionate little picture — with some great and necessary dashes of black humor — that opens a new door into the world of damage, at home and everywhere, that we now need to face squarely.

Other mild disappointments and modest surprises: “London River” is Rachid Bouchareb’s first movie since his astonishing Oscar-nominated 2007 feature “Days of Glory” (or “Indigènes”), and while it’s a generous-natured exercise, it’s so unsubstantial it practically slips off the screen. Brenda Blethyn plays a farm woman from Guernsey who, right after the 2005 London bus bombings, goes to the capital in search of her missing daughter, and is shocked — shocked! — to find the place, as she puts it, “crawling with Muslims.” Naturally, she comes to learn that Muslims are people too, but it takes a while. The Malian actor Sotigui Kouyaté’s rich, understated performance, as a fellow traveler also searching for his child, at least gives the movie some ballast.

English director Richard Loncraine’s “My One and Only,” a feathery but not unpleasant period picture (set in the 1950s) that’s loosely based on the early life of the perpetually tan George Hamilton, has partially restored my faith in Renée Zellweger as an actress: Here, she’s playing a woman close to her own age — let’s say 40-ish — who’s trying to find a husband to support herself and her two sons, even as she realizes that her sexual allure may be on the wane. The performance is conspicuously lacking in the desperate cuteness Zellweger has been peddling these days (most recently in the aw-shucks romantic comedy “New in Town”) and suggests that, if she can only bring herself to be less adorable, she may once again be a pleasure to watch. Here’s hoping.

And with that thought, I leave the 2009 Berlinale. The mood here among distributors and deal makers has been understandably subdued. Given the grim global economic climate, the road ahead for foreign and small, independent pictures is obviously going to be bumpy. Then again, Variety reports a heartening increase in ticket sales among the public for the Berlinale: This year, the festival had sold 270,000 tickets by its halfway point, well over the 240,000 tickets sold during its entire run last year — suggesting that at least in some places on planet Earth, people are still excited about going to the movies. And while no one here is particularly upbeat about the future of film or journalism and criticism, it’s clear that no one is giving up, either. Meanwhile, let’s start small: It never hurts to bring your own bag.