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  • Cinema Scope

    Season of the Bear

    Mar 23, 2018 8 minutes
    By Adam Cook

    If you’re looking for the lowdown on this year’s Berlinale Competition, which is known far and wide for its mediocrity, you’ve come to the wrong place. This year’s edition looked especially bleak on paper, and this writer’s one attempt to venture into the great unknown did not go unpunished. Axel Petersen and Mans Mansson’s revolting “comedy” The Real Estate is an offensive and elitist satire of the housing crisis in Stockholm that irresponsibly revels in its protagonist’s classism far more than it criticizes it; it may have been the section’s worst entry, though thankfully I can neither be proven right nor wrong. (Continuing with a habit of missing prizewinners, I’ll have to catch up later with Adina Pintilie’s surprise Golden Bear winner Touch Me Not.) The standouts were predictable but welcome, coming from stalwart auteurs Christian Petzold, Lav Diaz, and Wes Anderson (who I’m tired of having to convince people about; see Isle of Dogs and decide for yourself, or not).

    Petzold’s timely transports Anna Seghers’ 1944 novel to the contemporary world, transforming the past into a dystopian future-almost-present. A cross between a bloated Vincent Gallo and Joaquin Phoenix, Franz Rogowski plays Georg, who escapes to Marseille from Paris as German troops are closing in. The year is unclear, as is the political situation: allusions to “camps” and “cleansings” that in Seghers’ novel are direct references

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