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Under Pressure: Filmmaker Y (Yavshalom Pollak) doesn't know how to deal with the film's screening constraints, which his hostess (Nur Fibak) insists on.
In cinemas from March 17th
»Ahed's knees«
17-year-old Ahed Tamimi should at least have been shot in the knee, said deputy speaker of the Knesset Bezalel Smotrich in 2018. The injury would have forced the young Palestinian woman to life imprisonment.
Tamimi became internationally famous when she slapped an Israeli soldier and cameras caught the scene.
She was later sentenced to eight months in prison.
How do you live in a country where politicians express fantasies of violence against teenagers?
How do you make art in this country, and how do you shoot films there, when the culture minister insists that the films be subjected to a content check before they receive state funding?
One possibility is to do it like Berlinale winner Nadav Lapid (»Synonyms«) and not shoot a film but an outburst of anger.
For »Aheds Knie«, which won the jury prize in Cannes 2021, Lapid sends an alter ego into the Israeli desert: Director Y (Yavshalom Pollak) is supposed to present his new film, which was just shown at the Berlinale, in a library.
Before that, however, the seductive assistant librarian (Nur Fibak) gives him a list of things he's not contractually allowed to talk about.
The crew for example.
In Y, the ban on speaking triggers the opposite: a compulsion to speak.
Everything has to go, the madness, the desperation, in the end even a horrible story from one's own military service.
This is how political cinema works that takes no prisoners.
Hannah Pilarczyk
»Aheds Knie«, Israel 2021, written and directed by Nadav Lapid.
With: Yavshalom Pollak, Nur Fibak.
109 minutes
"Three floors"
The Italian auteur filmmaker Nanni Moretti is a sympathetically shameless artist.
»Dear Diary« is the name of his film from 1993, in which he tells of his Vespa rides through Rome, his hardship as a storyteller and an ugly skin condition.
In the film »Three Floors«, Moretti describes the fate of the residents of a residential building in a middle-class district of Rome.
Alba Rohrwacher plays a young mother who can't do anything with her baby, has ghost apparitions and misses her husband who works abroad.
Margherita Buy appears as a judge's wife (portrayed by Moretti herself);
at the beginning of the film, the son of the two kills a passer-by while drunk. And Riccardo Scamarcio embodies an architect,
So lots of drama.
»Three Floors« wants to be a kind of Italian version of »American Beauty«.
The film, told in leaps in time of up to five years and in nicely lit pictures, whose screenplay messed up the novel by an Israeli author, is unfortunately only a cheerful and then increasingly annoying colportage hodgepodge.
Moretti presents the case of the aging architect who sleeps with a minor as an outrageous masculine victim story.
It shows a grown man who, despite having known the people next door for decades, doesn't know that the neighbor's granddaughter isn't grown up.
A dumbfounded, innocent-looking guy who ends up in court for seducing a teenager - and is acquitted.
An educated, intelligent person who does not apologize for his own behavior, but from whom the girl asks for forgiveness ten years after the crime.
Sorry for the spoilers, but talking about power and sex, lies and abuse in this way these days: I find that not only shameless, but also shameful.
Wolfgang Hoebel
»Three Floors«, IT/ F 2020. Director: Nanni Moretti.
Book: Moretti, Federica Pontremoli, Valia Santella.
With: Margherita Buy, Alba Rohrwacher, Riccardo Scamarcio, Alessandro Sperduti.
119 minutes
»Petite Maman«
What does the death of a close loved one mean for a child?
The French director Céline Sciamma tells the story unobtrusively but radically from the perspective of her eight-year-old heroine Nelly (Joséphine Sanz), who, after the death of her grandmother, withdraws more and more from her parents' care into a magical forest world.
In the forest, Nelly meets a girl of the same age (Gabrielle Sanz) who resembles her a lot and is called her mother.
With admirable patience and psychological sensitivity, Sciamma, who achieved a stroke of genius with »Portrait of a Young Woman on Fire« (2019), mixes dream and reality in »Petite Maman«.
Wolfgang Höbel
»Petite Maman«, F 2021. Written and directed by Céline Sciamma.
With: Joséphine Sanz, Gabrielle Sanz, Nina Meurisse, Stéphane Varupenne.
72 minutes
Read the detailed review here
