The Catholic prayer could be spoken or sung.
Starting this Thursday, the start date of the 74th edition of the Berlinale, it can also be seen on the big screen.
The film festival started with a collective prayer for the victims of the abuses of the Catholic Church, led by actor Cillian Murphy and now producer Matt Damon, meritorious in its intentions but uneven in terms of the result.
The film
Small Things Like These
, adaptation of the acclaimed novel by Claire Keegan - published in Spanish as
Small Things Like These
in 2022—returns to one of the darkest episodes in Irish history, which is saying something: the mistreatment that took place throughout the 20th century in the so-called Magdalene laundries.
Run by religious orders, but funded by the state, their official mission was to house “fallen women”: single mothers, raped girls, sex workers and other wayward angels.
To atone for their sins, the nuns who ran these establishments forced them to clean, sew or wash clothes without any remuneration and in inhumane conditions.
An estimated 30,000 women were victims of organized abuse that did not end until the 1990s.
The film, which reunites Murphy and Damon shortly after
Oppenheimer
, is set in two times, although it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the past from the present.
First, during the winter of 1985, when the protagonist, a taciturn father of a family and coal deliveryman, discovers the abuses that occur in the town convent, and must decide whether to act or remain silent.
And, secondly, his childhood in Ireland in the 1950s, where he was raised as the bastard son of a teenage mother, the source of countless traumas that will emerge violently in his adulthood.
Cillian Murphy, in a scene from 'Small Things Like These', the film that opened the Berlinale.SHANE O'CONNOR
Favorite for the Oscar for playing the father of the nuclear bomb, Murphy plays this tortured man using his favorite tone: that of the impassive man who hides an unsuspected inner world, which is sometimes transparent in his impossible face.
Following strictly the five phases of grief, which the film goes through with the crudeness of a self-help book, his character seems like a mixture of an unhappy child in a Dickens story, to which the film does not always point subtly, and an extemporaneous disciple of Jesus Christ who defends the values of the gospels, in the face of a society in which the law of silence prevails.
“I don't know if I'm fit to speak for the entire nation, but as an Irishman I think it was a collective trauma that we're still processing.
“Art may be more useful in healing this wound than a government report,” Murphy said at a press conference.
And he was right: few know that the Irish Government apologized to the victims in 2003, but almost no one has forgotten the previous film about this episode,
The Magdalene Sisters
, with which Peter Mullan won the Golden Lion in Venice. a year before.
The film, directed by Tim Mielants ('Peaky Blinders'), describes a society that preaches virtue but engages in vice.
Despite the appearance of restraint, it falls into the Manichaean and the miserabilistic.
The film, directed by Flemish Tim Mielants (with whom Murphy already worked on the series
Peaky Blinders
), is one of the first projects produced by Actors Equity, the new studio founded by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, whom Murphy proposed to join. the project while filming
Oppenheimer
in the New Mexico desert.
“When I started working in the nineties there were movies like that all the time.
They were part of our life.
This is a project that asks the public to continue loving this cinema, to continue caring.
I think there is a part of the audience that still does it,” Damon said at the Berlinale.
The film is correct in describing the climate of discreet oppression that reigns in a small town where only the church bells can be heard, a microsociety that preaches virtue, but then engages in the worst vices.
Mielants, who is not Irish, but says he knows of similar cases ("there are also those in Belgium," he has defended himself), manages to describe a society that is rotten from the inside, in favor of extreme immobility, that celebrates Christmas while ignoring what is happening to them. happens to these girls and has turned the repression of their drives, both good and bad, into a differential fact.
Only, under the appearance of absolute restraint that
Small Things Like These
exudes , the film tends to fall into Manicheanism and sensationalist detail and over-explanation.
Also in a political message that hides an uncomfortable subtext, as if it defended every man for himself rather than the denunciation of systemic abuse, individual salvation and not collective salvation.
Despite everything, that sequence will remain in memory where Emily Watson, the young devotee of
Breaking the Waves
, plays a mother superior who is distinguished from her by her Calabrian mafia methods, including bribery.
Low profile
The presence of Murphy and Damon brought a bit of
star power
to an edition that will not have too much of it, in which the stars will arrive in dribs and drabs (despite everything, in the next few days there will be Martin Scorsese, Kristen Stewart, Rooney Mara and Gael García Bernal, among others).
The films at this Berlinale have a lower profile than on other occasions, but they include on the menu a long series of stimulating political and social issues, from the thorny colonial heritage to new gender politics, passing through the interference of technology in our lives.
In the background, the president of the official jury, the actress Lupita Nyong'o, with the director Albert Serra in front of her. ANNEGRET HILSE (REUTERS)
The political context has also crept into the festival.
First, due to accusations of excessive equidistance of the Berlinale regarding the conflict between Israel and Palestine, which has sparked protests among the festival workers themselves.
And, above all, due to the controversy arising from the invitation to the far-right AfD party to the inauguration this Thursday.
Five of its deputies were summoned by the festival and then canceled when their presence became unsustainable, after the publication of an open letter from 200 industry professionals that called this invitation “incompatible” with respect to the values of “empathy and understanding” that This festival is usually proclaimed.
Regional MP Gunnar Lindemann compared the gesture to the exclusion of Jews from the public sphere during Nazi times.
The ultra party, which is rising in the polls, plans the deportation of non-white Germans if it comes to power.
The scandal reached this Thursday at the press conference of the official jury, chaired by actress Lupita Nyong'o.
Would she have agreed to sit at a gala where the extreme right was present?
“I'm happy not to have to give that answer, to not be in that position,” she dodged with Albert Serra, a member of her jury, to her left.
On the right, German director Christian Petzold added: “We are giving them more strength than they deserve.
There are only five individuals.
Every weekend there are hundreds of thousands of people who protest against that party in the streets.
“They are more important.”
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