Health restrictions have resulted this year in a “reduced format” of the Berlinale, which is held from February 10 to 20 in the German capital, with fewer films presented than usual and teams reduced to the bare minimum. A two-step formula has also been designed to ensure maximum tightness for the public: six days of screenings reserved for professionals, then four for the public. The awards ceremony was brought forward to Wednesday, February 16, in the middle of the protest. Less numerous, the films swallowed up at a run nonetheless enter into all sorts of fertile collusions. It is the beauty of a festival to create as many sparks as unexpected relationships.
Likely consequence of the recent confinements, the films of this 72and publishing show a clear tendency to restrict their perimeter to the domestic universe: the room where one locks oneself up, the house one builds for oneself. The craziest is Incredible but true, the latest feature film by the troublemaker Quentin Dupieux, presented in a special screening. In this new pataphysical farce, which arrives shortly after mandibles, a couple (Alain Chabat and Léa Drucker) buy a house on the strength of a very special property, a kind of surreal conduit that operates a twist of time. The gadget will be of no use to them, if not to reveal the sterile monomania of these two specimens as well as of their friends, including a Benoît Magimel who is very satisfied to have had an electronic penis installed. Hilarious from start to finish, the film is built like a series of short-circuits in time, giving popular actors the opportunity to let loose as rarely. The absurd here never comes from a gratuitous gimmick but on the contrary touches on the inept unconscious which agitates our time dabbling in its own nothingness.
Bonello’s confinement film
Filming the unconscious was, in fact, an ambition shared by several Berlinale films. Starting with the aptly named Coma by Bertrand Bonello, containment film made with the means at hand, presented in the Encounters section. A young girl (Louise Labeque, seen in zombie kid) isolated in her teenage room due to the pandemic, spends her days sailing on the thread of her thoughts or plunging into the mysteries of the networks. She swallows the videos of a guru influencer, the mysterious Patricia Coma (Julia Faure, as always excellent), projects on her dolls a funny soap opera, dreams of a virtual zone which would have the appearance of a haunted forest. To accompany these divagations tinged with anguish, the film borrows all sorts of registers: YouTube-type videos, animation, figurines, subjective views, voice-overs. Bonello explores the complete porosity between our dreams and the digital ocean, where connected unconscious seem to flow continuously.
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