Overthrown kingdoms mark the first two highlights of the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival, commonly known as the Berlinale. On Feb 9 the festival, taking place amidst the temperature so cruel to tropical creatures that I'd venture to nickname the event the Brrrrrrlinale, opened with Benoit Jacquot's stylish, wry and fluid "Farewell My Queen", a French Revolution drama that re-tells the final days of Louis XVI through the eye of Marie Antoinette's loyal servant, Sidonie Laborde, played by Lea Seydoux (aka the French assassin in the latest "Mission: Impossible").

Almost the entire film takes place in the hollow chambers of the Versailles, an ignorantly tranquil world whose calm surface is about to tremble with the revolutuinary force. The whispers of the Bastille incident arrive, along with the "decapitation list", and Laborde, whose love for Marie Antoinette suspiciously borders on the erotic territory, grows more anxious by the minute. For a costume drama, the film feels light of touch, a quality that works for and aginst this kind of material. Diane Kruger plays Antoinette, a majestic babydoll who seems to live on another plain of reality, and Virginie Ledoyen, beautiful like a painting, is Duchess Polignac, another peacock in this glittering, mournful zoo.

Then on Feb 10, I made the right choice of going to the evening show of the historic 1928 Soviet film, "Oktober", the propagandistic epic that has just been digitally restored to a marvellous condition by the Munich Film Museum (there are several versions of the film circulating cinematheques around the world due to the various exports and censorships of the original). The film was directed by, of course, Sergei Eisenstein, and the Berlin screening was accompanied by live orchestra playing the newly unearthed score by Edmund Meisel. It was a thunderous, heart-pounding experience -- 116 minutes flew by in a flash as the packed theatre saw the re-staging of the Bolshevik Revolution that toppled Tsar Nicholas in luminous black-and-white. Eisenstein's well-known montage technique, with its fervid cutting and superimposition of symbolic images onto the realistic, crowded action, was incredibly heightened by the skillful orchestra that matches the lightning-quick editing pace with rhythmic precision. And it's the live music that made all the difference: the ham-fistedness and grandiosity of the propaganda might have come across as comical and dated to contemporary viewers, except that Meisel's score restored the film's original earnestness and (blindside) sincerity. A powerful performance -- bravo to the 83-year-old film and the orchestra. 

More report on the films showing at the Berlinale will continue here in the following days (if the cold doesn't finished me off first). 

Besides the tale of the soul-peddling Leverkhun in "Doctor Faustus", Thomas Mann wrote the famous "Death in Venice", and the German writer made it quite clear that he viewed the lagoon city in a negative light: a place of pure decay and supreme kitsch. Had Sokurov thrown in more of Mann's "Faustus" into the original Marlowe's and Goethe's classic, Venice could've played an ironic role in the awards night of one of the world's major film festivals.

Sokurov's "Faust" is a high-art dark comedy: Faust is a professor frustrated by the sorry limitation of human knowledge (this is perhaps the only resemblance to Leverkhun in "Doctor Faustus", a composer who wishes to go far beyond the chromatic) while the Devil in this case is a moneylender (are we going back to "The Merchant of Venice"?). It says a lot when the first shot in the main narrative of the film is that of a penis, wrinkled and injured, before a corpse is graphically disembowelled. All is meant as a half-joke. Anyway, Sokurov is known for his proud reinterpretaions of history and the lives of famous tyrants who occupy it; "Faust" is actually proclaimed as the fourth film in the series of portraits of corrupt and powerful men, from Hitler (in "Moloch") to Lenin ("Taurus") and Emperor Hirohito ("The Sun"). How Faust fits into that gallery of historic rogues is, as usual, open to our own interpretation.

Let's quickly round up the rest of the awards here. "Alps" by Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, won best screenplay (I secretly hoped it would win something bigger). Deanie Ip won Best Actress from Ann Hui's staid "A Simple Life", while Michael Fassbender cruised, as expected, to the Best Actor trophy from playing a sex addict in "Shame". 

The best director prize went to Cai Shangjung from the Chinese film "People Mountain, People Sea", and the Special Jury Prize went to "Terraferma", by Italian Emanuele Crialese. Meanwhile Andrea Arnold's "Wuthering Heights", which I really like, won technical achievement in cinematography, and quite rightly. The two young actors from the Japanese film "Himizu", about the post-tsunami moral anarchy in Japan, won the prizes for emerging actor/actress.

Alas, I'm not sure if any of these titles will land on the Thai shores. Our best hope rests with the local film festivals. Otherwise, you've heard of the names of these films that have shaken up the global cinema scene, and if necessary, trade your soul with the Devil so you can watch them :)

Venice hosts the world’s oldest movie festival, but what has throbbed and bubbled in the past few days is young angst. It’s a grim world for youths, from the Greek meltdown in ‘Alps’ to the post-tsunami moral anarchy in ‘Himizu’, and the radical romance of the latest adaption of ‘Wuthering Heights’, featuring, for the first time, a black Heathcliff. These Competition titles are hopefuls for the Golden Lion, one of the most respected prizes in world cinema, which will be crowned tomorrow night at the closing ceremony of the lagoon cine-fest.

‘Alps’, by Yorgos Lanthimos, is a dark satire that rides on cold aesthetics. Of its quartet of main characters, one is a teen gymnast, and she joins a band of eccentrics who make a living by re-enacting the lives of dead people to comfort their aggrieved families. It’s a dangerous game for both sides as the various identities assumed by the Alps team – as the quartet call themselves – merge into and consume their real lives. But then again, what is real and what is not – the philosophy that underlies the idea of cinema itself – is separated by an invisible threshold in this smart, mean, relentless movie that knocks you around with its silent punches.

Lanthimos’s film doesn’t allude to the recent debt crisis that has mired the Greek spirit, but the sense of despair and existential void can easily be read as a symptom of a society that’s going through a hard time. On the contrary, Sion Sono’s ‘Himizu’ makes sure you understand the film as an allegory – no, maybe as a literal reflection – of Japan that’s reeling from the shock of the March 11 tsunami and the subsequent nuclear crisis. And it’s the young people, the film suggest, who’re bearing the biggest brunt in the country that’s beginning to doubt in their own future.

‘Himizu’ opens with an image of rubble left by the devastating tsunami, apparently shot on real location not long after the waves struck.  The film, which is physically and emotionally violent, tells the story of Sumida, a high-school boy living by a lake with his dysfunctional mother. Sumida’s father has left the family, though he keeps coming back to ask for money and to beat up the boy while saying harrowing things like ‘I wish you never existed’. Sumida’s female classmate is suffering from a similar fate: Her mother has built a gallows, painted brightly red, in their living room and encourages the girl to hang herself as soon as she’s ready. Count your blessings you’re not Japanese teeangers.

Of course ‘Himizu’ – meaning ‘a mole’ – uses the ploy of dark comedy to get its point across. What’s striking is that the film’s black humour and over-the-top, nearly cartoonish story accumulate their unlikely power and hit you hard in the stomach (and the head too). Sion Sono is a director who doesn’t value subtlety, and in his movies – the 4-hour-long ‘Love Exposure’ and the serial murder saga ‘Cold Fish’ -- he’s always used far-fetched setup and garish details to throw insult at the superstructure of the rigid Japanese society. There will be those who feel that the film is too blunt in its depiction of familial violence.  But violence, internal and external, natural and unnatural, is the point here, and ‘Himizu’ is one of the first Japanese films to use the backdrop of the tsunami as a lens to look at the emotional aftershock felt by the country.

Shifting style yet still in the terrain of teen angst, Emily Bronte’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ has received a new interpretation by Scottish director Andrea Arnold (the dense ‘Red Road’ and the gritty ‘Fish Tank’). Despite the several movie versions, this new one manages to convey the ‘atmospheric tumult’ – as Bronte described the stormy Yorkshire heights in her novel – through a fresh film grammar and stylized misc-en-scene: shot in 4:3 ratio rather than the wider 16:9, the film relies on close-up, hushed exchange, woozy, hand-held camera following the characters on their many runs across the damp fields, and remarkable shots of everyday sensuality, like when young Catherine Earnshaw kisses the bleeding wounds of Heathcliff after he was caned. Director Arnold has given us an interiorized romance, where feeling simmers and obsession boils. In remaking a classic story, Arnold guns for modern aesthetics. And by making Heatfcliff black – in the book he's a gypsy – the film increases the tension between the characters and gives the story’s second half, when Heathcliff returns to the heights as a rich man, a possibly new re-reading.

The film will split the critics, but here’s a ‘Wuthering Heights’ like none you’ve seen before.

The 68th Venice Film Festival will wrap tomorrow.

Briefly here.

Yesterday Rirkrit Tiravanija, emiment visual artist and maestro of live museum curry-cooking, premiered 'Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbours' in the Orrizonti section. The 149-minute film -- which presents nothing more than the uncle of the title walking, talking, farming, eating, drinking -- has turned out to be one of the best Thai films of the year. Neither detached nor intimate, neither exotic nor romantic, at its conceptual level 'Lung Neaw' (no relation whatsoever with 'Lung Boonmee'!) reveals itself to be a patient study of time -- how it flows, how it's interminable, and how life occupies that stream of invisible liquid, sculpted and lulled by it.

This is a teaser, and a full report on the film and its Venice premiere will be in the LIFE section of the Bangkok Post on Wednesday. I should say here that later in the week, the Venice Festival will also screen Kongdej Jaturanrasmee's 'Tae Piang Pu Diew' (or 'P-047'), which to me is another best Thai film of the year. Sorry, but again the full report will follow later.

On another note: Venice can't get enough of Michael Fassbender. And in turn, Michael Fassbender (or his characters) can't get enough sex. First the actor plays Carl Jung in 'A Dangerous Method', a psychoanalyst who upstages Freud in their theoretical rivalry by having dark sex with his patient. And now Fassbender plays Brandon, a hyper-sexed New Yorker whose uncontrollable libido (he would make Freud proud) gets him in an existential crisis. Brandon just can't help it: he uses prostitutes, he maturbates, he picks up girls, he consumes a formidable quantity of porn, print and digital -- sometimes all of this in the same night. 

The film is called 'Shame'. This is a new work by Brisith artist-turned-filmmaker Steve McQueen, whose sensational 2009 debut, 'Hunger', also starred Fassbender in the physically demanding lead as an IRA prisoner on an epic hunger strike. In 'Shame', let's just say that Fassbender is more solid than the whole movie, and the McQueen enthusiasts may sulk when this follow-up doesn't quite match the stylistic excitement of his first film. 

Cary Mulligan plays Brandon's dysfunctional sister, and her part is the weakest in the story, which feels underwritten in many ways. It's Fassbender, playing a soul tortured by his own impulse, by the pain rather than pleasure of sex, who saves the film.

A wounded physician is the best physician, said Carl Jung. And thus a madwoman makes a perfect psychiatrist -- someone who's gone over the threshold and come back, clutching the precious knowledge of which those who remain safely on this side would never know.

Or so it is sugested in "A Dangerous Method", the new David Cronenberg's film screened in the Venice Competition this morning. It proves to be a less dangerous head-trip than many might've expected, but still a tough, dialogue-heavy, letter-reciting drama about the early days of psychoanalysis and the legendary rivalry between Freud and Jung. Viggo Mortensen plays the cigar-smoking Sigmund Freud, Michael Fassbender is the pipe-sucking Jung -- but the wildcard here is Keira Knightley, who plays Sabina Spielrein, the deranged, masochistic Russian girl who's initially treated by Jung before leading her good doctor along the path of sexual exploration. As the film suggests, the madwoman-turned-shrink is a major catalyst to the two doctors/theorists (especially to Jung, haunted by a rigid family life and his belief in the metaphysics), and the history of psychoanalysis owes her a great deal.

It's a joke in the film that Freud's staunch belief in the power of sexual drive has arrived from the fact that he doesn't get any. Then Freud would've loved to see the film I saw in the afternoon, fabulously titled "Whores' Glory", and shot partly, would you be surprised, in a massage parlour of our crazy Bangkok. Precisely, in the establishment called Hi-Class on Rachadapisek Rd. The film, a sort-of documentary, was made by Austrian Michael Glawogger -- perhaps one of the two or three most important Austrian filmmakers at work today -- and it is mostly a straight-faced record of brothel life in three country, Bangkok, Bangladesh and Mexico. As if the only people who get horny are those who live near the Equator. 

The Bangkok part, subtitled "The Fish Tank", is very superficial. Not that I'm particularly well-versed in the business of the fish tank -- the nickname of the glass room through which prostitutes display themselves in massage parlours -- but because the film cannot cross over the lure of exoticism. That hookers also pray is hardly a revelation, since spiritual belief doesn't only belong to "the good women". What also bugs me is the fact that "Whores' Glory" uses actors (at least two that I recognise) to pose as customers who visit the fish bowl, and they say lines that sound forced and banal and that do not add to anything we've understood, rightly or wrongly, about the profession. By the way, I doubt if the film will ever get to play in Bangkok, not even at film festivals, because the censors would fly into a rage at some of the images depicted here -- and I don't just mean the acknowledgement of the sex trade. 

The parts shot in Bangladesh and Mexico are more interesting, not only because I'm not famliar with those places, but because the film involves a more strategc narrative, and the power of documentary-style observation is slightly more pronounced. Still, "Whores' Glory" is hardly a definitive film on the subject that's complex, globe-spanning and full of dialectics. For a start, the film would've been much more interesting, to me at least, had it included an episode on the red-light district in a wealthy Western country. Whores and glory are global currencies, aren't they?

 Venice, September 1

The sun, as expected, is fierce. The movies, so far, have been lukewarm. The 68th Venice International Film Festival opened on Aug 31 with George Clooney's The Ides of March, in which Ryan Goslin plays a press secretay to Clooney's presidential candidate. And in the past two days, the parade of stars descending upon the red carpet at Lido could've blotted out the relentless Venetian sun, raising the perennial question whether Venice -- one of the three or four major film festivals in the world -- can strenghten its preferred cocktail of big-name projects with more obscure, even experimental movies (in the sidebard Orrizonti section) and rise to challenge Cannes as the most influential cinema event. 

As I'm writing, Madonna is giving a press conference in the next room. Madonna is here to present "W.E.", a sometimes engaging, sometimes ridiculous tale of romance and of two women's search, literally, for impregnation and everlasting love. Set in dual periods, it tells parallel stories of a present-day woman called Wally who becomes obsessed with the story of the scandalous, romantic, fairty-tale, throne-sacrificing love saga between King Edward and his American lover and later wife, Wallis (this "W.E." of the title).This is the story that gets told as a sidebar in "The King's Speech" -- Edward was the brother of the stuttering king, who abdicated in order to pursue the forbidden love with Wallis. 

Didn't I tell you that Madonna is the director -- not the actor? And while the film has a confident visual flourish that nearly smothers you in its swirl of courtly,  luxurious pre-war life, the script is utterly devoid of mystery, and the attempt to pair the two women --the modern-day Wally with King Edward's Wallis -- feels forced and tenuous. Especially in the present-day section, which strikes me as overwritten and overdirected. What works, or works better, is the period part, because the story of Wallis -- the woman who acquires the image of an emotional, flightly, fun-loving flirt in the popular imagination, or at least those who've watched "The King's Speech" -- is being told here from her point of view. The message is simple, probably too simple to leave any bitter afterthought: what lies behind every fairy tale is a tragedy of varying degrees. It's the same in the case of Edward and Wally here.

The good news is, "W.E" will open in Bangkok. Later this year I guess, or I hope. At the press conference, Madonna was asked one of those annoying yet precious questions, at least for the sake of sound bite: "Would you give up a throne for a man or a woman you love?".

Her answer: "I can have them both. Or all three of them." Welcome to Venice.

The 64th Cannes Film Festival winners

Palme d'Or: "The Tree of Life" by Terrence Malick.

Grand Prix (secon prize): "The Kid With a Bike" by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, and "Once Upon a Time in Anatolia" by Nuri Bilge Ceylan.

Best Director: Nicolas Winding Refn from "Drive".

Best Screenplay: Joseph Cedar from "Footnote".

Best Actor: Jean Dujardin from "The Artist".

Best Actress: Kirsten Dunst from "Melancholia".

Jury Prize (a sort of honorary mention): "Polisse" by Maiwenn Le Besco.

It's been a pleasure writing. See you around.

It's almost over! The Bangkok tin mine is waiting for me!

The Palme d'Or will be announced Sunday night around 8pm (1am in Thailand). The Palme Dog, however, was already announced -- yes, there's a prize for best canine performance in film, a kind of adorable spoof that should please dog lovers (what about cats!?) -- and the winner, deservedly, is the dog from "The Artist". Felicitations, mate.

The Queer Palm, another unofficial prize, was also announced, and the winner is the South African film "Beauty", which tells the story of a racist roughneck who struggles against his feeling toward a pretty young boy. I find the film quite dour and skin-deep, save for one intense scene in a Cape Town hotel room. 

For the official prizes, the Un Certain Regard already celebrated its winners a few hours back. This year Emir Kusturica chairs the jury for Un Certain Regard, Cannes's sidebar section that generally features upcoming directors or established ones with a unique style. Nine years ago, Apichatpong Weerasethakul won this prize that heralded his arrival in the internatinal film scene that culminated in his Palme d'Or triumph in 2010. This year, the top prizes is split between the Andreas Dresen's "Stopped on Track", about the last month in the life of a cancer patient, and "Arirang", an experimental self-portrait by Korean director Kim Ki-duk (urgh). I saw both, and let's say I prefer other films in this section, but congratulations to the winners anyway.

It's a useless yet irresistible activity to guess tomorrow's Palme d'Or winner, the world's most respected cinema trophy, and since there's no Thai contender this year, the stake feels less exciting. I'm not going to venture into the business of speculating the winners in each category (Palme d'Or, Grand Prix (second prize), Best Actor, Best Actress, etc), but I'll share the list of my top films in the festival. Cannes is special because it only show premieres -- the film shown here must not be shown anywhere else before -- and I hope these films will find its way to Bangkok, or to your DVD player, some time soon.

Cannes 2011 top 10 films (not in any particular order)

1."Le Havre" by Aki Kaurismaki (the director is Finnish, though the film, a comedy about a shoeshine and an immigrant boy, is in French. In Competition.

2. "The Tree of Life" by Terrence Malick (this film by an American director will certainly split audiences and critics around the world). In Competition.

3. "Drive" by Nicolas Winding Refn (the director is Danish, though he's made films in America and Europe. His early film "Pusher" was shown at Bangkok Intl Film Festival in early 2000s). In Competition.

4. "Duch: Master of the Forges of Hell" by Rithy Panh (the Paris-based Cambodian director interviewed a former warden of a Khmer Rouge prison). Out of Competition.

5. "Hard Labour" or "Trabalhar Cansa" by Brazillian Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra. This is the film about a haunted supermarket and the ghost of slavery. Un Certain Regard.

6. "Miss Bala" by Mexican Gerardo Naranjo. A girl wants to be a beauty queen but becomes a pawn in a cross-border gangster activities instead. Un Certain Regard.

7. "This Is Not a Film" by Jafar Panah and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb. Panahi has been house arrested in Tehran -- this is the film he made in his house, with a help from a friend. Out of Competition.

8. "The Kid With a Bike" by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Another solid film from the Belgian brothers who won the Palme d'Or twice already. In Competition.

9. "Elena" by Andrey Zviagintsev (the Russian director gives us a chilling portrait of new Russia throug the story of an old welathy tycoon and his wife). Un Certain Regard.

10. "Tatsumi" by Eric Khoo (the Singaporean director tells the life story of a Japanese comic book artist). Un Certain Regard.

I doubt if Robert De Niro and his jury will share my view, but let's see tomorrow.