There’s a bit of a gender-inclusion dialectic going on at this year’s Berlinale. On one hand, the international jury is composed evenly of men and women. On the other, the head of the jury, Juliette Binoche, opened the festival by calling for an end to the public condemnation of Harvey Weinstein. And while the festival is proud that seven of 16 films in the main competition are directed by women (that’s up from four last year), and has pledged to “work for” the proportion reaching 50% next year, the most prominent German film that premiered at this year’s festival, The Golden Glove, features some of the seediest, most relentless depiction of violence against women in recent memory.
Nevertheless, there’s a good chance that a female filmmaker will walk away with the Golden Bear for the second year in a row. Among the aforementioned seven films in competition are three of the slate’s most impressive: Teona Strugar Mitevska’s God Exists, Her Name Is Petrunya, a claustrophobic black comedy about a listless and unemployed Macedonian woman who spends an entire night under police interrogation for participating in a men-only religious ceremony; Marie Kreutzer’s The Ground Beneath My Feet, a tightly controlled psychodrama which subtly draws the viewer into a woman’s growing sense of paranoia and suspicion of her own senses; and Nora Fingscheidt’s System Crasher, a raw, affecting—but not oppressively dark—portrait of a young girl with severe emotional disturbance.
Interestingly enough, God Exists and The Ground Beneath My Feet open with nearly identical shots: extreme close-ups of a woman hiding under her bedsheets, hesitant to confront the outside world. Once they emerge, however, each woman reveals herself to be a starkly different person, and at the center of a starkly different production. A former history major interested in the integration of communist economies with democratic principles, God Exists’s Petrunya (Zorica Nusheva) is, it’s almost needless to say, unoccupied in impoverished, post-communist Macedonia. And The Ground Beneath My Feet’s Lola (Valerie Pachner) is a Type A, over-occupied professional who practically sweats German efficiency. Petrunya rebels, externalizing her frustration at handsy hiring managers and patriarchal traditions, while Lola internalizes the stress of her merciless schedule and strictly compartmentalized life, coming to doubt her sanity and the motives of the people around her.
Mitevska’s camera stays close to its protagonist, the tight frame becoming another way in which Petrunya is confined by her circumstances. An annual village tradition has the local priest toss a wooden cross into the freezing-cold river, and a herd of young men dive in after it; Petrunya does an end run around them, grabs the cross for herself, and makes off with it. As the town erupts into furor over the “theft,” neither the police nor the priest can coerce the intractable Petrunya into returning the cross. “Am I under arrest?” Pentrunya persists, and the answer is yes and no. The police can’t arrest Petrunya, but God Exists shows what at first an indolent millennial’s arrested development to be the product of an arrested social position.
God Exists creates a sense of intimacy with Petrunya through its close-ups, but Ground Beneath My Feet manages to put us in its main character’s distorted state of mind even while maintaining a tone of cool distance. Lola’s mentally ill sister, Conny (Pia Hierzegger), has been hospitalized after a recent suicide attempt, and Lola, who strictly divides the personal and professional, keeps getting calls from Conny claiming that the institution is abusing her. But after Lola is informed that Conny couldn’t be making those calls, her entire reality seems up for question. The film doesn’t use visual abstractions to illustrate Lola’s burgeoning breakdown, instead relying on manipulations quietly executed by Kreutzer’s screenplay and precise mise-en-scène to make us, like Lola, question everything we see on screen.
Like its protagonist, The Ground Beneath My Feet is lean, fit, and highly effective within the bounds it sets for itself. For this reason among others—including its Austro-German specificity—its chances at the Golden Bear seem rather distant. With a more unique tone and a more universal feminist theme, God Exists likely has a better shot. But the best of this bunch—and perhaps of the competition slate thus far—is Fingscheidt’s System Crasher, which might be referred to as a social-problem film, though it abstains not only from didacticism or easy solutions, but also from fetishizing victimhood or sentimentalizing childhood.
Beautiful but anything but tender, System Crasher is awash in pink: its titles are in spray-painted, neon-pink scrawl; its nine-year-old protagonist, Benni (Helena Zengel, who, if the film were English-language, would already be a sensation for her performance), is always garbed in the color; and the screen becomes a swatch of bright pink whenever the emotionally disturbed child breaks out into one of her characteristic rages. Saturating the film in pink isn’t just an appropriation of the archetypically girlish color to signify female rage and rebellion; it’s also just another way that Fingscheidt’s film is loud. Benni’s genuinely frightening fits of uncontrolled fury, which often turn violent or end with her running away from those who want to protect her, are accompanied by raucous, percussive music that helps immerse the viewer in Benni’s subjective, chaotic swirl of perceptions.
What these three films have in common is their exploration of a female psyche impacted in some way by oppressive conditions. In System Crasher and God Exists, that’s specific forms of violent patriarchal power, and in The Ground Beneath My Feet, it’s the “always on” information-age capitalism that dominates schedules, minds, and bodies. The films share a sense of concreteness, a foundation in the everyday stressors in the place each is set. It’s not quite a “Frauen-Berlinale” here in Berlin, as documentarian Barbara Rohm described the festival to the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, but it’s easy to see why these three powerful films might make one think otherwise.
Berlinale runs from February 7—17.
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