Berlinale Dispatch: A Chinese Epic plus an Indonesian Zoo Tale Vie for your Jury's Favor

Today might be the following-to-last day's competition tests in the Berlinale, meaning people take an opportunity of a possible champion for the extent that forthcoming nexus s ever possible. The 2011 jury is headed by Mike Leigh, at dinner another evening some pals which i were playing the WWMLL What Is Going To Mike Leigh Like? game. Voting for honours can be a democratic process, nevertheless the jury leader can set a bad tone. Nonetheless, its hard to say, searching around inside the Berlinale 2012 bag, what Leigh and co. might choose. Professionals faves up to now seem to become Christian Petzolds Barbara, a distinctive, slow-building drama occur seventies East Germany, and Miguel Gomes Tabu, an inventive melodrama that employs old-school movie conventions and sensuous black-and-white-colored cinematography to weave an account of love and loss. But experts faves together with a jurys options dont always align. At this time around, the region is quite open. Im wondering just what a Mike Leigh-introduced jury will consider Postcards within the Zoo, with the youthful Indonesian filmmaker who passes the title Edwin. Postcards can be a gentle story, getting a loose-jointed, somewhat impressionistic narrative structure, of a youthful lady, Lana (Ladya Cheryl), who stays her existence in the Jakarta zoo, though she doesn't formally work there. She helps bathe the zoos baby tiger she knows many particulars in regards to the zoos tigers, which she shares authoritatively while using zoos site site visitors and, eventually, she occupies with another zoo denizen, a magician-cowboy who turns her into his assistant and accomplice. (She dons an Indian-girl outfit and takes her devote his knife-throwing routine.) Throughout this meandering journey of self-discovery, Lana also becomes a massage girl inside a health health spa, serving males who nonchalantly remain in for full-service satisfaction, together with a happy ending (if theyre prepared to cover this). The look is superbly shot the very first section is actually a quantity of postcards, an easy meditation round the zoos peaceful, inspiring character, including shots from the mother and baby hippo idling in the pool, together with a droll little sequence through which Lana muses aloud about why one of the tigers wont eat. (She surmises he feels sorry for your chickens that become his dinner.) Postcards, Edwins second feature, is actually low-key that it's emotional effects dont really linger the look does not matter, nonetheless it is also reasonably enjoyable, particularly due to its pensive, low-key aura. Wang Quanans White-colored Deer Plain, however, isn't low-key. This nearly-three-hour Chinese epic includes no real fight moments and extremely little pageantry, nevertheless it does something thats possibly harder to tug off: It wrestles while using changes and struggles the nation experienced between 1910, the conclusion of Imperial China, and 1938, time in the Japanese invasion. The story, an adaptation from the questionable historic novel by Chen Zhongshi, uses the power struggle between two village families difficult thats intensified with the lady, carried out by an significant actress named Cat Zhang Yugi, who gets into their midst as a means of talking about sweeping or painful alteration of China throughout the initial half from the final century. The look is gorgeous to look at - well, not the famine sections, but virtually otherwise. Wang features a weakness for showing, over and over again, the twinkling golden wheat fields that play part inside the story, and they are beautiful. An individuals figures, sadly, frequently possess a back burners for the scenery. Theyre cogs inside the machinery of the united states and because in the movie, too possibly thats intentional, nevertheless it does keep White-colored Deer Plain from being as including as possible. You never know, from what weve seen up to now, just what the Berlinale 2012 jury applies to? (The crowd includes Franois Ozon, Mike Gyllenhaal, Anton Corbijn and Charlotte now now Gainsbourg, additionally to Asghar Farhadi, the director of last years Golden Bear champion A Separation.) A Hungarian picture that examined today, Bene Fliegaufs Just the Wind, draws its written content from recent real-existence problems, through which several Romany families were wiped out inside their houses, the targets of racial hate. The look is harrowing, yet it's also somewhat detached Fliegauf frequently works harder than he must, maybe, to underscore the panic and anxiety visited upon the town inside the wake of individuals killings. Nevertheless the picture is topical, and thats an excellent making a jury crunches and get sucked in. Well see what continues on Saturday, by which time Ill have bid the Berlinale adieu for the next year though before that, Ill be checking along with a review of Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerods Bel Ami, featuring the Pale One themselves, Rachelle Lefervre. Discover much more of Movieline's coverage within the 2012 Berlinale here. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.