A big beast with a split personality, the Berlinale likes to parade big Hollywood names while playing films of serious political intent. In that sense, Angelina Jolie's In the Land of Blood and Honey is exemplary – what could be more Berlin than a directorial debut by a major movie star with the Bosnian war on its mind? Suffice to say here that Jolie's gauche portrayal of a Night Porter-type relationship between a Serb soldier and his Bosnian captive strains for significance. But it does illustrate Berlin's main problem: how to stay relevant when the better films are all held back for Cannes.
Any event that can line up Jolie, Jake Gyllenhaal (on the jury), Christian Bale (in Zhang Yimou's very weak rape of Nanking epic The Flowers of War), Meryl Streep (receiving a lifetime achievement Golden Bear – and brandishing a Russian doll with her face painted on it), can guarantee itself big audiences, and the crowds do come. What's more of a problem is that the films often trail bad reviews after them.
Take Jayne Mansfield's Car, actor Billy Bob Thornton's latest stab at directing. It's an ambitious Tennessee Williams-like Vietnam war era portrait of a southern US family of three grown-up sons (Thornton, Kevin Bacon, Robert Patrick) and a daughter (Katherine LaNasa) ruled by paterfamilias Robert Duvall. When the body of Duvall's long-gone wife is shipped back from England, they're forced to meet her second husband John Hurt, his son (Ray Stevenson) and his daughter (Frances O'Connor). Much culture-clash absurd comedy ensues, some of it outrageously black, not to mention crazy. Tone is all over the place, there's too much "signature" acting, strange musings on war and family abound, yet it has a wicked sense of sharp humour. Many critics deemed it a complete failure; I thought it a constantly surprising hoot.
As the competition jury, led by an amiable Mike Leigh, soon discovered, Berlin usually favours rather conventional stories, but one strong exception was Tabu, from the Portuguese director Miguel Gomes. This intricately structured memoir of a love affair among whites in Africa in the 1960s borrows its title and some of its technique from FW Murnau's 1931 silent film set in Tahiti. Gomes's Tabu starts, in black-and-white silent mode, with a droll tale of a jungle explorer so haunted by his dead lover that he feeds himself to a crocodile who then becomes a melancholy ghost. The film proper begins (with sound dialogue and modern shooting techniques) in present-day Lisbon as Pilar, an elderly woman, frets about her neighbour, Aurora, who is frittering her savings away at the Estoril casino. Unfolding in a gentle manner full of wry humour, this section leads us to Aurora's torrid 1960s past, which returns to a silent cinema mode of piercing looks between the gorgeous young Aurora and her Errol Flynn-like beau, and expressionist lighting as the voiceover explains the action and quotes from exquisitely purple love letters. This sleight-of-hand card game of a film was easily the festival's best.
A different kind of invention was at work in the Finnish black comedy Iron Sky in which a colony of surviving Nazis prospecting gas on the dark side of the moon decides to return to earth to "cleanse" it. Best characterised as a melding of 'Allo 'Allo with Star Trek, the film revels in broad performances and a high-school kind of kitsch that's endearing enough and would have taken the film to Galaxy Quest levels if it only had some decent gags. The audience I saw it with gave it a somewhat muted reception, the cause of which is easy to imagine.
Another highlight came from the "Berlin School" director Christian Petzold, best known for chilly psychodramas. Barbara begins in a typically austere milieu, the East German GDR of the 1960s, as Barbara (Nina Hoss), a top flight Berlin doctor, is assigned to a rural outpost. This may be her punishment for asking for an exit visa, yet her behaviour is that of a trained spy. While the Stasi keep only a fitful watch on her, she equips herself with a bike, is able to meet her West German lover, and is expert at hiding things. Meanwhile her amiable chief doctor has developed a crush on her. Or is he being paid to keep a close watch on her?
Despite the froideur of its spy-film trappings, Barbara warms with the thawing relationship between the doctors, drawing on the rich Russian tradition of medical stories seen in Turgenev, Chekhov and Bulgakov that are so deft with resonant details. Its best asset, though, is Hoss, whose exact playing is a wonder.
Andrea Riseborough is a similarly self-contained presence at the heart of the Northern Ireland Troubles thriller Shadow Dancer. Just her standing on a windswept Belfast street in the right colourful clothes is enough to convince you that she's a dedicated IRA volunteer. Yet the film fails to back her up. In a rather moodless opening sequence in London, her character, Collette, aborts a bombing mission and is arrested. It's MI5 man Clive Owen's job to turn her into a "tout" (informant). Concern for her son's future turns her. Soon we're into a routine plot of double-cross as Collette and her family face suspicion from both sides. It's a film of wan smiles on grey streets, with Collette's red coat allowed to blaze out of its background. There are some nicely orchestrated sequences, but overall the film lacks sophistication and the script is too routine.
One joy of the Berlinale was to witness a powerful comeback from Italian masters Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. In the 1970s and 80s, hugely impressive period political dramas of community such as Padre padrone and Kaos were their stock in trade, but Caesar Must Die is a present-day film about prisoners performing Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in jail. Able to weave in much of the prisoners' circumstances, the film's glory is their physical presence. The faces of these hardcore felons, shot in black and white, seem carved in granite, and are so in touch with the fiercer emotions that you never doubt the sincerity of the lines, even though every actor is at the least a born liar, let alone murderer or mafia hood.
I also enjoyed Kevin Macdonald's documentary about Bob Marley, Marley. Though it can't escape the tag of hagiography (it was made under the aegis of Ziggy Marley and Chris Blackwell), it does reveal harsher aspects of the singer's character, the driven lifestyle he pursued, and the Jamaican gang culture of his time. The star talking head is Bunny Wailer, an extraordinary character who makes no bones about his differences with Marley. If this film has a message for a festival that likes to mix politics with pleasure, it must be the legendary cry, "Don't Give Up the Fight".
Nick James is the editor of Sight & Sound
