(Berlin) On Thursday morning, Potsdamer Platz was bathed in a fog so dense that one would not have recognized Kristen Stewart, president of the jury of the competition of the 73e Berlinale, more than 20 m away. Everything was grey. We would have thought – you will excuse the cliché – in wings of desire by Wim Wenders, shot here nearly 40 years ago, when this ultramodern neighborhood was just a wasteland near the Berlin Wall.
At the start of the evening, the fog had dissipated, to the delight of the dozens of curious people gathered in the “fan zone”, on the occasion of the opening night of the 73e Berlinale. They were waiting outside the Berlinale Palast, the festival’s headquarters, for the arrival of Anne Hathaway, Peter Dinklage and Marisa Tomei, stars of Rebecca Miller’s latest romantic comedy, She Came to Me, greeting German TV stars in evening dress. The brave ones. I wore a tuque and gloves.
I didn’t wait to see Peter Dinklage. We were on the same plane en route to Berlin – he was a few classes up, of course – and I had another screening scheduled for the evening. I sneaked into the “fan zone” with my press credentials, fearing that a security guard might take a closer look. And above all, that he strictly interpret the regulation requiring a “recent photo”.
“You must have come here a long time ago! noticed the Festival employee when she handed me my accreditation the day before.
– No, but it’s been a long time since I came. It was 22 years ago.
– That explains the picture! »
There was no photo, as we say in Annecy. Not a gray hair, not a wrinkle, the cherubic look. “We recognize your hair,” the employee, who couldn’t have been much older than 22, told me, with a wave of her hands around her head indicating that my unruly hair had the same volume. I specified that the photo which I had transmitted to the press service must have been mislaid, worried that she would take me for a flirtatious person trying to pretend to be younger.
Fortunately for me, at the Berlinale, nobody cares about the photos on the accreditations. We are not at the Cannes Film Festival, whose security system rivals that of an Israeli airport in the midst of an intifada. There are no bag searches or metal detectors here. And I thought it was because I covered the Berlinale before the September 11 attacks that people were so cool.
In this festival financed almost 50% by the State in this year of post-pandemic “return to normal”, the efficiency is formidable. The online ticket distribution service would make the Toronto Festival blush with envy. We don’t skimp on the comfort of festival-goers, media people, industry, and the general public alike (unlike Cannes, always). I saw the opening movie in a reclining padded chair with a footstool (how do you say La-Z-Boy in German?). Because of the jet lag, I ran the risk of dozing off.
I did not fall asleep. It’s already saying something She Came to Me, an independent romantic comedy that dissects the genre, with its mise en abyme and its references to other art forms (opera in particular). It’s not a memorable film, far from it, but despite the shortcomings of its screenplay – reversals are unlikely even for a fable – it’s rather amusing, charming, even moving at times. We smile more than we laugh, but it’s just quirky and witty enough to stand out from the Ticket to Paradise formatted from Hollywood cinema.
It is the story of a composer, Steven (Peter Dinklage), who struggles with the white score syndrome since the failure of his last opera and his subsequent depression. The drugs that his former shrink Patricia (Anne Hathaway) gives him, who has since become his wife, do not seem to have the desired effects on his anxiety attacks and his lack of inspiration.
By chance, in a Brooklyn bar, Steven meets Katrina (Marisa Tomei), captain of a tugboat from Baton Rouge, self-confessed “addicted to romance”, which will have the effect of a hurricane on his life. At the same time, the son of Patricia, an obsessed with cleanliness who reconnects with Catholicism, experiences his first love affairs with the daughter of their cleaning lady, who is married to a fan of historical re-enactments.
We inevitably think of Woody Allen’s cinema, the undeniable influence of Rebecca Miller’s previous fiction feature film, the charming but equally minor Maggie’s Plan (with Greta Gerwig and Ethan Hawke), in 2015. This time more wacky.
“It took me seven years to make this film. It was quite difficult, ”said the author-filmmaker on Thursday at a press conference about her seventh feature film – the first since the documentary she dedicated in 2017 to her famous father, the playwright Arthur Miller (Death of a traveling salesman).
Before becoming a screenplay, She Came to Me was a short story published by Rebecca Miller, a multidisciplinary artist who was initially a painter, then an actress, before moving behind the camera. “It was set in Dublin, with two characters, one of whom has a creative block,” she says. I started with that, it was the germ of the film. »
She then made the main character a composer, drawing inspiration in particular from the profession of her son Cashel Day-Lewis (whose actor father, Daniel, is Miller’s longtime companion). With the collaboration of another musician, Bryce Dressner, guitarist of The National, who composed the soundtrack as well as the piece that accompanies the credits, sung by Bruce Springsteen.
Anne Hathaway loved the screenplay so much She Came to Me, she says, that she (partly) “bought the company” (it’s an old advertising slogan, young people). She co-produced this film which also features the Polish actress Joana Kulig, revealed on the international scene by the excellent Cold War by Pawel Pawlikowski. “It’s a film that touched my heart, deeply,” says Hathaway. It’s a radical film that takes risks. »
From the American point of view, we understand that “taking risks” and being “radical” now describe the fact of making something other than a Hollywood film likely to rally a large audience.
To a journalist who asked her if “her heart beat for independent cinema”, Maria Tomei replied that her heart beat for cinema tout court. “It’s important to like all types of films if we want cinema as an art form to survive, when it’s less and less easy to attract people to theaters,” said the actress. , which was Marvel’s most recent films featuring Spider-Man.
She couldn’t have said it better under the circumstances. She Came to Medespite its selection at the opening of the Berlinale, has not yet found a distributor in North America…