Berlin Film Festival News
by Andre Soares
Peeping jane Marianne Faithfull tries to see if there’s a Best Actress Silver Bear awaiting her on the other side of the wall.
In The Guardian, Geoffrey Macnab interviews Marianne Faithfull, whose Irina Palm, the story of a woman who becomes a sex worker in order to get money for her sick grandson, was shown in Berlin:
"Irina Palm is far less voyeuristic than such a synopsis might suggest. Faithfull plays Maggie beautifully, with an understatement that belies her rock’n'roll past. She is at pains to point out that there is nothing remotely glamorous or funny about working in the sex industry. ‘I’ve had friends who worked in the sex trade, really good friends. And they are now dead. I can never remember them telling me they were having a good time. It was a tough choice. Usually, it was the classic story: young girl comes to big city with no money and gets put into this life.’"
(As an aside, I also know people who work in the sex industry. They’re all alive, and to the best of my knowledge, none of them is any more miserable than anybody else.)
In the New York Times, A. O. Scott discusses "festival film genres" and solid acting:
"Directorial acumen, agile screenwriting and sensitive acting distinguish the run of the mill from the genuinely interesting. In the films I saw in Berlin this year — the ones I liked enough to write home about, in any case — the quality of the acting often made the difference. Thus Sam Garbarski’s Competition film Irina Palm, about a British woman who turns to sex work in order to finance a life-saving operation for her grandson, would have been yet another British naughty-granny comedy were it not for Marianne Faithfull’s enigmatic, deadpan and remarkably funny lead performance. Der Fälscher / The Counterfeiters (left), a German Holocaust movie directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky, would have seemed much more glib without the banty, combative charisma of Karl Markovics, who plays a Jewish counterfeiter conscripted into a Nazi plot to forge large quantities of British and American currency. And the bracing pleasures of André Téchiné’s imperfect but powerful Les Témoins / Witnesses owe a great deal to the work of a cast that includes Emmanuelle Béart and Sami Bouajila."
Anna May Wong at the San Francisco Asian American Film Festival
César Awards - 2007 Nominations
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