Berlin 2007: Marianne Faithfull, THE WITNESSES
Peeping jane Marianne Faithfull tries to see if there’s a best actress Silver Bear awaiting her on the other side of the glory hole.
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 screened at the Berlinale:
"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.’"
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Thanks to her well-intentioned, sex-working granny, Faithfull is now one of the top contenders for the Silver Bear for best actress.
As an aside, I also know people who have worked — and some who continue to work — in the sex industry. They’re all alive, and to the best of my knowledge, none of them is any more miserable than other people I know who have followed different professional paths.
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Johan Libéreau, Sami Bouajila in The Witnesses
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 [sic] 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."
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Téchiné’s The Witnesses is set during the first years of the AIDS pandemic. Also in the cast: Michel Blanc, Julie Depardieu, and Johan Libéreau.
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Tags: André Téchiné, Berlin 2007, Berlin Film Festival, Film Festivals, Irina Palm, Johan Libéreau, Marianne Faithfull, Sami Bouajila, The Counterfeiters, The Witnesses
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