Keeping It Small in Berlin

The 74^th Berlinale, a major European film festival in a major European capital with major attendance from the local cinephile population, somehow feels very minor. Berlin’s storied filmfestspiele this year is a quiet spectacle of low star power in modest productions: intimate stories, interior landscapes, and humble characters wrestling with their inner lives.

It doesn’t help when your Opening Night film is literally called Small Things Like These. Tim Mielants’ 1985-set Irish period piece, based on Claire Keegan’s novel, boasts a riveting performance from Cillian Murphy as a coal-toting deliveryman and father of four schoolgirls haunted by all the institutionalized sexism surrounding him. He’s the kind of man who gets up in the middle of the night and sits in the dark, silently brooding. When it comes clear to him that the local convent is squirreling away and abusing so-called “fallen women” in what they then called the Magdalene Laundries, he quits his mopey ruminations long enough to help deliver justice for at least one soul.

The earnest but turgid film’s timeliness in playing the Berlinale doesn’t come so much from its subject matter—addressing a secret church scandal that ended nearly 30 years ago—as it does from being Oppenheimer-adjacent. Murphy told Matt Damon about the project while on set for Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-frontrunner blockbuster, which incidentally just won 7 BAFTAS over the weekend. Murphy’s passion for Small Things Like Theses so impressed Damon that he offered on the spot to produce the UK film with his partner Ben Affleck through their newly formed production studio Artists Equity.

“This literally fell in our lap,” said the actor-producer at the film’s press conference, where he and Murphy brought all the star power they could muster to goose the curtain-raising festivities. “I was out in the New Mexican desert with Cillian, watching what he was doing in Oppenheimer, and how incredible it was. And a couple of days later, Cillian said, ‘I have my next movie I really want to do.’ And I said, ‘We’re starting a studio, can we do it?’ It really came together quickly.”

None of the competition entries have yet told any stories on large political canvases, with the exception of the dolorous Nazi-era drama From Hilde, with Love. And yet, despite the global conflagration driving its tragic plot, Andreas Dresden’s meandering and myopic film still has somewhat of a reductionist chamber piece vibe. From Hilde, with Love follows a sweet but mousy young woman (Babylon Berlin’s Liv Lisa Fries) who falls in love with a Nazi resistance fighter, helps out his communist sympathizer friends in sending morse code messages to the Soviets, and soon finds herself pregnant and imprisoned, awaiting trial for treason.

The war is a constant presence, but a distant one that’s more talked about and felt than actually seen. This is a homeland tragedy, where the action takes place in houses, apartments, backyards, office rooms, and cell blocks. Bureaucracy is the real enemy here, not armaments—the kind of soulless German efficiency in prosecutorial processing that leads to fatal results.

The governments in these Berlinale competition films tend to be supporting narrative players, meant to add a background of quiet menace. My Favourite Cake, one of the strongest contenders this week, occasionally mentions Iran’s morality police, who do show up briefly to harass a few innocent younger women flashing a bit too much hair from under their headwraps. But the bittersweet late-life romance, written and directed by Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha, is really much more of an unrushed, deeply affecting two-hander about a lonelyhearted 70-year-old woman who steels up enough courage to initiate a romantic evening with an unsuspecting, solitary, age-appropriate and clearly delighted taxi driver.

Only one director this week really proved that he knows how to go for broke. In the dazzling black-and-white melodrama La Cocina, Mexican filmmaker Alonso Ruizpalacios uses the pressure-cooker kitchen culture of a touristy Times Square restaurant to explore notions of illegal immigration and trenchant racism over the course of a very long day. Imagine a cross between The Bear and Do the Right Thing, sprinkled with a subplot about an unwanted pregnancy and some missing cash register money, and you’ll get the overly familiar storylines. With a lesser director in charge, the film’s very basic script beats would take about 80 minutes of screen time to cover. But in Ruizpalacios’ impish, indignant hands, La Cocina sprawls itself over 139 minutes of alchemical virtuosity.

Lending some name recognition is an earthy Rooney Mara as the alluring knocked-up waitress, with the magnetic newcomer Raúl Briones Carmona playing her rakish, fast-talking boyfriend, a mouthy but charming undocumented worker who’s also a cauldron of ambition and resentment that’s about to explode. La Cocina is Ruizpalacios’ English-language debut—what will hopefully be the first of many that attracts even more high-wattage actors to showcase and develop his thrillingly high-wire style of moviemaking.