What They Yearned For in Berlin

Yearning is the best word to describe this year’s 75^th Berlin International Film Festival, a week of big-screen desire exemplified by its top-prize Golden Bear winner, Dreams (Sex Love). Dag Johan Haugerud’s wise, incisive study of a Norwegian teenage girl’s first crush—and the confessional book she writes as personal therapy—is a dazzling and well-deserved honoree. Johanne (Ella Øverbye) is the contemplative 17-year-old whose emotionally vivid and arrestingly articulate description of a love affair with her French teacher Johanna (Selome Emnetu) is so preternaturally self-aware that it startles both her mother and her grandmother, and makes them both re-evaluate their own feelings for amorous connection. 

Heavy on expositional voiceover narration, and comfortable letting conversations play out as these women wrestle with their feelings, Dreams remains beguilingly cinematic for a film that insists on using language to explore inner truths. How we watch the characters—and how Haugerud frames them—is just as vital as what they say. But it’s fundamentally an ode to the power of the written word, an aspect that jury president Todd Haynes underlined when he presented the award to the filmmaker. “It cuts you to the quick with its keen intelligence,” he said.

“This was beyond my wildest dreams,” said Haugerud when he accepted the top prize for Dreams. “It’s a film about writing and reading. So, I would say, write more and read more. It expands your mind. It’s very good for you.” The film is the third in a trilogy, and the full parenthetical title refers to those other two installments—Sex debuted a year ago at the Berlinale, and Love played at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. 

 Befitting its diamond anniversary, the 75^th Berlinale also had its fair share of glittering objects with hard surfaces that cut deep. Among them was a second competition film with the title Dreams, in this case an austere Michel Franco melodrama that calls bullshit on liberal benefactors who support the needy at a comfortable arm’s length.   

Jessica Chastain stars as a wealthy San Francisco scion named Jennifer who hides her torrid love affair with a handsome Mexican immigrant half her age named Fernando (Isaac Hernández). He’s an accomplished ballet dancer and she supports his dance academy in Mexico City, jetting in to write checks while getting balled south of the border. When Fernando surprises her by making the harrowing illegal trip up to the Bay area, she’s both physically aroused and emotionally dejected, refusing to tell her WASP-loving philanthropist father (Marshall Bell) and smugly racist brother (Rupert Friend). Torn between losing her lover or her fortune, Jennifer takes a few desperate measures that don’t end well. 

Chastain’s raw and at times quite literally naked performance was a strong contender for Best Leading Performance, but that award instead went to Rose Byrne for her virtuosic appearance in Mary Bronstein’s woman-on-the-verge psychodrama If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Having made its splashy debut last month at Sundance, If I Had Legs brought its unnerving intensity to a welcoming Berlin as it chronicles the existential reckoning of a mother whose daughter—rendered as an almost entirely offscreen voice—is willfully malnourished and at risk of losing her medical treatment. Byrne blends comedy and angst in quicksilver fashion, marking a career-best role.

 Best Supporting Performance went to Andrew Scott for his tender, conflicted portrayal of composer Richard Rodgers in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, a heartbreaking and bittersweet look at estranged lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) on the opening night of Rogers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! And the conversations between Scott’s distracted Rodgers and Hawke’s desperate Hart are a bubbling stew of wounded emotions. The alcoholic Hart, still stinging that Rodgers ended their fruitful but tumultuous 24-year partnership, keeps trying to sell Rodgers on an idea for a new musical—and Rogers talks to him like the indebted ex-lover who’s moved on but still feels tremendous sympathy. It’s a delicate balance to strike, but Scott does it by pulling off an incredible range of emotional colors—disappointment, hope, anguish, resignation, affection—in his brief screen time.

Two entries were literally sparkling. Lucile Hadžihalilović’s shimmering meta-fantasy The Ice Tower, a dreamlike meditation on how fantasies fuel our inner lives, won the award for Outstanding Artistic Contribution. It refracts the story of the Snow Queen through the 1970s lens of an alpine teenage orphan named Jeanne (Clara Pacini) who runs away to a mountain village and stumbles onto the movie set for a filmed version of the fairy tale. Marion Cotillard plays a forlorn actress who stars as the Snow Queen, a role that blurs for the besotted Jeanne, whose obsession turns increasingly dark. 

And literalizing its gemlike status was outré competition entry Reflection in a Dead Diamond, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s thrillingly fetishistic 1960s homage to both James Bond movies and fumetti neri, Italian comics which introduced dashing spies like the stylish thief Diabolik and his female counterpart Satanik. The filmmaking duo’s avant-garde approach services a stream-of-consciousness narrative where a septuagenarian superspy reflects back on his cloak-and-dagger past—or was it all just a role he played for the movies? No matter, just enjoy the suave casino antics, fatal stiletto heels, ridiculous gadget-laden jewelry, elaborate disguises and sexy assignations. 

Although the Berlinale is rich with cinephile treasures, the festival also prides itself on reflecting the world’s political moment, most glamorously by hosting the world premiere of Bong Joon-ho’s wacky sci-fi gasser Mickey 17, in which a cloned Robert Pattinson keeps dying for the sake of protecting pioneering space colonists from cosmic radiation and alien viruses. The journey, led by a dim-witted megalomaniacal evangelist-politician (think Donald Trump crossed with Jerry Falwell), is full of digs at a dystopic future that devalues and commodifies as half-truths and dogmatic groupthink rule the roost.

 And with the AfD, Germany’s Eurosceptic far-right Alternative for Germany party, poised to make large gains among the electorate during this weekend’s national elections, Radu Jude’s Kontinental ’25 was by far the most topical competition film. No surprise that the biting state-of-Europe comedy-drama, which examines the fatal fallout when a Hungarian bailiff evicts a homeless Romanian from a building’s cellar, won Best Screenplay.

 “I’m a bad screenplay writer, so it’s a very funny award to get,” said Jude as he collected his prize. “I hope there is more solidarity in Europe. Not bullshit solidarity, but real solidarity. And I hope the Hague prosecutes these murderous bastards,” he added referring to Russia’s war with Ukraine. 

“And, considering tomorrow’ elections,” he added, “I hope next year’s festival doesn’t open with Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.”