Berlin, (EFE) in the excellent Vicky Krieps and Greta Lee.
The veteran Von Trotta (Berlin, 1942) returned to the Berlinale with a portrait of a strong and emancipated woman, the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann, suddenly broken and abandoned by her Swiss colleague Max Frisch, with whom she formed a couple until jealousy and promiscuity broke out. on both sides they broke love.
Song (Seoul, 1989) made her debut with “Past Lives”, a film with autobiographical profiles, about a girl who emigrates with her parents from South Korea to Canada, first, and then to New York, but leaves behind a schoolmate. that will continue to be attached to the first love.
Ingeborg Bachman. Journey into the Desert” is the journey in the desert to which Frisch sends the elegant, free and seductive woman who is the writer, a regular in elitist social and literary circles, like himself.
“Ingeborg arrives in the desert exhausted and with the trauma of abandonment. There she will have her love revenge and recover her energy ”, Von Trotta explained before the Berlinale, the festival in which she has competed six times and to which she has now attended after receiving the honorary award from the European Film Academy in December.
“The desert is a place of silence, away from the noise that surrounds this circus called social life,” said Krieps, winner of the Best Actress Award at Cannes with “Corsage,” her indomitable review of “Sissi.”
Von Trotta finds the perfect Ingeborg in Krieps and adds that figure to the list of female characters in his filmography, be it Gudrun and Christiane Ensslin -the terrorist from the Red Army Faction (RFA) and her sister-, the communist Rosa Luxemburg or the writer Hannah Arendt.
A male actor of similar stature fails for Frisch, the character played by Ronald Zehrfeld, a regular face in German television productions.
In “Past Lives”, on the other hand, everything works perfectly: Greta Lee plays the South Korean integrated in the United States, whose adolescence runs smoothly, later becomes an author without major problems and finds an equally harmonious partner.
The first love she left behind in Seoul will look for her through Facebook years later, they will contact each other by skype and virtually recover the emotional thread they left behind. Her rationality cuts off those communications, but not permanently.
Everything in Song’s film moves with exquisite smoothness, without fear of falling into the sappy. Greta Lee’s counterpart is Teo Yoo, the South Korean lover who is not satisfied with having his Skype communications cut off.
The plot line of “Past Lives” is apparently resolved in its opening scene -a meeting in a hotel bar between an Asian-American trio, where one of the three is left out of the conversation-. Song, however, leaves room for surprises.
The third film in competition of the day was “Disco Boy”, directed by the Italian Giacomo Abbruzzese. German actor Franz Rogowski plays a Belarusian who manages to cross Europe and reach Paris, where he enlists in the Foreign Legion as a way to one day acquire French nationality.
He becomes a member of a commando whose mission is to rescue French hostages captured by a guerrilla group in the Niger Delta, at the mercy of oil and environmental plundering by large Western companies.
Rogowski, a solid figure of German cinema, is immersed in a somewhat delirious plot, between trance dances in the jungle that later move to techno, back in Paris, and seasoned with a physical camouflage with the Nigerian guerrilla and his sister . Gemma Casadevall
