I was once in love with Berlinale: Encountering Claire Denis: Love, Poison and Masks – Culture”>Juliette Binoche – and to be honest: who wasn’t? I see her waving in front of the Berlinale Palace, from a distance she is pretty close to me and, of course, not to be overlooked in her orange two-piece suit: trousers with a striking length, blazer with a striking neckline.
She takes a long time for the dozens of photographers who have arrived, has to keep walking back and forth, turning back and forth on the red carpet, which so far has looked more like a dead carpet at the Pandemic Festival, but seems to shine tonight. In the palace, too, the audience is delighted, they applaud, take photos and cheer. Berlin in love.
Six coincidences and many tears
She’s 57 now, according to the internet, but her smile still looks as daring as it did in the movie Three Colors Blue. Anyone who hasn’t seen that and anyway the whole color trilogy has never loved the cinema. Can there be anyone who can capture that smile that sends her off with ease? You’re more likely to catch a shadow.
I fell in love with Juliette in the fortunately almost infinitely long film “The Infinite Lightness of Being”. It was about a deep love that crossed three corners in the middle of the Prague Spring, when Soviet tanks crushed freedom but not human affection between a man and two women. Finally a film that was terrific in a different way than the equally terrific book before it.
Czech novelist Milan Kundera wrote that it takes at least six coincidences to fall in love. Admittedly, I’m not entirely too-to-to-to-to-too-too-too here in the Berlinale Palast with Juliette Binoche. Of course it can’t be like that with us.
[Der tägliche Nachrichtenüberblick aus der Hauptstadt: Schon rund 57.000 Leser:innen informieren sich zweimal täglich mit unseren kompakten überregionalen Newslettern. Melden Sie sich jetzt kostenlos hier an.]
In her new film she loves a man, but then her old love shows up and Sara, as she is called here, tears it up. If you translate the English title into German, the film is promisingly called: “Both sides of the blade”.
But for that he is strangely blurred, too playful and too cerebral at the same time, too loudly screaming and too romanticizing. Decisively undecided like life when you sleep and cry together at the same time. “When you love someone, it’s never quite over,” says Sara. The shadow of memory sticks inside you, sometimes it shines brightly outside.
When Juliette Binoche showed her small liver spots on her back and the many tears on her cheeks for the last time and after midnight the curtain fell in the Berlinale Palast, it was finally over between the two of us. Director Claire Denis and actor Vincent Lindon stand up and are greeted with applause.
But one place is empty: Juliette is no longer there. A man boos. I kind of understand him, but I still don’t like him. I can’t show my disappointed love, can’t catch the shadow anymore.
And how did the film end, this love between two men and a woman across three corners? I already forgot it on the way home; after midnight through the lonely Berlin night.
Robert Ide’s previous Berlinale columns:
Going to the cinema with sleeping goggles and Claudia Roth – the Berlinale kicks off on the virus wave
Of involuntary erections and pubic hair toupés – How sex really works in film
Marius Müller-Westernhagen and the cleaning man from Potsdamer Platz – How to survive a film tear
The fabric on our skin – breathing masks and beauty masks at the festival
