Between the end of the year and the opening of the 64th Berlinale (6-16 February 2014), the world of film lost three greats: the Hungarian director Miklos Jancso, the American actor Philip Seymour Hoffman and the Austrian-Swiss actor Maximillian Schell. The festival is screening films by each in their honour. The Berlinale opened with the American filmmaker Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, uncharacteristically an in-competition film. This is the eighth film by Anderson, who was born in 1970, studied philosophy and made his debut in 1996. Anderson is among a handful of American directors who combine both the American and European schools of filmmaking; it is therefore no great surprise that his film is a UK-German production premiering in Berlin, with a star cast that includes names from across the Atlantic: Saoirse Ronan, Bill Murray, Ralph Fiennes, Edward Norton, Tilda Swinton, Léa Seydoux, Jude Law, Owen Wilson, Willem Dafoe, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman. This year marks the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War, and The Grand Budapest Hotel is set partly in 1932, in the Inter-war Period during the rise of the Nazis. This is not a historical film, however. With the bloody backdrop of war, rather, it is a black comedy that captures the spirit of the early 20th-century “end of history”. It is an oblique record of colonial Europe's first, terrible disillusionment so many decades prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Filmed across eastern Europe and named after the former capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire, it nonetheless takes place in an imaginary country in an imaginary world where even the Nazi emblem is not called a swastika but simply a “zigzag”. Pre-war Europe is embodied in Swinton's character, Madam D., a rich noblewoman who has lived to old age. On her death at the start of the film, she bequeathes a painting worth millions to the manager of the Grand Budapest Hotel, M. Gustave (Fiennes), with whom she has fallen in love. Madam D's son Dmitri (Brody), however, accuses M. Gustave of contriving to obtain the painting by killing his mother... This is the principal story in the film, but it is interwoven with many other stories through a Thousand and One Nights-style narrative told by Mr. Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham) to the Young Writer (Law) in 1985, the device by which the viewer travels back in time to 1968 and 1932. A tour de force, somewhat too lighthearted for its topic, in The Grand Budapest Hotel Anderson's imagination is unduly countered by a cold, calculated approach, yet his commitment to fantasy is so strong the film even breaks into animation. Another British production competing for the debut award (the only one that includes a cash prize of Euro 50 thousand) as well as in the official competition, is the French filmmaker Yann Demange's ‘71, a clear reference to the year of the Derry shootings in Northern Ireland. With the same topic of Catholic-Protestant conflict, the day known as Bloody Sunday was the subject of Paul Greengrass's eponymous film of 2002, which won the Golden Bear at Berlin that year. Yet, like The Grand Budapest Hotel, ‘71 is not a straightforward historical film on a specific incident. This is rather a condemnation of sectarian conflict and violence, beautifully filmed using wide-angle views as well as a handheld camera, and balancing long with short shots to manipulate time. There is nothing new in the subject of an army fighting militants who see it as an occupation army. On both sides there are those who use and those who reject violence; among the Irish militants there are those who cooperate with the British Army and those who fight it. The film starts with the English soldier Gary (Jack O'Connell) promising his son to come home safe from the war in Belfast; it ends with him returning, safe, having deserted. Nothing could be more conventional, but there is enough innovation in style and vision. Demange sees everyone as a perpetrator and a victim at the same time. The climax is purely cinematic: having fallen injured within enemy grounds, Gary flees, avoiding his own comrades in arms on a long night that, though protracted, portrays the human struggle for survival. This is the birth of a talented film artist. Nor was the selection of the Algerian-French filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb's third film Two Men in Town surprising, after his London River (2009) and Little Senegal (2001) participated in the Berlinale's official competition. Though born in Paris in 1953, Bouchareb's work since his first short film in 1985 and through his first full-length feature in 1985 concentrates on his Arab-Muslim-African heritage and its interaction with his contemporary European awareness. A loose remake of Jose Giovanni's 1973 eponymous film, the French-Algerian-American-Belgian coproduction may indeed be Bouchareb's most universal film to date, dealing with the topic of roots at a markedly metaphysical level. Set in a small American town on the border with Mexico, the film opens with sunrise in the desert. Someone kills someone from a distance and the viewer doesn't know who is the killer or the killed; the film ends with a repeat of the same scene but this time the viewer does know who killed who: the killer walks away silhouetted in the light. It is a Cain and Abel scene, filmed appropriately in cinemascope. William Garnett (Forest Whitaker) is released after spending 18 years—a good half of his life—in prison, having been tried for murdering the Sheriff Deputy (Michael Stone). He decides to embark on a new life, working as a cow or car cleaner and starting a family. He forms a relationship with Teresa Flores (Dolores Heredia), the only employee at the bank where he opens an account. Yet Garnett is caught between the sherif Bill Agati (Harvey Keitel), who wants to send him back to prison, short of killing him, and the Mexican gang chief Terence ( Luis Guzmán), who wants Garnett to work for him. Together with the law, these two form the sides of a triangle around Garnett. It's as if Bouchareb is composing a complex contemporary metaphor for humanity's beginnings on earth, asking what we manages to make of ourselves having sinned. Likewise the characters' beliefs: Garnett is a Muslim black man, the sherif a Christian white man; the Mexican gangster is an atheist. In an unlikely development Garnett's adopted mother (Ellen Burstyn) turns out to be white. In the character of Bill and its contradictions is a sharp critique of one aspect of civilisation. The sherif dislikes the way illegal immigrants are treated and left to die in the desert, yet he thinks of a young man from the town fighting in Afghanistan as a war hero; he insists on the law yet he wants to unlawfully punish Garnett for killing his deputy. The parole officer trying to help Garnett (Brenda Blethyn), on the other hand, embodies a different, hopeful aspect of civilisation. The repeat of the first scene with which the film ends occurs when Terence attacks Teresa, bringing Garnett's story full circle.
