Sex, violence and politics in Berlin

Halle Berry's controversial performance in Monster's Ball was one of the highlights of a patchy Berlin Film Festival.

When Marc Forster was researching Monster's Ball, he spent three months visiting Death Row prisons in the Deep South, meeting prison staff on the so-called "strap-down" crews and exploring the day-to-day routines of the condemned and their captors. He recruited an adviser who had executed 26 people on the electric chair. He even sat in the chair himself. "When someone dies, they all hold their fingers like this with the thumbs inside," he gestures with his hands. "When you look on the side of the chair, there are these nail marks on the wood. It's horrifying." Lethal injections, he suggests, are equally cruel: often, the executioners are not able to find a vein. When they do, it's not uncommon for prisoners to suffer an allergic reaction and to start twisting and shaking on the table as they die.

A decade ago, Krzysztof Kieslowski's A Short Film About Killing helped pave the way for the abolition of capital punishment in Poland. Forster acknowledges that Monster's Ball is unlikely to have any such success in the US, where in some states support for the death penalty is actually on the increase. "But if people in America are still willing to lobby for the death penalty, then they should see how it is done."

Monster's Ball put most of Berlin's other competition movies (in what was a patchy year) to shame. It's a redemptive tale about the racist prison guard (Billy Bob Thornton) who falls for the wife (Halle Berry) of a man whose execution he presided over. What's startling is the understatement and quietness that Forster brings to the material. He often holds shots for a small eternity, keeps dialogue to a minimum and eschews flamboyant flourishes. "It's a film about interrupted silences," the softly spoken Swiss director suggests. "The sparseness was much more of a challenge for the actors. All they had to work with was looks and details... it's very easy to act anger, but it's much harder and more interesting when you don't have that cheap way out." Thornton, Berry and Sean Combs (the Death Row prisoner) could easily have seemed like gimmick casting, but Forster elicits unshowy, disciplined performances from all three.

The key scene comes mid-way through the film, when Hank (Thornton's character) and Laetitia (Berry) drunkenly make love. This is the one moment when the characters openly show emotion. Forster draws a stark contrast between this sequence and an earlier incident in which Hank and his son (Heath Ledger) visit a prostitute in a dank motel room. The sex then is so perfunctory that it's almost comic. When Hank and Laetitia come together, there's the sense that two scarred and repressed characters have found a way to overcome the suspicion and bitterness that has dogged both their lives.

The scene is filmed without the flashy montage, soft focus lighting and cocktail bar music that so many studio movies resort to when depicting characters making love. If anything, in its length, emotional intensity and calm willingness to take in the less flattering parts of people's bodies, it's the kind of sequence you might expect to find in a Bertolucci film. You believe, in other words, that something real and sticky is taking place.

We didn't think of it as a sex scene in a movie," Berry (nominated for an Oscar earlier this week) commented. "We approached it as these characters really getting what they needed, like they needed the air to breathe."

Unfortunately, the US censors did think of it as a sex scene. And, to Forster's fury, a significant amount had to be trimmed before the film could be released in the States. "I had to talk to the ratings board eight times and in the end I had to cut a minute out of the scene," he complains. "The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), which makes these decisions, is a board of eight people. They're all ages, but each has to be a parent. Basically, one person gets assigned to each picture and if that person is very conservative, you'll have a very tough time... I fought so much with the first person, who was an old lady, that they put me in touch with another member, and then, in the end, I was in touch with the whole board by speakerphone."

The board actually liked Forster's movie, and conceded that the sex scene was not in any way prurient or exploitative. That didn't stop them from trimming it. Miscegenation is still taboo in US movies, as directors like Jonathan Kaplan, who directed Michelle Pfeiffer and Dennis Haysbert in Love Field have attested. Forster admits: "The studio [Lion's Gate] was taking a risk. They felt uncomfortable financing it but I did it for a budget that they couldn't say no to." Berry and Thornton, he points out, both worked for a fraction of their normal fees.

What perplexed the director was that none of the eight MPAA members even raised an eyebrow about the violence in the movie, which encompasses everything from a brutal execution to a shockingly depicted suicide. The "European" version showing in Berlin was uncut. It remains to be seen what the British censors will do. The ball, ahem, is in their court.

Most Unlikely Party Political Broadcast

As he battles for the French Presidency, Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin has unearthed a secret weapon. In fact, he has unearthed eight of them – the stars of François Ozon's new film, a musical comedy called Eight Women, which was unveiled in Berlin earlier this week. Jospin invited the eightsome – including such sacred icons of French cinema as Danielle Darrieux (who made her screen debut in a Billy Wilder picture, back in 1933) Catherine Deneuve, Fanny Ardant and Emmanuelle Béart – to dinner a few days ago. In an even more shameless attempt to curry favour, he arranged a special screening of the film for the eight women ministers in his Cabinet.

Ozon is sceptical of such blatant electioneering. Asked if he was flattered by Jospin's sudden enthusiasm for his film, the 35-year-old director (who once made a short documentary about Jospin) suggested that a certain gamine resident of Montmartre was to blame. Chirac and the right have "hijacked" Amélie, treating it as if it's a feature-length party political broadcast for the Gaullists. Now, or so Ozon believes, Jospin is trying to do the same with Eight Women for the other side. "Obviously," he says, "I'd far rather have my film hijacked by the left than by the right."

We're thus treated to the spectacle of an election in which taste in movies is becoming as important as ideology itself. It's hard to see why Jospin thinks Eight Women might get him elected. It's almost as barbed and cynical about French family life as the director's debut feature, Sitcom, a film more likely to get him sent to Devil's Island than to win him the plaudits of the political classes.

If Eight Women is a tribute to French womanhood, it's a very slanted one. A camp and mischievous musical shot in the sort of eye-popping, iridescent colours that Douglas Sirk used in his melodramas Written on the Wind and Magnificent Obsession, it touches on everything from incest and lesbianism to greed, snobbery and furious sibling rivalry. The creaky plot might have been borrowed wholesale from an Agatha Christie novel. The setting is a remote country house in France in the 1950s. A family is about to celebrate Christmas, but the festivities are cut short when it's discovered that the patriarch has been murdered. One of the eight women in the house must be to blame.

Ozon tells his story in determinedly cheerful fashion, throwing in various musical interludes in which the eight divas – all decked out in wondrously elegant, Dior-style costumes – get to sing a torch song each. Beneath all the artifice and surface gloss, there is a strong vein of melancholy. "It's a sad story," Ozon concedes. "All these women are suffering. They're not able to love." In one delirious Sapphic sequence, Deneuve and Ardant wrestle furiously on the carpet and then coil their bodies round one another in a passionate embrace. What Jospin felt about this has not been revealed yet, but Ozon reckons that the late François Truffaut (who knew both women intimately) would be "laughing in his grave at the idea... maybe he even dreamed about it."

Best Performance from One of Julia Roberts' Ex-boyfriends

"To write good, I've got to live bad," the Puerto Rican gutter poet and playwright Piñero once stated. A thief and drug addict, he was sort of 1970s New York answer to Jean Genet or François Villon. His play Short Eyes was nominated for six Tony Awards. Writer-director Leon Ichaso's biopic of Piñero subscribes to hoary old myths about self-destructive visionary artists. It's flashily but confusingly directed, with constant switches from colour to black-and-white, unmotivated flashbacks, mannered slow motion and jump cuts, but boasts a riveting performance from Benjamin Bratt (former boyfriend of Julia Roberts) in the title role. Bratt plays Piñero as a dishevelled delinquent and petty hoodlum who recognises his own predicament: he has to be on the streets to be able to write, but the longer he stays there, the more danger he puts himself in. It's bravura acting, the kind of livewire performance that rekindles memories of Al Pacino in his Seventies heyday in Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon.

Chaplin and Hitler

The home-movie footage seen in Kevin Brownlow and Michael Kloft's new documentary The Tramp and the Dictator lay festering for years in two suitcases in the basement of the Chaplin villa in Switzerland. Shot by Sydney Chaplin, Charlie's brother, it shows the comedian on the set of The Great Dictator, in which he played both the Hitler-like despot Adenoid Hynkel and a humble Jewish barber.

Sydney was clearly a bit of a satyr. Darryl Zanuck once called him "the greatest ladies' man in Hollywood history". Filming his brother at work on a ballroom sequence, he trains his camera on the most voluptuous women he can see. He is perched high up for the tragicomic sequence in which two files of storm troopers come looking for the barber and he scurries away between their legs. Brownlow and Kloft intercut the original sequences with Sidney's colour footage. It's startling how seamlessly they match.

As the narrator Kenneth Branagh tells us, there were some uncanny parallels between Hitler and Chaplin. They were born in the same week of the same year. The former lived as a tramp in pre-war Vienna. The latter became the most recognisable movie star in the world by impersonating a tramp. Both were at opposite ends of the political spectrum. A famous left-winger, Chaplin was reviled by Nazi propagandists, who referred to him in official publications as "a disgusting Jewish acrobat".

Sidney Lumet, one of the talking heads in the documentary, points out that Chaplin was widely assumed to be Jewish, even in the US. As he says, when he was growing up, "everyone who was funny was Jewish". Chaplin was funny, ipso facto he must have been Jewish.

In 1940, defying the Hollywood studio bosses (who were desperate to keep the German market open for US movies), Chaplin began work on The Great Dictator. He was going toe to toe with Hitler; one critic described the film as "a championship match for the ages". Without the support of Roosevelt, it's unlikely that Chaplin would have been able to complete the movie, which he entirely financed himself.

In what was his first talkie, Chaplin proved he was a brilliant mimic. His gobbledegook, yelled out with fearsome intensity, sounds well-nigh identical to the speech patterns of Hitler in demagogue-mode. Not that Hitler seemed to mind. The strangest revelation in the documentary, made by screenwriter Budd Schulberg (who was in Germany with the US forces), is that the Führer asked to see The Great Dictator not once but twice. A member of his "inner circle" testifies to Hitler's sense of fun, his love of movies (The Lives of a Bengal Lancer in particular) and his obsession with Greta Garbo. Even so, there is something chilling about the idea of the Nazi leader chuckling his way through a screening of a film that set out to ridicule him. He's the one spectator Chaplin wasn't setting out to amuse.

Best Historical Epic

At 170 minutes, Bertrand Tavernier's Laissez-passer, is baggy and self-indulgent, but it's also an immensely entertaining yarn about one of the most controversial periods in French film history – the early 1940s. The story is set around the Continental Film Studios in Paris, where the French made movies under the thumb of the Nazi occupiers. Were they collaborators or were they using their films to smuggle anti-Nazis messages to the French people? The question has never entirely been resolved, but Tavernier recreates wartime Paris with a zest and humour that shows up wartime dramas such as Charlotte Gray (out next week) and Captain Corelli's Mandolin for the hollow-at-the-core charades they are.

Biggest Christina Ricci Misfire

Unveiled in the Berlin market, mercifully far away from the glare of the competition, was Marc Munden's undercharged romantic comedy, Miranda. It stars John Simm as a shy North Yorkshire librarian (more Adrian Mole than Raskolnikov) who falls in love with a chameleon-like femme fatale (Christina Ricci, pictured below, in Opposite of Sex mode) and follows her all the way to London. The casting is intriguing: there's John Hurt at his most oleaginous as Miranda's shady pimp/Svengali and Kyle MacLachlan as the masochistic businessman she's trying to con, but the script – with its asides about dim-witted Japanese property developers and kung fu-loving adolescents – hardly passes muster. With its laddish humour, facetious voice-over ("you've got eyes like a panda, Miranda") and hectic pacing, the film ends up resembling nothing so much as a feature-length version of one of those Barclays bank "Frankie Gets Cash" ads. All in all, Miranda is one of Ricci's less astute career decisions.

Most Mawkish Short Film

Jason Kliot's cryptic short film, Site, consists of nothing but close-ups of faces peering upward. All the faces express bewilderment or sadness. There are Rabbis, students, Japanese tourists, old women, children – a complete cross-section – filmed on the streets of what is clearly some modern city. They all seem transfixed, but Kliot never lets us know what they are looking at until the final credits when an intertitle announces, simply, "New York, September, 2001." Some spectators booed at the conceit, some applauded. Most were baffled and frustrated. The film makes no sense – it's a random montage of faces – until Kliot provides a context, and by then, it's over anyway.