Berlinale dress code

Dear Jim,

I haven’t rang in a while, I know, but I’m trying to keep the phone bill down as I’m currently out of a job. Apparently blogging is free, so let’s give it a try instead. Just what is it that makes blogs so different, so appealing? Well I don’t know Jim, I don’t read any and to be perfectly frank I don’t see why anyone should.

Now let me tell you what I got up to yesterday. I sat on my ass all afternoon well into night. I did it in four separate cinemas. Yes, it’s the Berlinale Film Festival again. Well, actually it’s already almost over, but it was my last day of screenings and so I thought I’d go out with a bang and watch as many as I could in one go. The best movie by far was Asyl – Park and Love Hotel by Kumasaka Izuru, who was annoyingly young, talented and free of facial imperfections. (His hair was a disaster though; it was long, unbrushed and randomly dreaded, which I suppose is of some comfort to us all.) His movie was about a woman who was the proprietress of a love hotel. If you don’t know what a love hotel is, find out on somebody else’s site.

At first I thought, oh no, this is going to be one of those long-breathed movies, with too much attention to the play of sunlight on closed curtains and sleeping actors’ faces, which if the truth be told, the Japanese can be very good at, can’t they? But it wasn’t at all.

On the top of the love hotel, the woman had opened a free public space, and while couples were fucking below with their eye on the clock, children and pensioners spent the day on the rooftop, either playing on swings or playing shogi. The reason why the woman let people go on her rooftop was because her husband had built the small playground twenty years before for their own children, but they had never any and he left her. What impressed me most about the film was the main character and the actress who played her. She reminded me so much of my mother. In fact she was 59, which is the age my mother was the last time I saw her. (By the way, I really want to talk to my mother and have tried her number in Lagos everyday for the past four weeks but can’t get through. But I think I’d better stick to taking about the Berlinale for now. Otherwise this blog will be all over the place.)

Well anyway, this woman becomes the mother figure to three other women in the movie: One who she mistakenly thinks was trying to kill herself, when actually she was just about to sharpen her pencil with a knife; one who she sees every morning at the same time jog by her hotel (who without her knowing each time is actually counting the number of steps it takes her to get back to her house and who writes the number down in a little booklet which she keeps by her at all times, until one day she drops it in front of the love hotel); and one who comes to the love hotel with a different guy practically every day to collect his sperm in a test tube in an attempt to get pregnant, even though she knows her chances are slim because she’s been declared infertile.

Well thank God the movie was so good that I could forget about the person sitting next to me. She was insanely cheerful, had brought her own home made biscuits sported had ruddy cheeks and a sensible anorak and before the screening kept asking out loud in a sing-songy voice whether she might still have enough time to go to the toilet. Oh well, she’s somebody’s mother I suppose, but not mine.

Anyway the film before that was by a radical left-wing new wave director called Watamatsu Koji called Ecstasy of the Angels. It was made at the beginning of the 70s, mostly in black and white and the director explained afterwards that it had been half funded on the prerequisite that it could be marketed as a soft porn flick. The result were very long-breathed sex scenes interspersed with passionate bouts of political debate. The German audience loved it. And I did too, but for less dialectical reasons. After spending so much time faced with naked Japanese women from 1970 getting fucked in the leg, and taking, as the Chinese say, one long breath and five short ones, I was at least able to come to the conclusion that, just like their counterparts in the West, Japanese women of today are far less curvaceous than before. Why is that? It makes for much better sex scenes. I think Mr Watamatsu would say it’s because they’re not getting enough political discourse. And Jim, I suppose this should all be of some consolation to you buddy: having a bony ass and sunken cheeks is totally sexy these days (if you’re a straight man, it seems, and we all know they’re still worth a try). Jim, dear, one last thing about the director – he looked terrible wearing a body-warmer in a heated cinema. Promise me you’ll never a body-warmer, even if you find one for 50c. Old age is no excuse for looking like a frump.

Which brings us onto the third movie of the day: An Italian movie about a Moroccan woman who is about to be married off to someone she’s never met and who needs to have her hymen restitched together for the wedding night. She and her queer buddy (who for added good measure was a transvestite) drive from Italy to Casablanca (via the ferry) to have the operation. On the way they visit the man’s family and see his son (who has been told he is dead). On a North African beach they even find a dead dolphin in a homage to Fellini! The best thing about it was the co-director, who took questions from the floor and looked stunning in a short-cut suit jacket, which was tailored around the sides and metallic grey in colour. He wore fantastic Italian thick-rimmed glasses, white shirt, black tie (knotted tightly – of course – and off to one side). The whole ensemble was set off by a pair of wonderful sneakers, which he wore by leaning on the side of his foot. He was much better than his movie, which, just to be fair to him, I’m not going to name, so maybe one day you might be duped into seeing it and thus make a small contribution to funding his impeccable dress sense by way of the cinema ticket. At the end of the movie I just had time to explain to my friend Francesca (who remains Bavarian despite the pseudonym) how I came to know the German word for such a tender thing as ‘hymen’ at such a tender age of 21. Here’s how: Herbert of the UCL German department once told me of a Chinese opera where they flew in live ducks to be part of the set, and where one of the main characters was a nun called Sister Hymen-Stone, whose hymen was apparently as solid as a you guessed it.

Isn’t it strange how strong our memories are sometimes? This memory is practically cannibalistic because it’s eaten up all the others I have of Chinese opera (which, as you know, were many), so I sometimes think that it was me who actually saw the performance with Sister Hymen Stone of the tame foreign ducks, when actually I only got to hear about it while trying not to laugh. Perhaps that’s exactly why I confuse the memory with others, because isn’t that what Chinese opera is all about: trying not to laugh?

The last movie was a documentary about Wolfgang Tillmans. I have little to say about it other than the Pet Shop Boys made a guest appearance and that Wolfgang is a fan of oversized T-shirts with the word ‘cock’ or ‘dick’ on them, which made him all the more down-to-earth I thought.

Right Jim, I think that’s quite enough about the Berlinale, don’t you think? I hope though, that I have in some way given you a few ideas for stories and am waiting to read your next piece. I’ll be in touch soon.

Oh and by the way can you guess why, as the very first picture on my blog, I have chosen a picture taken from a packet of instant noodle soup? It has something to do with Japanese Marxist revolutionaries.