Milos Stehlik

Listen to Milos Stehlik's Commentary

Here is the difference between the Academy Awards and the Berlin International Film Festival: the Oscars are about last year's movies released in theatres. The Berlin Film Festival, the first major international film festival of the year and the second largest film festival in the world is about premieres of films that are brand new, completed, perhaps, just yesterday.

The Berlin festival shares an uncomfortable construct with the Oscars. The Festival is about art, even experiment, but it is also about celebrity and commerce. This is always an uneasy co-existence. In Berlin, the hype is all about American star power—Robert DeNiro in for the European premiere of The Good Shepherd, Clint Eastwood for Letters From Iwo Jima, Cate Blanchett for Notes on a Scandal. With Germany as Europe's largest movie market, the Berlin Film Festival has maneuvered itself into the European launching pad for Hollywood films.

The Golden Bear, the top award given at Berlin each year, was won this year by Tuya's Wedding, a Chinese film set in the remote high desert of Mongolia. I don't know how many people will see Tuya's Wedding when and if it is ever released in the U.S. I would guess the audiences will be smaller than those who watched the Berlin Festival's biggest public-private moment, widely circulated on the internet. Sharon Stone, nursing a cold, was at the festival for her role in the German-produced film by Ryan Enslinger, When a Man Falls in the Forest. She also hosted a benefit called Cinema for Peace. Perhaps you could write off her behavior to cold medication, but she was caught on camera in a bizarre, surreal moment. First she shushed the audience and then called them “You naughty little Germans. Naughty, nasty little Germans,:” an unscripted monologue not warmly embraced by those present.

Yu Nan, who plays Tuya in Tuya's Wedding is perhaps less glamorous than Sharon Stone, but more stable - she hauls water, rides a mean camel and horse – skills and virtues which Sharon Stone might embrace. In remote Mongolia, Yu Nan plays a hard-working and tough sheep herder with a disabled husband and two kids. This is not a life without problems—water must be carried from far away, and it's obvious Tuya can't manage forever. The one-stop solution seems to be to get a divorce, re-marry, and have the new husband take care of the disabled ex.

Tough, hard-working, pretty women with a sense of humor are hard to find not only in Hollywood but in inner Mongolia as well. The word that Tuya is available spreads quickly and a procession of suitors ensues. Some are genuine losers, but soon the knight in shining armor, who turns out to be Tuya's former classmate, arrives by getting his Mercedes stuck in a rut in the road. Baolier is now a wealthy oil man and with the resources to solve Tuya's problems. The ex-husband is going to a private nursing home, the kids and Tuya with the new husband to the city. Unfortunately if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is, and Baolier turns out to be both selfish and more than a little insensitive in the bedroom. But have heart: the film does have a happy ending.

Director Wang Quan'an dramatizes Tuya's Spartan life, her resilience and her stoicism with a deadpan, positive slant. The film is set in the stunningly beautiful Mongolian mountains—a landscape to which the characters, unlike the audience, never react.

Tuya's Wedding was an odd film to win the top award in Berlin. It's engaging but conventional. It's ethnographically rich but psychologically thin. But even stranger was the jury's award of the Silver Bear, the second prize in Berlin, to the Argentine-French-German feature by Ariel Rotter, El Otro, or The Other. The middle-class main character here is the mysteriously tortured soul of Juan Desouza, a lawyer whose pretty wife is pregnant. On a business trip to a small town to settle a real estate deal, out of nowhere, he assumes the identity of a man who dies sitting next to him on the bus. Juan is clearly running away from and in search of something, but you'd never know what he was looking for watching this movie. At the dead man's funeral, he meets a woman with whom he has anonymous sex in his hotel room just before—equally puzzlingly—he takes the bus back to Buenos Aires. The best thing about El Otro is that it's just 83 minutes, but even this seems an eternity. El Otro, the story of a confused man's search for something is a confused movie that's full of pseudo-intellectual pretentiousness.

The mystique of discovery of anything new and exciting in film was missing in this year's miserable Berlin weather. But then the best German film of last year, which just won the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award – Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others, was rejected by the Berlin Film Festival last year. The Lives of Others had to claw its way to through the market of the Berlin Film Festival's biggest competitor on the Festival circuit, the Cannes Film Festival.

This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio's Worldview.