Now that everyone has grown tired of touting the allegedly thrilling promise of 3-D, we may have some chance of figuring out exactly what its future might be. While I still think 3-D is almost less than a gimmick (I'm even skeptical about what Martin Scorsese might do with it), I'm beginning to think that its real promise, whatever that might be, lies not in big-budget filmmaking like the lame-brain Sanctum but in the hands of directors working on a more modest scale who simply have a good idea and a spark of enthusiasm for the medium.
I wouldn't have written that yesterday, before I saw two -- two! -- terrific 3-D features back-to-back here at the Berlinale, one animated and one live-action, both more pleasurable than I ever would have imagined. I kicked the morning off with Michel Ocelot's Tales of the Night, a collection of six odd little fairy-tales connected by a sweet framing device: Two actors and a no-nonsense veteran producer sit at desks in their headquarters in an old theater, spinning out ideas and plans for their next production. We see their planning sketched out in quick, clever jots: A screengrab of an illustration of medieval French ladies is part of the trio's costuming research; they chatter with excitement about where their next story might be set (how about Tibet, or Africa?) and what the color palette might be ("Better bring your sunglasses!" says one, in reference to the sea, sky and fruit colors he has in mind for a tale set in the Caribbean).
Except these characters aren't drawn in any great detail: They're flat, black silhouettes, a cross between Indonesian shadow puppets and Victorian paper cutouts. Ocelot, the animator behind pictures like the 1998 Kirikou and the Sorceress, has been thinking about this project for some 20 years; the seeds for it were sown with a few shorts he made for French television in the early 1990s.
Ocelot's idea of 3-D is more like a diorama: His black figures stand apart from their magnificent polychrome backgrounds (which might be a pop-art swirl of oranges or yellows, or an art-deco-style wallpaper repeat). The effect is more that of a charming paper toy theater than an elaborate $15-per-ticket extravaganza, and it's wholly modern and alive, a simple way of marrying new technology with age-old storytelling techniques.
And Ocelot doesn't fall down on the storytelling. These six tales are fanciful and strange, involving deceitful princesses and werewolves, adventuresome lads who must fulfill impossible quests, cities of gold whose fortunes lie in the citizens' ability to appease a giant monster with virgin sacrifices. Ocelot shows us lots of wonders: Potentates wearing helmets suggesting the nobility of the eagles on the Chrysler Building, princesses in tulle veils and rustling skirts whose details we can't see but can easily imagine, a parade of little turtles with gleaming gold shells. (Their turtle toenails make a gentle clickety-clack sound as they move across the screen in unison.) Tales of the Night is in French, and I found it a little difficult to process the subtitles and absorb all the movie's textural beauty at the same time. Still, if American audiences get to see the film (and I hope they do), it would be wonderful if they had the opportunity to opt for subtitles rather than dubbing. That way they'd have the pleasure of hearing a character refer to a "giant iguana" as "iguane géant!" It sounds so much better in French.
Seeing two 3-D movies in a row is pretty much my idea of torture, and a colleague and I came very close to decamping to see The Touch (with my beloved Elliot Gould), which is being shown as part of the festival's Ingmar Bergman retrospective. In the end, persuaded by a few enthusiastic colleagues, we -- with much eye-rolling and many deprecating remarks -- opted to check out Wim Wenders' Pina. I'm glad we did.
For years, Wenders and German modern-dance choreographer Pina Bausch, longtime friends, had been working on a movie together. Bausch died suddenly in 2009, at age 68, and this is Wenders' tribute to her, less a strict documentary than a heartfelt -- and visually gorgeous -- celebration of Bausch's work and her mode of working.
I'd always avoided Bausch, assuming it was all bony dancers in drab skintone leotards, miserably acting out the angst of mankind, or whatever. I now know how wrong I was. Some of Bausch's ideas may not result in anyone's idea of conventional (whatever that is) beauty: She might scatter the floor with peat moss, which would mingle with the sweat clinging to the dancers' dresses, resulting in damp, mother-earth stains; a man in a tutu, being pushed along slowly on a railway handcar, appears to be carrying some pretty heavy-duty German sorrow and guilt on his shoulders.
But Wenders makes it all seem accessible, framing and connecting images -- sometimes very strange ones -- in a way that draws us closer rather than alienating us, without ever softening the intended effect. He films a dancer in a printed chiffon dress pirouetting en pointe against a drab, deserted industrial backdrop. Did I mention that there's uncooked veal squidging from her slippers? Wenders hardly pretends this is business as usual. Rather, he coaxes us into understanding, or at least reckoning, with the jarring but wholly compelling image in front of us. It's as if he were saying, "I realize this woman has stuffed raw meat in her toe shoes, but trust me, go with it."
And if you're going to film anything in 3-D, why not dancers? Wenders revels in the contours and angles of these glorious bodies, some of which are brazenly muscular in some places and fleshy in others. (Bausch used dancers of all ages.) There's vast grace and beauty here, but there's also evidence of how dancers put their bodies to work: Jutting shoulderblades, veins a-poppin', bunions coming right at ya! Wenders' camera shows it all. I don't want to see older films retrofit in 3-D, God forbid. But watching Pina made me wonder what Claire Denis Beau Travail -- an openly passionate ode to the male human body -- would look like if it had been made in 3-D.
There's a third 3-D picture here at the festival, being shown out of competition: Werner Herzog's lyrical, vaguely spooky Cave of Forgotten Dreams, in which our happy-go-lucky guide and narrator reveals the splendor of ancient wall drawings in the Chauvet caves of France. I saw Cave in Toronto last September -- you can read about it here -- but its charms haven't dimmed for me since then. While I still think 3-D should be used sparingly (even under the best circumstances, it makes the old eyeballs work overtime), it's heartening to see filmmakers having so much fun with the medium, and with the aim of pleasing their audience -- not fleecing them.