Berlinale Berlinale

If it's February, it must be the Berlinale!

Despite not being any sort of film buff all the rest of the year, I have a real fondness for this festival, which brings together a wealth of interesting, off-beat films from all over the world, in just about every imaginable language, most of them things you just wouldn't get a chance to see anywhere else.

Berlinale films can be uneven – they can be amazing or boring or just kind of weird – so picking screenings is always an exercise in randomness. I usually manage to see about four films (which is nothing compared to people I know who make the Berlinale their full-time job for the ten days it's running!) Of those, one or two will be fantastic, one or two fine, and maybe one is not that great. I don't care – I always learn something new and see something different.

This year – mostly because of being in bed sick for a week but also because I just didn't feel like making myself crazy over the festival's hair-rendingly difficult ticket-buying process – I only saw two movies.

Luckily for me, both were fantastic.

First I saw "The Broken Circle Breakdown," from Belgium. I don't want to give anything away, because you should definitely go see this when it surely goes into wide release after being such a hit at the festival, but it's beautifully shot, fantastically directed/edited, extraordinarily acted – and probably also one of the saddest things you'll ever see. Still worth it, but go prepared to be devastated.

"The Broken Circle Breakdown," promotional still:

The director and lead actors were present at the screening I attended – another one of the fun things about the Berlinale – but weirdly even though they came out on stage to accept the audience's rapturous applause, they didn't do a Q&A like usual. And I definitely had questions.

They did sing us a song, though. (The movie is about bluegrass musicians, and you could say the music is one of the most important characters in it.) Here they are, singing a capella:

Then! Then I saw the eagerly awaited "Before Midnight," third in Richard Linklater's series with "Before Sunrise" and "Before Sunset."

I rewatched the first two over the course of the week in preparation, and reconfirmed my first impressions:

"Before Sunrise" is lovely for what it is, a perhaps-naive-but-surprisingly-charming look at what it is to meet and really connect with another person.

"Before Sunset," though, is brilliant. It's smart, it's real, it's funny, it's disillusioned but it's hopeful. It's exactly what it is to be 30-something and have long since found out that life is not nearly as romantic as you thought it was. The writing, acting and directing are all fantastic – there's not a second wasted, even though the whole thing is done in real time.

And "Before Midnight"? I'm still processing it (which is good, a sign of how thought-provoking it was) but I give it my approval. It's not an easy movie, though. If I had to sum it up in a sentence, I'd say it's about how being 40 and a parent and trying to juggle your own life with your family's needs is really, really, really hard.

All of them (director, actors, writers) do a good job with the material, though, and even more impressively, they manage to pull off the same conceit as in the first two movies: At the end, you don't know for sure how the story continues from here, but you're left with room to hope.

"Before Midnight," promotional still:

I would still say the second film, "Before Sunset," is the best of the three. Then again, as my friend Naomi astutely pointed out, of course "Before Sunset" is the one that resonates with us and where we are in our lives right now. Perhaps "Before Midnight" will resonate just as strongly with people 10 years older than us.

So: If anyone out there is (or has ever been?) 40-ish and a parent...I'd like to know what you think of this film!