Berlin Film Festival

Festival of woe, but happily no lemons

There's a bizarre discrepancy between the promotional glitz and the reality in Berlin.

For the big shows at the Berlinale Palast, festival director Dieter Kosslick accompanies the talent up the red carpet, dressed in his trademark scarf and fedora, and looking like a 1920s impresario. Up comes the flashiest trailer on the festival circuit, laden with BMW and L'Oreal logos – and then, as often as not, the film that follows is a drama about labour relations in a Zagreb toilet roll factory.

It's been a while since this festival lived up to its cachet, but if Cannes is the place for excitement, Berlin is where you go to test your tolerance for the worthy. In this year's competition, some film titles looked like an outright challenge to critics – Sleeping Sickness, Our Grand Despair and If Not Us, Who (aka, some press wags quipped, "We See 'em so That You Don't Have to").

Still, if it was grand despair you were after, nothing matched The Turin Horse, from Hungary's master of existential bleakness Bela Tarr. His new film, inspired by an anecdote about Nietzsche, is so grim that it makes Tarr's previous films, such as Werckmeister Harmonies, look like Mamma Mia!. Set in a wind-battered valley, the film follows a carter and his daughter as they eke out an austere existence, while the horse they depend upon mysteriously refuses to co-operate. Almost religiously repetitive in its depiction of life as ritual, the largely wordless film reaches a devastating, quietly apocalyptic ending. If you find Beckett too frivolous, this is the film for you – a harrowing but intensely beautiful work.

For those who prefer their bleakness with a bit of oomph, I can thoroughly recommend Russian-Ukrainian entry Innocent Saturday, Alexander Mindadze's film about an engineer who gets trapped in Chernobyl after the reactor explosion and spends his day brawling and boozing at a riotous wedding party of the doomed: a manic, dynamic death-dance of a film.

Among the competition's hot tickets was Ralph Fiennes's directing debut, Shakespeare's Coriolanus transferred to the world of modern warfare. It divided critics, the general feeling being that despite Fiennes playing the lead, it didn't really spark until Vanessa Redgrave came in, all guns firing. Universally admired, however, was Pina, Wim Wenders' 3D tribute to dance legend Pina Bausch. Another major 3D venture was Cave of Forgotten Dreams, in which Werner Herzog explores the world's oldest cave paintings; almost a by-the-book National Geographic-style exercise until it takes a distinctly Herzogian turn, as the master starts musing about albino crocodiles.

Other delights were tucked away in odd corners. The Guard was an Irish comedy thriller about a rogue cop, played by Brendan Gleeson. Witty and scabrous, it played like an encounter between Father Ted and The Bad Lieutenant. Best debut was The Fatherless by Austrian director Marie Kreutzer, about a group of adults facing the legacy of their upbringing in a hippie-style collective: a terrifically acted, intelligent debut from a name to watch.

But my own revelation was the truly uncategorisable Target, a massively ambitious, visually lavish sci-fi fantasy from Russia. Set in 2020, it's about several wealthy Muscovites' search for the source of youth, and what happens when they find it. Target has it all – snazzy future gizmos, TV gameshow satire, motorway action, weird sex, lashings of existential philosophy and the odd poem by Mikhail Lermontov. It's rather like Minority Report remade in the spirit of Tarkovsky, with some J G Ballard on the side. Nutty, expansive and downright visionary, Target deserves to be the cult sci-fi hit of the next decade.

Next Week:

Jonathan Romney delves into the Australian underworld, with crime-dynasty drama Animal Kingdom