Berlinale ’10: Tuan Yuan (Apart Together), Shutter Island

A survey of the “Oscary” films playing at Berlin ’10

Berlin fest opener "Tuan Yuan" (Apart Together)

The 60th Annual Berlin Film Festival kicked off with Apart Together, the latest from 2003 Golden Bear winner Wang Quanan. This modest domestic drama has drawn comments from critics as being an unusual choice, bearing none of the crowd-pleasing allure of Fox Searchlight’s (who’ve guessed?) My Name is Khan nor marquee stars (Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer and Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island are also playing at the fest).

Maggie Lee at The Hollywood Reporter calls the film “universal” but ultimately superficial:

Drama about a family separated by civil war has universal resonance but skims over deeper historical and psychological trauma.

Variety’s Derek Lee is on a similar train of thought, emphasising the film’s familiar, unfussy feel:

A well-played, light family drama that references major historical and political issues beneath a low-key front, “Apart Together” continues a quality career course for mainland Chinese writer-director Wang Quanan (“Weaving Girl,” Berlin Golden Bear winner “Tuya’s Marriage”) without significantly advancing it or springing any surprises.

Dan Fainaru at Screen Daily also mentions a wafer-thin texture, hinting at political motives in the script quashed somewhere during execution:

An original choice to open Berlin on its 60^th anniversary, this modest family melodrama  turns out to be a thin – if kindly – bittersweet autumnal romance. Whatever political intentions may have been buried in Apart Together’s script, which follows a Kuomintang solder’s attempted reunion with the woman he left behind in Shanghai forty years previously, there is little trace of them left onscreen.

Oscar prospects: Best Foreign Language Film, and only if it can make it through the Academy’s notoriously sticky screening process that dolls out the outragious snubs (yes, that 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days snub still hurts) as often as the pleasant inclusions.

Leonardo Dicaprio in the star-studded thriller "Shutter Island"

Meanwhile, Guy Lodge at In Contention is mixed on Scorsese’s latest, praising Scorsese’s  “decade-long quest to find the hardest way to make an easy living” while underscoring the pic’s shallowness:

…when the elements align, it can work to smashing effect — as in “The Departed,” a nifty pop movie-movie winkingly intended as the prototypical “Scorsese film” that casual cinemagoers attributed to him, but that he’d never actually made. When they don’t, however, you get “Shutter Island,” a film awash with beauty and trademark stylistic flourishes, attached to a narrative that he never seems all that into. A near letter-faithful adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s pulpy source novel, itself something of a genre lark for the author, it surprises principally by offering more intrigue as a Scorsese picture than as an entertainment. As an artistic investigation of B-movie construction, it has all the impeccable craft, and a measure of the cinephile intelligence, of “The Departed” or “Cape Fear”; but a lot of the fun is missing.

Todd McCarthy of Variety likes the film a whole lot more, observing a filmmaker at the height of his creative powers. He goes on to place Shutter Island in Martin Scorsese’s filmography in a similar place as The Shining in Kubrick’s. Slightly baffling.

Expert, screw-turning narrative filmmaking put at the service of old-dark-madhouse claptrap, “Shutter Island” arguably occupies a similar place in Martin Scorsese’s filmography as “The Shining” does in Stanley Kubrick’s. In his first dramatic feature since “The Departed,” Scorsese applies his protean skill and unsurpassed knowledge of Hollywood genres to create a dark, intense thriller involving insanity, ghastly memories, mind-alteration and violence, all wrapped in a story about the search for a missing patient at an island asylum.

Screen Daily’s Tim Grierson is similarly drawn in, seeing a slick genre flick raised up by Scorsese’s greatness:

Clearly flawed but entirely involving, Shutter Island is a superb genre thriller elevated by director Martin Scorsese’s consummate skill. Based on Dennis Lehane’s novel about two federal marshals trying to track down an escaped patient from a remote mental institution, this occasionally operatic psychological drama weaves an impressive spell, and even though it overstays its welcome, the film is simply too engrossing to deny.

Kirk Honeycutt, in an admittedly strange review, crafts an analogy of Scorsese as circus performer. He is evidently taken with Scorsese’s portrayal of reality, perception and paranoia:

Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island” is a remarkable high-wire act, performed without a net and exploiting all the accumulated skills of a consummate artist. It dazzles and provokes. But since when did Scorsese become a circus performer?

Oscar prospects: Genre bias and a delayed release date from last year means its best bets are in the technicals, particularly Cinematography. Art Direction (spooky horror landscapes not really being their thing, Pan’s Labyrinth excepted which is a complete fantasy film – fodder for the art directors branch), VFX and sound categories only if the Academy goes nuts for it.

Next up: Greenberg and Roman Polanski’s latest “The Ghost Writer”.