The best of the Berlin Film Festival

Banksy’s ‘Exit Through the Gift Shop’

The trick is to stay upright. Here at the 60th Berlin Film Festival, pavements thick with black ice – which seems to have been left by the city authorities as a co-ordination test for pedestrians – trip up many a festival-goer. I went down on day one; several colleagues have gone down since. Berlin has never been like this before. My theory: the only way to get people into the Berlinale Palast for some films, thinks the festival, is feet first.

They are wrong. (And happy 60th birthday, by the way.) The movies have almost all been watchable. The only question is whether they are memorable. The Golden Bear has no favourite as I write. All I see is a gilded grizzly turning its head helplessly in every direction.

We started off with two talking-point films, Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer and Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island. The first is the Polish master’s latest, barely edited before his Swiss house arrest. The second has been held in detention for months, undergoing reported re-tuning. Although Polanski was not in Berlin – stars Ewan McGregor and Pierce Brosnan did the speeches – Scorsese and his lead actor Leonardo DiCaprio were all over town. You could deduce DiCaprio’s co-ordinates any time, by the direction from which the wind was bringing crowd cries of “Leo! Leo!”

The Ghost Writer is a nifty suspense tale based on Robert Harris’s bestseller about a former British prime minister (Brosnan) and the ugly truths unearthed by his ghost-autobiographer (McGregor). These relate to collusion with US military adventurism in the Middle East. Gee: I wonder whom Harris and Polanski could be thinking of? Even without the publicity boost of a former Labour leader’s Iraq-enquiry cameo, there should be audiences for a cleverly told story with a charismatic Brosnan turn and solid direction from Polanski. Solid? Yes, it’s a faint-praise word. This is essentially a James Bond film with topical hoopla, not quite the movie we still dream of from the maker of Chinatown.

Shutter Island is dismaying in the opposite direction. Not solid, more like a soufflé flying around in a particle accelerator. Based on another bestseller, by Dennis Lehane (Mystic River), it delivers Leonardo DiCaprio in police detective drag to a sombre island asylum off Boston Harbour. (Think of Arnold Böcklin’s painting “Isle of the Dead” gone film noir.)

DiCaprio is investigating a murder, apparently. Yet the doctors are uncooperative (Ben Kingsley, Max von Sydow) and since the year is 1954, great purulent rashers of trauma sizzle away – the after-blaze of Nazism, the contemporary scorch of McCarthyism – until the last-reel moment when we realise (if we are slow) that things are not what they seem.

Roman Polanski’s ‘The Ghost Writer’, starring Pierce Brosnan

Scorsese, unlike Polanski, is “on” even when his scripts are off. We are nearly gothicked to death. Plot twists fly in our faces like howling rain. And as each fresh star comes before the camera, we ask: which mad-scene party piece will this be? DiCaprio alone acts with controlled intensity, though that face-that-never-grows-up still seems a little incongruous in a mature leading role.

As the thriller bug bit and banalised much in the early Berlinale – extending from Iran’s The Hunter, depicting a bereaved man’s vengeance on the cops who shot his wife and child during an anti-government demo, to Austria’s The Robber, with a marathon runner moonlighting as bank thief – the best films in the first days were documentaries.

A month ago, I said the same thing from Sundance. This genre is no longer ring-fenced by the words “truth, whole truth and nothing but”. Documentary now includes mockumentary. Exit Through the Gift Shop is a hilarious blend of fact and hoax, directed by and allegedly featuring – but who is to know? – Banksy. The legendary unseen graffitist may be the chap with hood-shaded face and techno-distorted voice, who narrates the story of one Thierry Guetta. Guetta apparently – take that adverb as read throughout – evolved from a video-chronicler of graffiti artists’ work to an artist himself, siphoning millions from the Los Angeles gullible.

Banksy thinks this is bad for real street artists (turned gallery millionaires) like himself.Then again, Banksy brought Guetta on, so who is to blame? The Berlin audience lapped it up, helped by the film’s fizzy editing and funky visuals. There is nothing like art that questions the nature of art, especially at an arts festival.

How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster?, directed by Norberto López and Carlos Carcas, is a skilful if more conventional voyage around aesthetics. The filmed images of Norman Foster’s buildings are sensational. The camera glides and curvettes around skyscraper tops, or captures the Millau Viaduct in France from every magic-making angle on a misty day that makes this epic structure look like the bridge to Valhalla.

The Golden Bear won’t lay its paw on either of these: Berlin seldom gives documentaries competition status. So the likeliest films right now – with Scorsese also shown non-competitively and Polanski an outside bet – are four from eastern Europe. Florin Serban’s If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle is a strong juvenile-prison drama cast with teenagers from a Romanian jail. It seizes attention with its tale of a boy taking hostage a girl social worker, to put the screws on a mother about to wreck his brother’s life (in ways explained) as she has wrecked his. It’s a small tale, given maximum resonance.

Better still is Semih Kaplanoglu’s Honey. The Turkish director of Eggs and Milk completes a trilogy of nutritive titles with this quietly hypnotic tale of a six-year-old boy’s response to a momentous event involving his beekeeping father. By “beekeeping”, don’t think of earthbound hives; this man risks his life by climbing tall trees to scoop out the golden succulence.

The one event apart, the film is almost plot-free. Kaplanoglu gives us an enchanted maze, a many-coloured honeycomb, of the boy’s sentient life, from his slowly waking emotions (even to tragedy) to the intelligence articulations taking shape in school. Nature’s presence is everywhere, lyrically photographed. The central performance is touching, truthful and overpoweringly charming, one of those classic screen turns by a child, up there with The Kid and The Red Balloon. Bora Altas, the boy actor, was the star at the press conference, all three feet of him heroically keeping his face above desk level, trying not to be engulfed by the translation earphones.

Alexei Popogrebsky’s How I Ended This Summer and Jasmila Zbanic’s On the Path are sombre dramas at opposite ends of a continent. The Russian film scores 10 each for suspense and atmosphere, three for clarity of motivation, as two men running an Arctic weather station feud, sometimes opaquely, while the bad season closes in and the cabin fever mounts. The film has some of the mood-magnetism of The Return. The Bosnian director, who won the Golden Bear with her last feature Grbavica (2006), puts herself in frame again with a convincing portrait of a Sarajevo love affair eroded by the man’s conversion to Islam. There is a brilliant sequence, eerie and ambiguous, in a Koran-chanting rural retreat that could be a terrorist induction camp. This was a stronger assault on the Islamisation theme than Germany’s competition entry Shahada, a three-tale essay-movie with crime frills, interlinking Muslims and Germans in Berlin.

Other films have rattled in and out of view like the city’s tramcars. Those that don’t use thriller voltage try comedy. But that hasn’t been this year’s dependable power source: see Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg, a rickety Ben Stiller vehicle about midlife crisis from the maker of The Squid and the Whale, or Zhang Yimou’s A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop, a slapstick Sino-makeover, thin and frenetic, of the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple.

My bet for top prize, until I change my mind on Sunday, is the Turkish entry. After all, how could a Golden Bear not be attracted to a film called Honey?

The 60th Berlin International Film Festival runs until February 21. www.berlinale.de