Sean Penn goes to the war in Ukraine to look in the mirror, then takes his documentary to the Berlinale

You found out that Sean Penn was in Ukraine to tell us his vision of that war, and you fear the worst. On the one hand, there is his tearing authorial decrepitude which led the protean director to strange blood ties, crossing the line or Oath to be unrecognizable in his two smash hits at Cannes with The last face and flag day.

Besides those signs of loss from the north, you find a public figure. Al Penn who supported Fidel and Raúl, who was a close friend of Hugo Chávez and mediated through him for the Iranian regime to release an American citizen. And that he came to interview Chapo Guzman while he was on the run. He cited the fact that there were two de facto presidents in Mexico. At that time, Enrique Peña Nieto and the head of the Sinaloa cartel. And, look, I don’t know if the worst thing about this wasn’t so wrong.

There is no doubt that Sean Penn in his story about Ukraine will not differ from the reasonable current: those who condemn the Russian invasion and support the victims in Ukraine. Among other things, because if it were different, to show some indication of sympathy with the devil, this Berlinale, which implemented large doses of Ukrainian production in its cycle to show its support for the cause, would in no case allow it to program a North American documentary.

And you discover that yes, indeed Sean Penn feels that he is on the good side of history for once. His visceralism corresponds with the general politics of the West and his own country, according to which he has so often positioned himself as a dissident. But you also immediately see that, in reality, a director known as Sean Penn went to Ukraine to show us not the disasters of war, but what the character of the same name feels in front of them.

That when he talks to a woman who tells him about the death of her loved ones, the camera looks at that woman, and then focuses on the face of the star and on her frowning and contrite face with which the star sympathizes with that pain. So, in fact, once a great actor and director went to Ukraine to talk about his book.

His film, shot in Kiev from the first days of the war (he caught him there by accident because he planned to film something about that territorial conflict in 2021) is really about Penn’s face and how he seems to be risking his life when his vehicle In Kiev travels from the presidential palace where he interviewed Zelenski to the nearby hotel where he stayed.

I don’t know if the title of the movie, super power, is an open confession of that enormous and unpleasant narcissism. Everything is as empty as the interviews with Zelenski, clumsy and random. Since the Ukrainian president does not seem to me to be a good communicator, the result of that meeting at the summit is nothing.

As I switch from observing the divo reporter to looking at the time, I remember that mammoth interview that Oliver Stone got from Vladimir Putin. There were eight hours of recorded material. It is a visual document that provides the most information on record about the crime kingpin. And it smells like sulfur, but it gives you a sibylline rawness, it scares you. You seem to see images and words that will really document the roots of evil. And no continuous close-ups of Stone and her belly button. I don’t know if that material is still available on a platform where those images were just a click away, or if it was deemed unnecessary to give speakers – even from the past – to an invader who did so much damage.

Echoes of “Taxi Driver”

There are very few pinnacles of North American cinema that display such magnetism as to compel so many films to return later – or much later, as in this case – to the paths they inaugurated. One of them is Taxi driver And the path he covered is, of course, a Dantesque corridor through which we saw many fauna of various self-destructive furs circulate, some even signed by Paul Schrader, the same screenwriter of the original screenplay for Scorsese’s film.

manodromeby the South African director John Trengove, is a direct and savage attempt to Update of the great classic And not only because the successor of that post-Vietnam Travis Bickle is no longer a taxi driver but an Uberization driver. when it was recorded Taxi driver Characters like the one played by Robert de Niro were located green dogs marked by the trauma of war in the Asian jungle.

There are millions in North America today. is a call white trash, white trash who feels enraged by their vital insecurities, ignored by the miscegenation of races. Therefore Jesse Eisenberg of manodrome He is very representative of all that horde that stormed the Capitol. Or all those who riddle schools, cafes or churches. Or from groups that are the silent majority and wait in their homes.

manodrome it ennobles more and contributes to another important wound in that crisis of the desperate: the collapse before questioning the role of masculinity. This rapture is actually essential on the way to hell for its protagonist. His path goes through the ferocity and sweat of gyms – where he will envy the musculature of African Americans – and he does not mince words.

It introduces Eisenberg – smothered in his complexes, in his unacknowledged homosexuality, in tension with a pregnant woman – in a sect that might have something of Fight club Fincher and it counts as the High Priest with a recovered Adrien Brody. and although manodrome It’s still a pastiche of all that cinematography it’s incomparable to, yes, we have to admit there are some ticking time bombs in its script.

I suspect that the perfidious director John Trengove is also aware of the very unacceptable ideological ambiguity that he almost understands and nurtures this wounded puppy. But as a film festival of bad vibes, his goes pretty far. Much to the displeasure of audiences who prefer things like the sweet Chinese melodrama of the title A tower without a shadow, the work of Zhang Lu, who spends two and a half hours in a kitsch bath (the Chinese, when they get their hands on it, are worse than Turkish soap operas) about family, forgiveness, orphanhood, fatal diseases, all underlined to the point of fatigue. But nothing happens because we should be talking about human kindness. And it’s easy to receive communion there. I’ll take hell. Although he is bizarre and a usurper of someone else’s size as much as an illegitimate grandson Taxi driver.