How Berlinale 76 sounded, from Charli XCX to Judas Priest
In an edition of the Berlin Film Festival marked by controversies and political upheavals, with European cinema less central than expected, it was music that gave rhythm and identity to the selection. Not only in the titles explicitly dedicated to singers and bands, but also in those films where the songs become emotional nerve, narrative compass, poetic declaration. It is a trajectory that is now evident in the great European festivals: telling music means telling the present, its myths and its fractures.
Charli XCX
The most magnetic and talked about appearance was that of Charli XCX, out of competition with “The MomentNot a simple cinematic cameo (after “1001 Nights: A Hero” it was clear that the big screen really intrigued her) but a more conscious and protagonist-like step: the film is a mockumentary that rereads the mainstream explosion linked to the “Brat” EP in an alternative key, questioning that point of no return in which an artist supported for years by a loyal queer community is suddenly sucked into the global media circuit.
“The Moment” is brilliant and poisonous in the right way, and it works all the better the more you still have the memory of the “Brat Summer” of 2024. There is something liberating and at the same time melancholy in seeing Charli interpret a version of herself who makes different decisions, perhaps more self-destructive, certainly more extreme. In the press conference he declared that era closed, with the clarity of someone who knows that in pop survival also involves self-scrapping.
Yet there was a different energy at the Palast. Germany confirms itself as one of the territories where its fan base is most alive and visible, and the German media have given it warm, almost complicit, attention. While waiting for the press conference, a pin in the shape of a bear (the symbol of the Berlinale) immersed in the acid green of “Brat” appeared in the hands of the journalists. A detail, but a revealing one: no matter how much the end of an era can be proclaimed, certain aesthetics cannot be dismissed with a sentence. Even now that she’s scored Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, that green, edgy, hyper-aware vibe still seems to pulse beneath the surface. More than a farewell, “The Moment” resembles a phase transition: not the death of “Brat”, but his mutation.
Bill Evans
In competition, his musical films are surprising for their rigor and ambition, excellent candidates for the final prize list. The first is “Everybody Digs Bill Evans” by Grant Gee, a biopic in milky and very controlled black and white that tries to translate the fragile purity of the pianist’s touch into images. Gee is no stranger to musical storytelling, but here he seems to want to take a further step: not limiting himself to mythology, not giving in to the comfort zone of genius and masterpiece. The film opens at the Village Vanguard, in 1961, in those legendary evenings from which “Sunday at the Village Vanguard” and “Waltz for Debby” were born, two records that rewrote the grammar of the jazz trio. It would be easy to stop there, in the perfect moment of consecration. Instead Gee chooses reverse shot: in the same time frame the car accident takes place that takes the life of Scott LaFaro. It is from that fracture that the film really takes shape.
“Everybody Digs Bill Evans” doesn’t tell the story of the birth of a masterpiece, but what happens when music no longer seems to be enough. Mourning (personal, of course, but above all artistic) becomes a suspension of creative breathing. Evans loses not only a stage partner, but that rare harmony that makes absolute improvisation possible. The film insists on this point with an almost obsessive delicacy. The dialogues, at times, are smoothed out to the point of seeming like literature rather than real life. But the choice is consistent with the stylistic structure: everything is calibrated, composed, designed to reflect the restrained elegance of Evans’ jazz. The camera moves like a slow phrasing, leaving room for silence and suspension. It is not an easygoing film, nor an emotionally easy one. It requires attention, a certain willingness to inhabit melancholy. But on a technical and formal level it is among the most solid proposals of the competition: a work that tries to do with cinema what Evans did with the piano, searching for the right note even within the shadows.
The Loneliest Man in Town
The second musical title in competition is “The Loneliest Man in Town”, that is, the title that comes closest to being “Italian” of an edition that is truly unrepresentative for our colors and European cinema in general. The Austrian film, which moves halfway between documentary, fiction and a fictionalized reconstruction, is in fact written and co-directed by Bolzano-born Tizza Covi together with her colleague Rainer Frimmell. The duo has always been versed in cinema that blurs the limits of the acted and the real, often using non-professional performers. It happens again this time, with the blues musician Al Cook/Alois Koch, a Viennese bluesman who plays a fictionalized version of himself in the film. The feature film is a truly powerful portrait of a life dedicated to music, written and listened to, but never transformed into a product, always without compromise: stunned by seeing Elvis at the cinema at the age of fourteen, Cook taught himself to play the guitar and the piano (he still can’t read sheet music) and in five years he became able to speak English with a southern accent by watching and re-watching interviews with his youthful idol.
The film, however, is as far from a hagiography as possible: the inspiration is in fact the struggle of this local blues star, appreciated by many legendary American names despite never having set foot in the States, who risks losing the house and studio that he has transformed into his archive and historical memory. The same happens in “The Loneliest Man in Town”, which tells of an elderly man and artist who, in the gentrification of his Vienna, loses his human, musical and practical points of reference, without giving up a slow, analogue life dedicated to his passions (thinking of “Perfect Days”, Wenders might like it a lot). It is fascinating how the film performs, in fact, the same operation as “The Moment” (the pseudo documentary version of an artistic self halfway between fiction and reality), telling how two artists very different in age and gender struggle to maintain their own artistic identity and their own space in a world that asks them to be something else.
The Ballad of Judas Priest
More traditional in structure, but no less lacking in energy, is “The Ballad of Judas Priest”, a documentary directed by Tom Morello which traces the rise of the band which, together with Black Sabbath, helped codify British heavy metal. The film starts from the industrial Midlands, from that working-class England made up of factories, exhausting shifts and gray suburbs, to remember how metal was born (even before as a sound) as a response to class identity. There is space for the slow construction of an aesthetic that we take for granted today: leather, studs, chains, an imagery that mixes eroticism and religious iconography and which, as the film tells us, also takes shape by assembling clothes bought in sex shops after years of a chaotic visual identity.
The emotional heart of the documentary, however, is dedicated to Rob Halford. The frontman’s queer identity, long lived in silence in an environment dominated by machismo and suspected homophobia, becomes the key to rereading not only the singer’s personal history but also some tensions within the metal scene. The film insists on the weight of that double life, on the need to separate stage and intimacy, retrospectively overturning the hypermasculine imagery of the band.
From a formal point of view, “The Ballad of Judas Priest” does not reinvent the language of the musical documentary. It alternates archival materials, face-to-face interviews and celebratory round tables that at times indulge in a predictable hagiography. A sharper analysis of why, in the critical imagination, Judas Priest have sometimes been perceived as the “less serious” version of Black Sabbath, almost a step below in the symbolic hierarchy of the genre, would have benefited. Yet the film works. It works because the music remains magnetic, because the riffs have not lost their bite, and above all because the band members (Halford in the lead) speak with a calm irony that dampens even the most self-congratulatory moments. There is a mature, almost tender awareness in the way they talk about mistakes, excesses and contradictions. “We have lived and breathed metal for over five decades… the cassock is removed, revealing Priest in all their metal glory,” they declare. It’s a solemn phrase, but there’s less poise in their smile than you might think.
Finally, outside the strictly musical perimeter but impossible to ignore, the cameo of Conchita Wurst (Thomas Neuwirth) in “The Blood Countess”, a horror-fantasy directed by Ulrike Ottinger with Isabelle Huppert in the role of an aristocratic and decadent vampire. The appearance is brief but full of meaning: not a simple pop wink, but rather a conscious insertion into a film that reinterprets symbols, myths and traumas of Austrian history in a gothic and ironic key, in which there is also time for an ironic performance of “Rise like a Phoenix”, the song with which he won the Eurovision. It is not Neuwirth’s first cinematic foray (he had already appeared in the Netflix film dedicated to Eurovision) but here his presence has a different weight. Conchita is no longer just a musical or television icon: she has become part of the national cultural imagination, an almost mythological figure who can naturally inhabit an allegorical story about collective memory. The disguise, the theatricality, the fluid identity dialogue perfectly with the visual universe of Ottinger, who has always worked on excess and symbolic stratification.
