16/02/2007 Another day at the Berlinale film festival. "Bad Faith," a French film, was concerned with a Jewish French woman becoming pregnant with her Moroccan Muslim lover and the strains on the relationship that come from that make her decide to have an abortion. Charming and beautifully shot, with lovely bed-linen I noticed, is it just me but these issues that are so vital and contemporary relevant for us today, especially one notes the Muslim mother is portrayed as less prejudiced than the Jewish French bourgeois, but aren't they the very same issues that we heard all about as children? I remember, don't you, the discussions, films, delicate warnings of unhappiness to follow, short stories, ( Puccini's' "Madame Butterfly"), dealing with examples of English/Japanese, German/French war brides, Jewish/Goy, Roman Catholic/Atheist, Baptist/Hindu, Black/White, Chinese/ Indian and so forth. Do things never progress? What about male/female marriages don't they cause a lot of woe? Oh yes that's what all the other films are about. I guess it must be so: there are as the man said, who? Was it Shakespeare? There are only five plots in literature and films, so dumbo don't be a superior know it all. It is how the thing is done that matters not the subject matter. Strange isn't it? In films and Biennales as in art.
This evening we went to a Turkish restaurant at the Hackescher Höfe that looked wonderful on entering but became more touristy exotic on second glance. Never mind it was not bad and was remarkably inexpensive, so the very long wait between courses was just a grit your teeth thing but we were all longing to leave and go home to our snug beds by the end. Coming out at last from the Hasir, the prostitutes were out in force standing at regular intervals along the Hackescher Markt, with pastel coloured umbrellas like parasols shielding them from the snow. They all were trussed up immaculately wearing high white boots, tiny white skirts, white zippered jackets, thick tan foundation make-up, and pale whitish lipstick. They were too flawlessly turned out, stood too solidly in their place, stared just past one without eye contact, their hair too perfect to be ordinary people just there by chance. It looked like performance. What was striking was that they all wore similar spotless white outfits under their pink or turquoise umbrellas.
