Berlinale 2021: Copilot #review (Panorama)

The establishing scenes tenderly set up the rollercoaster relationship, from fun fairground rides to Asli's autopsy course work, from playful truth-or-dare to pass out games. The youthful Lebanese immigrant Saeed (Roger Azar, who learned German for the role at the Goethe-Institut) is only sketched but sweet, magnetic, iridescent and unfinished enough to make his struggling development accessible; shy medical researcher Asli (Canan Kir) oscillates between innocence and tenacity, yet Kir for me at times remains too uniform to entirely follow how she portrays Asli's complex, suppressed character arc. The elliptical absences over five heavily time-lapsed years are a tall order for relative newcomer actors to fill with character depth and at the same time without too much foreboding. This decidedly not being a socio-political drama but an intimate observation, I at times wished for more radical direction and an even tighter circling of the young couple. The title decisions --from the film's working title Loved to the final German title "The World will be a Different One," from the interim The Pilot's Wife to the apt Copilot (Saeed's loving nickname for his partner, in retrospect charged with allusions of co-guilt)-- seem to speak to the fact that different artistic and directorial deliberations were at play in the production process.

While Asli becomes a bit more self-assured and self-reliant over the film's two hours, Saeed becomes disoriented and lost. Together they live more the aching for unconditional love than love. Berrached walks the delicate and uncomfortable balancing act around whether a fanatical mass murderer can be a lover, or whether a misguided terrorist can be lovable; what we know of each other, what we want to know, and how far we are responsible for each other. The film leaves you with these nagging, intimate questions. Did you really know him, Asli's mother (the marvellous and multi-faceted Özay Fecht) --who is against the relationship with an Arab-- sums it up at the end. A sense of implicit inter-cultural hesitation, lack of mutual understanding, and doubt is there from the start and interwoven throughout. Berrached's strength, as before with 24 Weeks, is that she instills the viewer with a lingering sense of hope and insecurity rather than any definitive insights.

The 1990s setting (don't think Deutschland 89 restaging though) after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in search of a new world order and without the 20/20 hindsight of the next millennium is central to the couple's meandering life choices as well as the film's aesthetics and atmosphere. Berlin-Beirut cinematographer Christopher Aoun, in the Oscar race with The Man Who Sold His Skin as well as freshly nominated for another German Camera Award, is responsible for the imagery bathed in a subdued, elemental twilight, supported by a subtle yet distinct score. When I asked him about his favourite scene, Aoun replied:

"Saeed's cousin's wedding, with that melange of Middle Eastern and East German traditions! We wanted the wedding to feel special and festive, but to also have a great heaviness. For this scene, the production and costume designers and Anne and I went back into our own pasts, collecting personal photos of friends and family. This way we also projected ourselves into that scene, an emotional, very personal moment."

The German producers of Razor Film already ventured far with the Saudi Arabian films The Perfect Candidate and Wadjda and were rewarded with dozens of awards. The good news for audiences not attending the virtual spring Berlinale who want to catch this probing pre-9/11 drama: Berrached's Copilot will be in (German) theatres this summer.

by @JuttaBrendemuhl


image: Canan Kir. Copilot by Anne Zohra Berrached. DEU, FRA 2021, Panorama © Christopher Aoun / Razor Film