Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
Directors: Dianna Agron, Peter Chelsom, Fernando Eimbcke, Justin Franklin, Dennis Gansel, Dani Levy, Daniel Lwowski, Stephanie Martin, Josef Rusnak, Til Schweiger, Massy Tadjedin, Gabriela Tscherniak, Defiant Screen Entertainment.
Cast: Helen Mirren, Keira Knightley, Mickey Rourke, Diego Luna, Jim Sturgess, Dianna Argon, Alexander Black, Carol Schuler.
Berlin I Love You is a 2019 romantic drama that is an installment of the Cities of Love franchise created by French film producer Emmanuel Benbihy. The anthology consists of a series of short films, set in the one specific city, often featuring top names on both sides of the camera.
This is the fifth in the series after Paris, je t’aime; New York, I Love You; Tbilisi, I Love You; and Rio, Eu Te Amo.
This collective feature film is made of 10 stories of romance set in the German capital. While Berlin is not exactly a name synonymous with love, it’s once divided nature gives food for thought. Nevertheless, a couple of stories address the contemporary nature of the city.
One stars Knightley (as Jane, a refugee worker) and Mirren (plays her concerned mother, Margaret), in which Jane works at a refugee shelter; another has Black (a refuge) and Schuler (friendly prostitute, Laila) in the cast.
The topic of sexual harassment is undertaken via a group of women (Emily Beecham, Veronica Ferres, Lili Gattyan and Phoebe Nichols) who gather in a Laundromat when discussion turns to various forms of abuse they have recently suffered at the hands of men.
As Burk Linz, Luke Wilson plays a big-budget Hollywood filmmaker whose sense of wonderment is re-energised by a puppet theatre run by a beautiful woman, Katarina (Agron). A miscast Diego Luna plays a trans woman, who is both hit on and insulted by a teenage boy. Rather uninteresting is the vignette where an ageing Mickey Rourke as Jim, in a hotel bar, tries to pick up a much younger fellow American.
Writers Fernando Eimbcke, Justin Franklin, Dennis Gansel, Dani Levy, Massy Tadjedin and Gabriela Tscherniak unhurriedly place focus on the various possibilities of love, illustrating its universality in major cities around the world.
