G6 The Boston Globe FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, 2019
By Ty Burr
GLOBE STAFF
No, “This Is Not Berlin,” it’s Mexico
City, in 1986, and rebellious artistic/
sexual ferment is boiling over in the
nightclubs and in the streets. Hari Sa-
ma’s coming-of-age drama strikes a lot
of familiar notes while remaining en-
grossing and compassionate in the de-
tails. To quote the title of a Roxy Music
song that pops up on the soundtrack,
it’s the “Same Old Scene” — yet one we
haven’t seen quite this way before.
The movie benefits greatly from the
presence of Xabiani Ponce de León as
the 17-year-old hero: Lanky and
watchful, he’s insecurely handsome
between a camouflage of hair. The
youthful central figures of Bildungsro-
mans are often passive — it’s the char-
acters around them who make sparks
— but Carlos uses his passivity as a
stealth weapon of rebellion. In the
opening shot, as his schoolmates brawl
with a rival gang in the street, Carlos
stands calmly amid the fray, unpunch-
ing and unpunched.
He’s less interested in futbol than in
tinkering with electronics and pining
for the sister of his best friend, Gera
(José Antonio Toledano). Rita (Ximena
Romo) is the sort of firebrand who
brings Patti Smith poems to her classics
class and shrieks punkified lyrics as the
lead singer for her boyfriend’s band.
Carlos gets into the band’s good
graces and into their favorite club, the
Aztec, after he fixes the boyfriend’s
synthesizer, and here is where his un-
sentimental education truly begins.
The Aztec is a hotbed of musical, sexu-
al, and pharmaceutical experimenta-
tion, with potential mentors both dan-
gerous (David Montalvo, as a predato-
ry junkie) andinterestinglydangerous
(Mauro Sanchez Navarro, as Nico, a
polyamorous peacock of an artist and
scenester).
“This Is Not Berlin” feels very much
like the youth of its creator, director/
co-writer Sama, rearranged for film:
The music, the highs, the lows. (Sama
himself plays the hero’s older and wis-
er uncle, a hipster motorcycle gear-
head who dropped out of the rat race
years earlier.) The title carries a double
sting, as this Central American under-
ground tries to push back against gov-
ernment repression while differentiat-
ing itself from European models andcoming up with an organically Mexi-
can form of shocking the bourgeoisie.
There are some awfully generic sto-
ry beats: the betrayal of a best friend
left behind as the hero grows up and
away, the third-act death of a key fig-
ure, a mother (Marina de Tavira)
mired in depression. There’s also a re-
freshingly frank treatment of sex and
nudity, given the preferences of Nico’s
circle for sleeping around and for na-ked art-event outrages. Staging an an-
ti-soccer intervention outside a stadi-
um takes cojones.
But the details are fresh and the
lead actor holds the screen even as his
character withholds himself, defining
who he will be in his own time and on
his own terms. “This Is Not Berlin” is a
relative rarity: a coming-of-age drama
in which the student may have more
maturity than the teachers.Ty Burr can be reached at
[email protected]. Follow him on
Twitter @tyburr.By Mark Feeney
GLOBE STAFF
Watching movies about artists
tends to be vastly less interesting than
looking at those artists’ work. If the
artists are David Hockney and Robert
Frank, that sets the bar that much
higher. It’s a tribute to Jack Hazan’s
1974 sort-of documentary about Hock-
ney, “A Bigger Splash,” and Gerald
Fox’s 2004 British television documen-
tary, “Leaving Home, Coming Home: A
Portrait of Robert Frank,” that they
narrow the gap as much as they do.
Each film plays various dates at the
Museum of Fine Arts Sept. 1-11.
“A Bigger Splash” is the title of what
is likely David Hockney’s most famous
painting. It can be glimpsed, very
briefly, in the opening credits. The
Hockney painting that figures most
prominently in what follows -— it, too,
is a famous one — is “Portrait of an
Artist (Pool With Two Figures).” That
bit of misdirection — sharing a title
with one painting while presenting the
making of another — is of a piece with
the sort-of-documentary aspect. The
film has a vérité feel, with various real-
life people doing the sorts of things
they would do in real life. Among them
are Hockney; his longtime lover Peter
Schlesinger, who is one of the two fig-
ures referred to in the painting title;
his longtime dealer, John Kasmin; his
married friends, the designers Ossie
Clark and Celia Birtwell (the subject of
another famous Hockney painting).
The “sort-of” emerges as one realiz-
es how often things are being done
with the camera clearly in mind.
Events may not be staged, but they are
certainly being arranged or enacted.
Fact and fiction do a dance, just as
chronology does. The film is largely set
in London (another bit of misdirection,
the Yorkshire native Hockney being by
then so thoroughly associated with Los
Angeles). It opens in 1973, then jumps
around earlier in the ’70s, in a chrono-
logical-card-shuffling manner.
That playing with temporality is
one of the many ways that “Splash”
feels so much of its time. The upheav-
als of the ’60s are over, but the influ-
ences are being felt in the cooling-
down (and opening-up) of the ’70s.
The temporal shiftiness feels sub-Go-
dardian. The lack of emotional polish
feels kinda-Cassavetes. The slightly in-
ert affect feels post-Warhol — and the
matter-of-factness of the portrayal of
gayness feels post-post-Warhol.
“Splash” isn’t all that good, frankly.
Legato disjointedness and amiable
stiltedness are still disjointedness and
stiltedness. But its being such an index
of what-was-in-the-air-then makes it
very interesting. So does the window it
offers on Hockney: his working proce-
dures, his personality, his sly charm.
Where Warhol, say, was all scheming
zero affect, Hockney was — thankfully,
still is — boyishness abundant: not just
the peroxide-blond hair and oversize
glasses and out-thrust chin, but the
constant bubbling play of his intelli-
gence.
A grace note for those who sit
through the closing credits is discover-
ing that Dick Pope, who has done such
splendid things as Mike Leigh’s cine-
matographer, was one of the camera-
men. His big splashing would come
later.
If there’s a film that prefigures “A
Bigger Splash” in using well-known
cultural figures to braid together reali-
ty and contrivance, it’s Robert Frank’s
and Alfred Leslie’s short “Pull My Dai-
sy” (1959). There are bits of it shown
in “Leaving Home, Coming Home,” as
well as clips from many of the films
Frank made after “The Americans”
(1958), his landmark book of photo-
graphs that six decades later retains an
astonishing power. Is it too much to
say that what Tocqueville did for
America before the Civil War with
words, Frank did after World War II
with images?
As one would expect, the documen-
tary includes many Frank images,
from throughout his career. As one
would hope but might not expect,many are unfamiliar. As one would
hope but really not expect, most of the
film consists of the notably reticent
Frank being interviewed.
“The pictures have to talk, not me,”
he says. But talk he does and memora-
bly. “It isn’t pretty, life,” he says of his
artistic vision. “It isn’t the sweet life.
But it’s the real life that I looked for
and that I got.” Or on what it meant to
exchange Old World for New: “Leaving
Switzerland, it felt like the door
opened: You were free. And I liked it. I
liked it a lot.”
Frank turns 95 on Nov. 9. He was
79 when “Leaving Home, Coming
Home” was shot. He’s surprisingly vig-
orous and unsurprisingly cranky. Withhis hangdog face and slight Swiss ac-
cent, he’s an engaging figure. We see
him in lower Manhattan and on Cape
Breton Island (he and his wife, the art-
ist June Leaf, divide the year between
the two places). We accompany him on
a visit to Coney Island, both the neigh-
borhood and beach. Best of all, we get
to enjoy the marvelous chemistry be-
tween him and Leaf. If “A Bigger
Splash” is a breakup movie (which it is,
not just Hockney and Schlesinger, but
also Clark and Birtwell and, profes-
sionally, Hockney and Yasmin), this
one doubles as a marriage movie.Mark Feeney can be reached at
[email protected].MOVIE REVIEW
YY½
THISISNOTBERLIN
Directed by Hari Sama. Written
by Sama, Max Zunino, and
Rodrigo Ordoñez. Starring
Xabiani Ponce de León, José
Antonio Toledano, Ximena Romo,
Mauro Sanchez Navarro. At
Kendall Square. 115 minutes.
Unrated (As hard R: Graphic
nudity and sexual acts, drug use,
some violence). In Spanish, with
subtitles.... because it is
Mexico City
SAMUEL GOLDWYN FILMSXabiani Ponce de León (left) and
José Antonio Toledano in “This Is
Not Berlin”Two documentaries, two very different masters
CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
MOVIE REVIEWS
YY½
ABIGGERSPLASH
Directed by Jack Hazan. Written by
Hazan and David Mingay. At
Museum of Fine Arts, 105 minutes.
Unrated (as R: nudity, sexuality,
language)
YYY
LEAVINGHOME,COMINGHOME:
APORTRAITOFROBERTFRANK
Directed by Gerald Fox. At Museum
of Fine Arts. 86 minutes. Unrated (as
PG-13: casual, matter-of-fact
obscenity)
Both play various dates, Sept. 1-11.
http://www.mfa.org/programs/filmMETROGRAPH PICTURESGREENWICH ENTERTAINMENTDavid Hockney,
in “A Bigger
Splash.”Robert Frank and June Leaf in Nova
Scotia in “Leaving Home, Coming
Home: A Portrait of Robert Frank.”