Amy Adams needs to change agents

Special correspondent in BerlinIt's becoming a genre in itself: the only redeeming feature of a failed film is Amy Adams's performance. After Nightbitch, The woman at the window either Hillbilly elegyTo the list of blunders, we must add the family melodrama. At the sea, which premiered this Monday in the official competition of the Berlinale. In the film, the actress ofArrival She plays the director of a dance company who reconnects with her family after spending six months in a rehabilitation center for alcoholics. Childhood trauma and addiction are the major themes of this film directed by Hungarian filmmaker Kornél Mundruczó, a director who tends to have little faith in the viewer's intelligence and, therefore, often underlines all the ideas in the stories he tells. Adams, who did not present the film at the Berlinale, brings depth to a character who has hit rock bottom after a life in the shadow of her father, a successful choreographer, a functioning alcoholic, and a negligent father figure—qualities she has inherited more or less unconsciously. At the sea It delves into the wounds of this woman in crisis, with no desire to return to her former self, forced to rethink her work and marriage, and perhaps even to sell the house where she grew up, a beautiful beachfront mansion in Cape Cod, the summer retreat of New York's wealthy. As Fragments of a Woman (2020)A superior film by the director himself, Mundruczó brings to the screen a work by his wife, the playwright Kata Weber, but here the protagonist's emotional journey lacks depth and substance. Amy Adams' talent demands more stimulating challenges, and her career needs a good shake-up.

Return to Bulgaria

The disappointment that it has meant At the sea This has been offset by the projection, also in official competition, of the remarkable Roza DollA serious and adult drama about exile and grief, starring an art curator who, 28 years after settling in Montreal, returns for the first time to his native Bulgaria to verify that the paintings of an eight-year-old child prodigy are authentic and not a scam. Roza Doll It's one of those films that requires a certain commitment and patience, especially in the first part, but where genuine emotion eventually emerges, particularly in the final stretch, where the themes of the artistic narrative and the fractured identity of the man who left the country after his wife's death organically converge. And the Quebecois director Geneviève Dulude-de Celles, a name to watch, skillfully manages the emotional and expressive restraint of her protagonist, a magnificent Galin Stoev, who in the final act confirms his candidacy for Best Actor at this year's Berlinale.