BERLIN, Feb 10, (AFP): A Tarantino-tinged love story plunging US up-and-coming actors Shia LaBeouf and Evan Rachel Wood into the Bucharest underworld dazzled the Berlin film festival Saturday. “The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman” by first-time feature director Fredrik Bond drew savage reviews after screening at last month’s Sundance festival but appeared to win over the more international audience in Berlin, where it drew enthusiastic applause. The Swedish-born Bond, a successful commercial and music video director, lets his slick style shine through in the tale of US backpacker and hopeless romantic Charlie (LaBeouf), smitten at first sight with a Romanian cellist (Wood). But Wood’s Gabi has just lost her father, who happened to die while sitting next to Charlie on the plane, and is still entangled in a marriage with the brutal gangster Nigel played by Denmark’s Mads Mikkelsen (“Casino Royale”). Charlie, whose own mother (Oscar winner Melissa Leo) has just died, lets his infatuation with Gabi draw him ever deeper into Nigel’s ultraviolent milieu, in a bid to rescue her and give their budding romance a chance. German star Til Schweiger (“Inglourious Basterds”) enters the picture as Darko, the owner of a strip club who is on the hunt for an incriminating videotape he believes Gabi is holding.

Hopes
Meanwhile Charlie meets up at a youth hostel with two British party animals including the Karl — ginger-haired Rupert Grint from the “Harry Potter” movies — who hopes to make a start in the eastern European industry with a character called Boris Pecker. A gravel-voiced narration by English actor John Hurt gives Charlie’s quest a mythical quality Bond said he had sought. The director said he took inspiration from Quentin Tarantino scripts such as “Pulp Fiction” and “True Romance” that could pivot from humour to horror and back again, with a tender love story at the heart of the action. The picture also drew comparisons with Emir Kusturica’s Balkan romps.

Bond said the rollicking mix of cultures on screen and on set had appealed to him, as well as a chance to show off one of eastern Europe’s most beautiful cities that is still off the beaten tourist track.
“I felt like Bucharest had something that was quite similar to the characters Charlie and Gabi,” he said. “It’s kind of a broken city that has gone through a lot of abuse.”
Bond said a scouting trip through eastern Europe led him to zero in on the city.
“Everything from all the wild dogs on the streets to people’s hardened personalities...” he said.
“They’re very tough in Romania... there’s a sense of protection I think because they’ve been exposed to dictators and so forth. But once you get to know them they’re the most dedicated, amazing, lovely people, very much like Gabi’s character.”
“The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman” is one of 19 films vying for the Golden and Silver Bear top prizes at the 63rd Berlinale, the first major European film festival of the year.
 

Snapping bear traps, howling wolf packs and an amateur amputation in a Canadian forest await 1890s German fortune hunters in “Gold”, one of two Western-themed contenders premiering at the Berlin film festival Saturday.
Like Quentin Tarantino’s Oscar-nominated “Django Unchained” and its former slave hero, “Gold” subverts the classic Western by putting a woman (Nina Hoss) at the centre of the frontier quest. Hoss, one of Germany’s top actresses who drew rave reviews last year for her portrayal in “Barbara” of a 1980s doctor plotting to escape the communist East, plays a divorcee who joins the Klondike gold rush in 1898.
She was working as a housemaid in Chicago “for a dollar a day” and has little to lose when she breaks off on horseback with an expedition of six other Germans led by an unscrupulous profiteer.
Director Thomas Arslan said he developed the screenplay after finding a book of photographs from the era and journals by Germans who saw the vast North American continent as a chance for a fresh start.

Cheers
“There was a huge amount of material, particularly from German emigrants — it was an enormous movement — so I incorporated it into the script,” he told reporters after a press preview that drew cheers.
The motley group, including a father of four from a New York hovel hoping to strike it rich for his family, set off north of Vancouver for what is meant to be a six-week journey overland.
But the posse, including a dozen horses, dwindles as the treacherous terrain claims victim after victim.
In one excruciating scene that drew peals of nervous laughter at the screening, a member of the expedition stumbles into a bear trap’s iron jaws and, after Hoss’s character Emily frees him, undergoes a brutal amputation with only whisky to dull the pain.
 

Arslan, who called two months of on-location filming in the Canadian wilderness a challenge, said he had wanted to put a woman at the heart of his Western as the ultimate outsider in such a setting while linking the story to his native Germany.
“I need to have a way into a story,” he said. “It would be a little absurd or at least random to have our actors playing Calamity Jane.”
Also in competition Saturday was “A Long and Happy Life” by Russian director Boris Khlebnikov about a young businessman who moves to the countryside to operate a farm and mounts resistance when an investor backed by public officials forces him to sell his land.
At first a hero to the residents of the depressed village who see him as a potential saviour, Sascha refuses to give up the fight long after it is lost and turns to increasingly desperate means to stand his ground.

Khlebnikov said he saw his film as a kind of contemporary Western featuring a man trapped by circumstances and driven by vengeance who becomes a gun-slinging outlaw to wrest back power from those trying to keep him down. But he said the movie, which received public funding and in which civil servants come across as corrupt and unfeeling, was primarily a social commentary on rural life in today’s Russia.
“If you’re travelling around from one farm to another in remote Russia, they can’t make a living,” he said. “You have a sense that those villages are sort of dying because there’s no work.”
“Gold” and “A Long and Happy Life” are among 19 films vying for the 63rd Berlinale’s Golden and Silver Bear top prizes, to be handed out by a jury led by Chinese director Wong Kar Wai on Feb 16.