Today was, as the observant reader may have noticed, a Sunday. It never fails to surprise me how depressed and lost a Sunday can make me feel, even now that I’m in my mid-thirties and am often tempted to think I have life Figured Out. You would think that, several hundred Sundays later, I would no longer experience the same existential angst and melancholy that Sundays used to induce during my teens and early 20s. But yes.
Why is this? Why is Sunday so haunted by the Saturnine creatures you would expect to plague, well, Saturday?
Even though Sunday is supposed to be the first day of the week, as my parents used to drum into me when I was a young and impressionable Catholic (although writing this, it seems odd that Sunday should represent the start of the week, when it of course marks the day God rested after the six days of creation), it still feels like the end of something. Things are complete for another week; for a while we cannot kid ourselves that we are just beginning all kinds of great endeavours with only excitement and future achievements to look forward to.
I for one cannot experience any period of time coming to an end without feeling a bit glum: every ending reminds me of the Great Ending that awaits all of us. Before I got my current job, I recently attended a conference in Munich on commercial real estate, a topic which genuinely holds little interest for me. But how sad I felt when the conference was over and I was heading to the airport to fly back to Berlin!
Of course today’s Sunday was particularly blue because my wife, S, is away on vacation so I spent the day alone, with no chum to browse flea markets or frequent cafés with.
I also felt sad today because it marked the end of the Berlinale. Quite why an annual film festival coming to an end should affect me so much, I can’t say. Probably it was because this was the first year that I really got into it, knew which films were on, and waited with anticipation to hear which film had won the Golden Bear. I was disappointed that my favourite, the touching Brazilian movie “O Ano em Que Meus Pais Sairam de Ferias,” did not win it, and felt slighted somehow, in the way that you identify with a work of art that you liked. I hadn’t seen the winning film.
I think I also felt regret that I had not seen more films in the festival — I only ended up seeing six, plus a couple on DVD — in the same way you might regret not having done more when your holiday comes to an end. The Chinese film I saw this evening, “Luo Ye Gui Gen” (“Getting Home”) — and which was my last film of the festival — had a suitably elegiac tone: a man tries to bring the body of his dead friend home to his family so he can be buried in his birthplace. (The fact that the destination is revealed early on to be the Three Gorges tips the viewer off that not everything is going to end as planned.)
For me, one of the best parts of the festival was seeing two Berlin cinemas I had never been inside before, the Delphi Filmpalast and the Zoo Palast, both just off the Ku’Damm. Normally they show — typically for Germany, unfortunately — dubbed versions, which is why I had never set foot inside either before. But I was struck by how cool both of them were, with their fantastic 1950s architecture and opulent designs. The bar in the Delphi Filmpalast has a sort of carved wooden mural depicting what appeared to be some kind of mountain landscape (I couldn’t quite work out what it represented exactly), while the carpet in the main cinema at the Zoo Palast has a stylised filmreel design. You don’t get touches like those nowadays.
