A new look at autism as Berlin film festival opens

By Noah Barkin

BERLIN (Reuters) – The Berlin Film Festival opened on
Thursday with a story of love and loss starring Sigourney
Weaver as an autistic woman whose daughter dies in a car crash
and Alan Rickman as the man who helps her cope.

With snow falling on the German capital, the bittersweet
British-Canadian co-production “Snow Cake” kicked off the 56th
annual “Berlinale,” regarded as one of the top three festivals
in the world alongside Cannes and Venice.

The film, which received scattered applause from Berlin’s
notoriously blunt audience of journalists and critics, jolts
viewers out of their seats early on when a truck ploughs
full-speed into Rickman’s car, instantly killing a quirky
hitchhiker girl he has just picked up.

Wracked with guilt about the accident and weighed down by
his own troubled past, Rickman’s character Alex forms a strange
bond with the girl’s mother, a high-functioning but emotionally
erratic autistic named Linda.

Weaver, whose diverse film credits include the “Alien”
films and “The Ice Storm,” spent the better part of a year
meeting people with autism to prepare for the role — an
experience she said gave her a new view on the disorder.

“I think we have to begin to see it as a gift,” she told a
news conference. “We may not understand what it’s there for,
but if you’re in the presence of someone with autism you learn
so much. You learn how to play, you learn how to see things,
you learn how to experience things and how jarring the world
is.”

GRIM LINE-UP

“Snow Cake” headlines what critics have described as a
strong but morbid line-up of films featuring murder, drug
addiction, exorcism and rape.

Weaver and Rickman will accompany Berlinale head Dieter
Kosslick down the red carpet on Thursday evening, and other
stars due to appear at the February 9-19 festival include
George Clooney, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Natalie Portman.

A record number of 18,000 film buyers, sellers, producers,
directors, actors and journalists will crowd the screening of
400 films, including “A Prairie Home Companion” from Robert
Altman and “The Road to Guantanamo,” an account of three
British men held at the U.S. prison camp in Cuba.

“Snow Cake,” which contains both poignant and off-key
moments, was directed by Marc Evans and written by first time
screen-writer Angela Pell. Pell was inspired by her own
autistic son Johnny, who like Weaver’s character in the film
loves to eat snow and bounce up and down on a trampoline.

“I wanted to write a film that showed that sometimes living
with autism can be harrowing but that actually most of the time
it’s really good fun,” Pell told reporters.

Unlike “Rain Man,” the 1988 film that starred Dustin
Hoffman as the autistic brother of Tom Cruise, “Snow Cake”
strives for a more subtle message about a disorder which is
characterised by repetitive acts and a preoccupation with
fantasy.

In a dig at those who would try to put autism in a box, one
of the film’s more disagreeable characters says at one point:
“I know about autism, I saw the film.”