The first days of Berlinale 74 brought almost spring-like warmth; the weather had softened, but little else. A contentious political climate was expected, and it delivered—starting with the jury's opening press conference, which dwelt more on war and racism than cinema itself. The opening film tackled urgent social themes, yet the real focus fell on its star. Cillian Murphy, then in the thick of Oscar season for Oppenheimer, carried Tim Mielants's Small Things Like These—an Irish actor in an Irish story, though directed by a Belgian. Among the accumulated brutalities of mid-1980s Ireland that Murphy's character Bill Furlong encounters—a coal merchant navigating poverty and shattered families (his own trauma emerges in flashback)—stands a darker chapter: the Magdalene Laundries, convents where girls deemed "immoral" and abandoned by their families were imprisoned without consent. The last one closed in 1996.
Murphy seems to embody a collective Irish guilt for generations of accumulated wrongs. His Bill does not hide his feelings; he suffers visibly, his anguish carved into a sharp face by dark, suffocating cinematography. He represents an ideal of charity that begins as mere imagination and needs a shock to become action. Yet the film falters in its own hesitation, repeating itself long after its message has landed.
The competition's other provocation is Aaron Schimberg's thriller A Different Man. The director, born with a cleft palate later corrected by surgery, has long been drawn to how faces marked as abnormal are perceived—both by those who observe and by those being watched. Yet he admitted to the press the bind he faces: cast a nondisabled actor, and you deny disabled actors representation; cast someone inhabiting their own disability, and you risk exploiting real suffering. So Schimberg chose both.
Sebastian Stan begins the film in a mask, playing a man with a disfigured face, presumably from neurofibromatosis. When offered an experimental cure, he accepts. There is a before and after, as if he were given the chance to become someone else. Here lies the first moral provocation: Does changing one's face also change one's soul? Or is the self independent of appearance? He wants to bury his past, yet it finds him anyway—first as a play dramatizing his former life, then through another man with neurofibromatosis. This man is not an actor pretending. He is Adam Pearson, a real British television personality living with the condition. The meeting between the regular features of an actor performing disfigurement and the genuinely altered face of actual disease becomes morally taxing for viewers, but within the film it is devastating: the newly "corrected" man recoils violently at confronting someone who embodies what he once was and can never be again. Metaphorically, it is an actor discovering he cannot play disabled as convincingly as disability itself.
Here is an original way of thinking about how to represent particularly visible conditions—facial ones above all—without falling into victim narratives or denying the real bullying and social harm involved. Cinematically, one may feel unmoored by the predictable unraveling of someone who cannot hold body and mind in balance. Theoretically, though, the film opens onto infinite questions about the morality and immorality of representing disability visually and psychologically—questions that arise when the viewer's gaze is held, for two hours, on everything they might prefer never to confront.