The ‘biopic’, presented this Friday at the Berlin International Film Festival, makes it clear that its rapid decline had to do with its business structure and the advent of the iPhone
Raise your hand whoever is reading this article from your Blackberry. Nobody? Logical. Those mobiles no longer serve more than as antiques; the company that manufactured them stopped doing so in 2016. And the biopic ‘Blackberry’ (directed by Matt Johnson), presented today in competition at the Berlinaleserves as practical summary of the reasons why a company that dominated the world managed to lose all presence in the market that it had invented itself. It is not clear, however, that it serves for anything else, considering the comfort with which it remains reclining on the type of clichés – camera in hand to feign documentary authenticity, grainy image as a means of transport to bygone eras, inexplicable hairstyles – that have given a bad name to biographical cinema. To understand each other, nothing to do with ‘The social network’ (2010).
It was in 2003 when Blackberry introduced what we now consider the first modern ‘smartphone’. It was a device that not only functioned as a telephone, but also allowed to send and receive both e-mails and text messages and surf the Internet, and its keyboard appealed to professionals looking for flexibility to work outside the office with the main tools they used on their desktop computer. It didn’t take long for him to become a status symbol for the Wall Street sharks., celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Bono and political leaders, thanks in part to their reliability in terms of security. As the new movie makes clear, its rapid decline was due in part to problems stemming from its business structure and above all, of course, the irruption of the iPhone, more capacity and speed, more screen, more applications, better design and better service. Today, Blackberry is a company dedicated to cybersecurity.
Pandemic and racism
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In ‘Survival of Kindness’another of the films aspiring to the Golden Bear presented this Friday, Rolf de Heer once again uses a mixture of allegory and naturalism to denounce the abuses of the white settlers on the Australian indigenous population; he already did it in titles like ‘Ten canoes’ (2006) and ‘Charlie’s Country’ (2013). The film portrays a practically abstract post-apocalyptic world: the characters have no names, the dialogues are unintelligible, the landscapes are indeterminate. A terrible pandemic has decimated the white population – whose survivors must wear gas masks – but not people of color, who continue to be enslaved and killed.
At the beginning of the story, a black woman is abandoned inside a cage in the middle of the desert, condemned to die. She but she manages to escape from her, and from then on she embarks on an odyssey through a beautiful land but full of hate, violence, disease and blood. As she watches it, the film exudes sympathy for the fate of oppressed peoples but, especially considering that it’s clear from the first minute of its footage that it will end badly, It is worth asking: what goodness are we talking about?