Critics should be allowed to admit it when they just don't know anymore. As a title, is Vulva 3.0 amusing and intriguing, or seriously creepy? The subtitle Between Taboo and Fine-Tuning, which for all I know probably is a single word in German, does at least signal that ambivalence is part of the package, if you will, but then it also makes everything more complicated. Anyway, this is the documentary in which we learn that many early myths contain stories of vulva revelation saving the world, and in which one labiaplasty practitioner, evaluating her patient, says, "True, it's very American, but it's beautiful," shortly before another woman quips, "We're back to invisibility being an ideal of beauty." Vulva 3.0 is not the centerpiece film of this year's Berlin & Beyond festival — that would be Exit Marrakech, an intimate yet geographically-enhanced drama of estrangement between father and son — but surely it is the most "Wow, those Germans, eh?" of the entire lineup. Of course the entire lineup ranges across several counties, taking in mountain villagers, cabaret-singers, road-trippers, art-forgers, refugees, architects, a female mariachi singer, and other irresistible characters along the way. And maybe the broader message here is that it's a small world after all. The scruffy drama I Am the Keeper, a multi-award-winner, involves a middle-aged guy getting out of prison and trying to start over in the small hometown where, as he puts it, "everybody knows you and begrudges you everything, except maybe the flu or a rash." That sounds sort of like the sweet spot between taboo and fine-tuning, and haven't we all been there?
Jan 29-Feb 3 at Goethe-Institut, S.F.; Aquarius Theatre, Palo Alto; California Theatre, Berkeley, goethe.de/ins/us/saf/prj/bby/enindex.htm
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