In Berlinale’s Retrospective, Dušan Makavejev’s Gorilla Bathes at Noon proves once again to be an unmissable, grainy and darkly comic meditation on ideology and identity in a newly reunified Berlin.
Catching a film in the Berlinale Retrospective section has become a bit of a ritual for me. I try to make space for at least one or two each year, as in amongst all the Competition premieres and hard hitting contemporary documentaries, it always comes as a welcome chance to sit with a classic or an overlooked gem on the big screen. This year, I managed to get to the screening of the 1993 movie Gorilla Bathes at Noon, directed by legend of Yugoslavian Black Wave cinema, Dušan Makavejev.
The film follows a stranded Red Army officer, Major Lazutkin (played by the gorgeous Svetozar Cvetković) wandering around a post-Wall Berlin after being abandoned by his military unit who have returned to Russia without him. What unfolds is a drifting, humorous, episodic portrait of a city in transition — as absurd as it is melancholic, as reflective as it is political. Watching today, decades later, in a cinema in Alexanderplatz, I was struck – as I often – am by the unbelievable pace of change that this city has undergone, a city which nevertheless remains iconically recognisable in its colours, skylines, and faces in all cinematic representations I’ve ever seen, and this was no exception.
Shot on film, Gorilla Bathes at Noon was wonderfully grainy — colours soft and saturated, the texture of celluloid giving Berlin that 1990s tactile, dreamlike quality. My favourite shots by far were of Major Lazutkin cruising round the city on his bicycle (in what has now become a bit of a cinematic tradition – think Tilda Swinton’s 1988 masterpiece Cycling the Frame), passing pedestrians, punks and pineapple fruit sellers, through parks and markets and under Kottbusser Tor. This is a city alive and bustling and yet still in a state of political suspension as statues are dismantled, borders are dissolved, and nationalist identities are shakily being formed and then re-formed once more.
Makavejev’s collage style — mixing together archival propaganda footage with the Lazutkin’s wanderings — creates a strange, darkly comic meditation on ideology and its after effects. Lenin’s statue is washed, dismantled, and finally transported in one of the final shots. The humour is recognisably Yugoslavian, in their wonderful tradition of dryness and disorientation. Alongside the humour, Makavejev asks what happens to belief systems, to loyalties, to selfhood, when the world that once was vanishes overnight?
As retrospectives go, this was exactly what I hoped for — a filmic conversation about a city with a storied past in all its glorious, grainy beauty.
Our team is on the ground at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival, running from February 12th to 22nd, 2026.
