Reckless bank is villain at Berlin film festival

By Mike Collett-White

BERLIN (Reuters) - A thriller about an international bank that takes huge and morally dubious risks in order to control more and more debt was a fitting opening to the Berlin film festival on Thursday.

"The International," starring Clive Owen and Naomi Watts, was contrived years before the banking crisis hit, but German director Tom Tykwer said that what has happened on the markets did not come as a complete surprise.

"Back then many people said, is it actually feasible that a private bank is the villain in a movie?" he told Reuters.

"But we instinctively ... said this is a reality we have to formulate because this represents a system that is about to torpedo itself," said the maker of the critically acclaimed "Run Lola Run." "And the fact this is actually happening now is a grotesque coincidence."

The International, shown to the press earlier on Thursday, opens the 2009 Berlin film festival with a red carpet gala event. It kicks off 11 days of screenings, parties and deal making at Europe's first big festival of the year.

Owen plays Interpol agent Louis Salinger, who sacrifices everything to bring down a major multinational bank which is selling arms to anyone willing to buy them and prepared to stop at nothing to protect its own interests.

INTERNATIONAL PURSUIT

His mission takes him to Milan, Istanbul and New York, where he narrowly survives a gunfight in the Guggenheim museum.

The point of a bank buying and selling arms, one character explains, is not to control conflicts around the world but to control debt, the key to the bank's profit and power.

The plot echoes recent criticism of banks and their aggressive lending policies which many blame at least in part for the economic crisis.

"The fact that the bubble has burst the moment the movie is coming out I don't find enjoyable but ... dismal," Tykwer said.

For Owen, the attraction of playing the doggedly determined Salinger was his moral strength.

"He has got weaknesses, his private life is a mess, the pursuit of this bank is at the cost of everything else in his life, but at the center of him is this morality," Owen told Reuters in an interview to publicize the film.

The Berlin film festival has earned a reputation for tough, hard-hitting cinema, and 2009 is likely to be no exception.

In the main competition "Storm" examines the legacy of war in former Yugoslavia while "Mammoth" tackles issues of globalization and economic migrants.