Berlin 2020: My Salinger Year film review – Margaret Qualley stars in festival opener, a love letter to literature

3.5/5 stars

A passion for literature forms the heart of My Salinger Year, the opening movie of this year’s Berlin Film Festival.

Featuring an impressive central turn from the increasingly visible Margaret Qualley, there’s something marvellously old-fashioned about this tale set on the cusp of the digital age. It takes place in 1995, largely in the behind-the-times office of a Manhattan literary agency where framed pictures hang of F. Scott Fitzgerald and other icons of the written word.

Directed by French-Canadian director Philippe Falardeau, the film is based on a memoir by American novelist Joanna Rakoff, whom Qualley plays. Joanna, a Berkeley student who arrives in New York with ambitions to write, wins a job at the agency as the assistant to the company’s grand dame, Margaret (Sigourney Weaver, who is excellent). “Writers make the worst assistants,” she is told by her tyrannical boss, in a relationship that recalls, superficially, Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada.

The agency’s prize client is The Catcher in the Rye author J.D. Salinger, who hasn’t published a book in 30 years and remains “in total isolation” in the state of New Hampshire. One of Joanne’s jobs is to sort through fan mail he still receives. While these are never passed on to Salinger, she must read each one before shredding it – just in case there lurks another Mark Chapman, the man who assassinated John Lennon who was found reading a copy of Catcher when he was arrested.

Several fantasy moments put you inside Joanna’s head as she imagines those who write to Salinger. These spill out into reality when she can’t resist the urge to reply to one fan. Then, sending shock waves through the agency, Salinger emerges from his seclusion to use a small firm in Virginia to publish Hapworth 16, 1924, his last ever original work which first appeared in The New Yorker in 1965 but never in book form.

Falardeau never shows us Salinger in full, adding to the mystery surrounding his persona, in a story that touches lightly on issues of literary creation and the fallout from releasing art into the public domain.

True, the director doesn’t always handle the balance between the comic and the sombre well. But Qualley, best known for her role in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood , effortlessly carries the film on her shoulders.

“Don’t get stuck answering the phones,” Salinger tells her. “You’re a poet.” Watching her self-belief grow is a delight.

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