That divisive films have the power to stir up heated debate is one of their greatest pleasures. But in the case of festival juries and their closed-door mysteries, when a decision does not match predictions there can be a tendency to attribute ulterior motives. This Berlinale edition came at an unstable time for the festival. Its long-time director Dieter Kosslick is unpopular for presiding over a perceived decline in programming quality toward less innovative and more star-powered fare; with him about to retire, debate swirls as to whether the event can reinvent itself. That Touch Me Not — the kind of film more often found in an experimentation-friendly side-section than the main competition — was crowned by the jury was seen by some as a political choice, awarding the radical spirit the film represented rather than any intrinsic quality in its execution. More insidious was the conflation in some reporting of the film with the #MeToo movement, which it has little to do with either literally (it was in development years before that hashtag revolution) or thematically (unless any film by a woman about sexual reticence is now reducible to that label). With this tenuous connection made, it became easier to dismiss the award as a cynical bandwagon exercise.

Now that Touch Me Not has the Golden Bear, we might well ask why Pintilie need to care about critics’ public tantrums. Unfortunately, a certain sabotage is built into the notion that the award was a shameful mistake. Given that this was its world premiere, anyone outside the Berlinale has only press reports to rely on. Within Pintilie’s native Romania this has suited the right-wing, who have widely reproduced Bradshaw’s comments in the media to justify their aggressive rejection of a film they haven’t seen but which threatens their core values; they can claim that this is what EU co-productions and western liberal decadence produce. Certainly, the film (rejected twice for state funding) is very different from the naturalistic, black-humoured Romanian New Wave classics that have brought the nation’s cinema global arthouse acclaim over the last two decades (New Wave masterpieces such as Cristi Puiu’s Aurora and Radu Muntean’s Tuesday, After Christmas are both films about men having relationship breakdowns during mid-life crises). Once at the festival vanguard, that style is becoming a stale template, and black sheep like Pintilie face strong barriers in forging past it. Journalism these days favours polemical hot takes with scant regard for context; maybe outbursts like Bradshaw’s are just what critics do now. Like it or not, however, the Golden Bear affirms another truth: that to many, Touch Me Not is real cinema, too.