BERLIN — A true story about the challenge and beauty in two women’s working relationship in the mid-1990s, “My Salinger Year” with Sigourney Weaver and Margaret Qualley, world premiered with a gala opening Thursday for Berlin’s 70th International Film Festival.
The picture is adapted from Joanna Rakoff’s memoir of her life and times as an assistant in the Manhattan literary agency that handled reclusive “The Catcher in the Rye” author J.D. Salinger. It’s also a portrait of Rakoff as an ambitious young woman wanting to exit secretarial duties to be a writer.
Qualley, who co-stars in next week’s “Seberg” as an unhappy ’60s housewife and who earned praise for her role as a Manson follower in “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” didn’t have to look far to find a connection with her character.
“Yes, I went to New York when I was 16 and I had a similar experience of chasing my dream, coming from a small town and feeling inspired by New York City,” she said.
Weaver, sitting next to Qualley at a packed afternoon press conference, was asked if she channeled her dragon lady boss Katharine Parker from “Working Girl” (an Oscar-nominated and Golden Globe-winning performance) into Margaret, Salinger’s semi-dragon lady literary agent.
“I didn’t think about Katharine — and I feel Katharine’s not a nice person. But I don’t blend the two, I let them sprout.
“This,” she added, “is a love letter to the old” — pre-internet — “literary world. Even the office we worked in, we met the man who bought the office from this company and he kept the file from every author. That really nurtured me a lot, to think I was J.D. Salinger’s agent.”
A few years back, when Rakoff had to decide who would adapt and direct her 2014 memoir, she explained, “At the time I was talking to several directors. Philippe Falardeau was the only one who came to Cambridge and spent a day talking me through what he wanted to do.
“He so completely understood the story, the world of the book, I knew he was the person who was going to do it. I do think, in a normal way, this film is testament to the ways art changes your life.”
As “My Salinger Year” celebrates writers and books in its classy Grand Palast premiere, the opening night party had to move out this year. Why? Because the basement, which has a theater, is now presenting the male strippers of “Magic Mike Live,” the spinoff of Channing Tatum’s hit movies.
With great dismay and sorrow, the Berlinale learned of the fatal shooting attack yesterday in Hanau.
At today’s Opening Gala of the 70th Berlinale, the International Film Festival will commemorate the victims of Hanau with a minute of silence.
