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Lifting the Veil
If recent trends hold, American audiences may finally get to see what the
rest of the world is watching.
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
Day by Day
With reviews by:
Lisa Alspector, Zbigniew Banas, Lee Gerstein, Joshua Katsman, Dave Kehr, Patrick Z. McGavin, Gerald Peary, Reece Pendleton, Mark Peranson, Johnathan Rosembaun, Barbara Scharres, Ronnie Scheib, and Alissa Simon.
* RECOMMENDED
Wednesday, October 6 | Thursday, October 7
| Friday, October 8 | Saturday, October 9 |
Sunday, October 10 | Monday, October 11
| Tuesday, October 12 | Wednesday, October 13
| Thursday, October 14
| Friday, October 15 | Saturday, October 16 |
Sunday, October 17 | Monday, October 18
| Tuesday, October 19 | Wednesday, October 20
| Thursday, October 21
WEDNESDAY
 OCTOBER
MANSFIELD PARK
It's never fair to judge a screen adaptation of a literary masterpiece by
its fidelity to the source—otherwise Volker Schlöndorff would qualify
as the greatest film director on earth. But one does expect to see at least
some token acknowledgment of the work. Patricia Rozema's Mansfield
Park starts out promisingly enough in its earthy evocation of the
fetid, overcrowded, none-too-genteel poverty from which young Fanny Price
is "rescued" to begin a life as a poor relation at Mansfield Park. By
sharply foregrounding what was once mere background detail, in particular
the slavery that supports those to the manor born, Rozema highlights the
casual cruelties of the class system. Austen's dry wit has given her plenty
to work with in depicting the hypocrisy of the upper crust, but Rozema goes
much further, attributing to Austen's phlegmatic, wastrel, or choleric rich
all manner of guilt, sadism, and thwarted nobility. All of which might be
construed as ideological if not particularly poetic license, were it not
that Rozema's Fanny inexplicably mutates into a self-confident Amazon once
she grows up. No Austen heroine—probably no Austen character—has
ever been so confoundedly heroic; this Fanny Price could not only teach her
grandmother to suck eggs, she could probably lay them too. Francis O'Connor
is positively glowing in the role, sweeping over the grounds and less
enlightened mortals with a flair that assures her of a moral and marital
stake in the family's stately home. There's something more than a little
perverse about taking one of the most timid, self-effacing heroines in
English literature and turning her into a paragon of modern free-spirited
womanhood. (RS) (Chicago Theatre, 7:30)
THURSDAY
 OCTOBER
LA MALADIE DE SACHS
French director Michel Deville, virtually unheard from since the release of
his subtle La lectrice in 1988, has adapted a well-known French
novel about a doctor overwhelmed by the moral and medical demands of his
isolated village. The film is capably made, but it poaches on the themes,
mood, and story of Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1950)
and even attempts Bresson's brilliant conjunction of form and storytelling.
Like the Bresson film, La maladie de Sachs concerns the
self-punishing spiritual purification of a rural figure whose values,
medical skills, and deeply humanistic empathy for his patients are
insufficient to treat their pain. And as in the Bresson, the doctor's own
physical deterioration becomes a metaphor for his insignificance. But this
movie lacks the transcendent poetic intensity of the Bresson, and its
final, protracted third is repetitive. Still, it does have a somber purity,
and Deville's work with his actors and his feel for landscapes and physical
space is superb. (PM) (Water Tower upstairs, 4:00)
THE JUNK FOOD
GENERATION
Writer-director Shinobu Sakagami's first feature concerns a young Japanese
woman who meets a homeless Japanese man (Sakagami) in the U.S. They decide
to steal drugs from the Mafia, then flee to avoid reprisals. (Water Tower
downstairs, 4:15)
THE GRANDFATHER
Fernando Fernan-Gomez plays an elderly patriarch in 19th-century Spain who
returns to his birthplace to decide which of his two young granddaughters
should inherit his wealth. Jose Luis Garci directed and cowrote this
feature, the fifth of his movies to be nominated for an Academy Award.
(Water Tower upstairs, 6:00)
THAT'S THE WAY I LIKE
IT
A 20-year-old Bruce Lee fan in 1977 Singapore who lives with his parents
and works at a grocery store discovers disco when he sees a local spin-off
of Saturday Night Fever. He sees the movie again and again, and is
inspired to enter a dance contest with a childhood friend as his partner.
Written and directed by Glen Goei. (Water Tower upstairs, 6:15)
NEW DAWN
* The striking originality of New Dawn, Emilie Deleuze's
auspicious debut film, lies in its depiction of work—we get to watch a
bunch of men learn how to operate heavy machinery. There are few things
seen less on-screen than what people do for a living—unless of course
they're cops. Alain (Samuel Le Bihan) is no cop. At the film's opening he
has what many would consider a dream job, as a video-games tester ("You get
paid for that?" asks an awestruck young messenger). But Alain chucks his
upscale high-tech position and heads to the unemployment office, where he
enrolls in the most change-of-pace job conceivable—a 16-week bulldozer
training program miles from the comforts of Paris. His wife and
four-year-old daughter are understandably less than thrilled at his
impulsive adoption of downward mobility. As his family drifts away, Alain,
slightly ill at ease in the rowdy industrial boot camp, is pulled into an
amazingly ambiguous quasi-big-brother, quasi-homosexual relationship with a
belligerently touchy kid whose passionate knowledge of the types of digging
engines is matched by his hopeless ineptitude at handling them. Deleuze
filmed at an actual training site using many of its personnel and trainees,
and the interactions between them and her stars subtly read as class and
culture shock. New Dawn is extraordinary in depicting the complexity
of class and gender myths surrounding work and the complexity of one man's
emotional response to them. (RS) (Water Tower upstairs, 6:30)
THE WHITE SUIT
This film marks the not especially monumental directorial debut of popular
Yugoslav actor Lazar Ristovski, who's probably best known here for his role
in Emir Kusturica's Underground. Ristovski's debt to Kusturica is
immediately apparent, though his is a kinder and more humanistic brand of
absurdism. A gentle soldier (Ristovski) takes a train home after a telegram
from his brother tells him their mother has died and to bring his white
suit when he comes. Along the way he meets all kinds of people who do
inexplicable things for inexplicable reasons, all having something to do,
we can only surmise, with the expression of national character.
Everything's meant to be madly surreal and folkloric—a dog that
doggedly follows the hero, a baggage car full of fireworks for the
engineer's son, a man who travels with his own cow because he's allergic to
supermarket milk, a Russian underwater stripper named Carmen with her
impassioned impresario/pimp in tow. There are moments when we glimpse what
the film could be—the hero says "I love you" to Carmen in 100 different
languages in rapid succession while hanging outside her train window. But
even these moments come off as mildly endearing at best. As an actor
Ristovski possesses enormous charm. As a director he knows only how to cast
his hero well. (RS) (Water Tower downstairs, 6:30)
AFRAID OF
EVERYTHING
Nathalie Richard, who has done superb work with Jacques Rivette and Olivier
Assayas, is the primary reason to see this black-and-white feature from
director-writer David Barker. She plays a Frenchwoman who's been
permanently injured in a car accident and now suffers from agoraphobia,
which effectively traps her in the New York loft where she lives with her
American architect husband. Her beautiful, free-spirited sister turns up,
capturing the attention of the husband and the couple's circle of friends
and intensifying Richard's anguish. The film's ambiguities and off-center
moods are intelligently realized, and the claustrophobia and psychosexual
underpinnings evoke Polanski films of the 60s and 70s (Repulsion,
The Tenant). But ultimately Barker's style drains the life from the
film, making it feel like an academic exercise as it becomes increasingly
inert, emotionally and dramatically. Richard and the impressive young
Belgian actress who plays her sister, Sarah Adler, have some fine moments
together—Richard's face can register a deep range of responses—but
Barker doesn't give their characters the shape and complexity they deserve.
(PM) (Water Tower upstairs, 6:45)
JASON AND THE
ARGONAUTS
Special-effects buffs generally cite this 1963 effort by Ray Harryhausen as
the master's masterpiece, and his work does a great deal to enliven the
tired plot and vacuous stars (Todd Armstrong, Nancy Kovack) directed by
Donald Chaffey. Buff interest of a different sort is provided by Bernard
Herrmann's score, one of his finest. (DK) (Water Tower downstairs, 7:00)
THE JUNK FOOD
GENERATION
See listing above. (Water Tower downstairs, 8:30)
THE PERSONALS
A quiet, attractive, 30-ish woman quits her job as an ophthalmologist and
places an ad for a mate in a Taipei paper. She receives more than 100
responses and meets a series of men for conversation, tea, and occasional
sympathy. Some prospective hubbies are studied in long single takes, some
are revealed in quid pro quo interactions with the heroine, while the
remaining interviewees are glimpsed only in rapid montages. Among the most
memorable are a betel chewer and heavy smoker who promises to give up both
habits if she'll marry him, a shoe salesman with a fetishist's love of his
job, a voice actor who carries on animated conversations between his
multiple assumed characters, an autistic young man whose mother is looking
for a wife to cure him, and a pimp with attitude who's recruiting for his
business. Just when The Personals threatens to become gimmicky,
director Chen Kuo-fu starts shifting focus from the men to the woman, whose
long reflective journeys by train and bus and boat to and from the
interviews take up more and more of the film. Her story, revealed in bits
and snatches, makes her search appear increasingly enigmatic, tracing a
completely different arc and coloring all that went before. (RS) (Water
Tower upstairs, 8:30)
LA MALADIE DE SACHS
See listing above. (Water Tower upstairs, 8:45)
THE GOLDEN VOYAGE OF
SINBAD
Gordon Hessler directed this 1974 British feature whose main raison d'etre
is some first-rate "Dynamation" special effects from Ray Harryhausen (who
collaborated with Brian Clemens on the script), including a ship's
figurehead that springs to life and Sinbad crossing swords with a six-armed
statue. With John Phillip Law and Caroline Munro. (JR) (Water Tower
downstairs, 9:00)
TREASURE ISLAND
*Scott King uses several Chicago theater actors in this visually
striking, formally ambitious first feature about spies trying to cripple
Japan's intelligence operations during World War II. Two American
cryptographers at a fictional San Francisco naval base are composing
correspondence about the identity of a corpse, in an elaborate campaign
intended to persuade the Japanese that they've uncovered valuable American
intelligence. As a narrative, the film can be frustratingly opaque and
peculiar—there's a succession of scenes that seem fundamentally at odds
with one another and never quite coalesce into a coherent whole. But as a
work of imagination it's impressive, showcasing King's inventive use of
spatial and temporal rhythms and diagonal framing and evolving into a
fascinating, trenchant portrait of the time and culture as it explores
racism, xenophobia, aberrant sexuality, nationalism, and honor. The acting,
especially by leads Lance Baker and Nick Offerman, is strong,
unconventional, and deeply compelling. King shot the beautifully textured
black-and-white images, which are wonderfully complemented by the editing
and production design. Not a complete success, but this film's ambition
puts a lot of American independent cinema to shame. (PM) (Water Tower
upstairs, 9:15)
FRIDAY
 OCTOBER
THE WHITE SUIT
This film marks the not especially monumental directorial debut of popular
Yugoslav actor Lazar Ristovski, who's probably best known here for his role
in Emir Kusturica's Underground. Ristovski's debt to Kusturica is
immediately apparent, though his is a kinder and more humanistic brand of
absurdism. A gentle soldier (Ristovski) takes a train home after a telegram
from his brother tells him their mother has died and to bring his white
suit when he comes. Along the way he meets all kinds of people who do
inexplicable things for inexplicable reasons, all having something to do,
we can only surmise, with the expression of national character.
Everything's meant to be madly surreal and folkloric—a dog that
doggedly follows the hero, a baggage car full of fireworks for the
engineer's son, a man who travels with his own cow because he's allergic to
supermarket milk, a Russian underwater stripper named Carmen with her
impassioned impresario/pimp in tow. There are moments when we glimpse what
the film could be—the hero says "I love you" to Carmen in 100 different
languages in rapid succession while hanging outside her train window. But
even these moments come off as mildly endearing at best. As an actor
Ristovski possesses enormous charm. As a director he knows only how to cast
his hero well. (RS) (Water Tower downstairs, 4:15)
THE PERSONALS
A quiet, attractive 30ish woman quits her job as an ophthalmologist and
places an ad for a mate in a Taipei paper. She receives more than 100
responses and meets a series of men for conversation, tea, and occasional
sympathy. Some prospective hubbies are studied in long single takes, some
are revealed in quid pro quo interactions with the heroine, while the
remaining interviewees are glimpsed only in rapid montages. Among the most
memorable are a betel chewer and heavy smoker who promises to give up both
habits if she'll marry him, a shoe salesman with a fetishist's love of his
job, a voice actor who carries on animated conversations among his multiple
assumed characters, an autistic young man whose mother is looking for a
wife to cure him, and a pimp with attitude who's recruiting for his
business. Just when The Personals threatens to become gimmicky,
director Chen Kuo-fu starts shifting focus from the men to the woman, whose
long reflective journeys by train and bus and boat to and from the
interviews take up more and more of the film. Her story, revealed in bits
and snatches, makes her search appear increasingly enigmatic, tracing a
completely different arc and coloring all that has gone before. (RS) (Water
Tower upstairs, 4:30)
HARMONIUM IN MY
MEMORY
Set in 1963 in rural South Korea, Lee Young-jae's film centers on a love
triangle: 17-year-old student Hongyeon develops a crush on her handsome,
idealistic teacher Suha, who in turn has fallen hard for another teacher,
Eunhee. Mixing comic whimsy with drama, Lee sets his story in the pastoral
North Cholia province, an area resistant to the changes wrought by modern
technology. This is a film of many fine small moments, a tender backward
glance at the recent past that never stoops to easy sentimentality.
Bracketed at the beginning and end by images of a much older Hongyeon, seen
playing the Connie Francis record that was a favorite of Suha's, the film
is never clear about what it means to hold on to old memories, though it
does imply that while the past is never really gone, it is ephemeral and
difficult to retrieve. And while there's much sweetness in Lee's vision of
the past, there's also much sorrow—which probably accounts more than
any other feeling for the persistence of memory. (JK) (Water Tower
upstairs, 6:00)
CREATURE
Parris Patton's documentary follows a drag queen as he transforms himself
into a preoperative transsexual, eventually visiting his parents on their
farm in an effort to win their unconditional love. Patton emphasizes
Stacey's transformation but includes other interviews with drag queens and
prostitutes, repetitiously crosscutting to dad back on the farm. But once
Stacey and his boyfriend hit the road to visit Stacey's folks, the film
finds its focus. Stacey's mother and grandmother fear for his soul and try
to convince him to live a "normal" life, and Patton affords the parents and
grandmother some sympathy for their heartfelt emotions rather than
demonizing them as one-dimensional proselytizers. Stacey, on the other
hand, is a born performer, and one can't help but wonder how many of his
dramatic revelations have been created for the camera. On the same program
is David Chartier and Avi Zev Wieder's short subject, I Remember.
(LG) (Music Box, 6:30)
RAISE THE HEART!
Solveig Anspach's involving if dramatically muted French feature is a
sobering examination of the narrow divide between hope and selfishness,
personal fulfillment and social irresponsibility. A young woman who's just
discovered she's pregnant is devastated to learn that she also has breast
cancer. Her doctor advises her to terminate the pregnancy because
chemotherapy could harm her baby, then a second doctor tells her the
treatment poses no particular risk. This isn't great filmmaking—at
times it's close to television. But the framing of the issues in deeply
subjective terms and the examination of gender and sexuality issues make it
resonate. (PZM) (Water Tower upstairs, 6:30)
TWO STREAMS
The previous films of the imaginative, versatile Sao Paulo-based
Carlos Reichenbach to reach Chicago are his 1993 Buccaneer Soul,
which charts the friendship of two intellectual writers in the 50s and 60s,
and his 1987 Suburban Angels, a surrealist fantasia suggesting both
Raul Ruiz and the French New Wave. This feature is a lyrical, episodic
story of two adolescent girls staying at a country house in 1969 who
develop crushes on an uncle, a political refugee in hiding. The images have
some of the ripe flavors and color coordinations of Douglas Sirk's 50s
melodramas, and the music is lush and emotional. There's a fair amount of
comedy, and some of the performances periodically turn artificial, as
if Reichenbach were deliberately camping up the nostalgic atmosphere. The
pacing is leisurely in spots, but the sweeping, bravura camera movements
sometimes attain delirium. (JR) (Water Tower downstairs, 6:30)
THE DREAM CATCHER
Ed Radtke's feature, his second, could serve as a template for the typical
American independent film: it's a road movie about a pair of alienated
teens (Maurice Compte and Paddy Connor) who roam the midwest looking for
missing parents—a mother who may or may not be working in a diner, a
father who may or may not be in jail. If sincerity alone accounted for
artistic value, The Dream Catcher would be some sort of masterpiece:
Radtke's commitment to his characters is complete and unshakable. But
there's hardly one original moment in all of the film's 98 minutes, as the
two kids hitchhike, hop freight trains, and bond with Indians. In the end,
the film is far more sentimental than either its counterparts in the 30s
(Wild Boys of the Road) or the 40s (They Live by Night). (DK)
(Water Tower downstairs, 6:45)
DREAMING OF JOSEPH
LEES
There must be a film school in England where they teach the exact shade of
dreariness appropriate to any given historical period. The late 50s were on
the underlit sepia side, judging from Dreaming of Joseph Lees, Eric
Styles's first feature. In this dank romantic triangle set in a rustic
corner of Somerset, Eva (Samantha Morton) is a clerk at a local sawmill,
dreaming since childhood of her distant cousin Joseph Lees (Rupert Graves);
his loss of a leg while collecting geology specimens only heightens his
elegant appeal. Meanwhile her own quiet elegance has captured the heart of
the local lothario, her best friend's brother Harry (Lee Ross). Eva and
Harry's yearning for someone a step higher on the class (read evolutionary)
ladder is spelled out in terms so cliched and excessive as to be positively
soap operatic. Harry is not only a farmer who mucks about with pigs, he's
also an amateur boxer who gets beaten bloody. Joseph, when he isn't on the
continent sending Eva art books in Italian, languidly limps by the sea. The
most fascinating aspect of this film is its portrayal of a woman
emotionally blackmailed by the suicide threats of a lower-class hysterical
male—an inversion of the usual class and gender roles as revelatory as
it is resonant. Melodrama is an underrated genre, and there are
unfortunately few moments when Styles seems willing to drop his careful,
well-made period-piece realism and plunge into the absurd, mitigated mess
around it. (RS) (Water Tower upstairs, 7:00)
THE CARRIERS ARE
WAITING
* Documentarian Benoit Mariage's first fiction feature is an
extraordinarily subtle, witty, and nuanced work, its editing light,
free-form, and wholly nonjudgmental. It chronicles—in black, white, and
a lot of gray—the last months of the 20th century as lived by a family
of four in the Walloon region of Belgium. Dominating the film is Roger
(Benoit Poelvoorde), an irascible paterfamilias who gives new meaning to
the phrase "acting out" as he frantically brainstorms to keep his family's
head above water. Learning that a local business is offering a four-door
sedan to anyone who can set a new world record—any record—he
determines that his heir, a great placid slug of a son, is destined to
become the new world door-opening champion. To this end he hires a trainer,
builds a freestanding door frame in the middle of his backyard, and nearly
works the kid to death with a torturous entering-and-exiting regimen as
grueling as it is absurd. Roger's stunning lack of sensitivity in family
matters is not unrelated to his work as a newspaper stringer—he
unapologetically asks a shell-shocked deliveryman who's just run over a
teenager to hold up his victim's driver's license so he can get them both
in the shot, then sends his eight-year-old daughter to pick up one of the
loaves of bread the collision has spilled onto the street ("no, not that
one—a baguette"). But despite his dubious child-raising practices,
Roger is no monster. For his daughter, riding through the night on the back
of her father's motorcycle with her arms around him, these police-blotter
excursions are a magic time of closeness, of wordless communion. (RS)
(Music Box, 7:00)
THE GRANDFATHER
Fernando Fernan-Gomez plays an elderly patriarch in 19th-century Spain who
returns to his birthplace to decide which of his two young granddaughters
should inherit his wealth. Jose Luis Garci directed and cowrote this
feature, the fifth of his movies to be nominated for an Academy Award.
(Water Tower upstairs, 8:15)
THE LOVE OF THREE
ORANGES
* A small gem, this film marks the directorial debut of Taiwanese
writer and theater director Hung Hung, the pen name of Hung-ya Yen. Hung,
who cowrote Edward Yang's A Confucian Confusion and his
extraordinary A Brighter Summer Day, has created a deceptively
simple chamber piece about a love triangle between three young Taipei
residents. JJ (Jiunn-jye Lee), recently back from military service and
unhappily employed delivering pizzas, rekindles a relationship with a
former girlfriend (Angela Ma), only to discover that she's romantically
involved with her female college roommate (Wei-chi Chen). The relationships
are marked by an awkward emotional ambivalence that's rarely acknowledged
by the characters but conveyed wonderfully through Hung's use of space,
framing, and music (a fine original score by Chi-ling Liu). Running just
under an hour, The Love of Three Oranges is a brief snapshot of
intersecting lives that captures the power of unexpressed emotions with
quiet poignancy. On the same program, Came to Visit, a 40-minute
short from Estonia. (RP) (Music Box, 8:30)
THE WISDOM OF
CROCODILES
Po Chih Leong directed this vampire film from the United Kingdom, starring
Jude Law as a predatory seducer. (Water Tower upstairs, 8:45)
THE TOWN
Shot on digital video, Yousry Nasrallah's film belongs to the heightened
melodramatic tradition of Egyptian cinema epitomized by Nasrallah's mentor,
the great Youssef Chahine. A fable of immigration and identity, it's based
on a poem by Constantine Cavafy, yet seems equally in debt to the RKO story
department of the late 40s and early 50s. Roschdy Zem, in a performance
that suggests the young Jack Palance, is a would-be actor who lives and
works in Cairo's market district; following his dream, he moves to Paris
but finds the only acting he's allowed to do is in the boxing ring, where
he's expected to perform in fixed fights. A beating by gangsters leaves him
without money or memory in a Paris hospital, and upon his release he
wanders the streets like a film noir figure, unaware of where or who he is.
Nasrallah handles the outsized emotions and grand themes with ease and
aplomb; Claire Denis (Nenette and Boni) contributed to the script.
(DK) (Water Tower upstairs, 9:00)
THE WHITE SUIT
See listing above under this date. (Water Tower downstairs, 9:00)
AMERICAN MOVIE
Who isn't tired of American independent filmmakers with yuppie bank
accounts and film-school pedigrees? Meet Mark Borchardt, Milwaukee high
school dropout with three kids, impossible debts, a drinking problem, and
part-time jobs as a paperboy and a janitor at a cemetery—who's also
writer, director, editor, and overacting star of a low-budget splatter
movie he's been struggling to finish for years. He's the improbable
protagonist of Chris Smith's marvelous feature documentary, an alternately
hilarious black comedy and sad story of a screwed-up chronic overreacher
who's always involving his peculiar family, his girlfriend, and his
lawbreaking drinking buddies in his Ed Wood-like movie schemes. Borchardt:
"The American dream stays with me every day—and thank God they've
extended my phone bill until Friday." (Borchardt's horror-psychodrama,
Coven, recently showed at the Toronto international film festival;
in a bargain-basement George Romero, Sam Fuller kind of way, it's pretty
fascinating outsider cinema.) (GP) (Music Box, 9:15)
LA MALADIE DE SACHS
French director Michel Deville, virtually unheard from since the release of
his subtle La lectrice in 1988, has adapted a well-known French
novel about a doctor overwhelmed by the moral and medical demands of his
isolated village. The film is capably made, but it poaches on the themes,
mood, and story of Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1950)
and even attempts Bresson's brilliant conjunction of form and storytelling.
Like the Bresson film, La maladie de Sachs concerns the
self-punishing spiritual purification of a rural figure whose values,
medical skills, and deeply humanistic empathy for his patients are
insufficient to treat their pain. And as in the Bresson, the doctor's own
physical deterioration becomes a metaphor for his insignificance. But this
movie lacks the transcendent poetic intensity of the Bresson, and its
final, protracted third is repetitive. Still, it does have a somber purity,
and Deville's work with his actors and his feel for landscapes and physical
space are superb. (PZM) (Water Tower upstairs, 9:15)
THE JUNK FOOD
GENERATION
Writer-director Shinobu Sakagami's first feature concerns a young Japanese
woman who meets a homeless Japanese man (Sakagami) in the U.S. They decide
to steal drugs from the Mafia, then flee to avoid reprisals. (Water Tower
downstairs, 9:15)
SATURDAY
 OCTOBER
IN THE RYE
Roman Vavra's feature from the Czech Republic recounts three separate tales
set in the same rye field. (Water Tower upstairs, 1:00)
LOVING JEZEBEL
* Theodorous can't help himself: he's compulsively attracted to
women already involved with other men. As the film opens, he's about to
bail out the back window of his apartment, fleeing from the enraged husband
of his lover. From there the film goes back in time as Theo describes his
unrequited love in kindergarten for Nikki Noodleman, who preferred the
company of another pint-size stud. In writer-director Kwyn Bader's lively,
uncynical comedy, Theodorous never succumbs to earnest self-analysis but
knows he must change his wanton ways if he's to have any hope of keeping
his sanity. Bader has loaded his pithy script with great dialogue and some
wonderfully wry observations by Theodorous about true love. And Hill Harper
negotiates Theo's comic turns with as much aplomb as he does the dramatic
moments (of which there are many); Nicole Ari Parker is terrific as
Frances, Theodorous's first true adult lover, a sort of kooky, repressed
dominatrix; and Sandrine Holt is touching as Mona, the aggressive, needy
West Indian friend who fantasizes about returning to Trinidad with
Theodorous in tow. It's nice to see a film that has an interracial cast for
no other reason than that it takes place in multicultural New York. (JK)
(Water Tower upstairs, 1:00)
TWO STREAMS
See listing under Friday, October 8. (Water Tower downstairs, 1:45)
MINAZUKI
Minazuki has the hallmark of director Rokuro Mochizuki's films—a
blending of gangster and soft-porn genre elements into a surprisingly
feeling but often violent work. Cuckolded and abandoned by the wife he's
adored, mild-mannered accountant Suwa, regarded by all as a bumbling loser,
is joined by the wife's yakuza brother in tracking her down. This brutally
black comedy-drama also throws Suwa together with Yumi, a much-abused young
prostitute who makes the unlikely discovery that this computer geek is a
powerhouse in bed. The trio head off to a provincial seaside resort, Suwa
and Yumi coupling frenziedly and the brother demonstrating increasingly
savage behavior. Mochizuki skillfully interweaves themes of sadism,
obsession, and power, which intersect in an explosive surprise ending.
Minazuki isn't his best, but it's a fine introduction to his quirky
work. (BS) (Water Tower downstairs, 2:00)
RAISE THE HEART!
See listing under Friday, October 8. (Water Tower upstairs, 2:15)
BIG WHEELS, ANGELS& TURTLES:
INTERNATIONAL SHORTS
Short films from Germany, Belgium, Australia, Canada, and the U.S. (Music
Box, 2:30)
THE LOVE OF THREE
ORANGES
* See listing under Friday, October 8. (Music Box, 2:45)
AFRAID OF
EVERYTHING
Nathalie Richard, who has done superb work with Jacques Rivette and Olivier
Assayas, is the primary reason to see this black-and-white feature from
director-writer David Barker. She plays a Frenchwoman who's been
permanently injured in a car accident and now suffers from agoraphobia,
which effectively traps her in the New York loft where she lives with her
American architect husband. Her beautiful, free-spirited sister turns up,
capturing the attention of the husband and the couple's circle of friends
and intensifying Richard's anguish. The film's ambiguities and off-center
moods are intelligently realized, and the claustrophobia and psychosexual
underpinnings evoke Polanski films of the 60s and 70s (Repulsion,
The Tenant). But ultimately Barker's style drains the life from the
film, making it feel like an academic exercise as it becomes increasingly
inert, emotionally and dramatically. Richard and Sarah Adler, the
impressive young Belgian actress who plays her sister, have some fine
moments together—Richard's face can register a deep range of
responses—but Barker doesn't give their characters the shape and
complexity they deserve. (PZM) (Water Tower upstairs, 3:15)
AN INVITED GUEST
The festival seems to be offering several corny and implausible thrillers
written and directed by African-American filmmakers this year (see
Asunder); presumably there are plenty of available funds for this
sort of hokum, and black male filmmakers are just as capable of providing
it as their white male counterparts. Shot in Columbus, Ohio—though it
might as well be New York or Los Angeles—An Invited Guest stars
Mekhi Phifer as Silk, who contrary to the film's title shows up uninvited
at the house of aspiring screenwriter Howard (Mel Jackson) while he's
working on a script with his two partners. Howard's wife Debbie (Mari
Morrow) has left in a huff because Howard forgot it was their anniversary;
returning later, she finds Silk hustling everyone at poker. She's soon
seduced by the mysterious stranger, and in a scene straight out of
soft-core porn, Silk has his way with her on the kitchen counter. The
adult-film ambience is heightened by the continuous wash of synth music,
which begins to percolate at the slightest hint of danger. The plot
contains so many unbelievable twists that after a while you lose count and
sit back to enjoy the ride, as almost every character is revealed to be a
scheming, duplicitous scumbag. (JK) (Water Tower upstairs, 3:15)
LOVERS
Jean-Marc Barr's Lovers is a Dogma 95 film and therefore was made
according to certain "naturalistic" rules: it was shot on location with a
handheld camera, doesn't contain any music or sound effects added in
postproduction, doesn't use special lights or filters. Yet there's no rule
about realism in the script—two of the most famous Dogma 95 movies,
The Idiots and The Celebration, boast insanely
convoluted baroque happenings at their centers. Which makes it even
stranger that Barr should have chosen for his first film a bland-as-pabulum
love story about a French girl (Elodie Bouchez) who works in a bookstore
and a Yugoslavian painter (Sergei Trifumovic) in Paris without a visa, or
that he should have chosen to have his actors speak English, which both do
with sufficient clarity but without warmth or color. Barr—yet another
actor turned director; he was in Breaking the Waves—seems to
have no handle on this story. His camera lacks energy and perspective: it
neither traces the mad arabesques of an amour fou nor records the
restlessness of cohabitation; instead it seems content to listlessly follow
the pedestrian characters in their desultory meanderings—on some
principle of reality for reality's sake. This is a film of washed-out
colors, washed-out action, and washed-out actors. Way before Dogma 95, Andy
Warhol and Paul Morrissey did this kind of direct take on life a hell of a
lot better, even if they sometimes resorted to tripods. (RS) (Water Tower
downstairs, 4:15)
ALONE
Winner of the Panorama audience award at the Berlin film festival, Benito
Zambrano's first feature follows a mother and her pregnant daughter who
leave their village in southern Spain for the city. (Water Tower
downstairs, 4:45)
PATHS IN THE NIGHT
* German director Andreas Kleinert's Paths in the Night is a
far more striking, magisterial work than In the Name of Innocence,
his fest entry two years ago. Shot by Jürgen Jürges in stark, velvety black
and white, Paths looks like the bleak, angst-ridden films Werner
Herzog used to make and Hungarians still do—the hero's face is a
landscape of pain that resembles the barren industrial wastelands to which
he seems magnetically drawn. Walter was once powerful in some unspecified
way—a get-together of former colleagues has an eerily familiar sinister
aura, as if all ghosts of past German power, Nazi or Stasi, take on the
same whispery creepiness—but he's now unemployed. His need to do
something worthwhile, to serve order and a higher good, drives him to
patrol the subways with a young punk kid and his sister—the children he
never had—dispensing summary justice by siccing them on skinheads
caught in the act of terrorizing others. The buildup to the tragic ending
is magnificent, but it goes on a little too long, venturing into a
jewelry-store heist that's generically unfocused. Kleinert has always been
extraordinary with actors, and he gets a fine performance from Hilmar Thate
as Walter. But Kleinert strikes his truest tragic note in the figure of
Walter's wife (Cornelia Schmaus), the emotional fulcrum of the film, the
luminous promise of life waiting for her husband just outside the arbitrary
desolation of his mind. (RS) (Water Tower upstairs, 4:30)
NEW DAWN
* The striking originality of New Dawn, Emilie Deleuze's
auspicious debut film, lies in its depiction of work—we get to watch a
bunch of men learn how to operate heavy machinery. There are few things
seen less on-screen than what people do for a living—unless of course
they're cops. Alain (Samuel Le Bihan) is no cop. At the film's opening he
has what many would consider a dream job, as a video-games tester ("You get
paid for that?" asks an awestruck young messenger). But Alain chucks his
upscale high-tech position and heads to the unemployment office, where he
enrolls in the most change-of-pace job conceivable—a 16-week bulldozer
training program miles from the comforts of Paris. His wife and
four-year-old daughter are understandably less than thrilled at his
impulsive adoption of downward mobility. As his family drifts away, Alain,
slightly ill at ease in the rowdy industrial boot camp, is pulled into an
amazingly ambiguous quasi-big-brother, quasi-homosexual relationship with a
belligerently touchy kid whose passionate knowledge of the types of digging
engines is matched by his hopeless ineptitude at handling them. Deleuze
filmed at an actual training site using many of its personnel and trainees,
and the interactions between them and her stars subtly read as class and
culture shock. New Dawn is extraordinary in depicting the complexity
of class and gender myths surrounding work and the complexity of one man's
emotional response to them. (RS) (Music Box, 4:45)
THEME: MURDER
Martha Swetzoff's hour-long documentary is a troubling meditation on the
emotional repercussions of her father's unsolved murder. A prominent art
dealer in Boston during the 1950s and '60s, Hyman Swetzoff was beaten to
death in his apartment by an assailant who was probably known to him.
Hoping to find some answers to a mystery that has shadowed her for 30
years, Swetzoff sets out to interview her father's friends and
acquaintances as well as detectives assigned to the case—and comes up
with an increasingly unsettling series of revelations about her father's
life. There are no emotional fireworks here, no cathartic TV newsmagazine
resolutions. But it's precisely the growing sense of ambiguity and the
painful realization that she may never find the emotional closure she hopes
for that makes this such a haunting work. (RP) (Music Box, 5:15)
TREASURE ISLAND
* Scott King uses several Chicago theater actors in this visually
striking, formally ambitious first feature about spies trying to cripple
Japan's intelligence operations during World War II. Two American
cryptographers at a fictional San Francisco naval base are composing
correspondence about the identity of a corpse, in an elaborate campaign
intended to persuade the Japanese that they've uncovered valuable American
intelligence. As a narrative, the film can be frustratingly opaque and
peculiar—there's a succession of scenes that seem fundamentally at odds
with one another and never quite coalesce into a coherent whole. But as a
work of imagination it's impressive, showcasing King's inventive use of
spatial and temporal rhythms and diagonal framing and evolving into a
fascinating, trenchant portrait of the time and culture as it explores
racism, xenophobia, aberrant sexuality, nationalism, and honor. The acting,
especially by leads Lance Baker and Nick Offerman, is strong,
unconventional, and deeply compelling. King shot the beautifully textured
black-and-white images, which are wonderfully complemented by the editing
and production design. Not a complete success, but this film's ambition
puts a lot of American independent cinema to shame. (PZM) (Water Tower
upstairs, 5:15)
SARA AMERIKA
A story about four people in Berlin after the dismantling of the Berlin
Wall, directed by Roland Suso Richter. (Water Tower upstairs, 6:00)
IT ALL STARTS TODAY
Bertrand Tavernier's unconventional, absorbing new feature laments our lack
of social responsibility. Lean, mesmerizing Philippe Torreton (Captain
Conan) is the charismatic director of an ambitious kindergarten in
bleak northern France. He and his highly motivated staff work tirelessly to
stimulate the children's curiosity, but their work is hampered by the
parents' poverty, alcoholism, and physical and sexual abuse. Tavernier
gives the children vivid, sharply delineated voices; working with a largely
nonprofessional cast, he strips bare the characters' frailty but grants
them a decency and honesty that redeems them despite the mounting hardships
and tragedies. Unfortunately, the succession of verbal confrontations
between the director and the traumatized community—parents, local
politicians, ineffective social workers—threatens to reduce the film to
a social policy primer, a problem alleviated somewhat by Torreton's
electric performance. The standout cinematography is by the great Alain
Choquart. (PZM) (Water Tower downstairs, 6:45)
LOVING JEZEBEL
* See listing above under this date. (Water Tower upstairs, 7:00)
THE PERSONALS
See listing under Friday, October 8. (Music Box, 7:00)
WHO ELSE IF NOT US
This Russian feature directed by Valery Priemykhov is a good example of a
mediocre foreign film that's worth seeing because of what it shows us about
the country it's set in. Two Russian youths from the sticks loot a
department store in Moscow and head back home on a raft; one of them gets
caught and sent to prison for a year. The performances are variable, the
lip sync is lousy, the story less than enthralling. I also didn't warm to
the disco version of Albinoni heard on the sound track or the hokey use of
slow motion. But the opening sequence, set in a huge and opulent shopping
mall where the boys encounter a drag queen, made my jaw drop, giving me an
image of Moscow that contradicted most of what I imagined about the place,
and other details of contemporary Russian life kept me interested most of
the way through. (JR) (Water Tower downstairs, 7:00)
AFRAID OF
EVERYTHING
See listing above under this date. (Water Tower upstairs, 7:30)
AMERICAN HOLLOW
Rory Kennedy is the youngest child of Robert Kennedy (she was getting
married on the day of the fatal John Kennedy Jr. crash), and her
compassionate, leftist documentaries are a testament to her father's final
days. For American Hollow she spent months living in the ramshackle
Appalachian homestead of her salt-of-the-earth protagonist, Iree Bowling,
the 68-year-old matriarch of a sprawling hillbilly clan of 13 grown
children and 30 grandchildren. They have no plumbing, little education, and
little money; they drink and get sent to jail. But they have humor,
fortitude, and family togetherness. If a Bowling gets in trouble, another
Bowling will be there. It's a great story, told with feeling and humanity.
In the finest episode a teenage Bowling falls madly in love with a local
girl and plans to marry her. When she ditches him, his young mother gives
him a shoulder to bawl on. (GP) (Music Box, 7:30)
DREAMING OF JOSEPH
LEES
See listing under Friday, October 8. (Water Tower upstairs, 8:45)
NIGHT SHAPES
The pope is coming to Berlin, and amid the traffic jams of pilgrims, three
sets of characters try to find some happiness during one long night at the
end of the millennium. Peschke, a middle-aged executive eclipsed by the
young guns at his company, mistakes a young Angolan boy for a thief;
eventually he discovers that the boy is mute and lost, and his attempts to
locate the boy's friends lead him into an all-night odyssey. The other two
stories are less successful but are aided by strong, nuanced performances.
In one a lonely bumpkin hires a young, drug-addicted prosititute as his
companion for a night on the town; apparently he's seen Pretty Woman
too many times, and he tries to "save" her, but she's not interested. In
the other Hanna and Victor are a homeless couple with some stolen money;
they dream of spending the night in a luxury hotel but instead face
prejudice and disillusionment. (LG) (Music Box, 9:15)
SET ME FREE
The films of Montreal director Lea Pool (Straight Through the Heart,
Movements of Desire) are strikingly personal essays that frequently
explore the emotional consequences of female sexuality. Her courageous new
film is clearly autobiographical, investigating her traumatic family life,
her emerging sexuality, and her discovery of film while growing up in the
early 60s. From its opening image— 13-year-old Hanna (Karine Vanasse)
submerged in a vast body of water—the movie captures the struggle and
heartbreak of a young girl on the cusp of adulthood. Hanna's emotional and
intellectual growth are stymied by a contentious home life: her father
(Miki Manojlovic), a Polish Jew, is too busy revising a collection of
poetry to keep his family fed and housed, and the never-ending economic
crises have devastated Hanna's fragile mother (Pascale Bussieres), a French
Catholic who must submerge her own ambition and artistry to work as a
seamstress. Hanna derives her notions of power and pleasure from the
cinema, turning repeatedly to Godard's My Life to Live (1962), with
its radiant performance by Anna Karina. Pool has trouble adequately
developing two prominent plotlines—Hanna's strong identification with
her teacher (Nancy Huston) and her sexual attraction to a classmate
(Charlotte Christeler)—and at one point seems to suggest a possible
incestuous relationship between Hanna and her sympathetic, playful older
brother (Alexandre Merineau), though she backs away from it. But Vanasse's
intense, graceful, and unaffected performance carries the film over the
rough spots; she confidently evokes Hanna's volatility and tension, her
need for independence and personal expression balanced against a larger
search for emotional solidity. (PZM) (Water Tower downstairs, 9:15)
THE CARRIERSARE
WAITING
* See listing under Friday, October 8. (Water Tower upstairs,
9:15)
ASUNDER
Obsession and deception are the principal themes explored in Tim Reid's
hybrid thriller. Hybrid films can be intriguing if they successfully blend
the conventions of different genres, but unfortunately Reid's attempts fall
way short of the mark. Initially he seems to be trying to say something
about coping with the sudden loss of a spouse, but then the film unravels
into a mess of clumsy cliches and hokey plot twists. Chanoe Williams (Blair
Underwood) is grieving for his pregnant wife, who was killed in a freak
accident at an amusement park. He becomes increasingly fixated on the
beautiful wife (Debbi Morgan) of his best friend (Michael Beach), but his
motives never become clear, and what we know of his psychology is
unconvincing. Lacking any discernible complexity and not particularly
likable, Reid's characters don't generate much sympathy. (JK) (Water Tower
upstairs, 9:30)
LOVERS
See listing above under this date. (Water Tower downstairs, 9:30)
CREATURE
See listing under Friday, October 8. (Music Box, 9:45)
SUNDAY
 OCTOBER
ANIMATION NATIONS
Animated shorts from Ireland, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Norway,
the U.S., Canada, and Australia. (Music Box, 11:30 AM)
SARA AMERIKA
See listing under Saturday, October 9. (Water Tower upstairs, 12:45)
THE TOWN
See listing under Friday, October 8. (Water Tower downstairs, 1:15)
BELFAST, MAINE
* The last, best, and longest (247 minutes) of the films I saw at
the Locarno film festival this year, Frederick Wiseman's patient unpacking
of a small town in Maine confirms the impression of his previous
masterpiece, Public Housing: that the masterful documentarian of
High School (1968) and Welfare (1975) has now become a
masterful essayist. Or maybe he's been an essayist all along but has lately
begun exercising his intelligence and organizing his documentary materials
in increasingly subtle and nondidactic ways. What seems different and
special about his recent work is its avoidance of easy theses. He picked as
his subject this seaside community of 6,000 inhabitants, 99 percent of them
white, because he lived a few miles away. He explains his approach as
follows: "To document both change and continuity brought about by economic
pressure on everyday life in Belfast, I examine its institutions and
everyday practices. I also take a look at places where people interact:
family life, commerce, public services, and public places." My favorite
scene is a high school teacher's brilliant lecture on Moby-Dick that
throws a great deal of light on everything else, but a lot of what I
remember most vividly is the documentation of the daily work involved in
preparing and packaging seafood—none of it boring to watch. This will
eventually turn up on PBS, but a big screen gives it the monumentality and
weight it deserves. (JR) (Music Box, 1:30)
AMERICAN HOLLOW
See listing under Saturday, October 9. (Music Box, 1:45)
ASUNDER
See listing under Saturday, October 9. (Water Tower downstairs, 1:45)
HARMONIUM INMY
MEMORY
See listing under Friday, October 8. (Water Tower upstairs, 1:45)
SET ME FREE
See listing under Saturday, October 9. (Water Tower upstairs, 2:15)
AFTER THE TRUTH
In Roland Suso Richter's German feature, a Nazi functionary at Auschwitz,
long believed dead, reappears, surrenders to the authorities,
and—represented by a young, ambitious lawyer—tells his version of
what happened. (Water Tower upstairs, 3:15)
IT ALL STARTS TODAY
See listing under Saturday, October 9. (Water Tower downstairs, 3:15)
CREATURE
See listing under Friday, October 8. (Music Box, 4:00)
JUHA
* When I heard that Aki Kaurismaki—the Rainer Werner Fassbinder
of Finland and the crowned prince of acerbic camp and working-class
melancholia—was making a silent black-and-white feature, the fourth
version of Juhani Aho's 1911 novel, I expected something arch and
postmodernist. Yet in spite of a few flashes of mordant humor, some
wonderfully spare sound effects, and a few minimalist lighting schemes that
suggest 50s Hollywood, this is a moving pastiche whose strength is its
sincerity and authenticity rather than its taste for irony and anachronism.
A fallen-woman story set in the present, featuring a farm couple and an
evil playboy from the city who lures the wife away, it conveys the sort of
purity and innocence associated with silent cinema storytelling, including
a love of nature and animals, a taste for stark melodrama, and an emotional
directness in the acting (Kaurismaki regular Kati Outinen is especially
effective)—evocative at various times of Griffith in the teens and
Murnau in the 20s. Accompanied by a live orchestra at the Berlin film
festival, the film is now furnished with a music track featuring the same
score and musicians that's essential to its power. No other film by
Kaurismaki has affected me as much as this one, but if you don't love
silent movies it may come across as a pointless exercise. (JR) (Water Tower
upstairs, 4:00)
LOVING JEZEBEL
* See listing under Saturday, October 9. (Water Tower upstairs,
4:15)
THAT'S THE WAYI LIKE
IT
A 20-year-old Bruce Lee fan in 1977 Singapore who lives with his parents
and works at a grocery store discovers disco when he sees a local spin-off
of Saturday Night Fever. He sees the movie again and again, and is
inspired to enter a dance contest with a childhood friend as his partner.
Written and directed by Glen Goei. (Water Tower downstairs, 4:15)
AN INVITED GUEST
See listing under Saturday, October 9. (Water Tower upstairs, 6:00)
MINAZUKI
See listing under Saturday, October 9. (Water Tower downstairs, 6:00)
RAISE THE HEART!
See listing under Friday, October 8. (Water Tower upstairs, 6:00)
THE LOVE OFTHREE
ORANGES
* See listing under Friday, October 8. (Music Box, 6:00)
MOLOCH
* Alexander Sokurov's other recent features—Stone,
Whispering Pages, Mother and Son—have extremely
aggressive styles and simple, often reactionary contents. Here the subject
is a day in the life of Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler, at Hitler's mountain
retreat in late spring 1942, and the film strives, with some success, to be
believable, making it more than simply rhetorical or bombastic (despite the
mythical opening in which a naked Braun, played by Elena Rufanova, dances
and cavorts on the huge terraces of a fortress in the clouds—not quite
Leni Riefenstahl, but suggestive of her manner). The script is by Sokurov's
usual screenwriter, Yuri Arabov, and it was shot in Germany with theater
actors from Saint Petersburg who were subsequently dubbed by Germans
(including Eva Mattes as Eva Braun); the central characters also include
Joseph and Magda Goebbels, Martin Bormann, and a priest. Sokurov's films
usually project moods and emotions, but this one mainly provokes thoughts
and reflections. Sokurov has noted that he used Braun largely as a
distancing and demystifying lens for viewing Hitler: "I couldn't love him,
and that's why I needed somebody [Eva] to love him. Otherwise it would have
been impossible to discern him: you can't see anything black against a
black background." (JR) (Water Tower upstairs, 6:15)
ALONE
See listing under Saturday, October 9. (Water Tower downstairs, 6:15)
AN EVENING WITHRAY
HARRYHAUSEN
One of the festival's five tributes, and probably the only festival event
designed for special-effects addicts. Born in 1920, Harryhausen was
inspired by King Kong to develop stop-motion animation techniques
that led first to work on George Pal's Puppetoon shorts and eventually, in
the late 40s, to assisting Willis O'Brien on the effects of Mighty Joe
Young; later came SF and fantasy films ranging from Earth vs. the
Flying Saucers to Cy Endfield's Mysterious Island, as well as
two features showing separately at this festival, Jason and the
Argonauts and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. This program will
include both clips and demonstrations. (JR) (Music Box, 7:00)
BIG WHEELS, ANGELS& TURTLES:
INTERNATIONAL SHORTS
See listing under Saturday, October 9. (Music Box, 8:15)
THE DREAM CATCHER
See listing under Friday, October 8. (Water Tower upstairs, 8:15)
NIGHT SHAPES
See listing under Saturday, October 9. (Water Tower upstairs, 8:30)
THE WISDOM OF
CROCODILES
See listing under Friday, October 8. (Water Tower upstairs, 8:30)
TRAIN OF LIFE
Another Holocaust fable that, like Schindler's List and Life Is
Beautiful, insists on moral uplift and historical evasion. Train of
Life was filmed before Life Is Beautiful, and director and
screenwriter Radu Mihaileanu had originally intended to cast Roberto
Benigni in the crucial role of a village idiot in central Europe in 1941
who devises an ingenious plot to escape the wrath of the Nazis—building
a fake deportation train. The humor here is woven more freely into the
narrative than in Life Is Beautiful; the Jewish tailor responsible
for fashioning the Nazi uniforms is particularly sharp and expressive. The
best passages show Jewish life and culture—the music, daily rituals,
and emotional rhythms, which have an understated beauty the balance of the
film never captures—conveying a strong, convincing sense of what was
lost. Shot in part by Yorgos Arvanitis, Theo Angelopoulos's great
cinematographer, the film is far more visually accomplished than Life Is
Beautiful, but it uses the same sort of emotional manipulation to turn
the Holocaust into farce. (PZM) (Water Tower downstairs, 8:30)
LOVERS
See listing under Saturday, October 9. (Water Tower downstairs, 8:45)
THE LETTER
* This doesn't approach the achievement of Manoel de Oliveira's
previous feature, Inquietude, the highlight of last year's festival
and my favorite film of 1998. But the 34th film of Portugal's greatest
filmmaker maintains his usual cool audacity, fearlessly courting absurdity
at every turn. Now that he's in his early 90s—making him the only
living filmmaker who worked before the coming of sound—you might say
he's entitled to his dry conceptual wit; but this wasn't the position of
the members of the American press at Cannes when The Letter won the
jury prize, many of whom seemed scandalized. An adaptation of Madame de La
Fayette's classic 1678 novel about court intrigue and unrequited love,
La princesse de Cleves, transplanted into contemporary European high
society and played out in designer clothes, it simply and brutally
juxtaposes two eras 300 years apart to elicit not easy laughs but
sustained, amused disbelief. The heroine, suffering stoically in a
passionless arranged marriage, is not so much played as embodied by Chiara
Mastroianni—whose mother (Catherine Deneuve) was cast in de Oliveira's
The Convent and whose father (Marcello Mastroianni) was in his
Journey to the Beginning of the World. Even less acted is the object
of her concealed love and lust, the famous Portuguese pop singer Pedro
Abrunhosa, imperturbably playing himself as an incongruous stand-in for the
duke of Nemours. Most of the action is summarized in long intertitles,
leaving de Oliveira free to ponder the imponderable with his usual
aristocratic distance and patience. (JR) (Music Box, 9:00)
MONDAY
 OCTOBER
AFTER THE TRUTH
See listing under Sunday, October 10. (Water Tower upstairs, 3:30)
THE LETTER
* See listing under Sunday, October 10. (Water Tower upstairs,
3:45)
JUHA
* See listing under Sunday, October 10. (Water Tower upstairs,
4:00)
NEW DAWN
* See listing under Saturday, October 9. (Water Tower downstairs,
4:00)
WHO ELSE IF NOT US
See listing under Saturday, October 9. (Water Tower downstairs, 4:00)
PATHS IN THE NIGHT
* See listing under Saturday, October 9. (Water Tower upstairs,
6:00)
SARA AMERIKA
See listing under Saturday, October 9. (Music Box, 6:00)
TRAIN OF LIFE
See listing under Sunday, October 10. (Water Tower upstairs, 6:00)
WHO ELSE IF NOT US
See listing under Saturday, October 9. (Water Tower downstairs, 6:00)
IN THE RYE
See listing under Saturday, October 9. (Water Tower upstairs, 6:15)
AMERICAN HOLLOW
See listing under Saturday, October 9. (Music Box, 6:15)
MINAZUKI
See listing under Saturday, October 9. (Water Tower downstairs, 6:15)
THE TOWN
See listing under Friday, October 8. (Water Tower upstairs, 6:15)
ASUNDER
See listing under Saturday, October 9. (Water Tower upstairs, 8:15)
UNDER THE SUN
A middle-aged male virgin advertises for a housekeeper, and a beautiful
mysterious blond turns up; a Swedish feature directed by Colin Nutley.
(Water Tower upstairs, 8:15)
WAIT AND SEE
Influential Japanese director Shinji Somai focuses his signature style of
dispassionate long takes on a subject that has preoccupied much of recent
Japanese cinema—the seismic effects of widespread economic recession on
family life. On the surface nothing has changed—all the exquisitely
apposite trappings of 80s affluence seem serenely in place. The young head
of the household, whose success in the corporate world has allowed him to
marry into money, has even added a quaintly eccentric touch: a couple of
chickens in the backyard, a nod to his rustic roots perhaps, or maybe only
something warm and living to counter the suburban sterility. He seems nice
enough—loving and attentive to his child, polite to the point of
blandness with his wife and mother-in-law. Into this life of careful
civility comes his long-lost, presumed dead father, whose drunken
earthiness alternately seduces (unlike his son the suit, this kimono-clad
throwback is handy around the house) and appalls (he sneaks around to peep
at the mother-in-law bathing). Unable to cope with this sudden intrusion
from the past, the young man finds himself equally unequipped to deal with
the future. The investment company for which he works is on the verge of
bankruptcy, but old habits of corporate fealty keep him from taking his
colleagues' advice and deserting the sinking ship. Somai is good at
maintaining surface tension, and the very absence of immediate emotional
release makes the film's unexpectedly upbeat finale really pay off. (RS)
(Water Tower downstairs, 8:15)
HUMANITY
* The most disputed and reviled of the prizewinners at Cannes, this
brave, ambitious, difficult, and highly memorable second feature by
regional French filmmaker Bruno Dumont, shot in his hometown (as was his
previous The Life of Jesus), follows the police investigation of a
rape and murder. The two-and-a-half-hour story sticks mainly to an oddball
detective's assistant who lives with his mother and often hangs out with a
neighbor he silently loves and her loutish boyfriend. Dumont clearly views
this anguished sad sack as a Dostoyevskian hero, though the stylization of
the character is sometimes more than he can handle—whatever Dumont is,
he's no Tarkovsky, much less a Bresson, and a scene in which his hero
levitates suggests he's no Pasolini either. Still, I was held and often
moved by the mulish persistence of the slow pacing, the precise and
sensuous grasp of the locations, and the brute physiognomy of some of the
characters (especially the neighbor and the hero's boss), the like of which
I've never seen in movies before. Critics have called this dull and ugly,
the hero laughably pathetic (one even insists he's retarded), and the plot
and style ridiculous—precisely my reaction to For Love of the
Game and other slick Hollywood atrocities. I'd gladly see
Humanity many more times, because it has a singular vision of the
world, a great deal of conviction, and depths of feeling that are at times
almost equal to its pretensions. (JR) (Music Box, 8:30)
NIGHT SHAPES
See listing under Saturday, October 9. (Water Tower upstairs, 8:30)
FROM THE EDGE OF THE
CITY
A skillful first feature written and directed by Constantinos Giannaris
that displays a complicated understanding of cultural displacement and
alienation. He trains his camera (some of the florid visual designs are too
much) on a group of angry, rude, tough young Russians of Greek descent from
the coast of the Black Sea who live in a forlorn, economically ravaged
neighborhood in western Athens and, without judgment, follows them as they
cruise, hang out, and engage in petty thefts. Acknowledging their
camaraderie and shared deprivation, Giannaris shows how being outside the
established order and communal solidarity of native-born Greeks has turned
them into hustlers and criminals. The drama hangs on the developing
consciousness of the smart, tactful leader Sasha, who realizes that their
longing for escape and adventure is almost certainly a prelude to disaster.
The material and themes may be familiar, but Giannaris's impressionistic,
unsparing storytelling gives them a pungent, raw immediacy. (PZM) (Water
Tower downstairs, 8:45)
THEME: MURDER
See listing under Saturday, October 9. (Music Box, 9:00)
TUESDAY
 OCTOBER
UNDER THE SUN
See listing under Monday, October 11. (Water Tower upstairs, 3:30)
FROM THE EDGE OF THE
CITY
See listing under Monday, October 11. (Water Tower downstairs, 3:45)
MOLOCH
* See listing under Sunday, October 10. (Water Tower upstairs,
6:00)
TWO STREAMS
See listing under Friday, October 8. (Water Tower downstairs, 6:00)
SET ME FREE
See listing under Saturday, October 9. (Water Tower upstairs, 6:15)
THE UNSPOKEN
A former resident of a psychiatric hospital encounters a scorned woman at
an abandoned motel, and they negotiate an unspoken, intriguingly primitive
relationship that's interrupted when his mother shows up with a minister
and a mission: she intends to make sure her son fulfills a destiny
suggested in flashbacks to his childhood, when her spiritual fervor both
inspired and tormented him. Despite the expressive power of the
cinematography (by Rob Sweeney, Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day),
the rhapsodic art direction, and a rare restraint in the use of close-ups
and point-of-view shots, this hollow parable suffers from archness. The
ideas about fanaticism and maternal abuse overwhelm the symbolic imagery
instead of being supported by it, leaving the story symbol heavy yet
remarkably free of subtext. Director Frederick Marx (who produced and
edited Hoop Dreams) wrote the screenplay with Steven Ivcich. With
Sergei Shnirev, Martie Sanders, Harry Lennix, and Laura Hughes. (LA) (Music
Box, 6:15)
WAIT AND SEE
See listing under Monday, October 11. (Water Tower downstairs, 6:15)
THE LETTER
* See listing under Sunday, October 10. (Water Tower upstairs,
6:30)
PUNITIVE DAMAGE
A documentary from New Zealand by Annie Goldson about the current tragedy
in East Timor as seen through the struggle of Helen Todd, mother of slain
human rights activist Kamal Todd, against the Indonesian government and
military officials responsible for her son's death. (Music Box, 7:15)
AN INVITED GUEST
See listing under Saturday, October 9. (Water Tower upstairs, 8:15)
AFTER THE TRUTH
See listing under Sunday, October 10. (Water Tower upstairs, 8:30)
FROM THE EDGE OF THE
CITY
See listing under Monday, October 11. (Water Tower downstairs, 8:30)
NOT OF THIS WORLD
This is a film of muted colors—of grays and blues and beiges—and of
equally muted emotions. There are no grand gestures or dramatic
revelations, yet in its own understated way, Giuseppe Piccioni's Milanese
character study shows how the possibility of change can hit you like a ton
of bricks. A stunned jogger stumbles on a sweater-wrapped baby in a park,
drops it into the arms of a passing nun, and scurries off, his part in any
potential drama over. But for the nun, who's on the verge of taking her
final vows, and for the man who owns the sweater, the commedia has
just begun. An odd friendship develops between the nun, whose fierce
attachment to someone else's baby puts her vocation in question, and the
putative father, an uptight owner of a dry-cleaning shop who can't even
remember the names of the handful of girls who work for him. But this isn't
a couple film. There's the story of the baby's mother, and of her
ex-boyfriend the cop, and her new job in a restaurant, and her fellow
waiters and waitresses, and the diners in the restaurant, etc, etc.
Scattered through the free-form interactions are time-arresting group
poses—of nuns, workers, friends, families—that put main characters,
secondary characters, incidental characters, and even total strangers in
temporary social clusters that chart the film's curiously collectivistic
journey. It's a trip worth taking. (RS) (Water Tower upstairs, 8:45)
POST MORTEM
In this first feature by Louis Belanger, Linda is leading a double life: by
day she's a loving mother to her five-year-old daughter Charlotte, and by
night she's a thief, preying on wealthy men willing to have sex with her.
Ghislain is a lonely middle-aged man who works in a morgue; through the
strangest of circumstances, his path crosses Linda's and he has the
opportunity, in a manner of speaking, to save her life. Belanger seems in
part to be working the same territory as Claude Chabrol, but while Belanger
is adept at portraying some of the sinister forces behind the human
condition, he doesn't have the mastery to do this material justice. For
this drama to engage the viewer, there has to be some sympathy for
Ghislain, and while Gabriel Arcand's understated performance is
fascinatingly creepy, he isn't very engaging. There's only a slight frisson
generated late in the story between Ghislain and Charlotte, and while this
isn't really the point of the film, more of this relationship would have
helped make things interesting. (JK) (Water Tower downstairs, 8:45)
JUHA
* See listing under Sunday, October 10. (Water Tower upstairs,
9:00)
PUBLIC ENEMY
The lives of four former Black Panther members are examined in this
French-produced documentary directed by Jens Meurer. Poet and teacher Jamal
Joseph, professor Kathleen Cleaver, musician Nile Rodgers, and Black
Panther cofounder Bobby Seale reminisce about their involvement with the
movement in the 1960s and reflect on how their lives have changed since.
The four are also shown at work on current projects, as well as educating
the public about the history of the Panthers. While pieces of this material
are interesting, the film never really digs into some of the more
compelling issues raised by its subjects. Rodgers, now an extrmely wealthy
record producer, worries about having sold out; Joseph, the most insightful
and astute interviewee, asks the central question that seems to haunt all
four participants: "Was it worth it?" The film is so enamored of its
subjects it opts for just fuzzy nostalgia. Viewers who have some historical
background in the Black Panthers might enjoy the film, but those seeking a
good introduction or deeper insight into the movement should probably look
elsewhere. (RP) (Music Box, 9:15)
WEDNESDAY
 OCTOBER
LEA'S STORY
A single mother (Vilma Santos) who works at a women's crisis center and has
been abandoned by the fathers of both her kids finds romance, only to be
threatened by charges of neglect when the fathers return. Chito S. Rono
directed this Filipino feature. (Water Tower downstairs, 3:00)
POST MORTEM
See listing under Tuesday, October 12. (Water Tower downstairs, 3:15)
NOT OF THIS WORLD
See listing under Tuesday, October 12. (Water Tower upstairs, 3:45)
THE CRIMINAL OF BARRIO
CONCEPCION
Shot on a shoestring by first-time director Lav Diaz, The Criminal of
Barrio Concepcion focuses on lowly, devoted farmhand Serafin Geronimo
(Raymond Bagatsing in a concentrated performance), a feverish Raskolnikov
in this Filipino adaptation of Crime and Punishment. After a popular
journalist is butchered—one in a series of murders—another
investigative reporter (Angel Aquino) discovers the shell-shocked Serafin
and eventually draws out his painful story. Each act of this rigorously
structured film is marked by a radical shift in genre and tone: it begins
as realist muckraking journalism, excoriating businessmen and politicians
for human-rights violations, then plunges into noir territory as the
guilt-ridden Serafin describes a kidnapping gone wrong. Eventually it
becomes teary melodrama—par for the course for a Filipino
production—when the tables are turned on the ultraconfident journalist.
Diaz's unobtrusive camera style is likely a function of the budget (one
camera broke on the first day of shooting and was never replaced), but he
uses his minimal means to maximum effect. (MP) (Water Tower downstairs,
5:30)
KAZOKU CINEMA
Loosely based on the best-selling novel by Korean-Japanese author Yu Miri,
this film tells the story of a whacked-out Korean family who with some
trepidation allow a film crew to shoot their everyday lives for the purpose
of making a fictionalized documentary. Familial tensions wreak havoc on the
production from the outset. The parents haven't been together for years,
can't stand the sight of each other, and immediately slip back into their
acrid quarreling. Daughter Yoko works as a porn actress and her brother,
Kazuki, apparently suffers from autism. Outbursts from family members
constantly disrupt the proceedings, until it becomes difficult to
distinguish scripted dialogue from cacophonous improvisation. This is
another example of the edgy, confessional cinema that's been gushing forth
from the East lately, especially Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China, and
both North and South Korea. Director Park Chul-soo generates both comedy
and drama from the improbability of capturing reality on film, recalling
both the infamous PBS documentary on the Loud family from the early 70s and
Albert Brooks's excellent Real Life. (JK) (Water Tower upstairs,
6:00)
BOYS DON'T CRY
The true story of Teena Marie Brandon, a young woman from Lincoln,
Nebraska, who inverted her name—to Brandon Teena—and her sexual
identity. Dressing as a boy, she moves to a conservative small town and
falls in with a group of local losers; among them is the sweet, lonely Lana
(Chloe Sevigny, excellent as always) with whom Brandon has a tender sexual
affair. Crisply directed by first-time feature filmmaker Kimberly Peirce,
Boys Don't Cry also reflects the politically savvy, stylistically
adventurous personality of its producer, Christine Vachon (Poison,
Happiness). As Brandon, Hilary Swank (of Beverly Hills 90210)
is an effectively ambiguous presence, with some of the scrubbed naivete of
a Disney protagonist. Ultimately, social defiance leads to tragedy, in a
violent conclusion that makes martyrs of much of the cast. (DK) (Water
Tower upstairs, 6:00)
PUBLIC ENEMY
See listing under Tuesday, October 12. (Music Box, 6:00)
WAIT AND SEE
See listing under Monday, October 11. (Water Tower downstairs, 6:00)
UNDER THE SUN
See listing under Monday, October 11. (Water Tower upstairs, 6:30)
THE THIRD PAGE
A hard-luck story from Turkey—the description makes it sound like a
comedy—about a TV extra who gets mugged. Zeki Demirkubuz directed.
(Music Box, 6:45)
LEA'S STORY
See listing above under this date. (Water Tower downstairs, 8:15)
LOVE WILLTEAR US
APART
The first feature of cinematographer Yu Lik-wai is a sharply etched
portrait of the desperation and longing of four immigrant outsiders
adjusting to the rapidly changing culture of contemporary Hong Kong
following the end of British rule. As storytelling the movie is choppy and
fragmented, but as a succession of images yielding a very specific time and
place, it's potent and compelling. Ah Ying has drifted into petty crime and
prostitution. Ah Jian—who's involved in an unsatisfying relationship
with Ah Yan, a young woman whose promising dance career was halted by
recurring foot injuries—operates a porn shop frequented by Ah Chun, a
morose loner. Their stories never merge into a deeper, fluid whole, but the
social context is admirably developed—Lik-wai's Hong Kong is harsh and
bleak, a place ruled by a Darwinian social order that treats the displaced
and marginalized brutally. The artificial brightness of a 7-Eleven and
understated, ominous images of porn-district squalor underline the
characters' fears, desires, and frustrations in a world with no easy
resolutions. (PZM) (Water Tower downstairs, 8:30)
MY LITTLE BUSINESS
The title refers to a journeyman woodworking shop that's been in the hero's
family for years. So when it goes up in flames early in the film it seems
that not only are the hero's finances at stake but a whole way of life.
He's insured—or he should be, except that his agent, a good buddy, also
happens to be a crook. But with a little help from his friends he can break
into the insurance company and retroactively register his policy. In this
well-paced comic caper movie, veteran director Pierre Jolivet stacks the
deck with the skill of a Reno dealer. The hero is a regular guy who not
only eats, drinks, and jokes with his workers, but even manages to stay
friends with his ex-wife and her live-in Arab boyfriend. The embezzling
villain turns out to be an orphan in search of his Russian roots. The crime
is victimless—who can consider an insurance company a victim? The
actors are superb—funny, believable, and capable of turning any line
into a seemingly spontaneous eruption of Gallic eccentricity. But there's
nothing spontaneous in making a self-congratulatorily craftsmanlike French
indie version of a male-bonding Hollywood action flick. The means of
production may be different, but the macho mentality is the same. It only
proves that whether they're Americans earnestly blowing away bad guys or
French suavely seducing their homely secretaries into taking the fall, boys
will be boys. (RS) (Water Tower upstairs, 8:30)
WILD SIDE:THE DIRECTOR'S
CUT
Three years before committing suicide, Donald Cammell, codirector of
Performance, lost control over the editing of this 1994 feature
about sexual experimentation, loyalty, and betrayal. Editor Frank Mazzola
has put Cammell's version together again, adding footage and altering
practically every sequence. The cast includes Joan Chen, Anne Heche, and
Christopher Walken. On the same program, The Argument, a recently
discovered 1971 short film by Cammell about the nature of filmmaking, shot
by Vilmos Zsigmond. (Music Box, 8:30)
FLY LOW
It sounds like a good idea for a movie: intercutting two separate stories
centering on the same location. In one story, three male youths who've
escaped from an orphanage hide from the authorities in an abandoned
schoolhouse; in the other, three young women who once attended the school
make a sentimental journey there. Like many South Korean films, Kim Sion's
feature is attractively filmed in vibrant colors—a direct or indirect
legacy of the Technicolor equipment purchased long ago from this country,
the kind that's no longer used here—and for the most part the two
stories unfold in markedly different photographic styles. Unfortunately,
neither story is very interesting or compelling apart from its visual
treatment, and when one character from each story meets the other at the
schoolhouse in a brief epilogue, the effect is mainly gratuitous. (JR)
(Music Box, 8:45)
MOLOCH
* See listing under Sunday, October 10. (Water Tower upstairs,
8:45)
VALERIE FLAKE
* Valerie (Susan Traylor) is still reeling from the death of her
husband, though her family thinks she ought to be over it by now. Once a
painter with an academic position, she's started working in an LA grocery
store, where she declines a promotion. After driving her husband's old VW
bus to Palm Springs, she meets Tim (Jay Underwood), who's desperate to
become more than a one-night stand. This darkly comic, exceptionally moving
character study has drama, revelation, and expertly drawn secondary
characters, but its power comes from Traylor's fearless, idiosyncratic
performance and a deeply expressionist production design that makes nearly
every object as evocative as the desert landscape where Valerie tries to
paint again. John Putch directed a screenplay by Robert Tilem; with songs
by Kathleen Wilhoite. (LA) (Water Tower upstairs, 9:00)
THURSDAY
 OCTOBER
YESTERDAY CHILDREN
Roman Catholicism and traditional animistic beliefs clash in this
well-intentioned social drama from the Philippines, set in a remote village
during a prolonged drought. Not surprisingly, the natural disaster brings
to the surface a variety of prejudices and reveals the community's
hierarchy of values pertaining to God, man, and nature: a few villagers
seek solace in prayer, but the majority believe that only a sacrificial
virgin can appease the angry gods. Caught in the middle are the village's
children, especially the blind girl and bastard boy subjected to the stern
dictates of superstitious adults. Director Carlos Siguion-Reyna has a keen
eye for psychological detail as well as the spiritual complexity of life in
a rural community. He takes no sides in the religious tug-of-war, revealing
both the moral shortcomings of the church and the animists' vicious cycle
of misogyny. The linear narrative can be fairly predictable but fails to
diminish the clarity of Siguion-Reyna's social observation. (ZB) (Water
Tower upstairs, 4:00)
MY LITTLE BUSINESS
See listing under Wednesday, October 13. (Water Tower upstairs, 4:15)
VALERIE FLAKE
* See listing under Wednesday, October 13. (Water Tower downstairs,
4:15)
LEA'S STORY
See listing under Wednesday, October 13. (Water Tower upstairs, 6:00)
PUPS
This low-budget American movie about kids with guns is nothing if not
topical: it premiered at the LA independent film festival two days before
the Columbine shootings. A disaffected 13-year-old (Cameron Van Hoy), bored
with videotaping his suicide attempts, robs a bank with his girlfriend
because he finds a gun. Director Ash seems fascinated by the sudden ascent
to power and visibility of those who were formerly impotent and invisible
(his previous film, Bang, concerned a knocked-around starlet who
gets a taste of power when she dons a cop's stolen uniform). The kids come
off fairly well. The boy's shrill role-playing reflects both his pubescent
self-consciousness and his uncertainty about his place in society, an
uncertainty further fueled by watching his life unfold on TV through old
home-movie footage and interviews with his friends and neighbors. The girl
(Mischa Barton of Lawn Dogs and The Sixth Sense) is more
graceful in her startling mood transitions, as befits her more passive,
less alienated role. But the adults, hostages in interminable interaction
with the kids and one another, are god-awful, their characters poorly
written and indifferently acted (though Burt Reynolds does a decent if
boring star turn as a caring FBI agent). The waste this represents is
brought home in the one adult-kid interaction that does work—a long,
fascinating interview session between sardonic MTV host Kurt Loder (playing
himself) and the pint-size Bonnie and Clyde wannabes as they try to put
their inchoate desires into words. (RS) (Water Tower downstairs, 6:00)
THE PAST
Ivo Trajkov's feature from the Czech Republic focuses on a man trying to
flee his past. (Water Tower downstairs, 6:00)
PUNITIVE DAMAGE
See listing under Tuesday, October 12. (Water Tower upstairs, 6:15)
CONVERSATIONS WITH GREGORY
PECK
The world premiere of a documentary by Barbara Kopple (Harlan County,
U.S.A., Wild Man Blues) about the movie star, now in his 80s,
telling stories about his career and hanging out with his friends and
family. Peck will be present to receive the festival's Lifetime Achievement
Award. (Music Box, 6:30)
POST MORTEM
See listing under Tuesday, October 12. (Water Tower downstairs, 6:30)
YANA'S FRIENDS
More than a million Soviet Jews have emigrated to Israel during the past
decade, but integrating into Israeli society hasn't been easy for them.
Several good contemporary Israeli fiction films, among them Coffee With
Lemon and The Distance, have poignantly addressed the problems
faced by these immigrants, but Yana's Friends isn't among them.
Written and directed by Arik Kaplun, himself a Russian emigre, this overly
contrived and broadly comic film focuses on a group of immigrants in a Tel
Aviv neighborhood during the gulf war. Yana (played by Kaplun's wife,
Evlyn) is a melancholy blond with a heart-melting smile who's left pregnant
and in debt when her scheming husband absconds to Russia with their
immigration grant money. Her vulnerability and waiflike good looks arouse
the protective and other instincts of her womanizing neighbor Eli. Yana's
story is intercut and gradually connected with that of another newly
arrived couple, vulgar strivers who exploit their wheelchair-bound war-hero
grandfather by parking him, hat in hand, next to a street musician. Yana
and Eli's response to gas masks and sealed rooms may inspire a few laughs,
but this sex-and-death territory too was covered better in other films.
(AS) (Water Tower upstairs, 6:30)
FLY LOW
See listing under Wednesday, October 13. (Music Box, 7:00)
HUMANITY
* See listing under Monday, October 11. (Water Tower upstairs,
8:00)
RATCATCHER
This highly impressive debut feature by Scottish director Lynne Ramsay
extends the visual acuity and emotional power of her astonishing shorts
Small Deaths and Gasman, which were prizewinners at Cannes.
Seeking refuge from his stultifying home life, 12-year-old James Gillespie
(William Eadie) searches for adventure at a nearby canal, where he
befriends Margaret Anne (Leanne Mullen), an emotionally vulnerable,
sexually exploited 14-year-old. Their ensuing relationship is understated
yet emotionally truthful, exploring the full range of their alternately
frightened and exhilarated interior lives. Sometimes Ramsay relies too
heavily on metaphor (the mounting garbage surrounding their economically
ravaged community) to balance out her work, and the children's bleak home
lives are too recognizable from the films of Alan Clarke and Mike Leigh.
But the film becomes almost abstractly beautiful in its final half hour
(the tracking shot that follows James as he runs along the banks is
breathtaking). With its fluent images and sensitivity to mood,
Ratcatcher signals the start of a promising career. (PZM) (Water
Tower downstairs, 8:30)
THE THIRD PAGE
See listing under Wednesday, October 13. (Water Tower upstairs, 8:30)
PEOPLE WHO LOVEEACH
OTHER
Jean-Charles Tacchella (Traveling Avant, Cousin, cousine)
directed this romantic comedy in which a radio announcer (Richard Berry)
narrates the story of his on-again, off-again relationship with a woman
(Jacqueline Bisset) over three decades. (Water Tower downstairs, 8:45)
THE UNSPOKEN
See listing under Tuesday, October 12. (Water Tower upstairs, 8:45)
BOUNCE
* Based on the real-life experience of coproducer and costar Walter
Velasquez, Bounce is a gritty low-budget indie dealing with life in
the South Bronx. Director Adam Watstein met Velasquez while both were
working at a children's after-school sports program; the project was
sparked when Walter's best friend (played in the film by Jamal Mackey) was
gunned down shortly after the two had secured a recording deal. Shot over
the course of a year—four shoots over four seasons—using a skeleton
crew and a nonprofessional cast, Watstein's film is amiably unvarnished.
Some of the acting is uneven, but Watstein gets several arresting
performances from his cast, notably Velasquez and Mackey. Using a
methodology reminiscent of Cassavetes, Watstein initially withheld his
script from the cast during rehearsals, insisting that they articulate a
given scene in their own words before introducing the dialogue he'd
written. The effort has paid off: Bounce is much more successful
than most other films that deal with daily life in the projects. (JK)
(Music Box, 9:15)
BURLESK KING
Mel Chionglo's Filipino feature focuses on the hard life and troubled past
of a "macho dancer" in Manila, the son of an American soldier. (Music Box,
9:30)
FRIDAY
 OCTOBER
KAZOKU CINEMA
Loosely based on the best-selling novel by Korean-Japanese author Yu Miri,
this film tells the story of a whacked-out Korean family who with some
trepidation allow a film crew to shoot their everyday lives for the purpose
of making a fictionalized documentary. Familial tensions wreak havoc on the
production from the outset. The parents haven't been together for years,
can't stand the sight of each other, and immediately slip back into their
acrid quarreling. Daughter Yoko works as a porn actress and her brother,
Kazuki, apparently suffers from autism. Outbursts from family members
constantly disrupt the proceedings, until it becomes difficult to
distinguish scripted dialogue from cacophonous improvisation. This is
another example of the edgy, confessional cinema that's been gushing forth
from the East lately, especially Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China, and
both North and South Korea. Director Park Chul-soo generates both comedy
and drama from the improbability of capturing reality on film, recalling
both the infamous PBS documentary on the Loud family from the early 70s and
Albert Brooks's excellent Real Life. (JK) (Water Tower upstairs,
3:45)
YANA'S FRIENDS
More than a million Soviet Jews have emigrated to Israel during the past
decade, but integrating into Israeli society hasn't been easy for them.
Several good contemporary Israeli fiction films, among them Coffee With
Lemon and The Distance, have poignantly addressed the problems
faced by these immigrants, but Yana's Friends isn't among them.
Written and directed by Arik Kaplun, himself a Russian emigre, this overly
contrived and broadly comic film focuses on a group of immigrants in a Tel
Aviv neighborhood during the gulf war. Yana (played by Kaplun's wife,
Evlyn) is a melancholy blond with a heart-melting smile who's left pregnant
and in debt when her scheming husband absconds to Russia with their
immigration grant money. Her vulnerability and waiflike good looks arouse
the protective (and other) instincts of her womanizing neighbor Eli. Yana's
story is intercut and gradually connected with that of another newly
arrived couple, vulgar strivers who exploit their wheelchair-bound war-hero
grandfather by parking him, hat in hand, next to a street musician. Yana
and Eli's response to gas masks and sealed rooms may inspire a few laughs,
but this sex-and-death territory too has been covered better in other
films. (AS) (Water Tower downstairs, 3:45)
LOVE WILL TEAR US
APART
The first feature of cinematographer Yu Lik-wai is a sharply etched
portrait of the desperation and longing of four immigrant outsiders
adjusting to the rapidly changing culture of contemporary Hong Kong
following the end of British rule. As storytelling the movie is choppy and
fragmented, but as a succession of images yielding a very specific time and
place, it's potent and compelling. Ah Ying has drifted into petty crime and
prostitution. Ah Jian—who's involved in an unsatisfying relationship
with Ah Yan, a young woman whose promising dance career was halted by
recurring foot injuries—operates a porn shop frequented by Ah Chun, a
morose loner. Their stories never merge into a deeper, fluid whole, but the
social context is admirably developed—Lik-wai's Hong Kong is harsh and
bleak, a place ruled by a Darwinian social order that treats the displaced
and marginalized brutally. The artificial brightness of a 7-Eleven and
understated, ominous images of porn-district squalor underline the
characters' fears, desires, and frustrations in a world with no easy
resolutions. (PZM) (Water Tower downstairs, 4:00)
CHECKPOINT
*In Alexander Rogozhkin's excellent microcosmic war film, set
somewhere in the Caucasus (Chechnya's a good guess), a handful of soldiers
are stuck in the middle of a hostile landscape with no clear objective. As
in classic Hollywood rear-guard war pics, each baby-faced recruit is given
a distinguishing mark, a quasi-heraldic emblem—one has a foxtail
affixed to his helmet, one has a dog named Castro, one a pet rat that rides
on his shoulder. At the film's opening they're shot at by the mother of a
little boy who's been killed by a land mine; panicking, they fire back. As
punishment, the patrol is sent to an isolated checkpoint whose sole claim
to military importance seems to be the sniper trying to wipe it out. The
first casualty, the pet rat, receives a solemn funeral and daily roses on
its grave. Basically, these are good kids—clueless but sort of sweet.
They can no more understand the lethal hatred of which they're the object
than the fatal consequences of their own actions. They trade grenades and
bullets for grass or sexual favors, never stopping to think that those same
bullets might be shot back at them. Pissed off at being cheated by a local
villager, they set a booby trap, only to be shocked when it blows off an
old man's hand and kills two sheep. The small-scale intimacy, the
naturalness of the dialogue and performances, the sense of time that
contracts and expands, and the desultory nature of the proceedings make
what's being done to and by these soldiers all the harder to swallow. The
Russian Revolution started as an antiwar movement; it's taken a while for
Russian cinema to return to its roots. (RS) (Water Tower upstairs, 6:15)
NOT OF THIS WORLD
This is a film of muted colors—of grays and blues and beiges—and of
equally muted emotions. There are no grand gestures or dramatic
revelations, yet in its own understated way, Giuseppe Piccioni's Milanese
character study shows how the possibility of change can hit you like a ton
of bricks. A stunned jogger stumbles on a sweater-wrapped baby in a park,
drops it into the arms of a passing nun, and scurries off, his part in any
potential drama over. But for the nun, who's on the verge of taking her
final vows, and for the man who owns the sweater, the commedia has
just begun. An odd friendship develops between the nun, whose fierce
attachment to someone else's baby puts her vocation in question, and the
putative father, an uptight owner of a dry-cleaning shop who can't even
remember the names of the handful of girls who work for him. But this isn't
a couple film. There's the story of the baby's mother, and of her
ex-boyfriend the cop, and her new job in a restaurant, and her fellow
waiters and waitresses, and the diners in the restaurant, etc, etc.
Scattered through the free-form interactions are time-arresting group
poses—of nuns, workers, friends, families—that put main characters,
secondary characters, incidental characters, and even total strangers in
temporary social clusters that chart the film's curiously collectivistic
journey. It's a trip worth taking. (RS) (Water Tower upstairs, 6:30)
VALERIE FLAKE
* Valerie (Susan Traylor) is still reeling from the death of her
husband, though her family thinks she ought to be over it by now. Once a
painter with an academic position, she's started working in an LA grocery
store, where she declines a promotion. After driving her husband's old VW
bus to Palm Springs, she meets Tim (Jay Underwood), who's desperate to
become more than a one-night stand. This darkly comic, exceptionally moving
character study has drama, revelation, and expertly drawn secondary
characters, but its power comes from Traylor's fearless, idiosyncratic
performance and a deeply expressionist production design that makes nearly
every object as evocative as the desert landscape where Valerie tries to
paint again. John Putch directed a screenplay by Robert Tilem; with songs
by Kathleen Wilhoite. (LA) (Water Tower downstairs, 6:30)
GANGLAND
Pegue Gallaga and Lore Rayes directed this Filipino thriller, described as
evocative of Quentin Tarantino, about four boys who join forces against a
drug dealer. (Water Tower downstairs, 7:00)
MY LITTLE BUSINESS
The title refers to a journeyman woodworking shop that's been in the hero's
family for years. So when it goes up in flames early in the film it seems
that not only are the hero's finances at stake but a whole way of life.
He's insured—or he should be, except that his agent, a good buddy, also
happens to be a crook. But with a little help from his friends he can break
into the insurance company and retroactively register his policy. In this
well-paced comic caper movie, veteran director Pierre Jolivet stacks the
deck with the skill of a Reno dealer. The hero is a regular guy who not
only eats, drinks, and jokes with his workers, but even manages to stay
friends with his ex-wife and her live-in Arab boyfriend. The embezzling
villain turns out to be an orphan in search of his Russian roots. The crime
is victimless—who can consider an insurance company a victim? The
actors are superb—funny, believable, and capable of turning any line
into a seemingly spontaneous eruption of Gallic eccentricity. But there's
nothing spontaneous in making a self-congratulatorily craftsmanlike French
indie version of a male-bonding Hollywood action flick. The means of
production may be different, but the macho mentality is the same. It only
proves that whether they're Americans earnestly blowing away bad guys or
French suavely seducing their homely secretaries into taking the fall, boys
will be boys. (RS) (Music Box, 7:00)
SEX, SHAME AND
TEARS
Writer-director Antonio Serrano cut his teeth in the hot-blooded world of
Mexican soap opera; his feature film debut is a slick comedy-drama about
two couples riven by the reappearance of a long-lost love. Ugly duckling
Maria sleeps with hunky, coke-snorting yuppie Tomas despite her sympathy
for his put-upon wife, Ana. Across the street, sex-starved Andrea betrays
intellectual Miguel with free-spirited Carlos. War between the sexes
erupts, and the boys camp out in Miguel's apartment while the girls bunk at
Ana's, the players alternately bickering with and consoling each other and
sneaking over to the other side for more romantic entanglements. True to
his roots, Serrano wants to moralize and titillate at the same time, and
his stereotypical characters' overheated emotions tend to prevent any
narrative consistency. (LG) (Water Tower upstairs, 7:00)
BOUNCE
* Based on the real-life experience of coproducer and costar Walter
Velasquez, Bounce is a gritty low-budget indie dealing with life in
the South Bronx. Director Adam Watstein met Velasquez while both were
working at a children's after-school sports program; the project was
sparked when Walter's best friend (played in the film by Jamal Mackey) was
gunned down shortly after the two had secured a recording deal. Shot over
the course of a year—four shoots over four seasons—using a skeleton
crew and a nonprofessional cast, Watstein's film is amiably unvarnished.
Some of the acting is uneven, but Watstein gets several arresting
performances from his cast, notably Velasquez and Mackey. Using a
methodology reminiscent of Cassavetes, Watstein initially withheld his
script from the cast during rehearsals, insisting that they articulate a
given scene in their own words before introducing the dialogue he'd
written. The effort has paid off: Bounce is much more successful
than most other films that deal with daily life in the projects. (JK)
(Music Box, 7:30)
PUPS
This low-budget American movie about kids with guns is nothing if not
topical: it premiered at the LA independent film festival two days before
the Columbine shootings. A disaffected 13-year-old (Cameron Van Hoy), bored
with videotaping his suicide attempts, robs a bank with his girlfriend
because he finds a gun. Director Ash seems fascinated by the sudden ascent
to power and visibility of those who were formerly impotent and invisible
(his previous film, Bang, concerned a knocked-around starlet who
gets a taste of power when she dons a cop's stolen uniform). The kids come
off fairly well. The boy's shrill role-playing reflects both his pubescent
self-consciousness and his uncertainty about his place in society, an
uncertainty further fueled by watching his life unfold on TV through old
home-movie footage and interviews with his friends and neighbors. The girl
(Mischa Barton of Lawn Dogs and The Sixth Sense) is more
graceful in her startling mood transitions, as befits her more passive,
less alienated role. But the adults, hostages in interminable interaction
with the kids and one another, are god-awful, their characters poorly
written and indifferently acted (though Burt Reynolds does a decent if
boring star turn as a caring FBI agent). The waste this represents is
brought home in the one adult-kid interaction that does work—a long,
fascinating interview session between sardonic MTV host Kurt Loder (playing
himself) and the pint-size Bonnie and Clyde wannabes as they try to put
their inchoate desires into words. (RS) (Water Tower upstairs, 8:30)
1999 MADELEINE
* This is the first episode of Laurent Bouhnik's series "10 films/10
ans," but like the works in Rohmer's and Kieslowski's series, it can stand
on its own. Madeleine (the oddly beautiful Vera Briole), a rather clueless
seamstress, doesn't completely understand what's going on with the unhappy
dressmaker she's working for or with the men she meets through personal ads
or by chance, but she doggedly continues trying to meet
somebody—anybody—believing that love will somehow transform her
gray existence. She's never read E.M. Forster or much of anything else,
except horoscopes and the instructions for the vacuum cleaner she buys
because she's attracted to the salesman, but "only connect" is her motto
nonetheless. In her eyes, even a random groping on the bus might lead to a
relationship. Compulsively watchable and beautifully acted by Briole and
Anouk Aimee, who gives a chilling performance as Madeleine's troubled
mother, this film leaves you satisfied but wanting more. (MB) (Water Tower
downstairs, 8:45)
HEROES IN TYROL
The self-proclaimed "Alpine rock musical," full of singing and belching, is
here. This film by Austrian iconoclast Niki List—known for equally
cheeky productions such as Cafe Malaria and Muller's
Office—spoofs that Teutonic genre, the mountain film. All trace of
finer sensibilities is banished in favor of a glut of gross, easy laughs.
Set in the Alpine equivalent of Dogpatch, the film chronicles the quest of
Max, the cunning local hero with a touch of cretinous stupidity, to win the
hand of coy perennial virgin Emma. But first Max must thwart evil
developers who plan to transform his beloved village into a Tyrolean theme
park. The plentiful goofy musical numbers are, for the most part,
hard-rocking fun. At a screening at Cannes three-quarters of the audience
was out the door after the first round of fart jokes; the remainder had a
whale of a time. (BS) (Water Tower upstairs, 9:00)
EAST IS EAST
Stage is stage and screen is screen and never the twain shall
meet—unless one puts a hell of a lot of thought into it. Unfortunately,
Damien O'Donnell hasn't in his plunked-down-on-celluloid adaptation of Ayub
Khan-Din's London-to-off-Broadway hit comedy East Is East. Om Puri
stars as a Pakistani patriarch in 1971 mod England who realizes late in the
game that his five sons and daughter have slipped beyond his cultural
control. His frantic attempts to bring his swinging brood back to the rigid
standards of Islamic purity that he—the proprietor of a fish-and-chips
shop in Manchester with a salt-of-the-earth English wife of 25
years—has never adhered to himself provide most of the film's
cross-cultural gags and tensions. Puri is a brilliant actor. One has only
to see him in a somewhat similar role in Udayan Prasad's My Son the
Fanatic to realize what he can do with a performance that isn't
pitched, along with everything else in the frame, to the second balcony.
For O'Donnell tones down nothing for the camera. The two girls Puri
arranges to have his middle sons marry aren't merely dutiful sari-wearing
strangers, they're the kind of cross-eyed, bucktoothed caricatures of
feminine unattractiveness that went out with mother-in-law jokes. Up close,
all sorts of stage exaggerations that from a distance might have appeared
dramatic or farcical look cheap and grotesque, with an over-the-top
theatricality that always seems reserved on-screen for gays and ethnic
others. Yet ultimately East Is East is far less insulting to
Pakistanis or Mancunians than it is to its audience. (RS) (Music Box,
9:30)
NOTHING
Dorota Kedzierzawska's first two films, Devils, Devils and
Crows, were popular on the international festival circuit, and it's
easy to see why. She and her trusted cinematographer, Arthur Reinhart,
create almost magical worlds full of tinted imagery and diffused
light—all achieved entirely through imaginative use of the camera.
Kedzierzawska is also rightly praised for her on-screen work with young
children, including many preschoolers. Nothing, her most recent
feature, is a tragic story that centers on an abused wife (Anita
Borkowska-Kuskowska in a powerful performance) who's forced to hide her
pregnancy from her irascible husband and the couple's three young children,
who are deeply affected by their parents' tribulations. The photography is
mesmerizing, but the film's emotional impact is uneven. Much too often
there's an unsettling discord between the beauty of the dreamlike images
and the darkness of the story. (ZB) (Water Tower upstairs, 9:30)
THE STORY OF AH
Joel C. Lamangan directed this Filipino melodrama about a mute woman forced
into a brutal marriage. (Water Tower downstairs, 9:30)
MUTINOUS SHORTS
Short films from the U.S., Switzerland, New Zealand, and Brazil. (Music
Box, 10:00)
SATURDAY
 OCTOBER
HEROES IN TYROL
See listing under Friday, October 15. (Water Tower upstairs, 1:15)
AVE MARIA
* Her mother was Indian, her father a Spanish duke whose wealth and
status enable Maria to live in a mission in New Spain without taking her
vows. There she masters botany, astronomy, and cartography, directing the
monks in making maps of the region. Threatened by her autonomy and anxious
to exploit her father's fortune, the priests put an end to her studies,
nearly driving her insane. But the loss of a secular purpose inspires an
epiphany, and she begins using her knowledge and skill to ease the
suffering of the indigenous people—frustrating the priests and angering
the conquistadores, whose goals are furthered by the spread of disease.
Much of the power of this fictional hagiography, a disarmingly feminist
examination of colonialism that's as intricate visually as it is
thematically, comes from the complexity of the allegorical characters; with
one exception, no one is merely self-interested or selfless. Eduardo
Rossoff directed a screenplay by Camille Thomasson; with Tere Lopez Tarin.
(LA) (Water Tower upstairs, 2:00)
1999 MADELEINE
* See listing under Friday, October 15. (Water Tower downstairs,
2:15)
CHECKPOINT
* See listing under Friday, October 15. (Water Tower downstairs,
2:30)
GAMES & PATTERNS: SHORT FILMS
ABOUT YOUTH
Short films from Mexico, Ireland, India, Korea, and the U.S. (Music Box,
2:45)
THE LOVE OF THREE
ORANGES
* A small gem, this film marks the directorial debut of Taiwanese
writer and theater director Hung Hung, the pen name of Hung-ya Yen. Hung,
who cowrote Edward Yang's A Confucian Confusion and his
extraordinary A Brighter Summer Day, has created a deceptively
simple chamber piece about a love triangle between three young Taipei
residents. JJ (Jiunn-jye Lee), recently back from military service and
unhappily employed delivering pizzas, rekindles a relationship with a
former girlfriend (Angela Ma), only to discover that she's romantically
involved with her female college roommate (Wei-chi Chen). The relationships
are marked by an awkward emotional ambivalence that's rarely acknowledged
by the characters but conveyed wonderfully through Hung's use of space,
framing, and music (a fine original score by Chi-ling Liu). Running just
under an hour, The Love of Three Oranges is a brief snapshot of
intersecting lives that captures the power of unexpressed emotions with
quiet poignancy. (RP) (Music Box, 3:00)
NOTHING
See listing under Friday, October 15. (Water Tower upstairs, 3:00)
EAST IS EAST
See listing under Friday, October 15. (Water Tower upstairs, 3:45)
THE LITTLE GIRL WHO SOLD THE SUN
and LE FRANC
The film world lost a giant when Senegalese master Djibril Diop Mambety
(Touki Bouki, Hyenas) died last year. His final work—the
second short of an unfinished trilogy titled "Tales of Little
People"—is simple but evocative, more fabulistic and less pessimistic
than his features. Sili (Lissa Balera) is a rebellious, paraplegic
ten-year-old who decides to earn a living by hawking the newspaper Le
soleil on the streets of Dakar rather than begging alongside her blind
grandmother. As the only female in the business, she's constantly being
picked on by competing newsie hoodlums, though with help she prevails. In
this beautifully photographed hymn to the courage of street children,
Mambety mixes rural and urban images (persistently returning to a shot of a
skyscraper) to show workers of unequal means in a country that's in the
process of modernizing. Music plays an important role in his vision (the
score is by his younger brother, Wasis Diop), with an occasional dance
scene emphasizing Sili's vibrancy. The film is emblematic of Mambety's
vision of a resourceful, self-reliant, but cooperative Africa that's
antagonistic to the cutthroat competition of the market. (MP) On the same
program, Mambety's Le franc, a 45-minute film from 1994 in which a
penniless musician wins a lottery. Jonathan Rosenbaum writes, "This isn't
up to the level of Mambety's extraordinar |
