European Union Film Festival - Week One
March 5th, 2010 by PatrickThe 13th Annual European Union Film Festival opens Friday, March 5 and runs through Thursday, April 1 at the Gene Siskel Film Center (164 N. State St.).
Below are reviews of selected films playing during week one (Friday, March 5 through Thursday, March 11).
Ian FitzGibbon’s A FILM WITH ME IN IT (Ireland)
Saturday, 9:30pm and Monday, 6pm
A FILM WITH ME IN IT begins as an understated character comedy but slowly reveals itself to be a sinister and unpredictable piece of work. As funhouse narratives go, it’s one of the most satisfying since Takashi Miike’s AUDITION or Spike Jonze’s ADAPTATION, and fans of either film should rush to this without reading any plot summaries beforehand. (A nice thing about seeing movies at festivals is being able to discover them unprejudiced—a condition A FILM rewards in spades.) Writer Mark Doherty stars as a version of himself, an out-of-work actor in the middle of an unlucky streak; popular comic Dylan Moran plays his best friend, an alcoholic writer who’s equally misfortunate. Both men are veterans of BBC comedy—Doherty worked on Armando Ianucci’s “Time Trumpet,” Moran’s starred in the series “Black Books” and a number of stand-up specials—and their performances have a well-read sensibility reminiscent of the Ealing Studio comedies or Bruce Robinson’s WITHNAIL AND I. Director Ian FitzGibbon helms the film unobtrusively (also in the BBC tradition), which grants a steady momentum through the plot twists where a more stylized approach may have bogged them down. Working in HD allows FitzGibbon to better let the material speak for itself, though the medium creates some fine lighting effects during the night scenes. (Think Vermeer painting a Halloween tableau.) It’s worth mentioning, because A FILM WITH ME IN IT is the kind of entertainment that succeeds largely on seamless craftsmanship. And succeed it does. (2008, 87 min, 35mm) – Ben Sachs
Gianni Di Gregorio’s MID-AUGUST LUNCH (Italy)
Saturday, 5:45pm
MID-AUGUST LUNCH is only screening once during the EUFF and, really, it wouldn’t expect anything more. This unassuming, slight comedy concerns a handful of lonely Romans who are too old or too broke to go anywhere nice for their August vacation. Since everyone else has gone to the coast to escape the heat, the streets of Rome are desolate, so when a lone extra walks onto the scene your eye catches him immediately: what is he doing here? Unemployed Gianni (Gianni Di Gregorio) and his elderly mother, under threat of eviction, play host to the elderly mother and aunt of their landlord and the elderly mother of Gianni’s doctor. A domestic circus ensues. There are dietary restrictions and pills to be taken, and there is only one TV, one fan: if this were a lesser movie, Gianni would be a curmudgeon whose heart is warmed by the antics of his houseguests. But no such crass transformation takes place. Gianni is warm and considerate throughout, and if his guests seem a little giddy it’s only because they don’t usually drink wine or spend so much time with other people. The camera lingers with Gianni and his mother’s quiet conversations, over the uncorking of a bottle, on smoke winding its way out of cigarettes: it behaves like another happenstance guest at the title meal, noticing what we have time for when no one else is watching or waiting. (2008, 75 min, 35mm) – Josephine Ferorelli
Adrian Sitaru’s HOOKED (Romania)
Saturday, 7:30pm and Thursday, 8:15pm
It was perhaps inevitable that the “objective” long-take style of Puiu, Mungiu, and Porumboiu would provoke an antithetical reaction in the next generation of Romanian filmmakers, and HOOKED is an example of such an approach. The actors are as invested in the material as we’ve come to expect from recent Romanian cinema, but director and co-writer Adrian Sitaru is not content to follow them like a documentarian. Nearly every shot of his film is from some character’s perspective, and the restless editing ensures that no one perspective has the last word. The story, as others have pointed out, is a variation on Polanski’s KNIFE IN THE WATER, in which an argumentative couple on holiday is tested by the arrival of a mysterious stranger. What’s different is that the couple is adulterous, the stranger is a prostitute, and the suspense never reaches life-and-death extremes. Sitaru is more fascinated by the shifting allegiances in everyday conversation, maneuvers we generally prefer not to acknowledge. (The film’s title translates literally as “Sport Fishing”—i.e., catching fish just to throw them back—which comes closer to describing the interactions.) The central conceit of hand-held shots of realistic bickering at first suggests POV internet porn or a Duplass Brothers movie; but, thankfully, Sitaru is more insidious than either. Ultimately, the shifting perspectives of HOOKED (which constantly reveal intimate moments to be viewable from another angle) return to the Romanian New Wave’s great theme: living with the legacy of a police state. If Sitaru’s observations aren’t as fresh as his predecessors, his cast keeps things engaging throughout, particularly Maria Dinulescu (the enterprising high schooler in CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’) as the prostitute. (2007, 80 min, 35mm) – Ben Sachs
Andis Miziss’ THE HUNT (Latvia)
Saturday, 5:45pm and Wednesday, 8:15pm
Essentially an accomplished student film, in which a smartly-placed camera ponders subjects like coincidence, repetitive behavior, and freak occurrences so as to avoid more finicky ones, like psychology and volition. That said, Andis Miziss’ first feature contains a number of exceptional moments that promise more fully realized work down the road. A “home” for unwed pregnant women that operates on a moving train; a group of children imitating their hunter father by mounting stuffed-animal heads on the attic walls; a wiry, Albini-esque presence manning an empty bar while the mirror ball still runs: These sights evoke the recent surrealism of Gyorgy Palfi (HUKKLE, TAXIDERMIA) or Zoltan Kamondi (DOLINA) in tone if not in logic. Like these Hungarian contemporaries, Miziss seems capable of making a Brothers Grimm atmosphere out of any location; unfortunately, he devotes much of THE HUNT to prosaic stuff like a philandering architect and a cop with a guilty conscience. It’s still engaging on the whole, with some lovely night photography and dolly shots that allow your imagination to expand on the mysteries of Miziss’ woodsy locations when his screenwriters do not. (2009, 71 min, HDCAM video) – Ben Sachs
Zdenek Tyc’s EL PASO (Czech Republic)
Monday, 8pm and Wednesday, 6pm
“El Paso” is how you announce a highway robbery in Romani, and EL PASO is the chronicle of a Roma family, Vera Horvathova and her children, getting robbed by the Czech government, one civil service at a time. It’s also a thorough shake-down of gadjos who purport to want to help the Horvaths. Social workers, journalists, and pro-bono lawyers are all revealed to have ambivalent, compromised motives. Vera on the other hand is a pillar of strength, and her children are sweet and similar: the integrity of the storytelling suffers for this intermix of laparoscopy and soft-focus, although the blow is softened by natural performances all around. The writing is at its smartest when it strays from a social justice agenda to follow its characters into the local bar, or when it lets a couple bond over how guilty they feel for quitting Vera’s case, but more often it vacillates between over- and under-explication, setting off clichéd narrative chain reactions and then blinking for the duration of difficult resolutions. The opening shots of EL PASO are vivid and breathless, and they promise a pace and tone the movie doesn’t sustain. Recurring use of footage from the security cameras in the Horvaths’ housing project succeeds in conjuring the ghost of totalitarianism, but otherwise cinematographers Jiri Berka and Patrik Hoznauer tend to play it straight and narrow. For all the qualifiers, though, this is a movie with good intentions and good moments held together by honest acting. (2009, 100 min, 35mm) - Josephine Ferorelli