European Union Film Festival – Week Three
The 13th Annual European Union Film Festival opened 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 three (Friday, March 19 through Thursday, March 25).
Jessica Hausner’s LOURDES (France/Austria)
Saturday, 3pm and Thursday, 6pm
Jessica Hausner shot LOURDES on the Red One. The tiny HD camera that produces 35mm-like images with a fraction of the set-up time, the most powerful tool of the impatient, is here used for to create careful images. A camera that could conceivably go anywhere fast and photograph anything is asked to sit still and pay attention. But to present Hausner’s choice of equipment as a perfect metaphor for LOURDES would be taking it too far; in fact, it would mean missing the point of the film: the victory of the momentary over the symbolic. Wheelchair-bound with multiple sclerosis, Christine (Sylvie Testud) has gone with a group of pilgrims to Lourdes. She’s looking for a change of pace while they search for a miracle, talking amongst themselves like Tati’s tourists. One or two miracles end up occurring, but whether they’re “real” is a matter of debate. Someone like Ulrich Seidl, unleashed in this Catholic tourist trap, where every other person is in a wheelchair or walks with a cane and the shop displays are stuffed with light-up Virgin Marys, would think up enough monstrosities to fill a four-hour film. Hausner doesn’t have Seidl’s contempt, nor does she think boredom is either funny or soul crushing. What’s she got is a talent for attentiveness (she did, after all, start her career as a script girl for Michael Haneke—on FUNNY GAMES, no less). She approaches her characters the same way she approaches her audience: willing to make a joke, but completely non-condescending. This is a sincere and patiently made film, which doesn’t mean it’s a sluggish or slow one, or for that matter anything less than completely engrossing. (2009, 96 min, 35mm) — Ignatius Vishnevetsky
Yorgos Lanthimos’ DOGTOOTH (Greece)
Friday, 8:15pm and Monday, 8:15pm
Mention of the words “Greek” and “cinema” in the same sentence often provokes shudders from veteran filmgoers. The fact is, one is used to seeing the same touristic views of the southeastern European country in film after film; the same easygoing, slightly quirky story of an extended family (usually staring Irene Pappas) set against a Mediterranean paradise. Either that, or the latest chef d’oeuvre by Theo Angelopoulos, who is to Greece what Manoel de Oliveira has become to Portugal. The novelty of Greek cinema seems to have worn off years ago (in the not too distant past the Film Center even offered a yearly spotlight on the country), and now one can finally look beyond it to individual works. On the surface and at its core, DOGTOOTH has very little in common with some of the dominant characteristics associated with Greek cinema: it’s set mostly in interiors (a single house, in fact); the characters at the center of the film are completely atypical, in fact, totally balls-out nuts by any national standards; and its style is closer to Ulrich Seidl or Harmony Korine in the way it flattens out space, often capturing its protagonists in awkward, slightly off-center compositions. DOGTOOTH is a real oddity, and as such it merits close attention. Expertly straddling dark, Buñuelian humor with psychological horror, the film centers on three kids who are held captive by their parents at a remote estate. Even when the film’s central contrivance becomes perfectly coherent, the film never loses its fascination or mystery. Director Yorgos Lanthimos’ approach is to shoot and edit as if each scene were a loose fragment, so that small details or clues are teased out in the elaborate narrative. A discussion piece, if there was ever one, and a film that grows with multiple viewings. (2009, 96 min, 35mm) — Gabe Klinger
Amos Gitai’s DISENGAGEMENT (France/Israel)
Sunday, 5:15pm and Monday, 6pm
I recall a recent article about Klaus Schmidt, the man who started the dig at Göbekli Tepe, the world’s oldest known temple. Schmidt came to Turkey by following the notes of another archeologist who had visited Göbekli Tepe decades prior and decided not to investigate further. Arriving at the site, Schmidt looks around. He spots what he recognizes to be the remains of a limestone quarry, and realizes that a structure must be buried under the hill he’s standing on. At that moment, he understands why the earlier archeologist had left. He has a minute to make his decision: either he jots some notes in his journal and turns around, as the other man had done, or he can walk forward to investigate. If he does, he’ll spend the rest of his life digging into this hill. Sometime during the 1980s, Amos Gitai made that same decision: to dig up old and recent ruins using every technique available to him. DISENGAGEMENT was made in 2007, before the excellent ONE DAY YOU’LL UNDERSTAND (which played at the Film Center last year) and CARMEL (which hasn’t yet played in the city). It’s a film in two acts with a prologue. The prologue: a handsome Israeli man of French citizenship flirts with a Palestinian woman of Dutch citizenship aboard a train; both carry passports for countries they don’t belong to. Act one: the man is a policeman, taking leave in France before he must evict settlers from the West Bank. He’s there for the funeral of his adopted father, and he spends his time rejecting the desperate, kinda incestuous advances of his adopted sister and sitting around in a dilapidated mansion that alternately resembles the circus from LOLA MONTES and a war zone from NOTRE MUSIQUE. Act two: he returns to Israel and the sister comes with him, looking for a daughter she gave up for adoption, who now works as a schoolteacher in Gaza. All of this is depicted with scientific accuracy. Or maybe that should read “poetic accuracy,” since the impulses of science and poetry are the same: to seek out terms with which to define our experience of the world. (2007, 35mm, 115 min) — Ignatius Vishnevetsky
Peter von Bagh’s HELSINKI, FOREVER (Finland)
Wednesday, 8pm and Sunday (March 28), 5pm
While Peter von Bagh has been making films since the late 60s, he is not as well known as a filmmaker as he is a critic, film programmer, and archivist—someone who has spent his life immersed in film, someone who has given a careful eye to everything he sees. It shows. Both of the cinematic spheres he’s travelled in come together in HELSINKI, FOREVER. This is an essay film, a city symphony, and a psychological investigation of a people that can fairly stand alongside of Dziga Vertov’s MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA, Chris Marker’s LETTER FROM SIBERIA, and Thom Anderson’s LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF. Vertov was concerned with the geometry and geography of place; Marker with the spirit of place; and Anderson with the weight of place. Von Bagh manages to infuse his film with all three—he’s exploring the Finnish national identity through the representation of Helsinki and its citizens in dozens of Finnish films from the turn of the twentieth century through Aki Kaurismäki’s films towards the end of the century. And if the portrait skews towards the somber side, the footage from the various narratives, documentaries, newsreels, and home movies that von Bagh uses is stunning. As is the editing. If the eye for selection is an archivist’s, then the mastery with which it’s organized is a filmmaker’s. Von Bagh’s cuts give the film a graceful flow across time and across space—illuminating the narration with visual examples of correspondences of events and places and behavior many decades apart. Pieces are snatched from an obscure (for us) national cinema and reconfigured into a new whole—one that unmasks hidden and buried truths. Like von Bagh’s method, the film’s effect is cumulative; it sneaks up on you as you watch it. Chicago critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has high praise for HELSKINKI (and that seems to have helped it reach wider audiences here and abroad), and he’ll be introducing the Wednesday screening. (2008, 75 min, DigiBeta video) — Patrick Friel
Jacques Doillon’s JUST ANYBODY (France)
Friday, 6pm and Wednesday, 7:45pm
There’s no shame in making an “actor’s film.” After all, we discovered performers before we discovered directors, even though those performers were often trains, passersby, workers, or infants unaware of the purpose of a camera. A good performance recorded well is good cinema. That’s what Jacques Doillon has set out for in JUST ANYBODY: to write a good script, to have good actors perform it well, to record those performances in the way he feels they should be recorded, and to edit it in a way that highlights the aspects of the script and of the acting that he feels are most important. Digital video is a good match for this sort of production. You don’t need much of a crew and can shoot as much coverage and as many takes as you want quickly and without having to worry about the stock you’re using up. Ok, so JUST ANYBODY is not PONETTE nor L’AMOREUSE nor LES DOITS nor YOUNG WERTHER, but Doillon trying to make a “good” film is better than most other directors trying to make a “great” one. Gérald Thomassin, the teenage lead in Doillon’s LE PETIT CRIMINEL, is now in his 30s; a nervy, wiry man with a thin moustache and the sort of mouth that makes it look like he’s trying to hide his teeth. Clémentine Beaugrand, on the other hand, has a charming smile, and she’s almost a head taller than him, too. They play Costa and Camille, a mismatched couple/non-couple in Le Crotoy, a seaside town that resembles an Eric Rohmer location as filmed by Jacques Rivette (never has the slanted ceiling of an attic room loomed larger). He’s a petty crook, close to homeless; she’s middle-class. The question isn’t why they’re attracted to each other or why they do the terrible things they do. Doillon isn’t interested in those sorts of things; they just happen. The question is: what do people do at this sort of impasse? JUST ANYBODY is a film about character, not motivation. (2008, 121 min, 35mm) — Ignatius Vishnevetsky
Pawel Borowski’s ZERO (Poland)
Sunday, 7:30pm and Thursday, 8pm
A couple dozen characters, bound by coincidence, repeatedly cross paths over a trauma-filled day in Lodz. The situations begin generically enough—love affairs conducted in secret, parents estranged from their grown children, detectives on the prowl—but they grow darker and weirder as they accumulate. Writer-director Pawel Borowski keeps upping the ante as he goes, not only with plot twists (which occur so often as to constitute the very fabric of the film) but also with ambitious long takes containing multiple actions or complex camera movement. Comparisons to MAGNOLIA are perhaps inevitable, but while Borowski shares P.T. Anderson’s intoxication with making movies, ZERO is a very different work. Borowski isn’t much concerned with redemption, nor does he strive for profundity with every scene. His structure—designed like a game of exquisite corpse—eschews cross-cutting in favor of narrative contrivances where every scene ends with the entrance of another major character, who then becomes the center of the action. The technique sometimes evokes puzzle movies like HUKKLE or CODE UNKNOWN, but ZERO is arguably more entertaining than either, keeping the momentum of a thriller even during quieter scenes. (A sequence in which an old puppeteer searches a supermarket for a pair of scissors is just one example of Borowski’s exuberance.) The film is also more forthright in its melodrama: Without dwelling on the familiar theme of alienation in a modern city, Borowski still elicits a number of soulful performances from his large cast. The predominant feeling of vulnerability only makes the characters more sympathetic when very, very bad things begin to happen to them, and it makes for an especially gripping final act. And yet the traumas themselves are so imaginatively conceived and executed that even the ugliest moments of ZERO are exhilarating to watch. Borowski is a former animator making his live-action debut, and the film’s frequent shifts in perspective and tone suggest a cartoonist thrilled by the expanded universe he gets to control. (2009, 112 min, 35mm) — Ben Sachs
Ian FitzGibbon’s PERRIER’S BOUNTY (Ireland)
Friday, 8:30pm and Saturday, 6:45pm
Last year’s EU Festival screened two films by veteran Romanian director Radu Gabrea; and while not quite a “sidebar presentation,” it still marked the first time Gabrea was introduced to Chicago viewers as an auteur. This year, the festival screens two films by director Ian FitzGibbon (A FILM WITH ME IN IT and now PERRIER’S BOUNTY), a veteran of Irish television just making a name for himself in features. Both are as modest and as workmanlike as one would expect from a TV director; but seen in short succession, the films display consistent wit, economy, and handling of suspense. PERRIER’S BOUNTY, the more recent of the two, is a costlier and hence “bigger” film than FILM, but only slightly less enjoyable for the inflation. Shooting in austere, Siegel-esque widescreen, FitzGibbon indulges in the foolproof pleasures of action cinema (guns, animal stunts, burning cars, Brendan Gleeson) without abandoning the low-key comedy that was the soul of his previous feature. Certain moments are lingered over with theatrical affection—a mob boss having to overcome homophobia out of respect for an associate; a son buying his father cocaine to thank him for saving his life—and they stand out because the story moves so breathlessly otherwise. The top-flight cast (Gleeson, Cillian Murphy, Jim Broadbent) is able to project long histories in little detail, allowing the resourceful FitzGibbon to keep things moving and maintain a high pedigree of storytelling. (He satisfies all the requisites of a first act in less than 15 minutes.) The story itself is classic noir about a mild man in trouble, with Murphy playing a fuck-up whose attempt to pay off a 1,000-Euro debt winds up in a trail of dead bodies and the mob on his trail. Some of the underworld “color” (alternately sadistic and naive) recalls the characterization of British crime films, but the dialogue is Irish in the best way. Screenwriter Mark O’Rowe (who also penned BOY A) gives this modern suspense film an anachronistic amount of rueful monologues, some of which graze the underclass lyricism of John M. Synge or Sean O’Casey. And FitzGibbon, still very much a writer’s director, stages them with as much enthusiasm as he does the gunfights. (2009, 83 min, 35mm widescreen) – Ben Sachs
Jean-Claude Schlim’s HOUSE OF BOYS (Luxembourg/Germany)
Saturday, 8:45pm and Tuesday, 8pm
An above-average gay coming-of-age story, whose formal ambition is nearly strong enough to overcome the familiarity of the story. HOUSE OF BOYS follows the hedonistic Frank through his eighteenth year, during which he runs away from home in Luxembourg, gets taken in by the titular burlesque house in Amsterdam, becomes a star dancer and finds true love. It’s set—we’re constantly reminded—in 1984, and Frank’s maturation is plotted to mirror concurrent developments in queer history. His story begins up-tempo, with scenes of self-assertion, defiance, and partying; it ends, more soberly, when he loses a close friend to AIDS. Writer-director Jean-Claude Schlim aims to cover a lot of ground in under two hours, and the film is actually most enjoyable when it’s at its most excessive. Schlim stuffs the movie with musical numbers (even letting the fearless Udo Kier, playing a transvestite named Madame, pay homage to the drag routine in THE DAMNED!) and pushes scenes of melodrama to the hilt. The frequent crane and dolly shots evoke old musicals as well as any of the dancing; ditto the natural-seeming camaraderie between the dancer boys. Schlim’s accomplishments with actors and the camera are all the more compelling for standing in stark contrast with his relative flat-footedness as a writer, which sometimes reaches Wiseau-level proportions. The longest monologues are often, in fact, summaries of the plot and the estimable Stephen Fry (playing a compassionate doctor) is cast as the movie’s voice of reason but regularly given lines like “There’s NO such thing as gay cancer!” On the whole, this is still engaging stuff, a contemporary equivalent to the modest, comfort-food genre films Britain regularly turned out in the 40s. (2009, 114 min, 35mm) — Ben Sachs
Peter Greenaway’s REMBRANDT’S J’ACCUSE (Netherlands/Germany/Finland)
Saturday, 8:30pm and Sunday, 2:30pm
If the cancellation of Greenaway’s master class is bumming you out, fret not, you still have this chance to hear him give a lecture. In this thesis-defense-cum-documentary, a small frame containing the director’s talking head appears repeatedly in the center of the screen to lament the impoverishment of contemporary visual culture, to wryly analyze puzzling details of Rembrandt’s masterwork The Night Watch, and to cross-examine actors in period dress who portray members of the artist’s intimate circle. Greenaway’s explicit thesis is that the group portrait contains Rembrandt’s accusation of murder against its subjects, but the point he is more urgently preoccupied with making is that contemporary viewers of art (and cinema particularly) do not know how to interpret images. Conceived as part of a multimedia installation for the Rijksmuseum (Which houses The Night Watch) with installation and opera components, it’s hard to imagine this movie existing without at least its companion piece, the 2007 drama NIGHTWATCHING. Much of the footage in REMBRANDT’S J’ACCUSE is either from the complementary narrative or features the same actors, costumes, and set-pieces, and both films promote this exuberantly comprehensive conspiracy theory. But while NIGHTWATCHING uses the narrative of conspiracy as an occasion to linger in 17th Century Amsterdam with sensual, beguiling, complicated characters (it has the warmest center of any Greenaway film so far), REMBRANDT’S J’ACCUSE is an accusation in form and content, even employing the font of Emile Zola’s famous headline for its title. Behind the director’s image we are assaulted with violent string instruments punctuating the cuts in a rapid stream of visual information; and with diagrams, graphics, overlaid scenes, Photoshop filters. He makes his case aggressively, sometimes playfully, and always thoroughly, but whom is he accusing? He points not just at the subjects of the painting, whom he believes revenged themselves on Rembrandt by gradually ruining his career and personal life, but also at us for needing to be told what he believes are facts in plain view. Note that Peter Greenaway will not be in person due to conflicts with his shooting schedule. The previously announced master class is cancelled. (2008, 86 min, HDCAM Video) — Josephine Ferorelli