European Union Film Festival – Week Two
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 two (Friday, March 12 through Thursday, March 18).
Catherine Breillat’s BLUEBEARD (France)
Saturday, 7:30pm and Thursday, 6:15pm
BLUEBEARD is Catherine Breillat’s second period piece after THE LAST MISTRESS and it may be an even more focused, intensely felt work. Continuing to project contemporary fears about gender relations onto an immaculately constructed past, Breillat—like Bunuel or de Oliveira—creates an environment that feels eerily timeless. This effect derives also from Breillat’s approach to actors and sound design: Every detail is rendered singular, precise—like a philosopher’s postulate—but at the same time made to feel immediate, even familiar. Few directors are better at depicting uncomfortable intimacy than Breillat, and it’s a sign of her mastery that she’s now capable of doing so without nudity or explicit sex. The film is a fairy tale and a medieval pageant (at times suggesting a dark parody of Rohmer’s MARQUISE OF O), appropriately chaste and, for the most part, suggestive. Breillat acknowledges 17th-century convention in economic detail, the staging of social functions, and in casting early-pubescent-aged girls as Bluebeard’s prospective wives. (This choice in fact makes the story’s central marriage even creepier to watch; the sheer size difference between Dominique Thomas, who plays Bluebeard, and lead actress Lola Creton manages to express female fears of male sexuality more directly than anything in ANATOMY OF HELL.) Yet so many observations from Breillat’s other films—especially those of rivalries between sisters, mothers and daughters—are worked effortlessly into the plot. A framing device of two young sisters reading Bluebeard in the 1950s reminds us that fairy tales endure by appealing to the individual imagination; and the film gains an enigmatic quality by obfuscating how much the modern girls’ sensibilities influence the fairy tale on screen. Breillat also generates mystery by depicting this childhood (sibling rivalry and all) as one very much like her own. How queasily confessional is this film? “It struck me that girls read this tale at a very young age: I myself read it when I was five,” Breillat recently told the Village Voice. “It’s a story that teaches these little girls to love the man who’s going to kill them.” For all her attention to period detail, Breillat is still obsessed by how societal myths shape women today. In locating the origin of these myths, she’s made one of her most haunting films yet. (2009, 80 min, 35mm) – Ben Sachs
Kristina Buozyte’s THE COLLECTRESS (Lithuania)
Saturday, 5:30pm and Thursday, 8pm
The voyeuristic tendencies of humanity are spilling themselves all over the web as you read this. Cell phone footage of violence and misery are as instantly disseminated and have replaced the daily newspaper of the 20th Century. No longer do we wait for tomorrow, and no longer do we take time to process the events we hear about through the media. Or in our own lives. The immediacy of the mass recounting of history has lead to a numbing of our emotions and a disconnection from others. Or so the argument goes. In one of the smartest films about the continuing intrusion of technology in our lives, the ability to document experience is posited as the only means for reconnecting with emotion. After the death of her father renders speech therapist Gaille void of feeling, she stumbles upon a drunken auteur disguised as a low-grade video editor. Living amongst filth and bottles of vodka, he turns weddings into farces, where brides are ugly and guests gorge on reception food like pigs. He edits some footage of Gaille working for her to present at a conference, and she realizes that only through seeing herself on tape does she reconnect with her feelings. She begins to have herself taped as she engages in a variety of stunts. The pranks begin harmlessly enough, with the taping of Gaille crashing a wedding and kissing the unexpecting groom, but she needs to keep upping the ante. Of course this self-reflexive voyeurism has a price to pay, and Gaille systematically severs her connections to everyone around her. Although comparisons to VIDEODROME are not unfounded, where Cronenberg tried to shock us into agreeing with his thesis, Buozyte uses her video sequences to humanize her characters. This film shows a deft eye for visual style and a light touch in pacing, somewhat remarkable for an MFA thesis film. Expect more from Buozyte in the future. (2008, 84 min, 35mm) — Jason Halprin
Andrei Gruzsniczki’s THE OTHER IRENE (Romania)
Friday, 8:15pm and Monday, 6pm
Only a few months after the successful run of Corneliu Porumboiu’s POLICE, ADJECTIVE comes another deadpan, thoroughly Romanian inversion of the crime film—the anti-BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING to Porumboiu’s anti-SERPICO. THE OTHER IRENE is a mystery on only the most superficial level. The hero’s mounting suspicion about his wife’s disappearance doesn’t generate tension so much as it reveals his alienation from life in general. Aurel (Andi Vasluianu) is a man with seemingly no ambition, working as a mall security guard while his wife makes her way up the corporate ladder. When she leaves for a month-long business trip to Cairo, it’s the most interesting thing to happen to Aurel in years—anticipating her return gives his monotonous routine something like direction. It’s a full half-hour into the film before Irina is announced dead by authorities, and director Andrei Gruzsniczki keeps the same lento pace as Aurel starts investigating what may have happened to her. The results are another fine Romanian joke: The investigation turns out to be as dull as anything in Aurel’s life to date. Gruzsniczki shares Porumboiu’s habit of lingering over uncluttered frames until they’re taken for granted; he also forgoes music for a taxonomy of white noise. (More than Totalitarianism, it’s the shadow of bureaucracy that seems to haunt the Romanian New Wave the most.) But Gruzsniczki is more interested in storytelling, in the accumulation of events as well as detail, than the director he’ll be compared to the most. For all its dogged lack of suspense, THE OTHER IRENE is not lacking in surprises, particularly those of character. (2009, 90 min, 35mm) — Ben Sachs
Jan Hrebejk’s SHAMELESS (Czech Republic)
Sunday, 7:30pm and Wednesday, 6:15pm
SHAMELESS, the story of an unrepentant asshole and the woman who divorces him, is a quietly extraordinary (anti)romantic comedy. Jiri Machacek plays Oskar, a weatherman who has no qualms about broadcasting false reports of sunshine in order to keep his family on holiday longer while he carries on with the babysitter. He lies sincerely, constantly, but without bothering to cover his tracks, and so he loses his wife, Zuzana (Simona Babcakova), and his job. What follows is philosophically so different from what Hollywood romance has taught us to expect that this otherwise conventional middle-class story becomes exceptional. Without doling out punishments, prizes, or moral lessons, the narrative takes us through Oskar and Zuzana’s next several chapters of life. The camera observes from an amicable distance, seeing more information than ambience. We aren’t meant to pity either character, even when Oskar prepares himself a squalid dinner of ramen noodles in a beer mug, or when Zuzana stalls in taking her bathrobe off at the public pool, then leaps in before anyone can perceive her bathing suit. The humor is visual and specific, with deep ironies laid into the plot and uncovered slyly at just the right moment. The heart of the movie reveals itself in a radio interview between Oskar and Zuzana; the circumstance is simultaneously natural and absurd, the tone is tender and resigned. If you expect Oskar to stop lying, good luck. But the movie is generous, and so sometimes he tells the truth by accident. (2009, 88 min, 35mm) — Josephine Ferorelli
Daniel Monzon’s CELL 211 (Spain)
Saturday, 9:15pm and Thursday, 7:45pm
Luis Tosar delivered one of the best performances of the decade in TAKE MY EYES (2003), Iciar Bollain’s understated drama about domestic violence. In that film, Tosar played his petit-bourgeois victimizer as victim—of social pressures, narrow-mindedness, and buried self-loathing—without resorting to cliché or condescension. Since then, he’s been an actor of great reliability (He stars in roughly three films a year), finding nuance in a variety of roles and rarely undermined by grandstanding. CELL 211 is the exception that proves the rule. In a stunt performance reminiscent of Nicolas Cage’s recent work in THE BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS, Tosar adopts a Popeye-the-Sailor voice and rock-star strut for Malamadre (“Bad Mother”), the prison kingpin who stages a large-scale riot. Alberto Ammann plays his foil, a clean-cut prison guard forced to pose as an inmate (and Malamadre’s right-hand man) when left on the wrong side of the bars. Director Daniel Monzon keeps this suspenseful and cheerfully implausible: Ignoring some ill-advised allusions to Gasper Noe’s IRREVERSIBLE, this would make a fine double-bill with many a Hong Kong action film. Tosar and Ammann achieve a chemistry reminiscent of John Woo’s leads, and Monzon keeps the action tense and squeamish in the Ringo Lam tradition. Most of what this has to say about prison has been lifted from other prison movies (There’s even a warden who beats suspects during interrogation), but it’s great entertainment. (2009, 110 min, 35mm) — Ben Sachs
Agnes Jaoui’s LET IT RAIN (France)
Friday and Monday, 6pm
After their career peak UN AIRE DE FAMILLE (1996), a discomfiting family comedy in the Fassbinder tradition, married writers Agnes Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri have become less confrontational in their work. Their themes of passive-aggression, familial discord, and resentments encumbered by successful people have mellowed into subtext for calmer narratives, and the pair now seems more concerned with the passage of time than with momentary eruptions. LET IT RAIN, their third script to be directed by Jaoui, aims for the novelistic weight of Andre Techine in its episodic structure and bounty of major characters; but the overriding tone of light comedy brings it closer to the Woody Allen of HANNAH AND HER SISTERS. (This is not a bad thing.) Bacri plays another variation on his crass-but-well-meaning Baby Boomer persona, this one a washed-up documentarian making a profile of Jaoui’s feminist activist. Bacri’s having an affair with Jaoui’s sister; Bacri’s assistant (who still moonlights as a restaurant manager) is thinking of cheating on his wife with a co-worker; and Jaoui is too busy with politics to make much time for anyone. A consistent virtue of European cinema is that it regards the middle-class as merely a station in life and not a source of entitlement, and LET IT RAIN is sympathetic towards its characters without being self-congratulating. (An unfortunate exception: We never learn the nature of Jaoui’s activism; it’s simply an idealized backstory for another Modern Working Woman.) Bacri and Jaoui are simply interested in character—especially that of long-term relationships—and they’re generally astute in considering how the zeitgeist shapes everyday lives. This is the sort of modest observational drama that reached its apex (in virtually every nation) in the 1950s. Chances are it will look great in 2070. (2008, 100 min, 35mm widescreen) — Ben Sachs
Thierry Michel’s KATANGA BUSINESS (Belgium)
Saturday, 5:15pm and Tuesday, 7:45pm
Many of the great recent films to come out of northern Africa (BAMAKO, TARFAYA) have been in response to economic developments that have left the continent destabilized. These films are often modest in their choice of detail, as if in defiance of the globalized rhetoric reshaping their nations. Thierry Michel’s documentary KATANGA BUSINESS is a valuable work, then, for providing sociological context for the poetry of Sissako and Ngangura. The subject is the mining industry in the Congo, a source of tremendous wealth that’s run almost exclusively by multi-national corporations. It’s no secret that the system keeps Congolese workers impoverished (not to mention in peril), but Michel is not interested in mere agitprop. After some introductory material explaining the nation’s economic history, BUSINESS opens up to depict the culture that’s grown around (and against) the mining industry. Some of the people on screen emerge as rather admirable, such as a soccer coach turned provincial governor who talks to miners and CEOs with equal candor; and a particular Belgian CEO comes across as more open-minded than one would expect. Michel has a background in TV journalism, which is apparent in his haphazard aesthetic: The helicopter shots of the mines are disappointingly prosaic, though certain journalistic details—independent diggers being paid for ore from an old suitcase filled with cash—are reminiscent of Jia Zhang-ke. Still, the film’s is so comprehensive in its scope and so thorough in its investigation that anyone interested in contemporary Africa should come out of this informed. (2009, 120 min, DigiBeta video) — Ben Sachs