Black Harvest International Festival of Film and Video
Gene Siskel Film Center – Ongoing (Check Venue website for complete schedule)
The annual Black Harvest festival, now in its 16th year, continues through September 2.
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.

Joshua Conro’s SHARKULA: DIARRHEA OF A MADMAN
Friday, 8:15pm
With its appalling title alluding to a potent metaphor for the profuse stream-of-consciousness rapping style of its subject, SHARKULA is an ostensive documentary about local cult hip-hop hustler Brian Wharton, who—like the Joe Goulds, Wesley Willises, Thax Douglases, Party Steves, and other legendary eccentric bohemians before and alongside him—represents the dynamic extremes of true, corporeal social embeddedness, as the rest of us barely notice our retreat into the telecommunications revolution which threatens to bring everyone you’ve ever known into increasingly tangential and irrelevant contact. This necessarily persistent urban lifeworld is ephemerally documented here: Sharkula navigates the remaining bustling streets of our city, affably flattering hundreds of strangers every day in succession: “Do you like hip-hop?” before moving in for the $5- cassette kill—and if this hasn’t happened to you, maybe you just moved here yesterday. Perhaps less relevant to the preceding issue is the film’s meticulous depiction of the cultural background from which this singularity emerged: the borderline male-separatist triumverate of graffiti, breakdancing, and freestyle rapping. This underground scene (inscribed here by the limited set of interviewees, including PNS of the Molemen and J2k of Flosstradamus), sometimes literally underground (a drunken Sharkula video filmed in a wintry basement), trivially problematizes the conception of Wharton’s drawing/breaking/rapping as “outsider art”, for each regional participant scarcely seems confident of their own objective status as successful “insiders” or otherwise. While their discussions are often funny, they are all but conclusively downbeat, unable to deflect the perpetuation of the all-too-familiar Second-City self-deprecating anxiety towards “making it” (which while fully endemic to hip-hop and the (professionalized) visual arts, is thankfully not a universal cultural condition here). Quoted in New City last March, Sharkula laid bare his armchair demography: “There’s nine million people in Chicago…a thousand new people here everyday. I got to sell CDs.” Whether his (incessantly) recorded material can ever be recognized as meaningful to a greater public, one is left to respect this one last man’s wish to stand at our crossroads (in snow, rain, heat, gloom of night) and to touch as many other fellow humans as possible, in some slight way. (2010, 98 min, Mini-DV) – Michael Castelle

Sex African American Style (Shorts Program)
Saturday, 8:15pm and Thursday, 8:15pm
The weakest entries (THE MATTRESS HUSTLE, THE MORNING AFTER, an episode of the web series LENOX AVE.) in this program are a blur of pricey negligees, silk sheets, attractive people, oddly featureless rooms, and slooowwww jamz (drinking game: take a shot every time one of these shorts opens with a slow pan up or across the legs of a reclining woman, starting at the feet). Incidentally, the head-and-shoulders standout, Kiara Jones’ AMAZON WOMEN, includes all of those things—even the opening leg shot—which just goes to prove that greatness and dullness can be achieved through the same basic elements. What AMAZON WOMEN has that these three already-mentioned films don’t is an unhurriedness to the plot and a sparingness to the edits and shots. Unlike those three mentioned offenders, it doesn’t set out to make a statement about sexuality or relationships, but only about its characters—two stoned young women (Frances Turner and Nicole Roderick, in what could, respectively, be called the “Juliet Berto” and “Dominique Labourier” roles) still dressed to the nines at the end of an uneventful evening—and doesn’t feature a sex scene, yet it’s franker than those three films combined. Marcus Thomas’ CASTING NOTICE is a fun, good-looking trifle in which a struggling actor (Brandon Young, from the Baltimore Sun season of The Wire) considers doing porn; Keith Purvis’ ONLINE is essentially an extended single-gag skit, though there’s nothing really wrong with that. – Ignatius Vishnevestsky

Carmen Madden’s EVERYDAY BLACK MAN
Monday, 8:15pm and Wednesday, 6pm
Essentially a late-period Charles Bronson movie disguised as a times-are-tough-in-the-neighborhood drama, with Henry Brown in the Bronson role (complete with that mustache, deliberate delivery, and the two marks of a true Bronson character—a boring job and a daughter) and all the requisites: cutaways to what-the-bad-guys-are-doing, an uncomfortable balance between multiculturalism and xenophobia, nostalgia for a community of “good people” overrun by nogoodniks, a slow-boil structure light on action and heavy on establishing the protagonist as a man whose hand is forced, and even the use of a violent act against a woman as a turning point. Brown plays a man struggling to run a small business who takes on a young Muslim man as a partner, unaware that his charismatic new associate is a drug dealer. It’s more J. Lee Thompson than Michael Winner (thankfully), though with none of Thompson’s craftsmanship; however, if Bronson was still alive, Carmen Madden could direct FAMILY OF COPS IV. A low-key but unsubtle B-film of the 1980s variety; you film studies types will have a field day watching a single-star sub-genre founded on thinly-veiled racism get divorced from its context and lead. (2010, 105 min, DVCam) – Ignatius Vishnevestsky

Martin Baer and Claus Wischmann’s KINSHASA SYMPHONY
Sunday, 5:15pm and Monday, 6:15pm
Bearing a strong resemblance to one of Jia Zhangke’s Shanxi movies—that is, feeling like a Chinese movie made in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by German documentarians—and following a group of people trying to promote Western art in Africa, KINSHASA SYMPHONY could be described (both in terms of its plot and its production) as a story of cultural appropriation and re-contextualization. The titular symphony is reportedly sub-Saharan Africa’s only Western-style classical orchestra, composed of part-time musicians of varying levels of skill (the brass section is noticeably warbly), many of whom have had to make their own instruments and must contend with power outages during rehearsals. A good report on an obscure subject and a good surface full of keen images, it’s the sort of thing that’s more substantial when taken apart (whether as ideas or pulled stills) than when kept together (whether as actual sequences or an entire film). Nothing bad can be said about it; it’s a good way to spend 95 minutes and not much else. (2009, 95 min, HDCam) – Ignatius Vishnevestsky

The 17th Annual Chicago Underground Film Festival

CUFF is presented by IFP/Chicago and takes place at the Gene Siskel Film Center from Thursday, June 24 to Thursday, July 1. Below is a sampling of the programs from our contributors. The full schedule is at www.cuff.org.

Kevin Jerome Everson’s ERIE (New American)
Sunday, 1pm
Let’s just get this out of the way: ERIE is an awesome film. Kevin Everson’s fourth feature is his best since his first film, the remarkable SPICEBUSH (2005). Intentionally or not, Everson has taken up the mantle of Charles Burnett’s KILLER OF SHEEP: perhaps no two filmmakers have turned as sensitive and human an eye to the lives of working-class African Americans as they have. Where Burnett had Watts in Los Angeles for SHEEP, Everson frequently returns to his home state of Ohio, and other rustbelt environs, for his features (he currently lives and teaches in Virginia). He focuses on the disenfranchised (particularly those who are casualties of the decline of the industrial base in the US) and blue-collar workers, people whose vision of the American Dream is an honest one, a fair one. Everson’s films often shade whether we are seeing documentary or narrative or something in-between. In ERIE, the series of long-take vignettes continues this elusiveness. It’s unclear how much of what we’re shown is staged or arranged. It plays like documentary, but the moments are too perfect to simply be happened upon. It doesn’t really matter, though. What we see are the people. Black people. Living lives or just being. Privileged and dignified by Everson’s camera. Real people, whether they are scripted or not. No artificial dramatics; no drugs; no bangers; no “victims.” Just people. High school students rehearsing two vastly different musical numbers simultaneously. A man struggling to unlock his car with a coat hanger. A young girl staring at a candle, silently, fidgeting slightly. For sixteen minutes. Who else allows a young African American girl so much uninterrupted screen time? Who else gives us so much time to really see a young African American girl? Amen. Showing with Braden King’s short HOME MOVIE. (2009, 81 min, HDCam) – Patrick Friel

Chuck Workman’s VISIONARIES: JONAS MEKAS AND THE (MOSTLY) AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE (New Documentary)
Friday, 8:15pm and Thursday, 6pm
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Life Is Unpredictable: Films by Jonas Mekas (Experimental Revival)
Saturday, 4:45pm
No other figure has played such a central role in the development of the American avant-garde cinema as Jonas Mekas. He came to the US after the end of WWII (he and his brother Adolfas were in a displaced persons camp for a time) and, in a few brief years, began making his mark on the cultural life of New York and beyond. A Lithuanian (he’s a celebrated poet in his native language) who never lost his accent, Mekas began filming his new environs in 1950, founded the influential journal Film Culture in 1955 and began writing an equally influential film column for the Village Voice in 1958. Mekas’ interests early on were European art cinema and American classics (the pre-auteur theory ones). Famously, he lambasted the avant-garde films of the time as crude, narrow, technically uninspired, and, most regrettably, a “conspiracy of homosexuality.” He quickly changed his opinions, though, and became (and remains) one of the most vocal and passionate champions of experimental film. Along side his writing, publishing, and cheerleading, Mekas was also an early exhibitor (Film-Makers’ Cinematheque; Anthology Film Archives) and distributor (Film-Makers’ Cooperative) of avant-garde film. And, from the early 50s on, an engaged and remarkable filmmaker in his own right. We’ve not previewed Chuck Workman’s new documentary on Mekas and the Avant-Garde but, even if it’s just a light gloss on the field and its major figures, we’ll count it as valuable if it creates a bit of interest and seeking out of experimental cinema by those who don’t know it. Workman himself has made documentaries on Andy Warhol, Jack Kerouac, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Playboy. He’s best known for his 1986 short film PRECIOUS IMAGES and, for many years now, as the compiler of the montage sequences for the Academy Awards. Chuck Workman and local film and art writer and artist Fred Camper will have a discussion after the Friday screening. NOTE: Jonas Mekas was originally scheduled to be in person for this screening and for the screening of his short films, but has had to cancel his appearance. (2010, 90 min, DigiBeta) – Patrick Friel
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Jonas Mekas began shooting film in 1950, but his earliest completed work is the 1961 feature GUNS OF THE TREES. Over the years, he was an active film diarist, compiling the footage into a highly-regarded group of films, including WALDEN (1964-69), REMINISCENCES OF A JOURNEY TO LITHUANIA (1971-72), and LOST, LOST, LOST (1949-75). [One of these later diary compilation films, THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1993), will be showing at Doc Films on July 8.] This program features a generous selection of Mekas’ short films and videos spanning more than forty years. The two I’ve seen are both instructive looks at two aspects of Mekas’ life. WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN (1949/2002) features some of Mekas’ earliest footage, shot just the year after arriving in the US. This material was edited in 2002 and the fifteen-minute short is a delicate and beautiful portrait of the poor Lithuanian community in Brooklyn. It’s a bittersweet film, chronicling the difficult circumstances of his fellow Williamsburg residents, but also reflecting the freedom and remove from the still harsh post-war Europe he had found here. NOTES ON THE CIRCUS (1966) is one of Mekas’ best-known films and one of his most kinetic. It is a vibrant example of his famous pixilation, or single framing, style of shooting, in which he would only film in quick, brief bursts. There is an energy and disorienting sense of movement in the film, a perfect visual corollary to the kind of excitement and awe a child might feel at visiting a circus the first time. Also showing are: A LETTER TO PENNY ARCADE (2001), AWARD PRESENTATION TO ANDY WARHOL (1964), STREET SONGS (1983), TIME & FORTUNE VIETNAM NEWSREEL
(1968), CUP/SAUCER/TWO DANCERS/RADIO
(1983), and CASSIS (1966). In lieu of Mekas’ canceled appearance, the program will be introduced by local film and art writer and artist Fred Camper. (1964-2002, approx. 96 min total, 16mm and video) – Patrick Friel

Ashby, Kolak and Prokopas’ SCRAPPERS (New Documentary)
Sunday, 4:45pm and Thursday, 8pm
SCRAPPERS is a standard bearer for the Chicago Underground Film Fest, both as the only feature film in the festival about Chicago, and as the definitive record of a vast underground culture. Who drives those spray-painted trucks with high walls full of battered appliances, and what happens to the things they collect? The first feature-length documentary by Brian Ashby, Ben Kolak, and Courtney Prokopas, SCRAPPERS travels with two hardworking men and their families through three years of life at the margins of fickle industry. The patient and curious camera reveals a Chicago of informal economies, not just the ins and outs of collecting scrap metal, but bargains with neighbors through car windows and child-care arrangements made when everybody works and no one has money. Like their subjects, the filmmakers are quick on their toes and have their eyes wide open to the luck of circumstance; their captured goods range from the tenderly human to the violently mechanized. We notice every cat that wanders through the frame and peek into every pot cooking on a stove. The familiar aspect of Chicago’s alleyways is rendered uncanny with gliding, truck’s-eye-view camera work. Long wordless sequences of cars being compressed and copper being turned from cables to dust are buoyed by Chicago percussionist Frank Rosaly’s optimistic workday funk score (performed on found metal objects). With the exception of a handful of well-placed inter-titles, SCRAPPERS lets the subjects and images do all the telling of both the personal stories about making ends meet and the big political story about a crashing economy and the crashing price of metals. They are the same and different stories at once; the connections are deep and plain. Documentaries rarely balance deep involvement with such a light touch. The result is essential. Ben Kolak, Brian Ashby, and Courtney Prokopas in person at the Sunday screening. (2009, 90 min, HDCAM) – Josephine Ferorelli

Matt Porterfield’s PUTTY HILL (New American)
Sunday - 7pm
With its northeastern setting, lower-middle-class milieu, and melodramatic elements, Matthew Porterfield’s second feature has much in common with the work of Maine-based independent Todd Verow (SHUCKING THE CURVE, A SUDDEN LOSS OF GRAVITY). But where Verow’s proud amateurishness suggests an effort to dramatize ineloquent characters on their own terms, Porterfield brings an aestheticized distance to PUTTY HILL. He frequently breaks the action to interview characters as if for a TV news broadcast; at other moments (generally more effective), he frames them architectonically against their environment as though he were an ethnographer of Baltimore. Organizing this loose collection of scenes is a young man’s death by heroin overdose, which brings his dissolute family back to the dead-end town where he died. The subjects include ex-convicts, skateboarders, and (perhaps inevitably) Teenage Girls Precociously Interested in Drinking and Sex, none of whom seem especially excited about being alive. PUTTY HILL isn’t a provocation like Larry Clark and Ed Lachman’s KEN PARK nor a poetic meditation on former working-class America like David Gordon Green’s ALL THE REAL GIRLS, though the film’s exhibition-hall-style photography often evokes both of them. The film is fascinating primarily for its ambivalence; the finest scenes eschew plot and even dialogue entirely for curious observation. The climax is a series of karaoke performances by the (perhaps inevitably) non-professional actors at the boy’s funeral, which include Top 40 hits like “Wild Horses” and “I Will Always Love You.” Better yet is an earlier scene in a makeshift tattoo parlor, where the seedy, concentrated action is improbably scored to R. Kelly’s 2009 remix of “Birthday Sex.” Matt Porterfield in person. (2010, 87 min, DigiBeta) — Ben Sachs

Laurel Nakadate’s STAY THE SAME NEVER CHANGE (New American)
Monday, 8pm
A film of calculated naïveté and undirected anger, STAY THE SAME NEVER CHANGE plays like an art-punk cassette found in a used car. (Appropriately, the score is by lo-fi songwriter Owen Ashworth, a.k.a. Casiotone for the Painfully Alone.) It’s a collection of vignettes, shuffled casually, about teenage girls killing time in the outskirts of Kansas City. Most of them laze in their imaginations, practicing conversations with boys or trying on old Halloween costumes; some appear in scenes of dreary exploitation, presumably out of boredom. Director Laurel Nakadate isn’t interested in childhood’s end so much as its death knell: Her tableaux are driven by entropy rather than any kind of dramatic momentum, which will likely drive some viewers crazy. But in skirting boredom, Nakadate sometimes evokes the self-annihilating stare of photographers like Rineke Dijkstra, artists drawn to tawdry subject matter as a means of contemplating amorality. Less effective are Nakadate’s “revelations” of Middle American ignorance (a young mother praying her baby won’t “grow up to be retarded,” a pre-teen asking Oprah Winfrey in a letter to adopt her like “all those children in Africa”, etc.), which are less grating for their condescension than for their lack of imagination. Still, STAY THE SAME contains enough restless experimentation to merit its place in an underground film festival. It’s the sort of film that conveys the discovery of filmmaking through sheer activity, the manipulation of personal talismans into themes. Laurel Nakadate in person. (2009, 93 min, HDCAM) — Ben Sachs

Matt McCormick’s SOME DAYS ARE BETTER THAN OTHERS (New American)
Saturday, 7pm
Matt McCormick, whose freewheeling Portland, Oregon “Peripheral Produce” events in the early part of the last decade were the highlight of that town’s independent film scene, has always made short films that—from the brutally maudlin found-film collage SINCERELY, JOE P. BEAR (2000) to the disingenuous and comic crypto-documentary THE SUBCONSCIOUS ART OF GRAFFITI REMOVAL (2002)—promote a kind of numbed sentimentality and urbanist meta-nostalgia sensible primarily to a childless slacker bohemia. After a shift into more experimental shorts with fascinating and emphatic attention to sound design, his first feature, SOME DAYS ARE BETTER THAN OTHERS, is a contemplative HD narrative with a casual, indie-rock superstar cast (Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney, James Mercer of The Shins) whose characters inhabit some of the many spaces of downward mobility (animal shelter worker, temp staffer, thrift store employee) particular to the region; the film also includes a transcendent soundtrack by the accordingly melancholy ambient-music prodigy Matthew Cooper (a.k.a. Eluvium). Showing with Lisa Barcy’s short animation ANONANIMAL. Matt McCormick in person. (2010, 93 min, DigiBeta) – Michael Castelle

Shorts Programs One – Six
Showtimes noted below
In addition to the features and docs above (and the others not covered), CUFF has six programs of shorts which, based on the selected ones we’ve seen, are all well worth checking out. Shorts Program One (Friday, 9:15pm) includes video maker Jesse McLean’s gently disturbing look at contemporary culture and behavior, THE BURNING BLUE, Alexander Stewart’s simple but elegant geometric computer animation ICELAND SPAR, and German film and video maker Thorsten Fleisch’s glossy abstracted blur of color, DROMOSPHERE. Few people can tweak obscure (and not so obscure) pop culture detritus like video artist Kent Lambert, and he finds both camp value and underlying truths about ourselves in his chosen material for FANTASY SUITE (Shorts Program Two, Saturday, 1:15pm). A number of the works in Shorts Program Three (Saturday, 9:30pm) push to extremes for humorous effect (sometimes troublingly so). Steve Reinke and Jessie Mott’s animated EVERYBODY features a cast of cryptic, verbally abusive, and anatomically-obsessed animals. Lori Felker spoofs TV gardening shows with a host who becomes increasingly personal in her narration in THIS IS MY SHOW. Pippa Possible and Crispin Rosenkranz pair cooing nonsense-talk with crotch shots in the weirdly funny two-minute PLEASANT SPECIAL FRIENDS NICE. In Shorts Program Four (Sunday, 1:15pm) Marianna Milhorat’s L’INTERNATIONALE combines images of isolation, remove, and social estrangement with stunning cinematography and Kathryn Ramey utilizes a range of film techniques and styles to consider the life of Nineteenth Century American imperialist William Walker in YANQUI WALKER AND THE OPTICAL REVOLUTION. Shorts Program Five (Sunday, 3pm) includes Chi Jang Yin’s beautiful LIGHTHOUSE, which observes workers in a Chinese factory town. Landscape features prominently in three works in Shorts Program Six (Sunday, 6pm). Robert Todd continues his mastery of 16mm cinematography in the lush and stunning GOLDEN HOUR. Jack Cronin uses grainy black and white Super-8 film to create a haunting texture of a place in SLEEPING BEAR. Michael Robinson’s IF THERE BE THORNS draws upon the verdant tropics and the heated texts of William S. Burroughs, V.C. Andrews, and Stevie Nicks for this quasi-narrative fever dream. – Patrick Friel

The 22nd Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival
The Nightingale and Chicago Filmmakers – Check website for complete schedule
The Onion City festival began on Thursday and continues through Sunday, June 20, with an additional eight programs at the Nightingale (Friday) and Chicago Filmmakers (Saturday and Sunday). The festival, which is run by Chicago Filmmakers, includes films, videos, digital works, and two projector performances from over a dozen different countries.
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Group Show One (Friday, 7pm, The Nightingale): The truth is a funny thing. It not exactly an absolute, and it’s a little more than a matter of opinion. Sometimes when you want to figure out how historical events created the truth of today you have to fabricate a myth. And sometimes that myth is closer to the truth than history. The two documentaries included in this show are attempts to mix disparate facts in order to illuminate a truth that was never mentioned at the moment reality existed. Duncan Campbell’s MAKE IT NEW JOHN (2009, UK) retells the story of automotive wunderkind John DeLorean and the car that would be his downfall. Using a vast array of found footage, Campbell fills us in on the childhood and career of DeLorean, how he suddenly leaves his job as a top executive at GM, and founds a new kind of car company. But as the story of the DeLorean Motor Company unfolds, interviews that seem too perfect to have taken place are inserted into the film. Campbell asks us to choose whether the original footage or the recreation does a better job of representing history. Kathryn Ramey is also concerned with how History represents the events of the past, but takes a less direct approach. In YANQUI WALKER AND THE OPTICAL REVOLUTION (2009, USA) she also uses both stock and original footage, but presents them as different renderings of the truth. Reading more like an essay than Campbell’s film, she uses hand processed Super 8 footage, time-lapse photography, and tourist footage of contemporary Nicaragua. Attempting to draw connections between America’s contemporary economic dominance of Central America and William Walker’s 1856 invasion (and subsequent presidency) of Nicaragua, she reads from historical documents and teaches us about this rogue conqueror from the not-so-distant past. And ultimately, her technical interventions in image creation are just as truthy as the facts. (Jason Halprin)

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Group Show Two (Friday, 9pm, The Nightingale) is teeming with bright and beautiful video work. Mark Street’s COLLISION OF PARTS (2010, US) is exactly what the title promises—it’s a sharply edited and confidently messy mix of documents and abstractions featuring the natural, urban, political, and personal. There’s a plunge into the virtual with Emily Carmichael’s touchingly funny retro-video-game-based LEDO AND IX GO TO TOWN (2010, US) and Jeanne Liotta’s karaoke video filmed “live” in Second Life, SWEET DREAMS (2009, US). The absurd and aggressive Barry Doupé seriously intensifies those elements in WHOSE TOES (2009, Canada). Gregg Biermann’s TRAFFIC PATTERNS (2009, US) is a spinning, twirling, gorgeous riff on previously mined mirrored imagery. Van McElwee pixilates and smears to marvelous effect in NAVIGATORS (MELTING CHRONONS) (2009, US). (Josh Mabe)

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Abstraction abounds in Group Show Three (Saturday, 4pm, Chicago Filmmakers). Mary Helena Clark gives us beautiful blues and aquatic abstractions in the ethereally shimmering SOUND OVER WATER (2009, US). Robert Todd shows the textures of light leaving the day in LULLABY (2009, US), and mixes flattened planes of light with crisp nature in SEEKING SUNLIGHT (2010, US). Robbie Land’s FALL CREEK ROAD (2009, US) explodes with fiery, intensely colored optical printing. Ross Nugent produces startling color effects from an overlaid triple projection in SPILLWAY STUDY/CARPE DIEZ (2009, 8 mins., 3 x 16mm projector performance, US). One of the most interesting things to keep an eye out for during this festival is the unintentional budding connection between a group of video artists in Chicago and Istanbul. In this program, you can see those parallels in the always-amazing work of local Jake Barningham and the Turk Eytan Ipeker. Check out the work of Yoel Meranda (in Group Show Four) and Kyle Canterbury (in Group Show Five) to see for yourself. Also in the program: work by Seoungho Cho, Barry Gerson, and Richard Tuohy. (Josh Mabe)

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If Group Show Four (Saturday, 7pm, Chicago Filmmakers) is packed it’s due to the screening of a new work by the still reining overlord of American experimental film and video, Kenneth Anger! According to the artist ICH WILL! (2008, US) is “a poetic, ironic reverie on the Hitler Youth.” Yoel Meranda, a video artist who makes subtle tiny abstractions, has four new works in this program. Pablo Marin’s Super-8 UNTITLED TRILOGY (2008-09, Argentina) give us pounding depth effects in the first section, a more poetic second section, and a humorously trifurcated third. Ichiro Sueoka simply and touchingly presents flaking, time-bleached, decaying images of a parade in MARCHING ON (2009, Japan). Also in this program: work by Simon Payne, Thorsten Fleisch, and Emily Wardill. (Josh Mabe)

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Group Show Five (Saturday, 9.15pm, Chicago Filmmakers) is probably the strongest program of the festival. Local Kyle Canterbury is growing by leaps and bounds as of late. He’s showing three new pieces that reveal a vision that is becoming extraordinarily connected to the rhythms and construction of his subjects. Barry Doupé returns with an oddly beautiful consideration of animated flowers in THALE (2009, Canada). Stephanie Barber’s TO THE HORSE DREAM OF ARMS (2010, US) is a brief, intense study of a piece of found footage featuring a boy being flashed by a reflection of light. Two pieces from master animator Lewis Klahr’s recent pop music project “Prolix Satori” are showing: NIMBUS SMILE (2009, US) features a cheerless, city dwelling woman facing disaffection to the Velvet Underground’s Pale Blue Eyes, while WEDNESDAY MORNING TWO A.M. (2009, US) strikes a more perilous and sorrowful tone. The latter title is flat-out brilliant. Also in this program: work by Vincent Grenier, Ben Rivers, Fern Silva, Marina Gioti, Simon Payne, and T. Marie. (Josh Mabe)

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Group Show Six (Sunday, 4pm, Chicago Filmmakers) is presented in memory of JoAnn Elam, Chick Strand, and Callie Angell—three remarkable women who have died in the past year. The work being shown in tribute include: CARTOON LE MOUSSE (1979, US) from San Francisco legend Chick Strand; the feminist classic LIE BACK AND ENJOY IT (1982, US) from local filmmaker JoAnn Elam; and two of Andy Warhol’s films for Warhol scholar Callie Angell, including the amazing SHOULDER (1964, US). The pensive and deeply felt DARK RIVER (2009, US) by local Chi Jang Yin features women recalling the art made in their youth. The startlingly intense Super-8 film DAYLIGHT + THE SUN (2009, US) by local Karen Johannesen gives us light that is abrasively and almost unnaturally forceful. The inspired SOMEWHERE ONLY WE KNOW (2009, US) by local Jesse McLean shows us an extraordinary moment when “reality” is shattered by reality. Also in this program: work by Deborah Stratman, Alexi Manis, Adele Friedman, and Friedl vom Gröller (Kubelka). (Josh Mabe)

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Globe-hopping Group Show Seven (Sunday, 6.30pm, Chicago Filmmakers) features a number of fantastic film works. NON-ARYAN (2009, US), by Abraham Ravett, achieves something astounding by revealing the very physical texture of memory. The stark THE SOUL OF THINGS (2010, US) by Dominic Angerame seeks to disclose the history hidden in places. WASH + SHAVE (2010, US) by Jonathan Schwartz presents the titular events with an amazingly straightforward lyricism. Also in this program: work by Erin Espelie, Karen Mirza & Brad Butler, Shambhavi Kaul, and Kamal Aljafari. (Josh Mabe)

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Group Show Eight (Sunday, 8:45pm, Chicago Filmmakers) includes an international selection of new video work—INDIA SHOUTING MATCH (2010, UK) by George Barber,
BRUNE RENAULT (2010, France) and
SAYRE AND MARCUS (2010, France) by Neil Beloufa,
4’ 22” (2009, UK) by William Raban,
TODAY! (CHASE SCENES 63A, 63B) (2010, US) by Jessie Stead, and
THIS IS VERY GOOD (2009, Austria/Czech Republic) by Jakub Vrba—and an
UNTITLED LIVE PROJECTOR PERFORMANCE (2010, approx. 15 mins., 3 x 16mm projector performance, with fans) by Chicagoan Joe Grimm.

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More info at www.chicagofilmmakers.org/onion_fest.
Note: The Onion City festival is programmed by C-F editor Patrick Friel.

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 four (Friday, March 26 through Thursday, April 1).

Jacques Rivette’s AROUND A SMALL MOUNTAIN (France)
Sunday, 3pm and Monday, 6pm
An Italian driving to Spain meets an Englishwoman in a small town in France. We don’t know what he (Sergio Castellitto) does for a living, but he owns a nice car and seems to have a lot of time on his hands, though it might just be because he has enough money to afford sitting around when he feels like it. She (Jane Birkin) is a member of a circus family who left the business 15 years ago, but has returned for a few days to help with a tour. They’re both somewhere in late middle age. His name is Vittorio; hers is Kate. As he tries to figure out her mystery, he befriends the circus performers, including Alexandre (Andre Marcon), a veteran clown who performs a complicated routine involving dinner plates. As in Chaplin’s LIMELIGHT, the circus performances are shown without crowd noise, but not because we’re to assume the role of the theater audience; there’s simply no one there to applaud. The clowns and acrobats perform to small handfuls of bored people, and when they discover that Vittorio appreciates their work (and actually laughs!), they want his friendship just as badly as Vittorio wants Kate. For those who’ve never seen a Jacques Rivette movie, or don’t know him by reputation, 36 VUES DU PIC SAINT LOUP (titled AROUND A SMALL MOUNTAIN for English release, a name like a 1930s Japanese movie) will be a well-acted, somewhat elusive, small film. Those who’ve seen even just a handful of Rivette movies will probably be struck by the film’s weightlessness; a Rivette film, which usually seems to drain all of the mental and emotional resources of its actors and director, has never been made with so little apparent effort. Rivette’s a curious case for two reasons: first, the closer his films get to “the mainstream,” the less “marketable” they become (at roughly half the running time of the average Rivette film and with no paranoia, AROUND A SMALL MOUNTAIN should be easier for the average audience to appreciate, and yet it’s much harder to explain the appeal of this film than it is to explain the appeal of his 13-hour-long, intensely paranoid OUT 1); second, despite being a director who devotes himself above all to the filming of actors, he benefits the most out of all the ex-Cahiers critics from auteurism. It’s become something of an accepted truth that Rivette is “the least well-known of the French New Wave’s most talented directors,” but there’s a reason for it: few people have sought out a Rivette film without knowing who Rivette was. It’s unfortunately likely to remain that way, but a movie-goer should acquaint themselves with Rivette for the same reason a reader should acquaint themselves with Balzac: because they represent what it’s possible to accomplish by placing the work above the works. Rivettians will have the theater and the unseen ghosts they’ve come to expect, and the Lubtchansky clan, whose own family business partly consists of making Jacques Rivette films and who are here represented by editor Nicole and cinematographer Irina. Those who want to see a movie with Jane Birkin in it or a movie about the circus or just a good way to spend an hour-and-a-half or so will get all of those things, plus some great uses of the color blue and some fine clowning. These two groups will see something different in every scene, but what they’ll be able to enjoy together are the movie’s last twenty minutes or so, which are beautiful and direct in a way that requires no explanatory notes. (2009, 84 min, 35mm) – Ignatius Vishnevetsky

Bruno Dumont’s HADEWIJCH (France)
Saturday, 7:15pm and Wednesday, 6pm
Bruno Dumont depicts damaged souls with immaculate artistry. His images are often arranged with a painter’s meticulousness and his soundtracks, typically devoid of music, give seeming order to everyday white noise. These elements would suggest a Christian cinema of grace attained by the unwitting (or at least a theologically-informed cinema, like Dreyer’s or Bresson’s), but Dumont is of a decidedly existential bent: His great theme is the search for dignity amidst a world of chaos. Whether his characters achieve this dignity (HUMANITE, FLANDRES) or not (THE LIFE OF JESUS, TWENTYNINE PALMS), their struggle has never been conceived in religious terms; in this regard, his fifth film, HADEWIJCH, represents a departure for Dumont. Its college-aged protagonist Celine is searching specifically for communication with God, looking first in a convent (located in the small country town for which the movie is named) and then, disastrously, in the secular world. One pivotal scene excluded, her story is free of sex or violence: In another departure, Dumont mostly restricts himself to G-rated material. His concern is Celine’s response to mundane experience, which she finds generally unfulfilling; her yearning for divine presence is so strong that she’s moved by almost nothing. In Celine’s search for transcendence, she will experiment several times with martyrdom—by fasting, in resisting the affections of an admiring young man, and through one radical decision, which should remain a surprise for those who haven’t seen it. Throughout HADEWIJCH Dumont ponders, Is this young woman overcome with self-love, as one older nun insists, or does she have the makings of a saint? The camera is impassive; it doesn’t pretend to know. But like Carlos Reygadas’ SILENT LIGHT (another film about fundamentalism made by an avowed atheist), HADEWIJCH takes religion seriously enough not to condescend to its practitioners. Whether the film succeeds as religious parable, however, greatly depends on your response to Julie Sokolowski, its young star. Like all of Dumont’s leads, Sokolowski had no previous acting experience before making this film. Her actions are unaffected, but maddeningly opaque; she doesn’t seem to have answers about Celine, either. For some viewers, her presence may embody the same unwitting grace of Bresson’s Mouchette and Balthazar; for others, she will be nothing more than a blank slate. In either case, her consistent unreadability illustrates the movie’s key refrain, that “God appears to us in the invisible.” And in Sokolowski’s constancy, Dumont finds a fitting model for his seriousness of intent. (2009, 101 min, 35mm) – Ben Sachs

Tomm Moore’s THE SECRET OF KELLS (Ireland/France/Belgium)
Thursday, 6:30pm
An improbable contestant for this year’s Oscar in Best Animated Feature, THE SECRET OF KELLS is a slender and simple story, light on the usual Disney and Pixar-style comic relief and plot machinations. Instead it makes use of the origin myth of Ireland’s national treasure, an illuminated manuscript known as the Book of Kells, to explore an extraordinary hodge-podge of visual styles, some stunning, others less so. The major division of style is between the Stepan Zavrel-style environments and the unarticulated Cartoon Network-style characters that inhabit them. Art Director Ross Stewart creates atmospheres that are so divine it’s hard to believe they are populated with such schematic humans, including racial caricatures that really don’t fly anymore. There is one very charming character with some texture (on his face and clothes); he’s a kind of monastic Willie Nelson. But the humans are beside the point: this movie makes radical use of perspective, presenting you with panoramic and bird’s eye view at the same time, then dissolving into a kind of boundary-less digital snow-globe world, not laboring to explain these episodes rationally. Long sections of the film are wordless, and better for it. The visual language borrows from Insular artistic tradition but it isn’t weighed down by faithful mimicry. The scenes that are built to resemble illuminated manuscripts are formidable, but they give way gracefully to Australian aboriginal geometries and watercolor worlds that resemble Eastern European children’s book painting. And there are always enough obviously digital movement and lighting effects that the aesthetic doesn’t turn into one big, false nostalgic vision. (2009, 75 min, 35mm) – Josephine Ferorelli

Peter von Bagh’s HELSINKI, FOREVER (Finland)
Sunday, 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. (2008, 75 min, DigiBeta video) – Patrick Friel

Vinko Moderndorfer’s LANDSCAPE NO. 2 (Slovenia)
Saturday, 7:30pm and Tuesday, 6pm
Between A FILM WITH ME IN IT, THE BONE MAN, and now LANDSCAPE NO. 2, this year’s festival has shown European cinema excelling at the modest-scale thriller, a genre the U.S. once dominated but relegated to the video market decades ago. LANDSCAPE is easily the darkest of these films, not only in its evocations of genocide but in much of its characterization. Sergej, the ostensible hero, is easily the biggest asshole to occupy the center of a movie in some time: A self-centered thief who constantly deceives the friends and (concurrent) girlfriends who support him, he makes the antihero of Jan Hrebejk’s recent SHAMELESS look like Capra’s Mr. Smith. After Sergej unwittingly takes some old documents indicting an esteemed general in crimes against humanity, he finds himself chased by hitmen and State police. It’s hard to feel sorry for the schmuck, but Sergej’s lack of sympathy ends up being central to the film’s politics—which emerge only gradually, after writer-director Vinko Moderndorfer has successfully established a steady pulse of suspense. (The film’s 90 minutes just fly by.) In a neat reversal of a Roman Polanski set-up, the antihero suffers because of a lack of curiosity. There’s subtext here about the post-Communism generation’s ignorance of recent history, which Moderndorfer clearly finds alarming, and it makes the film worthwhile as a snapshot of Eastern Europe today. (2008, 90 min, 35mm) – Ben Sachs

Daniel Sanchez Alvaro’s GORDOS (Spain)
Friday, 8:15pm and Sunday, 4:45pm
Four overweight people enter a group therapy program to find out the root of their obesity and end up learning much more about themselves. The premise of this ensemble comedy sounds like it could result in either bad-taste humor or cliché truisms, though it’s relatively devoid of either. While certainly a crowd-pleaser, writer-director Daniel Sanchez Alevaro’s film has less in common with contemporary Hollywood than with the grown-up situation comedies Vincente Minnelli or Leo McCarey made in the 1950s (DESIGNING WOMAN; RALLY ‘ROUND THE FLAG, BOYS!). The therapy group isn’t characterized reductively by single neuroses; they’re three-dimensional people who remain flawed even when they overcome some of their problems. The group’s therapist is similarly complex, managing to help his patients while screwing up aspects of his own life. (It’s the rare film that advocates therapy without idealizing it.) Unlike most of his Hollywood counterparts, Alevaro manages to make a light comedy that still looks like a real film. His ‘Scope framing is clever, often containing subtle observations about the characters’ lives, and he maintains an engaging momentum while editing between the subplots. But most remarkable about the film is its generosity. Besides exhibiting an enlightened view of diverse body images, Alevaro refuses to condescend to the potential stereotypes in the group: the devout Catholic woman and the gay professional man. All lives (as opposed to lifestyles) are entitled to happiness, the movie preaches, but happiness does not come easily. Alevaro conveys this message even in the movie’s explicit (but still good-natured) sex scenes, which take the unpopular stance of showing that long-term relationships can still be erotic. It’s a modest victory for a film that aims primarily to entertain, but GORDOS proves that light entertainment can still be a model of responsibility. (2009, 110 min, 35mm widescreen) – Ben Sachs

Felix Van Groeningen’s THE MISFORTUNATES (Belgium)
Friday, 6pm and Saturday, 9:30pm
The original name of this Flemish comedy, De helaasheid der dingen, roughly translates as “The Shittiness of Things,” and it’s a better reflection of its grungy humor than the more generic title of the English-language release. Based on a novel by Dimitri Verhulst, the film takes a light-hearted view of poverty and alcoholism without overlooking the ugliness of either; the most recent point-of-reference is probably TRAINSPOTTING. Like that cult favorite, THE MISFORTUNATES adopts an episodic structure that strings together the “greatest hits” of addiction before crisis overwhelms. The setting, similarly uninspiring, is a northern Belgian village in the early 1980s; the addicts are four grown brothers living with their mother so they can blow their paychecks on booze. It’s told from the point-of-view of one brother’s son, who improbably grows up in this home (though Verhulst based the novel on his own childhood), and the film is most engaging when it adopts a child-like sense of wonder at the pathetic goings-on. Director Felix Van Groeningen shoots the ‘Scope production almost entirely hand-held, switches between black-and-white and color in the same sequence, and encourages a performance style just one note away from caricature. It’s lively filmmaking, suggesting lives rich in spontaneity. One memorable shot has the boy, drunk for the first time, trying to play darts with a billiard cue. The camera moves back and forth with his wind-up, the cue occupying most of the wide frame like a javelin. Van Groeningen evokes seasickness but maintains a steady enough rhythm to quell nausea. “[The film] makes the rather subversive suggestion that [addicts’] lives are purposeful and even fulfilled in a way because they’re so highly motivated,” Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote of Ivan Passer’s BORN TO WIN, and there are times when THE MISFORTUNATES merits such praise. The film’s pungent depiction of various drudgeries (small-town life in particular, working in general) contributes to this subversive quality as well. (2009, 108 min, 35mm widescreen) – Ben Sachs

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

Mia Hansen-Love’s THE FATHER OF MY CHILDREN (France)
Wednesday, March 17, 8pm (final screening)
A great film, worthy of comparison to the masterpieces of Maurice Pialat, André Téchiné, or Edward Yang. Like those directors at their peak, Mia Hansen-Love has realized her characters so thoroughly that the very formal properties of the work—narrative structure, pacing, even edits between close-ups and medium shots—reflect the tenor of their experience. It’s a movie whose every detail exalts the potentiality of being alive, not only in moments of spontaneity but also in familiar actions that achieve unexpected resonance. Ironically, THE FATHER OF MY CHILDREN was inspired by the 2005 suicide of Humbert Balsan, the legendary producer of European and Middle Eastern art cinema. The film is organized around the death of its Balsan stand-in, Gregoire Canvel; it occurs, without pathos or hysterics, about halfway through the narrative. But as in Pialat’s life-affirming VAN GOGH, Hansen-Love does her best not to foreshadow Canvel’s suicide. In fact, the first half of CHILDREN depicts his life as perfectly fulfilled, both professionally and at home. It’s rare that a work of art can find profound things to say about happiness, but that’s just one of Hansen-Love’s accomplishments here: An early scene in which Canvel takes his wife and daughters to a Medieval cathedral shows a man at peace with his place in human history. There’s no attempt to stress the parallels between Canvel, who uses his wealth to support great films, and the merchants who financed religious art in the past. The focus is on his daughters’ discovery of the building’s grandeur, the fresh appreciation that makes great art timeless. (On the subject of great art, special mention should be made of Pascal Auffray’s cinematography, which uses natural light as gloriously and as modestly as Nestor Almendros’ work for Eric Rohmer.) The film is so attentive to Canvel’s impact on others that it doesn’t even register as a major shift when he disappears from the story: A subplot late in the film concerning his oldest daughter’s coming-of-age feels like an outgrowth of his support of the arts. Hansen-Love’s faith in art—as lifeblood, as historic record, as the center of community—is so axiomatic that one can fully enjoy CHILDREN without picking up on the inside references to Balsan’s career. (It’s in keeping with the film’s universal wisdom that the fictional movie posters around Canvel’s office aren’t cinephilic in-jokes but thematic watchwords, with titles like “The Journey is the Destination” and “Je sais que tu m’entends” [”I know that you hear me”].) And yet it’s the very accessibility of the film, relatable even in singular circumstances, that makes it such a successful tribute to its subject. (2009, 110 min, 35mm) – Ben Sachs

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

Frank Perry’s masterpiece has a rare screening Thursday at Doc Films, and I’d like to write a little bit more about why I believe that it’s one of most unjustly neglected films of the 1970s.

Her husband Jonathan is a partner in a successful law firm. They live with their two young daughters in a luxurious highrise just off the park. So why is Tina so lifeless and exhausted? Well, for starters, her husband (Richard Benjamin, exquisitely obnoxious) is an egocentric nag who only seems interested in climbing the next rung on the social ladder. And her children are goggle-eyed aliens who constantly whine, when they’re not being openly hostile towards her. At a party, Tina happens to meet George, a celebrity writer with a streak of narcissism a mile wide. He propositions her. Eventually, she gives in. And that’s when the story really takes off.

But this is no angst-ridden drama of infidelity. DIARY’s brilliance, for me, is that it treats this stuff as black comedy, not as tragedy. DIARY has more in common with Paddy Chayefsky’s satires THE HOSPITAL and NETWORK than you might think. All three are equally stylized, and their stylization is key to their effectiveness. For example, we all know that newscasters really don’t talk like Howard Beale in NETWORK. We only wish they did. It’s a fantasy; or one might say, taking things to their logical conclusions. DIARY OF A MAD HOUSEWIFE is not called ANATOMY OF A MARRIAGE for the very reason that the film is not a balanced look at relationships. It’s all from Carrie Snodgress’ point of view (as borne out by the “punchline” ending). The lack of so-called “realistic behavior” in Richard Benjamin’s character that enrages so many critics should not be troubling. (Think of George C. Scott in DR.STRANGELOVE for example.) I believe that his character is exactly meant to be “a hypothetical nebula of every bad hetero-male trait.” In fact, were his character Jonathan to be portrayed in a fair, balanced way, akin to Michael Murphy’s character in AN UNMARRIED WOMAN (which, by the way, serves as a useful reference point since Mazursky’s movie is like an inverse of DIARY), I’d go so far as to suggest the movie would then be pointless. It’s because he’s so “grating, demanding, anal, immature,” so completely over the top, that the movie has its zing.

DIARY was a very ahead-of-the-curve attempt to address the broken promises and corroded idealism of the 60s. Remember, it came out in 1970! What other mainstream American filmmakers were ready to call the 60s a failure in 1970? The film is basically saying, “You know peace and love and flower power? All those 60s dreams? It was all a sham. And it was doubly a sham for women, who are just as trapped as they ever were. All that so-called freedom they thought was right around the corner was just an illusion. And it was largely perpetrated by the men themselves.”

At the the end of the film, during his monologue, Jonathan reminisces about how he met Tina during a political campaign, and says, “You remember how fired up we were about what was happening in Washington? We were so young and hopeful. It sounds corny. But we were idealistic. Weren’t we, Teen? And then, suddenly it was all over. Gone. I used to wake up at 3 o’clock in the morning, crying, because it wasn’t there anymore.” The angst of a generation torn between increasingly meaningless tradition (what is modern marriage? does it even involve love anymore, or is it just about materialism and the family unit?) and a social mobility that seemed even more vapid (Jonathan’s whole “kick” is social mobility; not content with a luxurious high rise apartment and his law form partnership, he restlessly seeks out the personal affirmation that he thinks will come from from hobnobbing with celebrities, even though they only use him.) Jonathan is far from from being merely a one-dimensional stand-in for the typical MCP. He causes his own humiliation, even as Tina is just a glutton for punishment, moving from one egocentric creep to another.

Yet the film is not misanthropic. Perry films the action in a cool, clean style, capturing the daily rhythms of Tina’s routine: housework, shopping, sneaking a quick belt of vodka while fixing dinner. Between the drudgery and the male chauvinism, it’s no wonder she’s “mad.” His film shows how our habits are at first forced upon us by Western society–before we eagerly, wistfully embrace them.  These obligations both restrain us and coddle us; we feel trapped by them even as we come to rely on them more and more to tell us how to relate to one another. In 2009, how have things changed?