Cine-File Blog

Na Hong-jin’s THE YELLOW SEA (South Korea)

Friday, 11pm

All the virtues of THE CHASER (2008) are still evident in Na Hong-jin’s second feature, which generally succeeds at recasting them on a larger scale. Na’s editing has a strong, distinctive pulse: his films dart to a new detail every few seconds, but that doesn’t undermine their sense of space. Indeed, it only contributes to the sense of perspective–what would be called “voice” in literature. Na creates bustling underground societies through induction, noting the myriad little bits of business involved in, say, driving a taxi, breaking into a gated apartment, or cutting off a man’s thumb. Nothing comes easily for his characters, a fact that Na emphasizes by drawing out certain scenes to depict things step-by-step: he’s the rare action director who seems to get what it’s like to break your back for a living. (Seldom do actors seem so genuinely exhausted at the end of a foot-chase sequence.) Na’s aesthetic has similarities to Michael Mann’s research-heavy realism, but the results are earthier, less definitive in their observations. Since there were no English subtitles on the digital projection of YELLOW SEA that I attended, I can’t comment much on the nuances of story or character (though it’s worth noting that Na has such a vivid imagination that every character develops a particular way of walking or lighting a cigarette). From what I could gather, the movie concerns a disgraced badass of some sort, estranged from his wife and working as a taxi driver, who’s forced into dangerous activity to pay his debt to a local hood. Kim Yun-seok, the sweet-eyed, large-cheeked star of THE CHASER, plays the hood; Ha Jung-woo, who played the killer in that movie (and acted in some of Kim Ki-duk’s films as well), plays the put-upon antihero. Ha begins the movie in a state of desperation, and things only get worse over the next two hours or so. The poor sucker has to smuggle himself across the titular sea–East Asia’s center of criminality, according to an opening title card–commit an elaborate burglary, even kill to survive. As narrative, the movie represents either a slow drift away from realism or the gradual construction of something more interesting: it culminates with a city-wide knife fight that lasts for more than half-an-hour, maybe the most exquisitely choreographed action sequence to play Chicago since the second half of Miike’s 13 ASSASSINS. Yet even at its most ludicrous, THE YELLOW SEA displays a charged curiosity about how things really work. Try to see it with an electrician. (2011, 140 min) –Ben Sachs

Justin Kurzel’s SNOWTOWN (Australia)

Friday (10/14), 8:30pm and Saturday (10/15), 9:40pm

For all of you who were wondering when Lodge Kerrigan (CLEAN, SHAVEN) would make an Aussie serial-killer tone poem, well, first-time writer-director Justin Kurzel beat him to it. SNOWTOWN is the punishingly bleak story of John Bunting, Australia’s most prolific serial killer, and his friendship with/recruitment of a teenage boy. But there’s bleak and then there’s bleak. The propulsive drone of the score, the almost physically textured photography, the languid cuts combine to create a test of endurance—a drone of despair, abject poverty, and brutality that’s admirable in its single-mindedness. There’s no particular insight offered beyond the old saw that serial killers are scary, and some of them are really charming folks. The emphasis seems to have been on creating a visual and aural tableau in which serial murder is more likely than municipal trash collection. It’s an astoundingly effective, technically brilliant piece, but there’s just no light here. (2011, 120 min.)

Mia Hansen-Løve’s GOODBYE FIRST LOVE (UN AMOUR DE JEUNESSE) (France)

Monday (10/10), 6pm

The great Maurice Pialat reportedly claimed to edit his films by removing all the footage that didn’t strike him as true. That might explain the sustained emotional intensity of his work, the jarring transitions between scenes, the way his movies captured so accurately the subjective experience of being alive even when their content departed from strict realism. A similarly cryptic logic—as well as a comparably overwhelming emotion—pervades Mia Hansen-Løve’s third feature, her first since THE FATHER OF MY CHILDREN (2009). The movie seems to advance by intuition: you can never predict where it’s going. The story follows Camille (Lola Créton) and Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky) from adolescence, when they’re high-school sweethearts who go through a traumatic breakup, to their mid-20s, when they reunite after several years. Nothing happens comfortably or predictably: Hansen-Løve will devote several minutes to a seemingly mundane action, then bring the plot several months into the future with a simple, unassuming edit. (The greatest elisions, usually skipping over a few years at a time, are denoted by elegant fade-outs that suggest the line breaks in a poem.) Likewise, the movie generally seems tied to Camille’s perspective, though it shifts at several critical moments to depict things that happen only to Sullivan. It’s puzzling as to just whom or what is guiding the movie’s attention; perhaps it’s the characters’ passion itself, which has transformed the film’s structure no less radically than it has the characters. Hansen-Løve is playing with aspects of narrative movies we usually take for granted—such a consistent perspective and a clear sense of time’s passage—and turning them inside-out. The result is a movie that seems organized not by events but by their emotional impact.

Though GOODBYE FIRST LOVE is surprising to watch, it’s hard to synopsize the content without making it sound trite. (Both the film’s original title–which translates literally to A LOVE OF/FROM YOUTH–and the English variant are bland but nevertheless accurate descriptors.) Hansen-Løve’s subject is how it feels to love somebody too passionately–the all-consuming romance we must experience but ultimately reject in order to grow up. She’s keen to the exhilaration of first love as well as its dangerous unpredictability: it has a nervous momentum you can’t quite put your finger on, as though something very bad might happen at any time. Yet the film conveys great warmth in its intimacy to the characters, which persists even when the characters resist easy sympathy: Hansen-Løve seems confident that the mistakes of youth (of which the film contains many) can lead to knowledge. It’s indicative of her sensitivity that each time the story moves forward a few years, the characters seem to have learned something in the interim; their faces betray some sad or protective quality they haven’t shown before. Remarkably all of the actors convey a decade worth of emotional development in the film’s 110 minutes. Everyone is extraordinary, but Créton (last seen in Catherine Breillat’s BLUEBEARD) is worth singling out, as she transforms from a child into a fully-formed adult without the aid of obvious make-up or costume choices. (Even more impressive: she was only 17 when this was shot.) Her performance achieves something similar to the CG effects of THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON, another recent movie eerily fixated on the passage of time. But there’s nothing elegiac about GOODBYE FIRST LOVE. Bittersweetly, but with eyes wide open and mind unclouded, Hansen-Løve conveys the impermanence of youth by playing up another basic fact that movies take for granted: that the images you see in a theater are constantly disappearing before your eyes. I was in tears throughout the film; I missed it well before it was over. (2011, 110 min, 35mm)

Gerardo Naranjo’s MISS BALA (Mexico)

Saturday (10/8), 8pm and Monday (10/10), 8:35pm

Gerardo Naranjo’s first feature after the Nouvelle Vague-ish I’M GONNA EXPLODE (2008) is a heart-racing allegory that likens the corruption of contemporary Mexico to a rigged beauty pageant. The title character is a poor 23-year-old from Tijuana who’s accepted into the Miss Baja California beauty contest just when a powerful drug cartel threatens her into running their deadly errands. The juggling of these responsibilities becomes a source of tension as well as dark humor; the movie’s underlying joke is that no matter what Laura does, she’s always representing Mexican society. Naranjo doesn’t force any of his ironies, however: The filmmaking is so virtuosic that you’re always caught up in the rush of events, the implications emerging only gradually. Like his countryman Alfonso Cuarón, Naranjo works in complicated, movement-heavy long takes, particularly during the epic gun battles: It’s three-dimensional filmmaking, with the camera moving nearly as much as the many players in the drama. There are also moments when Naranjo’s camera settles on some stunning widescreen composition, and these flashes of self-contained beauty are no less surprising for seeming to emerge, impossibly, from the general chaos. This will likely spark conversations about the ongoing drug war along the U.S.-Mexico border (as a final title card reminds us, it’s left tens of thousands of casualties in the last five years alone); but first it demands to be experienced as the galvanizing comic nightmare it is. (2011, 113 min, 35mm widescreen) –Ben Sachs

SADERMANIA: FROM FANSHIP TO FRIENDSHIP (USA)

Saturday (10/15), 6:15pm

Listen up, brudder! Chris Sader is the ultimate Hulkamaniac, proven by the veritable temple of autographed Hulk Hogan memorabilia in his parents’ basement. The son of Polish immigrants to Chicago, Sader became obsessed with Hulk Hogan at the tender age of four, and spent the next 26 years slowly transforming into a good friend of the pro-wrestler, but you likely figured that out from the documentary’s title. The truth is, this doc is not very good, in fact, it’s insufferable at times, but none of that is due to the subject matter. Even when SADERMANIA relies on animated comic book panels to illustrate the stories Sader tells, Sader’s obsession is fascinating enough to transcend the mediocrity of the documentary. Either director Adam Gacka doesn’t have enough faith in the material to let Sader tell his story, or else he feels the need to assert his authorial voice for fear of it being subsumed by his subject matter. In either case, it is fortunate that there are moments in the doc like Hulk Hogan’s recounting of the first time he met Chris Sader or the tour of Sader’s basement shrine. One senses that given the treatment it rightly deserves, SADERMANIA could be a fascinating, insightful portrait of an unusual passion. As it is, the passion is there, but the insights are nestled between agonizing groans. (2010, 85m) – Douglas McLaren

Listed in order of preference. So far, the best things I’ve seen in the fest have been Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai’s DON’T GO BREAKING MY HEART (which I reviewed for the Chicago Reader) and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA. I hope to post something soon on the latter.

Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne’s THE KID WITH A BIKE (Belgium)

Saturday (10/8), 5:15pm and Sunday (10/9), 5pm

In their patience, tolerance and political utility, the films of Belgium’s Dardenne brothers evoke the noble practice of social work, and their latest is no exception. The simple story concerns an 11-year-old boy abandoned by his no-good father and living as a ward of the state; as played by an amazing discovery named Thomas Dorset, he is a very real case study, arousing neither pity nor cooing sympathy. Cyril is given to running away and attacking authority figures: clearly he has never benefited from an adult who could teach him right from wrong. Things seem to take a positive turn when he finds a hairdresser (Cécile de France, best known here as the meteorologist in Clint Eastwood’s HEREAFTER) who agrees to be his part-time foster parent; but as this is Dardenne brothers’ film, nothing is so easily resolved. The kid remains a behavioral problem no matter how much attention he’s shown, and, in a shocking turn, a youth gang seduces him into some pretty bad trouble (it would lessen the movie’s impact, however, if you knew what it was going in). The Dardennes continue to practice a hypnotic, verite-inspired realism that’s almost without peer in contemporary movies. Consider the specificity with which they realize Samantha’s hair salon or the kitchen in which Cyril’s father works: in just a few shots they can convey exactly what it involves to earn a day’s wage. (They also continue to display a back-of-the-hand knowledge of Seraing, the working-class town where they’ve made most of their films, evoking a lived-in environment from the very first shot of the picture.) Yet the lasting power of the Dardennes’ work comes not from their documentary detail but their old-school faith in melodrama to humanize abstract social problems. In fact, THE KID WITH A BIKE often feels like a 21st century update of Frank Borzage’s classic YOUNG AMERICA (1932), and its call for more people to take compassion on our planet’s many, many abandoned children is no less stirring than Borzage’s. (2011, 87 min)

—

CORPO CELESTE (Italy)

Saturday (10/8), 4:45pm and Sunday (10/9), 1pm

This film’s writer-director, Alice Rohrwacher, likes to discover scenes from the inside out, generally beginning with the camera right next to a character’s head, then following her across a room or moving back to reveal the busy environment that surrounds her. She also likes to withhold key information about characters and conflicts until the drama develops an almost infuriating air opacity. The style–which may be described as an active, poker-faced curiosity–often resembles that of the great Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel; and her story, a sly parable about faith in the modern age, specifically echoes Martel’s THE HOLY GIRL (2004). But it would be unfair to call Rohrwacher a mere copycat: every filmmaker needs role models, especially when she’s starting out; anyway, this is not a style one comes by easily. It requires, for one thing, an ability to imagine any setting down to the square inch, so that the camera can sit anywhere within it and generate the same level of dramatic tension. Rohrwacher is capable of that task: the film’s lower-middle-class family and the lethargic Catholic church they attend are realized acutely; and every character displays her own variation of lumpenprole passive-aggression. One major story line involves the priest’s effort to ascend the ladder of Catholic hierarchy, to which he sets himself as though lobbying his general manager for a raise. Rohrwacher turns his bureaucratic servitude into a running gag: every church service gets interrupted by the ring of his cell phone. The movie is filled with garish juxtapositions of Catholic ritual and information-age banality (in the first scene of Communion class, the teacher quizzes her kids on the catechism to the theme from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire), but the humor really stings because Rohrwacher seems to take faith seriously. How can religion still impact ordinary lives, the movie asks, when they lack the room to accommodate it? Marta, the film’s 13-year-old heroine, spends the film trying to model her life after what she learns in religious school, and her sincere efforts result in one calamity after another. Rohrwacher has a wonderful sympathy for the girl, who’s too introverted and, at times, downright weird to seem cute in standard movie fashion; Rohrwacher is also spot-on in Marta’s strained relationships with her bitchy older sister (who’s turned 18 like many real teenagers do, by acting the petty tyrant whenever she’s around someone younger than her). Like Martel–or, for that matter, Jane Campion or Catherine Breillat–Rohrwacher excels at characterizing a particular form of cruelty that exists mainly between women: the hurtful critical assessment presented under the veneer of advice and delivered at the exact moment it can do the most damage. It’s one of the movie’s many little achievements; among the bigger ones is Hélène Louvart’s 16mm photography. Louvart has worked for Claire Denis, Jacques Doillon, and Agnès Varda; she’s apparently an expert at capturing fleeting light sources and characters in movement. (2011, 95 min)

—

FAT, BALD, SHORT MAN (Colombia)

Friday (10/7), 9:10pm and Saturday (10/8), 12:45pm

Another minutely observed comedy-of-manners from South America, which seems to have become the world capital of the genre in the past decade. Like several recent Uruguayan films (WHISKY, GIGANTE, NORBERTO’S DEADLINE), its theme is the disappointment of everyday adulthood and the tone is understated and sympathetic. What distinguishes it from other entries in the genre is that it’s been animated in the neo-Rotoscoping technology developed by Richard Linklater and Bob Sabiston’s WAKING LIFE (2001) and A SCANNER DARKLY (2005); while it isn’t as ingenious as those examples, it still uses animation to purposeful effect. The movie, set in anonymous modern environments like office buildings and meeting halls, recognizes the way a certain culture turns people into blots. The title character is a terminally shy notary clerk who’s still a bashful virgin at 46; when he’s presented head-on, he’s nothing but an amorphous white canvas with five small dots for eyes, nostrils and mouth. He’s a human doormat, laughed at by his colleagues and conned by his brother into paying him countless “loans.” The plot concerns his first steps towards self-actualization–which the movie realizes, like the character himself, modestly and sweetly–and it proceeds like a good short story, illuminating the generally overlooked moments whose small comfort make life fulfilling. (2011, 97 min)

—

MACHETE LANGUAGE (Mexic0)

Tuesday (10/11), 8:40pm and Wednesday (10/12), 7:15pm

Kyzza Terrazas, who wrote the script for Gael Garcia Bernal’s directorial debut, DEFICIT (2007), here directs his own screenplay, about radicals in Mexico City. It’s shot on HD video and mostly in close-up, which seems appropriate for a movie about characters this self-conscious and paranoid. Ramona is the singer and guitarist for a pretty-good punk band; Raymundo is an anarchist photographer or documentarian of some sort. They appear to be in their mid-30s, draped in a certain level of street cred but also seeming to have worn their youth thin. Life needs to take on greater meaning or else it will wither. Should they have a baby or blow something up? Over the course of the movie’s short running time, Terrazas’ aesthetic lays down a real nervy groove; the characters’ desperation becomes quite palpable by the end. In its gritty, somewhat show-offy performances and general pessimism about the fate of the radical Left, the movie feels like an update of the sort of early 70s Hollywood art movie that would have starred Al Pacino or Jack Nicholson. It’s a raw, inside view of counterculture despair; if it looked just a little scrappier it would feel a real dispatch from the void. (2011, 82 min)

—

KINYARWANDA (US)

Friday (10/7), 8:45pm, Saturday (10/8), 12:35pm, and Thursday (10/13), 1:45pm

This fictionalized account of the Rwandan civil war of 1994 scrupulously avoids sensationalism in its approach, and it’s commendable for this reason alone. It’s presented in short, titled chapters–some of them as short as only a few minutes–that accumulate like a mosaic. This seems an appropriate way to convey how immense the atrocity of genocide is: every segment suggests another life cut short by the war, and the arbitrariness of the structure implies there are as many stories to tell as there were victims. It’s a distinctly egalitarian work, devoting comparable screen time to both Hutu and Tutsi characters, warriors and peacemakers, children and adults. The director, an American named Alrick Brown, even tries to bring as much celebratory behavior into the movie as he can, so as to remind us just what is lost in the destruction of so much life. Dancing and chanting are major motifs: KINYARWANDA practically begins with a group of teenagers singing along (improbably) to “Islands in the Stream” at a house party, and it goes on to show men chanting, alternately, for the death of their enemies and the reunification of their country. The HD videography is only so-so, but it adequately captures the sunny climate of the movie’s setting. (2011, 100 min)

—

JOINT BODY (US)

Wednesday (10/12), 3:40pm, Friday (10/14), 6:30pm, and Saturday (10/15), 9:15pm

If you like the films of James Gray (and we at Cine-File certainly do), then you’ll probably be sympathetic towards Brian Jun’s blue-collar drama; that’s not to say you’ll admire it, however. The movie contains all of Gray’s awkward tendencies–and even a few of his strengths–but little of the ingenious craftsmanship that makes his work so important. As it stands, the movie is commendable for taking regular lives seriously without succumbing to shallow “realism.” Its main characters, a recently paroled felon and the stripper he befriends, speak with improbable eloquence, and Jun presents their downstate Illinois milieu with a careful (some might say too careful) aesthetic that emphasizes its tragic mood. Many shots are composed around narrow rays of overhead light meant to evoke Gordon Willis’ work in the GODFATHER trilogy (though, like quite a few other movies in this year’s festival, the HD video doesn’t live up to the film images it evokes), and they contribute greatly to the general portrait of regret. Jun uses genre movie archetypes much like Gray does, to bring a sense of universality to the story and characters; but he lacks Gray’s sense of nuance, and a lot of his ideas end up sounding like cliches. Still, there’s inherent value in any movie that asks us to sympathize with an ex-con trying to rehabilitate himself, and some of the performances are really something. Alicia Witt, as the stripper, shows a willingness to appear genuinely weary and beaten by life. (2011, 85 min)

—

SOUTHWEST (Brazil)

Friday (10/7), 8:15pm, Saturday (10/8), 12:30pm, and Tuesday (10/18), 2:45pm

CORRODE (India)

Saturday (10/8), 8:25pm, Sunday (10/9), 12pm, and Tuesday (10/11), 2:30pm

I remember commiserating one year with my fellow C-F contributor Josephine Ferorelli about having to slog through a number of festival titles we weren’t particularly excited about. The movies that were bringing us down weren’t even bad, necessarily. They were just so dispiritingly alike, regardless of their country of origin; it felt as though national film styles were being subsumed into a generically arty, festival-ready aesthetic. “It’s like the development of World Music,” Josephine observed.

There’s plenty of World Cinema at this year’s International Film Festival, but that’s not meant entirely pejoratively: it’s simply a reflection of the times. As such, it doesn’t seem coincidental that SOUTHWEST (2011, 128 min), from Brazil, and CORRODE (2011, 92 min), from India, should feel so similar. Both are features by first-time filmmakers, shot somewhat arbitrarily in black-and-white widescreen, containing relatively little dialogue and sequences of deliberately dream-like subjectivity. The fact that they’re in black-and-white widescreen is reason enough to see them on a big screen; however, I would recommend seeing only one, as you’re likely to experience a nagging sense of deja vu if you attend them both. Tellingly, each film is at its most interesting when it looks beyond its festival style (predominated by a general impassivity that refuses, for no particular reason, to suggest how you should interpret the material emotionally) to contemplate the location where it was shot. One can only do so much with universal themes: In narrative cinema, they ultimately have to happen in some place and befall somebody.

SOUTHWEST makes fine use of its rural setting, creating supple atmosphere from brambles, small islands, and big, shady trees. Eduardo Nunes, the director, likes to track slowly through this environment as though his camera were an invisible participant in the action. It’s a fitting enough realization of the film’s premise, a Ray Bradbury-like fairy tale about a woman who lives her entire life, from birth to death, in a single day. This raises some interesting questions about what gives life permanence and meaning, particularly in the scenes when the heroine interacts with her own mother. Where Clarice has been unrooted in time, her mother is in the middle of a mid-life rut on the day the story takes place. Who is the unluckier woman? The one who has to live indefinitely with her grief or the one who drifts right over it?

The film is at its least convincing when the characters attempt to discuss their situation: Nunes doesn’t seem particularly interested in dialogue or in giving his actors enough mannerisms to make them seem like fully observed personages. The same can be said of Karan Gour, the writer-director of CORRODE, though Gour’s attention to economic realities makes up for his awkwardness in other areas. Before the movie lapses into another retread of Polanski’s REPULSION, this provides some good insight into the lower-middle-class of Mumbai. The central couple, Chhaya and Avrind, worry constantly about improving their station in a manner that seems borne out of their environment. Avrind’s been employed now and then in the fitfully booming construction industry, but the money hasn’t given them anything to build on; Chhaya pines for motherhood, though doctors have told her she has little chance of conceiving. As Avrind foolishly attempts to start his own business (in cloth, which he knows little about), Chhaya begins to obsess over the Hindu goddess Lakshmi. She thinks Lakshmi will grant all her wishes if she can buy a large, expensive sculpture of the goddess; in the end, the obsession drives her mad. While this turn is utterly implausible (among this type of lumpenproletariat, the desire for advancement is stronger and generally more destructive than madness), it allows Gour to experiment with a lot of effects to suggest Chhaya’s mental state.

Ralph Fiennes’ CORIOLANUS (UK)

Thursday (10/13), 8:00pm

Lo, by what feat of contrivance came this picture to us? Though Ralph Fiennes produced, directed, and stars in the film, “vanity project” is not quite the phrase to describe CORIOLANUS, as a vain man would not willingly debase himself in this manner, covered in his own blood and spittle, eyes wild with rage, and then placed so damn close to the camera’s lens. Nay, this is a Voldemort Project. Fiennes’ penchant for terrifying children is put to use here as an increasingly-crazed general of a fictitious Roman-esque nation. Banished for his disdain of the common people, he returns as the de facto leader of an invading army in a single-minded quest for revenge. Like Kenneth Branagh, Baz Luhrmann and Julie Taymor before, Fiennes manages to make of a modernized Shakespeare play not exactly a good movie, but a curious one. A film in which television news anchors speak in iambic pentameter and Gerard Butler changes accents mid-sentence, his tongue stumbling over antique phrasings. Ignoring for a moment the clear camp factor, Fiennes’ directorial decisions continually surprise: his eye for shot composition is well-developed. Should he be so lucky as to direct another feature, we can only hope that film will follow in CORIOLANUS’ mad footsteps. (2011, 122m) – Douglas McLaren

MADAME X (Indonesia)

Wed (10/12), 1:45pm; Fri (10/14), 10:15pm; Sun (10/16), 4:10pm

With the majority of Indonesians considering homosexuality and bisexuality abnormal acts forbidden by morality and religion, the emergence of a film like MADAME X, with its open celebrations of homosexuality and fluid gender identity, is a wonderfully transgressive act, especially given that this transgendered heroine fights against sexual repression and human rights violations (including child labor and human trafficking). Its gleeful camp aesthetic recursively mimics music videos, low budget action films, and the Batman television show. Transgender hairdresser Adam comes to recognize halfway through the film that no one will speak for her if she doesn’t speak out against the Morality League and their three burqa-clad supervillain champions, leading to her transformation into superhero Madame X. Despite the clear messaging, the movie remains just a fun, queer night out, which is fantastic. (2010, 100m) – Douglas McLaren

The 14th Annual European Union Film Festival- Week Four
Gene Siskel Film Center
(Friday, March 25 — Thursday, March 31)

A number of our contributors weigh in on a selection of titles from the final week of the EU festival. Screenings are listed in chronological order based on the first show date. Watch for possible additions during the week.

Manoel de Oliveira’s THE STRANGE CASE OF ANGELICA (Portugal/Spain)
Friday, 6pm and Saturday, 3:15pm
Many early reviews unfairly labeled ANGELICA as a “meditation” on something or other; more often than not, it was some combination of death, film, and the past. As themes, these are all fairly obvious contenders given the director’s advanced age and the film’s unadorned plot—Isaac (played by Oliveira’s grandson Ricardo Trêpa) photographs a young woman who has suddenly died and sees her smiling at him through his lens, and then consequently through his developed photographs. The issue of the film’s meditative quality is a little less straightforward: although this claim is backed up to some extent by a bucolic setting, minimal dialogue, slow pace, and metaphysical tendencies, Oliveira himself describes the film as “terrifically violent…much more violent than any of my films about war.” It’s difficult to grasp what this means initially, because the film never feels violent in any conventional sense—despite central themes of death, there’s very little depiction of physical damage or even disagreement between the characters. The film’s most noticeably disruptive or discordant moments are usually at the service of humor, often a perfectly deadpan sight gag. The overall experience often feels like being lulled seamlessly and peacefully into one man’s charming fascination and fantasy with images. But it’s precisely this sense of peace that’s so violent—the way we’re so readily absorbed into Isaac’s calm obsession is unsettling, as is the sense that everything outside of this lull is just an insurmountable swirl of questions. In this way, the film acts as a near-perfect facsimile of religious experience, all while quietly critiquing religious attitudes. It’s a critique that’s first lobbed sharply at Angelica’s conservative Catholic family, and then more intricately and uncomfortably at Isaac, whose life is built around the kind of ritual and devotion that denies any sort of real human contact. (2010, 95 min, 35mm)—Anne Orchier

DUST (Luxembourg)
Friday, 8pm and Saturday, 9:15pm
Perhaps the mellowest end-of-humanity film since Don McKellar’s LAST NIGHT (1999), this arty feature from Luxembourg uses a decimated population as the backdrop for a quiet chamber drama in the middle of the woods. Twin siblings Elodie (Catherine Steadman) and Eli (Olly Alexander, from ENTER THE VOID) enjoy a peaceful life on their dead parents’ country manor, only to lose the balance when a stranger arrives and seduces Elodie. This may be pretty impressive on a big screen: Max Jacoby, a first-time filmmaker working in widescreen, creates a lot of awesome, edenic imagery with the isolated countryside; and the pervasive silence is generally soothing rather than eerie. Apart from the central juxtaposition, there isn’t a lot going on here in the way of story (The quasi-incestuous drama is just another variation on Jean Cocteau’s immortal Les Enfants Terribles), but as mood-driven filmmaking it shows a fair amount of promise. That the drama is so low-stakes may be a subtle joke on Jacoby’s part; like with the ultra-Canadian LAST NIGHT, much of the fascination is in considering how the apocalypse would play out in a nation less politically volatile than the U.S., England, or Japan. (2009, 91 min, 35mm widescreen)—Ben Sachs

Radu Jude’s THE HAPPIEST GIRL IN THE WORLD (Romania)
Sunday, 7pm and Wednesday, 8:15pm
A well-observed comedy of discomfort in the Elaine May tradition, in which the passive-aggressive tendencies of various provincial types are exaggerated to their breaking point. The title character is a small-town high school student who wins a national contest set up by a juice company; her prizes are a new SUV and the starring role in a commercial shot in Bucharest. Her parents—shrewish, micromanaging types in garish plaid—accompany her to the shoot, but stand over her shoulder the entire time, pressuring her to sign over the deed to the car. Their persuasive strategies, which range from sane financial arguments to flat-out guilt tripping, come to dominate the second half of the film; the commercial crew, depicted as equally petty and domineering, is forced to compete for the girl’s attention. Radu Jude, the director and co-writer, keeps the Romanian New Wave going with a formal virtuosity comparable to that of 12:08 EAST OF BUCHAREST or THE PAPER IS BLUE. As in those films, the camera fixes a dead-eyed stare on everything and even the trivial, background actions are executed with the utmost dramaturgical precision: The effect is to endow small moments with unspoken foreboding. Where most of his peers have used the aesthetic to convey the lasting impact of totalitarianism, Jude is more interested in the invasive properties of capitalism, which he regards as a sick joke rather than a muted horror film. It would be unfair to reduce HAPPIEST GIRL to its political observations, however; Jude displays a knack for social caricature and for depicting the subtle change that occurs in tiny intervals of time. (2009, 99 min, 35mm)—Ben Sachs
—
Jude’s break-out short film, THE TUBE WITH A HAT (2007), can be viewed for free here.

The 14th Annual European Union Film Festival- Week Three
Gene Siskel Film Center
(Friday, March 18 — Thursday, March 24)

A number of our contributors weigh in on a selection of titles from Week Three of the EU festival. Screenings are listed in chronological order based on the first show date. Watch for possible additions during the week.

Jaroslav Vojtek’s HRANICA (THE BORDER) (Slovakia)
Friday, 8:15 and Thursday, 8pm
In 1946, Soviet ideology found a logical geographical endpoint and cleaved a random community in two. The tiny, Hungarian-speaking town of Slemence suddenly became Male Slemence, USSR (now the Ukraine) and Velke Slemence, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia). Families that used to live three minutes apart could now only visit by way of visa applications and a trip to the capital. Vojtek’s documentary spans the 2000s, during which Slovakia joins the European Union and a border crossing opens in the center of town. He tells the story with a certain visual and narrative ambiguity: it’s never immediately obvious which side of the border we are on, and in fact the border just looks like an overgrown driveway with some uniformed teenagers chillin’. If you took a magnifying lens to your map of Central Europe, it might be reassuring to discover that what the eye perceives as a hard-drawn line breaks down into an ambiguous grassland. The bulk of the film is composed of old Slemencians’ wistful recollections: stories of tricks for communicating or smuggling vodka across the divide, hopes of seeing a certain cousin or visiting a father’s never-seen grave before dying. Then, when the EU opens the border for business, nostalgia gives way to the anxiety of new neo-liberal subjects. Vojtek’s commitment to on-the-ground, personal geography makes a slyly radical critique of the ideologies that have imposed their maps on this territory. (2009, 72 min, 35mm)—Josephine Ferorelli

Michelangelo Frammartino’s LE QUATTRO VOLTE (Italy)
Saturday, 5:15pm and Monday, 7:45pm
Michelangelo Frammartino’s sophomore film is a transcendent work, by far one of the best films to screen at the Toronto International Film Festival last year and likely one of the best to screen at this year’s EU Festival. Following Pythagoras’ notion of the four-fold transmigration of the soul from human to animal to vegetable to mineral, the film contains four possible chapters, progressing/regressing from an aged goat herder to a tree rendered to charcoal. Lacking dialogue and barely containing a plot, the film relies on Frammartino’s superb pacing and his ability to construct a series of seemingly random events into a theological extrapolation of Jacques Tati’s filmic oeuvre. Indeed, this is Tati written for the cosmic scale. The camera’s omniscient placement gives a perceived anticipation of all events, and the film’s long, static shots engross the viewer with the beauty of Italy’s mountains, providing Frammartino the chance to weave thematic threads throughout the frame. This being a film about the transitive soul, we begin to see its presence in everything, from the dust that falls in the chapel to the goats that roam the hillside. There is a sublimely wry sense of humor throughout much of the film, but it drops away in the last third, as the tree that may or may not be the transmogrified body of our elderly herder is segmented and shipped off to be turned into charcoal. With almost the same solemnity and patience as Tarkovsky’s bell-casting scene in ANDREI RUBLEV, we see our fresh-cut protagonist piled up, buried, and smoked into its final, mineral state. Considering the braided and hermetic nature of LE QUATTRO VOLTE, it would perhaps be ideal to screen the film as an infinite loop, allowing the viewer to ruminate at the film’s own perennial pace. As it is, buy a ticket for each screening: you will want to see this a second time. (2010, 88 min, 35mm)—Doug McLaren

Nicolas Philibert’s NENETTE (France)
Sunday, 3pm and Wednesday, 6:15pm
The most recent film by long-time French documentarian Nicolas Philibert (best known for 1992′s IN THE LAND OF THE DEAF) takes as its subject the titular Nénette and her fellow orangutans in the menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Philibert’s observational camera focuses almost exclusively on the apes—the only glimpses of humans are fleeting, seen in reflection or otherwise obscured. With Nénette as our star (she’s the star there, too, having lived there for most of her 40 years), we are given nearly uninterrupted time to watch her. She doesn’t do much. Hers is a sedentary life (orangutans, we are told, tend to sit around a lot, even in the wild), so our attention is fixed on her face and body, rather than her actions. Are we anthropomorphizing, or do we see boredom? Or sadness? Or ennui? At the same time that we are trying to decipher this enigmatic ape and her fellow captives, we are listening to a flow of others doing the same thing: from visitors (the children seen the most perceptive and honestly inquisitive, of course), to current and former handlers, to the words of an acclaimed ape anatomist. It is this combination of “objective” observation and “subjective” rumination that creates the interesting tension in NENETTE. In this space between the two, Philibert’s film turns from simple documentary to a deeper philosophical inquiry. It’s not just a film about an orangutan (though it is compelling on that front), but one that also raises questions about what her life and situation say about us. Showing with Philibert’s ten-minute short NIGHT FALLS ON THE MENAGERIE (2010). (2010, 67 min, DigiBeta Video)—Patrick Friel

THE INVISIBLE FRAME (Germany) and RABBIT À BERLIN (Poland)
Sunday, 4:45pm and Wednesday, 7:45pm
“What if this wall goes on and on forever?” asks Tilda Swinton in CYCLING THE FRAME, a 1988 video made for West German television. It was a binary question, referring not only to her circumnavigating all 160km of the Berlin Wall by bicycle but also to the indefinite future of the wall: it certainly couldn’t stay up forever, could it? Twenty years later we find Tilda again riding her bike, but now along the line where that wall once stood. Crossing freely from East to West, her tires dance over the cobblestone marker that runs like an archeological scar across Berlin. Swinton’s idle thoughts pass by in voice-over, stones skipping across an immense subject: “East, West, does it matter where I am anymore?”; “One wall comes down and there’s all these other little ones that pop up”; “I wish they’d put trees and hedges and birds’ nests on maps. It’d be easier to find your way.” These are sketches of ideas, each one a kernel for its own analytical essay, and each would appear to be a flippant rejoinder were it not for the fact that here we are, riding our bicycle along Karl Marx Straße, gazing at the bilious McMansions constructed in the former East. (2009, 60 min, video)
—
Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short, RABBIT À BERLIN gives a brief history of the Berlin Wall by way of detailing the lives of the rabbits walled within the no-man’s-land of Potsdamer Platz. It’s a fascinating documentary, examining the unintentional architecture of rabbit paradise, with lush green fields, no predation, and plenty of room for their ever-expanding warren. As Cold War paranoia sets in and the East German government moves to make the wall more formidable, we see what was once a perfect rabbit commune turn into a literal death trap for our leporine signifiers. Desperation under Soviet occupation turns to exuberance when the wall falls, and the rabbits, much like the reunified populace, seek to strike a new equilibrium. (2009, 50 min, video)—Doug McLaren

THE ARBOR (United Kingdom)
Sunday, 7pm and Thursday, 6pm
This documentary about the short, sad life of playwright Andrea Dunbar (who died of a drug overdose at 29) is grounded in several interesting formal experiments: Rather than have any the interview subjects appear on screen, director Clio Barnard has actors lip-synch their spoken testimonies, and the film is punctuated with scenes from Dunbar’s work performed in the public-housing community in Yorkshire where she grew up. These strategies seem appropriate responses to Dunbar’s work, which was acclaimed for its highly realistic depictions of working-poor life; like her writing, however, they succeed in exposing the unnerving details of poverty rather than proposing any analytic interpretation of them. If you don’t have a problem with that, you’re likely to find the film a powerful experience; I found it self-defeating and more than a little voyeuristic. Still, there’s no denying Dunbar’s talent—or Barnard’s, for that matter—as an observer of squalid lives, and the film forces you to confront a lot of painful realities that most people would rather overlook. The second half of THE ARBOR focuses on the life of Dunbar’s oldest daughter Lorraine, an even sadder figure than her mother, whose drug addiction drove her to prostitution and other criminal activity. Like her mother, she’s surprisingly eloquent in describing her condition, though seemingly incapable of overcoming it. (At the time this movie was being made, she was serving a four-year prison sentence for involuntary manslaughter.) Her story, luridly compelling as it is, may pose the ultimate question regarding the lasting value of Dunbar’s art. (2010, 94 min, DigiBeta video)—Ben Sachs

ZACHES (Bulgaria)
Sunday, 7:15pm and Thursday, 7:45pm
As an act of cultural exchange, the United States should deploy to Eastern Europe all the practitioners of CGI and animatronics currently working in Hollywood. The benefit of this arrangement would be two-fold: First, we would get to see more movies like ZACHES, which uses special effects to vibrantly re-envision regional folklore all but forgotten by much of the world; and, second, the competent-but-lazy directors of modern Hollywood, having been relocated to places similar to our own Appalachia and Deep South, would finally start making movies about a more diverse population than the one they encounter in their circumscribed portion of Southern California. For the time being, we still have ZACHES, in all its phantom-carriage, robot-ostrich glory. The film is an adaptation of several stories by E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822), a major figure of the Romantic movement in Germany. Hoffmann was renowned for his satire as well as his fantasy stories, and the film honors his work in both genres. The central premise has a beautiful fairy taking revenge on a prince, who has sworn to abolish all the fairies in his kingdom, by putting a spell on his Parliament that compels them to bring a stupid, disagreeable dwarf to political power. Anri Koulev, the director of this film, has a long background in animation and set design, and it shows in almost every scene. The story is fleshed out with a lot of imaginative detail, such living dolls, magic mirrors, and the aforementioned robot ostrich. But there’s a serious subtext to the film’s fairy-tale invention: Like Terry Gilliam’s ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN, this posits that the intellectual victories of the Enlightenment led to an overall loss of imagination of the Western world. In this context, Hoffmann becomes not only a great man of letters but also a hero for dreamers everywhere. (2010, 127 min, DCP video)—Ben Sachs