Cine-File Blog

Stu Maddux’s GEN SILENT (New Documentary)
Landmark Century Saturday 12pm
The best documentaries teach you things you should know just by letting you get intimate with people you haven’t met. An insightful view of what’s happening as the GLBT front-guard ages and dies, GEN SILENT is as timely as it is warmly efficient. The movie begins with soft-focus, dreamy shots of smiling elders in the Boston pride parade, with voice-over from one of our subjects, Lawrence. There’s a prettiness to the look of this movie that doesn’t cover up suffering, but draws you into it gently. Lawrence, in his 60s, is 20 years younger than his partner Alexandre, who suffers from Parkinson’s and dementia, and lives in an assisted-living facility. Scenes of Lawrence spoon-feeding Alexandre and putting lotion on his hands have the deep pathos of someone else’s routine. This is Alexandre’s second old-folks’ home; they didn’t feel safe in the first one. In interview after interview, the elderly and their advocates voice the same basic mistrust for mainstream institutions. These people have a living memory of pre-Stonewall persecution; some of them were forcibly hospitalized and ‘treated’ for deviance, and all of them lived in fear of that possibility. Graphics appear on-screen several times, keywords like FEAR, INSENSITIVITY, and ISOLATION, giving the impression that this movie could be repurposed as training materials for care-givers if necessary. Some of the captions have typos, and this somehow adds to the feeling of urgency and practicality of the project, rather than distracting the viewer. If time-saving tricks were used in post-production, none of the footage feels rushed or casual. This is a movie with an important story to tell about how big the purview of love is.
(70 min, 2010, DV)

Nick Whitfield’s SKELETONS (New British)
Friday- 8:30, Saturday- 4:20, Monday- 10:15
Reviews have already compared Whitfield’s debut feature to Samuel Beckett’s GHOSTBUSTERS or a very British LETHAL WEAPON. While these are good starting off points for a plot summary, the mechanics of the story and the hermetically sealed aesthetic universe are in place to allow something more delicate and radical to occur. At the risk of getting heavy on this mischievous, astral comedy, the central drama resembles nothing so much as a very productive group session of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Bennett (Andrew Buckley) and Davis (Ed Gaughan) are two round, middle-aged men in suits, trudging through a British countryside that’s been scrubbed clean of any decade-giveaways. They make house-calls in which they semi-literally get the skeletons out of people’s closets through an analog mechanical exorcism, and then leave their clients quickly to avoid the fallout. Davis has been using their technology on the sly to return again and again to a memory from his childhood while Bennett threatens, cajoles, bargains with him to stop, but ultimately covers for him to their superior, the Colonel (Jason Isaacs, with a handsome fishing cap and a thin scar the whole way round his neck). They meet their profound match in the household of Jane (Paprika Steen), who wants them to use their skills to find her missing husband. Even though he may be alive, she’s been digging for him in the yard, different holes every day (“can’t dig in the same place twice, that’d be crazy“), while her young son kicks a ball against a wall and her adult daughter Rebecca (Tuppence Middleton), who hasn’t spoken in three years, practices witchcraft in a shed. Davis’s bad habit of repeating the past causes something to go wrong in the exorcism, wherein he can suddenly only speak Bulgarian (a ‘hazard of the trade’). An unlikely duo on the outside, Davis and Rebecca meet on the astral plane (the unconscious) and dispatch the Imaginary Father together (their fantasies, both good and bad, of the fathers who abandoned them), return to their positions in the Symbolic order, and reclaim Le Nom Du Pere and language, before returning to consciousness to confide in their maternal figures (Bennett and Jane, respectively). Meanwhile Bennett and Jane have done some analysis of their own; By the end of the film Jane is using her shovel to make a garden, and Bennett has re-engaged with the Pleasure Principle: after years of living by the rules, he makes himself seen by Jane. The psychological intentions of this movie (even if they were never explicitly Lacanian) are clear in the absence of bells and whistles and the minimum of supernatural explication: we get only what information we need to move us inside the characters. That visual and narrative modesty is what helps this movie do something really weird and exceptional.
(94 min, 2009)
-Josephine Ferorelli

Valerio Mieli’s TEN WINTERS (New Italian)
Monday- 5:30, Tuesday- 8:15
In praising this subtle, insightful movie, permit me one unflattering comparison: it’s got structural similarities to WHEN HARRY MET SALLY. Our protagonists, Silvestro (Michele Riondino) and Camilla (Isabella Ragonese), meet at the beginning of college, and re-meet more or less annually until they are older and wiser. But unlike Ephron and Reiner’s battle-of-the-sexes middlebrow manifesto, Mieli’s series of vignettes pushes no agenda. We aren’t being dragged anywhere, and when we move forward in time we must use our brains to understand what’s changed. Despite the imposed structure that the title implies, we aren’t bound too strictly to a formula; sometimes it’s February, sometimes it’s November. We travel from rainy Venice outskirts to snow-blanketed Moscow and back. This movie is a long complicated interaction between two smart, prideful, insecure people, and the movement from one affective relationship to the next feels propelled by those characters and not by plotting demands. Similarly, the humor (and it’s very funny) arises without strain from observant writing and intuitive acting. And though Silvestro and Camilla are witty people, sometimes their humor isn’t played for comedy. Their relative ability to make each other laugh is a good barometer for how well they are getting along each winter.
(99 min., 2009, 35mm)
-Josephine Ferorelli

Xavier Dolan’s HEARTBEATS (New Canadién)
Thursday- 6:20, Friday- 8:45
There are moments in this brightly colored, ambitious and stylized study of a romantic triangle where although the characters are well drawn, the overall feeling is a little unformed, as if the biggest questions haven’t been asked yet. It’s an odd quality to find in a movie this polished and sensually pleasing, until you learn that writer, director and star Xavier Dolan was born in 1989 (this is his second feature film. The first is J’AI TUÉ MA MERE), which makes him 4 years younger than Francis, the 25 year-old character he plays. Francis and Marie (Monia Chokri) wage an increasingly heated battle for the affections of the handsome manipulator Nicholas (Niels Schneider), slowly eroding the charmed friendship that attracted Nicholas to them in the first place. Both Francis and Marie are intensely fashion conscious in a way that plays a slightly unconscious role in the film; even in moments of most unflattering vanity, they are still shot from the flattering angle. At the same time, this attention to surfaces creates a couple of unforgettable scenes of pure style, with an excellent soundtrack. Francis and Marie’s showdown in the woods, with its slow-motion red high heels and swirling sun-dappled leaves is equal parts Almodovar and Shaw brothers. And the rematch of Francis and Marie vs. Nicholas has the beautifully arch coolness of Patrice Leconte’s RIDICULE, all conducted in the broad-vowelled, wild-west French of Montreal.
(102 min., 2009, 35 mm)
-Josephine Ferorelli

THE HOUSEMAID (South Korea)
Sunday (10/17), 7:15pm
The last film by Im Sang-soo to receive U.S. distribution was THE PRESIDENT’S LAST BANG (2005, released here in 2006), a formal knock-out that dared to re-stage South Korea’s 1979 coup d’etat as black comedy. Im’s latest isn’t nearly as brazen (and what could be?), though it managed to upset quite a few people before it even went into production. This shares its title and several key themes with a 1960 psychological thriller widely considered one of the greatest works in Korean cinema. It isn’t a remake, however, but a personal reworking of that established classic; as in LAST BANG, Im is manipulating familiar material–with the confident recklessness of a punk rock frontman–as a way of testing contemporary sensibilities. Where the original told the story of a middle-class father seduced, undermined, and ultimately held hostage by the title character, this HOUSEMAID turns the story on its head: Here, it is the family that seduces the caretaker–who remains, compellingly, a sexually curious college grad–and the housemaid who becomes horribly victimized. In another bold move, Im upgrades the milieu from middle-class to extreme wealth: The husband of the family seems to have some role in the government, but life in his mansion is made to seem so cut off from the rest of the world that he may as well be a feudal lord. The deliberate uncertainty is integral to the film’s impact. Im gives the haute-couture settings a seductive, even sexy veneer (evocative of classical studio filmmaking) despite the general odiousness of the behavior, which reflects a constant struggle for oneupmanship between the family and servants. Im creates a masterful aesthetic out of this struggle, deftly manipulating the widescreen frame to shift audience sympathy from one character to another within the same shot. While this isn’t a satire per se, Im maintains the mercilessness of a great satirist, and his critique of power–be it political, economic, or sexual–is frequently profound. (2010, 106 min, 35mm widescreen)

The original HOUSEMAID can be viewed here, for free:

http://mubi.com/films/2039

ERRATUM (POLAND)
Oct 14, 8:30pm; Oct 15, 6:05pm, Oct 17, 12:00pm
Slow and grueling, ERRATUM quietly observes the homecoming of Michal to the small town he grew up in. Brought in to pick up his boss’ newly imported car, Michal inadvertently runs over a homeless man and finds himself stuck in the village he had hoped to quietly slip out of without running into anyone he knows. Michal is stuck, bored to death with the small town politics, and frankly, so are we. A boring, unidimensional character, Michal’s only concerns are with leaving town and seeing to the proper burial of the stranger he ran over. Most of the residents seem to despise Michal for some unmentioned slight he suffered them, and though its tempting to side with the villagers, Michal is just too lifeless of a person to really concern oneself with. The film’s saving grace is the photography of the Polish seaside town, which is a rather stunning location and would serve well a better film. (2008, 95 min)
- Doug McLaren

HOW I ENDED THE SUMMER (RUSSIA)
Oct 10, 5:40pm; Oct 12, 3:30pm; Oct 17, 12:30pm
Working in a weather research station on a remote island in the Russian Arctic, Pasha is a young kid, jumping about listening to music and playing video games like he’s John Cusack circa 1987 as he verifies a computer program that might someday replace the lonely, rugged researcher Sergei he works with. When Sergei leaves to catch trout, Pasha intercepts a radiogram bearing terrible news for Sergei. The right time to pass the news along never comes up and we spend much of the film watching Pasha dodge Sergei from room to room shirking his responsibility and inventing ways to prevent Sergei from speaking with superiors on the mainland, all in the hopes that a transport vessel will come shortly and take the hot-tempered Sergei off his hands. A fairly straightforward and somewhat unimaginative film made bearable by its pacing, which, like the trout swimming in the arctic lagoon, has slowed to a near crawl in the cold. Though it should be noted that even glaciers move, and when this film finally picks up in the third act, things move swiftly and dangerously along. Never forget: when you leave base camp, always bring your rifle. (2010, 124 min)
- Doug McLaren

Let me just preface this post by saying that I expect ASLEEP IN THE SUN to be a real crowd-pleaser, though I was only lukewarm on it; and, by a similar token, that I expect a lot of people to dislike THE HAPPY HOUSEWIFE, even though I enjoyed it immensely.

ASLEEP IN THE SUN (Argentina)
Wednesday, 8:30pm, Thursday, 9:15pm, and Monday, 1:30pm
Every year, it seems, the Chicago International runs at least one work of gentle magic realism from a South American nation: This is the entry for 2010. If it seems artistically suspect to reduce one of the major twentieth-century literary movements to a set of generic tropes, the film genre as it now exists–and exemplified by the work of Eliseo Subiela (LAST IMAGES OF THE SHIPWRECK, THE ADVENTURES OF GOD)–is consistently pleasurable without being simplistic or mawkish. The loving historical detail and appeals to universal imagination that define the work of Marquez and Julio Cortazar are alive and well in these films, ditto a particular bug-eyed sincerity that seldom thrives outside of Spanish-language literature. In spite of being so entertaining, these films have no direct Hollywood equivalent (though Charlie Kaufman’s screenplays come close), which means they’re always a welcome presence at our festival. If you have any interest in this kind of storytelling, you ought to see this now, as you won’t have a chance to see anything like it until next year’s fest. Set in a “a circular neighborhood without corners [and] lost in time,” this concerns a mild-mannered watchmaker forced to institutionalize his wife when she begins acting strange–only to find the institution’s policies far weirder than any of her behavior. Writer-director Alejandro Chomski keeps this so enticingly mysterious that it’s a bit of a letdown when everything is revealed (but only a bit–the big narrative twist is one of the film’s funniest moments). The production design draws extensively from 1950s technology and decor, and Chomski has digitally augmented the colors so that they resemble children’s book illustrations. Every detail evokes warm familiarity but remains, by all the aesthetic tweaking, sadly out of reach: In short, the film achieves a successful union of form and content. (2010, 84 min, 35mm widescreen)

THE HAPPY HOUSEWIFE (Netherlands)
Friday, 6:15pm, Saturday, 4:30pm, and Tuesday, 3:15pm
The first of many surprises is that the title is not ironic. The first fifteen minutes show, in excessive detail that borders on bad taste, a woman who has it all and loves it: career, mansion, solid marriage, great sex. It’s almost a parody of upper-middle-class life, done up in a slick, playful style evoking a Hollywood situational comedy of the 1950s (e.g., Vincente Minnelli’s DESIGNING WOMAN, Frank Tashlin’s THE FIRST TIME) as directed by Paul Verhoeven. Director Antoinette Breumer (the sister of actress Famke Janssen, incidentally) crams a lot of observation into the comedic passages: Even the throw-away details–like the couple eating Indonesian take-out in their gated community–hit hard without hard-selling their point. After the housewife gives birth, though, the film takes an unexpected turn; without giving too much away, there are hallucinations, scenes of von Trier-esque psychodrama, and a car driving into a courtyard full of nuns. And this all in the second fifteen minutes! Breumer’s ability to encompass so many different kinds of excess without quite approaching camp makes THE HAPPY HOUSEWIFE the closest Western equivalent to date of a Takashi Miike film, surpassing even Lee Daniels’ PRECIOUS. Even when the second half gets into more conventional dramatic patterns, Breumer displays a lightness with her actors and, generally, a refusal to take the material too seriously. (As an advance warning, however, to viewers with a low tolerance for this sort of thing: The last half-hour contains a lot of hugging exchanged in earnest.) But the sentimental passages remain colored by the brazen eroticism of the early scenes: Breumer has proven herself not just unafraid of human sexuality, but an advocate for its full realization. (If you’ve seen the Mexican film LEAP YEAR in this year’s festival, you’ll recognize the difference.) In the past year, Chicago has gotten to see a number of exciting new movies directed by women: THE HEADLESS WOMAN, 35 SHOTS OF RUM, BLUEBEARD, EVERYONE ELSE, THE PLACE IN BETWEEN. One reason these movies are so exciting is that their depictions of sex, neuroses, even the passage of time feel as though they could not be crafted by male auteurs. (Is it the evasion of a perfectly linear progression? A way of evoking desire without prurience or guilt? I can’t say for sure, but I look forward to discussing the films.) THE HAPPY HOUSEWIFE only strengthens the pack. (2010, 97 min, 35mm widescreen)

Last week, I wrote about Sarah Bouyain’s first fiction feature, THE PLACE IN BETWEEN (a.k.a. NOTRE ETRANGERE), before it played at the Chicago International Film Festival. It’s a warm, subtly probing movie on some large issues of immigration and cultural identity; as I wrote last week, it’s commendable for exploring these themes without resorting to familiar homilies. Amy is a young woman of about 20, born in Burkina Faso but adopted a French family when she was a baby. The film depicts her first visit to her birthplace, but intercuts the story with another narrative about Mariam, a middle-aged Burkinabe living in France. In another form cultural exchange, Mariam agrees to teach her native language to a curious white employer played by the great Nathalie Richard. These interactions between French and African culture are a lifelong subject for Bouyain, herself the daughter of a Burkinabe father and French mother.

I took the director to the Billy Goat Tavern, a few blocks (but, culturally speaking, worlds away) from the River East 21 where the festival was taking place. “It’s like a movie down here!” she said, as we walked beneath Michigan Avenue and an ambulance blared past. This set off a tangent about movies’ capacity to reflect the experience of foreigners in otherwise familiar locations; she was especially fond of Roman Polanski’s FRANTIC, which she’d only just seen recently. “It’s interesting that the movie shows Paris from such an American perspective, because Polanski knows Paris very well. But I liked that he took a perspective that wasn’t his.”

Below is a partial transcript of our conversation:

BEN SACHS: What made you decide to make a narrative feature? You’ve written novels and made a documentary before, but never a fiction film.

SARAH BOUYAIN: The story [of THE PLACE IN BETWEEN] was my first desire, before the documentary and before the short stories. I wanted to be a director first.

BS: What made you want to make films?

SB: I was very attracted by the story of my grandmother, who’s in my documentary… She was born in Burkina Faso, she was born during colonization. Her father was a French soldier [and] her mother was an African woman. [Her mother] was raped–and she was not the only one, of course. And the babies who were born after these so-called “weddings” between French soldiers and African women, they were put in an orphanage. The mothers couldn’t keep them, and the fathers didn’t want to give them their names because they were black babies. So, they were put in orphanages and raised far from their actual parents. And what struck me in that story was the fact that these people didn’t have their own story. They had to invent the past of their lives…

It was the fictional part of that reality that interested me most, and it influenced my imagination… Also, my father is black and my mother is white, so I’m a biracial woman, too. It made me think a lot about my own past.

So, I had made a documentary, but it was the fiction in it that inspired me to do it. And the novels and the short stories, I wrote them before the documentary. Because at that time [the early 2000s], I didn’t dare ask the people about their stories. I imagined their lives before I met them. And it was strange, because I had guessed so many things [correctly] without asking them… In life, sometimes you don’t have the feeling that you make choices, but that life chooses for you.

BS: One of the nice things about working in fiction is that you can reclaim those choices.

SB: Yes. Also, first you can tell the story that you want to tell… So, I wanted to tell a story with this film. I didn’t think about the cinema. It was cinema, but I didn’t think of cinema. I wanted to tell a story.

BS: It’s funny to hear that, because the movie struck me as very cinematic. The way it looks at faces, it doesn’t feel like television–or even documentary. You’re letting the images speak for themselves.

SB: I wasn’t conscious of it. Really, I wanted to tell a story first. You have to choose the place where you put your camera… That comes from you, but you’re not aware of it. I think if I have the chance to do another film, I will think more about cinema and how to say things through cinema rather than through story.

BS: Do you have ideas for what’s next?

SB: Yes. I would like to write a very simple story and work a lot with the actors. Really take all the time I need–It’s impossible, but you always want to take all the time you need–to really experiment with things.

BS: Where did you find the actors for THE PLACE IN BETWEEN? I know Nathalie Richard, but most the other women in the film I haven’t seen before.

SB: The young girl, Amy, that actress is called Dorylia Carmel, and she comes from theater. She’s a French actress. Her parents are from Congo, but at that time, she didn’t know [Congo] very well. That’s what I wanted. So, she has that look–I wanted that–but she has a way of moving and speaking that was French.

BS: She had never been to Burkina Faso before you shot this?

SB: No. She had been once to Cameroon, I think, and after we shot she went to Congo to visit the town of her parents.

BS: So there is a documentary aspect to this movie. This character is discovering Burkina Faso as the actress is.

SB: Yes. It is a documentary, you could say, because of the way that we shot it. For example, there’s a moment where she’s walking [in Burkina Faso] and she looks everywhere around her… We asked her to walk in the street and we were far away. We used a telephoto lens to follow her. The people around her didn’t see us because we were hidden somewhere. So, she was just walking and we were following her…

Also, those moments when she’s sitting on a bench and looking at the road and everything, we did that in two parts. We filmed her, but maybe two hours before, we filmed the people in the streets. We stayed for a long time so the people didn’t pay attention to us.

BS: Abbas Kiarostami has shot a lot of his outdoor scenes that way. He’ll shoot the actors in the scene at different times.

SB: I didn’t know that! (laughs)

BS: So, Assita Ouedraogo, who plays the cleaning woman: What’s her background?

SB: Maybe you’ve seen her in LA PROMESSE, by the Dardenne brothers?

BS: Yes! I didn’t realize that was her.

SB: I really like the way she [acts].

BS: The way she smiles or suppresses a smile can say so much that she doesn’t have to speak a lot to communicate. Has she been in a lot of films in France?

SB: No, unfortunately. She’s actually Burkinabe, and it’s very difficult to be an actress in Burkina Faso. The wages are very, very low. So, she was working as a teacher at first [after LA PROMESSE], and now she’s working in the administration for schools. She has her own children, too, and she has to take care of them. So, she couldn’t [act] for many years, and the young directors don’t know her. So, she did nothing after LA PROMESSE, but I really wanted her to play that part.

BS: You had her in mind for all these years?

SB: Yes. Also, when I was younger, I was working as a camera assistant on a movie she was in. I met her then, and I thought she was very nice. So, I’d had her on my mind for a long time. When I told my producer about her, she said, “Yes, we must meet her and test her to see if she can still act.” She still could act! (laughs)

BS: It’s interesting to learn that she’s working in education, because that gets back to the documentary element of the movie. For most of the time she’s on screen in your movie, she’s teaching somebody.

SB: What’s very funny about that is that she actually knows very little of that language. So, another actress in the movie who came from Mali, she had to teach Assita, and then Assita could teach Nathalie Richard [in the movie]. And my cousin coached Nathalie off-set. But [Nathalie] didn’t have to be coached a lot because she caught the language very, very fast. But sometimes, I said to Assita, “Remember when you were a teacher and you were encouraging children.” There’s that scene when Nathalie is beginning to speak in that language. She says the words, and Assita looks at her as if she were a child.

BS: I thought that moment was very cinematic. All the emotion of the scene is contained in their faces. There’s a sensitivity there that you wouldn’t see in a Hollywood movie. I imagine a Hollywood film would be sentimental about that relationship, or else try to satirize the good intentions behind it.

SB: I wanted the relationship to be as professional as possible at the beginning… I didn’t want those good intentions or things like this. Also, I’m an African woman as well as a French woman; I’m very tired of how black people are shown in [French] movies, with those good intentions. There were things I wanted to avoid. I [also] wanted to avoid scenes of travel by plane, for example. I wanted to avoid the Arrival at the Airport, all the cliches that we see about Africa [in movies]. Because Amy is not a tourist. She’s there to claim her mother. So, she can’t see the things that you see when you’re a tourist… And, yes, the relationship between Maya and Estelle is the same thing. I didn’t want to show the cliches. I’ve suffered those cliches enough. I didn’t want to put them in my film.

BS: Are there are any other films that you see as avoiding those cliches?

SB: I like the films by Claire Denis, the way she shows the black community. You see people; you don’t see that they are black. I like that… That’s the most striking example I have in mind. But I have the feeling that, sometimes, directors are afraid of showing the African community or the Chinese community [in France]. They hide themselves behind cliches.

BS: I think there’s a fear of seeming presumptuous about another culture.

SB: This is a problem in France. If you want to get money to make a movie, you don’t write a story about black people, for example. The producers and the distributors say people won’t want to see a movie about black people, because there are no stars, except maybe one or two…

BS: Alex Descas?

SB: No, not even him! He’s a star in independent movies, but you can’t get [a lot of] money with Alex Descas… As far as producers are concerned, there are no stars in the black community or the Chinese community. But there won’t be any stars if you can’t make movies about these people! I hope that things are going to change. Here [in the United States], there are communities, but in France we don’t acknowledge them.

BS: Would you be willing to make a film about white characters?

SB: I want to film the meeting of Occidental culture and African culture… Because, it’s not just culture [that gets exchanged]; it’s also history.. And I have the feeling that I’m not done with that [subject]. I have a lot of things to say. But now I’m trying to find other ways of speaking about it.

Sometimes, I ask myself if I want to tell a story that doesn’t concern black people or people with an African background. But I have the feeling that that time hasn’t come yet.

BS: So, going back to the film you want to make next…

SB: I would like to shoot another story in Burkina Faso, but without any white characters. It would be just me [and an African cast]. I’d want to use my role as a director to provoke an encounter between an African story and my point of view, which is mainly Occidental. Because, of course, I know Burkina Faso very well–I often went there with my father–but I was raised in France. So, I want to try to tell a story with no white people, so that French audiences would be more aware of me, behind the camera. This is what I want to try, for now.

THE PLACE IN BETWEEN screens again at CIFF on Wednesday at 4:30pm.

LOVE LIKE POISON (France)
Monday, 6:20pm and Sunday (10/17), 1:15pm
A fourteen-year-old girl returns from Catholic boarding school to spend the summer in her small-town home, where she must confront her parents’ separation, her grandfather’s slow death, and the attentions of a cute boy in the neighborhood. This is familiar material, to be sure, but writer-director Katell Quillévéré displays such feeling for her characters and setting that the film doesn’t feel like a series of clichés. She’s also surprisingly frank in depicting sexual subject matter without letting it overwhelm the story at hand: This isn’t THE SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS, but it isn’t Catherine Breillat territory, either. Quillévéré is after a holistic portrait of adolescence, and her tone–probing, attentive to small things, and honest in its emotional content–reflects the manner in which many teenagers aspire to see themselves. Also commendable is the film’s treatment of Catholicism, which is serious without turning reverent or critical: Anna may come to doubt her religious teaching, but Quillévéré wants us to know that doubt is perfectly natural, too. In recent movies as diverse as Krzysztof Zanussi’s A WARM HEART and Daniel Sánchez Arévalo’s GORDOS, European cinema has provided images of religious and secular values operating in mature co-existence; and LOVE LIKE POISON provides several more. (The character of a self-effacing, soccer-playing priest is especially charming.) This is more of a cultural achievement than a cinematic one, but it’s edifying all the same. (2010, 82 min, 35mm)