Cine-File Blog

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)

Christophe Honoré’s MAN AT BATH (New French)
Saturday, 10:45 (Mature audiences only!)
Some people complain that porn has no ideas and the acting is bad. Some people complain that movie sex is just moaning and flapping bedsheets. MAN AT BATH, a French mood piece in the fleshy tradition of SHORTBUS, wants to bridge this divide. Christophe Honoré (DANS PARIS, MA MERE, LES CHANSONS D’AMOUR) has been working on this engineering project for quite some time, digging deep into Jacques Demy and Jean Eustache while reading the erotic works Georges Bataille. If MAN AT BATH feels a little lighter than the earlier films, it might signal a fun, new urban studies reading list. The plot is simply that Emmanuel and Omar break up with each other and pursue other prospects. Omar travels to New York for a week with his Handicam (and Chiara Mastroianni) while Emmanuel stays in their apartment in Paris. During that week they both get off with a lot of extremely attractive people , but despite these adventures they still miss each other. Both men are flaneurs, Baudelaire’s gentleman strollers of the city, lonely and stimulated by the crowded streets. But a lot has changed since Baudelaire wrote ‘A une passante’, describing, as Walter Benjamin puts it “the object of a love which only a city dweller experiences, which Baudelaire captured for poetry, and of which one might not infrequently say that it was spared, rather than denied, fulfillment”. Now as neither protagonist nor audience is spared elegant, graphic scenes of this one kind of fulfillment, we feel love’s absence strongly.
(2009, 72 min)
-Josephine Ferorelli

Dennis Todorovic’s SASHA (new German)
Saturday: 7:45, Sunday: 1:45
Sasha is a sweet boy, and SASHA is a sweet movie. The dramatic stakes in this comedy are everyday high, but not over-ambitious. The eldest son of a close and contentious Montenegrin family living in Cologne, Sasha (Sascha Kekez) studies piano and secretly longs for his piano teacher, Gebhard. Sasha’s mother, a thwarted pianist, pushes and pleads with him to practice for his music school audition, while his father, a macho Balkan cliché with thwarted basketball ambitions, constantly encourages him to screw (girls) and brawl more, study less. Sasha’s best friend Jiao loves him, and Sasha’s brother Boki loves Jiao. When Gebhard reveals his plan to move to Vienna, a chain reaction of confessions and reprisals is set in motion. Sometimes the film sighs under the weight of its plot, but sometimes the whirring of the plot’s machinery reminds us what stories and contrivances are for. Concerned with the control and flow of information, SASHA is shot mostly in confined spaces full of people. Each small environment has its own set of rules and shared information, and we never move from one to another casually. Language barriers exist in nearly every grouping of characters and subtly shift relationships of power. Which is not to say that the feeling is heavy. Like many children of two cultures, SASHA has a wry and playful attitude toward all the code-switching.
(2010, 101 min, 35mm)
-Josephine Ferorelli

Below are pieces on several screeners I’ve seen, listed in order of preference.

CERTIFIED COPY (Italy/France)
Saturday, 6pm and Monday, 6:15pm
CERTIFIED COPY is Abbas Kiarostami’s first shot-on-celluloid narrative after a decade of video experiments and it’s also his first feature shot in Europe. These facts alone would deem the film a major work, but it’s a milestone for Kiarostami regardless. The premise is teasingly simple, in the grand tradition of THE TRAVELLER and TASTE OF CHERRY: A British art historian (William Shimell) has written a book on the history of forgery. In it, he posits that it’s irrelevant whether great art is authentic or merely copied because it’s the impact of the work that determines its legacy. After giving a lecture in Tuscany, he meets a beautiful antiques dealer (Juliette Binoche) who likes the book but disagrees with its argument. They hit it off anyway and then decide to spend the afternoon together, visiting historic sites and bickering about art. This promises, and essentially delivers, a genteel conversation piece in the Eric Rohmer mold; but in its particulars, the film is every bit as weird as Kiarostami’s prior masterpieces. Much of the dialogue feels improvised or tossed-off, though the characters are often filmed in a manner that suggests cosmic significance: They’re isolated in symmetrical, icon-making close-ups; reverently followed in tracking shots that emphasize the fragility of any moment in the course of time; and (Kirostami’s calling card) made into specks on landscape shots that identify them only by the car they’re riding in. At different points of their afternoon, this man and woman behave like strangers, a long-married couple, and smitten kids on a first date. Which of these interactions is real? Does it matter? Nearly every scene of CERTIFIED COPY touches on some profound aspect of human experience–falling in love, realizing one’s place in the universe, et cetera–and in each of their incarnations, the characters are so fully realized by the leads that they never seem ciphers for bigger themes. (Binoche won the Best Actress prize at Cannes for her performance, which contains some of her most attenuated and unpredictable work; Shimmel, an opera singer in his major first film role, is a more limited actor by comparison, but he makes a fine Cary Grant to her Katherine Hepburn.) Their entire experience, in short, has been recast by their passion for art: Everything is mysterious and full of promise. Some critics writing about the film have invoked Henry James in describing this tale about the enticements of the Continent, but the results have less in common with, say, The Ambassadors than with James’ inexplicable freak-out The Sacred Fount. Who would have expected this great artist of open spaces to take after the most psychoanalytical of writers? Only the film’s aftertaste is truly shocking: Kiarostami has arrived at these Jamesian conclusions through entirely his own means. The film applies to psychology the same coy, unassuming perspective that Kiarostami directed at landscapes and faces, respectively, in FIVE (2005) and SHIRIN (2008). Remarkably, the project remains the same: to regard the subject as if it’s never been contemplated before. That CERTIFIED COPY maintains such a light surface tone while pursuing such meaningful questions makes most other recent filmmaking seem trivial or overwrought. (2010, 106 min, 35mm)

IF I WANT TO WHISTLE, I WHISTLE (Romania)
Friday, 4:15pm; Saturday, 1:30pm; and Sunday, 12:30pm
Ever since Cristi Puiu’s THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU played at CIFF in 2005, anywhere from two to six new Romanian films have played in Chicago every year. The overall quality of these films has been extraordinary, suggesting that Romania now possesses one of the most exciting national cinemas in the world. These films, whose directors are all between the ages of 30 and 40, are united by ambitious, seemingly improvised long takes–used for such varied purposes as suspense (Puiu’s STUFF AND DOUGH, Cristian Mungiu’s 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, AND 2 DYAS, Andrei Gruszniczki’s THE OTHER IRENE), deadpan comedy (Corneliu Porumbiou’s 12:08 EAST OF BUCHAREST and POLICE, ADJECTIVE, Cristian Nemescu’s CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’), psychological acuity (MR. LAZARESCU, Radu Muntean’s BOOGIE and TUESDAY, AFTER CHRISTMAS, the latter playing elsewhere in this festival), and journalistic observation (all of the above)–but these remarkable formal achievements would not be possible if it were not for the crop of young actors who populate the films. Unconcerned with appearing sympathetic, yet embodying their characters so thoroughly as to grant them a noble autonomy, this generation of actors seems to be reinventing naturalism as radically as the Moscow thespians of the 1890s or the Actors Studio graduates of the 1940s and 50s. IF I WANT TO WHISTLE, I WHISTLE is filled with such actors, many of them still adolescents. They render the juvenile detention setting terrifyingly real, whether its through staging violent turf wars or (in some of director Florin Serban’s most accomplished long-takes) soullessly giving themselves to manual labor. The hero, Silviu, spends much of the film trying to communicate with his younger brother on the outside before their mother takes him away to Italy: It’s a melodramatic premise, but Serban divests it of melodrama as the character stoops to the most animalistic means of self-preservation, culminating in a thirty-minute climax whose intensity is almost too much to bear. There are precedents to this kind of film, of course: Maurice Pialat’s angry chamber dramas, the unnerving “documentary fictions” of Frederick Wiseman, and the masterpieces of Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne. But the recent Romanian cinema exists in its own category, dramatizing through the most termitic action the most pressing national concerns–chief among them the legacy of Nikolai Ceaucescu’s totalitarian regime, which ended just 20 years ago. It’s exciting, even humbling, to watch a generation of artists come to terms with its national history while advancing the parameters of their art. It’s enough to give urgency even to minor efforts (such as THE OTHER IRENE or–on first viewing, anyway–most of Muntean’s work). IF I WANT TO WHISTLE, however, is a major film: fleet, scary, and disarming in its empathy. (2010, 89 min, 35mm)

THE PLACE IN BETWEEN (France/Burkina Faso)
Friday, 6:10pm; Saturday, 2:45pm; and Wednesday, 4:30pm
Sarah Bouyain’s first fiction feature is about several African-born women living in France, one of whom, adopted as a baby by a French family, makes a trip to Burkina Faso to visit the birthplace she’s forgotten. This is clearly personal territory for Bouyain, the child of a French mother and African father, who’s written two novels and produced one documentary film on similar subject matter. Given her history, what’s most surprising about THE PLACE IN BETWEEN is that it’s the work of a born visual storyteller. Without quite transcending the familiar arc of alienation, discovery, and self-acceptance, Bouyain makes every scene fresh by taking no image for granted. She has a disarming way of letting a shot settle on a performer with admiring sympathy, as though unconcerned whether the face or activity will yield some distillable meaning. As Bouyain’s characters are constantly discovering some new ripple of the culture (be it in France or Burkina Faso), so is Bouyain’s camera. These are images of such intoxicating generosity that I enjoyed the entire film even though my DVD screener lacked subtitles and I speak very little French. As such, I can’t justly recommend the film as storytelling or psychological portrait. But let me note one character played the great Nathalie Richard (Rivette’s GANG OF FOUR and UP DOWN FRAGILE): a French bank teller who hires one of the emigrant characters to teach her the emigrant’s native tongue. She is particularly fascinating to watch. Her voice and mannerisms suggest nothing like a liberal caricature, only curiosity and mysterious poise. (I can’t wait to see the film with subtitles to find out if I’m right.) Watching Richard interact with the unknown actress who plays her employee/tutor, I kept thinking of an essay by Robin Wood about Claire Denis’ I CAN’T SLEEP, which was circulated online in the wake of Wood’s death last year. In that piece, the great critic opined that Denis’ contribution to cinema was a kind of universal sympathy, shots in which everyone in the frame was made to seem equally compelling by their very humanity. Without overselling this generally modest film, it often seems that Bouyain is capable of this sympathy, too. (2010, 82 min, 35mm)

ON TOUR (France)
Sunday, 8:30pm
Mathieu Amalric’s third feature as director, and the first to reach the U.S., is a loving tribute to the work of John Cassavetes–not just THE KILLING OF CHINESE BOOKIE (with which it has the most obvious parallels), but his entire filmography of messy, seemingly improvised testaments to human complexity. The premise has a washed-up TV producer (Amalric: frumpy, mustachioed, and lovably scuzzy) managing a troupe of American burlesque dancers as they tour the French hinterlands, but the true subject is the vicissitudes lurking beneath entertainment: all the thwarted desires, in short, that popular entertainment proposes to soothe. As a director, Amalric is just as drawn to documentary-like reaction shots of the backstage action as to whatever’s happening on stage, and he’s equally enamored of performers bickering in a dressing room as what they do when they put on a show. The film has a gorgeously haphazard rhythm: Like Cassavetes, Amalric is after the start-and-stop pace of life as it’s lived; but like Cassavetes, he’s such an accomplished actor that he presents real life as the ultimate performance piece. The cast includes several burlesque dancers apparently playing themselves (The opening credits introduce all of them by their stage names), and part of the thrill of the movie is seeing how the experienced actors modify their own style to suit them. The behavior is uniformly natural but self-protecting: Overall, the film shapes the viewer’s voyeuristic impulses into a humanistic sympathy. Watching ON TOUR, it’s easy to see why so many major filmmakers (Arnaud Desplechin, Olivier Assayas, Alain Resnais, Andre Techine, Steven Spielberg) have wanted to work with Amalric: His excitable eyes and movements suggest a restless intelligence constantly responding to the world around him. Here, the viewer is treated to an entire film from his perspective, and a treat it is. What’s most surprising about ON TOUR is that it doesn’t change its pace as it nears its conclusion: No matter what challenges face the characters, the world around them is forever bustling; the resolution (to the extent that film offers any) doesn’t propose to change that. (2010, 107 min, 35mm)

THE ROBBER (Austria)
Friday, 8:40pm; Saturday, 3:30pm; and Monday, 4:10pm
Director Benjamin Heisenberg, adapting a non-fiction novel by Martin Prinz, is working with an amazing case here: a national marathon champion who anonymously committed armed robberies in his free time. The subject matter readily invites a no-nonsense, psychologically astute action movie–a contemporary update on THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE or Don Siegel’s CHARLEY VARRICK–but Heisenberg’s approach is decidedly more cerebral. Grim, distant, and making no attempt to understand his psychopath psychologically, the perspective suggests an entomologist pretending to be Jack Webb. The film is most fascinating when its antihero is giving himself over to one of his two major passions. The Steadicam long-takes present a man exacting, almost robotic in running and robbing, and Andreas Lust, in a highly physical performance, appears that he could only master the latter by training for the former. (In an ironic variation on the sports movie formula, the athlete’s self-actualization makes victims of everyone around him.) Eschewing any explanation of intent, however, leaves Heisenberg open to a lot of comfortable aestheticizing. As in David Michod’s recent ANIMAL KINGDOM (another promising debut feature), a lot of the filmmaking is fascinating to watch, but seems on reflection like a shorthand version of the more complex art of Michael Haneke and Bruno Dumont. Minimalist widescreen compositions, unemphatic line deliveries, and a finely chiseled soundtrack that’s always heightening some mundane piece of white noise (the hum of a machine, a lousy top 40 single) confirm an intellectually vogue, predigested-Adorno sensibility that mass society is inherently dehumanizing. Even if you find that attitude patronizing, there’s plenty to admire in Heisenberg’s suspenseful movie, including several foot chases that carry the spontaneity, foreboding, and strange exhilaration of a bad dream. (2010, 97 min, 35mm)

LEAP YEAR (Mexico)
Sunday, 5:30pm and Monday, 8:45pm
WE ARE WHAT WE ARE (Mexico)
Wednesday, 8:45pm and Friday (10/15), 9:15pm
These two films are the most hotly anticipated Mexican features to play in Chicago in some time. Both played at Cannes (where LEAP YEAR won the Camera d’Or, the award for the best first feature in competition) and both toy with controversy every bit as cannily as arthouse provocations like IRREVERSIBLE and THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE, AND HER LOVER. I didn’t either film very much–or the two examples I’ve just cited, for that matter–but each is so assured in its formal attributes (composition, direction of actors, manipulation of suspense) that I wish I had admired them more. Certainly, those who like high art that breaks social taboos will find a lot of food for thought. In LEAP YEAR (2010, 88 min, 35mm widescreen), a young, ostensibly well-educated woman devotes herself to a lonely routine of writing Internet journalism and bringing home sadistic men for one night stands. The film systematically denies any interpretation for her behavior: It all takes place in her cramped Mexico City apartment, and writer-director Michael Rowe limits the dialogue to the pithy and the banal. Rowe is an Australian expatriate living in Mexico, and the most interesting thing about LEAP YEAR is that it’s the rare Mexican feature that feels as if it could take place in any country. Tellingly, the most overt cinematic influences are Belgian (the scenes of routinized behavior recall Chantal Akerman) and Taiwanese (the transformation of the film frame into a static, theatrical space is pure Tsai Ming-liang). The movie derives much of its impact from Monica del Carmen’s lead performance, which is courageous if ultimately unrevealing. Del Carmen submits to enough physical degradation as to set some kind of record for an actor working outside of porn, and she devotes herself to the role as though this were a desirable achievement. As with most of the other details, however, her accomplishment exists in a creative vacuum, exactingly realized but opaque in its purpose.

On the other hand, WE ARE WHAT WE ARE (2010, 87 min, 35mm widescreen) is rather blunt in its central metaphor: a working-class Mexico City family saves money on food by murdering and eating social undesirables. If taken as political allegory, this is pretty simplistic stuff, especially since Jorge Michel Grau (another debutante writer-director) is dead-serious about the material when it contains so much opportunity for black comedy. As horror filmmaking, though, it can be quite effective. Grau uses depressed urban environments with a sense of purpose comparable to George Romero’s 70s films: He overcomes any pitying impulse to make the inner-city setting seem like someone’s actual home, which makes the intrusions of graphic violence feel that much more unsettling. He also establishes a recognizable dynamic within the family of cannibals, dramatizing their horrible condition with familiar tensions: sibling rivalry among the grown children, a struggle for at-home authority between the widowed mother and her eldest son. For me, there’s something fundamentally misshapen about Grau’s project: Because the characterizations aim for utter realism–and often succeed, it should be noted–it’s hard to believe that these people would live at the mercy of such a thin horror premise. (The film’s biggest shortcoming is that it doesn’t evoke a state of utter necessity, as in Romero’s films, to incite such dire behavior.) But this may be mere nitpicking; there are plenty of scares and moody atmosphere to get absorbed in.

GOLDEN SLUMBER (Japan)
Friday, 9:15pm; Saturday, 8:45pm; Wednesday, 2:45pm
For many attendees of the Chicago International, the most interesting thing about GOLDEN SLUMBER will be that it’s set in Sendai, a small city in northeastern Japan. It’s a fascinating-looking place, topographically varied (Like many Japanese cities, it’s surrounded by mountains) and rich in local color. The population is around one million, but possessing the diversity of a much larger city, as Sendai is home to several large corporate offices in addition to a number of small universities. On the whole, it doesn’t resemble any U.S. city I know, though parts of it (as depicted in the film, anyway) reminded me of some of the smaller Canadian cities I’ve visited: modest in comparison with a cultural capital like Tokyo, but still generally urbane. There’s little to impel a Chicagoan to visit, though the nature of the city–an alternative to the megalopolis, the suburb, and the rural town–is well worth contemplating. Thankfully, the leisurely paced GOLDEN SLUMBER offers the audience plenty of thinking room. With every location and character quirk lingered over past the point of narrative utility, the more imaginative viewer can compile the details into a sort-of ethnographic lesson. Such is the great, unremarked-on pleasure of attending unknown films at an international festival: learning about a foreign culture through its popular entertainment. It’s good to know that GOLDEN SLUMBER contains such merit as sociology, because it doesn’t have much going for it as entertainment. A pleasant but uninspired update on Hitchcock’s favorite premise, this has a late-20s slacker running from the authorities (and shadowy men in suits, of course) once he’s framed for the assassination of the Prime Minister. There’s something comforting in the film’s familiarity: By now, the NORTH BY NORTHWEST formula has become a cinematic comfort food, and it’s interesting to see how it’s handled by filmmakers outside the Anglo-American tradition. In addition to the regional specificity of the location (which is funny in and of itself: imagine Alan J. Pakula setting THE PARALLAX VIEW in Omaha), there’s something quintessentially Japanese about the film’s “good natured” serial killer jokes and the particular brand of pathos granted to the hero because he lacks a steady career at 28. Those completely unfamiliar with Japanese pop culture should be entertained by the jarring moments of sentimentality, which pop out of the suspense story from time to time, only to vanish as suddenly. And if anyone enjoys the superfluous Beatles references that gives the film its title and central motif… Well, they’re less demanding viewers than I. (2010, 134 min, 35mm)