CRUCIAL VIEWING
Ebrahim Golestan’s BRICK AND MIRROR (Iranian Revival)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) — Thursday, 7pm (Free Admission)
There are so, so many ways to approach this breathtaking movie, rich with meaning and ripe for multivalent levels of reading. Like many of the Italian Neorealist or French New Wave films that clearly influenced BRICK AND MIRROR, it is visually stunning and poetically scripted, as rhythmically edited as any Resnais and as meticulously shot and lit as any Antonioni. But there is something altogether unique about BRICK AND MIRROR that speaks to a tragically truncated new wave of cinema unique to Iran. The country grappled with rapid westernization, women's liberation, and modernity in the 1960's. Tehran's urban art scene was the locus of much of the tension that arose, both around those movements, and against the Shah's regime. Poetry and cinema were two of the most popular forms of artistic expression at the time, and BRICK AND MIRROR is, in many ways, a visual poem, sometimes with characters seeming to directly address the camera as they issue poetic soliloquies. This should come as no surprise to those who research the film, because Golestan, who only made two feature films and four documentary short films, spent a formative decade of his life in a passionate love affair with Forough Farrokhzad, a beloved poet who died tragically young in a car accident at age 32. Together, they made what many consider the best film of Iran's truncated new wave, THE HOUSE IS BLACK (1963), a spellbinding documentary about a leper colony. Much like THE HOUSE IS BLACK or Resnais' NIGHT AND FOG (1956), BRICK AND MIRROR uses documentary elements in new and innovative ways that blur boundaries between narrative and essay and cut through to the viewer in captivating ways. BRICK AND MIRROR tells a simple narrative on its surface: a taxi driver named Hashem gives a ride to a woman who leaves a baby behind when she exits his car, unbeknownst to him until he hears the baby crying, and the woman has vanished. His ensuing anxiety and growing moral panic through the course of the night and the next morning could easily play out like a social realist drama, but instead, Golestan stretches the boundaries of narrative and detail to give us much more. Hashem spends a good deal of time in this movie holding the infant while various intellectuals and bourgeois institutional figures lecture him on what he should and should not do, betraying their hypocrisy and serving as vehicles for Golestan to critique the dominant regime and society at the time. At the same time, other characters (mostly women) are given space and time and framing to give passionate soliloquies that portray their suffering. Hashem's girlfriend, Taji, becomes the defining moral compass of the film, and can easily be read as a stand-in for Farrokhzad; her compassionate clarity and existential loneliness a sharp contrast to Hashem's cowardice and moral failing as night turns into morning. This gorgeous film, shot in black-and-white Cinemascope, reaches an emotional climax with Taji in an orphanage in one of the most haunting tracking shots in the history of cinema. BRICK AND MIRROR has recently been lovingly restored by Cineteca Bologna (in part thanks to a 35mm print in the University of Chicago archive), which is a relief, because so many films of the Iranian New Wave were lost to the fundamentalist revolution of 1979. Viewers will easily track how this film influenced so many Iranian directors to follow, from Bahram Beyzai to Jafar Panahi to Abbas Kiarostami. (1965, 125 min, DCP Digital) AE
Jessie Maple’s TWICE AS NICE (American Revival) / Gina Prince-Bythewood’s LOVE & BASKETBALL (American Revival)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University — Friday, 7pm (Free Admission) / Gene Siskel Film Center — Saturday, 3pm and Wednesday, 8:15pm
Twice as nice, indeed! This week, we’re lucky to be able to see not just one, but two films by Black women directors about Black women in basketball. These are exemplary films, but, as with many films directed by women and people of color, they come with those regrettable superlatives—‘first,’ ‘second,’ 'one of a few,' etc.—which, in the annals of film history, often wind up eclipsing the excellence of the films themselves. Still, those superlatives are necessary to aid one’s appreciation of the struggles faced by these filmmakers. Jessie Maple, who will appear at the screening of her second feature, TWICE AS NICE (1989, 70 min, 16mm restored print), is a bona fide trailblazer, having been the first African-American woman admitted to the union of International Photographers of Motion Picture & Television (IATSE) in New York. (Maple details this experience in her 1977 book How to Become a Union Camerawoman, which appears to be out of print. She published a follow-up memoir last year, called The Maple Crew; I haven’t read it, but I imagine it’s essential reading for anyone interested in the experience of women and people of color in the film industry.) According to the New York Times, her first feature, WILL, is “the first post-civil rights feature film directed by a woman,” with other sources claiming it was the first post-civil rights feature directed by a Black woman, specifically. Many sources also claim that, with TWICE AS NICE, she became the first Black woman to direct two feature-length films. Co-produced by her husband Leroy Patton under the auspices of their independent production company, LJ Films, TWICE AS NICE is about twin college basketball stars, Caren and Camilla Parker (played by Pamela and Paula McGee, both real-life basketball players), at a pivotal point in their respective lives and careers. Caren, specifically, hopes to be the first woman to join the “MBA,” the WNBA having not yet been established. (That would happen in the mid-90s.) Eventual WNBA superstar Cynthia Cooper-Dyke appears as one of the girls’ teammates, and poet, actress, and filmmaker S. Pearl Sharp wrote the script. Most impressive is what the film doesn’t say; though it’s a relatively short feature, the narrative is magnified by Maple’s canny direction. The audacious physicality helps to account for this, Maple utilizing both the sport and her actors’ bodies, those which are criminally underrepresented on the big screen, to imposing effect. Part of writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood’s romantic drama LOVE & BASKETBALL (2000, 124 min, 35mm) takes place around the same time; it begins in the early 80s when the protagonists are pre-teens. Playing the characters as teenagers and later adults, the wondrous Sanaa Lathan and Omar Epps star as Monica and Quincy, respectively, neighbors and basketball obsessives who bond over their love of the game. Divided into four quarters, like said game, the film follows the characters from middle school into high school; then to college at the University of Southern California, where both play for the school; and, finally, five years into the future, after they’d broken up in the previous quarter amidst his personal turmoil and her burgeoning professional success. (After graduating in the early 90s, Monica goes to Spain to play basketball; this recalls the beginning of Maple’s film, when Caren and Camilla get back from playing basketball in Japan, women ball players often having to find opportunities abroad due to the lack of such opportunities at home. In another similarity, Monica aspires to be the first female NBA player and, in the epilogue, is shown to have later joined the WNBA, connecting the character to several of the real-life athlete-actresses from TWICE AS NICE.) LOVE & BASKETBALL is intensely earnest and romantic, not to mention discreetly subversive. It’s noticeably political, yes—most obviously with regards to gender, the dearth of support for and interest in women’s basketball being an integral part of Monica’s character development—but it presents and is best enjoyed as a romantic coming-of-age drama that utilizes its lack of discernible racial politics to comment on the very expectation, often by white audiences, that such issues be invoked in films about Black people. Where TWICE AS NICE draws attention to what’s not explicitly stated, LOVE & BASKETBALL relies on Prince-Bythewood’s engaging, expertly crafted script. Co-produced by Spike Lee and co-starring Alfre Woodard, Regina Hall, Dennis Haysbert, and Tyra Banks (the latter in a bit part), LOVE & BASKETBALL is one of the top ten highest-grossing films about basketball ever. Prince-Bythewood and her debut feature don't carry the same “trail-blazing” qualifiers as Maple and her first and second films; still, it's special by virtue of being one of the few of its kind: a film directed by a Black woman about Black life. Twice is nice but still not enough. Here’s to many, many more. KS
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Director Jessie Maple in person at the screening of TWICE AS NICE.
Jocelyne Saab’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN BEIRUT (Lebanese Documentary/Essay Film Revival)
Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) — Tuesday, 7:30pm (Free Admission)
“History doesn’t repeat itself, it stutters...” That’s the central observation of Jocelyne Saab’s brilliant, inscrutable found-footage revue, which traipses through the wreckage of Lebanon’s celluloid past in search of the truth about the city of Beirut. The framing device for Saab’s inquiries is exuberantly ‘pataphysical: two young women, Yasmin and Leila, arrive at the decrepit movie palace of the aging cinephile, Mr. Farouk, bearing newly discovered reels depicting Beirut’s past. As the lights go down and some of the earliest moving images of the city appear on screen, our two irreverent protagonists are transported into the world of the film, appearing in period dress and monochrome to lament that all they’ve found of Beirut’s past is “a head-spinning series of clichés.” For the remaining 90 minutes, Saab sends Yasmin and Leila down the rabbit hole of these clichés, ingeniously weaving their insouciant commentary into a non-linear montage of film clips reflecting the fragmented history of what Farouk calls “the city of love.” ONCE UPON A TIME hopscotches from the romanticized (yet ultimately unfulfilled) cosmopolitanism of the 1950s and 1960s, back to the colonial misadventures of the French Mandate era (1920-1943), and forward to the sectarian cataclysms of the 1970s and 80s, through a deftly-assembled mosaic of scenes drawn equally from Western and Arab films. From tawdry spy thrillers to sex comedies to arthouse films (including Volker Schlöndorff’s CIRCLE OF DECEIT, on which Saab worked as an assistant director, as well as her own A SUSPENDED LIFE), Saab’s picture show exhaustively burlesques the idea of truth itself—a notion which takes on a particularly melancholy weight when one considers that Saab, who passed away in 2019, spent almost 50 years in pursuit of it as a journalist and documentary filmmaker. Fed up with the dreams and lies they encounter in cinema’s exotifying yet empty mirror, Yasmin and Leila demand a proper history lesson—only to meet their teacher in the form of a donkey. “My dear donkey, don’t you see anything coming?” the two ask, “If all the Lebanese had a wise donkey like you, they wouldn’t be where they are today.” Striking a peculiar and precarious balance between nostalgia, bitter irony, and recrimination, ONCE UPON A TIME IN BEIRUT ends in an inevitable confusion—one that expresses both the glories and tragedies of Lebanon’s past, and the deep uncertainty of its future. (1994, 101 min, Digital Projection) MM
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Followed by a discussion by University of Chicago professors Allyson Field and Ghenwa Hayak. The film screens as part of their Cinema without an Archive class.
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Wang Xiaoshuai’s CHINESE PORTRAIT (New Chinese Documentary)
Facets Cinematheque — Check Venue website for showtimes
Nothing if not ambitious, this short documentary attempts to portray the social, economic, and topographical diversity of contemporary China in less than 80 minutes. The movie consists of a series of static long takes that mainly depict people at their places of employment. Director Wang Xioashuai observes students, farmers, miners, musicians, and more, yet he rarely shows these people working; instead he has them pose for the camera so that viewers can contemplate the subjects’ physicality vis-à-vis their location. Many of the shots are arresting, thanks to Wang’s sophisticated visual sensibility; his use of sound is impressive as well, the cacophony of environmental noises often adding another layer of meaning to the images. CHINESE PORTRAIT doesn’t proceed according to any obvious rhetorical or aesthetic trajectory, as Wang shifts between different regions and social milieux, between film and video, and even between different aspect ratios. The formal variety parallels the variety of the content so that a monumental sense of diversity emerges—in the end, this digest approach to Chinese society tells us that modern China is essentially impossible to summarize. The theme is somewhat banal, especially when considered alongside the revelations of other, superior 21st-century Chinese documentaries (e.g., DISORDER, 24 CITY, pretty much anything by Wang Bing). Still, this is worth seeing for the images and for the invention of the montage; the film holds one’s attention as well as any good still photography exhibition would. (2018, 79 min, Digital Projection) BS
Kelly Reichardt's WENDY AND LUCY (American Revival)
Music Box Theatre — Tuesday, 7pm
"You know, scientifically speaking, Marian," says Matthew Modine in SHORT CUTS, "there's no such thing as beyond natural color." Is there such a thing as beyond naturalism? If there is, Reichardt has moved beyond it, beyond even neorealism, using an unvarnished eye to fashion impressionistic portraits of characters who inhabit very specific times and places. Though she's made only a handful of films, a randomly chosen moment from any one of them bears her distinct sensibility. Her newest, NIGHT MOVES, opens later this year. That's a great reason to revisit one of her previous masterpieces (though "masterpiece" seems like a pretentious way to describe this simple, heartbreaking story about loneliness). WENDY AND LUCY is centered on an outstanding performance by Michelle Williams and a painterly eye for the environs of Oregon. Anyone who's ever spent time in the Pacific Northwest will savor details like the greenness of the grass in an empty field or the slow clatter of a freight train going by. It's a small gem that has all the Americana of a John Ford movie yet recalls the naturalism of VAGABOND and even UMBERTO D. And like those movies it's about people literally living hand to mouth, an existence where a gift of $6 (which occurs towards the end) is truly a sacrifice. Owing much to co-screenwriter Jon Raymond's fiction, it unfolds like a perfectly constructed novella. (2008, 80 min, 35mm) RC
John Waters’ CRY-BABY (American Revival)
Music Box Theatre — Friday and Saturday, Midnight
In his 2019 memoir Mr. Know-It-All, John Waters describes the cast of CRY-BABY as “perfect, like a dinner party in a celebrity mental institution.” Looking back on the campy jailhouse musical—featuring the likes of Johnny Depp, Ricki Lake, Iggy Pop, Mink Stole, and Willem Dafoe—it’s hard to disagree with that sentiment. Waters’ eighth feature-length film, CRY-BABY parodies the two opposing sides that have always been in the trenches of the culture wars: the troublemakers and the squares. Cool guy Cry-Baby (Johnny Depp, with a dramatic single tear streaming down his face in almost every scene) falls in love with the prim and respectable Allison (Amy Locane), and their town, whose residents are firmly entrenched on one or the other side of the troublemaker-square divide, descends into chaos, accompanied by absurd and delightful musical numbers. Like most entries in Waters’ filmography, CRY-BABY’s staying power lies in its one-liners that appeal to the cult classic crowds: from “Electricity killed my parents!” to “There’s nothing wrong with my face, I got character!” and “You swapped me for milkmaid?” It’s not Waters’ most revolutionary or provocative work, but CRY-BABY effectively pokes fun at the sanitized GREASEs and ROMEO AND JULIETs of the world for the queerdos and freaks alike. (1990, 85 min, 35mm) CC
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Featuring a pre-show vinyl DJ set by Gaudy God starting at 11:30pm.
Mevryn LeRoy’s THE BAD SEED (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Thursday, 9:30pm
Although perhaps not as widely known as the slightly later VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960), THE BAD SEED truly set the stage for the unsettling evil-child horror film sub-genre. A mother, Christine (Nancy Kelly), learns that her child, dead-behind-the-eyes yet bright Rhoda (Patty McCormack), was present for the mysterious death of a classmate who was competition for a penmanship award. After learning the disturbing circumstances behind her own adoption, Christine is fearful that murderous impulses could be inherent in her bloodline. Mevryn LeRoy’s film is entirely emblematic of its time. It’s a cautionary tale born out of post-WWII paranoia that the next manifestation of pure evil walks amongst society, just waiting to inflict unspeakable horrors once reaching full maturity, with some Freudian discourse thrown in to boot. Despite this, the film mixes its horror with some melodrama, has some surprising twists, and features some notably chilling performances by Nancy Kelly and Patty McCormack. THE BAD SEED set the groundwork for the evil child films; its ripple effects have been felt from THE EXORCIST to WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN. (1956, 129 min, 35mm) KC
Ida Lupino’s NEVER FEAR (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Wednesday, 7 and 9pm
An old saw for would-be authors is “write what you know.” Whatever its merits, this advice was something Ida Lupino put into practice for her first credited film as a screenwriter and director. NEVER FEAR, also known as THE YOUNG LOVERS, written with her second husband, Collier Young, taps into Lupino’s firsthand experience with polio. When she contracted the disease in 1934, Paramount canceled its contract with her. Although she continued to act, her opportunities over the next few years were limited by her physical condition. It was this experience that pushed her in the direction of working behind the camera where she could use her intellectual abilities to express herself. NEVER FEAR, a project of Lupino’s independent production company, The Filmakers, is a raw look at the physical and emotional turmoil of a gifted, young woman struck down by polio before her 21st birthday. Carol Williams (Sally Forrest) is a dancer in love with her dance partner, Guy Richards (Keefe Brasselle), and excited about their future in show business and in life. Just before she falls ill, the pair scores a big performance contract and gets engaged. It all falls apart when Carol is sent to a Los Angeles hospital for diagnosis and a long haul in rehabilitation. Lupino smartly reteamed Forrest and Brasselle, both of whom appeared in her uncredited directorial debut, NOT WANTED (1949), and had chemistry to burn. Forrest, herself 21 and a skilled dancer, nails the inexperience and heightened emotions of youth as Lupino pulls a complex performance from her that might have been a mess in other hands. Brasselle is an appealing, ardent suitor, and Lupino contains his tendency to go a bit big. Hunky Hugh O’Brian, who plays another polio sufferer on Carol’s ward, seems destined to be Carol’s real love, but the script thankfully takes him in another direction. A knockout modern dance duet at the beginning of the film from choreographer Billy Daniel represents a clear break from the swing dance styles of the 1940s and presages the sparring the lovers will engage in during the film. At times, NEVER FEAR gets sudsy, but the emotional core of the film stays grounded. Like THE MEN, another 1950 film featuring Marlon Brando’s electrifying screen debut as a disabled veteran, location shooting in a real hospital makes for an interesting look at mid-century rehabilitation techniques. (1950, 92 min, DCP Digital) MF
Takashi Miike’s AUDITION (Japanese Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Friday, 8:15pm and Tuesday, 6pm
AUDITION may have been Takashi Miike’s international breakthrough, but it’s an uncharacteristic work in several respects. When Miike is at his freewheeling best (as in DEAD OR ALIVE 2: BIRDS, THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS, or DETECTIVE STORY), he’ll change a film’s tonal register repeatedly over the course of the running time; AUDITION, on the other hand, contains only one significant shift in tone. Many of Miike’s other features abound with outlandish humor as well as gruesome violence, but (save for a humorous montage that occurs fairly early) AUDITION abounds only with violence. In terms of style, Miike often likes to alternate between long takes and brisk montage; this film favors the former over the latter. AUDITION is also one of the only Miike features (of which there are now over 100) that can be said to tackle issues of sexual politics and gender roles; his work is usually too absurd to connect to real-world concerns. Still, AUDITION is thoroughly Miike-esque in the devilish glee with which it provokes its viewers. That big shift—from muted drama to grisly horror—is one of the great surprises in modern movies, and it plays like a tramcar veering wildly in a dark funhouse. Miike restrains himself for the movie’s first half, seldom moving the camera and developing a gentle (albeit occasionally wry) tone. The movie promises to be a subdued, if eccentric tale of a 60-ish widower, Aoyama, who gets persuaded to look for a new wife—until the story becomes something totally different. Aoyama pretends to be a producer holding auditions for a fake movie, videotaping women talking about themselves under the assumption they’ll be cast in the lead role. He comes to pay for this ruse and then some, experiencing emotional manipulation and ultimately torture at the hands of the woman he picks to be his bride. His comeuppance is excruciating, yet also bleakly funny, representing an ironic reversal not only of the audience’s narrative expectations, but also what they might think a straight man can get away with. (1999, 115 min, DCP Digital) BS
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SAIC professor Jennifer Dorothy Lee lectures at the Tuesday screening.
Luchino Visconti’s SENSO (Italian Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Sunday, 8pm
One of the most operatic of all films, Luchino Visconti’s SENSO opens at a performance of Il Trovatore and goes on to spin a melodramatic tale in which both the emotions and aesthetics are sumptuous. The year is 1866, and Venice sits under Austrian occupation. A countess (Alida Valli) whose cousin is part of the Italian resistance meets an Austrian lieutenant (Farley Granger) with the aim of gaining information about the enemy army. Against her best intentions, she falls in love with the officer and enters into a passionate affair with him. The woman sacrifices not only her principles, but her integrity as well, staying devoted to her paramour even after she learns he’s cheated on her many times over. Rainer Werner Fassbinder may have named THE DAMNED as his favorite Visconti film, but this is the one that most anticipates his own cinema, presenting passion as a brutal force that drives people to their destruction. The final act even feels proto-Fassbinderian—the bitter final meeting between the two lovers finds two lost souls burning themselves out in a torrent of spite and self-pity. For all the messiness of the emotions, Visconti’s style is magnificently controlled, with dancelike camera movements and the richest, most immersive mise-en-scene he created prior to THE LEOPARD. The Technicolor cinematography is also hypnotically lush; this was Visconti’s first feature in color, and he makes the most out of it, presenting a wide array of hues in nearly every shot. The opulent visual style is a perfect analogue to the intense emotional content—like his characters, Visconti holds nothing back. Still, there’s something almost subtle about the way the filmmaker charts his subjects’ downward trajectory, his formal control betraying the impulsiveness on display. (1954, 119 min, DCP Digital) BS
Pedro Almodóvar’s PAIN AND GLORY (New Spanish)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Check Venue website for showtimes
While not exactly a valedictory work, Pedro Almodóvar’s PAIN AND GLORY signals that the 70-year-old director is feeling the passage of time more acutely. Working again with his long-time avatars, Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz, who play fictionalized versions of the director and his mother, Almodóvar has created a fairly subdued memory piece taken from the point of view of an inactive elder statesman of film. Salvador Mallo (Banderas), suffering from the chronic pains of old age and writer’s block, gets word that his first film has been restored and is to be revived. Presenters want him and his star, Alberto Crespo (Asier Etxeandia), to appear together for a Q&A at the screening. This request forces Mallo to reconnect with Crespo, who hasn’t spoken to him since Mallo fired him more than 30 years before over his heroin use. This time, however, Mallo decides to “chase the dragon” himself. His antics trying to score some smack intermix with memories of his move as a child (Asier Flores) with his mother (Cruz) to the small village where his father (Raúl Arévalo), a meager earner, ensconced them in his home in a hillside cave. The contrast between Mallo’s childhood environment and his expensive adult home—fire-engine-red everything hung with museum-quality paintings that he is occasionally asked to loan out to exhibitions—offers the paradox of memory: the cave yields moments of great light, including young Mallo’s homosexual awakening, while his present-day home feels dark and somewhat institutional despite being awash in color. Uniformly fine performances, particularly Banderas’ wry portrait of the artist as a museum piece, inform the generosity of Almodóvar’s cinematic maturation. (2019, 113 min, DCP Digital) MF
Michael Mann's THIEF (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Monday, 7pm
Is Michael Mann the greatest working American director? It's true that Frederick Wiseman has a greater influence over world cinema on the whole and Clint Eastwood is more nationally valuable for his ongoing critique of the American character. Yet Mann inspires greater reverence than either of them due to the sheer beauty of his approach. An artist with an acute sense of the fleeting moment, the unnatural pace of time in contemporary life, and myriad variations of artificial light (He's likened himself to a photorealist painter), Mann is simply our greatest living image-maker. Shot primarily in Chicago, THIEF builds its atmosphere around the city's proletarian feistiness; it's certainly the native Southsider's most autobiographical work. In the first of many idiosyncratic takes on realism, Mann cast actual Chicago cops to play criminals and actual former criminals as cops. In doing so, he made first steps toward the great theme of his work: the uncanny leveling of human behavior under modern professionalism. James Caan plays a successful life-long thief who wants to get married and settle down. He discovers his own humanity too late (There's always One Last Score), but there are great realizations on the way to failure. Caan considers this his best performance, and he's probably right: Several of the most important scenes are two-person conversations that reach Bergman-esque levels of intimacy and recrimination. These moments of heightened self-doubt alternate with bloody gun fights and meticulously observed crimes; unlike Howard Hawks or Anthony Mann—two of his thematic forbearers—Mann seems deeply ambivalent about the macho attitudes that tend to accompany these subjects. In lives increasingly defined by professional obligation, Mann regards the decline of traditional gender roles with serious curiosity and surprising nostalgia. (In this sense, his films have affinities with those of Tsai Ming-liang.) THIEF is the first of Mann's elegies for professional masculinity, and it's sharpened greatly by the film's harsh night photography. (1981, 122 min, Digital Projection) BS
Stephen Frears' HIGH FIDELITY (American Revival)
Music Box Theatre — Monday, 7pm
Now that Stephen Frears has retreated into middle-brow British heritage filmmaking (THE QUEEN, PHILOMENA, etc.), his director credit on HIGH FIDELITY, the all-American Sub-Pop rom-com, is all the more mysterious and unaccountable. Transplanting Nick Hornby's London-set novel to Chicago with the assistance of star/producer/writer John Cusack and his boyhood friends from Evanston, HIGH FIDELITY succeeds largely on the basis of its slippery but firmly committed command of local detail. Cusack's record store, Championship Vinyl, is located at the intersection of Milwaukee and Honore in a Wicker Park that's post-Liz Phair but still pre-gentrification and consequently overrun with over-achieving Charlie Brown crust punks. All the aspiring grown-ups live in one of those lovely old apartment buildings in Rogers Park or Lakeview, where the rain washes away your tears as you stomp through the unkempt courtyards. The hyper-specific observation always wins out, even when it's purely invented. (There's a moment when Cusack hops onto the Purple Line at Armitage. The train enters a tunnel and goes underground. Now, every CTA rider knows that the Purple Line remains elevated for the duration, but that's banal. HIGH FIDELITY implicitly suggests something better: a Purple Line ride that retains the ecstatic promise of coming out again on the other side in a blast of sunshine.) You always feel grounded in the film's crowded chronology, calling up personal memories that are inevitably intertwined with pop signposts: we had that conversation the week that "The Boy with the Arab Strap" came out; we went on that date the same night that THE DREAMLIFE OF ANGELS opened at the Music Box. It's all of a piece with the incessant list-making, the encyclopedic editorializing, the ever-fragile mantel of expertise. "This is a film about—and also for—not only obsessed clerks in record stores," suggested Roger Ebert upon HIGH FIDELITY's release, "but the video store clerks who have seen all the movies, and the bookstore employees who have read all the books. Also for bartenders, waitresses, greengrocers in health food stores..." Yes, HIGH FIDELITY speaks to all these people fine, but let's be real: this is a movie that is deeply, specifically, and unmistakably about the culture of record stores. It uncannily contains a piece of every single record store in which I've ever stepped foot. And if they all vanished tomorrow, the species could be genetically reconstituted purely on the basis of the collected side-eyes, chortles, guffaws, growls, and straight-up asshole moves in HIGH FIDELITY. It's anthropology, but it's also a superlative romantic comedy—an up-to-date ANNIE HALL purged of Allen's misogynistic impulse to crack all the jokes at the woman's expense. No matter how small the role, everybody here from Iben Hjejle to Todd Louiso is a three-dimensional presence. (In the closing reel, Jack Black gets elevated to a crowd-pleasing four-dimensional plateau.) It might not be in my Top 5, but it's damn close. (2000, 113 min, 35mm) KAW
Louie Schwartzberg's FANTASTIC FUNGI: THE MAGIC BENEATH US (New Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Check Venue website for showtimes
Did you ever consider that mushrooms, which are after all a form of fungus, could be used to save humanity from pandemic viruses, as well as reduce viruses in bees? That they could fight Alzheimer's, alcoholism, and depression; and climate change and pollution? Indeed, Louie Schwartzberg's fascinating, wildly ambitious, visually spectacular documentary FANTASTIC FUNGI makes more claims for the potential of mushrooms than I could ever summarize in this space: from the medicinal to the spiritual to the gastronomic, from the personal to the world-historical. The film is occasionally profound; though it's not afraid to risk being banal or silly. It also functions as a profile of Paul Stamets, a noted mycologist (that is, a person who studies fungi) and public speaker who farms gourmet mushrooms in the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. He's the author of Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save The World, and the film is driven by his palpable excitement and sense of urgency about getting across ideas which he feels are key to the future of humanity, and the planet. The film demonstrates how New Age (or, if you prefer, non-Western) knowledge about mushrooms is increasingly finding purchase beyond the counterculture, and finding validation by scientists. Moving quickly, it is dense with information and provocative ideas—some perhaps a bit of a stretch, others eminently sensible—featuring a host of interviews with PhDs and authors, including Michael Pollan and Andrew Weil. Schwartzberg, a video artist who's worked for Disney and National Geographic, illustrates and corroborates their assertions with time-lapse and macro cinematography and special effects, all meant to show us "things that are real but invisible to the naked eye." At their best, his trippy, dreamy, beautiful imagery evokes the likes of Douglas Trumbull and Terrence Malick, or Godfrey Reggio's KOYAANISQATSI. (Only once or twice was I reminded of a screensaver.) It's a heady sound and light show, a mystical experience itself, making even chemistry beautiful. We learn that mushrooms are the fruiting body of fungi, and also their organ of sexual reproduction. Indeed, there's a priapic aspect to the film's plethora of time-lapse imagery of elongating, blooming mushrooms. I gazed in wonder at the beauty of their unbelievably diverse shapes, sizes and colors, transforming before my eyes. The fact is that mushrooms are really just the representative tip, though, of a whole invisible fungal network: the bulk of this ancient organism grows underground; it is composed of a mass of branching, elongating threads called mycelium. Mycelium is everywhere below us, an underground world. (In fact, Brie Larson even narrates as the voice of the mycelium fungi.) Among the film's theses is that fungi—that nature itself—is intelligent. The mycelium works like the brain's neural pathways, via electrolytes and electrical pulses. Now, the thing is, as we get older, we become slightly wary. We're on guard for cults, gurus, and visionary charlatans. Naturally critical, we're skeptical of the easy fix. I didn't get the whiff of the indoctrinate from this film, though—just thoughtful, ethical people trying, with hope, to explain a mushroom-centered vision of healing, on the chance that if people understood, things could change. I was profoundly moved by the testimony from psilocybin studies participants at Johns Hopkins. (Psilocybin is the compound found in "magic mushrooms": after a heyday for medical psilocybin research in the '50s and '60s, Nixon made it illegal in 1970.) These are people with terminal cancer who took psilocybin under the supervision of doctors, and who speak of their essentially ineffable experience in terms of a feeling of immense power, of infinite space—of touching the numinous. One woman says she'd never felt so keenly her sense of being worthy of love, of being cared for, of being important to someone—with the implication that that someone is some higher force, or light, or God. It's a vision of nature itself as something like the substance called love. It would seem, then, from these folks' testimony, that psilocybin can help us prepare for the end of life, by reducing the fear of death. We even meet Stamets' octogenarian mother who, receiving a diagnosis of Stage 4 breast cancer, began taking the turkey tail mushroom along with her chemo-therapeutic agents, and survived beyond anyone's wildest expectations. Here is a film that hopes to do no less than change lives, and by doing so, change the world. There's a beautiful vision here that, I believe, badly needs to be heard and shared. (2018, 80 min, DCP Digital) SP
Ladj Ly’s LES MISÉRABLES (New French)
Music Box Theatre — Check Venue website for showtimes
Testifying to the nearly unmatched power of sporting events to unite people across ethnic and class boundaries, Ladj Ly’s LES MISÉRABLES opens with rousing footage of French citizens flooding into the streets to celebrate their country’s 2018 World Cup victory. Ly focuses especially on exultant black faces, including those of characters officially introduced later, as he films this very real national eruption of joy. Accentuated by the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe looming on the horizon, the sequence encapsulates the foundational French tenet of fraternity, realized in one outsized moment of esprit de corps that Ly will soon show as utterly fleeting. There will be plenty more images of bustling congregations to come, but their animating communal pleasure will be replaced by melees of inequity-fueled desperation. Taking its inspiration from the 2005 suburban Paris riots, LES MISÉRABLES chronicles a 48-hour period of pullulating racial tensions in Clichy Montfermeil, where housing projects provide residence to many North African immigrants. Hewing closely to policier genre conventions, Ly uses an anti-crime unit as our initial point of entry to this world, introducing us to the coolheaded Gwada (Djebril Zonga) and the unapologetically racist sergeant Chris (Alexis Manenti), who’re joined by taciturn new recruit Stephane Ruiz (Damien Bonnard). The irony is immediately apparent that this nominally “anti-crime” unit, which spends much of its time harassing random black residents on the street, is really only exacerbating the problem. The film’s main inciting incident comes when Issa (Issa Perica), a boy from the projects, steals a lion cub from a Romani circus. His theft sets off a domino effect of raucous confrontations, hair-trigger police violence, digital media incriminations, and winching civic unrest, cracking racial, religious, and economic fault lines wide open in every direction across the city. Ly brings his background in documentary to bear on the proceedings, using vérité-style mobile shooting to enhance the urgency and chaos of the increasingly fractious conflicts he depicts. At its best, this febrile on-the-ground energy brings to mind the gritty docu-dramatic aesthetics and angry revolutionary politics of Gillo Pontecorvo or Costa-Gavras; at other times, the film can feel hampered by its broad characterizations and reliance on crime-narrative tropes. Still, as a snapshot of a turbulent 21st-century Western sociopolitical climate—and a sonorous reminder of the legacy of institutional oppression and precarious revolt it carries on—LES MISÉRABLES packs a solid punch. “What if voicing anger was the only way to be heard?,” rebuts a Muslim character to Ruiz’s wariness of the growing societal disorder. Ly leaves us with the same question, hanging in the middle of an internecine stalemate between a Molotov cocktail and a gun. (2019, 104 min, DCP Digital) JL
Greta Gerwig’s LITTLE WOMEN (New American)
Music Box Theatre — Check Venue website for showtimes
As one of literature’s greatest hits, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women has been an endless source of identification for generations of girls. But do the four March sisters still have something to offer to modern women who live comfortably in a gender-fluid, marriage-optional world that is far removed from the types of constrictions Alcott’s characters faced? Perhaps we haven’t come as far as we think, if the considerable appeal of Greta Gerwig’s version of LITTLE WOMEN is any indicator. Gerwig has done a masterful job of scrambling the timeline of the story, beginning with Jo (Saoirse Ronan) selling her first story to a Boston newspaper, thus announcing a fresh take on the familiar story for a new generation. Gerwig creates an energetic, teeming mise-en-scène in which the sisters’ actions are much more relatable and real. Meg (Emma Watson), for example, is much less the staid and proper sister in this version, even voicing her frustration with her marriage to a man of modest means. The biggest shift Gerwig, as screenwriter, has made is moving Jo into a less commanding position and focusing more attention on Laurie (Timothée Chalamet) and Amy (Florence Pugh). I surmise this was done to play to Chalamet’s fan base, but it also downshifts the message of independence Jo has always represented to wallow in the excess of Downton Abbey-style riches. Also jarring was a Friedrich Bhaer played with a pronounced French accent by dreamy Louis Garrel, son of French director Philippe Garrel. Was the good professor Alsatian after all? And not to quibble, but could Gerwig not have found a single American actress to play the American March sisters? While Gerwig’s LITTLE WOMEN has not dislodged Gillian Armstrong’s emotionally resonant 1994 version from my heart, it is a worthy adaptation by one of our most gifted filmmakers. (2019, 134 min, 35mm) MF
Vincente Minnelli's AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (American Revival)
Alliance Française (54 W. Chicago Ave.) — Saturday, 1:30pm
John Sayles's LIMBO has nothing on this ending: a magnificent seventeen-minute ballet, and then suddenly The End. What will happen between Gene Kelley and Leslie Caron? Perhaps Vincente Minnelli's wisest insight was knowing that we wouldn't really care. Seen today it's the details that grab your attention: It's: the artfully faux-Paris, artificial settings executed with such skill even the bottles behind the bar in a café become a study in early '50s MGM production design. It's the Gershwin, of course (there are at least eleven of his tunes on the soundtrack). And, more than anything, it's Oscar Levant, stealing every scene he's in—a particularly memorable dream sequence finds him conducting an orchestra of his own doppelgangers. And who can deny that the real sparks fly between Levant and Kelley, not Kelley and Caron? It's irrelevant whether or not you actually buy Kelley as a painter—the Technicolor is such an eyeful and the score so tuneful that it's enough to sit in a darkened theatre and drink it in. (1951, 113 min, Video Projection) RC
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
The Chicago Film Society (at Northeastern Illinois University, The Auditorium, Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) screens John Huston’s 1962 film FREUD (140 min, 35mm) on Wednesday at 7:30pm. Preceded by Tex Avery’s 1955 cartoon SH-H-H-H-H (6 min, 16mm).
Conversations at the Edge (at the Gene Siskel Film Center) presents An Evening with Vaginal Davis on Thursday at 6pm, with Davis in person. Screening are: CHOLITA! (1995, 7 min), DOT (1992, 15 min), THAT FERTILE FEELING (1982, 8 min), ONE MAN LADIES (1994, 29 min; co-directed by Glenn Belverio), and a TBA surprise work.
The Green Line Performing Arts Center (329 E. Garfield Blvd.) hosts We Tell: Body Publics on Thursday at 7pm. Screening are: NATURE’S WAY (Elizabeth Barret and John Long/Appalshop, 1973, 21 min), HSA STRIKE ’75 (Jerry Blumenthal, Judy Hoffman, and Gordon Quinn/Kartemquin, 1975, 20 min), LA OPERACIÓN (Ana Maria Garcia/ Latin American Film Project, 1982, 40 min), and TO THE POINT (Wanda Moore, Ryan Saunders, and Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong/ Prevention Point Philadelphia and Scribe Video Center, 1997, 14 min). All Digital Projection. With Judy Hoffman (University of Chicago/Kartemquin), Sarah Oberholtzer (Free Spirit Media) and Alex Halkin (Americas Media Initiative) in person. Free admission.
The Museum of Contemporary Photography (at Film Row Cinema, 1104 S. Wabash Ave., 8th Floor, Columbia College) screens Xu Bing’s 2017 Chinese documentary DRAGONFLY EYES (81 min, Digital Projection) on Tuesday at 6pm, with Xu Bing in person. Free admission.
Chicago Filmmakers (5720 N. Ridge Ave.) hosts an Open Screening on Saturday at 7pm. Note that there is now a week-in-advance deadline to submit work (which has passed). Free admission.
The Instituto Cervantes (31 W. Ohio St.) screens José Mari Goenaga and Jon Garaño’s 2010 Spanish film FOR 80 DAYS (105 min, DVD Projection) on Tuesday at 7pm. Free admission.
The Beverly Arts Center screens Brad Bird’s 2004 animated film THE INCREDIBLES (115 min, Digital Projection) on Wednesday at 7:30pm.
Asian Pop-Up Cinema presents Arts & Culture Doc Fest on Saturday at 2pm at the Chicago Cultural Center (Claudia Cassidy Theater). The program features four episodes from the 2012 Wonders of China documentary series (approx. 30 min each). Screening are: WUDANG TAI CHI, THE LEGEND OF SHADOW PUPPETRY, AMAZING MUSIC FROM NATURE, and WILDLIFE’S PARADISE [YARLUNG ZANPO GRAND CANYON]. Free admission.
Sentieri Italiani (3712 N. Broadway Ave.) screens Marco Bellocchio’s 2019 Italian/International film THE TRAITOR (145 min, Video Projection) on Saturday at 4pm.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Bong Joon-Ho's 2019 South Korean film PARASITE (131 min, DCP Digital) plays for a week; Yale Strom's 1994 documentary THE LAST KLEZMER: LEOPOLD KOZLOWSKI, HIS LIFE AND MUSIC (85 min, DCP Digital) is on Friday at 2pm and Sunday at 3:45pm, with Strom in person at the Sunday screening; Barry Jenkins' 2018 film IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK (119 min, DCP Digital) is on Saturday at 5:30pm and Monday at 8:15pm; and the Panorama Latinx Short Film Showcase (2019, 89 min total, DCP and ProRes Digital) is on Saturday at 8pm (check the Siskel website for films showing and in-person filmmakers).
Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week: Tsai Ming-liang’s 1998 Taiwanese film THE HOLE (95 min, 35mm) is on Friday at 7pm and Sunday at 1:30pm; Martin Scorsese’s 2019 film THE IRISHMAN (208 min, DCP Digital) is on Saturday at 7pm and Sunday at 4pm; Jean-Marc Vallée’s 2013 film DALLAS BUYERS CLUB (117 min, DCP Digital) is on Tuesday at 7pm; and James L. Brooks’ 1987 film BROADCAST NEWS (133 min, DCP Digital) is on Thursday at 7pm.
Also at the Music Box Theatre this week: The 2020 Oscar-Nominated Documentary Short Films (DCP Digital) opens; Richard Stanley’s 2019 film COLOR OUT OF SPACE (110 min, DCP Digital) continues; and Yoshifumi Kondo’s 1995 animated Japanese film WHISPER OF THE HEART (111 mins, 35mm) is on Saturday and Sunday at 11:30am.
The Chicago Cultural Center hosts the Chicago Latino Film Festival screening of Raúl Garcia's 2015 Puerto Rican film A WEDDING IN CASTAÑER (112 min, Video Projection) on Wednesday at 6:30pm. Free admission.
CINE-LIST: January 31 - February 6, 2020
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs, Kyle A. Westphal
CONTRIBUTORS // Rob Christopher, Cody Corrall, Kyle Cubr, Alexandra Ensign, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Michael Metzger, Scott Pfeiffer