We will highlight physical screenings at the top of the list for theaters and venues that are open, grouped in our standard Crucial Viewing and Also Recommended sections, as well as all other physical screenings, and list streaming/online screenings below.
Please note: With an uptick of Covid cases, remember to check the venue websites for information on safety protocols and other procedures put in place. All venues are now requiring proof of vaccination or a negative PCR test. We recommend verifying those protocols before every trip to the theater. And, of course, stay home if you’re sick, be nice to theater staff, and always wear a mask!
🔊 CINE-CAST: The Cine-File Podcast
Episode #22
In anticipation of the Highs and Lows series starting this Saturday at the Music Box (which comprises eight double features of a “lowbrow” movie paired with an art film), Cine-File editors Ben and Kat Sachs talk high and low cinema with series programmers Will Morris and John Dickson (who's also a Cine-File contributor). The discussion topics range from Robert Bresson to '90s teen comedies, with considerations along the way of critic Robin Wood, programmer Henri Langlois, and the 1980s work of Francis Ford Coppola. Things get a little wild. 🙃 The introductory theme is by local film composer Ben Van Vlissingen.
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Listen to the Cine-Cast here!
🔥 HIGHS AND LOWS AT THE MUSIC BOX
From Saturday through Thursday, March 10, Oscarbate and Hollywood Entertainment present Highs and Lows at the Music Box Theatre. Check out our interview with series programmers Will Morris and Cine-File contributor John Dickson above. Below are reviews of select films playing in the series, which includes several double features of “high” and “low” cinema (which one is which? That’s up to you!). In addition to the below film pairings is Patrick Read Johnson’s 1995 film ANGUS (90 min, 35mm) and Robert Bresson’s 1967 French film MOUCHETTE (81 min, 35mm) on Sunday at 2pm. One admission admits you to both films. More info here.
Luís Buñuel’s THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTY (France) and Tamra Davis’ BILLY MADISON (US)
Saturday, 7pm
One of the most overlooked great British critics, Raymond Durgnat (1932-2002) argued through his writing that cinema is the most democratic art form, often jumping in the same essay from observations about “art movies” to observations about “disreputable” genre cinema—and maintaining the same level of enthusiasm no matter his subject. The Highs and Lows series starting this weekend at the Music Box (programmed by Will Morris and Cine-File contributor John Dickson) seems a bit like a Durgnat essay come to life; the movie pairings forge film-historical connections based not on directors, genres, or countries, but on imagery, subject matter, onscreen behavior, and attitudes about filmmaking. For instance, the movies in the opening double feature, Luís Buñuel’s THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTY (1974, 104 min, 35mm) and Tamra Davis’ BILLY MADISON (1995, 90 min, 35mm), are bound by ideas of disrupting the social order and breaking taboos. For Buñuel, one of the O.G. Surrealists, these ideas were influenced at various points by anarchism, Communism, and psychoanalysis; the sometimes hilarious, sometimes terrifying dream logic of PHANTOM OF LIBERTY (perhaps his most purely Surrealist feature since L’AGE D’OR [1930]) invokes the untapped revolutionary power of the subconscious. On the other hand, BILLY MADISON star Adam Sandler is one of the most famous Hollywood conservatives of his generation; even in a comic free-for-all like this (the closest a Sandler comedy vehicle has gotten to a peak-era Jerry Lewis movie like THE BELLBOY [1960]), one senses a certain reactionary energy—after all, it’s a film that asks us to root for a filthy rich guy who refuses to grow up and who gets a kick out of humiliating people less fortunate than himself. And yet, all films being created equal, one sees, through the pairing, a universal ability of cinema to destigmatize and humanize things like infantile behavior and bodily functions. When Sandler, in BILLY MADISON, disrupts a fancy businessmen’s dinner by acting like a little kid, the overarching sentiment isn’t categorically different than that of the great dinner party sequence of PHANTOM OF LIBERTY, which imagines an alternate reality where bourgeois people eat in private but defecate socially. And then there’s the sketchbook nature of both films: PHANTOM OF LIBERTY, a collection of Surrealist vignettes that move from one to another like an extended dream, bears similarities to Monty Python’s Flying Circus (popular around the time the movie was made); that show inspired pretty much every sketch comedy series that came afterwards, including Saturday Night Live, where Sandler got his start. The charming disregard for conventional narrative structure in both films speaks to the liberty inherent in film comedy. At the same time, both films reflect the dark possibilities of being untethered to narrative conventions (and, by implication, social order). Why do both of them climax with an appearance by a mass shooter? [Ben Sachs]
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Rainer Werner Fassbinder's ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL (Germany)
Tuesday, 7pm
Rainer Werner Fassbinder remains an unsettling force in world cinema decades after his death—bringing an urgency to cinephilia by marrying it to radical politics and emotional candor—and ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL is an ideal starting point for those unfamiliar with his work. Taking Douglas Sirk's ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS as inspiration, Fassbinder updated the '50s melodrama to confront modern social ills such as racism and the enduring presence of fascism in German culture. Sirk's May-December romance is now set among Munich's working-class, with the players recast as a former Nazi bride and a Moroccan immigrant; the pair's punishment by society is far crueler than anything Sirk could have imagined. Yet in Fassbinder's eyes, even the most prejudiced individuals are above loathing: His diagrammatic approach to drama, influenced by Brecht and Straub and Huilet, lets us see all the characters as victims of the State's neglect. (One critic described Fassbinder's milieu as a "democracy of victims," which nicely summarizes his radical, if pessimistic worldview.) The style is breathtaking, as was often the case in the director's Hollywood-influenced middle period, evoking Sirk's tracking shots and controlled mise-en-scene while critiquing their underlying emotion. This paradox inspires not only social commentary but some brilliant dark humor, which helps the film from seeming truly merciless: The jokes are to prevent us from weeping. (1974, 94 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
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Screening after Kevin Rodney Sullivan's 1998 film HOW STELLA GOT HER GROOVE BACK (124 min, 35mm).
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William Greaves’ SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM: TAKE ONE (US/Experimental)
Thursday, 7pm
The majority of William Greaves’ filmmaking career consists of television documentaries about African-American life, but he made an important contribution to experimental cinema with his 1968 feature SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM: TAKE ONE. A quasi-documentary meta-movie with an original score by Miles Davis, it alternates between footage of actors performing a drama about marital discord in New York’s Central Park, footage of the crew shooting the drama, and footage of that crew shot by a third party. Greaves plays the director of the film-within-a-film (and to complicate matters further, he’s often seen holding a camera himself); he’s a persistent, often aggravating presence, goading his performers and locking horns with his technical collaborators. For Amy Taubin, writing about SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM for the Criterion Collection in 2006, the film provokes questions about much more than filmmaking, opening up issues of power dynamics and representations of race. “It did not directly engage race or racism,” Taubin concedes, “although the fact that Greaves is both the film’s director-writer-producer and its on-screen protagonist—the focus of almost every scene—guaranteed that the viewer, regardless of race, had to confront whatever racial stereotypes she or he held. Quite simply, in 1968, there were at best a handful of African-American directors working in television and no African-Americans directing feature films. For an African-American director to make a feature film, let alone one as experimental as a film by Warhol or Godard, could not have been imagined if Greaves hadn’t gone out and done it.” The provocative nature of Greaves’ presence ties into larger political issues shaping the zeitgeist in which the film was made. Taubin continues: “Given that in May of 1968 the war was raging in Vietnam, students were occupying university buildings, the French left had almost staged a successful takeover of the government, and a string of assassinations had begun, [the film-within-a-film] would be absurdly reactionary if it were taken at face value. Is the crew’s eventual antagonism, then, part of [Greaves’] master plan to dramatize the other major, though not explicitly stated, theme of the film: power, in particular the power struggle between the leader and the group?” This 35mm revival of SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM feels particularly relevant in our current era, when debates about representation and the significance accorded to directors have become most pronounced in film writing. In this regard, it may be the most contemporary movie playing in town this week. (1968, 75 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
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Screening after Ron Howard's 1999 film EDTV (124 min, 35mm).
📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
Marguerite Duras’ DESTROY, SHE SAID (France)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 7pm
In various books of the Nouveau roman movement with which Marguerite Duras is sometimes associated, a generation of French writers sought to revolutionize the novel by stripping their fiction of overt characterization and emotion and privileging objective-sounding descriptions and experiments with literary form. The Nouveaux romans owed a lot to cinema (even when you can’t understand the meaning of these books, you can visualize them exquisitely), so it makes sense that some authors in the movement would also try their hand at filmmaking. Duras entered the movies with a bang, writing the screenplay for Alain Resnais’ groundbreaking HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR (1959); while this film contains numerous tropes of Duras’ literature (eroticism, hotels, the fetishization of downtime), it doesn’t really foreshadow the movies she would start directing a decade later. Resnais, for all his affinity with intellectuals, was really a pop-obsessed romantic, and the dynamism and balletic gracefulness he brought to Duras’ writing were distinctly his own. By contrast, a film like the Duras-directed DESTROY, SHE SAID is a cold, blunt object that suggests the dramatic equivalent of brutalist architecture. It may contain more expressions of emotion than the entire directorial output of fellow Nouveau romancier Alain Robbe-Grillet, yet they never register as such here—it would be closer to the mark to call them documents of people admitting to having emotions. DESTROY, SHE SAID relates the interpersonal intrigue between two men and two women who meet at a rural hotel, and in highly Nouveau roman fashion, all four characters become more mysterious, rather than less, as the narrative unfolds. Duras first developed the story as an English-language screenplay for Joseph Losey; when that project fell through, she rewrote it as both a novella and a film, and both were released within a year of each other. Watching DESTROY, SHE SAID, you can all but see the words on the page. You can also feel the dialogue weighing down the events—the language has a concrete quality in both senses of the word. A landmark of sorts, this deserves mention alongside Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s CHRONICLE OF ANNA MAGDALENA BACH (which was released a year earlier) in that it pushes a certain materialist, language-dominated aesthetic about as far as it can go in cinema. Screening as part of Doc’s Sunday night series: Destroy, She Said: A Marguerite Duras Retrospective. (1969, 100 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Takashi Miike’s THE BIRD PEOPLE IN CHINA (Japan)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 9:30pm
***Note: This screening was rescheduled from last week. Please check Doc’s website to verify the screening is still happening.
Among the world’s most renowned directors, Takashi Miike is not only one of the most prolific, but also one of the most unpredictable. While he may be best known for his ultraviolence and crime films, he has produced everything from science fiction films (TERRA FORMARS [2016]) and fantasies (YATTÂMAN [2009]) to the almost undefinable horror musical THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS (2001). Miike himself has traced the varied cinematic opportunities he has tackled to THE BIRD PEOPLE IN CHINA, a film he took over from another producer who just couldn’t get it done. The magical story of a Japanese businessman and a yakuza who go deep into an undeveloped region of Yun Nan Province in search of high-quality jade is based on a book by Makoto Shiina, a serious novelist and essayist who has said that he writes fantasy and science fiction to refresh himself and his imagination. The idea of trying something new in a new country appealed to Miike, and he threw himself into the difficult shoot. Masahiro Motoki plays Wada, the young salaryman who is a last-minute substitute for this geological expedition when the original project manager ends up in the hospital (possibly by design). As Wada starts on his way to the “jade village,” Ujiie (Renji Ishibashi) accosts him and attaches himself to the project to protect the financial interests of the yakuza gang that loaned a large sum of money to Wada’s company. The trip to the village is arduous for Wada and Ujiie, but absolutely hilarious to watch. Their guide and translator, Shen (Mako), takes them over pitted roads in motorized wrecks, up mountain trails on foot, and finally, to a river they must negotiate on a raft pulled upstream by a team of river turtles. Once they reach the village, Wada and especially Ujiie are spellbound by the spectacular scenery and the flying class a young woman (Li Li Wang) conducts for the village youngsters, who strap homemade wings to their arms and flap through the verdant fields. The two men settle into the village, and Ujiie starts to undergo a radical change. When Wada prepares to return to Japan, Ujiie becomes the unlikely champion for rejecting capitalism and preserving the natural environment and the traditional lives of the people. Cinematographer Hideo Yamamoto seduces the audience with images that recall Fan Kuan’s “Travelers Among Mountains and Streams.” A wonderful score by Kôji Endô has a contemporary feel that unites the traditional with the modernizing Chinese society. The origin of the “bird people” of Yun Nan is a wonderful surprise I wouldn’t dream of spoiling. Suffice to say that I’ll never hear the Scottish folk song “Annie Laurie” again without thinking of THE BIRD PEOPLE IN CHINA. Screening as part of Doc’s second Thursday night series: No Love in Your Violence: A Takashi Miike Retrospective. (1998, 118 min, 35mm) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Courtney Stephens’ TERRA FEMME (US/Documentary/Performance)
Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) – Friday, 7pm [Free Admission]
About the discerning hodgepodge of archival material that is TERRA FEMME—whose own filmic landscape has been assigned labels such as performance lecture, live documentary, and documentary performance, but which, like its subject, is something altogether ineffable—filmmaker Courtney Stephens says this in an interview with Another Gaze: “I encountered these films while looking for b-roll for my own project, but as I started working with them, I found that this ‘b-roll’ was able to convey what I hoped to say better than I could say it myself.” But she does say it herself—and quite perceptively so. During Friday’s screening, she’ll say it in person as she accompanies the aptly edited footage of amateur films by women filmmakers from the early- and mid-20th century. The footage comes from what are termed travelogues, films that document the women's travels around the world, from across the continental U.S. to India and even the Arctic Circle. Such travels were then quite rare for women, whose wanderlust was confined to the imaginative realm while their male counterparts had more freedom to traverse the globe. Stephens divides the films into segments, each considering a different facet of the amateur travelogue genre (even the categorization method itself is explored). All of the filmmakers represented here are extraordinary, but a few stand out: There’s Aloha Wanderwell, who, as a young woman, traveled around the world in a Model T Ford for a stunt that was partly sponsored by the Ford Company, and Carry Wagner, whose husband sent her off to Italy alone only to tell her that he wanted a divorce. Still, she discovered a desire to explore on that trip—her films are particularly “anti-monumental,” as Stephens observes, focusing on the everyday in the places she visited. Also represented are an unidentified Black couple who went to Moscow at a time when Americans typically didn’t travel there, leading Stephens to wonder if perhaps they were part of a Soviet program designed to showcase the USSR’s nonracist attitudes. Initially hoping to determine whether or not a literal female gaze exists, Stephens comes to ponder the intersectionality of the filmmakers—often affluent white women (usually only those with money were able to travel so extensively for leisure)—and their subjects—often exotic “others” who live in places that were exploited for colonial gain. A jumping-off point from which Stephens asks these questions is her own experience living abroad in India after a frightening medical scare. She uses the footage and adventures of women from the past and roots them in her own one-time desire for escape, also interweaving poignant insights from various writers and scholars. By traveling with the film when possible and narrating it live (which was how travelogues were sometimes presented in the vaudeville era), Stephens becomes a descendant in this lineage, exhuming the past to consider the present. Filmmaker in person for performance and post-screening discussion. (2021, 60 min, Digital Projection) [Kat Sachs]
This Radiant World: Transforming the Self / Transforming the World (Experimental Shorts)
Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm [Free Admission]
It’s not so much the times that are a-changin’ as it is… everything… that’s a-changin’. The works in this program may resound with those who’ve felt that the last two years have been a period of frenetic stasis, during which we’ve moved little but still so much has changed: the trajectory of our lives, the politics of our country, and most stridently, its civil balance (bringing to the forefront its long-standing lack thereof). German filmmaker Margaret Raspé’s THE SADIST BEATS THE UNQUESTIONABLY INNOCENT (1971, 6 min, Digital Projection) takes its name “from a book on human perversions,” per Raspé’s description. The film depicts the process of cream becoming butter, with the majority of its duration focused on a disembodied hand as it beats the cream, the fluid and fat separating. What at first seems like a depiction of process begins to reflect the film’s title, the perverse anonymity of the one transforming and the leaden guilelessness of that being transformed emerging as a stark binary. Raspé filmed this and many of her other works using a camera mounted atop a helmet, which transmits an impudent serenity that outstrips the deceptive simplicity. Forged from one of her own poems, S. Pearl Sharp’s BACK INSIDE HERSELF (1984, 4 min, Digital Projection) is a brief but piercing examination of woman’s identity. That Sharp and the woman avatar, played by Barbara O. Jones from Julie Dash’s DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST, are both Black imbues the work with an examination of racial identity as well. The continuous whispered refrain of “she’s going back inside herself” is a radical earworm if there ever was one. Sharp’s cinematography is striking; the stark black-and-white and exquisite grain of the celluloid are poetry in motion. Per my write-up of Deborah Stratman’s FOR THE TIME BEING (2021, 7 min, Digital Projection) when it screened at last year’s Chicago Underground Film Festival, the piece is a tribute to the late artist Nancy Holt, with whom Stratman shares a penchant for certain visual and thematic motifs. It simultaneously evokes Holt’s work—specifically the dot formations from her Sun Tunnels—and calls upon her spirit in images of placid lakes, earth-shattering craters, and illusive symbols, all of which emphasize how “time endures, goes on, remains, persists, lasts, goes by, elapses, passes, flows, rolls on, flies, slips, slides, and glides by,” to quote Holt’s letter to Robert Smithson that gives the work its name. The transformation in this instance is forged by time, against which we are all defenseless bystanders. I might never come fully to understand how Argentine filmmaker Matías Piñeiro has interpreted Shakespeare through films that completely reimagine the Bard’s timeless lore, but they sure suck me in. Made with Lois Patiño, SYCORAX (2021, 20 min, Digital Projection) considers the motivations of the eponymous character from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Witch mother of Caliban, she’s the one who imprisoned the spirit Ariel in a tree. She’s dead before the events of the play take place, however, so she’s unseen and unheard; her voicelessness gives rise to Patiño and Piñeiro’s opaque (though also verdant, thanks to its tropical setting) contemplation. What’s a more exemplary transformation than the changing of the seasons? In BLÄTTER IM HERBST [LEAVES IN AUTUMN] (2018, 4 min, Digital Projection), Austrian filmmaker Markus Maicher considers the beauty, the boldness, and, ultimately, the fleetingness, of this transition, with sublimely shot images of leaves silhouetted against the sky. Japanese filmmaker Daïchi Saïto’s EARTHEARTHEARTH (2021, 30 min, 35mm) may be the experimental-film equivalent of Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (which itself is already plenty experimental), though it appraises the earth rather than space. Depicting in abstract the Andes mountains and set to the plangent improvisations of saxophonist Jason Sharp, this vision of the landscape is continuously transformed through a variety of effects. In viewing a segment of earth the way cinema traditionally views the mysterious expanses of the galaxy, one might also transform their perspective of our own hurdling space rock. This is the third of the four-program “This Radiant World” series, co-curated by Julia Gibbs and former Cine-File managing editor Patrick Friel. [Kat Sachs]
An Evening with Nazlı Dinçel (US/Turkey/Argentina/Experimental)
Conversations at the Edge at the Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 6pm
It seems appropriate that Ankara-born, Milwaukee-based artist Nazlı Dinçel prefers to project their shot-on-celluloid shorts themselves whenever they’re able to attend the screening; their film work is so closely tied to their personal identity that it follows they’d want to maintain an intimate connection to it even when it passes through a projector. Intimacy is key to Dinçel’s art, in terms of both form and content. Several of their shorts reflect the confessionalist poetic tradition, with Dinçel sharing details of their sexual history and the most private parts of their anatomy. The three selections in this program from Dinçel’s SOLITARY ACTS series (2015, 23 min total, 16mm) contain closeup images of masturbation and onscreen text in which the artist relates their experience of discovering masturbation in early adolescence. The results are discomforting at first, but Dinçel quickly normalizes the subject matter through their decidedly non-salacious gaze. You come to feel like you’ve been let into the filmmaker’s confidence; the work invites you to find aspects of your own private experiences in Dinçel’s. The SOLITARY ACTS selections are heightened in their impact by the richly textured 16mm cinematography, which underscores the motif of touching and draws attention to the physical nature of shooting on film. Dinçel goes even further with these ideas in the black-and-white short INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO MAKE A FILM (2018, 13 min, 16mm). This work does indeed contain suggestions about how to make a film, but it’s more concerned with “exploring the possibilities of analog filmmaking in the wake of the photochemical film industry’s collapse,” to borrow a line from Dinçel’s artist bio. Sexual activity factors into INSTRUCTIONS, ditto portions of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” and some theoretical reflections on the nature of film images. The overriding sentiment is one of curiosity, suggesting that Dinçel brought these components together with the expectation that they’d yield different emotions in combination than they would individually. The one shot-on-video piece in the program, UNTITLED (2016, 12 min, Digital Projection), is less overtly personal than the others, but it still strikes a raw nerve. The soundtrack, which consists of hateful comments overhead at an unidentified film festival, speaks to how much meanness and general bad behavior exist in the art world and whose widespread exposure in the past several years have been part of a larger cultural upheaval. Playing the hideous discussion over shots of a darkened screening room or sometimes just a black screen, Dinçel makes it shockingly immediate, forcing you to empathize with anyone who’s been on the receiving end of such cruelty. Also on the program are BETWEEN RELATING AND USE (2018, 9 min, 16mm) and SHAPE OF A SURFACE (2017, 9 min, 16mm). Filmmaker in person. [Ben Sachs]
Charles Burnett's KILLER OF SHEEP (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 6pm
Critic J. Hoberman proposed two types of film debuts that can perhaps unfairly overshadow a director’s entire career: First, debuts that are radically new and arrive seemingly fully-formed—think CITIZEN KANE and BREATHLESS—and second, works that have an innocence and rawness born of circumstances that can never be replicated, for which he cites Satyajit Ray’s PATHER PANCHALI, Jack Smith’s FLAMING CREATURES, and Charles Burnett’s 1978 masterpiece KILLER OF SHEEP. In Burnett’s case those lightning-in-a-bottle circumstances involved a shoestring budget and weekend-only shooting with mostly non-professional actors over the course of several years beginning in 1972, all in service of what was to be the young director’s MFA thesis at UCLA. Because Burnett initially had academic, not theatrical, aspirations for the work he never secured the rights to the 22 classic R&B, jazz, and soul songs on the soundtrack. For this reason, the film never saw a wide release until 2007. The film takes place in post-riot Watts, Los Angeles and involves the day-to-day lives of families in the neighborhood. The main protagonist is Stan, an amiable slaughterhouse worker who toils mightily to support his wife and two children while maintaining his integrity. The rhyming of Stan’s lot in life—a powerless man conveyed from scene to scene by an overwhelming sense of inevitability—with his own methodical killing and processing at the slaughterhouse transcends the political. The depiction of black family life solely for the purposes of overt polemic is the type of cliché Burnett fought throughout his career. Ultimately, the film is too warm to be scathing. Instead, much like Stan, KILLER OF SHEEP feels innocent and unassuming. It’s a sincere statement by a young director that earns its comparisons to the classics of Italian neorealism. And like those classics, Burnett’s sense of realism is universal: The characters’ victories and defeats are all small—a stroke of the knee and a smirk, a flat tire, a scraped elbow—but feel earth shattering in the moment. We sense out of narrative habit redemption is coming in the end, but when art imitates life and it doesn’t we accept it like fate. Dinah Washington’s “The Bitter Earth,” which is played multiple times to increasingly devastating effect, perfectly encapsulates KILLER OF SHEEP. At once beautiful, fatalistic, despairing, in the end it leaves us only with hope: “I’m sure someone may answer my call, and this bitter earth may not be so bitter after all.” Screening as part of 50/50, the Siskel’s year-long series including a film from each year the theater has been open. (1978, 81 min, 35mm) [James Stroble]
Joachim Trier’s THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD (Norway)
Gene Siskel Film Center and the Music Box Theatre – See Venue websites for showtimes
After watching THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD, I was surprised to learn that it’s not an adaptation of a book, although director and co-writer Joachim Trier is a former novelist. The film perfectly captures the tone of a certain brand of literary novels about the messy lives of women in their 20s and early 30s. It also fits into the lineage of cinema using devices like voice-over and chapter headings, complete with a prologue and epilogue. Julie (Renate Reinsvke) is introduced to the audience as a medical student. The film speeds through her collegiate experience, taking us to the point where meets Askel (Anders Danielsen Lie), a comic book artist known for his character Bobcat, at 30. The two move in together, but she starts growing dissatisfied with this domesticity. One night at a party, she meets Eivind (Herbert Nordrum) at a wedding party and impulsively flirts with him without having sex. (The two watch each other going to the bathroom.) Catching up with him at a café several months later, the tension between them blossoms into a full-fledged romance. Trier may be best known for putting Lie, a part-time actor who has never given up his day job as a doctor, on the world stage. Lie’s role as a recovering heroin addict in Trier’s OSLO, AUGUST 31ST brought out a fragile masculinity, but THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD shows his range: without coming across a macho caricature or even a particularly flawed person, one can see hints of the dark impulses he brings up while arguing with a feminist on a talk show. Despite its title, THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD isn’t concerned with judging any of its characters, least of all Julie. While the film occasionally strains its efforts to feel up-to-the-minute—as in the section where Julie’s essay “oral sex in the age of #metoo” goes viral—its careful structure, embrace of physicality and tonal changes show tremendous backbone. I’m unsure Trier is aware of how small Julie’s world appears— critic Michael Sicinski has pointed out that she has no friends of any gender—but in general, he updates the rom-com for a time whose old fantasies have grown stale and whose new ones are still nascent. (2021, 127 min, DCP Digital) [Steve Erickson]
Gordon Quinn and Gerald Temaner's INQUIRING NUNS (US/Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 8pm
Call it Chronique d'un Chicago. The pair of nuns traversing the streets of Chicago asking pedestrians, "Are you happy?" is Kartemquin Films' direct response to Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch's 1961 Parisian documentary CHRONIQUE D'UN ETE, explicitly so. In the car en route to the first series of interviews, director Gordon Quinn explains to his volunteer nuns the structure of Morin and Rouch's film, hoping the sisters can similarly draw out interesting, serendipitous responses from their interviewees. What's most intriguing about NUNS is the possible response bias from interview subjects. Next to Vietnam (this being shot in 1968, everyone eventually mentions the Vietnam War, generally after being probed with, "What makes you unhappy?"), the most discussed topic is religion. It's a source of meaning and happiness in the lives of many, yes, but the striking thing is in the amount of time it often takes people talking to two nuns to mention religion, especially given the nuns' open interview technique. When a nun gives a person a neutral response, could it be that the person begins crafting answers to elicit a positive response from the nuns? What answer could it be but religion? This is perhaps the film's biggest weakness—rather than a sociological exploration of the responses and their possible causality, the documentary is instead content to stay effervescent yet superficial, exemplified when the sisters interview a novitiate nun at the Art Institute. Still, the documentary's slice-of-life approach and occasional moments of genuine insight temper any misgivings about its lack of depth. Screening as part of Scored by Glass, a partnership with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra celebrating composer Philip Glass. (1968, 66 min, 16mm) [Doug McLaren]
Bernard Rose's CANDYMAN (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday and Saturday, 9:30pm
While Chicagoans are quick to recall the location shooting of CANDYMAN in the Near North Side's Cabrini-Green public housing community, few seem to remember just how highbrow this low-budget Clive Barker adaptation really was: the main characters are UIC folklore/anthropology Ph.D. students studying (via ethnographic interviews) the urban legends on which the film's plot is itself based, and the soundtrack is an elegant, metronomic fugue for electric organ, strings, and chorus by Manhattan minimalist don Philip Glass. The story, conflating the by-then nearly universal Anglo-American folktales of "Bloody Mary" and "The Hook" (regarding menstruation and castration, respectively) with some vague Shakespearean allusions, a touch of hypnotism, and a lot of bees, centers on the real-world locus of imagined terror for a generation of city residents and journalists: the intersection of Division and Larabee. In a twist which seems rather insightful even for the early 90s, the post-colonialist "Indian burial ground" cliché is displaced onto the contemporary process of gentrification then occurring in Old Town: Virginia Madsen's character's high-rise condo is itself revealed to be part of a redeveloped former housing project. The resulting film oscillates widely and sometimes uncomfortably between clever meta-horror and quotidian actual horror, but remains an underrated snapshot of the city's pre-"Plan For Transformation" unconscious, in the shadows of the towers which no longer exist. Someone may answer my call, and this bitter earth may not be so bitter after all.” Screening as part of Scored by Glass, a partnership with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra celebrating composer Philip Glass. (1992, 92 min, 35mm) [Michael Castelle]
George Cukor's GASLIGHT (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 7pm
Almost 80 years after its premiere, George Cukor’s GASLIGHT remains an essential and influential staple of the psychological thriller genre, successfully blending elements of horror, film noir and melodrama like few other films of its era. After a two-week whirlwind romance, Paula (an incredible Ingrid Bergman) marries Gregory (Charles Boyer), who convinces her to move back into her deceased aunt’s house in London. This childhood home, however, is not a place of comfort for Paula, as her aunt was brutally murdered there years ago. Gregory’s manipulation doesn’t stop there: his increasingly abusive behavior towards his wife involves cutting her off from the outside world and systematically convincing her she’s going mad. With memorable supporting performances from Joseph Cotten, Dame May Whitty, and Angela Lansbury (in her movie debut), GASLIGHT is a skilled illustration of psychological torture. The camera at times isolates Paula from everything and everyone around her, and Bergman’s expressive face reveals each thought and emotion as she stands amongst the decisively crowded mise-en-scène. In other moments, the camera flies into close-up, suggesting the insidious force traumatizing Paula; Cukor merges performance, camerawork, and staging in spectacularly practiced ways. Perhaps the largest cultural effect of the film is felt in the denominalization of the title; also, “gaslighting” has recently become a more widely recognizable tactic of abusers. GASLIGHT often feels surprisingly contemporary—it’s impossible to watch it and not consider present dialogues surrounding true crime stories, especially regarding female audiences. Early in the film, Paula encounters an older lady on the train who is enthusiastic to describe true and fictional accounts of violent crimes against women. This continues to be a familiar conversation, and it establishes GASLIGHT as a strikingly realistic antecedent of current cultural fascinations. Screening as part of the Film Center’s Bad Romance Series. (1944, 118 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]
Guy Maddin's COWARDS BEND THE KNEE (Canada)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Wednesday, 7pm
It’s hard to think that an Early Hollywood-obsessed experimentalist like Guy Maddin would have as much fun as he does. But that’s exactly the push-and-pull tension that makes his films so unique, a slipperiness that makes them perfect for viewers on his wavelength and, ahem, maddening for those who aren’t. The first of his “Me Trilogy” (followed by BRAND UPON THE BRAIN! in 2006 and MY WINNIPEG in 2008), COWARDS BEND THE KNEE (2003) is a fragmented “autobiography” in the fashion of lost silent films about the exploits of a hockey player named Guy Maddin. After a rousing hockey game that opens the film, Guy’s life spins quickly out of control when he falls for his girlfriend’s abortionist’s assistant’s daughter (named "Meta") in the middle of the girlfriend’s procedure. But this, too, becomes fraught when Meta will not let him touch her with his hands until her father is avenged for the dismembering of his own hands. From here, Guy falls into a cyclone of desire and romantic competition and the film continues apace, each of the ten chapters outlining new familial, sexual, and metaphysical dimensions. Like the early films themselves, Maddin’s coding can be troubling at times: a hockey team is emblazoned with the star of David, and the film has a thread of Asian exoticism that never quite sits right. Still, COWARDS BEND THE KNEE (fictional qualities aside) has the true feeling of a memory. Time is malleable in this world, with moments getting papered over by rapid-fire splices (courtesy of Maddin’s longtime editor John Gurdebeke) or repeating as the film fixates in Martin Arnold-like stretches on the most charged Freudian gestures. If the celluloid itself is the raw material of experience, Maddin’s structural approach reflects the distortions of the mind that reduce memory to its most symbolically loaded highlights, remembering a life through isolated moments of sex and violence. While it’s certainly a film you won’t forget, it’s one that feels designed to be half-remembered. Preceded by Maddin's 1994 short film SISSY BOY SLAP PARTY (6 min, Digital Projection). Screening as part of Doc’s Wednesday night series: A Guy Maddin Retrospective. (2003, 64 min, Digital Projection) [Maxwell Courtright]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
F. Gary Gray’s SET IT OFF (US)
Facets Cinema – Friday, 7pm
A profoundly affecting display of female friendship and the unique trials faced by Black women, F. Gary Gray’s SET IT OFF will—to be completely cliche for a moment—make you laugh, and it will make you cry. The powerhouses that are Jada Pinkett Smith, Queen Latifah, Vivica A. Fox, and Kimberly Elise star as four best friends in Los Angeles. Stony (Pinkett), Cleo (Latifah) and T.T. (Elise) work together as cleaners; Frankie (Fox) is a bank teller. The film begins with her bank getting robbed by someone she knows from the projects. Because of this, she’s unfairly fired from the bank, and a cop on the scene (John C. McGinley) even presumes she was involved in the crime. This is just the first of several hardships faced by the women—Stony’s brother is shot by McGinley’s cop, T.T.’s son is taken away from her after he accidentally drinks cleaning detergent at his mother’s job, as she had been unable to afford childcare—hardships that eventually drive them to start robbing banks themselves. While casing a bank, Stony, who emerges as the de facto main character, meets Keith (Blair Underwood), a handsome, well-educated banker. Yet it’s the friendship between the four women where the real love of the film is found. Deeply bonded after decades of friendship, their love for one another transcends any traditional sort of romance. The group is successful at first, but setbacks continually rear their ugly heads. Scripted by Takashi Bufford and Kate Lanier, the story is altogether too realistic where it has no business being so. It shouldn’t be realistic that people from disenfranchised communities must resort to illegal and often dangerous activities just to get by. It shouldn’t be realistic that a mother can’t afford childcare and thus can’t keep a job. And it certainly shouldn’t be realistic that a young Black man might be shot dead by police, because of a white cop’s prejudiced assumptions over his actions during arrest. But also realistic is the love this community has for its own, protecting each other where society at large has failed to do so. Gray (whose first feature was the stoner buddy classic FRIDAY) tautly directs the riveting script, relying largely on medium close-ups and medium wide shots to emphasize environment and include all four women, or variations of them, in the frame. It’s finely edited, too, by John Carter, who edited Miloš Forman's TAKING OFF, Elaine May’s THE HEARTBREAK KID and MICKEY AND NICKY, and other films such as THE KILLING FLOOR, Gray’s FRIDAY, and SOUL FOOD. (He had a fascinating career, being the first Black editor employed by network television [CBS] and the first Black person to be admitted to the American Cinema Editors society.) Not for nothing, author and activist Ibram X. Kendi is a big fan of the film, writing in his book Stamped from the Beginning that it was the “most sophisticated, holistically antiracist thriller of the decade,” which did what “law-and-order and tough-on-crime racism refused to do: it humanized inner-city Black perpetrators of illegal acts, and in the process forced its viewers to reimagine who the real American criminals were.” The subject is hard, and the stakes are high, but the film is tinged with a joy shared by the four women that makes it a genuinely beautiful love story as much as anything else. (1996, 123 min, Digital Projection) [Kat Sachs]
John M. Stahl's LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 7pm
"Nothing ever happens to Ellen," says one character. Later, another pronounces: "Ellen always wins." Undoubtedly Ellen is at the very center of LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN, a film that represents the zenith of that rare bird, the "Technicolor noir." But to write off Ellen as an archetypal femme fatale is to overlook a more interesting, feminist reading. What if the film is actually a subversive critique of society's oppression of women? As brilliantly played by Gene Tierney, after a time Ellen finds herself trapped in a life of hyper-glossy but empty luxury, her occasional horseback riding her only pleasure. By society's rigid strictures all she's allowed to do is tend to the materialistic concerns of her husband's lifestyle, even as he himself is free to earn a living by spinning escapist fiction (undoubtedly consumed by other Ellens caught in their own traps). As she battles to assert herself, she uses the scant weapons available to her: murder, blackmail, even a self-induced miscarriage. Naturally, because of the Production Code, she cannot be allowed to stand tall at story's end. But even so, as she stands at the top of the stairs before her fall, we can see in her eyes that she's prepared to die rather than continue her empty existence. The film possesses a subterranean commentary every bit as scathing as a Douglas Sirk melodrama, should one care to look for it. Screening as part of the Film Center’s Bad Romance Series. (1945, 119 min, DCP Digital) [Rob Christopher]
Wong Kar-wai’s HAPPY TOGETHER (Hong Kong)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 5pm
Many of Wong Kar-wai’s films are preoccupied with the cultural anxieties surrounding the British handover of Hong Kong, from CHUNGKING EXPRESS’s expiration date-obsessed cop to the titular year of 2046, which marks the period before the city’s self-regulation ends. Released in 1997, the year of the handover, HAPPY TOGETHER filters these anxieties and longings—as well as the possibilities of what a new, globalized Hong Kong might mean—through the prism of a tumultuous gay romance. The partners are the assertive Ho Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung) and more mild-mannered Lai Yiu-Fai (Tony Leung), who have come to Buenos Aires looking to recharge their floundering relationship, and to see Iguazu Falls, their symbolically elusive destination. We understand this is not the first time they have tried an implausible romantic gambit: Fai instructs us via voiceover of Po-Wing’s constant refrain after each so-called breakup, “Let’s start over.” Start over, and over, they do. After a split in Argentina, and without money to fly back home, the two reluctantly get back together when Fai spots Po-Wing cruising at the tango club where the former has taken a job. Wong proves that, indeed, it takes two to tango, as the lovers push and pull in a torrid dance, quarreling over money and their cramped apartment at one moment, and then, in Wong’s impressionistic montage, tenderly swaying in one another’s arms in the next. The two might seem like polarities, echoing the antipode status of Buenos Aries and Hong Kong, but really they are sides of the same coin, lonely and displaced, even if their desires manifest differently. Wong conveys their underlying reversibility through sleight-of-hand doublings and substitutions, using mirrors and jump cuts to make the men assume each other’s places. It doesn’t take much parsing to read their relationship as a metaphor for Hong Kong’s uncertain future with China, while a third character introduced later, Chang (Chang Chen), represents a similarly unmoored Taiwan. But HAPPY TOGETHER can also just be enjoyed as a ravishing, emotionally plangent song from the heart, saturated with all of Wong’s dreamy stylistic flourishes and musical grace notes. Few shots in his filmography are so simply, shatteringly poignant as Tony Leung sobbing into a tape recorder, or the protracted aerial footage of Iguazu Falls pouring its contents with both the majesty and implacable flux of nature. Screening as part of the Film Center’s Bad Romance Series. (1997, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
David Lynch’s MULHOLLAND DRIVE (US)
Facets Cinema – Saturday, 7pm
Part mind-bending mystery, part hair-raising thriller, part tear-jerking break-up soapfest, David Lynch’s MULHOLLAND DRIVE evokes an aura of nocturnal wonder and dread, a realm caught between the parameters of waking life and dreams, achingly poignant in its emotional core, absolutely hypnotizing in its formal ambiance, and sometimes-frustratingly labyrinthine in its thorny construction. Addressing the cult of personality that is David Lynch’s public persona, it’s hard to look past the hovering cloud that is his semi-comical presence as a cult figure. His fan base certainly gives the impression that Lynch has been, and will always be, the only director who can tap into the idea of dreamworlds and existential cinematic strangeness. Even though this is severely not the case, it isn’t enough to diminish an artist who frequently operates at the height of his powers behind the camera. MULHOLLAND DRIVE contains many elements of his previous work and re-contextualizes them into a concise, epic investigation into the landscape of a shifting personality, that moves with the weight of a person waking and falling into a series of dreams, contrasted with possible realities imagined and lived in. Naomi Watts plays “Betty,” who comes to Hollywood hoping to achieve stardom as an actress in the movies. She catches the attention of a young director played by Justin Theroux, who has been told by a shady, ultra-powerful group (led by Twin Peaks’ “The Arm”) to cast a different actress in his movie. This actress, first glimpsed being driven along the spiraling and ink-black road of the film’s title, suffers a near-assassination attempt, and is left an amnesiac. When she wakes, she believes her name is “Rita”, eventually running into “Betty,” where together they try to solve the mystery regarding “Rita” and her true identity, falling into a romantic obsession in the process. Over the course of the movie, the characters’ identities begin to shift, leading to possible alternate realities in the film’s story and timeline, where Lynch plays with the illusion of the cinema as a false construction that occasionally evokes deep emotional responses from those witnessing it. This idea is fleshed out in the “Silencio” scene, where the two women stumble upon a nightclub with a singer, Rebecca Del Rio, performing a Spanish version of a famous Roy Orbison song. As she sings, the two women begin to cry uncontrollably at the performance, which is eventually revealed to be false, as the singer isn’t even singing and the music is pre-recorded. When the music stops, so does the singer, as she collapses on stage and is dragged off. Lynch pulls a cinematic magic trick on his viewers, engulfing them in the emotions of these two women, who are witnessing something that is a construct and not real, while simultaneously being emotionally swept up in its power and beauty, crying to an illusion that is revealed to be false. One of the most powerful scenes of the last several decades, the rest of the film is a testament to a director operating at peak levels of his matured artistry. Twin Peaks: The Return has much in common with this bewitching work, even in its production history. MULHOLLAND DRIVE started originally as a TV pilot, later to become a series, but never actually materialized into one, so it was changed to a feature film, while Twin Peaks: The Return is a television show that feels more like a long movie in the spirit of Jacques Rivette (who once remarked that the feature film TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME, very much the origin to MULHOLLAND, left the French filmmaker “floating” when he left the theater). Much like his recent work with Peaks, characters tend to appear and vanish without trace, while identities twist and morph into sometimes wholly different characters. Like the devastating, yet cathartic ending of his recent 18-hour masterwork, digging deeper into an obsessive mystery can sometimes bring you further and further from the reality of what it is you began searching for in the first place. Screening as part of Facets’ Galentine’s Day programming. (2001, 147 min, Digital Projection) [John Dickson]
Mia Hansen-Løve’s BERGMAN ISLAND (France/Sweden)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 7pm
Shortly after Ingmar Bergman died in July 2007, the critic, programmer, filmmaker, and onetime Cine-File contributor Gabe Klinger organized a weekend program of Bergman titles at the Chopin Theatre. Jonathan Rosenbaum introduced a revival of SAWDUST AND TINSEL (1953), then led a post-show discussion; the conversation yielded some of the most constructive thinking about Bergman I’ve yet encountered, in large part because Rosenbaum acknowledged what makes the Swedish writer-director such a difficult filmmaker at times. Noting that Bergman was inspired to make SAWDUST AND TINSEL by the dissolution of one of his marriages, Rosenbaum called out the film’s central allegory as being too personal to achieve the sort of universal impact the filmmaker was going for. “One definition of pretension,” Rosenbaum suggested, “might be pretending that something is universal when it’s really not.” I bring up Rosenbaum’s insight not to devalue Bergman, but to honor him. How many filmmakers before him attempted to give voice to the full range of their psyches, good and bad? Bergman almost single-handedly brought to narrative cinema the idea that a movie could be the expression of a filmmaker’s soul, and this makes him one of the indisputable giants of the medium. At the same time, Bergman was a complicated human being; as more than one character in Mia Hansen-Løve’s BERGMAN ISLAND points out, he was great artist but also a self-centered jerk whose relationships with his nine children by six mothers ranged from nonexistent to psychologically abusive. Because Bergman plays such a crucial role in the development of movies, reconciling with his personal contradictions feels like confronting certain contradictions inherent to movies as a whole. Like all the major art forms, cinema can be a vehicle for unbridled self-expression, in all that implies—it can give rise to soul-searching and narcissism, and Bergman certainly indulged in both. BERGMAN ISLAND is an appropriately personal tribute to the Swedish master: it’s the kind of soul-bearing, self-regarding art film that could not have been conceived without Bergman’s influence. Plainly inspired by Hansen-Løve’s longtime relationship with fellow French director Olivier Assayas, the movie charts a short vacation that two married filmmakers (Vicky Krieps, Tim Roth) take to Fårö, the small island where Bergman spent the last several decades of his life. The first half of the movie follows the couple as they tour the island and run into other cinephile tourists (including Gabe Klinger, who’s credited as “American Man”); Hansen-Løve delivers a semi-autobiographical account of a marriage falling part that can’t help but recall certain passages of Bergman’s SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE (1973). The second half, which largely consists of the movie that the female filmmaker is currently writing, recalls some of Bergman’s narrative experiments like PERSONA (1966). Both stories center on a woman who’s unhappy in her longtime relationship; the major difference is that the first shows the woman remaining unhappy in her plight and the second shows her having an affair with an old flame she re-encounters at a wedding. The concentration on female psychology is Bergmanesque, but the sensitivity and understatement shown by Hansen-Løve, a great director in her own right, are very much in keeping with her previous films (particularly GOODBYE FIRST LOVE [2011], which the second half of BERGMAN ISLAND most resembles). As usual, Hansen-Løve elicits exacting performances from her leads (including Mia Wasikowska and Anders Danielsen Lie as the stars of the movie-within-a-movie), and she uses Fårö to memorable, if characteristically subtle, effect. This may be too inside-baseball for many viewers (even fans of Hansen-Løve’s other films), but it succeeds in stirring debate about Bergman—and making a passionate case for why he still matters. (2021, 113 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Michel Franco’s SUNDOWN (Mexico)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
Mexican director Michel Franco hit American screens a year ago with NEW ORDER, a severely misguided vision of revolution. It brought out his worst tendencies: cinematography that was superficially stylish rather than expressing an original vision and the kind of edgelord sensationalism that delights in images of rape and torture. SUNDOWN is not entirely free from these tendencies, especially the latter (one scene shows a young boy committing murder on a beach), but Tim Roth, playing a wealthy Englishman who has decided to take an extended vacation in Mexico while ignoring his life’s serious problems, is paradoxically compelling as a man whose actions are inscrutable. At SUNDOWN’s start, Neal Bennett (Roth) is on holiday in Acapulco with his sister Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and his niece and nephew. Alice gets a phone call informing her that her mother is terminally ill, followed by the news of her death. But when they head to the airport to go back to the UK, Neal loses his passport and can’t travel with them. He continues a lazy existence of sitting in the sun, drinking beer, and romancing a much younger Mexican woman, financed by an allowance from a slaughterhouse’s fortune. Without Roth, this film might go nowhere, but he convincingly plays a man who seems to have no inner life, governed only by his moment-to-moment physical desires; he's apathetic even when sent to jail. (Critic Tim Grierson wrote that Roth’s “unknowability has been his secret weapon.”) SUNDOWN avoids the temptation to treat Neal’s behavior like a mystery. While it does eventually try to explain Neal’s behavior, the film decides to leave most of its questions open. A brief blossoming of emotion near the end shows just how thoroughly the film has leaned into its lack of affect. Where NEW ORDER seemed to cater to stereotypes about Mexican violence and Latin American leftism turning into authoritarianism, SUNDOWN plays knowingly with received notions about gringos and their interactions with Mexicans. Franco has frequently been compared to Michael Haneke, but SUNDOWN also suggests the Antoniennui version of recent TV shows about the awful lives of wealthy people. (2021, 82 min, DCP Digital) [Steve Erickson]
Pedro Almodóvar's PAIN AND GLORY (Spain)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 1pm
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. Screening as part of the Film Center’s ¡PEDRO! Series. (2019, 113 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s DRIVE MY CAR (Japan)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
How do we deal with misfortunes that arrive when we least expect them? In DRIVE MY CAR, the characters channel their emotions (or lack thereof) into their art, their tools, and their environments. The film follows Yūsuke Kafuku, a theater director who is known for putting on multilingual productions, a concept you could spend hours discussing. For a large portion of the film, we find him traveling in his car, listening to a cassette recording of his wife reading lines for Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in preparation for a production he's going to put on. The film takes on these various layers (it's a cinematic lasagna, if you will), filled with references, different languages, and emotions that are both explosively expressed and shamefully hidden. This comes as no surprise, given that the film is an adaptation of a short story by Haruki Murakami, whose work is also filled with references and taboo eroticism. Hamaguchi delivers a nuanced film that should only get better with each viewing, as details and subtleties are weaved into things said or left unsaid. This makes sense—Kafuku’s multilingual production raises some interesting questions on the ways we can approach communication. Despite a language barrier, or an unwillingness to say something out loud, intentions and feelings can still seep through with a knowing glance or shy shift of the body. Often, the audience and maybe one or two characters might know the truth of the scenario, but Hamaguchi places us in an awkward position, knowing right next to the main cast. It’s hard to say what's the right way to deal with these scenarios, but delaying the inevitable impact of your feelings will only do you harm in the long run. (2021, 179 min, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]
Paul Thomas Anderson’s LICORICE PIZZA (US)
Various local theaters (Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema, The Logan Theatre) and multiplexes (AMC, Regal, et al.) – See Venue websites for showtimes
There are strong similarities between LICORICE PIZZA and PHANTOM THREAD (2017), Paul Thomas Anderson's previous film, though they present very different depictions of burgeoning romance. PHANTOM THREAD wrapped its lovers inside a hermetic world of high-end fashion, poisonous mushrooms, and very precise food orders. While the tone seemed to spell a romance bathed in doom, the results were closer to an arthouse rom-com. Anderson kicks up the romance and comedy for LICORICE PIZZA, yet the film’s construction doesn’t feel as pensive or classical as that of the previous film; it's something looser and shaggier, if only on the surface. LICORICE is glossy, loud, bright, and brimming with comedic subplots, but what holds it together are the experiences of its two main characters, played by Alana Haim (of the band Haim) and Cooper Hoffman (son of the late, great Phillip Seymour Hoffman)—their youthful romance will tug on the heartstrings of even the most jaded filmgoers. The film takes place in a world where youth is subjected to the forces of impending adult realities, represented here by a coked-out film producer (Bradley Cooper's winking portrayal of Jon Peters, the producer of the 1976 A STAR IS BORN), a gay politician with a cold attitude toward love (writer-director Benny Safdie, portraying LA politician Joel Wachs), or a pair of thrill-seeking actors hellbent on continuing the raucous nature of their lives well into their 60s (Tom Waits and Sean Penn, the latter portraying a character based on William Holden). The protagonists even encounter an actress based on Lucille Ball and America's gas-shortage crisis (pay close attention to a Herman Munster cameo as well). Though our young main characters remain locked in their growing views of love and human relationships, they're challenged in their beliefs when they come into contact with each of these adults. Anderson throws in plenty of quirks that could read as random flourishes, yet these quirks are designed to highlight our main characters’ lack of awareness of their surroundings, how the things they encounter make no sense to them; it makes sense that the audience isn’t allowed an easy explanation. I'm sure the surface-level casualness will be more deeply understood as the years roll by, but as far as entertainment goes on an immediate level, you aren’t going to find anything more heartwarming or funny than LICORICE PIZZA. (2021, 133 min, DCP Digital) [John Dickson]
Steven Spielberg’s WEST SIDE STORY (US)
Various multiplexes (AMC, Regal, et al.) – See Venue websites for showtimes
It’s hard to imagine what cinema would be like without remakes. From the lowliest programmers to the most bizarre arthouse films, no producer, director, or film star seems immune from thinking, “I wonder what I could do with that.” But taking on a remake of a film as beloved and revered as Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’ WEST SIDE STORY (1961) is another matter. Despite its flaws—an unconvincing Tony, an Anglo Maria, stagebound scenes and dances, dubbed singing—the world embraces that version and quivered in apprehension when Steven Spielberg announced his intentions to give it another go. I was concerned about what would happen to Jerome Robbins’ magnificent choreography and use of space, and whether Spielberg’s patented emotional manipulation would somehow trivialize the genuine emotional pull of the original. At the same time, the moment seemed right to bring this story of tribal division and violence to the screen. I am happy to report that this new WEST SIDE STORY more than justifies its existence. The film blends elements of the original, such as Robbins’ choreography for Tony (Ansel Elgort) and Maria (Rachel Zegler) at the school dance, with more realistic actions. Instead of the world falling away in a white haze as the teenagers fall in love, Spielberg stages this moment behind some bleachers. Yet, he doesn’t entirely abandon the poetry of Robert Wise’s mise-en-scène. For example, the neighborhood that is the setting for this tragedy is haphazardly crumbling under the wrecking ball of “urban renewal,” rather than being efficiently clear cut for new high-rise apartments and (ironically) today’s artistic mecca, Lincoln Center. He also hangs the back courtyard of Maria’s apartment building with laundry that never comes in to be folded. Justin Peck, resident choreographer of the New York City Ballet, largely coordinates his style with Robbins’, but finds a way to open up the dances to incorporate the community and the everyday lives of the characters—a big plus for “America,” though the dance still does not escape its clichéd construction. His new dance for “Cool” isn’t as evocative for me as Robbins’ crablike scream of shock from the Jets following Riff’s death because the sequence was moved back to its original spot before the rumble. Nonetheless, the mixture of playful sparring between Tony and Riff (a magnetic Mike Faist) as they vie for the handgun Riff has just purchased (a great new scene) and the danger of the rotting dock on which they dance provides a satisfying foreshadowing of death. The biggest change in this WEST SIDE STORY is the script by Tony Kushner. The film was so frontloaded with dialogue in both English and Spanish that I grew impatient to hear Leonard Bernstein’s magnificent score, which benefits from new orchestrations and singing voices that can handle its expert level of difficulty. That said, the intelligence of Kushner’s dialogue and where he locates each scene drive home the point that the outmoded gang culture represented by the Jets and the Sharks was bound to give way to the toxic nationalism that is currently tearing our country apart. In a stroke of genius, it is left to Rita Moreno, who has moved from her portrayal of a youthful Anita to the shopkeeper Valentina, to plead for “a new way of living” and “a way of forgiving” in her rendition of “Somewhere” that is as timely as ever. Her life experience and understanding of this sad story grace the film with a welcome depth that I found extremely moving. If you have qualms, put them aside and immerse yourself in the pain and glory of this new WEST SIDE STORY. (2021, 156 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
Also Screening
⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
Michael Gitlin’s 1994 experimental essay film THE BIRDPEOPLE (61 min, 16mm) screens on Thursday at 7pm. Preceded by Joyce Wieland’s 1986 short film BIRDS AT SUNRISE (10 min, 16mm). More info here.
⚫ Chicago Film Society (at Northeastern Illinois University)
Stephen Chow and Lee Lik-chi’s 1999 Hong Kong comedy THE KING OF COMEDY (90 min, 35mm) screens on Wednesday at 7:30pm, at the Auditorium at NEIU (3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.). Preceded by Edward Sedgwick’s 1937 Laurel and Hardy short A DAY AT THE STUDIO (8 min, 16mm). More info here.
⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Marin Karmitz’s 1972 French film COUP POUR COUP (89 min, Digital Projection) screens on Monday at 7pm as part of the Which Side Are You On? Labor and Collection Action On Film series.
Fred Waller’s 1935 short film SYMPHONY IN BLACK: A RHAPSODY OF NEGRO LIFE (9 min, DCP Digital) and John Cassavetes’ 1959 independent drama SHADOWS (87 min, Digital Projection) screen on Tuesday at 7pm as part of the Nights of the Swingers! Jazz in Film series.
Jan de Bont’s 1994 thriller SPEED (116 min, DCP Digital) screens on Thursday at 7pm as part of the Keanu and Nic’s Excellent Adventure series. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ Facets Cinema
Also screening as part of the Galentine’s Day programming are Noah Baumbach’s 2012 film FRANCES HA (86 min, Digital Projection) on Sunday at 2pm and David Mirkin’s 1997 film ROMY AND MICHELE’S HIGH SCHOOL REUNION (92 min, Digital Projection) on Sunday at 5pm. More info here.
⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Nagisa Ōshima’s 1967 Japanese film IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES (102 min, 35mm) screens on Friday at 7pm as part of the Bad Romance Series.
Benjamin Renner, Stéphanie Aubier and Vincent Patar’s 2012 animated film ERNEST & CELESTINE (80 min, DCP Digital) screens on Saturday and Sunday at 11am as part of the monthly Kid Flix series.
Mike Nichols’ 1966 film WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (131 min, 35mm) screens on Tuesday at 7pm as part of the Bad Romance Series. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
Juho Kuosmanen’s 2021 Finnish film COMPARTMENT NO. 6 (107 min, DCP Digital) continues; see Venue website for showtimes.
Rob Reiner’s 1987 film THE PRINCESS BRIDE (98 min, DCP Digital) screens on Monday at 7pm as part of the Princess Bride Valentine’s Show. More info on all screenings here.
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
Jessica Kingdon's ASCENSION (US/China/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
Two men in a Chinese factory are surrounded by a mountain of metal parts, their welding rigs casting a bright white light from offscreen. You begin to wonder, Are they assembling car jacks or some other piece of automobile equipment? They start to test their creation, assuring that everything is properly attached and tightened. At this point, they have stood their work upright and it appears to be some sort of metal frame for a robot or animatronic. Director Jessica Kingdon cuts to another factory where a handful of women are assembling, trimming, and lubricating giant silicone sex dolls. Surprisingly, this is not even one of the most absurd scenes in ASCENSION. Kingdon provides us with a gorgeous fly-on-the-wall-style film, bouncing around as an omniscient observer all over China. That is, until one of the subjects gets stung by an insect and the perspective is broken for a second, but that's bee-sides the point. If anything, that moment is a testament to the compassion that Kingdon brings to the subject matter. There is no doubt that China gets slammed by propaganda on the daily in our American 24-hour news cycle. While the nation's not perfect, it faces similar problems that we do domestically. Unfortunately, the majority of those problems weigh heaviest on the lower- to middle-class, something that we as Americans are all too familiar with. The film features its fair share of absurd moments, but they are not any more absurd than the “Not The Onion” headlines we see in the United States. Whether it's Amazon workers having to skip bathroom breaks, or Chinese laborers having to fabricate jiggly sex dolls, workers are pushed to their limits and demeaned around the globe. Hopefully this film gets some attention with the right crowd, and this type of passive, yet focused filmmaking could change others' worldviews for the better. Followed by a pre-recorded conversation between the director and Steve James. (2021, 97 min) [Drew Van Weelden]
Blerta Basholli’s HIVE (Kosovo/Switzerland/Albania/Republic of Macedonia)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
One of the most difficult things for people to face is having a loved one vanish without a trace. Filmmakers are attracted to the inherently dramatic stories of the disappeared, particularly when political turmoil is the cause. For example, THE KILLING FIELDS (1984) rages over the mass murders of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and Patricio Guzmán’s NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT (2010) deals in part with the attempts of Chileans to find the remains of those disappeared by the vicious Pinochet regime. Now, from Kosovo, we have HIVE. First-time feature director Blerta Basholli has chosen to tell the true story of Fahrije Hoti, a mother of two living in Krusha e Madhe, where one of the largest massacres of the war in Kosovo (1998–99) took place. The film is set in Krusha in 2006. Fahrije (Yllka Gashi) and many of the other villagers whose husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers were taken are living in ramshackle homes after their own homes were burned to the ground. As Muslim women, they are not allowed to work outside the home or drive, and they rely on pooled income to make ends meet. When a supermarket in Mitrovica offers to sell their homemade avjar (a roasted red pepper spread), Fahrije defies convention—and suffers for it—by getting a driver’s license, starting a company, and trying to convince the village women to work with her. While watching HIVE, I was reminded of Aida Bejić’s marvelous SNOW (2008), a magic-realist tale of grieving widows of the Bosnian War. Despite the story similarities, the films are quite different, with HIVE planted squarely in the real world. It’s infuriating how the “rules” make it impossible for these Muslim women to survive without a man, and sadly predictable how the villagers seek to intimidate Fahrije and those who have joined her. Led by a grounded performance by Gashi and a great supporting performance by Çun Lajçi as Fahrije’s father-in-law, HIVE admirably highlights how Fahrije did what she had to do and inspired others to face their losses courageously and build a new future. (2021, 84 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY (Japan)
Available to rent through Facets Cinema here
HAPPY HOUR, the intimate epic that established Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's international reputation, achieves a novelistic density through the uncommonly detailed way it plumbs the emotional lives of its quartet of lead characters. WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY, the first of two 2021 releases by the director (followed by DRIVE MY CAR), resembles a short-story collection in how it depicts three narratively unrelated vignettes that are formally separated by their own chapter headings and credit sequences. Hamaguchi proves to be equally adept at the short-film format as he was with a 5-hour-plus run time: the mini romantic dramas that comprise WHEEL are gratifying to watch as self-contained episodes, but when one contemplates how they might be linked on a thematic level, the entire project attains a profound resonance (it wasn't until the morning after my first viewing that I realized the magnitude of Hamaguchi's deceptively modest approach). The first section, “Magic (Or Something Less Assuring),” begins with an extended Rohmerian dialogue between two female friends, one of whom regales the other about a "magical" date with a man she has fallen in love with, unaware that he is also her friend's ex-lover. It ends with a chance encounter between all three characters, punctuated by a brief but daring fantasy sequence. The title of the second section, "Door Wide Open," refers to a literature professor's policy of avoiding scandal by always keeping his office door open when meeting with students. One day he receives an unexpected visitor, a woman who is attempting to ensnare him in a trap. Or is she? The final section, "Once Again," is the best: two women who haven't seen each other in 20 years meet providentially on a train-station escalator before spending the day together and eventually realizing that neither is whom the other had thought. Hamaguchi himself has said that "coincidence and imagination" are the movie's main themes and, indeed, as the title indicates, each of the stories involves the intersection of the free will of the individual and the fickle nature of fate. But WHEEL is also about the inexorable pull of the past and how the characters' regrets over roads not taken have keenly shaped who they are. This latter aspect is the key to understanding how a film so charming on the surface can also contain such a melancholy undertow and how characters with only a small amount of screen time can seem so fascinatingly complex and believable. Hamaguchi shows the psychological underpinnings of everyday human behavior in a manner rarely seen in the movies. He knows how to pierce your heart. (2021, 121 min) [Michael Glover Smith]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
Also Screening/Streaming
⚫ Asian Pop-Up Cinema
In celebration of the Lunar New Year, specifically the Chinese New Year, Asian Pop-Up Cinema is streaming six films for free via Smart Cinema USA through Tuesday. More info here.
⚫ Blacknuss Network
As part of the Carnegie Hall AfroFuturism Festival, the Blacknuss Network presents We Fly Away Home: A Film and Discussion Series on Afrofuturism in Cinema. The series is virtual; the second event, “From the Cry of Jazz to Space is the Place and Beyond,” takes place on Sunday at 3pm. Per the event description, the program will ask, “How has music as a futurist form been used? How can it be used in the context of an Afrofuturist Cinema?” Further, the session will include “works that answer some of these questions and will no doubt raise many more.” More info here.
⚫ Facets Cinema
Alice Rohrwacher, Francesco Munzi, and Pietro Marcello’s 2021 documentary FUTURA (110 min) is available to rent starting this week. More info here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
Check hold-over titles here.
⚫ VDB TV
In acknowledgement of the ten-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, the Video Data Bank is highlighting the work of Jem Cohen by making his twelve-part GRAVITY HILL NEWSREELS: OCCUPY WALL STREET series available for continuous and complete viewing. More info here.
CINE-LIST: February 11 - February 17, 2022
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Michael Castelle, Rob Christopher, Maxwell Courtright, John Dickson, Steve Erickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Doug McLaren, Michael Glover Smith, James Stroble, Drew Van Weelden