CRUCIAL VIEWING
Raoul Walsh's THE BIG TRAIL (American Revival)
Music Box Theatre — Thursday, 7pm
In his first starring role, the slim, young John Wayne (just 23 years old!) is conventionally handsome, almost Elvis-like. The physical characteristics of the Duke's future tough-guy image (a swaggering walk, a careening feline voice) conspire against the youth's slighter build, making him into a gawky pretty-boy with a comically over-pronounced drawl. He's also not yet a great actor, a little too community theater; he hasn't yet learned how to give words weight, only how to make them sound good. But the lead's shortcomings don't drag THE BIG TRAIL down; instead, they just become part of the fabric of this strange Oregon Trail Western. One of the earliest Hollywood films to be shot in widescreen, it has a certain anachronistic quality, looking equally 1920s and 1950s (or, even more accurately, like the kind of movie a Silent Era director would make given mid-century technology) while sounding firmly early 30s, the crisp 70mm images contrasting with the muddy mono early-talkie soundtrack. Fox's ad copy of the time billed this as "the most important picture ever produced," and though that's a pretty big exaggeration, there's a lot to be said for a film that marries a story of frontier adventure with an adventure to the frontier of aesthetics. Even in an era marked by unmatched inventiveness (the dawn of sound), THE BIG TRAIL stands out; the film speaks a language entirely its own, one with strong emphases on scale and dioramic depth, put to beautiful use in an early scene where Wayne shows off his considerable knife-throwing skills amidst a tableau vivant of onlookers. (1930, 125 min, 35mm restored archival print) IV
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The 35mm restoration of the longer 70mm version is showing as the opening film in the Music Box's 70mm Film Festival.
Kantemir Balagov’s BEANPOLE (New Russian)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Check Venue website for showtimes
Kantemir Balagov’s sophomore feature is easily one of the most piercing and intimate character studies in recent memory. Based on Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history The Unwomanly Face of War, BEANPOLE is a striking portrait of the women whose lives were defined by the lasting psychological horrors of World War II. Set in the wreckage of a war-torn Leningrad, two women form a lasting bond and try to remember what it was like to truly be alive. Balagov acutely examines not just the horrors of war or the horrors of being a woman—rape, infertility, motherhood, loss, among others—but also how those identities uniquely feed into one another. It’s not a film that’s concerned solely with despair; rather, there are glimmers of hope in BEANPOLE that come from the intrinsic power of a relationship with no regard for men and a defiance by these two women against the structures and circumstances that have hurt them. Viktoria Miroshnichenko and Vasilisa Perelygina’s performances are rightly haunting and calculated, navigating the highest highs and the lowest lows of being human with aplomb. Witnessing what seems like an acting masterclass makes it hard to fathom that BEANPOLE was their debut film. The work of cinematographer Kseniya Sereda is also impossible to ignore. Each frame is akin to a painting in its own right: rich, vibrant, and full of life in an often-bleak existence. But it’s in the film’s moments of silence where Balagov’s thesis rings the loudest: life is hard, but life after war is hell. (2019, 138 min, DCP Digital) CC
Apichatpong Weerasethakul's UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES (Thai Revival)
Chicago Film Society (at Northeastern Illinois University, The Auditorium, Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) — Wednesday at 7:30pm
A hushed and floating aureole of a film, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's UNCLE BOONMEE captivates and holds us firm in some timeless stupor. The northern Thai jungle throbs patiently—with past lives and past events, monkey ghosts and ethereality—while Boonmee comes full circle, or doesn't. The film centers on an elderly Thai farmer, Uncle Boonmee, who is dying of kidney disease. Fading in his farm home, his son and wife appear as spirits (in easily one of the most affecting family dinner scenes on film) to ease Boonmee into non-being. As in SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY and TROPICAL MALADY, Weerasethakul's Buddhism informs the fluidity of time and body, though here he forgoes the formal duality of those films for something like a drifting continuum. Boonmee laments his karma, having killed in the past either too many communists or bugs on his tamarind farm, and later dreams of a stunted future where images of one's past are projected until they arrive. Are we some Baudrillard-like copy of a copy, reborn and born again—or perhaps a continual permutation of events and memories? As in his past work, Weerasethakul lets us linger just long enough in dense but controlled compositions. The distance of his subjects in the frame methodically draws us deeper into his hypnotic world where the sound of our breathing heightens anticipation. It amplifies the pulse and hum of the darkened, textured jungle on screen. But the frame here is also Weerasethakul's most purposeful one, leading us gently into fabled recollection, and cunningly deep inside a haunting cave-womb. History and spirit have a composite curiosity that envelops both Boonmee and the viewer. It offers as much as one is willing to ask. (2010, 114 min, 35mm) BW
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Preceded by Jodie Mack’s 2013 experimental short BLANKET STATEMENT #2: IT’S ALL OR NOTHING (4 min, 16mm).
Angela Schanelec’s I WAS AT HOME, BUT… (New German)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Check Venue website for showtimes
The international distribution of Christian Petzold’s films in the 21st century, resulting in his critical coronation as contemporary German cinema’s preeminent auteur, has been a welcome development in the world of cinephilia. It is regrettable, however, that the films of Thomas Arslan and Angela Schanelec, Petzold's formidable colleagues in the movement known as the “Berlin School” (the first generation of graduates from the German Film and Television Academy to make their mark after the reunification of Germany), remain largely unknown outside of their native country. As critic Girish Shambu points out in a recent video essay, the Berlin School has been called a “counter cinema” for the way these filmmakers have reacted against the aesthetically and narratively unadventurous mainstream German movies of the ‘80s and ‘90s and have taken inspiration from the glory days of Fassbinder and the New German Cinema of the '70s instead. Schanelec is generally regarded as the most challenging of the Berlin School directors: her would-be 1998 breakthrough PLACES IN CITIES was panned as a “joyless snoozer” by Derek Elley in Variety who claimed Schanelec’s movies “throw out no emotional lifelines for the viewer.” I would argue, however, that, while devoid of obvious emotional signifiers and easy character identification techniques, Schanelec’s work, like that of her hero Robert Bresson, can be emotionally overwhelming if one is watching and listening correctly. I WAS AT HOME, BUT…, Schanelec’s latest, is an ideal introduction to her unique brand of cinema: a fragmentary, elliptical and non-linear tale of a young teen boy’s return to the home where he lives with his single mother and younger sister after having run away a week previously. Upon returning, the boy, Phillip, resumes rehearsing a grade school production of Hamlet in which he plays the title role, while also attempting to navigate life in a still grief-stricken home two years after the death of his father; one scene, where Philip and his sister Flo continually attempt to console their mother Astrid, who rebuffs them while cleaning a kitchen sink, is ingeniously staged by framing the characters from behind in a static long take that goes on for so long it eventually evokes a feeling of cosmic wonder. Astrid (the superb Maren Eggert), meanwhile, has a few misadventures of her own: one amusing subplot details her failed attempt to buy a bicycle from a man with a tracheotomy, and another sequence, gut-bustingly funny, sees her haranguing a Serbian filmmaker (Dane Komljen, playing himself) in the street after having walked out of his movie. Finally, a parallel story involving one of Phillip’s teachers (TRANSIT’s Franz Rogowski) debating whether to have a child with his own girlfriend may seem random initially but ends up poignantly underscoring Schanelec’s aim of painting a complex portrait of the joys and sorrows of parenthood. While her title may reference Ozu’s coming-of-age classic I WAS BORN, BUT… and a prologue and epilogue featuring a donkey obviously nod to Bresson’s AU HASARD BALTHAZAR, Schanelec ultimately generates a sense of majestic spirituality through an employment of image and sound that is entirely her own. This is nowhere better exemplified than in a remarkable, time-hopping sequence, scored to M. Ward’s muted cover of David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance,” that begins in a cemetery at night before flashing back to years earlier in a hospital room then flashing-forward again to the present in a museum. A masterpiece. (2019, 105 min, DCP Digital) MGS
Tsai Ming-liang’s I DON’T WANT TO SLEEP ALONE (Taiwanese/Malaysian Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Friday, 7pm and Sunday, 1:30pm
The first film Tsai Ming-liang made in his native Malaysia, I DON’T WANT TO SLEEP ALONE is also the director’s most opaque work. It alternates between two story lines, both featuring Tsai’s muse Lee Kang-sheng as a man in dependence on others’ help. In the first, Lee plays the brain-dead adult son of a dysfunctional family; this section of the film revolves around the man’s daily rituals of being bathed, groomed, and fed. In the second, Lee plays a homeless man who gets beaten nearly to death by street hooligans, rescued by a group of day laborers, and nursed back to health by the most compassionate member of the group in the ruins of a building in the process of being demolished. Both narratives employ recurring themes and motifs of Tsai’s filmography (helplessness, unrequited love, modern architecture, and water), yet the director never spells out here how these things are connected. The film proceeds, rather, like a piece of music, flowing elegantly between incidents and setting a distinctive, melancholy mood. This musical quality is likely intentional on Tsai’s part; the movie was commissioned (along with five others, including Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY) by New Crowned Hope, an international arts project commemorating the bicentennial of Mozart’s birth. Still, the aesthetic is less Mozartian than it is distinctly Tsaivian—the long takes, stifling mise-en-scene, and thematic emphasis on sexual frustration are all in keeping with the director’s body of work. What’s different is the setting, which Tsai presents with tantalizing ambiguity. Where his other films utilized the uninviting architecture of modern Taipei to convey the characters’ loneliness, SLEEP ALONE finds something warm and almost comforting in the seedy locales of Kuala Lumpur. Here, the characters’ passions make sense and have a home. Adding another layer of curiousness to the film, Tsai has stated in interviews that much of the action comprises the dreams of the paralyzed adult son, which suggests the movie advances a Mozartian harmony between the real and the imagined. (2006, 118 min, 35mm) BS
Ida Lupino's OUTRAGE (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Wednesday, 7 and 9pm
Ida Lupino's directing career is still underappreciated and misconstrued. Her stature as a pioneering woman who burst through the Hollywood boy's club as an independent producer-director under the banner of The Filmakers is justly celebrated, but the films themselves have received short shrift until very recently. (NEVER FEAR had been flatly unavailable until Kino's recent box set, and NOT WANTED had hitherto been released on disc under its sexploitation reissue title, THE WRONG RUT, complete with a medically dubious childbirth scene grafted in.) Lupino's most frequently revived film, THE HITCH-HIKER, is her least characteristic and least socially engaged—and the one most readily assimilated as a crackerjack noir by men who dig that kind of thing. But the main strain of Lupino's work as a director is a particular—and particularly square—species of 'social problem' film. Is it any surprise that the first generation of auteurist critics—the ones who elevated the philosophical fisticuffs of Howard Hawks and Raoul Walsh over the preachy homilies of Stanley Kramer, Elia Kazan, and Fred Zinnemann—had no great interest in Lupino's films? But as the late Ronnie Scheib has argued, Lupino's films fit within this genre and stand apart from it: "Lupino's characters do not know how to act. Their 'problems'—rape, polio, illegitimate children, bigamy—have put them beyond the pale, beyond the patterned security of their foreseeable futures. The 'problem' is not how to reintegrate them back into the mainstream; the 'problem' is the shallowness of the mainstream and the void it projects around them—the essential passivity of ready-made lives." This void—of nice-guy liberalism, of middle-class security, of romantic love and sexual feeling—is what sets Lupino's films apart and forms the core of OUTRAGE, perhaps her finest directorial effort. It was, in many ways, an impossible project: made at a time when American society measured rape by the absence of purity rather than the absence of consent, OUTRAGE was initially deemed unfilmable by the Production Code Administration, which insisted on removing such terms as 'rape,' 'rapist,' 'sex fiend,' and 'sex maniac' from the script. The result of this interference is a film more emotional than clinical, one completely attuned to the trauma experienced by sexual assault survivor Ann (Mala Powers) and steeped in her interiority because OUTRAGE has no workable vocabulary for describing violations of bodies in the world. (The act is variously described as a 'vicious criminal attack' and a 'criminal assault.') But centering the film on Ann's experience of a crime that cannot be spoken is a practical masterstroke that enlarges the circle of critique to implicate society at large—not just the rapist, but the other men in Ann's life who process the incident as being completely about them, the everyday violence implicit in a domestic disagreement, the false front of chivalry that masks the presumption of absolute obedience. And, like all of Lupino's Filmakers features, it also maps an understated topography of class difference with a precise command of detail, its story laid in mills and packing plants and working-class homes with natty couches. In this world where mobility is a mirage and the banality of existence looms large, the sexiest thing one lover can promise another is a serving of homemade gravy. "Aren't you the happy little worker?" asks one of Ann's officemates when she arrives at her desk beaming one morning. "There's sixty million men in this country and I found the right one," she replies. Despite the late-inning intervention of a judge, a prosecutor, a priest, and a psychiatrist who earnestly try to diagnose Ann's post-assault breakdown, the simplest explanation remains the best one: she didn't find the right one, and he probably doesn't exist. (1950, 75 min, 35mm) KAW
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JCC Chicago Jewish Film Festival
The JCC Chicago Jewish Film Festival opened on Thursday and runs through March 15 at various locations.
Catherine Corsini’s AN IMPOSSIBLE LOVE (New French)
Landmark Renaissance Place Cinema, Highland Park — Friday, 7pm
Based on the 2015 novel Un Amour Impossible by Christine Angot, Catherine Corsini’s meticulous drama recounts the highly sexual and emotionally abusive relationship of Rachel (Virginie Efira), a provincial Jewish woman, and Philippe (Niels Schneider), a selfish man from a wealthy family, as told in voiceover by their love child, Chantal (Jehnny Beth). The strong physical attraction Rachel feels for Philippe leaves her helpless to refuse him anything, including letting him impregnate her while refusing to ever marry her. His anti-Semitism comes out in a remark about money-grubbing Jews that shocks Rachel, but does not dissuade her from her attachment to him. When she does eventually break from him, Chantal eagerly continues to pursue his affection. The film covers a long period, from the 1950s to the 2010s, without clearly defined divisions of time or obvious changes of wardrobe and appearance, aside from Chantal’s growth from a baby to an adult. What could be five years turns out to be one, and events late in the characters’ lives are dropped into the narrative without preparation or development. Efira is a magnetic actress, and her chemistry (including explicit sex scenes) with Schneider is breathtaking. AN IMPOSSIBLE LOVE takes up such familiar subjects in French cinema as class and incest, but does so in a sly, largely unstated way. While the film can be slow going, it creates an aura of love as an entity that exists out of time. (2018, 135 min, Digital Projection) MF
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Dror Zahavi’s CRESCENDO (New German)
CMX CinéBistro at Old Orchard, Skokie — Saturday, 8pm
There have been many approaches to reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable differences of Israelis and Palestinians, with most of them focused on bringing young people from both sides of the conflict together to get beyond the rhetoric and see each other, first and foremost, as people. Dror Zahavi’s CRESCENDO centers on one such effort to build rapport by creating a chamber orchestra composed of young Israeli and Palestinian musicians who will perform together in a concert for peace to be staged in Germany. German conductor Eduard Sporck (Peter Simonischek), whose Nazi parents were concentration camp physicians, is the man who must find a way to get these angry young men and women to make beautiful music together on and off the concert stage. Zahavi’s set-up is involving, if a bit farfetched in expecting a conductor to be an effective mediator, but he leans a little too heavily on the contrast between the comfortable lives of the well-trained Israeli musicians and the chaotic lives of the oppressed Palestinians. The progression of his Romeo and Juliet subplot doesn’t make a lot of sense and tips the film into schematic melodrama that undermines the strongly built relationships he has developed. A near-miss, but still interesting. (2019, 106 min, Digital Projection) MF
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Max Lewkowicz’s FIDDLER: A MIRACLE OF MIRACLES (New Documentary)
CMX CinéBistro at Old Orchard, Skokie — Sunday, 3pm
For my money a best of the fest, FIDDLER: A MIRACLE OF MIRACLES is a packed 92 minutes of intellectual stimulation and emotional fulfillment. Director Max Lewkowicz doesn’t miss a thing in this definitive look at the development of the phenomenally constructed and wildly successful musical Fiddler on the Roof, which premiered on Broadway in 1964. He deftly covers the source material from Sholem Aleichem, even burrowing into the Yiddish writer’s antipathy for matchmakers in a close reading of the underlying brutality of the song “Matchmaker”; a clip from Alexis Granowsky’s JEWISH LUCK (1925), a film based on Aleichem’s sinister creation, Menakhem Mendl, shows that Mendl’s “matchmaking” scheme amounted to trafficking Jewish women to brothels in Argentina. He threads us through the production numbers from the beginning of the musical to the end, using excerpts from various productions and the 1971 Norman Jewison film, and commentary from a wide variety of luminaries: actors, including three Tevyes (Michael Bernardi [son of former Tevye Herschel Bernardi], Danny Burstein, and Chaim Topol); Sheldon Harnick, Jerry Bock, and Joseph Stein, the writers of the lyrics, music, and book, respectively; and even the obligatory appearance of Hamilton phenom Lin-Manuel Miranda, who, for once, actually contributes something meaningful to a documentary about something he wasn’t part of. We learn that the title and set design were strongly influenced by the paintings of Marc Chagall. We learn that unwritten reviews of the first out-of-town tryout in Detroit—not written due to a newspaper strike—would have been bad; and how much reworking the show went through under the talented, but tyrannical, rule of director Jerome Robbins. We see parts of a Japanese production and learn that the Japanese team wondered whether an American audience could understand a work that was so Japanese in feeling. The amount of information that is skillfully conveyed is truly breathtaking, but more astonishing is the depth of feeling communicated through the performances and interviews. Topol tearing up when remembering the last scene he shot in Jewison’s movie—saying good-bye to Hodel (Michele Marsh) in “Far From the Home I Love”—had me choking up as well. I’m really only scratching the surface of what this documentary offers. You may not think you need to know more about Fiddler on the Roof, but, trust me, you do. (2019, 92 minutes, Digital Projection) MF
Saeed Nouri’s WOMEN ACCORDING TO MEN (New Iranian Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Saturday, 2:30pm and Sunday, 5pm
One of my favorite films is THE THREE DISAPPEARANCES OF SOAD HOSNI (2011), an ingenious biopic of the titular Egyptian actress by Lebanese filmmaker Rania Stephan that uses footage from Hosni’s own films to tell her life story. Iranian producer/director/screenwriter Saeed Nouri uses a similar approach in WOMEN ACCORDING TO MEN to tell not one Iranian woman’s story, but all Iranian women’s stories, many of which are universal to all women. It is paradoxical that so many contemporary male filmmakers in Iran are so sympathetic to the plight of Iranian women now under the yoke of sharia law when Nouri shows how sexist many pre-revolution films were. Indeed, Nouri seems to bend over backwards to condemn his countrymen for their prurience and phobic responses to women. He uses explanatory title cards and the remnants of purged films from the 1930s to 1979, the year of the Iranian Revolution, to show “the Iranian woman’s life cycle from tradition to modernity portrayed mostly by male filmmakers.” For example, he mentions the 1936 law of “unveiling” declared by ruler Reza Shah Pahlavi, followed by a clip of women removing their chadors. (He does not explain that this was an effort by Pahlavi to Westernize the country and that it also applied to traditional clothing worn by men.) Later, he inserts a clip from Iraj Ghaderi’s THE UNVEILED (1973) of a man trying to convince a miniskirted woman to don a chador. He lampoons men’s fear of “aggressive“ women in a clip from Parviz Sayyad’s SAMAD AND SAMI, LEILA AND LILY (1971) that shows a man running from a woman in terror after she declares that love between a couple makes living without benefit of marriage justifiable. He also shares the unhappy fate of actresses and female filmmakers in the country. A title card informing us that “Forouzan abandoned acting in 1976, but her properties were confiscated after the revolution” is accompanied by a clip of Shapour Gharib’s NOTORIOUS (1971) showing a woman and her possessions being carted away on a pick-up truck. He ends the film on a hopeful note of defiance (“And nothing will conceal our roar. Nothing.”) from Fereydoun Rahnema’s THE SON OF IRAN IS IGNORANT OF HIS MOTHER (1974) that we can only hope will come to pass. The film’s English subtitles and title translations leave a great deal to be desired and cause some confusion as to the connections Nouri is trying to make. Nonetheless, the plethora of clips from more than 120 archival Iranian films is quite a treat. (2019, 90 min, DCP Digital) MF
Shengze Zhu’s PRESENT.PERFECT (New American/Hong Kong Documentary)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) — Friday, 7pm (Free Admission)
Shengze Zhu’s PRESENT.PERFECT plays like the flip side to Hao Wu’s 2018 documentary PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF DESIRE, which also considered China’s recent live-streaming phenomenon. PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC profiled several people who’d become stars by broadcasting their lives online, making millions in the process; PRESENT.PERFECT, a found-footage documentary in the vein of much of Penny Lane’s work, was culled from the feeds of several less popular live-streaming hosts (or “anchors”) who exhibit the same compulsive need to record themselves despite broadcasting to relatively few followers. Where Hao Wu’s film was fascinated with glamour, Shengze Zhu’s is more interested in marginalized lives and behavior. A few of the subjects in PRESENT.PERFECT have extreme physical disabilities, another is a middle-aged cross-dresser; everyone seems capable of delivering discomforting confessions. Structurally, this resembles such Ulrich Seidl films as ANIMAL LOVE, DOG DAYS or IN THE BASEMENT in how it cuts between a variety of off-putting people until general patterns of behavior begin to emerge and one regards the subjects, if not with affection, then with begrudging sympathy. (Shengze Zhu’s editing also resembles Seidl’s; she’ll hold a shot for long enough for one’s disgust to give way to fascination.) The burn victim and the dwarf with truncated limbs and extremities who appear in PRESENT.PERFECT seem to value live-streaming because it forces strangers to pay attention to people from whom they’d normally look away—no number of viewers is too small to them; every viewer is a victory. Yet the movie also recognizes how live-streaming encourages a certain exhibitionist impulse that may not be healthy to indulge. Shengze Zhu represents this impulse amusingly through recurring footage of an eccentric young man who likes to dance (abysmally) in public. PRESENT.PERFECT concludes with a scene of this man, moving to Psy’s “Gangnam Style” in front of maybe a couple dozen onlookers; the scene marks a culminating triumph, as if the dancing fool were celebrating everybody’s right to be acknowledged in the public sphere. (2019, 124 min, DCP Digital) BS
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Director Shengze Zhu in person.
Bill Forsyth’s GREGORY’S GIRL (Scottish Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Saturday, 2:30pm and Monday, 6pm
There’s something Lubitschian about Scottish director Bill Forsyth’s comedies—at least the ones I’ve seen—in that their characters, be they children, teenagers, or seemingly hapless adults, exude a sort of world-weary gaiety that betrays their illusory simpleness. I wouldn’t say it’s executed the most elegantly in GREGORY’S GIRL, considered to be Forysth’s breakout, but it might be the most conspicuously Lubitschian, as it’s less tempered by ripened apprehension, unlike some of Forsyth's later, more mature comedies. The film follows the romantic travails of a teenage boy, Gregory (John Gordon Sinclair), who’s fallen in love with a girl at his school; the kicker (pun intended) is that they meet when the girl, Dorothy (Dee Hepburn), tries out for the school soccer team and puts the boys to shame with her superior athletic skills. It’s a simple love story with something of a twist at the end (involving eighties Scottish New Wave band Altered Images’ lead singer Clare Grogan, who costars), but it’s not the plot that beguiles. Rather, it’s the whimsical digressions that defy expectations of what the film might have been—a standard coming-of-age tale, equal parts bawdy and sentimental, like so many others—and make it a smart comedy that doesn’t really say something about anything, but revels in its own gratifying essence. One scene in particular embodies the film’s capriciousness: the bumbling soccer coach sees Gregory leaving the locker room that Dorothy must share with the boys. While checking to see if Dorothy is being bothered by Gregory, he decides to show her a soccer trick, which she’s eager to imitate. Soon the two are dancing around the locker room, the complicated play turned into a languid Charleston, after which the plot is unceremoniously resumed. This manifests in entire characters as well, such as Gregory’s baking-obsessed friend, who sells his goods to staff and students alike, and his own little sister, a source of wisdom far beyond her years. The school as an economic microcosm, kids as sages—the confounding truth in these scenarios accounts for its singular drollery. Coming back to its similarities to Ernst Lubitsch’s films, these examples might even be termed “superjokes,” the unexpected joke on top of the previous joke that Billy Wilder said defined the German master’s fabled touch. Much like Lubitsch, there’s no denying that Forsyth, who is said to have pioneered Scottish cinema, injects a certain indefinable something into his films that gives them universal appeal and makes them such a pleasure to watch, whilst also being delicate, complicated things, the allure of which are as mysterious as the source of their charm. (1980, 91 min, DCP Digital) KS
Lynne Ramsay’s WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN (Contemporary British/American)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Thursday, 9:30pm
A gripping psychological exploration of the tacit agreement in parenthood to love and care for one’s child, and of the fears and doubts that can arise when all is not perfect, WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN stands as one of Lynne Ramsay’s most masterful films. Told through a complex interweaving of memories, the film unfolds through the eyes of former travel writer Eva (Tilda Swinton) while visiting her nearly adult son, Kevin (Ezra Miller), who is in prison for killing some of his high school classmates. Her memories tell the story of Kevin’s growing up and serve as a search for understanding. Eva’s relationship with Kevin is a complicated one. The flashback memories show their interactions through three separate periods in their lives (infant/toddler, grade school, high school); Kevin seems to eschew all forms of affection from his mother while simultaneously doting on his father, Franklin (John C. Reilly). But perhaps Eva’s own actions are to blame for her son’s sadism? Eva is torn between wishing that Kevin had never been born and her maternal desires to love and be loved by her child. Although Eva serves as the vehicle through which the audience vicariously experiences these entangled pieces of the past, her presence in these memories is more akin to a specter, listlessly floating from one painful and fractured moment to another. WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN a work of palpable parental nightmares. (2011, 112 min, 35mm) KC
Kelly Reichardt's RIVER OF GRASS (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Tuesday. 9:30pm
Set in a small town near the Florida Everglades (Kelly Reichardt herself is from Miami), RIVER OF GRASS follows Cozy, a disenchanted stay-at-home mom, and Lee, an apathetic ne'er-do-well, as they embark on a life of crime after accidentally shooting a man with Cozy's policeman father's gun. Said "life of crime" turns out to be much like their actual lives, full of confusion, disappointment, and ennui. Described by Reichardt as being "a road movie without the road, a love story without the love, and a crime story without the crime," it succeeds insomuch as Cozy and Lee fail— they're something of an antithesis to the Bonnie and Clyde mythology that's inspired generations of road-hungry filmmakers. RIVER OF GRASS also contains Reichardt's signature brand of idle suspense that characterizes her oeuvre to date. The “twist,” so to speak, is more so a culmination of simmering uncertainty than an unexpected action meant to catch viewers off guard. The performances are similarly melancholic—particularly Lisa Bowman as Cozy and Dick Russell as her dad—and the 16mm cinematography lends itself to the fatigued tone. It’s worth seeing for reasons more than just being a popular contemporary director’s first film—it provides further insight into her career-long examination of aimless exploration and pathetic apostasy. (1994, 81 min, DCP Digital) KS
Lizzie Borden's BORN IN FLAMES (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Tuesday, 7pm
With a concept, style, and politics that are still radical and relevant, Lizzie Borden's 1983 film gets a revival screening that is all-too-timely. Railing against the patriarchal and racist structures that remained in even the most progressive corners of American Society after the '60s and '70s, we are thrust into a feature length narrative of critique. Borden is able to place her ideology front and center, but also let the story sneak up around it. Embracing the gritty look of both 16mm film and the more battered parts of New York City in the early '80s, and combining them with an objective camera, she uses her low-budget as a storytelling asset. The world in which the anarchist movement dubbed the Women's Army carries out its counterrevolutionary campaign of pirate radio and direct action is rendered complete through a skillful combination of narrative and documentary modes. Artificial news clips about the progress of the current Socialist government and covert operations of the Women's Army's are mixed with observational shots of unemployed men and women on the streets, and we are constantly reminded of the veiled nature of the allegory. Other fictional scenes feel like we're watching the unedited negotiations between rival factions in a civil war as shot by an embedded cameraperson. When the pirate radio DJ—who acts as the film's voiceover—declares that the true nature of socialism is constant revolution, it seems a natural reinforcement of the film's message, rather than a didactic add-on. Managing to tow the line between preaching and pandering is not an easy task when taking on the very fiber of our society, and rarely has a film done it with such ease. (1983, 90 min, 35mm restored archival print) JH
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s SHOPLIFTERS (New Japanese)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Friday, 4pm and Tuesday, 6pm
Coming home after a day spent shoplifting, a man and a boy see a young girl playing by herself outside an apartment and decide to take her home with them. Their household is presided over by an elderly woman, along with two younger women, one of whom has a relationship with the man. Their home is a ramshackle corrugated lean-to, perpetually in danger of being demolished by a local property flipper. They get by on various grifts and scams to supplement the meager salaries of the grownups’ menial jobs and the old lady’s pension. Each member of this makeshift family does their best to play the part they wish they had in their previous lives. I kept thinking of Dickens’ Oliver Twist while watching this movie. There’s a lot of Fagin in the man and of the Artful Dodger in the boy; the grubby neediness of their lives is out of Dickens as well. In his careful and unassuming way, Kore-eda has made a devastating indictment of capitalist society, as well as the sacrosanct place the nuclear family holds within its structures. He continues plumbing the depth and breadth of what connects one human being to another through this group of strangers—unwanted or rejected by their relations and by the larger world—who throw in their lots together to form a bond made by choice rather than blood. This one left me gutted. (2018, 121 min, DCP Digital) DS
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SAIC professor Jennifer Dorothy Lee lectures at the Tuesday screening.
Pedro Almodóvar’s PAIN AND GLORY (New Spanish)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Saturday, 7 and 9:30pm and Sunday, 4pm
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
Gregory La Cava's MY MAN GODFREY (American Revival)
The Park Ridge Classic Film Series (at the Park Ridge Library, 20 S. Prospect Ave., Park Ridge) — Thursday, 7pm (Free Admission)
Is there a more quintessential—or contentious—screwball comedy than MY MAN GODFREY? Gregory La Cava's Fifth Avenue farce has been the locus classicus of the genre since an anonymous Variety scrivener off-handedly coined the phrase in a GODFREY review, observing “Lombard has played screwball dames before, but none so screwy as this one." Within two years, the same trade paper would lament "the apparently unending string of screwball comedies." Almost as soon as GODFREY was recognized as a landmark, critics began wagging fingers at the film and its spawn. In 1940, Otis Ferguson cited GODFREY's arrival as the moment when "the discovery of the word 'screwball' by those who had to have some words to say helped build the thesis of an absolutely new style in comedy," before according pride of place to the earlier SING AND LIKE IT, "consistently funnier and more screwball as well." William K. Everson's 1994 screwball survey, American Bedlam, likewise acknowledged GODFREY's place in the canon, with the caveat that the film is "lunatic rather than charming, and in addition to being unreal is totally dishonest." So what is it about this madcap reveille that sets people off and sends them running to the nearest trash heap? There's no arguing with the performances—William Powell’s effortless suavity is the perfect counterpoint to Lombard's antic, giggly effusion, and Mischa Auer's gigolo remains an absurd specimen of primate masculinity. These three, plus matriarch Alice Brady, were each nominated at the 1937 Academy Awards, marking GODFREY as the first film to receive a quartet of acting nominations—in the year that the supporting categories were introduced, no less—but the less-heralded turns from Gail Patrick and Eugene Pallette are equally accomplished. Patrick takes a crude sketch of a cruel character and imbues her with enough interiority to render her climactic question—"What good did you find in me, if any?"—exquisitely deserved and heart-stoppingly earnest. At the decade's start, Pallette was still a somewhat generic second fiddle of comic relief, an embarrassed man scurrying around the lady's locker room in FOLLOW THRU; by MY MAN GODFREY, he had settled into his artistic groove and his highest purpose, embodying the put-upon patriarch with sandpaper vocal cords. Pallette gets the film's most famous quip—"All you need to start an asylum is an empty room and the right kind of people"—and perfects its delivery with an even, unenunciated reading that lets it land with selfless aplomb. La Cava excels at filling an empty room with the right kind of people, and the film's handful of crowd scenes are marvels of camera movement and antic, maximal composition. So far, so good. But the crux of GODFREY is its gossamer social veneer, a Depression-era update of the eternal story of a princess slumming outside the palace walls. Opening amidst the shantytowns of Sutton Place and gradually revealing that its titular hobo is a Harvard man on a sociological vision quest, MY MAN GODFREY isn't just a questionable work of social realism, but something like the business end of a broken bottle. The "forgotten men" are phonies, the Depression is a bunch of hot air, and prosperity is just around the corner—just level the slums and salt the earth with nightclubs. In retrospect, MY MAN GODFREY was clearly a way station for screenwriter Morrie Ryskind, who began as a socialist and Marx Brothers scenarist, but would soon fink for HUAC, provide seed money for The National Review, and pen right-wing diatribes for syndication from his Southern California mansion. "If them cops would stick to their own racket and leave honest guys alone," opines one of Powell's hobo buddies, "we'd get somewhere in this country without a lot of this relief and all that stuff." Amen, brother? (1936, 94 min, Digital Projection) KAW
Levan Akin’s AND THEN WE DANCED (New Georgian)
Music Box Theatre — Check Venue website for showtimes
Despite shifting cultural norms and advancements in modernity, dance remains to be an art form still heavily steeped in tradition. This is especially pertinent in Gregorian dance, according to Levan Akin’s third feature film AND THEN WE DANCED, which places strength and control above softness in order to capture both the essence of perfection and the spirit of the nation. Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani) has danced since he could walk and is used to this structure, but he finds himself stuck between two polarizing worlds after a new male dancer named Irakli (Bachi Valishvili) evolves from an object of competition to one of desire. In private, they grow closer—at odds both with the binary roles they perform on the dance floor as well as the permeating threat of homophobic violence in their homeland—and the public repression of their desire bubbles up inside of them until it explodes. While these threats are real and taken seriously, this is by no means a tragedy. At several points, AND THEN WE DANCED is effortlessly sun-kissed and optimistic, underscored by an ABBA- and Robyn-laced soundtrack that encapsulates the infectious innocence of being young, gay, and in love. It brims with hope even in its darkest moments, walking the tightrope between tradition and progression with expert precision. Gelbakhiani gives a performance of a lifetime both as an actor and as a striking dancer; it's almost impossible to take your eyes off of him. AND THEN WE DANCED doesn’t simply yearn for a world that is “accepting” or “tolerant” of queer people—it dares for the world to see us for everything we are regardless of the hatred and violence that is thrown at us, especially globally. That we are still standing, we will keep fighting, and we will keep dancing in spite of it all. (2019, 106 min, DCP Digital) CC
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
The Chicago Irish Film Festival opened on Thursday and continues through Sunday at various locations. More info and full schedule at http://ciff2.sites.goelevent.com.
The Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) welcomes Mihaela Mihailova (Univ. of Michigan), who will give a lecture titled “Computer Generated Ideology: The Neoliberal Multi-Verse of Contemporary US Studio Animation” on Friday at 4pm. Free admission.
The Conversations at the Edge series (at the Gene Siskel Film Center) screens Mariah Garnett’s 2019 US/UK experimental documentary TROUBLE (83 min, DCP Digital) on Thursday at 6pm, with Garnett in person.
Also at Block Cinema (Northwestern University) this week: Mania Akbari and Douglas White’s 2019 UK/Iranian/German documentary A MOON FOR MY FATHER (85 min, DCP Digital) is on Thursday at 7pm, with Akbari in person. Free admission.
Chicago Filmmakers (5720 N. Ridge Ave.) screens Bridgette Auger and Itab Azzam’s 2018 Lebanese/UK documentary WE ARE NOT PRINCESSES (74 min, Digital Projection) on Saturday at 7pm.
Cafe Mustache (2313 N. Milwaukee Ave.) hosts a screening of Hawk Martha’s 2020 experimental collage film MEANT SO MUCH TO ME (Unconfirmed Running Time and Format) on Thursday at 8pm. Free admission.
Cinema 53 (at the Harper Theater, 5238 S. Harper Ave.) screens Adam Mazo and Ben Pender-Cudlip’s 2018 documentary DAWNLAND (86 min, Digital Projection) on Thursday at 7pm. With series curator and U of C professor Eve Ewing and American Indian Center Executive Director Heather Miller in conversation after the screening. Free admission.
The Beverly Arts Center screens Ian Fitzgibbon’s 2019 Irish film DARK LIES THE ISLAND (87 min, Digital Projection) on Wednesday at 7:30pm.
Sentieri Italiani (3712 N. Broadway Ave.) screens Luca Miniero’s 2018 Italian film SONO TORNATO [I’m Back] (100 min, Video Projection) on Saturday at 4pm.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Mark Bozek's 2018 documentary THE TIMES OF BILL CUNNINGHAM (74 min, DCP Digital) begins a two-week run. Bozek and former model and fashion advocate Bethann Hardison in person following the 6:15pm Friday (February 28) screening; Pawel Pawlikowski's 2004 UK film MY SUMMER OF LOVE (86 min, 35mm) is on Friday at 6:15pm, Saturday at 4:15pm, and Wednesday at 8pm; and Navid Mahmoudi's 2019 Iranian/Afghani film SEVEN AND A HALF (75 min, DCP Digital) is on Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 3:30pm.
Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week: Park Chan-wook’s 2005 South Korean film JOINT SECURITY AREA (110 min, DCP Digital) is on Sunday at 7pm; John Landis’ 1980 film THE BLUES BROTHERS (133 min, 35mm) is on Monday at 7pm; and Gregory Nava’s 1997 film SELENA (127 min, 35mm) is on Tuesday at 7pm.
Also at the Music Box Theatre this week: Céline Sciamma’s 2019 French film PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE (121 min, DCP Digital) and Jan Komasa’s 2019 Polish film CORPUS CHRISTI (115 min, DCP Digital) both continue; Roger Vadim’s 1968 film BARBARELLA (98 min, DCP Digital) is on Tuesday at 7pm, hosted by Dwight Cleveland, author of Cinema on Paper: The Graphic Genius of Movie Posters; Frank Oz’s 1986 film LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (94 min, 35mm) is on Monday at 7pm; Ken Kwapis’ 1985 film FOLLOW THAT BIRD (88 min, 35mm) is on Saturday and Sunday at 11:30am; and Haruka Fujita’s 2019 animated Japanese film VIOLET EVERGARDEN: ETERNITY AND THE AUTO MEMORY DOLL (90 min, DCP Digital; Subtitled Japanese-language version) is on Saturday and Sunday at 11:30am.
Facets Cinémathèque screens Karim Aïnouz's 2019 Brazilian/German film INVISIBLE LIFE (139 min, DCP Digital) and Onur Tukel's 2017 film THE MISOGYNISTS (85 min, Video Projection) for week-long runs.
CINE-LIST: February 28 - March 5, 2020
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs, Kyle A. Westphal
CONTRIBUTORS // Cody Corrall, Kyle Cubr, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jason Halprin, Dmitry Samarov, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Brian Welesko