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!
🇪🇺 CHICAGO EUROPEAN UNION FILM FESTIVAL
The 25th Annual Chicago European Union Film Festival begins this week at the Gene Siskel Film Center and runs through March 17. We have reviews of select films below; in addition to these, Hannah Bergholm’s 2022 Finnish body horror film HATCHING (86 min, DCP Digital) screens on Saturday at 8:15pm and Mina Mileva and Vesela Kazakova’s 2020 Bulgarian film WOMEN DO CRY (107 min, DCP Digital) screens on Sunday at 1pm. More info on all screenings here.
Xavier Giannoli’s LOST ILLUSIONS (France/Belgium)
Friday, 7pm
One reason why Honoré de Balzac was a great writer is that he described almost all characters in a way that readers across time and place can recognize the behavior in people they’ve met. Not for nothing did Balzac name his career-long project, an encyclopedic study of French society in the first half of the 19th century, The Human Comedy; his ultimate concern was humanity as a whole. Unfortunately, the universal nature of Balzac’s wisdom is difficult to translate to cinema, as the seventh art thrives in specific sights and sounds. This may explain why there are few major film adaptations of Balzac despite the writer's prodigious output of nearly 100 novels and novellas. Xavier Giannoli’s LOST ILLUSIONS is about as good as one could expect from a straightforward Balzac film adaptation. It successfully captures the flavor of the book (one of the author’s most important individual works), re-creating its sociological perspective, cynicism, eroticism, and conservative humor; but Giannoli and his able cast and crew can only hint at the scope and intricacy of Balzac’s novel, which charts the rise and fall of a young writer from southwestern France who goes to Paris in search of fame and fortune. In some of the most compelling scenes, Giannoli simply has a narrator deliver Balzac’s witty, incisive prose in voiceover while the images illustrate what’s being said. These opulent moments get at the book’s portrait of Parisian literary society as a complex network of friendships, pseudo-friendships, rivalries, and sham rivalries—a network in which every public gesture has potentially drastic repercussions. Given this environment, most of the characters are pathologically self-aware, and this provides an opportunity for the actors in any adaptation of Lost Illusions to really George Sanders it up with acidic, blasé performances. Playing two of the hero's enemies, Xavier Dolan and Jeanne Balibar work the best in Sanders mode, while Cecile de France and Salomé Dewaels deliver effective turns as the hero’s naive lovers. Indeed, Giannoli’s LOST ILLUSIONS is basically an actors’ showcase, which isn’t a bad way to represent Balzac’s character-driven writing. Yet the more precise the characterizations get, the more the movie veers from Balzac’s theme of how all creative institutions (if not all creative types) are susceptible to corruption by money and social influence. Still, this Masterpiece Theater-style digest of great literature is exceedingly lively and sexy. (2021, 150 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Jonas Bak’s WOOD AND WATER (Germany/France/Hong Kong)
Saturday, 5:15pm
Anke (Anke Bak) has just retired from her job at her local church and calls her daughter (Theresa Bak) to share the news and ask if they can meet at the summer home on the Baltic Sea they used to occupy to celebrate. Her son Max says he will try to fly in from his home in Hong Kong to attend, but after yet another year as a no-show, Anke decides to visit him instead. He isn’t at his apartment when she arrives, so she spends the night sharing a room with two young women in a hostel and then becomes friendly with the doorman (Patrick Lo), who let her into her son’s apartment. As the cast list reveals, WOOD AND WATER is a family affair for first-time feature director and screenwriter Jonas Bak, and like families everywhere, the Baks’ deeper relationships remain opaque when seen from the outside. Wood and water, the two elements a fortune teller (Edward Chan) tells Anke are necessary to her health and happiness, are much more revealing of what Bak feels is important. His gorgeous, lingering images of the Baltic Sea, the Black Forest where Anke lives, and the giant, concrete buildings that form the “woodland” of Hong Kong overwhelm the flimsy plot he has constructed. While we ponder the protests in the streets of Hong Kong against the changes to come under mainland Chinese rule and wonder where the heck Max is, Bak seems to be saying that our urgent, individual concerns hold little sway over history and our elemental world. (2021, 79 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Laura Wandel’s PLAYGROUND (Belgium)
Sunday, 6pm
In its most idealized version, childhood is a time of Elysian innocence, freedom from responsibility and inhibition, and unfettered permission to wonder. Of course, the reality is far more complex. Plenty of books and films have sought to represent just how painful and isolating childhood can actually be; PLAYGROUND is notable for how it depicts a state of early-life unrest primarily through audiovisual means. Across 72 terse minutes, Laura Wandel and cinematographer Frédéric Noirhomme film at child’s-eye level in tight, shallow-focus shots that never stray from seven-year-old Nora (the cherubic Maya Vanderbeque, a complete natural). The tremulous girl has just begun school, and she's initially seen in tears, clinging to her older brother Abel (Günter Duret) before the start of her first day, her distraught face lingering in screen-filling closeup. PLAYGROUND rigorously maintains this intimate physical proximity, orbiting Nora first as she struggles to acclimate to her new surroundings, and then as she grapples with how to act on the increasingly cruel bullying faced by her brother. With the exception of the kids’ father and one caring instructor, Wandel mostly keeps the adults out of view, rendering teachers and staff as an abstracted, unaccountable excess that manifests in the nagging chorus of verbal orders emanating from offscreen. While certain elements of PLAYGROUND recall the unsentimental realism of the Dardennes or Maurice Pialat, it’s the film’s intensely circumscribed subjective focus that makes it feel closest in aesthetic kin to László Nemes' SON OF SAUL (2015). In this claustrophobic sensory regime, Wandel adumbrates some of the ways in which the school ecosystem and its structures of authority foster prohibitions and dysfunctions for kids, rather than possibilities. Instead of becoming a tract on institutional failings, however, PLAYGROUND keeps itself grounded in Nora's modest but urgent emotional world, reminding us that the struggles of children are not necessarily simple ones and that they deserve our every attention. (2021, 72 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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Eugen Jebeleanu’s POPPY FIELD (Romania)
Monday, 8:15pm
There seems to have been an explosion over the past half-decade of international queer cinema that's hyper-focused on the particulars of culture. As opposed to the Rainbow Capitalism that's been strangling queer cinema in the US, many of these pictures have looked inward at what makes queerness a non-starter for assimilation—at least for the time being. Films dealing with the struggle of being in the closet will always exist; it's just that at this point (at least in America, and possibly the West as a whole), they've become trite. So, to see a movie like POPPY FIELD, which handles the subject in a way that transcends common tropes, is incredibly refreshing. Cristi is a Romanian gendarme who, according to his brash sister, is going through a “gay phase.” We see him with his long-distance lover Hadi, a French Muslim, having a playful breakfast, simply enjoying each other’s company. In the middle of this visit, Cristi is called to help calm a riotous protest at a movie theatre. It turns out that a group of nationalist Orthodox Christians have entered a screening of a “lesbian film” and are preventing the movie from being shown. As the situation escalates, Cristi finds himself face-to-face with a former lover who threatens to out him to his co-workers. In a rash move of self-protection and hatred, Cristi attacks the man, which only aggravates the situation and puts him in an even more precarious position. What POPPY FIELD does better than many films about the Closet is that it gives the situation a level of stakes beyond personal loss. A full riot may occur because of Cristi’s sexuality—because of his temper, his fear. The balance between his hyper-masculine position as a gendarme and what is perceived as his anti-masculine love of other men carry real weight. Eugen Jebeleanu understands better than most that the Closet is a purgatory. It is a place where people exist who have yet to experience their freedom or their punishment. It is a void that depletes the soul while protecting the flesh. After Cristi attacks the man who identifies him as gay, he’s sequestered in the cinema auditorium while his colleagues attempt to quell the problem he's raised. This physical purgatory only heightens Cristi's existential and a spiritual imprisonment. From this point, the film slows to a meditative pace, explores its ideas, and offers uncomfortable truths and realities—all while never dragging. POPPY FIELD doesn't break any new ground in the history of queer cinema, but it takes an old story and not only gives it a unique spin; it creates an uncomfortably beautiful portrait of what it means to be trapped in a purgatory created by the self and society. (2020, 82 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
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Tea Lindeburg’s AS IN HEAVEN (Denmark)
Wednesday, 6pm
It starts with a dream, like much of our lives. Dandelion wisps meld into clouds, and rainstorms bring a torrent of blood. Despite the surreal opening of Tea Lindeburg’s AS IN HEAVEN, the film on the whole is quite minimalistic. It follows a day in the life of a 14-year-old farm girl in the late 1800s. Lise is counting down the days until she leaves the family farm to go off to school. Her family feels differently, and the film introduces us to all the major members: Lise's supportive mother, who clearly loves her handful of children; her father, who does not want her to go but prefers to keep his wife happy; and a grandma whose main concerns are following the Lord’s will and sticking to the status quo. The film wastes no time in thrusting us into the various dynamics; we quickly move from scenes of breakfast to chores to babysitting the siblings. The storytelling can be jarring, but it's settled with me since my initial viewing. At times, AS IN HEAVEN feels like a transcendental film by Bresson or Ozu; at others, it feels like a modern, A24-distributed psychological horror. This combo might sound unholy to some, but I found it engaging and a nice reminder that art films don’t have to just be slow cinema or bust. The approach adds nicely to the central themes of religious predeterminism and oppressive gender roles. We should always push to break free from codes, whether it's in our art or our day-to-day lives. (2021, 85 min, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]
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Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes’ THE TSUGUA DIARIES (Portugal)
Thursday, 8pm
THE TSUGUA DIARIES is a thoughtful examination of pandemic lockdown: its repetitiveness and disruptions, the ways in which we keep ourselves preoccupied, and, perhaps most significantly, how we react to and make the best of an ever-changing situation. The film follows three friends (Crista Alfaiate, Carloto Cotta, and João Nunes Monteiro) as they while away the month of August. They work on house projects, play with animals, argue and flirt, and sometimes just laze about doing nothing whatsoever. THE TSUGUA DIARIES, however, presents the narrative in reverse order, starting with day 22 and moving to day one; the result is that married co-directors Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes create a self-aware and very personal cinematic experience, where fiction gradually bleeds into reality to illuminate the filmmaking process during the pandemic. As the film progresses, the curtain is pulled back to reveal a fully metatextual, at times humorous, contemplation on creativity. Gorgeously shot in 16mm, the film emphasizes the verdant colors of nature, blurring indoor and outdoor spaces. It also adds to the haziness of the summer-set film in which both the characters and audience are perplexed by unclear circumstances: the former dealing with the effects of the pandemic in real-time and the latter watching events both fictional and about the film itself unfold out of order. The backwards chronology is not just a gimmick in THE TSUGUA DIARIES, but an exploration of improvisation and a celebration of the resourcefulness and ingenuity of filmmaking at even the strangest of times. (2021, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
🔥 HIGHS AND LOWS AT THE MUSIC BOX
Ends Thursday! Oscarbate and Hollywood Entertainment present Highs and Lows at the Music Box Theatre. 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!). One admission admits you to both films. More info here.
Martin Scorsese’s THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (US) & Francis Ford Coppola’s PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED (US)
Saturday, 2pm
Those of us who are old enough can cast our minds back to 1988 and recall just how controversial was Martin Scorsese’s THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST. When not banned outright, the film—an intense, often exhilarating fictionalized life of Jesus based on Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1955 novel—was met with violence, boycotts, and protests on multiple continents from right-wing fundamentalists, who objected to the very notion of investigating the human side of Christ. The idea that he might have had human feelings, including sexual urges and fear of death, was an anathema to the bible thumpers. Angered by this thoughtless reaction, Lou Reed wrote a powerful song about the film, "Dime Store Mystery." "The duality of nature, godly nature, human nature, splits the soul," Lou sang of Christ, concluding, "I find it easy to believe that he might question his beliefs." In 1989, Lou’s New York album, which contained that song, was on heavy rotation in my freshman college dorm room, as was Peter Gabriel’s Passion, his beautiful and exciting soundtrack for LAST TEMPTATION. Scorsese had always wanted to film a life of Christ, not least because of his formative experiences with Biblical epics. Crucially, he burned to make a character study that would help viewers identify with the duality of Christ, who was at once fully divine and fully human. Barbara Hershey gave him the Kazantzakis novel in the early ‘70s, and he spent the next 15 years trying to mount a movie version; after an aborted start in 1983, he finally shot the film in 1987 in Morocco. In an empathetic performance, Willem Dafoe plays Jesus as a tortured Scorsese hero (literally, in this case), torn between the spirit and the flesh, confused about his calling, and human enough not to be above sin. Is he tormented by the voice of God—or is he schizophrenic? In the film as in the book, Christ’s last temptation—which, dreamlike, takes up the last 35 minutes of the film—is to come down from the cross and live the life of an ordinary mortal man: to have a family with Mary Magdalene (Hershey), whom he loved, to grow old and die. As Scorsese was at pains to point out, the film is not a version of the Gospels. Still, it includes key scenes from them: Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist (Andre Gregory); the wilderness temptations; the Sermon on the Mount and the gathering of disciples; the raising of Lazarus, who is later murdered by a pre-conversion Saul (Harry Dean Stanton). The Passion Week events are here, including the casting of the money changers out of the temple and the judgment of Pontius Pilate (David Bowie). As deeply serious a work as this is, its tone can be comic (you can tell Scorsese had seen LIFE OF BRIAN), albeit sometimes unintentionally. Elsewhere, the tone is feverish, nervous. I find the film compulsively watchable and moving, hypnotic, intoxicating even, and strangely shaped. It never drags despite its two-hour-and-44-minute running time. That has to do with the energy of Scorsese’s moving camera, his innovative approach to point of view, and Thelma Schoonmaker'ssublime editing, so key to the film’s propulsive rhythm and poetry. The vivid images of bravura cinematographer Michael Ballhaus are in dialogue with the history of religious art. LAST TEMPTATION made the struggle with inner conflict and growth, with faith and doubt, into something urgent for me, a doubter raised Methodist. Here is a Christ to understand our suffering, not a “flesh-colored Christ that glows in the dark,” if I may paraphrase the poet. Scorsese decided to jettison the period language and have his characters speak largely in naturalistic American English. Paul Schrader is the credited screenwriter; what appears onscreen represents substantial uncredited rewrites by Scorsese and Jay Cocks, who refashioned the dialogue in terms of what they felt they themselves would say. It works for me. In fact, Harvey Keitel’s Brooklyn-accented Judas is one of my favorite Harvey performances. The essence of the vision, as Scorsese says, was to do “Jesus on Eight Avenue.” How do you make the message of Christianity work out on the street? The message is love, but how do you actually live it out, live with forgiveness and compassion? How does one go about loving one’s enemy? Seeing the film again made these questions feel personal and alive for me. After all, I struggle with feelings of hatred for the people I regard as my enemies every day. Scorsese hoped to make viewers feel the magnitude of Christ’s sacrifice, the agonizing nature of his decision, the selflessness of his shouldering of responsibility. He made a living, pulsing, flawed work of art that attempts to do nothing less than wrestle with the mystery of life. LAST TEMPTATION is about the struggle to find God, but that can be a metaphor for any spiritual change or personal evolution through which a person must go. Perhaps the line that moves me the most is when Jesus confides to Judas how ashamed he is when he thinks of all the mistakes he’s made—“of all the wrong ways I looked for God.” Such a line speaks to the journey all of us are on. (1988, 164 min, 35mm) [Scott Pfeiffer]
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PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED is a familiar film from both a contemporary perspective and from a 1986 perspective, as it came out amidst a trend of similarly themed movies (such as the 1985 blockbuster BACK TO THE FUTURE); it’s also part of a larger '80s cultural fascination with revisiting mid-century America. At the start of the film, Peggy (Kathleen Turner) is attending her 25th high school reunion with her daughter instead of her philandering husband Charlie (Nicolas Cage), once her childhood sweetheart. She faints when the pressure of the event becomes too much, then wakes up twenty-five years younger, back in high school with a chance to do things differently. The plot successfully balances lightheartedness with dark melancholy about regret and longing; the most emotional moments of PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED are driven by the heroine's interactions with those she’s lost over the years, especially her grandparents. While there are obvious jokes about “look how times have changed!”, the film is more about change—and constancy—on a personal scale. It's held together by Turner’s playful and sincere performance as Peggy, who exhibits self-awareness and determination from the beginning. The supporting cast includes, among many recognizable faces, Joan Allen, Jim Carrey, and Helen Hunt. Standing out, unsurprisingly, is Cage, whose acting choices as teenage Charlie are wholly wild, not least is the squeaky voice he uses throughout; while his performance infamously prompted pushback from production and fellow actors alike, it somehow totally works. (1986, 103 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]
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Peter Farrelly's DUMB AND DUMBER (US)
Sunday, 2pm
A happy couple walks through the snow together. The woman playfully throws a bit of snow at the man. The man's face drops and becomes stern. He hard-packs a snowball. The woman smiles: unaware, adoring, joyful. The man whips a snowball directly into her face. This is a great moment in the history of cinema. It's primal, perfect, crystalline. The music, the performance, the camera, and the editing all work in harmony. It's as graceful as Fred Astaire's "Drum Crazy" performance in EASTER PARADE. It's as forceful as the sequence on the Odessa Steps. Also, right before this scene, Jeff Daniels puts the carrot and two lumps of coal as a snowman's dick and balls instead of his nose and eyes. (1994, 107 min, 35mm) [JB Mabe]
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Screening after Alfonso Cuarón's Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN (2001, 106 min, 35mm).
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Luís Buñuel’s THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTY (France) and Tamra Davis’ BILLY MADISON (US)
Tuesday, 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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Věra Chytilová's DAISIES (Czech)
Thursday, 7pm
Věra Chytilová's films have earned her acolytes and enemies at an equal rate—particularly DAISIES, an anarchic, poetic, visually exhilarating film lacking in any affirmation whatsoever. In more recent years, it has cemented Chytilová's stature as an avant-garde genius, a feminist icon, and a major influence behind films such as CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING and MULHOLLAND DRIVE. In the period immediately following its release, Chytilová was marked as both a dangerous dissident (by the Czechoslovak government, who unofficially blacklisted her) and a political traitor to the Left (by Godard, who made her the central figure of his anti-Soviet/Czechoslovak documentary PRAVDA). During one of the first screenings of her work in France, audience members walked out, complaining that "they shouldn't make that kind of film. It undermines people's faith in socialism. If that is the way it really is, then none of it is worth it at all." DAISIES leads with exactly this kind of "objectionable" nihilism, opening with the two protagonists deciding that "the world is spoiled; we'll be spoiled, too." These two teenage girls, both named Marie, spend the rest of the film on a hedonistic rampage of consumption and destruction, in no particular order, culminating in a banquet scene that merges both tendencies to an apocalyptic conclusion. Marie and Marie do everything that decent women shouldn't (cheat, steal, make messes, advertise casual sex without following through, overeat, etc)—and care about precisely nothing. They speak in nonsensical, non sequitur dialogue that seems like it could have been randomly generated ("Why say 'I love you?' Why not just 'an egg?'"), but was actually carefully curated by Chytilová to serve as "the guardian of meaning" for her "philosophical documentary." During production, the only thing that she insisted remained untouched was the original script; everything else was up for grabs. Her production team took full advantage of this freedom in depicting the Maries' nihilistic spree, resulting in a surreal and stunning display of meaningless excess at every turn. Most notably, Jaroslav Kucera, the film's cinematographer (and Chytilová's husband), shot the film as one of his famous "colour experiments," and Ester Krumbachová, the film's costumer, styled the Maries in trendy mod bikinis and minidresses as often as elaborate sculptural outfits made from newspaper and loose wires. (1966, 74 min, DCP Digital) [Anne Orchier]
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Screening before Jesse Dylan’s 2001 stoner classic HOW HIGH (93 min, DCP Digital).
📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
John Ford’s AIR MAIL (US)
Chicago Film Society at Northeastern Illinois University (The Auditorium, Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) – Wednesday, 7:30pm
Given John Ford’s penchant for understatement, it may come as a surprise that he was a great admirer of F.W. Murnau, one of the cinema’s supreme baroque stylists. And yet Ford was so impressed by the German Expressionist that he sometimes went out of his way to make films that directly acknowledge Murnau’s influence, uncharacteristic works like THE INFORMER (1935) and THE FUGITIVE (1947). With the early Talkie AIR MAIL, Ford collaborated with the innovative cinematographer Karl Freund, who not only shot multiple films for Murnau, but also Carl Th. Dreyer’s MICHAEL (1924) and Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS (1927). Perhaps Ford suspected that this would be the only time he’d get to work with Freund, because the film exploits his talents to the utmost. The evocative chiaroscuro effects and ambitious camera movements commonly associated with the silent German masterpieces Freund shot are all over AIR MAIL; the film takes place in a heightened reality that often suggests science fiction. The lighting and camera effects are foregrounded by the lightweight, episodic plot, which recounts a few crisis-filled weeks for a team of air mail pilots stationed at a Rocky Mountain outpost. In both themes and dramatic content, the film feels like a dry run for Howard Hawks’ ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS (1939), with Ralph Bellamy in the Cary Grant part. Hawks’ film is by far superior—it has a more pronounced sense of danger, and it really digs into the philosophical implications of what it means to risk your life for a living—but that’s not to slight Ford’s achievement. AIR MAIL has got to be one of the most technically marvelous things he ever made, showcasing pioneering special effects in addition to Freund’s dynamic cinematography. The film was produced by Carl Laemmle Jr. during his remarkable eight-year period as Universal Pictures’ Executive in Charge of Production. The movies he supervised spared no expense in the service of artistic effect, and many of them, AIR MAIL included, display the glory of overspending in virtually every shot. Laemmle Jr.’s love of art-making nearly bankrupted the studio; his departure from Universal was not voluntary. AIR MAIL serves, among other things, as a valuable record of his vision of an ornately beautiful popular cinema. Preceded by the 1956 Encyclopedia Britannica Films short OUR POST OFFICE (10 min, 16mm). (1932, 84 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Sam Peckinpah's PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID (US)
South Side Projections and the Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm [Free Admission]
Sam Peckinpah had made elegiac westerns before PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID, notably RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY (1962) and THE WILD BUNCH (1969); these films centered on aging bandits and lawmen who had "outlived their lives by far" as the mythological Old West around them was rapidly fading. But the director's last true western focuses on the youthful title outlaw who, as embodied by outlaw-country singer Kris Kristofferson, is just one of the ways the movie flirts with the counterculture of its time and thus embodies the New Hollywood movement of the early '70s (despite the fact that Peckinpah was old enough to be the father of most directors of the "film school generation"). The film also features a crack script by Rudy Wurlitzer—then best-known as the author of the Pynchon-approved experimental novel Nog and the original screenplay for Monte Hellman's TWO-LANE BLACKTOP—and a superb guitar-driven score by Bob Dylan, who additionally plays the supporting role of "Alias," a mysterious knife-throwing expert and member of Billy's gang. While Dylan's acting seems stiff and awkward, his music, including the original song "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" (written for a moving scene involving Slim Pickens and Katy Jurado), remains one of the very best things about the film. The spirit of Dylan's work seems to have infused other aspects of the movie as well, such as the sly moment where Wurlitzer mashes up two of the bard's best-known lyrics by having Billy ask Pat Garrett (James Coburn) "How does it feel?," to which Garrett responds, "It feels like times have changed." That exchange refers to Garrett's having sold out to the corporate, politically corrupt "Santa Fe Ring," and Billy's betrayal by his former friend (reminiscent of the relationship dynamic between William Holden and Robert Ryan in THE WILD BUNCH) is what gives PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID its surprisingly resonant emotional core. Peckinpah's tragic vision of former friends on opposite sides of the law (with the ironic twist that the one who lives outside the law is the more honest) is highlighted by the two brilliantly edited sequences that bookend the film. It opens with shots of Billy using chickens for target practice that are daringly intercut with shots that flash-forward to Garrett's murder decades later. It ends with Billy's assassination, filmed in the director's famed "balletic" slow-motion, during which Garrett fires two shots—one into Billy's chest and another into his own reflection in a wardrobe mirror. The original theatrical release was a version taken away from Peckinpah in post-production and brutally re-cut by MGM executives; it was understandably a critical and commercial failure. Seen here, in the director's original "preview version," it's a masterpiece. Followed by a discussion with UChicago Department of Music professor Steven Rings, who’s working on a book about Dylan, and Department of Cinema and Media Studies professor James Lastra. (1973, 123 min, 35mm) [Michael Glover Smith]
Marguerite Duras’ LE NAVIRE NIGHT (France)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Sunday, 7pm
In LE NAVIRE NIGHT, Marguerite Duras builds on the formal concerns of LE CAMION, which she wrote and directed two years earlier. That film reached an extreme of cinematic minimalism by showing Duras and Gérard Depardieu discussing a hypothetical movie in lieu of showing a “real” one, with only depopulated landscape shots to break up the cerebral conversation. LE NAVIRE NIGHT (which means “The Ship Night”) also contains plenty of depopulated landscape shots, but the relationship between the film’s images and dialogue—as well as the relationship between the hypothetical and the genuine—is more complex. On the soundtrack, Duras and filmmaker Benoît Jacquot (who had served as assistant director on Duras’ INDIA SONG) take turns telling a story about two strangers (one male, one female) in present-day Paris who connect via an out-of-use telephone line that had been installed by the occupying German forces during World War II. The strangers share intimate secrets and form a close bond, yet they never meet in person; to underscore that the relationship exists mainly in the participants’ imaginations, Duras presents not only shots of uninhabited parks, streets, and buildings, but also scenes of the actors Bulle Ogier, Dominique Sanda, and Matthieu Carrière getting ready to make a nonexistent film. These latter sequences trade in banal, behind-the-scenes details that rarely make it into finished films (e.g., lighting rigs, make-up artists at work), effectively de-romanticizing the art form at hand. Alternately, many of the people-less shots feature seductive camera movements that suggest the rich emotions of characters who are not actually present. The ghostly dynamism of these shots, which bring movement to the frozen beauty of architecture, affirms Duras’ affinity with Alain Resnais; so too does LE NAVIRE NIGHT’s pronounced morbidity. It isn’t that far into the film when Duras reveals that one of the main characters has been living with leukemia for about a decade. This information inflects everything that follows, which makes watching LE NAVIRE NIGHT feel a bit like taking a ride down the River Styx. (1979, 90 min, 16mm) [Ben Sachs]
Peggy Ahwesh: Recent Installations (US/Experimental)
Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) – Thursday, 7pm [Free Admission]
There are few living avant-garde filmmakers as influential or as hard to pin down as Peggy Ahwesh. Beginning her career with Super 8 films that often feel like home movies or direct-cinema documentaries, Ahwesh has changed both materials and thematic foci several times over the course of her career, always taking new approaches to the concerns of the day. Lately, Ahwesh’s themes and forms are rooted in modern digital technology, an interest that began with arguably her most famous film, SHE PUPPET (2001), created entirely with gameplay footage of the Tomb Raider games. These days, Ahwesh seems concerned primarily with how technology mediates our understanding of the world and ourselves, particularly when cultural borders are felt less personally while physical ones are enforced more harshly. This is the common thread between the installation films Ahwesh will be showing and discussing at her upcoming artist talk at the Logan Center for the Arts. || Land borders in particular are the main focus of the first film on the program, BORDER CONTROL (2019). Refashioning footage she took of the original 8 slabs created as prototypes for Trump’s border wall near San Diego, Ahwesh mirrors and overlaps the slabs, creating a kaleidoscope of concrete that ultimately has no “here” or “there,” just an endless eternity of hard material. This approach is visually complimented in the other 2019 film on the program, KANSAS ATLAS, which uses dual channel video to mirror and juxtapose drone footage of a small Kansas town’s flat features, allowing fields to bounce off each other into an eternal flatness. The narrator of KANSAS ATLAS could easily describe both films when she poetically intones that "the line of the horizon both joins and disjoins era and sky. It is at once a closure of space and a flight into infinity. When you get to the place where the sky and earth touch, in the history of the sky it will be written that you punctured a gap between the star-laden firmament and the earth." Though the Trumpist specifics of BORDER WALL are clear, Ahwesh also seems to be stating that borders themselves are made to be transcended, and that the true sublime is to be found only in the infinitesimal space between them. || Ahwesh’s FALLING SKY (2018) and THE BLACKEST SEA (2016) will be on view as well, two films previously shown side by side in installations. Both films are constructed from found footage taken from Taiwanese news networks who often animate their news with absurd 3D clips re-enacting the days’ stories. Each film works as a highlight reel of the index of human suffering, FALLING SKY depicting calamities of the air (or “in the air” as it were, i.e. random homicides) and BLACKEST SEA covering more sea-based terrors. While these montages don’t make the clips seem less silly per se, they highlight our morbid fascination with death and destruction, and the way the two are de-fanged in media to make the horrors of the world more digestible. Taken altogether, the series is a distinctly contemporary treatise on the ways technology can distort our world for better or worse, sharpened by Ahwesh’s ever-searching eye for the uncanny in the everyday. Filmmaker in attendance for a post-screening Q&A. (2016-2019, approx. 38 min, Digital Projection) [Maxwell Courtright]
Richard Benjamin’s MERMAIDS (US)
Music Box Theatre – Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am
MERMAIDS is narrated by teenaged Charlotte Flax (Winona Ryder) as she, her swimming-obsessed little sister, Kate (Christina Ricci), and their flashy single mother, Rachel (Cher), attempt to start a new in a quiet New England town in the early 1960s. Cher and Ryder portray Rachel and Charlotte’s relationship as fraught yet believably grounded; Ricci’s Kate is the glue that holds the family together, and her faultlessness is one of the few things on which Rachel and Charlotte can agree. Rachel (whom Charlotte contemptuously refers to as “Mrs. Flax”) has a pattern of up and moving anytime she goes through a breakup, and they’ve relocated a lot over the years. In rebellion against her freewheeling mother, Charlotte has turned to a fixation with Catholicism, specifically with saints and ideas of chastity; she's challenged in her faith by her burgeoning interest in sex, spurred by the presence of Joe (Michael Schoeffling), the handsome 26-year-old caretaker of the convent next door to her new home. When Rachel begins to get seriously involved shoe store owner Lou (a charming Bob Hoskins) it seems like the Flax family might have finally found some stability, but their tumultuous relationships with each other and the men in their lives puts this at risk. MERMAIDS is often surprisingly intense in its depictions of adolescence and mother-daughter relationships. Charlotte’s defiant actions against Rachel, whom she believes is failing as a mother, are at times authentically distressing; this is especially demonstrated when she runs away and is taken in by a typical suburban family, to whom she lies about her picture-perfect homelife. The film doesn’t shy away from examining the complicated aspects of Charlotte discovering her sexuality, both as she’s genuinely interested in it and forcefully uses her religious obsession to safeguard herself from what she sees as ending up like Rachel. While Charlotte and Rachel are characters that feel fully realized, the film never fully illuminates implied larger themes about female sexuality. Though it doesn't explore every nuance it suggests, MERMAIDS balances its darker moments with sincerely lovely ones—these are usually surrounding Hoskin’s Lou, whose genuine kindness towards Rachel and her two girls provide some of the film’s sweetest scenes. (1990, 110 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Rene Lichtman, Peter Gessner, and Stewart Bird's FINALLY GOT THE NEWS (US/Documentary)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Monday, 7pm
The backstory of FINALLY GOT THE NEWS is part of 1960s counterculture legend: white filmmakers at the radical Newsreel collective sent a team to Detroit to make a film about the League of Revolutionary Black Workers’ wildcat protests at Detroit’s automotive plants in 1968. This nascent Detroit Newsreel fell apart, and the League commandeered the filmmaking equipment, arguing that if Newsreel was unable to make a film that represented the League’s actions as they wanted them represented, they had lost the right to the equipment. Talk about seizing the means of production! The League invited former Newsreel members to stick around and help make the film, and Stewart Bird, Rene Lichtman and Peter Gessner agreed. (They're usually credited as the directors of the film, but that seems a bit mendacious given what actually happened.) What we see is what the League wanted us to see, sometimes over the objections of the "professionals," assisted by Newsreel members who knew how to operate the cameras. It’s a unique film in that it’s the only radical film of the period that was made by revolutionary Black workers, but its historical value is far from the only reason to see it. It sets itself apart as something different from its opening scene, a wordless photo montage that connects the history of slavery in the United States to the then-current lack of Black workers in the UAW. From there, the film loosely follows the lead-up to and aftermath of a union election at a Dodge plant, interspersed with interviews with League members who address the camera directly, explaining what emerges as a concrete strategy for revolutionary action. It also touches on efforts to build interracial alliances among workers, police brutality, and community organizing, but the real strength of the film is in those first-person interviews, the most literal outcome of the League’s decision to seize the cameras and make the film they felt needed to be made. The League never made another film, and is long gone itself, but this unique film allows its message to live on. Screening as part of Doc’s Monday night series: Which Side Are You On? Labor and Collection Action On Film. (1970, 55 min, Digital Projection) [Michael W. Phillips Jr.]
Spike Lee's MO' BETTER BLUES (US)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Tuesday, 7pm
Ironically the Spike Lee films most typically described as minor (e.g., CROOKLYN, GIRL 6, SHE HATE ME, RED HOOK SUMMER) tend to be the most overstuffed, the ones in which Lee tries to pack in too many visual ideas and thematic concerns for one movie. These are the films built on “thin” premises; they “don’t hang together” like conventional narrative movies do. I’d argue that these are some of Lee’s most characteristic works, and that they speak to why he’s such a valuable film artist. Like his colleague Jim Jarmusch, Lee is one of the only genuine poets in contemporary American cinema; his movies represent a sort-of free verse in which the filmmaker draws on his feelings about a range of subjects to create snapshots of the world as it exists at the moment the movie was made. MO’ BETTER BLUES, probably the best of Lee’s “minor” films, finds the director thinking about the cultural legacy of jazz, the economics of being a working artist, sexual politics circa 1990, sports, and his own position as a Black American filmmaker. The way Lee riffs on these subjects—exploring them more directly here, keeping them in the background there—suggests the influence of jazz and an affinity with Jean-Luc Godard, who’s always structured his movies in a similar fashion. Lee creates a conduit for his various concerns in the protagonist of Bleek Gilliam (Denzel Washington, in the first of his collaborations with Lee), an openly polyamorous trumpet player who lives in Brooklyn and leads a moderately successful jazz quintet. Bleek considers himself independent as an artist and in his sexual life; nothing can tie him down. Yet one of his lovers, Indigo (Joie Lee), hints at wanting more of a commitment; his manager, Giant (Spike Lee), is a ne’er-do-well friend who can’t do his job well; and his saxophone player, Shadow (Wesley Snipes), wants to break away and start his own band, forcing Bleek to take more of a heavy hand in managing the group. Lee rotates through the various subplots as he does the themes, connecting them all with brilliant camerawork and colorful visual design that sometimes recalls the paintings of the Harlem Renaissance. This was the fourth of Lee’s six collaborations with cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, and it shows the two at the height of their partnership: Dickerson gets to exploit his love of 40s and 50s musicals in his swooping movements (there are crane shots in MO’ BETTER BLUES that rival Minnelli’s) and try out new ideas. It’s the first movie where Lee employed his trademark move where the actors appear to be floating, a technique he’s used since to express everything from elation to dread. The movie would be crucial viewing for that reason alone. Screening as part of Doc’s Tuesday night series Nights of the Swingers! Jazz in Film. (1990, 130 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Kathryn Bigelow’s POINT BREAK (US)
Music Box Theatre – Friday and Saturday, Midnight
There was a point in my life where I was completely obsessed with this film. For years, I would evangelize the good word of POINT BREAK to all who would listen—and sometimes to those who wouldn't as well. One of my old bands used a Patrick Swayze sample from this movie to open one of our tracks. A co-bandmate of mine even made it on to NPR by fact-checking an inaccuracy about the movie Robert Siegel made on All Things Considered, something they attributed to the number of times I had made them watch this film. I even drove 12 hours round trip to catch a production of the hilarious theatrical send-up Point Break Live! So, to say that I think this a great movie would be a severe understatement. Even today, it seems ridiculous to most people to hear about the genius of POINT BREAK. To them, it's a dumb ‘90s action movie about bank-robbing surfer dudes and a couple of buddy cops—one an old loose cannon, the other an uptight, fresh-faced new guy—playing a good old-fashioned game of cops and robbers. There are shootouts, surfing, even skydiving. (The final DVD release of this movie was dubbed “The Pure Adrenaline Edition.”) It seems like a dumb movie for dumb people. And here's the trick: it is, but also it isn't. POINT BREAK is actually two films happening at the same time. Keanu Reeves plays Johnny Utah, a federal agent assigned to LA to track down a gang of bank robbers lead by surfer guru Patrick Swayze. With the aid of his crackpot supervisor Gary Busey, Reeves goes undercover to infiltrate the gang, but ends up developing a sense of camaraderie with them. This seems like a by-the-numbers conceit, but if you squint oh so slightly, a whole other film appears. Bigelow tosses aside the traditional male gaze of the action film and replaces it with an equally sexualized female gaze that turns this tough-guy action flick into the queerest himbo will-they-or-won't-they romance ever made by a major Hollywood studio. Until she became the first woman to win the Best Director Oscar for THE HURT LOCKER, Kathryn Bigelow was never taken very seriously by the greater public. It took her breaking away from genre subversion and turning to more straightforward storytelling in order to be taken seriously. Suddenly, it seemed like everyone looked back at her work and thought, “Oh my, maybe what she was doing was tongue-in-cheek the whole time!” (As if her music video for New Order that looks exactly like a bad Mötley Crüe video wasn't blatant enough.) Suddenly, the mainstream was catching up and saying, “Maybe NEAR DARK wasn't just a dumb vampire movie, but a movie about chosen family and patriarchy.” It's almost insulting. Actually, it’s completely insulting. POINT BREAK is the kind of action film you get when it's made by someone who studied under Sylvère Lotringer, Susan Sontag, Edward Said, and Andrew Sarris. This is a director who understands symbols and semiotics but also Hollywood pageantry. Bigelow asks, “Instead of having the undercover cop get in too deep with his role, what if he got in too deep with his love?” This isn't the muy macho no homo bromance we're used to, but an almost Shakespearean love story about two men from different cultures who can never be together. Yes, it's an infinitely quotable action movie (“Utah! Gimme two!) that’s also so relentlessly queer that it's almost astonishing. And the best part is, you get to choose which of the two films you'd like to watch. They're both there. Turn your brain off and the volume up if you want and watch what is quite possibly the greatest chase scene ever shot. Or go reach for that post-structuralist lens and get your queering female gaze full of himbo tragedy. POINT BREAK offers all things to all people at all times. If you want the ultimate, you've got to be willing to pay the ultimate price, which in this case is simply the low price of admission. (1991, 122 min, 35mm) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
Guy Maddin's THE FORBIDDEN ROOM (Canada)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Wednesday, 7pm
A woodsman mysteriously appears aboard a submarine that hasn't surfaced for months and whose crew is on the brink of perishing due to lack of oxygen and an unstable cargo: such is the story of THE FORBIDDEN ROOM. Guy Maddin's penchant for nonlinear storytelling and the bizarre is on full display; the narrative jumps from an instructional video on how to take a bath to a song about a man who's obsessed with women's derrieres to the importance of a father's mustache to his family. It is a blending of surrealism à la David Lynch's ERASERHEAD or MULHOLLAND DRIVE and early German expressionism favorites like NOSFERATU or THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI. Maddin's imagery is striking, vibrant, and fluid; some scenes are heavily stylized while others prefer a soft 16mm feel, complete with scratches and other imperfections. Faces shift and melt into one another giving the film a dreamlike quality that lends itself to the film's psychedelic undertones. Intertitles have long been in the director's repertoire and he uses them in lieu of dialogue or to further emphasize the strange actions shown on screen--the words are just as alive as the cryptic images themselves. As much as Maddin's visual style is a pastiche, so too are his familiar themes and obsessions. THE FORBIDDEN ROOM is no exception: the tone shifts throughout (bleakness, irony, and the horrific stand out) and human fears— of drowning, of being alone, of the unknown—are frequently coupled with sexual undertones. The result is another confounding (and rewarding) work that challenges easy interpretations. Screening as part of Doc’s Wednesday night series A Guy Maddin Retrospective. (2015, 120 min, DCP Digital) [Kyle Cubr]
Terry Gilliam's TIME BANDITS (UK)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 6pm
If Andrei Tarkovsky crafted profound lyric poems about dreams and the time-space continuum, then Terry Gilliam might be his lowbrow, comic book counterpart. Indeed, anachronistic whimsy abounds in TIME BANDITS, the first feature in Terry Gilliam's "Trilogy of Imagination." The film centers on Kevin, a precocious young history buff who discovers that his bedroom closet is a time portal to the past. After inadvertently joining forces with a team of treasure hunting dwarves, he travels to various centuries, encountering Napoleon, Robin Hood, Agamemnon, and others. Each dwarf has been said to represent a member of the Monty Python troupe (Gilliam himself is embodied by Vermin, the plucky leader of the group). The word "logic" is not part of Gilliam's vocabulary, and the sooner one can jettison the need for any hint of historical accuracy or narrative coherence, the sooner one will be susceptible to the film's charm. Though it has the trappings of a children's movie, TIME BANDITS features some delightfully disturbing images, namely undead minotaurs who emit fireballs from their empty eye sockets. In fact, under its fanciful surface, this is essentially a story about a boy who's so ignored by his parents that he welcomes what befalls them. Gilliam attempts to inject the film with some social commentary by offering a perfunctory critique of techno-modernity and consumer culture, but luckily this gets lost amidst all the wackiness. As with any Gilliam film, TIME BANDITS boasts plenty of psychedelic eye candy and visual wizardry, including spatial distortion, inverted images, and M.C. Escher-esque set design. Screening as part of 50/50, the Siskel’s year-long series including a film from each year the theater has been open. (1981, 116 min, DCP Digital) [Harrison Sherrod]
Joachim Trier’s THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD (Norway)
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]
Jane Campion’s THE POWER OF THE DOG (US/UK/Australia/New Zealand/Canada)
Facets Cinema – See Venue website for showtimes through Sunday
It’s been 12 years since Jane Campion’s last feature film, BRIGHT STAR. That movie stays with me for containing one of the rawest scenes of a character crying in grief I’ve ever witnessed; I still get chills thinking about it. THE POWER OF THE DOG is darker, but no less emotional, unhurriedly revealing the devastating and murky inner lives of its characters with astonishing skill and empathy. The film is demarcated by roman numeral chapters, each building tension by slightly shifting audience expectations. It’s clear this growing anxiety is leading to a dark, violent end, but I was constantly reconsidering what that end might be and consistently taken aback by Campion’s twisting complexity of the characterization onscreen. The story takes place in 1920s Montana, following the Burbank brothers: quiet and clean-cut George (Jesse Plemons) and rough yet charismatic Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch). For years they've run a prosperous cattle ranch, but their situation is upended when George marries sweet Rose (Kirsten Dunst), a widow who brings along with her scholarly son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Phil is enraged by this change, and his immediate cruelty to Rose and Peter is distressing. It’s slowly revealed his unbridled rage is complicated by his past; most notably he had a deeply meaningful relationship early in his life with a cowboy mentor who’s long since passed. Though never onscreen, Bronco Henry’s presence looms as large as the Montana mountains. And, oh, those mountains. Ari Wegner’s cinematography is breathtaking and true to the Western genre, but it also feels alien. The landscape seems both impossibly picturesque and quietly full of terrors. Shots of wide-open spaces are juxtaposed with tight quarters, driving the characters fears and desires: the camera captures scenes through windows and doors (à la THE SEARCHERS), the brothers’ cold ranch house, and Phil’s secret sanctuary in the nearby woods. We witness the characters as they navigate not only the setting, but their own troubled existence within it. They dance around each other as they grapple with overwhelming loneliness fueled by constantly needing to assess the intentions of those around them. Cumberbatch is powerfully unsettling, but the film belongs to Dunst, who masterfully portrays Rose’s emotional shifts with crushing compassion. Smit-McPhee, too, is incredible as Peter, whose motives are skillfully inscrutable until the final, quietly shocking moments. (2021, 125 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
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]
🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
Also Screening
⚫ Block Cinema
“Flesh to Spirit: Materiality and Abstraction in Black Experimental Film” (1966-2019, 70 min, Digital Projection/16mm/35mm), a shorts program including films by Paige Taul, Edward Owens, alima lee, Ayanna Dozier, Barbara McCullough, Cauleen Smith, Robert Banks, ariella ta, Ja’Tovia Gary, Ulysses Jenkins, and Christopher Harris, screens on Friday at 7pm. Filmmakers Taul and Harris will be in person for a post-screening discussion and Q&A. More info here.
⚫ Chicago Irish Film Festival
The 23rd Chicago Irish Film Festival takes place in-person through Sunday and virtually from Monday through March 13. More info here.
⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Yu Hyeon-mok’s 1963 South Korean film THE DAUGHTERS OF KIM’S PHARMACY (109 min, Digital Projection) screens on Friday at 7pm as part of the Classics of South Korean Cinema series.
Mike Mills’ 2021 film C’MON C’MON (110 min, DCP Digital) screens on Saturday at 7pm as part of the New Releases series.
On Thursday at 7pm, Chad Stahelski’s 2014 action film JOHN WICK (101 min, Digital Projection) screens as part of the Keanu and Nic’s Excellent Adventure series; afterward, Doc will screen a mystery Takashi Miike film at 9:30pm as part of the Takashi Miike Retrospective. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ Facets Cinema
Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1950 film NO WAY OUT (106 min, DCP Digital) screens on Sunday at 1pm as part of the Tribute to Sidney Poitier series. More info here.
⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
The Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts and the Oscar Nominated Live Action Shorts programs begin screening this week, while the Oscar Nominated Documentary Shorts program continues.
Hany Abu-Assad’s 2021 film HUDA’S SALON (91 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week.
“An Evening with Andy Slater” screens on Thursday at 6pm as part of Conversations at the Edge, followed by a discussion with Slater. Per the event description, the “program [was] designed especially for the Gene Siskel Film Center’s acoustic capabilities, [and] Slater will present a selection of recent sound-based works inspired by research into Crypto Acoustic Auditory Non-Hallucination, a midcentury scientific theory hypothesizing that some blind people have the capacity to hear trans-dimensionally.” More info on all screenings here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
The Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts and the Oscar Nominated Live Action Shorts programs begin screening this week. More info here.
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
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
⚫ Blacknuss Network
As part of the Blacknuss Network’s virtual We Fly Away Home: A Film and Discussion Series on Afrofuturism in Cinema, the fourth event, “The Africa in Afrofuturism,” featuring a screening and discussion with Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Pierre Bekolo, takes place on Sunday at 3pm. More info here.
⚫ Chicago Filmmakers
Kapra Fleming’s 2021 documentary LEE GODIE, CHICAGO FRENCH IMPRESSIONIST (74 min) is available to rent through Saturday. More info here.
⚫ Facets Cinema
James Vaughan’s 2021 Australian film FRIENDS AND STRANGERS (81 min) is available to rent through March 31. More info here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
Check hold-over titles here.
⚫ VDB TV
“Points of View – Video Artists Read the World” (1973 - 2020, TRT 118 min), programmed by Abina Manning, is available to stream for free on VDB TV. The program includes short video works by Nancy Holt, Dana Levy, Kevin Jerome Everson, Basma Alsharif, eteam, Martine Syms, Paul and Marlene Kos, and Sky Hopinka. More info here.
CINE-LIST: March 4 - March 10, 2022
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Maxwell Courtright, Kyle Cubr, John Dickson, Steve Erickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, JB Mabe, Raphael Jose Martinez, Anne Orchier, Scott Pfeiffer, Michael W. Phillips Jr., Harrison Sherrod, Michael Glover Smith, Drew Van Weelden