We will list/highlight physical screenings at the top of the list for theaters and venues that have reopened, and list streaming/online screenings below.
Check the venues’ websites for information on safety protocols and other procedures put in place.
📅 SAVE THE DATE
Cine-File and the Front Row present the Chicago premieres of new restorations of Arthur J. Bressan, Jr’s PASSING STRANGERS (1974) and FORBIDDEN LETTERS (1979) at the Music Box Theatre on Sunday, July 25 at 7:30pm and 9:30pm, respectively. Tickets are $12 for one film and $20 for the double feature, and can be purchased here. The films will be preceded by introductions from filmmakers and queer film historians Jenni Olson (co-initiator of The Bressan Project with Bressan’s sister, Roe Bressan) and Evan Purchell (director of ASK ANY BUDDY and founder of the eponymous podcast), with a conversation between Olson, Purchell and Cine-File associate editor Kathleen Sachs.
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Get your tickets here!
🔊CINE-CAST: The Cine-File Podcast
NEW! -- EPISODE #18
Episode #18 of the Cine-Cast opens with associate editors Ben and Kathleen Sachs and contributors Megan Fariello and Josh B. Mabe discussing all things VHS, from the democratization of cinephilia to TikTok filters. Next, contributors Mabe and Raphael Martinez chat with filmmaker Joe Swanberg about his new VHS rental pop-up operating out of Borelli's Pizza on Lawrence Ave. Finally, in a "Friends of Cine-File" segment, contributor Marilyn Ferdinand interviews her longtime partner Shane Truax about his experience working in a video story and his reminiscences of the medium. The introductory theme is by local film composer Ben Van Vlissingen. Find out more about his work here.
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Listen to the Cine-Cast here!
📽️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS
Jean-Paul Salomé’s MAMA WEED (France)
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes
Patience Portefeux (Isabelle Huppert), a translator of Arabic who works for the Paris police, is having a difficult time making ends meet. She owes money to the Chinese manager of her apartment building as well as to the nursing facility where her mother lives. When an opportunity arises to solve her financial problems and repay the kindness of her mother’s caregiver, she unhesitatingly masquerades as Mama Weed, a Muslim drug dealer. The crime thriller films of director Jean-Paul Salomé frequently feature female protagonists and at least a few A-list actors who elevate the material. MAMA WEED, which Salomé adapted from a novel by Hannelore Cayre, benefits greatly from the presence of Huppert, who adds to her distinguished and storied career with an amusing but complex portrayal of an enigmatic woman for whom personal loyalty, even to a long-dead husband, overrides virtually all other considerations. This energetic crime film thankfully eschews violence to focus on character dynamics, but stereotyping Arabs and Chinese as criminals is a sloppy, offensive genre attitude Salomé should have avoided. (2020, 104 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Michael Sarnoski’s PIG (US)
Music Box Theater – See Venue website for showtimes
As Rob—a disheveled man living off the grid with his truffle pig— Nicholas Cage delivers a performance that overrides most of his 21st-century filmography. PIG is a reminder of Cage’s talent and commitment, transcending both the expectations and limits that audiences have placed on him since his Academy Award win for LEAVING LAS VEGAS. Making his directorial debut, Michael Sarnoski fashions a story about the death of dreams as brought about by the deaths of people we know and by other people taking over our stories. Rob goes on a journey to find his pig after she’s kidnapped; he’s accompanied by Amir (Alex Wolff), a young supplier in Portland’s high-end restaurant industry who exhibits little concern for his son. Shifting between the cutthroat supplier business and the culinary scene, PIG never falters in its twisted vision, considering how loss can force us to change, how food can trigger memories, and how a single man can impact an entire community. Sarnoski gives some fine actors (Cage, Wolff, Adam Arkin) nuanced moments to marinate in; the film’s emotions feel earned, not forced. An ode to food, memory, and mourning, PIG is also a welcome reminder that Cage can command a film when paired with the right director. (2021, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Frank]
Morgan Neville’s ROADRUNNER: A FILM ABOUT ANTHONY BOURDAIN (US/Documentary)
Music Box Theatre — See Venue website for showtimes
As Anthony Bourdain, the subject of ROADRUNNER, says in a non-spoiler, the story of this film does not have a happy ending. It came as a shock when the charismatic celebrity chef, writer, traveler, and TV personality committed suicide in 2018. But to readers of Kitchen Confidential, the memoir that first catapulted him to fame, his one-time heroin addiction and marginal life in the restaurant industry suggested struggles under the glittering markers of success. Morgan Neville, an Oscar-winning documentarian whose films often focus on famous people (WON’T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR [2018], KEITH RICHARDS: UNDER THE INFLUENCE [2015], BEST OF ENEMIES: BUCKLEY VS. VIDAL [2015]), lets Bourdain speak for himself through clips and outtakes from his TV shows and other archival footage. The film goes through Bourdain’s life in chronological order, highlighting his first meeting with Eric Ripert, the French chef who became one of his best friends, as well as the origins of his partnership with Lydia Tenaglia and Christopher Collins, the married couple who produced his first show, A Cook’s Tour, and its spinoffs, No Reservations, The Layover, and Parts Unknown. Interviews with Tenaglia, Collins, and other people in Bourdain’s life—including chef David Chang, producer/director Helen Cho, artist David Choe, and Bourdain’s second wife, Ottavia Busia-Bourdain—illuminate and expand on stories told in the various clips. Fans of Bourdain’s TV shows will recognize a lot of the footage; indeed, the film feels like a two-hour episode of Parts Unknown rather than a fully fleshed-out documentary, as it doesn’t go beyond its subject to consult other sources or consider the subject’s larger influence. If you don’t know anything about Bourdain, ROADRUNNER is a reasonably good introduction. If you do, you’ll recognize the film as an elaborate, if belated, celebration of his life that should have arrived shortly after his death. Letting Bourdain’s still-grieving friends dump all over actor Asia Argento (his last girlfriend) without offering her a chance to appear onscreen is a pretty low blow. Ultimately, the observations and speculations about Bourdain do not uncover the reasons for his suicide, which is an unfathomable act no matter who does it. (2021, 119 min, DCP Projection) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Check Venue website for the Music Box Garden Series line-up and showtimes.
Released and Abandoned: Forgotten Oddities of the Home Video Era presents: FRANKENTHOLOGIES: THE MOVIES THAT WEREN'T MOVIES
Comfort Film at Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave. – Outdoor Screening) – Wednesday, 8pm [Free Admission]
From Comfort Station’s website: “In the glory days of the VHS era, distributors were desperate for product, and just about anything could be slapped into an eye-catching box and placed on video store shelves across the nation—including short films disguised as movies! Enjoy the small but fascinating world of "Frankenthologies," films that were compiled by slapping a bunch of genre-themed shorts together into a package, calling it anthology, and getting it distributed! Watch some of the most interesting shorts from this trend, featuring work from filmmakers who went on to bigger and better things!” (Digital Projection)
Nightingale Cinema in The Lot
Hyde Park Art Center (5020 S. Cornell Ave.) Parking Lot – Thursday, 8pm [Free Admission with RSVP]
The Nightingale hosts a free drive-in screening in the parking lot of the Hyde Park Art Center on Thursday at 7:30pm. The program, Squish Squish (approx. 103 min total), features work by Pangaea Colter and Charli Rogers. “Watch two artists self-actualize their identities in this mix and match of video diaries, music videos, and abstract narratives,” reads the event description. “One part digital drag, two parts gender euphoria. Embrace two bodies of work as they wiggle, gyrate, and tickle more than just your eyes and ears.” More info and a required RSVP link here.
Two Sneak Previews from Magnolia Pictures!
Analog Rooftop Cinema at Borelli's Pizzeria (2124 W. Lawrence Ave.) – Friday and Saturday, 9pm
This weekend’s screenings are surprise sneak previews—half the fun will be finding out what they are! Here’s what we can say: both are soon-to-be released by Magnolia Pictures. Friday’s film was described by The Hollywood Reporter as “[T]HE FLY meets the Farrelly Brothers” and by Variety as “[d]elightfully stupid and unusually sweet.” Saturday’s film is an ambitious animated film with voices by some pretty cool people.
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Tickets cost $20 cash, which includes a drink.
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
Roy Andersson’s ABOUT ENDLESSNESS (Sweden)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here and the Music Box Theatre here
Swedish writer-director Roy Andersson trades almost exclusively in tableau-like shots that suggest the offscreen space goes on forever—in this regard, all of his features beginning with SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR (2000) could be called ABOUT ENDLESSNESS. Andersson’s style is by now immediately recognizable; as Nick Pinkerton summed it up in a November 2020 article for Sight & Sound: “It comprises a string of vignettes, almost all playing out in a single take, viewed by a locked-down camera with a static frame that holds its human subjects in the philosophical distance of a deep-focus long shot… The skies in his Stockholm are overcast or pale; the light in the city is weak and milky; and the walls are bare in the city’s seedy cafés and offices and flats. Grays and off-whites proliferate, and the palette is desaturated, as though colors have lost their will to live in this cold climate.” For those who appreciate his aesthetic or his dry, Scandinavian wit, Andersson’s approach is endlessly compelling. Each shot feels like a little world unto itself (too bad Chicagoans can’t see this on a big screen); the director strews details all around the frames, creates expansive backgrounds, and brings each scene to a pointed observation reminiscent of a fable or parable. ABOUT ENDLESSNESS (for which Andersson won the Best Director prize at the Venice Film Festival) feels especially parable-like in its focus on big philosophical questions. The movie runs just 76 minutes but has the air of an epic, since Andersson seldom strays from considerations of what it means to live, love, believe, act morally, kill, grieve, and die. Most of the scenes are narrated by an omniscient figure who flatly delivers pithy descriptions of the onscreen action (e.g., “I once saw a man who wanted to surprise his wife with a nice dinner…”), which renders them, alternately, universal and almost comically simple. Indeed, the straight-ahead, presentational style is a reliable source of deadpan humor; even the recurring character of the preacher who’s lost his faith comes across as a little funny when seen from such an exaggerated distance. Andersson’s style can be devastating too, as in the scene of a man who instantly regrets carrying out an honor killing; and it can be majestic, as in a scene occurring roughly halfway into ABOUT ENDLESSNESS that finds three young women improvising a dance in front of an outdoor cafe in late afternoon. A director prone to using miniatures to create the illusion of outsize spaces, Andersson is very good at reminding us how small—which is to say, precious—humanity is in light of eternity. (2019, 76 min) [Ben Sachs]
Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez’s THE AMERICAN SECTOR (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
For those of us who witnessed it, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was a surprise and the beginning of a sea change in the world order as we knew it. In the ensuing years, sections of the Wall were sold to interested buyers all over the world as historical artifacts and, in some cases, works of graffiti art. Co-directors Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez spent more than a year crisscrossing the United States to places where one can view pieces of the Wall. The often-random distribution of Wall sections is quite interesting. The film opens with one concrete monolith sitting isolated in the middle of a forest. Two others show up at the side of an interstate highway, apparently not even near a rest stop. Southern California has more Wall segments than any other part of the country, though no one seems to know why. More expected are the museums and other institutions that house segments and chunks, including the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, where a rather beautiful sculpture shows bronze horses in active motion trampling the Wall underfoot. I was excited to learn that a part of the wall lives inside the Brown Line’s Western ‘L’ station, which I went in and out of for years when I lived in Lincoln Square, an ethnic German neighborhood. Perhaps most fascinating is an audio recording of Stephens speaking with someone at CIA headquarters, who explains that many clearances would be needed for Stephens and Velez to film the section at Langley. The spokeswoman says that people working for the CIA wondered whether the end of the Cold War meant that the agency would be disbanded—how naïvely quaint. I’m not sure that THE AMERICAN SECTOR makes any grand statements, despite its closing words of how we are back to building walls again, but it sure is a fun ride. (2020, 69 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Jafar Panahi’s CRIMSON GOLD (Iran)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here and the Music Box Theatre here
Abbas Kiarostami receives screenplay credit on Jafar Panahi’s fourth feature, CRIMSON GOLD, and one of the many compelling things about the film is how it plays like an inversion of Kiarostami’s TASTE OF CHERRY. That film told the story of one man’s efforts to find someone to bury him after he commits suicide; the hero’s quest, which confirms his connection to other people, is ultimately life-affirming in spite of its morbid nature. CRIMSON GOLD opens with a botched robbery that ends with the hero’s suicide, then flashes back to show the days leading up to that event; it’s a despairing journey that builds upon Panahi’s depiction of modern-day Tehran as an unforgiving hellhole that he introduced in THE CIRCLE. As in TASTE OF CHERRY, the hero’s progress is marked by three encounters, though here, the hero doesn’t initiate them. Hossain is a pizza delivery man, and the people he meets on his deliveries tend to regard him from the start as a social inferior. (Compare this with the gratitude with which the strangers regard Mr. Badii when he offers them rides in his SUV.) Each encounter reminds Hossain of his powerlessness within Iranian society, though, ironically, each one hinges on a moment of camaraderie. In the first, Hossain recognizes his customer as a military buddy from the Iran-Iraq War; the old acquaintance, embarrassed to see Hossain reduced to delivering pizzas, leaves Hossain with kind words and a handsome tip. The delivery man is unable to complete his second delivery, as the apartment building he’s supposed to enter has been surrounded by a police tactical unit, which waits in ambush for people leaving a party with illegal drinking and dancing on the second floor. The officer in charge of the unit berates Hossain for trying to enter the building, but forbids him from leaving the scene, since he could find a phone somewhere and warn the partygoers about their impending arrest. Hossain has a poignant conversation with a teenage soldier before deciding to share his undelivered pizzas with policemen lying in wait. The third key encounter of CRIMSON GOLD takes place in the high-rise condo of a rich man whose apartment has just been vacated by two female guests. Feeling spurned and lonely, the rich man invites Hossain in for dinner. He’s much nicer to Hossain than the wealthy jewelry store owner who’d condescended to him in an earlier scene; still, the apparent randomness of the rich man’s kindness—which Hossain clearly recognizes—speaks to the great, and likely insurmountable, social divide between him and Hossain. Like Kiarostami’s decision to place the hero’s death at the start of the movie, the scene in the high-rise makes Hossain’s act of desperation seem inevitable. Heightening the film’s morbid air is the ghostlike lead performance by Hossain Emadeddin, an actual pizza delivery man and an actual paranoid schizophrenic. Emaddedin’s deadpan under-reaction to practically everything borders on comical, yet it also reflects the inability of isolated, working-poor individuals to impact the system that degrades them. (2003, 96 min) [Ben Sachs]
Cathy Yan’s DEAD PIGS (China)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here
Writing for MUBI about the influences on her debut feature, DEAD PIGS, writer-director Cathy Yan cited two films—Robert Altman’s NASHVILLE and Paul Thomas Anderson’s MAGNOLIA—and several contemporary photographers. These influences play out clearly in DEAD PIGS, an ambitious, multi-character narrative that’s rich in striking imagery. Like NASHVILLE and MAGNOLIA, the movie is as much about its setting (in this case, rapidly evolving Shanghai and its outskirts) as it is about the characters, and both are portrayed with a mix of sympathy and cynicism. Yan’s storytelling feels more closely aligned with Anderson’s than Altman’s: DEAD PIGS is not a hazy hang-out movie where the characters cross paths by chance (if at all), but rather a fully orchestrated affair in which people come together by destiny and grand fictional devices. Yan’s narrative machinations don’t become obvious for a while; for its first 20 or 30 minutes, DEAD PIGS hums along on the energy of the gliding camerawork and hyped-up cross-cutting, both of which convey a sense of constant activity befitting the ever-changing environment. The film largely takes place in two settings, old neighborhoods on the brink of demolition and the modern skyscrapers taking their place. Embodying the first of those settings is Candy Wang, a beauty parlor owner who refuses to leave the two-story home she was raised in, despite the fact that every other homeowner on her block has sold their property to a large-scale development firm, which has already razed all the other buildings before the movie starts. (Yan based the character on a real-life woman who helped start China’s “nailhouse” phenomenon of homeowners who refuse to leave their homes when developers attempt to demolish them.) Representing the new Shanghai is Sean, an American architect embarking on a career with the firm that wants to buy Candy’s house. A naive westerner who sees China’s wild capitalist dog race as an opportunity to make it big, Sean resembles the hero of John Maringouin’s gonzo independent production GHOSTBOX COWBOY (which premiered the same year as this), though DEAD PIGS never becomes a nightmare like Maringouin’s film does. The closest it gets is in the hideous spectacle of the title. Throughout the story, Shanghai is plagued by a disease that kills pigs by the thousands; the region’s poor pig farmers abandon the corpses in the rivers, and the image serves as a metaphor for the displaced victims of China’s avalanche-like urbanization. (2018, 122 min) [Ben Sachs]
Teona Strugar Mitevska’s GOD EXISTS, HER NAME IS PETRUNYA (North Macedonia)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
“It’s 2018, but it still feels like the Dark Ages in Macedonia,” says TV reporter Slavica (Labina Mitevska, sister of the film’s director). Slavica and her cameraman, Bojkan (Xhevdet Jashari), are in the small town of Štip to cover an unusual story—a woman named Petrunya (Zorica Nusheva) joined in a religious competition meant only for men and recovered the sought-after lucky cross tossed in the river by the town priest (Suad Begovski-Suhi). The townspeople, especially the young men who believe that Petrunya stole the cross from them, are scandalized and demand that she give it back or face dire consequences. But Petrunya broke no civil law, and the police who hold her for questioning aren’t quite sure what to do with her. The situation set up by Mitevska, who co-wrote the intelligent and perceptive screenplay with Elma Tataragic, examines the persistence of patriarchy in the modern world. Petrunya is a 32-year-old, overweight woman who lives with her supportive, but ineffectual father (Petar Mircevski) and her mother (Violeta Sapkovska), who seems to both hate Petrunya and want to keep her tied to her apron strings. A college graduate with a degree in history who has never had a job, Petrunya is humiliated when she applies for work with the manager of a garment factory (Mario Knezović). The entire set-up, with the manager sitting in a glass-walled office in the middle of a room full of women working at sewing machines, is masculine control writ large. Nusheva brings to life all of Petrunya’s frustration with her dead-end circumstances, her anger at her belittling mother, and her confusion about how to change her life—a confusion that impelled her to jump into the water to find the cross without even thinking. I had flashbacks to Jan. 6 watching the angry young men of the village mass at the police station and break through the glass door to visit their displeasure on Petrunya. They are the cross she and the other women in the film have had to bear their whole lives—one Petrunya finally realizes she doesn’t have to shoulder anymore. Inventively shot by DP Virginie Saint-Martin, the film tips into humor during the interview segments, with Slavica answering her own questions and airing her feminist viewpoint. It is during one of these interviews that we come to understand the film’s title. One of the townsmen says he doesn’t understand what the fuss is about. “What if god is a woman?” he says. What if, indeed. (2019, 100 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Jeanne Leblanc’s LES NÔTRES (Canada)
Available to rent through Facets Cinématheque here
Ripping the lid off a small town to reveal its depraved underbelly has long been a strategy for social criticism, but this had lost its sting around the time AMERICAN BEAUTY won the Best Picture Oscar. Yet Jeanne Leblanc’s film goes much deeper, generating a bleak tone that presents sexual abuse as horrible but banal. The streets of Sainte-Adeline, Quebec, are almost parodically broad, green and sunny. But the town is haunted by an industrial accident which killed 13-year-old Magalie’s (Emilie Bierre) father. After she passes out during a dance rehearsal at school, a doctor’s examination reveals that she’s in her second trimester of pregnancy. Her mother (Marianne Farley) and much of the town suspect that Magalie’s best friend Manu (Leon Diasco Pellettier) is the father. She receives harassing texts on her phone. But she has actually been groomed to believe she can consent to sex with Manu’s father Jean-Marc (Paul Doucet), the town’s mayor. Leblanc’s direction keeps its distance from the actors, framing them in medium shot. LES NÔTRES runs on barely suppressed tension, giving the audience more information than the characters. For a narrative which could have set out to shock or turn into melodrama, it’s actually fairly hushed. (On the soundtrack, crickets constantly chirp, melting into Marie-Heléne L. Delorme’s dark score.) Some images would fit perfectly in IT FOLLOWS, and LES NÔTRES suggests a horror film about a girl’s coming of age with all the metaphor and allegory stripped away. Bierre brings the character to life while preserving her inner mystery. The final shot, in which Magalie stares blankly at the camera, suggests the difficult life ahead of her while retaining the film’s reticence to speak too loudly. (2020, 103 min) [Steve Erickson]
Beth B.’s LYDIA LUNCH: THE WAR IS NEVER OVER (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
For those unfamiliar with Lydia Lunch, a short primer: Lunch is a prolific multidisciplanary artist and shit-stirrer who began her career in late-1970s New York. Initially known for her work in such (in)famous No Wave bands as Teenage Jesus and The Jerks, Beirut Slump, and 8-Eyed Spy and for her collaborations with filmmakers Richard Kern, Nick Zedd, Vivienne Dick, and Beth B., Lunch has gone on to work with artists ranging from Nick Cave to Hubert Selby Jr. to Weasel Walter over the ensuing decades. LYDIA LUNCH: THE WAR IS NEVER OVER, a new collaboration with Beth B., is a film essay of sorts. It isn’t a traditional biography showcasing art from Lunch’s past; rather, the film explores the overarching themes of her work. Placing as much attention on the work she’s doing now as on her heroic years as a teenager/twentysomething, THE WAR IS NEVER OVER explores how the motivations behind Lunch’s art—her unique takes on feminist, sexual, and artistic politics—have never wavered and how they may be more relevant today than ever. The film is still filled with absolutely blistering archival footage, not to mention equally jaw-dropping contemporary performances. For fans of Lydia Lunch, this is absolutely essential; for those who have only heard her name in passing, this is the perfect overview. Like Lunch’s work, the film is direct, running barely over an hour. And every minute is worth it. (2019, 75 mins) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
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Read an interview with filmmaker Beth B. and the film’s subject, Lydia Lunch, on the blog here.
Seth McClellan’s OTHERS BEFORE SELF: VOICES FROM THE TIBETAN CHILDREN’S VILLAGE (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
Due to the outreach efforts and charisma of His Holiness the Dalai Lama of Tibet, the world has learned of and largely sympathized with the plight of the Tibetan people, whose land was seized some 60 years ago by the People’s Republic of China. The Chinese outlawed the country’s language, culture, and religion, and continue to oppress, torture, and kill Tibetans. To keep Tibetan traditions and hope alive, the Dalai Lama established the Tibetan Children’s Village (TCV) in the Himalayan mountains of India. OTHERS BEFORE SELF offers a brief, but complete portrait of the TCV, where teachers act like parents for the children separated from their families in Tibet and the children learn English and take classes in Tibetan language and culture. Most importantly, the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism—compassion, love, others before self—are passed on to them in the hope that they will eschew bitterness as they grow up and move out into the world. The residents of the TCV, even some of the youngest, speak for themselves and their feelings about the Chinese government (not the people), which they see as greedy and selfish. They give voice to their hope, or lack thereof, of being able to see Tibet, most for the first time, and reclaim it for the Tibetan people. In showing a group of children working together and developing their minds and hearts, McClellan has painted an effective portrait of how we could create a more peaceful, pleasant world community. The cynic/realist in me thinks we’re doomed, but the dreamer in me was inspired by this moving, beautifully filmed documentary. (2021, 55 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Suzanne Lindon’s SPRING BLOSSOM (France)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Suzanne Lindon was just 20 years old when SPRING BLOSSOM (which she wrote, directed, and starred in) received its virtual premiere at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival, making her one of the youngest filmmakers—if not the youngest—to have a film in competition there. It is very much a young person’s movie, for better and for worse. On the one hand, Lindon conveys youthful feelings of vulnerability, restlessness, and self-involvement with striking accuracy; on the other, the film sometimes comes off as simple and naive, and Lindon’s tendency to place herself at the front and center of the scene makes the film’s self-regarding perspective indistinguishable from the one it depicts. SPRING BLOSSOM doesn’t approach the level of narcissism that Vincent Gallo reached with THE BROWN BUNNY, but it seems to come from a similar place, as Lindon demands viewers watch herself as she watches herself. Underscoring the personal nature of the project, Lindon plays a character named Suzanne. A seemingly well-adjusted 16-year-old Paris high school student, Suzanne is tired of her routine: she’s introduced surrounded by friends, their conversation muffled into background noise, as she finds herself unable to engage with them with much interest. One afternoon, Suzanne notices an actor outside a theater where the play he’s in is being performed. She becomes smitten with the older man (whom, we later learn, is 35), and gradually works her way into an acquaintance with him, setting up “accidental” meetings until he decides to invite her to a cafe on his own. Viewers dreading the story of an illicit sexual relationship will be pleasantly surprised to find that Lindon keeps the budding romance chaste, focusing on Suzanne’s growing confidence rather than her sexual awakening. Raphael, the actor, may come off as something of a cipher (the film never establishes convincingly why he’d welcome the romantic attention of a high school student), but Arnaud Valois at least succeeds in making him not seem like a creep. Lindon parts with realism in a few unexpected sequences where the characters break out in choreographed movements (it would be an overstatement to call it dancing), putting their ineffable feelings into moving images. The technique, like most of SPRING BLOSSOM, walks such a thin line between charm and preciousness that it will probably take another few films before Lindon falls decisively on one side or the other. That’s just fine—she certainly has time. (2020, 74 min) [Ben Sachs]
Melvin Van Peebles’ THE STORY OF A THREE-DAY PASS (France)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
THE STORY OF A THREE-DAY PASS, the first feature by influential independent Melvin Van Peebles, inspires comparisons with Jean-Luc Godard’s BREATHLESS with its intercontinental romance and jazzy montage, but a more fitting point-of-reference may be the films of William Klein, another American expatriate working in France when this was made. Like Klein, Van Peebles shifts frequently between naturalism and cartoonish exaggeration, and he exhibits a chic visual sensibility throughout. (The black-and-white cinematography is by Michel Kelber, whose long filmography includes Jean Renoir’s FRENCH CANCAN and Nicholas Ray’s BITTER VICTORY.) The three-day pass in question belongs to Turner, a Black American soldier who’s stationed in France. The white superior officer who grants the leave makes clear that he’s doing so to reward Turner for his obsequious behavior; in fact, he promises Turner a promotion when he gets back. The protagonist has mixed feelings about all this, and Van Peebles dramatizes the character’s ambivalence through scenes where he talks to another version of himself in the bathroom mirror, the mirror-image raising doubts and even calling his double an Uncle Tom. Turner manages to put his concerns aside when he leaves his base for Paris, enjoying himself first as a tourist and then as a paramour, entering into a romance with a white Frenchwoman named Miriam. Van Peebles presents their relationship in a freewheeling, Nouvelle Vague-like style, though the aesthetic doesn’t distract from the obstacles they face in finding happiness. Everywhere the couple goes, they’re met with dirty looks, insidious questions, and even physical confrontations; things reach their worst when Turner runs into some suspicious fellow (white) soldiers when he and Miriam are on the beach. The impediments to interracial romance are portrayed, alternately, as scary and comic. In one of the more inspired visuals, Van Peebles cuts from the couple’s first time in bed to a shot of Miriam being surrounded by a group of Africans in traditional tribal garb. This sort of bold imagery points ahead to Van Peebles’ incendiary classic SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG (1971), the film with which the writer-director would cement his reputation. (1967, 88 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Zaida Bergroth’s TOVE (Finland)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Coming-of-age stories are normally thought of as involving teenagers who learn the realities of adult life. In fact, we all come of age again and again as we pass through new phases of our lives. The unique coming-of-age tale director Zaida Bergroth tells in the biopic TOVE covers roughly 10 years in the life of Tove Jansson, a Finnish artist best known for her fanciful Moomin children’s books. Tove (Alma Pöysti) is 30 years old when the narrative begins in 1944. She is living at her parents’ home in Helsinki, trying to emerge as a serious artist from the long shadow of her censorious father, sculptor Viktor Jansson (Robert Enckell). When she fails to win a competitive grant to study abroad, she moves out on her own and begins her journey of self-discovery. The troll illustrations that eventually become the Moomins are introduced as mere doodles to help Tove unblock her more serious artistic impulses. It takes the encouragement of Vivica Bandler (Krista Kosonen), an upper-class theatre director with whom Tove falls deeply in love, to recognize their worth. Pöysti is engaging as the high-spirited Tove, infusing a fairly conventional biopic with energy and complexity. She is well supported by her fellow actors, particularly Kosonen. Linda Wassberg’s cinematography is warm and lush, befitting a story of creative and romantic passion. The costumes, art direction, and soundtrack laced with 1940s swing music evoke the exuberance of the post-WWII era and a certain go-for-broke attitude that Pöysti grows into. I particularly like a scene inside a lesbian club in Paris that is a riot of liberated women enjoying being themselves. TOVE offers a sumptuous and fully fleshed world that is a pleasure to visit. (2020, 103 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Hong Sang-soo's THE WOMAN WHO RAN (South Korea)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
The films of prolific South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo have become steadily more oriented around their female protagonists since he began working with Kim Min-hee in 2015’s RIGHT NOW, WRONG THEN. This mighty director/actress combo has reached a kind of apotheosis in their seventh and latest collaboration, THE WOMAN WHO RAN, a charming dramedy about three days in the life of a woman, Gam-hee (Kim), who spends time apart from her spouse for the first time after five years of marriage. When her husband goes on a trip, Gam-hee uses the occasion to visit three of her female friends—one of whom is single, one of whom is married, and one of whom is recently divorced—and Hong subtly implies that Gam-hee’s extended dialogue with each causes her to take stock of her own marriage and life. Gam-hee also comes into contact with three annoying men—a nosy neighbor, a stalker, and a mansplainer—while visiting each friend, situations that allow Hong to create clever internal rhymes across his triptych narrative structure. Hong’s inimitable cinematographical style has long favored long takes punctuated by sudden zooms and pans, but rarely have the devices felt as purposeful as they dohere. Notice how his camera zooms, with the precision of a microscope, into a close-up of a woman’s face immediately after she issues an apology to Gam-hee during the film's final act, and how the tears in this woman's eyes would not have been visible without the zoom. This is masterful stuff. (2020, 77 min) [Michael Glover Smith]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Also Screening/Streaming
Chicago International Film Festival Summer Screenings
Summer Screenings is a free weekly film series that celebrates sports and games from around the world. This week’s selection is Jahmil X.T. Qubeka’s 2019 South African film KNUCKLE CITY (124 min), featuring a conversation with director Jahmil X.T. Qubeka and South African Consul General Phumzile Pride Mazibuko on the streaming platform. More info here.
Facets Cinémathèque
Paul Felten and Joe DeNardo’s 2020 screwball thriller SLOW MACHINE (2020) and Sahar Mosayebi’s 2019 Iranian film PLATFORM (87 min) are available to rent through July 22 and August 5, respectively. More info here.
Gene Siskel Film Center
LOST AND FOUND: THE ECSTASY OF WORDPLAY, presented in conjunction with the Low-Res MFA Show at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) Galleries, is available to view through July 31. Viewers can visit the Low Res MFA Show website and schedule an appointment to view the exhibition if so desired.
Óskar Páll Sveinsson’s 2020 Icelandic adventure documentary AGAINST THE CURRENT (87 min) and Max Basch and Malia Scharf’s 2020 documentary KENNY SCHARF: WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE (77 min), about the East Village artist, are available to rent through July 29.
Nancy Buirsk’s 2021 documentary A CRIME ON THE BAYOU (89 min) is available to rent through August 5.
Ursula Liang’s 2021 documentary DOWN A DARK STAIRWELL (83 min) and Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s 2021 documentary TRUMAN & TENNESSEE: AN INTIMATE CONVERSATION (81 min) are available to rent through August 12.
Music Box Theatre
Jonathan Schroder’s 2021 documentary THE BOYS IN RED HATS and Abdelhamid Bouchnak’s 2018 Tunisian horror film DACHRA are available to rent beginning this week.
Check the Music Box website for hold-over titles.
Video Data Bank
VDB presents the online series Protest (1970-2020), with work by Adrian Garcia Gomez, Linda Montano, Tony Cokes, Videofreex, and Sabine Gruffat, here.
🎞️ ADDITIONAL ONLINE SCREENINGS
Paul Harrill’s LIGHT FROM LIGHT (US)
Available to stream on MUBI (subscription required), to rent on Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video, and for free through participating libraries on Kanopy
LIGHT FROM LIGHT boasts a premise fit for a multiplex spookfest—a paranormal investigator gets asked to inspect a man’s isolated Tennessee farmhouse for signs of his late wife’s presence—but the movie dabbles in the supernatural with reluctant seriousness. The careful attitude matches that of its protagonist, Sheila Garvin (Marin Ireland), a woman who works at an airport rental car station but also researches hauntings in her spare time. The movie opens with a radio interview in which Sheila relates a prophetic childhood dream, though she’s visibly wary of the limelight. She later scolds her teenage son Owen (Josh Wiggins) for trying to share the broadcast with his friend Lucy (Atheena Frizzell), and when the interviewer asks Sheila if she believes in ghosts, she gives a noncommittal answer. Through a referral from a local priest (David Cale), Sheila agrees to probe the home of Richard Barnes (Jim Gaffigan), a fish hatchery employee whose wife died a year before in a plane crash; since then, his keys have been mysteriously misplaced and certain lights have flickered on and off. (Harrill and production designer Brittany Ingram outfit Richard’s abode with indicators of his internal disarray—pizza boxes piled atop a kitchen counter, clothes strewn about in a side room.) Harrill treats Richard’s suspicions and Sheila’s inquisitive process with the utmost deference, but the movie—like his excellent previous feature, the also-Tennessee-set SOMETHING, ANYTHING (2014)—commands attention with its patient articulations of everyday behavior. Sheila is a resourceful professional and caring mother with underlying reservations about the state of her life, and Ireland superbly captures the character’s range of emotions. With the smallest gestures and adjustments in tone, she gracefully navigates the shifting demeanors of an overworked single mom. A marvelous moment occurs when Sheila arrives home with a box of recording equipment and cagily announces, “There’s more in the car,” signaling the couch-bound Owen to pause his video game and lend a hand. Gaffigan supplies another striking choice in his first exchange with Ireland, a tightly framed volley in which Richard soberly imparts recollections of his wife. As the conversation concludes, the scene ends on a wider shot of the room that reveals that Richard has been holding a Nalgene-like water bottle. This nearly invisible detail—of this wounded man clutching that random household object while delivering an impromptu biography of his wife to a complete stranger—conveys the quietly perceptive pull of Harrill’s work. (2019, 82 min) [Danny King]
Kon Ichikawa’s TOKYO OLYMPIAD (Japan)
Available to stream on the Criterion Channel (subscription required) and at Olympics.com for free
In 1964, Tokyo became the first Asian city to host the Olympics. With the Games returning to Tokyo 57 years and one COVID-related delay later, it seems as good a time as any to revisit (or discover) the epic splendor of Kon Ichikawa’s 1965 documentary TOKYO OLYMPIAD. Commissioned by the Japanese government—which had to find a new director after the initial choice, Akira Kurosawa, stepped down—the film helped pioneer a number of innovative techniques for filming sports, and it remains a touchstone among all subsequent athletic-themed documentaries. What makes TOKYO OLYMPIAD so thrilling lies, in part, in its blithe disregard for the tacit rules of sports coverage. Rather than adopt the journalistic approach that had been commonplace in prior IOC films, Ichikawa indulges in an immersive audiovisual impressionism, favoring kinetic and aesthetic sensations over the prosaic, results-driven concerns of competition. In other words, it’s a uniquely cinematic portrait that you would never see on broadcast television. In resplendent, vividly saturated CinemaScope images often shot with cutting-edge telephoto and wide-angle lenses, TOKYO OLYMPIAD presents a surplus of intensely dramatic images: athletes jumping hurdles in extreme slow-motion; sinewy flesh entwined on the wrestling mat; sweat dripping from brows; the cheek of a shooter draping ever-so-gently over the barrel of his rifle; the placid concentration of marathon champion Abebe Bikila as he blazes past a blur of spectators. Ichikawa also extends his attention beyond the competitors, granting peripheral details a level of importance that enhances the film’s maximalist scope. We see journalists clacking away on typewriters in the international press room; rain gathering on umbrellas; the devouring of meals in the Olympic Village cafeteria; and, in perhaps the most awe-inspiring image in a film filled with them, a panoramic shot of Mt. Fuji as a torchbearer trails like an ant across the bottom of the screen, smoke billowing behind him. Sometimes Ichikawa’s obsession with showing off his repertoire of cinematographic tricks (high shutter speeds, freeze-frames, animation, nearly abstract closeups, and localized sound) can overwhelm, even distract from the Games themselves. The Japanese government in 1965 expressed this very criticism, decrying Ichikawa’s unorthodox document of an event meant to showcase a new, modernized Japan to the world. Of course, TOKYO OLYMPIAD’s bold idiosyncrasies are exactly why it endures, as both a celebration of Olympic achievement and as a testament to cinematic possibility. (1965, 170 min) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
The World of Gordon Parks: Early Short Films (US)
Available to stream for free from Anthology Film Archives here through Tuesday
Presented in collaboration with the Gordon Parks Foundation and Chicago Film Archives, this program provides a superb introduction to the life and career of multidisciplinary artist Gordon Parks, who came to prominence as a photojournalist, but went on to write books and direct film as well. Parks receives directorial credit on just one of the four works here—FLAVIO (1964, 11 min), an adaptation of a renowned photo-essay he contributed to Life magazine—yet the films hold together remarkably well, advancing a poetic, yet never glamorized vision of poverty and a heroic view of those who rise themselves out of it. FLAVIO centers on a boy of about 10 who lives in a favela outside of Rio de Janeiro with his mother, father, and seven siblings. Parks, who grew up in poverty himself, never evokes pity for his subject, but rather emphasizes the ability of children to adapt to their situation, no matter how dire it is, with imagination and resilience. The film is striking in its mix of moving and still images; the former bring a sense of vitality to the latter, which in turn have the effect of making you stop and internalize Flavio’s plight. Directed by Joseph Filipowic, DIARY OF A HARLEM FAMILY (1968, 20 min) takes a similar approach, incorporating still images that Parks shot for another Life Magazine profile into a cinematic documentary portrait. Parks also wrote the narration for HARLEM FAMILY, and the events he chooses to emphasize in the family’s life are despairing and sometimes harrowing. As an artist who understood poverty intimately, Parks looks past the obvious indignities of living in a ghetto to consider how poverty dehumanizes people on a psychological level. Not everyone born into poverty remains trapped in it, however, as THE WORLD OF PIRI THOMAS (1968, 60 min) gloriously attests. Parks directed portions of this public-television documentary about Thomas, a onetime gang leader, drug addict and convict who became a celebrated author and poet; one recognizes the director’s stamp in the impressionistic montages of Spanish Harlem, which alternate moments of squalor with moments of joy. Tying together the social portraiture and human-interest stories is Thomas’ electrifying presence, which reflects the resolve he brought to bettering himself. Concluding the program is LISTEN TO A STRANGER: AN INTERVIEW WITH GORDON PARKS (1973, 19 min), in which the artist reflects on his own path out of poverty and what he hopes to achieve through his photography and film. Parks emerges here as a sincere, self-aware individual motivated by the desire to contribute something of value to society. [Ben Sachs]
CINE-LIST: July 16 - July 22, 2021
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Steve Erickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Michael Frank, Danny King, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Raphael Jose Martinez, Scott Pfeiffer, Michael Glover Smith