📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
Haile Gerima’s ADWA: AN AFRICAN VICTORY (US/Ethiopia/Documentary)
Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) – Friday, 6:30pm
The 1896 Battle of Adwa was a watershed moment in the pervasion of colonialism in Africa. For the first time in history, a non-European nation successfully thwarted a European colonizer (here, Italy). Exactly one hundred years later, Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima—who became a key figure of the L.A. Rebellion after first emigrating to Chicago to study acting—memorialized the occasion in his country’s history with this illuminating documentary about the decisive Battle of Adwa and the events leading up to it. Toward the beginning of the film, two young boys admire a large painting made to commemorate the battle; one of them narrates the action taking place in it to the other boy, who has low vision. One can’t help but to think of this framing device as a metaphor of sorts, about how context is vital in keeping us from being “blind” to historical events. Gerima utilizes this rather transparent device to uncommon effect, elevating what could have been another straightforward documentary to a personal reflection on history and how it’s communicated. “Upon seeing these two youngsters transfixed on this painting,” Gerima says in voiceover, “I was reminded of my own childhood system of acculturation. About different historical deeds of a nation passed from generation to generation through various cultural mediums, of custodianship, the transmission of stories, and especially through the art of folklore, popular songs, and war chants.” He later admits that “there was a stage when I was skeptical about my people’s history,” referring to the battle. Gerima asked his father, who not only detailed the heroic plight of the Ethiopians against their European oppressors, but in general was passionate about staging historical reenactments for the public, in which Gerima performed. He shows a segment from one of his father’s shows, “A Bell of Torment,” about an earlier interaction between the Ethiopians and the Italians that Gerima believes embarrassed the latter and resulted in the tension that led to the Battle of Adwa. From there Gerima continues the story, detailing the major events that took place up to the titular conflict. He uses media ranging from drawings, paintings and maps to archival imagery, oral interviews, and music; in this way film becomes a repository in which to gather assorted ephemera, combining visual references along with music and Gerima’s auditory recounting. It’s a kind of folklorish preservation system that keeps the story alive as well as the ways it had previously been told within Ethiopian culture. The story is fascinating, especially as it involves Empress Taytu (spelled Taita in Gerima’s film) Betul, wife of Emperor Menelik II, who led the Ethiopians to victory and gained newfound international recognition for his country as a result. Taita was integral to this success, fighting as hard as any man and thus becoming a critical aspect of the lore. Gerima’s moving, almost breathing document of the First Italo-Ethiopian War and the battle that defined it is a powerful tribute to the country and the medium, with the creative freedom afforded to the latter becoming symbolic of the freedom preserved in the former up until the Second Italo-Ethiopian War in 1935. In ruminating on his transition from being the unseeing, in his skepticism, to the seeing, visions that he's made into the film, Gerima revels in the possibility of his craft to tell such stories. Followed by a post-screening discussion with Gerima and Ivy Wilson, Director of the Black Arts Consortium at Northwestern University. (1999, 96 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]
Paul Bartel’s EATING RAOUL (US)
Chicago Film Society at the Music Box Theatre – Monday, 7pm
Warhol superstar Mary Woronov and cult film icon Paul Bartel were frequent collaborators, co-starring in well over a dozen films and often playing a married couple. Cult classic EATING RAOUL—also directed by Bartel (DEATH RACE 2000, LUST IN THE DUST)—is the best showcase of their prolific, matter-of-fact, funny chemistry. Prudish couple Mary and Paul Bland (Woronov and Bartel) are hoping to raise the money to open their own restaurant. After being harassed by the swingers that overrun their apartment building, the two find that they may be able to financially benefit from killing them off. Inspired by the local dominatrix (Susan Saiger), the pair take an ad out to draw in unsuspecting victims. Things become more complicated when grifter Raoul (Robert Beltran) gets involved in their schemes. The film also includes cameos from Ed Begley, Jr. and Buck Henry, though the standout is Edie McClurg as a swinger party goer. EATING RAOUL’s comedy is at times deceptively light, often reminiscent of a sitcom. The main setting of the Bland apartment, the light domestic bantering of Mary and Paul, and the slapstick comedy all make the film feel like a primetime television, though, of course, with much darker themes underlying it all. It’s a clever approach, purposefully making everything feel simultaneously out of the ordinary and mundane. Set in LA with saturated color in every scene, EATING RAOUL’s pitch black humor is perfectly balanced by its pop art look. Its parodying is in its pragmatic take on a wild tale, driven by Woronov and Bartel synchronously grounded and hilarious, unscrupulous and sweet performances. While EATING RAOUL feels timeless in its visual aesthetic and odd tonal shifts, it’s still decidedly of its time in its biting cultural satire of both the early '80s and the sexual revolution of the previous decades. Preceded by two 1972 shorts directed by Curt McDowell: KATHLEEN TRAILER (FOR UNDERGROUND CINEMA 12) and WEINERS AND BUNS MUSICAL (both 16mm). (1982, 90 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]
David Cronenberg's A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE (US/Canada)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 9:30pm
After a career of making monsters empathetic, David Cronenberg made A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE at his most philosophical and emotionally direct. Critics have projected multiple meanings onto the film’s title. Many see it as a label for the protagonist’s checkered past; others would use it to cite the film as a case study on a human response to conflict. The film follows Tom Stall, owner and server at a diner in a small town in Indiana. His family lives in a small slice of the American dream, a modern homestead with interactions out of a 1950s family sitcom. When trouble shows up in the form of two armed robbers, Tom is forced to protect those he cares about by killing. Spotted by a Philadelphia based crime syndicate through the event’s media coverage, the Stall family gets paid a visit. Ed Harris gives a chilling performance as a cyclopedic wise guy. The East Coasters are certain Tom is the former associate of theirs, Joey. As they insist on his identity and Tom continues to deny, paranoia and danger escalate. Forced by circumstances to protect his family, Tom confronts his adversaries in his old barbaric ways, from a life he swore off. After these events, Tom is given the impossible tightrope walk of protecting his family through any means necessary while picking up the pieces of the loving, tender persona they formerly knew him to be. In his first collaboration with Cronenberg, Viggo Mortensen breathes life into a man split between a Midwest family man and a butcher of Philadelphia’s crime world. In his science fiction films, Cronenberg’s hero would turn into a monster who proves his humanity. In this more realistic context, monstrosity is created through action, not a state of being. Tom’s acts of destruction in the name of preservation cut far deeper through their relevance to everyday human behavior. Cronenberg is interested in the human body, he’s notorious for morphing them in grotesque ways for his films. Over the years, bodily fluids have played a major role in his work, whether from sex or violence. Bodily fluids through violence show themselves through every act of killing through the film. Regarding body fluids through sex: Cronenberg examines the inner-workings of desire and how they manifest in all aspects of life from his earliest feature films. When the Stalls have sex, they play out a high school cheerleading fantasy, the old faintly familiar days before family responsibilities, a comfortable innocent foreplay. Diametrically opposed, the second sex scene comes when husband and wife tread on dangerous and unfamiliar territory. In the film’s reveal, Edie sees her husband as a stranger, a killer of the highest tier, in her house. The scene begins with kicking and screaming, ending in passionate intercourse on a staircase. In two simple scenes, Cronenberg displays the spectrum of libidinous inspiration within relationships. A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE is full of situations that represent the greater behavior of humanity, without comment presenting situations the audience could empathize with, were they placed in the given circumstances. Even the final two shots of the film sum up the journey of a relationship and hint towards its direction after the credits roll. The director follows the lineage of Howard Hawks, allowing collaborators to individually fall in love with the project, each spending herculean amounts of energy on research and preparation in service of making the greatest movie possible. The camera movement, Howard Shore’s score, and the pacing remain simple. As he has grown into his full capacities as a filmmaker, Cronenberg understands that less is more, and all dazzle pales in comparison to truly good material. Lesser directors’ egos would inhibit their service to the story. Screening as part of Doc’s Thursday II series, “Skin Under Skin: A Retrospective of David Cronenberg.” (2005, 96 min, 35mm) [Ray Ebarb]
Orson Welles' CITIZEN KANE (US)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm and Sunday, 4pm
What's left to say about CITIZEN KANE? These days, it's difficult to imagine anyone sitting down to watch it without first being warned that they are about to view The Greatest Film of All Time, an accolade so frequently affixed that it should by now count as a subtitle. Yet it remains a master class in aesthetic design in which all the production elements (bustling staging, overlapping dialogue, choose-your-own-adventure plotting, lighting so chiaroscuro that most of the shadows fall on the ceiling, editing so fluid it is better described as rhythm) work together so seamlessly as to seem impossible without one another. Famously the first and last studio project the boy wonder had final cut on, this boasts an unusually tidy rise-and-fall narrative for Welles; if his later, compromised studio films (THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, LADY FROM SHANGHAI, TOUCH OF EVIL) ultimately prove more rewarding, it is perhaps because their Rosebuds are obscured and their mysteries preserved. Screening as part of Doc’s Friday series, “Sight & Sound: The Greatest?” (1941, 119 min, 35mm) [Mike King]
Bernardo Bertolucci's THE CONFORMIST (Italy)
Music Box Theatre – Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am
THE CONFORMIST is a beautiful and surprisingly assured work that revered Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci and equally respected cinematographer Vittorio Storaro made when they were only in their 20s. The film dropped quickly from sight after its rave reception at several film festivals and only got a very limited run in the United States after the likes of Francis Ford Coppola urged Paramount to release it. The film also was scarce in its native country because of its depiction of the popularity of fascism in 1930s Italy. The story of the conformist, Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), begins by showing some sort of disconnect between Marcello and his surroundings—a shabby figure moving nervously in an elegant hotel room. Soon, the film reverts to flashback as we watch Marcello move from privileged childhood to fledgling spy for the Italian government. Marcello is friends with a blind fascist named Italo (José Quaglio). This not-very-subtle symbol for Italy under Mussolini broadcasts fascist propaganda on the radio and introduces an eager Marcello to the colonel (Fosco Giachetti), who can help Marcello realize his ambitions. Marcello enters a monumental building, his tiny figure like an ant moving across a vast marble expanse. He enters the wrong room for a brief moment and catches a glimpse of a ranking fascist seducing a woman in mourning attire who is laying across his desk. Marcello’s and the woman’s eyes meet for an instant. Excusing himself quietly, Marcello goes on to the colonel’s office, where he offers to try to infiltrate the antifascist movement through his former philosophy professor, a middle-age man named Quadri (Enzo Tarascio) who is a self-exile in Paris. When the colonel learns Marcello is soon to be married, he considers a honeymoon in Paris as the ideal cover. His fiancée, Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli), is a simple-minded bourgeoise whom Marcello chose because of her sheer ordinariness, her good looks, and her sexually eager nature. Giulia is shown in a black-and-white striped dress, and the shadows created by the light coming through some blinds suggest a noirish atmosphere, but moreso a rigid geometry surrounding Marcello. His desire, like all fascists, is for strict order. The Clericis’ train makes a stop before they proceed to Paris. Once the newlyweds are ensconced in their hotel room, Marcello phones Quadri to suggest a meeting for old times’ sake. When the Clericis arrive at the Quadri home, they are greeted at the door by a large dog and Anna Quadri (Dominique Sanda). Marcello seems thunderstruck by her, and we get the distinct impression that they know each other. In fact, Sanda played the woman in black and a whore Marcello encountered when he met a fascist contact in France. She is clearly the woman of Marcello’s dreams, and he spends the rest of the trip pursuing her. After a shocking and brutal scene in which Marcello carries out his orders, the film fast-forwards to the end of the war and the fall of Italy’s dictatorship. On the street, Marcello has an encounter that upsets everything he ever believed about himself and turns him into a raging lunatic. His fascist control is gone from inside him as well as from the city that swallows him up in the night. So, what is it that drives Marcello? What is it that he believes about himself that leads him to pursue social conformity in spite of the irrational urges that spill forth when he is confronted with Anna and her lookalikes? We are led to believe that a homosexual encounter Marcello had when he was 14 made him feel different. In addition, his mother (Milly) is a morphine addict and his father (Giuseppe Addobbati) is in an insane asylum. It would certainly not be a surprise if Marcello was a little touched himself, or at the very least, fearful of being overtaken by the madness that felled his father and drove his mother’s addiction. Those who seek to fence out the irrational will naturally gravitate to the safe, narrow tracks of society’s rules and, in the extreme, to fascism. Marcello’s attitude toward women is at least as repressed as his other urges. When the Quadris and Clericis go out for Chinese food and dancing, Anna asks Giulia to dance. The two do a seductive tango that disturbs the conventional couples on the dance floor and scandalizes Marcello. Quadri is content with their behavior: “They both look so pretty.” He has accepted the bisexual Anna as she is, whereas Marcello holds his wife in contempt, threatened by the fact that his conventional wife is more sexually liberated that he could have imagined. As the ultimate irrational in a man’s psyche, women must be as predictable as possible for the man Marcello desperately wants to become. Like all of Bertolucci’s films, THE CONFORMIST is deeply sensual. Storaro and film editor Franco Arcalli provides sumptuous visual effects that make the film appear to be a dream inside a dream, with an impressionistic, almost surrealist feel even as they create a mood and narrative drive that build from illusion to horror. Jean-Louis Trintignant, who died on June 17, 2022, at the age of 91, created a memorable character who, ironically, remained an unknowable shadow to himself. (1970, 113 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s DE HUMANI CORPORIS FABRICA (France/Switzerland/US/Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
For their first feature film together, LEVIATHAN (2013), Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel set GoPro cameras on and around a large fishing vessel in the North Atlantic. The result was a work of profound perceptual disorientation that turns churning waters, fish guts, and seagull-filled night skies into hallucinatory near-abstractions. All but subsumed in the chaotic montage are the fishermen, who come to seem powerless against the nature they attempt to master. Named after a series of groundbreaking 16th-century anatomy books, DE HUMANI CORPORIS FABRICA is similarly concerned with our imperfect control and understanding of nature, except this time the unruly subject is the human body, specifically its insides. The footage, much of it taken during various invasive surgeries at French hospitals, shows macro landscapes of gooey, stretchy, sloshing viscera as viewed by tiny cameras tunneling through patients’ bowels. A typical strategy of Castaing-Taylor and Paravel is to move out from almost indiscernible close-ups of human organs to the surgeons operating on them, a juxtaposition that forces us to confront our base, material corporeality and to consider the scientific-medical interventions necessary to sustain life. Like the fishers in LEVIATHAN, however, the power of the surgeons has limits that no amount of research or advanced technology can overcome. Their O.R. conversations—ranging from casual small talk to exasperated laments about staffing shortages and enervating work schedules—underline their status as ordinary people, situated within a bureaucratic system that often seems perversely discordant with its function of serving human health. DE HUMANI CORPORIS FABRICA is a grueling watch (a strong caution to the faint-of-heart), a kind of horror-documentary of abjection that undoes our own sense of self-possession. But it also regards the body as fundamentally incredible and resilient. When the hospital workers take to the dance floor during a staff party, Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” blaring on the soundtrack, the film returns from the Real of corporeal violability to a decadent Symbolic reassertion of bodily unity and autonomy. If those things are at least partly illusory, they’re illusions we need in order to live. (2022, 117 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Julia Bacha’s BOYCOTT (US/Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 1pm
In 2015, Illinois became the first state in the union to prohibit boycotts of Israel. The law targets taxpayer-funded public pension funds that invest in companies that have adopted a boycott-divestment-sanction (BDS) stance toward Israel. In 2021, one such company, Unilever, was removed from the investment portfolios of these pension funds because one of its companies, Ben and Jerry’s, refuses to sell ice cream in the West Bank. This and similar legislation in 35 states use government power to silence opinions with which it disagrees, a move that was declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in 1956. BOYCOTT, Julia Bacha’s short but illuminating documentary, outlines how evangelical Christians who support Israel as a way to hasten The Rapture, aided and abetted by the government of Israel, the pro-Israel lobby, and naïve legislators whose kneejerk reaction to anything pro-Israel is to support it, have worked to restrict the use of boycotts to effect change. Bacha quickly runs through major successful boycotts of the past—the Montgomery bus boycott, the grape boycott instigated by the United Farm Workers, the BDS movement against apartheid South Africa—while introducing us to three people who filed lawsuits against anti-BDS legislation in their home states of Arkansas, Texas, and Arizona and following the progress of their cases. Bacha mixes heart-rending photos and videos of the rough treatment of Palestinians in Israel with the stories of these plaintiffs—one a Palestinian speech-language pathologist, another a newspaper publisher, and the third a public-interest attorney, all of whom receive government funds for their work and all of whom balked at signing a sort of loyalty oath affirming that they will not boycott Israel. Of course, these laws would not be thought necessary by their sponsors if Israel would allow its Palestinian citizens equal rights and protections; indeed, the UN Human Rights Council said in 2022 that the situation met the legal definition of apartheid, which alone should justify the use of boycotts to force Israel to change its ways. Ah, but we live in different times with different values animating our government officials. Nonetheless, the same old ignorance in the electorate regarding what our ideologically motivated representatives are up to has allowed these laws to proliferate. Now is the time to get up to speed on how anti-BDS laws are moving out of the realm of Israel and into issues like gun sales and drug store operations that are much closer to home. Screening as part of the 2023 Chicago Palestine Film Festival. (2021, 73 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Cindy Sherman's OFFICE KILLER (US)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 7pm
It often seems that when famous gallery artists turn to film they tend to stick to the experimental. Perhaps it’s the desire to be “taken seriously,” or to continue their high art, just in a different medium. From Salvador Dali to Yoko Ono to Matthew Barney, those respected in the art world seem to, quite ironically, play it safe by staying weird. Cindy Sherman’s sole feature film, the 1997 horror-comedy OFFICE KILLER, is in direct contrast to this tiring practice—and thankfully so. Her film is pure, gleeful genre fare through and through. No too-clever-by-half attempts at cinematic subversion or meta commentary. No gimmicks, no tricks. Just a fun, entertaining black comedy. This doesn’t mean that the film is without any visual beauty. As a photographer in the late 1970s and early 80s, Sherman forever changed the art world with her incredibly cinematic, and highly influential, Untitled Film Stills series. This was the work where she took pictures of herself as different clichéd female types, very inspired by film imagery of the 1950s and 60s. The photographs go far beyond simply being well executed “stills” of non-existent films; her exploration of female identity and female roles in American society is ultimately what is being put on display. So anyone familiar with Sherman’s work shouldn’t find it surprising that when she decided to finally direct a feature that she would tell the story of a female office worker, of a certain age, and her growing madness in dealing with the world around her. The visual touches of Sherman’s photography delightfully appear now and again, but she mostly frees herself from the idiosyncratic eye of her past and allows herself all the room needed to tell this oddball story. Given the dry academic lens her art is often viewed through, it’s easy to forget how truly playful Sherman’s work is. This film is a great reminder than underneath everything Sherman continuously celebrates the joy that can come with artifice. Starring one of the grand dames of American comedy, Carol Kane, and a perfectly cast-against-type Molly Ringwald as the scenery-chewing villain, corpses and laughs quickly pile up. Co-written by New Queer Cinema pioneer Todd Haynes, OFFICE KILLER plays out as a lighthearted (blackhearted?) mélange of MS .45-lite and OFFICE SPACE. When Kane accidentally kills a man who has been emotionally abusing her at work she realizes that she may actually enjoy murder. What makes this film particularly timely is the source of her growing alienation. She is thrust, unprepared, into the same uncomfortable new world that so many people are experiencing right now—working from home. The comedy/horror of email and long-distance work are splattered across the screen. Laugh at the absurd, squirm at the gore, and remember that this goofball movie was directed by the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant. Screening as part of Doc’s Sunday series, “The Decisive Moment: Photographers Turned Filmmakers.” (1997, 82 min, Digital Projection) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
Cristian Mungiu's R.M.N. (Romania)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
In a storybook Romanian village nestled in the mountains and surrounded by forests, the creatures haunting the populace are neither mythical nor ancient. Matthias returns to the village after a run-in with the foreman at the German industrial livestock facility where he was to have been on a three-year contract. He isn't expected back home, nor is he particularly welcome. A hulking, angry caveman type, Matthias is estranged from his wife and feels she's raising their young son to be a sissy; he tries to resume an out-in-the-open affair with his ex-girlfriend who runs the industrial bakery—now the primary employer in the area after globalization and political upheaval have gutted other industries. When no locals can be found to fill their minimum wage positions, the bakery brings in Sri Lankans, which sets off a powder keg race- and class-based conflict. Meanwhile, Matthias's boy keeps getting spooked by things he claims to see in the forest and his aging father is acting erratically. A Christmas-time torchlight procession of villagers in bear-skins prompts one of the Sri Lankans to ask the costume's significance and are told that the men are trying to feel as one with the beasts to ward off evil spirits. But it's a much more familiar monster that haunts their home and Mungiu, admirably, doesn't let anyone off the hook or propose any easy solutions. Matthias keeps staring at his father's brain scans, taken after the old man collapsed and was unresponsive, but he doesn't know what he should be looking for or how to make it better. (2022, 125 min, DCP Digital) [Dmitry Samarov]
Albert Serra’s PACIFICTION (France/Spain/Germany/Portugal)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 8pm
Like Bertrand Bonello or Tsai Ming-liang, Spanish director Albert Serra seems less interested in telling stories than evoking a particular state of mind. PACIFICTION is worth seeing—and on the biggest screen possible—for this reason alone; it’s as environmental a moviegoing experience as any IMAX nature documentary. The film harkens back to the fabled era of LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, L’ECLISSE, PLAYTIME, and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, when art movies created a sense of boundless possibility with every shot. However, once you figure out what PACIFICTION is about (it takes about an hour), that sense of possibility develops a fairly revolting aftertaste. For not only is Serra’s new movie a work of hit-for-the-rafters art filmmaking, it’s also something of the slow cinema WOLF OF WALL STREET. The hero is a French wheeler-dealer based in Tahiti, something of a cross between Ben Gazzara in SAINT JACK (1979) and those frighteningly hollow nationless contractors in Don DeLillo’s novel The Names. Played by Benoît Magimel in an electric performance, this guy seems so intent on making a deal with everybody he meets that he comes off as gross even before you know what he’s wrapped up in. That he enjoys a life of sleazy luxury (through his connections to the local tourism industry) and wears just two variations on the same loud suit only thicken the toxic aura around him. In his previous films STORY OF MY DEATH (2013), THE DEATH OF LOUIS XIV (2016), and LIBERTÉ (2019), Serra presented the hedonistic pleasures of aristocracies past with such museum-piece airlessness as to make them seem like rituals from an alien planet; here, he brings the same approach to a contemporary milieu, and the effect can be entrancing, funny, disgusting, or just plain dull, depending on how you look at it. Is this a movie about the cult of Donald Trump? Why not? Screening as part of Doc’s Saturday series, “Dóc: New Releases.” (2022, 165 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Ari Aster's BEAU IS AFRAID (US)
Music Box Theatre – See venue website for showtimes
Beau Wasserman (Joaquin Phoenix) is not at home in his world. The street outside his dingy apartment building is a dystopian hellscape of caterwauling maniacs, his therapist asks him questions he can't or won't answer, and his mother keeps calling. He's to visit her the next day on the anniversary of his father's passing but never makes it to the airport. Instead, the route to his mother's house goes through a Freudian looking-glass of past, present, and future versions of his inner monologue. Along the way to confronting the Jewishest mother of Jewish mothers, Beau is hit by a car, returns repeatedly to his fraught boyhood, and finally gets together with his childhood love. None of it goes well. Aster's third feature (after the hit horror films HEREDITARY [2018] and MIDSOMMAR [2019]), doesn't veer away from the genre that made his name so much as take it internal. This is a movie in which little of what's shown can reliably be described as anything but Beau's overmedicated, paranoid perception. It's a journey through the psyche of a man who feels no agency over anything that's happened in his life. When I saw the trailer a few months back, I immediately thought of Charlie Kaufman's SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK (2008), but a more recent film working in this sort of waking nightmare/reverie mode is Alejandro Iñárritu's BARDO, FALSE CHRONICLE OF A HANDFUL OF TRUTHS (2022). All three attempt to wrest free of narrative constraints and try to visually and aurally render an individual's particular psychic landscape. They're visions that can't help being compared to the biography of their creators and come off as indulgent and egomaniacal to the broad movie audience. I hope this doesn't sink a promising young director's career, but I can't imagine fans of the Marvel Universe embracing the kind of neurotic saga of self-immolation that Aster unhurriedly rolls out over three hours. I loved every painful second. Beau is a pitiful nonentity, but Phoenix, cowering and bloated, a look ranging from worry to outright terror never leaving his face, makes us absolutely and utterly feel his pain. He knows his life is ridiculous and out of control and he makes us laugh even if he can't laugh himself. (2023, 179 min, DCP Digital) [Dmitry Samarov]
Rebecca Zlotowski’s OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN (France)
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for limited showtimes
The French are so good—and so consistent—at making understated dramas about middle-class discontentment that they probably have a name for this subgenre. Claude Sautet’s run of masterpieces from the 1970s may be the high-water mark for whatever it’s called, though there have been excellent entries from directors as diverse as Bertrand Tavernier, André Téchiné, François Ozon, and Mia Hansen-Løve. (Claude Chabrol, who blended the subgenre with elements of the suspense thriller, worked in a category all his own.) It seems like a difficult type of movie to pull off: if you get too cynical or angry about middle-class hypocrisy, you may end up with trite moralizing; but if you’re too accepting of your characters and their worldview, you may end up with something soft and complacent. As such, writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski walks a fine line in OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN. This semicomic movie, about a 40-ish divorcée who first realizes she wants to be a mother, doesn’t really question the logic behind typical bourgeois aspirations; however, it feels realistic in its depiction of the challenges that keep the bourgeoisie from realizing their dreams. The heroine, Rachel, is a high-school teacher who falls in love with Ali, a car designer who’s also divorced. He shares custody of his five-year-old daughter, Leila, and as romance develops between the two protagonists, so does Rachel fall for Leila and, in the process, discover that she longs for the “banal” goals of settling down and raising children. As proven by Justine Triet’s SIBYL (2019) and Paul Verhoeven’s BENDETTA (2021), Virginie Efira excels at playing headstrong women who are more than a little neurotic, and she delivers another smart and compelling performance as Rachel; she makes you reflect on what it means to be happy along with her. Zlotowski, for her part, delineates the hurdles to Rachel’s happiness in a manner that’s neither too obvious nor obscure. One recognizes a certain self-sabotaging quality in the heroine but also the impact of things beyond her control, like the unpredictable nature of interpersonal relationships, the demands of a high-stress career, and plain old bad luck. Life gives us plenty of reasons to be dissatisfied. (2022, 104 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
ALSO SCREENING
âš« Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
“A Siberian Poetics of Extinction in Cinema” screens Thursday, 7pm, followed by a Q&A with directors Alisi Telengut and Liesbeth De Ceulaer, which will later be added to the Block Cinema website for the viewers to access. More info here.
âš« Comfort Film at Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.)
“The Transformation,” a program of animated short films, screens Wednesday at 8pm. Free admission. More info here.
âš« Doc Films
Guillermo del Toro’s 2017 film THE SHAPE OF WATER (123 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 7pm, as part of Doc’s Thursday I series, The Three Amigos. More info here.
âš« Gene Siskel Film Center
David Guggenheim’s 2023 documentary STILL: A MICHAEL J. FOX MOVIE (95 min, DCP Digital) opens this week and Saim Sadiq’s 2022 Pakistani film JOYLAND (126 min, DCP Digital) continues. See Venue website for showtimes.
The Chicago Palestine Film Festival also continues; see above for a review of the film BOYCOTT, playing as part of the festival. View full lineup and schedule here.
The SAIC Film, Video, New Media, Animation and Sound Festival 2023 continues through Saturday.
Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s 2022 film THE EIGHT MOUNTAINS (147 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday at 8pm before opening for a full run on Friday, May 19. More info on all screenings and events here.
âš« Sweet Void Cinema
Find information on the Humboldt Park microcinema, including its screening and workshop schedule, here.
CINE-LIST: May 12 - May 18, 2023
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Ray Ebarb, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Mike King, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Raphael Jose Martinez, Dmitry Samarov