CIFF 2012: Holy Motors (2012)

Director/Screenwriter: Leos Carax

2012 Chicago International Film Festival

By Marilyn Ferdinand

There’s one thing that people rarely talk about and yet is vital in our lives: dreaming. I don’t mean night dreams, but daydreams. They are man’s best companion, wonders of existence.

French director Leos Carax said the above in an interview about his 1999 film Pola X, the film he made eight years after completing his self-described “variation on the least original theme possible: boy meets girl”—The Lovers on the Bridge. In truth, it’s hard to imagine a more original version of that formula, with its gritty, hallucinatory visions and hard-luck, abusively passionate lovers living on Paris’ famous Pont Neuf. Now here we are again, wondering where Leos Carax has been for the 13 years since Pola X premiered. Frankly, I don’t care. In fact, I wish more directors would go away and come back only when they have something they feel compelled to express, particularly if the results are as explosive and stunning as Carax’s new film Holy Motors.

The opening quote is very pertinent to the “plot” of Holy Motors. The film plays like a series of short stories tied together by one character, Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant), who is driven by his chauffeur Céline (Edith Scob) to various parts of Paris in a white limousine to act out a wide variety of roles. These roles are the active daydreams of their orchestrator, Carax, crafting found objects from his experiences into both ordinary and extraordinary moments. Indeed, the most extreme of his daydreams, one involving the abduction of a high-fashion model (Eva Mendes) from a photo shoot in the Père Lachaise Cemetery by Lavant as a demented leprechaun strongly reminded me of the daydreams Sally Potter had as she tried to write a murder mystery involving a dwarf and some Paris fashion models in her film The Tango Lesson (1997). If Carax did, in fact, crib the idea—and I have no way of knowing whether he did—it is only fair and proper for any dreamer to recycle material for his own purposes.

Despite the plethora of hit films with convoluted plots that sometimes go nowhere—for example, the inane summer blockbuster Inception (2010)—I imagine a lot of moviegoers will feel frustrated by Holy Motors. You see, it doesn’t exist to be a brain teaser you can use to smartly assert your own powers of reason and deduction. From the very beginning, Carax signals he is presenting his own dream material—he has a man go into an airport hotel room, pull the drapes, and then enter a grand movie theater through a chink in the wall where an audience is watching a film projected on a screen. Now that’s pretty straightforward, isn’t it? But who is the man? Why is he in the airport hotel? Where is he going when he checks out? Who gives a damn! His “real” life couldn’t possibly be more interesting or exciting than the dream life Carax has given him and us.

Of course, Carax immediately plays with our initial plot expectations by showing us Monsieur Oscar exiting an enormous, gated mansion with the farewell shouts of his children seeing him down the winding driveway. His bodyguards follow him in a black sedan as he walks to the white stretch limo and greets Céline, who tells him the information for his nine appointments that day are in place for him to peruse. He makes all kinds of captain of industry noises into his cellphone as he looks at the first folder. Then we see him shift to the side of the limo we haven’t been allowed to see. A theatrical make-up mirror and racks of costumes and props stand at the ready as Monsieur Oscar begins his transformation into an old beggar woman. The limo stops below a bridge, and the disguised Oscar stands on the bridge, his bodyguards near at hand, and begs for money. When he returns to the limo, his bodyguards largely disappear from the scene as he makes his rounds, with stops that include working in a motion-capture studio, assassinating a prominent businessman, scolding “his” teenage daughter, and saying good-bye to “his” beloved niece while lying on his deathbed.

Oscar even has an interlude where he meets Jean (Kylie Minogue), someone he seems to have a past with who also travels Paris in a white limo acting out roles. So is there a real Monsieur Oscar? A real Jean? When they finish their appointments, all of the play actors end up not necessarily where they started the day, and the drivers return to the Holy Motors garage. Céline dons a mask that suggests the role the actress who plays her had in Georges Franju’s Eyes without a Face, and leaves. When all the lights are out, the two dozen or so white limos parked in the garage blink their lights and carry on a conversation about their eventual obsolescence as the size of machines keeps shrinking.

So what can we glean from the various parts of this rollercoaster adventure? Carax reveals some of his own thoughts about his world. He speaks with someone who might be his employer (Michel Piccoli) who wonders about Oscar’s waning interest in the job because he fears there is no longer a “beholder” to view his creations, Oscar says he keeps on “for the beauty of the act.” This is the essence of the pure artist—art for art’s sake. He deplores the shift from the large cameras of filmmaking days gone by, wondering how anyone can even see the tiny digital cameras used today, a sentiment about the miniature, yet all-powerful machines we have all come to rely upon. Not a Luddite, rather a connoisseur of the industrial design of the past, he also finds extraordinary beauty in motion-capture technology, as Lavant in a black body suit and the incredibly flexible Reda Oumouzoune in a red body suit simulate the elegant contortions of oral sex and coitus as their movements are transformed into writhing, animated dragons on a screen above them.

By contrast, the sexiness of the fashion model kidnapped by Lavant in his Monsieur Merde persona (from Carax’s contribution to the 2008 trilogy film Tokyo!) is subverted by the feral midget. After he has escaped to his underground lair through the Paris sewers, he rips cloth from her diaphanous gown and turns it into a burqua, stripping naked himself to curl up in her lap. Perhaps the wild man who seems a huge danger—hilariously, he bites off the fingers of the photographer’s assistant who seems to think she can make him part of the shoot—really only wants a mother’s nonthreatening love. Have we been all wrong about male aggressiveness and female objectification?

Many moments in this film are hilarious. Besides the shockingly funny finger-biting moment, the deathbed scene ends with uncle lifting “his” niece’s (Elise Lhomeau) head as he gets out of bed to go to his next appointment. Their polite, perfunctory pleasantries and farewells make the artifice of an already melodramatic scene irresistibly funny. I found the interlude between a loving working-class father and his teenage daughter to be quite touching, particularly since the girl is played by Carax’s own daughter, Nastya Golubeva Carax. When Lavant discovers the girl has lied about her experience of a party and the whereabouts of her friend, he orders her out of the car. It’s not as frightful as all that, as they are in front of their own apartment building. The anticipated punishment is not what she expects—he merely tells her that she will have to live with herself the rest of her life. While this sounds like a lily-livered parent getting out of being a disciplinarian, the effect is a lasting indictment of her character, of all of us who lie and misrepresent ourselves.

We can take these little postcard messages from the film, but the main pleasure is simply in the watching. Holy Motors is mirthful, rueful, beautiful, ugly, miraculously original while still feeling quite familiar, particularly to cinephiles, and already has the earmarks of a modern film classic. It and its star, Denis Lavant, were the richly deserving winners of the top prizes at the Chicago International Film Festival. Bravo, Monsieur Carax, bravo!

Previous coverage

Night Across the Street: Raul Rúiz’s last completed film is a surreal and frequently comic float through the memories of a man who is ending his work life with the feeling that death is stalking him. (Chile)

The Scapegoat: New adaptation of the Daphne du Maurier novel in which a schoolteacher impersonates an arrogant aristocrat and has a warming effect on his dysfunctional family. (UK)

Tey: Telling the story of one day—the last day—in the life of a young man, a fact known, celebrated, and mourned throughout his community, this film confronts our peculiarly human tragedy of knowing we will die, and gives us a few answers about coping with that frightening inevitability. (Senegal)

Mr. Sophistication: A familiar story of a comedian trying to make a comeback is made compelling by great performances, an intelligent script, and deft direction and camerawork. (USA)

The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni: The life of Egyptian movie star Soad Hosni, a cultural icon and touchpoint for unity in the Middle East, is interpreted in a biopic using nothing but footage from her 82 films. (Lebanon)

Shun Li and the Poet: A tone poem of a film depicting the longings of a Chinese emigrant to Italy and the loving friendship she forms with an elderly Yugoslavian man in a small fishing village near Venice. (Italy)

The Last Sentence: A gorgeously photographed biopic of Swedish newspaper editor Torgny Segerstedt that focuses attention on his romantic intrigues as he wages a relentless campaign against Hitler and Swedish neutrality. (Sweden)

The Exam: In a taut thriller set in 1957 Hungary, a member of the secret police unknowingly undergoes a harrowing loyalty test under the watchful eye of his own mentor. (Hungary)

CIFF 2012: Night Across the Street (La Noche de Enfrente, 2012)

Director/Screenwriter: Raul Rúiz

2012 Chicago International Film Festival

By Marilyn Ferdinand

The extraordinarily prolific experimental filmmaker Raul Rúiz did not know he would die only four months after completing Night Across the Street in 2011, but he had faced death only the year before, when the outcome of a life-saving liver transplant was still in doubt. Perhaps curiosity about his own final journey sent him from his adopted home in France back to Chile, his country of birth, to film Chilean writer Hernán del Solar’s most popular collection of children’s stories, Across the Night, which Rúiz certainly must have read in his youth. Night Across the Street, another of Rúiz’s many literary adaptations, happily intermingles Del Solar’s stories in a beautiful and bewildering free float through the end of the career and life of its main protagonist, Don Celso Barra (Sergio Hernández), who is vaguely a surrogate for Rúiz himself.

The credits roll over a panoramic shot of the ocean where it meets the sandstone cliffs that edge the coast of Chile. The action commences some time in the late 1940s or early 1950s on a character who is meant to be the real-life French writer Jean Giono (Christian Vadim) as he is instructing a class of boys and, incongruously, Don Celso, in French-to-Spanish translation, using Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past as a text; significantly, Rúiz met Giono, as well as adapted the Proust novel for his 1999 film Time Regained, signaling that we may be headed off into a reverie on Rúiz’s own life. During the class, an alarm clock rings, causing Don Celso to fumble to turn it off, shake a pill out of large bottle, and open a hip flask to wash the pill down with whatever liquid the flask contains. The bell signaling the end of class rings, and Don Celso and Giono walk together along the dock in Antofagasta, where we learn later in the film Giono moved because he liked the town’s name (supposedly, this also occurred in real life). Don Celso mentions a new translated novel he just read, and Giono neither confirms nor denies that he was the person who did the translation.

Don Celso goes to his office at the ship-building business where he is employed. His boss complains that Don Celso is not doing his best work, to which the elderly man says he has no more ideas; the assembled members of the office staff mention that his retirement is imminent that week. Don Celso and the staff recite strange poetry, and throughout the film, we will see a wide variety of wordplay among them, from pompous speeches to loose word association that introduces an adolescent sense of play to Don Celso’s latter years that helps us segue into his memories of his own boyhood.

When we meet Don Celso’s younger self (Santiago Figueroa), he is showing off his encyclopedic knowledge of many subjects, but particularly of classical music. His favorite composer, Beethoven (Sergio Schmeid), appears and accompanies the young Celso on his wanderings—to the movies, to an athletic field, and to a fireman’s funeral, with Celso explaining the scientific advances of the 20th century they come across. Young Celso also meets up with Long John Silver (Pedro Villagra), a reference not only to Rúiz’s film Treasure Island (1985) but also to Del Solar’s story “Pegleg.”

One of the stories, “Rhododendron,” is manifest as a magical name/word young Celso uses for himself and, later, the name the elderly Don Celso gives to a garishly painted plaque of a fish he has hanging on the wall of his room at Nigilda’s (Valentina Vargas) boarding house. Don Celso’s room is filled with toys, taxidermy animals, and posters more appropriate to a child’s room, reminding me of the anteroom of death in Rúiz’s biopic Klimt (1995). He also has a collection of ships in bottles he built, a fairly clear reference to Rúiz’s film output.

The most dramatic story to be told is of Don Celso’s premonition of death, which Rúiz shoots as a thriller/melodrama involving Nigilda and a young man named Rolo she says is her nephew, but treats far too familiarly for that. Don Celso calls him Rhododendron, certain that the man has come to kill him. Rolo and a young woman on a bicycle who appears to be his actual lover are, in fact, plotting to kill Don Celso and take a fortune he has hidden somewhere in the boarding house. Death becomes an overriding theme from this point onward, as the boarding house becomes a haunted house where seances are conducted. Don Celso walks down the barrel of a gun, which poetically has people inside it from its own memories, and into the light as the white cliffs of the Chilean coast bring us full circle.

The look of this film is lush and intriguing, and Rúiz’s slow horizontal pans constantly change the perspective and views, framing characters in doorways and moving them out of view again like a half-grasped memory. I have read complaints about the use of DCP video for this film, but I was enraptured by the slightly softer edges and almost 3D foreground of characters on detailed backgrounds. The period details are meticulously placed, and the environments, from the boarding house to the barrel of the gun, exert both a nostalgic and specific pull as we share in Don Celso’s memories and fantasies. However, Rúiz never forgets his source material, offering the solution of a radio show on which Don Celso reads stories to his audience to get us into some of the more outlandish situations he films.

There are moments of wonderful humor, particularly with regard to Don Celso’s retirement party. The company president makes an almost incomprehensible speech of appreciation, losing his train of thought in the middle, and Don Celso answers with a fairly incomprehensible thank-you speech that the office secretary Rosina (Chamila Rodríguez) transcribes in short, staccato bursts of the typewriter. He is presented with his retirement gift, an enormous plaster head that looks a bit like Tweedle Dee, and shows his pleasure by tipping his wine glass to its lips to get it to drink. He has to use a wheelbarrow to get it into his room at Nigilda’s. A slight political edge also creeps in as one Chilean asserts that the Yanks need to go, that Hitler was only trying to do right by his country and that Chile could do with a Hitler in charge. This short speech is shocking, but gives some clue as to how Pinochet’s military junta could eventually overwhelm the country, forcing Rúiz to emigrate to Paris.

Rúiz’s frequent musical collaborator Jorge Arriagada provides a haunting score, interspersed with romantic pop tunes of the 40s and 50s that forward the story and provide exceedingly pleasant pillows on which to rest from the confusion of the narrative. There is no question that Night Across the Street is a challenging film, but as its director’s final complete effort, it bids farewell to his career, his life, and his unique gifts in an extremely satisfying way.

Night Across the Street screens Monday, October 22, at 8:30 p.m. All screenings take place at the AMC River East 21, 322 E. Illinois St., Chicago.

Tey: Telling the story of one day—the last day—in the life of a young man, a fact known, celebrated, and mourned throughout his community, this film confronts our peculiarly human tragedy of knowing we will die, and gives us a few answers about coping with that frightening inevitability. (Senegal)

Mr. Sophistication: A familiar story of a comedian trying to make a comeback is made compelling by great performances, an intelligent script, and deft direction and camerawork. (USA)

The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni: The life of Egyptian movie star Soad Hosni, a cultural icon and touchpoint for unity in the Middle East, is interpreted in a biopic using nothing but footage from her 82 films. (Lebanon)

Shun Li and the Poet: A tone poem of a film depicting the longings of a Chinese emigrant to Italy and the loving friendship she forms with an elderly Yugoslavian man in a small fishing village near Venice. (Italy)

The Last Sentence: A gorgeously photographed biopic of Swedish newspaper editor Torgny Segerstedt that focuses attention on his romantic intrigues as he wages a relentless campaign against Hitler and Swedish neutrality. (Sweden)

The Exam: In a taut thriller set in 1957 Hungary, a member of the secret police unknowingly undergoes a harrowing loyalty test under the watchful eye of his own mentor. (Hungary)

CIFF 2012: The Scapegoat (2012)

Director/Screenwriter: Charles Sturridge

2012 Chicago International Film Festival

By Marilyn Ferdinand

More than 50 years after Robert Hamer, director of such classic British films as Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and The Long Memory (1952), directed a faithful adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s novel The Scapegoat, another well-regarded British director, Charles Sturridge (“Brideshead Revisited”), has given the story another go. Moving it from France to England and slightly tweaking the motivation of the central characters has yielded a less schematic, more psychologically true rendering of the identity-switch theme at the center of the tale.

Unlike the original, in which a schoolteacher has his fateful meeting with his doppelganger while on vacation, in this tale, John Standing (Matthew Rhys) is a Greek teacher in a primary school who is let go because conversational French is thought to be a more useful subject for the languages department to offer. With prospects for another job dim because of his obsolete skill, he literally decides to drift, that is, take a walking tour of England. Thus, when he meets his double, Johnny Spence (Rhys), in a pub, gets drunk with him, and wakes up to find all of his belongings missing and Johnny’s chauffeur George (Pip Torrens) waiting to take him back to his estate in a Rolls Royce, John has no circumstantial ties that bind him to the truth.

Naturally, one small lie leads to another, as he is introduced to “his” family—his wife Frances (Alice Orr-Ewing), his daughter Mary Louise (Eloise Webb), his sister Blanche (Jodhi May), his brother and sister-in-law Paul and Nina (Andrew Scott and Sheridan Smith), and his mother Lady Spence (Eileen Atkins). The imperious housekeeper Charlotte (Phoebe Nicholls) shuttles John from one person to the next, and the poor man has to stumble through conversations that mean nothing to him and try to locate his mother’s room in the vast mansion, blundering into Nina’s room at one point. Her embrace indicates that she and Johnny were having an affair.

It becomes apparent fairly quickly that Johnny has wrecked his family and made a complete hash of the foundry business that built their fortune; his inability to negotiate a badly needed contract sealed his determination to flee from his life. Once John gets the lay of the land and starts to insinuate himself into the Spence household, he learns that Johnny and Lady Spence engineered his loveless marriage to Frances to get their hands on her trust fund—one that will not be settled because she has not produced a male heir or died. Lady Spence, shrewd and bitter, has taken to her bed where she is attended by her priest, Father McReady (Anton Lesser), and Charlotte, and uses morphine supplied by Johnny to provide her only slice of happiness. Paul’s confidence has been sapped by his mother’s hectoring putdowns and preference for Johnny, and Blanche hates Johnny with every fiber of her being for a variety of reasons.

The idea of the good versus evil twin, or dark versus light, has been explored in works as disparate as the various versions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the melodrama A Stolen Life (1948), and the Star Wars franchise. The influence of a good nature, however, is more the thrust of this film as it downplays the thriller aspects of the Du Maurier novel. However, John isn’t exactly Pollyanna playing the glad game to cheer everyone up. Instead, he uses the gentle patience he developed as a teacher and his desire for the loving family he doesn’t have, echoing the feelings of the orphaned Joey in the family drama In the Family (2011), to fall in love with the Spences and give them what Johnny never could. He owns up to the lies he told out of ignorance, the most important of which is that he landed the contract, but offers his ideas to put the business back on the right track after doing his homework about the financial situation and business plan. He lets Paul take the spotlight, encourages Lady Spence to get out of bed by telling her the house needs her, and shows a deep understanding for Blanche’s rage and grief by saying he wants to make things right.

One has to work to suspend disbelief not only that John can put things to right in only a week, but also that none of the Spences suspects John’s deception. Only Johnny’s French mistress (Sylvie Testud) and Charlotte guess that John is a fraud, perhaps highlighting how blind the upper class is to the reality around them. However, George and the foundry manager never suspect him either, so it’s anyone’s guess whether Sturridge intended to imply this subtext. On the other hand, making John a potential member of the permanently unemployed was a stroke of genius in driving his decisions in this film, though the film tends to underplay the obvious material appeal of impersonating an aristocrat, even one whose business is in trouble.

Welsh actor Matthew Rhys is unfamiliar to me, but he has a strong, but mutable physical bearing that can move easily from a sacked teacher to a lord of the manor, thus largely getting over one improbable hurdle this story poses. He adopts a different spine for John and Johnny, and is impressive in both, making me wonder if the film actually had identical twins in the two roles. As can normally be expected of a British cast, the performances are uniformly wonderful, though they fall just short of being the cohesive ensemble of other films. The look of the film is appropriately rarified and atmospheric, and fans of PBS’s Masterpiece dramas and such prestige films as The King’s Speech (2010) will lap The Scapegoat up, particularly as the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II forms an underlying rationale for John’s final decision to stay or go. The Scapegoat is a finely crafted, if somewhat superficial character study that is engrossing to the end.

The Scapegoat screens Thursday, October 18, at 8:15 p.m. and Sunday, October 21, at 1:15 p.m. All screenings take place at the AMC River East 21, 322 E. Illinois St., Chicago.

Previous coverage

Tey: Telling the story of one day—the last day—in the life of a young man, a fact known, celebrated, and mourned throughout his community, this film confronts our peculiarly human tragedy of knowing we will die, and gives us a few answers about coping with that frightening inevitability. (Senegal)

Mr. Sophistication: A familiar story of a comedian trying to make a comeback is made compelling by great performances, an intelligent script, and deft direction and camerawork. (USA)

The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni: The life of Egyptian movie star Soad Hosni, a cultural icon and touchpoint for unity in the Middle East, is interpreted in a biopic using nothing but footage from her 82 films. (Lebanon)

Shun Li and the Poet: A tone poem of a film depicting the longings of a Chinese emigrant to Italy and the loving friendship she forms with an elderly Yugoslavian man in a small fishing village near Venice. (Italy)

The Last Sentence: A gorgeously photographed biopic of Swedish newspaper editor Torgny Segerstedt that focuses attention on his romantic intrigues as he wages a relentless campaign against Hitler and Swedish neutrality. (Sweden)

The Exam: In a taut thriller set in 1957 Hungary, a member of the secret police unknowingly undergoes a harrowing loyalty test under the watchful eye of his own mentor. (Hungary)

CIFF 2012: Tey (Aujourd’hui; Today, 2012)

Director/Screenwriter: Alain Gomis

2012 Chicago International Film Festival

By Marilyn Ferdinand

I recently had the pleasure of meeting African-American storyteller Michael D. McCarty when he came to the Chicago area to bring his mostly African tales to eager audiences at the Fox Valley Folk Music and Storytelling Festival. His performance was a reminder of how rich in wonder and home truths the world’s stories are and why films that tap these ancient fables are so compelling.

I received a reminder of this fact yesterday as I watched the Senegalese film Tey. Director/screenwriter Alain Gomis introduced the film by asking us not to worry about the confusing premise too much and just focus on the present. Good advice, because Tey tells the story of one day—the last day—in the life of a young man, a fact known, celebrated, and mourned throughout his community.

The opening moments of Tey put us directly into the doomed man’s shoes. Satché’s (Saul Williams) eyes flutter open and we see what he sees—his bare stomach and the top of his pants. His hands pat his stomach, and then we hear some crying and wailing. Satché emerges from the bedroom to the hugs and tears of his family and friends as they mourn his impending loss. They go into the courtyard of the compound and sit in a circle. Satché’s father praises God that his son was chosen, and the assembled offer testimonials both kind and cruel about Satché. His mother (Mariko Arame) has the final word, a heartbroken mother telling how much she will miss him. Then it is time for Satché’s best friend Sélé (Djolof Mbengue) to take him out and ask him, “What do you want to do?” The rest of the film chronicles how Satché chooses to spend his final day of life.

Satché’s fate echoes through many stories I’ve heard over the years, particularly from Joseph Campbell, including the grace killing of the noble hostage well told in the Brazilian film How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (1971). Christians might see the story of Christ in this tale of a man chosen by God to die, but it’s hard to know if Satché’s death will be a transformative sacrifice for his community despite the honors bestowed upon him and joy surrounding him. There is something of the heroic soldier here, a man who has seen “the fear,” as the people he encounters call it. Yet, we also see a child soldier in camoflage fatigues carrying a weapon as Satché scans the streets of Dakar, somewhat undercutting the notion of the bravery society assigns to state-sanctioned violence.

What is most important, and what director Gomis emphasized in the post-screening Q&A, is the familiar admonishment to live each day as though it were your last. For Gomis, this is not a call to achieve as much as you can in whatever time you have, as it is in many Western societies. Indeed, Satché is chosen in the prime of life, before he has been able to put his American schooling into practice to help rebuild Senegal; he will never have the chance to rush to achievement as the fictitious Mozart did in Amadeus (1984).

Instead, Gomis focuses on connection, on living completely in the moment. This realization creeps up on Satché, coming to fruition when he finally grieves for himself after Uncle Thiemo (Jean Mendy), the man he has asked to wash him for burial, demonstrates on Satché in both a chilling and oddly reverential moment what he will do to prepare Satché for paradise. After this, Satché’s life force weakens, and he must be helped as Sélé walks him to his home and gives him the left-handed handshake that signals they will not see each other again for a very long time. Gingerly, Satché pushes open the metal doors portentously marked with Xs and goes into the courtyard of his home to see his wife Rama (Anisia Uzeyman) and two young children for the last time and lay down that evening to die.

With handheld and stationary cameras, Gomis’ cinematographer Christelle Fournier shoots extreme close-ups and scanning shots as Satché takes in his surroundings and the people in his life. We see leaves and the shadows the leaves make on the ground. We watch Satché drink the milk out of a coconut from a young man who is heavily in debt to a missionary school, and we wonder who is more unfortunate—the educated young man who will be in servitude to a debt for many years to come or the one who will not wake up the next morning. Uncle Thiemo tells Satché that he will actually live longer than someone who does not know when he will die because Satché has the awareness to really take in the most important aspects of his life in his final day. Indeed, Gomis recreates the feeling of all times converging in a single moment of being completely alive when Satché sits in his compound with Rama and sees his children, now teenagers, say good-bye and walk out the gate.

During the Q&A, Gomis commented on the positive changes Senegal has been undergoing slowly as more of the young people who went abroad to get educated and find opportunities are returning to the country, a detail he added to Satché’s story. We were shocked to learn that there are no movie theatres left in Senegal, and therefore, this film will not be seen in its own country outside of a cultural center or two that might set up a screening. He said he cast American actor Saul Williams as Satché because he admired Williams’ acting abilities, because he looks so Senegalese, and because his lack of knowledge of the languages spoken by the other cast members would give him an aura of standing a bit outside of the everyday world.

Gomis’ instincts were dead-on in every aspect. Tey is a hauntingly beautiful film that confronts our peculiarly human tragedy of knowing we will die, and gives us a few answers about coping with that frightening inevitability.

Tey screens Tuesday, October 16, at 2:30 p.m. Alain Gomis is scheduled to attend the screening. All screenings take place at the AMC River East 21, 322 E. Illinois St., Chicago.

Previous coverage

Mr. Sophistication: A familiar story of a comedian trying to make a comeback is made compelling by great performances, an intelligent script, and deft direction and camerawork. (USA)

The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni: The life of Egyptian movie star Soad Hosni, a cultural icon and touchpoint for unity in the Middle East, is interpreted in a biopic using nothing but footage from her 82 films. (Lebanon)

Shun Li and the Poet: A tone poem of a film depicting the longings of a Chinese emigrant to Italy and the loving friendship she forms with an elderly Yugoslavian man in a small fishing village near Venice. (Italy)

The Last Sentence: A gorgeously photographed biopic of Swedish newspaper editor Torgny Segerstedt that focuses attention on his romantic intrigues as he wages a relentless campaign against Hitler and Swedish neutrality. (Sweden)

The Exam: In a taut thriller set in 1957 Hungary, a member of the secret police unknowingly undergoes a harrowing loyalty test under the watchful eye of his own mentor. (Hungary)

CIFF 2012: Mr. Sophistication (2012)

Director/Screenwriter: Danny Green

2012 Chicago International Film Festival

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Harry Lennix is an actor who can be easy to take for granted. He’s worked in numerous films and television shows, always adding his solid presence to round and deepen even the most by-the-numbers script, though I hasten to add that most of the projects he has chosen are anything but ordinary. I was particularly impressed with his work in the lost and lamented Joss Whedon series “Dollhouse.”

Mr. Sophistication has a title that applies more to Lennix than Ron Waters, the character he plays. Ron is a stand-up comedian who threw a blazing-hot career and first wife (Gina Torres) away with his rampant drug use and subsequent erratic behavior. At the beginning of the film, he is doing his “ripped from my life” routine to a packed house at the Chicago nightclub his wife Kim (Tatum O’Neal) owns and runs. After the show, his former agent Sterling French (Robert Patrick) comes backstage to tell him that people in Los Angeles have been asking for him and that he can make a comeback—but only if there are no repeats of his drug-induced theatrics. Ron, dissatisfied with a wife who is a businesswoman with no time to meet his emotional and physical needs and enticed by the chance to be on top again, accepts French’s offer.

He is given VIP treatment when he gets to L.A., with each of his guests commenting on the plush digs he has at an upscale hotel. His first set at one of L.A.’s elite comedy clubs garners him plaudits from old and new fans alike, as well as an evening seduction from 24-year-old beauty Rosa (Paloma Gúzman) that develops into an affair. Rosa falls in love with Ron, and he is very indiscreet about being seen with her anywhere and everywhere. Word of his affair gets back to Kim, and she hops on the next plane to try to save her marriage. On the brink of a major break as warm-up comedian for pop singer Niki J. Crawford (herself), he finds himself at the edge of an emotional cliff, torn between Rosa and Kim.

It’s clear from this synopsis that there’s nothing new or different about this story, and aside from the absence of designer drugs, all the things you’d expect to see in such a tale—the surface love inadequately hiding the cutthroat, elitist attitudes of show people, lots of drinking and smoking, self-justifying characters—are on display. Yet, I am recommending this film without reservation on the strength of some very powerful performances by actors who have been given excellent dialog to work with and the steady hand of director Danny Green.

Green seems to have a particular facility with actresses, encouraging them to reach for their strength and their sexuality in equal measure. Both Tatum O’Neal and Paloma Gúzman play smart, strong women who are formidable competitors for Ron’s affection. O’Neal gets to portray not only an older and wiser woman who is persistent and confident in her own abilities, but also a sexy woman who understands Ron’s need for emotional support; she doesn’t use only sex to entice him back, but also the kind of intimate honesty and open dialog that is more important to Ron than physical fulfillment. Gúzman may be smoking hot—her intense concentration on Ron when she first sees him perform is a laser beam of admiration and desire—but she also speaks with youthful intelligence, offering Ron a chance to be all the things he wants to be because she can show him and teach him about the joy of love and life, sometime she accurately diagnoses as his one gaping lack up to now. In a single, memorable scene, Gina Torres tantalizes Ron as she shows with a look of complete love for her second husband, multimillionare ex-basketball player Rick Fox playing himself, that she is happier without him.

It is, however, Harry Lennix who stops the show with his complete realization of his complex character. Lennix dexterously handles the emotionally raw comedy scenes like he has been doing stand-up all his life, a Hemingway who takes what has happened to him during the day and turns it into comedic genius by the evening. So, we believe Ron was a superstar comic with a rare gift that he feels compelled to fulfill outside the safe confines of Kim’s club. We also see how his emotional vulnerability, both real and calculated, draws women irresistibly into his orbit. Ron is capable of lying through his teeth with complete conviction, and still feel very ashamed of himself. His justification that he is an artist who needs to be free sounds like bullshit even to him, but that’s his story, and he’s sticking to it. When he almost blows his big chance, it is because he is so emotionally messed up about his feelings for both Rosa and Kim that he takes his unfunny talking therapy out on his audience.

I loved the look cinematographer Keith L. Smith created, setting us down in dark, smoke-filled nightclubs and swank parties like we belong there—I really felt comfortable in rarified circumstances I’d normally never get a chance to experience rather than like a tourist watching “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” a comfort that is very hard to pull off. Green allows for some Southern California sunshine, but after the obligatory drive down Rodeo Drive, he mainly abandons the glitz for more lived-in areas of Los Angeles, such as the mixed area of the boutique where Rosa works.

Watching Niki Crawford move in and out of rooms with her entourage in tow actually made me laugh, but Crawford herself never came off as a caricature. The final credits roll over her performance at the Cavalcade that represents Ron’s revival in both career and spirit. It also is a lovely grace note for a wonderful showcase of talent that Danny Green has given us in Mr. Sophistication.

Mr. Sophistication screens Saturday, October 20, at 7:15 pm. and Sunday, October 21, at 12:15 p.m. Danny Green, Harry Lennix, and producers Albena Dodeva and Jon E. Edwards are scheduled to attend the screenings. All screenings take place at the AMC River East 21, 322 E. Illinois St., Chicago.

Previous coverage

The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni: The life of Egyptian movie star Soad Hosni, a cultural icon and touchpoint for unity in the Middle East, is interpreted in a biopic using nothing but footage from her 82 films. (Lebanon)

Shun Li and the Poet: A tone poem of a film depicting the longings of a Chinese emigrant to Italy and the loving friendship she forms with an elderly Yugoslavian man in a small fishing village near Venice. (Italy)

The Last Sentence: A gorgeously photographed biopic of Swedish newspaper editor Torgny Segerstedt that focuses attention on his romantic intrigues as he wages a relentless campaign against Hitler and Swedish neutrality. (Sweden)

The Exam: In a taut thriller set in 1957 Hungary, a member of the secret police unknowingly undergoes a harrowing loyalty test under the watchful eye of his own mentor. (Hungary)

CIFF 2012: Shun Li and the Poet (Io Sono Li, 2011)

Director/Coscreenwriter: Andrea Segre

2012 Chicago International Film Festival

By Marilyn Ferdinand

I have a lot of bones to pick with the translations of some of the film titles at this year’s festival, but in the case of Io Sono Li, I have to give it to the translators. I Am Li is far too prosaic and does a disservice to the touching relationship at the heart of this tone poem of a film. First-time feature director Andrea Segre certainly has a poet’s heart for having conceived and written a simple tale set in a complicated world and filming it with a discreet and tender hand.

The film opens with a title card that explains that every year, the Chinese celebrate Poet’s Day, marking the life of their greatest poet, Qu Yuan (340–278 BCE), by floating candles on waterways to help him on his journey to paradise. In the next shot, we see candles illuminated within paper lotus flowers moving gently on water; when the camera pulls back, it reveals two Chinese women leaning over a bathtub full of water, rippling the water with their hands to move the candles. A drunk Chinese man comes into the bathroom and mocks them. We see a close-up of one of the women, Shun Li (Tao Zhao), and watch her face pinch in distaste at the sound of the man urinating in the toilet.

Li is a single mother in her mid 30s who is working at a garment factory and living in a dormitory for Chinese workers in Rome. She has gone there to make a better life for herself and her 8-year-old son, who is still in China living with her father, but must work off the debt she owes to the employers who paid her way to Italy before her son will be allowed to join her. She misses him very much and writes to him and her father frequently, reassuring them and herself that one day she will get the “news” that her debt has been repaid.

Soon after, Li is told she is being transferred to Chioggia, a small fishing village on the Venetian lagoon, to work in a café. After a perfunctory greeting by her new bosses, she goes up to her room to meet her roommate Lian and settle in.

Li’s introduction from the café regulars is a mixed bag. When she tries to settle the tabs they ran up under the previous owner, they pretend they are not the people whose names she reads out. One of the regulars, Bepi (Rade Serbedziga), a Yugoslavian fisherman called The Poet because he makes up funny rhymes, has been living in Italy for more than 30 years. He comes in and orders a coffee with prune liqueur. Shun Li gives him the coffee but omits the liqueur, as her command of Italian is limited. He goes behind the bar, takes the bottle off the shelf, shows her the picture of the prune on the label, repeats the Italian for “prune,” and pours a measure of the liqueur into his coffee. Li thanks him for teaching her, and so begins what turns into a touching friendship of two lonely people.

Segre’s film taps the slower rhythms and muffling mists of a coastal village to give his characters and the audience room to breathe and enjoy getting to know this town and its inhabitants. For example, to Li’s surprise, the lagoon periodically floods the village for two or three hours. It doesn’t seem to put a dent in the village routine, as people don galoushes and float their boats down the streets to get around. Or one day, Bepi takes Li out on his fishing boat, and he watches her standing in the sun, her eyes closed, her face turned upward and looking serene and present. Watching this film feels like that—warm and restful despite the constant work Li and the fishermen must bend their backs to to get by.

When one of the fishermen, Coppe (Marco Paolini), retires after 35 years, we return to reality and understand that with age comes leisure, but also pain. Bepi’s is the loss of his wife the year before and the entreaties of his son, worried about his health, to come live with him in Mestre. His pain is compounded when the regulars start gossiping about his relationship with Li, and the reflexive xenophobia of small towns builds against both Li and even the mainly assimilated Bepi, a reminder that prejudice runs deep and can erupt at any perceived threat. Li is warned to break off contact with Bepi or start from the very beginning in paying off her debt. I felt the actors were true to their characters, and that Bepi was, in fact, falling in love with Li. And although the conflict was believable, it felt a little tacked on, indulging the Italian weakness for melodrama in a way that undercut the film’s poetry.

Nonetheless, Segre mainly maintains an enticing reticence throughout the film. For example, Lian has a very important role, but she is only shown walking somewhere every night to work—where is never revealed—and performing tai chi on the beach. Li and Coppe take a boat out to Bepi’s fishing hut near the end of the film, and Segre chooses to linger on the orange glow, reminiscent of the paper lotuses, on their faces before he pulls back to show the hut on fire. The very indirection of his focus reminds us that the commonplace and the lives of common people can be filled with poetry if we could only experience them in a different way. Shun Li and the Poet is a beautiful meditation of a movie.

Shun Li and the Poet screens Sunday, October 21, at 5:30 p.m. and Tuesday, October 23, at 6:15 p.m. All screenings take place at the AMC River East 21, 322 E. Illinois St., Chicago.

Northwestern University’s Block Cinema will also screen Shun Li and the Poet on Friday, November 16, at 7 p.m. The screening will be held at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston.

Previous coverage

The Last Sentence: A gorgeously photographed biopic of Swedish newspaper editor Torgny Segerstedt that focuses attention on his romantic intrigues as he wages a relentless campaign against Hitler and Swedish neutrality. (Sweden)

The Exam: In a taut thriller set in 1957 Hungary, a member of the secret police unknowingly undergoes a harrowing loyalty test under the watchful eye of his own mentor. (Hungary)

CIFF 2012: The Last Sentence (Dom Över Dod Man, 2012)

Director/Coscreenwriter: Jan Troell

2012 Chicago International Film Festival

By Marilyn Ferdinand

At 81, Jan Troell, a contemporary of Ingmar Bergman, continues to make finely crafted films that plumb real figures of Scandinavian culture to illuminate seminal events in Troell’s life and world history. In 1996, Troell made a warts-and-all biopic of Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun, a beloved Norwegian novelist who felt appeasement was the best way to ensure Norway’s sovereignty in the face of German aggression under Adolf Hitler. With his latest film, The Last Sentence, Troell trods this same territory as he examines the life of Swedish newspaper editor Torgny Segerstedt, a vehement anti-Nazi who did all he could to end Swedish neutrality during World War II. Even moreso than in Hamsun, politics in The Last Sentence takes a back seat to the peculiarly Swedish preoccupation with unhappy marriages.

Troell sets the stage brilliantly in the opening credits with newsreel footage from 1932 of Hitler being named Germany’s chancellor, followed by a hand moving a fountain pen across a piece of paper, a linotype operator punching the words into his machine, and a compositor lifting the type sent out by the linotype machine, applying ink to it, and rolling a paper proof sheet over it. The column-wide proof is delivered into the hands of newspaper publisher Axel Forssman (Björn Granath), who chuckles at Torgny Segerstedt’s (Jesper Christensen) characterization of Hitler as “an insult.” Axel’s Jewish wife Maja (Pernilla August) joins the men in a celebratory drink at their “declaration of war” against Germany’s new chancellor and steals back to Torgny after her husband thinks he has left her at the elevator to give her lover his well-deserved kisses.

At the Segerstedt home, Torgny wife’s Puste (Ulla Skoog) worries absentmindedly over the place cards and glassware for a dinner they are hosting. Puste has been in a state of suspended grief since the death of her 13-year-old son seven years earlier; Torgny has forbidden any mention of the boy, driving Puste around the bend and creating an estrangement between the couple. Torgny and Maja flaunt their affair at the dinner party, with Maja rearranging the dinner cards and entertaining guests by asking them if her nose looks like the Jewish caricatures rampant in Germany. Talk of Sweden having good Jews who are more evolved that the kind in Germany underlines the fight Torgny will have as his crusade against Hitler proceeds all the way to the end of the war, when Torgny dies in bed moments after hearing the news of Hitler’s demise.

The Last Sentence is punctuated with war news that has the effect of coming as news flashes that immediately recede into the background as the drama of Torgny’s domestic affairs take center stage, yet there is a subtle parallel between the macro and micro in the film. Sweden faces subjugation not only from Nazi Germany but also Soviet Russia when the Red Army invades Finland. A panicked populace hangs onto its gossamer-thin lifeline of neutrality. In the same way, Torgny openly pursues his passion for Maja while holding Puste hostage with his contempt and, yes, his love. Axel has a surprisingly open attitude to the affair, embarrassed rather than angry when he comes home early and runs into Torgny taking his leave from Maja. Puste, a Norwegian, suffers where Torgny, Maja, and Axel do not, throwing into relief the apparent ability of Swedes to compartmentalize, thus allowing them to maintain their political neutrality in the fact of overwhelming misery and threat from without.

One of the lovelier touches in the film is Torgny’s relationship with his three dogs, a Great Dane, a black lab, and a bulldog. Every day, his limousine takes Torgny and the dogs partway to his office, and then lets them out for their brisk walk the rest of the way. The bulldog, old and squat, can’t negotiate the steep hill and stairs on the route, so the car picks him up to take him up the hill, and he rides the elevator to Torgny’s office. The dogs are present throughout the film and add a dimension of unconditional love and devotion that balances the unhappiness between Torgny and Puste.

The acting is without peer, and I was very happy Troell decided to cast Christensen, a sexy and vital Danish actor who quite resembles Segerstedt, instead of his first choice, Max von Sydow. August leant a charismatic female presence to the film, whose lust for life and doing what she liked blew like a breath of fresh air through the rather conventional storytelling; equally, August deftly handles Maja’s fading light as her health begins to fail and Torgny takes up with his secretary Estrid (Birte Heribertson). While Puste is a fairly commonplace drudge, Skoog draws a line that refuses our pity; even when she sings a passionate love song to her husband, she remains emotionally true, the antithesis of a rejected mate open to our ridicule.

I have nothing but praise for the look of the film. The locations are sumptuous and perfectly appointed, the costumes add to the characterizations, and the luxurious HD black-and-white cinematography by Mischa Gavjusjov a good choice to accord with the newsreel footage and the opulence of the world Torgny inhabited. The excellent soundtrack, too, was meaningful in painting mood and feeling.

Although the film is based on two biographies of Segerstedt, neither of which has been translated into English, thus making fact-checking for this review a real challenge, facts have been altered for dramatic purposes. A number of names have been changed, persumably at the behest of the families involved, and Torgny died several months before Hitler, making his deathbed triumph satisfying only to the moviegoing audience. I’d venture to guess that a certain death did not actual occur as written, but rather was made to fit a Nazi movie cliché.

The Last Sentence is a worthy follow-up to Troell’s moving 2008 drama Everlasting Moments, and will satisfy most moviegoers with its superb craftsmanship and intriguing tale. For me, the film suffered because of its close likeness to Hamsun, which made the project seem more like one Troell felt capable of making rather than one he felt compelled to make as an artist. As I hold Troell in high regard, I felt a bit let down. On the other hand, this story offers a wonderful example of how necessary a truly free press peopled with brave journalists who will speak truth to power is to creating a just world. Torgny Segerstedt is virtually unknown outside of Scandinavia, but hopefully many people the world over will learn about him through this full-bodied work by one of Swedish cinema’s elder statesmen.

The Last Sentence screens Tuesday, October 16, at 5 p.m., Friday, October 19, at 6 p.m. and Saturday, October 20, at 4:30 p.m. The director is scheduled to attend the October 19 and 20 screenings. All screenings take place at the AMC River East 21, 322 E. Illinois St., Chicago.

Previous coverage

The Exam: In a taut thriller set in 1957 Hungary, a member of the secret police unknowingly undergoes a harrowing loyalty test under the watchful eye of his own mentor. (Hungary)

CIFF 2012: The Exam (A Viszga, 2011)

Director: Péter Bergendy

2012 Chicago International Film Festival

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Do the words “homeland security” make you feel protected? Do they make your skin crawl? Do you look around you in a bustling airport for unattended packages, or are you most interested in finding the food court? We may still say “It’s a free country,” but what citizens of the United States, and other countries as well, are more or less resigned to is the “new normal” of walking around in their stockinged feet as their shoes are x-rayed and their bags are randomly searched at the airport, going to museums that require they pass through metal detectors, or looking idly at Google Earth to see what their homes look like through the surveillance satellites and cameras that never sleep. We are all suspects now in an international game of terrorism, something the characters of Hungarian director Péter Bergendy’s second feature film must understand or face the consequences.

Hungarian screenwriting phenom Norbert Köbli has written a crackling thriller in which the main character is suspicion. Channeling the murderous paranoia of Stalinist rule in the year after the failed 1956 Hungarian counterrevolution, The Exam shows how oppressive regimes tend to eat their own tails by focusing on loyalty tests that were mandated for even the most zealously pro-Communist operatives in government.

The subject who is being tested on Christmas Eve—importantly, without his knowledge—is András Jung (Zsolt Nagy), a handsome young handler for the secret police. The opening credits cleverly show the double life Jung leads, toggling between close-ups of homey Christmas items like tree ornaments and candles and such tools of the spy trade as headphones and a gun being laid out for use. Jung poses as a German instructor who gives private lessons at an apartment maintained by the government as a less conspicuous way for Jung to contact his informants. We see him arrive home and carefully remove a matchstick he placed between the doors to inform him whether someone entered the apartment in his absence. He prepares to receive some of the informants he has been running by getting his hidden tape recorder and microphone set up and checking his list of agents. Before anyone arrives, his mentor Pál Márko (János Kulka) pays him a visit, inviting him for dinner and giving Jung a gift from his wife Janka (Mária Varga)—a ceramic angel to hang on his Christmas tree.

Thus begins Jung’s test. Márko goes across the street to an apartment where a surveillance team is set up to watch Jung, record his phone conversations from the tap placed in his telephone handset, and listen to his conversations with the informants he receives through the microphone hidden in the ceramic angel. The test proceeds uneventfully, and Márko is ready to call an end to it. The official test-runner, Emil Kulcsár (Péter Scherer), a nerdy, by-the-book member of the team who seems to idolize Márko, argues that they are required to watch the subject for 12 consecutive hours. Márko is dismissive of Kulcsár, consistently failing to remember his name, and wants to flaunt regulations so that he can get on with having a nice Christmas at home. That delightful possibility is definitively quashed when an unknown woman (Gabriella Hámori) arrives at Jung’s home and makes passionate love with him as the microphones and embarrassed spies catch every sigh.

Brutal and action-oriented, as befits his status as a war hero and early Soviet supporter, Márko follows up every lead, identifying the woman as Éva Gát, a music student with a questionable past whom Jung met at a concert. He becomes convinced that Jung is in love with her, and wonders how he can warn his surrogate son about the danger she poses to Jung’s position with the secret police. However, Jung is not the only agent in trouble; every main character, including the hapless Emil, has a personal, emotional tie that could jeopardize their position. Like many other films, books, and other works of art that deal with state oppression (e.g., Nineteen Eighty-Four), The Exam posits the personal and individual as major threats to the ruling order. As Jung tells a priest he has recruited to spy on another priest, guns are not the only weapons that can be used against the state.

In addition to the period detail, what I enjoyed so much about this exciting, cat-and-mouse film is that it was hard to decide who was the cat and who were the mice. In fact, from the landladies and enforcers who follow the orders of Márko and Emil to the humorless, intimidating Jung, we are never really sure whom to trust, what anyone is feeling, and what actions are real or staged. The actors play more than one role within their basic character, aware of living their cover stories, how they must behave to accord with the rules of the test, and holding their personal identities like precious water in a leaky bucket. Nagy particularly impresses as a cold operative with an equally passionate flipside and the capacity for sudden violence when his survival is threatened.

Like Jung, we, too, are being tested, asked to examine our loyalties by which character we identify with and root for. In the final scene, Márko and his wife finally sit down to Christmas dinner. The place setting for Jung remains empty until Janka at last removes it. The state has swallowed the personal, and we are left to consider the true cost of the “new normal” to our own lives.

The Exam won the Gold Hugo in the 2012 CIFF New Directors Competition.

CIFF 2011: What Love May Bring (aka, Ces amours-là; What War May Bring, 2010)

Director: Claude Lelouch

2011 Chicago International Film Festival

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Claude Lelouch has been making films for 50 years. The hot tickets at the Chicago International Film Festival are not his two films From One Film to Another and What Love May Bring. That’s a shame. While I’m sure David Cronenberg’s and Lars von Trier’s new films are well worth seeing, there really is nothing like seeing the work of a master filmmaker completely in command of his form, not to mention a chance to see the man in the flesh and ask him questions. My experience of seeing What Love May Bring is one I will treasure forever.

What Love May Bring compresses everything Claude Lelouch knows and wants to say about cinema through a series of true stories that he has fashioned into a single narrative—the life and loves of Ilva Lemoine (Audrey Dana), the daughter of a filmmaker who was killed in World War I and the stepdaughter of Maurice Lemoine (Dominique Pinon), the projectionist at the fictional Eden Palace Cinema in Paris. The story begins in the present in a studio where the score for the film is being recorded. In the booth sit several people we will come to recognize as actors in the film, including Ilva (Gisèlle Casadesus) as a very old, blind, but still beautiful woman. As she hears the music, she nods in remembrance, and then we get a brief interlude (done as a silent film) of her parents meeting and her father’s death. Much of the rest of the story is told through the summation of Simon (Laurent Couson), an attorney who is defending Ilva from a charge of murder. His defense, basically, is that Ilva’s entire life has been in service to love, and it was love that drove her to shoot her husband, completing a suicide he was too cowardly to do himself. Only in France (or, possibly, only in a Claude Lelouch film) would such a defense be offered as legitimate.

Whatever conclusion you might come to about Ilva’s actual guilt or innocence in the case is overwhelmed by seeing how much life she has lived—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Living in occupied France, Ilva goes to the German high command to beg for the life of her stepfather, an innocent who is to be one of 20 random French citizens executed in retaliation for a Resistance bombing that killed two German soldiers. She ends up throwing over her boyfriend (Raphaël) and taking up with Horst (Samuel Labarthe), the Nazi who initially rejected her plea and then changed his mind. Just after the liberation of Paris, she will fall into bed and love with two men at the same time—Jim Singer (Gilles Lemaire), heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune, and Bob (Jacky Ido), a black boxing champion who saved Jim’s life and became his best friend. To reveal more would be to reveal too much; suffice to say that Ilva’s convoluted love life will continue, loop back on itself, and renew itself as the film progresses.

Lelouch has this to say about Ilva and his film:

I knew that the heroine of What Love May Bring would be a woman, and that the backbone for the film would be her portrait. All wars have helped to make the modern woman what she is, but it was during the Second World War that she really emerged. Who were the winners of that war? Women. The world we are living in today is the result of that victory by women. They know how to juggle their dreams and the hardships of daily life. They can take a blow and bounce back, they can heal. Love can kill them but it is also love that cures them. I understood very early on that women are ready to sacrifice themselves for love, that they were at the essential heart of things.

Ilva may be the backbone, but observations about the costs of human emotion and Lelouch’s own history are the appendages. Simon, for example, is a very gifted musician who can’t decide between music and law. He and his family are sent to a concentration camp because his neighbors want to be rid of his piano noise, yet his ability to play and entertain the camp soldiers saves his life and keeps his belly full. On the train to Auschwitz, he meets and instantly falls in love with the beautiful Salomé Blum (Salomé Lelouch), who, with her family, is denounced and sent to her death because the family are so successful at making wedding gowns that their concierge (Lise Lamétirie) never has a chance to use their sewing machine. After the war, Simon visits Madame DeBois and asks her the price of the sewing machine. She’s a bit confused at first, until he asks about the Blums and then says, “I know the price of that sewing machine.” He makes her squirm a bit, but chances are she won’t be eaten with guilt the way Jim is for the way he stole Ilva from Bob.

Lelouch’s story appears in the person of Coco, a Jewish boy who is hidden from the Gestapo in a basement but is kept from going stir-crazy and betraying his location when Ilva looks after him as he watches films at the Eden Palace. In an affecting scene, Coco at age 7 (Boaz Lelouch) goes up to the screen to see where the people are. Ilva redirects him to Maurice, who shows him how the magic lantern works and begins his apprenticeship. Later, Coco at age 19 (Sachka Lelouch) will film the first of many kisses to come when Ilva and the man who becomes her final, enduring love kiss for the first time. Lelouch has stated flatly that movies literally saved his life and that that kiss inspired all the ones that followed.

Music is a very important part of every one of Lelouch’s film. He said in the Q&A that he has two actors that come first in his movies: the camera and the music. He developed the score for the film even before he shot a single frame, and he hit the jackpot when he cast Laurent Couson as Simon. Couson is actually a very accomplished musician, playing piano and trumpet simultaneous in a Paris nightclub in one scene and conducting the orchestra that is scoring What Love May Bring. A slightly amusing and effective scene shows him auditioning for a music academy after the war. He plays a very impassioned classical piece as images of Salomé, the gaunt faces of other camp survivors, the neighbors who betrayed him, flash through his mind; overwhelmed, he breaks into “Stormy Weather” (Ilva’s song, he will learn one day in the future) and other jazz tunes, only coming back to the classical piece in the last couple of bars. A judge says “Well?” and he only answers “I’ll study law.” He never closes himself off from his creative side, however, as he plays at the nightclub after every case he wins.

Dana is incredible as Ilva. She is very attractive and seduces us along with every man she meets in the loving close-ups Lelouch favors. Dana is bold in playing a survivor who uses sex to thank people for doing her favors, for example, saving her father or saving her from the partisans who are arresting collaborators. She, like Piaf, regrets nothing when it comes to love, though she realizes too late that her decision-making skills often cause quite a lot of hurt. In the end, Dana maintains Ilva’s character as a straight throughline, and she becomes, if not the most noble character, at least one deserving of respect for her personal integrity.

Anouk Aimée makes a brief and quite lovely appearance as an actress on her way to the death camp. We see her on the train talking into a telephone to someone who might be her agent. She says she is to appear in a Cocteau play and will clear it up with the authorities once they reach their destination. She seems terribly self-absorbed and self-important, as the other passengers stare at her impassively. Modern audiences used to using cellphones might be fooled into thinking she really is on the phone, but of course, she merely brought this prop to rehearse a performance she still thought she would be giving. The other passengers on the train applaud her at the end. The film is filled to overflowing with such wonderful vignettes that put people rather than film technique at center stage.

A last homage Lelouch pays to cinema comes at the end of the film, which contains images from his many films and the many great actors, including Aimée in her younger days, he immortalized. After watching this, Lelouch’s 43rd film, I had an overwhelming feeling that I never needed to see another film again. Of course, this was a fleeting emotion, but it did express how swept up I felt in this chronicle of many grand passions and how fulfilling the experience was for me. A veteran observer of love, Claude Lelouch dedicates this film in an opening intertitle to his seven children; anyone who sees this film will recognize the profound love of this gesture and feel it as part of Lelouch’s extended family—his audience.

*Here’s a personal shout-out to Mark and Tom, two people who live in Mt. Prospect who have a clue about cinema. Thanks for making our evening at the AMC more enjoyable with their company and conversation.

What Love May Bring will screen Tuesday, October 11, 3:30 p.m., at the AMC River East 21 Theatres, 322 E. Illinois St.

Previous coverage

Good Bye: Mohammad Rasoulof, a director in prison for making films critical of the Iranian regime, gives viewers some insight into his ordeal through the story of a woman desperate to leave Iran, but feeling the noose tightening with each step she takes toward her escape. (Iran)

Le Havre: A gentle comedy in which an aged shoeshine hides a young illegal immigrant and works along with some generous neighbors to reunite the boy with his mother in London. (Finland)

King of Devil’s Island: Naturalistic and suspenseful look at life in an island detention center for boys and their rebellion against their harsh treatment. (Norway/France)

Cinema Komunisto: This entertaining and eye-opening documentary provides a loving look at the little-known national cinema of Yugoslavia and the film fanatic who made it happen: Marshall Josif Broz Tito, Yugoslavia’s president for life. (Serbia)

Inshallah, Football: One young man’s struggle to get a passport to play soccer in Brazil is the lens through which this documentary examines the Indian oppression of Muslims in the occupied region of Kashmir. (India)

George the Hedgehog: Irreverent and adult, this comic-book-based animated film pits George, a pleasure-loving hedgehog, against his clone, a stupid, vulgar internet superstar. (Poland)

The Kid with a Bike: What makes some people give unselfishly of themselves is the question examined in this intense tale by the Dardenne brothers of a boy abandoned by his father and the single woman who takes him in. (Belgium)

Without: A suspenseful story of guilt and loss slowly unfurls as a young woman acts as a temporary caregiver to a helpless elderly man in an isolated island home. (USA)

Madame X: A riotous satire on spy/superhero films that has a drag queen hairdresser transform into a crusader for freedom and equality against the forces of repressive morality. (Indonesia)

Southwest: A haunting, beautifully photographed journey of discovery, as a young woman who dies in childbirth gets a second chance to live to old age, but only one day in which to live it. (Brazil)

On the Bridge: Moving documentary about the torments of posttraumatic stress disorder suffered by Iraq veterans and the failure of the VA medical establishment to help them. (France/USA)

CIFF 2011: Good Bye (Bé omid é didar, 2011)

Director: Mohammad Rasoulof

2011 Chicago International Film Festival

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Looking at the phonetic Persian title of Mohammad Rasoulof’s latest film, Bé omid é didar, I guessed that Good Bye was losing something in translation. Thanks to an Iranian friend of mine, I learned that the Persian title literally translates as “hope to see you again.” Since Rasoulof has been sentenced to serve a one-year prison term and a 20-year ban on filmmaking for “assembly, collusion, and propagandizing against the regime,” the more literal translation offers a hopeful note about his release. However, given the trajectory of the film itself, I really don’t blame the translators for the more hopelessly final message they decided upon for the English version.

It would be a mistake not to see Rasoulof’s situation in the plight of his protagonist Noora (Leyla Zareh), a lawyer banned from practicing because of her civil rights activities and drawing increasingly sinister attention from the police. But Noora’s problems are compounded by her gender: women are not allowed to drive, cannot get medical procedures or check into a hotel without a male family member’s consent, and cannot take charge of simple transactions, like getting a security deposit back, without being harassed or cheated. Noora needs to carry out all these activities because she cannot take life in Iran anymore and is trying to find a means of escape.

Noora has found a fixer who advises his clients the best way to accomplish their goal, and withholds their visa if they don’t pay up everything they owe him. Noora has been advised to get pregnant, which she has achieved before the start of the film, and to be sure the baby is born out of the country. The fixer has arranged for her to give a paper at an international conference, going so far as to have the paper written for her.

The first sign of trouble is a premonition Noora has that there is something wrong with her pregnancy. After telling the fixer’s imperious secretary that she wants an abortion, the secretary scolds her that her boss has chosen the right way for her to escape and that she must go through with it. After a while, her fears are overcome by her growing attachment to her unborn daughter, nourished by ultrasound images and conversations with her husband, who has been stripped of his livelihood as a journalist and sent to do construction work in a southern desert.

Rasoulof’s tense film slowly narrows the ground on which Noora stands. One day, two policemen show up at her apartment and ask if she has a satellite receiver on her television. She answers yes, but that it doesn’t work. In one of the many small but telling touches Rasoulof supplies, one officer enters her home after putting plastic bags over his shoes to keep from tracking in dirt, while the other stands in the hall and writes her a ticket. How did they know she had the device? Soon thereafter, she gets into the narrow elevator of her building, and is crowded by two policemen who take her for a ride up and down the elevator shaft. They tell her they need to search her home, and once inside it, never let her out of their sight, even when her visiting mother returns to the apartment and makes them tea.

More bad news awaits Noora, including that her husband is having doubts about leaving Iran. So determined is Noora to escape her oppression that she tells him she will go anyway and let her daughter give her a new life. Shortly before her departure, she meets a friend of her husband who tries to dissuade her from leaving on his behalf. She tells him, “If one feels like a foreigner in one’s one country, it is better to leave and be a foreigner in a foreign country.” All he says before he walks off is “See you later.” What are the odds that he will?

There are many obstacles to Noora’s plan, but by far the worst is not knowing whom to trust. She has to work with a number of people—including her husband’s former mistress—to tend to her pregnancy and her plan of escape. Some of them are kind, some are hostile, others are all business, but any of them could betray her. When her husband has a change of heart, we know he could rat her out to keep her with him. Evidence of husbands and wives informing on each other in other repressive societies, such as East Germany, is rampant. But Noora’s behavior is more like an animal trying to gnaw its own leg off to be free of a trap; she has no choice.

Word is that the production of Good Bye was very fraught, and that much of the shooting and assembly was done clandestinely. Given the scrutiny Rasoulof must have been under, as evidenced by the meticulousness of the outrages he shows Noora enduring, this must be true. Yet the film is beautifully composed, with an emphasis on right angles that showcase how boxed in Noora is and subtly noirish lighting that suggests a person trapped by fate.

One interesting detail is a pet turtle Noora keeps in a small aquarium. When the aquarium starts to leak, she puts it on a tray. Tiring of emptying the water from the tray, she fills it with more water and puts the turtle on it. We watch the turtle struggle to get over the side as we hear Noora doing something in the background. Ah, she has been fashioning a barrier of newspaper to tape around the tray to keep her pet from escaping. Yet one day, it isn’t there, and a search of the living room yields nothing. On a realistic level, the turtle could have gotten down a hole, or it could have been taken, perhaps by the someone who informed the police about Noora’s satellite receiver. On a metaphorical level, the turtle’s existence in its faulty home is a mirror of Noora’s existence in her toxic country. Its puzzling disappearance is a foreboding of what might happen to Noora, perhaps even suggesting that she will be one of the dissidents who, we learn during the film, is hanged in secret.

These are extremely desperate times for filmmakers in Iran. Good Bye is an incredible act of courage and an artistic triumph by one of Iran’s most gifted and persecuted directors. Show your support for his art and voice by seeing Good Bye and bearing witness to the suffering underway today.

Good Bye will screen Tuesday, October 11, 3:15 p.m., Thursday, October 13, 7:30 p.m., and Saturday, October 15, 2:10 p.m. All screenings take place at the AMC River East 21 Theatres, 322 E. Illinois St.

Previous coverage

Le Havre: A gentle comedy in which an aged shoeshine hides a young illegal immigrant and works along with some generous neighbors to reunite the boy with his mother in London. (Finland)

King of Devil’s Island: Naturalistic and suspenseful look at life in an island detention center for boys and their rebellion against their harsh treatment. (Norway/France)

Cinema Komunisto: This entertaining and eye-opening documentary provides a loving look at the little-known national cinema of Yugoslavia and the film fanatic who made it happen: Marshall Josif Broz Tito, Yugoslavia’s president for life. (Serbia)

Inshallah, Football: One young man’s struggle to get a passport to play soccer in Brazil is the lens through which this documentary examines the Indian oppression of Muslims in the occupied region of Kashmir. (India)

George the Hedgehog: Irreverent and adult, this comic-book-based animated film pits George, a pleasure-loving hedgehog, against his clone, a stupid, vulgar internet superstar. (Poland)

The Kid with a Bike: What makes some people give unselfishly of themselves is the question examined in this intense tale by the Dardenne brothers of a boy abandoned by his father and the single woman who takes him in. (Belgium)

Without: A suspenseful story of guilt and loss slowly unfurls as a young woman acts as a temporary caregiver to a helpless elderly man in an isolated island home. (USA)

Madame X: A riotous satire on spy/superhero films that has a drag queen hairdresser transform into a crusader for freedom and equality against the forces of repressive morality. (Indonesia)

Southwest: A haunting, beautifully photographed journey of discovery, as a young woman who dies in childbirth gets a second chance to live to old age, but only one day in which to live it. (Brazil)

On the Bridge: Moving documentary about the torments of posttraumatic stress disorder suffered by Iraq veterans and the failure of the VA medical establishment to help them. (France/USA)

CIFF 2011: Le Havre (2011)

Producer/Director/Screenwriter: Aki Kaurismäki

2011 Chicago International Film Festival

By Marilyn Ferdinand

According to Lana Wilson in her excellent précis of the cinema of Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki in Senses of Cinema, “The protagonist of a Kaurismäki film is almost always the same character: a lonely, working-class underdog of few words in search of love and a steady job.” While Kaurismäki is still interested in such characters, with Le Havre, the first in a projected three-film series on port cities and Finland’s entry in this year’s Oscar’s race, he is definitely moving his concerns in a different direction.

Although much of its subject matter—smuggling illegal immigrants, late-stage cancer, police surveillance—is pretty serious, Le Havre, named for the French city in which it is set, is actually one seriously feel-good film. Kaurismäki has decided to give his sad-sack protagonist, an unambitious shoeshine named Marcel Marx (André Wilms), a break. Although he thieves food from Claire the baker (Elina Salo) and the greengrocer (François Monnié) because he can’t pay for it, the storekeepers are fairly laissez-faire about it, and Marcel has a wonderful wife, Arletty (Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen), who cares for his every need and knows how to save the money that runs like quicksilver through Marcel’s fingers. As a result, Marcel has a nice roof over his head, as does his dog Laïka, and always a few Euros generously proferred by Arletty to spend at the local tavern before dinner is served.

Dark clouds are coming Marcel’s way, however. Arletty has a sudden pain in her stomach; the doctor (Pierre Étaix) at the hospital tells her she’s a goner. Characteristically, Arletty is more worried about what will become of Marcel. She asks the doctor whether there is any hope, to which he replies that miracles do happen. “Not in my neighborhood,” is Arletty’s rueful reply. Marcel is told nothing about the seriousness of her condition, only that she will be in the hospital for a while for treatments and to stay away. The neighborhood people, knowing more about Arletty’s condition than Marcel does, sympathize with him. Claire comes by with home-cooked meals, and the barkeep Yvette (Evelyne Didi) gives him drinks on the house.

Soon, Marcel sees an African boy (Blondin Miguel) hiding in the water under a pier. The boy, Idrissa, is the only one of a group of refugees hiding in a container bound for England to escape police capture, and his case has been headline news in Le Havre ever since. Marcel buys a sandwich and bottled water and leaves them on the wooden steps of the pier for the fugitive. Soon he finds the boy hiding in Laïka’s doghouse. Marcel tries to find Idrissa’s parents and finds he can again rely on the kindness of his neighbors to help him hide the boy. He locates and visits Idrissa’s grandfather, locked up in deportation center, and learns that Idrissa’s father has been killed and his mother is established in London. Marcel determines to get Idrissa to his mother, but he will have to pay a hefty fee to the smuggler and evade the police, led by Inspector Monet (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), who has been tipped by a nosy neighbor (Jean-Pierre Léaud) where Idrissa is hiding.

I am going to quote from a fine review of an Indian film, Aadaminte Makan Abu, because it says beautifully much of what I want to say about Le Havre:

The protagonist of Aadaminte Makan Abu (Abu, the son of Adam) is, likewise, not a great soul – he does not go around committing noble deeds or inspiring people – but he’s a good soul, and that is quite enough: doors open welcomingly to him, and he never runs into a wall. Even his enemy admires him. What sort of a script is this, one may ask, that has no real conflict or resolution? It is one that demonstrates that the good are blessed with goodness.

Marcel is like this protagonist. In these “kill the poor and infirm” times, Marcel would be the butt of hostility, and the illegal immigrant he helps would be tossed to the wolves. Indeed, when Idrissa runs from the container, one of the policemen raises his rifle; he is quickly warned off this unnecessary act by a fellow officer. But Inspector Monet doesn’t care about Marcel or Idrissa facing “justice”; he wants to pursue real criminals, not people who are just trying to get by, and only intensifies his search for Idrissa under orders from the chief of police. Even then, he listens to his conscience and tells a life-giving lie.

The businesspeople in Marcel’s neighborhood don’t want a pound of Marcel’s flesh for every loaf of bread he’s stolen or cans of beans he didn’t pay for. When it comes down to it, they care more about Marcel and his cause than money—they haven’t forgotten how to be human. In contrast, Jean-Pierre Léaud looks and acts like a caricature, the real embodiment of a being who has lost his humanity and has started to look like something other than human.

In a terrific set piece, Marcel decides to hold a fundraising concert to raise the money he needs to pay the English smuggler (the Le Havre boatman only wants the price of gas). He persuades real-life singing star Little Bob (a cross between Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, and Billy Barty) to perform by getting Mimie (Myriam ‘Mimie’ Piazza), Little Bob’s girlfriend and muse, to make up a quarrel they had. The concert footage is very entertaining, and sent me and the hubby off to look up Little Bob’s work.

While the actors mainly maintain the sort of deadpan look and clipped line delivery characteristic of Kaurismäki’s work, the French setting seems to have warmed everyone up. The French love of love is apparent throughout the film, Blondin Miguel offers a sly performance of careless youth and a pathetic deadpan that softens all hearts toward him. He visits Arletty in the hospital and tells her she must get well because Marcel can’t manage without her. He has come to care about Marcel’s fate every bit as much as Marcel cares about his.

I don’t know if films like Le Havre are wishful thinking or a plea from filmmakers like Kaurismäki for all of us to remember our soft and generous side. Whatever the reason, a humorous but unsentimental look at goodness is something we all need more of.

Le Havre will screen Saturday, October 8, 5:30 p.m., and Sunday, October 9, 3:30 p.m. All screenings take place at the AMC River East 21 Theatres, 322 E. Illinois St.

Previous coverage

King of Devil’s Island: Naturalistic and suspenseful look at life in an island detention center for boys and their rebellion against their harsh treatment. (Norway/France)

Cinema Komunisto: This entertaining and eye-opening documentary provides a loving look at the little-known national cinema of Yugoslavia and the film fanatic who made it happen: Marshall Josif Broz Tito, Yugoslavia’s president for life. (Serbia)

Inshallah, Football: One young man’s struggle to get a passport to play soccer in Brazil is the lens through which this documentary examines the Indian oppression of Muslims in the occupied region of Kashmir. (India)

George the Hedgehog: Irreverent and adult, this comic-book-based animated film pits George, a pleasure-loving hedgehog, against his clone, a stupid, vulgar internet superstar. (Poland)

The Kid with a Bike: What makes some people give unselfishly of themselves is the question examined in this intense tale by the Dardenne brothers of a boy abandoned by his father and the single woman who takes him in. (Belgium)

Without: A suspenseful story of guilt and loss slowly unfurls as a young woman acts as a temporary caregiver to a helpless elderly man in an isolated island home. (USA)

Madame X: A riotous satire on spy/superhero films that has a drag queen hairdresser transform into a crusader for freedom and equality against the forces of repressive morality. (Indonesia)

Southwest: A haunting, beautifully photographed journey of discovery, as a young woman who dies in childbirth gets a second chance to live to old age, but only one day in which to live it. (Brazil)

On the Bridge: Moving documentary about the torments of posttraumatic stress disorder suffered by Iraq veterans and the failure of the VA medical establishment to help them. (France/USA)

CIFF 2011: King of Devil’s Island (Kongen av Bastøy, 2010)

Director: Marius Holst

2011 Chicago International Film Festival

By Marilyn Ferdinand

They don’t make films like this anymore, and more’s the pity. King of Devil’s Island is old-fashioned—very well made, brilliantly shot with a real sense of place, a tip of the hat to the old Hollywood Production Code, and suspenseful without being sensational. In fact, the blurb in the festival program led me to believe I would need to prepare myself for a bloodbath at the climax of the film. Instead, I got a story of friendship and solidarity that Howard Hawks would have been proud to put his name on.

The setting is 1915 Norway. Two teenagers—stocky, brooding Erling (Benjamin Helstad) and slim, gentle-looking Ivar (Magnus Langlete)—are being transported to Bastøy Island, which hosts a detention center for boys. Erling, once a harpooner on a whaling vessel, recalls watching a whale 25 meters in length with three harpoons in it take a full day to die—we are treated to the sight of a whale rising in the water, its scarred flesh close to the camera. Erling himself sports several scars, including a fresh wound inflicted by the police. He and Ivar are moved into Barrack C and are given the new designations C19 and C5, respectively.

The governor of Bastøy (Stellan Skarsgård) meets with C19, whom he expects will be a problem, and tells him that if he follows the rules, he will become a better person and get a chance to return to the world. The governor puts Olav/C1 (Trond Nilssen), the leader of Barrack C whose release after six years is imminent, in charge of teaching C19 the rules. Erling’s only goal is to break out at his earliest opportunity.

Life on the island is harsh, with heavy labor, strict attention to the rules, and classwork the only activities the boys engage in. Infractions are punished with intense physical toil, half of their already-meager rations, floggings, and, at the worst, solitary confinement. Erling is told that one boy placed in solitary banged his head against the wall so incessantly that he lost the ability to speak. Nonetheless, Erling scopes out the boathouse in which the governor’s rowboat is kept and quickly finds a way to break in and escape. Even though he is soon captured, the boys have seen what they were told was impossible—an escape—and the embers of rebellion at their harsh treatment are fanned. Barrack C explodes after the suicide of a boy who was being raped by loathsome housefather Bråthen (Kristoffer Joner), and the final showdown of the rioting boys and a battalion of Norwegian troops summoned by the governor forms a frightening climax to a tense film of building outrages.

This film takes its time developing its story. We get the lay of the land, the primitive conditions of life, the cold and damp, the heavy manual labor used to build character. We don’t really get to know the characters, so some of their actions come more out of the machinations of the script than the performances, yet the faces of these boys, cast after a nationwide search for “1915 faces,” tell volumes. One small boy has no lines, but the camera goes back to his stern, serious face again and again. When he is the only boy who stands his ground against the troops—not killed, as we fear, but scooped up with one arm by a soldier as they capture the rebels—we are not surprised. Indeed, as we await this showdown, it comes as a huge surprise that not one boy is actually harmed by the troops.

In keeping with this view of the prisoners as boys, not enemies, Stellan Skarsgård offers us a very strict man whose desire to teach right conduct mixes punishment with some compassion. Unfortunately, he is compromised by his desire to keep his young wife Astrid (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) on the island by filching some of the funds meant for the boys’ welfare. It’s hard to condemn him outright because he does seem to have a mission and threatens Bråthen with prison for his disgusting crime; yet, he is also arrogant, telling Olav, who has turned against him for letting Bråthen go, that everything good in Olav came from him. It’s shocking to learn that Olav was sent to the island for stealing some money from a church collection box when he was 7. And what could poor, simple-minded Ivar have done to deserve this treatment?

Benjamin Helstad is a revelation, pulsing with contained energy, a survival instinct second to none, and street smarts in place of an ability to read. He’s the cocked hammer of a gun, ready to fire his fists at any outrage, but he’s not a complainer. Trond Nilssen’s turn from a composed leader to a twisted-faced shouter is abrupt and awkward, but the understanding that has grown up between the two boys does make them a fairly compatible team.

The film was shot in the cold of winter, and the cinematography makes excellent use of the snow, ice, and fog to measure out the bleakness of the prison. A shot we’ve seen in many films, but one I never get tired of, is of the massive naval vessel bearing troops appearing out of the fog, frightening Olav and Erling at the doom it foretells. This isn’t a heroic Custer’s last stand kind of story; we are still talking about boys who know they can’t fight back and do the only thing they can—run.

King of Devil’s Island will screen Friday, October 7, 5:45 p.m., and Friday, October 14, 5:00 p.m. All screenings take place at the AMC River East 21 Theatres, 322 E. Illinois St.

Previous coverage

Cinema Komunisto: This entertaining and eye-opening documentary provides a loving look at the little-known national cinema of Yugoslavia and the film fanatic who made it happen: Marshall Josif Broz Tito, Yugoslavia’s president for life. (Serbia)

Inshallah, Football: One young man’s struggle to get a passport to play soccer in Brazil is the lens through which this documentary examines the Indian oppression of Muslims in the occupied region of Kashmir. (India)

George the Hedgehog: Irreverent and adult, this comic-book-based animated film pits George, a pleasure-loving hedgehog, against his clone, a stupid, vulgar internet superstar. (Poland)

The Kid with a Bike: What makes some people give unselfishly of themselves is the question examined in this intense tale by the Dardenne brothers of a boy abandoned by his father and the single woman who takes him in. (Belgium)

Without: A suspenseful story of guilt and loss slowly unfurls as a young woman acts as a temporary caregiver to a helpless elderly man in an isolated island home. (USA)

Madame X: A riotous satire on spy/superhero films that has a drag queen hairdresser transform into a crusader for freedom and equality against the forces of repressive morality. (Indonesia)

Southwest: A haunting, beautifully photographed journey of discovery, as a young woman who dies in childbirth gets a second chance to live to old age, but only one day in which to live it. (Brazil)

On the Bridge: Moving documentary about the torments of posttraumatic stress disorder suffered by Iraq veterans and the failure of the VA medical establishment to help them. (France/USA)

CIFF 2011: Cinema Komunisto (2011)

Director: Mila Turajlić

2011 Chicago International Film Festival

By Marilyn Ferdinand

If you had to name the number one film fan who ever lived, who would it be? Film’s early inventors and innovators, like Thomas Edison and Georges Méliès? Director/collector/ preservationist Martin Scorsese? A collector of commercials, industrial films, and other off-the-beaten-path ephemera like Rick Prelinger? After seeing Cinema Komunisto, my answer would have to be Marshall Josip Broz Tito, president of Yugoslavia from 1953 until his death in 1980.

According to the records and recollections of his personal projectionist Leka (Aleksandar) Konstatinovic, Tito watched a movie nearly every night of his life, sometimes in the middle of the night, and was responsible for the construction of the Avala film studio, the largest in Europe. Tito greenlighted pictures, read and made notes on scripts, sat in on filming, spearheaded the Arena Film Festival in an ancient Roman coliseum in the seaside town of Pula, and even hand-picked Richard Burton to play him in Sutjeska (1973), a movie about one of Tito’s World War II experiences. My own admiration for the great cinema from the Balkans, indeed, the very existence of that great cinema, may be thanks to the opportunities Tito gave to so many young filmmakers before Yugoslavia broke into the pieces it had been before he glued its disparate countries together.

If you want a geopolitical look at Yugoslavia, find another movie. Cinema Komunisto gives only the barest background on the formation of Yugoslavia and its political ties to the Soviet Union before launching into what amounts to a history of Tito and the movies. The glory that once was Avala is surveyed by those who worked there. Steva Petrovic, a producer at the studio, and former director Veljko Bulajic take the documentary camera crew through the crumbling studio as they bemoan the ruin it has become. Petrovic talks about the studio’s first major co-production, The Long Ships (1964), a Viking saga directed by Jack Cardiff and starring Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier. The expensive production made a lot of money and put Yugoslavia on the map for film production. Petrovic proudly shows off a costume made for the film, still in use 50 years later, as well as the many artifacts moldering in the properties department.

Bulajic relates how the Oscar-nominated The Battle of Nerevta (1969) came to be. Tito had a home on the island of Brioni, near Pula, and would invite filmmakers showing their work at the Arena Film Festival to visit him and his wife Jorvanka for dinner and drinks. When Tito asked Bulajic what was next, he said he very much wanted to do a film about the World War II battle in which the Balkan partisans rescued 4,500 wounded prisoners of the Nazis. Of course, Tito was a major player in this battle. Tito stood quiet for an uncomfortable amount of time and finally told Bulajic, “My advisors think differently, but I think it’s important for people to know their history.” With this ultimate greenlight, Bulajic set to work on the most spectacular film shoot I’ve ever heard of. With Tito’s permission, Bulajic was able to set fire to dozens of tanks and jeeps and send them over cliffs. The pièce de résistance was filming the surprise the partisans pulled on the Germans. They blew up a bridge to confuse the enemy and then rebuilt it immediately to evacuate the wounded. Bulajic actually blew up a real bridge—a massive one at that—and had seven cameras rolling to capture its collapse into a deep gorge below. Believe it or not, not one of the cameras caught the bridge falling, and the production team had to shoot a model exploding. Nonetheless, shots of the partisans moving through the gorge are vivid, and the site has become a war memorial still visited by many thousands every year.

Cinema Komunisto makes ample use of archival footage, for example, newsreels showing Tito and Jorvanka meeting with Stalin, Sophia Loren and Carlo Ponti, and Kirk Douglas; press conferences of Orson Welles praising Tito while on location with The Battle of Nerevta; and interviews with Richard Burton about how it feels to wear Tito’s uniform. Images and footage from Belgrade’s Hotel Metropole, the luxury hotel to the stars, contrast with a man removing photos from the wall of fame after the 2007 closing of the hotel, and Leka bemoans the ruin of Tito’s beautiful home (seen in before-and-after photos from the same angles), bombed by NATO in 1999. Director Turajlić talks with Yugoslavia’s number one star Bata Živojinović, who mainly played partisan soldiers killing Germans in many of the 300 (“absolutely terrible,” says Zivojinovic) partisan films made at Avala, as he views the Tito display in a war museum and contrasts it with footage of Tito reviewing the museum upon its opening.

Tito favored accuracy in the telling of his personal stories, and was very pleased that his jeep had the correct number on it in one film. He also refused to allow a script change that would be more intelligible for audiences, but that would change history: “But they didn’t come looking for me!” There are allusions to the dark side of Tito, but the film does not explore them. Newsreel footage of his state funeral in 1980 shows a massive outpouring of grief and a fast-forward to 1991 and the end of Yugoslavia as war breaks out. The suggestion is clear—without Tito’s iron grip on the government and the hearts and minds of the people, Yugoslavia would never have been a fixture on world maps for so long.

Cinema Komunisto advertises itself as a look at propaganda cinema, and it is true that the propaganda messages embodied by the brave communist partisans come through loud and clear. But the film’s real aim is to celebrate the film industry in Yugoslavia—as vibrant and glamorous as anything Hollywood or Cannes had to offer and done on a grander scale than virtually any imaginable—and preserve its memory; there is a petition to the Serbian government to save Avala Film on the documentary’s excellent website. If you love film, you simply cannot miss this entertaining and valuable documentary.

Cinema Komunisto will screen Sunday, October 9, 8:30 p.m., Monday, October 10, 4:00 p.m., and Wednesday, October 12, 3:30 p.m. All screenings take place at the AMC River East 21 Theatres, 322 E. Illinois St.

Previous coverage

Inshallah, Football: One young man’s struggle to get a passport to play soccer in Brazil is the lens through which this documentary examines the Indian oppression of Muslims in the occupied region of Kashmir. (India)

George the Hedgehog: Irreverent and adult, this comic-book-based animated film pits George, a pleasure-loving hedgehog, against his clone, a stupid, vulgar internet superstar. (Poland)

The Kid with a Bike: What makes some people give unselfishly of themselves is the question examined in this intense tale by the Dardenne brothers of a boy abandoned by his father and the single woman who takes him in. (Belgium)

Without: A suspenseful story of guilt and loss slowly unfurls as a young woman acts as a temporary caregiver to a helpless elderly man in an isolated island home. (USA)

Madame X: A riotous satire on spy/superhero films that has a drag queen hairdresser transform into a crusader for freedom and equality against the forces of repressive morality. (Indonesia)

Southwest: A haunting, beautifully photographed journey of discovery, as a young woman who dies in childbirth gets a second chance to live to old age, but only one day in which to live it. (Brazil)

On the Bridge: Moving documentary about the torments of posttraumatic stress disorder suffered by Iraq veterans and the failure of the VA medical establishment to help them. (France/USA)

CIFF 2011: Inshallah, Football (2010)

Producer/Director: Ashvin Kumar

2011 Chicago International Film Festival

By Marilyn Ferdinand

If my life depended on my knowledge of the Asian subcontinent, I’d be playing a very off-key harp somewhere out there in the universe. That’s why the CIFF’s “Spotlight South Asia” is such a welcome addition to this year’s festival, providing emerging voices from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka a much-needed showcase and giving people like me a chance to better understand this ancient and volatile region. My first foray into the “Spotlight” offerings, Inshallah, Football, was massively eye-opening, even as it told a story that’s all too familiar throughout the world today.

Basharat Baba is a very talented soccer player from the Srinagar district of Kashmir who has been recruited to live the dream of all aspiring soccer players—to train for and compete on a professional team in Brazil. But the Indian government won’t grant his request for a passport. Why? Herein lies the sad reality that has plagued Kashmir. This predominantly Muslim state has been trying to exercise its legal sovereignty since its forced occupation by Indian troops beating back Pakistani forces trying to control Kashmir following the 1947 Indian Independence Act that created the two independent countries. In Basharat’s case, his father’s past as a Pakistani-trained militant in the 1980s and 90s has put him on a government blacklist—the sins of the father, so to speak, preventing Basharat from realizing his dream.

Inshallah, Football provides helpful title cards that familiarize viewers with the facts and issues of the region, but there are some universal truths about the human condition that get a thorough airing as well. The dismantling of the British Empire left traditional political structures that existed before the British arrived in shambles in many parts of the world besides India and made land grabs in the name of security rather commonplace, for example, the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine. The paradox of structurally democratic nations heavily oppressing a minority population is also easily recognizable as the paranoia of power desperate to keep it. That such oppression breeds militants who are denied their rights is no surprise, nor is blacklisting of future generations of perceived enemies of the state.

Ironically, the film shows Basharat to be a young man very much like any in the world. He asks a pretty girl for her phone number even as he maintains a steady relationship with another girl, he hangs out with his friends and engages in some playful rough-housing, he becomes childishly stubborn when faced with the need for compromise, and he doesn’t understand why he is being punished for something he didn’t do. Basharat is lucky; he was given the chance to join a soccer academy run by Juan Marcos Troia and his wife Priscilla, who moved from Argentina to start a feeder system for talented Kashmiri youth to soccer clubs throughout the world. If he hadn’t gotten that chance, it is likely that he might have been one of the angry youths, their faces hidden, who throw stones at the Indian troops who dog their every move with random arrests, harassment, and “defensive” volleys of tear gas, and rubber and live bullets.

That possibility was his father Bashi’s worst nightmare. Bashi’s life as a militant had been filled torture, imprisonment, and separation from his loved ones. It was also an adventure and one in which Bashi committed his share of crime and violence. He talks movingly of the night he thought he would die—the warden of the dreaded Papa 2 prison, Kashmir’s Abu Ghraib, told him, “You know the policy now is capture and kill for militants. You were lucky you were captured at home.” Bashi is quite unemotional about his militant days; he has moved on, and is now a successful real estate developer.

The Indians show no such signs of moving on, and the cause for which Bashi fought and so many others died is a long way from won. I was absolutely floored to learn that Kashmir is the world’s most heavily militarized occupied zone, with 500,000 Indian troops holding back a perceived threat from Pakistan. It’s hard to understand why the Marcos Troias want to live in Kashmir, but they are a pair of do-gooders the Indian government should welcome for reducing militancy and sending Kashmiris out of the country. Unaccountably, this affable, loving couple had their visas revoked at the end of the film; while they won a one-year extension at the last minute, I have to think that director Kumar’s own run-ins with the occupying Indians caused them this unwarranted trouble. Inshallah, Football lost three appeals with the censor board, and finally won an A (Adult) rating, normally reserved for films depicting extreme violence or graphic sex, thus limiting its exhibition potential in India. Fight the power by seeing this important documentary and sharing your thoughts widely.

Inshallah, Football will screen Thursday, October 13, 5:00 p.m., and Saturday, October 15, 12:00 p.m. at the AMC River East 21 Theatres, 322 E. Illinois St. It will show Sunday, October 16, 8:00 p.m. at the University of Chicago’s DOC Films, 1212 E. 59th St.

Previous coverage

George the Hedgehog: Irreverent and adult, this comic-book-based animated film pits George, a pleasure-loving hedgehog, against his clone, a stupid, vulgar internet superstar. (Poland)

The Kid with a Bike: What makes some people give unselfishly of themselves is the question examined in this intense tale by the Dardenne brothers of a boy abandoned by his father and the single woman who takes him in. (Belgium)

Without: A suspenseful story of guilt and loss slowly unfurls as a young woman acts as a temporary caregiver to a helpless elderly man in an isolated island home. (USA)

Madame X: A riotous satire on spy/superhero films that has a drag queen hairdresser transform into a crusader for freedom and equality against the forces of repressive morality. (Indonesia)

Southwest: A haunting, beautifully photographed journey of discovery, as a young woman who dies in childbirth gets a second chance to live to old age, but only one day in which to live it. (Brazil)

On the Bridge: Moving documentary about the torments of posttraumatic stress disorder suffered by Iraq veterans and the failure of the VA medical establishment to help them. (France/USA)

CIFF 2011: George the Hedgehog (Jeż Jerzy, 2011)

Directors: Tomasz Leśniak, Jakub Tarkowski, and Wojtek Wawszczyk

2011 Chicago International Film Festival

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Hollywood has been making comic book movies for a long time, and the pace has reached frenzied proportions in the last few years. Much of this product is watered down, mindless, and badly executed, a disappointment to fans of the comics and of films alike. Well, here’s one film made from a comic book I can unreservedly recommend, and it’s the very first animated feature of a comic book to come out of Poland. As a film, George the Hedgehog carries on in the raunchy, irreverent, edgy tradition of such classics as Fritz the Cat and television’s The PJs. Yet, the script is pure Hollywood comedy-action cinema at its best.

In a grungy underground lab, a mad scientist (Grzegorz Pawlak) is feeding American pop culture images and sounds into a computer. The scientist hopes to develop a clone that will be a surefire superstar, win him the respect of the scientific community that has scorned him, oh, and garner him fame and fortune, too. The computer runs like a slot machine through hundreds of possible models and stops on the image of a hedgehog. A hedgehog? Well, the computer can’t be wrong. The scientist sends his assistant (Jaroslaw Boberek) to find the animal and get some DNA.

As it happens, there is a hedgehog in town, a beer-guzzling, skateboarding, womanizing slacker named George (Borys Szyc). He is having an affair with the beautiful blonde Yola (Maria Peszek), who is bored with her nerdy husband but can’t divorce him because she’s Catholic. He is also set upon regularly by Stefan (Marcin Sosnowski) and Zenek (Michal Koterski), unemployed neo-Nazis who pick on him because they can’t get all the women he can.

The assistant notices Stefan and Zenek and offers them a substantial amount of money to grab some blood, saliva, and quills from the hedgehog. He also instructs them to kill George, something they are reluctant to do because he is the only target in the neighborhood they can stomp for being different. In a comic fight, George defends himself with his skateboard, but Zenek bites his ass to draw blood, and Stefan collects his drool and quills. Leaving George to lick his wounds, the pair takes their “harvest” to the scientist who drops it into a machine that whirls him out a clone of George—a vulgar moron who vomits and farts profusely and humps anything in sight. The scientist sets his scheme in motion by shooting a music video of clone George and turning his hedgehog into an Internet sensation and Polish pop hero. But the real George will have to be dealt with sooner or later.

Hypersexed animals and gross-out jokes aren’t my usual cup of tea, but when they are mixed with pointed satire and killer animation, I’m all about it. George the Hedgehog, stripped of the local and timely topical humor of the comic book, takes on bigger fish and fries them black in a way that a worldwide audience can understand. For instance, the idea that a hedgehog could be an international internet star makes perfect sense in the era of YouTube sensations Surprised Kitty (54.2 million views and counting) and Maru (11 million views for just one of his videos). In another example, a sleazy politician (Leszek Teleszynski), who on first glance reminded me very much of Mayor Richard J. Daley (with Chicago being the city with the second-largest Polish population in the world, I have to wonder if this was more than a coincidence), hitches his wagon to the hedgehog to court the youth vote and affects rapper gestures. Anyone who has watched the steady parade of politicians on Letterman, Conan O’Brien, The Colbert Report, and similar shows will recognize the tactic and, if they haven’t given it much thought, become aware that they are being marketed to, not served.

The intelligentsia get a thorough drubbing as they pontificate on a talking-heads program about the bravery of clone George’s performance art—actually surveillance camera footage of him breaking into a sex shop, puncturing with his quills the blow-up doll he starts to screw, and burning the whole place down, thus releasing anatomically correct blow-up dolls to float like fantasy helium balloons over the city. While clone George’s performance had nothing to do with art, the flying dolls are really quite beautiful.

In an interview on Badass Digest, director Wawszczyk said the animators used a cut-out style of animation, or what was pioneered by UPA in the States as limited animation. Unlike the relatively simple cartoons I’ve seen using limited animation, the complexity of the background layering and detail work on the moving figures is very intricate in George the Hedgehog, both grotesque and beautiful.

The send-ups of Hollywood films are many. For example, the showdown between George and clone George at a stadium-style rock concert plays like a cross between the climaxes of Black Sunday and Valley Girl. George’s battles with Stefan and Zenek use the same type of slo-mo found in the Matrix movies. The filmmakers are also inordinately fond of car crashes, starting with a doozy when two policewomen who recur throughout the film see George drinking a beer on a public median strip and run across a busy street to ticket him, causing a major pile-up as drivers try to avoid hitting the women.

The focus on the inconsequential, on celebrity, that had Americans in a lotus eaters’ haze through the past two or three decades has infected Poland as well, only 20 years after throwing off the yoke of Soviet oppression. A truly free and anarchic soul like George exemplifies the genuine pleasures and possibilities of that new sense of freedom, but the creators of George the Hedgehog suggest that Poles are more interested in off-the-truck knock-offs.

George the Hedgehog will screen Friday, October 14, 10:45 p.m., and Saturday, October 15, 10:45 p.m. All screenings take place at the AMC River East 21 Theatres, 322 E. Illinois St.

Previous coverage

The Kid with a Bike: What makes some people give unselfishly of themselves is the question examined in this intense tale by the Dardenne brothers of a boy abandoned by his father and the single woman who takes him in. (Belgium)

Without: A suspenseful story of guilt and loss slowly unfurls as a young woman acts as a temporary caregiver to a helpless elderly man in an isolated island home. (USA)

Madame X: A riotous satire on spy/superhero films that has a drag queen hairdresser transform into a crusader for freedom and equality against the forces of repressive morality. (Indonesia)

Southwest: A haunting, beautifully photographed journey of discovery, as a young woman who dies in childbirth gets a second chance to live to old age, but only one day in which to live it. (Brazil)

On the Bridge: Moving documentary about the torments of posttraumatic stress disorder suffered by Iraq veterans and the failure of the VA medical establishment to help them. (France/USA)

CIFF 2011: The Kid with a Bike (Le gamin au vélo, 2011)

Directors: Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne

2011 Chicago International Film Festival

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Much has been made of depicting the Dardenne brothers as working-class heroes, surveying as they have economically marginal men, women, and children in their intimate, documentary-like feature films. For me, however, the Dardennes are anthropologists of the family. While extended families in the form of grandparents get their due—in The Kid with a Bike, a dead grandmother will spawn the crisis that catalyzes the plot—it is the nuclear family that seems to interest them the most.

The prevalence of foster families, both official and unofficial, in their films might suggest the economic component of their characters’ milieu, but the real investigation, it seems to me, is what kinds of people are or are not able to give of themselves to others. For example, the father in The Son was truly a father or he would not have been able to keep his heart open to a boy he wanted, at one point, to kill. The father in L’Enfant, on the other hand, was more interested in money than his own child, and was willing to make a devil’s bargain to avoid his parental role.

Guy Catoul (Jérémie Renier), the single parent in The Kid with a Bike, is a man who has put his son Cyril (Thomas Doret) in a children’s home after Cyril’s grandmother has died. The opening scene shows a defiant Cyril trying to phone his father, only to get an automated message that the number has been disconnected. His counselor (Carl Jadot), whom Cyril accuses of dialing the wrong number, says his father has moved. Cyril refuses to believe it (“He would have brought my bike to me!”) and desperately makes a break from the counselor and the other supervisors to go see Guy. He arrives at his father’s last address, an apartment in a council-housing estate, but can’t get in. The counselor catches up with him, and Cyril runs into the estate’s medical office and clings to a woman to avoid capture. He calms down only after the building superintendant agrees to let him into the apartment. It’s empty, and defeated, Cyril returns to the home.

A few days later, the woman Cyril grabbed, Samantha (Cécile De France), shows up at the home with his bike, which she bought from the man who bought it from Guy. After identifying the bike as his, Cyril says it must have been stolen. As Samantha drives off, Cyril races on his bike to catch up with her. He asks her if he can stay with her on the weekends; she agrees.

On his first weekend staying with Samantha at her hair salon/home, Cyril rides his bike all over town to his father’s various haunts, asking if anyone knows where Guy has moved. His last stop is at a mechanic’s shop where his father used to bring his motorcycle. The mechanic (Mourad Maimuni) says he tried to sell the motorcycle and a boy’s bike, and put a for-sale sign in the shop window. “Maybe the address is on the ad,” the mechanic says. Now confronted with the fact that his father did indeed sell his bike, Cyril’s mood is clouded and uncertain. His search for his father will eventually succeed, but he will be in for a rude awakening—his father, trying to wipe the slate of his life clean and start again, tells Cyril to go away and not come back.

A commenter on this site once said, “The Dardennes are a pair that confound me because I can’t quite figure out how they do what they do. They communicate to the viewer such rich emotion and information with such little design or spectacle.” I’ve given that comment a lot of thought, particularly with regard to this film, and I think I have a start at an answer. In truth, there is a real design to their films, and it is in the landscape of the human face they focus so closely and intently upon. Abetting this image of eternal fascination to human beings are the deeply committed performances the directors get from their cast. Young Thomas Doret throws himself into this role, and I mean that quite literally. He hurdles through doorways and down stairs, pedals with a furious purpose on his bike, relentlessly chases and wrestles with a boy who steals his bike, and punches and scratches his own face in anger and grief after being rejected by his father. He’s incredibly vulnerable—an easy recruit for Wes (Egon Di Mateo), a drug dealer and former children’s home dweller himself—and yet his intensity and anger are rather scary.

Whereas Guy is the Dardennes’ usual bad father, Samantha is, as her name suggests, a kind of samaritan. Cyril asks her why she agreed to take him in, and she can only answer “I don’t know.” It isn’t easy to understand why this woman would take a half-grown problem child on, and he certainly isn’t easy for her to handle. But she does, and even dumps her boyfriend Gilles (Laurent Caron) when he makes her choose between him and Cyril. Is she a born nurturer? Does she see someone she knew in Cyril? Is she someone who steps up to the plate because she can? Sometimes doing the right thing is just that simple, but, of course, she will have no guarantees that Cyril will turn out fine. He has obviously had a history that will make the future rocky at times, but Samantha seems willing to love him anyway.

A small touch has entered the Dardennes’ work, and that is music—short grace notes at crucial moments in the film that quite reminded me of the use of brief interludes from Mozart’s Great Mass in C Minor in Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped. It would not be a stretch to imagine that Bresson was an influence on the Dardennes. In contrast with Bresson’s increased pessimism, however, the Dardennes seem to be feeling more hopeful about the future. The Kid with a Bike is very nearly a feel-good movie.

The Kid with a Bike will screen Saturday, October 8, 5:15 p.m., and Sunday, October 9, 5:00 p.m. All screenings take place at the AMC River East 21 Theatres, 322 E. Illinois St.

Previous coverage

Without: A suspenseful story of guilt and loss slowly unfurls as a young woman acts as a temporary caregiver to a helpless elderly man in an isolated island home. (USA)

Madame X: A riotous satire on spy/superhero films that has a drag queen hairdresser transform into a crusader for freedom and equality against the forces of repressive morality. (Indonesia)

Southwest: A haunting, beautifully photographed journey of discovery, as a young woman who dies in childbirth gets a second chance to live to old age, but only one day in which to live it. (Brazil)

On the Bridge: Moving documentary about the torments of posttraumatic stress disorder suffered by Iraq veterans and the failure of the VA medical establishment to help them. (France/USA)

CIFF 2011: Without (2011)

Director/Screenwriter/Editor: Mark Jackson

2011 Chicago International Film Festival

By Marilyn Ferdinand

As I watched the opening moments of Without—an extreme close-up of lead actress Joslyn Jensen staring expressionless for rather a long time—I had that familiar sinking feeling. Oh no, I thought, not another contemplative indie movie full of arthouse pretensions and repressions. Preparing for the worst, I was absolutely shocked to find myself utterly engrossed in a film that slyly moves from commonplace to harrowing to heartbreaking through a tour de force near-solo performance by Jensen, some well-framed handheld camerawork by Diego García and Jessica Dimmock, who also coproduced the film, and tension-building editing by director Jackson.

Jensen plays 19-year-old Joslyn, who has been hired to look after a severely brain-damaged man while his family takes a vacation. Joslyn gets a ride to their cabin in the woods on Whidbey Island in Washington State by kitchen remodeler Darren (Darren Lenz), whose hints that he would like to get to know Joslyn better are firmly deflected. Joslyn has him drop her at a crossroads, starts down the road to the right, waits until he drives away, and then reverses course and goes to the left. She knocks on the door of the cabin and is ushered in by the owners (Bob Sentinella and Piper Weiss) to meet Frank (Ron Carrier), her charge for the next week or so.

The cabin is isolated, with unreliable cellphone service and no internet connection. Despite having access to 600 TV channels, Joslyn is instructed to leave the TV on the fishing channel, the only one Frank likes to watch, and not to increase the sound above 34. She is also told she can drink some Kahlua, but none of the whiskey (“It’s Bob’s. Believe me, he’ll notice.”), and that she must not put the knives in the dishwasher. She is given a booklet of instructions the couple, in all seriousness, calls “the bible.” The family says their good-byes and heads out. Joslyn says hello to Frank properly and settles in for what will be a long and lonely ride.

At first, Joslyn is seen being a caregiver, picking up Frank’s meds from the drugstore, feeding him stewed pears and carefully scraping whatever he burbles out between his lips with a spoon, changing his diaper while trying to avert her eyes to respect his modesty—or maybe just because she’s grossed out by the chore. Joslyn doesn’t appear to be a professional caregiver, nor a particularly nurturing, self-sacrificing person. Refreshingly, she’s a modern young woman who gets bored and restless. When she is not caring for Frank, Joslyn works out in the family’s home gym, listens to music on her iPod, looks at pictures and videos of her girlfriend on her iPhone, even sits in front of the oven and watches cookies bake.

Hints that there may be more to Joslyn’s temporary job than meets the eye come when she asks a barista about whether a certain woman is still in town. So, she knows this place! Yes, says the girl who serves her a chai latte every day at the drive-thru, and wasn’t it terrible about her daughter. Joslyn, fed up with the lack of an internet connection, rummages around in a spare room for a computer and camera, sets them up, and tries to get dial-up internet service. Despite the repeated connection failures signaled on the computer monitor, she seems to be communicating with someone through the camera. Her phone seems to move from room to room, doors that should be open are locked, and Joslyn believes Frank is messing with her. Her behavior around the old man becomes alarmingly sexual and abusive. Then, one night, as we rather expected, Darren lets himself into the house.

It’s hard to explain how it can be so fascinating to watch Joslyn behave like we all suspect those we hire to look after our homes might. But then, Joslyn’s behavior has a strange edge to it, a desperation, particularly when she seems to be communicating with her girlfriend. In one scene, Joslyn sits perfectly still at a window as she watches a deer outside. The deer is vigilant, then slowly approaches the window. That’s kind of how it is to watch this film—fight-or-flight alertness, curiosity, a pull toward something wounded and in need. As played by Jensen, Joslyn’s ordinary life is more extraordinary in its literal and emotional nakedness than most you’ll see in any film. I’ve read comparisons with Catherine Deneuve’s performance in Repulsion, but the truly apt comparison is with Bruno Lawrence’s last man on earth in The Quiet Earth. Indeed so riveting is she in her self-contained longing that camera focus problems and jostling barely register. Instead, we hungrily look for those amazing expressions that say so much in a film relatively free of dialog.

We all have secrets—even Frank, as Joslyn discovers to her disgust—and honestly, if I had never found out what Joslyn’s was, I wouldn’t have minded. It is revealed economically and with feeling, but the effect was worth a million causes. Here’s an indie film that can compete with the majors. Don’t miss it!

Without will screen Saturday, October 8, 3:45 p.m., Sunday, October 9, 1:15 p.m., and Wednesday, October 12, 3:30 p.m. All screenings take place at the AMC River East 21 Theatres, 322 E. Illinois St.

Previous coverage

Madame X: A riotous satire on spy/superhero films that has a drag queen hairdresser transform into a crusader for freedom and equality against the forces of repressive morality. (Indonesia)

Southwest: A haunting, beautifully photographed journey of discovery, as a young woman who dies in childbirth gets a second chance to live to old age, but only one day in which to live it. (Brazil)

On the Bridge: Moving documentary about the torments of posttraumatic stress disorder suffered by Iraq veterans and the failure of the VA medical establishment to help them. (France/USA)

CIFF 2011: Madame X (2010)

Director: Lucky Kuswandi

2011 Chicago International Film Festival

By Marilyn Ferdinand

If you’re looking for a pick-me-up after taking in some of the somber fare at this year’s festival, or if you want to add a genuinely funny satire to your DVD collection, Madame X is the movie for you. This Indonesian comedy based on a character created by its star, comedian Amink, pits a would-be transsexual hairdresser against the forces of puritanical morality, taking every cliché of the spy/superhero genre and tailoring them to the clichés of drag life. Unlike the title character of the 1966 American women’s film of the same name, this Madame X doesn’t suffer in silence—she kicks ass!

The film opens with a disheveled drag queen named Adam (Amink), her falsies popping out of her mini-dress, getting screamed at by a truck driver who found her sprawled in the bed of his truck. He calls her names and then reluctantly decides to give her a ride back to the capital city. Once inside the truck, he demands that she give him a blow job, but tosses her out when she puts a little too much tooth into it. The film flashes back to show us how she ended up in the back of the truck and sets up what will happen for the rest of the film.

Adam is working in a hair salon, celebrating her birthday, and dishing about the news blaring from the TV. Aline (Joko Anwar), a large and sassy drag queen, worships a Paris Hilton knock-off, Kinky Amalia (Shanty), who has been married 11 times in her alleged 22 years on earth; Adam, on the other hand, thinks she’s a skank and uses magic to maintain her youthful looks. She doesn’t know how right she is. Kinky and Bunda Lilas (Sarah Sechan), two wives of Dr. Storm (Marcell), the mysterious leader of a morality party, are driving around looking for a homosexual hairdresser who is celebrating a birthday; Bunda Lilas, a second-rate psychic, thinks this person is a danger to their diabolical plans. When she finds Adam, Bunda Lilas blows some animated red dust from her magic ring on Adam and her birthday cake, which looks cool and vaguely evil, but doesn’t seem to do much of anything.

When Adam, Aline, and the rest of the gang go out to celebrate her birthday at a gay disco, they are raided by the paramilitary gay-bashing organization BOGEM, and herded into the back of a truck. Aline escapes, does a victory dance in the street, and is promptly run over by a truck. Adam, infuriated, attacks her attackers and is thrown over a viaduct, which is how she landed in the bed of her rapist’s pick-up and eventually ends up in hiding at a dance studio run by former special ops fighter Uncle Rudi (Robby Tumewu) and his transsexual wife Auntie Yanje (Ria Irawan). (Note that despite the subtitles, Auntie Yanje is the only transsexual character in the film.) They teach Tari Lenggok, a martial arts dance form they invented, and Adam, learning of their secret spy operations, becomes their chosen crusader for the forces of freedom and equality when Mr. Storm and his wives kidnap the female dancers to be used as sex slaves in Thailand. Adam dons their black-leather, cone bra superhero suit, takes up their modified curling iron, blow dryer, hat pin weaponry, and becomes Madame X.

The trajectory of the plot is standard action hero stuff, circa 1965, mixed with special effects that are minimal and played for laughs, vaguely tracking with those that can be found in Big Trouble in Little China. The film is also liberally sprinkled with entertaining musical numbers that add to the enjoyment of this buoyant film. Two things make this film stand out as more than a cheap parody—the troubles it addresses are real, and its drag queens have none of the hyperflamboyant hostility found in so many American films. Gay bashing and the gay community’s fear and rebellion as depicted in the film are real; Madame X offers a positive, if lighthearted attitude to fighting the powers of conservatism. These strengths are a tribute to the writing, which provides character touches without exaggerating them, and the acting, which dignifies each character with a well-realized interpretation, no matter how cartoonish some of their behaviors may be.

The set pieces in the film are brilliantly executed without resort to 3D, CGI, casts of thousands, or any of the other extravagances of modern action films. It was a kick to watch Madame X wail on the baddies with cartoon starbursts saying POW and BAM in Indonesian. Adam’s showdown with the three wives—one played by pop singer Titi DJ is an opera star with, of course, a concussive high C—allows each of these characters to be broadly comic women, not robots who are pure evil because the script doesn’t want to deal with their humanity, arguing for dominance and jumping to their deaths in pursuit of a real crocodile designer handbag Madame X has thrown over the railing. In a hilarious scene, Adam is running on a beach when a vision of Aline rises over the horizon, illuminated with an angelic halo. The pair chitchats a bit before Aline gives the obligatory “avenge my death” order and then sinks with a quick slurp back into the sea. I can’t commend Joko Anwar enough for his comic panache in this role.

Adam is an incredibly appealing character—sweet with just a bit of sass, sincere, and for a drag queen, amazingly free of affectation. She is who she is, moving from a part-time whore for her worthless boyfriend to someone who finds the heroine within and a cause worth fighting for. Flashbacks to her childhood show her wearing a dress in the bedroom of her boyhood friend Hamar, who received a beating and an “x” marked with a machete on his chest by his homophobic father. Hamar breaks with Adam, blaming him for the abuse that will go on to warp and wreck his life. Sweetly, however, the film ends with a memory of the two youngsters sitting on a roof and enjoying each other’s company, a good feeling the film generates about the homosexual community that makes Madame X’s crusade one we hope will succeed.

Madame X will screen Wednesday, October 12, 1:45 p.m., Friday, October 14, 10:15 p.m., and Sunday, October 16, 4:10 p.m. All screenings take place at the AMC River East 21 Theatres, 322 E. Illinois St.

Previous coverage

Southwest: A haunting, beautifully photographed journey of discovery, as a young woman who dies in childbirth gets a second chance to live to old age, but only one day in which to live it. (Brazil)

On the Bridge: Moving documentary about the torments of posttraumatic stress disorder suffered by Iraq veterans and the failure of the VA medical establishment to help them. (France/USA)

CIFF 2011: Southwest (Sudoeste, 2011)

Director/Coscreenwriter: Eduardo Nunes

2011 Chicago International Film Festival

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Brazil, as a country, is generally divided into five regions: the North, the Northeast, the Central-West, the Southeast, and the South. So when director Eduardo Nunes names his first feature Southwest, it must be assumed that we are entering a place more of the imagination than of representation. We will see many things that behave as they do in the real world, but we must also be prepared to open ourselves up to illogic, magic, the impossible, to experience what Nunes has in store for us—a fairy tale with as much grace and ghastliness as anything offered by the Grimm brothers.

Right from the opening shot, the opposing forces of water and earth—the unconscious and the conscious—that will work on our heroine throughout the film are mixed. It is night, and a horsedrawn cart is seen moving along a dirt road through a veil of reeds in the foreground, bringing a old woman (Léa Garcia) who could be mistaken for nothing but a shaman to an inn. She is greeted at the door by a nervous younger woman, Concepção ((Dira Paes). They enter the inn and watch as the innkeeper empties a coffeepot and starts filling it with water. She and the old woman climb some crooked steps to the second floor. The old woman, Iraci, disappears behind a door as Concepção stands outside in the hall fretting and then runs downstairs to fetch the pan of hot water the innkeeper has prepared. Ah yes, a birth is about to take place.

Unfortunately, when Concepção enters the room, we see with her the wide, dead eyes of the mother-to-be. Iraci is chanting and brushing evil spirits away from the baby still trapped in the mother’s womb. She asks Concepção what the girl’s name was. “Clarice” is the answer. Soon, the cart is taking the women and, miraculously, the baby away from the inn. Iraci places the baby in the bow of a rowboat, climbs in, and rows to her house on stilts in the middle of a lake.

The villagers have fallen on hard times, as the fish and salt they harvest from the lake—formerly part of the Atlantic Ocean—are both diminishing. They blame Iraci, generally acknowledged to be a witch, for these misfortunes. Some curious children row out to her house, and 9-year-old João (Victor Navega Motta) climbs onto the wooden stilts to have a look inside. He sees a girl about his age between the slats; he forces a wooden shutter open, and a quick cut finds him sailing humorously into the water, presumably from a forceful shove. Soon thereafter, the girl emerges and rows her boat to shore.

The rest of the film follows this girl who says her name is Clarice as she goes from a child who has not yet learned a language to an old woman, apparently in the span of a single day. As she progresses through childhood (Rachel Bonfante), young womanhood and middle age (Simone Spoladore), and finally, old age (Regina Bastos), we learn the story of the dead woman in the inn whose spirit and memories the miracle Clarice seems to embody.

While Iraci does indeed seem to possess the powers of magic, the film casts her more as a fairy godmother as it mixes pre-Christian and Christian symbology. Iraci ties a seashell on a string around the baby’s neck, a symbol of the feminine unconscious that moves through her and protects her even as she emerges to her own conscious history by coming into contact with her family and the village. The part of the film during which Clarice as a young woman appears to be raped by her costumed and disguised father (Julio Adrian) occurs during Folia de Reis (Three Kings’ Day), a celebration of the birth of Christ; the miracle Clarice is born in an ancient inn with Concepção (Conception) as witness.

The script, written by Nunes and Guillermo Sarmiento, is exceptionally smart in slowly revealing Clarice’s story and requiring her to fulfill her destiny. Clarice ends up in her own room with her family. She sits on the floor looking into a box of ribbons when she sees her father peering in through the partially open door. She runs to the door, slams it, and locks it. Later, her mother (Marina Lima), grieving over the death of her daughter (“She was also named Clarice,” she says when the young visitor reveals her name), tells the young woman Clarice that her daughter started talking nonsense one day, a clue that she revealed who the father of her child was. Her tormented mother says only that she fears being alone to suggest why she and her rapist husband are still together.

Later, Clarice sees that the villagers have finally acted on their fear of the witch by burning her house. Clarice rows out to the house but reaches it just as it collapses in flames; she cannot return to her fairy godmother and must die as she was meant to, finding peace that she has been able to see her loved ones, experience the joys and sorrows of life one more time, understanding some of what happened to her. It is implied by Clarice dying as an old woman that a truly full life is one that experiences peace and understanding, if only for a single day.

Shot in widescreen black and white by Mauro Pinheiro Jr. to emphasize the extrareality of the situation, this film is absolutely stunning. Every frame is carefully composed, like an illustration in a book of fairy tales, yet the film also offers some wonderful discoveries of life in this region of Brazil (Pontal do Massambaba, near the district of Monte Alto in Arraial do Cabo). I was fascinated by the salt “farms” and the simple way the workers extract the salt from the water by spreading the water to aid evaporation and then shoveling the salt into wheelbarrows.

Nunes, a former sound designer, uses his skills to assemble as many as 80 audiotracks to create a film that is as luscious to listen to as watch. For example, when Iraci and Concepção enter the inn, he shoots from a high angle, revealing only a corner of the windmill that creaks eerily and rhythmically, a true wheel of fortune turning for one particular life. The performances are as understatedly telling as the screenplay, with Simone Spoladore, in particular, giving a virtuoso performance and Victor Motta very appealing as Clarice’s brother and playmate.

Nunes should be a strong contender in the New Director competition of this year’s film festival. See why by making sure to put the mysterious, beautiful, and moving Southwest on your festival schedule.

Southwest will screen Friday, October 7, 8:15 p.m., Saturday, October 8, 12:30 p.m., and Tuesday, October 18, 2:45 p.m. All screenings take place at the AMC River East 21 Theatres, 322 E. Illinois St.

Previous coverage

On the Bridge: Moving documentary about the torments of posttraumatic stress disorder suffered by Iraq veterans and the failure of the VA medical establishment to help them. (France/USA)

CIFF 2011: On the Bridge (L’âme en sang, 2010)

Director: Olivier Morel

2011 Chicago International Film Festival

By Marilyn Ferdinand

I don’t know about you, but I know exactly where I was on April 9, 2003, the day Baghdad fell to Coalition troops—I was in an airport waiting to catch a plane. Big Brother-like and almost impossible to avoid, every television in the place was broadcasting images of some Iraqis trying to topple a statue of Saddam Hussein in the center of the city. They used ropes, they pulled with U.S. Army jeeps, it took a very long time. Finally, the statue fell. That was supposed to be the beginning of the end, right? In 2010, the war was officially declared over, but we still have 50,000 troops in the country who could be ordered to start fighting again. So, maybe we really are still at war in Iraq.

As a result of this seemingly endless conflict, a cottage industry in films about the war in Iraq has sprung up. In my interview with Errol Morris about his Iraq-related movie, Standard Operating Procedure, he said in defense of his approach, “If people want the same cookie-cutter movie about Iraq, there are plenty you can go see.”

While I would argue about whether all these films look alike—they most certainly do not—their missions all point in the same direction: they want to make the war and its costs visible and understandable to audiences, particularly to Americans who bought the lies that started the conflict and who have had no truly personal stake in our actions abroad. Olivier Morel, a French photographer and documentarian living in the United States, focuses on soldiers who have returned to their homes, but not to their lives, because they are suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He focuses all of his attention on the direct testimony of six individuals from various parts of the country who served in various capacities in Iraq, from tank driver to surgeon, and one family whose son committed suicide. Their stories are both particular and universal, a chronicle of tormented consciences, anger at bad-faith politics and bad-policy military orders, and soul-crushing terror at their helplessness to stop great evil from happening.

David Brooks is a career military surgeon who had been through seven wars. Iraq was his Waterloo, the one that cracked him into a million pieces that he is still trying to pick up. Wendy Barranco, another healer, was only 19 when she went to Iraq; now the head of Iraq Veterans Against the War, she is riddled with guilt and full of apologies for giving “200%” to try to save soldiers as young as she—only to fail. Ryan Endicott skateboards barefooted along Venice Beach, and angrily relates that he has to call suicide hotlines to find someone who will talk to him. We’re not convinced that he really doesn’t want to kill himself, unless it is the VA medical system that has let him down he really wants to kill; there is death in his voice and in his graphic songs of pain and destruction.

Lisa Zepeda is a Chicago cop, so what street horrors hasn’t she seen at home. Still, her service in Abu Ghraib is different, much different, and like Ryan, she finds that her fellow police officers won’t listen to her, preferring to spout jingoistic justifications for destroying the Iraqis where they sit. Vince Emanuele lifts weights and rails against the policies that made insurgents every day in Iraq; he wonders if these strategies weren’t part of a diabolical scheme to create a war that will last forever, and given what has transpired, it’s not hard to wonder with him. Jason Moon is a patriot—was a patriot—and brings out the three-page list of medications the doctors have tried on him, complaining that before the war, all he ever took was a multivitamin. He recalls when the news of Abu Ghraib broke that he sat appalled at the depravity of the torment Sabrina Harman documented for the world; his fellows in Iraq laughed at the sight and made him wonder what kind of an alternate universe he had stepped into.

Jeff Lucey, represented by his parents and sister, stands in for the two veterans of Iraq who kill themselves each week. The Luceys seem to be so even-keeled when talking about Jeff and his slow-building insanity. Mother Joyce looked up camel spiders on the Internet when he mentioned them, not realizing that he was hallucinating them in his room, and father Kevin accepted Jeff’s protestations that he was fine until Jeff snuck out of the house wearing his uniform and weaponry to buy beer. In a rage, Kevin broke every bottle against a tree; he still doesn’t know why.

The living casualties of war are as old as war itself, and these vets bear some self-inflicted scars/tributes. Lisa has a pair of dog tags tattoed on her shoulder, one written in English and one in Arabic. Ryan has a pair of bloody hands tattoed on his back along with the phrase “Forgive me for I have sinned.” There do seem to be people in the world, particularly those calling a lot of the shots, who have no such conscience as these two vets, nor that of Jason Moon, who told his commanders that he would be unable to run over children who might be blocking a U.S. convoy of tanks, thus defying a direct order. These honchos might not be so cavalier about wasting lives in the most gruesome manner imaginable if they had to face getting some brain matter on the Saville Row suits war profits help them buy—but, of course, that will never happen. So, well-intentioned, if misguided soldiers will keep getting thrown to the lions, will continue to have their mental health needs experimented with and ignored by an overwhelmed or uncaring system, and will fail to have their stories widely disseminated to prevent more young people from following in their ruinous footsteps. One thing’s for sure—for many Iraq veterans who have returned home, that war will only end with their deaths.

Another film about Iraq? We really can’t have enough. Go see this exceptionally moving one, an oral history of madness told by the people who lived through it.

On the Bridge will screen Saturday, October 8, 1:15 p.m. and Sunday, October 16, 6:30 p.m. All screenings take place at the AMC River East 21 Theatres, 322 E. Illinois St.