CINE-FILE at the Chicago Film Festival

Taxi to the not-so-dark side

2008-10-28T11:59:00.000-07:00

Laila’s Birthday plays today at 6:10pm at River East.

Is it possible to make an apolitical film in Palestine? More appropriately, is it possible to be an apolitical Palestinian? Rashid Masharawi’s comedy Laila’s Birthday proceeds from this question, yielding a rather entertaining comedy of errors before arriving at moments of (sadly familiar) pathos. Its protagonist is a former judge—an emblem of nonpartisanship—reduced to driving a cab while he waits for the Abbas government to reestablish him in court. The film follows him through a day that goes from bad to worse; the running joke is that the tumult of occupied Palestine won’t even allow our decent judge to buy his daughter a birthday present.

Laila’s Birthday marks a great step forward for Masharawi, whose last film, the mostly-pleasant Waiting (2005), was undone by clumsy moments of didacticism. Here, the politics are less forced and less simple. Most of the people Judge Abu meets are friendly, law-abiding citizens like himself who regard the occupation as well Palestinian politics as really big inconveniences. In one of the film’s best scenes, an old woman waiting in line for food rations complains that Fatah and Hamas are equally corrupt because they only give out food to their own members. “So which party do you belong to?” someone asks her. “Whichever one is giving out the food.”

The film’s humor bears passing resemblances to the Jewish comedy that was most popular in the U.S. during the Great Depression. Likewise, at 71 minutes, Laila’s Birthday has the tautness of a Depression-era programmer. Masharawi moves the film deftly from episode to episode and from comedy to drama while presenting a believable portrait of contemporary Ramallah. To the casual Western observer, this may be the most valuable aspect of Laila’s Birthday, as it depicts a modern Palestinian city with all the (secular) bustle of American one. Even when Masharawi’s visual style appears indifferent, his locations remain expressive.

No secret, just a great film

2008-10-27T13:11:00.000-07:00

The Secret of the Grain has its final screening tomorrow (10/28), 8:30pm, at 600 N. Michigan.

Once in a while that rare French filmmaker comes along who is liked – hell, fawned over – by his public, the local industry that produces and releases his films, and the magazine that usually acts as contrarian to the tastes of all, Les Cahiers du cinema. If you are at least familiar with the Cahiers, you know that Abdel Kechiche has achieved some sort of miracle with his last two films, L’esquive (2004) and The Secret of the Grain (2007).

If you want to know why he is the darling of the French film world, look no further than the films themselves. You will find no explanation in the backstage of festivals and awards ceremonies (though Kechiche has already swept the prestigious French Césars twice). Kechiche has no previous industry standing. In public terms, he has proved to be a shy figure and has avoided festival appearances (you won’t see him in Chicago, alas).

It may be the subject matter – the perils facing France’s vibrant immigrant communities – that attracts spectators since even the most recent work by Jacques Rivette, virtually ignored in its native land, has seen a wider release in the U.S. than the last two Kechiche films. L’esquive, Kechiche’s second feature, was released in the States more than two years after its international premiere, and when it finally got to Chicago it only ran for a week at the Film Center. The Secret of the Grain didn’t come to town after its Venice premiere in 2007, though to the credit of CIFF’s programmers, the usual ruling out of year-old work was put aside in this case.

If you haven’t seen it yet, do yourself a favor and blowout the festival with The Secret of the Grain, a film about a North African man named Slimane who is laid-off from the docks of Sète and has the idea to open a restaurant featuring his ex-wife’s couscous. About an hour and a half is just the build-up; the rest, which falls in place with such nail-biting precision, you will just have to see for yourself.

Like L’esquive, Secret is a film in which words are an essential element. Kechiche allows his characters to engage each other in epic verbal outbursts that go on sometimes for ten minutes (in fact, one scene late in Secret is so endless in this respect that audience members generally flock out in droves). Patient viewers will be rewarded for sitting through such obstinate wordiness when they discover that the film comes to be entirely about the body: the body, not words, are literally the element that may save Slimane, his family, and his friends, from total catastrophe.

Yes, but how?

2008-10-26T11:18:00.000-07:00

Snow plays again today at 6pm and Tuesday at 4:10pm. Both screenings at 600 North Michigan.

Revanche plays again on Monday at 8:30pm at 600 North Michigan.

The late Gene Siskel once argued (in his review of Soul Food [1997], if I recall) that it wasn’t difficult to make a good movie. A filmmaker just needed to be honest with his or her experience, avoid succumbing to cliché, and try to depict life as it’s lived. Granted, this definition excludes most experimental or avant-garde movies, but it’s useful for the majority of narrative cinema, which communicates through storytelling, performance, and the like. Of everything I’ve seen at the Festival so far, all but one film has been at least Siskel-good; the exception was a Turkish family drama called Summer Book, whose over-dependence on clichés negated (for me, anyway) the more edifying images of small-town Turkish life.

And yet, I’ll probably retain that film’s lemon groves and an old-fashioned butcher shop longer than I will the more ephemeral imagery from The Sky, the Earth, and the Rain, a film I preferred on the whole. If there’s been one benefit of my second-tier press status (which means I can only get into films for free if they don’t sell out), it’s that I’ve been forced to see more modest filmmaking that aspires to be “good” instead of attention-grabbing titles that aspire to be great. And thus, I’ve accumulated a nice collection of mental snapshots from around the world.

One of the most accomplished “good” movies playing in this year’s festival is the Bosnian title Snow, which depicts a village’s efforts to return to stability after the civil wars of the mid-1990s. Despite the heavy subject matter, this is still restrained, eye-level filmmaking. Director Aida Begic devotes more time to the villagers’ jam-making business than their post-traumatic stress. She avoids outright pathos, though the war’s lasting effects are always felt: There are no men left in the village with the exception of a single grandfather, and the sizable number of orphans has led to something like collective child-rearing. Snow is the rare social drama that advances on the truism “life goes on” with a more sophisticated, “Yes, but how?” It moves slowly, observing recovery in small measures. The chapters are literally separated day-by-day. Emotional outbursts are kept to a minimum; with everyone in poverty, there are more immediate concerns. Though genocide is one of the eternally relevant political subjects (It is going on in the Sudan, in Iraq, as I write this), in movies it is too often fodder for simple catharsis. Here is a film that oversteps catharsis in favor of understanding.

The Austrian drama Revanche, on the other hand, is a long road to catharsis. It deals with two of the most metaphorically-ripe characters in contemporary drama—the ex-convict and the guilt-stricken police officer—and aims to find universal truth in their suffering. The movie begins as an exciting, though underplayed crime story. With its austere framing, nervous tone, and potent Method acting, it suggests a European cousin to Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007), another film that hinged on a bank robbery gone wrong. But Revanche switches its tune about half-way in, along with its setting (going from urban prostitution to life on a farm), and morphs into a quiet drama less about revenge than redemption. I should note that I’ve come to greet this theme with near-instinctive incredulity, so I probably enjoyed this less than last night’s audience, who responded with lengthy applause at the end. But this is still a most grown-up film, and the cast (especially Ursula Strauss, best known in the States from Barbara Albert’s films Free Radicals [2003] and Falling [2006]) is remarkable as the police officer's religious wife.

The Good Kind of Social Drama

2008-10-24T20:05:00.000-07:00

The Noise in My Head plays Saturday at 3pm and Sunday at 5:45pm. Both screenings are at 600 North Michigan.

We’ve all met women like Laura, but rarely in the movies. Early thirties, single, smart but unimaginative, reticent but prone to explode in an argument, pretty enough to date but never married. She works at a big business in a small city (Geneva, in this case) but always in a low-ranking job; even she could not see herself in a position of authority. She shows traces of perfectionism and yet is fundamentally unsure of herself. In fact, she's often in danger of emotional collapse, but avoids it by holding fast to the safety of conformism. With the exception of a sympathetic ex-boyfriend boyfriend, Laura is without companionship. In fact, she doesn’t appear to have anyone in her life with whom she can speak openly. Her unarticulated thoughts have been suppressed for so long they’ve accumulated to a near-schizophrenic din. (They’re the source of this movie’s title, by the way.)

When a woman like her turns up in a fiction film, she’s typically someone’s ex or a family member avoided except for at gatherings. The Noise in My Head is notable for following Laura as her life teeters but doesn’t fall off completely. Given its lack of sensationalism—Laura isn’t out-and-out mentally ill (though she comes close)—the film is not a piece of radical humanism like Lodge Kerrigan’s Keane (2005). Also, the intimate, realistic approach precludes the grand catharsis of a fantasy like Punch-Drunk Love (2003). It resides the squarest of genres, the modest social drama, whose frequent manipulativeness have made it something of an anathema to serious moviegoers. But The Noise in My Head doesn’t want to manipulate its audience. It simply wants to remind us of something that is worth remembering: just how difficult life can be for most people.

The film enters into a plot when Laura lunges impulsively at happiness. She takes in an 18-year-old boy she meets hawking papers on the street. He’s neither violent nor on the make sexually—two clichéd developments the movie thankfully avoids—but a different kind of risk. We come to learn he’s a pathological liar and a bit of a thief, a behavior problem for so long that his parents finally kicked him out. His name is Simon, and we’ve met people like him, too, working at convenience stores and other menial jobs. He’s the sort of kid who wasn’t forward enough in school to be a bully, but he wasn’t smart enough to be recognized as a student, either.

Director Vincent Pluss charts their relationship carefully, finding value in their everyday activities. More characters enter the film and each is as three-dimensional as the leads, giving way to a grand pathology of passive despair. It’s worth noting that Pluss, a young Swiss director still finding his voice, borrows only the best elements of other filmmakers. Taking Mike Leigh’s practice of allowing the actors to help sculpt the dialogue, he creates a comparably deep sea of humanity. Also, his anxious, propulsive editing recalls two masters of modern French cinema, Olivier Assayas and Arnaud Desplechin. But Pluss displays a sympathy for his characters (and a curiosity about the world) that cannot be faked. And he knows how to end a film miraculously. The Noise in My Head stops on a narrative caesura so unexpected and yet so carefully calibrated it reminded me of Flannery O’Connor’s short fiction, another storyteller who inspired awe before life’s possibility.

Discovery: SERBIS

2008-10-23T15:01:00.000-07:00

Serbis plays again on Saturday at River East at 7:30pm.

While I’ve seen some very good movies at the festival, Brillante Mendoza’s Serbis is the first one that threw me for a curve. It’s an in-your-face drama about an extended family that once operated three movie palaces in the Filipino city of Angeles but now runs only one—and that became a second-run porn theater some time ago. The subject matter recalls Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003) and Jacques Nolot’s Porn Theater (2002), but this is not a lament over the death of cinema or the failure of lonely people to connect. The environment is boisterous in spite of the depravity (As in the Tsai and Nolot films, the theater hosts a vibrant a gay cruising culture), full of life, full of character. Mendoza's mobile, mainly hand-held camera seems unable to keep up. The film takes place over an especially busy day as the family’s controlling matriarch awaits a decision in the bigamy suit she’s filed against her husband. Also, her teenage nephew is afraid to announce he’s gotten his girlfriend present; the local pre-op transsexual hookers are working harder than usual to get customers; and someone needs to take the kids to school. For all the melodramatic elements, Mendoza stages the proceedings as if he were Ridley Scott making an action film: We’re constantly in the middle of things. Remarkably, the camera is nonjudgmental throughout all of this, even during the movie’s most prurient moments. (Note to the squeamish: One of them is a hardcore scene involving someone’s popped boil.)

This is Mendoza’s seventh film in four years, and his fearlessness and sure hand with actors (particularly child actors) mark him as a major filmmaker. Serbis played in competition at the Cannes Film Festival this year, where it shocked a good part of the audience. Last night’s screening wasn’t as scandalous (though there were some "Well, I never" kinds of entertaining walk-outs), but it also provoked the realization that Mendoza is someone to watch. I’ll write more about this after Saturday’s screening, which I eagerly await.

The Writings on the Wall

2008-10-22T14:48:00.000-07:00

24 City plays again tomorrow, 10/23, at River East at 8:50pm.

After seeing more than half-a-dozen or so movies at any festival, one starts seeing patterns in the selections, overlapping themes. It’s always risky to lunge at generalizations about The State of World Cinema or (grander yet) What the World’s Thinking About. Better to regard the experience as a private optical illusion—the magic reassembly of disparate films into a cohesive whole.

That said, almost everything I’ve seen so far at CIFF has involved somebody losing their job. The exceptions—Sleep Dealer, Don’t Look Down, Delta, and 24 City—have involved people accepting menial labor. Comparisons to the global economic crisis are so obvious they don’t need to be spelled out… except these movies were conceived at least a year in advance, by artists working in different countries with different agendas. How legible was the writing on the wall?

Of the movies I’ve watched concerning unemployment, only one has incorporated failure in its overall aesthetic strategy: Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata. The CIFF program aptly describes it as a quiet drama about an average Japanese family—just barely avoiding an allusion to Yasujiro Ozu—and so it is until the final half-hour, when it operates in a sort-of narrative free-fall, with each new development seeming to come from a different movie. Before then, it is a compelling, but somewhat familiar look at a family in crisis, with the central story concerning the businessman father who’s too proud to admit he’s been laid off. The film follows his wife and two children (well-meaning misfits both) separately, so to stress how alienated they’ve become from one another. In its structure and patient, long takes, Tokyo Sonata has less in common with Ozu than with Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (2000), the greatest contemporary family film; and like Yang’s great accomplishment, understated humor tempers the melancholy of Modern Life. But then there’s the final 30 minutes. Without giving away too much, it forces the audience to switch from thinking about a family in crisis to what it means to lose everything—home, relations, one’s very sanity. It’s been less than a day since I watched Tokyo Sonata, and I’m still undecided as to whether its plot twist is brilliant or merely a great trick. Either way, I hope it returns to Chicago with a proper run so I can see it again.

From Mexico (and the future): SLEEP DEALER

2008-10-21T22:21:00.000-07:00

Sleep Dealer plays again Wednesday, 10/22, at 600 North Michigan at 8:30pm.

In a few generations, migrant workers will no longer need to cross the U.S. border for menial jobs: They can perform them from home with the use of virtual reality. That’s one of the ideas floating around Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer, a Phildickian sci-fi story that approaches a high-tech future from the perspective of Mexican laborers. As a film, Sleep Dealer is sometimes flat and too indebted to the Hollywood storytelling it aims to subvert. But as a think piece, it’s clever and endlessly imaginative. During a warm-hearted Q-and-A after tonight’s screening, Rivera admitted to spending 11 years on the project from conception to final cut; he clearly made great use of the time by realizing his future world down to the smallest details. (The intravenous modem cables that connect Mexican workers to U.S. job sites also enable a new form of writing whereby users upload their thoughts like video files. We come to learn that the movie itself is one such “novel.”) One measure of the film’s success is that it’s able to touch on big, relevant subjects—U.S. corporations privatizing water sources in the Third World, the military outsourcing combat duty—without making them seem extraneous to its fictional universe. The may characters may seem a bit transparent as a result, but, as in some of Dick’s best novels, Sleep Dealer still works as a funhouse mirror of current events, with the characters serving to help us explore the variegated terrain. The second and final screening would count as a must-see if Rivera is in attendance again. Animated, honest, and blessed with seemingly bottomless optimism, Rivera has the potential to become the Wayne Coyne of American independent cinema.

A visual essay on Steve McQueen's HUNGER

2008-10-21T16:13:00.002-07:00

There's still one more screening of Hunger (2008) at 8:30pm tonight. If you miss it, don't fret: IFC has plans to release the film Stateside in the very near future.

Possibly the most arresting film about prisoners since A Man Escaped (1956), Hunger invokes so many different types of images that it's hard to define director Steve McQueen's achievement in words. There's barely any dialogue in the film -- one crucial several-minutes-long scene excepted -- and as such it seems appropriate to express feelings about it using images. Here goes:

Francis Bacon (1909 - 1992): Three Studies for a Crucifixion - 2 (1962)

Imperial War Museum archives: Bergen-Belsen, Germany, 1945

Bill Viola (1951 - ): Ocean Without a Shore (2007)

A chamber in Her Majesty's Prison Maze, Northern Ireland

+++

Still from Alan Clarke's Elephant (1989) -- Side A (companion film)

Still from Hunger (2008) -- Side B

Tough Decisions

2008-10-20T17:21:00.000-07:00

In the first four days of the festival we had, in competing time slots, two films about pickpockets (The Pleasure of Being Robbed and Sparrow), two films about physical transformation (Beautiful and Hunger), and two important directors doing their sole Q&A's (Darren Aronofsky and Mike Leigh). In pure must-see terms, the new films by Abdel Kechiche, Kelly Reichardt, and Erick Zonca were competing on Friday as a run-up to the even more painful scheduling of 24 City, Of Time and the City, and Gomorrah in simultaneous slots on Saturday.

This may register as a complaint. In fact, it isn't. A cinephile faced with the luxury of having to decide between the new Jia Zhang-ke and Kiyoshi Kurosawa films, not to mention the lesser-known titles that don't come with the same level of critical support, should feel as though at a luxury dinner banquet. Tough choices are a part of festival life, and the more information available to the discerning cinephile, the more discerning his or her choices will be.

A serious discernment should consider the films themselves and never the projection standards, since one always hopes that those will be consistently excellent; however, a few discerning cinephiles have not been pleased the festival's digital projection, and had they been able to discern in advance that 24 City, to take one example, would be shown in subpar conditions, they would have certainly opted for another title.

Theater five and six at the River East, specifically, are the two screens in question. This reviewer spent four hours of Saturday with two films that should have looked a whole lot better: the aforementioned 24 City and Shanghai Trance by Dutch filmmaker David Verbeek. Different in mood though similar in dealing with a contemporary post-industrial backdrop, you wouldn't have been able to tell their visual designs apart if you saw them at this weekend's screenings. With theater five's dark and off-calibrated projection, they both looked muddy and indistinct.

It should be noted that the critics on this blog (and elsewhere) get into the movies for free. We're hardly the ones to complain. This isn't about us. But at the screening of 24 City, the couple who paid $12 sitting next to this critic made their aggravation seem perfectly understandable.

Let's Make Love

2008-10-19T09:36:00.000-07:00

Don’t Look Down screens tonight at 8:30pm and Friday, 10/24, at 10:30pm. Both screenings will take place at 600 North Michigan.

Born in ’68 screens today at 1:15pm at 600 North Michigan.

The nearly-full house at yesterday’s screening of Don’t Look Down (Argentina; 2008, 85 min, 35mm) challenged several clichés about U.S. movie audiences. Namely, they seemed perfectly comfortable with its joyous depictions of explicit sex, and when they laughed during these scenes (which was often), it wasn’t nervous laughter, either. But this may be less indicative of Chicago’s good vibes than of the strengths of Don’t Look Down—a rare film that manages to be funny and erotic at once.

At the outset, writer-director Eliseo Subiela doesn’t hint that his film will turn into a lesson in Tantric sex. The movie starts as a charming story about Eloy, a 19-year-old eccentric who works odd jobs and has crazy dreams about his dead father. (One of these dreams—unexplained until much later—has the father slowly emptying nuts and bolts from his suit pockets. The image plays as a wry parody of art-house cinema, and it got one of the bigger laughs of the day.) In one of many unpredictable turns, Eloy becomes a sleepwalker. He winds up one night in the apartment of an old lady therapist and her granddaughter, Elvira. Instead of kicking him out, the women take a liking to Eloy, with the beautiful, Gypsy-ish Elvira (who’s nine years his senior) deciding to make him a great lover by the end of the summer.

This premise verges on teenage male fantasy, but Subiela makes clear that the sex is not about Eloy’s gratification only. As in the classic comedies by Dusan Makavejev—particularly W.R. Mysteries of the Organism (1971)—sex is presented as life-affirming for anyone who enjoys it. (There’s another weird plot twist later on in which Eloy finds himself literally dematerializing at orgasm, but he makes sure not to deny Elvira pleasure before he does.) The film’s conflation of dreams, character quirks, music and eroticism yields a sensibility overflowing with life. Granted, this should feel familiar to anyone who’s read Gabriel Garcia Marquez or any other of the great South American Magical Realists. But how refreshing it is to encounter it in an accessible, crowd-pleasing film. Don’t Look Down also doubles as an instruction guide to more than a dozen challenging positions from the Kama Sutra. As our society enters a depression and more people will have to “make their own fun” (as my grandparents used to say), perhaps Subiela’s film will prove a rather utile one in the coming years.

Another film that conflates societal and sexual awareness is one of CIFF’s French entries, Born in ’68, by the writing-directing team of Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau (who are best known for their Jacques Demy tribute Jeanne and the Perfect Guy [1998]). As the title suggests, the movie begins with a look at France’s revolutionary/utopian generation before moving forward through the next four decades. The early passages depict an idealistic group’s efforts at establishing a commune in the French countryside—with as many scenes of free love as of farming. It’s hard to think of many other films that stage group sex with this much tenderness, and the most commendable thing about Born in ‘68 is its rich sensitivity. (Similarly, the large ensemble cast has no weak link—especially impressive, as many of the actors have to age believably over 40 years.) But apart from Ducastel and Martineau’s daring choice to shoot so much of a period piece in Bergman-esque close-up, much of the film comes across as a retread of Lukas Moodyson’s Together (2000), John Sayles’ Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980), Alain Berliner’s classic Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976), and other like-minded works. It much follows the now-familiar pattern of Leftists coming together to make good, falling apart, and then finding comfort in some modified version of their ideals. Not that this is necessarily a bad message (It’s especially valuable to hear in the United States as a corrective to the conservative propaganda of Forrest Gump [1994] and Oliver Stone’s ‘60s-set films), but it’s hard to say whether it merits a full three hours of attention. Still, Born in ’68 is a surprisingly leisurely three hours, and the confidence of its storytelling never bores.

Notes from last night's screening of HAPPY-GO-LUCKY

2008-10-18T12:37:00.001-07:00

The CIFF screening of Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) last night in anticipation of its release later this month (Oct. 24) served a twofold purpose: to present Mike Leigh with a career achievement award and to offer Chicago audiences their first opportunity in a long while to engage the great British filmmaker.

First, on the award. Festival director Michael Kutza commented that Leigh's first film, Bleak Moments (1971), won CIFF's Golden Hugo back in 1972. Gracious, Leigh said the career achievement award was "very special indeed", adding, "It's as if I've come full circle, though I hope it's not the end of the circle!"

Leigh then sat down for a Q&A with Tribune critic Michael Phillips. The proceedings were lively, to say the least. Audiences were clearly stunned by Leigh's lucid and amicable approach. He was never disengaged for a moment, even (you could say especially) when faced with a myriad of confused questions.

Happy-Go-Lucky was described by its director as "a story about being connected to your feelings and integrity", an "anti-miserabilist film". This commentator, for one, was grateful to see Leigh address world issues right off the bat. "There's a great deal for us to be gloomy and pessimistic about," Leigh explained, "I mean, we're suicidally destroying the planet!"

Getting back to the film, he summarized his point: "Happy-Go-Lucky is about a character getting on with it."

Indeed, Sally Hawkins' Poppy is that rare film heroine, a smart, disciplined woman with a career, dreams, and friends, but who unpretentiously floats from place to place and is content with the terms of each situation she encounters. If there's frivolity or dissatisfaction in her world, it's the others who see it and become the judges of Poppy's behavior. She has an unassertive wisdom and a heightened sense of awareness that places her on a different plain than virtually everyone she meets.

Poppy is one of the greatest film characters to emerge in the 21st century: a boisterously joyous and inventive elementary school teacher, she maintains the same free and unmournful approach throughout the film. "Teaching is an act of optimism," Leigh asserted last night, referring not just to Poppy, but also to the other teachers who dominate the film.

Teaching is the overarching subject of Happy-Go-Lucky; the characters comment on their own teaching and refer to the lessons of others. It's a critical dialogue that manifests itself with such a quiet ease that by the end of the film you leave the theater wanting to continue the discussion. A public school teacher in the audience was so elated that she personally thanked Leigh.

Happy-Go-Lucky's most crucial interactions occur in the confined space of a Ford Focus. Hawkins' Poppy and Eddie Marsan's Scott are perfect opposites. He's a peppery driving instructor who won't conform to Poppy's apparent lack of seriousness. A viewer familiar with Abbas Kiarostami's Ten (2002), in which the Iranian director almost solely used two cameras in a cramped car as his entire visual design, might wonder if Leigh saw it prior to making Happy-Go-Lucky.

The two cameras, one angled toward the passenger seat, the other to the driver, impose a curious limitation on Leigh's luxurious palette of London vistas (he opens the film with an amazing shot by a train track worthy of Antonioni). He alternates the two angles in an almost rhythmic way. As in a John Cage composition, the tension in these rhythms becomes so rigid that it offers an appropriate visual parallel to Poppy and Scott's intensifying conflicts.

(For a more in-depth summary of the film's many characters and details, check out fellow CIFF blogger Marilyn Ferdinand's critique.)

A scene that will surely stand out to viewers has Poppy on a nocturnal tour where she encounters a stuttering man underneath what appears to be a bridge. This writer asked the filmmaker for his thoughts on it, describing it as a moment that felt as if it had snuck away from Leigh's own Naked (1993). "It's a scene from the film Happy-Go-Lucky," Leigh retorted, but conceded, "I'm not surprised you would say that." Speaking of his intentions, Leigh said, "We wanted to subliminally pull the audience out of their comfort zone in that scene."

It's a key instant to understanding Poppy, something Leigh confirmed: "It's about her openness, her natural ability to connect. She's going to move on; the man, unfortunately, won't." Leigh even emphasized the film's own afterthought of the scene: "When she goes home, Zoe [her roommate] asks her where she's been and she doesn't respond. She keeps the moment private."

These dynamic shifts in the film are masterfully integrated, and it only takes a careful viewing to see this. A rambling audience member, stroking his sideburns and looking distractingly around the room as he told the filmmaker (and us) that he thought the ending didn't exactly summarize the film in a satisfying way had Leigh responding thusly: "Yeah, you're trying to say it's maybe too neat and tidy. Okay, that's a fair criticism."

What a gentleman. The rest of the festival will certainly have a hard time living up to this magical evening.

Winged Idiots and Wordless Angels

2008-10-18T10:13:00.001-07:00

Idiots and Angels (2008) screens tonight at 10:30pm, Tuesday (10/21) at 6:30pm, and Wednesday (10/22) at 7pm. Director Bill Plympton will be present for the Tuesday and Wednesday screenings.

Veteran animator Bill Plympton's latest uses a clichéd noir setting and a catalogue of hard-boiled genre characters to tell the rather unique story of a pathologically unfriendly man named Angel who unexpectedly grows a pair of heavenly wings. Unlike his last feature, Hair High (2004), which used the voices of Sarah Silverman, Dermot Mulrony and others, Idiots and Angels is completely wordless (if you don't include the Tom Waits waltz that's included towards the end of the film).

The question on fans' minds will be whether Plympton can sustain the same level of interest at seventy-eight minutes as in his similarly styled shorts. There's something kind of overwhelming yet cleverly executed about Idiots and Angels that doesn't exhaust the viewer. Call it a sort of formalism, but the imagination the film displays always leaves some room for further reflection. It's a counter-intuitive animated film, in which images can be contemplated and don't have to be immediately understood.

Consequently, there isn't anything very animated about it in the general sense. It takes place mostly in dreary settings -- grimy bars, small bathrooms, doctor offices -- where the only thing a spectator is tempted to contemplate is the flurry of wobbly pencil sketches (it's especially impressive to see on the big screen). Also, Plympton would rather show us the characters react to each other blankly -- a technique that finds its closest equivalent in the films of Aki Kaurismäki.

The point of view is always an unexpected one -- whether it's from a butterly flying around or inside the mouth of a protagonist as he downs a whisky shot -- and keeps us from fully settling in. It's uncomfortable at first but makes sense when you realize that Plympton may be using these inventive digressions as a way of distancing himself from the moral world of these characters.

The title refers to idiots and angels, plural, though there is really only a single person in the film who safely fits into the angel profile. This is a direct indication of Plympton's generosity towards the material. All of his characters are idiots and angels; he never shows a world that is better, with characters that are nicer or more virtuous in their deeds.

Finally, when someone violently appropriates Angel's wings, we realize he may have done the same in a like scenario. Does the film offer a catharsis, a sense of growth in these characters that we end up feeling a pang of regret for Angel? The wings try to guide him but Angel's journey remains ambiguous.

Kelly Reichardt's WENDY AND LUCY

2008-10-18T09:04:00.000-07:00

Wendy and Lucy screens today, 10/18, at 600 North Michigan at 6:10pm.

I was lucky to obtain the last ticket to Friday’s screening of Wendy and Lucy, which will likely sell out again tonight. Reichardt’s film is set to receive a wider release soon, but it seems like the optimal experience would be seeing it with a full house that doesn’t know just what to expect. The subject is homelessness in the United States, but Reichardt avoids any systemic judgments: Like many great political films before it, Wendy and Lucy focuses on specific moments that reframe “issues” as human experiences. The film observes a few days in Wendy’s life as her car breaks down in small-town Oregon and things go from bad to worse. Some critics have accused Michelle Williams as being too pretty a choice to play Wendy, but that seems like part of the movie’s point: Poverty can fall upon anyone with bad enough luck, not just people who “look” homeless. Wendy’s relationship with her dog Lucy—the one thing that keeps her going, much like Umberto D.’s immortal love for his Flag—further humanizes the situation, as does Reichardt’s eye for Oregonian life. The film has a heartfelt, handmade look to it (which often feels like 16-millimeter, even though it was shot on 35), which makes this one of the best pieces of regional American filmmaking since Julian Goldberger’s The Hawk is Dying (2006). (2008, 80 min 35mm)

From Chile: THE SKY, THE EARTH AND THE RAIN

2008-10-18T07:34:00.000-07:00

The Sky, the Earth and the Rain screens today, 10/18, at 600 North Michigan at 3:20pm, and on Monday 10/20, 4:00pm.

José Luis Torre Leiva’s The Sky, the Earth and the Rain boasts the year’s most awesome sound design and some of the most unforgettable images as well. Unfortunately, it’s cursed with a generic, uninformative title—which may explain why last night’s prime-time screening was so sparsely attended. But this is the sort of movie that international festivals were all but made for. It provides a window on an unfamiliar part of the world (a small island town off the coast of Chile) and operates in a tempo unfamiliar to most cosmopolitan viewers. The minimal story focuses on Ana, a reticent young woman who cares for her bedridden mother. For a while, she works at her island’s general store, but then she signs on as a maid for a single man who owns an apple orchard. That’s about it as far as the plot goes, but Torre Leiva makes every moment resonate: His meditative tracking shots and breathtaking Dolby soundtrack envelop the audience in natural spectacle. (Last night’s audience, who quite didn’t know what it was getting into, was brought to reverential silence about 15 minutes in.) Torre Leiva cribs a few shots from Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic The Mirror (1975), but not superficially. Indeed, The Sky, the Earth and the Rain is one of the few films since Tarkovsky’s passing that seriously contemplates nature as a living thing. This is a movie to get lost in. (2008, 110 min, 35mm)

Interview with Joshua Safdie, director of THE PLEASURE OF BEING ROBBED

2008-10-17T14:48:00.000-07:00

The Pleasure of Being Robbed screens twice this weekend, on Friday, 6pm, and Saturday, 9:30 pm. Director Joshua Safdie talked to Cine-file from his Manhattan studio.

It would be inaccurate to say The Pleasure of Being Robbed is solely about its lead character, Eléonore (Eléonore Hendricks). Sure, she gets the most screen-time, and at one point the film even visualizes what could be one of her dreams; but this is a film where each character is looked at with a great deal of affection and carries an equal weight. There is a story in each of their lives that are films in themselves, and the unfussy way in which Joshua Safdie captures these figures gives the sensation that the filmmakers just happened upon each scene.

There's a character named Batman, who casually strolls down the street calling each and every passerby "beautiful", "handsome", etc.; a stocky guy who walks into a bar, convulsively announces he's going to buy a drink for everyone, and then retreats in a fit of embarrassment; and an older man who pauses as we hear someone offscreen say, "You're getting younger and younger every day." These are the moments that give The Pleasure of Being Robbed a palpable texture of city life.

Safdie is fascinated by urban bustle. "I do all my thinking in transit," he says, "A quarter of the books I've read I've read walking from one place to the next." Safdie explains that it's in this shifting of one place to another that his characters find themselves. Referring specifically to Eléonore, he adds, "That's when she can be who she wants to be."

Safdie's camera frequently takes a fly on the wall approach, sometimes following her movements, sometimes letting her wander away from the frame. Describing Eléonore as "butterfly-like", Safdie gives us a logical progression of her con-artistry from purse-picking to grand theft auto. Eléonore's peculiar hobby is not easy to explain. We're not sure what kind of satisfaction she is deriving from it.

"She can't arrive on time to meet one of her oldest friends," Safdie recounts, "This friend sees her and recognizes her as Eléonore, but she doesn't recognize her, because she's never straight with her." He goes on to add," She knows she won't get past the small talk." There is something unnerving to Eléonore's seeming lack of intimacy with everyone around her.

In Robert Bresson's Pickpocket (1959), the character of the title also appears distant and lacking an overall awareness of his actions. That is, until Bresson gives him his big flash of redemption. Safdie gives us several glimpses at redemption, without being as definitive as Bresson. "I imagine her getting caught when she trades the CD for the DVD," he says about the ending, "Though it wouldn't have worked to put that in the film." Safdie views the scene as a way of the character "living on". "That's a kind of redemption," he says.

The subject of Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason (1967) was more of a reference for Safdie. "How many of his tears are sincere and how many are performative?" he asks about the figure of Jason Holliday, going on to observe, "Loot at Eléonore: she says she doesn't know how to drive and then suddenly she's doing fancy tricks and parallel parking."

"When she can't perform in the park it's the saddest thing in the world," Safdie says in describing the scene where Eléonore is caught sifting through a woman's purse. "It's like that moment when Robert Mitchum faces Lilian Gish in Night of the Hunter (1955) and he can no longer pretend to be a reverend."

Mouchette (1965) is also infused in The Pleasure of Being Robbed. Speaking of Mouchette, Safdie professes, "I really like the fact that nothing is going to stand in that girl's way."

Similarly, Eléonore has a sort of toughness that's difficult to reconcile. Early in the film she comes home with a bag full of kittens. "In that scene the audience always goes 'awww'", Safdie says," And then when Eléonore throws one of the kittens across the room, they are kind of shocked." Safdie concedes that she is "fucked-up", and even though his fondness for her is transparent throughout the film, he nevertheless gives her a more complex tinge in such instants.

Safdie related another scene, when a penguin gets thrown off a ledge into a pond, as another detail that upsets audiences. The entire premise may be upsetting, as Eléonore makes her way into Central Park Zoo and the film takes an imaginary flight to a pond where she wrestles around with a polar bear. (The penguin, for no apparent reason, is launched into the water while this is happening.) "That whole scene is a slight insight into her mind," Safdie explains, "There's no self in Eléonore, there are just other people, and she's looking at the polar bear as if it were just another thing or person." Safdie talks about the dream sequences in films like Los Olvidados (1950) and Milestones (1975) as inspiration. "They force you to find meaning in them," he says.

Perhaps the most poignant incident in the film is the one that introduces Eléonore. As she's attempting to call the attention of a nondescript Asian woman on the street so she can win her confidence and steal her purse, we realize this stranger named Dawn may be experiencing the most exhilaration she'll have all day. Safdie gives a few thoughts: "Dawn will probably remember Eléonore for the rest of her life, mostly because she stole her bag, but also because of the excitement she felt. People are fragile and seek excitement, excitement is what everybody wants."

Johnnie To's SPARROW

2008-10-17T12:46:00.000-07:00

Sparrow screens on Saturday, 10/18 at 600 North Michigan at 6pm.

Although it’s only one of two films I’ve seen so far in this year’s festival, it’s hard to imagine I’ll see anything more instantly satisfying than Sparrow. A playful, largely dialogue-free fantasy about a team of master pickpockets, it often feels like a great cartoon brought brilliantly to life, with elaborate set-pieces that use contemporary Hong Kong as creatively as Ratatouille used contemporary Paris. The movie reportedly took three years to shoot, and the filmmakers’ perfectionism is evident in almost every shot. Yet for all the technical mastery, Sparrow is a rather playful film, often evocative of a 50s MGM musical. (The maximally arranged widescreen frames certainly encourage this comparison.) While some critics—most notably the Reader’s Fred Camper—have written great defenses of Johnnie To in the past, I only found him intermittently brilliant before this film. But with Sparrow, he combines the giddiness of his action-comedies like Running on Karma with the focused aesthetic of his“Election” Trilogy and even manages to ditch the flip cynicism that made those films occasionally seem tasteless. Here is a movie that should entertain people of all ages for some time to come. (2008, 87 min, 35mm)

Also screening on Sunday, 10/26, 1pm

Cine-File braces for 'round the clock festival coverage...

2008-10-16T23:30:00.000-07:00

The big opening night gala may have been this evening, but the 44th annual Chicago International Film Festival kicks off its regular programming tomorrow, Friday, October 17, and runs for the next 12 days.

As to be expected, most of the Chicago press printed reports in the last two days, with J.R. Jones providing an especially nice overview in the Reader. At Cine-File, however, we've chosen to wait 'til the last minute and write about the festival as it happens--hence, the blog you're reading. We hope this better-late-than-never approach (characteristic, as any of writers would tell you) proves as interesting for us as it does informative for you. In addition to covering the films being screened, we intend to report on special events, memorable crowd responses, and the overall busy-body atmosphere: In short, everything that separates a film festival from a mere collection of movies.

A large international festival like this one is a great reminder of the complexity of the world, with media overload practically a boon to this end. I, for one, intend to kick off the festival tomorrow with screenings of LAILA'S BIRTHDAY (Palestine; River East 21, 4pm), HAPPY-GO-LUCKY (UK; RE 21, 7pm), and LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (Sweden; RE 21, 10pm). Jones compared the last one to George Romero's MARTIN; if he's even 50% accurate, this film should be spectacular.