CIFF Review: Le Week-End

“Le Week-End” is a brisk and alive comedy that bares some similarity to “Before Midnight.”

“Le Week-End” screened as a part of the Chicago International Film Festival. This early review is merely an impression of the version screened. The movie will be released in America in March 2014.

 Film critic Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote in a tweet that Lindsay Duncan’s character in “Le Week-end” would be the splitting image of “Before Midnight’s” Celine if only she was 15 years older and British. Not only is Roger Michell’s film on the realistic trajectory for where Jesse and Celine might end up two films from where they are now, “Le Week-end” crackles with the intelligence, realism and charm of Richard Linklater’s masterpiece of a trilogy.

And yet unlike “Before Midnight,” Michell’s film dares to make philosophical expressions of love and marriage into something other than talky and dour. It’s a brisk comedy with a spark for life and lunacy, and it hits a perfect note of authenticity between the chemistry of its two leads.

Jim Broadbent and Duncan play Richard and Meg Burroughs, a married couple of 30 years on vacation in Paris for their anniversary. Upon arriving at their dingy shoebox of a hotel, Meg immediately storms out and grabs a taxi to a luxurious Paris institution, doing so with a superficial, yet lovingly sophisticated confidence to always get her way.

Richard tags along like a sheep dog, at first appearing only concerned about money the way all cliché old men do in the movies. But after they’re well settled in and he’s stopped caring, he reveals that he’s been forced into retirement after an off-color comment about one of his students.

It’s just one of many complications in their marriage, one that leads Meg to question whether or not after 30 years she still wants to be with Richard. They bicker over their deadbeat son and why they don’t have sex anymore, but they do so with a sly, witty understanding of one another that shows at least why they belong as friends. Continue reading “CIFF Review: Le Week-End”

CIFF Review: My Sweet Pepper Land

“My Sweet Pepper Land” is a Middle Easter film that borrows from Western influence.

“My Sweet Pepper Land” screened as a part of the Chicago International Film Festival where it won the Golden Hugo for Best Film. This early review is merely an impression of the version screened.

Most of the Middle Eastern films to make their way overseas are inherently tied to their heritage and their cultural landscape. But that doesn’t mean some of their films ignore American influence. “My Sweet Pepper Land” may be about a border dispute town in a country trying to rebuild, but it’s a Western at heart, complete with a sheriff, bad guys, a standoff and shootout. It’s a surprising combination and an unexpectedly good film.

Hiner Saleem’s film is set in Kurdistan shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein. It opens in an awkwardly grim and darkly comedic opening in which this newly democratic country is conducting their first hanging. It’s an embarrassing display in which the man is left standing on a leftover ballot box from their election, the rope stretches to where he can tiptoe before breaking altogether, and an employee is brought in to tug in an attempt strangle him faster.

The scene has little to do with the main plot, but it sets the stage for how “My Sweet Pepper Land” plays; it’s a lightly politically charged film with rough edges and a bit of deadpan comedy. It’s a combination that doesn’t always work, at the expense of deeper nuance for both the characters and the turbulent conflict. Continue reading “CIFF Review: My Sweet Pepper Land”

CIFF Review: Walesa: Man of Hope

This Polish biopic about Lech Walesa, the leader of the Solidarity movement in Poland, is modest and workmanlike.

“Walesa: Man of Hope” screened as a part of the Chicago International Film Festival. This early review is merely an impression of the version screened. 

Despite being a moving, inspirational portrait of an influential Polish activist and political figure, you will not find any orchestral score in “Walesa: Man of Hope.” No strings, no swells, no cymbal crashes and timpani designed to jerk a tear; not in this biopic. The songs that punctuate Andrezj Wajda’s film are Polish pop and punk songs, music plucked straight from the garage.

This is the music of the working man, and although hitting the beats of a standard biopic, “Walesa” keeps its head down and does a workman-like job just as its protagonist would. It’s a modest film of a simple man, but also a great one.

Lech Walesa (Robert Wieckiewicz) joined the solidarity movement in the 1970s. The Soviet Union had control over Poland, and the nation was stuck in poverty with the Communist mentality to view working class, human labor as little more than a resource. Over just a few years, Walesa became the relatable figurehead of the movement. With a big sniffer over a sly, gruff smirk, he reached the working class in ways the young, rebellious liberals could not, eventually leading city wide strikes, negotiating for the poor and winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

The film joins Walesa in the early 1970s as his first child of six is about to be born. When a riot starts outside his apartment, he takes off his wedding ring and his watch and tells his wife Danuta (Agnieszka Grochowska) to sell them if he doesn’t return. He’s arrested, interrogated and forced to sign a document that’s bound to come back to bite him. Continue reading “CIFF Review: Walesa: Man of Hope”

Chicago International Film Festival Preview 2013

A preview of 35 films showing at the 49th Chicago International Film Festival (CIFF) between October 10-24

Toronto, Sundance, New York and now Telluride get all the love.

Those North American festivals have been covered to death in this Oscar season that’s come (and been declared finished) all too early, and the focus moves so fast that the media neglects to appeal to the millions in the Midwest and elsewhere who never get to see those buzzy movies with that tiny fraction of the film loving community.

But I call Chicago home, and so do thousands of other film lovers. Our Chicago International Film Festival is in its 49th year, and although Harvey Weinstein didn’t think to premiere his awards bait movies here, we get a diverse line-up of films and crave guidance, recommendations and coverage just like anyone else.

This year’s lineup, which runs October 10-24, is now available for sale to the general public and can be viewed in full here, seems especially strong, and my lineup is fairly stacked with a handful of near schedule conflicts. So if you’ve got a Festival Pass, here’s a little who’s who of 35 of this year’s CIFF movies.

*Films marked with an asterisk represent films on my personal schedule Continue reading “Chicago International Film Festival Preview 2013”

CIFF Review: Post Tenebras Lux

The Latin phrase “Post Tenebras Lux” translates to “light, after darkness,” which to me implies something like “clarity and understanding, after obscurity.” But Carlos Reygadas’s (“Silent Light”) new film provides only murky ideas and feelings. It’s an arresting film of occasional beauty and horror, but most of it is lost in the clouds.

The movie has no story. It’s a dreamscape of emotions, fantasies and nightmares. The film is set in the rural mountainside and focuses on a wealthy family of four. Juan (Adolfo Jimenez Castro) and Natalia (Nathalia Acevedo) have two adorable toddlers, Rut and Eleazar. The young girl Rut is seen running through a muddy field before a thunderstorm chasing after dogs and cows. Eleazar is seen taking off his diaper and hurling it across the room, and in another scene wearing a Spiderman outfit and talking about Peter Parker.

These moments are beautiful, but they’re aimless. They exist out of time as though they are simply dreams or memories.

Contrast these with the more disturbing images. Juan and Natalia go to a bathhouse in France and participate in an orgy, but even this does not seem real, with dozens of naked bodies and faces simply sitting and staring through the haze of the room as disturbing noises penetrate our surroundings. In another scene, Juan scolds a whining dog and then beats it mercilessly by slamming its head into the patio floor.

For me the film represents the fleeting nature of time, our ever changing memories that blur moments and reflect back at our best and worst. The problem is that it’s very likely the film will mean something else to you. Reygadas gets distracted with momentary glimpses of kids in England playing rugby or an animated devil with a toolbox stealthily invading someone’s home. They’re surreal, supernatural plot devices that aim to elevate the ordinary but fail to focus on any concrete ideas.

And it’s all seen through a refracted, convex camera lens, blurring the frame’s edges and causing us to see double out in nature. It starts as a unique aesthetic, but you wonder why Reygadas couldn’t make the film look dreamlike without filtering it all through a kaleidoscope.

It reflects the broader difficulty of “Post Tenebras Lux,” a film that enchants in its distinctly skewed view of the world but ultimately clouds what we had hoped to see more clearly.

3 stars

Off the Red Carpet: Week 3 (10/17 – 10/24)

Three weeks have passed since I started this column, we’re 18 weeks away, and I’ve seen yet another two major contenders thanks to the Chicago International Film Festival (I might’ve seen three if not for CIFF’s awful secret screening selection), “The Sessions” and “Silver Linings Playbook.”

“Silver Linings” is exactly the kind of film that could take Best Picture and sweep some of the acting awards if I didn’t think “The Master” could absolutely dominate in the acting branch, and that’s because it’s a crowd pleasing romantic comedy with a lot of depth and poignancy about disabilities. It’s more about disabilities than even “The Sessions,” which just uses its problem as a plot device. If it did, it would probably be the first straight rom-com to win since “Annie Hall.”

But this was a busy week elsewhere, so let’s get down to it.

Joaquin Phoenix calls Oscar season “bullshit,” heads explode amongst people who care about this stuff

Sometimes I’m really disappointed by the media. They have a habit of making a story out of nothing because when one person reports it, everyone else has to spread it around. Joaquin Phoenix said in a terrific interview with Elvis Mitchell for Interview magazine that he thought the whole act of campaigning and comparing people’s performances is “total, utter bullshit.” “It’s a carrot, but it’s the worst tasting carrot I’ve ever tasted in my whole life. I don’t want this carrot.”

That quote alone should give a sense of how batshit crazy and awesome the rest of the interview actually is, but pundits decided to pick out this quote and make a big deal about it, some claiming that he now doesn’t stand a chance at even a nomination.

Well, he’s too good in “The Master” for that. This wouldn’t be the first time someone has put down the Oscars and completely opted out of coming to the ceremony and still won (see: Woody Allen, for one). It’s clear that after two losses (“Gladiator,” “Walk the Line”) he’s tired of the posturing and is seeking a different kind of truth in his performances. So everyone can just calm down. (via Entertainment Weekly and Interview Magazine)

Gotham Award Nominations Announced

The Gotham Awards are significant because they’re the first batch of nominations in this long, long, long awards season. They recognize indie films that would otherwise need a boost amongst the studio fare, and this year they’ve helped put “Moonrise Kingdom” and “Beasts of the Southern Wild” back into the conversation. “Beasts” didn’t score a Best Feature nod, opting instead for the lesser known “The Loneliest Planet” and “Middle of Nowhere,” but director Benh Zeitlin scored a nomination and could make some surprise waves come Oscar time. Also in the fray is Richard Linklater’s “Bernie.” There is a small but vigorous campaign to get Jack Black nominated for an Oscar, and this is his first step in that direction. (via In Contention)

George Clooney could be first to be nominated in six Oscar categories

Guy Lodge of In Contention observed in a case of severe data overload that if “Argo” is nominated for Best Picture, producer George Clooney would be the first person to ever be nominated in six separate categories, Best Picture (“Argo”), Best Adapted Screenplay (“The Ides of March”), Best Director and Original Screenplay (“Good Night, and Good Luck”), Best Actor (“Michael Clayton, “Up in the Air,” “The Descendants”) and the category he won for, Best Supporting Actor (“Syriana”). Does Clooney sing? Maybe we can get him nominated for Best Original Song next year. (via In Contention)

“Holy Motors” and “After Lucia” take top prizes at CIFF

CIFF doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of the awards season, but I was there to enjoy it, and for “Holy Motors” to win its first major prize, along with an acting prize for Denis Lavant, says something. I’ve even heard people making a case for Best Original Song for Kylie Minogue’s cameo. I’ll remind you that I hated the film and appear to be the only person on the planet who thinks this way, but there’s no denying it’s not exactly up the Academy’s alley. “After Lucia” however is Mexico’s entry in the Foreign Film race, so any recognition is always a good thing. (via Hollywood Chicago)

Best Costume Design for “Django Unchained”?

Some pundits seem almost adamant in declaring that Quentin Tarantino’s latest film doesn’t really stand much of a chance this Oscar season, but I came across this interesting blog that says otherwise in one peculiar category: Best Costume Design. “Django’s” period clothing is done by Sharen Davis, nominated twice previously for “Ray” and “Dreamgirls.” The article also points out that Tarantino is responsible for some of the most iconic costumes in recent memory but has nothing to show for it. (via Clothes on Film) Continue reading “Off the Red Carpet: Week 3 (10/17 – 10/24)”

CIFF Review: Silver Linings Playbook

David O. Russell described the Led Zeppelin song “What Is and What Should Never Be,” a song used in his new film “Silver Linings Playbook,” as bipolar.

“And if I say to you, tomorrow…” Robert Plant croons smoothly, honestly and calmly, all before a big explosion. “And catch the wind, see us spin/Sail away, leave the day/Way up high in the sky,” he screams.

“Silver Linings Playbook” is just as exciting, surprising and stylish as that Zeppelin song. It’s a crowd pleasing rom-com about two people struggling with bipolar disorder who learn to love, stay positive and enjoy family in the face of lots of hardship.

Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper) is just being released from a psychiatric ward. Eight months earlier, he caught his wife cheating on him and beat her lover half to death, but because he was found to have undiagnosed bipolar disorder, he was able to spend his sentence in a mental institution rather than in prison.

It’s no wonder his disorder would go undiagnosed. Pat is part Italian and living in Philadelphia, and their loud, argumentative family dynamic blends perfectly with Pat’s honest, blunt and high-spirited speaking brought on by his disability. His father, Pat Sr. (Robert De Niro), also has a case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder when rooting for the Eagles, adjusting remotes and holding lucky handkerchiefs to ensure an Eagles victory. But O. Russell realizes that all these nervous ticks just come naturally as being part of a family. Continue reading “CIFF Review: Silver Linings Playbook”

CIFF Review: Leviathan

In “Leviathan,” the water is stained blood red, guts and debris fly past our eyes, alien pods tower in outer space, chains and the sounds of a hacking machete engulf us and suddenly as we look up away from all this horror, white demons fill the darkened sky.

“Leviathan” is the most disgusting, terrifying horror movie of the year, but it’s an experimental documentary that haunts and enchants in its otherworldly images, sanctimonious tone and Earth-shattering noises.

It’s unlike any documentary I’ve seen, a gruesome look at the fishing industry that creates moods only and does not make a point. The screening I saw at the Chicago International Film Festival had many walkouts. Does it indulge in its terror? Yes, but only because it is mesmerizing.

By using miniature Go-Pro cameras that can attach to helmets, clothing or be tossed around and jostled wherever, “Leviathan” achieves fish-eye perspectives that no human could. The images it sees would not be thought possible on Earth. David Bordwell calls it “the camera as flotsam.” In our line of sight we can spot a mutilated fish head, a bird so close we can make out the expression on its face as it tries to climb into a barrel holding some stray fish parts, hands grappling at chains in otherwise pitch black vistas or buried beneath mounds of fish in a fresh catch.

Before long we’re hurled overboard, not just sloshing around in the water but swimming furiously. The camera sees water rushing past as though we were a fish, then leaping out from beneath the waves to see a swarm of gulls descending on the ocean for a meal.

Except we wouldn’t know what we’re seeing or how to feel if not for the over-powering sound mixing that cues us in. The images and sounds are actually sped-up to appear absolutely cataclysmic, and the blurring of the film’s edits behind this wall of noise and darkness gives the film an eerily trance like quality. David Bordwell again compares “Leviathan” to the Russian, avant-garde silent film from 1927, “The Man with a Movie Camera,” rendering “the action hallucinatory” and putting “the very boundary between one shot and another” into question.

What makes “Leviathan” work above all is that it operates purely on this metaphorical level. We see fisherman hacking the fins off sting rays with a machete, then disposing the bodies through portholes dribbling out blood into the water. What’s the purpose of this gruesome stuff? The movie doesn’t say; it just exists. There are no people identified here, but we get a sense of how next-to-normal this work is when one man is glimpsed dozing in front of a TV as we hear a commercial singing, “877-CASH-NOW!”

“Leviathan” is a cinephile’s movie. It is impressive in the notion that such a film can even be made. It does not make a statement. It is not educational. It is not easy to watch. It is even in love with all these ghastly images. But it is remarkable.

4 stars

CIFF Review: Like Someone in Love

There seem to be a lot of times in Abbas Kiarostami’s “Like Someone in Love” that the characters ignore their phone. When they do answer, there’s something lost in translation.

I point out this minute detail because at times it seems to be the only thing to hold our attention in this film about communication between people. The film follows a narrative structure so stripped down that it is at once baffling, boring and beautiful.

It starts inside a bar of people talking and having fun, but the voice we hear is Akiko’s (Rin Takanashi) arguing with her boyfriend Noriaki (Ryo Kase). Akiko is a call girl in Tokyo about to be sent out of town to spend the night with Takashi, an elderly, lonely and retired college professor (Tadashi Okuno). Takashi’s interest in her isn’t sexual, instead looking only for an evening of romance. But he doesn’t make that completely clear, and she falls asleep in his bed.

The next day, Noriaki mistakes Takashi to be Akiko’s grandfather and asks for his blessing in marriage. Suddenly the focus seems to shift to Noriaki and how he struggles to keep his fractured relationship built on lies together. He doesn’t know Akiko is a call girl, and when someone suggests that a photo in an ad looks a lot like her, he lashes out. He’s a scrawny kid capable of intense violence and anger.

Like Ozu, Kiarostami’s films have always been a modern example of deeply personal, slow cinema. And now this Iranian auteur completes his transformation by taking this trip to Japan for “Like Someone in Love.” Unlike his most recent masterpiece “Certified Copy,” Kiarostami is exploring mismatched relationships, philosophy and human nature not through a jumbled, experimental narrative, but a movie that bucks narrative altogether.

It is at times a maddeningly empty film. We sit and watch characters sleep in cars or wait on doorsteps, but Kiarostami surprises us with the new interactions and the new hints at backstory that come from nowhere, something that becomes even more obvious in the film’s captivating and undeniably abrupt ending.

One of the film’s finest scenes shows Akiko listening to voicemails in the backseat of a cab. They’re messages from her grandmother, who has come into town to see her but has been neglected and waiting all day. Now as Akiko is forcefully sent out on a job without time for her to rectify her mistake, we get an understanding of just how lonely her day has been. In her last message, she says she’ll wait patiently in front of a statue before the last train home departs. The cab circles a roundabout at the station at that moment, and there waiting under a streetlamp just as she said is a little old lady holding a suitcase. The image is sad enough, but Akiko asks the driver to go around once more so she can get another look.

It’s a heartbreaking moment, and one that just hints at the many flaws and depths of these characters. And yet it is perhaps a film I’ll have to see twice, one that is regrettably unclear about its intentions and its structure, requiring picking up on nuance on a second pass.

Perhaps that’s why Akiko asked to drive around again; we just need a better look.

3 stars

CIFF Review: Holy Motors

There’s a photographer in “Holy Motors” shooting pictures rapidly and blindly of a lifeless model dressed in gold as played by Eva Mendes. “Beauty! Beauty! Beauty,” he says in complete cartoonish astonishment.

At that moment, a hideous man dressed in a green leprechaun’s suit and no undershirt pushes his way to the front of the crowd and stands silently biting his decrepit fingernails. The man has long red hair plastered to the side of his head and speaks only gibberish. He’s made a scene.

The photographer turns to him and starts shooting photos of him. “Weird, weird. Weird!”

Is this how one should watch “Holy Motors,” the absurdist French drama by the cult French director Leos Carax? It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this year and wowed audiences by being completely nutzo and was heralded as an underappreciated cult film because this year’s particular jury led by Nanni Moretti couldn’t possibly “get it.”

I saw it in a sold out screening at the Chicago International Film Festival Sunday night, where it was received by an audience that was half stunned and confused and half ecstatic.

I found myself in neither crowd, frustrated by this repugnant mishmash of a film that either has no point or all too much of one. If you’re going to make a surrealist masterpiece, my advice would be to not be disingenuous about it.

Luis Bunuel or David Lynch Carax is not, try as he might to put his star in a wig that shares the bizarre Lynchian swoosh. He’s made a film that revels in its own spontaneous style, modeling its half-baked ideas and genre spoofs only for us to gawk. The result is a series of avant-garde and art house shorts that have no commonalities, with the exception that its hero seems to smoke in every one. For every moment of “Holy Motors” that is tearful, erotic, giddy, suspenseful or chilling, Carax almost always has a way of ending each with a cheap visual gag. For all its visual flair and profundity, these segments resound as little more than stylized forgeries.

The film does not have a conventional narrative, if any at all, but it does have a protagonist, Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant). We first see him walking out of a mansion and into a limo where he is followed by bodyguards in black sedans. His driver, Celine (Edith Scob), informs him he has nine appointments today.

In preparation for these, he dons wigs, face putty and makeup in front of a brightly lit dressing room mirror. When he steps out of the car, he has made a complete transformation into another person.

First we see him as a hobbled street beggar, unrecognizable and hopeless. Next he dons a black motion capture suit and performs martial arts for a dark, empty room full of infrared lasers. A tall, slender, faceless woman walks out and is bathed in red by the lights, and the two slide across each other’s bodies in sexual acrobatics. The resulting animation is two snake-like monsters having sex. In another segment we meet the leprechaun, who kidnaps Eva Mendes and takes her to a cave, gouges at flowers and her hair, tears her clothes to make a gold burka, then strips down himself to reveal a full on boner and falls asleep to the sound of her lullaby.

Now after all this, is there any part of you that could believe a segment with Oscar picking up his daughter from a party and driving her home in disappointment could be considered genuine?

Don’t all these dramatic segments, like when he’s talking to his daughter on his death bed, or when he’s dragging himself helpless to the limo after being stabbed in the neck, feel like a lie? Maybe all movies are kind of a lie, which leads to what I think “Holy Motors” is actually about.

Now, let me preface this analysis by saying that “Holy Motors” may not be about anything. If watching Bunuel has taught me anything, it’s that two images back to back might not have anything to do with the other, and that anyone tying their brains into a pretzel to figure it out is either embarrassing themselves or projecting.

What I gathered is that this is a movie about performances. It’s about cinema and actors, and Denis Lavant should be applauded for tackling and embodying so many roles so convincingly. Here we have a guy who is such a method actor that for a moment he quite literally becomes someone else. If he were the same person when he got in and out of that limo, then each appointment would be impacted by the one that came before it. He’d be tired, if not dead several times over.

But that’s a plot analysis. The film’s opening shot is of a darkened movie theater audience, acting almost as a mirror looking back at us. This immediately makes us consider our own voyeurism and establishes the implication that it’s all a movie where anything can happen. Carax also includes glimpses of footage from the birth of cinema, like a naked man stretching or a hand clapping, to reference a time when the camera was so omnipresent that actors were aware of their performance, enabling them to embody anything on screen because there was no clear definition for what cinema was.

There are more subtle hints as well. One segment references names like Theo and Vogan, both of which are used in earlier appointments, suggesting that Oscar is an actor who has past traits seep in to his work. Each segment also seems to reference a particular genre, be it character drama, melodrama, gangster, art house or musical.

Maybe I’ve unlocked the film’s riddles and its brilliance, but it doesn’t excuse quite a lot. It doesn’t excuse the fact that it’s a mean spirited movie where violence and sex seem to occur without reason. It doesn’t lend for future viewing where more details can be unlocked because certain moments like the accordion ensemble, Celine’s green mask or the film’s final shot, are nothing more than one-off absurdist jokes, if not just Easter eggs. And it neglects the fact that directors like Bunuel and Lynch have a much stronger control over the tone of the audience. You know if you’re being duped, you know if a moment is supposed to be heartbreaking or beautiful and you know how you feel even if you don’t know what you’re seeing.

Carax’s film misses these marks. It often puts more exotic things on screen than actually compose them in a dynamic way, and Lavant’s performances should not be overstated because the film doesn’t give us much of a base ground from which to gauge his transformation.

I think claims that Carax’s film will be remembered as a classic years from now are exaggerated. It’s a movie that stands out only for its weirdness and little else.

1 ½ stars