(This was originally posted in installments on the Alternate Reality website in installments) in March and April, 2018.)
The Chicago European Union Film Festival runs this year until April 5 at the Gene Siskel Center located at 164 North State Street. Here are some minireviews on the films I saw. Some will open for longer runs later in the year at the Siskel Center and other places. Some may also be available soon online. The films are rated from * (terrible) to **** (outstanding).
Catch the Wind /Prendire Le Large (France) ***1/2-A middle aged widow has to face some harsh economic realities after her husband dies. The factory she works at is going to be relocated to Morocco, so she decides to risk everything and move there. She is immediately mistreated and discriminated against by the neighboring populace, and she has to beg to keep her apartment after all her money is robbed. She gets into trouble when she begins complaining about the substandard and dangerous work conditions. This is a slow starter, but it is ultimately deeply moving and satisfying. It also shows how corporations in the new global economy tend to treat workers like yesterday’s trash. As always, Sandrine (Vagabond) Bonnaire is completely convincing. In French with English sub-titles. Playing March 9 and 14.
Death of Stalin (U.K.) ***1/2–Hilarious British satire shows how Stalin’s death affected the USSR and his successors. Steve Buscemi (Blackboard Empire) gives a delightful performance as a young Nikita Khrushchev who does not always fully realize the absurdity of his own actions. The other members of the party attack each other and fight to divvy up the power. Michael Palin of Monty Python, Jeffrey Tambor of Arrested Development, Andrea Riseborough of Birdman, and Simon Russell Beale of Penny Dreadful contribute to the merriment in strong supporting roles. This is sort of like a smarter version of Hogan’s Heroes because it milks a dictatorial regime for well-deserved laughs. The exquisite soundtrack features well used pieces by the masterful Mozart, as well as more modern pieces by Christopher Willis which seem to channel Sergej Sergejevič Prokofjev and Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich. Stick around for the amusing doctored pics at the end. Based on La Morte de Staline, a French graphic novel by Fabien Nury & Thierry Robin. This film appeared on the top 10 lists of several major critics last year, and it is currently playing at Regal Webster Place and Century 12 Cinearts Evanston, but it will open wider. Made in the UK in English.
Ghost Stories (U.K.) ***1/2-Classy and intelligent horror film from England about Dr. Goodman, a professor who is very skeptical of the existence of the occult. He spends most of his time trying to debunk uncanny reports, so he is kind of like the old DC comics character, Doctor Thirteen or the X-File’s Dana Scully. His mentor now believes in the occult, and he sends his former pupil out on three investigations to prove that Goodman’s skepticism is erroneous. . One case involves a night watchman who sees some bizarre and terrifying visons in a woman’s asylum. Another case involves a man with an expectant wife who is tied to a ghost. In the best of the three, a teenager driving a car hits a mysterious misshapen creature as his parents harass him on the phone. We later learn that the ironically named Goodman has his own dark secrets, and all three stories unexpectedly merge in the shocking climax. Viewers need to pay attention, and the film is full of quick clues that audience members may miss if they blink or go to the bathroom. We can make what we want of the clues as one of the characters tells us, “The brain sees what it wants to see.” Although this is a bit less profound than the other two recent ghost films (A Ghost Story and Personal Shopper), it is far creepier. It was based on a popular play but unlike some other plays turned into movies (such as the 1931 Todd Browning version of Dracula) it never seems overly stagy or artificial. This delightfully old fashioned fright film relies more on surprise, suspense, and ambiguity than gore or fancy camera tricks. It reminded of many grand old supernatural anthology flicks such as Dead of Night, Dr., Terror’s House of Horrors, Trilogy of Terror, and Night Gallery. Playing in the Chicago European Union Film Festival at the Gene Siskel Center on Friday, March 23 and Thursday, March 29. The film is also scheduled to open wider in the USA on April 20.
Godard Mon Amour/Le Redoubtable (France/Italy ) ****-Splendid bio pic about the very young and rebellious Jean-Luc Godard’s legendary relationship with the comparatively stable actress , Anne Wiazememsky who stared in Au Hazard Balthazar (currently my favorite film) and Godard’s La Chinoise. At one point Wiamemsky and Godard form a totally democratic collective with other film makers, but the project fails with no leader. The relationship falls off the rails when Anne goes off to make a film with Marco Ferrari, and the normally progressive free thinker is threatened and becomes a sexist, controlling husband. The confrontation between Godard and his disciple, Bernardo Bertolucci is classic, and I had more fun watching this film than any other one this year so far. At one point his own disciples savagely turn on him and Godard learns the risk of always encouraging anti establishmentarianism. The director, Michel Hazanavicius, the maker of The Artist, shot this on digitable video and his camera tricks and style often emulate Godard (complete with spilt screens and word and numbers combined with images). This must see film far surpasses his previous Oscar winning film. In French with English sub-titles, This played on April 1 and 4.
Gutland (Luxembourg/Germany/Belgium) ***1/2-Sexy and surreal urban noir about a drifter looking for farm work who is seduced by his bosses’ sultry daughter. Eventually he finds pornographic photos and he finds out that the town is not quite as innocent as it seems. The angelically photographed, Vicky Krieps, who played the wife in The Phantom Thread, makes an even stronger impression here as the seductress. The plot gets a bit murky in the second half. In Luxembourgese and German with English subtitles, Playing on March 11 and 13.
A Heart of Love /Serce miłośc (Poland) ***- This film tells the tale of a real, slightly unhinged, and highly artistic couple based in Warsaw. Justyna Wasilewska is wonderfully eccentric playing Zuzanna Bartoszek and Jacek Poniedziałek is just as impressive playing Wojciech Bąkowski. She is a promising poet, and he is an established artist and musician. The couple come from different generations and so the film also examines the differences between the people born before and after the fall of communism. Their rivalry and artistic vanity gets in the way of their relationship and they begin drifting apart. One of the song lyrics alludes to their painful breakup. The film contains some real modern art, performances and installations. Many of the shots are very symmetrical and visually arresting, and this is the kind of film that you might see in an art museum. A Heart of Love is bizarre, interesting and occasionally hard to follow, but it is worth the effort. It is primarily recommended for avant-garde enthusiasts. In Polish with English subtitles. Playing March 24rth and 27 at the Gene Siskel Center.
Hustler’s Diary/Maste Gitt (Sweden) ***1/2-Riotous dramedy is about a common thug in a bad neighborhood who wants to be an actor. He writes about his criminal misadventures in a diary which gets into the hands of a book publisher who wants to make a book out if it. The thug is horrified because the thinks that if it gets in the wrong hands everyone he knows will get arrested. Many laughs are generated when the thug tries to get his delinquent younger brother to act respectable. The film also includes some social commentary and many of the criminals are immigrants from other countries who take up crime to avoid abject poverty (the director himself is a Croatian who emigrated to Sweden and the led actor’s family came from Turkey and ended up in Sweden.) . The shaky handheld camerawork and characterization was obviously influenced by Martin Scorsese’s and Spike Lee’s works. Many of these characters are so brutish and violent that they make the characters in Trailer Park Boys look like high society people. In Swedish with English subtitles. Playing on March 23 and 27 at the Gene Siskel Center
Indivisable/Indivisbli (Italy) ***1/2-Two Siamese Twins work as pop singers, but conflicts arise when one of them wants to be surgically separated. The dad is dead set against it because it would take away the novelty of their act and they could die during surgery. This visually opulent film was the best of the three Italian films I saw in the fest. In Italian with English sub-titles.
Jeannette or the Childhood of Joan of Arc/Jeannette L’Enfance De Jeanne D’Arc (France/Italy) ****-Bruno Dumont’s irreverent, subversive, moving and unusually shocking historical biopic/musical depicts young Joan before she went to battle (by two extremely capable actresses, Lise Leplat Prudhomme and Jeanne Voisin.) It was based on “The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc,” a dramatic text by a socialist mystical poet, Charles Péguy, “and it sets his words to music. The background music is often a jarring mixture of rock, rap, metal and synth pop and hip-hop. The film does an excellent job of combining the everyday with the divine and often has scenes of people praying or singing to God while doing banal things such as plucking chickens. Jeannette makes good use of nonprofessional actors with ordinary voices who get by with their charisma and apparent sincerity (it’s the opposite approach used in the slick, professional Glee show.) This is like a Jesus Christ superstar version of the Joan of Arc story. The film is sure to offend some (in one scene the young Joan does a cartwheel in the middle of a prayer), but no one will ever forget it, If you adored Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, you should also love this. The prestigious film journal, Cahiers du Cinéma chose it as the second best film of last year. With this film and his last two features, Lil Quinquin and Slack Bay, director, Bruno Dumont shows he is one of the best and most consistently entertaining avant-garde film makers on the planet. This was easily the best film I saw at the fest and it is an early contender for my next top 10 films list. Opening in Chicago this week. In French with English sub-titles.
The Last Processo / Finche C’e Prosecco Speranza (Italy) **1/2-A chubby, laid back inspector (he looks kind of like Kevin Smith) begins to investigate the mysterious murder of a count. The mystery is linked to a femme fatale with a gecko tattoo. The inspector finds out that his death is tied to corporate abuse of the land and environmental issues. This film has a fairly routine story, but the cinematography depicting the wine country is gorgeously picturesque. This film takes place in wine country and it is named after a type of wine (Italy sells some of the best low price wine in the world.) Italy has its fair of good cop dramas (such as Matteo). Although this film is sometimes diverting viewers might want to ask themselves why they would go all the trouble of going out to see a police film, when there are so many better cop drams that they can see on TV for free. I had this kind of wine at dinner around Christmas and it was quite good. In Italian with English subtitles. Playing on Saturday, March 24 and Tuesday March 27 sat the Gene Siskel Center in the Chicago European Union Film Festival.
Lots of Kids, a Monkey and a Castle/Muchachos Hijos Un Mono Y Un Castillo (Spain) ***- Rambling, non-cohesive and fascinating documentary is packed with non-successive interviews and spliced together super 8 footage. It focuses on a great octogenarian eccentric, Julita Salmeron, the film maker’s mom. Julita, had always dreamed of having a castle, a monkey and many kids hence the title. Remarkably, she does achieve her goals. She definitely had a flair for the bizarre. Julita adopts a monkey because she always wanted one that she could put dresses on that would eat dinner with her using a fork (I have always wanted to have an anteater like my hero Dail.) Speaking of forks, she also used to sleep with an extendable fork that she used to poke her husband with to see if he was still alive. Although she is morbidly obese and her son warns her that heavy people over 90 die earlier, she vows to eat even more and live many years longer. Although she does not believe in God, she always wanted to be a nun, and she occasionally still wears a nun’s habit (she got married in one). At one pint there is a party featuring a tree person standing still. The film also documents some darker times including the fall of her family; they lost everything during an economic downturn in 2008. She despises leftists because her dad was killed by communists. She keeps the bones and teeth of old family members in the house in boxes in the closet and she is a full-fledged hoarder. It times this seems like a collection of weird facts about a person rather than a movie, but the star is so fascinating that it works most of the time anyway. In Spanish with English subtitles.
Messi and Maude/ La Holandesa (Netherlands) ***1/2- Maude, a forty something wife who can’t have children, argues with her husband over the issue while they are on holiday. She runs off and gets picked up by an out of control father and his boy, Messi. When the man tries to rape her, she accidently kills him (or maybe she just knocks him unconscious) when she is defending herself. She leaves with Messi and gradually develops a deep emotional bond with him. The oddly paired couple travel through Chile and are dazzled by the country’s intoxicating beauty, and the child’s presence fills a void in Maude’s life. The female lead, Rivka (Public Works) Lodelzen, gives a winning, inspirational performance in the female lead role, and she has a promising future. Marlene Jonkmann’s directorial debut is a complete winner. This film in the great tradition of Lost in America, Alice in the Cities, and my personal favorite, Two Lane Blacktop, and it is one of the better recent road films I have seen. Like all those films it is about how a physical trip helps people find themselves. In Dutch with English subtitles. Playing Friday, March 23 and Saturday, March 24 in the Chicago European Union Film Festival.
Souvenir (Belgium/Luxembourg/France) ***- The always magnificent Isabelle Huppert plays sixty something factory worker who gave up an early and promising career as a pop diva many years ago. A much younger co-worker falls for her, and wants to manage her comeback, but she is not sure she wants to get back into the game. The story isn’t much and the film does not really go anywhere, but Huppert helps elevate the film slightly above average. She actually made this before her critically acclaimed, near masterpiece, Elle, but it is only opening in Chicago this year. In French with English sub-titles.
Submergence (Germany/France/U.S.A/Spain) ***-Talky, atmospheric, and arty romantic film about two lovers who split up and later they both end up underwater. James McVoy who played the young Professor X, is sympathetic as a secret M16 agent who is captured and imprisoned by Jihadists while the bookish and ravishing Alicia Vikander (of Ex Machina and The Danish Girl) must stay in a diving belle for months to further scientific research. As they fulfill their destinies they each look back on the brief days of romantic bliss they had together at Christmas. Win Wenders’ art film is slow moving but emotionally volatile. The ending is particularly powerful. There are still some signs of genius, but German new wave master, Wim Wenders (he did Wings of Desire and Paris Texas), is not exactly at the top of his game anymore. Wenders also made a film about Pope Francis this year which looks promising. English. Playing March 24 and 27 at the Gene Siskel Center.
There is a Light (Italy) ***- A gay guy who just went through a bad breakup meets a free spirited, erratic and spontaneous young woman (she is kind of an Italian manic pixie dream girl) and he goes on a cross country trip with her through Rome, Naples, and Calabria. She is pregnant and they are both at loose ends so sexual sparks fly between them (the most erotic scene involves eating chicken). Luca Marinella and Isabelle Ragonese (I’d love to interview her) give winning performances as an unconventional couple (they remind me of the couple in Something Wild), but I am not sure a gay guy would change his sexual preference so quick. I would have rated this higher but the ending is anticlimactic. In Italian with English subtitles.
Wild Mouse/Wilde Mause (Austria) ***- This acerbic comedy features a middle aged fuddy duddy who works as a newspaper music critic. His critic career helps define him as a human being so he has an identity crisis when he his unceremoniously fired by his newspaper. This causes problems because his forty something wife wants to desperately have a baby while she still can so he never tells her he is out of work. This causes his emotional destruction until he is reduced to drinking hard alcohol in the snow with no shirt and the only thing he looks forward to be getting revenge on the editor who fired him. He also starts getting closer to a much younger woman who is unhappily married. This is an enjoyable if forgettable midlife crisis angst comedy. In German and Italian with English subtitles.
Young Karl Marx /Le Jeune Karl Marx (Germany/France) **1/2-Considering the unusual amount of great talent assembled for this film, the results are slightly disappointing. The promising director, Raoul Peko, is best known for I am Not a Negro. August Diehl, who is best known for Inglorious Bastards, is sufficiently charismatic for the lead role, and Vicky Krieps is charming playing Marx’s wife. Stefan (Valerian and the City of Lost Planets) Konarske is also likeable playing Marx’s confidant and financier, the young Frederick Engels. Olivier Gourmant (he worked with the Dardenne Brothers on Le Promesse, L’Enfant, and Rosetta) gives a fiery performance as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first anarchist. Like The Motorcycle Diaries (which was about the young Che Guevera) this film shows us the evolution that took place in the mind of a revolutionary on the way to fame and greatness. The only problem is that the life of the young Marx is less inherently dramatic than Che’s, and heated intellectual discussions (usually shot in medium close-up shots) don’t always make interesting cinema. However the film is intellectually stimulating and the naive confidence of the young philosophers (one insists that in the future all art will be collective) brought back pleasant memories of grad school philosophic debates. Engles and his wife are pro labor leftists, yet Engles who finances Marx got rich from factory labor, so ironically both Marx and Engel used capitalist money to bankroll their campaign against capitalism. At around two hours, the film feels a bit overlong, but the footage of workers and other historical images at the end set to Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone ends the film on a high note. In English, German and French with English subtitles. Playing March 31rst and April 5 at the Gene Siskel Center.
Note: This film was not in the festival but it was shown in Chicago around the same time.
Happy End ***- This film features a terrific, high firepower cast. You can’t get much better than Jean-Louis Trintignant (of The Conformist, My Night at Maude’s, and A Man and a Woman), Matthieu Kasovitz (Valerian and the City of Lost Planets and La Haine), and of course, Isabelle Huppert, the reigning queen of French cinema (perhaps all cinema), who previously worked with the director of this film in the brilliant, The Piano Teacher and Amour. This is reminiscent of Claude Chabrol’s work because it finds dark humor in the banal lifestyle of a troubled higher middle class family, and it tries to tear the thin veneer off of civilization. This films begins with a teen girl narrating over her video footage of her to poisoning the mom she hates by placing sedatives in her drink. In the extended family, there are parents who cheat on spouses, a teen who tries to kill herself, and a patriarch who does not care if he lives or dies. The black humor ending cleverly renders the title ironic. For the thousandth time, the Austrian film maker, Michael Haneke calls attention to the limitations of a materialistic lifestyle. This has some great moments but it is not quite as magnificent as some of the director’s other works (such as The White Ribbon and Cache.) Haneke does not quite seem to be firing on all cylinders. But I guarantee you will never forget the shocking conclusion or the darkly hilarious opening. In English and French with English subtitles. This was the Austrian entry for the 2017 Academy Awards, but it is in French with English subtitles. This film has finished its Chicago run, but it is currently streaming on Hulu.
