The 50th Chicago International Film Festival is over. Here, the record of all the things I saw at CIFF this year, with links to reviews.
Thursday, 9 October, 2014 - OPENING NIGHT
7:00PM-
Miss Julie (Liv Ullmann, Norway / UK)
Not only does Ullmann fail to bring cinematic language into the foundational stage classic by August Strindberg, she seems actively anxious to avoid any such effort to expand and reconceive the material. This is hard on the text (arbitrarily but not ruinously transferred to Ireland), but even harder on the actors, who have no way out of the stultifying long close-ups and weird edits: Colin Farrell zooms from brittle nastiness to passionate anger to cool reflection without connecting any of the dots between those states, while Jessica Chastain plows right in with a stage-scaled performance that calls to mind Pamela Voorhees more than a 19th Century woman of the upper classes. 4/10 (reviewed here)
Friday, 10 October, 2014
3:30 PM-
Shorts 2: Animation - Squash and Stretch! (various)
Having served on the jury for this year's animated short film competition, I'm not at liberty to discuss the titles in depth, but it's an especially solid collection of work this year, without a single bad film out of the bunch. If you're in Chicago, I hope you'll check them out!
5:00 PM-
The Owners (Adilkhan Yerzhanov, Kazakhstan)
I freely confess that my admiration for the film's attitudes is possibly out of proportion to its actual merits; that, and the look of it when I saw it was so gauzy that I couldn't tell if it was a somewhat overdone stylistic choice, or a really bad DCP projection. Regardless, the aggression with which this fable of three orphaned siblings - one a young adult, one a teen, one a child - fighting to preserve their late mother's collapsing rural home from government stooges and grabby land developers alike indulges in its weird extremes delighted me to no end. Particularly in the parts where one of the siblings apparently keeps hallucinating cheap but enthusiastic musical numbers. Or maybe they're real. It's that kind of movie. Anyway, the combination of surrealism and miserabilism is strange but magnetic, to me; it's a film that occupies such a specific, narrow wavelength that I'm certain it probably would seem pretty dodgy and bad to far more people than would ever join me in kind of loving it. 8/10 (Reviewed here)
6:15 PM-
Free Fall (Pálfi György, Hungary)
A collection of darkly comic surrealist vignettes taking place in a single apartment complex, the film uses a mixture of genres and styles to explore human alienation in all sorts of different guises. Some elements work better than others - and at least one sequence, modeled on TV sitcoms, explodes on the launchpad - but the whole thing feels pleasingly complete and of a piece with itself, settling into a cozy, weird groove that makes the whole thing greater than the sum of its parts. It's not as groundbreaking or subversive as it seems to believe itself, but the most memorably off-putting parts are really memorable and really off-putting in a tremendously satisfying way. More a fun bit of trivia than essential cinema, but it's definitely a pretty unique, warped vision. 7/10 (Reviewed here)
7:15 PM-
El cordero (Juan Francisco Olea, Chile)
This black comedy about a devout Catholic who accidentally murders his office assistant and then is horrified to realise that he doesn't feel guilty about it has all the ingredients to be a sharp if perhaps overly nasty satire on that longstanding hobbyhorse of South American and Italian filmmakers, Catholic Guilt. And for well over half of the movie, it feels like that's exactly where it's headed, with the killer's priest putting him in touch with an amoral prisoner who encourages him to commit ever greater crimes in the hope of awakening his dormant sense of self-loathing. It starts to sag as it goes on, though, and the inconsistency of all the characters beyond our protagonist starts to assert itself as more and more of a problem. It also suffers a bit from some unmistakable first-time director hiccups: transitions on the soundtrack that are much too proud of how clever they are, oddly-chosen camera angles conflicting uncomfortably with generic two-shots; that kind of thing. But when it works, it's real damn funny, and Daniel Muñoz is perfectly cast as a pathetic, boring-looking sad sack. 6/10 (Reviewed here)
8:15 PM-
Force Majeure (Ruben Östlund, Sweden / Denmark / France / Norway)
Surprisingly comic in its depiction of how one accident and one bad choice can lead to the fragmentation of an apparently well-built nuclear family. The individual elements are all quite solid, but the feature as a whole makes its essential points at least once more than feels entirely necessary. Much the same is true of its visuals: the contrast between exaggerated, rigid geometry of the film's interiors and the uncontainable sprawl of the mountains is striking, but the interiors rely on a very narrow range of angles that start to feel boringly samey. It's an all-around solid and generally quite entertaining movie - I will confess to finding its Un Certain Regard win at Cannes to be a bit over-the-top, but it's a well-arranged and frequently attractive drama that's easy to recommend to people whose tastes run in just about every direction, even if that recommendation would perhaps lack an enormous amount of enthusiasm. 7/10
11:00 PM-
The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, Australia)
Yep, it's as scary as you've heard. And the scariest parts aren't the ones you'd be inclined to predict, either (there's a pop-up book so terrifying in its DIY simplicity that just shots of its spine started to freak me out). It's not a film that invents much of anything, instead doing really fantastic with a lot of horror tropes and elements that have already been done to death; it also uses sparing comedy in the perfect amount and at the perfect moments to ease tension without breaking it, and survives a potential fatal shift in narrative and character emphases so effortlessly that it's not until long after that you notice the shift even happened. It bungles some key developments in the last act in a most regrettable way, and its theft of themes from one particularly iconic horror film (to name it would be to spoil things) is brazen enough to seem a little shameless; but all in all, this is everything you could ever want in a horror film, from the mechanical build of its scares, to the dense psychology that's implied through all the screaming. 8/10 (Reviewed here)
Saturday, 11 October, 2014
2:00 PM-
Nabat (Elcin Musaoglu, Azerbaijan)
If I refer to something as "Central Eurasian art film shtick", even I'm not entirely sure what I mean, but it just feels so right. It is a fine and gorgeously made film, understand, with its repeated compositions and implacable long takes unfolding like glaciers receding, depicting a decaying village with terrible visual splendor. Its evocation of one steel-eyed old woman as the embodiment of All People, Everywhere who refuse to give in to the march of time and soulless modernisation works pretty well too, though Nabat herself never quite manages to feel like an actual woman instead of a placeholder for concepts. So it is an greatly impressive and accomplished film all around, just a film that it's very easy to get out in front of; and there's absolutely nothing good to be said about the final act, which brings in metaphorical wolves and even worse, metaphorical wolf pups, and just goes straight off the rails into arthouse inanity. 7/10 (Reviewed here)
4:00 PM-
The Circle (Stefan Haupt, Switzerland)
We have two films jockeying here for attention. One is a documentary about the couple who became the first officially-recognised same-sex union in Switzerland in 2007, 51 years after they first met; the film focuses on their recollection of their involvement with The Circle, a groundbreaking gay-interest magazine in the '40s and '50s. And while it is not by any means a revolutionary or aesthetically complex documentary, hearing the two men tell their stories and reminisce and enjoy the comfortable intimacy that comes with a half-century of life together is still delightful and moving. The other film, which gets a lot more screentime, is a bashed-together biopic of the coupe in the '50s - and, abruptly and unnecessarily, the '70s - that's even less aesthetically complex, and it's absolutely the dullest thing. The story is nice and all, but a podcast version of the film would have been just as nice, and lacked the obnoxious structural hijinx. 5/10
6:30 PM-
The Way He Looks (Daniel Ribeiro, Brazil)
This charming, well-observed study of a blind, gay teenager falling in love for the first time and learning to assert himself is outstandingly nice and overwhelmingly pleasant - two adjectives that are, by all means, good and appealing things for a movie to be. But also not words that immediately suggest themselves in connection with artistically bold and challenging movies, and this is neither of those. The way you expect it to all play out by the one-third or one-half mark is, indeed, exactly what happens, and all the special pleading of the lovely cinematography that's maybe a bit too reflexively gorgeous for a film about a character who can't see can't change that. Still, it's the best film about the cosmic awkwardness of high school dating that I've seen in a couple of years at least, and that kind of honesty is valuable even when it's not especially radical. 7/10 (Reviewed here)
8:00 PM-
Black Coal, Thin Ice (Diao Yinan, China / Hong Kong)
A bitter, drunk ex-cop; a woman in trouble with darker secrets than she let on; a graphic, brutal crime that serves as a metaphor for a society rotting from within; potent nighttime cinematography: we're in film noir country all right, even though it's in 21st Century China, and the visuals are dominated by gross, candy-colored neon and not savage black shadows. And truth be told, it Black Coal, Thin Ice had come out in America in the 1940s, I don't think it would seem more than just one of a couple dozen pretty terrific, pretty interchangeable films. It's delectably grim and stylish, but it feels like it's all right there on the surface, and however handsome that surface is, it's a little surprising that this was held to be the most worthy film at Berlin this year. But it's still essential viewing, or the next best thing to it. 8/10 (Reviewed here)
8:15 PM-
Beloved Sisters (Dominik Graf, Germany / Austria)
The film rolls in with a host of checks against it, in my estimation: a famous author biopic that pays as much attention to its costumes as its characters, banking most of its interest on surprisingly unsexy sex. And it's just a breath shy of three hours, too. I'm still not entirely sure how the last part happened - there's not nearly that much plot - but I can't say that it ever slows down where it shouldn't. And while the structure is conventional as all hell, as are the dramatic conflicts in the second half, Henriette Confurius and Hannah Herzsprung's performances as the sisters are energetic, varied, and comfortably lived-in, making sure we care about these people and their plight even when the screenplay loses its way here or there. It's a great depiction of the 18th Century as a time full of living, breathing people, not mannequins. Too bad about the jarring, carnivalesque score, though. 7/10
Sunday, 12 October, 2014
1:00 PM-
El cordero (Juan Francisco Olea, Chile)
This black comedy about a devout Catholic who accidentally murders his office assistant and then is horrified to realise that he doesn't feel guilty about it has all the ingredients to be a sharp if perhaps overly nasty satire on that longstanding hobbyhorse of South American and Italian filmmakers, Catholic Guilt. And for well over half of the movie, it feels like that's exactly where it's headed, with the killer's priest putting him in touch with an amoral prisoner who encourages him to commit ever greater crimes in the hope of awakening his dormant sense of self-loathing. It starts to sag as it goes on, though, and the inconsistency of all the characters beyond our protagonist starts to assert itself as more and more of a problem. It also suffers a bit from some unmistakable first-time director hiccups: transitions on the soundtrack that are much too proud of how clever they are, oddly-chosen camera angles conflicting uncomfortably with generic two-shots; that kind of thing. But when it works, it's real damn funny, and Daniel Muñoz is perfectly cast as a pathetic, boring-looking sad sack. 6/10 (Reviewed here)
2:45 PM-
Free Fall (Pálfi György, Hungary)
A collection of darkly comic surrealist vignettes taking place in a single apartment complex, the film uses a mixture of genres and styles to explore human alienation in all sorts of different guises. Some elements work better than others - and at least one sequence, modeled on TV sitcoms, explodes on the launchpad - but the whole thing feels pleasingly complete and of a piece with itself, settling into a cozy, weird groove that makes the whole thing greater than the sum of its parts. It's not as groundbreaking or subversive as it seems to believe itself, but the most memorably off-putting parts are really memorable and really off-putting in a tremendously satisfying way. More a fun bit of trivia than essential cinema, but it's definitely a pretty unique, warped vision. 7/10 (Reviewed here)
5:30 PM-
Force Majeure (Ruben Östlund, Sweden / Denmark / France / Norway)
Surprisingly comic in its depiction of how one accident and one bad choice can lead to the fragmentation of an apparently well-built nuclear family. The individual elements are all quite solid, but the feature as a whole makes its essential points at least once more than feels entirely necessary. Much the same is true of its visuals: the contrast between exaggerated, rigid geometry of the film's interiors and the uncontainable sprawl of the mountains is striking, but the interiors rely on a very narrow range of angles that start to feel boringly samey. It's an all-around solid and generally quite entertaining movie - I will confess to finding its Un Certain Regard win at Cannes to be a bit over-the-top, but it's a well-arranged and frequently attractive drama that's easy to recommend to people whose tastes run in just about every direction, even if that recommendation would perhaps lack an enormous amount of enthusiasm. 7/10
5:30 PM-
The Owners (Adilkhan Yerzhanov, Kazakhstan)
I freely confess that my admiration for the film's attitudes is possibly out of proportion to its actual merits; that, and the look of it when I saw it was so gauzy that I couldn't tell if it was a somewhat overdone stylistic choice, or a really bad DCP projection. Regardless, the aggression with which this fable of three orphaned siblings - one a young adult, one a teen, one a child - fighting to preserve their late mother's collapsing rural home from government stooges and grabby land developers alike indulges in its weird extremes delighted me to no end. Particularly in the parts where one of the siblings apparently keeps hallucinating cheap but enthusiastic musical numbers. Or maybe they're real. It's that kind of movie. Anyway, the combination of surrealism and miserabilism is strange but magnetic, to me; it's a film that occupies such a specific, narrow wavelength that I'm certain it probably would seem pretty dodgy and bad to far more people than would ever join me in kind of loving it. 8/10 (Reviewed here)
7:15 PM-
Beloved Sisters (Dominik Graf, Germany / Austria)
The film rolls in with a host of checks against it, in my estimation: a famous author biopic that pays as much attention to its costumes as its characters, banking most of its interest on surprisingly unsexy sex. And it's just a breath shy of three hours, too. I'm still not entirely sure how the last part happened - there's not nearly that much plot - but I can't say that it ever slows down where it shouldn't. And while the structure is conventional as all hell, as are the dramatic conflicts in the second half, Henriette Confurius and Hannah Herzsprung's performances as the sisters are energetic, varied, and comfortably lived-in, making sure we care about these people and their plight even when the screenplay loses its way here or there. It's a great depiction of the 18th Century as a time full of living, breathing people, not mannequins. Too bad about the jarring, carnivalesque score, though. 7/10
7:45 PM-
Nabat (Elcin Musaoglu, Azerbaijan)
If I refer to something as "Central Eurasian art film shtick", even I'm not entirely sure what I mean, but it just feels so right. It is a fine and gorgeously made film, understand, with its repeated compositions and implacable long takes unfolding like glaciers receding, depicting a decaying village with terrible visual splendor. Its evocation of one steel-eyed old woman as the embodiment of All People, Everywhere who refuse to give in to the march of time and soulless modernisation works pretty well too, though Nabat herself never quite manages to feel like an actual woman instead of a placeholder for concepts. So it is an greatly impressive and accomplished film all around, just a film that it's very easy to get out in front of; and there's absolutely nothing good to be said about the final act, which brings in metaphorical wolves and even worse, metaphorical wolf pups, and just goes straight off the rails into arthouse inanity. 7/10 (Reviewed here)
8:00 PM-
The Circle (Stefan Haupt, Switzerland)
We have two films jockeying here for attention. One is a documentary about the couple who became the first officially-recognised same-sex union in Switzerland in 2007, 51 years after they first met; the film focuses on their recollection of their involvement with The Circle, a groundbreaking gay-interest magazine in the '40s and '50s. And while it is not by any means a revolutionary or aesthetically complex documentary, hearing the two men tell their stories and reminisce and enjoy the comfortable intimacy that comes with a half-century of life together is still delightful and moving. The other film, which gets a lot more screentime, is a bashed-together biopic of the coupe in the '50s - and, abruptly and unnecessarily, the '70s - that's even less aesthetically complex, and it's absolutely the dullest thing. The story is nice and all, but a podcast version of the film would have been just as nice, and lacked the obnoxious structural hijinx. 5/10
Monday, 13 October, 2014
5:45 PM-
Ablations (Arnold de Parscau, France / Belgium)
A promising, if less than groundbreaking concept - a man wakes up on the banks of a river, hungover, finds that his kidney has been removed; he goes on a hunt to find out who could have done this - and a real snazzy opening 20 or 30 minutes suggest that this psychological thriller with gentle shades of implicit body horror is going to be a real barnburner, culminating in a nightmarish scene at a club with Lynchian overtones. But the second that's over, the script dives over a cliff: it's one thing to have the obviously disturbed protagonist act in frankly unbelievable, plot-saving ways that bear only a limited relationship to normal human behavior, and it's already pretty frustrating and keeps us locked outside of the film a little bit. It's another thing entirely to have everyone feel so uniformly unlikely as a real person. And despite some wonderfully creepy and surreal dream sequences, the film's aesthetic isn't nearly pervasively threatening enough to sell the idea that this is just a deranged universe, or to build up enough atmosphere to help us plow through the dubious plotting and annoyingly vague third act. 5/10 (Reviewed here)
8:00 PM-
Black Coal, Thin Ice (Diao Yinan, China / Hong Kong)
A bitter, drunk ex-cop; a woman in trouble with darker secrets than she let on; a graphic, brutal crime that serves as a metaphor for a society rotting from within; potent nighttime cinematography: we're in film noir country all right, even though it's in 21st Century China, and the visuals are dominated by gross, candy-colored neon and not savage black shadows. And truth be told, it Black Coal, Thin Ice had come out in America in the 1940s, I don't think it would seem more than just one of a couple dozen pretty terrific, pretty interchangeable films. It's delectably grim and stylish, but it feels like it's all right there on the surface, and however handsome that surface is, it's a little surprising that this was held to be the most worthy film at Berlin this year. But it's still essential viewing, or the next best thing to it. 8/10 (Reviewed here)
8:15 PM-
Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem (Ronit Elkabetz & Shlomi Elkabetz, Israel)
A sneakily funny Kakfa-style story of one woman's inability to get a divorce in the weird religious bureaucracy of Israel, the film falls in the awkward place of its greatest strength being its most pronounced weakness. Namely, its repetitive scenes and sing-song editing style, which beautifully capture the frustrating sameness and sense of time simultaneously dragging along and flying so fast you can barely notice it, that a woman in Amsalem's (co-director Ronit Elkabetz, in a lovely performance built out of reaction shots) would like feel in that scenario. And which also run out of anything interesting to do, until the filmmakers finally start resorting to funny camera angles just to keep some modicum of variety alive. At 80 minutes, it would be a gem. At almost 120, eh... 7/10
8:30 PM-
The Salvation (Kristian Levring, Denmark)
A dressed-up reworking of Death Wish is still a dressed-up reworking of Death Wish, even if you strain a little bit to make it do triple duty by serving as a parable about the hardships facing European immigrants in the days of the American Wild West, and also a Leone-esque tale of how violent revenge contrasts itself with the severe beauty of the western landscape. Mads Mikkelsen is all flinty strength as the implacable hero, Eva Green scorches the flesh off of men's bones with her eyes as a mute villain, the cinematography comes in a lot of metallic hues, and despite some individually potent scenes, the whole thing plays like Cormac McCarthy fanfic. 6/10
8:30 PM-
The Way He Looks (Daniel Ribeiro, Brazil)
This charming, well-observed study of a blind, gay teenager falling in love for the firs time and learning to assert himself is outstandingly nice and overwhelmingly pleasant - two adjectives that are, by all means, good and appealing things for a movie to be. But also not words that immediately suggest themselves in connection with artistically bold and challenging movies, and this is neither of those. The way you expect it to all play out by the one-third or one-half mark is, indeed, exactly what happens, and all the special pleading of the lovely cinematography that's maybe a bit too reflexively gorgeous for a film about a character who can't see can't change that. Still, it's the best film about the cosmic awkwardness of high school dating that I've seen in a couple of years at least, and that kind of honesty is valuable even when it's not especially radical. 7/10 (Reviewed here)
Tuesday, 14 October, 2014
3:00 PM-
A Few Cubic Meters of Love (Jamshid Mahmoudi, Afghanistan / Iran)
Romeo & Juliet in Tehran, with illegal Afghan refugees as the Capulets. So no, not original at all, and it comes as no surprise to find out that it's a first film, more concerned with existing at all than with cleverness or aesthetic boldness. But it's effective: the social realist style showcases the hardscrabble life of the refugees with bluntness and a gratifying lack of speechifying, while Hasiba Ebrahimi and Saed Soheili's performances as the star-crossed lovers have a lovely, casual coziness that evoke the shyness and excitement and silliness of young love in a deeply pleasing way. It's not surprising in the slightest, from its slice-of-life depiction of the refugees, the the shaky handheld camera, to the mordant poetry of the ending. But it works anyway, and the unexpected context lends freshness to its overfamiliar story. Nothing close to essential, but a satisfying watch. 7/10
5:45 PM-
1001 Grams (Bent Hamer, Norway)
If not for its consistent, reliably droll sense of mordant Scandinavian humor, I'd feel fine with tossing this one out altogether. Aggressively and drearily shapeless in its first half, unless you count the choking precision of the color scheme, the story of a scientist traveling to the international "calibrating each nation's Official Kilogram" seminar on behalf of her ailing father sets up one half-hearted metaphor after another on its way to a gloppy ending that tries to sell us on the idea that the whole thing was a romantic comedy, while unconsciously stealing from 21 Grams, of all blessed things. Some fine performances and laugh-out-loud compositions are a compensation for a script that doesn't earn its scattered emotional journeys, but hardly enough to make for anything more than a forgettable, pleasant time-waster. 5/10 (Reviewed here)
8:00 PM-
Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem (Ronit Elkabetz & Shlomi Elkabetz, Israel)
A sneakily funny Kakfa-style story of one woman's inability to get a divorce in the weird religious bureaucracy of Israel, the film falls in the awkward place of its greatest strength being its most pronounced weakness. Namely, its repetitive scenes and sing-song editing style, which beautifully capture the frustrating sameness and sense of time simultaneously dragging along and flying so fast you can barely notice it, that a woman in Amsalem's (co-director Ronit Elkabetz, in a lovely performance built out of reaction shots) would like feel in that scenario. And which also run out of anything interesting to do, until the filmmakers finally start resorting to funny camera angles just to keep some modicum of variety alive. At 80 minutes, it would be a gem. At almost 120, eh... 7/10
8:30 PM-
The Salvation (Kristian Levring, Denmark)
A dressed-up reworking of Death Wish is still a dressed-up reworking of Death Wish, even if you strain a little bit to make it do triple duty by serving as a parable about the hardships facing European immigrants in the days of the American Wild West, and also a Leone-esque tale of how violent revenge contrasts itself with the severe beauty of the western landscape. Mads Mikkelsen is all flinty strength as the implacable hero, Eva Green scorches the flesh off of men's bones with her eyes as a mute villain, the cinematography comes in a lot of metallic hues, and despite some individually potent scenes, the whole thing plays like Cormac McCarthy fanfic. 6/10
Wednesday, 15 October, 2014
12:30 PM-
The Owners (Adilkhan Yerzhanov, Kazakhstan)
I freely confess that my admiration for the film's attitudes is possibly out of proportion to its actual merits; that, and the look of it when I saw it was so gauzy that I couldn't tell if it was a somewhat overdone stylistic choice, or a really bad DCP projection. Regardless, the aggression with which this fable of three orphaned siblings - one a young adult, one a teen, one a child - fighting to preserve their late mother's collapsing rural home from government stooges and grabby land developers alike indulges in its weird extremes delighted me to no end. Particularly in the parts where one of the siblings apparently keeps hallucinating cheap but enthusiastic musical numbers. Or maybe they're real. It's that kind of movie. Anyway, the combination of surrealism and miserabilism is strange but magnetic, to me; it's a film that occupies such a specific, narrow wavelength that I'm certain it probably would seem pretty dodgy and bad to far more people than would ever join me in kind of loving it. 8/10 (Reviewed here)
5:45 PM-
Corn Island (George Ovashvili, Georgia / Germany / France)
"I admire it for making a bold choice and committing to it," I said to my friend seconds after the film ended, "but it really felt like everything people say when they make fun of foreign films at festivals". And seriously, I do admire the film: it is a fearless little fable about life on the border between two armies in a disputed corner of Eastern Europe, and the slow, methodical process of scratching a living from the fertile earth, and it does not try to soften its aesthetic at all. But it is slow. And methodical. And given to self-parodying images of a teen girl staring with studied disaffect, of an old man hacking away at cornstalks for minutes at a time, of water just being water. It's silly enough not to be a drag, but not on purpose. And just for lagniappe, it's weirdly invested in coming thiiiiiis close to actually staggering its way into child pornography. 5/10
5:45 PM-
Red Rose (Sepideh Farsi, France / Greece / Iran)
A young woman, politically active and using all the technological marvels at her fingertips to keep on top of everything, and a middle-aged ex-activist man, a recluse for many years out of lingering paranoia, meet against the riots following the rigged 2009 Iranian elections. Setting aside the enormously labored metaphor of ebullient but idiotic youth and wise but tired adulthood and- well, that's kind of the problem, setting that aside takes a lot of work, and there's not much left once you've done it. Political parables are nice and all, but this particular one tries so hard to make its protagonists stand-ins for generational currents that there's not much room left for its surprising and nervy story about sexuality as political gambit. Still, points for foregrounding the kind of people, places and events that don't get enough cinematic airtime, and the performances are absolutely splendid. 7/10 (Reviewed here)
6:00 PM, Festival Centerpiece-
The Last Five Years (Richard LaGravenese, USA)
Shaggy, unforced realism meets a structurally audacious musical and the results are about as inconclusive as you might think. The good news is that Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan, as a married couple whose five-year marriage is told front-to-back and back-to-front simultaneously, are superb, acting through their singing in a comfortably natural way that makes this unusually artificial movie feel not even slightly fussy or airless, and the songs from Jason Robert Brown's off-Broadway score fit the indie-realist aesthetic far more smoothly than I'd have thought possible. The bad news is that director LaGravenese doesn't trust his material or his audience at all, and he cuisinarts the whole film to hell and back with garishly overdirected moving shots and editing that obfuscates as often as it creates sublime, unexpected connections. Which, to be fair, does happen. 7/10
6:15 PM-
Ablations (Arnold de Parscau, France / Belgium)
A promising, if less than groundbreaking concept - a man wakes up on the banks of a river, hungover, finds that his kidney has been removed; he goes on a hunt to find out who could have done this - and a real snazzy opening 20 or 30 minutes suggest that this psychological thriller with gentle shades of implicit body horror is going to be a real barnburner, culminating in a nightmarish scene at a club with Lynchian overtones. But the second that's over, the script dives over a cliff: it's one thing to have the obviously disturbed protagonist act in frankly unbelievable, plot-saving ways that bear only a limited relationship to normal human behavior, and it's already pretty frustrating and keeps us locked outside of the film a little bit. It's another thing entirely to have everyone feel so uniformly unlikely as a real person. And despite some wonderfully creepy and surreal dream sequences, the film's aesthetic isn't nearly pervasively threatening enough to sell the idea that this is just a deranged universe, or to build up enough atmosphere to help us plow through the dubious plotting and annoyingly vague third act. 5/10 (Reviewed here)
8:00 PM-
The President (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Georgia / France / UK / Germany)
An unexpectedly snappy, funny, tense, and all-round entertaining film: unexpected first because its director and co-writer (with his wife Marzieh Meshkini - and by the way, when is she going to make another film, anyway?) is not remotely noted for his crowd-pleasers, and second because the content of the film, in which a murderous dictator and his little grandson flee through his country's wild areas in the wake of a revolution, encountering firsthand the results of his cruel reign, sounds like it should be a ghastly downer in anybody's hands. The angrily satiric tone trains its eyes first on the dictator's outrageously selfish behavior before expanding to indict the revolutionaries themselves, avenging violent thuggery by behaving as violent thugs; cynicism and worldliness thus sit alongside the haunting, even moving spectacle of the dictator reduced to rags and and filth, like a holy beggar in the wild. Some slow patches, but it's overall a very welcome shout from a filmmaker who's been much too quiet for a good while now. 8/10 (Reviewed here)
8:15 PM-
Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako, France / Mauritania)
Mauritania's first-ever submission to the Oscars is another slam dunk for one of the handful of African directors with any kind of internationally visible career. It's possibly Sissako's most conventional major work to date, though the mixture of elliptically-edited parallel storytelling and a whole movie worth of exquisite compositions, all in service to a raging, merciless political takedown is "conventional" only in the most relative sense. It's a tremendous piece of craftsmanship in which the art's success on its own terms goes hand-in-hand with its evocative relationship to the sociological commentary. Essential viewing. 9/10 (Reviewed here)
Thursday, 16 October, 2014
2:30 PM-
Free Fall (Pálfi György, Hungary)
A collection of darkly comic surrealist vignettes taking place in a single apartment complex, the film uses a mixture of genres and styles to explore human alienation in all sorts of different guises. Some elements work better than others - and at least one sequence, modeled on TV sitcoms, explodes on the launchpad - but the whole thing feels pleasingly complete and of a piece with itself, settling into a cozy, weird groove that makes the whole thing greater than the sum of its parts. It's not as groundbreaking or subversive as it seems to believe itself, but the most memorably off-putting parts are really memorable and really off-putting in a tremendously satisfying way. More a fun bit of trivia than essential cinema, but it's definitely a pretty unique, warped vision. 7/10 (Reviewed here)
3:00 PM-
Ablations (Arnold de Parscau, France / Belgium)
A promising, if less than groundbreaking concept - a man wakes up on the banks of a river, hungover, finds that his kidney has been removed; he goes on a hunt to find out who could have done this - and a real snazzy opening 20 or 30 minutes suggest that this psychological thriller with gentle shades of implicit body horror is going to be a real barnburner, culminating in a nightmarish scene at a club with Lynchian overtones. But the second that's over, the script dives over a cliff: it's one thing to have the obviously disturbed protagonist act in frankly unbelievable, plot-saving ways that bear only a limited relationship to normal human behavior, and it's already pretty frustrating and keeps us locked outside of the film a little bit. It's another thing entirely to have everyone feel so uniformly unlikely as a real person. And despite some wonderfully creepy and surreal dream sequences, the film's aesthetic isn't nearly pervasively threatening enough to sell the idea that this is just a deranged universe, or to build up enough atmosphere to help us plow through the dubious plotting and annoyingly vague third act. 5/10 (Reviewed here)
5:45 PM-
The President (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Georgia / France / UK / Germany)
An unexpectedly snappy, funny, tense, and all-round entertaining film: unexpected first because its director and co-writer (with his wife Marzieh Meshkini - and by the way, when is she going to make another film, anyway?) is not remotely noted for his crowd-pleasers, and second because the content of the film, in which a murderous dictator and his little grandson flee through his country's wild areas in the wake of a revolution, encountering firsthand the results of his cruel reign, sounds like it should be a ghastly downer in anybody's hands. The angrily satiric tone trains its eyes first on the dictator's outrageously selfish behavior before expanding to indict the revolutionaries themselves, avenging violent thuggery by behaving as violent thugs; cynicism and worldliness thus sit alongside the haunting, even moving spectacle of the dictator reduced to rags and and filth, like a holy beggar in the wild. Some slow patches, but it's overall a very welcome shout from a filmmaker who's been much too quiet for a good while now. 8/10 (Reviewed here)
6:00 PM-
Two Days, One Night (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Belgium / Italy / France)
Even as someone who has almost always been dubious of the Dardennes' program of bleak realism, I was thrown by how far this plot-heavy, thematically overt study of a crisis-heavy weekend feels from their previous output. So I can only imagine what the faithful might possibly think. That said, I can only be impressed by a film that treats on the difficulty of retaining one's dignity and human decency in the teeth of economic disarray in a compulsively watchable way that's practically thriller-like in its machinery. And Marion Cotillard, the biggest star the directors have ever worked with, is beyond wonderful. 8/10
6:15 PM-
1001 Grams (Bent Hamer, Norway)
If not for its consistent, reliably droll sense of mordant Scandinavian humor, I'd feel fine with tossing this one out altogether. Aggressively and drearily shapeless in its first half, unless you count the choking precision of the color scheme, the story of a scientist traveling to the international "calibrating each nation's Official Kilogram" seminar on behalf of her ailing father sets up one half-hearted metaphor after another on its way to a gloppy ending that tries to sell us on the idea that the whole thing was a romantic comedy, while unconsciously stealing from 21 Grams, of all blessed things. Some fine performances and laugh-out-loud compositions are a compensation for a script that doesn't earn its scattered emotional journeys, but hardly enough to make for anything more than a forgettable, pleasant time-waster. 5/10 (Reviewed here)
8:00 PM-
Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako, France / Mauritania)
Mauritania's first-ever submission to the Oscars is another slam dunk for one of the handful of African directors with any kind of internationally visible career. It's possibly Sissako's most conventional major work to date, though the mixture of elliptically-edited parallel storytelling and a whole movie worth of exquisite compositions, all in service to a raging, merciless political takedown is "conventional" only in the most relative sense. It's a tremendous piece of craftsmanship in which the art's success on its own terms goes hand-in-hand with its evocative relationship to the sociological commentary. Essential viewing. 9/10 (Reviewed here)
8:15 PM-
Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas, Switzerland / Germany / France)
The always-reliable Juliette Binoche and a never-better Kristen Stewart do a great deal of good work to keep the film on its feet through some frequently enjoyable and sometimes acutely insightful scenes which are, on an individual basis, almost always interesting and effective. But the whole is less than the sum of the parts, as the film is prone to repeating itself and insisting on themes and metaphors that were clear enough the first time. And then comes a protracted epilogue, and the movie starts dry-heaving itself to death. Even a misfiring Assayas is interesting and totally worth grappling with, but it's hard to overlook how much is going wrong here. 5/10
8:30 PM-
Human Capital (Paolo Virzì, Italy)
All the hallmarks of Italian prestige filmmaking are: gorgeous costumes, attractively severe locations, cinematography as glassy and polished as a marble floor. And as someone who likes Italian prestige filmmaking, that's enough to get my attention, but the really great stuff lies elsewhere: the showy three-part structure, in which we only understand the full scope of a vehicular accident and its relationship to the insulated rich of Italy's financial industry by catching pieces of it from three different perspectives is a bit overdone, but the story itself is a pretty terrific marriage of narrative drive and social commentary (spoiler alert: Virzì hates the shit out of the arrogant rich), and the population of characters is vivid, wide-ranging, and acted with enough sympathy and complexity that none of them ever feel like inhuman signifiers of political themes. Just about everything in here has been done before, several times even, but it's confident, smart filmmaking nonetheless. 8/10
9:00 PM-
Concrete Night (Pirjo Honkasalo, Finland / Sweden / Denmark)
The best thing about the film, by far, is its harsh, beautiful high-contrast black-and-white cinematography. It's not exactly a solid fit for the narrative content, and boy is it ever guilty of aestheticising poverty, but it's lovely on the eyes and does some good work in expressing the 14-year-old protagonist's alienated, cold worldview. Otherwise, this is alarmingly unexceptional: wicked older brother sets an impressionable teen on the road to crime and moral depravity; his unsettled feelings about his own sexuality makes him especially susceptible to making terrible choices as a form of lashing out. That whole deal. It leans on its foreboding, filthy imagery with tiresome intensity (steamed-up mirrors! rainstorms! urine-soaked alleys), going far beyond anything necessary to create a mood of dread or confusion, and launching right into parody. It's a stylish mess, with a key scene finding the protagonist staring into a mirror, homoerotically obsessed with his own face; that sounds about right. 6/10
Friday, 17 October, 2014
12:00 PM-
Black Coal, Thin Ice (Diao Yinan, China / Hong Kong)
A bitter, drunk ex-cop; a woman in trouble with darker secrets than she let on; a graphic, brutal crime that serves as a metaphor for a society rotting from within; potent nighttime cinematography: we're in film noir country all right, even though it's in 21st Century China, and the visuals are dominated by gross, candy-colored neon and not savage black shadows. And truth be told, it Black Coal, Thin Ice had come out in America in the 1940s, I don't think it would seem more than just one of a couple dozen pretty terrific, pretty interchangeable films. It's delectably grim and stylish, but it feels like it's all right there on the surface, and however handsome that surface is, it's a little surprising that this was held to be the most worthy film at Berlin this year. But it's still essential viewing, or the next best thing to it. 8/10 (Reviewed here)
5:00 PM-
Shorts 2: Animation - Squash and Stretch! (various)
Having served on the jury for this year's animated short film competition, I'm not at liberty to discuss the titles in depth, but it's an especially solid collection of work this year, without a single bad film out of the bunch. If you're in Chicago, I hope you'll check them out!
5:30 PM-
Human Capital (Paolo Virzì, Italy)
All the hallmarks of Italian prestige filmmaking are: gorgeous costumes, attractively severe locations, cinematography as glassy and polished as a marble floor. And as someone who likes Italian prestige filmmaking, that's enough to get my attention, but the really great stuff lies elsewhere: the showy three-part structure, in which we only understand the full scope of a vehicular accident and its relationship to the insulated rich of Italy's financial industry by catching pieces of it from three different perspectives is a bit overdone, but the story itself is a pretty terrific marriage of narrative drive and social commentary (spoiler alert: Virzì hates the shit out of the arrogant rich), and the population of characters is vivid, wide-ranging, and acted with enough sympathy and complexity that none of them ever feel like inhuman signifiers of political themes. Just about everything in here has been done before, several times even, but it's confident, smart filmmaking nonetheless. 8/10
6:00 PM-
Concrete Night (Pirjo Honkasalo, Finland / Sweden / Denmark)
The best thing about the film, by far, is its harsh, beautiful high-contrast black-and-white cinematography. It's not exactly a solid fit for the narrative content, and boy is it ever guilty of aestheticising poverty, but it's lovely on the eyes and does some good work in expressing the 14-year-old protagonist's alienated, cold worldview. Otherwise, this is alarmingly unexceptional: wicked older brother sets an impressionable teen on the road to crime and moral depravity; his unsettled feelings about his own sexuality makes him especially susceptible to making terrible choices as a form of lashing out. That whole deal. It leans on its foreboding, filthy imagery with tiresome intensity (steamed-up mirrors! rainstorms! urine-soaked alleys), going far beyond anything necessary to create a mood of dread or confusion, and launching right into parody. It's a stylish mess, with a key scene finding the protagonist staring into a mirror, homoerotically obsessed with his own face; that sounds about right. 6/10
8:00 PM-
Red Rose (Sepideh Farsi, France / Greece / Iran)
A young woman, politically active and using all the technological marvels at her fingertips to keep on top of everything, and a middle-aged ex-activist man, a recluse for many years out of lingering paranoia, meet against the riots following the rigged 2009 Iranian elections. Setting aside the enormously labored metaphor of ebullient but idiotic youth and wise but tired adulthood and- well, that's kind of the problem, setting that aside takes a lot of work, and there's not much left once you've done it. Political parables are nice and all, but this particular one tries so hard to make its protagonists stand-ins for generational currents that there's not much room left for its surprising and nervy story about sexuality as political gambit. Still, points for foregrounding the kind of people, places and events that don't get enough cinematic airtime, and the performances are absolutely splendid. 7/10 (Reviewed here)
8:30 PM-
In Order of Disappearance (Hans Petter Moland, Norway)
The debt to Quentin Tarantino is a bit too obvious, frankly: a pair of killers dishing about some random cultural ephemera? Oh, more please. But the unsmiling, deadpan sense of humor does a lot to redeem it, as does some really tremendous cinematography that links the moral bleakness of the story, in which a bereaved father gets in way over his head trying to fight gangsters, to the implacable snow, snow, snow, snow of the Norwegian winter. Did the world require a Nordic Pulp Fiction/Fargo hybrid? Arguably, it did not. But since one showed up anyway, I don't mind saying that's a fun time that's also suitably sober-minded, and Stellan Skarsgård is a surprisingly great surrogate for Liam Neeson in the whole "angry dad gets revenged" formula. 7/10
9:00 PM-
Camera (James Leong, Hong Kong / Singapore
Not one molecule of the story is fresh: in a rotten world of crooked real estate deals where it always seems to be the darkest hour of night, a psychologically unkempt private eye finds himself helplessly fascinated by a mysterious woman with opaque ties to corrupt businessman. The sci-fi setting, Hong Kong in a near future where every inch of the city is covered by security cameras, doesn't really alter the parameters of that generic set-up so much as hit them with a thin coat of paint. What does pep it up a bit is the protagonist himself: so obsessed with cameras that he has one installed into his eye socket, and convinced that he can uncover the truth behind everything by intensely watching and re-watching footage, he's an enjoyable hard-boiled and neurotic extension of our own modern world of surveillance. Not that the film has nearly as much to say about the surveillance state as it thinks it does, but for pleasantly complicated detective genre thrills, it absolutely gets the job done. 7/10
Saturday, 18 October, 2014
2:30 PM-
The Princess of France (Matías Piñeiro, Argentina)
No doubt about it, there's a definite tang of "the smartest juniors in the humanities dorm" to the film's concept and its limited-scale production, and I'd have liked it if it were had stretched a bit more beyond the template of the director's similar-in-every-way Viola from 2012. Still, what works, works, and purely as an intellectual exercise for literary classicists, this is exquisite brain candy: a group of 20-something Buenos Aires friends and artists work together on a radio adaptation of William Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost, in the process going through the same kind of sexual and interpersonal conflicts that mark that play. Brief enough to admit that you can feel free to take it as just a fun game, complex enough that you can spend a long dinner dissecting all the nuances of how it creates the shifting character relationships. It's a film that's literally impossible to recommend to anyone without knowing every inch of their tastes (the only person in the entire world to whom I could confidently say "you should definitely see this" is the one who recommended it to me in the first place), but I had an unmixedly good time with it, anyway. 7/10
3:45 PM-
The Look of Silence (Joshua Oppenheimer, Denmark / Indonesia / Norway / Finland / UK)
The companion piece and follow-up to Oppenheimer's extraordinary The Act of Killing is even more devastating in its depiction of the lingering effects of violence in the lives of those touched by it. Though it's not, perhaps, as singular: the "enter the mind of a remorseless killer" angle of the original, with its horrifying and beautiful images of those killers saw themselves, was unprecedented, while the more tight focus on the family of one victim here tends to serve up moments that feel like exactly what we'd expect. And while a handful of critics dinged Act for its exploitative take on the material, I might actually have a slightly larger problem with a couple of moments here. But who am I trying to kid? This is profound, upsetting, and totally essential cinema, with moments in which raw, visceral feelings are puked up in wave after wave of some of the most monumental scenes I have ever seen in a movie, almost unwatchable intense at some points, if not for how impossible it is to look away from Oppenheimer's eye or from the nobility and fearlessness of main subject Adi, hunting for any kind of gesture of humanity from the inhumane. 10/10 Reviewed here)
4:30 PM-
Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas, Switzerland / Germany / France)
The always-reliable Juliette Binoche and a never-better Kristen Stewart do a great deal of good work to keep the film on its feet through some frequently enjoyable and sometimes acutely insightful scenes which are, on an individual basis, almost always interesting and effective. But the whole is less than the sum of the parts, as the film is prone to repeating itself and insisting on themes and metaphors that were clear enough the first time. And then comes a protracted epilogue, and the movie starts dry-heaving itself to death. Even a misfiring Assayas is interesting and totally worth grappling with, but it's hard to overlook how much is going wrong here. 5/10
7:30 PM-
Of Horses and Men (Benedikt Erlingsson, Iceland / Norway / Germany)
A dazzling weird comedy about life in a small community nestled in a valley where the primary (if not only) industry seems to be horses, assembled as a loose series of vignettes in which the usual Colorful Folk© go about their weird, obsessive lives. It's not for everybody, and despite the passionate "no animals were harmed" title card at the end, animal lovers especially would have a nightmare of a time getting through the numerous scenes of equine suffering. But for those who have a good affection for loopy Scandinavian comedy of mildly grotesque characters doing warped and unpleasant things, the film delivers in spades; not ten minutes goes by without some kind of heightened absurdity that could be unpleasant if it wasn't so droll. It's aggressively dark but also reliably warm-hearted in some unexpected ways, and its ultimate depiction of people making little meaningful connections is shockingly tender for a movie that could so easily be described as "that one with the explicit horse sex scene". 8/10 (Reviewed here)
9:45 PM-
It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, USA)
The fear of STDs brilliantly literalised in the form of an unexplained malevolent force that adopts human form to stalk a young woman who picked up a curse from a sexual encounter with an older boy. Some clunky early plotting and frequently dodgy sound recording aren't nearly enough of a problem to derail the film's insightful, sweet look at late teenage friendships (though the film seems curiously unaware of social media or even cellular phones), nor its wonderful, slowly cranked-up tension punctuated by some great jump scares (it has a false scare so excellently timed, and with the characters themselves so awkwardly aware of the ridiculousness of the situation, that it works better than the legitimate scares in most lesser horror pictures), and its rewarding, not-at-all out of place jabs of humor in both the "nasty irony" and "casual hang-out banter" modes. And just when it shouldn't be able to get better, it absolutely nails the ending, avoiding the traditional horror pitfall of too much explanation and stop-the-monster contrivance by... but I shouldn't. If he keeps working in the genre, Mitchell clearly has the chops to become a generation-defining master. 8/10 (Reviewed here)
Sunday, 19 October, 2014
12:15 PM-
Camera (James Leong, Hong Kong / Singapore
Not one molecule of the story is fresh: in a rotten world of crooked real estate deals where it always seems to be the darkest hour of night, a psychologically unkempt private eye finds himself helplessly fascinated by a mysterious woman with opaque ties to corrupt businessman. The sci-fi setting, Hong Kong in a near future where every inch of the city is covered by security cameras, doesn't really alter the parameters of that generic set-up so much as hit them with a thin coat of paint. What does pep it up a bit is the protagonist himself: so obsessed with cameras that he has one installed into his eye socket, and convinced that he can uncover the truth behind everything by intensely watching and re-watching footage, he's an enjoyable hard-boiled and neurotic extension of our own modern world of surveillance. Not that the film has nearly as much to say about the surveillance state as it thinks it does, but for pleasantly complicated detective genre thrills, it absolutely gets the job done. 7/10
12:30 PM-
Red Rose (Sepideh Farsi, France / Greece / Iran)
A young woman, politically active and using all the technological marvels at her fingertips to keep on top of everything, and a middle-aged ex-activist man, a recluse for many years out of lingering paranoia, meet against the riots following the rigged 2009 Iranian elections. Setting aside the enormously labored metaphor of ebullient but idiotic youth and wise but tired adulthood and- well, that's kind of the problem, setting that aside takes a lot of work, and there's not much left once you've done it. Political parables are nice and all, but this particular one tries so hard to make its protagonists stand-ins for generational currents that there's not much room left for its surprising and nervy story about sexuality as political gambit. Still, points for foregrounding the kind of people, places and events that don't get enough cinematic airtime, and the performances are absolutely splendid. 7/10 (Reviewed here)
2:30 PM-
Life After Death (Joe Callander, USA / Rwanda)
After announcing itself, in its undeniably strong first five minutes, as a study of the lives of young Rwandans who have lived virtually all of their lives in the aftermath of the 1994 genocides in that country, the documentary immediately contracts into a snapshot of one young man and the ebullient American Christian family who have "adopted" him through their charity, Love 41. Hopelessly corrupted from the word "go" by the fact that Love 41 and its operators, Dave and Suzette Munson, are the film's producers, and unclear about its intentions: is it a study of how well-meaning wealthy white Westerners can be taken in by shiftless but charismatic African teens? About how African teens lead lives far too complex for jolly idiot Americans to solve by throwing a bit of money at them? About how the only hope is to pray, pray, pray, and keep shining the light of American sincerity on African suffering? Any angle you want to look at it from, it's reductive, facile, and patronising to somebody, and the jokey, slick tone doesn't help matters one iota. 4/10
3:45 PM-
Fair Play (Andrea Sedláčková, Czech Republic / Slovakia / Germany)
The CIFF guide breathlessly suggests that the official Czech submission to the Academy Awards "exposes the dangerous entanglement of ideology and sports in times of oppression", which, jerk that I am, sounds like a topic that surely isn't begging to be explored, nor is the link between sports and ideology as transparent and obvious as the blurb makes it sound. And yet, here we are, and it's a pretty solid, nervy little peek at life in the constant panicked hell of late-period Soviet socialism, where every moment of one's waking life is a self-aware political act, whether of submitting to or resisting the government. If it's the most shocking and insightful entry in what's something of a stock subgenre in modern Eastern European filmmaking, it's nonetheless a cleanly-told character drama with some impressive performances and a good slow build of its thrills, from a simple sports drama (what are the consequences of using steroids?) to a story in which, yes, ideology and sports get tangled (what are the consequences of not using steroids, if the overclass wants you to?). Straightforward but exciting. 7/10
4:00 PM-
Of Horses and Men (Benedikt Erlingsson, Iceland / Norway / Germany)
A dazzling weird comedy about life in a small community nestled in a valley where the primary (if not only) industry seems to be horses, assembled as a loose series of vignettes in which the usual Colorful Folk© go about their weird, obsessive lives. It's not for everybody, and despite the passionate "no animals were harmed" title card at the end, animal lovers especially would have a nightmare of a time getting through the numerous scenes of equine suffering. But for those who have a good affection for loopy Scandinavian comedy of mildly grotesque characters doing warped and unpleasant things, the film delivers in spades; not ten minutes goes by without some kind of heightened absurdity that could be unpleasant if it wasn't so droll. It's aggressively dark but also reliably warm-hearted in some unexpected ways, and its ultimate depiction of people making little meaningful connections is shockingly tender for a movie that could so easily be described as "that one with the explicit horse sex scene". 8/10 (Reviewed here)
4:30 PM-
Corn Island (George Ovashvili, Georgia / Germany / France)
"I admire it for making a bold choice and committing to it," I said to my friend seconds after the film ended, "but it really felt like everything people say when they make fun of foreign films at festivals". And seriously, I do admire the film: it is a fearless little fable about life on the border between two armies in a disputed corner of Eastern Europe, and the slow, methodical process of scratching a living from the fertile earth, and it does not try to soften its aesthetic at all. But it is slow. And methodical. And given to self-parodying images of a teen girl staring with studied disaffect, of an old man hacking away at cornstalks for minutes at a time, of water just being water. It's silly enough not to be a drag, but not on purpose. And just for lagniappe, it's weirdly invested in coming thiiiiiis close to actually staggering its way into child pornography. 5/10
5:00 PM-
Why Be Good? (William A. Seiter, USA)
A 1929 flapper comedy starring CIFF co-founder Colleen Moore, this restoration of a film long thought to be lost (along with virtually all of Moore's films) makes its North American premiere to celebrate the festival's 50th incarnation. As the first Moore film I have ever seen, and potentially the last, it's hard not to use it as a yardstick to judge her entire, hugely successful career, and confess that I find her a little too high-pitched: enormous gestures and expressions that communicate to the audience in bolded letters, "This feeling. It is how I am feeling right now. Look at my gigantic eyes wheeling around their sockets to communicate emotion". 1929 silent acting was fare more sophisticated than that. Still, she has a terrifically appealing movie star face, and the film, a playful noodle about a top-notch jazz dancer who accidentally falls in love with her boss, is absolutely charming and enjoyable despite having a virtually complete lack of any dramatic conflict whatsoever. 7/10
6:15 PM-
Two Days, One Night (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Belgium / Italy / France)
Even as someone who has almost always been dubious of the Dardennes' program of bleak realism, I was thrown by how far this plot-heavy, thematically overt study of a crisis-heavy weekend feels from their previous output. So I can only imagine what the faithful might possibly think. That said, I can only be impressed by a film that treats on the difficulty of retaining one's dignity and human decency in the teeth of economic disarray in a compulsively watchable way that's practically thriller-like in its machinery. And Marion Cotillard, the biggest star the directors have ever worked with, is beyond wonderful. 8/10
7:30 PM-
In Order of Disappearance (Hans Petter Moland, Norway)
The debt to Quentin Tarantino is a bit too obvious, frankly: a pair of killers dishing about some random cultural ephemera? Oh, more please. But the unsmiling, deadpan sense of humor does a lot to redeem it, as does some really tremendous cinematography that links the moral bleakness of the story, in which a bereaved father gets in way over his head trying to fight gangsters, to the implacable snow, snow, snow, snow of the Norwegian winter. Did the world require a Nordic Pulp Fiction/Fargo hybrid? Arguably, it did not. But since one showed up anyway, I don't mind saying that's a fun time that's also suitably sober-minded, and Stellan Skarsgård is a surprisingly great surrogate for Liam Neeson in the whole "angry dad gets revenged" formula. 7/10
7:45 PM-
Mr. Kaplan (Álvaro Brechner, Uruguay / Spain / Germany)
The almost completely full house I saw the film with at an afternoon screening attests to one thing: this is the nice 60-year-old lady's film of choice at CIFF this year. And being neither 60 years old nor a lady, and certainly not nice, it's hardly a shock to learn that the film did absolutely nothing for me at all: it's a charming and toothless story of a doddering old Polish-Jewish refugee who has lived these past decades in Uruguay deciding to spice up his 70s by going on a Nazi hunt whose light, genial comedy at the old man's expense and sleek picture postcard photography both scream "nominate me for a goddamn Oscar already!" as loudly as anything that doesn't actually depict the Holocaust possibly could. I found the whole thing enervating in its thinness, predictability, and lack of genuine dramatic stakes, but I'm going to go against my instinct and throw an extra point its way on the grounds that if you like this kind of thing, you'd really get a kick out of it. But if you like this kind of thing, I'm not entirely sure how you ended up at this blog. 6/10
Monday, 20 October, 2014
2:15 PM-
Mr. Kaplan (Álvaro Brechner, Uruguay / Spain / Germany)
The almost completely full house I saw the film with at an afternoon screening attests to one thing: this is the nice 60-year-old lady's film of choice at CIFF this year. And being neither 60 years old nor a lady, and certainly not nice, it's hardly a shock to learn that the film did absolutely nothing for me at all: it's a charming and toothless story of a doddering old Polish-Jewish refugee who has lived these past decades in Uruguay deciding to spice up his 70s by going on a Nazi hunt whose light, genial comedy at the old man's expense and sleek picture postcard photography both scream "nominate me for a goddamn Oscar already!" as loudly as anything that doesn't actually depict the Holocaust possibly could. I found the whole thing enervating in its thinness, predictability, and lack of genuine dramatic stakes, but I'm going to go against my instinct and throw an extra point its way on the grounds that if you like this kind of thing, you'd really get a kick out of it. But if you like this kind of thing, I'm not entirely sure how you ended up at this blog. 6/10
6:45 PM-
The Look of Silence (Joshua Oppenheimer, Denmark / Indonesia / Norway / Finland / UK)
The companion piece and follow-up to Oppenheimer's extraordinary The Act of Killing is even more devastating in its depiction of the lingering effects of violence in the lives of those touched by it. Though it's not, perhaps, as singular: the "enter the mind of a remorseless killer" angle of the original, with its horrifying and beautiful images of those killers saw themselves, was unprecedented, while the more tight focus on the family of one victim here tends to serve up moments that feel like exactly what we'd expect. And while a handful of critics dinged Act for its exploitative take on the material, I might actually have a slightly larger problem with a couple of moments here. But who am I trying to kid? This is profound, upsetting, and totally essential cinema, with moments in which raw, visceral feelings are puked up in wave after wave of some of the most monumental scenes I have ever seen in a movie, almost unwatchable intense at some points, if not for how impossible it is to look away from Oppenheimer's eye or from the nobility and fearlessness of main subject Adi, hunting for any kind of gesture of humanity from the inhumane. 10/10 Reviewed here)
6:45 PM-
The Princess of France (Matías Piñeiro, Argentina)
No doubt about it, there's a definite tang of "the smartest juniors in the humanities dorm" to the film's concept and its limited-scale production, and I'd have liked it if it were had stretched a bit more beyond the template of the director's similar-in-every-way Viola from 2012. Still, what works, works, and purely as an intellectual exercise for literary classicists, this is exquisite brain candy: a group of 20-something Buenos Aires friends and artists work together on a radio adaptation of William Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost, in the process going through the same kind of sexual and interpersonal conflicts that mark that play. Brief enough to admit that you can feel free to take it as just a fun game, complex enough that you can spend a long dinner dissecting all the nuances of how it creates the shifting character relationships. It's a film that's literally impossible to recommend to anyone without knowing every inch of their tastes (the only person in the entire world to whom I could confidently say "you should definitely see this" is the one who recommended it to me in the first place), but I had an unmixedly good time with it, anyway. 7/10
8:30 PM-
A Few Cubic Meters of Love (Jamshid Mahmoudi, Afghanistan / Iran)
Romeo & Juliet in Tehran, with illegal Afghan refugees as the Capulets. So no, not original at all, and it comes as no surprise to find out that it's a first film, more concerned with existing at all than with cleverness or aesthetic boldness. But it's effective: the social realist style showcases the hardscrabble life of the refugees with bluntness and a gratifying lack of speechifying, while Hasiba Ebrahimi and Saed Soheili's performances as the star-crossed lovers have a lovely, casual coziness that evoke the shyness and excitement and silliness of young love in a deeply pleasing way. It's not surprising in the slightest, from its slice-of-life depiction of the refugees, the the shaky handheld camera, to the mordant poetry of the ending. But it works anyway, and the unexpected context lends freshness to its overfamiliar story. Nothing close to essential, but a satisfying watch. 7/10
Tuesday, 21 October, 2014
1:00 PM-
In Order of Disappearance (Hans Petter Moland, Norway)
The debt to Quentin Tarantino is a bit too obvious, frankly: a pair of killers dishing about some random cultural ephemera? Oh, more please. But the unsmiling, deadpan sense of humor does a lot to redeem it, as does some really tremendous cinematography that links the moral bleakness of the story, in which a bereaved father gets in way over his head trying to fight gangsters, to the implacable snow, snow, snow, snow of the Norwegian winter. Did the world require a Nordic Pulp Fiction/Fargo hybrid? Arguably, it did not. But since one showed up anyway, I don't mind saying that's a fun time that's also suitably sober-minded, and Stellan Skarsgård is a surprisingly great surrogate for Liam Neeson in the whole "angry dad gets revenged" formula. 7/10
6:00 PM-
Mr. Kaplan (Álvaro Brechner, Uruguay / Spain / Germany)
The almost completely full house I saw the film with at an afternoon screening attests to one thing: this is the nice 60-year-old lady's film of choice at CIFF this year. And being neither 60 years old nor a lady, and certainly not nice, it's hardly a shock to learn that the film did absolutely nothing for me at all: it's a charming and toothless story of a doddering old Polish-Jewish refugee who has lived these past decades in Uruguay deciding to spice up his 70s by going on a Nazi hunt whose light, genial comedy at the old man's expense and sleek picture postcard photography both scream "nominate me for a goddamn Oscar already!" as loudly as anything that doesn't actually depict the Holocaust possibly could. I found the whole thing enervating in its thinness, predictability, and lack of genuine dramatic stakes, but I'm going to go against my instinct and throw an extra point its way on the grounds that if you like this kind of thing, you'd really get a kick out of it. But if you like this kind of thing, I'm not entirely sure how you ended up at this blog. 6/10
8:30 PM-
The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, Australia)
Yep, it's as scary as you've heard. And the scariest parts aren't the ones you'd be inclined to predict, either (there's a pop-up book so terrifying in its DIY simplicity that just shots of its spine started to freak me out). It's not a film that invents much of anything, instead doing really fantastic with a lot of horror tropes and elements that have already been done to death; it also uses sparing comedy in the perfect amount and at the perfect moments to ease tension without breaking it, and survives a potential fatal shift in narrative and character emphases so effortlessly that it's not until long after that you notice the shift even happened. It bungles some key developments in the last act in a most regrettable way, and its theft of themes from one particularly iconic horror film (to name it would be to spoil things) is brazen enough to seem a little shameless; but all in all, this is everything you could ever want in a horror film, from the mechanical build of its scares, to the dense psychology that's implied through all the screaming. 8/10 (Reviewed here)
8:45 PM-
Life After Death (Joe Callander, USA / Rwanda)
After announcing itself, in its undeniably strong first five minutes, as a study of the lives of young Rwandans who have lived virtually all of their lives in the aftermath of the 1994 genocides in that country, the documentary immediately contracts into a snapshot of one young man and the ebullient American Christian family who have "adopted" him through their charity, Love 41. Hopelessly corrupted from the word "go" by the fact that Love 41 and its operators, Dave and Suzette Munson, are the film's producers, and unclear about its intentions: is it a study of how well-meaning wealthy white Westerners can be taken in by shiftless but charismatic African teens? About how African teens lead lives far too complex for jolly idiot Americans to solve by throwing a bit of money at them? About how the only hope is to pray, pray, pray, and keep shining the light of American sincerity on African suffering? Any angle you want to look at it from, it's reductive, facile, and patronising to somebody, and the jokey, slick tone doesn't help matters one iota. 4/10
Wednesday, 22 October, 2014
12:15 PM-
Nabat (Elcin Musaoglu, Azerbaijan)
If I refer to something as "Central Eurasian art film shtick", even I'm not entirely sure what I mean, but it just feels so right. It is a fine and gorgeously made film, understand, with its repeated compositions and implacable long takes unfolding like glaciers receding, depicting a decaying village with terrible visual splendor. Its evocation of one steel-eyed old woman as the embodiment of All People, Everywhere who refuse to give in to the march of time and soulless modernisation works pretty well too, though Nabat herself never quite manages to feel like an actual woman instead of a placeholder for concepts. So it is an greatly impressive and accomplished film all around, just a film that it's very easy to get out in front of; and there's absolutely nothing good to be said about the final act, which brings in metaphorical wolves and even worse, metaphorical wolf pups, and just goes straight off the rails into arthouse inanity. 7/10 (Reviewed here)
1:00 PM-
El cordero (Juan Francisco Olea, Chile)
This black comedy about a devout Catholic who accidentally murders his office assistant and then is horrified to realise that he doesn't feel guilty about it has all the ingredients to be a sharp if perhaps overly nasty satire on that longstanding hobbyhorse of South American and Italian filmmakers, Catholic Guilt. And for well over half of the movie, it feels like that's exactly where it's headed, with the killer's priest putting him in touch with an amoral prisoner who encourages him to commit ever greater crimes in the hope of awakening his dormant sense of self-loathing. It starts to sag as it goes on, though, and the inconsistency of all the characters beyond our protagonist starts to assert itself as more and more of a problem. It also suffers a bit from some unmistakable first-time director hiccups: transitions on the soundtrack that are much too proud of how clever they are, oddly-chosen camera angles conflicting uncomfortably with generic two-shots; that kind of thing. But when it works, it's real damn funny, and Daniel Muñoz is perfectly cast as a pathetic, boring-looking sad sack. 6/10 (Reviewed here)
2:00 PM, Best of the Fest-
The President (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Georgia / France / UK / Germany)
An unexpectedly snappy, funny, tense, and all-round entertaining film: unexpected first because its director and co-writer (with his wife Marzieh Meshkini - and by the way, when is she going to make another film, anyway?) is not remotely noted for his crowd-pleasers, and second because the content of the film, in which a murderous dictator and his little grandson flee through his country's wild areas in the wake of a revolution, encountering firsthand the results of his cruel reign, sounds like it should be a ghastly downer in anybody's hands. The angrily satiric tone trains its eyes first on the dictator's outrageously selfish behavior before expanding to indict the revolutionaries themselves, avenging violent thuggery by behaving as violent thugs; cynicism and worldliness thus sit alongside the haunting, even moving spectacle of the dictator reduced to rags and and filth, like a holy beggar in the wild. Some slow patches, but it's overall a very welcome shout from a filmmaker who's been much too quiet for a good while now. 8/10 (Reviewed here)
2:30 PM-
1001 Grams (Bent Hamer, Norway)
If not for its consistent, reliably droll sense of mordant Scandinavian humor, I'd feel fine with tossing this one out altogether. Aggressively and drearily shapeless in its first half, unless you count the choking precision of the color scheme, the story of a scientist traveling to the international "calibrating each nation's Official Kilogram" seminar on behalf of her ailing father sets up one half-hearted metaphor after another on its way to a gloppy ending that tries to sell us on the idea that the whole thing was a romantic comedy, while unconsciously stealing from 21 Grams, of all blessed things. Some fine performances and laugh-out-loud compositions are a compensation for a script that doesn't earn its scattered emotional journeys, but hardly enough to make for anything more than a forgettable, pleasant time-waster. 5/10 (Reviewed here)
5:45 PM-
Fair Play (Andrea Sedláčková, Czech Republic / Slovakia / Germany)
The CIFF guide breathlessly suggests that the official Czech submission to the Academy Awards "exposes the dangerous entanglement of ideology and sports in times of oppression", which, jerk that I am, sounds like a topic that surely isn't begging to be explored, nor is the link between sports and ideology as transparent and obvious as the blurb makes it sound. And yet, here we are, and it's a pretty solid, nervy little peek at life in the constant panicked hell of late-period Soviet socialism, where every moment of one's waking life is a self-aware political act, whether of submitting to or resisting the government. If it's the most shocking and insightful entry in what's something of a stock subgenre in modern Eastern European filmmaking, it's nonetheless a cleanly-told character drama with some impressive performances and a good slow build of its thrills, from a simple sports drama (what are the consequences of using steroids?) to a story in which, yes, ideology and sports get tangled (what are the consequences of not using steroids, if the overclass wants you to?). Straightforward but exciting. 7/10
6:00 PM-
Cathedrals of Culture (Anthology, Austria / Denmark / France / Germany / Norway / USA)
Six directors study, in sparkling 3-D, a building in their home country that represents some important aspect of culture: the expected museums and libraries, but also, rather intriguingly, a prison and a research institute. As is usually true of anthology films, the quality is all over the place, and even the best isn't too great: it's no surprise that Wim Wenders (of the great Pina) had the best handle on how to use three dimensions to fully bring his building to life, but even his segment ultimately turns into a fairly generic "history of a cool building" like you'd see on a mid-tier cable station. I'd say the the film ends up batting .500, and the segments that work are all pretty visually delightful, but three hours is a lot of time to spend with anecdotes about architecture that have, ultimately, not that much insight beyond the obvious. 6/10
6:00 PM-
It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, USA)
The fear of STDs brilliantly literalised in the form of an unexplained malevolent force that adopts human form to stalk a young woman who picked up a curse from a sexual encounter with an older boy. Some clunky early plotting and frequently dodgy sound recording aren't nearly enough of a problem to derail the film's insightful, sweet look at late teenage friendships (though the film seems curiously unaware of social media or even cellular phones), nor its wonderful, slowly cranked-up tension punctuated by some great jump scares (it has a false scare so excellently timed, and with the characters themselves so awkwardly aware of the ridiculousness of the situation, that it works better than the legitimate scares in most lesser horror pictures), and its rewarding, not-at-all out of place jabs of humor in both the "nasty irony" and "casual hang-out banter" modes. And just when it shouldn't be able to get better, it absolutely nails the ending, avoiding the traditional horror pitfall of too much explanation and stop-the-monster contrivance by... but I shouldn't. If he keeps working in the genre, Mitchell clearly has the chops to become a generation-defining master. 8/10 (Reviewed here)
6:15 PM-
A Few Cubic Meters of Love (Jamshid Mahmoudi, Afghanistan / Iran)
Romeo & Juliet in Tehran, with illegal Afghan refugees as the Capulets. So no, not original at all, and it comes as no surprise to find out that it's a first film, more concerned with existing at all than with cleverness or aesthetic boldness. But it's effective: the social realist style showcases the hardscrabble life of the refugees with bluntness and a gratifying lack of speechifying, while Hasiba Ebrahimi and Saed Soheili's performances as the star-crossed lovers have a lovely, casual coziness that evoke the shyness and excitement and silliness of young love in a deeply pleasing way. It's not surprising in the slightest, from its slice-of-life depiction of the refugees, the the shaky handheld camera, to the mordant poetry of the ending. But it works anyway, and the unexpected context lends freshness to its overfamiliar story. Nothing close to essential, but a satisfying watch. 7/10
Thứ Tư, 22 tháng 10, 2014
2014 CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: DAY-BY-DAY GUIDE
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