What produces a skinhead is the subtle subject of Mike Leigh’s powerful and mysterious feature for British TV, though it may take you most of the film to realize it. We’re treated to the bitter inertia of a family on the dole in a cramped high rise in London’s East End, with particular emphasis on a raspy layabout (Phil Daniels) who berates and undermines his nearly catatonic kid brother (Tim Roth, who played van Gogh in Vincent and Me); a street punk; a young woman in the neighborhood; and the boys’ aunt, who has married into the middle class. Watch for an interesting early performance by Gary Oldman, as well as contributions from Marion Bailey and Alfred Molina (1983). (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Friday, January 24, 6:00, 443-3737) Read more
Jacques Rivette’s greatest film since the 70s is one of the most penetrating examinations of the process of art making on film. It concerns the highly charged work of a figurative painter (Michel Piccoli, giving the performance of his career) with his beautiful and mainly nude model (Manon of the Spring’s Emmanuelle Beart), but also the complex input and pressures of the painter’s wife and former model (Jane Birkin), the model’s boyfriend (David Bursztein), and an art dealer who used to be involved with the painter’s wife (Gilles Arbona). The complex forces that produce art are the film’s obsessive focus, and rarely has Rivette’s use of duration to look at process been as spellbinding as it is here. The film runs for four hours, but the overall effect is mesmerizing and perpetually mysterious (as Rivette always is at his best), and not a moment is wasted. Rivette’s superb sense of rhythm and mise en scene never falters, and the plot has plenty of twists. Freely adapted from Balzac’s novella The Unknown Masterpiece by Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent, and Rivette, with exquisite cinematography by William Lubtchansky, beautiful location work in the south of France (mainly a 19th-century chateau), and drawings and paintings executed by Bernard Dufour. Read more
