Reportedly the longest single film ever made, Edgar Reitz’s 13-part, nearly 26-hour “chronicle of a generation” (1992)–set in Munich during the 60s and only nominally a sequel to his 15-hour Heimat (1984)–mainly focuses on the experiences of one young man, a classical musician and composer named Hermann Simon (Henry Arnold) who moves from the small village of Shabbach (where Heimat was set) to find a new life and, echoing the title, a second home. Alternating masterfully between black and white and color, Reitz conveys a novelistic sweep as he deals with artistic and romantic ferment in 1960 and ’61 in the first two episodes, “The Time of the First Songs” and “Two Strange Eyes.” Among the other major characters are the hero’s best friend, a Chilean musician; a beautiful cellist they’re both drawn to; a lonely female law student; a couple of ambitious filmmakers; a jazz drummer; a crazed landlady and former singer; and two avant-garde composers. Reitz’s feeling for period and milieu are so good and his characters so rich and appealing one feels one could climb inside this movie and stay a long, long while. On the basis of the four hours I’ve seen so far, I suspect The Second Heimat offers the most comprehensive and persuasive grasp of the experience of the 60s we have on film, with the possible exception of Jacques Rivette’s nearly 13-hour Out 1, which has never been shown in the U.S. Read more
Adapted from a successful play, this tense and effective Venezuelan political thriller (1992), directed with craft and discretion by Alejandro Saderman, follows the principled decision of a nun to shelter a fugitive from armed rebels during a state of civil war, the ambivalent cooperation she elicits from a fellow nun, and the price they both have to pay for their courage. Saderman sticks to the claustrophobic feeling I assume the original play had, while still conveying a detailed sense of the surrounding community, from mayor to bishop to shopkeeper. And wisely, he tends to veer away from close-ups when he wants certain dramatic points to register; indeed, many of this film’s finest moments–most of them related to the performance of Veronica Oddo, who plays the more committed nun–transpire in long shot. Three Penny, Saturday, April 23, 6:30; also Facets Multimedia, Monday, April 25, 7:00. Read more
It’s a matter of some dispute whether Roman Polanski’s letter to the darker side of the romantic impulse–a French-English production made in 1992–represents him at his best or worst (I’d say the former), but there’s little question that this is his most emotionally complex movie to date. With its American, English, and French characters representing the three cultures Polanski has known since he left Poland, it’s also quite possibly his most personal film–and certainly his most self-critical. The major focus of the plot, told in flashbacks, is the perverse relationship that develops in Paris between a failed, well-to-do American writer (Peter Coyote) who becomes crippled and a young French dancer (Emmanuelle Seigner); their encounter with a British couple (Hugh Grant and Kristin Scott-Thomas) on a luxury liner on the Black Sea forms the present-tense story. This uneasy combination of comedy and tragedy, frank pornography and caustic antipornography, sexual fun and games and mental cruelty doesn’t allow the audience a comfortably detached viewpoint from which to judge the proceedings. Chances are you’ll either love it or despise it. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, April 15 through 21. Read more
Perhaps the most intriguing fact about this clever, touching, and well-directed independent feature is that the script was written by the late Endre Bohem in 1935 and revised by his son Leslie only a few years ago–a form of generational continuity reflected in one of the delayed revelations of the plot as well. The story–set in the present, though one can imagine it set during the Depression–concerns the fate of a single $20 bill that’s dropped on a city street, picked up, spent, given away, lost, and pursued by many people for multiple reasons, always gaining new significance with each new setting. Most of the resulting miniplots are self-contained, but the script also gracefully brings back characters, making a roundelay exercise like the recent Chain of Desire look fairly crude by comparison. Documentary filmmaker Keva Rosenfeld has switched to fiction with a great deal of craft and assurance, never allowing the large number of characters to seem top-heavy or confusing. The able cast includes Linda Hunt, Elisabeth Shue, Christopher Lloyd, Steve Buscemi, Brendan Fraser, Gladys Knight, Melora Walters, and Kamal Holloway. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, April 8 through 14. Read more
With the possible exception of Kurosawa, Nagisa Oshima (In the Realm of the Senses, Empire of Passion, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence) is the greatest living Japanese filmmaker. Unfortunately, the U.S. distributor of most of his early work has made very little of it available on video, which means that most Americans’ knowledge of the modernist Japanese cinema doesn’t include Death by Hanging, Boy, The Man Who Left His Will on Film, The Ceremony, and many other Oshima masterworks. Max Mon Amour (1986), his most recent feature, here receiving its belated Chicago premiere, isn’t as good as those movies, but then what is? This dry drawing-room comedy about an English diplomat’s wife (Charlotte Rampling) who has a “serious” affair with a chimpanzee was produced by Serge Silberman, producer of Bunuel’s last films, and written by Bunuel’s cowriter on the same films, Jean-Claude Carriere. Much of this film’s ongoing humor derives from the human couple’s sense of decorum; in a game effort to preserve his marriage, the diplomat (Anthony Higgins), who has a mistress of his own, arranges to have the chimp moved into their flat. Even for a filmmaker who essentially changes style with each picture–and has a reputation as a taboo breaker–this is uncharacteristic: the poker-faced surrealism of “civilized” people attempting to be mature about a woman’s passion for a chimp seems, not surprisingly, more like Bunuel than Oshima. Read more
It’s a matter of some dispute whether Roman Polanski’s letter to the darker side of the romantic impulsea French-English production made in 1992represents him at his best or worst (I’d say the former), but there’s little question that this is his most emotionally complex movie. With its American, English, and French characters representing the three cultures Polanski has known since he left Poland, it’s also quite possibly his most personal filmand certainly his most self-critical. The major focus of the plot, told in flashbacks, is the perverse relationship that develops in Paris between a failed, well-to-do American writer who becomes crippled (Peter Coyote) and a young French dancer (Emmanuelle Seigner); their encounter with a British couple (Hugh Grant and Kristin Scott Thomas) on a luxury liner forms the present-tense story. This uneasy combination of comedy and tragedy, frank pornography and caustic antipornography, sexual fun and games and mental cruelty doesn’t allow the audience a comfortably detached viewpoint from which to judge the proceedings. Chances are you’ll either love it or despise it. (JR) Read more
James Whale’s brilliant and surprisingly delicate 1936 rendition of the Kern and Hammerstein musical, which was based on an Edna Ferber novel, is infinitely superior to the dull 1951 MGM Technicolor remake and, interestingly enough, less racist. The rendition of Old Man River by Paul Robeson, magnificent throughout, is a high point, occasioning a montage sequence that shows Whale at his most expressionistic and inventive. With Irene Dunne, Allan Jones, Helen Morgan, and Charles Winninger. 112 min. (JR) Read more
The usual stuff. Some promising material about totalitarian maximum-security imprisonment in the year 2022 is quickly succeeded by OK action a la The Road Warrior on a remote island; the all-male cast begins to pall after a while, though Ray Liotta (hero), Stuart Wilson (villain), Lance Henriksen (father figure), and various others (Kevin Dillon, Kevin J. O’Connor, Ernie Hudson, Ian McNeice) do their best to keep you from nodding off. Martin Campbell directed from a screenplay by Michael Gaylin and Joel Gross that’s based on Richard Herley’s novel The Penal Colony. (JR) Read more
Two wartime propaganda shorts in French, directed by Alfred Hitchcock for the unoccupied French colonies: Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache (both 1944). Neither was shown much at the time, but both are interesting as period pieces and minor Hitchcockian narrative exercises. 57 min. (JR) Read more
A Harvard senior on scholarship (Brendan Fraser) has a rude encounter with a homeless wino (Joe Pesci) camped out in the basement of the campus library. The student and his three roommatesMoira Kelly, Patrick Dempsey, and Josh Hamiltonlearn a lot about how the other half lives, while the hero winds up with a surrogate for the father he never had. A good deal of this can be read as a Clinton-administration update of The Paper Chase (a Nixon-administration movie), with Gore Vidal enlisted to do a rough equivalent of John Houseman’s cameo in the earlier picture; otherwise, it’s a fairly effective tearjerker with a smidgen of social conscience, despiteor is it because of?the compulsive Hollywood gloss. Truth or Dare’s Alek Keshishian directed (with distinction if not honors), which helps explain why Madonna furnishes the movie’s theme song, and the better-than-average script is credited to William Mastrosimone, though both playwright Israel Horowitz and novelist Rafael Yglesias (Fearless) are said to have worked on it. (JR) Read more
It’s been suggested by the editor of the Budapest Daily News that one reason this 1993 Hungarian comedy, set during the 60s, was the most popular local movie ever released in Hungary is that Hungarian audiences are tired of films that are forever digging up the policies and social issues of the past. There’s clearly no threat of that happening here. This is a jaunty account of a wooden-hanger salesman (played by director and cowriter Robert Koltai, his first feature) taking along his awkward teenage nephew on trips to various trade fairs and the racetrack, and cluing him in to the facts of life, sexual and otherwise. The uncle has been compared to a life force like Zorba the Greek and Auntie Mame, and if you love those characters I guess you’ll enjoy this too; I was much more intrigued by the ambiguous nature of the character’s ethnic background. (JR) Read more
By reputation at least, this is a seminal early work (1978) by Peter Greenaway45 minutes long, involving the jokey reconstruction of an imaginary film. (JR) Read more
Perhaps the most intriguing fact about this clever, touching, and well-directed independent feature is that the script was written by the late Endre Bohem in 1935 and revised by his son Leslie only a few years agoa form of generational continuity reflected in one of the delayed revelations of the plot as well. The storyset in the present, though one can imagine it set during the Depressionconcerns the fate of a single $20 bill that’s dropped on a city street, picked up, spent, given away, lost, and pursued by many people for multiple reasons, always gaining new significance with each new setting. Most of the resulting miniplots are self-contained, but the script also gracefully brings back characters, making a roundelay exercise like the 1993 Chain of Desire look fairly crude by comparison. Documentary filmmaker Keva Rosenfeld has switched to fiction with a great deal of craft and assurance, never allowing the large number of characters to seem top-heavy or confusing. The able cast includes Linda Hunt, Elisabeth Shue, Christopher Lloyd, Steve Buscemi, Brendan Fraser, Gladys Knight, Melora Walters, and Kamal Holloway. (JR) Read more
A pointless second film version of Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel. Done in English and with a miscast American movie star as hero, just like its 1962 predecessor (by Orson Welles), this is shot on locationi.e., in Prague, a much more concrete location than the one in the bookand, as pedantically written by Harold Pinter, sticks superficially closer than Welles’s version to the original novel in terms of events. But under the unimaginative hand of English director David Jones, far from offering a true conceptual alternative to Welles, this film often plagiarizes Welles’s work, and, worse still, tends to plagiarize the less interesting shots. Twin Peaks’s Kyle MacLachlan makes a rather unconvincing Josef K (most of his actorly energy seems taken up in pronouncing clerk as clark to make him sound English), but the remainder of the cast is much betterAnthony Hopkins, Jason Robards, Polly Walker, Juliet Stevenson, and Alfred Molinaand Phil Meheux’ black-and-white cinematography is at least serviceable. If you don’t find the notion of a Masterpiece Theatre edition of Kafka as offensive as I do, you might actually enjoy this. (JR) Read more
Lara Flynn Boyle, Stephen Baldwin, and Josh Charles play college roommates who fight against their sexual attractions for one another (heterosexual as well as homosexual) to preserve their friendship, in a charming romantic comedy written and directed by Andrew Fleming. The movie’s clear reference point is Truffaut’s Jules and Jim of over 30 years ago, and despite a few false moments, its sweetness occasionally approximates some of the charm of the earlier picture. (JR) Read more
