This 1997 documentary is Errol Morris’s best film, a clear advance on Gates of Heaven, Vernon, Florida, The Thin Blue Line, and A Brief History of Time. It alternates interviews with four unconnected individuals: a lion tamer, a topiary gardener, a mole-rat specialist, and a robot scientist. The result is more a poem than a documentary, made coherent by Morris’s formal precision: he links found footage with the interviews, black and white with color, in a dreamlike continuity that invites the viewer to trace his or her own connections. It’s not at all difficult to watch, as the premise might suggest; in fact it’s beautiful as well as moving, an achievement of synthesis that announces Morris’s arrival as a master. 82 min. (JR) Read more
Mike Leigh’s gripping, multifaceted 142-minute comedy-drama, winner of the grand prize at Cannes in 1996, may well be his most accessible and optimistic picture. A young black optometrist (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) seeks out her white biological mother (Brenda Blethyn), a factory worker who put her up for adoption at birth, and as the two become acquainted, tensions build between the mother and another illegitimate daughter, between the mother and her kid brother (Timothy Spall), and between him and his wife, leading to a ferocious climax. The dense, Ibsen-like plotting of family revelations is dramatically satisfying in broad terms, though it leaves a few details unaccounted for. But the acting is so strongwith Spall a particular standoutthat you’re carried along as by a tidal wave. The younger daughter, a close cousin of the bulimic daughter in Leigh’s Life Is Sweet, is the weakest link in the chain of family discord, yet Leigh orchestrates the whole thing with such panache that you’re not likely to mind her too much. (JR) Read more
Akira Kurosawa’s 1951 film won the grand prize at the Venice film festival, introducing Kurosawa (and through him the Japanese film) to most of the Western world. Set mainly in 12th-century Kyoto, the film, based on a short story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, offers the radically different eyewitness accounts of four people (including a dead man) about a violent incident involving ambush, rape, and murder in a forest. The philosophically subversive premise of the story, at least by implication, is that all four narrators are telling the truth; Kurosawa’s much more sentimental conclusion, made even worse by a hokey finale, is that everyone lies. This serious limitation aside, the film is still an impressive piece of work, visually and rhythmically masterful. With Toshiro Mifune (as the bandit) and Machiko Kyo. In Japanese with subtitles. 88 min. (JR) Read more
Jacques Rivette’s 19th feature (1997) is perhaps the most classically constructed of all his films, in terms of mise en scène as well as plot. Sandrine Bonnaire stars as a research chemist whose kid brother (Grégoire Colin from The Dream Life of Angels) discovers that their father’s accidental death from falling off a train a few years earlier may have been a murder committed by his business partner (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), who’s subsequently taken over the business. The brother plans to kill the partner, and the sister, fearful that he might bungle the job, takes a train to the country to perform the deed herself. Her journey, covering almost 25 minutes, displays Rivette’s genius in handling duration and nuanced acting and shows Bonnaire at her near best. As a rule, Rivette’s actresses shine more than his actors, but Radziwilowicz — a skillful veteran of Wajda, Kieslowski, and Godard pictures — gives a wonderfully dense and suggestive performance, and the brooding intimations of Greek tragedy are part of what keeps this 170-minute thriller fascinating throughout. With Laure Marsac (in an intriguing double role as sisters) and Françoise Fabian; Pascal Bonitzer and Emmanuelle Cuau collaborated with Rivette on the script. Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Read more
One can safely assert without hyperbole that Jean Renoir’s 1937 masterpiece about French and German officers during World War I is better than anything being presented by the Chicago International Film Festival. You might think you’ve already seen it, but a good print hasn’t been available since the 30s, so you might be in for a revelation; I know I was. (Unfortunately the subtitles, unlike the French dialogue, don’t explain the film’s title; a better translation might be “the great illusion”–the deluded belief that this war would soon end and be the last one.) A film about war without a single scene of combat, it suggests with a great deal of irony and plausibility that the true divisions in World War I were of class rather than nationality, a point embodied in the friendship between aristocratic captains played by Erich von Stroheim (in his greatest performance in a sound film) and Pierre Fresnay, both of whom ultimately become sacrificial victims to the nouveau riche Jewish officer (Marcel Dalio) and the French mechanic (Jean Gabin) who manage to escape from a German fortress to freedom. (It’s fascinating today to relate the faint traces of anti-Semitism in Stroheim’s character to the posthumous knowledge that he was himself a Jew in hiding.) Read more
Voyage to the Beginning of the World
Born in 1908, Manoel de Oliveira is the only working director anywhere in the world who started his career in the silent era. For this meditative feature he enlisted the somewhat younger Marcello Mastroianni–in what proved to be Mastroianni’s last performance–to play someone very much like de Oliveira, an aging film director named Manoel setting out on a car trip with a few of his coworkers. Basically an exploration of the director’s Portuguese roots and the French and Portuguese roots of one of the actors, the film is laden with memories both personal and historical, and associations both cultural and familial; a moving (as well as slow-moving) road movie, it resembles many of de Oliveira’s other works in its paradoxical combination of 19th-century modernism and aristocratic Marxism. Not the least of its oddities is the fact that it starts out as a film about Manoel, then shifts focus halfway through to the French actor Jean-Yves Gautier, whose father was Portuguese and who’s meeting his Portuguese aunt for the first time. On the basis of a single viewing, I wouldn’t call this a great film on the level of de Oliveira’s Doomed Love or his recent Inquietude, but it’s one of his best since Valley of Abraham and one of his most accessible. Read more
Les bonnes femmes
Arguably the best as well as the most disturbing movie Claude Chabrol has made to date, this unjustly neglected 1960 feature, his fourth, focuses on the everyday lives and ultimate fates of four young women (Bernadette Lafont, Stephane Audran, Clotilde Joano, and Lucile Saint-Simon) working at an appliance store in Paris and longing for better things. Ruthlessly unsentimental yet powerfully compassionate, it shows Chabrol at his most formally inventive, and it exerted a pronounced influence on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz two decades later. A new 35-millimeter print will be shown. Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Saturday, September 11, 4:00, 6:00, and 8:00, and Sunday, September 12, 8:15, 312-443-3737.
–Jonathan Rosenbaum
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still. Read more
Folk wisdom is sprinkled immoderately into this comedy by writer-director-producer Lawrence Kasdan, about a popular psychologist named Mumford (Loren Dean) solving everyone’s problems in a small town of the same namethe old-fashioned charm and sweetness may remind you at times of stuff by John Ford starring Will Rogers. But the impression doesn’t last long, because most of the wisdom and the characters attached to it start to seem phony as soon as the movie’s over. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this while it lasted, especially for the cast: Jane Adams, Ted Danson, Hope Davis, Jason Lee, Mary McDonnell, David Paymer, Martin Short, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Alfre Woodard, and even Robert Stack in a funny cameo. (JR) Read more
Near the end of his career, star pitcher Kevin Costner hurls a masterpiece while reviewing his life. Among the things he has to think about are Kelly Preston as the woman he loves and is losing, Jena Malone as her teenage daughter, and the serious hand injury he’s had to come back from. I can’t imagine what baseball fans will make of this protracted tearjerker and its tortured flashback structure, but fans of director Sam Raimi who welcomed his recent impulses to diversify (The Quick and the Dead, A Simple Plan) after making his name as a horror specialist may have second thoughts. The actual culprit may be Costner, so bent on giving himself maximum screen time that I doubt even Carl Dreyer could have made much of the results, though I’m told that Universal reedited Costner’s version after he reedited Raimi’s. For the first 100 minutes or so I found this hokey but serviceable; after that my watch became more meaningful than anything I could locate on-screen. Adapted by Dana Stevens from a novel by Michael Shaara; with John C. Reilly and Brian Cox. (JR) Read more
Despite a good cast including Christina Ricci and amiably laid-back plot development, this feature by young writer-director Morgan J. Freeman (Hurricane Streets)not to be confused with the actor Morgan Freemandidn’t really grab me when I watched it on video. Set in and around a California road stop with a population of 89, the story focuses on an unexpected romance between a young local (Brendan Sexton III) and a TV actress (Kate Hudson) stuck in town when a tank truck crashes and the FBI, fearing a toxic spill, quarantines the area. There’s more charm than momentum, but maybe it works better on the big screen. With John Heard, Casey Affleck, and Sara Gilbert. (JR) Read more
An interesting, varied, and often appealing program of experimental short films and videos. Shuk-Shan Lee’s The Sky When It Is a Sunny Dayat 18 minutes, the longest entry in the bunchis a lyrical look at the lives and hobbies of a few blind people, and I especially liked one of the music videos by Kirstin Grieve, made for the band Low, which mixes close-ups of musical details with slow-motion footage of boys playing in piles of autumn leaves. Also on the program, Andy Grieve and Justin Allen’s Red Breath; Carolyn Faber’s Iota (1998); Mary Roland’s The Cabbie (1998); Akiko Iwakawa’s Swing/Everything I Wanted (1997); Amie Siegel’s silent Inclusum Labor Illustrat (1996), which is mainly about fetuses; and Chris Eichenseer’s Goodbye and Rewind (1998). (JR) Read more
Bela Lugosi has an obsession with Poe (apparently the main excuse for the title) and Boris Karloff is the criminal he treats to a nasty face-lift. The direction of this clammy 1935 horror item is credited to Louis Friedlander, which is actually Lew Landers in hidingperhaps understandably. 62 min. (JR) Read more
This 1967 spoof features stop-motion animation and the voices of, among others, Boris Karloff and Phyllis Diller; Jules Bass directed. 94 min. Read more
The fourth feature directed in England by American Joseph Losey (1956), credited pseudonymously to Joseph Walton due to the Hollywood blacklist, this serviceable but rarely screened thriller was released overseas in a version ten minutes longer as The Intimate Stranger. Scripted by Casablanca’s Howard Koch (another blacklisted expatriate at the time, signing himself Peter Howard) and shot on a shoestring in a dozen days, it concerns an American film producer (Richard Basehart) working in London whose job and marriage are threatened by an American actress (The Wild One’s Mary Murphy) claiming to be his mistress. It’s less effective than the English thrillers made during the same period by the similarly blacklisted Cy Endfield, though the uses made of an English filmmaking milieu are both convincing and fascinating, and it’s interesting to see Roger Livesey, a Michael Powell regular, turning up in a central part. It seems a Losey specialty to make almost all of his characters unpleasant, but the assured engagement of his best American work and subsequent English films like The Damned is only fitfully apparent here. With Mervyn Johns and Constance Cummings. (JR) Read more
What’s unexpected as well as moving about this 1998 film by Olivier Assayas, at least in relation to his other recent features (Cold Water, Irma Vep), is how sweet tempered most of it is. Split into six chapters, with several weeks or months separating one section and the next, it follows a group of close friendsmainly a novelist who’s just turned 40 (Francois Cluzet) and is becoming ill, a writer-editor in his 30s (Mathieu Amalric), and their current and former lovers (Virginie Ledoyen, Jeanne Balibar, Arsinee Khanjian, and Mia Hansen-Love). What we don’t know about these charactersand what we don’t see in certain scenesis often as interesting and as important as what we know and see, and Assayas’s sense of how relationships evolve between people over time is conveyed with a rich and vivid novelistic density. With Nathalie Richard and Alex Descas. In French with subtitles. 112 min. (JR) Read more
