The prolific Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been at work for nearly two decades, sometimes making straight-to-video features but more recently receiving some belated international recognition. This month the Film Center will show 35-millimeter prints of a half dozen of his recent thrillers, made between 1996 and 2000, and I can recommend all three that I’ve seenthough not without certain caveats. All three are fairly grisly, though Kurosawa’s frequent long shots impart a cool, detached tone to the cruelty and violence. And his plots can be difficult to understand, though his visual style is so riveting you might not mind. Eyes of the Spider and Serpent’s Path, rhyming companion pieces made in 1997, both star Shoh Aikawa and involve yakuza intrigues and a father tracking down the men who kidnapped and killed his little girl; I often couldn’t figure out who was doing what to whom, but I didn’t much care, because the visual sweep of the former and the claustrophobia of the latter were both compelling. The engrossing Cure (1998), which is getting an extended run, stars Koji Yakusho (Shall We Dance?, The Eel) as a troubled detective exploring a series of murders committed through hypnotic suggestion (as in The Manchurian Candidate), and while its creepy mystery plot is easy enough to follow even when it turns metaphysical, it’s unsatisfying as a story precisely because it aspires to create a mounting sense of dread by enlarging questions rather than answering them. Read more
This opening-night program of the eighth annual Chicago Underground Film Festival gave me my first taste of the work of James Fotopoulos, an energetic experimental filmmaker in his mid-20s whose morbid preoccupations with sex and horror have already been getting him some attention from serious critics. His third feature is a black-and-white narrative shot in about a week for $26,000, and the simple synopsis provided for itA group of people struggle to obtain power through sex and violencedoesn’t hint at the long takes from fixed camera positions, surveying a variety of grim midwestern locations, or the layered and sinister industrial sound design. The centrifugal and somewhat confusing narrative has something to do with a few women who work in lingerie modeling, showing off their outfits to older men (the conspicuous absence of sex and nudity is balanced to some degree by the stripping and masturbating of the model in Fotopoulos’s accompanying 2000 short, Drowning). Many writers have linked the filmmaker to Lynch and Cronenberg, but a heavily made-up grotesque who becomes prominent toward the end reminded me more of Tobe Hooper. The most interesting thing for me is the film’s abrupt ending, which proves how difficult it is to anticipate what Fotopoulos is up to. Read more
Ousman Sembene, the greatest of all African filmmakers (and one of the finest fiction writers on the continent as well), directed this upbeat 2000 comedy from Senegal, about a sassy, self-made woman who manages a filling station. Faat-Kine supports two illegitimate children by different fathers, along with her mother, and she’s not about to take shit from anyone. This is Sembene’s first film in eight years, and while it’s no less serious or political than his other late films (Camp Thiroye, Guelwaan), it’s a good deal funnier, more easygoing, and more affirmative. 118 min. A 35-millimeter print will be shown. Gene Siskel Film Center, Saturday, August 11, 8:00, and Sunday, August 12, 3:30. Read more
