Jonathan Rosenbaum

From the June 2, 2000 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

A gorgeous mirage of a movie, Claire Denis’ reverie about the French foreign legion in eastern Africa (1999, 90 min.), suggested by Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Foretopman, benefits especially from having been choreographed (by Bernardo Montet, who also plays one of the legionnaires). Combined with Denis’ superb eye for settings, Agnes Godard’s cinematography, and the director’s decision to treat major and minor elements as equally important, this turns some of the military maneuvers and exercises into thrilling pieces of filmmaking that surpass even Full Metal Jacket and converts some sequences in a disco into vibrant punctuations. The story, which drifts by in memory fragments, is told from the perspective of a solitary former sergeant (Denis Lavant, star of The Lovers on the Bridge) now living in Marseilles and recalling his hatred for a popular recruit (Gregoire Colin) that led to the sergeant’s discharge; the fact that his superior is named after the hero of Godard’s Le petit soldat and played by the same actor almost 40 years later (Michel Subor) adds a suggestive thread, as do the passages from Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd. Most of all, Denis, who spent part of her childhood in Djibouti, captures the poetry and atmosphere — and, more subtly, the women — of Africa like few filmmakers before her. Read more

From Film Comment, September-October 2000.

GEORGE WASHINGTON David Gordon Green, U.S.A., 2000

“A Terrence Malick rethink of Gummo “? That’s how one reviewer celebrated the curious first feature of 24-year-old David Gordon Green, a Texas-born independent, when it premiered at Berlin — a grim reminder of how closely critics can resemble both publicists and aspiring filmmakers pitching their projects to producers. If we assume that the audience is so jaded it merely wants to mix and match what it already knows, then it’s a logical (if unflattering) label for something new. Or if one’s simply stymied by the challenge of describing a fresh sensibility, some familiar points of comparison are perhaps inevitable. (For me, it would be Thomas Pynchon’s plaintive boys’ tale, “The Secret Integration”, despite some telling differences in class and regional setting.) But the fact is, whatever Green’s misjudgments — starting with the movie’s misleading title and ending with a kid’s cutesy/ unlikely list of favorite heroes for an offscreen shrink — the writer-director should mainly be credited with making nobody’s mistakes but his own.

One can see the sort of thing that prompted the wisecrack: Malick’s poetic Americana and adolescent female narrators, Gummo as a Southern working-class geek festival featuring the wanton murder of pets. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (June 30, 2000). — J.R.

Kikujiro

Rating *** A must see

Directed and written by Takeshi Kitano

With Beat Takeshi (Kitano), Yusuke Sekiguchi, Kayoko Kishimoto, Yuko Daike, and Kazuko Yoshiyuiki.

I’m finally starting to understand Takeshi Kitano’s movies, though given that his specialty seems to be a mixture of violence, slapstick, and sentimentality, I’m not sure I’ll ever be a convert. Still, I found Kikujiro (1999) — his eighth feature, showing this week at the Music Box — much more affecting than the other three features I’ve seen.

One of the fascinating things about Kikujiro, which has virtually no violence, is that it seems both more mainstream and more experimental in form than the other Kitano movies I’ve seen. It changes style so often that it all but eliminates narrative. It’s divided into sections like a photo album, with photos and captions doubling as chapter headings. It has intricately choreographed expressionist dream sequences, extended gags in extreme long shot that all but convert the main characters into balls ricocheting through pinball machines, and absurd physical gags in medium shot (e.g., the hero tries to swim) that take the form of frozen tableaux and provoke blank stares from other characters. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (November 2003).

The title of this 64-minute video by Guy Maddin (Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary) refers to its having been commissioned as a gallery installation for the Rotterdam film festival, to be watched through a succession of arcade-style peep-show machines. Screening here as a self-contained work, it seems like Maddin’s most personal project yet: the hero is a hockey player named Guy Maddin; his mother, like Maddin’s, runs a beauty salon; and Maddin even casts some of his own family members. But the overall feel is phantasmagoric–pitched, like most of Maddin’s work, in the style of a half-remembered late silent feature or early talkie. Also on the program are Maddin’s justly celebrated six-minute short The Heart of the World (2000), showing in 35-millimeter, and his five-minute Odilon Redon, or the Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Towards Infinity (1995). Gene Siskel Film Center.

From the October 10, 2003 Chicago Reader.

Having taken his formalist bent to extremes in The Circle (2000), Jafar Panahi switches to lumpy neorealism with minimal loss of force. The script by Abbas Kiarostami (who also wrote Panahi’s 2000 The White Balloon) was inspired by a news story about a pizza deliveryman in Tehran who shot a jeweler and then himself in the course of a robbery attempt. Panahi cast a real pizza deliveryman, Hussein Emadeddin, as the robber, only to discover that his overweight, middle-aged lead was a paranoid schizophrenic, which may account in part for his deadpan, oddly commanding presence. The film’s candid treatment of the class resentments brewing in contemporary Tehran have made the film unshowable in Iran, where the government has branded Panahi an American agent — a painful irony given that he couldn’t even enter this country if he wanted to without an inordinate amount of red tape and humiliation. In Farsi with subtitles. 97 min. (JR) Read more

From the March1, 2002 Chicago Reader.

Shot in 16-millimeter black and white with Dolby sound, then blown up to 35-millimeter, this singular experimental feature from Thailand (2000, 83 min.) is a freewheeling collaboration between filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul and villagers he encountered while driving south from Bangkok. After hearing a story en route, Weerasethakul asked others to continue and/or modify it; back in Bangkok, he shot portions of the narrative with nonprofessional actors. The entire film is a heady mix of fiction and nonfiction, with fantasy and actuality rubbing shoulders at every stage, and what emerges from the collective unconscious of the participants is surprising and fascinating. Weerasethakul packages his findings in diverse and inventive ways: as an improvised outdoor musical performance, as a game played by school children, as a collaborative description in sign by two teenage deaf-mutes. I can’t think of another film remotely like it. In Thai with subtitles. Read more

From the February 15, 2001 Chicago Reader. 

This brooding chamber piece (2000) about a love affair that never quite happens is so minimalist that it succumbs to the law of diminishing returns–yet for some reason it sticks in my gut. Director Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong’s most romantic filmmaker, is known for his excesses, and in that sense the film’s spareness represents a bold departure. Claustrophobically set in adjacent flats in 1962 Hong Kong, where two young couples find themselves sharing space with other people, it focuses on a newspaper editor and a secretary at an export firm (Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, the sexiest duo in Hong Kong cinema) who discover that their spouses are having an affair on the road. Wong, who improvises his films with the actors, endlessly repeats his musical motifs (including a melancholy violin theme and three familiar ballads sung in Spanish by Nat “King” Cole) and variations on a handful of images, rituals, and short scenes (rainstorms, cab rides, stairways, tender and tentative hand gestures), while dressing Cheung in some of the most confining (though lovely) dresses imaginable, with collars like neck braces. This isn’t among my favorite Wong Kar-wai features (in a pinch I’d pick Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express, Ashes of Time, and Happy Together), but that doesn’t mean my eyes weren’t glued to the screen. Read more

From the Chicago Reader, February 2, 2001.

Set in the late 18th century, this dazzling epic by Im Kwon-taek (Fly High Run Far) concerns the love between a prostitute’s daughter and the son of a provincial governor who marry in secret but are then driven apart. Im is Korea’s most prestigious filmmaker (with 96 features to his credit), and his stirring 2000 drama is both historically resonant and strikingly modern, remarkable for its deft and spellbinding narrative, its breathtaking color, and above all its traditional sung narration, which he periodically shows being performed with drum accompaniment before a contemporary audience. This is one of those masterpieces that would qualify as a musical if Hollywood propagandists hadn’t claimed the genre as their personal property. A must-see. 120 min. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, February 2 through 8.

Read more

From the December 1, 1989 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

Made for West German television in 1980, William Klein’s very entertaining and energetic documentary portrait of the rock-and-roll idol was shot mainly in Macon, Georgia, Little Richard’s hometown, at a time when the singer was a media evangelist for a company selling expensive commemorative Bibles. Midway through production, Little Richard had a financial dispute with the Bible company and announced that he’d received a message from God telling him to walk out on the film. He promptly disappeared. Ordinarily, this would have left the film and filmmaker high and dry. But a deft use of archival footage of Little Richard in his prime, combined with Klein’s usual fascination with media fanfare — including a hilarious procession of black and white Little Richard impersonators — gives the film more than enough to sink its teeth into. And because this is William Klein, the teeth are sharp and the bite is sure. (JR)

From the August 20, 2004 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

I headed the critics’ jury at Rotterdam in 2004 that gave its top prize to Yutaka Tsuchiya’s exceedingly weird fiction documentary video about teenyboppers drifting around Shibuya, Tokyo’s fashionable shopping district. (Another big fan of the film, incidentally, is Claire Denis.) Bewildering in the best sense, this kinky low-tech digital video is fascinating for its Martian-like characters — dressed like fairy-tale figures and preoccupied with obscure rituals — and its singular use of space, which combines the claustrophobia imposed by small cubicles, TV screens, and surveillance cameras with the vast exterior reaches of the urban landscape, confounding our usual grasp of inside and out, public and private. Imagine Blade Runner restaged inside someone’s closet. In Japanese with subtitles. 98 min. (JR)

My column for Caimán cuadernos de cine, submitted in April 2023.

One of the limitations of auteurist criticism is its overlooking of certain remarkable film directors who lack clear auteurist profiles, such as Alfred E. Green, Mervyn LeRoy, and Roy Rowland.

To consider them in reverse order: My work as  consultant on the 1998 re-editing of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil enabled me to become acquainted with Janet Leigh, and when I once asked her whom her favorite director was among those she worked for, her answer was neither Welles nor Hitchcock, both of whom she revered, but the much lesser known Rowland, the first one who directed her (in The Romance of Rosy Ridge, 1947), because he was kind enough to teach her certain basics about moviemaking. When Samuel Fuller cited LeRoy along with John Ford as a role model, I suspect he was thinking not only of LeRoy’s versatility but of his particular distinction in directing such powerful social dramas as I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) and They Won’t Forget (1937).

Alfred E. Green (1889-1960), a favorite of mine, started out as a silent actor and a director of two-reelers and ended his career directing TV episodes. Read more

From the January 24, 2003 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

Ernst Lubitsch’s only completed film in Technicolor (1943), and the greatest of his late films, offers a rosy, meditative, and often very funny view of an irrepressible ladies’ man (Don Ameche in his prime) presenting his life in retrospect to the devil (Laird Cregar). Like a good deal of Lubitsch from roughly The Merry Widow onwards, this is a movie about death as well as personal style, but rarely has the former been treated with such affection for the human condition. Samson Raphaelson’s script is very close to perfection, the sumptuous period sets are a delight, and the secondary cast — Gene Tierney, Charles Coburn, Marjorie Main, Eugene Pallette, and Spring Byington — is wonderful. In many respects, this is Lubitsch’s testament, full of grace, wisdom, and romance (as well as a certain amount of sexism). 112 min. A 35-millimeter print will be shown. Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, Monday, January 27, 8:00, and Thursday, January 30, 6:00, 312-846-2800.

From the April 14, 2006 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

A powerful 1996 neorealist feature by the French Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne that follows the instinctive, makeshift moral progress of a 15-year-old boy named Igor (Jerome Renier), the son of a slum landlord who rents to recently arrived immigrants, some of them illegal. One tenant, from Burkina Faso, falls from a scaffold and makes a dying request to the boy to take care of his wife (Assita Ouedraogo) and infant son; Igor spends the remainder of the movie trying to honor that request, even when it means breaking away from his own father and coping with the scorn and incomprehension of the widow. This is a beautifully realized, richly detailed story, full of humor as well as pathos, and part of the Dardennes’ strength in telling it is their openness to experience and the world around them without being hampered by didacticism. in French with subtitles. 93 min (JR)

From the Chicago Reader (March 1, 1997). — J.R.

Though more amateurish than the other celebrated first features of the French New Wave, Jacques Rivette’s troubled and troubling 1960 account of Parisians in the late 50s remains the most intellectually and philosophically mature, and one of the most beautiful. The specter of world-wide conspiracy and impending apocalypse haunts the characters — a student, an expatriate American, members of a low-budget theater company rehearsing Pericles — as the student tries to recover a tape of guitar music by a deceased Spanish emigre who may have committed suicide. Few films have more effectively captured a period and milieu; Rivette evokes bohemian paranoia and sleepless nights in tiny one-room flats, along with the fragrant, youthful idealism conveyed by the film’s title (which is countered by the opening epigraph from Charles Peguy: “Paris belongs to no one.”) With Jean-Claude Brialy. In French with subtitles. 140 min. (JR)

From the Chicago Reader (December 19, 1994). — J.R.

After Health probably the worst of Robert Altman’s Nashville spin-offs, disappointing in the thinness of its characters and the overall toothlessness of its satire. Altman and cowriter Barbara Shulgasser take on the French fashion world, and among the many plot strands are an amorous reunion of old lovers played by Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren (with a direct allusion to one of their scenes in Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow), a rivalry between three fashion magazine editors (Linda Hunt, Sally Kellerman, Tracey Ullman) hoping to hire a top fashion photographer (Stephen Rea), a liaison between two designers (Richard E. Grant and Forest Whitaker) depicted with a kind of snickering homophobia that seems 20 years out of date, an impromptu romance between two American reporters (Tim Robbins and Julia Roberts), a Marshall Field’s retailer who likes to dress in drag (Danny Aiello), an unconvincing corporate takeover involving Anouk Aimee (the closest thing to a real character in the movie), Rupert Everett, and Lyle Lovett, and an idiotic roving TV interviewer (Kim Basinger). Many of these strands appear to be setups for surprises or payoffs that either never come or are muffled when they do (some last-minute cutting by Miramax probably didn’t help). Read more