Jonathan Rosenbaum

A tolerable (if interminable) piece of mediocrity from 1960, adapted by Ernest Lehman from John O’Hara’s lengthy novel about the rise to power of a young war veteran (Paul Newman) among wealthy Pennsylvanians. Directed by Mark Robson; with Joanne Woodward and Myrna Loy. This was made in ‘Scope, so beware of scanned prints. (JR) Read more

Jacques Audiard (See How They Fall) directed this 1996 tale of a young man in France during the closing days of World War II (Mathieu Kassovitz) who fabricates a past for himself as a war hero. Clever, fashionably cynical, and entertaining, this moves along like a cabaret performancefor better and for worse. With Jean-Louis Trintignant, Anouk Grinberg, and Sandrine Kiberlain; Audiard and Alain Le Henry based their screenplay on a novel by Jean-Francois Deniau. 107 min. (JR) Read more

Not a Schwarzenegger sword-and-sorcery epic but a nuanced 1996 drama based on a little-known episode of World War I, in which French troops were compelled to fight an undeclared war in the Balkans long after the armistice had been signed. The title hero (Philippe Torreton), who leads the scruffy guerrilla units, regards himself as more a warrior than a soldier; the only fellow officers he respects are a nobleman in the infantry (Bernard Le Coq) and a humane lieutenant assigned to a military tribunal (Samuel Le Bihan). Director Bertrand Tavernier has a keen eye for period detail, and his use of handheld cameras in the battle scenes is impressive. At times the film evokes Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, though its antiwar sentiments are more querulous than didactic. This is a fine prosaic account of a neglected subject, but don’t expect much poetry. Tavernier and Jean Cosmos adapted an autobiographical novel by Roger Vercel; Torreton Read more

The fourth and best feature of writer-director-producer James L. Brooks (Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, I’ll Do Anything) focuses on a dysfunctional, obsessive-compulsive novelist in Greenwich Village (Jack Nicholson), the gay painter who lives next door (Greg Kinnear), and a waitress and single parent (Helen Hunt) who works nearby but lives in Brooklynall of whom get entangled through a number of personal catastrophes. Whether or not these characters add up to coherent individuals, what Brooks manages to do with them as they struggle mightily to connect with one another is funny, painful, beautiful, and basically truthfula triumph for everyone involved. Mark Andrus wrote the original story and collaborated on the script; with Cuba Gooding Jr. and Shirley Knight. (JR) Read more

Laurence Cote (Up Down Fragile, Les voleurs) plays the daughter of Bulle Ogier (L’amour fou, Irma Vep); both live in a northern suburb of Paris in this 1995 first feature by Emmanuelle Cuau. I sampled this a couple of years ago and liked what I saw; given the distinction of the two actresses involved, it should be well worth seeing. (JR) Read more

Directed by Gael Morel, the young lead of Andre Techine’s Wild Reeds (1996), this is a French feature about the sex lives of several 20-year-olds, gay as well as straight. I only stuck around for the first half-hour or so when I sampled this at Cannes last year and I wasn’t sorry to leave, but maybe I missed something. (JR) Read more

Kirby Dick’s 1996 documentary about performance artist and writer Bob Flanaganborn with cystic fibrosis, an incurable disease that made pain a constant factor in his lifechronicles his masochism, graphically illustrated in his performance pieces, as a way he coped therapeutically with his condition. The film also deals at length with Sheree Rose, who became Flanagan’s dominatrix, companion, and artistic collaborator over the last 15 years of his life, drawing some of its material from her own videotapes as well as Dick’s film footage. What emerges is perhaps the first in-depth look on film at a long-term sadomasochistic relationship, though one might argue that the nature of Rose’s investment is often ambiguous. Overall, this is serious, powerful, and provocative stuff. I can’t recall a film that compelled me to look away from the screen more often. (JR) Read more

Edward Yang’s ambitious and satiric 1994 Taiwanese feature, set over a couple of frenetic days in Taipei, deals with some of the effects of capitalism on personal relationships, weaving a web of romantic, sexual, and professional intrigues among an energetic businesswoman, her reckless fiance, a TV talk-show hostess, an alienated novelist, an avant-garde playwright, and others. As the title suggests, the collision between ancient Chinese beliefs and current economic trends creates a certain sense of vertigo, and this dense comic drama catches the feeling precisely. (JR) Read more

Who needs another killer couple fleeing cross-country with cops in hot pursuit? Yet thanks to this Australian thriller’s aggressive and unnerving formal approach–jump cuts that send us hurtling through the story like a needle skipping across a record and an inventive camera style that defamiliarizes characters as well as settings–the duo’s paranoia is translated into the slithery uncertainty of our own perceptions. The creepy alienation of the lead couple (Frances O’Connor and Matt Day) from their victims and the world in general eventually infects their own relationship, and variations on their mistrust crop up between the cops pursuing them and in just about every other cockeyed existential encounter in the film. Apart from some juicy character acting and striking uses of the outback as landscape, what distinguishes this genre exercise by veteran director Bill Bennett is the metaphysical climate he produces through style, transforming suspense into genuine dread; this is the most interesting reworking of noir materials I’ve seen since After Dark, My Sweet or The Underneath. Pipers Alley. –Jonathan Rosenbaum

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The last feature (1994, 104 min.) of late Cuban director Tomas Gutierrez Alea (Memories of Underdevelopment, The Last Supper), codirected by Juan Carlos Tabio and starring Alea’s wife Mirtha Ibarra. This charming and earthy road comedy, about a solution for the gasoline shortage hatched at an undertakers’ convention, fleetingly recalls William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying as well as Luis Buñuel’s Mexican Bus Ride. It’s touching to see Alea, a couple of years before his own death, deal with death as humorously and as unpretentiously as he does here. Check this one out. In Spanish with subtitles.

Fast, Cheap & Out of Control

Errol Morris’s best film to date–a clear advance on Gates of Heaven, Vernon, Florida, The Thin Blue Line, and A Brief History of Time–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. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, November 21 through 27. –Jonathan Rosenbaum

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Colonial Imaging: Early Films From the Netherlands Film Museum

Imagine you’re an American (or Dutch or French) tourist or explorer during the 1910s or 20s, visiting Africa, Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, and other remote places, gawking at the natives and their everyday lives and customs. At once fascinating and unnerving, this two-day, five-part program of silent films documents that experience. Having previewed about half of these intrusive travelogues on video, minus music and in some cases the early color processes some of them employed, I still found this a dazzling–and troubling–basket of riches. The filmmakers and their presuppositions are as clearly inscribed in the footage as their subjects, whether the spectacle happens to be Egyptians praying in 1920, the remarkable (and racist) animated interludes in a 1918 item about an American national park, extended looks at life in the Dutch East Indies in the teens, or 1928 glimpses of the American south (which imperialistically includes Cuba and Panama). When Martin and Osa Johnson, filming “Australian cannibals” in 1917, implicitly contrast their own “precautionary” rifles with those of the “bloodthirsty tribes” armed by “unscrupulous traders,” the duplicity becomes transparent. Saturday’s programs will include symposia at which an impressive array of local and visiting scholars (among them the University of Chicago’s Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen, and Yuri Tsivian, three of the most sophisticated silent film specialists to be found anywhere) will delve into the meanings and implications of this rare material. Read more

Hide and Seek

Su Friedrich’s 64-minute, black-and-white 1996 narrative about lesbian adolescence in the 60s makes impressive use of found footage from that period; the match between this material and the film’s fiction is often uncanny, assisted by wonderful performances from Chels Holland, Ariel Mara, and Alicia Manta, among others. Friedrich scripted with Cathy Nan Quinlan. On the same program, Friedrich’s Damned If You Don’t (1987), which deconstructs Black Narcissus and delves into history while presenting a portrait of a young nun who fights a losing battle against her sexual desires. Chestnut Station, Saturday, November 15, 5:00.

–Jonathan Rosenbaum

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A Brighter Summer Day

I’ve never read Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, but Edward Yang’s astonishing 230-minute epic (1991), set over one Taipei school year in the early 60s, would fully warrant the subtitle “A Taiwanese Tragedy.” A powerful statement from Yang’s generation about what it means to be Taiwanese, it has a novelistic richness of character, setting, and milieu unmatched by any other 90s film (a richness only partially apparent in its three-hour version). What Yang does with objects — a flashlight, a radio, a tape recorder, a Japanese sword — resonates more deeply than what most directors do with characters, because along with an uncommon understanding and sympathy for teenagers Yang has an exquisite eye for the troubled universe they inhabit. This is a film about alienated identities in a country undergoing a profound existential crisis — a Rebel Without a Cause with much of the same nocturnal lyricism and cosmic despair. Notwithstanding the masterpieces of Hou Hsiao-hsien, the Taiwanese new wave starts here. Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Saturday, November 15, 2:30, and Thursday, November 20, 6:00, 312-443-3737. –Jonathan Rosenbaum

Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still.

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Edward Yang’s angriest film (1996) follows various gangsters, hustlers, jet-setters, and western expatriates in contemporary Taipei, focusing in particular on the disappearance of a tycoon who owes $100 million to the local mob and his grown son, who wants to find him. A high-energy mosaic about the way we live, especially during economic boom conditions, with as much emphasis on sexual behavior as on business tensions, this builds to a climax of shocking violence before resolving itself into a poignant love story; the emotional and generic gear changes are part of what’s so exciting and reckless about it. In some ways it’s a loose remake of Yang’s previous feature, A Confucian Confusion, but it succeeds even more in capturing the tenor of our times. (JR) Read more