Jonathan Rosenbaum

This 1991 Argentine/Uruguayan coproduction by Argentinian writer-director Adolfo Aristarain was nominated for an Academy Award before being disqualified on a technicality, and by and large it’s better than most foreign movies that get nominated for Oscars. Aristarain compares the plotwhich involves the recollected adolescence of a boy growing up in Argentina’s Bermejo Valleywith that of Shane, but this hardly does it justice. The boy’s parents are an idealistic Jewish doctor (Cecilia Roth) and a sociology professor turned schoolteacher (Federico Luppi), who have helped found a cooperative of poor shepherds with an outspoken and committed nun. The Shane figure is a Spanish geologist-mercenary hired by the principal landowner in the region; all these characters, and the illiterate daughter of a local foreman the boy falls in love with, are treated with a novelistic density and ambiguity, and we’re likely to remember them afterward as we would real people. Recommended. (JR) Read more

In his eighth feature (1994), European cult figure and comic Italian writer-director-performer Nanni Moretti offers a graceful, charming, funny, and intimate three-part film essay. The first part, On My Vespa, follows Moretti as he travels around Rome on his motorbike, visiting various neighborhoods (as well as a couple of movies) and ruminating on what he sees; the second chapter, Islands, has him touring a group of islands off the coast of Italy and Sicily with an intellectual friend, searching for a quiet place to do some work; and Doctors, the most straightforward and factual section, chronicles Moretti’s visits to a string of doctors about a mysterious itching ailment and their conflicting diagnoses and prescriptions. For all the wayward digressions of this film (including some fascinating and hilarious notations about the role of television in contemporary Italy), the experience of the three parts is mysteriously and hauntingly unified, and one comes away with an indelible sense of having had human contact. 100 min. (JR) Read more

New Zealand writer-director Peter Jackson directed this cartoonish 1994 melodrama based on the real-life Parker-Hulme affair, in which two passionately interconnected and obsessive New Zealand teenage girls killed one of their mothers in 1952. Jackson tries to enter as well as celebrate the collective consciousness of the heroines, and though the results are often visually striking, they quickly become glib and mechanical as the lurching zooms and intercut fantasy motifs are repeatedly trotted out like favorite routines. Unlike the campy excess of Jackson’s earlier Dead Alive, this kind of deliberate overkillwhich extends to the broad caricatures of the girls’ families as well as the girls’ feverish fantasy lifeultimately points toward a dearth of ideas rather than a surfeit, though the story remains sufficiently interesting and troubling to hold one’s attention. With Melanie Lynskey, Kate Winslet, and Sarah Peirse. R, 99 min. (JR) Read more

This fruitful collaboration between Chicago independent Joseph Ramirez and Illinois poet Paul Hoover is a major advance over Ramirez’s attempt to yoke cinema with poetry in his first feature, Descent. Shot with a Chicago cast and crew in rural Iowa, Viridian follows the painful adjustments of a divorced young woman and her little boy as they move from one rented farmhouse to another, focusing on her dreams as well as her waking thoughts. Though the plot is minimal, the gorgeous cinematography (by Sean Culver, who also served as editor) and Hoover’s writing, most of which figures as the woman’s offscreen narration, mesh with and complement each other in arresting and mysterious ways. The marriage of lonely figures and landscapes occasionally recalls some of the best features of Jon Jost, and the functional performances by Diane Weyerman, Mathew Brennan, and James Larkin allow Ramirez as well as us to weave meditative moods and reflections around the evocative words and images. Ramirez, Hoover, Culver, and Weyerman will all be present at this world premiere to discuss their work. Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Friday, November 18, 8:00, and Saturday, November 19, 6:00 and 8:00, 443-3737. Read more

In his first American picture (1994), clearly a spin-off of La femme Nikita, nihilist French filmmaker Luc Besson raises the stakes of his popular girl-with-a-gun theme by making the heroine a 12-year-old (Natalie Portman) who learns from a hit man (French movie star Jean Reno) how to handle firearms in order to avenge the slaughter of her family (by a group of sleazy drug barons headed by Gary Oldman). One might assume such a notion to be commercially foolproof, but apparently something or someone intervenedwas it the ratings board or the NRA?and the movie winds up cheating its premise by leaving the girl’s trainer to carry out all the dirty work. For sweaty, suspenseful thriller mechanics the first reel or so is fairly adroit, and action buffs who like explosions probably won’t feel cheated. But the sheer oddness of the New York world constructed for this filmwhere cops and crooks are literally interchangeable, and Oldman and Danny Aiello are stranded in roles that pick over the leavings of earlier partsultimately seems at once too deranged and too mechanical. (JR) Read more

If Ivan Reitman made a family-values comedy about Julia Roberts sprouting a full-blown penis, chances are the results would be called cheap and tasteless; luckily for him, he lives in a culture where he can show Arnold Schwarzenegger pregnant instead and be credited for putting across a cute concept. Making it cute is the sight of Schwarzenegger displaying all sorts of wifely attributesfor me, the most offensive part of the movieas the hunk’s tummy gets bigger. (He and a fellow researcher played by Danny DeVito have been experimenting with a fertility drug.) Also important here is the popular idea in our culture (cf Tootsie, The Crying Game, et al) that guys make the best women anyway. To be fair to the filmmakers, Emma Thompson does a very funny job as the inadvertent egg supplier for Schwarzenegger’s infant, and the filmmakers (including screenwriters Kevin Wade and Chris Conrad) work overtime trying to keep the conceit ideologically inoffensive, even to the point of providing a female character (Pamela Reed) who’s pregnant in sync with Schwarzenegger and confusing us all about which part of Schwarzenegger’s body the baby finally emerges from. Truth to tell, this is a traditional (and traditionally bad) Hollywood movie in more ways than I care to name, but at least Reitman and company do their utmost to keep their tastelessness up to date (1994). Read more

A group of former Disney workers headed by Richard Rich (The Fox and the Hound) put together this formulaic, imitation-Disney animated musical fairy tale (1994). Undemanding kids may be held by it, but adults are likely to think that they’ve seen it all before. The settings tend to be more imaginative than the characters, and one may wonder if the assigning of a French accent to a frog points to some Francophobia on the part of the writers. Among the better-known voices are those of John Cleese, Sandy Duncan, and Jack Palance. (JR) Read more

This unforgettable two-part Canadian TV docudrama (1992) deals forcefully though not exploitatively with a very delicate subject–the sexual abuse and sadistic treatment of boys at a Catholic orphanage in Newfoundland by some of the religious brothers assigned to take care of them. Suggested by real-life events (and consequently held back from public broadcast while a related investigation was under way), the two 95-minute features are sensitively directed by John N. Smith and cogently written by Smith, Des Walsh, and Sam Grana. The first part focuses on the relationship between a key offender and a ten-year-old who has been singled out as “his boy,” leading to a complaint lodged by a janitor and a subsequent police investigation followed by a hasty cover-up. The second part charts the reopening of the case 15 years later, when the offender, who has long since left the order to become a respectable husband and father, is summoned to a hearing, along with his victim and a key witness, both young men now. Neither homophobic nor psychologically pat, the film doesn’t make the mistake of pretending to offer the last word on the subject, and is striking most of all for the nuanced performance of Henry Czerny as the main offender, though all the acting is first-rate. Read more

Along with Oja Kodar, cinematographer and low-budget filmmaker Gary Graver was the most faithful and indefatigable of Orson Welles’s collaborators over the last quarter century of his life, and this endearing but ramshackle feature-length video by Graver (1993) is like a conducted tour through the cameraman’s closet. The most precious documents on view are the original trailers for Citizen Kane and F for Fake, both in effect self-contained short works by Welles. (The first was made during the production of Kane; the second, an extravagant nine minutes long, was made more than three years after the European release of F for Fake, and because the feature’s U.S. distributor refused to process it, it survives only as a black-and-white work print.) But Graver is too generous and indiscriminate to stop there; he also offers the trailers for David and Goliath (a cheesy epic in which Welles plays King Saul) and Kodar’s first feature, Jaded (a singular exploitation item, still unreleased in the U.S., in which one can catch glimpses of Welles’s unreleased The Merchant of Venice). There are also a few fugitive clips from better-known Welles features, but the main topic broached is Welles’s unreleased The Other Side of the Wind, which still awaits completion funding; there’s no plot description or final footage, but its production is recalled by Cameron Mitchell, Susan Strasberg, Frank Marshall, Peter Jason, Curtis Harrington, and Peter Bogdanovich. Read more

A very suggestive, interesting BBC documentary (1993) by Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams about the Takarazuka Revuea Japanese all-female theater company and school, founded in 1914 and based in suburban Osakaand their female fans. The filmmakers don’t make many inferences about the psychosexual implications of this phenomenon, but the performers and fans have a lot to say, and some of the teachers (all male) have a few things to add. (JR) Read more

An exceptional personal documentary, Deborah Hoffman’s Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter is a beautifully precise, acute, intelligent, practical, touching, and even (at times) comic record of how she copes with her discovery that her mother has Alzheimer’s disease. Using video and audio recordings of her interactions with her mother and some on-camera statements of her own, Hoffman charts in haunting detail precisely what memory loss entails, not only for her mother but for her as she adjusts to the situation. Full of wisdom and insight about its subject, this 44-minute essay film is far from depressing. (JR) Read more

The third and best feature (1994, 99 min.) of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s highly ambitious Three Colors trilogy concentrates on the theme of fraternity (Blue tackled liberty, White equality). The principal characters are a young student and model (Irene Jacob) and a cynical retired judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant) whose paths cross by chance in Geneva, and in a way their meeting comes to stand for a good many of the other accidental incidents threaded through this densely textured movie, including one that ties up many of the loose ends of the two previous films. The telephone and (to a lesser degree) the TV set both play substantial roles in linking these and other lives, but they are far from the only linchpins in Kieslowski’s poetic universe; among others are the color red and the filmmaker’s own sardonic identification with the mordant former judge, who eavesdrops on the phone conversations of his neighbors and seems to hate them and himself in about equal measure. In French with subtitles. (JR) Read more

Even a romantic individualist like King Vidor, who would later film Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, was sufficiently stirred by socialist ideals during the Depression to make this exciting independent effort (1934) about an all-American couple who decide to pool their resources with others and build a collective farm. Beautifully directed and edited, this is one of the best and most energetic of Vidor’s early talkies, brimming with hope and enthusiasm and sparked by a wonderful climactic sequence. There’s even some melodrama when a love triangle elbows its way into the plot. With Tom Keene (an uneven performance), Karen Morley, and John Qualen. (JR) Read more

D.W. Griffith takes on the French Revolution, including pussyfooting Robespierre (his epithet), many other famous historical figures, and the sisters Lillian and Dorothy Gish in one of the best of the director’s late silent epics (1922). Shot on 14 acres at Mamaroneck, New York, and based on Adolph Ennery’s 19th-century French play The Two Orphans, the film is full of suspense and melodrama. With Joseph Schildkraut, Lucille LaVerne, Monte Blue, and Louis Wolheim. 150 min. (JR) Read more

Adapting a script by Henri-Georges Clouzot (The Wages of Fear, Diabolique) that Clouzot didn’t live long enough to film, Claude Chabrol dives into this story of obsessive and paranoid jealousy with a great deal of style and confidence, and one is waiting breathlessly for a second act or some sort of denouement when, alas, the film simply ends. The story, set on Lake Saint-Ferreol in Lauraguais, France, takes place largely in the mind of the recent purchaser of a deluxe resort hotel, who starts to suspect irrationally that his newlywed wife (played by Emmanuelle Beart) is having sex with a nearby garage mechanic; his fears grow as his imagination runs amok. (The title means hell.) With Francois Cluzet and Nathalie Cardone. (JR) Read more