Jonathan Rosenbaum

The 25th Chicago International Film Festival celebrates its longevity by offering more films this year than ever before. Not counting several special programs, about 130 films are being offered–and once again, quantity rather than quality is the festival’s principal calling card.

With the public tolerance for subtitles shrinking every year, and the number of foreign-language films distributed in this country decreasing correspondingly, any event that offers cinematic evidence of what is happening in other countries has to be valuable. Despite this built-in advantage, however, the Chicago festival unfailingly goes about its task with distressing unevenness. The number of insignificant-to-awful items set to be screened–along with some undeniably good and important films–continues to rankle, if only because festival director Michael Kutza doesn’t seem to have assembled this hodgepodge with any consistent aesthetic, historical, or political position in mind. If you entered a well-stocked bookstore and grabbed the first 130 titles in sight, you’d come up with a collection something like the films in this festival.

Thanks to this year’s large amount of retrospective items, and (one suspects) the critical input of Kutza’s assistant John Porter, who made some of the selections, the number of good films at the festival does seem higher than usual. Read more

The latest film of Sergei Paradjanov (1988), a loose adaptation of a story by Mikhail Lermontov about a Turkish minstrel and maiden, is a relatively minor work with much personal and autobiographical significance. But minor Paradjanov qualifies as something very close to major from most other filmmakers. The style is somewhat akin to the frontal tableaux vivants of The Color of Pomegranates with the addition of some camera movement, dialogue, and offscreen narration; the Azerbaijani dialogue and the subtitled Georgian narration tell the story proper, and the limitation of the visuals in this case is that they tend to be more illustrative than is usual with Paradianov. But even if Ashik Kerib were only a collection of beautiful shots (and it is clearly more than that), they would still be some of the most beautiful shots to be found in contemporary Soviet cinema–richly colored, mysterious, and magical. (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Friday, October 13, 6:00, and Saturday and Sunday, October 14 and 15, 4:00, 443-3737) Read more

Having now experienced two years’ worth of the Chicago International Film Festival, I’m not the least bit surprised to learn that the 25th-anniversary version, the largest to date, is starting on Thursday, October 12, three days before “opening night.” We’ll have plenty to say about this event when it gets fully under way next week; for the moment, here are reviews of the four films to be shown on Thursday, written by Gerald Peary, Ronnie Scheib, Barbara Scharres, and John Stevenson; films preceded by an asterisk (*) are recommended.

The Thursday films will be shown at the Music Box, 3733 N. Southport, and the University of Chicago, 1212 E. 59th St.; ticket prices are $6, $5 for Cinema/Chicago members. For further information, call 644-3456. –Jonathan Rosenbaum

*Jesus of Montreal

Denys Arcand had his first worldwide hit in 1986, with the intellectual sex comedy The Decline of the American Empire, although this smart and witty Quebec director is no novice. A well-known name in Canadian film since a notorious banned sociopolitical documentary in 1970, Arcand turned to fiction features and has become one of the sharpest and most irreverent observers of North American culture and middle-class values working today. In Jesus of Montreal, Daniel, a young unemployed actor, is hired by a priest with patron-of-the-arts pretensions to revive a wheezy 50s passion play for performance on a mountainside above Montreal. Read more

This is commonly known as Jean Renoir’s first American film (1941), although Renoir scholar Alexander Sesonske has established that Renoir’s creative role in the project was severely hampered by producer Darryl F. Zanuck and that he didn’t regard much of the film as his own. (The ending, for instance, was written by Zanuck and directed by Irving Pichel.) Nevertheless, the film has certain beauties and pleasures. Part of it was shot in Georgia’s Okefenokee swamp, and the treatment of the small community living nearby is often pungent and distinctive. With Dana Andrews, Walter Brennan, Anne Baxter, Walter Huston, John Carradine, Ward Bond, and Eugene Pallette. 86 min. (JR) Read more

The first feature of Australian director Bill Bennett (1985) focuses on a Vietnam war veteran (Chris Haywood) who contracts leukemia after his exposure to the defoliant Agent Orange and proceeds to fight the government bureaucracy, with the aid of his wife (Jennifer Cluff), in order to get compensation. Acutely realist in presentation, with solid performances from all of the actors, this is a straightforward, serious drama with a great deal of quiet power. (JR) Read more

Paul Scofield and Helen Mirren are both certainly able as the stars of this ecological parable, which is set on England’s Isle of Bryher at the time of the outbreak of World War I. But it’s not hard to imagine this sentimental, goodhearted effort as a low-budget Technicolor MGM family picture of the early 50s, with, say, Greer Garson and Donald Crisp. Seventy years before the story opens, the Isle of Samson has been blighted by a curse brought by the inhabitants’ preying on a school of beached whales. One of the survivors, now a deaf social outcast known on Bryher as the Birdman (Scofield), teaches two children on the island (Helen Pearce and Max Rennie) how to appreciate and respect nature, and when the whales begin to turn up on Bryher, it becomes their job to avert a repetition of the disaster that befell Samson in 1844. Adapted by Michael Morpurgo from his own novel and directed by Clive Rees, this is a pleasant enough family picture, although not a very dynamic one. (JR) Read more

Also known as White Threads of the Waterfall, this 1933 film by the sublime Kenji Mizoguchi is one of his two silent features to have survived intact. The plot concerns a female entertainer, whose act involves juggling jets of water, and her romantic relationship with a shy young man; years later the man has become a judge and presides over her trial for murder. A major reason why sound films came later to Japan than to almost everywhere else was the figure of the benshithe explainer of silent films who acted out all the parts and added commentary of his or her own, and whose popularity with Japanese audiences was such that they often went to hear and see their favorite benshi rather than their favorite film star. In the new subtitled print that will be shown, the sound track features music as well as narration by the late Shunsui Matsuda, one of the most acclaimed of the benshi perfomers. (JR) Read more

Errol Morris’s second film (1981), made after Gates of Heaven and before The Thin Blue Line, is a 55-minute documentary about the eccentric residents of a small town. Not as interesting as Morris’s other films, although it has its moments. (JR) Read more

This extravagant Fellini phantasmagoria, about 40 minutes long, was the best episode of Spirits of the Dead, a 1968 anthology of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. It’s usually shown dubbed in English. With Terence Stamp. (JR) Read more

More memorable for its title than for anything elsethe Harvard Lampoon once suggested pairing it with Inside Daisy Clover on a double billthis mild Norman Jewison comedy about what happens when a Russian submarine turns up off the New England coast features Alan Arkin (in his film debut), Carl Reiner, Eva Marie Saint, Brian Keith, Jonathan Winters, Paul Ford, and Theodore Bikel. (JR) Read more

Bruce Conner’s remarkable and disturbing 1965 treatment of the John F. Kennedy assassination is simultaneously a personal account of a national tragedy and a challenging analysis of the media that uses startling repetitions and juxtapositions to reformulate the event in all its complex horror. 15 min. (JR) Read more

Perhaps the most conventional work of the gifted Belgian experimental filmmaker Chantal Akerman, this documentary about the 1983 tour of Italy and France by German choreographer Pina Bausch is still personal and interesting. (JR) Read more

Like much of Reds, this is a very old-fashioned Hollywood blockbuster that is supposed to be progressive, although the sentimentality and simplicity of the conception tend to drag it down. An American spinster (Jane Fonda) goes to Mexico in 1913 to teach English, but finds herself in the midst of the Mexican revolution, and drawn to both a neurotic general in Pancho Villa’s army (Jimmy Smits) and a crochety, 71-year-old former journalist from the U.S. (Gregory Peck), the old gringo of the title, who turns out to be Ambrose Bierce. Directed and cowritten by Luis Puenzo (The Official Story), this adaptation of Carlos Fuentes’s novel, a long-nurtured project developed over eight years by Fonda, ultimately founders due to a surfeit of old Hollywood thinking: a rather soggy conception of Bierce and an unconvincing performance by Peck that both smack of shameless Oscar-mongering, a cliched view of Mexicans (including such standbys as the life-enhancing prostitute), and a surprisingly drab and uninteresting performance by Fonda that seems intended to stir us with its simplicity. Not entirely uninterestingsome of the crowd scenes and location shooting is watchable, and Peck can be charming when he doesn’t try too hardbut Fonda’s soupy offscreen narration tends to drown the film’s occasional virtues in unearned pieties (1989). Read more

Janos Rosza’s Hungarian comedy-drama about a contemporary family whose members are too busy to talk to each other, written by Miklos Vamos, begins promisingly with witty notations about the various ways the members of the family get up in the morning, avoid each other, and go about their business. The plot gets fairly convoluted after that, and as its various strands build to a climaxthe mother wants a divorce, the father cheats on her, the son plays hooky and spies on the other family members and neighbors through a periscope, the daughter has no one to talk to and eventually attempts suicide, and all of them neglect a grandmother who is dying in a hospitalthe pacing becomes more willful and leaden, and the film seems especially unsure about when to stop. But there’s still enough humor and observation to keep one interested much of the time. Dorotyya Udvaros, who plays the mother, won the best-actress prize at the Moscow film festival, and the film won the grand prize at Budapest’s film festival (1988). (JR) Read more

Nancy Allen plays a runner at the Chicago Board of Trade who seemingly sells her soul in order to become a successful soybean trader; Dean Stockwell is her evil and greedy employer who later becomes her rival. Writer-director Richard Martini tries to dress this premise up in cutesy behavior and some pithy moral adages about the state of the world, but delivers it in such a listless, uninvolving manner that it’s hard to be carried along by the movie’s honorable intentions. Brad Hall is rather likable as the romantic lead, and Danitra Vance and Ray Charles are around to deliver most of the moral lessons; Sally Kellerman does a bit as a nightclub singer. (JR) Read more