The 24th Chicago International Film Festival, now into its top-heavy second week, is offering 60-odd programs this week, reviews and descriptions of which can be found below. It’s particularly pleasing that the festival has managed to squeeze in filmmakers as important as Jean-Luc Godard and Raul Ruiz this week (although the latter is represented only by a half-hour sketch, which follows an hour of dull travelogue by two other filmmakers–one of them, alas, the great Jean Rouch–in Ice Breaker). Last-minute schedule and film changes are always a distinct possibility at this festival, but we’ve tried to keep things as up-to-date as possible; Jean-Claude Tacchella’s touching ode to postwar French cinephilia, for instance, will be playing at 10:30 PM at the Music Box on Thursday, November 3, and not at 10:00 as listed on the festival schedule; and Herz Frank’s The Highest Court will be showing at the Music Box on October 30 at 1:00 rather than the day before.
Friday October 28
South
Timothy Mo’s source novel is a striking piece of cross-cultural criticism, the Anglo-Chinese equivalent of a V.S. Naipaul story. Mo identifies vestiges of premodern values in the heritage of his working-class Chinese characters, who are extremely wary and even contemptuous of their new neighbors in London. This feeling of a culture with a black hole at the center that can reach up and casually obliterate people isn’t duplicated in this pallid adaptation, written by Ian McEwan and directed by Mike Newell, the auteur of The Good Father and Amazing Grace and Chuck. The Triad gangsters who are Mo’s emblems of the dark heart of China have been stripped of their solemnly ritualized secret-society qualities and are depicted as ordinary dull mobsters. Also, somebody handed down a disastrous decree that all the Chinese characters would speak English even with each other–where Mo’s point was precisely that the Chinese are vulnerable partly because they stubbornly remain aloof and culturally exclusive. The sour-sweet balance in all the characters has been tipped toward the sweet, as well, although Hong Kong director-actress Sylvia Chang does some wonderful things with her role as Lily, a stubborn, temperamental, bigoted charmer. Danny Dun, as the doomed Chen, the man who is “disappeared,” never conveys a feeling that malign forces are closing in on him. He’s just a standard urban sad sack, Chinese division. (DC) (Music Box, 8:00)
A Taxing Woman’s Return
A playful reworking of the vampire movie, this beautifully shot flick also has feminist overtones. Men are eliminated from its erotic economy, since elegant, aloof vampire Marie, who haunts the streets of Manhattan, has an unnatural taste for women’s blood. She meets a young fashion photographer, Ariel, who, soon seduced by Marie’s mystery, takes her picture and becomes completely obsessed when her new friend disappears. Complications arise when a well-meaning friend of Arlel’s, not having heard from her for days, breaks into her studio, then takes to an ad agency a particularly alluring black-and-white portrait of Marie in full regalia. The image will become the logo for a chic perfume. Will the vampire be mad at having been used as a symbol of consumerism? Never fear, more consumption will take place, to the satisfaction of both parties, on the very, very red lips of the two heroines. (BR) To be shown with Forbidden to Forbid. (Univ. of Chicago, 11:30)
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I discovered Joao Botelho in 1986, through his second feature, A Portuguese Farewell, an inspired remake of Ozu’s Tokyo Story. Far from being gratuitous, the Portuguese reference to the Japanese master was used to convey a similar kind of malaise: in Lisbon as in Tokyo, the generation gap is affected by a dead body offscreen–that of a son killed in a lost war. But while Ozu barely mentioned and never showed the fatal event, Botelho’s contemporary Portugal (shot in color) was intercut with black-and-white images from the past, of a soldier lost in a senseless colonial fight. With Hard Times, the filmmaker enters the filmic space thus open–the black-and-white footage is the space of memory, but also the space of discontent. Like the best filmmakers of his generation, Botelho is aware that the elusive present can only be understood through the past. To express the ambiguous situation of today’s Portugal (when the hopes raised by the 1975 revolution have been somewhat thwarted by the emergence of a new moneymaking class) he has chosen to illustrate Dickens’s Victorian novel using conventions of early cinema–namely those of D.W. Griffith. Shot in breathtaking black and white in an industrial suburb of Lisbon, the film shows, with sparse dialogue and rigorous mise-en-scene, how the lives of weaker, more sensitive, or more confused people are destroyed by the greed of the self-satisfied bourgeoisie. The true villain of the film, Gradgrind, a schoolteacher with political ambitions, is first shown trying to instill his belief in “facts” in the minds of his pupils. He spots a potential rebel in little Cecilia, the daughter of a circus-horse trainer, and when her father disappears, he decides to adopt her. Later, now a prominent politician, Gradgrind persuades his 20-year-old daughter, Louisa, to marry a 50-year-old industrialist, Bounderby. It takes Botelho only one shot (a close-up of Louisa’s face when her husband kisses her foot on their wedding night) to convey the unhappiness of this marriage. Meanwhile, a worker, Stephen, trapped in a marriage to a drunken hag, is accused of a theft (actually committed by young Thomas Gradgrind). First fleeing to escape punishment, he then decides to return to town to clear his name and is accidentally killed by a truck. Despite their social differences, Louisa and Stephen’s fates are clearly parallels: they are both “innocent souls” crushed because of their inability to speak up about and live out their desires. The last shot, another enigmatic close-up of Louisa’s face (then unable to answer Cecilia’s question “Are you happy?”) becomes a symbol for the entire film. The British actress Julia Britton was cast as Louisa because of her resemblance to Griffith’s virginal heroines. But, in Botelho’s elliptic masterpiece, innocence loses the game and an entire country is searching for its soul. (BR) (Univ. of Chicago, 3:00)
