• = recommended

This view is of necessity also that of the audience. But due to the disconcerting directness of Ouedraogo’s story telling and that of the villagers themselves, the boy’s questioning of the conventional wisdom of his society takes place within a calm acceptance that neither demands nor precludes change.

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. What the priest doesn’t anticipate is the obsession with the project that Daniel develops. Recruiting a disparate band of actors, he discards the old script and creates a multimedia performance piece grounded in the latest Middle Eastern research and awash in modern doubts concerning faith and divinity. Enraged church officials try to shut the show down, while trend-sniffing critics and talk-show hosts hail it as the city’s hottest ticket in avant-garde theater, making Daniel, who portrays Jesus, an instant celebrity. Arcand presents this as satire, and it can be read in any number of ways–as a battle between the sacred and the profane, the personal and the commercial, or censorship and freedom. There are some truly hilarious moments, including a wicked deadpan parody of auditions for a beer commercial, and a sequence in which Daniel’s actors scandalize their patron with an improvised string of mocking skits, the most memorable being “Kabuki Passion Play.” However, underlying this story with its obvious parallels between Daniel’s newfound career and the public life of Jesus is the director’s serious questioning of the nature of belief in contemporary life. It’s a risky move for Arcand commercially: the hip, upwardly mobile audience that has adored his earlier japes at modern sex may be less comfortable with an unabashed acknowledgment of spiritual conflict. The actual performance of the play goes on long enough to border on the polemical, but it’s not a terrible price to pay for the film’s melodramatic and quite powerful ending. (BS) (Univ. of Chicago, 7:00)

*Birth

By the Will of God

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A visually imposing work on the contrasting fates of two brothers, this Czech feature from Milos Zabransky is clearly influenced by the early surreal fantasies of Vera Chytilova (in particular About Something Else). Dan (Ondrej Vetchy) is reckless and irresponsible, a joker and womanizer out for a good time (he orders his girlfriend to do a striptease to pay off his bar bill). His older brother Boza (Jiri Schmitzer) is orderly and timid. He can’t stand Dan’s behavior, but he’s at a loss to do anything about it. The brothers, who share a run-down home with their mother, are both employed by a print shop, and when a beautiful and passionate press operator named Magda (Ivana Velichova) turns up, naturally Boza falls for her. She’s won over instead by Dan, but complications ensue when, in this order, Magda learns she’s pregnant, Dan is drafted into the army, and Boza agrees to marry her. Zabransky’s style i’s swift and clean (the film only runs 78 minutes); the sex scenes have an unexpected erotic charge, and his view of city life is sharply observed. His Czechoslovakia is a gray and brown wasteland of poverty and despair, of crowded buses and ineffectiveness. Stylistically he traffics in Christian symbolism and still-camera moves, which aren’t wholly successful but build toward a mournful resolution. What the film lacks is any real depth or substance. Some of the incidental pleasures found in longer films are blocked out entirely (there aren’t any secondary characters of real value and neither Magda nor Boza is drawn out). The introduction of the mother (Jirina Trebicka), who clearly favors Dan (we find out why near the end), isn’t particularly revealing. Despite all of this, the movie is still worth seeing for its dazzling visual effects and its fervently subversive notion of making Dan the film’s moral guardian and most sympathetic character. If it lacks the freewheeling inventiveness found in the best of the Czech New Wave, it’s still a significant improvement over anything Jiri Menzel has done recently. (PZM) (Music Box, 3:00)

It’s a sure sign of a classy production these days when you hear the strains of Sibelius’s Valse Triste on the soundtrack, as in East German director Roland Graf’s film based on the last, drug- and alcohol-ridden years of socialist novelist Hans Fallada. Not that there’s anything wrong with being classy, but a film such as this, a period piece carefully crafted for international festival viewing and television sales, so often has the juice drained from its subject, leaving a husk of meticulous research and superb set decoration. The centerpiece of this film is a dedicated and nuanced performance by Jorg Gudzuhn in a role that often requires him to communicate moods nonverbally and to do what a novelist does, namely sit around writing. The story is set in the late 30s, when Fallada has removed himself along with his wife and family to a remote village to avoid engagement with the Nazis, although he does a brief jail term for socialist activities. Careful is the word for this film, and while that works to its advantage in the evident pains taken with the recreation of the details of Fallada’s life, it is a disadvantage in the opaque view that it provides, offering few insights into what fueled Fallada personally or professionally. Beautifully photographed in muted light (and in color, contrary to the festival schedule listing), it gives the feeling of peering into the past. (BS) (Village, 3:00)