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.
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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) (Music Box, 7:00)
Ivan and Alexandra
This directness also breeds an intimacy, a sense of familiarity. By the film’s end we know every mud-bricked courtyard and intersection of the tiny village, we know who lives or might appear there, we know the shape and texture of each water jug and wooden bowl, the walk, habits, and gestures of each villager, as we might know the faces and contours of our own hometown. And since this ambivalence of familiarity and strangeness reflects the boy’s coming to consciousness, our view from without belongs not to ethnology but to memory. (RS) (Univ. of Chicago, 9:15)
