There’s a surprising amount to be learned about the state of the world from most international film festivals, and the Chicago International Film Festival, now in its 27th year, is no exception. A film festival can impart information that’s seldom available in the kind of print and TV journalism we’ve been getting in this country in recent years: the texture of everyday life in other countries and the fantasies of other cultures; the kinds of thought, emotion, and reflection that can’t necessarily be captured in sound bites, ancillary markets, and weekend grosses; aesthetic, political, intellectual, and erotic alternatives to the overhyped fare that Entertainment Tonight, At the Movies, Entertainment Weekly, et al are force-feeding us the rest of the year.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
I happened to see two major examples of this genre back-to-back at the Toronto Festival of Festivals last month. The first of these, Lars von Trier’s Europa, a Danish-French-German-Swedish coproduction with English and German dialogue, is a sort of rough European counterpart to Barton Fink, with a postmodernist mix of period nostalgia, technical wizardry, stylistic pizzazz, and shallow content; it will be opening commercially in the U.S. later this year (under a new title, Zentropa, so it won’t be confused with still another recent polyglot coproduction, Agnieszka Holland’s Europa Europa). The second, Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique, a Polish-French coproduction, will be showing twice next weekend at the Chicago festival.
I suppose that one oversimplified reading of the coproduction phenomenon might be that every place in the world is slowly but surely turning into America, culturally if not economically. But such a conclusion doesn’t apply to several other films at this year’s festival: two films from India by Satyajit Ray (Branches of the Tree and The Stranger), one from Japan by Kon Ichikawa (Noh Mask Murderers), one from Italy by Marco Bellocchio (The Conviction), a French film by Jacques Doillon (The Little Criminal), and a Belgian-French coproduction by Chantal Akerman (Night and Day)–none of which, I strongly suspect, qualifies as a polyglot production or as an imitation American movie. While I haven’t at this point seen any of the movies in the last group–for all I know, they could all be disappointments–I firmly believe that any festival that chooses to show the latest work by these directors has to be right on track; most or all of these movies will never open here commercially. The same goes for presenting the Cinematheque Francaise’s restoration of Alexander Volkoff’s silent Casanova, and for the three films I’ve seen of the ten devoted to Spanish producer Elias Querejeta–Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive and The South, Carlos Saura’s Cria, playing here under the title Raise Ravens.
While it’s regrettable that some of the best new features shown last month in Toronto won’t be here–Jacques Rivette’s magnificent four-hour La belle noiseuse from France, Edward Yang’s three-hour A Brighter Summer Day from Taiwan, and Derek Jarman’s Edward II are the first three that come to mind–the first of these will eventually be turning up at the Music Box in a regular commercial run, and the second will show (in a still longer version) at the Film Center.
