The 26th Chicago International Film Festival includes, at the latest count, 110 features and ten additional programs, spaced out over 15 days in two locations –a somewhat more modest menu than last year’s. Apart from this streamlining, it would be a pleasure to report some major improvements in the overall selection, but I’m afraid wanting isn’t having, and from the looks of things, this year’s lineup is not very inspiring.
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One doesn’t want to be churlish about any event that brings this many foreign-language pictures (and 15 American independent features) into the city. Overlooking the question of aesthetics for a moment, I happen to think that just about any international film festival offers a better sense of what’s going on in the world than the news, which is shaped so much nowadays by multinational business interests that it’s often hard to find very much else there. The inestimable value of the Soviet films I’ve seen lately, for instance, is their rendering of the emotional and sensual textures of Soviet life, from the barbaric urban apathy and anger found in The Asthenic Syndrome to the prison conditions glimpsed in Swan Lake–The Zone. The former quasi-allegorical mode of Soviet filmmaking is mingling with the social-realist mode, and the combination, yielding new kinds of suggestive content, is potent enough to recall the discoveries of the French New Wave 30 years ago. While I haven’t seen any of the three Soviet films scheduled for the Chicago festival, I suspect that they’re all probably worth seeing for this reason alone.
All film festivals have to cope with this sorry state of affairs; even the powerful New York festival can’t get everything it wants. But I suspect that what keeps the Chicago festival’s lineup relatively mediocre, despite noble efforts to upgrade the selection, is simply a lack of professional expertise. Last year I was present when a Hungarian director was politely explaining to one of the festival organizers that two or more of his films had recently been projected here at the wrong screen ratio; the staff member apologized, then asked him what a ratio was. I realize average filmgoers can’t be expected to concern themselves with the relative widths and lengths of projected screen images and the lenses and masking devices needed for accurate projection. But when average filmgoers are in charge of running a film festival, certain directors, producers, and distributors might hesitate about entrusting them with their prints–not to mention the future reputations of their films.
Bethune, the Making of a Hero, a blockbuster biopic about an eccentric Canadian doctor who became a hero in Mao’s China, played by Donald Sutherland–the most expensive Canadian feature to date–is muddled in structure but interesting in certain details. And Dennis Hopper’s The Hot Spot–also about to open commercially–is an enjoyable bad movie, a campy piece of noirish sleaze that disappoints only because one expects a lot more from Hopper. Otherwise, there are bound to be a few nuggets amid the usual dross, but your guess is as good as mine about where to look. The reviews below should provide you with a running start; recommended films are preceded by check marks. Be forewarned that last- minute cancellations are always possible, so phoning first is advisable (three titles in the flyer have already been replaced and another feature has been added).
