Chicago International Film Festival: Part One
Part one of HEAVE's coverage of the two week festival.
Welcome to HEAVEmedia.com’s first inaugural coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival! Throughout the next two weeks, we’ll be bringing you opinions and reactions on the best the fest has to offer. We’ll be updating every few days with our crack staff’s reviews of anything and everything they can get at which the CIFF has to offer. A quick intro to said staff:
MA: Max Alborn, freelance movie critic.
AD: Amy Dittmeier, Columbia graduate and staff writer for Gapers Block, The Deli Chicago and HEAVEmedia.
DM: Dominick Mayer, freelance movie critic and HEAVEmedia staff writer.
(The above initials will proceed each review. Just so ya know.)
*= Denotes a film covered by more than one writer.
Friday 10/9
The Girl On The Train - Inspired by events that shook France in 2004, Train centers on a young, 22-year-old Jeanne (Émilie Dequenne) who is as naive as she is aimless. Adored by her mother, Louise (the always lovely Catherine Deneuve), Jeanne finds herself embroiled in a tumultuous relationship with a mysterious young man, ultimately leading her to tell a lie that could alter both her life and the lives of those she loves forever.
What starts as a promising story unfortunately never takes off, as Train lacks the dramatic tone needed for its intended message and attempts to make complex situations rather than complex characters. Train tries to tell the stories of two families, but opts to simply use one as a placeholder for the advancement of the main family in the film. In its attempt to connect these two different families with their various histories, the viewer is left cold to both parties. The lack of chemistry, romantic and otherwise, between virtually every character does not help improve the film's shot at connecting with an audience.
While the cast does their best with what they have (particularly Deneuve as Louise), the script never feels authentic. The dialogue is often lifeless and provides little reverence to the inner workings of what seem like complicated characters. This is especially noticeable when the film shifts in tone to focus on anti-Semitism in France; a relevant issue in contemporary French film but misguided and poorly executed in Train, never feeling authentic to the characters shown. Rather, the issue of anti-Semitism is used to connect the two families, with their subplots in tow, together, rather than focus as a commentary on the issues of religious intolerance and deception.
Writing aside, other aspects of the film are distracting and damage the overall product, such as the editing and poor original score. Scenes are cut seemingly in the middle of conversations and the viewer is left to grasp at straws of what the prior scene was supposed to mean. The score is essentially a mess, ranging from hyper strings and drums to calmer notes and like the film, can finds its voice. All these aspects take Train off course, making it unable to resonate on the emotional level that, like the film's central heroine, it craves. - MA
Made In China – All I can say about this film is that it will likely go down as one of the big disappointments of the festival, at least for me. The buzz around it after the critic screening was extremely positive, and both showings this weekend sold out. Despite this, China is one of those forcibly Whimsical movies that leaves you unable to enjoy it, because it’s too busy trying to add quirks by the gross to remember that it’s (seemingly) supposed to be a comedy.
The film follows Johnson (Jackson Kuehn), an offbeat inventor who starts his own novelty toy company in a small rural town. With dreams of mass production in his head, he makes his way to China, where he’s supposed to meet up with a contact he met through Craigslist. This doesn’t happen, and he wanders for a solid day or so before happening upon a chance meeting with Magnus (Dan Sumpter), a businessman who takes pity on Johnson enough to arrange meetings with companies for him.
The biggest issue with this film is that it only has one joke, and it’s not really a joke: Johnson speaks no Chinese. This was a good idea for a film…when Lost In Translation did it almost six years ago. That film worked because it was funny, but also sweet. This film just has a bunch of montages of hand-drawn, stop-motion animated anecdotes about inventors that string together scenes of Johnson shouting at people in hopes they’ll understand what he’s saying. There is some sweetness (Johnson’s chance meeting-turned-English lesson on a train with a young woman), but the film misses the one note essential to a movie like this: We have to care about Johnson, not just laugh at him. Much of the audience at the Friday screening was laughing, but many seemed to not buy into him as a person and not just a laugh target. This is one of those indie films that’s harmless, but ambles along and won’t stick with anybody in two weeks when the festival is over. – DM
Partners (Complices) – You can’t help but want to live in France sometimes when you see what their modern filmmakers accomplish with genres that in America are tired to the point of total exhaustion. Exhibit A: Partners, which falls into the crime procedural genre, turns many of the conventions of that genre on its ear while at the same time indulging in a lot of its clichés. Somehow, it works.
The film surrounds Vincent and Rebecca (Cyril Descours and Nina Meurisse), a young couple who meet in a cybercafé and immediately take a liking to one another. Vincent is suave and mysterious, and Rebecca is intrigued by this, but very quickly we see just how mysterious he really is. Vincent is a male hustler, a fact he tries to keep quiet, telling Rebecca he works in real estate. She can see through this, especially when considering that he lives in a trailer in the woods, but she likes him far too much to stir the pot.
The other plot strand, which the film juxtaposes with the love story, concerns a pair of police officers (Gilbert Melki and Emmanuelle Devos) who find Vincent’s body face down in a river sometime in the near future after his meet cute with Rebecca. As they begin to dig deeper into the case, they find that male prostitution was the least of his problems; a morally wayward optimologist, Vincent’s pimp and Rebecca’s aloof mother also play a part in the tragic events that slowly unfold.
Despite a lot of old standards (nonlinear narrative is so common in these movies now that it’s more the rule than the exception), the film keeps you on your toes. This can be partially attributed to the surprisingly frank sexuality on display throughout, but even more so to the convincing love story that serves as a glue; the scenes with the detectives, while endearing, follow the standard formula of male cop, female cop sexual tension. Descours and Meurisse are excellent in making it clear how a relatively good girl like Rebecca could fall and stay in love with someone like Vincent. Their work together elevates this film beyond the tropes of its genre enough to merit a watch. – DM
Saturday 10/10
Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl (Singularidades de Uma Rapariga Loura) – If you’ve ever had a conversation with somebody who’s never tried to watch an “art film” about what they think one entails, they would probably describe something like this movie. Despite clocking in at only 63 minutes, which is barely feature length if it even qualifies, the film feels like it lasts at least three times as long. The plot is threadbare: Macario (Ricardo Trepa) sees a “blond hair girl,” Luisa (Catarina Wallenstein) from his office window one day. Later, he is on a train describing the great misfortune that she caused him to a passenger who for most of the film does not make eye contact with him once.
Now, credit where credit is amply due. The film’s director, Manoel de Oliveira, is 101 years old and still making movies. I have nothing but the utmost respect for such a feat, but the downside is that it’s clear he stopped learning new ways to make movies around 1967. The film has that soft-focus grain that exists as a product of that time, and it drags its feet along at the slowest imaginable pace, languishing on every shot of a cultural landmark. Speaking of which, the middle third of this movie is absolutely ridiculous. Macario goes to what looks like a Spanish country club, and wanders around playing poker with rich people and listening to a harpist. This scene lasts twelve minutes out of the hour-long running time. This was clocked accurately.
One of the major contentions by critics who favor films of this nature is that people simply don’t “get” foreign cinema. I say bullshit. Foreign film is not hard to get when it’s made competently, out of a story that’s worth spending the money on to film. Here, we have a film that really has no reason to exist other than a marvel of how old somebody can be and still make movies. Or, to caution against dating kleptomaniacs. – DM
Spy(ies) - The spy/espionage genre is a strained one, often being equated more with the 007 series rather than films like The Conversation. Helmed by director Nicolas Saada and hailing from France, Spy(ies) does not revolutionize the genre but honors it due to its attention to characters over gadgetry.
Spy(ies) stars Guillaume Canet as Vincent, an intelligent but unmotivated airport worker who illegally opens the wrong bag, its contents engulfing his partner in flames. Faced with jail time, Vincent is given the choice to be trained as an “asset”: an intelligence agent put in the field to discover the owner and origins of the deadly diplomatic bag. Sent to London and under the guidance of MI5 agent Palmer (played by vet Stephen Rea, clearly having a good time), Vincent must seduce Claire (French film vet Geraldine Pailhas), the wife of a shady pharmaceutical executive with connections to the bag and its contents.
Canet is effective as a man thrust into a network of people dependent on each other to survive, yet remains alone and flawed. When not doing reconnaissance work, Vincent can be found drinking alone in front of the TV or getting into fights with strangers on the street. Canet pulls off Vincent's actions with a cool and calm demeanor that never feels forced and is understated in its execution. However, Pailhas as Claire is the strongest player in the film as a woman divided between her past marriage, her loyalty to her ex-husband and her growing connection with Vincent. Specific scenes towards the end of the film show why Pailhas is in such high demand; her very look commands attention.
Spy(ies) is good, though at times feels slightly stretched. The script spends most of its focus on the relationship between Vincent and Claire and less time on the espionage element of the film, leaving the viewer to ponder just how far or dangerous is the conspiracy surrounding the characters. Perhaps the weakest point in the film is the last ten minutes, which disrupts the tone established through the bulk of the film and frankly felt rushed.
The biggest reason why Spy(ies) deserves a look is the respect it holds for the spy genre. The film understands that the essence of being a spy does not center on gadgets or exotic locales, but observation, deception and the fallout when such actions come to light. Ultimately, Spy(ies) works in its portrayal of flawed human beings and their respective desires to be seen with new eyes. – MA
Sunday 10/11
Beyond Ipanema – Brazil is one of those countries that terrifies the stuffing out of me. It's hard to imagine that this country's biggest export, other than amazing stories about corrupt policemen and machete gang wars, is music. In Beyond Ipanema, filmmaker Guto Barra and producer Béco Dranoff explore the influence Brazilian music has had on American music from the 1950s onward. Beginning with Carmen Miranda's huge success in 20th Century Fox's films, Brazilian music has infiltrated every aspect of American music. As a music nerd, it was interesting to see the extent of tropicália and bossa nova's influence in America. The godfather of modern music David Byrne, whose record label Luaka Bop started the world music craze in the late 80s, as well as many top Brazilian artists lead the documentary's narrative through the years of Brazilian-infused music in the US.
The documentary may be a little hard to handle if you're not into modern music, electronic, or jazz, however if you are there is a slew of fantastic interviews from American and popular artists that drive home the point of the film. Devendra Banhart, MIA, Thievery Corporation, Seu Jorge, and countless other modern musicians add their two sense as to how Brazilian music has changed their way of making music. The effectiveness of the documentary is also helped along by the director and producer. Both are not filmmakers by trade, but are instead very into the music business. Producer Dranoff even makes a small appearance in some archival footage, talking about a compilation he made called Red Hot + Rio. Sometimes doc directors can get caught up in the facts of the film and leave out the passion of it. Barra and Dranoff do a fantastic job of making Beyond Ipanema all about the music. – AD
*Cedar Boys – Coming from Australia and directed by Serhat Caradee, Cedar Boys is a mixed bag. It tells the story of a young Lebanese man named Tarek (Les Chantery), who wants what almost every young man wants: acceptance, money and a beautiful girlfriend he can call his own. However, being of Lebanese descent, Tarek finds all of these things difficult to get his hands on in the suburbs of Australia. When his best friend approaches him with a plan to rob a drug house, Tarek sees a way to get all he wants, but fails to understand the consequences involved when stealing from drug dealers.
Still with us? In truth, I turned to Dominick at the end credits, who promptly told me how the film “felt six hours long.” I could not have agreed more. Boys starts off promising, giving us a sense of impending danger for each of the characters involved in the drug robbery. In looking at the film as a whole, the first five minutes kill any dramatic impact intended by the filmmakers in the film's last ten. You know what is going to happen and you know who it is going to happen to. In stories such as these, if you know how it ends, you want to at least care about the characters before it ends.
Unfortunately, it did not happen for me. Chantery and Bren Foster (who plays Tarek's imprisoned brother Jamal) do their best to build characters that inspire feelings of remorse and brotherhood, but the script given comes off as flat and unauthentic to the beats of the film. Secondary characters set up in the start of the film seem to fall by the wayside as the film progresses, leaving the viewer cold to nearly everybody onscreen.
What the film does get right is a sense of atmosphere, notably in its many party/club scenes. The filmmakers build a cultural ideal that the beautiful life consists of drugs, money, and sex. In case you were born a year or so ago, these themes are all too familiar, especially in a drama that centers on drugs. In the film's defense, Tarek has other issues to contend with, like helping his jailed brother with his appeal or dealing with racism in Australia, but these issues take a back seat to atmosphere. Unfortunately, the atmosphere is not that exciting or original and I found that by the end credits I had watched a film that felt far longer than it really was and felt like I had gained or experienced little. Not to say that Cedar Boys is a horrible film; it simply feels all too familiar and attempts to say too much in a single breath. – MA
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A band of down-on-their-luck blue-collar workers happen upon a stash of drugs and try to pawn them off for themselves, only to discover that the drug trade isn’t as glamorous as it seems. The main issue with Cedar Boys is that there wasn’t a single scene that I hadn’t seen in another movie before. There’s the sweet but deluded hero, the drug dealer sidekick who falls too deep into the gangsta lifestyle, the brother in jail who tries to serve as a warning of things to come. Oh, and there’s the attractive blonde who’s in the film only to serve as an ideal and provide the film’s obligatory sex scene.
There’s not much wrong with Boys as far as mechanics are concerned, but there’s something lifeless about it. Maybe it’s the grainy photography which dances dangerously on the line of so-low-budget-it-can’t-afford-to-focus quite a few times. Or maybe it’s that the film really gives you no reason to be invested in a single character, as everybody in the movie is simply a “type.” Or, as Max mentioned above, it could be that the film runs at a relatively lean 106 minutes, but feels like an absolute dirge. There’s always a certain guilt as a critic when you have to meet a film not with love or hate, but simply indifference, but this film warrants it. It’s neither good nor bad, it’s just kind of there. – DM
The Castle – For this year’s festival, one of the earliest Special Presentations was this 1997 Australian comedy about a family fighting an airport expansion that involves them losing their home, handpicked by Roger Ebert for screening. Michael Caton runs away with this movie as Darryl Kerrigan, the patriarch of a cracked family who live in a house that backs up to an airport landing strip. The airport uses a legal loophole to claim the land for themselves, and the Kerrigan clan rebel. Of course, “rebellion” is a highly relative term when one of them is a slightly airheaded, newly married daughter (married to a babyfaced Eric Bana, no less!), the sons are in jail and obsessed with classifieds in newspapers and Darryl’s wife Sal (Anne Tenney) spends her days dabbling in hobbies.
Ebert mentioned before the screening that Harvey Weinstein picked this film up while still at Miramax, but never released it because it was “too Australian” to find an audience. What’s remarkable is how much of this film can be seen in the current wave of comedy. It follows something of a mockumentary style, which Christopher Guest started but really hit home in the new millennium. It’s also remarkably sweet and tender throughout, which makes a lot of the laughs hit home even harder; you can’t help but love every character in this movie, down to the bumbling local lawyer Darryl hires to take on a constitutional law hearing or the Arab next door neighbor who doesn’t seem to own anything but overalls. It’s not phenomenal, but it’s nothing if not a crowd pleaser, and given how depressing a lot of the fare has been this year, I couldn’t ask for more. – DM
Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (L’Enfer D’Henri-Georges Clouzot) – The title of this sorta-documentary is quite clever, because it’s both about famed French new wave director Clouzot’s never-finished epic Inferno and the artistic downward spiral the director entered into trying to make it. Early on, the frame of the film is established: fifteen reels containing thirteen hours of footage of Inferno have remained dormant for years now, because they lack both any kind of finalized audio and a number of scenes key to the plot. To finish this up and bring it (kind of) to life, filmmakers Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea Annonier use a mixture of created audio, remastered original footage and even table readings of the original script, along with interviews from many of the crew who watched it all happen, to bring Clouzot’s could-have-been-masterpiece to life.
As far as Clouzot’s original footage goes, the striking impression is that the man was way ahead of the curve. The film was set to star his muse-of-the-moment Romy Schneider as a woman beleaguered by her compulsively jealous husband, played initially by Serge Reggiani. It was to document the husband’s slow descent into paranoid madness, accompanied by endless visual spirals and other Technicolor camera tricks that would go on to become staples of the 1960s avant-garde cinema movement. Thematically, the film was also steeped in a great deal of blunt, implied and image-generated sexuality, a perfect showcase for Schneider, who stuns even today as an example of what the real movie starlets used to look like.
However, the film was never finished, and there are no punches pulled in discussing how Clouzot became increasingly erratic throughout the shoot, pushing his stars to the point of hazardous exhaustion and rarely being able to get through a day’s scheduled shooting due to his obsessive attention to every single detail. As both a portrait of an artist becoming trapped inside his own work and a testament to the roots of art-house cinema today, …Inferno is simply wonderful. This is not only the best film of the festival so far, but also the year’s best documentary to date. – DM
The Maid - Fresh from its strong run at Sundance, director Sebastian Silva has knocked one out of the park with The Maid. Catalina Saavedra stars as Raquel, an in-house maid who cares for a family of six. Her borderline-OCD behavior has kept the house in order for over 20 years, but now tensions seem to be mounting high for the overworked Raquel. In an attempt to ease her workload, her employers hire a second, younger maid to assist her. Raquel, unwilling to surrender the house and family to an outsider, acts out in various manners that leave the audience questioning how far she will go to keep her “home.”
The concept strikes one as a drama, and it is in the sense that it is a character piece about a troubled woman. However, the film is not devoid of many instances of dark humor. Saavedra, who truly shines despite her near-constant frown, is primarily responsible for this humor, especially in the way she takes passive aggressiveness to an entirely new level in her attempts to foil the new maid. However, credit must be given to the secondary characters, who play small but pivotal roles and provide some much needed contrast (and humor) to Raquel's icy demeanor.
It should be noted that nearly the entire 94-minute runtime focuses on Raquel. Were it not for Saavedra's fantastic performance, the film would be lifeless and without cause. Saavedra plays Raquel in a manner that inspires feelings of sympathy, anger and humor, sometimes all at once. Her face is stone cold throughout the film and yet one cannot help but wonder what emotions lie behind it. Raquel is a woman of few words but many thoughts, and Saavedra could not have been better in portraying a woman entirely devoted to a life that does not necessarily belong to her.
Devoid of gloss, Maid is a refreshing film for me personally during the CIFF. It does not emphasize its themes at the cost of its characters, whether concerning Raquel or the family that surrounds her. In the beginning, Raquel made me uncomfortable and was easy to dislike. However, through Saavedra's fantastic performance, the well done secondary family and friends and sharp direction, The Maid does not get bogged down in pretentiousness. Rather, the film is sincere in its characters and its belief that even the smallest acts can play a large part in the life of another human being. – MA
Mother – One of the more buzzed-about films coming out of this past May’s Cannes Film Festival, Mother is the new psychological drama/thriller from acclaimed Korean director Joon-ho Bong, who scored a major international crossover hit back in 2006 with his mashup monster movie The Host. Here, he focuses less on CGI creatures and more on a pair of deeply disturbed people.
Hye-ja (Kim Hye-ja) is a doting but steely woman, working in her craft shop by day while constantly tending to her son Do-joon (Won Bin). Do-joon is mentally handicapped, though the degree to which he is remains unknown for the most part. At the very least, he’s in no condition to be associating with friends like Jin-tae (Jin Goon), who encourages Do-joon to aggressively pursue a hit-and-run driver and teaches him about the virtues of sex. Early in the film, a young girl is murdered. Do-joon was the last man to come in contact with her, and some seemingly planted evidence leads to his being convicted for her murder. Hye-ja refuses to believe this, but when the police inform her of how little she can do, she elects to prove her son’s innocence on her own.
The film is arresting in the manner in which it addresses Do-joon’s condition, and all the tragedy that comes out of it, not only in scenes like the one where Do-joon confesses to the murder solely because he fails to grasp the concept of a police interrogation, but because of what happens when anybody in the film accidentally acknowledges his condition. Up to a point, we are left to wonder why Hye-ja doesn’t simply bring up his handicap to the police. It soon becomes apparent that her love for him as a mother leads her to withhold quite a bit. It also emerges that Hye-ja might have some serious problems of her own.
A lot has been made of this film receiving candidacy as South Korea’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar for next year over fellow cult-beloved Korean filmmaker Chan-wook Park’s Thirst. After watching both, I can see it quite easily. The latter is a brutal film that traffics heavily in the supernatural, while Mother deals instead with the inherent eeriness of motherly love, and the extremes to which it can be taken to protect those who receive it. This isn’t to say the film doesn’t have its moments of gasp-worthy violence, but that they aren’t a focus and come few and far between. If the film missteps at any point, it’s in the internal logic of the film, which stumbles at a few points before wrapping up a little too easily at the end. Without giving away too much, there is a sequence in which Hye-ja’s acupuncture needles are returned to her. The circumstances under which they are found and given back ring false to the character who returns them. Regardless, this is one of the few films at the festival so far that has definite guaranteed theatrical distribution, and is sure to find an audience both with fans of Joon-ho’s work and with genre fans in general. – DM
Posted by Dominick Mayer, Dominick Mayer on Oct 13, 2009 @ 10:00 am
