Capone's Art-House Round-Up with I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO, JULIETA, THE SALESMAN, THE AUTOPSY OF JANE DOE, and SAVING BANKSY!!!

Hey, folks. Capone in Chicago here, with a few films that are making their way into art houses or coming out in limited release around America this week (maybe even taking up one whole screen at a multiplex near you). Do your part to support these films, or at least the good ones…


I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO
One of the many Oscar-nominated films in theaters right now is the documentary I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO, a kind of personal history of the American black experience, as told by the late writer James Baldwin in an unfinished book he was writing when he passed away in 1987. As is explained in the film’s introduction, Baldwin told his agent in 1979 that he would be writing “Remember This House,” an first-person account of the lives and assassinations of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, all friends of Baldwin, whose deaths shaped his perception of the civil rights struggle in earth-shifting ways. But when Baldwin himself died, he had completed on 30 pages on the book, which director Raoul Peck (LUMUMBA, MURDER IN PACOT) has transformed and shaped into an electric, visual version of what Baldwin was aiming to accomplish.

Not exactly a biopic—although it certainly tracks the life and career of Baldwin—the film pushes Baldwin’s writings and speeches forward into the present day, showing that his beliefs could have been a part of the Black Lives Matter movement or the push to have more black films recognized at the Academy Awards, all through the eyes of a many writing about his influential friends (a wonderfully subdued Samuel L. Jackson supplies Baldwin’s voice when we hear excerpts from the book). Hopefully with I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO, Baldwin’s words and ideas will be introduced to younger generations who may not realize that the great writer had as clear a sense of race relations in America as any politician or great thinker today.

Although it’s not directly addressed in the film, some of Baldwin’s words also ring true for the gay community (of which he was a proud member), making the significance of the film all the palpable. We get clips of him on various talk shows, deflecting the barely veiled prejudicial questions being thrown at him, including some by noted liberal host Dick Cavett. Baldwin is often quite negative about his hopes for the future of black America, and with good reason, especially in light of the murder of his three friends, and likely other, less famous acquaintances.

The film does not go deep into Baldwin’s other writings or probe especially deep into parts of his life that aren’t relevant to this topic. Yet we still feel like we leave the film knowing a great deal about him that perhaps we didn’t before. Director Peck seems less interested in profiling Baldwin’s life story as he does going deep into his mind and getting to the things that he contemplated the most. He wasn’t afraid of the more violent forms of racist behavior; he was far more concerned with being thought of as less than, because such thoughts could lead to something much worse by adding a layer of shame and feeling unnoticed in generations of black men and women. He was thinking big psychological picture while the rest of the Civil Rights movement focused on specifics like integration and voting rights. Simply put, I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO is essential viewing for all Americans.


JULIETA
Returning to his more plot-heavy yet still quite emotionally gripping style of filmmaking, writer-director Pedro Almodóvar (TALK TO HER, VOLVER, ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER) brings up JULIETA, the complex, time-jumping tale of a woman’s search for her long-estranged daughter. Emma Suarez plays Julieta as a middle-aged woman from Madrid, who is on the verge of pulling up stakes and moving to Portugal with her boyfriend Lorenzo (Dario Grandinetti). But just as she’s taping up the last of her boxes, she runs into one of her daughter Antia’s old friends, who relays a story of randomly running into Antia recently. With almost no explanation to Lorenzo (or the audience), Julieta changes her plans, instead moving back into the apartment where she and her daughter once lived before she left home permanently, and she begins her search for clues as to where Antia might be.

The film then jumps back in time as Julieta begins chronicling the story of her early adult life (the younger version of her is played by Adriana Ugarte), when she met a perfect specimen of a man in fisherman Xoan (Daniel Grao), and they soon had their only child before things take a turn for the worse in their small, loving family. Almodóvar has pulled together material for his film from three stories by Alice Munro (AWAY FROM HER), and the result is an epic family drama spanning decades and loaded with an array of feelings, ranging from adoration to uncut bitterness.

The flashback culminates in an 18-year-old Antia (Blanca Parés) headed off to a retreat in the Pyrenees for spiritual cleansing, and when her mother comes to pick her up, she refuses to leave or even see her to explain. So it’s no surprise that the modern-day Julieta is obsessed with reconnecting with Antia, whom she hears has children of her own now. In a nice turn, the jilted Lorenzo isn’t so easily discouraged and ends up being a key component in Julieta coming to terms with her often-painful past. Julieta is a rich, full-bodied, almost pulpy return to form for Almodóvar, who hasn’t put aside his love for rich colors and stylized production design, but he has put the story first this time around, and there’s a noticeable difference in the tone that is much appreciated, as is the return of one of the director’s favorite actors Rossy de Palma as a nosy, controlling housekeeper in the flashbacks.

Considering how much I loathed Almodóvar’s previous film, I’M SO EXCITED!, I think I would have been happy with anything that was an improvement over that. But JULIETA combines some of his favorite visual and plot elements, with a bit of Hitchcockian mystery added in for an extra level of intrigue. As a result, the character of Julieta (played wonderfully by both actresses) is one of my favorite creations of his (and Munro’s). The film is warm, sexy, tense, and stunning in its choice of locations (cinematographer Jean Claude Larrieu’s work here is especially striking). Almodóvar has always been a favorite of mine, and if he isn’t already, I think it’s time he is considered alongside some of the masters working today, even if many of his stories lean more toward lighter and colorful material.


THE SALESMAN
Nominated for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award, THE SALESMAN reveals to us something that is rarely portrayed in movies from Iran: a detailed look at the country’s rich appreciation of artistic work from nations of the Western world. In this case, the story is set against the backdrop of a troupe of actors preparing to put on a production of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” whose universal messages of broken dreams and dying spirits can still be appreciated in any culture, much like the films of writer-director Asghar Farhadi (FIREWORKS WEDNESDAY, ABOUT ELLY, THE PASTi) seem to speak to all parts of the world, no more so than in his heartbreaking 2011 Oscar-winning family drama A SEPARATION.

THE SALESMAN concerns a married couple who are forced from their home when it literally begins to fall in around them because nearby construction has rattled their building, making it unsafe. Husband Emad (Shahab Hossieni) and wife Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti) are both actors in the play, and are rendered temporarily homeless until someone else working on the production alerts them to an empty apartment operated by a friend. After some confusion about the previous tenant’s property still in the space, the couple moves into the spacious unit, and all seems well.

Not long after the move, a series of confusing events occurs. Rana is about to jump into the shower when the buzzer rings. Assuming it is her husband, she buzzes him in, opens the front door a bit, and get into the shower. The action then jumps to the hospital where Rana is recovering from head wounds requiring stitches, and Emad is nearly driven crazy trying to pry from her exactly what happened. As she tells it, the person who she buzzed in was not her husband but an intruder that approached her in the shower, and glass was shattered in some type of struggle, injuring both Rana and the attacker. She seems intent on not involving the police, more out of shame at having to recount the story of another man seeing her. The question of a sexual assault never overtly comes up, but it lingers over a great deal of the film as one of many unanswered questions.

Was the intruder looking for the previous tenant, who it turns out was a prostitute? Did the man who set them up with the apartment know this and inadvertently put them in danger? Was there even an assault or just a terrible misunderstanding? Emad obsessively investigates the incident, and eventually comes up with the unlikeliest suspect, which further complicated the true nature of the incident. Nothing in a Farhadi film is ever simple. Misunderstandings, complex issues, and simple confusions are a part of each of his sophisticated works, and as a master storyteller he weaves various versions of the truth until something like a consensus rises to the surface, but almost never with that satisfying jolt we often get from American films. And all of the heightened emotion of the investigation takes its toll on both the marriage and the play.

While Rana seems to makes great strides in recovering from her attack and injuries, it’s Emad who seems more wounded in the longer term—his sense of manhood and pride utterly shattered. As he slowly, methodically unpacks the true nature of the injuries to his wife, the actual perpetrator seems less and less important to the incident than the long-reaching aftermath to all parties. Emad’s plan for revenge backfires to such a degree that it’s impossible to watch The Salesman as anything but a cautionary tale about allowing knee-jerk emotions to get the best of you. As an unfiltered drama, the film works to perfection; as a crime story, the pacing and flow are so unlike what Western audiences are used to, it might seems strange and oddly constructed. But as a pure piece of storytelling, THE SALESMAN is phenomenal in its emotional content and examination of the human condition.

Even if you’ve not heard of THE SALESMAN before this review, you probably have heard Farhadi’s name come up in the news in recent days. The gist of it is that he is protesting Trump’s executive order that many feel is discriminatory which prohibits travel from Iran and six other Muslim-majority countries until others from those countries are no longer banned. As such, Farhadi will not attending the Academy Awards later this month where he may quite possibly win for Best Foreign Film.


THE AUTOPSY OF JANE DOE
The richly textured and truly terrifying THE AUTOPSY OF JANE DOE has been impressing festival audiences for months now and has slowly been creeping its way across the country since late December. The film comes courtesy of director Andre Ovredal, the Norwegian filmmaker who gave us the 2010 cult hit TROLLHUNTER, and it centers on a father-son team of coroners (Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch), who work together in their rather retro-looking morgue on the bodies of the recently deceased. Things get weird when they take on a Jane Doe (Olwen Kelly), who has apparently been murdered, although there are no signs of any obvious trauma. But as the pair begin their morbid work, her body reveals to them a horrifying story that takes them from the familiar world of the dead into the world of something beyond death.

Cox brings a familiar but note-perfect version of his usual brand of professionalism and authority as Tommy Tilden, with Hirsch adding a tinge of rebellion and even boredom in son Austin, who has long-term plans with his girlfriend Emma (Ophelia Lovibond) that he hasn’t worked up the courage to tell his father about. But none of that really matters as the autopsy gets more detail oriented and things in their workplace begin to resemble a nightmare. Screenwriters Ian Goldberg and Richard Naing have constructed a tightly wound, beautifully paced, and utterly terrifying bundle of darkness that doesn’t forget to inject its characters with enough personality to make us care whether they live or die.

If you were afraid that the horror offerings were going to trail off in terms of quality in 2017, THE AUTOPSY OF JANE DOE (which technically is a 2016 release, I know) should set your mind at ease. Director Ovredal is the real deal, and this is a great, genuinely scary work.


FINDING BANKSY
Although it doesn’t end the debate about whether street art/graffiti art/anonymous art is a fancy term for vandalism, the documentary FINDING BANKSY lays out the captivating story of a handful of pieces by the most famous street artist, Banksy, that were literally cut out from the walls on which they were painted on and sold at auctions for hundreds of thousands of dollars without a the permission of the artist or any of the profits going to Banksy.

The focus of the film is Brian Greif, a street-art enthusiast, who managed to negotiate with a San Francisco building owner the removal of an iconic Banksy rat image from the side of her home in 2010, shortly after the artist did a series of pieces around the city, most of which were either painted over or otherwise defaced. Greif’s intent was the give the rat painting to a local museum, all of which seemed hesitant because the artist wasn’t involved in the transaction, and apparently the jury is still out on whether street art belongs in a museum at all. Even after Banksy (through official representatives) gives the intended museum his stamp of approval, they won’t take it. Meanwhile, offers from private collector come pouring in leading Greif to conclude that the painting is worth hundreds of thousands, but he still can’t give it away.

FINDING BANKSY gives us a peek into the rather shady world of dealers who trade in works they aren’t officially authorized to sell, and while these shifty characters have all the excuses in the books concerning why what they do is legal and above board, they still tend to operate clandestinely, placing not-for-sale works on display at organized art showcases, but still quietly taking bids on the side. It’s fairly easy to determine whose side of these debates former first-time feature director (and veteran cinematographer) Colin M. Day lands on, so those looking for an unbiased opinion on the value and place of street art in the culture should look elsewhere. But his slant doesn’t make the film any less interesting and informative.

Particularly engrossing is a lengthy interview with artist Ben Eine (a friend of Bansky and one of the few people who knows his true identity and what he looks like), who seems to have an honest and level-headed feelings about the place of street art in the art world and culture in general, with added insight into Banksy’s thought process and mission statement regarding his/her own public work, and whether it should be preserved or commercialized at all. FINDING BANKSY is a rare and impressive look at both the creative process and the way money tends to ruin and distort it.

-- Steve Prokopy
"Capone"
capone@aintitcool.com
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