Hey, everyone. Capone in Chicago here, to give you the second and final round up of my report on one of my absolute favorite film festivals in the Windy City every year, the European Union Film Festival, which takes place at the Gene Siskel Film Center (http://www.siskelfilmcenter.com).
The festival has grown so much since it's birth 10 years ago. It's now a month-long event that features 55 films this year from 24 EU countries, and it's basically a road map through the best film the continent has to offer. This year's lineup, which runs through the end of the month (concluding with the Oscar-nominated Danish offering AFTER THE WEDDING), has been overall the finest I've seen in the festival's 10 years. Look for many of these films to open over the course of the next year.
THE SECRET LIFE OF WORDS
Although technically from Spain, this stunning English-language work from director Isabel Coixet (MY LIFE WITHOUT ME) is an emotional perfect storm of a woman with a crippling past and a man with a serious medical condition who come together under bizarre circumstances to heal each other. If you've never had the wind knocked out of you by a film, try this one out for size. Sarah Polley returns under Coixet's direction (as she did in MY LIFE) as a partially deaf assembly line worker who often turns off her hearing aid so she can shut herself off from the world. Her boss forces her to take some time off, and while on a fairly mundane vacation, she overhears a man seeking a nurse for an oil rig worker hurt in a fire. Apparently a former nurse, Polley accept the job and is flown to the rig to help the slightly burned man (Tim Robbins). What follows is one of the most curious and fascinating give and takes I've ever seen committed to film. The way Robbins draws out tiny bits of information from his caregiver, who is in no way eager to give even the smallest bit of information. At its core, THE SECRET LIFE OF WORDS is a love story, but this couple has to earn the right to love each other before the filmmaker decides whether to let them come together. In a role written for her by Coixet, Polley has never, ever been better, and there won't be a man or woman alive who won't fall in love with her sheltered character. The power behind her eyes and in her movements will make you forget to breathe. And Robbins gives us one of the great roles of his long career as well. I should also mention a brief but moving appearance by Julie Christie as a mysterious woman who Polley calls occasionally but says nothing. When all is revealed about her past, it will probably cause you physical anguish. This is my favorite film of the festival, period.
EXTERMINATING ANGELS
It seems like once or twice a year, a film comes around that promises (and often delivers) lots of real-life sex, but in a slightly more sophisticated and mature presentation than your average XXX feature. French director Jean-Claude Brisseau took an incident in his career (when several actresses successfully sued him for sexual harassment after auditioning for him in connection with his 2002 feature Secret Things) as the basis for EXTERMINATING ANGELS. Frederic van den Driessche acts as Brisseau's stand in as a director casting the leads in what will be a sexually explicit, in-depth analysis of female sexuality. Therefore, the director must see how his actress work and have sex together, which they do with him in the room. Although he never takes part in any of the sex (he's a happily married man, after all), the intimate feelings set loose in these sessions unleash a furor of emotional instability in all of his actresses, culminating in a similar lawsuit against the director. EXTERMINATING ANGELS is less a profile of the feminine mystique and more an examination of a handful of crazy bitches, at least in the director's eyes. It's ultimately a cynical and vengeful piece that is often quite sensual but more often a nasty piece of cinematic payback to women Brisseau probably trusted at one point and now feels betrayed by. It makes for interesting filmmaking, but that doesn't make it art. The film plays Saturday, March 24 at 8pm.
THE TIGER AND THE SNOW
I've been hearing rumblings about this film for more than a year now, and I couldn't pass up the opportunity of seeing this, although I felt fairly certain that I would abhor Roberto Benigni's take on the war in Iraq. Much as he did with his Oscar-winning LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL, which injected some much-needed and long overdue humor into the Holocaust, THE TIGER AND THE SNOW takes a love story and drops it into the middle of Baghdad in the early days of American invasion. Benigni plays a poetry professor who is lovesick for an old flame (Benigni's real-life wife and frequent co-star Nicoletta Braschi), who just happens to be working for and traveling with an old friend of Benigni, an Arab poet played by Jean Reno. When Reno and Braschi travel to Baghdad and she is injured, Benigni sneaks into Iraq with a Red Cross team and finds his mortally wounded love while the war outside rages on. True to form, Benigni (who also directed and co-wrote the screenplay) taps into his usually spastic persona as he finds the humor in minefields, trigger-happy American G.I.s and suicide bombers. He takes advantage of the fact that his dark features could be mistaken for Middle Eastern, and tears through war-torn Baghdad with the soul purpose of saving the life of a woman who claims not to care for him any longer. For no particular reason, the masterful Tom Waits (Benigni's DOWN BY LAW screen partner) appears as a wedding singer in a bizarre dream sequence. The cameo doesn't help, not even close. The film isn't offensive in the way it makes light of the war; it's just ill-informed, hopelessly sentimental, and, above all, boring.
ADAM'S APPLES
On the festival circuit for more than a year, this offering from Denmark is absolutely one of my favorites of the festival. Writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen (writer of THE KING IS ALIVE, OPEN HEARTS, MIFUNE, and the recent Oscar-nominated AFTER THE WEDDING, which is the EU Festival's Closing Night film) tells a uniquely amusing story of forgiveness under almost any circumstances. Recent Bond villain Mads Mikkelsen plays a small-town minister who takes on former convicts to work and live in his church. A new dweller named Adam (Ulrich Thomsen) comes the church, and he immediately begins trouble amid those living there. Adam, a skinhead and habitual instigator, starts fights with everyone, including the nerdy cleric, who takes his beatings and reacts as if they never happened. He was punched because God decided he needed to get punched, is his way of thinking. But as the film goes on, we learn things about the holy man's past that not only explain his behavior, but also make us concerned for his well-being and state of mind. Mikkelsen and Thomsen are extraordinary together as the yin and yang of human behavior. The story may be simple, but I never quite new where it was going to take me, and it was utterly fascinating to see what would happen next. Jensen has a gift for writing stories about unlike people put into situation where they are forced to live together. He examines the way people re-adjust their actions and reactions, and often shows us it's easier to get along with strangers than we would imagine.
DON'T TELL
Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at last year's Oscars, this Italian work from director Cristina Comencini tells the tale of the crippling effects a woman's past has on her otherwise promising future. Giovanna Mezzogiorno (from the original Italian version of THE LAST KISS) plays Sabina, a woman very happy in her marriage and her life until she begins have terrifying nightmares (or perhaps remembrances) of herself as a child. These visions are ill timed, since she has also recently discovered she's pregnant, and uses the baby as an excuse to stop being intimate with her husband. The truth is something about her nightmares is resulting in her not wanting to be touched by anyone. She seeks out her brother, a teacher in America, for clues as to something in their shared past that could account for her disturbances. I don't think anyone who's ever seen a film about child abuse is going to be particularly shocked by what Sabina uncovers and eventually remembers about her childhood, but that doesn't make the film any less unsettling. Even a subplot involving two of Sabina's closest friends (a middle-aged woman whose husband has just left her, and a blind lesbian) is interesting and ties in nicely to the main story. Overall, DON'T TELL is a smart and respectful movie that gets to the core of what torments a person and what makes them whole again.
KLIMT
Boy, did I dislike the pretentious, nonsensical drivel from the so-called legendary director Raul Ruiz (TIME REGAINED, GENEALOGIES OF A CRIME) about the life of artist Gustav Klimt (John Malkovich) circa turn-of-the-last-century Vienna. The screenplay seems to pride itself on incomprehensible ramblings that are meant to pass for high-concept versions of intellectual speak. Despite an impressive cast that features Saffron Burrows, Veronica Ferres, Stephen Dillaine and Nikolai Kinski (son and virtual lookalike of Klaus), the film never gets its footing in either the real world or something more surreal that might at least be excused as Ruiz attempting to show us the world through Klimt's warped mind and over-stimulated body. The cut shown at the festival will be Ruiz's international release cut, we're told, but I can't imagine that being enough to salvage this spastic bit of storytelling.
THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO CINEMA
The title of this film is something of a misnomer, but it's catchy and it's something that will (and should) draw the crowds in to see this remarkably entertaining, insightful and often hilarious documentary about the hidden and not-so hidden sexual meanings in some of our favorite films. Although renowned structuralist Slavoj Zizek probably spends a little too much time focusing on the works of Alfred Hitchcock, Andrei Tarkovsky and David Lynch (three perverts, to be sure), I loved watching him pick apart everything from the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin to THE MATRIX and REVENGE OF THE SITH. What makes his on-screen analysis all the more amusing is his (and director Sophie Fiennes, sister to Joseph and Ralph) choice to place himself in some of the actual locations where the scenes were shot — the hotel balcony from THE CONVERSATION, alongside the Golden Gate Bridge at the exact spot where Jimmy Stewart sees Kim Novak jump in VERTIGO and, of course, throughout the Psycho house. Zizek doesn't look particularly comfortable in front of the camera, but at the same time, it's clear there's nowhere else he'd rather be. He has a heavy Eastern European accent and a slight lisp that makes his delivery priceless. But more than anything this three-part, two-and-a-half hour crash course in the under-language of the 43 films he spotlights is informative and will make you look at these (and probably most) films a little more closely from now on. It's an phenomenal achievement.
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