Chicago Film Festival: Michael Clayton

Michael Clayton is the fall season's most interesting and rewarding contradiction. Overplotted, and guilty of repeating the same backward-looping structure that writer-director Tony Gilroy just pulled off with greater ingenuity in The Bourne Ultimatum, but nonetheless commanding in its shape and refreshingly alert to how a real person usually experiences one crisis within a web of other crises: professional, ethical, domestic, and introspective. Inconsistently acted, but never poorly acted, and graced with several distilled examples of truly inspired performance. Handsome in look and pristine in texture, even if the movie's elegant sheen affiliates it with the high-gloss corporate aesthetic that the rest of the film seems designed to interrogate, even to criminalize. Thematically diffuse, especially when we're asked to take such a debonair star as an emblem of modern disillusionment, and even more so when the broad diseases of a culture get repackaged at the conclusion into a duel between two paragons of Honesty and Deceit. Paradoxes abound all over Michael Clayton and impress themselves on every level of my response to it. And yet, say whatever else you will, such pervasive, inchoate dispersal of such mutually permeating anxieties has rarely been evoked so tautly at the center of a post-9/11 Hollywood movie, and the multiplex needs more movies where life, work, morality, and debt comprise the constellation of adult experience, unimpinged upon by concessions to youth audiences and unameliorated by any whiff of romance. Enigmas and imbalances of power persist. Sex remains the furthest thing from the movie's mind. Time-honored structures of narrative wobble, even if the wobbling betrays no truly radical inclinations. Even the audience-friendly finale affords plenty of room for the putative victor to sink back into doubt and impotence and for the villain, or the offstage cadre of villains, to sprout new hydra-heads and think of new survival tricks. Credit watchers, we few and proud, are rewarded by this movie, which isn't over until the final blackout cut, when the hero's name, spookily rendered in the serifed idiom of the corporate business card, doesn't grace or complement Michael's image but actually snuffs it out. Click here to read the rest...

Photo © 2007 Section Eight/Warner Bros. Pictures

TGI(CF)F

For those of you following along at home, that's Thank God It's Friday and also Thank God It's the Chicago Film Festival, where the hits keep on coming. I'm still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for all of these screenings, even when I've crammed five into a single day, and my schedule has mostly stayed consistent with my initial plans. The print for the tantalizing Dreams of Dust unfortunately never arrived, and life intervened to prohibit my attendance at Opium and Chicago 10 on Wednesday night, and to postpone my rendezvous with The Man from London from Thursday afternoon to Sunday night. I'll also have to bag my plans for The Banishment and One Hundred Nails next Tuesday for a work obligation—one of the very few disadvantages to hitting such a major film festival in one's own hometown, all of which are significantly outweighed by the advantages of sleeping in my own bed, eating my own food, and knowing all the quickest routes between the theaters.

The Festival staff compensated for the Dreams of Dust cancellation with a substitute ticket for the gay British thriller Surveillance on Tuesday night, so that will be my last screening appointment until the big Savages finale on Wednesday. Further and greater compensations have been furnished by the films I have actually seen, both within the Festival program and among the concurrent multiplex releases that I have squeezed in between commitments. I hope you've enjoyed the reviews so far, and I promise to keep turning them out, for Michael Clayton and Yella, two suspenseful dramas from the world of work, with more similarities than they superficially admit; for 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, the Romanian Palme d'Or winner that's every bit as galvanizing as you've already read elsewhere; for Taxi to the Dark Side, one of the year's most urgent and best-assembled documentaries; for Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress, one of the program's few outright misfires, and not as interesting a misfire as one might rightfully expect from Breillat; for the engagingly sweet if undeniably thin Lars and the Real Girl; and for James Gray's We Own the Night, a Sony/Columbia release that mostly got drubbed at last spring's Cannes Film Festival. The short report, timed for its debut in wide release today, is that I loved We Own the Night, with its crystal-clear and classical form, its superb sound design, and its canny positioning of all the scenes you saw in the trailer into stages of the narrative where you won't expect them. Go out and catch it—give the movie that opening-weekend boost that it needs—and check back here in the next few days for a fuller tribute.

(And for all you dear souls who wrote earlier this week with birthday wishes—God bless you every one! Personal replies forthcoming when this delicious madness subsides...)

Chicago Film Festival: Stuck

Stuart Gordon's Stuck trumps even The Darjeeling Limited as the most prophetic title of the movie year so far, initially strutting around with a real, punchy amorality before bogging itself down into stalled, repetitive dramaturgy. The movie increasingly assumes the stance of a transfixed but inarticulate bystander to its own premise, rather than using that premise as an aperture into revelation of character, accumulation of suspense, or persuasive ethical reflection. The opening sequence, a long steadicam shot through a garishly lit nursing home, throbs with the first of several interpolated hip-hop tracks by DJ Honda—titled, naturally, "Get on Your Job"—thus tipping viewers off that even though Stuck was financed and filmed in Canada, this ain't Away from Her. This sequence soon finds American Beauty's Mena Suvari sporting dark cornrows and toting a tray of sick-looking jello as she smilingly administers to her patients. Despite her kind demeanor, the film obviously has darker thoughts in mind, and if the coiled rap and skulking camera weren't enough to signal a storm warning, even the quaaluded viewer will take note of the literally explosive title credit and the dispatch with which Suvari's nurse Brandi finds herself wiping up the nastiest pool of #2 incontinence in recent screen memory.

Nasty shit and the raw shock of having to clean it up is what Stuck is all about, and though subtlety of simile is never where director Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator) or screenwriter John Strysik set up shop, the movie barrels and bristles along through its first half-hour. Like the blazing first acts in one of Samuel Fuller's underbelly thrillers, like The Naked Kiss or Shock Corridor, Stuck draws potent energy and giddy overstatement from Suvari's germy and menial duties, from the scene where her smiling-piranha boss dangles a promotion in front of her to secure her "volunteering" for weekend labor, from the Ecstasy pills and alcohol that soon permeate the movie's system as well as her own, even from the low-fi cinematography with its steamy streets and tight orientation around faces and moving bodies. Meanwhile, the parallel montage patently forecasts a fateful encounter between, on the one hand, Brandi and her drug-dealing boyfriend Rashid (Russell Hornsby) and, on the other, middle-aged Tom (Stephen Rea), whose tense eviction from his apartment is itself interrupted by a violent, offscreen squabble upstairs, allowing him to abscond with a heap of his white-collar clothes before heading out into the nightscape of Providence, Rhode Island (actually Saint John, New Brunswick). In their last hours of leading separate lives, Tom and Brandi both narrowly avoid hitting or being hit by other cars on the road, which might read as an early symptom of Stuck's simplistic propensities if the movie weren't, at that point, absolutely thriving on the certain foreknowledge of its crisis and on a poetics of pure impact rather than an ethics of depth or an aesthetic of cleverness. The same principle redeems the episode where Tom, sadly ensconcing himself on a park bench for the evening, is approached by Sam (Lionel Mark Smith), a veteran and apparition of the foggy streets who rolls his clanking shopping cart in silhouette like the Ghost of Christmas Past. Smith's own powers of prediction ("I'll be seeing you again...") cannot be doubted, because Stuck has already shown itself to be the kind of movie where mystical street prophecies will be ratified by life, though the timing and nature of how Sam's vision comes true seems titillatingly up for grabs.

We don't have to wait long to find out. When Brandi, addled by narcotics and distracted by her cell phone, plows right into Tom as he crosses a seemingly empty street, the movie palpably clicks into place as the movie it wants to be, like a loaded barrel being snapped back into a gun. Soon enough, while two policemen who lack any peripheral vision whatsoever book old Sam for vagrancy, he espies Brandi's car careening through the streets with Tom's abdomen and legs still protruding from her windshield onto her front hood. The associated thrill for the audience is structural as well as visual: having already played the imminent card of a second exchange between Tom and Sam (albeit a one-sided one), the narrative horizon stands totally open. As one of Stuck's characters will shortly espouse, "Anybody can do anything to anyone at any time," and though he intends a moral as well as a practical pronouncement about The Way We Live Now, he also gives voice to the machinery of the script. Who will survive this grotesque incident? Who will intercede as savior, witness, accomplice, or undertaker? When, if at all, will Tom regain consciousness? When, if at all, will Brandi's Darwinian impulses to save herself and to doom her desecrated victim be countermanded by a higher moral calling? And why are the choreography of the accident itself and the relative proportion of Tom's headfirst penetration into the cab of Brandi's car so sloppily shot and carelessly edited? Click here to read the rest, including spoilers and reflections on a Q&A with the filmmakers...

Photo © 2007 Rigel Entertainment/Amicus Entertainment

Chicago Film Festival: Hallam Foe

David Mackenzie is back to some of his Young Adam tricks in Hallam Foe, and once again, the most riddlesome tricks of all are a) how he gets the movie to spring as excitingly as it does from a sketchy story with significant limitations, and b) why the movie fails to work a little better despite all the evident and encouraging talent involved. Hallam Foe orbits around the twin suns of Collision and Surveillance, as encapsulated in the opening sequence that starts with the title character (Jamie Bell) squatting in his treehouse to spy on his sister, who at that moment is taking an amorous roll in the glade with her boyfriend. After streaking himself up with some "barbarous" makeup and a makeshift headdress made of a badger hide, Hallam war-whoops his way down a pulley-and-cord contraption and crashes right into the humiliated lovers. The whole sequence, improbable in incident and choreography, serves primarily to acquaint us with Hallam Foe's bold and peculiar experiments in exaggerated reality. As befits a film about an incorrigible peeping tom, Hallam Foe is full of point-of-view shots and furtive, handheld pokes around corners and to the sides of various barriers. Just as markedly, however, but with much more distinctive formal panache, Mackenzie and cinematographer Giles Nuttgens (The Deep End) perpetually shuttle Hallam in and out of strong but strikingly different lighting schemes, soundscapes, and color patterns. Though these contrasts and effects occasionally spill into overstatement—trains that sound like entire artillery brigades, saturated colors and overexposed light to signal big emotional climaxes—Hallam Foe cannot be accused of concealing its investment in the dramatic heightening of sensation, the privileging of psychic logic and hormonal pulls over safer and more quotidian forms of "realistic" storytelling. Indeed, the film's evocation of Hallam's jumpy and inchoate overstimulation is its sustaining badge of craftsmanship and creative vivacity. Click here to read the rest...

Photo © 2007 Scottish Screen/Ingenious Film Partners

Chicago Film Festival: Scream of the Ants

I purchased a ticket to Scream of the Ants based solely on my affinity for Mohsen Makhmalbaf's past work, which has a nasty habit of receiving no commercial distribution in the United States despite the relative box-office potency of his Gabbeh and Kandahar and the critical adoration of those films and several others. Which is to say, I lacked any notion of Scream's theme or plotline and could not possibly have forecast the poetic, festival-style justice of wandering in the space of a single morning from Wes Anderson's Kool-aid vision of India to Makhmalbaf's assiduously bleak travelogue of subcontinental misery and his fulminating screed against the venal idealisms and disavowals that so often typify a foreigner's passage to India. As an Indian journalist advises a betrothed Iranian couple aboard an Indian train, "Most foreigners who come to India are stupid. They come chasing all the wrong things." Not coincidentally, this pronouncement follows the woman's admission that she and her fiancé have come in pursuit of a "Complete Man" or "Perfect Man" reputed by an acquaintance of theirs to "do great things in people's lives." This is a harebrained, romantically superficial agenda to rival Owen Wilson's—though Makhmalbaf, already savvy enough to set the West aside and show how one south Asian culture trivializes another, is also attuned to how India exploits and mystifies its own. Not only is the journalist riding the train to investigate a rumor about an old sage who can "stop trains with his eyes," and thus to earn a living by perpetuating the very kind of hooey he pretends to ridicule, but he kills time aboard the train espousing his own strain of unqualified utopianism ("Life is a miracle – everything is a miracle!") that is ubiquitously undermined by the status quo of a country where 99% of a billion citizens live below the global standard of poverty. In a brilliant and wickedly funny masterstroke, when the train finally haps upon the celebrated Baba sitting cross-legged on the rails, he privately confides to the Iranian couple that he sat on the tracks one day in hopes of ending his misery, but the train conductors all persist in slamming on their brakes—and now, the adulating crowds of pilgrims who have gathered around and behind him refuse to release him or to desist from holding him up as a spiritual icon.

This 20-minute opening of Makhmalbaf's movie is rendered with the political friskiness and absurdist humor for which Iranian films, much less Iran itself, is seldom given credit, largely because Western festivals and distributors decreed the flowering of Iranian cinema based on the evidence of children's stories like Children of Heaven and somber meditations like Taste of Cherry. The Makhmalbaf of A Moment of Innocence or Gabbeh, and even more certainly his Iranian contemporaries like Kamal Tabrizi and Massoud Dehnamaki, would have spun a teasing but illuminating feature out of this comic entrapment and the serious currents of ignorance, projection, and desperation that give rise to it. The Baba himself, with his weather-beaten body and his doubly-elbowed arm—a souvenir, no doubt, of a long-ago compound fracture—is a transfixing character who may or may not be "in" on the joke of which his fate is the center. Therefore, it's with considerable regret that we watch Makhmalbaf and his characters abandon this anecdote for a shape-shifting movie that never finds any comparably fertile or crystallized point of focus, however much justifiable anger and philosophical ambivalence Makhmalbaf allows himself to vent through the ensuing hour of arguments, monologues, vérité photography, and narrative cul-de-sacs. The husband, a former Communist long disabused of any form of hope or belief in his fellow man, reveals himself to be a colossal narcissist and a chauvinist of epic proportions—not least when he hires a prostitute for an entire night to get down on all fours and serve as a table on which to set his teacup. The wife, comparatively sympathetic but worryingly recessive, hungers for the kind of fulfillment this lover will never give her and hangs more desperately on the dream of finding a Complete Man whom she doesn't even recognize when she finds him.

Scream of the Ants grows nearly intolerable as the two trade bitter barbs over the course of a long night, so much so that we excuse the totally incongruous edit that finds them reunited for a taxi-ride into the desert. In an even more marked demonstration of the narrative listlessness that afflicted his script for his daughter Samira's most recent film, At Five in the Afternoon, Scream of the Ants lacks anything like the muscular, compressed montage that typified earlier Makhmalbaf projects. He resorts to fixing the camera on scenes and objects which are themselves prodigious or harrowing or beautiful rather than making them so through framing and metaphor, as he did so indelibly with the floating prostheses of Kandahar or the titular character of The Cyclist. Scream of the Ants, whose title refers to the unheard protests of people in a godless world, lapses inexcusably into talking-head aesthetics, with various characters spouting different strains of Makhmalbaf's own frustrated and contradictory world-critiques... but then, just as the picture precipitously lost its footing after the first act, it recovers its visual potency, at the very least, in an extended finale along the shores of the Ganges: filled with bathers, bobbing with corpses, strewn with blossoms, lapping against the concrete banks where even the wealthiest of the deceased are burned by their families for want of a proper gravesite. Again, the strange and bitter world yields itself up to Makhmalbaf's camera without his necessarily intervening or shaping our impressions at the level of his most rigorous artistry. And yet, these moments of mysterious and discomfiting realism make Scream of the Ants an urgent record of a denied world (and not an emblem of that very denial, like The Darjeeling Limited is, for all its cosmetic wonders). In its visual austerity, its withering speeches, its unusual tolerance for nudity and verbal vulgarity, and even in its aesthetic self-sabotage, Scream of the Ants maps a Godardian arc from artistic wit and sophistication into dogmatic ideology and ascetic self-loathing, directed if not against the director himself than at least against his medium and against his world. Whether this breakdown is ameliorated or extended by the riverside coda is up to each viewer to decide, just as the question remains open as to whether Makhmalbaf has really made a movie here or else just crudely illustrated an Op/Ed that's been thundering inside his head.

Commercial distributors will sprint in the opposite direction from a picture like this (check out the Variety review!), so I'm doubly grateful to the film festival. For better or worse, this side of Makhmalbaf is exhilarating at its best but still feels essential at its petulant and shapeless worst (embodied, for me, in a long speech by a German tourist who's repeating what a million college-campus T-shirts have contended for years). I wanted to scream several times during Scream of the Ants, sometimes for no better reason than the film's laziness and hectoring tone, but just as often for the same reasons that have pushed Makhmalbaf to this edge of his own outrage. C+

Photo © 2006 Makhmalbaf Film House/Wild Bunch

Chicago Film Festival: The Aerial

If Guy Maddin and Leo McCarey got together to remake Brazil, their efforts might yield something like Esteban Sapir's The Aerial, a jaunty errand into silent-era surrealism and anti-corporate allegory that should, by all rights, be too obvious in its points and too crammed with fancies to generate the level of charm and light-touch magic that it does. In The Aerial's universe—billed as "Once upon a time..." but inclined, too, toward the present and the prescient—a monolithic and mobster-defended television station has already committed a whole host of crimes against humanity: its leaders have literally revoked the voices of the world's citizens; they have eliminated rival media outlets; and they have saturated the grocery market with boxes of "TV Foods," basically sugar cookies topped with a lulling spiral of white frosting. Only one woman in the film's unnamed city has retained her own voice and the right to its exercise, but at the heavy prices of hooding her face, parading her body in sultry nightclub performances, and indenturing herself to the tyrannical and devil-tailed mastermind Mr. TV. This woman, simply named Voice, has a child, a boy born without eyes whose own vocal capacity is a desperately kept secret. Soon, the fate of this pair intertwines with that of an inventor, his young daughter, and his grandfather, who live and work in a TV repair shop. When the girl arrives to visit her blowzy, cigarette-smoking mother, she befriends the sightless son of Voice. When Voice herself is abducted by Mr. TV and his henchmen—on the way to an even grander, and weirder, scheme of world domination—the two children as well as the girl's reunited mom and pop trek into the snow-swept mountains to rehabilitate an old transmitter and basically culture-jam the villains to death and the slumbering, wordless population to life.

As you will already glean, the political line of The Aerial does not distinguish itself in nuance or depth, and Sapir is much softer on the question of whether silence is coerced or whether it is passively and hegemonically accepted. The almost-ending of the movie, which suspends and challenges the power dynamics and the prevailing apportionments of Good and Bad, would have offered a richer, more provocative conclusion than the one we actually get, however much The Aerial admits of its fairy-tale contours. Sapir also indulges in some appropriations of several sign systems—Communist, Nazi, Judaic, marital, domestic—that he cheekily but indubitably simplifies in pursuit of his homiletic agendas. But all of that said, The Aerial is patently an exercise in formal and stylistic brio, and in breathing witty, creative life into hard-leftist axioms. On these scores, the movie is a robust success. The antique, tungsten quality of the flickering light and the evocative, efficient editing achieve a splendid mixture of beauty and economy. The soundtrack is bright and unimpeachable—not just the warm, funny, inspired musical score but the ingenious instrumentation that also supplies all of the film's foley effects, including footsteps and gunshots. Sapir also has great fun throughout with the placement, phrasing, and materiality of his intertitles; characters are frequently spotted waving or shoving the text out of their way, or having the summary terms of entire emotional states scrawled right over their heads.

Best of all, the gusto with which Sapir reprises so many silent-era tropes while also flexing them for new expressive potentials rhymes perfectly with The Aerial's polemical support of creativity over convention, of under-exploited powers over institutionally regulated genres and boilerplates. Even as the movie assumes discordantly conservative notions of redemption through sentimentalized childhood and of the two-parent nuclear family as ethical building-block, the geometries and overlays and eccentricities of the film stoke the very imagination which Sapir's politics almost suppress. Compared to Maddin's frequently arch and esoteric approaches to the tropes of early cinema, Sapir shows a Pixar-ish loyalty to clear, clever, and spirited storytelling, over and above arcana and idiosyncracy for their own sakes. Thinner and less adventurous than first impressions imply, but a feast for the ear and the eye from start to finish. B

Photo © 2007 LadobleA

Chicago Film Festival: Men in the Nude

Number of nude men in Men in the Nude: Zero. Aside from some glimpses of backside and some female bosoms, the title of Károly Esztergályos' movie doesn't denote anything except some marketer's cynical attempt to hustle an audience looking for a thrill. Clearly, I was such an audience, but since I don't care about the baseball playoffs or the new fall season on TV, you can't be too hard on me. Plus, as Nathaniel has often observed, it's a fairly open secret that a gay moviegoer implicitly obligates himself (or, despite a perpetually malnourished market, herself) to see a steady stream of coming-out comedies and somber closet dramas that have big dreams of mediocrity, and next to no aspirations toward actual, enduring value.

Men in the Nude—about a middle-aged Hungarian novelist (Lászlo Gálffi) who surprises himself by taking home a young, blond, rabbit-faced hustler (Dávid Szabó) while the writer's wife (Éva Kerekes) is off performing a play in the provinces—treads a lot of safe, unilluminating water for its first hour. Chest-kissing, opera, poppers, petty crime, early-dawn homecomings, briberies, saucy wives, the heedlessness of youth, the laments of encroaching age. I will say that Esztergályos offers the first image I've ever seen of a character reading aloud from great hardcover literature (Death in Venice, as if you didn't assume) while simultaneously being fellated (and in the very same shot!). Had the movie hewed to the path of well-worn inanity and yielded another tacky-sexy chuckle or two like this one, Men in the Nude could have relied on its notoriously generous niche-market constituency for a passing grade: our version of the Gentleman's C. There but for the (dis)grace of compulsive jump cuts, truncated subplots, and what-were-they-thinking allusions to the film's own emptiness goes Esztergályos. "Wife comes home early—it's a banal story," the writer confides to his Mrs. and to the audience, with faster and fuller assent from the latter, and that's even before a stilted penultimate sequence in a police interrogation room or a desperately "surreal" finale that conjoins far-scattered spaces and swells the volume of the soundtrack for no reason but the most pitifully failed echoes of Lynchian unmooring or exquisite Beau travail-style crystallization. If the Men were emotionally or psychologically denuded, to whatever qualified degree, Esztergályos would have at least some reason to have made this movie, much less to have chosen this moniker. But even by the standards of visually undistinguished wait-for-the-DVD fare, this one's fully missable. D+

Photo © 2006 Centrál Filmstúdió

Chicago Film Festival: Control

The first half-hour of Anton Corbijn's Control parades so many smart, savvy strategies for avoiding the typical music-bio pablum that it's particularly dispiriting when the middle and end of the film so dully and incorrigibly embrace those very clichés. So, let's emphasize the beginning, since the filmmakers conjure so much good will in those early sections that even the increasingly arbitrary sound-image matches, the literalized use of songs to embody narrative action, and the late-breaking bouts of prosaic and redundant narration can't entirely snuff the film's appeal. Control at least admits from the outset, by filling the screen with closed doors and massive, unforgiving edifices, that visual and psychological penetration will always run into impassable barriers. I think that's why the sketchbook quality of the screenplay and the scrappy but eloquent black-and-white photography work so well; like Christopher Munch's The Hours and Times, though with more expansive narrative parameters, Control riffs on and hints at the lived experience of Ian Curtis, the lead singer of the British-invasion band Joy Division, instead of reaching for an exhaustive Seven Ages of Man biography.

Retreating into silence before blasting back to life with a Sex Pistols concert, a deliciously foul-mouthed improv poet, or a line from a favorite album sung at top volume into a mirror, the sound design of Control's first act doesn't just walk us through a portmanteau of fantastic songs but actually reacquaints us with the forceful, sensual, dare one say "primal" appeals of sound itself—even as writer-director Corbijn, a personal acquaintance of his subject, evokes Curtis in a charming, unhistrionic way as a Portrait of the Punk Rocker as a Young Low-Level Bureaucrat. Despite the prevailing ethos of punk, Curtis isn't fulminating against the System, and the film avoids pitting him falsely against some staid status quo. With his jerky, aw-shucks gestures in concert, Ian Curtis could be playing Curly in a community-theater Oklahoma!, but then he goes ramrod straight to wail out lyrics like "dance to the radio" as though the fate of the world (or of his, at least) depended on it, Ian constitutes his own graph of contradictions and mysterious affinities, and the film prefers to spark our own guesswork than to flip straight to any specious answer keys. Did Ian "get" that he was punk? When and how, and why, did he learn to sing like this? What did his band members think of his style, his lyrics, his dalliances? Entire sequences depend, and thrive, on the thrills of deferred and enigmatic revelation, as when Ian strides down his monochrome street beneath a potent Joy Division score (a sufficient shot in itself), turning to reveal that the word "HATE" has been graffiti'd on the back of his black leather jacket, and arriving at the front door not of a club or a rehearsal space but the Employment Exchange—where, unlike any rock star in any biopic in history, he handles his paper-pushing job rather well, and with seeming equanimity. Control doesn't need Ian to emit any rebel yells or to posit him at the center of any nostalgic iconography. The characterization, like the bulk of the songs, is scrupulously trimmed to an evocative hint, instead of a full-blown effigy.

But then, "effigy" and also "blow" pretty well describe the second half of the film, where Curtis' artistic and psychological legacy is reduced to one of inconsolable self-stranding between the claims of a wife (Samantha Morton, charismatic but under-challenged) and the arms of a mistress (Downfall's Alexandra Maria Lara, a frustrating blank of Paris Hilton proportions). Plus, Ian's medications threaten him as much as the maladies for which he takes them. And he sings "Isolation" in the plexiglas isolation of a recording booth, and "Love Will Tear Us Apart" plays while love, or something like it, sort of tears Curtis' marriage apart without, somehow, sparing us any of the customary sequences of matrimonial suspicion, confrontation, and tentative reunion. Resorting to ever more desperate strategies for getting inside Ian Curtis' head—a hypnotherapy session, a banal letter recited at length, visual and sonic reprises of earlier shots and snippets—Control becomes the very film that an ill-informed, speculating outsider would have made about Curtis after watching lots of Rays and Walk the Lines, and hardly the work of a promising stylist or a genuine technician, much less an actual confidante. Even the most abstract images, as of rope spinning through a pulley, assume strict, thudding roles within the overt logic of the narrative, and after several connotative deaths and a thousand spotlighted shots of Ian's flouted wedding band, the gig finally winds itself up. B–

Photo © 2007 Becker Films/The Weinstein Company

Chicago Film Festival, Appetizer Course: Lust, Caution

Ang Lee's Lust, Caution is not technically part of the Chicago Film Festival; it just happens that the film opened commercially in Chicago on the first full day of the festival, so a funny thing happened on the way to the evening screenings and I snuck in a Lust, Caution showing on my way downtown from work. Frankly, I haven't been all that enthusiastic about this one, since I'm almost always lukewarm about Lee's decorous direction and his almost self-consciously tangential relationships to the stories and genres he tackles from film to film. One of the distinguishing marks of Lust, Caution, though, is that it turns so many of its potential vices and pitfalls into virtues. For instance, Lee's muted, middlebrow personality as a director winds up suiting the many, teasing layers of guile, secrecy, and cool impersonation in the film. The tired cliché of the actress with a knack for deception, self- and otherwise, takes organic and plausible shape within the script rather than sliding off the wire-rack of old storytelling truisms. Hollywood's millionth quantum leap back into World War II keeps uniforms, phalanxes, and battlefields almost entirely off-screen in favor of an unusually subtle look at the sociology of foreign occupation and the psychology of resistance. Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, who softened the edges of his typical style for Lee's Brokeback Mountain, reprises that film's formal elegance but finds welcome opportunities for the restive verve and eye-popping color he brought to Spike Lee's 25th Hour. Tony Leung Chiu Wai, whose rueful suavity was becoming overfamiliar, uncorks a blistering, barely contained nastiness that Richard Widmark would have admired, but even he is outshone by newcomer Tang Wei in the starring role. Tang has to age persuasively, communicate silently, smile demurely, screw acrobatically, and, hardest of all, graduate on-screen from a neophyte actress (without overplaying the awkwardness) to a seamless role-player (without letting us forget that she's acting or lose sight of the high stakes for the woman behind the mask).

All of these demands Tang rewards with mystery, depth, and panache, and she does so without delivering a coy, hackneyed portrait of the exoticized Oriental artifact (as Wong Kar-wai increasingly allows his actresses to do). The actress judges her expressions and movements as precisely as Lee orchestrates light, rhythm, and the frugal but exceptional score by Alexandre Desplat. The story never plumbs as deeply as the cast and other artists imply that they could happily and easily venture, and despite the heroic feat of making a 160-minute movie breeze right by without sacrificing emotional clarity, editor Tim Squyres lapses a few times into an antic, overly intrusive mode that hyperbolizes some testy games of mah-jongg and a few violent showdowns. Plus, I'm still waiting for Lee to fight his impulses toward elegant outsiderism and really dig into the perspectives of his characters—a trick he almost managed with the revelatory fight sequences of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and with the elaborately self-conscious characters of Sense and Sensibility, for whom the boundary between inner life and external codes of conduct existed only sporadically. Still, Lust, Caution spins a satisfying and surprising yarn, and the formal and visual motifs are more ambitious and ambiguous here—for example, not just recurring mirrors, but excitable camera movements in relation to those mirrors—than anything in Brokeback (a film whose cautious relation to the lust between Ennis and Jack, elided in favor of serial goodbyes and accumulating subplots, is more than compensated here). I'll be lucky if the festival yields even two or three films as strong and refreshingly confident as this one. B+

Photo © 2007 Focus Features/River Road Entertainment

Getting in on the Festival Action

I try to keep the self-pity on a tight leash around this blog, but every year I tell myself I'll scrounge up the money to hit the Toronto Film Festival, and I never ever make it (even though, this year, my disappointment was more than compensated by a personal visit from my idol-critic Mainly Movies on his way back from the big event, as well as detailed, sensational write-ups at The Film Experience and GreenCine).

But then, I realize, what am I griping about?? The Chicago Film Festival, despite a paucity of big premieres and a shortage of national coverage, is a pretty top-flight shindig and it's right in my neighborhood. Last year, having just moved here, I didn't hear about the festival until lots of the showings were sold out, and I was limited to three screenings, albeit interesting ones. This year, though, I had my act all kinds of together, and I scored a killer itinerary. I've never actually covered a film festival before, but I'm looking forward to regular updates and write-ups all through this one—and also to that coffee-fueled, bloodshot, Donnie Darko state of being that even the most inveterate festival goers tend to describe. Bring it on, and stay tuned!

FRIDAY, OCT 5
Control (UK, Anton Corbijn) - Biopic of the lead singer of Joy Division that's been winning plaudits and audience love since Cannes; Samantha Morton's on board, which is always a plus, and I like the still images
Men in the Nude (Hungary, Károly Esztergályos) - Could be a fairly banal story of middle-age coming out prompted by some kind of Death in Venice encounter, but Eastern Europe has been churning out great stuff lately, and who could resist that title?

SATURDAY, OCT 6
The Aerial (Argentina, Esteban Sapir) - One of those mad experiments that wash ashore at festivals; this one is a pastiche of silent-movie tropes as well as a comic screed against mega-corporate media
Scream of the Ants (Iran, Mohsen Makhmalbaf) - A living legend who still has trouble getting American distribution; I prefer his daughter's films to his own, which are sometimes too austere or dogmatic, but his best work (A Moment of Innocence, Kandahar) is frequently stunning
Hallam Foe (UK, David Mackenzie) - Whatever its shortcomings, the best parts of Young Adam (no, not just the naughty bits) have lingered well over the past couple of years, so I'm eager to see this new project, headlined by Jamie Bell (Billy Elliot, Undertow)
Stuck (Canada, Stuart Gordon) - Mena Suvari (remember her?) and Stephen Rea in some exploitation thriller that was a surprise critical fave in Toronto. The late-night slot is promising.

SUNDAY, OCT 7
Dreams of Dust (Burkina Faso, Laurent Salgues) - Story about African goldminers forced to tunnel, mole-like, more than 100ft. into the ground in search of their quarry. Interesting to see whether gorgeous images and political content get blended any better here than in Western films about African immiseration
4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (Romania, Cristian Mungiu) - A major coup, for the festival and for me: the world hasn't stopped wagging about this one since the first day of Cannes, and certainly not after it scooped the Palme. Should be a high point.

MONDAY, OCT 8
Yella (Germany, Christian Petzold) - Mainly Movies loved this one in Berlin, as did the awards jury. I don't know much about the plot except that it concerns an extremely estranged married couple.
Taxi to the Dark Side (USA, Alex Gibney) - Gibney, director of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and producer of the current No End in Sight, exposes post-9/11 American torture practices, focalizing the case of an Afghani taxi driver who was imprisoned and killed in 2002
The Last Mistress (France, Catherine Breillat) - A convalescent Catherine Breillat (Fat Girl) makes an unexpected swerve into costume drama, with the equally unexpected Asia Argento at her side

WEDNESDAY, OCT 10
Opium: Diary of a Madwoman (Hungary, János Szász) - Let's hope I'm not burned out by all the intensity before I even get to this acclaimed dramatization of a real-life relationship between an asylum inmate and her morphine-addicted doctor, adapted from the doctor's diaries
Chicago 10 (USA, Brett Morgen) - Rack one up for hometown stories, and for interesting multimedia experiments, with this doc about Chicago's radical anti-war demonstrators of the late 1960s. Currently on Mike D'Angelo's list of the year's best

THURSDAY, OCT 11
The Man from London (Hungary, Béla Tarr) - I'm a virtual novice with Tarr, having only seen Almanac of Fall, so even though this one's gotten mixed notices at best, I'm still intrigued
Lars and the Real Girl (USA, Craig Gillespie) - I'm mostly avoiding the imminent commercial releases, but the timeslot was right for this one, and I'm curious to see how a faux-indie like this looks amid the context of so much international drama and documentary

FRIDAY, OCT 12
Silent Light (Mexico, Carlos Reygadas) - My most anticipated ticket of the fest. The reviews have trumpeted just what I wanted to hear: that Reygadas has preserved his brilliant visual acumen and jettisoned his compulsive petulance in tone and content. Fingers crossed to high heaven.
Irina Palm (Belgium, Sam Garbarski) - An unusual cast (Marianne Faithfull, Miki Manojlovic, Jenny Agutter) and production history for this tale about a 50-year-old prostitute. I clearly ruined myself in Nathaniel's Best Actress contest with this pick (among others!), but the film still intrigues me

SATURDAY, OCT 13
Faro: Goddess of the Waters (Mali, Salif Traoré) - I seek out as much African cinema as I can at events like this, since commercial distributors are never any help, even on DVD
The Witnesses (France, André Téchiné) - Téchiné might be back in Wild Reeds territory with this AIDS-influenced domestic drama set in France in the 1980s. And any film that recalls Wild Reeds is a good thing
Flight of the Red Balloon (France, Hou Hsiao-hsien) - Some foreign artists try to break into Hollywood; Hou has opted to break into French cinema with this light-touch expansion on the classic Red Balloon short film. A one-time Special Event showing for the fest

TUESDAY, OCT 16
The Banishment (Russia, Andrei Zvyagintsev) - I'm kind of asking for it here, since no one said anything nice about this one at Cannes, but I loved the director's first movie The Return, so I'll extend benefit of the doubt, at least once
One Hundred Nails (Italy, Ermanno Olmi) - The title refers to a mad act by a disillusioned university professor who nails 100 books to a library door before seeking refuge in a new life. Hopefully I will meet some different fate than this. In any event, Olmi is an old master (The Tree of Wooden Clogs) in whose work I'm entirely unversed, plus there are echoes here of Tarkovsky's ravishing Nostalghia, a personal favorite

WEDNESDAY, OCT 17
The Savages (USA, Tamara Jenkins) - The closing night gala, with Jenkins and Laura Linney in attendance, and a glowingly-reviewed film to boot. The trailer delights me every single time I see it. A great way to end what I anticipate will be an extremely rewarding couple of weeks!

The Midwestern Croisette

The 42nd annual Chicago International Film Festival reaches its halfway point today, and glory be, I finally got to participate. I must say, I'm impressed at the range of films and countries represented. Even though a few high-visibility English-language tentpoles like Shortbus, Babel, and The Fountain are holding the festival together, the menu offers generous fictional and non-fictional courses from Latin America, East Asia, Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the South Pacific (read: nearly everywhere except Africa, though I'd also have loved a shot at Inuit breakout Zacharias Kunuk's Journals of Knut Rasmussen). I've actually never attended a film festival before, so yesterday marked my introduction to more than the films themselves: for example, to the way a city's immigrant or second-generation population will turn out in droves for a national export, which will barely cause a blip on the eventual commercial market; or to the exquisite pride that derives from finally deciphering the processes of ticket-buying, schedule coordination, and navigation between theaters. Had I been a little more on top of things, I would have bought a ticket to last night's 11:00pm showing of The Host before it sold out, but now that I've secured my merit badge in demystifying festival bureaucracy, I'll do better next year.

As for the two films I saw—actually one-and-a-half films—I urge you to keep an eye peeled for Syndromes and a Century. Thai sensation Apichatpong Weerasethakul once again weaves an intricate, entrancing enigma out of rhythms, scenes, and techniques so quotidian that many filmmakers would find nothing to observe in them. The opening shot is of tall, thin trees swaying in the wind while the soundtrack hums with the distant echoes of electronic apparatus and media emissions. Gradually these sounds—analogous to Cliff Martinez's minimalist score for Soderbergh's Solaris but even more muffled—give way to a soundtrack of breezes, chirping birds, and buzzing insects, but just as the image finds this more "natural" sonic referent, Syndromes cuts to a close-up of a downcast man, head tilted forward before an antiseptically white background, which instantly undermines the lingering pastoral soundscape. These sorts of editing tricks, subtle discontinuities, and creative mixing and matching with noises, images, subplots, and characters is exactly what Apichatpong excels at, especially because he bends them so deftly in service of character and narrative. The movie, following a typically playful Apichatpong structure, goes on to trace two different stories that begin with the same incident (reprised in slightly altered form halfway through Syndromes' runtime). The first iteration privileges a self-possessed female doctor in a rural hospital, managing a forlorn suitor and a memory of near-love while efficiently dispatching her medical duties to a cantankerous clutch of Buddhist monks and a crop of newly hired doctors. The second iteration aligns itself with one of those new hires, though the hospital is now an austere military facility in a modern city, and hospital business plays out largely in subterranean corridors, supply closets, and blinding white enclosures. Though Syndromes is Apichatpong's most stylistically subdued film to date, it's still an unusually patient and good-natured portrait of rural/urban crossover, of spatial and musical dislocations, of clinical, spiritual, and popular perspectives, of romance and absurdity and barely voiced grief. B+

By contrast, the Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan seems impervious to the pleasures of understatement or quiet implication. I thought that Distant, Ceylan's big festival hit of a few years ago, was an elegantly framed rumination on awfully familiar ideas (estrangement as worldview, familial imposition), enlivened only by rare bursts of humor that the palette, mise-en-scène, and self-serious direction nonetheless worked hard to oppress. Climates, Ceylan's latest effort, which nabbed the FIPRESCI laurel at this year's Cannes festival, struck me as an even more laborious mounting of dismally old saws. The obvious, meticulous deliberation with which Ceylan has framed his images and timed his edits does not conceal the banality of what he produces—marked foreground/background gulfs between alienated lovers, ostentatious and tinny sound elements, protracted close-ups that climax with inexpressive tears. Particularly hard to take was a psychologically complicated scene in which a distraught Bahar (played by Ceylan's own wife, Ebru) seems to attempt a spontaneous murder-suicide while riding a motorbike with her atrabilious lover Isa (Ceylan himself). As the two of them crash on the roadside, the camera captures every untrained, agitated whinge of these non-professional actors, relegating the whole incident into a turgid bout of queasy, inarticulate exhibitionism and eroding every glint of potential in the script. Soon to follow is an endless shot of erotic/violent aggression between Isa and an old flame; again, the performers and the film surely want to be lauded for their "courage" and rigor in realizing such a tempestuous, illegible encounter, but again, the physical vocabulary of both actors radiates a nervous, under-rehearsed improvisation, and the formal presentation offers no needed assist. The unsettling narcissism with which Ceylan films himself and his intimates working hard to render themselves unlikeable and impenetrable feels as pointless and arid as the affective fallacies of heat, chill, snow, shade, and rain imparted by the title and dully realized in the photographic and location choices. About an hour into this thing, sensing no prospect of Ceylan's Climates growing any more hospitable or sustainable, I decided to check the weather outside. Walked out

(Images © 2006 Chicago International Film Festival; © 2006 Kick the Machine/Fortissimo Films; and © 2006 Pyramide Films/Zeitgeist Films)

I Wanna Be a Part of It

Just in time for my departure from the East Coast, the New York Film Festival announces an especially succulent program for 2006. Fair enough, the write-ups of David Lynch's Inland Empire and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century seem to borrow an awful lot from earlier films by the same directors, but surely both men deserve our immense trust. I'm very curious about the Malian Bamako, which Amy Taubin adored at Cannes; the much-heralded Korean horror film The Host; and, perhaps most of all, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, co-directed by Zacharias Kunuk, the Inuit director who debuted so fabulously with the breathtaking Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner).

In a peculiar twist, I've become really intrigued by the latest films from directors whose previous efforts I only sorta appreciated, like Todd Field's In the Bedroom follow-up Little Children, described by NYFF staff as "loosely adapted" from Tom Perrotta's novel; Sofia Coppola's coltish and stylistically irreverent Marie Antoinette; and Climates, by the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose big Cannes hit Distant was strikingly shot but, for me, a little too calculated and... well, distant. By contrast, as much as I've enjoyed or at least admired Pedro Almodóvar's recent career run, I can't muster up any real excitement about the squishy-sounding Volver, no matter how many actresses appear in it. (Note: A longer discussion of Almodóvar is evolving in the Comments section—by all means, please join in!)

Volver, plus all the American titles—except, as far as I can tell, the Lynch—will make their way to the popular commercial market this fall. As for the Kunuk, who knows, and as for Ceylan, Apichatpong, and Sissako, they're lucky when they get any U.S. distribution for their films, period. That means it's up to our lucky New Yorkers to see everything and report back. You know who you are!

Cannes Lineup

It's in. How come I'm not excited? (Lynch's absence doesn't help.)