A fitting climax for the Chicago Film Festival’s luminous 1995 Cinema Under the Stars series is the 1961 French film classic “Jules and Jim,” which will be shown at 8:30 p.m. Thursday on the Skyline Stage at Navy Pier.
The single best-loved and most influential picture of the late French filmmaker Francois Truffaut–and perhaps of the entire French New Wave–“Jules and Jim” ((star) (star) (star) (star)) was a transcendent emotional experience for the young filmgoers who made it a prime cult movie of the early ’60s. In Henri Roche’s unsparing novel-memoir of early 20th Century artistic Europe, Truffaut found a subject that inspired all his dark romanticism, artistic exuberance and social pessimism–and a heroine, Jeanne Moreau’s unfettered Catherine, who became, for many, symbol of her age.
The movie spans the years 1912-33 (moving from the Belle Epoque just before World War I to the book-burning in Hitler’s Germany). And it’s about the two once-inseparable writers and comrades whose world is torn apart by their love for Catherine and each other: Austrian Jules (Oskar Werner) and French Jim (Henri Serre), two intellectual artists whose friendship survives storms of warfare, but not of the heart.
Shooting in Cinemascope and black-and-white, evoking the past through an almost impudent use of archival clips and period footage, Truffaut contrasts the essential bleakness of Roche’s sad tale with the exuberance and free-spirited swagger of its telling.
Coming after the staider ’50s, “Jules and Jim” seemed a wild, sensuous breeze of liberty and recklessness. In retrospect, we can appreciate more fully the cargo of pain beneath that buoyant surface.
Call 312-644-3456.
– Not all Hong Kong movies are in-your-face action romps, as amply proven by the local premiere of Yim Ho’s fine 1994 “The Day the Sun Turned Cold” ((star) (star) (star) (star)), at 4 and 7:45 p.m. Saturday at the Film Center of the School of the Art Institute. This picture, a multiple award winner at the Tokyo Film Festival and Hong Hong’s 1995 submission for the Foreign Language Oscar, is a serious, realistic, finely crafted drama based on an actual criminal case: an accusation of murder brought by a Chinese village son against his mother a decade after his father died under strange circumstances.
Yim, a director of unusual intelligence and a keen sense of period, handles the mystery cleverly–though he plays the incident as less a detective story than a series of increasingly traumatic emotional revelations, juxtaposing freedom and entrapment, passion and human coldness.
The Film Center is at Columbus Drive and Jackson Boulevard. Call 312-443-3737.
– Japan’s action master Seijun Suzuki, who should have a cult of his own going by the end of the Film Center’s 16-film tribute to him, is represented this week by two wild and woolly thrillers, the often astounding 1963 “Youth of the Beast” (6 p.m. Friday and Sunday) and the unscreened 1964 gangster saga “Our Blood Will Not Forgive” (7:45 p.m. Friday; 4:15 p.m. Sunday), with sullen ladies’ man Akira Kobayashi as a yakuza Hamlet.
“Youth of the Beast,” which starts as murder mystery, then veers into heavy-duty gangster violence with the appearance of Jo Shishido as one of the most seemingly brutal and crazy yakuzas ever. What follows sometimes also suggests a demented version of Kursosawa’s samurai classic “Yojimbo.” The whole movie is packed with outrageous visuals and set-pieces, pitched to a savage comic extreme, mixing conscious self-satire and over-the-top action.
– The Music Box weekend matinees–both at 11:30 a.m. Saturday and Sunday–include a reprise of “Moving the Mountain,” Michael Apted’s stirring 1994 documentary on the Chinese student movement and the Tiananmen Square massacre, and two more chances to see the Music Box’s re-release of one of the century’s great films and most poignant family epics: Satyajit Ray’s 1955 Bengali masterpiece “Pather Panchali,” first film of “The Apu Trilogy.”
For more information, call 312-871-6604. The Music Box is at 3733 N. Southport Ave.
– Also at the Film Center: a reprise of Heather MacDonald’s disturbing report on Oregon’s anti-gay initiative “Ballot Measure 9” (6 p.m. Thursday) and two more of documentarian Les Blank’s uniquely high-spirited and warm-hearted chronicles of America’s “other cultures.” They’re shown together at 6 p.m. Saturday and Tuesday. “Sworn to the Drum: A Tribute to Francisco Aguabella” is an affectionate, catchy look at the master Cuban jazz and dance drummer, and his roots in African music and Santanera rites. “The Maestro: King of the Cowboy Artists” is quintessential Blank. Its subject is one of his richest: the flashy but dedicated life of multi-gifted California painter Gerry Gaxiola–who wears self-designed rhinestone cowboy outfits, puts on yearly “maestro” shows and sports a style and ethic that seem a mixture of Vincent Van Gogh, Marty Robbins and Tom Mix.
– “Tsahal,” a study of the Israeli Army, which is the latest documentary by Claude Lanzmann (“Shoah”), premieres at 11 a.m. Sunday at the Skokie Theater, 7924 Lincoln Ave., as a benefit for the American Jewish Congress. (Only a few tickets are still available.) Call 312-332-7355.
– The Children’s Summerfest Film Series at the DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 E. 56th Pl., screens a movie adaptation of Richard Wright’s classic story “Almos’ a Man” at 10:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. Wednesday. Call 312-947-0600.
