The second weekend of Chicago’s 36th International Film Festival has its share of excitement and discovery. The fest offers two superb and highly provocative new films — Liv Ullmann’s intense Swedish drama of a disastrous marital infidelity and its aftermath, “Faithless” (with a script by Ingmar Bergman), and Bela Tarr’s macabre and almost maddeningly rigorous Hungarian fable of social deterioration, “Werckmeister Harmonies.”
Here are capsule reviews for films, listed in chronological order, that critics were able to view in advance. Check the Tempo section Monday through Thursday (closing night) for daily reviews and updates (a complete schedule is on the Internet at metromix.com). Film screenings will take place at Loews Cineplex Theatres (abbreviated as Loews), 600 N. Michigan Ave.; Music Box Theatre (Music Box), 3733 N. Southport Ave.; and University of Chicago DOC Films at the Max Palevsky Cinema (DOC), 1212 E. 59th St.
For tickets and other information, see accompanying story — or call the festival’s 24-hour hotline: 312-332-FILM.
– “The Captive” (star)(star)(star) (Chantal Akerman; France-Belgium). Akerman has always had a flair for offbeat erotica, and this sexual thriller, inspired by Marcel Proust’s “La Prisoniere,” is her most accessible movie in quite a while. In a way, it’s a more graphic version of “The Collector,” crossed with “Last Tango in Paris.” In it, an obsessive, wealthy young man kidnaps a gay-leaning female beauty and they engage in elaborate sex games in his Parisian digs. French; subtitled. (3:30 p.m. Friday, Loews; also 5:30 p.m. Sunday, Music Box) — Michael Wilmington
– “The Debt” (star)(star) 1/2 (Krzysztof Krauze; Poland). Gritty, violent crime saga — based on fact — about a couple of over-ambitious crooks who try to make a big score and get in way over their heads with the Warsaw mob. Polish; subtitled. Krauze to attend. (3:45 & 6:30 p.m. Friday, Loews) — M.W.
– “Clouds of May” (star)(star)(star) (Nuri Bilge Ceylan; Turkey). This subtle, beautifully shot film is a gently ironic study of the relationship between a Turkish filmmaker, who has returned to his country home to make an independent movie, and his elderly father, whom he has recruited as an actor. As the discontented son worries about his film, the father worries about his land; their concerns converge during the troubled shoot. Turkish, subtitled. Ceylan to attend. (6 p.m. Friday, Loews; also 4:15 p.m. Saturday & 3:45 p.m. Sunday, Loews) — M.W.
– “Faithless” (star)(star)(star)(star) (Liv Ullmann; Sweden). Another of Ingmar Bergman’s great late series of semi-autobiographical screenplays (“The Best Intentions,” “Sunday’s Children”), this is the tense, powerful study of a theater director’s reckless and irresponsible liaison with his friend’s wife, which mars or destroys all their lives. Framed as a reminiscence by the now elderly director (Erland Josephson), summoning up the ghosts of his past in his island solitude, the film has been superbly directed by Liv Ullmann, again proving herself Bergman’s most sympathetic and brilliant interpreter as either actress or filmmaker. Swedish; subtitled. Part of the Critics’ Choice Series; Ullmann to attend. (6 p.m. Friday, Loews) — M.W.
– “A Belly Full” (star)(star) 1/2 (Melvin Van Peebles; France). The director of the notorious “Sweet Sweetback . . . ” returns with a somewhat gentler, French-language satire. In it, a conservative French couple hires an African emigre and, while ostentatiously displaying their tolerance, they secretly involve her in a series of weird and injurious scams. Van Peebles keeps dealing satiric hammer blows here. French; subtitled. Van Peebles to attend. (6:30 p.m. Friday, DOC; also 7 p.m. Saturday, Loews) — M.W.
– “Tales of an Island” (star)(star)(star) 1/2 (Dariush Mehrjui & Mohsen Makhmalbaf; Iran). Two excellent short movies by two of Iran’s finest filmmakers, both backstage pictures set, somewhat ironically, during troubled and difficult film shoots. Old master Dariush (“The Cow”) Mehrjui’s “Lost Cousin” is the intensely romantic story of a lost love that haunts one of the actors during the seaside photography of a film romance. Farsi; subtitled. (7 p.m. Friday, Music Box; also 2 p.m. Saturday & 4:30 p.m. Sunday, Music Box) — M.W.
– “To Die (or Not)” (star)(star)(star) (Ventura Pons; Spain). In this ingeniously constructed nightmare comedy-drama, a long-blocked screenwriter unfolds his latest idea: a movie fable about a fantasy last-minute choice between life and death. We then watch the writer himself in the throes of sudden fatality, followed by a series of seven strangely interconnected stories all of which are repeated twice: once (in black and white) with a death and the second time (in color) with a survival Fascinating. Catalan; subtitled. (8:30 p.m. Friday, Loews; also 4 p.m. Saturday & 4:15 p.m. Sunday, Loews) — M.W.
– “Bus Riders Union” (star)(star)(star) (Haskell Wexler and Johanna Demetrakas; U.S.). Good, rousing documentary about a unique social movement: the L.A. Bus Rider’s Union and its three-year battle against the waste, inefficiency, botched priorities and broken promises of the city’s M.T.A. and its ludicrous mismanagement of L.A. mass transit. Wexler to attend. (8:45 p.m. Friday, Music Box) — M.W.
– “Monday” (star)(star)(star) (Sabu; Japan). The fourth feature of Japanese cult director Sabu is a caustic, pitch-dark satire about a repressive businessman who wakes up in a hotel where, slowly and methodically, he begins to piece together the events of the previous night, a succession of weird encounters entangling him in the murder of several local gangsters. Japanese; subtitled. Sabu to attend. (9 p.m. Friday, Loews; also 11:45 p.m. Saturday, DOC, and 8:45 p.m. Sunday, Loews) — P.Z.M.
– “Of Women and Magic” (star)(star) 1/2 (Claude Miller; France). An unhappy female student tormented by migraine headaches checks into a hospital, where she becomes enmeshed in the mysterious affairs of her silent, possibly insane old roommate. Weird events abound, as two lives unravel. French; subtitled. (9:30 p.m. Friday, DOC) — M.W.
– “Chronically Unfeasible” (star)(star)(star) (Sergio Bianchi; Brazil). A fascinating blend of documentary realism and social satire, this Brazilian film tracks the corresponding and rhyming actions of five characters spread across the country’s five zones, examining their customs, rituals, feelings, actions and, most interesting, attitudes about class and race. Portuguese; subtitled. Bianchi to attend. (9:45 p.m. Friday, Loews; also 1:30 p.m. Sunday, Loews) — P.Z.M.
– “A Paradise Under the Stars” (star)(star) 1/2 (Gerardo Chijona; Cuba). Lurid comic melodrama set in the world of Havana cabaret shows and night life, all about a complex tangle of increasingly daffy sexual, familial and show-biz relations. Spanish; subtitled. Chijona to attend. (9:45 p.m. Friday, Music Box) — M.W.
– “Minerva’s Quest” (star)(star) 1/2 (Oscar Blancarte; Mexico). Likable, well-shot tale of an embittered and selfish would-be Mexican novelist who keeps flashing back to her half-magical childhood; there we see her abusive fisherman father, her charming but irresponsible uncle — and the mermaid fantasies and dark secrets buried back there. Spanish; subtitled. Blancarte to attend. (1 & 3:45 p.m. Saturday, Loews) — M.W.
– “The Marcorelle Affair” (star)(star) 1/2 (Serge Le Peron; France). Modern French neo-noir: a bizarre thriller with Jean-Pierre Leaud (once Truffaut’s fugitive lad in “The 400 Blows”), as a prosecutor lost in horrific fantasies and Irene Jacob (“Three Colors: Red”) as the Polish hooker who pulls him into a shadowy world. French; subtitled. Le Peron to attend. (2 & 8:45 p.m. Saturday, Loews; also 6 p.m. Sunday, Loews) — M.W.
– “Song of Tibet” (star)(star) 1/2 (Xie Fei; China). An epic romance, wildly romantic and gorgeously shot, which is also a major cultural event” a Tibetan story with an all-Tibetan cast, sympathetically shot by one of China’s most prominent filmmakers (“Women from the Lake of the Scented Souls”). At the center is a love triangle and numerous hardships and adventures recalled by an elderly couple, who recount the tale of their meeting, flight, combative romance and long enmities and friendships. Tibetan; subtitled. Xie Fei will attend. (3:30 p.m. & 6 p.m. Saturday, Loews; also 6:15 p.m. Sunday, Loews) — M.W.
– “Bread and Roses” (star)(star)(star) (Ken Loach; United Kingdom). Ken Loach’s first American-set film is about the labor struggles of poor Hispanic workers in modern Los Angeles, where two Mexican sisters — one a legal emigrant, one not — become involved in the city’s sometimes violent janitors strike. Loach follows the labor battle with his usual uncanny sense of the real. Like “Riff Raff” or “Raining Stones,” this sympathetic and strong story is a vivid, spontaneous-seeming portrait of working-class people done with neither condescension nor false glamorization. (6:15 p.m. Saturday, DOC) — M.W.
– “Gaea Girls” (star)(star) (Kim Longinotto & Jano Williams; United Kingdom). A BBC-made documentary exploring the deeply ritualized, intensely rigorous training of a group of young Japanese women learning the art, stagecraft and physical daring of professional wrestling. Given the Japanese obsession with propriety and restraint, the work begins promisingly, an intriguing investigation of transgressive gender study, violence, sexuality and competition, but the directors neither fully penetrate the surface nor successfully individuate their subjects. Japanese; subtitled. Williams to attend. (M.W.: (star) 1/2) (6:30 p.m. Saturday, Music Box) — P.Z.M.
– “This I Wish and Nothing More” (star)(star) (Kornel Mundruczo; Hungary). A gloomy, bleak portrait of squalor and desperation about the complicated sexual adventures of a man trapped in an unexciting marriage who turns tricks with his brother-in-law for fun and thrill seeking, not realizing the other man’s deep, unrequited passion for him. Hungarian; subtitled. Mundruczo to attend. (6:45 p.m. Saturday, Loews; also 8:30 p.m. Monday, Loews) — P.Z.M.
– “Werckmeister Harmonies” (star)(star)(star)(star) (Bela Tarr; Hungary/France). Full of Tarr’s usual haunting imagery and cryptic menace, shot in a succession of moody, beautifully framed and stunningly extended long take black-and-white sequences, this film is a fable about social collapse and the onset of mob rule. A small Hungarian village is visited by a seedy little carnival whose attractions are a huge stuffed whale and the mysterious, little-seen “Prince”; before long, the villagers have been whipped into a frenzy of frustration and violence. Hungarian; subtitled. Tarr to attend. (8:30 p.m. Saturday, DOC; also 8 p.m. Sunday, Music Box) — M.W.
– “Envy of Gods” (star)(star) (Vladimir Menshov; Russia). The director of that overrated Russian Oscar-winner “Moscow Does not Believe in Tears” tries to give us a story of great love and overwhelming passion in troubled times: in 1983, before the Cold War’s end. It’s both sappy and sensual. After watching “Last Tango in Paris” and meeting the quickly smitten Gerard Depardieu (in a beefy good will cameo), a married Russian TV editor falls for a brooding French journalist and the two embark on the kind of mad feverish sexual spree that can only end in death, divorce, exile or a tango. Russian and French; subtitled. Menshov to attend. (9:15 p.m. Saturday, Loews; also 1:45 & 8:15 p.m. Sunday, Music Box) — M.W.
– “The Goddess of 1967” (star)(star)(star) (Clara Law; Australia). One of the strangest love-on-the-run road movies ever from top-notch Hong Kong filmmaker Clara Law (“Autumn Moon”), who is now a Melbourne resident. A Japanese car freak embezzles money to buy the legendary “Goddess” sports car, a 1967 Citroen DS (which he first saw in Melville’s classic noir, “Le Samourai”), and winds up fleeing through the desert with a blind runaway, whose life has been blighted by sexual abuse by her demented grandfather. (8:45 p.m. Sunday, Loews) — M.W.
FILM FESTIVAL FACTS
When: Daily through Thursday
Where: Film screenings will take place (unless otherwise noted) at Loews Cineplex Theatres, 600 N. Michigan Ave.; Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave.; University of Chicago DOC Films at the Max Palevsky Cinema, 1212 E. 59th St.
Closing Night (Thursday) Film: “Shadow of the Vampire,” U.S. (8:30 p.m., Music Box Theatre)
Special programs: Best of the Fest Awards Night (8:30 p.m. Monday, Music Box Theatre); Gala 2000, with special celebrity guest — identity to be announced (6 p.m. Oct. 21, Hyatt Regency Chicago, 2233 Martin Luther King Drive)
Single-ticket prices: $8 (Cinema/Chicago members); $10 (non-members); $5 (weekday matinees before 5 p.m.); $6 (weekend matinees before 5 p.m.); a variety of passes/packages available
Festival office: 32 W. Randolph St., Suite 600; 312-425-9400
Festival 24-hour hotline: 312-332-FILM
Web site: www.chicagofilmfestival.com
— Heather M. Lajewski
