Here’s BFF Debra, the lovely Beth, and your culture vulture blogger during the opening night preview party.  It’s free to get into the Modern Wing the entire week till Friday, May 22.  Shame on you if you live in Chicago, or are visiting Chicago, or are even remotely within 5 miles of the city perimeter, and you don’t go to spend a couple of hours in this wonderful place.

“Faro:  Goddess of the Waters” from Burkina Faso has a cliched tradition vs. modernism theme, played out with so much fabulous African color, I thought I was in one of Lisa Ling’s National Geographic specials but with a plot and dialogue.  The film is about an educated engineer who goes back to his remote village to build a dam, and all types of crazy business (possessed virgins, hurricanes, etc.) attributed to Faro, the river goddess ensue. About half an hour into this mess, I was thinking of getting a pedicure.

“Witnesses”, the latest film from acclaimed French director, Andre Techine, is a pretty straightforward story of shifting relationships and sexual identity in 1980s France, during the confusing early days of the AIDS epidemic.  I wished the story was more compelling, and tackled more ideas around the socio-political-cultural context (a lot of work was done in France to try and discover the cause of the disease and how to combat it). But I guess Techine didn’t really want to do an update on “And the Band Played On”, but rather find an excuse to film some really hot man-to-man coupling involving sizzling, extremely butch, rising French-Algerian actor, Sami Bouajila. Pouty actress Emmanuelle Beart, who is usually the objectified one in these French movies, is relegated to the background, usually wearing a heinous canary yellow ruffled sundress and madly typing on an ancient remington typewriter.  The things one does for a paycheck!

Israel’s “Jellyfish” won the Camera D’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, which is the prize given to first films.  Maybe one can forgive the directors for their baffling mix of styles (magical realism vs. naturalism), languid pacing, and total lack of focus because it is their first time at bat.  The attempt to portray the lives of a group of Tel Aviv residents sounds fascinating on paper, but is totally uninvolving.  Maybe its bias on my part, but I was most interested in the storyline involving the Filipino caretaker, although I wished that the writer and directors painted her story in a more vivid and socially-conscious fashion.

With the abundance of bare breasts and old men ogling them, I kept on wondering whether I was watching a Larry Flynt fantasia video instead of Jiri Menzel’s “I Served the King of England”, the Czech Republic’s entry to the 2008 Academy Award foreign language film category.  This slight trifle, mostly tedious, sometimes funny, tells the story of a guy who climbs the ladder in the hotel industry and survives the Nazis only to be imprisoned as a millionaire needing rehabilitation during the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in the 1950s.  It has a sweet and whimsical tone, which is a little jarring given the dark subject matter, and little else, an art film for the retirement community.

The Chicago International Film Festival ends tomorrow, October 18, with a screening of “The Savages”.  Director Tamara Jenkins and star Laura Linney will be attending the event.

- Sarah Ruhl’s ambitious, monumental, provocative “Passion Play” which despite being messy and chaotic at points in its three hour and 45 minute running time, and inspite of some incomprehensible giant fish imagery and gratuitous full frontal male nudity (hey, I am not complaining though!) is a phenomenal, risky attempt to illuminate the self-serving relationships between politics and religion;

- Avant-garde royalty Joanne Akalaitis, Caryl Churchill, and Seneca collaborate for a crazy, memorable night of theatrical violence and sibling rivalry in the Court Theatre’s “Thyestes”.  If the exaggerated movements of the actors and some perplexing singsong delivery do not drive audiences out of the Court, then Akalaitis’ smell-o-rama tactics of flooding the theatre with the smell of beef and onions while the horrific killing and eating of Thyestes’s children are recounted will.  This is a shame because it is one hell of an exciting provocateur of a show.

- Gary Griffin and Ana Gasteyer, fresh off their Broadway forays in “The Color Purple” and “The Threepenny Opera” respectively, collaborate on a beautifully staged, intensely sung and acted production of Sondheim’s much misunderstood musical, “Passion”.  See my previous blog entry!

- Speaking of Broadway, Anna Shapiro, whose fantastic Chicago production of “August:  Osage County” is transferring intact to New York later this month, has mounted a frenzied, must-not-miss, not-your-grandfather’s “The Crucible” as the Steppenwolf season-opener.  James Vincent Meredith, in a brilliant stroke of casting, anchors the piece with a riveting John Proctor. (Take that, Daniel Day-Lewis!)

- Nilaja Sun has brought her acclaimed “No Child…” which was the sensation of the last off-Broadway season to Chicago and has reaped the same ecstatic praise here.

- And all the new work that we are privileged to see before they go on to productions elsewhere:  Brett Neveu’s “Weapon of Mass Impact”, Keith Huff’s “A Steady Rain”, Mia McCullough’s “Spare Change”, Eric Rosen’s “Wedding Play”…the list goes on. 

The best thing about all of this is that you can see many of these plays for 20 bucks or less (which is roughly equivalent to a week of daily Starbucks iced soymilk latte no foam two splenda).  I am baffled by the fact that given the amount of artistic offerrings in the city and how reasonably priced much of them are, many Chicagoans still opt to spend their Saturday afternoons and evenings at…uhmmm…Kirkwood’s. Especially since our New York cousins are being conned into paying stratospheric prices for their theatre tickets…those prices are becoming so unreasonable, very soon, they’ll be expecting “extras” with it…see this hilarious blog entry from Rob Kozlowski:  http://robkozlowski.blogspot.com/2007/10/broadway-and-fellatio.html

- “Four Months, Three Weeks, and Two Days” was the surprise winner of the Palm D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and I think the award was richly deserved.  This is a harrowing, provocative film about a student who tries to help her roommate get an abortion in Ceaucescu-era Romania.  But that is just the jump-off point for reflections on the nature of morality within a totalitarian regime (are absolute standards of right and wrong as we know possible in that situation?  or are people driven to be situationally moral?  there’s some philosophical debate here that I am not well-versed to take on). Shot in naturalistic style, with lots of tracking shots and grey atmospheric lighting, it reminded me a lot of Kiezlowski during the Decalogue days.  Excellently acted, written, and directed (by Cristian Mungiu, who has directed only one other film before this), ”Four Months..” is one of my richer film going experiences of the year.

- “You, the Living” is an absurd dark comedy from the highly respected Swedish director Roy Andersson.  There is no plot, but there is a lot of strange laugh-out-loud humor, a musical number or two, an over the top melancholy biker chick, and very sharp observations on the pettiness and self-involvement that people are often capable of.

- “Love Songs” or what I have told my friends as the French pansexual musical (!).  Boy and girl invite other girl, who may or may not be a lesbian, to a threesome relationship.  Girl dies of aneurism.  Other girl is bisexual, not goldstar lesbian, since she hooks up with a straight guy.  Boy sulks and meets other girl’s boyfriend’s gay brother who then proceeds to stalk boy.  After initial resistance, boy and gay brother end up happily ever after (or at least making out on a balcony). Add the dead girl’s meddling older sister, lots of catchy French pop songs, beautiful rain soaked shots of the Place d’Bastille, a really terrific, youthful, wink wink energy, and you have a fun, very French time at the movies.  “Amelie” this definitely is not.

- “La Leon” is probably one of the most stultifying experiences I have had in a darkened movie theatre for a while.  I never really figured what this Argentine film (which won a directing prize at the Berlin film festival) is about, but it sort of involved illegal loggers from Paraguay, soccer, a closeted gay guy who gets dry humped in the woods by his nemesis, and lots of beautiful cinematography of reeds swaying in the wind and seaweed floating on a lake. 

- “Ploy” – Billed as an erotic thriller from Thailand, this is again one of those head-scratchers that people who go to arthouses feel they have to admire.  There must be something in the pad thai sauce in Bangkok for the new wave of Thai directors to be doing movies that make no sense to anyone who’s sober (exhibit A: “Tropical Malady” which was screened at the festival several years ago). A couple from the US go home to Bangkok for a funeral and all kinds of crazy things and dream sequences and “is this real or is this not” situations ensue.  I have a pretty high tolerance for artsy, pretentious films, but this one really taxed my patience (especially after the hotel maid, whose only dramatic use from what I can discern is to have graphic sex with the bartender character, gets a musical number near the end of the movie).

The Chicago International Film Festival runs till Thursday, October 18.  For movies and schedules, check out the website:  http://www.chicagofilmfestival.org/cgi-bin/WebObjects/CIFFSite.woa/wa/pages/Home