A reduced, streamlined Chicago International Film Festival opened it’s 45th year last night with the premiere of Uma Thurman’s latest flick, Motherhood, and will run for the next 14 days until October 22. For many Chicagoans, the fall season marker is the Chicago Marathon (happening this weekend), for me, self-styled, hot-blooded film aficionado, it’s the Festival. I was a little surprised, though, at the lack of big, event-type movies in this year’s schedule, since last year saw the likes of eventual Oscar Best Picture winner Slumdog Millionaire, Mickey Rourke’s return to civilization, The Wrestler, Arnaud Desplechin’s festival circuit favorite A Christmas Tale, and Charlie Kauffman’s headscratching debut, Synecdoche, New York, among others. This year, only two much-buzzed-about films are included in the Festival slate, the latest Lars Von Trier sex-gore-talking fox grostesquerie, AntiChrist, which provoked massive walkouts at Cannes but won the Best Actress Award for star Charlotte Gainsbourg for cutting her delicate parts in extreme, jawdropping close-up; and Lee Daniel’s Precious, based on the book “Push” by Sapphire, which has been acclaimed everywhere from Sundance and Toronto, with alleged Oscar frontrunner performances from Mo’Nique and Mariah Carey (Academy Award-nominated Mariah Carey???? This trumps Lars von Trier talking-fox-genital-cutting insanity! You go, girl!). This lack of showcase films, many of which we’ll get to see anyway in their regular runs after the festival, may bode well for the celluloid-mad Chicago audience to discover obscure gems that may never see the light of commercial release in the United States. My own festival viewing slate (I buy a pass every year) is a combination of festival circuit favorites and little-known films that could potentially be transcendent…or a train wreck.
Because I couldn’t get into the sold-out AntiChrist screening, I’m going to Marco Bellochio’s highly-regarded Cannes entry, Vincere, about Mussollini’s secret mistress and son, instead. Bellochio can be snooze-inducing at times but his visual style can be grand and painterly. I’ll also be at Police, Adjective, which won the Jury Prize in the Cannes Un Certain Regard sidebar competition for its darkly comic tale of a Romanian cop, as well as Patrice Chereau’s latest, Persecution, which got somewhat tepid reviews at Venice, about a married man (Romain Duris) having relationship troubles with his girlfriend (Charlotte Gainsbourg, again) who is stalked by a stranger he meets in the subway (Jean Hughes Anglade, who I’ve never seen as a guy-stalker type).
Other intriguing films I’ve decided to see include Daniel and Ana, a Mexican film that also provoked walkouts at Cannes (though not at the AntiChrist level) about siblings who are kidnapped and then forced to perform in a porn movie (!); the Israeli entry Eyes Wide Open, about homosexuality in Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox community (!!), and Hipsters, a crowd favorite at Toronto, about young people in 1950s Stalin Russian struggling against the government, and told as a…Russian musical (!!!- yes, it really does deserve the three exclamation points). Of course, the Festival is full of eccentricities as always, and I love it! I’m going to the Filipino film (but of course!), The Rapture of Fe, about a woman having an affair with a monster from Filipino folklore; Kanisoken, from the Japanese director Sabu, just recently seen at the New York Film Festival, a highly-stylized adaptation of a 1929 Japanese novel about men in a crab-canning boat, and A Woman’s Way, which uses elements of Greek drama to tell the story of a love affair between an ex-con and a transvestite (lovely!). I’m, once again, breaking my rule of not seeing English-language movies for another Michael Fassbender film (he was brilliant in my best film of last year’s Festival, Hunger), the much-raved about FishTank, which supposedly contains an Oscar-caliber performance from newcomer Katie Jarvis, as a teenager from the London projects who falls in love with her mom’s boyfriend (Fassbender, but seriously who wouldn’t?).
See you guys at the cinema!
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