Since I started going to the Film Festival in 1999, I always feel a little “festivaled”-out by the second weekend. It is sometimes a struggle to haul my bleary-eyed, stiff-backed, sensation-weary self back for another go-round of films about Kazakh magic healers or Argentine illegal loggers. But my second week schedule for this year contained some of the most surprising, most overwhelming, most provocative films I’ve seen recently. They weren’t all successful, but their daring, original, thoughtful topics made for some interesting, sometimes difficult and emotionally-draining, viewing. Here, then, are my thoughts on the final four films of my viewing schedule for the 2009 Chicago International Film Festival:
Daniel and Ana – This Mexican film, which already caused quite a stir during this spring’s Cannes Film Festival Directors’ Fortnight competition, probably takes the cake as the most harrowing film I’ve seen this year, or in any Festival year of recent vintage. The story of affluent siblings in Mexico City – she’s in her early 20s and about to get married, he’s sixteen and in high school – kidnapped at gunpoint and forced to have sex on film by their captors is even more difficult to watch given the knowledge that it is based on a true story. I really liked first-time director Michel Franco’s unfussy, undramatic, almost documentary-like direction, which gives the film a naturalistic veneer that accentuates the real-life nature of the events depicted. I also heartily applaud lead actors Marimar Vega and Daniel Yazbeck Bernal (Gael Garcia Bernal’s younger brother), heart-wrenching, brazen, emotionally and physically raw performances. There is a lot of focus on the individual, emotional aftermath of the event (and even more shocking narrative twists happen as the brother descends into a dark, deep depression), but as an audience member, I really wanted, no, needed, to understand, the socio-cultural drivers of the widespread kidnappings in Mexico City and why some people are kidnapped for this particular purpose. Who is the audience for these videos? Why don’t the victims speak up? Who are the kidnappers? What should the story say about the class conflicts and divisions in the city? Ultimately, if these themes were tackled in the film, the whole difficult, stomach-churning, wringer-running time the audience was put through would have been worth it.
Eyes Wide Open – When I first read the description of this movie, which had already earned raves at Cannes and Toronto, I thought, hmmm, sounds like Brokeback Mountain with tzitzits (actually it’s so much closer in tone and evocation to Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, except that instead of Maggie Cheung in a cheongsam you get Zohar Strauss in a tallit). But this incandescent, and ultimately hauntingly sad film set in Jerusalem about a married Orthodox butcher who has an affair with his gay assistant, is a revelatory look into a culture, a community, and a place that not many filmmakers have tackled before (the only other one I can think of is the Sundance favorite Trembling Before G_d from a few years back). Director Haim Tabakman gives us a meticulous, insightful look into the Jewish Orthodox community: it’s rituals, practices, and worldviews, and their crushing effects on gay people (the scene where the butcher and his assistant go to evening Talmudic study and then sing arm in arm with the rest of the men, communicating subtle hints of their yearning for each other, is intricately and delicately directed and acted). The acting is phenomenal: Strauss achingly paints a very layered portrait of a man torn between his religion and his family duties and his energetic feelings for the male hottie next door (well, actually above, since the assistant lives in the storeroom on top of the butcher shop); Israeli heartthrob Ran Danker is appropriately smoldering, seductive, and sympathetic; and Tinkerbell (yes, finally, an actress named Tinkerbell in a gay movie! How about that?) is heartbreaking as the wife who knows in her heart and in her mind that her husband is cheating on her with another guy but who can’t speak up due to the social place she has been consigned to in the community. I think everything in the film is heartfelt and authentic, even the requisite wife-”mistress” confrontation scene, this time played over the cleaning of a brisket (interesting!). Although I must say Danker is beautifully photographed in this scene like a Dolce&Gabbana model, while Tinkerbell is made to look like a 1970s-era Cloris Leachman in a $7.75 sale cardigan from Wal-mart. I mean, really, talk about stacking the odds for the gay boy!
A Woman’s Way – Speaking of gay….well actually, mega-gay, or better yet, beyond-any-cosmic-consciousness-gay, A Woman’s World is probably one of the most unique, flabbergasting films I have seen in the Festival ever! This Greek film, directed by Panos H. Koutras, already rocked the house at the Berlin Film Festival this year with its bizarro-world combustible mix of an inverted Oedipus Rex meets tranny porn meets Maria Callas! Yep, you read those words right! Strella (real-life transsexual Mina Orfanou who looks like Cher with too much make-up…yes, dearies, I didn’t think that was even possible until I saw Orfanou…but she’s fabulous and has unbelievable star quality, rare in a non-professional actor), a Callas female impersonator who also works as a prostitute, has an affair with an older man, just released from a 15 year jail sentence (Yiannis Kokiasmeno) who’s looking for the son he left years before. Director Koutras at the talk-back requested that the audience not reveal any details about the plot, and its twists and turns, so I won’t say anything more. The film though is big-hearted, unconventional, wacky, unabashedly campy, and just really, uhmmm, different, containing everything from Melina Mercouri impersonators to animated squirrel dream sequences to explict man-on-tranny action. I wasn’t too thrilled with the upbeat ending, which may or may not be condoning something socially unacceptable, but overall, A Woman’s Way is one of those films that make you grateful for an international film festival in your hometown. Otherwise, you may not have the opportunity to see it at all!
Persecution - Lest everyone thinks I created a mini-LGBT film festival out of this year’s schedule for myself (and be accused once again by BFF Debra to be ensconced on the gay bandwagon), no, it just so happened that many of the films in my second week had gay themes. Persecution, fresh from last month’s Venice Film Festival, is the latest from Patrice Chereau, who likes to make complicated movies out of simple themes (case in point: Intimacy with its unnecessary real sex scenes). It’s a ridiculous, but somewhat amusing, fantasia about a hot-headed, brutally frank, impatient, kinda mean pseudo-carpenter (the beyond-hot Romain Duris who gives a more soul-baring, thoughtful performance than this film deserves) who attracts and gets obsessed over by women (his girlfriend played by the icy Charlotte Gainsbourg) and men (his doormat friend played by Gilles Cohen, who effectively captures homoeroticism, and his stalker, a hilariously deadpan Jean-Huges Anglade, who occupied the same French heartthrob status that Duris currently has in the 1980s). Essentially, the film boils down to the way we attract, repel, and hold on to the people in our lives, but there is so much of the circuitous, angsty, semi-pretentious talk that French filmmakers are so fond of, that the movie eventually becomes tiresome in some parts. Duris is infamous for dropping trou in every movie he’s in, but Persecution probably contains the best cinematic record of his bare ass. Lovely. Points too for having Antony and the Johnson’s otherworldly “Mysteries of Love” play over the end credits.
The Film Festival ends tonight with a screening of The Young Victoria, starring Emily Blunt. See you all next year!
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