The Chicago International Film Festival
ends another year tonight with its 7 pm screening of the The Debt, starring Helen Mirren and Sam Worthington. I ended my Film Festival experience earlier this week with the last of my dozen films – below are my impressions on the last four films I saw. See you all next year for another remarkable film-viewing experience!
I’ve seen some pretty heady, wacky, and at times, whacked-out stuff at the Chicago International Film Festival over the years. Christopher Honore’s Ma Mere, for one, in which Isabelle Huppert’s character has an affair with her son, played by Louis Garrell (who probably sets the cinematic record for male masturbation, including a jaw-dropping final scene when he does the deed while he looks over her dead body in the morgue, of all places). Or Kornél Mundruczó’s Johanna which re-tells the story of Joan of Arc as an opera-musical, set in a Hungarian hospital for the terminally-ill, where a drug-addicted Joan is martyred for trying to heal the patients by having sex with them. Or Kim Ki-duk’s Time about an obsessive woman who undergoes plastic surgery to get back her boyfriend, which contains a lengthy surreal coffee shop scene followed by a chase scene in which the actors are wearing white masks throughout. But this year’s Leap Year, the Mexican film from Australian transplant Michael Rowe, which caused quite the commotion at Cannes earlier this year and won the Camera D’Or prize for best first film, is up there with the outrageously memorable. It is audacious and envelope-pushing, not only because of its graphic sex scenes (an unsimulated hand job, asphyxiation during anal sex and “golden showers”, anyone?) and it’s ferociously brave performance from lead actress Monica del Carmen, but also because by having a laser-sharp focus on the mundane, routinary aspects of a person’s daily life, it is able to paint a vivid, tragic, universal portrait of contemporary urban living. It is breathtaking. Here are my thoughts on Leap Year and other films I saw this week at the Festival, all of them coming to us from Cannes:
The Chicago International Film Festival is in full swing, and I’m swinging along with it. Panting and dizzy is probably more like it, though, given the cinematic shenanigans I witnessed during the first festival weekend – from a guy gagged, bound, hooded, stuffed into the backseat of a car with the engine running in a sealed garage, to graphic sex scenes, amputee and non-amputee alike, to lengthy MRI scans of a woman’s thorax and diaphragm. Yeah, really. Thank goodness for the gay film! I’d like to give props, though, to the Festival organizers, not just for the adventurous programming, but also for more audience-friendly logistics. I think the Festival is really settling in quite gracefully at the AMC River East, its home of the past three years, and there’s less of Nurse Ratched’s mental ward’s frenzy of previous years. The lines to see the films are still there, but they’re less chaotic than before (and the Film Festival experience wouldn’t be complete without these lines – especially if in some of them you bump into long-forgotten participants of your far-flung youth’s numerous walks of shame!). Here are my thoughts on the first set of films I saw at the Festival:
The name “Lars von Trier” evokes as much dread in me as the words “H1N1″, “chicken feet”, and “I’m staying over tonight.” After suffering through The Idiots, Dancer In the Dark (and who, other than this oft-accused misogynistic director would make ethereal, eternal cinematic icon Catherine Deneuve carry a plate of spaghetti while singing “My Favorite Things”? Please, some things are sacred cows!) and parts of The Kingdom, I said I’d rather have my eyes poked out than sit through another one of his films. So no Breaking the Waves, Dogville, or Manderlay for me. However, after hearing and reading all the buzz, both heated denouncement and rapturous praise, I wouldn’t be true to my self-proclaimed cineaste status if I didn’t go to see his latest opus, Antichrist, the notorious sensation of the global film festival circuit this year (actually I was just more curious than anything else). Now on a commercial run after its sold-out screening at the recently concluded Chicago International Film Festival, I must say the film is ridiculous, overblown, and a whole lot of sheep dung for significant parts of it, but it is also undeniably hypnotic, impressively infuriating, and ultimately, for better or for worse, memorable. And it’s probably the funniest film I’ve seen all year (yes, it’s funnier than Bruno!), hilarious in its self-absorption and pretension, like an eccentric, middling artist at a pseudo-hipster gallery opening.
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:
Even for a film festival junkie like me, the whole thing could sometimes be a little too much. After the tenth time of lining up for a film, or after suffering through another concentration-requiring scene while the person beside you loudly chows down on his nachos like a Siberian tiger gnoshing on a piece of deer leg (thank goodness for subtitles!), or after the fifth Q and A session with a film’s director full of inane questions (such as “what’s your advice for an aspiring filmmaker?” to which my response would have been “It’s to get the hell out of a film festival Q and A session and make a film! Geez!”), I sometimes wonder why my DNA wasn’t rigged to be a Cubs fan instead. Drunk on their ass wearing sweat-stained shirts in a Wrigleyville bar, they look like they live much simpler lives. Then the lights go down on a film which turns out to be exhilaratingly stimulating and transcendent, and I wouldn’t want to trade my film festival life for a Cubbie fan’s life- ever (plus, where would I get such heinous outfits?). Several years ago, that film was Michael Haneke’s Cache, which was followed the next year by Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, both of which went on to much deserved universal acclaim. This year, that wonderful film that defines my film festival experience for the year is another one from Romania, Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective, a prime example of envelope-pushing filmmaking, which had already won this year’s Cannes Film Festival Un Certain Regard Jury Prize. My comments on Police, Adjective and two other films I saw in the past couple of days are below:
Recently Attended Events
- 2/02/2012: Disgraced (American Theater Company)
- 1/29/2012: Time Stands Still (Steppenwolf Theatre)
- 1/28/2012: Ameriville (Victory Gardens Theater)
- 1/22/2012: Enron (Timeline Theatre Company)
- 12/21/2011: Penelope (Steppenwolf Theatre)
- 12/17/2011: Spring Awakening (Griffin Theatre Company)
- 11/12/2011: Red Light Winter (Mary-Arrchie Theatre Co.)
- 10/16/2011: The Ugly One (Sideshow Theatre Company)
- 10/15/2011: Overweight, Unimportant: Misshape - A European Supper (Trap Door Theatre)
- 10/08/2011: Follies (Chicago Shakespeare Theatre)
- 10/02/2011: Elling (Redtwist Theatre)
- 10/01/2011: Becky Shaw (A Red Orchid Theatre)
- 9/25/2011: Violet (Bailiwick Chicago)
- 9/18/2011: Clybourne Park (Steppenwolf Theatre)
- 9/16/2011: The Kid Thing (About Face Theater and Chicago Dramatists)
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