Talking Screens, A Week In Chicago Film, April 5-April 11, 2024
Prequel “The First Omen,” rife with nuns, and Dev Patel’s directorial debut action picture “Monkey Man” previewed after our deadline, but we have reviews of Alice Rohrwacher’s neo-neorealist “La Chimera” (Music Box, Film Center); Woody Allen’s Parisian murder procedural,”Coup de Chance“; and the black-and-white Canadian goof of Canadian spoofs, “Hundreds of Beavers.”
Also: The thirty-fourth Onion City Experimental Film Festival opens this week, one of the most concentrated of experimental film events open to the public, running April 4-14, both in-person at the Siskel Film Center and Filmmakers’ own Firehouse Cinema, “featuring an engaging array of beautiful, timely, and formidable works that transcend borders, from Chicago and beyond, Onion City continues to be devoted to the world of avant-garde film and video.” Countries represented in this year’s program include Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Jordan, Mexico, The Netherlands, Poland, South Korea, Sweden, Thailand, Ukraine, the United States and the United Kingdom. “One year can really change a lot in terms of social and environmental issues, and technological development. The advent of accessible AI tools has opened up a valve for experimentation. We are seeing some quite innovative usage of AI imagery,” says programmer Nicky Ni. “We also try to highlight exemplary filmmakers from or making works about Chicago, its industrial past, its housing and immigration crises, and its deteriorating infrastructure.” Local filmmakers on show include Shawn Antoine II, Jose Luis Benavides, Chi Jang Yin, Tanner D Masseth, Raine Yung, Oona Taper, ben sonjira young, æryka jourdaine hollis o’neil, Charles Cadkin, Steve Reinke and Deborah Stratman. More here.
“Triple Threat,” the debut 3D showcase at the Music Box also plays all week. The series runs the gamut from the earliest films produced in the format to more recent manifestations, thirteen features and a Three Stooges short all told, from the 1950s classic era (“Dial M For Murder,” “House of Wax,” “Creature From The Black Lagoon”); to Pixar (“Toy Story 3”); to films by Scorsese (“Hugo”), Godard (“Goodbye To Language”), Tony Scott (“Top Gun”) and Ridley Scott (“Prometheus”), as well as “Saw 3D,” “Tron: Legacy” and “Jackass 3D.” Our feature on the theater’s new setup and the goal of the programming is here; the complete Music Box listings are here.
Repertory & Revival includes “Children Of Men” at the Film Center (below). Doc Film’s groaning smorgasbord includes Bob Fosse’s “Cabaret” (35mm), Friday-Saturday); David Lynch’s “Eraserhead,” Friday; the Chicago premiere of Laura Citarella’s epic four-hour-and-twenty-minute Venice-prized Argentine mystery, “Trenque Lauquen“; another James Benning 16mm entry, 1999’s “El Valley Centro,” Sunday; Bill Gunn’s 1980 “meta soap opera,” the recently reconstituted 165-minute “Personal Problems,” Monday; Kurosawa’s “Kagemusha” on Wednesday; and Mizoguchi’s “Ugetsu” on Thursday. This quarter’s teeming seminar of essential pictures marches on.
OPENERS
Cannes-prized writer-director Alice Rohrwacher not only evokes her earlier countryman Roberto Rossellini in her style—neo-neorealist—but invokes him in conversation. Her 133-minute “La Chimera,” a gorgeous, weird pastoral, finds an ex-convict returning to his Italian village, where he takes a moment before persisting in his trade of robbing antiquities. Once on ground and under it, the film hallucinates warps in time, swaddling its tomb raider in history. Rohrwacher’s 1980s is a timeless setting in other regards, too. (Trauma rises from bodies and graves in emanations of magical realism.) This kind of experimentation, especially in her insistence on beauty, beauty, beauty, is to be encouraged: I love the look of her light—there are patterns, for instance, in a long opening scene on a train where moving, dappling shadows hypnotize and soothe, emblematic of the product of Rohrwacher’s eye. With Josh O’Connor, Roberto Rossellini’s daughter, Isabella Rossellini; Alba Rohrwacher. Opens Friday, April 5 at the Music Box and Film Center.
“Coup de Chance,” Woody Allen’s fiftieth feature is another trim ninety-minute-or-so effort from the intrepid eighty-eight-year-old filmmaker, seemingly never at a loss for innovative avenues for finance. There’s eccentric charm to the French-language result, seemingly both leisurely and impatient, with sometimes misrepresentative subtitles and (I’m told) tortured syntax to the ear of French speakers. (A quick spaghetti Bolognese is rendered as “spaghetti and meatballs.”) And, as in his twenty-first-century murder dramas, all the way back to “Match Point” (2005), Allen’s actors all seem to be in their own movies, if not on different planets. “Crimes and Misdemeanors” (1989) was still a unified motion picture with excellent actors striking notes of performance, and a script that wasn’t simply hitting elemental plot points. (“Coup de Chance”‘s moral statements spoken aloud are the movie equivalent of restless leg syndrome.) And the quips! Perfectly acceptable this side of a slight moan and seemingly silky when spun out in another language: “Isn’t this dress too sexy?”; “No such thing, it would be like being too rich.”
The master of the taut French-language thriller, Simenon, is invoked by name, if his pace of eleven-day novels, written in 8,000-word daily gulps, is not. But the look! Limber framing and assertive Steadicam capturing a range of lighting palettes by eighty-three-year-old Vittorio Storaro (“The Conformist,” “Apocalypse Now,” “Reds”)—washes of the palest lavender and robin’s-egg blue—as well as a game and charming French cast make for a genial bauble, its only alarming suggestion of Allen’s life outside of the cinema being a villain’s obsession with a room-filling electric train set. In theaters Friday, April 5; video-on-demand, April 12.
The handmade, silent, black-and-white “Hundreds of Beavers” and its larky invocation of familiar Canuckiana has cartoon heft and Guy Maddin-style fantasy, less derivative and more delirious; gag-ridden in the school of Mel Brooks and especially “Blazing Saddles.” Shot across four years with more than 1,500 effects shots, “Hundreds of Beavers” never neglects the hundreds of laughs. Bring on not just the beavers, but knit fish, trappers, puppeteered frogs, applejack, snow, frost, tundra, etc. etc. But Mr. Maddin himself would like a word about the manic pace, inspired slapstick and brimming sight gags: “Steroidally swollen with gags and smarts positively bucktoothed with goofiness and gorgeous with world-building invention.” Go, Guy, go! Music Box, Wednesday, April 10, 9:30pm.
HOLDOVERS
Facets features the tactile “The Taste of Things,” April 6-7. Our review here.
REPERTORY & REVIVAL
“Children Of Men” (35mm), Alfonso Cuarón’s Christmas 2006 feature, is monstrously alive to the condition of despair as well as the necessary dogged march forward to survive. (It’s also riven with information, imagery, implication and metaphors that stand the rest of time, and in its urban canvas and refugee crisis, rings true more today than when it was made; “The Zone Of Interest” functions the same way, in more concentrated form.) Cuarón consulted a raft of futurists to game a damnable future, his 2027, and the backdrop seethes with detail. Like his other films, including “Roma” (2018), “Children of Men” is concentrated cinema, wrought, focused, emblematic. They don’t make movies like this anymore, and to rewatch this masterpiece is to see that Cuarón is equally concerned with the survival of richly detailed cinema as the fraught voyage of his encircled, besieged characters. Masquerading as a science fiction film, “Children of Men” is set three years from 2024, when, for reasons unknown, after wars and disasters and plagues, women worldwide have not been able to conceive for eighteen years. In its quietly bravura opening scene, Theo (Clive Owen), an alcoholic onetime activist, witnesses a crowd in a café weeping over television news coverage of the death of an eighteen-year-old—“the world’s youngest person.” A few seconds later on Fleet Street—a London with grit but without glamour, dirtied as if by another century’s version of the Blitz—a terrorist bomb detonates. Julian (Julianne Moore), a former lover, turns up, dragging Theo into a battle for the future of the other failed, failing cities; he must protect a female “fugee,” a woman (Clare-Hope Ashitey) who is unaccountably pregnant, on her way to sanctuary. Does the government want her dead? What of the masses of angry anarchists? Siskel Film Center, Tuesday, April 9, 6pm.