Ray Pride

When a film festival's been around long enough or a journalist has been around that festival for a while, coverage can turn into a bureaucratic recap, a history of the ups and downs of an organization against the ups and downs of world cinema.

But what about the movies? Chicago's got film festivals year round, and theaters like the Siskel Film Center, Facets and the Music Box have new work every week, and campus-located groups like Block Cinema and DOC Films show off-Hollywood movies as well. What does the Chicago International Film Festival, now in its thirty-ninth edition offer? A whole lot more movies in a short period of time, including previews of a couple dozen movies that will filter into art houses over the next six months or more.

The movies. 2003 has been a remarkable year for documentaries, in quantity and quality, and in commercial viability. Among the dozen entries in the Docufest section of CIFF, there's Jonathan Demme's "The Agronomist," a portrait of Haitian political instability through the eyes of a friend of the director; Niki List's "Move!" an inspiring look at seven young Austrian artists ready to change the world; and Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain's accidental project, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," wherein the filmmakers found themselves in Venezuela during the middle of a coup against President Chavez, witnessing events while trapped in the Presidential Palace. Ron Mann's "Go Further" follows Woody Harrelson on an eco-friendly bus tour of the West Coast, putting the maxim of "think globally, act locally" to an entertaining test. John Cadigan's "Peple Say I'm Crazy" is said to be the first film made by a schizophrenic; Nathaniel Kahan's "My Architect" wrestles with the legacy of Louis Kahn as architect and father to the filmmaker. Two standouts: Ulrich Seidl's "Jesus, You Know," a strikingly intimate companion to his more alienating work like the fictional "Dog Days"; and Russian director Victor Kossakovsky's momentous and lyrical "Hush!", which consists of images shot over the course of a year from a ten-foot area of street that could be seen from his St. Petersburg apartment.

For those who like their drama intense, there's the terse and shocking family tale from Israel, "Broken Wings"; from France's master of familial guilt, Claude Chabrol comes "The Flower of Evil," with the aftereffects of denial and hypocrisy again resounding through the lives of his characters.

In the World Cinema section, Catherine Breillat weighs in with her slight but funny "Sex is Comedy," a self-critique of the shooting of her controversial "Fat Girl." In the three-country Asian horror trilogy, "Three," Kim Jee-Woon's "Memories" is memorably haunting and grisly. Isabel Coixet's "My Life Without Me" is a quiet, lovingly detailed production, with a story of cruel denial, as 23-year-old mom of two Sarah Polley (in another compelling performance) hides her impending death from cancer, leaving her family in the dark as she fades. Lucian Pintilie's "Niki and Flo" is something I'm looking forward to, a new movie from a terrifically quirky Romanian veteran.

The International competition includes "At Five in the Afternoon," the third feature from 23-year-old Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf, and Jafar Panahi's "Crimson Gold," which begins as a glum summation of the stylistic devices of recent Iranian cinema, but continues as something much stranger, epic and hurtful. Tsai Ming-Liang's "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" is an agonizingly minimal comedy of the closing of a Taipei movie palace; I've loved thinking about it since but suffered while watching it. Christoffer Boe's "Reconstruction" is one of the most-praised Danish films since "Celebration," and I've regretted not having been able to catch it until now. "Lush" and "inventive" are usually promising adjectives in festival promo copy; there's also the Cannes Best First Film prize going for it. Two new features by Raoul Ruiz are in the mix, as well as yet another feature from unstoppable 94-year-old Portuguese Manoel de Oliveira.

Peter Greenaway's latest inscrutable indulgence, "The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 1," showcases his digital-video fetish, and "Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself," Lone Scherfig's comic follow-up to her quirky romance, "Italian for Beginners," is also scheduled.

The New Directors Competition includes Peter Hedges' modest comedy-drama, "Pieces of April," with a charming twerpy turn by Katie Holmes as a family black sheep who wants to make a perfect Thanksgiving dinner for her family, which includes Patricia Clarkson as her ill but clearheaded mother. Sounds like a Sundance cliché, but it's funny and heartfelt at truly unexpected moments. Jim Sheridan's "In America" is another strange and lovely Manhattan tale, with an Irish émigré family struggling to make ends meet one hard summer. There are lovely things to spare in this movie co-written by Sheridan's daughter Kristen, also a director of note. Richard Jobson's "16 Years of Alcohol" is emotionally torrential, daring to overload the eyes and ears, and its hyperreal visual style (partially owing to a new video-to-film transfer that shines) and hyperliterary narration seemed to alienate many viewers at Toronto. While there are comparisons to be made to the ironically ambered nostalgia of Terrence Davies and the sudden bursts of whimsy and violence of "Trainspotting," Jobson, who fronted The Skids, has a relationship with music and language that soars much more often than it oppresses. And while his movie can be aligned with the work of other filmmakers, Jobson's voice seems authentic, much like Breillat, Coixet, Makhmahbaf, Chabrol, Ming-Liang and the other directors whose work is on show.

Chicago International Film Festival starts Thursday, October 2 at the Music Box and Landmark Century Cinema. A selective listing is available on this web site.

(2003-10-02)

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