Ray Pride

Among journalists who go to lots of festivals, the canard of the 2005-2006 box-office blahs has given way to one of the 2006 film-festival blues: so much disappointment spread across so many movies.

The forty-second edition of the Chicago International Film Festival, drawing from thirty countries and probably just as many festivals earlier in the year--Berlin, Rotterdam, Cannes, Venice, Toronto, Telluride, with just a splash of Sundance, has a selection of 112 features and documentaries; the best of which I've seen or heard about are listed below. The range is daunting, but with lots of good stuff. Full information is at chicagofilmfestival.com.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the Turkish director of the mordant "Distant" truants with "Climates," a story of the fissures in a relationship, played by Ceylan and his younger wife, and shot using high-definition video for its visual potential. Another movie driven by his look would be Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Thai "Invisible Waves," a moody bit of mystery shot by Chris Doyle, who also collaborated on Ratanaruang's earlier, darkly comic "Last Life in the Universe." Among the most experimental of Asian filmmakers is SAIC grad Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who's represented by another bifurcated narrative, "Syndromes and a Century." Controversial, prolific South Korean auteur Kim Ki-Duk's "Time" takes on extreme plastic surgery; photographer Lauren Greenfield's doc, "Thin," examines anorexia and bulimia with compelling force.

There's strong advance word on Christopher Smith's English horror-comedy "Severance," pitting corporate arms dealers against angry soldiers; a more serious war pic is the French-Algerian "Indigenes" (Days of Glory) by Rachid Bouchareb, following four Northern African soldiers fighting to liberate France in the closing days of World War II. Claude Chabrol's "Comedy of Power" also comes with gleeful advance word in a corporate satire based on a French Enron-like scandal, starring a reportedly "brittle" Isabelle Huppert. 97-year-old Manoel de Oliveira's forty-first film, "Belle Toujours," is a sequel to Luis Bunuel's "Belle de Jour," and reportedly a treat. "Street Thief," by Malik Bader, documents a young Chicago criminal's life with impressive conviction (and narrative audacity). Hong Kong's Johnny To is one of the great contemporary action directors, capping off his "Election" trilogy with "Triad Election."

Among up-and-coming directors, the festival's programmed "The Aura," the second feature by the recently deceased Fabien Bielinsky ("Four Queens"), a moody, lovingly visual thriller about taxidermy, guilt and blackmail, set mostly in an Argentine forest. Claudia Llosa's "Madeinusa" is a sumptuous, vibrant bit of Peruvian magical realism; "Madeinusa" is the name of Llosa's female protagonist. Joey Lauren Adams' "Come Early Morning" pits an older female protagonist, played by Ashley Judd, as a woman in her thirties still struggling to define life and love for herself; the Arkansas setting (Adams' stomping grounds) is alternately amusing and clichéd, yet the performances hold sweet sorrow. Jeff Lipsky's "Flannel Pajamas," a contemporary romantic drama with some very funny moments, is an infuriating mix of the awful and the inspired, and drearily shot and designed. Still, Julianne Nicholson's performance is her best yet, and there's an impressively bold scene where she's naked for long moments against a New York City sky that took at least a modicum of bravery.

True melancholy can be found in James Longley's beautifully shot act of witness, "Iraq in Fragments," following the lives of three children during the early stages of the war. The Flaming Lips-scored "Summercamp!" by Bradley Beesley and Sarah Price promises to be more optimistic. For optimism of another kind, I'm looking forward to the unpreviewed "Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing," by Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck. The one movie I've seen that I would call a masterpiece is Russian émigré Julia Loktev's fiercely controlled, compellingly opaque, gorgeously austere "Day Night Day Night," which quietly, methodically observes a polite, tiny young woman of indeterminate ethnicity (who speaks with flat American inflection) in the hours before embarking on a suicide bombing in an unnamed city. (Loktev says she was inspired by a female Chechen bomber's story.) There's tension, absurdity, comedy and ultimately, silence. What are her politics? Who are her compatriots? Loktev's background is documentary and video installation, and much of her prior work depends on banality and repetition, yet as shot handheld in HD video by Benoît Debie ("Irreversible"), the features of her unnamed protagonist (Luisa Williams) attain as much power as Falconetti's in Dreyer's "Joan of Arc." When you realize where she is and what she intends to do, all you can do is watch her face and what Loktev gives you is her character's face: sharp-featured, haunted, beautiful, lost, ready to die, ready to kill. Leslie Schatz's imaginative sound design is a glossary of how to create imagery without visuals, another part of Loktev's clinical intimacy. "Day Night Day Night" a stunner like nothing else I've seen this year.

(2006-10-03)

Also by Ray Pride

Who Would Jesus Kill?
Let me respond from the bottom of my heart: "Jesus Camp" is terrifying, sadistic and deeply oppressive, suffocating in its portrayal of hostility to youth and knowledge, and I hope nothing else on screen, in the press, or in real life makes me feel as hopeless and helpless about the future of America
(2006-09-26)

Tip of the Week
Michel Gondry's first writing-directing mashup, "The Science of Sleep," is a gentle, leisurely, Paris-set shaggy-sheep romantic comedy about dreams and prehensile romantic longings, with tiny Latin heartthrob Gael Garcia-Bernal playing young Stephan, an illustrator fixated on visions of apocalypse, fantasizing, awake and asleep, of tall, lithe, plain-beautiful Charlotte Gainsbourg
(2006-09-26)

The Last Picture
Some movies are inseparable from where you see them
(2006-09-19)

Tip of the Week
School of the Art Institute graduate Hong Sang-soo directs some of the most compelling movies I know
(2006-09-19)

Delish
(2006-09-19)

Threeness Abounds
(2006-09-12)

Tip of the Week
(2006-09-12)

Truth, Justice and the American Way
(2006-09-05)

Tip of the Week
(2006-09-05)

Mirror Mirror
(2006-08-29)

The Grand Illusion
(2006-08-29)

Tip of the Week
(2006-08-29)

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