Ray Pride

The tenth anniversary of the European Union Film Festival at the Siskel Film Center takes over most of its March schedule: fifty-five films from twenty-four countries? I thought cinema was dead! (Nope, not hardly.)

While several of these dispatches from other shores have distributors, others may not return to Chicago anytime soon. (The Siskel listings indicate whether a screening is "courtesy" of a company that will bring the film back in coming months.)

The closing-night film, Susanne Bier's Danish "After the Wedding" was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Academy Award, and early reports are that it builds on the substantial strength of her earlier "Brothers" and "Open Hearts"; it co-stars the terrific actor Mads Mikklesen (The "Pusher" trilogy; "Casino Royale"), and comes from IFC Films, which has been supporting Danish movies in the U.S. for several years. From Austria, Barbara Alpert ("Elementary Particles") returns with "Falling," another multi-character study in interpersonal chaos. Chilean-born French resident and all-round provocateur Raul Ruiz ("Time Regained") rejoins John Malkovich with "Klimt," in a European cut of a racy portrait of the life and art of the painter Gustav Klimt. The Czech "Beauty in Trouble" is underlined by several songs by Glen Hansard, front man of the Irish band The Frames (and who stars in the marvelous Irish musical "Once" later this year).

From France, Costa-Gavras returns to the screen with a black comic thriller, "The Ax," based on a Donald E. Westlake novel. Alexandra Leclere's "Me and My Sister" is a funny sibling-rivalry comedy between Isabelle Huppert and Catherine Frot. The 84-year-old Alan Resnais adapts another play by British writer Alan Ayckbourn, with "Private Fears in Public Places," a very civilized story of loneliness and real estate with a beautifully refined, distilled visual style. Not previewed but a movie I've been dying to see is Philippe Garrel's "Regular Lovers," a three-hour black-and-white widescreen story of the writer-director's own experiences in 1968, paralleling the romanticized view in Bertolucci's "The Dreamers." Garrel, whose films can be infuriating, is supposed to have captured a moment ideally here, and stars his son, Louis, as a draft-dodging poet on the streets of May. (Palm Pictures should release later this year.) Agnes Joaui, the so-bright writer-director of "The Taste of Others," is a playwright and actress as well, and in Francois Favrat's "The Role of Her Life," she comes out from behind the cameras to play a brassy diva who tortures her personal assistant.

Philipe Groning's "Into Great Silence" is a three-hour documentary about a silent order in the French Alps' Grand Chartreuse monastery, shot without crew or lighting. Long, but as you would expect, meditative. Christian Petzold is one of my favorite little-seen directors, and the EU fest has been responsible for most of his Chicago showings. His latest, "Ghosts," continues the precise yet elliptical style of his earlier work. He's a poet of unease. (His scripts are co-written by the theorist and documentarian Farun Harocki.)

From England, the unlikely "Colour Me Kubrick," with an unlikely John Malkovich impersonating a man who gamboled about London in the 1990s, pretending to be the elusive Stanley Kubrick even though he looked nothing like the director and was mostly in it for the liquor and the rough trade. Director Brian Cook and screenwriter Anthony Frewin were both close associates of Kubrick's; early reviews call it a lovely, swishy wisp of a movie. Also from England, director Sophie Fiennes listens to theorist Slavoj Zizek for two-and-a-half hours as he discourses on movies by Lynch, Tarkovsky and more in "The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema." The most compelling of the UK pics I've been able to preview is Chris Petit's "Unrequited Love: On Stalking and Being Stalked," an extension of the critic-novelist-directors essayistic documentary work with novelist Iain Sinclair. Petit has an uncommon grasp of the modern capital city, as well as the modern disease of looking and watching and stalking and having it done back in turn. The English masterpiece, however, is Andrea Arnold's beautifully crafted "Red Road," shot on digital video and exploiting a fresh, bold palette in the story of a policewoman whose job is to watch Glasgow's banks of surveillance monitors. The modern paranoia and contemporary sexual violence that grows from Arnold's unflinching film (and Kate Dickie's intent, sere performance as the troubled, vengeful woman) are nightmarish yet haunting. The film began as a challenge by Lars von Trier's company, that three directors with the same outline would go out and make a film with the same characters and actors; it is so much more than a stunt.

The complete European Union Film Festival schedule is at siskelfilmcenter.org.

(2007-02-27)

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