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By John Demetry
These words mark the spirit of the best films at last week's 36th Chicago International Film Festival. It is refreshing to find earnest artistic interest taking precedence over greed. Come Undone, recently previewed in Entertainment Weekly's "Gay 2000" issue, is a solid example of this. Elkaim plays an 18-year-old who meets his first male lover while on vacation with his sister, depressed mother, and her nurse. He nonchalantly gives into experienced 18-year-old Stephane Rideau's advances. First-time French filmmaker Presque Rien takes an unusual route in the coming-out genre of gay films. The film doesn't so much detail their relationship as Elkaim's increasingly depressed emotional state during this period. Presque explores this with time-jumping storytelling and an intimate style focusing on private moments rather than straight narrative.
A clever device highlights dialogue to appear later in the film as chapter-stops. Eventually, we discover that the previewed dialogues have different meanings than expected, creating a subtle, teasing narrative commentary on sexual confusions. First-time solo director Cesc Gay holds promise for the future. Also from Spain, the sixth film by Agusti Villaronga, The Sea is stunningly bad. Fantastic, sometimes Visconti-style camerawork and a lush sense of violence and the male body make for a fun, yet queasy experience. In telling the story of the effects that the horrors of the Spanish Civil War have on a trio of teenagers (a nun, a closet-case, and a kept boy, oh my!), Villaronga strives embarrassingly for profundity. All his hackneyed ideas about religion, war, and plague aim to make you feel guilty for enjoying his potboiler sensuality.
Family Pack, one of the worst films of the festival, is about a lesbian in 1969 Belgium and her attempts to tell her family about her partner. Failing to examine real family relationships or being queer in this time period, first-time director (and My Life in Pink screenwriter) Chris Vander Stappen settles on wacky-family cliches and nutra-sweet art direction. It left me with a stomachache. My favorite films of the festival (as of October 13) were even better than my faves from last year's festival. It's a sign of what an astonishing year this has been at the movies. In preferential order, George Washington, Faithless, The Day I Became a Woman, Djomeh, and the The Captive should be put immediately on your must-see lists.
The first time I saw George Washington, its Cinemascope photography and unique sense of life moved me as an uncommonly empathetic portrait of an unfamiliar social milieu, drawing lines of common experience. The second time I saw it, I realized what a massive film it truly is. Green builds off of the elements I experienced the first time to create an original, perceptive tapestry of the intertwining of an American mythology and social/economic and psychological consequences. Its tone of mysterious awe locates a dark and twisting American dream. You probably won't see a better film this year. Faithless, an 155 minute Swedish film from a screenplay by Ingmar Bergman, sounds like a daunting venture. Fear not. Its detailing of the aftermath of an adulterous affair among three artists is like an emotional bulldozer. The story is told in flashbacks via acting exercises between an older director and an actress. Despite the immensity of its source material, director Liv Ullman (one of the great actresses of cinema) brings the most powerful touches. She makes the director a major character through reaction shots. Her direction of actress Lena Endre's sustained monologues make it the most moving performance of the year. Finally, Ullman's visual use of the 9-year-old daughter of the married couple, the true victim of the adultery, gives the film its emotional center. Unflinching morality coupled with unceasing humanity. Appearing at the end of the screening to answer questions, Ullman received the only standing ovation I saw at the festival. Marzieyh Meshkiny's The Day I Became a Woman and Hassan Yektapanah's Djomeh represent the continuing awesome output from Iranian cinema. The three intertwining tales in Meshkiny's film goes beyond mere propaganda about the plight of women in Iran. It becomes a universal, lyrical film poem whose rhymes and echoes haunt even through the screening marathon of a film fest. Djomeh, a much simpler film, also makes its specific focus on Iranian racial prejudice against Afghani immigrants insightful to our culture. Intensely romantic Djomeh (played charmingly by Jalil Nazari) left his homeland because of a scandalous love affair, but now finds himself in love with an Iranian girl. His courtship and his discussions about love with his boss form the basis of the film's story, marked by repetitions and crystal-clear landscapes that provide contrast between hope and home. Earlier this year, Raul Ruiz's Time Regained proved Proust could be adapted to the screen. In very different ways, Chantal Akerman's The Captive, an adaptation of Proust's The Prisoner, continues this astounding trend. Like the book, Akerman's film focuses on the philosophical underpinnings in the process of projecting desire onto another person through jealousy. However, Akerman uses the source to scrutinize the male gaze by using Hitchcock techniques (p.o.v. shots, voyeuristic treks by car, a museum sequence ala De Palma). Ultimately, she shows how this gaze makes a prisoner of both the seer and the seen. This report back from the fest might seem remote to some readers. However, I strongly recommend, if you did not attend in Chicago, that you see these films at a theater near you. Or better yet, urge theater owners--especially people who run local cinematheques, college film programs, film festivals, or arthouse theaters--to book these films! The fest's logo is cheesy, but it should also ring true for queer filmgoers: Long Live Curiosity. |
Come Undone
Swimming
George Washington 
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