Ferdy on Films, etc.

2008 Chicago International Film Festival

That’s a Wrap

By Marilyn Ferdinand

During the CIFF, I’m tired, I’m stressed, I’m wracking my brains to write the best reviews I can, and I’m always, always looking forward to its end. Rod says I make it sound like the Bataan Death March! In the true fashion of a spoiled brat, of course, now that it’s over, I miss it. I admit I wasn’t that tired, stressed, and brain-wracked. I admit that I enjoyed writing the reviews, discovering some really wonderful films that I would never have seen otherwise, and seeing filmmakers who generously made time to talk with the audience. I feel privileged that I am able to attend this festival, now in its 44th year, when other cinephiles have nothing like it to enjoy.

Of Time and the City

This year’s CIFF held some very special delights for me. Some of them I stumbled across even though they were already being talked up in the film world: Let the Right One In, the very first film I saw, was just such a film. Others had the reputations of their directors to guide me, for example, Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky and Terence Davies’ Of Time and the City, the latter’s strongly imagist construction eluding my powers of description and analysis. My favorite film of the festival, The Sky, the Earth, and the Rain, came into my life through the recommendation of a colleague I ran into in the prefestival screening room (Thanks, Gabe!). I met the rest of the films based on my interest in their capsule descriptions, the countries from which they hailed, and how well they fit into my schedule. On the whole, I’d have to say this was a good year.

The Vanished Empire

Looking at my selections, my interest in films about and by women is a clear standout. Nina Paley, Gulshat Omarova, Deepa Mehta, Aida Begić, Marie Caillou, Christine Rebet, Sofia Carillo, and Karen Shakhnazarov (honored Russian director of The Vanished Empire, the last film I saw, but did not review) all turned in good to great feature and animated efforts. Although many of the women-centric films I saw—including the hamhanded Beautiful from South Korean director Juhn Jaihong and the splendid family drama Everlasting Moments by Sweden’s lesser-known master Jan Troell—dealt with women’s physical and emotional suffering, most also revealed feminine strength, humor, and creativity. I hope that producers, distributors, and exhibitors in both the indie and mainstream worlds start sampling more from the vast pool of talent and product from female filmmakers.

Must Read After My Death

The complement of documentaries was quite good. Although I only reviewed one, I saw three—the aforementioned Of Time and the City and Must Read After My Death. Both of these films look back on bygone times—the former a meditation on Liverpool and the British Empire, the latter a remarkable culling of thousands of hours of audio and video records spanning decades made by an unconventional and unhappy family—and each was both very personal and a reflection on society. I recommend them both.

The CIFF juries made their awards, a couple of which I disagree with—most strongly, best new director for Dead Girl’s Feast, the only film I walked out of—many about which I have no comment because I did not see the films. I usually don’t see eye to eye with the juries, but that, I suppose, is just a matter of taste and life experience.

And now here’s my “acceptance speech” (skip if these revolt you).

I’ve been gratified by the courtesy of the CIFF staff (especially Lori Hile) in making my status as a member of the press a lot more comfortable and easy than it has been the past two years. I’m also grateful for the help The Beachwood Reporter has given in getting my reviews to a wider readership in Chicago and, hopefully, putting more bodies in seats at the festival. Here’s a special shout-out to Felix Massie, creator of my favorite animated short, Keith Reynolds Can’t Make It Tonight, for coming all the way from England to attend the animated shorts screening and hand-delivering a copy of his film to me. Most of all, all of you who have read, enjoyed, and commented upon these reviews make the effort to go beyond being a passive film viewer completely worthwhile every year. l

Previous CIFF Coverage

Fear(s) of the Dark: Six animated shorts by some of today’s best graphic illustrators weave tales of terror and suspense. (France)

Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story: Caustic documentary about the man who ensured the victories of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush through a new age of take-no-prisoners politicking that has played to American’s fears through the present day. (USA)

Shorts 2: Animation Nations: Eleven short, animated films tackle subjects as diverse as procrastination, an angry comedian, a contrite polar bear, and a middle manager who snaps. (Mexico, Poland, Russia, Sweden, United Kingdom, USA)

The Sky, the Earth and the Rain (El cielo, la tierra y la lluvia): A beautiful, meditative look at the lives of four people on a cool, rainy island off the coast of Chile told almost exclusively with images. (Chile)

Heaven on Earth: A beautiful Indian woman travels to Canada to marry a man she's never met. When she becomes the victim of domestic abuse, her imagination conjures a potent ally for her release. (Canada)

Happy-Go-Lucky: Mike Leigh's newest film centers on a free spirit with boundless curiosity and a compassionate heart who tries to share her feelings of optimism with people desperately in need of it. (United Kingdom)

Native Dancer (Baksy): Worlds collide as the magic of a faith healer goes against the guns and influence of a young mobster over sacred ground. (Kazahkstan)

Everlasting Moments (Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick): A family saga involving domestic abuse, poverty, and the miracle of photography from master film director Jan Troell. (Sweden)

Sita Sings the Blues: Riotous animated comedy by Nina Paley tells the story of her own break-up through a reimagining of the Indian epic the Ramayana. (USA)

Snow (Snijeg): A handful of Muslim women in a small village in Bosnia labor in unresolved grief until an unexpected confrontation frees them to go on with their lives. (Bosnia-Herzegovina)

Beautiful (Arumdabda): The burden of beauty gets a savage treatment in this disturbing film by a first-time director. (South Korea)

Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in): An unconventional vampire story and an even more unconventional story of young love involving a 12-year-old boy and a vampire "girl" is emotionally rich, surprisingly honest, and properly horrifying. (Sweden)

2008 Chicago International Film Festival

Fear(s) of the Dark (Peur[s] du noir, 2007)
Directors: Blutch, Charles Burns, Marie Caillou, Pierre di Sciullo, Lorenzo Mattotti, Richard McGuire

By Marilyn Ferdinand

The hubby and I enjoyed a great Halloween warm-up when we attended the final CIFF showing of Fear(s) of the Dark, an animated horror anthology from France that shows off some of today’s outstanding animators from France, Italy, and the United States, skillfully assembled by artistic director and title-sequence designer Etienne Robial. This was the third animated offering at the CIFF I viewed, and it served to reinforce my feeling throughout the festival that I’ve been missing a great deal by not seeing more animated films.

Fear(s) of the Dark, a mainly monochromatic film, has five discrete stories—four told beginning to end and one told in episodic fashion throughout the film. It also has interludes in which geometric shapes illustrated and animated by Pierre di Sciullo accompany the voiceover narration of actress/director Nicole Garcia, who details the social and existential fears of a self-absorbed woman (not making a difference, being hopelessly bourgeouis, dying of cancer or in a car wreak). These breaks from the more traditional horror of the other shorts provide a realistic look at the fears most of the film’s viewers actually face. Horror fans might find them distracting, but I was very amused.

The episodic film, by Blutch, opens the film as a cadaverous-looking man in 18th century dress restrains a team of four ravenous dogs as they walk through a town. Animals scurry for cover but the humans the man and the dogs encounter don’t fare as well as, one by one, the dogs break away and tear a boy, a laborer, and a dancer to pieces both on and off camera. The last dog, still under the man’s control, sees its reflection in a mirror and is mesmerized. The ending is completely unexpected and deeply satisfying. The animation is energetic, communicating the chaos driving these dogs and their master onward.

The first short, by Black Hole comic book creator Charles Burns, tells the story of a lonely boy named Eric (poignantly voiced by the recently deceased Guillaume DePardieu) whose isolated home in the country affords him few opportunities for social intercourse. His interest in the nature around him includes a fascination with insects, which he collects. One day he finds what looks like a praying mantis in a earthenware jug wedged between two tree limbs. He plucks the insect up with tweezers and drops it into a specimen jar. For some reason, he decides to hide the jar under his bed before going down for dinner. When he returns, the jar is empty. When Eric is old enough he goes to college, where he studies biology. He’s considered a nerd by everyone but Laura, a pretty classmate who eventually becomes his girlfriend. Their relationship goes kind of haywire, and we learn that Eric’s insect collecting had consequences. This segment seemed like a Twilight Zone episode, with a simple illustration style that seemed right out of the 1950s. The hubby liked it the best, but I liked it the least, mainly because its story seemed so hokey.

Marie Caillou’s manga/anime-influenced short deals with Sumako, a young girl whose family moves to a new town. They live in a house that backs up to a cemetery where a ferocious samurai warrior is buried. Sumako is taunted in school as the new kid and roughed up by the ancestors of the samurai. She heads into the cemetery out of curiosity and ends up confronting her deepest fears. The story is told in segments as Sumako, held in restraints, is given a dose of sodium pentathol by someone who looks like a mad scientist and told to keep dreaming. Her “cure,” for what we’re not sure until the very end, will only come when she reaches the end of the dream. I was intrigued by this short, its structure making me want to learn what happened next, like a good horror story told around the campfire. The ending may puzzle some people, but one crucial scene inside Sumako’s home telegraphs the horror that we are not allowed to witness.

Lorenzo Mattotti’s short creates a wonderfully eerie atmosphere right from the start, as a dark figure opens a door and walks in just far enough for a light to strike one wide and sinister eye. The man tells a story from his childhood about the mysterious disappearance of his uncle, whose empty boat returns to the shore of a marsh from which he was poaching fish at night. The man’s young friend, an apparent expert on the natural life of the area, observes a duck with a broken wing and says that the creature was injured by something large and ferocious. More people go missing as rumors of a bog monster stir the town. A tracker/hunter is called in to catch or kill the monster, which he does. But the man’s friend is never seen again. I thought this film was beautifully drawn and suspenseful. When the boy goes searching in the marsh with the rest of the tracking party, he comes upon a “presence” in the reeds. I leaned forward to see what would get him, only to have him respond to the calls of the hunting party to return. I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the ending, but it was a very good effort throughout.

The last film, by Richard McGuire, was my favorite by far. Beginning with a small black dot on a field of white—a man braving a raging snowstorm—we are plunged into darkness as the man breaks into an abandoned house for shelter. He builds a fire and, rummaging in the dark, finds a bottle of booze in a cabinet. As he drains the bottle, he flips through a photo album he’s found on a table. The proper Victorian family that must have lived in the house is chronicled, including a melancholy daughter who is fond of ripping the heads off her dolls. Later, the daughter, now grown, is shown with her husband. Soon, his head is removed from other pictures. Eventually, every head in the album is cut out. The man dreams of a crazy woman with a butcher knife. But is it a dream? This short shows all the crazy details that a man in a strange, unlit house might imagine or encounter, lending a reality to the proceedings. I found myself squinting to see in the pitch dark and laughing at the all-too-human events that confounded the man, such as a table with uneven legs he tries to correct and his rage at inanimate objects. As the last full film in the collection, it was a great capper to a great evening. l

Film trailer

Previous CIFF Coverage

Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story: Caustic documentary about the man who ensured the victories of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush through a new age of take-no-prisoners politicking that has played to American’s fears through the present day. (USA)

Shorts 2: Animation Nations: Eleven short, animated films tackle subjects as diverse as procrastination, an angry comedian, a contrite polar bear, and a middle manager who snaps. (Mexico, Poland, Russia, Sweden, United Kingdom, USA)

The Sky, the Earth and the Rain (El cielo, la tierra y la lluvia): A beautiful, meditative look at the lives of four people on a cool, rainy island off the coast of Chile told almost exclusively with images. (Chile)

Heaven on Earth: A beautiful Indian woman travels to Canada to marry a man she's never met. When she becomes the victim of domestic abuse, her imagination conjures a potent ally for her release. (Canada)

Happy-Go-Lucky: Mike Leigh's newest film centers on a free spirit with boundless curiosity and a compassionate heart who tries to share her feelings of optimism with people desperately in need of it. (United Kingdom)

Native Dancer (Baksy): Worlds collide as the magic of a faith healer goes against the guns and influence of a young mobster over sacred ground. (Kazahkstan)

Everlasting Moments (Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick): A family saga involving domestic abuse, poverty, and the miracle of photography from master film director Jan Troell. (Sweden)

Sita Sings the Blues: Riotous animated comedy by Nina Paley tells the story of her own break-up through a reimagining of the Indian epic the Ramayana. (USA)

Snow (Snijeg): A handful of Muslim women in a small village in Bosnia labor in unresolved grief until an unexpected confrontation frees them to go on with their lives. (Bosnia-Herzegovina)

Beautiful (Arumdabda): The burden of beauty gets a savage treatment in this disturbing film by a first-time director. (South Korea)

Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in): An unconventional vampire story and an even more unconventional story of young love involving a 12-year-old boy and a vampire "girl" is emotionally rich, surprisingly honest, and properly horrifying. (Sweden)

2008 Chicago International Film Festival

Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story (2008)
Director/Writer: Stefan Forbes

By Marilyn Ferdinand

In the run up to the 2008 presidential election, nearly everyone agrees that the United States under Republican domination for most of the last 20 years has come as close as it gets to ideological, financial, civic, and social ruin. Who’s to blame? A lot of people say George W. Bush, the sitting president. Many more say Dick Cheney, Bush’s vice president, who many contend is running a shadow government that is subverting the Constitution.

I’m afraid you have to go back even farther, all the way back to 1980, when Ronald Reagan overtook John Connally, the favorite in the Republican presidential primaries, and went on to beat incumbent president Jimmy Carter. Was it Reagan’s Hollywood charm that won the day? No, it was a lie—that Connally was buying black votes—that sunk the heir apparent. That lie was spread by Lee Atwater.

Lee Atwater—the man who called Strom Thurmond his mentor and Karl Rove his protégé—gets a thorough going-over in Boogie Man as a win-at-all-costs political operative for the Republican Party until he died of brain cancer in 1991 at the age of 40. There didn’t seem to be anything Atwater wouldn’t do to win, yet he didn’t seem to come to character assassination from any ideological reference point. Atwater was from South Carolina, where everyone was a Democrat. A born rebel, he decided he would be a Republican—simple as that.

By the time Atwater had performed his dirty magic tricks on Reagan’s behalf, he had already ruined Democrats Tom Turnipseed’s and Max Heller’s bids for Congress by charging that the former was “hooked up to jumper cables” (mentally ill), and running a independent Christian candidate to slam Heller for being a Jew and having this straw candidate drop out after the damage was done, thereby leaving the door open for Republican candidate Carroll Campbell to win.

Atwater was so single-mindedly ambitious for fame, money, and power—and put in seven-day weeks to get them—that his colleagues in DC didn’t even know he was married and a father until he mentioned that his family was moving up from South Carolina. People who liked him—and that was just about everyone who wasn’t victimized by him, with the exception of RNC director Ed Rollins, whom Lee stabbed in the back with planted lies to gain the RNC leadership for himself—could look past his empty-hearted ambition. Atwater, a fervent blues fan and musician, endeared himself to his African-American band members despite his race-baiting Willie Horton commercial against Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. Bush Sr. never truly accepted Atwater, a Southern hick to this East Coast brahmin, but Bush used him and his tactics without compunction.

In one of the enlightening talking-heads interviews director Forbes conducted, so-called liberal journalist Eric Alterman remarks, “Imagine if he had chosen to be a Democrat!” This comment is an interesting “tell” on Alterman, and there will be more subtle, damning commentaries on the media in this film, particularly the Washington press corps, which one interviewee characterizes as lazy and looking for something juicy. Unlike his father, Bush Jr. hit it off famously with Atwater and certainly would have had Atwater ensure that his 2000 race against Al Gore was not so close had Atwater lived. As it is, the press corps did Atwater’s job for him, having learned how those well-chosen lies and steadfast adherence to a narrative can sell newspapers, make careers, and garner power. I was amused to see how Forbes set a camera angle for his interview with Sam Donaldson that repeatedly drew my eye to the journalist’s five Emmys on the book shelves in the background. Donaldson lied on a 1999 broadcast of This Week in Washington that, “Al Gore does use fear. Remember 1988, it was Al Gore when he was running in the primaries for president who found Willie Horton, and he used Willie Horton against Dukakis.”

Among the interviews in Boogie Man are Tom Turnipseed, who laughs at the jumper cables line that destroyed his candidacy and then says, “It’s really not funny”; Michael and Kitty Dukakis, who ruefully say in unison, “always respond” as the 20-20 hindsight on their decision to take the high road; Republican political strategist Mary Matalin, who complains that the Democrats needed to make Atwater into their “boogie man” because he was “our leader”; and B.B. King, who rather like the voters who were willing to vote against their interests to support a belief, “if he’s for the blues, he’s my man.”

The film is short on psychological insight. We hear from Rollins that he saw the eyes of “a killer” when he looked at the rather unimpressive Lee. Joe Sligh, a musician who played with Atwater in their group, Upsetter's Revue, said Atwater told him he heard the screams of his little brother Joe every day in his head; Joe was killed when a kettle of boiling oil tipped over on him. We hear about the humiliation of Southerners over their defeat in “the War of Northern Aggression.” Did these formative events and conditions make Lee Atwater what he was? Without interviews with his wife, his children, and other close relatives, it’s impossible to say. The very generous and judiciously chosen film excerpts that tell Atwater’s political story don’t provide a clue, but perhaps his political ambition is the most we need to know about Atwater.

Not a sports fan, Atwater loved wrestling, which he called the most “honest” sport, a comment that seemed to reveal his cynicism about the world. When he was dying of cancer, Atwater wrote about how he found out that the things he pursued weren’t really important. He searched for religious guidance. Yet, after his death, a bible he received as a gift remained unopened in its wrapper. It appears his cynicism remained intact right to the end. This is must-viewing for anyone with an interest in contemporary politics. l

Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story screens on Saturday, October 25 at 9:30 pm at the AMC River East 21, 322 E. Illinois.

Film trailer

Previous CIFF Coverage

Shorts 2: Animation Nations: Eleven short, animated films tackle subjects as diverse as procrastination, an angry comedian, a contrite polar bear, and a middle manager who snaps. (Mexico, Poland, Russia, Sweden, United Kingdom, USA)

The Sky, the Earth and the Rain (El cielo, la tierra y la lluvia): A beautiful, meditative look at the lives of four people on a cool, rainy island off the coast of Chile told almost exclusively with images. (Chile)

Heaven on Earth: A beautiful Indian woman travels to Canada to marry a man she's never met. When she becomes the victim of domestic abuse, her imagination conjures a potent ally for her release. (Canada)

Happy-Go-Lucky: Mike Leigh's newest film centers on a free spirit with boundless curiosity and a compassionate heart who tries to share her feelings of optimism with people desperately in need of it. (United Kingdom)

Native Dancer (Baksy): Worlds collide as the magic of a faith healer goes against the guns and influence of a young mobster over sacred ground. (Kazahkstan)

Everlasting Moments (Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick): A family saga involving domestic abuse, poverty, and the miracle of photography from master film director Jan Troell. (Sweden)

Sita Sings the Blues: Riotous animated comedy by Nina Paley tells the story of her own break-up through a reimagining of the Indian epic the Ramayana. (USA)

Snow (Snijeg): A handful of Muslim women in a small village in Bosnia labor in unresolved grief until an unexpected confrontation frees them to go on with their lives. (Bosnia-Herzegovina)

Beautiful (Arumdabda): The burden of beauty gets a savage treatment in this disturbing film by a first-time director. (South Korea)

Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in): An unconventional vampire story and an even more unconventional story of young love involving a 12-year-old boy and a vampire "girl" is emotionally rich, surprisingly honest, and properly horrifying. (Sweden)

2008 Chicago International Film Festival

Shorts 2: Animation Nations

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Is it an exercise in futility to review short films, either animated or live action? Outside of film festivals, the chances of seeing any short films is slim to none—that is, if you’re thinking about standard film venues.

Of course, the fortunes of short films have never been better. We may never get those cartoons before the feature films anymore, but I’d argue that short films are more numerous and internationally available than any other type of film. The Internet has made distribution a reality for both fledgling filmmakers who want to go on to full-length films and veterans of the short form who have been producing high-quality work for decades. Animation specifically has exploded with the advent of affordable desktop technology and multitudes of media schools like Flashpoint, “The Academy of Media Arts and Sciences,” which is a sponsor of the CIFF and where I viewed screeners for the festival on wide screens using the best set of headphones I’m ever likely to clamp over my ears.

It’s important for cinephiles to support short films as the proving ground for the great filmmakers and innovators of tomorrow. I’ve enjoyed watching our very own Jonathan Lapper of Cinema Styles master the short form and get the interest and opinions of cinephiles around the globe. I don’t know if the traditional movie industry will ever truly embrace short films as they once did, but through virtual film festivals, websites, and various social networking venues, film fans will once again be able to experience the unique pleasure of the short stories of cinema.

Ferdy on Films, etc. is considering making short-film reviews part of our regular fare. We’d like your opinions on this possible new direction. Email us or comment here.

And now, reviews of the 11 short animated films that comprise Shorts 2: Animation Nations.

Hot Dog (2008)
Director: Bill Plympton

The latest in Plympton’s “Dog” series—Guard Dog and Guide Dog being his previous efforts—has our erstwhile hound deciding to join the fire department. After a brush-off from the fire chief, Dog chases (as dogs do) a fire truck, manages literally to hop aboard, somehow ends up driving the truck to the site of a burning building, and saves a damsel in distress. Of course, Dog fouls it up in the end, but not before Plympton creates classic cartoon animation that stretches the limits of the physical world and takes us inside Dog’s mind with visual balloons of great hilarity. I’m not always fond of Plympton’s animations, but his Dog series is a real winner and the type of cartoon short I’d love to see at the front of a feature film if that practice ever returns to the cinema.

Hot Dog trailer

The Black Cabinet (2007)
Director: Christine Rebet

Using a flickering, mainly static-image style, Christine Rebet very obliquely comments on complacency in a dangerous world. The aristocratic roulette players in the bottom half of the frame applaud with amusement at a puppet made to dance for their amusement, a scene that replays again and again. I was reminded of Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler, as disaster of the aristocrats’ making seems inevitable. I thought the illustrations were quite interesting, but there was little to suggest to viewers a “story,” and I found myself unpleasantly puzzled until the last frames of the film.

Kizi Mizi (2007)
Director: Mariusz Wilczyński

This crudely drawn animation by a well-known Polish animator, framed to suit the proportions of each scene and shot with intentional blurs, depicts a noirish love triangle between two cats who love the same mouse. The mouse loves only one of the cats, but the cat travels frequently; in her loneliness, the mouse repeatedly plays a tape of Fleetwood Mac’s "Need Your Love So Bad". She eventually succumbs to the seductions of another. If you can picture a cat and a mouse French-kissing, you’ll understand how distastefully weird this film can be. But it is important to keep in mind that the story is introduced in the credits as a bedtime story. When we return to the world outside the story, a delightful surprise awaits us. If you have the patience to wait out the repetitiveness of this overlong short, you might end up with a laugh at the end.

Procrastination (2007)
Director: John Kelly

This short discusses what the director/illustrator is feeling as he tries to get to work. Perhaps the favorite of the audience, the narration provides examples with which we all can identify, and the animation style is, in a word, cool. I managed to find the entire film on YouTube. See for yourself.

Procrastination in full (4:16 minutes)

Trepan Hole (2008)
Director: Andy Cahill

An inventive stop-motion animation that doesn’t have a narrative, Cahill’s short film plays with form as two ropey creatures move in and out of holes and tweak each other in a style the reminded me of some of Plympton’s transforming heads. Since the word “trepan” usually refers to holes drilled into skulls as an primitive treatment for mental illness, the creatures suggest “The Hearse Song” (“The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, The worms play pinochle on your snout…”). Trepan Hole doesn’t mean anything—it’s just fun to watch.

Trepan Hole clip

Stand Up (2008)
Director: Joseph Pierce

An angry film, Stand Up shows a stand-up comedian introduced as John J. Jones, everyone’s favorite everyman, bomb in front of an audience when he starts to insult them and dwell on serious topics. Pierce does a wonderful job of taking an initially warm audience and slowly turning them sour. He shows the bitterness behind every clown, eventually having Jones strip naked before storming off the stage. The black-and-white illustrations are grotesque and fluid. This is a short drama that goes for the jugular.

Stand Up clip

Stand Up

John and Karen (2007)
Director: Matthew Walker

This trifle has a polar bear apologize to his angry penguin girlfriend for criticizing her swimming speed and the size of the fish she catches. There’s not much to this short film, though I liked the line, “So you don’t catch whales. Nor do you need to!” The illustration style is clean, sweet, children’s book material.

Keith Reynolds Can’t Make It Tonight (2007)
Director: Felix Massie

The opening dialogue by voiceover narrator Scott Johnson is, “This is Keith Reynolds, and today is promotion day. Having worked at the company eight years, he is the most senior Junior Business Analyst in the building. He's been waiting for this day for a very long time.” My favorite short of this series, the idea for Keith Reynolds came from the years Massie spent in the corporate world. The insanity of the passed-over middle manager has been filmed before, but the animation makes it simultaneously more funny and more serious as the figures have a crash-test dummy quality to them. I’d love to have this film in my private collection.

Keith Reynolds Can’t Make It Tonight clip

Lavatory – Lovestory (2007)
Director: Konstantin Bronzit

This touching short film from Russia tells the story of a lavatory attendant with a secret admirer. The woman who watches over and cleans the men’s lavatory collects the coins the men drop in an empty mayonnaise jar at a turnstile she guards. As she reads a newspaper called “Happy Women,” she looks longingly at pictures of women who have a loving man encircling them. When she puts down the newspaper, she finds a bunch of flowers in her jar. Much puzzlement and craziness ensues as she keeps throwing the flowers out, only to have them replaced. The ending is sweet and satisfying. But do lavatories in Russia really have opposite-sex attendants? That’s something to mull.

Lavatory – Lovestory in full (9:39 minutes)

Out of Control (Fuera de control, 2008)
Director: Sofia Carillo

Honestly, I couldn’t make heads or tails out of this stop-motion animation from Mexico. The CIFF program says, “A chain reaction upsets the balance of a bizarre cycle.” OK, that sounds good to me, though I really didn’t see any cycle going before it got broken. The film has a deathlike quality and a very organic look. I liked the visuals even though that’s all I could appreciate in the noisy, but wordless, short film.

Lies
Director: Jonas Odell

This strong, disturbing documentary from Sweden uses live-action animation to tell three stories of lies and deceitful lives—one of a burglar who managed to fool security guards at an office building and steal checks and merchandise, a young boy who confessed to a crime he didn’t commit and who then went on to become a thief, and a gypsy who was told by her mother never to reveal her true ethnicity and who bounced around the foster care system and became a drug addict. I found that this film from a young, but already celebrated, director,had an interesting and appropriate visual style—linear, mechanistic, muted in color. Because it uses interviews with the subjects themselves, the film is very dialogue-heavy and laden with subtitles, and that made actually watching the film difficult. Still, Lies is a compelling short. I couldn’t get this clip to download, but maybe you can. l

Shorts 2: Animation Nations screens on Sunday October 26 at 2:15 pm at the AMC River East 21, 322 E. Illinois.

Previous CIFF Coverage

The Sky, the Earth and the Rain (El cielo, la tierra y la lluvia): A beautiful, meditative look at the lives of four people on a cool, rainy island off the coast of Chile told almost exclusively with images. (Chile)

Heaven on Earth: A beautiful Indian woman travels to Canada to marry a man she's never met. When she becomes the victim of domestic abuse, her imagination conjures a potent ally for her release. (Canada)

Happy-Go-Lucky: Mike Leigh's newest film centers on a free spirit with boundless curiosity and a compassionate heart who tries to share her feelings of optimism with people desperately in need of it. (United Kingdom)

Native Dancer (Baksy): Worlds collide as the magic of a faith healer goes against the guns and influence of a young mobster over sacred ground. (Kazahkstan)

Everlasting Moments (Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick): A family saga involving domestic abuse, poverty, and the miracle of photography from master film director Jan Troell. (Sweden)

Sita Sings the Blues: Riotous animated comedy by Nina Paley tells the story of her own break-up through a reimagining of the Indian epic the Ramayana. (USA)

Snow (Snijeg): A handful of Muslim women in a small village in Bosnia labor in unresolved grief until an unexpected confrontation frees them to go on with their lives. (Bosnia-Herzegovina)

Beautiful (Arumdabda): The burden of beauty gets a savage treatment in this disturbing film by a first-time director. (South Korea)

Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in): An unconventional vampire story and an even more unconventional story of young love involving a 12-year-old boy and a vampire "girl" is emotionally rich, surprisingly honest, and properly horrifying. (Sweden)

2008 Chicago International Film Festival

The Sky, the Earth and the Rain (El cielo, la tierra y la lluvia, 2008)
Director: José Luis Torres Leiva

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Most people go to the movies to relax, a term that means different things to different people. Some like a comedy that can induce the laughter needed get those happy-making endorphins going. Others like films of human emotion that can serve as a catharsis for them. Still others don’t like to relax at all—they’d rather be juiced on the latest actioner, thriller, or scifi/fantasy. In all these cases, the moviegoer may experience a feeling of well-being, but I’d argue that very few of these films are actually relaxing.

The Sky, the Earth and the Rain is that extremely rare film that truly turns down the noise of the world, creating a meditative state that allows one’s body and being to relax totally and be in the moment. It’s likely to leave many people feeling fidgety, waiting for something to “happen.” In fact, a lot does happen in this film, but its story is told with an economy of exquisitely designed visual compositions that unmistakably communicate developments in the plot and extremely spare dialogue that can’t amount to much more than 25 lines in the entire film. This Chilean film is the epitome of show, don’t tell.

The movie’s central character—whose name we don’t learn until the film is nearly three-quarters finished—is Ana (Julieta Figueroa), a woman in her late 20s whose captivating face often looks much younger than her years. Her days are spent taking long walks; gazing out at the sea; tending to her paralyzed and dying mother; spending time with her friends, a 30ish Verónica (Angélica Riquelme) and depressive Marta (Mariana Muñoz); and riding a ferry that takes her from her island home to the mainland of Chile, where she works as a cashier in a grocery store. One day, the store owner receives a complaint from a customer that Ana has shortchanged him; at the end of the day, the money in the till is short. Ana is sacked. Verónica arranges for her to work as a housekeeper for Toro (Pablo Krögh), a friend of hers.

Every strand in Ana’s life will move forward in what can be considered plot developments. Yet, plot is almost beside the point. This stunning film, shot by Into Briones using handheld, steadicam, and fixed camera techniques, and directed with utter sensitivity and patience by Torres Leiva (for which he was rewarded with the FIPRESCI Prize at the Rotterdam International Film Festival), creates such a peaceful, rhythmic world that it envelopes the viewer.

The opening scene takes place in a misty wood where a girl is playing with a magnificent chocolate German Shephard named Eka. The girl, whose identity we won’t learn until about the time we learn Ana’s name, calls to the dog as she moves through the woods and off camera. The dog strays in another direction, toward the cameraman. For some reason, this random move by Eka affected me with its freedom—not something I’m used to seeing in movie dogs.

Ana’s island is a cold, damp place, and again the detail of the islanders walking around in knee-high rubber boots and layers of clothes topped with warm coats when outside and thick, wool socks when inside conveyed a very visceral feeling for me of the land and its atmosphere. Brione manages to create dimensionality on the screen by finding and shooting layers at a slightly skewed angle—for example, trees, mist, more trees, and a figure in the background. He plays with focus, blurring the foreground focal point in a straight-on shot while sharpening the background, and vice versa. There are many haiku-like shots—with matching soundscapes—of trees, fields, ocean waves, weathered buildings, a slow-moving ferry docking, that aren’t in any hurry to matter except as what they are. Toro hunts with Eka at his side, and Ana watches him with quiet adoration. Yet later, when a group of city slickers out for a day of pheasant shooting fire into the air, the sound actually causes Ana and the audience to jump, so deep in our quiet moments are we.

Plot turns occur as they might in real life. Ana walks up the dirt path to Toro’s home one morning and finds Verónica walking toward her. A worried look comes across Ana’s face. Later she asks Verónica, “How long have you known Toro?” Verónica responds, “Why?” That’s all we need to know to surmise that Verónica is sleeping with Toro, and Ana is jealous. In another scene, Ana is returning from the mainland on the ferry; we spy Verónica next to a taxi with the housekeeper who cares for Ana’s mother while she’s at work. Again, we know instantly that Ana’s mother has died.

Some plotlines are left open. Marta has once been found crying inconsolably and later, tried to wade into the ocean, resisting Ana and Verónica as they pull her back. In the most starkly evocative image of the film, Marta stands next to a solitary tree with a limb just perfect for hanging. We view them in long shot, then Marta collapses. The camera moves in to an extreme close-up of her eyes, and that’s the moment we realize Marta is epileptic, may be brain-damaged from the seizures, and certainly hates living with the condition. Her actions, formerly mysterious, suddenly make sense. She runs off into the woods one day, and that’s as far as her story goes.

This film’s trailer was cut in a more frenetic style that I found a bit deceptive about the film’s atmosphere. I have included a clip below that truly captures the film’s slow-paced seductiveness.

If that felt like watching paint drying, this film is not for you. However, if you want to see a Monet painting and expressive Old World faces come to life, I highly recommend this treasure of a film. l

There are no more showings of The Sky, The Earth and The Rain. There is scant seating available for the October 29 screening at the BFI London Film Festival. Look for this film at your local art house or a film festival coming up in your area.

Previous CIFF Coverage

Heaven on Earth: A beautiful Indian woman travels to Canada to marry a man she's never met. When she becomes the victim of domestic abuse, her imagination conjures a potent ally for her release. (Canada)

Happy-Go-Lucky: Mike Leigh's newest film centers on a free spirit with boundless curiosity and a compassionate heart who tries to share her feelings of optimism with people desperately in need of it. (United Kingdom)

Native Dancer (Baksy): Worlds collide as the magic of a faith healer goes against the guns and influence of a young mobster over sacred ground. (Kazahkstan)

Everlasting Moments (Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick): A family saga involving domestic abuse, poverty, and the miracle of photography from master film director Jan Troell. (Sweden)

Sita Sings the Blues: Riotous animated comedy by Nina Paley tells the story of her own break-up through a reimagining of the Indian epic the Ramayana. (USA)

Snow (Snijeg): A handful of Muslim women in a small village in Bosnia labor in unresolved grief until an unexpected confrontation frees them to go on with their lives. (Bosnia-Herzegovina)

Beautiful (Arumdabda): The burden of beauty gets a savage treatment in this disturbing film by a first-time director. (South Korea)

Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in): An unconventional vampire story and an even more unconventional story of young love involving a 12-year-old boy and a vampire "girl" is emotionally rich, surprisingly honest, and properly horrifying. (Sweden)

2008 Chicago International Film Festival

Heaven on Earth (2008)
Director: Deepa Mehta

By Marilyn Ferdinand

On my way to the screening of Heaven on Earth, I drove past a church at which a wedding celebration was underway. I stopped to let a grandmother pull her grandson across the road, his tiny shoes barely touching the ground, his munchkin-size suitcoat hiking up as he gripped his grandmother’s hand. A large van obscured my view of what was going on in front of the church, but I could clearly hear music with a Middle Eastern flavor. As I passed beyond the van, I took a quick look at people in a circle dancing and clapping with their arms held high. I watched this scene as long as I could in my sideview mirror, reflecting on how this neighborhood, once Swedish Lutheran, had given way to a new immigrant community that no longer worshipped Jesus Christ in the church at which they celebrated.

As Heaven on Earth began, I found myself wrapped in another celebration—this one a prewedding party of a large group of Indian women dressed beautifully in vibrant, gold-threaded saris, armfuls of bangle bracelets, and many-tiered chandelier earrings. They danced with the joyous freedom I had seen only an hour or so ago in my hometown, preparing a beautiful bride named Chand (Bollywood star Preity Zinta) for her journey to Canada to meet her bethrothed for the first time and accustom herself to life in a new country, with a new family. I felt as though I were getting a chance to see inside the experience of a family like the one I had glimpsed only briefly, and savored the possibilities that would soon unfold in the dark theatre. I expected Chand to experience many feelings that go along with being in a strange environment among strange people. But I did not expect this radiant bride to become the extremely unhappy, isolated victim of spousal abuse.

How can any bride expect their spouse to despise and abuse them? Perhaps it is more to be expected in arranged marriages that happen long distance, but Chand didn’t seem worried. The morning before her departure, Chand’s much wiser mother, awakens her to repeat a story about a cobra. Chand sasses that she’s heard the story a hundred times. “Do you remember the moral of the story?” her mother says. “Don’t mess with a cobra!” is Chand’s response. The lesson her mother really wants her to remember is to learn to yield to difficult circumstances. It sounds like Chand’s mother has seen a good many arranged marriages and observed—perhaps lived herself—the difficulties.

When Chand’s new family meets her at the airport, they remark glowingly that she is even more beautiful than her picture. Her husband-to-be, Rocky (Vanch Bardwaj), is teased by his family for being as “as shy as a girl” upon meeting Chand. When the family arrives home, Chand learns that she is to share a small, single-story house with Rocky’s parents, his sister and brother-in-law, and their two children. Chand says little and keeps her eyes downcast in shyness and obedience.

The marriage takes place almost immediately. As Chand waits for the ceremony to start, she looks out the window. “Dear God. It’s snowing!” Instead of wonder at this new experience, one of the bridal guests just says, “Oh shit.” The splendor and solemnity of the wedding ceremony made me feel this marriage was truly blessed. When the newlyweds return to their home, Chand lays expectantly on her side, still fully dressed in her wedding regalia, awaiting her husband. When he lays down, he says, “We’re not going to do anything tonight. I’m tired.” Chand, still a virgin, might be expected to be a tad bit relieved, but the look of disappointment, of worrying that she does not please Rocky, makes the scene particularly cruel.

The couple drives to Niagara Falls for a honeymoon. When Chand asks if they can take a picture of this physical wonder, Rocky says, “Only tourists take pictures.” Their first sexual embrace never happens because Rocky’s domineering mother (Balinder Johal) arrives at their room with the excuse that she had a premonition that he was in an accident. Rocky decides that he and his brother-in-law will sleep in the car, and Chand and Maji will take the room. When Chand suggests they get another room, Rocky slaps her hard across the face. Chand begins to use her imagination to retell the cobra story in her mind as a way to soothe her, take her back to India, and find a place of her own.

Life for Chand now involves the endless drudgery of working in a laundry, even though she complains to her sister-in-law and coworker Aman (Ramanjit Kaur) that she has a degree. A Jamaican coworker (Yanna McIntosh) advises her to grate a root she gives Chand into Rocky’s drink; once he drinks it, he will fall instantly in love with her. Unfortunately, the root makes Rocky pass out. When Chand tells her friend about this, she says “You have to use the whole root.” When Chand does this and pours it into some milk, a chemical reaction occurs that causes the liquid to boil. Chand runs outside and dumps it on the ground and shakes her burned hand. In silhouette, we see a cobra rise in the foreground.

The cobra will become a nuisance to Rocky’s family, but a source of solace for Chand, as it assumes the image of her husband and comes to her as the man she would like Rocky to be. One day she stays home from work, and the cobra Rocky enters her room, where they make love. When the real Rocky learns that she has been with another man—although Chand insists she was with him—he beats her savagely. A thoroughly confused Chand speaks to the cobra Rocky once more. The cobra provides her with a means to prove she is not an adulteress and gain her freedom—one, of course, that requires her to find great courage within herself.

Indians are taught that cobras are very powerful and can assume the shape of anything they wish. Chand did not make the connection between her imagination and the miraculous appearance of a cobra in Brampton, Ontario. Indeed, Rocky refused to allow her to call her mother and denied her the calling of marriage to which she had given herself willingly. Cut off from her roots, abused and reviled by her witchy mother-in-law and the men in the family, she suffered the usual fate of domestic abuse victims. The folklore of the cobra connects directly with the first scene—the celebration of the women. It is in the suppressed feminine power that Chand finds strength and a way to defeat her abusers.

Deepa Mehta, an acclaimed director, is herself is an immigrant to Canada, and the film captures the flavor of an Indian colony in a new world. Her grasp of the dynamics of domestic violence is accurate and heartfelt—every blow Rocky lands can be felt. She uses a device of shooting Rocky and Chand as a couple in monochrome, reflecting the joylessness of their marriage and the otherworldliness of Chand’s imagination. It’s hard to understand Rocky’s attitude. Is he gay? Is he angry about being forced into an arranged marriage? Does he truly not like Chand? Or women in general? He beats Chand savagely when she pushes Maji to the floor, but when he tells his parents that they will always be his first priority, we can sense his own entrapment and resentment.

The film feels a bit long and goes slack in a couple of places, because it’s hard to know exactly how much time passes between Chand’s arrival in Canada and the end of the film. And despite Chand’s assertions that she had been with no man but Rocky, the complete lack of even discreet or suggested sex scenes made it difficult for me to believe the couple had ever consummated their marriage. Mehta, however, uses extreme close-ups to great effect, practically putting the audience into the scene and Chand’s imagination. The cast, with the exception of newcomer Bardwaj, are very affecting and individual, even Geetika Sharma, who plays Aman’s daughter Loveleen with enthusiasm for her new role model, and later, with dread.
Heaven on Earth regards patriarchy with a cold, clear gaze and asserts the salvation for women—and perhaps men—through belief in feminine power. This is a tough, but ultimately uplifting film. l

Trailer

Heaven on Earth screens Monday, October 20 at 6:10 pm at the AMC 600 N. Michagion 9.

Previous CIFF Coverage

Happy-Go-Lucky: Mike Leigh's newest film centers on a free spirit with boundless curiosity and a compassionate heart who tries to share her feelings of optimism with people desperately in need of it. (United Kingdom)

Native Dancer (Baksy): Worlds collide as the magic of a faith healer goes against the guns and influence of a young mobster over sacred ground. (Kazahkstan)

Everlasting Moments (Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick): A family saga involving domestic abuse, poverty, and the miracle of photography from master film director Jan Troell. (Sweden)

Sita Sings the Blues: Riotous animated comedy by Nina Paley tells the story of her own break-up through a reimagining of the Indian epic the Ramayana. (USA)

Snow (Snijeg): A handful of Muslim women in a small village in Bosnia labor in unresolved grief until an unexpected confrontation frees them to go on with their lives. (Bosnia-Herzegovina)

Beautiful (Arumdabda): The burden of beauty gets a savage treatment in this disturbing film by a first-time director. (South Korea)

Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in): An unconventional vampire story and an even more unconventional story of young love involving a 12-year-old boy and a vampire "girl" is emotionally rich, surprisingly honest, and properly horrifying. (Sweden)

2008 Chicago International Film Festival

Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)
Director: Mike Leigh

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Before the sold-out screening of Happy-Go-Lucky, CIFF founder Michael Kutza introduced director Mike Leigh by letting us know that Leigh’s very first film, Bleak Moments, won the Gold Hugo Award for best feature film at the 1972 CIFF. Now, 25 years later, we were about to view his 18th film, with a title diametrically opposite to his first film. In between, Leigh has turned in some pretty dark stories of the human condition. Had Mike Leigh finally gotten his fill of pain? Was Happy-Go-Lucky to be his breakthrough from beneath the heavy mists of English pessimism?

Not quite, but with Happy-Go-Lucky, Leigh seems to signal that he’s willing to accept it all—good, bad, indifferent—and help the naysayers adjust to some new realities of British life—multiculturalism, the firm grip of feminism that allows people like his main character Poppy (Sally Hawkins) to remain happily single, and death to the Angry Young Man (maybe). In point of fact, however, Leigh has been aiming for a new humanism for a very long time. In Poppy, he creates his and Hawkins’ version of a guiding light.

We enter this film with a bounce, as a garishly dressed Poppy cycles through the streets of London as the opening credits roll to a bouncy 60s-ish score by Gary Yershon. Her journey ends in a bazaar, where she places her bike against a rail and enters a bookstore. She bids the bookseller (Elliot Cowan) a hearty hello and compliments him on the quality of his bookshop. He barely acknowledges her presence. As she peruses the shelves, she keeps trying to engage him in conversation, or even just get a word out of his mouth. “I like your hat,” she offers. He looks at her as if she’s nuts. When she’s ready to leave the store, she says “Having a bad day?” He speaks! “No.” She shrugs, walks out the door, and finds that her bike has been stolen. Her response after the initial shock is, “I never had a chance to say good-bye.”

Poppy shares her flat with her long-time friend Zoe (Alexis Zegerman). Both of them are elementary school teachers who traveled together all over Australia and Southeast Asia. They both taught school in Thailand, and now are back working with inner-city children. They work hard and play hard. Zoe, Poppy, Poppy’s sister Suzy (Kate O'Flynn), and some of their friends dance the night away at a disco, then go back to the flat where they continue drinking and play flirty girl games with each other.

One of the teachers in her school invites Poppy to her flamenco dance class after Poppy injures her back on the trampoline and has to stay off it for a while. The instructor (Karina Fernandez) and class are exactly as I remember my dance classes—a critical teacher with a colorful vocabulary for expressing motion ("Pretend you are an eagle. Lift your arms like an eagle.") and a messed-up love life that she brings into the classroom as the students stomp toward each other in what she hopes will be a strong, territorial assertion. Her rant about her lover going off with a blonde Swedish bitch is a comedic highlight of the film.

The film does not stay in a major key throughout, however. Poppy faces the serious problem of a young boy in her class who is being violent with other children. Tim (Samuel Roukin), a social worker, is called in to help, and he and Poppy discover the boy's mother's boyfriend has been hitting the boy. While wandering the streets after this discovery, Poppy finds herself in a bad neighborhood, where she hears a short song repeated again and again in the recesses under an industrial bridge. She finds a homeless man (Stanley Townsend), obviously mentally ill, and tries to communicate with him. Despite some fear on both their parts, they manage to connect briefly. This scene reveals the deep impulse in Poppy to explore, reach out, help, find moments of grace in even the bleakest circumstances. She's not always successful, but her philosophy is that there's no harm in trying—a sentiment the film both affirms and, in its most frightening scene, disproves.

Leigh attended the screening, at which he received a Career Achievement Award, was interviewed briefly by Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Phillips, and made himself available for a generous Q&A session. Leigh explained his process of lengthy improvisations with actors to arrive at characters and situations; only then does he write a script which is rigidly adhered to during shooting. He mentioned that he wanted to do an optimistic picture, and wanted to work with Hawkins. She is his focal point, appearing in virtually every frame of the film, helping us to see through Poppy's eyes what a happy life looks like. Unfortunately, the audience questions were, for the most part, amazingly dumb, including one from a woman who asked how he found the actress to play Poppy. In a scathing rebuke, he accused her of not listening to him because he just explained his process of starting with actors and developing characters. He then asked her if she had another question; by then, she must have crawled under her seat.

I asked how the flamenco scene was imagined, and he said that he and Hawkins decided Poppy needed three activities outside of school. She mentioned salsa, and he countered with his favored dance form, flamenco. Karina Fernandez had no previous knowledge of flamenco; she is, in fact, not even Spanish. But once she came on board, she took weeks of lessons to learn the dance style. Her teaching approach and technique look so natural, I was amazed that she wasn't actually a flamenco instructor.

Leigh explained that Poppy gets the guy (Tim), because "she deserves it." This was, for me, a revealing statement that seemed to underscore the essential pessimism of Leigh's world view. In this film, Scott is an Angry Young Man, though he targets immigrants rather than society and his elders, whose thick inner wall has made it impossible for him to understand, interpret, or communicate genuine feelings. I couldn't help but feel that Leigh might have been a recovering Scott. His scorching rebukes of audience questioners definitely had the ring of Scott yelling at Poppy and trying to force her to take driving (that is, him) seriously.

The way that Leigh photographs Hawkins in close-up, along with her disposition, suggests an Audrey Hepburn for the new millennium. The score, the bright colors, and the bohemian lifestyle he depicts reinforced this feeling for me, though Hawkins is no classic beauty.

Hawkins adopted a peculiar laugh for Poppy that emerges in nearly every difficult situation and that I thought I would find annoying very quickly. Surprisingly, I came to like it very much, perhaps because I got a chance to see Poppy in more than a superficially silly mood. As with all of Leigh's films, the process by which the characters are born infuses them with depth and reality that can sometimes be hard to come by using more conventional means.

Happy-Go-Lucky is perhaps one of Mike Leigh's most conventional films, but that only adds to its charm. This is a film to lift your spirits without insulting your intelligence. l

Trailer

Happy-Go-Lucky had a one-time Gala Presentation at the CIFF. Look for the film in limited release across the United States in the fall.

Previous CIFF Coverage

Native Dancer (Baksy): Worlds collide as the magic of a faith healer goes against the guns and influence of a young mobster over sacred ground. (Kazahkstan)

Everlasting Moments (Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick): A family saga involving domestic abuse, poverty, and the miracle of photography from master film director Jan Troell. (Sweden)

Sita Sings the Blues: Riotous animated comedy by Nina Paley tells the story of her own break-up through a reimagining of the Indian epic the Ramayana. (USA)

Snow (Snijeg): A handful of Muslim women in a small village in Bosnia labor in unresolved grief until an unexpected confrontation frees them to go on with their lives. (Bosnia-Herzegovina)

Beautiful (Arumdabda): The burden of beauty gets a savage treatment in this disturbing film by a first-time director. (South Korea)

Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in): An unconventional vampire story and an even more unconventional story of young love involving a 12-year-old boy and a vampire "girl" is emotionally rich, surprisingly honest, and properly horrifying. (Sweden)

2008 Chicago International Film Festival

Native Dancer (Baksy, 2008)
Director: Gulshat Omarova

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Yesterday, I watched two screeners that ended up dealing with a similar theme. Distant Tremors, by Belgian director Manuel Pouette, addressed the pull of tribal religion and superstition on a young Senegalese man who wants nothing more than to emigrate to France and leave his village ways behind.The film had an eerie mixture of colonial cruelty and the abiding mystery of tribal customs, but failed to add up to much more than atmosphere. The better of the two was Native Dancer, which depicts the resurgence of shamanism among the Islamic residents of a corner of Kazahkstan that previously was militantly atheistic under Soviet communist rule.

The mountains that separate Kazahkstan from China form a brilliant backdrop for the patch of barren, brown earth on the side of a highway where Aidai (Neisipkul Omarbekova), a powerful baksy (shaman), helps people in need. Our first encounter with Aidai is as she is trying to help an old woman walk free of her crutches. Men who volunteer their services to Aidai grab a black sheep from a pen, slit its throat, and let its blood drip all over the ailing woman. Aidai tells the woman to rub the blood over every part of her body as Aidai mutters some incantations. She tells the woman to stand up and walk; her family try to give her her crutches, but Aidai waves them away. “Get up and walk,” she admonishes her patient. The old woman stands and moves forward on unsteady legs that manage to support her.

Aidai is consulted to cure everything from defiant daughters to drunken brothers. She also has the power of second sight, which she uses to help people find what has gone lost. When a woman comes to her to ask where the family cow has gone, Aidai sees it in a barn with two men who have stolen it. When another woman asks where her missing husband is, Aidai says to stop searching—he’s been killed by a hit-and-run driver. When she wails about how she and her children will survive, Aidai tells her he left money in a hidden strong box.

One day, Batyr (Farkhad Amankulov), a successful businessman, drives up to Aidai’s ramshackle compound with his young son Asan (Almat Ayanov). Batyr credits Aidai with helping him and his now-dead wife conceive Asan and, in gratitude has given Aidai the land on which her clinic rests. Tied up in the back of Batyr’s SUV is his ne’er-do-well cousin, whom he wants Aidai to cure. Aidai throws the cousin into a hole, covers it with bamboo bars, and tells him he can come out when she says so.

Batyr is summoned by a good friend to meet with a young, arrogant gangster named Arman (Nurlan Alimzhanov) who wants Aidai’s land so he can develop it for his own profit. Batyr resists, but with the help of some unscrupulous police and city officials, Arman forces Aidai off the land—in point of fact, she flies into a rage, spins furiously in a circle, and drops dead on the spot.

Arman demolishes her clinic, and builds a gas station and restaurant/ night club. Batyr’s friend invites him to the grand opening, where he gets into a fight with Arman. That night, Arman’s businesses burn to the ground. Arman, sure Batyr set the fire, demands monetary restitution. Batyr believes Aidai’s spirit caused the fire, but says to his friend, “Tell him. I’m tired of explaining things to him,” and gets up to leave. Rude words are exchanged, and before long, Batyr is selling everything he owns to ransom his kidnapped son from Arman and his thugs.

Native Dancer is an odd film—half magic realism and half gangster caper, with a large dash of comedy thrown in by Batyr’s feckless cousin. Director Omarova, in her second outing, makes great use of the spreading landscape that suggested to me the powerful New Mexico terrain. It’s not hard to believe in magic on lands such as these. In addition, Omarova populates her film with locals, including real faith healer Omarbekova as the fictional Aidai. I’m sure it’s nothing to residents of former Soviet bloc countries to hear handsome, Asian-featured Kazakhs speaking Russian, but for me, it was an incongruous, but delightful treat.

The juxtaposition of Lexus SUVs and mud huts, mixed drinks and sheep’s blood, high heels and cloth mocassins throws the disconnect between Aidai’s world and Arman’s into high contrast. The film accepts some of Aidai’s magic—her second sight—as authentic, but firmly plants her in the real world as well. When we reach the final scene in which Aidai tends to Asan, it’s as easy to believe her grandmotherly affection has as much to do with curing him as her incantations and the bird she draws on his back with blood.

I was enchanted by the adorable Ayanov as Asan. In one scene, Omarova shows him standing on a curb, his backpack at his feet, waiting for his father to pick him up from his kickboxing class. Her medium-long shot dwarfs him in this cityscape, making him look both very cute and very vulnerable. On Aidai’s plain, he always appears larger, surrounded by the human activity of Aidai’s patients and volunteer workers.

Farkhad Amankulov has the weary fierceness of Beat Takashi when he’s cursing Arman out or chasing down his son’s kidnappers. But his gentle side also emerges whenever he and Asan are together, and his basic respect for people deserving of it marks him as a plainly sympathetic, and somewhat naïve character. Aidai knew how to get over on Arman better than he did. But that’s why she’s a “witch,” the term her adoptive family always uses for her.

Omarova doesn’t quite achieve a strong, cohesive tone, which made this film less compelling for me than it could have been. But she handles her professional and nonprofessional actors extremely well, and I believed in the lives she put up on the screen even if the gangster section felt a little forced and clichéd. Still and all, Native Dancer is an assured work from a talented, up-and-coming director. l

Film trailer

Native Dancer screens Saturday, October 18 at 2:15 pm, Tuesday, October 21 at 8:40 pm, and Wednesday, October 22 at 4:10 pm at the AMC River East 21, 322 E. Illinois St.

Previous CIFF Coverage

Everlasting Moments (Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick): A family saga involving domestic abuse, poverty, and the miracle of photography from master film director Jan Troell. (Sweden)

Sita Sings the Blues: Riotous animated comedy by Nina Paley tells the story of her own break-up through a reimagining of the Indian epic the Ramayana. (USA)

Snow (Snijeg): A handful of Muslim women in a small village in Bosnia labor in unresolved grief until an unexpected confrontation frees them to go on with their lives. (Bosnia-Herzegovina)

Beautiful (Arumdabda): The burden of beauty gets a savage treatment in this disturbing film by a first-time director. (South Korea)

Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in): An unconventional vampire story and an even more unconventional story of young love involving a 12-year-old boy and a vampire "girl" is emotionally rich, surprisingly honest, and properly horrifying. (Sweden)

The Edge of Love (2008)
Director: John Maybury

By Roderick Heath

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spendthrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

—In My Craft or Sullen Art, by Dylan Thomas

The above poem comprise the last words of the The Edge of Love. They are used as a kind of thematic underlining of what we’ve seen. They’re also the reason that the film has been made, to the extent that any film like this is made—to get off on the presence of greatness that lends some sense of weight to an otherwise feckless tale. At least a musical biopic is self-explanatory—there’s music we like on the soundtrack with the people who made it magically returned to youth by cinematic sorcery. Dylan Thomas, for whom the film largely has nothing but contempt, is the reason why it’s been made.

I always come to the end of films like Sylvia, Pollock. Control, or Surviving Picasso—those in which the tortured arty soul ends up like a goldfish flapping on the floor or the prick gets his comeuppance from someone speaking as the voice of contemporary sexual politics—wondering why they are made, why they treat their subjects so. In Thomas’ case, a drunkard who collapsed and died in a Greenwich Village bar at age 39, there’s not much image to despoil, and this is part of the problem. Anthony Burgess fought to have Thomas acknowledged as a meticulous craftsman who endlessly revised his ecstatic phrasings, a man used up at least as much by his own dedication as he was by drink. Thomas’ work in the film is portrayed as nothing more than an excuse to ignore his kid. It’s a common complaint that artist biopics rarely offer much in the way of insight into the art. Thomas’ poetry features throughout The Edge of Love, in disjointed voiceover readings that reduce them incoherent snatches of prettification.

The Edge of Love was directed by John Maybury, former experimental director with a Schnabel-esque love of visual gibberish who broke out with Love Is the Devil (1999), a similar portrait of Francis Bacon’s affair with his rough-trade criminal boyfriend. An obtuse, often insufferable work, that film was at least aggressive in studying how a ruthless soul makes for strong art and bad housekeeping. I wonder then if the reason such films are made is to take peeks into modes of lifestyle otherwise forbidden to mainstream filmmakers. A lot of artists have juicy private lives. And a lot don’t. I don’t foresee a film about Anthony Trollope, holding down a lifelong career as a designer of mailboxes whilst writing great English novels, anytime soon. But in what other kind of high-profile movie sporting rising stars of import are you going to get explorations of multiple-partner romance that doesn’t also include a singalong to “I Say A Little Prayer”? Films about adults doing adult things don’t get much play these days beyond certain restricted cable channels.

The Edge of Love threatens to study a ménage a trios. The film’s early hype, its poster with Sienna Miller and Keira Knightley lying back on the grass, red lipstick lacquered on and encouraging you to take a dive in, promised gorgeous decadence and anarchic indulgence. Fooled you! Miller and Knightley lounge in bed together and giggle like they’re having a sleepover; they certainly don’t engage in any Sapphic naughtiness. Thomas does bed both women, but, of course, that funny business isn’t allowed to stand.

I’m talking around the point—which could be because I’m not sure what the point is. One could have made The Edge of Love to explore the way society degrades talent in the living and then celebrates it once they’re dead. Thomas’ words are prostituted by wartime authorities, yet he can barely make enough to feed his family, forcing him to live by sucking friends dry, to create work that now gets films made about him. No, wait, this isn’t what the film’s about. It’s about two bestest best friends, Caitlin Thomas (Miller) and Vera Phillips (Knightley), who hide underneath the covers and giggle and make kissy faces at each other and prance in Super 8 home movies and cry when one of them like becomes a total slut with the other’s guy. No, wait, it’s about Vera’s husband, tragic soldier William Killick (Cillian Murphy) who is desperately in love with her, suffers in war, and comes back horrified to find his wife’s had it off with her old boyfriend, the fancy-pants poet who’s also spent all his money. No wonder William goes taking pokes at loud-mouthed pseudo-socialist bitches and shoots his Sten gun through the wall to shake the smart-asses up a bit. No wait, it’s a courtroom drama where Thomas tries to destroy Killick because of love for Vera. No wait, I’m bored.

According to critics and biographers, the film is based in vague, specious speculation anyway. Most films of this sort end up, even if they don’t want to, as finger-waving moralising. Artists take and give nothing but words back. The male artist who fucks freely will be condemned for his feckless, misogynist ways. The female who does so will be celebrated for her liberation even if the world in the film condemns her. Behind every great man is a woman. Get married and stay that way. Good thing you listened to your parents and became a lawyer. Love’s intended audience—and they sat all about me in the theatre—can walk away tut-tutting about disgraceful behaviour, whilst having received a sugar rush from it. I recall my old high school English teacher doing after we’d been watching Tom & Viv (1994). Eliot! That bastard! Leaving his wife in a loony bin! For being a loony! Just goes to show you! No normal person’s marriage disintegrates because of mental instability, no. Only those of famous poet-type male chauvinists.

The Edge of Love begins well. Maybury concentrates on texture, and the first half-hour is a dense web of impressions. He plays energetically with Dennis Potter-esque evocations of jazz-age images of perfection and exoticism colliding with hard reality in Vera’s singing act, staged bizarrely in underground air raid shelters. Thomas, Caitlin, Vera, and Killick live under the shadow of the Blitz, the threat of death a constant reality, streets reduced to dark warrens of menace, even the familiar refrains of romance taking on an existential quality and Thomas’ sonorous radio readings acting as shadowy artistic conscience for this calamitous age. Both Vera’s act and Thomas’ poetry then are presented as dichotomous cultural responses to an age of omnipresent darkness. But the truth is, the film is not in the slightest bit interested in this notion, and the drama moves to the false refuge of the Welsh coast to become a glorified bedroom farce played as lacerating character study. What begins as a layered study of the relationship between artistic effort and society becomes just another tale of what happens when you dip in more than one honey jar.

One of the few films that effectively portrayed why artists do such things was Philip Kaufman’s Henry and June (1990). Henry Miller, his wife June, and their mutual girlfriend Anaïs Nin, use each other and enjoy each other in an attempt to gain experience and push their sense of life to the limit. The Edge of Love never approaches such exploration, largely because it’s not sure what it’s exploring, and comes up with just a bunch of arty boozehounds hurting each other. The film makes sure to shame pacifistic, romantic, socially outcast, mercurial Thomas before honourable upright soldier Killick. The last images of Love see Dylan and Caitlin heading, grey-faced and dour, into oblivion, whilst Vera and William settle down to become happy rose growers. Is this really what Maybury and screenwriter Sharman MacDonald wanted to tell us?

If I’m aggressively misunderstanding this film, it’s because I went into it dreading exactly the type of film I got. “Why do I sleep with other women?” Thomas asks rhetorically at one point. ‘Because I’m a poet!” This got a big laugh out of the audience; of course guys only become poets to get laid as often as possible. Despite Maybury’s efforts, The Edge of Love ends up as another facile bit of patronising, bohemian eavesdropping, ending by whacking all its characters as firmly on the knuckles with a hickory switch as it can get away with considering that, all in all, the drama has added up to nothing.

What one gets out of it is some uneven but generally solid acting. Nobody except Rhys is at home with their accents, but I’ve never found that as important as some critics insist it is. Energy and expressiveness are far more important. Murphy is the least well-used, putting his protean, pansexual physiognomy in such a square part. Knightley plays a woman who is as much a fascinating siren’s image as she is reality to the men in her life. Miller is the rampaging wild woman whose energy goes all outwards rather into her art. Knightley’s never really topped her ironic casting in Pride and Prejudice (2005) as a woman whose intelligence both subverts and increases her attractiveness. Here she’s left playing another sobbing Celia Johnson wannabe. Miller and Rhys both exude a kind of solidity that threatens to eat through the tinnier reductions of their characters. In films like Casanova (2005), Factory Girl (2006), and here, Miller always takes me by surprise as a broadcast from a slightly earthier age of screen femininity, with her broad freckle-spotted cheeks and surprisingly husky voice. She fills the cliché of the fiery Irish boho girl with real zest, whether thumping Thomas’ head against the floor or picking out her stitches in sadomasochistic fury.

Rhys is fascinating to watch. He had previously evoked a pitch-perfect Lord Byron in TV’s Beau Brummel: This Charming Man, and here presents a Thomas somewhere between the roseate-lipped fawn of Augustus John’s portraits and the bloated disaster area of his Chelsea Hotel end. Thomas once told a story about being fascinated by his grandmother’s grey face so much as a boy that he crawled under a table to lift her skirt and see if all the rest of her was grey, too. There’s not much of that Thomas in The Edge of Love for Rhys to have fun with. l

2008 Chicago International Film Festival

Everlasting Moments (Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick, 2008)
Director: Jan Troell

By Marilyn Ferdinand

"We are the last dinosaurs of Swedish film," complained Ingmar Bergman to Jan Troell in 1983. It is strange to see Bergman so down on his lot in the Swedish filmmaking industry, since the director was one of the most recognized and lauded ever in world cinema. His penultimate work, a TV movie called Saraband, was eagerly awaited by cinephiles all over the world, and when he died in 2007, the tributes poured in by the hundreds. Bergman never doubted that Troell was his equal, yet Troell hasn’t gained that same level of respect from the cinematic world. When Everlasting Moments, his first full-length feature film in seven years, came out, the Toronto International Film Festival didn’t even schedule it; it was shown there only as a last-minute replacement for another film. That never would have happened to Bergman.

It’s hard for me to comprehend why Troell doesn’t seem to have the reach and appeal of Bergman. When I saw The Emigrants (1971) his towering epic of the Swedish émigré experience in America when it, too, arrived in America three years after its initial release, I knew I was seeing greatness. But very few of his works ever followed it to these shores. It wasn’t until the very first Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival in 1999 that I got a chance to see another film by Troell, a fascinating look at the strange marriage of Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun and his wife Marie in Hamsun.

Ghita Nørby played the frustrated Marie in that film, and she plays Miss Fagerdal, a rich wig maker whose home the central character in Everlasting Moments, Maria Larsson (Maria Heiskanen), used to clean. The Finnish-born actress plays the Finnish-born wife of Sigfrid “Sigge” Larsson (Mikael Persbrandt) and mother of his seven children. The story, derived from Agneta Ulfsäter Troell’s book of her family history, is told as a memory play by this couple’s eldest daughter Maja (played as young woman by Callin Öhrvall). There is an I Remember Mama quality to this turn of the 20th century saga spanning 40 years, but Sigge is no kindly Lars Hanson, and Maria Larsson’s biggest problem isn’t having her daughter reject a family heirloom for her graduation present but rather keeping Sigge from slitting her throat with a straight razor.

The legend of Sigge and Maria’s betrothal centers on a raffle in which they won a camera. Sigge said he should get the camera since he bought the ticket, but Maria said she was part of the idea. Maria said she’d let Sigge keep the camera, but he would have to marry her so that she could have it, too. He did. When we enter the story proper, Sigge is waiting along with other men for day work at the docks. Few men are chosen, but because he is strong as a horse, Sigge usually gets picked. Once the children start to arrive, Maria quits service with Miss Fagerdal. She takes in sewing to add to the family’s meager coffers.

Maja is a good student who loves school and wishes to be a writer. One day, her teacher honors her with a visit to her home. In the middle of the visit, a very drunk Sigge is delivered to his door by two friends. Maja is humiliated, Maria is furious, and all of them pay a visit later on to the local temperance club where Sigge takes the pledge yet again. When they return home, the handsome and charming Sigge invites his wife to love; she only relents when he promises never to drink again, and they conceive Elon, child number 6. Sigge tries to keep his word, but The Captain (Antti Reini), a man who works with Sigge on the docks, likes his drinking partner. Influenced by his best friend, Englund (Emil Jensen), Sigge becomes a socialist and joins the dock workers union. When the union calls a strike, Sigge has plenty of idle time to spend in the union hall. He walks a vivacious young barmaid named Mathilda (Amanda Ooms) home one day and begins an affair with her.

With Sigge out of work, Maria tries to pawn the camera they won years ago to help pay the bills. Entering the photography shop of Sebastian Pedersen (Jesper Christiansen), Maria hears him behind a curtain playing a violin while accompanied by the howls of his dog Leo. He comes to the front, examines the camera, and says it’s a very fine one, a Contessa. It still has an unexposed photographic plate in it. Maria confesses the camera has never been used; she doesn't understand how it could possibly make images. Pedersen shows her how the process works by removing the lens, holding it up to a window where a butterfly is fluttering, and casting its shadow through the lens onto Maria’s open hand. He closes her hand, showing that she can capture images through the camera lens. Maria is enchanted. Pedersen teaches her how to use the camera, and she takes it home and snaps a picture of her children. When she brings it to Pedersen to be developed, he is impressed with her eye. He sets her up with supplies, and says he will let her use the camera until he decides what to offer her for it.

Sigge changes jobs when a hauler finds out how good he is with horses and hires him. Finances are still tight, and domestic relations in the Larsson house remain tense as Sigge continues to drink and abuse Maria and the children. Maria, however, finds her photographic skills more and more in demand and her friendship with Pedersen a source of comfort. When Sigge suspects Maria is cuckolding him with Pederson, he flies into a rage, and that's when the razor blade comes out. A defiant Maria dares him to use it, "just remember the children." He lets go, but this is no simple domestic disturbance. He is thrown in jail for attempted murder, and we wonder if Maria might finally have a chance to break free of him now and find some real happiness.

Everlasting Memories has an old-fashioned feel to it, and not just because it is set in the past. The film tells its story in a straightforward, conventional manner, including a voiceover style that hearkens from another time. The look and feel of the film are like an overstuffed, high-back chair—full, handsomely hued in rich, deep tones that grow soft at the edges. The subject matter—a troubled marriage, family, and emigration as exemplified by Maja’s expatriate aunt—is pure Troell. Perhaps his reaffirmation of his style confirms Bergman’s assessment of him as one of Sweden’s dinosaurs of film. Yet, Troell really knows how to dig into the heart of characters and families, expressing their longings without revealing all their secrets. He makes ordinary people in dreary circumstances intriguing and compelling.

Maria acts as our eyes onto the beauty of the world that can be found everywhere people normally find misery. A grieving mother asks Maria to photograph her dead daughter as a keepsake; Maria composes a picture of the young girl in repose that astounds the mother: "She never looked more beautiful." A neighbor woman talks about her Down Syndrome child as one she’d have aborted had she known. Maria asks to photograph the child, bringing a luminous smile to her neighbor at the honor. Somehow, her appreciation for the good in all things extends even to her husband. “Maybe it was love,” a grown Maja tells us. It certainly is love that fills this film and reaffirms Jan Troell as a filmmaker who affirms life without sugar-coating it. I highly recommend this return of a true master. l

Film trailer

Everlasting Moments screens Sunday, October 19 at 5 pm, Monday, October 20 at 6 pm, and Tuesday, October 21 at 4 pm at the AMC 600 N. Michigan 9. Director Jan Troell will attend all three screenings.

Previous CIFF Coverage

Sita Sings the Blues: Riotous animated comedy by Nina Paley tells the story of her own break-up through a reimagining of the Indian epic the Ramayana. (USA)

Snow (Snijeg): A handful of Muslim women in a small village in Bosnia labor in unresolved grief until an unexpected confrontation frees them to go on with their lives. (Bosnia-Herzegovina)

Beautiful (Arumdabda): The burden of beauty gets a savage treatment in this disturbing film by a first-time director. (South Korea)

Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in): An unconventional vampire story and an even more unconventional story of young love involving a 12-year-old boy and a vampire "girl" is emotionally rich, surprisingly honest, and properly horrifying. (Sweden)

2008 Chicago International Film Festival

Sita Sings the Blues (2008)
Director/Writer/Animator: Nina Paley

By Marilyn Ferdinand

The great stories of civilization teach lessons and convey beliefs. Many civilizations have The Good Wife and The Prodigal Son parables. India combines these two stories in the Ramayana, an epic poem from about 1000 BC. Indians through the centuries have been told, “Be as Rama,” the prodigal son who became one of India’s great rulers, or “Be as Sita,” Rama’s good and faithful wife. American animator Nina Paley got her hands on the Ramayana after a traumatic break-up with her boyfriend Dave, and saw the story in a much different light. Her film, Sita Sings the Blues, is subtitled, “The Greatest Breakup Story Ever Told.” Since she combines the Ramayana with her own break-up, it’s anyone’s guess which story she’s talking about.

The basic story told in Sita Sings the Blues is as follows: Dasharatha was the king of Kosala, an ancient kingdom that was located in present-day Uttar Pradesh, and ruled from its capital, Ayodhya. Dasharatha had three wives named Kausalya, Kaikeyi, and Sumitra. Kausalya, the eldest queen, was the mother of the eldest son Rama. Rama was to be king when he grew to manhood. Rama married the beautiful Sita, and they were very happy.

Kaikeyi wanted her son to be king. She reminded the king that he promised to grant her two wishes. When she asked that Rama be banished for 17 years and that her son be made king, Dasharatha had to agree. Good son Rama prepared to go into the wilderness, and Sita begged to go with him. He didn't want her to be with him in a dangerous forest filled with demons who were pestering the holy men and stamping out their fires, but she said a wife's place is at her husband's side. So they went off together.

Ravana, the many-headed, many-armed king of Lanka (Sri Lanka today), was said to be a very learned and wise man, though he's always called evil because he lusted after Sita and abducted her. Hanuman, a monkey warrior, found out that Ravana had carried Sita to his palace in Lanka and told Rama that Sita wanted him to rescue her. Rama raised a monkey army, crossed a land bridge to Lanka, and defeated Ravana. But he worried that Sita had been unfaithful to him and rejected her. Dejected, Sita asked that a fire be built that she could fling herself onto. They did so, but instead of dying, Sita survived, thus proving her purity. Seventeen years having passed, the pair took a flying chariot back to Ayodhya.

Unfortunately, Rama's subjects did not believe in Sita's purity. Rama banished her, though she was pregnant with twin boys. She gave birth, and Rama found her again, but still doubted her purity. She asked Mother Earth to swallow her up if she was pure. Of course, the earth opened, and Sita was taken out of reach.

A bodhisattva, clearly a woman who may have been Sita, rises out of the ocean on a lotus flower, gyrating to traditional Indian music. Next to her rises a Victrola with a bird standing on it. She reaches over, bends the bird’s beak over to play the record, and we hear the voice of Annette Hanshaw, a torch singer of the 1920s and 30s, warble a love song. The record skips at the lyric "a woman like me," forcing the bodhisattva to hit the Victrola. The scene explodes into a riot of music and dance as the opening credits role.

The Ramayana is a story all Indians learn in childhood; it is three grown-up Indians, represented by shadow puppets, who serve as our guides through the basics of the story and whose faulty memories and modern sensibilities give Paley ample opportunity for some great comedy. For example, the commentators try to decide how long ago the story takes place, starting at the 13th century. Paley provides appropriate garb for that century. “No, no, it was much longer ago than that.” The setting changes. Finally, one commentator chimes in “BC.” A title card places the story at “A long time ago BC.” One of my favorite moments comes when they wonder whether Sita deserved her fate. After all, she could have gone back to Rama with Hanuman and kept hundreds of warriors from being slaughtered. "And monkeys!" one says. "Yes," another comments, "what about animal rights?"

The animation style varies. When the elements of the story are simply being recounted by the commentators, the characters are stylized watercolors or stiff, cut-out images from magazines and books. Whenever Paley wishes to tell the story musically, all of the characters look like cartoons, with Sita portrayed as a kind of hinged-doll Betty Boop and the rest resembling Dudley Do-right. Annette Hanshaw provides Sita's singing voice, trilling out such famous tunes of the time as "Am I Blue," with Sita colored an appropriately dark blue. The film takes on a 1930s musical film quality at these junctures.

Paley intersperses the story of Sita with her parallel break-up story, beginning in San Francisco where she lives happily with Dave and their cat Lexi, going through to his temporary assignment in India and her joining him, to her flying to New York City for a conference and getting an e-mail from him saying "Don't come back. Love, Dave." After a suitable period of desperate longing and humiliation, Nina gets her act together, adopts another cat, and starts reading the Ramayana, revealing the origins of her idea to create Sita Sings the Blues. These scenes shorthand Nina and Dave's emotions very effectively, and her depictions of her cats couldn't be more dead-on and funny if she had videotaped them and inserted them in the film. Interestingly, I was worried about what happened to Lexi. Others must have been, too, because Paley adds a title card at the end assuring us that Lexi is being spoiled rotten by her new humans in San Francisco.

The film also includes a 2:30 minute intermission, during which the characters move around and get food from the concessions and audience sounds are heard. Since the film is only 82 minutes long, this was a huge joke on the butt deadeners movie fans increasingly have to endure. The curtains open after intermission to a fabulous dance choreographed to terrific Indian music that features Waking Life-style animation and quick cuts of Sita that get the audience back in the mood.

You can see exactly how all of this plays out in the trailer below:

Sita Sings the Blues is a wonderfully entertaining film packed with more great moments than I can possibly describe, with delightful animation and, if you're a fan of torch and blues music of the 1920s and/or Annette Hanshaw, a great soundtrack. The Ramayana is supposed to teach about submitting to one's fate, and despite the modern spin on the story, Nina learns to do just that. l

Sita Sings the Blues screens Saturday, October 18 at 4:40 pm, Sunday, October 19 at 12:15 pm, and Tuesday, October 28 at 6:15 pm at the AMC River East 21 322 E. Illinois St.

Previous CIFF Coverage

Snow (Snijeg): A handful of Muslim women in a small village in Bosnia labor in unresolved grief until an unexpected confrontation frees them to go on with their lives. (Bosnia-Herzegovina)

Beautiful (Arumdabda): The burden of beauty gets a savage treatment in this disturbing film by a first-time director. (South Korea)

Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in): An unconventional vampire story and an even more unconventional story of young love involving a 12-year-old boy and a vampire "girl" is emotionally rich, surprisingly honest, and properly horrifying. (Sweden)

2008 Chicago International Film Festival

Snow (Snijeg, 2008)
Director: Aida Begić

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Among the thriving film industries of Eastern Europe, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s has consistently provided courageous and inventive stories that tell the rest of the world what has happened and is happening in this scarred region. The female filmmakers of Bosnia-Herzegovina have been especially articulate in depicting the aftermath of the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims by their Serbian neighbors during 1992-1995. The superb Grbavica: Land of My Dreams, a film created by women, dealt with the postwar trauma of a Muslim woman and her daughter that helped people like me who had only heard about the Bosnian War on the news understand the deep, human consequences of this tragic conflict.

Now we have another beautifully wrought film—the winner of the critics' week grand prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival—from another female director about the survivors of the tiny Muslim town of Slavno who saw all its males, including young boys, rousted from their beds and taken off to be slaughtered. Snow takes place in a time out of time. Real-life events occur, but the handful of residents (surely there must be more than 10 people in this village) who have lost fathers, husbands, and children live in a kind of limbo, wishfully thinking and dreaming that their men somehow escaped unharmed or clinging to bitterness over their ruined lives.

At the center of the film are Alma (in a mesmerizing, soul-searing performance by Zana Marjanović), a young widow and the only woman in the film to wear the veil and modest clothing prescribed by Muslim traditions, and Ali (Benjamin Djip), a young boy who witnessed the murder of the men and boys of the village and ever since has seen his voice muted and his hair refusing to grow. Ali lives with the only other man in the village, the elderly Dedo (Emir Hadžihafizbegović), who leads prayer sessions for the women.

Alma has started a cottage industry canning fruits and vegetables and making chutneys to “feed half of Bosnia”—a dream her dead husband had. Working with her are Sabrina (Jelena Kordic), a young woman who listens to rock music, dresses like a mod, and dreams of going to Sweden to hook up with a man she had a fling with after her husband was killed; Jasmina (Sadzida Setic), a bitter woman whose young sons and husband were murdered and who now looks after two orphan girls; and Najida (Jasna Beri), a Bosnian Mother Earth whose daughter Lejla (Alma Terzić) holds out hope that her father somehow survived. Safija (Vesna Masic), the mother-in-law Alma barely tolerates, lays on her sofa, prostrate from a weak heart and seemingly retired from life. The matriarch of the village, Nana (Irena Mulamuhic), sits in her home where she has undertaken the project of weaving a very long carpet out of cloth remnants she cuts from tote bags and bolts of fabric.

Najida helps Alma drag a cart filled with jars of preserves up a hill to set up a roadside stand. The road seems abandoned; how do they scratch out a living with this highly unprofitable enterprise? Najida tells Alma she needs to relieve herself and wants Alma to come with her. In the short time the cart is left untended, a truck barrels around the turn and smashes the cart and the fruits of the women’s labor to bits. The driver, Hamsa (Muhamed Hadzovic), offers to pay for the ruined goods and gives the women a lift back to town. When he tries to strike up a conversation, Alma is cold and distant. Then he says he is from Alma’s home village and says that he escaped death by hiding under dead bodies for two days. He now makes a good living delivering furniture from Germany to Bosnia. Alma warms to him after she learns he, too, is a victim. He strikes a bargain with her to buy all their stock for sale in Germany. He also seems to have his eye on Alma.

Back in the village, the other women are skeptical that Hamsa will keep his promise, but Alma’s faith is unshakable. Even when a Serb named Miro (Jasmin Jelco) comes with an offer from a large company to buy their land, Alma encourages the women to put their faith in Hamsa. On the appointed day of his arrival to buy their stock, Hamsa is a no-show. When Miro returns with Marc (Dejan Spasic), an officer of the buying company, to get the villagers to sign contracts selling their land, many of them comply. Alma is tempted to give up as well, but Safija counsels her to stay put: “We’ve lived through worse.”

A storm and engine trouble force Marc and Miro to stay in town. When Ali comes in, his hair now growing, he and Miro have a strange confrontation that changes the fate of all the villagers and enables them to move past their grief and anger and get on with their lives.

Snow deftly mixes reality with dreamscapes, superstition, and magic in a town that seems as mythic as Brigadoon. We don’t see much of Slavno beyond a few ramshackle buildings and some house interiors. With only a handful of inhabitants, Slavno just can’t exist and provide for all of the needs these people have. Like Brigadoon, the residents of Slavno are under the influence of an enchantment—in this case, a mourning that can’t end because of the uncertainty surrounding the fate of their men and boys. Alma has a recurring dream—twisting her beautiful veil as she walks, washing herself at a fountain, carrying a cup of water and a towel to the site of prayer—but we don’t know it’s a dream at first. Alma herself wakens from these dreams unsure of where she is and what she is to do. When the netherworld in which Slavno exists finally comes to an end, the villagers walk across an expanse on the rug Nana has woven and floated on air to accept their passage.

The color saturation in the film is vivid, intoxicating, the stuff that dreams are made on. Think of What Dreams May Come or The Fall, and you'll have some idea of just how gorgeous and communicative they are. The sound design also helps us float on this film. For example, while listening to a theological lesson from Dedo, Ali is distracted by a rustle of wind that slowly grows louder and stronger. "God sees everything," Dedo says to Alma late in the film. When the storm that traps Miro and Marc in Slavno announces itself with a strong, roof-snatching force, it seems like the climax of God's intervention on this blighted village.

One of the orphan girls plays with some powdered cement, pretending it is snow. When the real snow comes, Slavno’s luck begins to change. The village may survive after all. Its residents already have. l

Movie trailer (French subtitles):

Michael Guillen of The Evening Class offers an illuminating interview of the director.

Snow shows Saturday, October 25 at 3 pm, Sunday, October 26 at 6 pm, and Tuesday, October 28 at 4:15 pm at the AMC 600 N. Michigan 9.

Previous CIFF Coverage

Beautiful (Arumdabda): The burden of beauty gets a savage treatment in this disturbing film by a first-time director. (South Korea)

Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in): An unconventional vampire story and an even more unconventional story of young love involving a 12-year-old boy and a vampire "girl" is emotionally rich, surprisingly honest, and properly horrifying. (Sweden)

2008 Chicago International Film Festival

Beautiful (Arumdabda, 2008)
Director: Juhn Jaihong

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Back in 1996, a delightfully depraved film from South Korea called 301, 302 took on the effects of rape on a survivor and the person who tries to help her. The rape victim holds down a responsible job but succumbs more and more to her anorexia. Her neighbor, a shallow woman who only knows how to interact with her husband through sex and gourmet cooking, ends up losing him. She fills the void by trying to cook the perfect meal to heal her self-starving neighbor. The ending of the film is shocking but somehow appropriate, providing each woman with an outlet for her rage. Significantly, 301, 302 was written by a woman, Lee Suh-Goon.

Unfortunately, first-time director Juhn Jaihong looks every bit the unskilled neophyte. A protégé of Kim Ki-duk, a much-lauded director of the Korean New Wave who provided the story on which Beautiful is based, Juhn shows no subtlety or understanding of the deeper problems of women in Korean society that were explored to such great effect in 301, 302. Beautiful takes the dilemma faced by beautiful young women in a society that disrespects women at a very basic level and turns out a less graphic version of slasher porn. Kim Eun-yeong (Cha Su-yeon), the lovely victim in Beautiful is no match for the gawkers and stalkers she tries unsuccessfully to evade. She is for them and for the makers and audiences of this film an object to be abused, laughed at, blamed, and ultimately destroyed by the obsession of her self-appointed savior.

We first meet Eun-yeong in a café where she is waiting to meet her friend Mi-yeon (Lee Min). Several school girls notice her, remark on her great beauty, and ask her for her autograph even though she is not an actress or anyone famous. Actually, Eun-yeong doesn’t seem to exist in this film except to be a victim. We don't see her work or go to school. She has one friend, Mi-yeon, but no boyfriend or, it appears, anyone else in her life, including family. Her beautiful, expensive-looking apartment is devoid of any personal photos; only a couple sketches of a nude woman—presumably Eun-yeong—garnish the décor. Is what she’s about to go through a comment on Eun-yeong’s essential narcissism?

So what does she go through? She’s harassed constantly by men—those she knows, like Mi-yeon’s boyfriend, but more often strangers on the street. Her distant admirers send her bunches of flowers, which she has the doorman of her condominium toss in the trash. She makes the mistake, however, of taking a single lily up with her as a simple decoration. This act encourages her stalker Eun-cheol (Lee Chun-heui) to declare his love by faking his way into her apartment as a meter reader. When she tries to brush him off as she has done with every one of her ardent admirers, he throws her around, slaps her unconscious, and rapes her. Then he takes pictures of her.

Remorse sends Eun-cheol to the police to confess. The police call Eun-yeong in to the station and ask why she didn’t report the crime. Humiliated and traumatized, she barely speaks. One jackass detective accuses her of leading men on by dressing in short skirts and, well, being so damn pretty. Indeed, her attacker said that she raped him with her beauty. Eun-yeong certainly does seem to have a hypnotic effect on men. Detective Kim (Myeong-soo Choi), a decent police officer who shields her from his partner’s rudeness becomes obsessed with her, too, copying tapes her stalker made of her and jacking off to them. He then abandons his job (an extended vacation, he says) and starts following her around.

Eun-yeong barely notices that he always seems to be around. She's too busy trying to make herself unattractive. She dresses in long, concealing clothes. Then she gets the idea to gain weight from watching a fat girl she spoke with one day wolf down a large lunch. Eun-yeong's binges, however, only shock her system, and she ends up in an emergency department with an inflamed stomach and a doctor who tries to feel her up. When she leaves the hospital, she collapses, and, in a somewhat comical scene, is swarmed by men fighting to be the one who takes her home in a taxi. Detective Kim again comes to her rescue. Then she decides to lose weight and look skeletal, but her constant exercise and near fasting causes her to collapse before her body can adjust to a starvation regime. Again, she ends up in the hospital.

As Eun-yeong grows more and more insane, decides to become a hooker, and vomits almost nonstop, she starts to see her rapist everywhere and nearly stabs a man she sees enter a men’s room. Fortunately, discreet stalker Detective Kim prevents her from striking the man she thought was her attacker. More of this tiresome craziness ensues until the film ends in a bloodbath.

If it had bothered to take Eun-yeong’s problems seriously—or even made her into a believable character with a real life—Beautiful could have some interesting things to say about women. Beauties are often swarmed by besotted men who scare, more than flatter, them. Rape does make women feel ashamed, complicit in their own attack, and desperate to fade into the background so they won’t be targeted again. Without a proper support network, rape victims do become emotionally unstable. Many young women are not taught self-defense or self-respect, and more importantly, many young men are not taught to respect women. But Beautiful does not wish to explore Eun-yeong’s relationship to her own power as, say, Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher or I Spit on Your Grave do. She says repeatedly that she wants to live and that she can’t go on as a victim anymore. But the director and screenwriter would rather let Detective Kim call the shots and force her fate on her like a second, more deadly rape. Eun-yeong’s allure seems more that of a sorceress than a fresh-faced young woman, and we all know what happens to witches.

This film's pinpoint devotion to the mechanics of obsession is so clumsily handled that it neither illuminates that compulsion nor comments effectively on what it means to be beautiful in a misogynistic society. “Beauty is destiny,” someone says to Eun-yeong. According to this movie, being a beautiful woman means being reduced to a raving crone who is destroyed without any reason or poignancy. This is a huge step backward in Korea’s films about women. Let’s hope this new director finds another direction; he’s completely out of his depth in the feminine world. l

Beautiful Trailer

Beautiful shows Saturday, October 18 at 1:15 pm, Sunday, October 19 at 3:15 pm, and Monday, October 20 at 5:45 pm at the AMC 600 N. Michigan 9.

Previous CIFF Coverage

Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in): An unconventional vampire story and an even more unconventional story of young love involving a 12-year-old boy and a vampire "girl" is emotionally rich, surprisingly honest, and properly horrifying. (Sweden)

2008 Chicago International Film Festival

Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in, 2008)
Director: Tomas Alfredson

By Marilyn Ferdinand

This is going to seem like a very peculiar way to open a review about a vampire movie, but serendipity led me to it. The hubby put on a Beach Boys CD as I sat fumbling for words, and the song “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” came on. When I heard the lyrics “And wouldn’t it be nice to live together, in the kind of world where we belong,” I thought, yes, that’s a sentiment Let the Right One In taps. Unlike the kind of sunny romances the Beach Boys immortalized, however, this story of young love comes from Sweden, a land better known for darkness and melancholy. And then there’s that small issue of the lovers being a 12-year-old boy and a vampire who looks like a “12 year old, more or less” girl. This is no trite or gimmicky love story, however. A more emotionally rich, honest, and harrowing film—though properly wrapped in the conventions and graphic horrors of vampire tales—you’re not likely to see for some time.

The film opens in a dreary apartment block in a suburb of Stockholm. Snow covers the ground, and darkness covers the gloom. Moving inside one apartment, we see the back of a boy. He puts his hand to the window and smears a palm print down the pane. We see his face, wistful, pale, framed by fine, pale hair. He has a knife out and pretends to talk to someone, daring that someone to come forward to be stuck like a pig. The boy, Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), collects knives and newspaper clippings detailing crime and violence. He lives with his divorced mother, pines for his father who lives a good distance away, and goes to a school where his intelligence, shyness, and status as a child of divorce makes him an object of torment for bully Conny (Patrik Rydmark) and two lackeys. They chase him into a bathroom stall, threaten him, soak his pants in a urinal, and mock him in scenes of painful cruelty.

These bullies are the imaginary pigs at the end of Oskar’s knife, and Oskar goes into the wide courtyard of his apartment complex and repeatedly jabs his knife into a tree. The camera shifts to Oskar’s right to reveal a girl standing on a table, coatless in the frigid night. They have a brief conversation. Her name is Eli (Lina Leandersson), the girl who the neighbors said moved into the apartment next to Oskar’s with her father Håkan (Per Ragnar).

Inside the apartment, Håkan is packing a square case with a plastic bottle, a knife, some contraption fitted with a mask, and a plastic coat. He goes into an isolated wood where he encounters a teenage boy. Distracting the boy, Håkan places the mask over the boy’s face and renders him unconscious. He puts on his plastic coat, wraps a rope around the boy's feet, tosses the rope over a tree limb, and hoists him up. He places the plastic bottle under the boy’s head, slits his throat, and catches the blood that pours from his neck. Unfortunately for him, a dog out for a walk with his owner catches the scent of blood and runs barking toward Håkan. Håkan flees the scene when he hears human voices. Returning to the apartment, he unpacks his case, only then realizing he left the bottle of blood at the scene. Eli, furious, yells, “Do I have to do everything myself?” “Forgive me,” is Håkan’s only response. Håkan seems to be trying to make something up to her. Her insolence toward him suggests that he might not be her father after all.

On a street near a frozen lake, good friends Lacke (Peter Carlsberg) and Jocke (Mikael Rahm) bid each other a warm good-night after a pleasant night out. Jocke crosses under a bridge, where he encounters a girl cringing in the cold. He goes to her aid, lifting her up to carry her to shelter. The girl is Eli, and grabs him with great ferocity and drains his blood. A prissy, old bachelor with a houseful of cats witnesses the scene. By the time he calls for help, the body is gone—dragged by Håkan to a hole in the ice and dumped in. Only traces of blood are found buried under some soft snow where Jocke’s body fell.

With one confirmed and one suspected death and the townspeople on alert, Eli must remain at home. She spends time with Oskar, and one day, notices that he has a bandage on his cheek. He told his mother that he fell at recess, but in fact, the bullies whipped him with a tree switch and accidentally hit him in the face, leaving a long gash. “You have to fight back,” she counsels. “When they hit, you hit harder.” She also promises him that she will always have his back. When Oskar goes to school the next day, he asks the gym teacher if he can start doing weight training.

Eli’s need for blood sends Håkan out again looking for a “donor.” His attempt to drain a teen athlete while his friends wait for him outside the school goes awry. As the boy is rescued unharmed, Håkan, hiding in the showers of the locker room, pours acid on his face to disguise his identity and keep Eli safe from prying eyes. He is taken to the hospital, and Eli remains at home, hungry.

Her need for blood has weakened her, and her body is starting to give off an odor, which Oskar embarrasses her by commenting upon it. She determines to get what she needs from Håkan, who has been hospitalized. Removing her shoes, she crawls up the side of the building and to his window. In a truly horrifying scene, he unplugs his airway, opens the window, and offers his neck to her. When she is done, he falls lifelessly to the ground.

Others will fall to Eli, even as she falls for Oskar. She crawls into his bed one night, naked, and he remarks on how cold she is. “Is it gross?” she asks. He doesn’t really answer, but he doesn’t turn her away. They lay in silence for a short time, and then Oskar asks her to go steady. She wants things to remain as they are, but he says they can, only they will just be for each other. Since it’s clear they are already a conspiracy of two in a world that has little use for them, it’s easy for Eli to agree. They become more entwined in each other’s lives. Oskar finally asks her if she’s a vampire. “I live on blood, yes.” She invites him into her home, where they dance to pop records. He gains unfettered access to her home, and she watches over him as the bullies escalate their attacks on him.

John Ajvide Lindqvist’s 2007 novel, Let the Right One In, was a runaway best-seller in Sweden, has already received numerous translations, and has been optioned by United Artists for a mainstream Hollywood version. With so many actual and proposed versions of this story floating around, however, it’s hard to imagine a better version than this film, with a screenplay by the novelist himself. From what I’ve read about the novel, many things that were left vague in the film are explicitly spelled out. I think the story may be better served by the visual and aural mood of the film craft, the simple and sometimes inarticulate conversations of Oskar and Eli, and the faded, shadowy adults who react to events but never penetrate the true mystery of connectedness. Indeed, the most emotionally remote among the characters are the ones who suffer the most awful fate.

The land itself seems permeated with loneliness as depicted in glorious Cinemascope by camera artist Hoyte Van Hoytema. He captures flat, linear images—the exterior wall of the apartment building in which Oskar and Eli live with its square, symmetrical, characterless windows; the straight maze of white-trunked birches in which Håkan commits murder; the vast expanse of a frozen lake in a monochrome world. In such a void, every sound is magnified. The meticulously detailed sound design gives us Eli’s animal growl as she feeds. We hear the wet sounds of mouths eating or nervously salivating. We hear each blow of Oskar’s beating and the strange sounds of unseen action while Oskar is underwater. The musical score contributes a foreboding structure, yet yields to tenderness as the love story progresses. Special effects are spare, realistic for the givens of the story, and deeply affecting and startling. Watch for a brief moment when Eli asks Oskar to “be me,” and Eli’s face as she would appear if she looked her real age flashes briefly, showing not only the successful connection between the pair, but also a human longing in her “human” face.

The remarkable performances of Hedebrant and Leandersson as Oskar and Eli command the lion’s share of the attention in the film. Eli, who’s “been 12 for a long time,” never really had a chance to live as a human. She still has a thirst for life that has kept her going through the loneliness and rootlessness of a vampire’s existence. Her existence isn't depicted as sinister or horror-mongering, however. She does what she has to do without making a big thing of it. When Oskar seems to judge her for killing people, she puts him in his place by saying he’s just like her. “The first time I ever heard you, you were talking about killing. I do it to live. You want revenge.” When they finally kiss, Eli’s mouth is stained with blood, enacting a version of the blood-mixing alliance Oskar attempted before he knew her true nature.

The trailer below showcases the amazing look of this film, with all the horror traditionally associated with a vampire story and only a hint of the vital heart beating at its center when both Eli and Oskar “let the right one in.”

A fine interview with the director by Todd Brown of Twitch is worth reading. It doesn’t contain major spoilers, but I’m glad I didn’t read it before I saw the film. This is a film that should be felt, not examined. l

Let the Right One In shows on Friday, October 17 at 10:00 pm at the AMC River East 21, 322 E. Illinois St., and on Saturday October 25 at 10:45 pm at the AMC 600 N. Michigan 9.

2008 Chicago International Film Festival

By Marilyn Ferdinand

It's hard to believe another year has come and gone and that I'm back in training for another Chicago International Film Festival. It's a time that I relish even as I agonize over how I'm going to see everything I want to see and get it all written up each day.

Things have progressed since I covered my first CIFF. I was automatically included on the press list and have been given additional privileges to attend special events. Thus, I hope to be able to give you a lot more than just film reviews. Because I'm on the press list, I also got advance notice of screeners that are available and when and where I can watch them. This is unbelievably good news for me, as it will help me create a more flexible, less hectic schedule and give film buffs in Chicago plenty of advance notice about films they might want to see. I saw my first screener yesterday, and will post on it on Sunday. In keeping with the Halloween season and the mania to focus on horror that has seized my buddies in the film blogosphere, the first screener I watched was a vampire tale from Sweden.

There are a number of buzzworthy directors with films at the CIFF, including Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Tokyo Sonata), Arnaud Desplechin (A Christmas Tale), Mike Leigh (Happy-Go-Lucky), animator Bill Plympton (Idiots and Angels), Andrzej Wajda (Katyn), and Johnny To (Sparrow). Major-label films Synecdoche, New York, The Brothers Bloom, The Wrestler, and Zack and Miri Make a Porno will also be making an appearance. Darren Aronofsky, Rachel Wiesz, and Mike Leigh are expected to attend their respective film screenings. Some of my favorite directors with few-and-far-between films, Jan Troell, Terence Davies, and Jerzy Skolimowski, also will be showing at the CIFF.

Perhaps a bit on the downside, 23% of the feature films on display are from the United States, with only one film from sub-Saharan Africa (South Africa), Australia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Czech Republic, Israel, and Romania—all sources of the best films I saw from last year's festival and other festivals. But the CIFF has always had its ups and downs, and there is still the likelihood of making some great discoveries along with the familiar and already-recognized films.

I hope you'll keep an eye on the offerings I lay before you and enjoy my discoveries with me. Now it's on with the show.l

O Brother, What a Soundtrack

By Marilyn Ferdinand

I know that everyone's talking about the new Coen Brothers' film Burn After Reading. I've kind of been ignoring the Coens for the past seven or eight years, so if that makes me a pariah of a movie buff in your eyes, go somewhere else. I've gotten pretty tired of their facile take on comic and serious stories alike. Their send-up of hillbillies, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, isn't much different, but its one overwhelmingly redeeming quality is its soundtrack. I was listening to the soundtrack on my iPod this morning and remembering a review of it I did back in 2000. I'm not likely to review a Coen film on this site (though Rod has and maybe will again), so consider this my review of O Brother, Where Art Thou?

In 1941, a highly successful film director named John L. Sullivan tired of making meaningless popular hit after hit. Longing to make a film of substance, he set off on an odyssey to discover and embrace the REAL America for a film with the working title of "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" Unfortunately, the real America was a bit more than Sullivan could handle.

Sixty years later, film makers Joel and Ethan Coen picked up where the fictional Sullivan of Preston Sturges' classic comedy Sullivan's Travels left off. Not only did they maketheir own version of a screwball comedy, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, but they also found the real America in the glorious music—and musicians—they chose to inhabit their film.

The O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack is arguably the best of 2000. It is also the film's real star, wrapping the riotous whimsy of the story (very loosely based on Homer's The Odyssey) in the soulful, straightforward music of rural America. Indeed, the music came before the O Brother script and influenced its development.

The soundtrack was produced by T-Bone Burnett. Burnett is perhaps best known for playing with Bob Dylan and producing albums by such rockers as Elvis Costello and the Counting Crows. But he began his musical life as a blues musician and has produced a number of country albums, including Revival for Gillian Welch, who performs on the soundtrack. Burnett has chosen a stellar line-up of traditional folk, country, blues, and bluegrass music, recording new tracks of established standards in the "old-timey" manner and, importantly, reviving historical recordings.

The film opens with a chain gang (which includes the travellers we follow throughout the film) singing a traditional work song, "Po Lazarus." This is one of the remarkable historical recordings Burnett has chosen, and to great effect. The album credits the performers as James Carter and The Prisoners, but this is no variety act. The prisoners were real members of a chain gang led by Carter, most likely another prisoner. They were recorded in 1959 by renowned folk music collector Alan Lomax for the Archive of American Folk Song collection of the Library of Congress as they chopped wood at the Mississippi State Prison in Lambert. "Po Lazarus" is the most direct link on the album to the African music traditions black slaves brought to America with them, from the participatory nature of the song to the practice of praising in song great heroes' exploits.

The traditional song "Down to the River to Pray," which the escaped travelers hear as they hide in a forest, gets a soulful interpretation from one of today's biggest country music stars, Alison Krauss, the youngest person ever to be asked to join the cast of the Grand Ole Opry, the Carnegie Hall of American country music. Krauss is backed reliably by members of the First Baptist Church of White House, Tennessee, and country vocalists Norman Blake, Dub Cornett, Porter McLister, David Rawlings, Tim O'Brien, Maura O'Connell, Pat Enright, Sam Phillips, and Gillian Welch.

Krauss, Welch, and country/folk diva Emmylou Harris team up to perform the only new song on the album, sung in the film by three river nymphs to tempt the erstwhile travellers. Rather than lure the men to their deaths, as the sirens did in The Odyssey, these treacherous women lull them to sleep with the rhythmic "Didn't Leave Nobody but the Baby," based on a traditional African-American lullaby and accompanied by the comic/hypnotic sounds of a musician plying his bow against a metal saw.

As the travelers enjoy their freedom from the chain gang, Krauss and Welch vocalize their exhilaration with the Albert E. Brumley folk hymn, "I'll Fly Away," accompanied on mandolin and guitar by Mike Compton and Chris Sharp. Characteristic of many hymns popular during the 1930s, the period in which the film is set, "I'll Fly Away" celebrates the joy that will come only after death, in sharp contrast with the misery many rural Americans suffered on a daily basis during the Great Depression.

A fateful encounter of the travelers is with Tommy Johnson, a black musician who claims to have sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in exchange for extraordinary musical ability. In many accounts of this scene, Tommy Johnson is considered to be a fictional version of Robert Johnson, one of the most famous and gifted blues musicians America has produced and one who claimed a similar encounter with the devil.

In fact, Tommy Johnson, played ably in the film and on the soundtrack ("Hard Times Killing Floor Blues") by blues musician Chris Thomas King, was an actual bluesman who was a contemporary of Robert Johnson. It is said that he told Robert Johnson about his encounter with the devil and suggested he try the same approach. It is fitting that in the process of rehabilitating old-timey music for modern audiences, the Coens and T-Bone Burnett would similarly resurrect the name and reputation of the first sinner at the crossroads.

Tommy and the travelers team up on a record that becomes a break-out hit in the film and is the centerpiece tune of the film, "Man of Constant Sorrow." The first rendition of the song has Dan Tyminski pitching in for actor George Clooney, who, unhappily, did not inherit the singing talent of his aunt, Rosemary Clooney. Tyminski, one of the fictional Soggy Bottom Boys, is a member of Union Station, Alison Krauss' band. The other Soggy Bottom Boys on this track are Harley Allen and Pat Enright.

"Man of Constant Sorrow" is closely associated with Ralph Stanley, one of the living legends of old-time bluegrass music. Stanley and his late brother Carter, along with their band The Clinch Mountain Boys, were some of the greatest practitioners of what they called "mountain music." The Stanley Brothers are represented on the O Brother soundtrack with their 1955 recording of "Angel Band."

Ralph Stanley takes a solo turn in the most powerful, harrowing track of the album, an a capella wail of uncertain origin, "O Death." This song comes as the shadow of death falls across Tommy Johnson and communicates, as few songs ever have, the bone-chilling horror of dying.

Surprisingly, a song usually thought of as upbeat, "You Are My Sunshine," becomes an acutely sad lament in the hands of bluegrass veteran Norman Blake. Other surprises on the soundtrack include actor Tim Blake Nelson's pleasant imitation of the first "commercial" country performer, Jimmy Rodgers. Nelson hams through the Rodgers tune "In the Jailhouse Now", backed by a much larger gathering of Soggy Bottom Boys. Rodgers' signature yodel is provided by Pat Enright. A personal favorite of mine is the young Peasall sisters' sincere performance of "In the Highway," a song by Maybelle Carter of the Carter Family country music dynasty. Finally, singing cowboy Harry "Mac" McClintock is given a new airing with his 1926 recording of his own song "Big Rock Candy Mountain."

Other delights abound on this thoroughly enjoyable, heartfelt celebration of old-timey American music. O Brother, what a wonderful soundtrack. l