Hey folks, Harry here with an exhaustive and wonderfully thorough report on the CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL where it seems Capone was swept away by THE GODDESS OF 1967, which currently does not have a U.S. distributor... though from the sound of the film, it looks like after it's wins (Best Actress at VENICE FILM FESTIVAL and Best Director at CHICAGO) well it has a good chance... at least I hope so... so we'll have a chance to see it. Capone discusses a great many films, so it is best if you just wade in... good stuff below...
Hey, Harry. Capone in Chicago. I needed the past weekend to process and recover from the excess that was the Chicago International Film Festival. 25 films in two weeks, most of them real winners. Here is Part 2 of my two-part coverage.
ONCE IN THE LIFE
Making a big deal about an actor trying his or her hand at directing is sort of silly. Why would they be any more or less qualified than someone who isn’t an actor? And history has shown that some actors make fine directors, such as Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson, Kenneth Brannagh, Angelica Houston, and Jodie Foster. ONCE IN THE LIFE marks the feature film directing debut of Laurence Fishburne. The movie is based on his play “Riff Raff,” and he stars in he film as well.
ONCE IN THE LIFE is an okay movie. If feels like a play blown up and fleshed out, but not in particularly original ways. Fishburne is “20/20” a small-time Hispanic hustler looking for an easy score by ripping off some drug dealers with his partner, played by Titus Welliver. The real “star” of the film is Eamonn Walker, best known for playing Kareem Said on HBO’s prison drama “Oz.” He is 20/20’s best friend, who is trying to get out of the game and into a life with his wife (Annabella Sciorra) and their new baby.
The film examines the lives of the three main characters (Walker, Fishburne, and Welliver), all of whom are men who exist on the periphery of life. I liked the film’s sense of hopelessness and desperation, but the overwritten screenplay left the actors with too much time to make big speeches about the nothing lives they have built for themselves. While Fishburne’s future as a director may be questionable, his performance is one of his best, which is saying a lot for the man who gave us Cowboy Curtis, Furious Styles, Ike Turner, Othello, and Morpheus. Fishburne moves like a man trying not to be noticed, as he dips and weaves through day-to-day living. It’s a mannered performance that is unnerving simply people the guy can’t keep still.
ONCE IN THE LIFE will not win any awards. My guess is that Fishburne took a chunk of his MATRIX money and got this small and very personal project out of his system before he jumped back into the next two MATRIX sequels. Don’t worry if this one slips through your fingers.
KRAMPACK
This odd little Spanish film is a graphic coming-of-age drama about two 16-year-old boys who talk about all the things you’d expect 16-year-old boys to talk about: girls, sex, sports, parties. Although the two don’t live in the same town anymore, they spend summers together, and as each day ends, they climb into bed and “Krampack” in front of each other or sometimes do it to each other. One of the boys is clearly in love with the other, but the other is all about scoping out the beaches and festive nightlife of Spain for women. Whether you think the film is borderline exploitation or not (I didn’t), you may not find KRAMPACK very interesting. While it does take a unique approach to one boy’s self discovery as a homosexual and the performances are sensitive and sometimes moving, the film didn’t quite work for me. Perhaps it was the filmmaker’s ability to raise important issue without really dealing with them that bothered me. Sometimes shit just doesn’t come together, and this is one of those cases.
THE CAPTIVE
This French wonder is a film that some will find utterly amazing, others (probably women) will be totally offended, and still others will be completely baffled. THE CAPTIVE is a quiet meditative film about dangerous love, obsession, and more specifically possession. Stanislas Merhar is Simon, who reminded me a great deal of the AMERICAN PSYCHO character minus the psychotic tendencies. Just image all the polish and shine trapped in an uptight French dude. The object of his affection is Ariane (the radiant Sylvie Testud, who I’ve been in love with since BEYOND SILENCE a few years back). Ariane is Simon’s girlfriend and willing prisoner of love, despite her occasional leaning toward women. Her every breath is questioned by Simon. But he doesn’t ever yell or hurt her; he picks everything she does apart at the seems, and she loves him all the more for it. THE CAPTIVE is the kind of movie that people who don’t ever like French films hate the most. I love them BECAUSE of film’s like this. Simon’s elaborate sexual desires (dry humping Ariane through the sheets is his preference) are met willingly by Ariane, and you never quite know how the story will resolve itself, but you have every confidence it will be tragic...or will it?
FAITHLESS
One of the highlights from this year’s Cannes Film Festival was Liv Ullman’s second effort directing a script by Ingmar Bergman (the first was PRIVATE CONVERSATIONS). FAITHLESS (a play on the word “unfaithful”) is one of the most emotionally shocking and powerful works that I’ve seen in quite a while. If I had more time, I’d write an essay on this movie. Like Bergman’s SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE, this film picks apart a relationship borne of infidelity and how most such relationships are doomed from the start. Patterned after a true story from Bergman’s life (although not one involving his affair with Ullman, or so she said at the Q&A after the screening), FAITHLESS is told from the point of view of Bergman regular Erland Josephson (as the Bergman stand-in). He is having a conversation with the beautiful and sad Krister Henriksson (primarily known for her Swedish theater work), who we soon come to realize is not really in the room. She’s more of a walking, talking memory of the old man, and she relates a story of her life and affair with David (Thomas Hanzon). She is married to a famous classical music conductor and has a 9-year-old daughter with him, but that doesn’t stop her from having a torrid affair with David and throwing everybody’s life into utter chaos. This is classic Bergman. No horrible thought goes unspoken, no vengeful deed goes undone (especially by the husband), and no good thing comes from the affair. I’ve been fortunate enough to see all four of the films that Ullman has directed, and this is by far the greatest, if only for its scope and range of emotion. She keeps us guessing as to what Josephson’s role in all of this is and why he’s talking to a woman that isn’t really there. Is she a ghost? Or is she his remembrance of her? It’s complicated and totally worth finding out the answers. By the way, Liv Ullman is still absolutely stunning at 61; she looks about 25.
ONE 4 ALL
French director Claude Lelouch is an odd bird. He makes crowd pleasers, which in France seems like it would be frowned upon quite heavily. He made a name for himself in 1966 with A MAN AND A WOMAN, and lately he’s been churning out films like LES MISERABLES (the French version from 1995); MEN, WOMEN: A USER’S MANUAL; and CHANCE OR COINCIDENCE. He’s a “friend” of the Chicago Film Festival, so they always screen his films here even if they never get released later on. ONE 4 ALL is escapist fluff about three total hotties (including the original LA FEMME NIKITA, Anne Parillaud) who concoct a scam to seduce very rich men without sleeping with them and get them to fork over tremendous sums of money before they break up with them. Sounds like a party, and in fact, that’s how it’s treated. The film has flash and dazzle and charm, but not in the way of substance. And it contains the single most ridiculous ending in the history of film. That’s not much of a recommendation, but if you’re familiar with Lelouch and know what to expect, you might like it.
DONOVAN QUICK
Colin Firth takes a stab at the lightweight, working-class, U.K. crowd pleaser genre (FULL MONTY, WAKING NED DEVINE, and 100 others in the past five years). This time the oppressors are the mass transit companies, which hold monopoly on routes and service in a small town. When the Windmill Transport Bus Company cancels service on a local train route, the retarded Sandy has no way to make it to his day care center. The mysterious title character blows into town and rents a room in Sandy’s sister’s house. With a suitcase full of cash, Donovan vows to help Sandy form his own one-bus bus company to provide service to the locals on a more convenient schedule for a more reasonable price. And the service is a hit (although they never really do resolve the whole day-care issue), so much so in fact that Windmill decides to extend its route to run a couple minutes ahead of Sandy and Donovan’s. The battle begins. DONOVAN QUICK is a little darker than the other films in this genre, especially as we start to discover where Dononvan has come from and what brought him to this small town. Also, a sub plot involving Sandy and her alcoholic abusive boyfriend is pretty intense. The film means well but doesn’t show us anything we haven’t seen before. Colin Firth is good and a little creepy as Donovan, but the film is one of those that slips into town for a week and by the time you realize it’s there, it’s not.
THE MARCORELLE AFFAIR
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: no one loves Hitchcock like the French. In the first part of this round-up, I told you about a great devious little French film called HARRY, HE’S HERE TO HELP. And today, it’s the tangled web of THE MARCORELLE AFFAIR with Irene Jacob (THREE COLORS: RED) and icon Jean-Pierre Leaud (400 BLOWS). Leaud plays a respected district attorney with a passion for classic horror films. Unfortunately this passion leads to many strange and misleading dreams and an exaggerated sense of reality. He hooks up with a Polish hookers (Jacob) and the evening they spend together (or don’t spend together, depending on how you look at it) leads to a spiraling series of events that gets Leaud caught up in murder plots, immigration mishaps, and just general dark confusion. Leaud’s never-changing face just barely hides his confusion and bewilderment at the events that swirl out of control around him. Psychodrama in the highest order.
THE GODDESS OF 1967
Heed my words, Harry. Keep your eyes pealed for Australia’s THE GODDESS OF 1967, probably the best movie I discovered at this year’s festival. (I believe it ended up winning Best Director for Hong Kong director Clara Law, and rightfully so.) Part classic road movie, part domestic drama, and all totally refreshing and new, GODDESS is about so many things; I don’t know where to begin. A young Japanese man sits at his computer in Tokyo and bids on his dream car, a 1967 Citroen DS (also known as a “Goddess”). He makes the deal with an Australian man, and flies to the land down under to pick up his prize. When he gets there, he finds a room full of blood and brains and a blind girl (the dead man’s niece) sitting in the kitchen. Apparently the seller killed his wife and himself just hours earlier, so the blind girl called B.G. (a stunning Rose Byrne, who is a perfect combination of Natalie Portman and RUN LOLA RUN; in fact, she’s been chosen to play Queen Amidala’s hand-maiden in EPISODE TWO) is now in charge of selling the car. But her price is a life to a relative that lives five days’ drive for the young Japanese man. As their cross-country journey progresses, we are given flashbacks revealing the tortured histories of the previous owners of the DS, all relatives of B.G. (which I always assumed stood for “Blind Girl”). The flashbacks turn out to reveal things about the present as well, and show us the pretty horrible life that B.G. had to endure to get to this point. Innovatively directed and very well acted (especially by the star in the making and my new girlfriend Rose Byrne), the film is about connection, freedom, and the healing power of travel. All you studio geniuses who read this site, seek this one out and release it, you bastards.
OF WOMEN AND MAGIC
Digital video fever and Dogme 95 have not been lost on the French. Well-respected for the Hitchcockian style of his movies, Claude Miller tries his hand at the Lars von Trier school of filmmaking with OF WOMEN AND MAGIC, a psychological creep fest set in a dimly lit hospital. Anne Brochet (Roxanne in Gerard Depardieu’s CYRANO DE BERGERAC) is Claire, a perpetually worn-out graduate student who suffers from painful and never-ending headaches. She eventually checks into a neurological hospital and is placed under the care of a detached and unsympathetic doctor. She shares a room with two other patients, including the much older Eleonore who may or may not have major healing powers that only seem to kick in after she throws very violent fits. The mixing of the medical and the supernatural obviously calls to mind Von Trier’s THE KINGDOM T.V. series (in fact, OF WOMEN AND MAGIC originally aired on French T.V.), but this isn’t quite as bizarre as that. Claire’s problems have their roots in the real world: smothering parents, a married and lying boyfriend, and overwhelming sense of misery permeates all parts of her life. This is a strong and chilling work, and Claude Miller continues his long history of freaking me out.
BREAD AND ROSES
Proud socialist Ken Loach’s (MY NAME IS JOE, LADYBIRD LADYBIRD) latest film is set right here in the U.S., and actually acts as a nice companion piece to another film at this festival, BUS RIDERS UNION, which I discussed in Part 1 of this round-up. In BREAD AND ROSES, Loach takes on the plight of immigrant Mexican workers in Los Angeles, who take cleaning jobs and are exploited for below-minimum-wage pay and no overtime. Pilar Padilla is Maya, who we meet as she’s scrambling over the border to live with her legalized sister Rosa. Rosa gets her a job as with a janitorial company in an executive office building. Soon after her arrival, she Maya gets involved with a union organizer named Sam (Adrien Brody). Despite the fact that she will be deported if arrested, Maya gets involved with “Justice for Janitors,” which seeks to organize cleaning crews and ask for benefits and wage protection for them. I don’t know the name of the actor who plays the janitors boss in Maya’s building , but his an incredibly realistic and scary performance as a total bastard who plays on the fears and poverty of his mostly illegal crew. Not surprisingly, Loach pulls no punches in showing the police brutality and worker exploitation that is inherent in this type of struggle. The ending of BREAD AND ROSES wraps things up a little to conveniently, but the film as a whole is great.
HOTEL SPLENDIDE
Toni Collette leads the way through what can only be called a Gothic comedy. Borrowing heavily from the French absurdist filmmakers Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet (DELICATESSEN and THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN, HOTEL SPLENDIDE is set on a miserable sunless island in a crumbling hotel inhabited by residents that never leave and eat nothing but fish-based meals. At one time, the facility was run by a nutrition compulsive mother, whose three grown children (Daniel Craig, Katrin Cartlidge, and Stephen Tompkinson) now operate the facility. We’re told that when dear mother died, the children cremated her body in the hotel’s furnace so her essence could be scattered throughout the establishment’s heating ducts. Tasty. So on to the island steps Collette, an “escapee” from this dreary place, who has returned upon hearing of mother’s death. She used to have a relationship with the Tompkinson character, who is also the hotel chef. Determined to free the guests of their miserable state, ! she starts whipping up extravagant meals for everyone and just generally waking the place up. Craig’s older brother is resistant to these changes and fights back with a level of venom that would make mother proud. One particularly good performance is given by Hugh O’Conor, who you may remember from THE YOUNG POISONER’S HANDBOOK a few years back, as an incredibly shy resident who takes a liking to Collette. Much like THE SHINING, every door opened in the Splendide revels a new silly horror or at least a considerable oddity. I had no idea what to expect next from this wicked little movie and loved every minute of it. But I was in desperate need of a bath after the screening.
And finally...
SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE
My favorite film of 1998 was GOD AND MONSTERS, the slightly fictionalized account of director James Whale (FRANKENSTEIN, BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, THE INVISIBLE MAN). The details of Whale’s life were accurate, but the framework involving Whale’s friendship with his gardener was invented for dramatic purposes. With SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE (which is not scheduled for release under around Christmas or maybe early in 2001), we take the next step: creating an entirely made-up story surrounding the making of arguably the greatest vampire film every made, NOSFERATU.
John Malkovich stars as the legendary German master of expressionism F.W. Murnau, who, in the name of realism, finds a real vampire to play the lead in NOSFERATU. (In the real universe, the role of Count Orlock the vampire is played by character actor Max Schreck.) Schreck the vampire (an incredible performance by Willem Dafoe) agrees to do the part if he can feast on the blood of the film’s leading lady after production. Not surprisingly, Schreck’s thirst must be satisfied before production is complete so he starts picking off lesser crew members in the interim. Despite Murnau’s disgust with Schreck’s behavior, he must put up with it to finish his masterpiece. SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE is an escapist’s dream. It manages to combine the unlikely elements of camp and deadly seriousness seamlessly. It’s a film about obsession and bloodlust, drawing parallels between the literal vampire (Schreck) and the artistic vampire (Murnau, who is more than once accused of sucking the life fro! m ! his cast and crew).
For me, the film’s best moments were the staggeringly faithful recreations of NOSFERATU itself. It’s clear that the actors playing actors studied the movement and acting style of the 1922 original. Both Dafoe and Eddie Izzard (as actor Gustav von Wangenheim) have painstakingly learned the art of silent-film acting while developing distinct off-screen personae as well. Behind the camera (Murnau’s camera, that is) is another unique crew, including Cary Elwes as a replacement cinematographer (Schreck, of course, kills the first one; in fact, the film did have two cinematographers after the first one died) and the always-wonderful Udo Kier as producer and art/costume designer Albin Grau.
SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE is fun, but it’s not without faults. Willem Dafoe’s accent in so thick that it’s difficult to understand him much of the time. The film is also too short. We feel like we jump into the middle of an ongoing story that needs to be longer at both ends. I would love to have seen how Murnau and Schreck met and the negotiations that led to Schreck being in the film. Although Malkovich puts in a solid performance, Murnau’s character is underwritten to a fault. Sometimes not knowing a characters history makes them more mysterious, but here it made me not care about him as much as I should have. Aside from the accent, I can’t fault Dafoe’s work. He physically changes his walk, talk, and look so substantially that I forgot what the real Max Schreck looked like in NOSFERATU. It’s work worthy of many an award. The screenplay does give us a bit of time to get to know Schreck’s heavy breathing, rat-like vampire, but more time with him would have been better as well.
But the bottom line here is, strong second film from director E. Elias Merhige, whose first film BEGOTTEN is an indescribable and disturbing experimental work that I saw in 1991 and still think about occasionally. For those who care, it’s essentially a silent film about the literal (caesarean) birth of the world, featuring characters named God Killing Himself, Mother Earth, and Son of Earth-Flesh on Bone. I think Disney released it. But it’s fitting that the man responsible for such a film should take on a project like SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE, which, although not perfect, is highly memorable and endlessly clever and fascinating.
