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  La Ciénaga |
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Was it coincidence that at least five festival films featured insistent cell-phone ringing onscreen, mocking transgressors in the audience? Actually, such acoustic violations were not a problem at the 37th Chicago International Film Festival. In fact, audiences were no problem at all: Chicagoans flocked to the festival in droves, providing a record number of sold-out houses, making hits even of unlikely offerings like The Orphan of Anyang.
Nevertheless, the festivities began with a twenty-first century thud: for an opening night publicity magnet, festival programmers had the bad taste to book the Arnold Schwarzenegger slaughter-the-terrorists thriller Collateral Damage, an offensive choice even before September 11. It attracted publicity all right — all the wrong kind — when the studio sheepishly withdrew the film, filling the slot with David Mamet’s Heist.
Then there was the tribute to Halle Berry for her "ability to inhabit a wide range of memorable characters." No offense to the shapely and talented Ms. Berry, but a memorial to her ten years in movies seems premature. What will they do when she delivers a real career-defining performance? Compared to last year’s tribute to Gregory Peck, this choice smacks of crass star-mongering.
Still, no one argued with the roster, despite the absence of new works from Godard, Makhmalbaf, Rivette, de Oliveira, and Rohmer — all running at the parallel New York Film Festival. Chicago’s program offered three times as many films, so lucky film buffs risked going cross-eyed from sorting through nearly a hundred features on the festival schedule. In fact, ten filmgoers could each choose ten different films and each experience a completely different festival. With this caveat in mind, the highlights of one festival experience follow.
 Amélie |
The reliably earthy Shohei Imamura pulls down the pants of pretension once more in Warm Water Under a Red Bridge, sending a laid-off salary man to a remote seaside town populated solely with lusty oddballs (Zorba the Greek would fit in nicely). The aggressively coarse local fishermen look with derision on his craven corporate ways; equally unwelcome is an impudent African Olympic hopeful who keeps running through the village, with his Japanese trainer in hot bicycle pursuit, wielding a plastic baseball bat. The raucous comedy takes a turn toward magical realism as the hero embraces his fate in the arms of a woman who orgasms in epic geysers of warm water, which then runs down into the river and under the red bridge, renewing nature (and occasioning lots of water imagery). Now and then, Imamura also pauses to ponder science and the cosmos, as in a visit to a high-tech tunnel designed to capture neutrinos ("It’s so twenty-first century!", cries the heroine).
 ‘R Xmas |
Aging landowners on estates going to seed, sisters planning an impossible trip to the big city, long-standing extramarital accommodations, unrequited love among the young, disrespected servants: these elements make La Ciénaga seem like a sweaty, sordid version of Chekhov, which may come closer to the playwright’s intentions than all those productions in starched frocks. Importing these characters to Argentina, director Lucrecia Martel updates the scene with urban legends, rave parties, and swamp-clogged swimming pools, then adds her own off-kilter details: one child has a surplus tooth growing out of his palate. What’s missing is the Russian’s embrace of human weakness and his yearning for poetry, but the director skillfully layers a dozen different stories around one ruefully funny performance: Graciela Borges, as the drunken household diva, pulls shards of broken glass out of her breast as she absently follows TV coverage of a local apparition of the Virgin Mary on a water tank.
"What is a ghost?" asks The Devil’s Backbone, "Something dead which still seems alive." Stylishly produced by Pedro Almodóvar and vividly staged by Guillermo del Toro, this historical horror drama sets a plucky youngster into an isolated orphanage during the tumult and famine of the Spanish Civil War. A ghost soon appears — seeking revenge, of course, but against whom? Is it the widowed schoolmistress with a wooden leg? Or the philosophical Argentine professor who drains fluid from his jars of preserved embryos and sells it as tonic to the villagers? Or perhaps the fascist stud who tips the sexual balance in this community? Or the children who believe that a huge unexploded bomb planted in the courtyard is alive, ticking with heartbeats? The script (which del Toro developed in film school as his thesis) draws such distinctive and well-rounded characters — and then stages such imaginative effects, with impressive attention to sound — that the film accumulates a surprising sweep, even more so since the final body count is positively Shakespearean.
NEXT: The self-destructive life of a restless Taiwan disco-baby
