The 56th Chicago International Film Festival runs from October 14th to the 25th, 2020. Most of the films will be virtually streamed throughout those dates. Some other special presentation films will be projected live at the ChiTown Movies Drive-In located at 2343 S. Throop St. in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. You’ll also be able to livestream filmmaker Q&As as part of the price of your ticket. Download the festival program to purchase tickets and get more information.
The Columnist (De Kuthoer) (Netherlands, 2019) was a major disappointment for me. Ivo van Aart seems to have paid some dues with shorts, documentaries and some consistent television work; this would be his first full-length feature. The film follows online columnist Femke Boot (the very good Katja Herbers, going above and beyond her call of duty here), whose work is earnest, day-in-the-life musings, but hardly button-pushing polemic. Yet she nonetheless draws a small audience of comment-section trollers who spare themselves no shame in insulting her, degrading her, threatening her and her teenaged daughter Anna (Claire Porro) and even accusing her of pedophilia. Femke herself is trying to make the jump from columnist to novelist, and her publisher is pushing her brand with TV appearances, including one with well-known goth horror writer Steven Dood (the Dutch word for ‘death’). On the show, Dood (Bram van der Kelen) is a contentious black-clad mascara-wearing provocateur, but off camera he turns out to be a lovable sweetheart named Erik Flenderman, just working his own brand, who advises Femke to never read the comments section. Ever.
But as Femke does battle with willing her novel into existence, she can’t get her mind off of the haterz who keep dogging her online posts with hateful invective. When she discovers that one of her most prominent commenters has just moved next door to her, the hatred she’s been masochistically absorbing leads to a decidedly un-equal opposite reaction; she kills him, then escalates to become a serial killer, “souvenirs” and all, on the hunt for each and every “loser with a laptop” she can track down and kill.
I didn’t suspend disbelief for a single word of it. Van Aart and writer Daan Windhorst string together a series of maliciously shallow episodes that have little narrative foundation or dynamic; they have a cool idea that’s darkly funny to follow for the latter two-thirds of the film, but nothing in the early going creates honest motivation for what ensues. Katja Herbers gives it her best, but Windhorst doesn’t give her much to go on. When the killing starts, it’s not fierce or clever enough to be taken seriously, nor is it instructively funny enough to get us on her side, and stuff like this only works if you have both. Her victims are almost exclusively white men, but the seemingly notable exception isn’t even acknowledged. “Why can’t we just have different opinions and be nice about it?” Femke asks a potential victim at whom she’s levelled a shotgun. But there’s no irony here, no satiric distance, and little if any has been structured into the story. Nothing elevates Femke above the same virulently reactionary stupidity to which her victims acquiesce. This film wants you hate what it hates while cheering on genuinely hateful responses to what you’ve now both agreed to hate. It doesn’t want you to be challenged, surprised or amused. It just wants you to be complicit. That’s not funny.
The recorded Livestream Q&A with director Ivo van Aart is available to watch here.
credit: chicagofilmfestival.com
As agreeably intriguing a film as I’ve seen in some time, Preparations To Be Together For An Unknown Period Of Time (Felkészülés Meghatározatlan Ideig Tartó Együttlétre) (Hungary, 2020) is Hungarian filmmaker Lili Horvát’s second feature film.
A Budapest native, Dr. Márta Vizy (Natasa Stork, in a performance of admirable stillness and precision) is a superb neurological surgeon working in New Jersey. She’s at the top of her field, but it’s left the rest of her life wanting. When she meets the handsome and engaging fellow Hungarian Dr. János Drexler (Viktor Bodó) at a medical conference, a plan is devised for them to meet in Budapest one month later to the day. Márta, taking a huge leap of faith, arrives at Budapest’s Liberty Bridge at the designated time, but János is a no-show. When Márta finally catches up to him through no small effort, he declares that they’ve never met and he doesn’t know her. Despite her profound disappointment, she, nonetheless, stays.
Márta is now a surgeon at the same hospital as János, but, even though her skills are evident, she’s still the new arrival in a department full of older male doctors. Case by case, she builds confidence and camaraderie, including some attention from the med-student-son of one of her patients. The film becomes a blend of her initial hopes (stood-up, or did she invent the whole scenario?), her new home and everyday life (despite his denial, János starts to ingratiate himself with his new colleague) and what new and strange shapes her new life may take. There’s a very gauzy, almost noirish atmosphere to the narrative, almost like the earlier metaphysical travelogues of Marcelo Gomes (I Travel Because I Have to, I Come Back Because I Love You, 2009) or José Luis Guerín (In the City of Sylvia from 2007), where the pragmatic reasons to travel to a destination become secondary, or even immaterial, to the memories, experiences and expectations that the traveler has brought with them into the new environment, and how they shape the traveler’s present state-of-mind. Horvát chooses to explain much of her mystery near the conclusion, and I was disappointed she felt the need to do that. But it’s in no way a dealbreaker.
Horvát’s marvelously atmospheric mise-en-scène is aided immensely by the fine work of cinematographer Róbert Maly, as grainy, shadowy nightime exteriors or magazine-crisp facial close-ups or everything in-between; it’s masterful stuff. And Gábor Keresztes is equally informative in its way, richly evocative without being showy or intrusive. (The slightly-out-of-tune prepared piano snippets are genius.) This may be my favorite film of the fest.
The recorded Livestream Q&A with director Lili Horvát is available to watch here.
The spirit of hard-boiled American author Jim Thompson is apparently alive and well in Northern Switzerland if writer / director Stefanie Klemm has anything to say about it. Her first feature, Of Fish And Men (Von Fischen Und Menschen) (Switzerland, 2020), presents us with a rural working-class mother and daughter who are blamelessly violated by the thoughtless evil that surreptitiously flows under our day-to-day lives. Judith (Sarah Spale) has been working at her family’s rural fish farm for years. Divorced, she’s raising her 6-year-old daughter Milla (Lia Wagner) on her own. When the determined and hard-working ex-con Gabriel (Matthias Britschgi) arrives to help out while he’s on probation on drug charges, there’s a chance it could be good for both of them. But when Gabriel’s lower-than-low-life brother David (Julian Koechlin) arrives, uninvited, he leads Gabriel back down the heedless criminal rabbit-hole and headlong into tragedy.
There are some remarkably obvious things Gabriel could do to make things right, but his self-loathing prevents it. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool screw-up, and it’s now far more the fabric of his identity than any kind of conscious choice he can change. Judith is devastated, but not so much that she won’t commence her own vengeful inquiries when the feckless local police provide no help. We eventually encounter her ex-husband and his new family, and Judith’s sister Sophie (Sarah Hostettler), who do their best to lend support, but their lives clearly have little in common with Judith’s.
To say much more about the narrative would spoil some well-earned twists, but the resolution of the film is impressive – Are Judith and Gabriel resigning themselves to the darkness, or is there some kind of forgiveness and redemption possible here? Klemm leaves things open, having given you everything you should know to decide for yourself. Her good work brought to mind the similarly complex narratives of Erick Zonca or Jacques Audiard. Kacper Czubak’s handheld camera work is very well done, smartly forwarding the narrative unobtrusively, while Marcel Vaid’s musical accompaniments are equally tasteful. Fill out your viewing list by giving this very good film a shot.
The recorded Livestream Q&A with director Stefanie Klemm and producer Sereina Gabathuler is available to watch here.
Periscope In The Bathtub 