The 57th Chicago International Film Festival runs from October 13th to the 24th. Films will be shown at the AMC River East 21, the Music Box Theater, the Gene Siskel Film Center and the Chi-Town Movies Drive-In. Complete schedule and information is here.
Bergman Island (France/Germany/Belgium/Sweden, 2021) is the new film from French writer/director Mia Hansen-Løve. The story relates a self-imposed getaway by a working filmmaking couple, Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth), who are writing individual projects but have travelled together to Sweden to the island of Fårö for inspiration – it was Ingmar Bergman’s home, and he shot a number of his films there. There’s a museum and island tours relating to his films, but Chris and Tony are primarily there for their own work. Inevitably, the place, the acquaintances they make and the storytelling spirit of Bergman shape their work in subtle but undeniable ways, but Hansen-Løve is also interested in how Chris and Tony creatively interact with each other as collaborators: supportively, competitively, even antagonistically.
Tony is more of a mainstream-ish genre filmmaker, while Chris’ oeuvre leans to more humanistic, pensive, emotional concerns. Hansen-Løve’s narrative is somewhat of a hodgepodge, reflecting her own general approach, and eventually focusing on Chris’ story while elbowing Tony’s character off to a distant side. Chris is game to share her work on the page with Tony (he’s a fair listener, but it’s not a two-way street for him) and her creative process becomes a film-within-a-film – Mia Wasikowska becomes Amy, Chris’ character, while Chris becomes Mia Hansen-Løve, or at least an equal participant in what Hansen-Løve is creating with Vicky Krieps. The narrative structure being so interwoven with character creation, and the ebb and flow of emotions thereof, is unsurprisingly prevalent in Bergman’s work as well – Hansen-Løve has a great sense of his emotional choreographies with his own actresses, and the rhythmic and pictorial details of his own visual narratives, but doesn’t overdo it in telling her own story. Familiarity with Bergman’s own films isn’t required to enjoy this one, but you’ll appreciate Hansen-Løve’s meta-interweaving, even if some of her choices don’t necessarily lead anywhere. It’s an intriguing, multi-layered story, agreeably intimate with some real passion underneath everything. There’s a lot to like here, but I suspect many, like me, will find it too meta-noodly to really hold up in the long run.
Bergman Island screens on Thursday, October 14th at 8:00 pm, and opens for a regular theatrical run at the Gene Siskel Film Center on Friday the 15th.
A genuinely involving psychological thriller, Jacob Gentry’s Broadcast Signal Intrusion (USA, 2021) draws influence from myriad sources, but still maintains its own creative identity. James (Harry Shum Jr.) is a video editor and archivist who discovers two short but disturbing pirate broadcast interruptions in regular programming on Chicago television in May of 1987. Most original video footage of the transmissions had been seized by the FCC and FBI – for James, in 1999, copies of the transmission are now extremely rare. He starts research on Internet bulletin boards, and with people close to the investigations, and discovers theories that link the perpetrator of the transmissions to unsolved disappearances of women – James’ own wife, Hannah, mysteriously disappeared around the same time. And the textbook Hitchcock everyman starts down the rabbit hole.
The script, from Phil Drinkwater and Tim Woodall, is quite good at meshing an investigative noir thriller with genuinely unsettling ‘j-horror’ flourishes as James’ investigations, smartly pursued at first, start to give way to obsession and grief, and the hallucinatory aspects of the transmission start to weigh on James’ own perceptions. There’s Cronenberg, there’s DePalma, there’s David Lynch, there’s Hideo Nakata and others, all here in spirit, but admirably evoked rather than emulated. Scott Thiele’s camerawork is superb, Ben Lovett’s musical score is fun and functional, and it’s all directed with a sure stylistic hand by Gentry. The sadly abrupt ending is a disappointment, but everything up until then is presented with such assurance and creative commitment that I was still very impressed.
Broadcast Signal Intrusion will be shown on Thursday, October 14th at 9:30 pm at the Music Box Theater, and opens theatrically in the next few weeks in Chicago.
Periscope In The Bathtub 