Movies – The 2022 Chicago International Film Festival – Part 3

The 58th Chicago International Film Festival runs from Wednesday, October 12 to Sunday, October 23, 2022. Most films will screen at the AMC River East 21, 322 E. Illinois St., but selected others will be shown at the Music Box Theatre, the Gene Siskel Film Center, the Chicago History Museum, Austin Town Hall and the Hamilton Park Cultural Center. Download the festival program to purchase tickets and get more information.

Pauk Kircher in “Winter Boy.” credit: jeanlouisfernandez

Christophe Honoré’s oeuvre can be maddingly inconsistent, but when he makes a film that works, it’s well worth noting. Perhaps as autobiographical a film as Honoré has made, Winter Boy (Le Lycéen) (France, 2022) deals with young Lucas Ronis (an excellent Paul Kircher), who is not only dealing with the growing pains of being a young gay man in the eighties, but is also grieving over the sudden death of his father. Lucas’ older brother Quentin (Vincent Lacoste) grieves as well, but carries a harder veneer, staying strong to help their mother Isabelle (Juliette Binoche, killing it as always). When Quentin returns to Paris for work shortly after the funeral, he invites Lucas along for a change of scenery and a little break. But Lucas uses the chance to plunge headlong into opportunism and promiscuity, betraying his brother’s trust. Returning to Brittany and Mom, Lucas’ repressed array of emotions overcomes him, and he’s institutionalized for a bit of time. But despite the hell he experiences, and subjects himself to, he’s ultimately saved by cohesion and closeness of Quentin and Isabelle, even as they, too, grieve profoundly in their own ways.

If I didn’t know the level of personal history invested here by Honoré, I’d say the narrative is a bit formulaic. But there’s a rapport between the director and his cast members of uncommon depth and sensitivity, and that’s what elevates the film to its genuinely moving excellence. Veteran cinematographer Rémy Chevrin’s camerawork is gorgeous as well. It’s a film much greater than the sum of its parts, and I highly recommend it.

Winter Boy will be shown on Saturday, October 22^nd at 2:30 pm and Sunday the 23^rd at 7:15 pm.

Kayije Kagame in “Saint Omer.” credit: Neon / Chicago International Film Festival

Director Alice Diop sat in the gallery of the 2016 trial that her film, Saint Omer (France, 2022) is based on; a young Senegalese woman, studying in France, well-spoken and adept at her graduate studies, brought her 15-month-old baby daughter to the seashore and left her to high tide. The tiny body washed ashore a day later, and was eventually traced back to the mother. Understandably haunted by the case, Diop has created a hybrid narrative – the specifics of the case remain essentially the same, but Diop has created an alter-ego for herself observing the trial. Rama (Kayije Kagame) is a novelist doing research on a modern examination of the myth of Medea: abandoned after 10 years of marriage to Jason (of Golden Fleece / Argonauts renown), she murders the princess he’s thrown her over for, then murders five of the male children she bore for him. The power of the myth is the philosophical question – how can a mother kill her own children? The accused here, renamed Laurence Coly (and portrayed movingly by Guslagie Malanga) expresses her own hope that the trial will help her arrive at the reasons she did it. For now, she can only ascribe it to sorcery. In the meantime, we learn that her father, in Senegal, cut her off financially mid-studies, and the older man she was living with (Xavier Maly), the father of her child, now doesn’t want much to do with her or the whole situation. Rama, another Senegalese intellectual woman, also pregnant, also trusting of her white partner (Thomas de Pourquery), is profoundly empathetic.

A skilled documentarian (this is her first ‘fictional’ narrative film), Diop stays a few steps back, presenting the story with an unobtrusive-but-soul-baring illumination that reminded me of Frederick Wiseman’s work. Her approach is nonetheless explicit about the hopeless and harrowing isolation that Laurence can’t help but feel in this wood-paneled post-colonial white Western European courtroom. Clare Mathon lends her practiced cinematographer’s eye, enriching Diop’s visual narrative, and this film only reinforces how good she’s been over the last few years. What a gorgeous, heartbreaking and enlightening film.

Saint Omer screens on Wednesday, October 19^th at 5:30 pm and Saturday the 22^nd at 5:15 pm.

Movies – The 2022 Chicago International Film Festival – Part 2

The 58th Chicago International Film Festival runs from Wednesday, October 12 to Sunday, October 23, 2022. Most films will screen at the AMC River East 21, 322 E. Illinois St., but selected others will be shown at the Music Box Theatre, the Gene Siskel Film Center, the Chicago History Museum, Austin Town Hall and the Hamilton Park Cultural Center. Download the festival program to purchase tickets and get more information.

Jarkko Lahti in “The Woodcutter Story.” credit: Tero Ahonen © Aamu Film Company

The Woodcutter Story (Metsurin Tarina) (Finland, 2022) is the directorial debut of Mikko Myllylahti, best known as the writer of crowd-pleasing biopic The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki (Finland, 2016). Despite ubiquitous cold, snow and distance, Pepe (the versatile Jarkko Lahti) leads a fulfilling life in a tiny village in rural Finland, working at the local sawmill and socializing with his fellow workers and their families. But when the sawmill is shuttered to make way for mining interests, the community starts to fall apart. Unemployed Pepe’s mother dies in short order, and his wife Kaisa (Katja Küttner) starts therapy (and an affair) with the local barber (as do a few other wives). Pepe’s best friend Tuomas (Hannu-Pekka Björkman) kills himself in despair, Pepe’s house burns down, and Kaisa and his son leave, as do a number of the other wives: “Now that the men have ruined everything, we’ll start a new life in the city.” Eventually, Pepe and his co-workers get menial manual labor from the mining company, but Pepe’s friends are losing faith while Pepe resiliently retains his Zen optimism about life. In the film’s second half, Myllylahti’s conception of what comes after major changes and trauma are explored in a more serious vein, through the barber’s orphaned daughter carrying on with the family business and a travelling “singing psychic” who visits the town and unearths some serious communal spiritual concerns.

Many will find the film’s first half an earnest but inferior knockoff of the Scandinavian penchant for deadpan existential humor – Aki Kaurismäki’s work, Roy Andersson’s, or the unkind ironies of Ruben Östlund. I didn’t mind the tone here, and was good for the ride throughout. Where Myllylahti fails isn’t in his superb script, or his dark but righteous examination of spirituality as deliverance or panacea – it’s simply in his inexperience as a director. Most of this would work well with more subtle dynamics, more variations of tone and rhythm. His cinematographer, Arsen Sarkisiants, is quite good, as is the composer of the music score, Jonas Struck. But editor Jussi Rautaniemi can’t do much with Myllylahti’s stiffly presentational mise-en-scene, the lack of options he provides for his cast or his abrupt transitions. On paper, it likely sings. As presented here, though, it’s clunky, lacks subtlety, is a bit condescending and runs about fifteen minutes too long. Mikko Myllylahti remains a terrific writer, but his first directing project is a sadly unsatisfying slog. Keep him in your prayers.

The Woodcutter Story screens on Tuesday, October 18^th at 8:00 pm and Thursday the 20^th at 2:30 pm.

Happy Salma and Laura Basuki in “Before, Now & Then.” credit: fourcoloursfilms.com

Kamila Andini is a highly regarded award-winning Indonesian filmmaker. Her fifth feature film is Before, Now & Then (Nana) (Indonesia, 2022), an affecting historical drama drawn on the background of the extraordinary violence of the mid-sixties in Indonesia resulting in the deposition of perceived liberal – socialist President Sukarno and the assumption of national leadership by General Suharto. Our protagonist, Raden Nana Suhani (portrayed impressively by Happy Salma), manages to survive the purge of alleged communists and suspected leftists that resulted in at least 500,000 deaths and 1.5 million incarcerations, but loses her father, her husband, and her young son. She’s eventually taken in by a wealthy plantation owner, Raden Darga (Arswendy Bening Swara), who seems to genuinely love her. But, despite a safe and secure home for she and her children, it’s a socially conservative and oppressively patriarchal society. Darga sends two of their children away to distant relatives on the say-so of a local witch doctor, and Nana’s looked down on by the more entrenched local wives. She also discovers that her husband keeps a mistress – perhaps more, but Nana certainly becomes aware of Ino (Laura Basuki), a young and forthright butcher in the downtown street market who visits Darga while Nana shops and tends her young daughter and a new male child. But rather than rivals or competitors, Nana and Ino find a common wavelength and develop a mutually reinforcing deep friendship.

Andini is clearly a talented director, with formidable visual skills and a practiced hand with her cast and fellow filmmakers. Cinematographer Batara Goempar is influenced by the Wong Kar Wei school of images, but maintains his own lovely consistencies throughout, and Ricky Lionardi’s music score is unobtrusive but evocative. Kamila Andini, I daresay, is in David Lean’s league of filmed storytelling. I’d see this film here at the festival – I’m skeptical it’ll get the distribution it deserves.

Before, Now & Then will be shown on Wednesday, October 19^th at 8:00 pm and Thursday the 20^th at 5:45 pm.

Movies – The 2022 Chicago International Film Festival – Part 1

The 58th Chicago International Film Festival runs from Wednesday, October 12 to Sunday, October 23, 2022. Most films will screen at the AMC River East 21, 322 E. Illinois St., but selected others will be shown at the Music Box Theatre, the Gene Siskel Film Center, the Chicago History Museum, Austin Town Hall and the Hamilton Park Cultural Center. Download the festival program to purchase tickets and get more information.

Álfrún Örnólfsdóttir in “Band.” credit: alief.co.uk/

Álfrún Örnólfsdóttir’s Band (Iceland, 2022) purports to be a fun, quirky, empowering documentary on the Post-Performance Blues Band, a loose musical performing collective of four women three women three women and their male producer who turn their prosaic middle-age-ish lives into the stuff of unbridled creative abandon. Or not. There’s a minimalist accompanying sampled background track (an element their male collaborator, Petur, is working to improve), the resourceful Hrefna doing a combination of rapping, recitation and sprechstimme, Álfrún contributing with her modern interpretive dance moves and Saga doing whichever combination of music and/or dance strikes her as expressive at the moment. (Her day job seems to be actual professional dancer – go figure.) There are bits of thoughtful humor here, and spunky resilience, and a few poignant ironies about womanhood, sisterhood, motherhood, etc…, but not remotely enough to fashion a particularly good film. Points scored for a tasteful lack of docu-shaky-cam (thank you Sebastian Ziegler). Fire up some Sleater Kinney on YouTube and spare yourself.

Band will be shown on Tuesday 10/18 at 8:15pm and Thursday 10/20 at 1:00pm (a $13 weekday matinee).

Tang Wei in “Decision To Leave.” credit: m.koreanfilm.or.kr

Park Chan-wook’s Decision To Leave (헤어질 결심) (South Korea, 2022) is an irresistibly slick noir policier, but it starts out as a bit of a shaggy dog. Detective Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) is a clean-cut, pleasant-but-leaning-to-humorless professional, pulling along his brash partner Soo-wan (Go Kyung-Pyo) through a homicide investigation; a civil servant and experienced mountain climber has inexplicably fallen off of one. When they bring in the climber’s wife, Song Seo-rae (Tang Wei, superb and inscrutable), for questioning, she, understandably somber, nevertheless doesn’t seem upset or surprised that he’s dead. She’s a nurse / caretaker for elderly seniors and seems to be doted upon by her clients. But fleeting associations with a surprising array of criminals and cagey businessmen casts doubts on her expressed devotion to her husband, and the sleepless Hae-jun stakes her out. If she’s not just a nurse, and a good one, then for what is it a cover?

Like Sam Lowry in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil or Scottie Ferguson in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, once Hae-jun falls under Seo-rae’s spell, things start incrementally spiraling downward for him, and his case.  Seo-rae is Chinese, and self-deprecating about her struggles with the Korean language. This leads to consistent awkwardness and opportunistic gamesmanship – the deployment of cell-phone translation apps becomes crucial, both in what can’t be said in “your” language and in the flip-flopping of the phones’ male and female voices. Eventually the case is closed despite the smitten Hae-jun’s better instincts.

Hae-jun had been working in Busan, spending his weekends with his wife in Lipo, where she’s a scientific researcher at a nuclear power plant. But now Hae-jun has transferred to Lipo, to be with her, and to continue his police work their as a group leader. And whom should they run into than Seo-rae and her new husband! How nice. At least, until Hae-jun is asked to investigate the death of Seo-rae’s new husband…

Park’s most satisfying films seem to be his collaborations with screenwriter Seo-kyeong Jeong (The Handmaiden, Thirst, I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK, Lady Vengeance), and so it is here. Her scripts tend to accumulate details through observing her characters, and we piece the story together through them. We don’t necessarily get a conventionally outlined comprehensive narrative, but the scripts have reliable structure and allow our own imaginations to fill in the blanks. This is a terrific and involving film that you’ll want to view more than once, and that will assuredly have a regular theatrical run after the festival.

Decision To Leave will be shown on Monday 10/17 at 8:15pm.