Friday 4 October
Chen Mo, a young man fresh from the countryside who’s scrambling to make a living selling flowers on the streets of Beijing, meets Meiting, a masseuse-hairdresser who, having repulsed the aggressive advances of her boss, has no place to live. She moves into his tiny apartment, and they forge a unique relationship, which grows increasingly tender and intimate. First-time director Liu Hao designed this ultra-low-budget independent feature (shot in 16-millimeter and blown up to 35-millimeter) as a chamber piece, focusing almost exclusively on his two leads and exploring the ways his handheld camera can animate the small space they call home. Neither character has a family–both are victims of the Cultural Revolution’s policy of relocating urbanites to the countryside–so they decide to become something of a family themselves: on some days he plays daddy to her, on the others she plays mommy to him. Avoiding cuteness, Liu opts for an offbeat, penetrating analysis of creative relationship crafting, and his engrossing film stumbles only near the end, when it turns toward melodrama. In Mandarin with subtitles. 78 min. (SK) (Landmark, 7:00)
Bellaria–As Long as We Live!
Bruce Beresford (Breaker Morant, Driving Miss Daisy) brings his talent for sturdy, unadventurous drama to this British feature about Desmond Doyle, an Irish tradesman who lost custody of his children in the mid-50s and fought a prolonged legal battle to reclaim them from the state’s industrial schools. The film has been a pet project for Pierce Brosnan, winner of the festival’s career achievement award this year, and he gives a credible performance as Doyle, a handsome ne’er-do-well who can’t seem to hold on to a job or turn down a pint. Equally strong are Stephen Rea as Doyle’s crisp solicitor, Aidan Quinn as his Yankee barrister, Julianna Margulies as the comely barmaid who tries to straighten Doyle out, and Alan Bates as the alcoholic attorney whose knowledge of Irish family law helps surmount what Rea describes as the “cozy conspiracy between the Catholic Church and the Irish state.” Unfortunately their energies can’t rescue Paul Pender’s soggy and predictable screenplay, which ends in tears and shafts of sunlight. 94 min. (JJ) (Chicago Theatre, 8:00)
Dog Days
I Japanese director Takashi Miike is a cult filmmaker for our time. His work since 1995 has been fast, cheap, and frequently out of control. Celebrated by his fans for excessively violent horror-thrillers such as Audition (1999) and Ichi the Killer (2001), Miike takes a welcome break from that fare with The Happiness of the Katakuris, a camp musical-comedy hoot. It comes on like an outrageous episode of The Simpsons or South Park, milking humor from a happy-smiley family’s attempts to turn a country estate into a guest house. As their new life spins out of control, murders and apparitions do nothing to halt the flow of songs, dances, and sickening pastel imagery. Like an Austin Powers movie made for a fraction of the cost, it throws in a bit of everything–scatological jokes, movie pastiches, animation, satire of national manners–as it whips up an infectious energy. Starring Kenji Sawada and Keiko Matsuzaka. In Japanese with subtitles. 113 min. (AM) (Landmark, 9:45)
