The fourth annual European Union Film Festival continues Friday through Sunday, February 23 through 25, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson. Admission is $7, $3 for Film Center members. For further information call 312-443-3737. Films marked with a 4 are highly recommended.
The Restless
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A tremendous commercial success in Finland, this 2000 debut feature by Aku Louhimies explores the desperate narcissism of the privileged young, who question love and cling to their freedom in the face of marriage and parenthood. A callow ambulance doctor who goes in for one-night stands (Mikko Nousiainen) picks up a graduate student who tries to domesticate him, but he hits on her best friends instead, threatening their relationships. Louhimies cowrote the script with Aleksi Bardy, the producer of a popular reality-TV series, and though its characters’ lusty sex scenes and drunken bouts are convincing, it lacks both intellectual gravity and psychological insight. There’s more drama in Mac Ahlberg’s cinematography, which starkly contrasts the various spaces of the doctor’s compartmentalized life and burnishes the last glow of summer in the film’s lakeside setting. 110 min. (TS) (8:00)
Born in Absurdistan
Rent-a-Friend
Based on a true story, this 19th-century period romance (2000) by Patrice Leconte concerns the only man ever condemned to death on Saint Pierre, a French island near Newfoundland. Convicted of a drunken and senseless murder, he attracts the interest of the garrison captain’s wife (Juliette Binoche), who engages him to help her construct a greenhouse, and after his good deeds endear him to the islanders, the captain and his wife take up his cause. There are some irritating cutaways to the boat carrying a guillotine to Saint Pierre for the execution, but Bosnian-born director Emir Kusturica delivers a superb performance as the prisoner, a brutish cipher who gradually reveals his humanity, and the delicate lighting often produces silhouetted faces that evoke the ultimate incomprehensibility of human emotion. 112 min. (FC) (5:00)
