The fourth annual European Union Film Festival continues Friday through Thursday, February 16 through 22, 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.
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Julien Temple (Absolute Beginners, The Filth and the Fury) directed this 2000 BBC chronicle of the intense, uneasy friendship between romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Energized by the political tumult following the French Revolution, the duo embraced democracy and rural utopia and collaborated on Lyrical Ballads, but Wordsworth’s move toward Tory respectability ended the friendship. Temple’s Coleridge (Linus Roache) is a gentle, excitable genius who loves nature, questions authority, and uses opium to fuel his work, sort of a precursor to today’s pop-music wonders; his Wordsworth (John Hannah) is a whimpering villain who refuses to publish “Kubla Khan.” But the film is less notable for its biographical insights than for its look and mood, its sequences of a drugged-out Coleridge turning his surroundings into poetry reminiscent of the delirious biopics Ken Russell made for the BBC in the 1960s. Much of the film was shot on location, and John Lynch’s crisp, sensuous cinematography beautifully evokes paintings from the period. 120 min. (TS) (8:00)
I Know Who You Are
This Danish survival drama (2000) by Kristian Levring is the fourth film certified by the authors of “Dogma 95,” a manifesto that calls for natural lighting, digital cinematography, and improvisational acting. Those principles seem to work best in films that strip down the psychology of a dysfunctional group in a single location and a limited time span (The Celebration), and true to form, Levring examines 11 passengers of a tour bus (including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Janet McTeer, Bruce Davison, Brion James, and Romane Bohringer) that breaks down at an abandoned mining town in the Namibian desert. Awaiting their rescue, the passengers endure primitive conditions and decide to stage King Lear, whose lines one of them (David Bradley) knows from memory. The project unleashes fear and loathing among them, and the film wastes no opportunity in drawing parallels to Shakespeare while also referencing Lifeboat, Apocalypse Now, and Lord of the Flies. Most of the confrontations are shot in close-up, dragging us into the melee as the grungy-looking actors spit out their venomous dialogue. Yet the script, by Levring and Anders Thomas Jensen, flits from one encounter to the next, leaving behind only gut-wrenching performances and a vivid feel for the locale–forlorn stretches of desert and dark, humid interiors, both symbolizing recesses of emotion that have otherwise eluded us. 109 min. (TS) (8:00)
Ten middle-aged guys, veterans of Portugal’s colonial wars in the 70s, meet for their annual reunion in this 1999 buddy movie with a touch of Fight Club–they’re still trying to prove their masculinity, as crudely and brutally as possible. A silly subplot about drug dealing provides yet more violence, but the characters seem so drunk or brain damaged that they barely know what’s happening, and director Joaquim Leitao’s poorly composed images are so disorienting that they rarely supply any sense of place. I most enjoyed the scene in which an enraged wife smashes the car of her whoremongering husband–but not for the right reasons. 120 min. (FC) (5:00)
The European coming-of-age drama has become a staple of international film festivals in the U.S.; this dutifully heartwarming contribution from Greece (1999), written and directed by Costas Kapakas, follows a trouble-prone rascal as he tries to make sense of the adult world (gruff but loving parents, charmingly eccentric aunts and uncles, and a doddering grandparent thrown in for comic relief and the inevitable funeral scene). The story unfolds through a series of flashbacks as the main character, now grown, drives to a reunion to meet his boyhood friends and sweetheart. If you haven’t seen this story already, you’ve probably been living under a rock, and while this isn’t a bad retread, it hasn’t much to recommend it by way of the direction or performances. 105 min. (Reece Pendleton) (8:00)
