The fourth annual European Union Film Festival runs Friday through Thursday, February 9 through 15, 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.
Don’t Cry Germaine
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Based on a French-Canadian novel by Claude Jasmin, this 2000 Belgian film concerns a family whose father and mother have drifted apart. The mother wants to return to her native Pyrenees, where people look out for each other, and after the father learns that the suspected murderer of their eldest daughter might be living there the couple pack their four children into an old van and set off. The strongest element of this road movie is Dirk Roofthooft’s broad portrayal of the volatile and ridiculously macho father, by his own admission an “unemployed bum,” who blusters unfeelingly at a family that loves him anyway. Unfortunately, his gradual softening seems more sitcom syrup than credible self-awareness, and Alain de Halleux, a still photographer directing his first feature film, fails to assemble the postcard shots into a dynamic drama. 98 min. (FC) The director will attend the screening. (8:00)
The Policewoman
Stuart Townsend and Kate Hudson star in this 1999 comedy from the UK, about a Dublin waitress who brings home a handsome stranger and finds herself competing with her sisters and her mother for his affections. Gerard Stembridge directed. 102 min. (8:00)
Melancholy without ever being depressed, this 2000 Italian feature by Mimmo Calopresti (The Second Time) is a film of extraordinary resonance and depth, infused with a clarity all the sharper for its refusal to resolve or intensify conflict. The film opens in a hospital whose large, dim vaulted spaces echo the columned arcades of a coolly twilit Turin and ends with the infinite, shimmering expanse of the Calabrian sea; its uniqueness comes from its curious blend of larger-than-life mythic oppositions and the nuanced understatement of their playing out. A repressed Turin businessman (veteran actor Silvio Orlando) imports a poor young relative from his Calabrian peasant past in a desperate bid to connect with his troubled teenage son and lay his own ghosts to rest. While the businessman’s furtive avoidance of any warmth, commitment, or change only escalates with each occasion for human interaction, the boys, despite their differences (the rich man’s son is aimless, emotional, and unfocused, while the southern “peasant” is strong, silent, motivated, and stubborn as a rock), begin a hesitant, hedging mutual exploration. The film very definitely opposes north and south, maturity and youth, and capital and labor, but in ways that are neither didactic nor confrontational. Rather, the characters, caught between fascination and defensiveness when they encounter a contrasting lifestyle, alternate between odd circlings of each other’s turfs (climbing up walls to rescue or spy on one another) and prickly strategic retreats (the two boys, dragged to a soccer game, huddle together in polite incomprehension as their usually dour, undemonstrative elder explodes in an orgy of emotion when the home team scores). Calopresti started as a documentarian, and his film lies somewhere between the flat, insistent testimony of documentary (his two young leads are startlingly believable nonprofessionals) and a moody evocation of character as destiny (Orlando has practically patented this sort of role). I Prefer the Sound of the Sea raises many questions but provides no answers, only a fascination with the textures and choices of lives in the making. 84 min. (Ronnie Scheib) (5:00)
A pampered young writer who’s sold out to a big-time publisher begins to feel his life spinning out of control in this disastrous 1999 attempt at social satire from Greek director Nicholas Triandafyllidis. Most of the humor is aimed at the celebrity-craving mass media, but the director’s timing is so bad and the situations so phony that few of the jabs connect (one demented gag has the writer’s mother dying from too much espresso). The bewildering melange of setups, including sappy musical interludes and Felliniesque parties, ultimately overwhelms the protagonist’s longing for his lost innocence, and as a cheap plot mechanism Triandafyllidis gives him the magical ability to transport himself out of unpleasant situations, which should provoke envy on the part of anyone stuck watching the film. 101 min. (TS) (7:30)
