The sixth annual European Union Film Festival runs Friday, March 7, through Thursday, March 27, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State. Admission is $8, $4 for Film Center members. For further information call 312-846-2800. The schedule for March 7 through 13 follows; a full festival schedule through March 27 is available on-line at www.chicagoreader.com.
SATURDAY, MARCH 8
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Fleeing her violent husband, a beautiful woman and her young son find temporary lodging with a loony grad student who’s obsessed with Kierkegaard and whose neighbor, an alcoholic day laborer, destroys plants during a gardening job because he doesn’t like his client. When the woman turns down her host’s sudden marriage proposal, he goes berserk, tossing her possessions out a window and leaving her with no option but to return home, where her husband beats her so severely that she winds up in a hospital. As a study of people about to come unhinged, this 2000 melodrama has its moments, and director Per Fly gets fine portrayals from his principals (Jesper Christensen is particularly disturbing as the gardener). But the compositions are sterile and the editing wooden: in a key scene, when the wife learns that the gardener is her long-lost father, Fly’s intercutting of her face and a box of her letters is awkward and unconvincing. In Danish with subtitles. 93 min. (FC) (4:15)
Open Hearts
Adapted from a novel by Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese author Jose Saramago, this 2002 political parable is premised on a fantastic conceit: Spain and Portugal break away from Europe and float out to sea together. Magical realism is a tough thing to bring to the screen, and Dutch director George Sluizer, who wrote the screenplay with Yvette Biro, doesn’t quite achieve the correct subtle balance of the mythical and sociopolitical. Still, the suspense sequences are on par with those in his best-known picture, The Vanishing, and the acting has conviction, especially veteran Federico Luppi as an old man who impregnates two women. In Spanish and Portuguese with subtitles. 100 min. (TS) (8:00)
The characters in this 2001 adaptation of Harry Mulisch’s epic philosophical novel are nearly rich enough to sustain the fablelike plot, but ultimately this bows under the weight of its own portent. Stephen Fry and Greg Wise, both delightful, play best friends and brilliant academics–one a linguist and the other an astronomer–who both fall in love with a beatific cellist (Flora Montgomery) in 1960s Amsterdam. The three seem made for one another, and in fact they were: the triangle has been arranged by God, working through a rookie angel (shades of It’s a Wonderful Life). The Lord has given up on mankind and wants to take back the tablets upon which the Ten Commandments were originally engraved; the blue-eyed golden child miraculously cofathered (in separate couplings) by the two scholars is fated to retrieve the stones from their hiding place in Rome. Director Jeroen Krabbe (Left Luggage) excels at the early comic sequences and the drawing of the romantic triangle, but the story turns exceedingly dark in the last hour, and from what I know of the Mulisch novel, its intellectual underpinnings haven’t survived the translation to the big screen. 134 min. (JJ) (3:00)
If I Should Fall From Grace
