I just know how this world works. –George W. Bush, first presidential debate
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Some of the features portray aspects of more than one foreign culture. Jean-Luc Godard’s Notre musique, a beautiful, oddly serene reflection on war set and filmed in Sarajevo, counts among its characters the French-Swiss Godard himself, a French-Jewish journalist based in Israel, Algerians, Vietnamese, and even Native Americans. Ousmane Sembene’s Moolaade, a rousing drama about village women defying the tradition of genital mutilation, was filmed in Burkina Faso; this is the first time the father of African cinema, now in his early 80s, has made a film outside Senegal. My own selection for the festival, the late Samuel Fuller’s The Big Red One: The Reconstruction–an autobiographical account of combat during World War II shot in the late 70s–is about as American as you can get, but its settings include North Africa, Sicily, France, Belgium, and Germany. Four films by Iranian filmmakers will be screened, including Marziyeh Meshkini’s Stray Dogs, set in Afghanistan, and Bahman Ghobadi’s Turtles Can Fly, set in Kurdistan on the border between Turkey and Iraq. And Raymond Depardon’s The 10th District Court documents the proceedings in a French courtroom, showing us contemporary France in all its multicultural contradictions. Apart from Turtles Can Fly, which I haven’t caught up with yet, these are my favorites of the films I’ve seen so far.
Festival selections more grounded in single national cultures are equally revelatory. The seven following films are next on my list of favorites, in rough order of preference. Shona Auerbach’s Dear Frankie is more proof (after David Mackenzie’s superb Young Adam) that an exciting and subtly inflected new brand of Scottish cinema is taking shape. David Gordon Green’s Undertow and Alexander Payne’s Sideways are both masterful examples of American regional cinema. (Undertow portrays the rural south as a gothic fairy-tale setting, and Sideways uses a tour of California wine country as a pretext for two buddies getting through midlife crises.) No less American is Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation, a diaristic chronicle of a terminally dysfunctional family (put together for practically nothing on a computer), and no less bleak and analytical is Guka Omarova’s Schizo, which shows what it takes for a 15-year-old boy to get ahead in rural Kazakhstan. Chantal Akerman’s comedy Tomorrow We Move, set almost entirely in a Paris apartment, focuses on a young porn author (Sylvie Testud) whose recently widowed mother (Aurore Clement), a piano teacher, moves into her apartment, then tries to sell it.
It’s a pity that of the seven best films I saw last month at the Toronto film festival, only three–the Godard, the Sembene, and the Depardon–are screening at the Chicago festival. Another one, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Cafe Lumiere, will be at the Gene Siskel Film Center for a single screening next month. The remaining three are Jia Zhang-ke’s The World–my favorite movie of the year so far–Sally Potter’s Yes, and Abbas Kiarostami’s Five, and I’m pretty sure the first two will turn up here someday. (The Kiarostami may not because the distributor is MK2, the French company that wanted an exorbitant amount from the festival to show Alain Resnais’ splendid Pas sur la bouche and wanted way too much from the Film Center to show Five in its current Iranian film festival; both festivals declined to pay.)
