By Jonathan Rosenbaum
Another problem is that sometimes art houses such as the Music Box prefer to show some films after practically everyone else on the planet has seen them. Brian Andreotti, the Music Box’s booker, says this is because the art houses want to wait for the New York reviews–which sometimes means waiting to hear what reviewers who don’t even like foreign films have to say. Why should their verdicts be so precious? Especially since New York is already months behind cities such as Tokyo and Paris, which places Chicago somewhere west of Dogpatch in the pecking order. Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, my favorite movie to play in Chicago in 2000, premiered at the Venice film festival in August 1999 and made it to Paris and Tokyo two or three months later; New York didn’t open it until the following summer, and Chicago got it almost a half year after that. I saw it for the first and second times in Toronto in September 1999, 15 months before it wended its way here. And the most exciting new film I saw last year, again in Toronto–Jafar Panahi’s The Circle–won’t open in New York until this spring, which probably means we can’t expect to see it here before the summer or fall.
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A New York friend just left me a message saying that she loved Traffic when she saw it but now can barely remember anything about it. This sounds like an ideal response from the vantage point of the studios, which often seem to design movies to be forgotten–the movie as disposable tissue. But the guiding principle behind my choices was that I had to remember each vividly enough to regard with pleasure the prospect of seeing it again. One could of course argue that a pleasurable film one has forgotten can be seen again as if for the first time, but for me pleasure is too closely tied to memorability; my sense of the best ones derives from what seems inexhaustible about them.
Rosetta. It’s been almost a year since Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s controversial Cannes prizewinner played in Chicago, but its passion and energies remain firmly imprinted on my senses. Much less philosophical and far more visceral than The Wind Will Carry Us, this picture is no less evocative of what’s currently happening around the world–a subject most American filmmakers, in spite of their many merits, are too provincial to see, much less depict.
The River. The Taiwanese film that had the biggest impact last year was Edward Yang’s magisterial Yi Yi, but since it’s been shown locally only at the Chicago International Film Festival–it opens commercially at the Music Box in early March–I’d rather draw attention here to Tsai Ming-liang’s shocking masterpiece, a 1996 family story that opened belatedly here in April at Facets. In some ways The River is even more of an apotheosis of Tsai’s obsession with water imagery as a symbol of blocked libido than his subsequent feature, The Hole (1998). It also uses many of the same actors as Rebels of the Neon God and Vive l’Amour, his first two films. Given his small range of themes and stylistic options, he surely deserves the label “minimalist” a lot more than Kiarostami, but that doesn’t prevent this film from registering with maximal impact.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Apart from the two Iranian films tied for seventh place, this is the only movie in my top 11 that I’ve seen just once, so I’m only guessing that it will hold up as well as the others. It’s the first Ang Lee picture I’ve thoroughly enjoyed without feeling some qualm about its middle-class view of the world, its academicism, or its genre, and both the stars and the fight choreography have a lot to do with what keeps it flying. It opened late last month.
The Day I Became a Woman–written by Mohsen Makhmalbaf and skillfully directed by his wife, Marziyeh Meshkini–is one of the four films I saw last year that emerged from Makhmalbaf’s idealistic and productive film school, most of whose students so far are members of his own family. (Makhmalbaf explains in his preface to the script of The Day I Became a Woman that he hoped to make this a state-run school, but Iran’s ministry of culture replied “that one dangerous filmmaker like me was enough for one country.” His curriculum is by no means limited to cinema and generally focuses on one subject per month, including bicycling, painting styles around the world, and traditional Iranian music.) Some Western commentators have ridiculed or scoffed at this enterprise, suggesting with paternalistic condescension that he should go back to being an old-fashioned auteur, though I can’t imagine why. His project of directing personal films seemed to come to a natural end, at least temporarily, with his autobiographical A Moment of Innocence, and given the uncommon distinction of his daughter Samira’s two features to date (The Apple and Blackboards) and this, his wife’s first feature–a provocative trio of sketches about women of three ages–I can’t imagine how he could be making a better use of his time, or ours, for that matter. The utopian aspects of his school are clearly related to Iran’s current reformist and youth movement, which also helps to account for much of what’s happening in Iranian cinema.
