By Jonathan Rosenbaum
I’d like to call attention to Mr. Zhao, but I couldn’t with a clear conscience include it on my ten-best list without playing a game of one-upmanship with readers. For the same reason, I won’t include movies that haven’t yet opened locally. Some of my colleagues in Chicago do, but they’re catering to the whims of distributors; looking for awards and ad copy, distributors screen these movies for reviewers near the end of the year and open them briefly in New York or Los Angeles to qualify for this year’s Oscars. I’d rather my list contribute to an ongoing discussion among viewers than serve as a pronouncement from Mount Sinai, so I’m bypassing such worthy 1999 candidates as Rushmore and The Thin Red Line to concentrate on movies that we could all see in Chicago last year. My colleagues might argue that these 1999 features will surface fairly soon, but theoretically so might Mr. Zhao–in which case it, like those other titles, will qualify for next year’s list. My bottom line, in any case, is that a best-of-the-year lineup owes more allegiance to the year and its inhabitants than to anyone else’s promotional campaign.
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Given this wretched state of affairs, I’m hard pressed to explain why, of my favorite 15 movies shown in Chicago last year, 10 are American and 8 are studio releases–though I hasten to add that only 4 of these (The Apostle, Pleasantville, Bulworth, and Touch of Evil) succeeded commercially in theaters. Maybe impossible working conditions create a greater sense of urgency and determination in some filmmakers, or maybe the promotional power behind studio product worldwide is so disproportionately huge that I’ve been swayed along with everyone else. Yet the two best movies on my list were made almost as far from the machinations of the commercial industry as one can get these days (that’s why most of you haven’t seen them). Also, of the 47 notable releases cited below, 9 were shown at the Chicago International Film Festival, and most of those exclusively, which suggests that despite all my griping about the festival over the past 11 years, it’s become a central resource in presenting many important works that the industry ignores.
- Inquietude. I prefer the French and Portuguese title of this three-part feature–which my dictionary defines as “disturbed state”–to its English title, Anxiety. But whatever you call it, Manoel de Oliveira’s masterpiece offers so many lingering beauties and profundities that even after three viewings I feel I’ve barely scratched the surface. (Also, because the New York film festival passed on it, it’s one of the few major foreign films of 1998 that received a U.S. screening only in Chicago.) It features no stars (excepting Irene Papas in the third episode), and few mainstream critics are liable to support it, so its odds of getting an American distributor are just about nil. But one way or another, I’m sure, it will find its way back to Chicago.
The film was a labor of love that Duvall nurtured for many years, in defiance of the studios’ indifference. And though his own performance as the preacher is central to the film, his ensemble cast, professionals and nonprofessionals alike, gives The Apostle most of its uncommon power, above all during its extended church sequences. Duvall’s storytelling may be less masterful than his orchestration of those performances, but the film demonstrates that exposing a world and a way of life can be more relevant and fulfilling than hitting the plot points on time–the principal agenda of that 80 percent of commercial cinema that no one can remember the following week.
A tie between two documentaries, Public Housing and Vietnam: Long Time Coming. I mentioned the former in my top-ten roundup last year, when it didn’t qualify for the list because it had shown locally only on television; in November this 195-minute in-depth look at everyday life in Chicago’s Ida B. Wells housing project finally turned up at the Film Center with director Frederick Wiseman in attendance. The second film, directed by Jerry Blumenthal, Peter Gilbert, and Gordon Quinn, showed at the Chicago International Film Festival and then on public television; in between it turned up briefly in the suburbs but didn’t stick around long enough for me to review it.
Another tie, this one between The Apple and Pleasantville, two hopeful movies about community that surfaced in Chicago around the same time. (I’m stretching the criteria to include The Apple because its October screening at the Film Center was only a preview; it will open commercially later this year.) An Iranian comedy by a teenage girl, Samira Makhmalbaf, The Apple reenacts the true story of illiterate twin sisters who were kept at home from birth, until a social worker discovered them when they were 11 and enabled them to step outside. Pleasantville, by screenwriter Gary Ross, is another first feature about a belated awakening–the discovery of color by a small town that’s lodged inside a hokey, black-and-white 50s sitcom.
