Friday 8 October
A quiet, attractive 30ish woman quits her job as an ophthalmologist and places an ad for a mate in a Taipei paper. She receives more than 100 responses and meets a series of men for conversation, tea, and occasional sympathy. Some prospective hubbies are studied in long single takes, some are revealed in quid pro quo interactions with the heroine, while the remaining interviewees are glimpsed only in rapid montages. Among the most memorable are a betel chewer and heavy smoker who promises to give up both habits if she’ll marry him, a shoe salesman with a fetishist’s love of his job, a voice actor who carries on animated conversations among his multiple assumed characters, an autistic young man whose mother is looking for a wife to cure him, and a pimp with attitude who’s recruiting for his business. Just when The Personals threatens to become gimmicky, director Chen Kuo-fu starts shifting focus from the men to the woman, whose long reflective journeys by train and bus and boat to and from the interviews take up more and more of the film. Her story, revealed in bits and snatches, makes her search appear increasingly enigmatic, tracing a completely different arc and coloring all that has gone before. (RS) (Water Tower upstairs, 4:30)
Raise the Heart!
Ed Radtke’s feature, his second, could serve as a template for the typical American independent film: it’s a road movie about a pair of alienated teens (Maurice Compte and Paddy Connor) who roam the midwest looking for missing parents–a mother who may or may not be working in a diner, a father who may or may not be in jail. If sincerity alone accounted for artistic value, The Dream Catcher would be some sort of masterpiece:
J Documentarian Benoit Mariage’s first fiction feature is an extraordinarily subtle, witty, and nuanced work, its editing light, free-form, and wholly nonjudgmental. It chronicles–in black, white, and a lot of gray–the last months of the 20th century as lived by a family of four in the Walloon region of Belgium. Dominating the film is Roger (Benoit Poelvoorde), an irascible paterfamilias who gives new meaning to the phrase “acting out” as he frantically brainstorms to keep his family’s head above water. Learning that a local business is offering a four-door sedan to anyone who can set a new world record–any record–he determines that his heir, a great placid slug of a son, is destined to become the new world door-opening champion. To this end he hires a trainer, builds a freestanding door frame in the middle of his backyard, and nearly works the kid to death with a torturous entering-and-exiting regimen as grueling as it is absurd. Roger’s stunning lack of sensitivity in family matters is not unrelated to his work as a newspaper stringer–he unapologetically asks a shell-shocked deliveryman who’s just run over a teenager to hold up his victim’s driver’s license so he can get them both in the shot, then sends his eight-year-old daughter to pick up one of the loaves of bread the collision has spilled onto the street (“no, not that one–a baguette”). But despite his dubious child-raising practices, Roger is no monster. For his daughter, riding through the night on the back of her father’s motorcycle with her arms around him, these police-blotter excursions are a magic time of closeness, of wordless communion. (RS) (Music Box, 7:00)
The Wisdom of Crocodiles
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French director Michel Deville, virtually unheard from since the release of his subtle La lectrice in 1988, has adapted a well-known French novel about a doctor overwhelmed by the moral and medical demands of his isolated village. The film is capably made, but it poaches on the themes, mood, and story of Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1950) and even attempts Bresson’s brilliant conjunction of form and storytelling. Like the Bresson film, La maladie de Sachs concerns the self-punishing spiritual purification of a rural figure whose values, medical skills, and deeply humanistic empathy for his patients are insufficient to treat their pain. And as in the Bresson, the doctor’s own physical deterioration becomes a metaphor for his insignificance. But this movie lacks the transcendent poetic intensity of the Bresson, and its final, protracted third is repetitive. Still, it does have a somber purity, and Deville’s work with his actors and his feel for landscapes and physical space are superb. (PM) (Water Tower upstairs, 9:15)
