Friday 6 October
Robert J. Siegel directed this sweet, low-key movie set in Myrtle Beach about a shy but perceptive teenager named Frankie (Lauren Ambrose) who, along with her older brother, manages the family restaurant during the summer tourist season. She and her flirtatious best friend (Jennifer Dundas Lowe) spend their evenings guy watching and prowling for dates, but their relationship is threatened by the arrival of a seductive waitress, who instigates Frankie’s sexual awakening. There’s nothing exceptional about this coming-of-age story. But it’s presented in such a nicely understated manner, and Ambrose turns in such a good lead performance, that it rises several notches above most of today’s teen movies. 98 min. (RP) (600 N. Michigan, 4:00)
Brother 2
Paul Cox’s new film, his 18th, chronicles an affair between two people in their 70s who meet after a 50-year hiatus, only to fall in love all over again. To say anything against this tender, touching portrait of twilight passion risks putting oneself in a circle of hell just below little boys who pull wings off flies and just above theater critics. Certainly the film is chock-full of dignity and grace, not to mention awash in would-be profundities about the meaning of life and death. Julia Blake does make a septuagenarian sex object of surpassing beauty, and the couple’s lovemaking is nothing if not tastefully done, the camera constantly cutting between the past (nubile young bodies rolling around in the grass) and the present (dignified peeks at their more mature selves betwixt the sheets). These lovers suffer from none of the little indignities of old age–Cox deals in nothing smaller than cancer and angels and organs and apotheoses. And they’re blessed with children of rare understanding, who support with brio their parents’ search for significance before the final bow. The one element of conflict and drama Cox allows to disturb the idyll (besides the Specter of Death) is magnificently played–the woman’s husband’s myriad reactions to his wife’s betrayal, from uncomprehending pain to childish spite to an understanding that’s 40 years too late. Only here does the film show any flash of humor, any departure from just-flawed-enough-to-be-human noble sentimentality. Otherwise it’s all so overdetermined–each encounter of the present-day lovers mirrors some moment fromthe long-ago day when they parted–that it reduces their whole affair to a matter of last-minute revisionism. 92 min. (RS) (This film was selected for the critic’s choice section of the festival by Roger Ebert.) (600 N. Michigan, 7:00)
Peppermint Candy
Frank Novak’s hilariously demented American independent film revolves around the marital battles of an Italian immigrant forklift driver and her unemployed husband in blue-collar LA and each one’s attempts to rally the neighbors to his or her side. The characterizations are down and dirty but never mean-spirited–it’s essentially an affectionate portrait. The wacky, profane dialogue and the multiple obsessions–including the passion most of the male characters have for collecting toy action figures–have the ring of truth. The film’s best sequences use comedy to get at some deeper, wicked insight into human nature–the moment the wife’s new lesbian lover, a yuppie accountant, sees the wife’s table manners, you know it’s over. Yet the Pyrrhic glee with which the husband reacts to a nasty incident involving his wife’s car paradoxically evokes more pity than laughs, nicely setting up the finale. 90 min. (BS) (600 N. Michigan, 9:00)
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Agusti Villaronga (In a Glass Cage) directed this handsomely photographed Spanish period drama about three young people at a tuberculosis sanatorium who, during their childhood in Majorca, had witnessed the revenge killing of a classmate. That event, tied to Franco’s persecution of dissidents during World War II, has been pivotal in shaping the youngsters’ psyches and lives. Francisca is now a nun, Manuel is deep into Catholic guilt, and Ramallo has turned to hustling. The film plays with the notion of TB as the plague of the 40s but doesn’t get beyond weepy scenes of emaciated boys coughing and dying. Its real focus is on the self-loathing homosexual attraction–suggestive of Genet and Mishima–between the ascetic Manuel and the rowdy Ramallo. Villaronga seems to be after a parable about young people’s terror of death and the church’s failure to offer them spiritual shelter, but he ends up with a sensationalistic melodrama about the torments of sexual yearning. 107 min. (TS) (600 N. Michigan, 9:30)
