Friday, October 10
At the geographic and moral center of Idrissa Ouedraogo’s earlier films (Yaaba, Tilai) there was always the village. Here there’s no village, only a road. On the side of the road is a broken-down jalopy that the title characters dream of fixing up and driving to the city. The dream is an old one–it has defined their relationship for years. It’s not a particularly rational or well thought-out dream, which becomes increasingly evident as it begins to come true. When a local quarry reopens their lives become a paradox: they get well-paid jobs to make money to fix the car to go to the city so they can get well-paid jobs. As reality sets in and choices have to be made, their friendship begins to unravel, their integrity to falter. Kini & Adams, a Burkina Faso-French-Zimbabwean-English production, made in English with South African actors to reach a larger audience, consciously strives for universality. And there’s absolutely nothing simplistic in this powerfully told tale. The cast is magnificent, and it’s amazing what beauty can be found in a flat, dusty landscape or in the gray and white stones of a quarry. Yet one misses the unique contours of Ouedraogo’s village and the specificity that rooted it so deeply in time and space. (RS) (1:00 and 3:00)
3 Destiny
Who needs another killer couple fleeing cross-country with cops in hot pursuit? Yet thanks to this Australian thriller’s aggressive and unnerving formal approach–jump cuts that hurtle us through the story like a needle skipping across a record and an inventive camera style that defamiliarizes characters as well as settings–the characters’ paranoia is translated into the slithery uncertainty of our own perceptions: this is the most interesting reworking of noir materials I’ve seen since After Dark, My Sweet and The Underneath. The creepy alienation of the lead couple (Frances O’Connor and Matt Day) from their victims and the world in general is eventually replicated in their own relationship, and variations on the same kind of mistrust crop up between the cops pursuing them and in just about every other cockeyed existential encounter in the film. Apart from some juicy character acting and striking uses of landscape, what makes this genre exercise by veteran director Bill Bennett special is the metaphysical climate produced by the style, transforming suspense into genuine dread. The outback is an eyeful too. Slated to open commercially soon. (JR) (7:00)
Cosmos
Winner of jury prizes at film festivals in Seattle and Florida, Scott Saunders’s second feature isn’t the type of independent American movie to score big at Sundance–it’s not neo anything, its characters don’t wear their quirkiness like halos, and nobody dies. Its virtues are far more down-home, home being a tenement on New York’s Lower East Side. The headhunter of the title is a nice guy named Ray, who’s sliding into middle age without having ever quite grown up. He lives with Terry, a Colombian woman he married so she could get a green card. She speaks no English and he speaks no Spanish, but they share affection on about the level of clarity Ray’s comfortable with. Both work on the phone–Ray in a ratty T-shirt at his office, incongruously recruiting powerhouse lawyers for megabuck corporations, Terry in the kitchen, moaning in feigned phone-sex ecstasy. Into this setup comes blond, suburban-California mother of two Linda, Ray’s sister, whose three trips to New York the film chronicles. At first she’s a stranger in a strange land, as disoriented as the audience. But the love between the siblings is palpable, and their acceptance of each other complete. The actors and dialogue are utterly convincing, and the film has an amazingly laid-back, lived-in feel that invites us to suspend judgment. It also knows better than most how to convert its low-budget liabilities into assets: the lead actor wrote the film, some of which is shot in his apartment. At a time of Hollywood overinflation, there’s a lot to be said for true intimacy. (RS) (9:30)
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Mathieu Kassovitz’s second feature (his first was Hate) was easily the most despised film in competition at Cannes, although there were relatively few walkouts. Like Michael Haneke’s Austrian film Funny Games (see separate review), though much more lowbrow, this French thriller exploits affectless violence to the utmost while attacking the exploitation of affectless violence, as a 25-year-old punk (Kassovitz) is trained in fatherly fashion by a seasoned hit man (Michel Serrault). But it lacks the icy distance of Haneke’s film, and its flagrant borrowings from Taxi Driver, GoodFellas, and Natural Born Killers also testify to the puritanical hypocrisy of those sources. Scorsese and Stone can get away with this sort of doublethink better than Kassovitz, however, because they put more emphasis on entertaining the audience than on preaching; Kassovitz, through sheer confused sincerity, too clearly exposes the muddled hypocrisy of his undertaking. Still, Assassin(s) has a certain dramatic voltage and communicates an underlying despair. And even when Kassovitz alternates between crass product placement and attacks on TV commercials, he’s merely giving the mainstream press what it usually asks for from movies. Maybe part of the rage this film provoked at Cannes had to do with the near accuracy of its calculations. (JR) (1:30)
