Wednesday, October 6
La maladie de Sachs
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
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 is superb. (PM) (Water Tower upstairs, 4:00)
Fernando Fernan-Gomez plays an elderly patriarch in 19th-century Spain who returns to his birthplace to decide which of his two young granddaughters should inherit his wealth. Jose Luis Garci directed and cowrote this feature, the fifth of his movies to be nominated for an Academy
The striking originality of New Dawn, Emilie Deleuze’s auspicious debut film, lies in its depiction of work–we get to watch a bunch of men learn how to operate heavy machinery. There are few things seen less on-screen than what people do for a living–unless of course they’re cops. Alain (Samuel Le Bihan) is no cop. At the film’s opening he has what many would consider a dream job, as a video-games tester (“You get paid for that?” asks an awestruck young messenger). But Alain chucks his upscale high-tech position and heads to the unemployment office, where he enrolls in the most change-of-pace job conceivable–a 16-week bulldozer training program miles from the comforts of Paris. His wife and four-year-old daughter are understandably less than thrilled at his impulsive adoption of downward mobility. As his family drifts away, Alain, slightly ill at ease in the rowdy industrial boot camp, is pulled into an amazingly ambiguous quasi-big-brother, quasi-homosexual relationship with a belligerently touchy kid whose passionate knowledge of the types of digging engines is matched by his hopeless ineptitude at handling them. Deleuze filmed at an actual training site using many of its personnel and trainees, and the interactions between them and her stars subtly read as class and culture shock. New Dawn is extraordinary in depicting the complexity of class and gender myths surrounding work and the complexity of one man’s emotional response to them. (RS) (Water Tower upstairs, 6:30)
Jason and the Argonauts
A quiet, attractive, 30-ish 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 between 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 went before. (RS) (Water Tower upstairs, 8:30)
