Chicago Latino Film Festival
Spanish director Fernando Trueba (Belle Epoque) juxtaposes the grim and the farcical in this lavishly produced 1998 feature about a troupe of Madrid film people invited by Nazi minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels to shoot an Alpine flamenco musical at Germany’s fabled UFA studio. The Spanish contingent, headed by the starlet Macarena (eye-catching Penelope Cruz) and her Svengali-like director, are glad to escape their war-torn homeland, but then the repellent Goebbels begins to pursue Macarena romantically, and the visitors witness the persecution of the Jews. Trueba wants to mock the banality of evil as Lubitsch did in To Be or Not to Be, except he trots out too many Nazi cliches and milks the Jews’ helplessness to the point of bathos. He’s more in his element evoking the film-business milieu in loving detail or noting the camaraderie that spurs apolitical artists to action. (TS) Buffet, cocktails, and music precede this opening-night program; tickets are $75, $65 for ILCC members. (Rubloff Auditorium, 6:00)
Short videos, program one
Three Chilean friends watch their dreams of a utopian society fade as they struggle to get ahead under the Pinochet regime. Ricardo Larrain directed this 1999 feature. (Water Tower, 8:00)
Southern Border
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A doctor (Federico Luppi) visits devastated communities in a hypothetical Latin American country in search of former students, whom he slowly discovers have been assassinated. He also meets up with an army deserter (Damian Delgado), who initially takes him hostage but ends up accompanying him from site to site. Flashbacks to horrors in which the kidnapper ambivalently participated as a soldier seem designed to make him sympathetic, but calculated framing and editing reveal exactly how writer-director-editor John Sayles faked the action in the most shocking of these, making the scene little more than smugly manipulative. Though he relies heavily on metaphysical tropes for profundity and some pretentious American tourists for comic relief, he seems to want us to contemplate real suffering–but the self-righteous tone of this elaborate 1997 production prevents this. (LA) (Facets Multimedia Center, 9:00)
Men With Guns
