Friday, October 9
On balance, “Dogma 95”–a Danish manifesto signed by Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg, and others that calls for location shooting, handheld cameras, direct sound, and an avoidance of special effects–probably has more significance as a publicity stunt than as an ideological breakthrough, judging from the first two features to emerge under its ground rules, von Trier’s The Idiots and Vinterberg’s The Celebration. Both films are apparent acts of rebellion and daring that are virtually defined by their middle-class assumptions and dogged apoliticism, though von Trier’s movie boasts one good scene surrounded by a lot of ersatz Cassavetes. Yet Vinterberg’s work, which is even more conventional in inspiration–think Ibsen, Strindberg, Bergman–is genuinely explosive because it’s so powerfully executed. Shot with the smallest and lightest digital video camera available, The Celebration chronicles the acrimonious and violent family battles that ensue at a country manor house where the 60th birthday of the family patriarch is being observed, not long after the eldest son’s twin sister has committed suicide. The extreme forms of aggressive behavior that emerge from the onset and Vinterberg’s jagged style of crosscutting disguise the fact that this is basically a very well written, acted, and directed piece of psychodrama rather than the revolutionary experiment it pretends to be–the sheer power of the gradual unveiling of family secrets eventually won me over. (JR) (600 N. Michigan, 7:00)
Leo the Last
A seemingly well-meaning film about “saving” a tough street kid from homelessness and junk food, Saving Grace is anything but graceful. The dialogue is bathetic, the staging arch, and the acting less than mesmerizing. But when one of the main characters declares he’s Jesus Christ and actually means it, Saving Grace transmutes itself from an earnest social-problem movie to a somewhat creepy parable of Christ returned to earth–and things at least begin to get interestingly messy. Transposing Duncan Sarkies’s play to the screen, New Zealand director Costa Botes (codirector with Peter Jackson of the mockumentary Forgotten Silver) infuses the theatrically symbolic acting out with a corporeal realism that’s more than a little unsettling–as long as it stays within the realm of the highly unlikely. For it’s far easier to accept the deification of a Maori carpenter–able to walk on water and flip coins so they land on their edges–than the demonization of the “unsaved” homeless, depicted here as the kind of soulless, scuzzy freaks that generally populate cheapo postapocalyptic action flicks. Saving Grace aspires to the tension of a millennial film like The Rapture, succeeding less in its cutesy updatings (Christ coming out on a radio talk show, a refrigerator full of loaves and fishes) than in its anguished vision of a modern-day Christ in whom salvation and exploitation are inexplicably intertwined. (RS) (600 N. Michigan, 9:15)
Xenophobic and awkwardly staged, this feature about the intersecting fortunes of a group of twentysomething professionals at a New Year’s Eve party at the end of the millennium is also dull and vapid, though it continually strains for insight and profundity. First-time writer and director Nick Davis can’t animate his uncharismatic characters in a fresh or compelling way, and the crosscutting of the individual stories is mechanical and uninspired. The film’s nominal hero, a good-looking though callow kid (Dan Futterman), must choose between two astonishingly attractive, accomplished women–the girlfriend (Jennifer Garner) he can’t commit to and the colleague (Amanda Peet) he lusts after. Most of the other characters are either pathetic or shrill. Davis tries to jazz up the material with technique, video interpolations, and black-and-white flashbacks, but these devices can’t disguise the hollowness of the movie’s ideas. There’s one strong scene–an emotionally bruising moment when a young man discovers a hard truth about his father (well played by Buck Henry)–but Davis can’t give it any lasting resonance. (PM) (600 N. Michigan, 9:15)
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Alexei Balabanov’s extraordinary follow-up to last year’s Brother is as utterly compelling as it is beyond-the-pale weird. Life in sepia-toned turn-of-the-century Saint Petersburg is as cheap as it was in the vividly contemporary Moscow of Brother, though whether that’s a by-product of the corruption of capitalism or a sickness of the psyche is moot. Of Freaks and Men is about pornography–its buyers and its sellers. Not surprisingly, it’s a business that attracts the soulless, the sadistic, and the sold out, all marked by traumas in the past or present (“And so Lisa became a woman,” a title card announces). It’s not a pretty picture. The only characters displaying emotions other than untrammeled greed or sadistic joy soon become addicted to their victimization or flutter around helplessly like butterflies waiting to be impaled. The film owes much to silent cinema–personality and destiny are defined more by the way figures stride or creep or scurry (to the stirring strains of Prokofiev) through streets and hallways on their dirty-postcard rounds than by their often static dramatic confrontations. Indeed, Of Freaks and Men heralds the incorporation of technical and artistic discoveries into prefilm structures of exploitation: here the invention of cinema is marked by the passage from still photos of naked women being beaten with switches to moving pictures of naked women being beaten with switches. (RS) (600 N. Michigan, 9:30)
Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance
