By Jonathan Rosenbaum
One woman who recently rang my office wanted to know if the fact that a film was reviewed in the Reader meant that it was available on video. Not surprisingly, she came across Reader reviews on the Internet: I suspect that it’s only within the vast playpen of cyberspace that such confusion could take root. In this zone, history, causality, and agency are often only dimly defined: this same woman was under the impression that I was Dave Kehr, my predecessor at the Reader who departed a dozen years ago. I also periodically get E-mail queries about the availability on video of films I reviewed eight, nine, or ten years ago, which I generally don’t answer because the questioner’s guess is as good as mine. Video rental stores are the logical places to ask instead.
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Some in the CFCA have argued that Chicago critics in the multiplex vein are made to look stupid by national release patterns, and the new bylaws are meant to counter that impression: one might call it a Tooth Fairy Initiative undertaken by the weaker tooth fairies (the critics) in deference to the stronger tooth fairies (the distributors and exhibitors), who refuse to budge, and in further deference to the public at large, who are expected to know nothing and have blind faith in the tooth fairies’ collective beneficence. (Close your eyes, make a wish, and when you open them, the movie will be available–unless it isn’t.)
End-of-the-year press shows and openings are problematic to begin with, tied as they are in many cases to eligibility for Oscars and critics’ prizes–which translate into advertising. Often predicated on big companies’ strong-arm capacity, such openings are intended to exploit the amnesia or ignorance of viewers, who might conclude that Amistad is a more profound depiction of slavery than last year’s Nightjohn or the 1975 Mandingo. (Given my antipathy to the skillful but gloating L.A. Confidential, which just swept the National Society of Film Critics and New York Critics Circle awards, I haven’t yet made time for a close second look, but it strikes me as a considerably less imaginative reworking of noir conventions than Lost Highway or Kiss or Kill.) For critics eager to get their names in ads, screenings far in advance of release are an irresistible temptation to forsake common sense and dive into the cascading hype. And from the looks of things, the new CFCA bylaws, far from seeking to alleviate this obnoxious situation, are designed mainly to facilitate it.
Yang, who was in town for the tail end of his retrospective, told me that the school in the film is the one he attended as a teenager and that most of the incidents really happened to him and his classmates. A statement about Yang’s generation that took him four years to conceive, prepare, and shoot, A Brighter Summer Day is arguably the greatest of all Taiwanese films–surpassing even the works of a master like Hou Hsiao-hsien–because it gives a voice to a quotidian culture without a voice of its own. Moreover, it’s a voice in which exquisitely composed sounds and decanted images work in tandem–a voice that conjures up a vivid night poetry lit by little oases of illumination that endures in the mind like few other film experiences.
The Ceremony. The strongest film in over a quarter of a century by French New Wave filmmaker Claude Chabrol, adapted from Ruth Rendell’s A Judgment in Stone, this ambiguous, powerfully acted melodrama returns to the bourgeois terrain of most of Chabrol’s best work. The mixture of love and hatred he’s always felt toward his own class resurfaces here but in a different configuration, because this time he regards his bourgeois characters with clear affection. Yet he also seems to understand the unbridled class hatred felt by a maid (Sandrine Bonnaire) and her best friend (Isabelle Huppert) toward them, and he charts it with dispassionate precision. A psychoanalyst, Caroline Eliacheff, collaborated with Chabrol on the script, but part of the picture’s uncommon impact is its capacity to carry conviction in its shocking story line without wearing its psychology on its sleeve. In this respect and others, The Ceremony shows the enduring influence of Fritz Lang on Chabrol’s filmmaking–at least as pertinent as the influence of Alfred Hitchcock, though it’s noticed less often.
The Sweet Hereafter. Atom Egoyan flexes his muscles in this ingenious adaptation of Russell Banks’s beautiful novel about the effects of a school bus accident on a small town, effects exacerbated when a big-city lawyer (Ian Holm) turns up and tries to initiate litigation. Though the results are finally less accomplished than in the fully rounded Egoyan features Calendar and Exotica, his mastery of sound and image remains secure; the Brueghel-like long shot depicting the bus accident itself, a rare example of morphing used to artistic effect, is my favorite shot in any movie released this year. And Egoyan’s commentary on capitalism is every bit as suggestive as LaBute’s, though it’s less explicit and is complicated by the lawyer’s own tragedy, involving a wayward daughter. Few filmmakers have attempted to deal with family grief as fully and as seriously as Egoyan has throughout most of his career. And if he characteristically articulates this concern by restructuring Banks’s story, which depends on individual voices, into a set of interlocking and obsessive loops–the same structure found in most of the novels of Kurt Vonnegut–he gives the resulting drama a remarkable narrative fluency.
