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One reliable pleasure of attending the Chicago International Film Festival is discovering filmmakers who have solid reputations in their home countries but aren’t especially known in the U.S. This year I’ve enjoyed catching up with Alain Guiraudie (Stranger by the Lake), a French writer-director who’s made about a half-dozen films since 2000, and with the Netherlands’ Alex van Warmerdam, who’s been active since the mid-1980s. Unlike the films by first-time directors that make up much of the CIFF program, Van Warmerdam’s Borgman (which screens again tomorrow at 8:15 PM) displays a fully formed artistic sensibility. Regardless of its overall merit, the movie marches to its own beat.
At times, Van Warmerdam seems to take the term “exquisite corpse” literally. Of all the murders I saw in this year’s festival, Borgman had the most creative. There’s an Edward Gorey quality to the deaths—I couldn’t help but chuckle at some of them.
