VENUES Chase Auditorium, 10 S. Dearborn (Black Perspectives Tribute); Harris Theater for Music and Dance, 205 E. Randolph (opening night); River East 21, 322 E. Illinois; 600 N. Michigan.
The funniest movie to play Chicago last year wasn’t Knocked Up or Superbad—it was Roy Andersson’s You, the Living, a desperately dark Swedish comedy that screened twice as part of the 2007 Chicago International Film Festival. I wanted to recommend it to all my friends but didn’t get around to it, figuring it would open shortly at Landmark or the Music Box anyway. But one year later You, the Living still hasn’t won a U.S. release, and I realize my friends may never get a chance to enjoy it as I did—in a theater, with eddies of startled, awkward laughter traveling up and down the rows. Even in our digital age of seemingly limitless choices, great films can still come and go without cracking the U.S. market.
The Brothers Bloom Rian Johnson made his feature debut with the art-house sleeper Brick (2005), which transposed the hard-boiled dialogue and tangled mystery of a Dashiell Hammett novel to a suburban SoCal high school. This follow-up is another puckish reworking of a familiar genre—the con-man story, in which a professional trickster falls in love and has to choose candor over deception. Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody are the title brothers, whose scheme to swindle eccentric heiress Rachel Weisz is complicated by Brody’s unexpected feelings for her. With its references to Joyce and Melville and its metafictional musings, The Brothers Bloom is every bit as quirky and literate as its predecessor, but it lacks the conceptual edge of Brick, which used noir mythology to comment on the social ruthlessness of high school. As a result, it often seems precious and overconceived, its accumulating crosses and double-crosses as devoid of consequence as a child’s backyard game. PG-13, 113 min. (JJ) Johnson and Weisz will attend the screening, part of the festival’s opening-night program. Tickets are $35-40. aThu 10/16, 7 PM, Harris Theater for Music and Dance
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RFear(s) of the Dark Sinister and beautiful, this mostly black-and-white animation from France culls the talents of six artists and designers—Blutch, Charles Burns, Marie Caillou, Pierre di Sciullo, Lorenzo Mattotti, and Richard McGuire—who were asked to explore their most primal fears. Their styles run the gamut from comic-book pen-and-ink (Burns) to expressionistic pencil work (Blutch) to geometric abstraction (di Sciullo), but their sequences all reach past the stock materials of the horror genre into the obscure shadow land of the human psyche. Artistic director Etienne Robial has integrated the artists’ work so smoothly that one hesitates to single out any particular segment, though the one that really made my bowels clutch was Burns’s tale of a virginal college student who’s seduced by a pretty classmate, implanted with larvae, and harvested for a race of giant humanoid insects. In French with subtitles. 85 min. (JJ) aSun 10/19, 7:50 PM, 600 N. Michigan
The Girl by the Lake When a beautiful young woman is found murdered in a provincial town in northern Italy, a surly police veteran (Toni Servillo in a nicely understated performance) is called in from a nearby city to investigate. He quickly assembles a list of suspects, including the dim-witted villager who discovered the body, a neighbor who’s disarmingly cooperative, a hockey coach with a prison record, and the girl’s layabout boyfriend. First-time director Andrea Molaioli shows great skill in moving the mystery along without planting too many red herrings; when the investigator mistakenly decides one suspect is the culprit, his error registers more as a character flaw than a plot device. With Fabrizio Gifuni and Valeria Golino. In Italian with subtitles. 95 min. (JK) aThu 10/23, 4:15 PM, 600 N. Michigan
RHunger British visual artist Steve McQueen has earned acclaim for work that’s topical, challenging, and political without being polemical, traits it shares with his stark but moving drama about the Irish Republican Army’s 1981 hunger strike inside Northern Ireland’s notorious Maze Prison. Avoiding conventional exposition, McQueen and his cowriter, Enda Walsh, draw the viewer in through shifting points of view, as the convicts endure increasingly brutal tortures in their struggle to be recognized as political detainees. The fulcrum of this deeply humanist work is an extended two-shot of the strike’s leader, Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), as he converses with a priest (Liam Cunningham); the virtuosic sequence encapsulates the whole sorry history of a horrific civil war. 96 min. (AG) aSun 10/19, 3 PM, River East 21, and Tue 10/21, 8:30 PM, 600 N. Michigan
RJerusalema Ralph Ziman’s crackling South African crime drama gives the genre a fresh political spin by showing how easily the high ideals of antiapartheid protesters might curdle into the debased populism thugs use to justify their power grabs. (“I had two heroes, Karl Marx and Al Capone,” the protagonist announces in voice-over at the outset. “I think they’d both be proud of me.”) The early scenes seem like a Soweto remake of The Public Enemy, with two kids trying to make their bones as carjackers despite the inconvenient fact that they can’t drive (their first victim has to give them lessons before they can make off with his vehicle). Ten years later, they’ve been radicalized by the 1994 elections and moved on to Johannesburg, where the smarter and more forceful one (the charismatic Rapulana Seiphemo) launches a nonprofit housing trust that drifts into criminal activities. In English and subtitled Zulu, Khosa, and Afrikaans. 118 min. (JJ) Ziman will attend the screenings. aSun 10/19, 7:30 PM, and Mon 10/20, 8:45 PM, 600 N. Michigan
