The tenth European Union Film Festival continues through Thursday, March 29, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. Tickets are $9, $7 for students, and $5 for Film Center members. Following are selected films screening through Thursday, March 22; for a full schedule visit chicagoreader.com.
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R Beauty in Trouble A struggling Prague family loses everything in a flood, which pushes the husband into crime and imprisonment and his beautiful wife (Ana Geislerova) into the arms of the kind and wealthy Tuscany-based winegrower who sent him away. Writer Petr Jarchovsky and director Jan Hrebejk collaborated on the formidable Up and Down (2004), and this 2006 feature, which takes its title from a Robert Graves poem, is equally impressive for its mastery, intelligence, and ambition in juggling intricate plot strands and memorable characters. It also treats class difference and right-wing intolerance in the Czech Republic as ferociously as Mike Leigh has done in depicting Thatcherite England. In Czech with subtitles. 110 min. (JR) a Sat 3/17, 5:30 PM, and Mon 3/19, 6 PM.
RDon’t Tell A far cry from the heavy-handed treatment of incest on American television, this handsomely produced 2005 Italian drama approaches its subject with delicacy and a nearly poetic sensibility. Giovanna Mezzogiorno stars as an actress who puts aside her ambitions to help support her struggling actor husband (Alessio Boni of The Best of Youth); after he gets cast in a hot TV series, she visits her troubled brother in Virginia to see if he can shed some light on her recent nightmares. Director Cristina Comencini adapted her own novel. In English and subtitled Italian. 120 min. (AG) a Sun 3/18, 5 PM, and Wed 3/21, 6 PM.
Klimt I miss the relative funkiness of Raul Ruiz’s low-budget films, but this internationally produced feature (2006) is probably the best of his more opulent work since Time Regained (1999). A series of speculative riffs on the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt, it stars John Malkovich in the title role. Unfortunately the Film Center has been able to book only the “producer’s cut” of the film, which is half an hour shorter than the version shown in France but feels half an hour longer. It’s been cut as if it were a biopic and sometimes registers as a failed one. But it’s still an eyeful. 97 min. (JR) a Sun 3/18, 3 PM, and Thu 3/22, 6 PM.
The Role of Her Life Karin Viard (Time Out, The Ax) won a French Cesar for her role in this 2004 drama, as a timid journalist who becomes personal assistant to a movie star (Agnes Jaoui of Look at Me) and mistakenly regards her as a friend. Director and cowriter Francois Favrot subtly orchestrates the mounting tension between the women, noting the actress’s caprice and narcissism as well as the assistant’s toxic self-abasement. But the movie’s tone and psychological realism are badly undermined by a strained romantic triangle involving the star’s gardener (Jonathan Zaccai), who too quickly surrenders his principles and becomes her buffoonish plaything. In French with subtitles. 100 min. (AG) a Sun 3/18, 3:15 PM, and Thu 3/22, 8 PM.
