The 13th European Union Film Festival continues Friday, March 19, through Thursday, April 1, at Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. Tickets are $10, $7 for students, and $5 for Film Center members. Following are selected films screening through Thursday, March 25; for a full festival schedule see siskelfilmcenter.com.
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Dogtooth I’ve seen movies this weird before, but never from Greece. Inside the confines of a nicely appointed country home, a stern patriarch and his obedient wife keep their teenage son and two teenage daughters cloistered from the world and zanily miseducated. Tape-recorded vocabulary lessons teach them new words with absurdly inaccurate definitions, an LP of Frank Sinatra singing “Fly Me to the Moon” is presented to them as their grandfather’s voice, and a female security guard from the father’s workplace is periodically brought home to copulate with the blank-faced young man. Writer-director Giorgos Lanthimos walks a fine line between the sinister and the hilarious, though the confused siblings (Aggeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni, and Hristos Passalis) are never less than poignant. This is one you won’t forget, though probably not for lack of trying. In Greek with subtitles. 93 min. —J.R. Jones Fri 3/19, 8:15 PM, and Mon 3/22, 8:15 PM
Lourdes In this austere but often wry French drama (2009), a woman with multiple sclerosis (Sylvie Testud) makes a religious pilgrimage to the title town, where millions have journeyed since the Virgin Mary was reportedly seen there in 1858. The protagonist isn’t particularly devout, going more for social contact than for any hope of a miracle, but when she rises from her wheelchair one day, cured, the incident provokes envy and spite among others in her tour group. Austrian writer-director Jessica Hausner uses rigorously formal compositions to echo Christian iconography, though her script focuses on the vexing nature of miracles: are they divine signs, proving that life has meaning, or merely random events, further testing the limits of human endurance? In French with subtitles. 96 min. —Andrea Gronvall Sat 3/20, 3 PM, and Thu 3/25, 6 PM
Lourdes
