The tenth European Union Film Festival runs Friday, March 2, 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 9; for a full festival schedule visit chicagoreader.com.
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RColor Me Kubrick Alan Conway, a gay con artist in England who successfully impersonated Stanley Kubrick in the 90s, died in 1998, only a few months before Kubrick. His exploits are fascinating because the people he fooled, seduced, and/or exploited knew even less about the filmmaker than he did when he brandished Kubrick’s name and promised to hire or help them. This 2005 British feature by writer Anthony Frewin and director Brian Cook, both former Kubrick assistants, uses Conway’s unlikely saga to mount an appreciative send-up of a certain style of gay extravagance, with John Malkovich having a field day as Conway. 86 min. (JR) a Sun 3/4, 3 PM, and Thu 3/8, 8:15 PM.
Eastern Sugar Three bored and aimless friends from a small town in eastern Hungary spontaneously head to a posh lake resort to land summer jobs in this 2004 film by Ferenc Torok. Hunger for sex and drugs dooms their chances at progress, and after one gets fired and another quits, the trio head for Budapest, where one of them (Ervin Nagy) auditions for an adult film in what passes for humor. The characters are so simplistic and transparent that when they screw up, you only wonder what took them so long. In Hungarian with subtitles. 89 min. (Peter Margasak) a Sun 3/4, 5 PM, and Tue 3/6, 6 PM.
Manual of Love In the style of La Ronde, this frothy 2005 Italian comedy by Giovanni Veronesi consists of four overlapping stories, each covering a different aspect of love: infatuation, crisis, betrayal, and abandonment. All four contain hilarious moments, but the most endearing is the first, about an unemployed young man (Silvio Muccino) smitten with a beautiful woman (Jasmine Trinca). Undeterred by her brush-offs, he pursues her until she agrees to date him, and the story gradually begins to explore how attraction can become indistinguishable from obsession. In Italian with subtitles. 108 min. (JK)
a Sat 3/3, 3 PM, and Mon 3/5, 8:15 PM.
