The 15th European Union Film Festival continues Friday, March 9, through Thursday, March 29, at Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. Tickets are $11, $7 for students, and $6 for Film Center members. Following are selected films screening through Thursday, March 15; for a full schedule see siskelfilmcenter.org.
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Beats Being Dead Christian Petzold, director of such German neonoirs as Yella (2007) and Jerichow (2008), delivers the first installment of the Dreileben Trilogy, three movies by different directors that function as discrete narratives but are linked by the peripheral movements of a serial killer. In this one, a young male nurse (Jacob Matschenz) pursues a heavy-breathing romance with a comely hotel maid (Luna Zimic Mijovic) after furtively watching her fellate a biker at a midnight lakeside party. There isn’t much more to the plot than that, but Petzold—whose Jerichow managed to approximate the primal lust of The Postman Always Rings Twice—proves that the urgent physical needs of attractive young people generate their own kind of narrative momentum. In German with subtitles. —J.R. Jones 87 min. Sat 3/10, 2 PM, and Tue 3/13, 6 PM
Beyond Camp enthusiasts should have a grand time with this 2010 Scandinavian coproduction, which features Noomi Rapace (star of the European thrillers adapted from Stieg Larsson’s books) in a role that could have been written for Elizabeth Taylor in 1965. She plays a housewife who has it all—a big suburban home, loving children, a darkly handsome spouse (Rapace’s then husband, Ola, in the Richard Burton part)—but can’t get beyond her upsetting childhood memories. Director Pernilla August precedes each of the overwrought flashbacks with a close-up of Noomi’s pained face, to stress her inner torment. The childhood scenes take place in a 1970s Sweden that looks just like the present except that everyone wears tacky vintage clothes; as the heroine’s alcoholic parents, Ville Virtanen and Kaurismaki regular Outi Mäenpää are almost as loud as the costumes. In Swedish with subtitles. —Ben Sachs 98 min. Sun 3/11, 3 PM, and Thu 3/15, 6 PM
