By Ray Pride

Olivier Assayas’ marvelous meander of a memory piece, “Something In The Air (Après mai)” is a tactile collection of impressions, with the movie itself finely situated in France, 1971, but also in the world of Gilles, seventeen-year-old high-school student intent on becoming a painter, and who follows a path very similar to the one the filmmaker took to his storytelling career.

Dreamily paced, serenely elliptical and seldom less than beautiful, the fifty-eight-year-old writer-director’s film looks back at his own coming to awareness, but also engages in a serious conversation with the late work of French master Robert Bresson, including his “L’argent,” “Four Nights of a Dreamer” and especially, “The Devil, Probably.” There is an implacable, concrete beauty to those films, where objects and colors and young faces, especially young male faces, are presented as mute forces of manmade nature. (The ending of the film, however, impresses a female face onto the protagonist and the filmgoer alike: a fantastic, phosphorescent image in a film about a film that loses its boundaries and becomes the film itself, pointing Gilles emphatically toward his vocation.) Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Immediacy of emotion is at the heart of Nikolaj Arcel’s romantic historical drama about Danish court politics and idealism in the 1760s, with a career-making role by Alicia Vikander as Queen Caroline Mathilda, a young woman in a new country. There’s a character to the film, as Arcel says, that “even though the period is obviously there in the set designs, with the costumes it was filmed and edited as we would have filmed and edited a film taking place in modern Copenhagen.” Mads Mikkelsen is stirring as a rebellious doctor called to court to attend to her husband, the daft, increasingly troubled King Christian VII (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard): how much can one behind-the-scenes figure change the world? And how quickly do he and the imported Queen become entangled? Passions play.

“A Royal Affair” feels modern. Despite its period setting, it’s in a school with movies like Olivier Assayas’ “Les destinees” or “Carlos.” Here’s the conflict, but more importantly, here’s the air, the light, the seductive or abrupt way the characters talk to each other, I tell Arcel during his visit to the Chicago International Film Festival. “We had a rule from the very beginning that we didn’t want to make a stuffy kind of historical piece, we really wanted to be as modern as we could be but then again,” he says. “How do you do that, is it even possible if you go back in time like that? One of the things we said, we’re not going to focus on the surroundings, we’re going to focus on the characters as if we were living back then. What if we were actually in the 1760s, we had these characters, how would we film it? As a director, you have a tendency, you want to say, ‘Oh this is the 1760s, we need BIG, we need the castle, all the official happenings,” and we didn’t want to do that. We just wanted to be close to the characters at all times.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“Keep the Lights On” is a fierce, if understated portrayal of attraction and addiction in the lives of two men, a documentary filmmaker and closeted lawyer across a decade in New York City and how their world moves—and doesn’t move—around them: there’s a marked sense of place and duration in Ira Sachs’ portrait of co-dependency. Sachs’ four features, including “Delta” and “Forty Shades of Blue” feel steeped in private, intimate language, but this story, drawn from a long-term relationship of his own, is the first that has the declarative feel of being unadulterated autobiography, which of course, is shaped and distilled, but not especially filtered through genre or influence, as was his most recent film, “Married Life” (2007). Read the rest of this entry »

More comic than any of the identikit wisecracks in “The Killer Elite” would have been if this period story of retired OSS men at each others’ throats—kicked, punched and snarled through by Jason Statham, Robert DeNiro and Clive Owen—had kept the title of its source material, a book by Ranulph Fiennes called “The Feather Men.” The Feather Men! Then again, this dizzying assemblage of editing overkill is so murky in motivation, outcome and cinematography, that now vastly ironic title would crumple to a whimper almost instantly. A few of director Gary McKendry’s would-be iconic images are strong, like Statham’s gentle clenching-unclenching of his palm as blood congeals under the main title, but the restless editing seldom pauses. The dialogue has more lumps than fast-food oatmeal: “yer geezer”; “ah, yah horny git”; “g’wan, yah cheeky buggers”; “Well, it’s 5 o’clock somewhere, iddn’t it?”; “He’s your worst nightmare”; “War’s never over until both sides say it’s so” and the marvel, “C’mon, shit happens when you play the deep end of the pool, Danny.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Social Network

Top 5 Domestic Films
“The Social Network,” David Fincher
“Winter’s Bone,” Debra Granik
“Ghost Writer,” Roman Polanski
“Exit Through the Gift Shop,” Banksy
“Inception,” Christopher Nolan
— Ray Pride

Top 5 Foreign Films
“Carlos,” Olivier Assayas
“Everyone Else,” Maren Ade
“Dogtooth,” Yorgos Lanthimos
“Father of My Children,” Mia Hansen-Løve
“I Am Love,” Luca Guadagnino
— Ray Pride

Top 5 Films
“Animal Kingdom,” David Michôd
“Enter the Void,” Gaspar Noé
“Inception,” Christopher Nolan
“Lourdes,” Jessica Hausner
“Monsters,” Gareth Edwards
—Bill Stamets

Top 5 Documentary Films
“Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno,” Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea
“Sweetgrass,” (no director credited) [Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor]
“The Oath,” Laura Poitras
“Videocracy,” Erik Gandini
“Rembrandt’s J’Accuse,” Peter Greenaway
—Bill Stamets Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Mia Hansen-Løve’s “The Father Of My Children” (Le Pere De Mes Enfants) tells stories in the same fleet, restless fashion as Olivier Assayas. Yet she has an assured voice of her own as a filmmaker. As a young actress, she was at the heart of Assayas’ 1998 “Late August, Early September,” an oblique meditation on friendship, mortality and legacy. At 29, and the mother of his child, she’s made something remarkable and gracefully mature: a story about one protagonist, Gregoire Canvel  (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), a producer of art films, that shatters into a story with several protagonists after a violent incident. Most notably, a strand of the story emerges with the Canvel’s eldest of three daughters, Clemence (played by de Lencquesaing’s own daughter, Alice) that suggests the natural path of a born cineaste. Hansen-Løve offers the offices of Canvel’s Moon Films, not as a place of carefree privilege or of cinematic dreams but as a dogged machine always one step behind, always in search of further finance for the dreams of his beloved, difficult auteur directors. (It’s neither “Day for Night” nor “My Life Is In Turnaround.”) There are turns in the tale better discovered than learned through synopsis: while the filmmaking is quietly observant, the examination of family, business, self-worth and the possibility of failure is bold and haunting. This is a beautiful, full-blooded film. (“The Father of My Children” won a special jury prize at Cannes in 2009.) (Ray Pride)

“The Father Of My Children” opens Friday at Landmark Century.

Top 5 U.S. Films
“The Hurt Locker,” Kathryn Bigelow
“The Limits of Control,” Jim Jarmusch
“A Serious Man,” Joel and Ethan Coen
“Two Lovers,” James Gray
“The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” Wes Anderson
—Ray Pride

Top 5 Foreign Films
“Summer Hours,” Olivier Assayas
“The Headless Woman,” Lucrecia Martel
“35 Shots of Rum,” Claire Denis
“You, the Living,” Roy Andersson
“Night and Day,” Hong Sang-soo
—Ray Pride Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

1. “In the Mood for Love,” Wong Kar-Wai, 2000
Repetition, proximity, music, exchange of glances. Looks of desire, clouds, rain. Unconsummated romance = cinema.

2. “Yi Yi,” Edward Yang, 2000
Perfection. It’s taken for granted because it seems so simple, so easy, so natural. Family as lovingly detailed soap opera; at just under three hours, the late Taiwanese master made a multigenerational epic worthy of a novel. And, strangely befitting his background in computer science, he knew precisely where to place the camera for the most dynamic effect.

3. “Before Sunset,” Richard Linklater, 2004
Linklater knows there’s grandeur in the smallest of shared, skittery moments. This couple that never was, with dreamy memories of their one-night stand, are different people now, older, oft-disappointed, yet despite underlying melancholy, still straining for a moment of genuine contact. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

A confession: huge film festivals are as frustrating as they are invigorating. Sundance, Toronto: I’m always worried someone else is having the better fun. The better discovery. The sharper interaction. No matter how much access you have as a film journalist, you’re still inevitably missing more than a little something.

The New York Film Festival, however pricey, books a relatively small number of features and keeps overlapping programming to a minimum. At Sundance this year, every way I tried to organize screenings and interviews and panels and photography felt like a spreadsheet filled with M-80s. There’s a great nonfiction film festival, True/False, that just closed their sixth edition this weekend in Columbia, Missouri. Just the right size out in the middle of nowhere, it was a great regret I couldn’t go this year and see and learn as much as I did when I went in 2008.

Which comes around to the 12th Annual European Union Film Festival at Siskel, running through the end of March. For several years, while not a film festival in the sense of setting up camp for a brief time in a certain place, the EU Fest has brought together the best of all the festivals most avid filmgoers couldn’t even begin to clear the time and have the money to attend. Fifty-nine films from twenty-seven countries in Chicago’s premier two-screen cinema, with two screenings of most features? That’s about as easy as it gets to navigate a survey that size, of the crème-de-la-crème of what’s being produced Over There these days. Read the rest of this entry »