Movies

European Union Film Festival

March 27, 2008

The 11th European Union Film Festival continues Friday, March 28, through Thursday, April 3, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. Tickets are $9, $7 for students, and $5 for Film Center members. For more information see siskelfilmcenter.com.

In the City of Sylvia and Some Photos in the City of Sylvia Two hypnotic and haunting 2007 features by Spanish experimental filmmaker Jose Luis Guerin, about the same romantic obsession. (The reference points are W.G. Sebald’s novel Vertigo and Alfred Hitchcock’s film of the same title.) The silent Some Photos in the City of Sylvia (65 min.) uses black-and-white stills with English intertitles to recount an unseen artist’s return to Strasbourg to search for a young woman he met briefly 22 years earlier while making a Goethe-related literary pilgrimage. The far more elliptical In the City of Sylvia (84 min.) tells the same story with color, carefully articulated sound, and minimal, subtitled French dialogue; in this film the artist returns only six years after his pilgrimage. Both works are mysterious, beautiful, and primal. It’s a pity the first, an intimate study and scenario for the second, is being shown after only one screening of its more languid successor. (JR) In the City of Sylvia: Fri 3/28, 6:15 PM, and Sat 3/29, 3:15 PM. Some Photos in the City of Sylvia: Sat 3/29, 5 PM.

Kings For the most part director Tom Collins keeps his 2007 adaptation of Jimmy Murphy’s play The Kings of the Kilburn High Road from feeling like a staged work. He’s helped by the guttural, muscular Irish Gaelic language, which adds a distinctive aural thrust to this story of six combative friends who left Ireland for London in the 1970s. When five of them reunite in middle age for the wake of the sixth, they mourn not only his demise but the slow death of their dreams. The exceptional cast includes Colm Meaney as the one who made good and Donal O’Kelly, a particular standout, as a layabout rotted by alcohol and spite. Subtitled. 86 min. (AG) A reception will follow this closing-night screening.  Thu 4/3, 6:30 PM.

Lagerfeld Confidential The title of this 2007 French documentary suggests high-class intrigue, but what’s most remarkable about its portrait of fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld is his plain speaking. A busy man with little patience for foolishness (including that of director Rodolphe Marconi), Lagerfeld poses many contradictions: he is personally fastidious but keeps a messy office; he claims to disdain possessions but owns several homes and an enviable library; he has spent his life creating haute couture for the rich and famous yet calmly asserts that he’ll be forgotten when he’s gone. Among the visiting glitterati, Nicole Kidman is regal, Monaco’s Princess Caroline, bratty. In English and subtitled French. 86 min. (AG)  Sat 3/29, 7 PM, and Tue 4/1, 6 PM.

The Missing Star A contemporary Italian tries to reckon with the ascendant Chinese in this tasteful and scenic dramatic feature by Gianni Amelio (L’America, The Keys to the House). When a party of Chinese businessmen arrives at a closing steel mill in Italy to take possession of its blast furnace, a conscientious and now-unemployed maintenance man (Sergio Castellitto) tries without success to convince them that the furnace is structurally damaged. Following the new owners back to Asia, he engages a young translator he met in Italy (Tai Ling) to take him into southern China and finally onto the Yangtze River so he can avert a disaster. The lead characters’ cross-cultural relationship is too muted to yield much emotionally or politically, but Amelio’s languid pacing and Luca Bigazzi’s landscape photography cast a spell. In Mandarin and Italian with subtitles. 106 min. (JJ)  Sat 3/29, 5 PM, and Mon 3/31, 6 PM.

The New Man Finnish director Klaus Haro (Mother of Mine) energizes this Swedish historical drama (2007) by filling his large cast with capable young newcomers. Julia Hogberg is especially effective as an impoverished, motherless teen who’s chosen by the government for forced sterilization in 1951. Sent to a home for socially undesirable girls, she mounts a spirited defense of her fellow inmates that gradually wins over the head nurse (Maria Lundqvist). Screenwriter Kjell Sundstedt drew on the real-life experience of his aunts, who were among the 30,000 victims of Sweden’s 42-year experiment in genetic engineering. In Swedish with subtitles. 101 min. (AG)  Sun 3/30, 3 PM, and Tue 4/1, 8 PM.

Train Keeps a Rollin’ A little white casket carrying the sacred remains of a venerated figure known as the Holy Mother of Barczica is loaded onto a train for a nationwide tour of Hungary, but after the train derails in a small village the relic becomes a prop in the machinations of the vain stationmaster; his waddling, babushka-clad wife; his horny assistant; and a ripe young Gypsy beauty who’s looking for a man. Robert Koltai (Colossal Sensation!) wrote, directed, and stars as the stationmaster in this chronically overpitched rustic farce (2007), whose yelling and arm-flapping put me to sleep long before its wheezing end-credit outtakes. In Hungarian with subtitles. 83 min. (JJ) Koltai will attend the Saturday screening.  Sat 3/29, 8:45 PM, and Mon 3/31, 6 PM.

True North Peter Mullan and Gary Lewis, who costarred in My Name Is Joe, reunited for this tense 2006 drama set on the North Sea. Lewis plays the Scottish captain of a failing trawler docking in Belgium; his son (Martin Compston), worried about their debt, cuts a deal behind the skipper’s back to smuggle aboard some illegal Chinese immigrants. As the other crew member in on the scheme, Mullan provides the film’s moral compass, moving from giddiness over the quick cash to growing concern about the stowed passengers as the homeward journey unexpectedly lengthens. Steve Hudson directed. In English and subtitled Mandarin. 92 min. (AG)  Sat 3/29, 3 PM, and Wed 4/2, 8:15 PM.

The Unknown Woman Directed by Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso), this 2006 Italian feature is both a stylish thriller in the Hitchcock manner (though much racier) and a melodrama recalling Douglas Sirk. The heroine (Ksenia Rappaport), a Ukrainian national struggling to keep her Italian work permit, sorely tests one’s sympathy; hoping to become a nanny in the household of a wealthy jeweler (Michele Placido), she conceals her past as an S-M prostitute and eventually resorts to theft and violence. The melodrama form allows Tornatore to examine such current issues as human trafficking and black-market babies within a yarn that, for all its sentiment, is never less than gripping. In Italian and Russian with subtitles. 116 min. (AG)  Sun 3/30, 3 PM, and Tue 4/1, 7:45 PM.

ALSO PLAYING

Akamas  Fri 3/28, 8 PM, and Mon 3/31, 7:45 PM.

And Along Come Tourists  Sun 3/30, 5:15 PM.

Arabian Nights  Sun 3/30, 5 PM, and Wed 4/2, 6 PM.

Chaos  Sat 3/29, 8:45 PM, and Thu 4/3, 8:15 PM.

It’s Gonna Get Worse  Fri 3/28, 8 PM.

London to Brighton  Sat 3/29, 7 PM, and Tue 4/1, 6 PM.

Seamstresses  Fri 3/28, 6 PM, and Mon 3/31, 8 PM.

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