Chicago FilmFest Mini Reviews: "Silver Cliff", "Larger Than Life", and an Audience Fave!

I was really into it, having fun and feeling like this was where I belonged. Two screenings back-to-back, with ten minutes in between to take a bathroom break and dash across to the opposite end of the multiplex, was the highlight of this past Saturday.


Before I review "Silver Cliff" (a Brazilian drama) and "Carol Channing: Larger Than Life" (A Documentary from the US), I must mention one of the Best of the Fest winners (I'm very excited)....


Chosen as one of the two Audience Favorites was Claude Lelouch's epic poem to the cinema titled "What Love May Bring" (photo above, and reviewed here last week).  I was excited to know that, out of the 150-plus films screened at the Festival,  and of the four that I was able to get to, I was right there among an appreciative crowd that was as moved and delighted as I was.

That night, the Event Schedule showed that the film was sold out. After making an inquiry, we were told that a few tickets might be available after all.  Timing and personal preference, and a little bit of scrambling, made it possible to be a part of what would turn out to be one of the essential events of the entire two weeks.

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"SILVER CLIFF"

The dashing producer (Rodrigo Teixeira) of the Brazilian film "Silver Cliff" introduced the festival screening, and explained that the movie is based on the lyrics of an old classic pop song called "Eye to Eye", which is played at the end of the film. The song is about getting through heartbreak and renewing your life after love goes away (sort of the same sentiment as "I Will Survive", in dreamy Portuguese.) 

The movie is an almost plotless tone poem about the sudden and unexplained disintegration of a marriage.  After having sex with his wife one morning, Violeta's distracted husband goes on a business trip. From the road, he sends her a voice message saying he doesn't love her any more, and is leaving her and their teenage son.  Devastated, she tries to go after him, and winds up wandering the streets of Rio de Janeiro that night, where she meets a little girl and her handsome young father.  After spending time together, they part company at daybreak, and their fates are left to our imagination, as the song suggests there is hope.

The film at first drew me in with its strong visuals, its attention to textures and creative use of framing of the characters, keeping backgrounds out of focus to suggest the alienation and entrapment of its characters in a mundane existence.  Alessandra Negrini, as Violeta, must carry the film in closeup, with her outpouring of confusion and emotion without the benefit of dialogue or much of anything to to.

What began as an intriguing visualization of the grief and confusion of life's tragic turning points eventually becomes tedious. The viewer feels stranded, watching protracted tracking shots of Violeta wandering and weeping.  One is left to notice meaningless details, like the sloppy paint job in the cheap hotel where she checks in that night, or the virtuoso camerawork in the bar sequence where Violeta dances alone to "Maniac."  The virtuosity for its own sake frustrates the viewer from learning anything more about Violeta, what might have happened, or what she will do next.

"Silver Cliff" is a nicely-produced, nice looking film, that nevertheless exemplifies the common independent-filmmaker impulse to create something out of a vague yearning, a wish to visualize an emotional state, but finally having little of lasting value to say.

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"CAROL CHANNING: LARGER THAN LIFE"

"Carol Channing: Larger Than Life" is an explosively entertaining, fast-moving film about one of the treasures of the American stage.  Contemporary viewers may not know or remember Carol Channing, and may find her irrelevant.  This film sets out to disprove that idea!

Best known for her classic Broadway roles in "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" and "Hello Dolly", Channing had a life filled with hard work, inspiration, and a generous view of the world.

The film is an expert compilation of current interviews with Channing, who serves as the film's "narrator"; on-screen commentaries from superstars like Betty Garrett, Lily Tomlin, Debbie Reynolds, Bob Mackie, Chita Rivera, Jerry Herman, JoAnne Worley (Channing's "Dolly" stand-in, who never got a chance to take the stage), Barbara Walters and many others; vintage photographs from Channing's childhood and early career, as well as old clips from TV interviews, variety programs and talk shows, commercials, and her Oscar-nominated turn in "Thoroughly Modern Millie". 

Woven into this gorgeous movie tapestry are clips from a current show that has Channing, at age 90, rehearsing with many of the guys from the chorus of her "Hello Dolly" revivals.  Most poignant is the revelation of her eventual marriage to the boy she grew up with, and loved for over 70 years, through the hardships of her own oppressive marriage, the challenges and heartbreaks of the road, and the excitement of her singular show-biz life.

The crowd where I screened this movie loved the surprising and hilarious anecdotes about her first movie kiss (with Clint Eastwood!), her thoughts on the movie version of "Hello Dolly" with Barbra Streisand, and many, many others.  I was moved by stories of Channing's compassion, her concern for a fellow cast member with AIDS, and her deep understanding of the pain of racism through her associations with Ethel Waters and Louis Armstrong.  It is even thought that Channing herself had a black ancestor.

This is a terrific film for show-business buffs, Broadway followers, and cultural nostalgists.  Director Dori Beirnstein (who appeared after the screening in Chicago) has done an astounding job of assembling an unbelievable amount of material into a frothy, energetic and informative movie.  Channing was a great subject, too, and from all appearances one of the nicest celebrities imaginable, very cooperative and a good sport. 

It is sometimes hard to evaluate a film about a charismatic subject and separate the subject from the quality of the filmmaking.  Here, it is a perfect marriage.  "Carol Channing: Larger Than Life" held me spellbound, smiling throughout, and choking back tears frequently. I must study this film for the skill of it's editing, too.  I loved the sequence in which Channing explained how "Before The Parade passes By" was written for "Hello Dolly", and what the song means. Crosscutting between four different interviews in rapid succession, Beirnstien tells a great story with comical subtle differences between the recollections of her subjects.

Channing represents to me a generation that we will soon lose forever, people like Mark's mother and my parents, and that except for the love and skill of great filmmakers, or the devoted preservation of lore by their loving families, their stories may disappear with them.  I recommend this film very highly indeed.

See it for no other reason than that people like Carol Channing, Louis Armstrong, Jerry Herman, Gower and Marge Champion, and others like them, will be remembered. 

And by their example, to remain encouraged to keep trying while there is still a chance....The words to this song have never been more inspiring....

Before the parade passes by
I've gotta go and taste Saturday's high life
Before the parade passes by
I've gotta get some life back into my life
I'm ready to move out in front
I've had enough of just passing by life
With the rest of them
With the best of them
I can hold my head up high
For I've got a goal again
I've got a drive again
I wanna feel my heart coming alive again
Before the parade passes by

Chicago Film Festival: Two From France

My first trip to The Chicago Film Festival last weekend aroused my primal excitement for film...I re-discovered the pure love for the motion picture that I first felt in my adolescence. 

The AMC River East 21, right in the heart of Chicago's Gold Coast and the Magnificent Mile, provided a perfect home and showcase for the entire Film Festival, under one roof.  If I had the time and resources, I could have reveled in as many as five films. 


I did manage to attend two screenings, in between meeting staff and volunteers, walking in unseasonably warm sunshine all the way to Navy Pier, snapping photos of the light on the lakefront, and cooling off in the peaceful formality of a small art gallery.


And now, mini-reviews of the two screenings I attended, both from France: "American Translation", and "What Love May Bring."

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"American Translation", filmed in Paris and the surrounding countryside by Pascal Arnold and Jean-Marc Barr, keeps a viewer off-balance.  The script, by Arnold, takes an erotic story of young lovers and introduces dangerous material about murder and addiction and the pleasures of the sordid.  It's a slice-of-life psychodrama that builds a good amount of tension in its first two thirds, before losing its focus in the final scenes, and coming to sudden conclusion that resolves none of the psychological issues it begins to explore.

Still, it works as a seething romance between Aurore, an aimless and privileged girl of French-American parents, and Chris, an illiterate, darkly attractive cad with a taste for strangling young male prostitutes.  After they meet by chance in a hotel restroom and agree to stay together, Aurore becomes helplessly intrigued and enamored of this walking time bomb, who nevertheless opens up to her and reveals everything. 

The film takes a blackly comic and disturbing turn as, instead of fleeing in fear from Chris, Aurore becomes fascinated, drawn in, and agrees to participate in Chris' criminal scenarios.

Lizzie Brochere as Aurore succeeds in the tricky task of convincing the viewer of her outright addiction to this handsome criminal.  As Chris, Pierre Perrier is charming and frightening, in a performance as sensual as anything I have seen on screen in years.  There is real chemistry between the two, a natural rawness  They exude a tragic beauty; I don't think the actors even wore makeup.

The movie subverts an American romantic notions about European country idylls, using jump cuts and techno-pop in otherwise tranquil road scenes as the two lovers travel in their van looking for new victims.  There are long stretches of anticipatory dread with nothing but ambient city noise heard outside a window, or natural sounds during a victim's final moments.  Sometimes, Chris and Aurore appear as innocents with no control over their dark impulses.  There is an unexplainable connection between them; they even prevail on a priest in Chris' home town to "marry" them, after which they have wedding bands tattooed on their ring-fingers.

One thing that attracted American audiences in the 1950's and '60's to European cinema was the frank and matter-of-fact treatment of sexuality and the human body.  It appears that this free attitude toward sexuality still holds.  There is enough nudity in "American Translation" to scandalize a mainstream American audience.  Considering the violent natures and activities of the characters, depictions of violence are kept to a minimum, and what is shown is not explicit.  There is something perversely refreshing about a film about young serial killers that prefers female breasts and male genitalia to blood and gore.  There is virtually none of the latter in this film.

For lovers of vintage art-house cinema, "American Translation" can be described as an oddly winning blend of Terrence Malick's "Badlands" and Bertolucci's "Last Tango in Paris", with the menacing undercurrent of "Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer."  If you like edgy filmmaking, how can you go wrong?

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"What Love May Bring" demonstrates the possibility of crafting a deeply personal film on a grand, epic scale.  Veteran Director Claude Lelouch (Oscar-winner for "A Man and a Woman", 1966) has given us his 47th film, a love poem to the cinema, and a tapestry of five stories told in a single narrative, all of them true. 


Lelouch tells these stories in the style of the movies he loved as a child.  So, his WWII tales of Nazi intrigue, ill-fated romance, resistance, cabaret singers, nightclub dancers, treacherous lovers, and a little Jewish boy in hiding, take on the style of melodrama, musical comedy, battle epic, and  silent film.  The movies,  and their partner, music, are the substance of "What Love May Bring".

It is a lovely film, a feast of sorts. While it can be seen as self-indulgent, I accepted it as Lelouch's expression of gratitude for the art and the industry that sustained him, and a "thank you" to those before his camera and behind it for almost 50 years.


The plot is convoluted and would take too much time to recount it all here.  Much of it is fanciful and gruesome in equal measure, running the gamut from musical fantasy to wartime realism. It attempts to contain the sweep of history, beginning with a WWI newsreel filmmaker, his widow, and his orphaned son. The son grows up to survive the death camps, becomes a musician, and then a lawyer. 

The stories are told in flashback as the lawyer defends in court the central character, a young woman who is charged with murdering her husband, who in turn may have shot his army buddy over her.  She hides a Jewish friend's son in her father's cinema every day.  The backstories involve the woman's affair with a Nazi Officer to save her father, a projectionist, from the firing squad, and the origin of her husband's fortune, won by his grandfather (a Native American) in a land-race. The film wants to embrace all of this history, stylized to the movies that filtered the world for the character who emerges as the rightful narrator.


To keep up with the plotlines and characters is exhilarating and a bit exhausting, but finally rewarding, as it becomes clear that Lelouch is celebrating an art form that had saved his life and became a life's passion.  By the time we are looking at a montage of shots, the faces from  Lelouch's previous films, we come to realize that the Jewish boy hiding from Nazis every day in the movie theater is Lelouch himself.  I was terribly moved by this realization, as the images and the music washed over me.  The music, by the way, is by long-time collaborator Francis Lai ("Love Story").


Sure, it is sentimental. But I think Lelouch has a right to feel emotional, and to want to enthusiastically share his love of the cinema with all of us, as well as his family, who all carry the mantle of the performing arts.


Lelouch became friends with Chicago Film Festival founder Michael Kutza back during Kutza's college days when he discovered Lelouch's liberating style of filmmaking.  The screening was followed by a wonderful Q & A with Lelouch afterward.  Those of us who attended felt the electricity of a magical film experience, presided over by its creator.


Note: IMDB lists this film under the title "What War may Bring".  That certainly lends the whole film a different kind of gravity. Not sure when, or why, the title changed.

Coming: The Chicago Film Fest; "50/50"and "Weekend"--Sunday Journal #2

Your Chicago Correspondent will have a report on the beginning of the Chicago Film Festival  Saturday, we spent all day in the City, refugees from the quiet, sterile suburbs, and immersed ourselves in movies, chaos, gorgeous weather and lakefront delicacies.  We spent hours in darkened screening rooms with sexy serial killers; World War II romance and melodrama, music and nostalgia; and the iconic French Director, Claude Lelouch (and his darkly handsome son.)




Also this week, reviews of two non-festival films now playing: the "cancer-comedy" "50-50" which I enjoyed; and the gay love story "Weekend" which left me wanting.


Finally, a few musings on the state of the world left behind by Steve Jobs.


Hope to see you here this week!