“Ghostlight”
Talking Screens, A Week In Chicago Film, June 14-June 20, 2024
Openers with reviews this week: “Ghostlight,” “Robot Dreams,” “Beijing Watermelon” and “Banel & Adama.” Repertory & Revival includes “Morvern Callar” (bel0w); Doc Films swims into summer with “Jaws” (Thursday, June 20, Friday, June 21); Mike Nichols and Elaine May’s “The Birdcage” (Music Box, June 20); Elia Kazan’s “Wild River” (Music Box, Saturday-Sunday matinees); William Friedkin’s “Cruising” (below); historical compilation fantasia “Ask Any Buddy” (below); and “Yorgonna Love It Week” at the Music Box.
The African Diaspora International Film Festival (ADIFF) returns, in collaboration with Facets with a lineup of films, discussions and receptions that “highlight the vibrancy and diversity of global cultures,” running June 14-16. Films, programs and more here.
Chicago-savoring and stage-loving “Ghostlight,” the low-key but heartening new film from partners Alex Thompson and Kelly O’Sullivan is a follow-up to their “St. Frances” (2019), and it captures the vicissitudes of theater, family, secrets and a lot about life as well. Our extended conversation is here. Thompson and O’Sullivan will be at post-film Q&As following the Friday, June 14, 6:45pm and Saturday, June 15, 7pm screenings. “Ghostlight” opens Friday at the Music Box.
Pixar returns to the big screen instead of streaming on Disney+ as it sequelizes its portrait of inner emotions in “Inside Out 2,” previewed after our deadline.
“Tuesday”
First-time filmmaker Daina O. Pusic’s fairytale “Tuesday” finds a mother (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and her teenage daughter (Lola Petticrew) confronting Death when it arrives in the form of a talking bird. Opens Thursday, June 13 at River East, Newcity 21, Webster Place, Landmark Century and other theaters.
Pablo Berger’s Spanish-French, dialogue-free 2023 animated tragicomedy, “Robot Dreams,” is a piquant gem, as well as bittersweet. A lonely dog in Manhattan builds himself a robot friend… Adapted from a graphic novel by SAIC alum Sara Varon, Berger’s film works from the virtues of realist classical animation: clean lines, simple story, endless surrealistic suggestiveness. The ache eddies. Opens at the Film Center, Friday, June 14.
“Banel & Adama”
A painterly contemplation of two lovers in remote Senegal, “Banel & Adama,” from debut French Senegalese female filmmaker Ramata-Toulaye Sy, is disrupted when duty calls for him to become chief; he resists, and tragedy of mythic proportion escalates. Desire faces the world; the world looks back. Lovely and lyrical even as the bravura filmmaking outstrips the contours of the story. Opens at the Film Center, Friday, June 14.
“Beijing Watermelon,” is a wonderful 1989 masterpiece from Nobuhiko Ôbayashi (“Hausu”) in a digital restoration. Here’s Film Comment’s Saffron Maeve on this marvel of mood: “Arriving shortly after the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, ‘Beijing Watermelon’ is a mellow true story about a greengrocer on the outskirts of Tokyo who took a troop of poor Chinese exchange students under his wing in 1987. Initially reluctant to haggle with them, Shunzo (Japanese comedian Bengal) becomes consumed with his burgeoning status as an intermediary and father figure—before long he is their chaperone, valet, guarantor, and personal shopper, gleefully interpreting their broken Japanese. ‘Japan… China… friendship,’ he mutters to himself on loop, affirming his belief that hidden in these interpersonal relationships is a key to international relations, while his wife and children are left to manage the store alone. Where Ôbayashi’s earlier work is markedly surreal, ‘Beijing Watermelon’ exhibits neorealist sensibilities, with misty images of daikon, cabbage and green onion, and scenes of Chinese students and Japanese locals dancing and debating on the beach. But a geopolitical heaviness also hangs over the film, which started production in May 1989, when the Tiananmen Square demonstrations had already been raging for a few weeks in Beijing.” Streaming on Criterion Channel; opens at the Film Center, Friday, June 14.
REPERTORY & REVIVAL
“Morvern Callar”
“Morvern Callar” is paired with Britney Spears’ “Crossroads” in another Music Box “Highs & Lows” double feature: but anything to see Lynne Ramsay’s 2002 hallucination on a big screen. Only Ramsay’s second feature, the beautiful yet opaque “Morvern Callar” is the sort of adaptation—drawn from Alan Warner’s dizzying 1995 fiction of the same name—that captures the essence of a tale, its mood and emotion more than the bones of narrative. Movies aren’t texts and plots; at their best, they’re pretexts to eavesdrop on behavior or to see through the eyes of a perceptive artist. And adaptations are not projects for the pedantically bookish; the most intriguing adaptations come when a director and her team—screenwriter, cinematographer, editor, music supervisor—find an unlikely and gratifying way to fashion someone else’s material to their sensibility. “Autistic” and “childlike” are two of Ramsay’s favorite adjectives for both the run-at-the-mouth fiction and the behavior of the character. Morvern is a chain-smoking twenty-one-year-old supermarket clerk in a small, seaside West Scotland town. Her boyfriend commits suicide, resting in a streak of darkening blood on the kitchen floor. She opens his Christmas presents to her, pops in a mixtape he’s left for her. After a night out with her best friend, Lanna, she finds he’s left her money and his unpublished novel. What’s a girl to do? In the case of Morvern, she places her name on the title page and ships the printout to a big London publisher, gets rid of the body and lights off with Lanna on a package holiday to southern Spain. Lost on the dance floor and otherwise in search of some modest measure of human intimacy, her holiday’s interrupted by a visit from the publishers, who, over champagne, offer a staggering amount of money for her “brilliant” book. The journey begins. Much like Hou Hsiao-hsien, Ramsay and her cinematographer Alwin Küchler share a photographer’s knack for capturing the blush and blur of glimpse in an intoxicated instant, constructing an emotional subjectivity, a shimmering use of focus and focal lengths that disorient our perceptions at just the right moment. Samantha Morton, whose face can move vertiginously from elation to lack of emotion, plays Morvern. She’s a modern incarnation of silent-era actors who were born ready for their close-up. Is Morvern opaque or inhuman? Is the story nihilist or one lacking a discernible moral stance? Just watch the face. Music Box, Tuesday, June 18, 7pm.
The Music Box has added “Kinds Of Kindness” by Yorgos Lanthimos (“Poor Things”), opening June 28 in 35mm, plus opening Friday, June 14, a weeklong series of movies by the Greek filmmaker they’re calling “Yorgonna Love It!” DCPs will be shown of “The Favourite,” “The Lobster,” “Killing Of A Secret Deer,” “Poor Things” (review here) and his little-seen third feature, “The Alps,” which may be closer to Lanthimos’ weird Greek heart than any of his other movies than “Dogtooth.” It trickles off like a fading pulse. Details and tickets here.
“Using fragments from 126 theatrical feature films, ‘Ask Any Buddy,'” writes BAM, “creates a kaleidoscopic snapshot of urban gay culture during that time. From casual tearoom cruising to actual police raids, it uses rare footage shot at dozens of real bathhouses, bars, parades, and elsewhere to explore both the sex film genre’s unique blend of fantasy and reality and its role in documenting a subculture that was just becoming visible.” (This trailer is non-explicit.)
“Cruising”
In his indispensable memoir, published when he was seventy-eight, William Friedkin wrote of the ups, downs, pauses and rekindlings of his long career. Of the bruising of “Cruising” (1980): “Had I done ‘Cruising’ simply to stir up controversy? I thought not. I knew it would be controversial, but not to this extent, nor did I believe it would trigger violence against gays. And it didn’t. I made it because it was a fresh take on the detective film against a background that had never been seen by a mainstream audience. And it encompassed the themes that continue to fascinate me: good and evil in everyone; our conflicting desires.” (More thoughts on Friedkin here.)
CHICAGO SEEN
Chicago-born filmmaker William Friedkin, son of immigrant Ukrainian parents, now has a street named after him, dedicated earlier this week in front of Senn High School, his alma mater, at 5900 North Glenwood. His widow, Sherry Lansing, a native of Chicago’s South Side, and the former CEO of Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox, was to attend the designation by Alder Leni Manaa-Hoppenworth. The honor comes through the efforts of Senator Billy Marovitz, a lifelong friend of Friedkin, who died last year. Local writer Frank Sennett tweeted: “Hope the ceremony ends with an epic car chase.”
Ray Pride
