FRIDAY, OCTOBER 14 The Servile
Didactic cinema is seldom seen in the U.S., though it’s common in cultures where moviemaking has become an extension of oral tradition. In the hands of a master like Adoor Gopalakrishnan, an instructive tale of good and evil doesn’t have to sacrifice individuality, humanity, or entertainment value. Take The Servile, which charts the moral destruction of Tommi, the timorous tenant farmer of Patelar, a cruel land baron. Patelar humiliates Tommi for sport in a variety of ways, from stripping and beating him on a public street to raping his wife and making her his mistress. Tommi’s decision that his salvation lies in total submission proves to be a fatal one, for there is no vile act that the landlord will not carry out with the help of his servant. But the story’s predictability becomes an asset rather than a liability: viewing the characters as black and white–one representing innocence, the other consummate evil–frees the viewer to appreciate the subtlety and detail with which Gopalakrishnan renders the story. (Scharres) (Pipers Alley, 5:00)
The Silences of the Palace
One of the best films to hit the festival circuit this year, Tunisian director Moufida Tlatli’s The Silences of the Palace uses a story-telling technique that emphasizes unforced observation, drawing the viewer into the flashbacks of Alia, a careworn singer who relives scenes from her childhood while visiting the palace where she was born 26 years earlier. The daughter of a kitchen maid, Alia is raised in a uniquely communal way by a contingent of female servants, yet she senses early on that she is not entirely one of them. Fatherless, she longs to be singled out for privilege at the same time that she fears it. Her feelings vacillate between pride and shame when her beautiful mother is regularly required to dance for the prince’s guests, and with a child’s simplicity she strains to understand why. The story is integrated into a larger, complex picture of the give-and-take between all-powerful rulers and those they command, an ancient relationship and a special world that the film lets us know is soon to fall. The film’s greatest strength and beauty come from its depiction of the lives of the palace women; all the behind-the-scenes merriment, daily rituals, and camaraderie make this not a polemic on third world feudalism but a drama about the growth of a woman whose life is marked by both great strength and tragic abuse. (Scharres) (Fine Arts, 7:00)
Red
Red, which closes Krzysztof Kieslowski’s magnificent “Tricolor” trilogy in magisterial fashion, may well be the only film successfully shot from the point of view of Fate. As might be expected, Fate paints in gratifyingly sweeping strokes: the heroine’s pensive face on a chewing-gum billboard ad covers an entire intersection, and the looked-down-upon perambulations of two characters who loop and glide around each other without quite meeting make for an exhilarating ride. She (Irene Jacob) is a model in love with an Englishman with whom she has long, awkward phone conversations, while he’s a law student in love with a blond who does “personalized” weather reports over the phone. That their respective significant others are a twit and a bimbo, unworthy of their love, is an inescapable and probably unfair conclusion. But one of the liberating advantages of a fate’s-eye point of view is that fairness has nothing to do with it. Perhaps no one understands this better than the character to whom our heroine is led when she runs over and then has to care for his dog–a retired judge (played, in authoritatively seamy fashion, by Jean-Louis Trintignant) who electronically eavesdrops on his neighbors and may or may not embody fate on earth. If Kieslowski retires after this film, as he has stated he will, he couldn’t have chosen a better swan song. (RS) (Fine Arts, 9:15)
The Cow
Karel Kachyna’s feature from the Czech Republic focuses on a love story between two social outcasts–the illegitimate son of a prostitute, who tries to keep his syphilitic mother alive by selling the family cow, and a younger prostitute from the same village. (JR) (Pipers Alley, 1:00)
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Dutch filmmaker Sonia Herman Dolz’s quasi documentary is an improbably charming rumination on the mystique of Spanish bullfighting. Focusing primarily on one season in the meteoric career of 20-year-old sensation Enrique Ponce, Dolz moves adroitly back and forth between the arena and the various preparations that go on “backstage” before the fights. With almost fetishistic intensity, the film (featuring some lovely cinematography by Ellen Kuras) captures the ritualistic fervor that permeates every aspect of the fight, from the selection of cows for breeding purposes to the suiting up of the bullfighter to the manic ticket selling that goes on outside the arena. As the film’s title implies, this is a highly romanticized view of bullfighting; the footage is interspersed with set pieces designed to highlight the mythic aspects of the fight, and all the talk about what a manly and virtuous “sport” it is is hard to take seriously when you see just how stacked the deck is against the bull. Still, the film does a wonderful job of capturing the essence of the Spanish culture’s love of the bullfight. A word of caution: the movie is quite graphic in its depiction of the bloodletting, so I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re squeamish or offended by the whole idea. (RP) (Music Box, 1:00)
The Golden Ball
A French/Guinean coproduction directed by Cheik Doukoure about a penniless 12-year-old soccer whiz from the West African provinces who runs away to the city, joins a famous French soccer team, and then has to decide whether or not to return home. (JR) (Pipers Alley, 3:00)
Dallas Doll
This is much too goofy to qualify as an absolute success, but it’s so unpredictable, irreverent, and provocative that you may not care. Australian writer-director Ann Turner has a lot on her mind, and it’s unlikely you’ll be able to plot out many of her quirky moves in advance. Imagine Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (with Sandra Bernhard in the Terence Stamp part–she seduces most members of a bourgeois Australian family, and enough other country-club notables to wind up as mayor) crossed with Repo Man and you’ll get some notion of the cascading audacity. This is a satire about foreign invasion in which America (in the form of Bernhard, a spiritual “golf guru”), then Japan, and finally extraterrestrials in a spaceship all turn up to claim the land down under as their own. Along the way are delightfully incoherent dream sequences, bouts of strip miniature golf, some hilarious lampooning of the new-age mentality, and my favorite performance by a dog this year. Incidentally, Bernhard herself despises this movie and has been trashing it wherever she goes, but I liked it as well as or better than many of her routines. (JR) Running on the same program is Universal Appliance Co., a short by Australian Andrew Lancaster. (Pipers Alley, 5:00)
