Talking Screens, A Week In Chicago Film, November 3-9, 2023

Latest reviews include “Priscilla,” “Divinity,” “Quiz Lady,” “The Persian Version” and “Fingernails.” Repertory & Revival highlights include “Cooley High,” “Strange Days,” 1923 silent “The Vibrant Shawl,” David Lynch’s dazzling dud “Dune,” “Dazed And Confused,” a Chicago Filmmakers anniversary salute to the pioneering film festival Blacklight, and Wakefield Poole’s “Take One.”

The twenty-ninth Black Harvest Film Festival takes over the Siskel Film Center November 3-16. “Revolutionary Visions” is the 2023 theme; the whole calendar is here. (Our interview with Black Harvest festival coordinator-curator Nick Leffel and curator Jada-Amina is here.)

The Children’s International Film Festival marks its fortieth yr at FACETS, featuring recent animation, live-action and documentary movies for audiences ages two to eighteen and beyond.

The 2023 free Doc Chicago mini-conference opens with “A Conversation with Gordon Quinn,” featuring Kartemquin Movies co-founder Gordon Quinn: filmmaker, fair-use advocate, and mentor to generations of makers of nonfiction. Filmmaker and educator Dinesh Sabu (“Unbroken Glass”) will talk with Quinn, and include clips from rarely screened early Kartemquin Movies. Doc Chicago is a free, volunteer-run mini-conference that continues on Saturday November 4 with documentary panels and talks on the Cultural Center. Full schedule here. The free Gordon Quinn event is Friday, November 3, 7pm, Chicago Cultural Center, Claudia Cassidy Theater. RSVP here.

“Beguiled” may very well be the title of just about any of Sofia Coppola’s eight features: a figure’s fixations and fascinations are going to be caught in offhand, decorative fashion of great specificity, and on this instance, inside an insistent haze like a memory of an heirloom.

Still, each of those visual and aural elements is wealthy with deliberation and vibrates with suggestiveness. Certainly one of the oddest elements of the somber, muted “Priscilla,” not less than partially a fairytale a few princess trapped in a castle, is that her prince Elvis, Jacob Elordi, is six-foot-five and her Priscilla, Cailee Spaeny, is just over five feet tall, accentuating the fairytale at a look. The one mention of size is in a scene where Elvis and his posse watch Priscilla try on outfits: “You’re a small girl, baby, you bought to steer clear of prints,” Elordi says in his chosen mutter-mumble-murmur. “I got this for you,” we hear Elvis say, then see a hand lay a pearl-handled pistol laid upon a gown.

Those are typical of the flat affect of “Priscilla”‘s funniest lines, within the form of David Lynch, or more pointedly, the Terrence Malick who made “Badlands,” a portrait of an outsider pairing of an older “bad boy” and a teen girl. Coppola pointedly quotes at an apposite moment essentially the most familiar piece of music utilized in “Badlands,” Pachelbel’s Canon in D Minor.

Most of “Priscilla” functions as cool collage, and blooms with even cursory knowledge of their doomed relationship. Yet knowledge is just not required: all of the steps from discovery by a friend of Elvis in a German snack shop to her departure upon her divorce, to an unknown, unmoored future, are established with elliptical grace. It’s like lyrics.

Still, moments are offered in iconic form, as when ninth-grade Priscilla sits with a book and an emptied bottle of Coca-Cola when she’s seen: unapologetically pictured as a baby, a tiny odalisque in Elvis’ eye, and hardly the Coke-toting nymphet of the “Lolita” movies by Kubrick and Adrian Lyne.

Coppola’s opening image is telling: Priscilla’s bare feet with toes painted crimson, cross white shag carpeting, tempting, sinking. As is the location of her credit as writer-director, following a glimpse of a chandelier overhead: let me describe the luxe, let me assay the fug.

It’s a life occluded by a Sun: even when Priscilla writes his name in a spiral notebook in school, we only see a part of the word “Elvis.” The vibrations are elemental, just like the moment at a celebration when Elvis is banging through Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and the liquid in a glass atop the piano ripples just like the glass of water within the Three Mile Island power plant in “The China Syndrome.”

Coppola avoids the trimmings of Graceland that may be familiar to someone who’s visited once (twice, 3 times), from TV screens to monkey statuary. His Memphis Mafia (and their wives) are the set dressing. It is a cloistered castle with no turret: Priscilla is suggested to remain out of sight of fans on the gate in any respect cost.

“I’m at all times occupied with the fantasy and the truth of what looks like one thing, looks ideal, after which the truth of that,” Coppola said earlier this week in a virtual interview. “Perhaps growing up across the film business, I see different sides. So I don’t have a more realistic view of what that could be like. It looks like such a fairytale on the skin. After which to listen to the struggles that she went through, it’s under no circumstances what you expect. There’s this concept in our culture that the celebrity and wealth will make you completely happy, and it’s only a reality that it comes with an entire other set of bags. I’m at all times occupied with the combination of fantasy and reality. Just starting along with her feet sinking into the carpet, I hope gets the audience into the concept that we’re going to experience this through her shoes and thru her eyes.” “Priscilla” opens in theaters Friday, November 3.

Alexander Payne (“Election”) is back after years within the wilderness, and he’s got Paul Giamatti in “The Holdovers” (35mm) in a Nineteen Seventies-set holiday parable featuring a shitty private school teacher and a student he reluctantly takes under wing. Opens Friday, November 3 at the Music Box.

Illustrating a theorem, sketching a notion: true love can now be determined by technology within the second feature from Greek director-writer-producer Christos Nikou (“Apples”). “Fingernails” stars Jessie Buckley, Riz Ahmed, Jeremy Allen White and Luke Wilson in a giddily visual neighborhood meet-up of the Greek weird wave (the movies of Yorgos Lanthimos, especially “The Lobster”) and Charlie Kaufman (“Everlasting Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind”) and Spike Jonze (“Her”). (Credits for cinematographer Marcell Rév, a new-generation master of color temperatures and contrast, include the series “Euphoria,” “White God” and “Jupiter’s Moon”). The first protagonists of the elongated love triangle are the ineffable Buckley and the ever-charming Ahmed. Nikou stays strange on this swatch of right-now-futurism, but additionally expands on his vocabulary of crunchy yet seductive imagery from “Apples.” Admittedly, the movie’s got more eye candy than red corpuscles. In limited release and on Apple TV+ starting Friday, November 3.

Immortality may very well be just across the corner in Eddie Alcazar’s “Divinity,” a spasmodic eyeful, a no-budget black-and-white experimental feature on the wages of everlasting life, executive produced by Steven Soderbergh. Respiratory with the lungs of “Eraserhead,” cradling the curiosity of Cronenberg, aiming to the celebrities of Guy Maddin, “Divinity” is an unlikely accumulation of images, a coherent-enough-to-haunt assemblage of body horror, bad dreams and crushed virtue. (It’s got a number of the cumulative weight of a movie like Phil Tippett’s “Mad God” or Aleksei German’s “Hard To Be A God”: you breathe where you possibly can.) Alcazar, a veteran of game design, confects a retro-futurist scheme of live motion and stop-motion to pop essentially the most reluctant of eyeballs. There’s dystopian beauty to spare for a dystopian world: living perpetually may very well be a cracked curse. Limited shows at Drafthouse, starting Friday, November 3.

A comedy in daring, candied colours and spirited performances, Maryam Keshavarz’s “The Persian Version” sings, zings and even stings with cultural specificity. Iranian American Leila embraces each her origins and her life in Latest York City, but things exit of whack when family gathers after her father’s heart transplant. Leila mocks the family’s American immersion as “Sears family portrait and all,” but an early scene that cuts from a celebration where she climbs atop a confused partner to a handshake between Richard Nixon and Reza Pahlavi brightly encapsulates the inner landscape we’re set to explore. The opening is a daring gambit, traveling with Leila as she heads to a Halloween costume party with a surfboard, with headdress but in a neon-pink bikini, or “burkini.” Madcap dashes like that rise above the potent danger for a descent into therapeutic digression. Dance and song are elemental as Keshavarz’s third narrative feature celebrates three generations of Iranian American women, and the rating by Rostam Batmanglij bridges cultures. “As a child, I at all times longed to see the nice Iranian American immigrant film, Keshavarz writes in a director’s note. “The Italians had ‘The Godfather’ and ‘Moonstruck,’ the Asian community got ‘Joy Luck Club’ and ‘Wedding Banquet,’ South Asians have ‘The Namesake,’ even Greek Americans got ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding.’” Those portraits inspired “The Persian Version,” and as he was writing, “I used to be inspired by the intimacy and bravado of Lulu Wang’s ‘The Farewell’ and the epic mediation on Pawlikowski’s parents’ relationship in ‘Cold War.’ I made the film I at all times longed to see—one which bridges my Iranian and American worlds.” Winner of the Audience Award and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award within the U.S. Dramatic Competition at Sundance 2023. Friday, November 3 in theaters.

Jessica Yu’s “Quiz Lady” is the sort of tonally eclectic, swing-often-for-the-fences comedy tailor-made for sustaining the theatrical audience for laughter bursting from grown-up topics, so in fact it’s debuting on streaming as an alternative of on the large screen. (Ragged but enthusiastic comedies work best amongst tickled-pink strangers in the nice and cozy dark.) Coming in at a kindly ninety minutes or so, Yu, a documentarian and tv director (“Grey’s Anatomy,” “Billions,” “Fosse/Verdon,” “Citadel”) works with a succession of contrivances that mix Awkwafina and Sandra Oh as sisters, one a cosmic wreck, the opposite with dreams of quiz-show glory, who rush to cover for a mother with gambling debts. (Plus a kidnapped dog.) Physical comedy and verbal slapstick ensue with slaps at racial stereotypes and the status of sophistication in America. What’s good is healthier the closer the film involves its comic climax, and Awkwafina is a human hydroelectric complex: use all the ability you wish, there’s charge to spare. Jason Schwartzman brings dapper charm. With Paul Reubens. “Quiz Lady” streams on Hulu from Friday, November 3.

 

REPERTORY & REVIVALS

“Cooley High” (35mm), the seminal Black coming-of-age drama set within the Sixties at a faculty in Chicago is the Music Box matinee. Filmmaker Michael Schultz looks back with Reggie Ugwu at the New York Times. “The editor of a movie I’d done, ‘Together for Days’ (1972) [a kind of gender-swapped, post-civil rights-era update of ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’], connected me with the producer Steve Krantz. He had met the author, Eric Monte, they usually had a script based on all of those incredible stories Eric had from growing up within the Cabrini Green [housing project] of Chicago. However the script wasn’t really a script—it was still mostly just stories. So I met with Eric for seven or eight hours a day for 4 weeks. Every night, me and my wife [Gloria Schultz] would cut every thing down until we had the finished script… It had this perfect dramatic twist within the death of a friend that sends the essential character off to pursue his dreams. That basically happened to Eric. And I believed it may very well be a window into the lives of Black kids that had never been seen before. My theory was that if it was as culturally specific as possible, and as Black as possible, it could translate across the racial divide and folks would fall in love with these kids and their humanity.” Music Box, Saturday-Sunday, November 4-5, 11:30am.

Mary Astor, Edward G. Robinson and William Powell “playing a colourful Spanish villain,” made their screen debuts within the 1923 “The Vibrant Shawl” (35mm): Richard Barthelmess plays “a wealthy American adventurer twisted up with Cuban resistance to Spanish rule within the 1850s. Caught between Andalusian dancer La Clavel (Dorothy Gish) and Spanish loyalist spy La Pilar (Jetta Goudal), Abbott finds himself throwing in with the rebels, putting himself and the patriotic Escobar clan in grave danger.” Chicago Film Society, Music Box, Monday, November 6, 7pm.

Wakefield Poole’s seminal 1977 “docufantasy” “Take One” invited “a bunch of real gay men to live out their deepest sexual fantasies for the camera… A love letter to each San Francisco’s gay community and to the magic of cinema itself, it is a hidden gem of Nineteen Seventies queer cinema and documentary filmmaking.” Music Box, Sunday, November 5, 9:30pm.

Who’s seen David Lynch’s “Dune” on the large screen? The 1984 disappointment that presaged Dino De Laurentiis’ kindly apology in the shape of giving Lynch $6 million or so and final cut to craft “Blue Velvet” and turbocharged Lynch’s determination to manage his profession? Here’s your probability to witness some inexplicably weird stuff near the size it was intended, plus a younger Patrick Stewart with a pug. Drafthouse, Saturday, November 4, noon.

A thirtieth-anniversary showing of “Dazed And Confused” features a Jack Black-moderated pre-recorded Zoom conversation with filmmaker Richard Linklater and a few of his teeming solid from his leisurely Renoiresque coming-of-comedy-age hang that reflects multiple eras, not limited to its setting and the 1993 time of its release. Drafthouse, Wednesday, November 8, 2:20pm.

Violent, vivid, virtual and vitally viscid, Kathryn Bigelow’s errant 1995 Y2K-set thriller “Strange Days” (35mm) holds notions about racism, representation and the point-of-view of cinematic violence that remain charged today. From a screenplay by James Cameron and Jay Cocks. The neural drench of the electronic-driven rating continues to be powerful. “Bodies confused/Memories misused,” indeed, Mr. Morrison. Doc Films, Thursday, November 9, 7pm.

 

CHICAGO SEEN

Chicago Filmmakers will rejoice its fiftieth anniversary with screenings and special events running through spring 2024. “The primary program on this series celebrates the Blacklight Film Festival with a special screening of Oscar Micheaux’s silent cinematic masterpiece, ‘Symbol of The Unconquered,’ accompanied by a live improvised and electronic music rating performed by saxophonist Edward Wilkerson, guitarist Jonathan Woods and synthesizer player Jim Baker. This event, a collaboration with Black Harvest Film Festival and Blacknuss Network, pays homage to the legacy of Blacklight Film Festival, a festival of international Black cinema founded in 1982 by Floyd Webb and the late Terry White Glover at Chicago Filmmakers. The Blacklight Film Festival made a major impact during its existence, contributing to the popularity of Black cinema as a significant and diverse component of worldwide filmmaking. Blacklight reached its zenith on the Film Center of the School of the Art Institute and concluded its run in 1994.” This event “not only commemorates the past but additionally serves as a testament to the enduring power of film and music to encourage, educate, and unite audiences. It embodies the essence of Blacklight Film Festival’s legacy and its commitment to celebrating diversity and innovation on the planet of cinema,” says Blacklight co-founder Floyd Webb. Tickets for the event on the Siskel Film Center here.