European Union Film Festival Week One
Every March, for the past 14 years, the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, Illinois brings a wide variety of new films from around Europe during the European Union Film Festival. This year’s festival has films from 27 countries and 65 Midwestern premiers. Each week of the festival, I will bring a few select reviews from the schedule’s diverse selections.
BURKE & HARE (United Kingdom), directed by John Landis
If I told you there was a comedy/horror film directed by John Landis and starring the likes of Simon Pegg, Andy Serkis, Tim Curry and Tom Wilkinson, I would assume you’d be interested. Though Burke & Hare certainly doesn’t meet the heights of those involved, it is a fun, quirky film worth seeing with lowered expectations. The film follows William Burke (Simon Pegg) and William Hare (Andy Serkis), two down-and-out con-men who find out they can make pretty good money selling freshly dead bodies to the medical schools in Edinburgh. Not surprisingly, when nearby natural deaths don’t create enough supply to meet growing demands, Burke and Hare have to take the problem into their own hands.
Even if Burke & Hare is lesser John Landis, it is John Landis none-the-less. Grotesque images mixed with very silly humor may be unappealing to many, it worked for me in a very base way. Landis has always been on the cutting edge of horror effects and while there isn’t a lot of opportunity to be flashy, the body effects are top notch. Overall, the production design does a good job of presenting this fantastic version of 1800’s Scotland, which is important in giving this film any success. The cast is also particularly strong, led by the always accountable Pegg and equally good Andy Serkis (it really is a treat to actually see him in something when he’s not in the form of an ape, or a bigger ape, or whatever Gollum is). Hell, even Isla Fisher is better than I’ve ever remembered her being.
Really, to say the humor is silly is a bit of an understatement — when most of the comedy comes from trying to fit a dead person into a herring barrel or botched attempts at killing old women, there isn’t a lot of room for nuance. But it’s tough to expect much more from Landis, whose comedic sense has never really been all that sophisticated — I mean, his most important comedic moments are two men in suits driving a car through a mall and a 40-year-old looking college student pretending he’s a zit. Thus, Landis is definitely in his stride and the performers seem to be having a whole lot of fun in this grotesque world.
Burke & Hare is never going to be considered a classic, and nor should it be. It is worth seeing though, on its own terms, as an enjoyable little silly romp.
COUSINHOOD (Spain), directed by Daniel Sánchez Arévalo)
You can add Cousinhood (Primos) to the list of cutesy romantic comedies to come out of Europe over the past few years. It is brightly colored, quickly paced, full of likable characters dealing with issues like infidelity, alcoholism, prostitution, the horrors of war and mental illness — but never too seriously (yes, this really is a comedy). While its handling of quite serious problems in such a light manner has its drawbacks, most will be too delighted to care.
At the beginning of the film, we meet Diego as he tells the story of his fiance unexpectedly leaving him. After a lot of drinking and crying with his two cousin buddies, he comes up with the plan to leave Madrid for his small hometown, find his first sweetheart and decry his undying love. Simultaneously, Diego’s two cousins (one a potentially mentally challenged and sickly former war hero and the other a socially arrested man-child playboy) redeem themselves through random encounters. At this core, it’s a pretty simple romantic plot that we’re used to seeing. I’ll admit, Cousinhood gains from being European — my simple American being finds it as much more sophisticated than Spanish audiences probably would. To me, though, it’s on the level with the sillier comedies of François Ozon (Potiche, Ricky) and films like Pascal Chaumeil’s Heartbreaker.
Still, it’s hard to dislike a film so charming, yet silly, with so many likable (albeit simply drawn) characters. It nicely uses its Spanish roots, mixing in some good melodrama for effect — at one point, the film name-checks Pedro Almodóvar, which may be slightly blasphemous, but you can definitely see the influence. Whether the characters are slipping into silly hijinks, crying about lost loves or figuring out their problems through karaoke versions of popular 1990s pop songs, it coherently mixes the semi-tragic with the humorous.
If you tend to like romantic comedies but wish they cared more about being funny than romantic, Cousinhood will probably work for you. If you are looking for a film that nails the romantic beats, look elsewhwere, as the film doesn’t spend a lot of time or effort to convince you why these characters are in love or why we should even care. Like most bad Hollywood rom-coms, the people are all ungodly pretty, so let’s just let that be. From the very first scene, though, Daniel Sánchez Arévalo deftly uses visual jokes, references and situational comedy. And the comedic moments are greatly aided by an always light and frothy tone and genuinely likable characters.
ELLES (Poland/France), directed by Malgorzata Szumowska
This year at the European Union Film Festival, there was something known only as “Sneak Preview” — a film which couldn’t be named, only identified as being from a Polish director, 96 minutes in length and featuring a “major French star.” Since I figured they wouldn’t go through so much pomp and circumstance if this wasn’t a pretty interesting film, I decided to jump into it blindly.
Turns out the special advanced screening was for a film called Elles, to be released in the U.S. later this year. The film stars Juliette Binoche (is there really any other “major French star” these days?) as a journalist for Elle Magazine who is writing a feature profiling two young prostitutes. As a Juliette Binoche vehicle, it is about what you would expect — she is stunning, natural and full of emotion. As a film about a profile of young prostitutes, it is about what you would expect — a “modern” look at the “misunderstood” profession that isn’t as bad as most people would think, but really probably isn’t worth its benefits.
Besides Binoche’s performance (as strong as ever), Elles also boasts a very interesting narrative, told in a complex-but-not-confusing way. Essentially the film takes place over one day, though is filled with scenes of Binoche interviewing her subjects and their sexual encounters on the job. There are no apparent connective threads through the narrative, though, so it is impossible to place the scenes as they are happening and are equally complex in perspective — there is no real indication if these are scenarios as they happened, as they were described to Binoche or something she takes bits and pieces of and creates from her own imagination. This narrative strikes a wonderful balance of being challenging without pretentious or overly-opaque.
Still, Elles is reminiscent of other films that are just better, which is always a tough hill to climb. One great example is the recent French film House of Pleasures, which is infinitely more fascinating as a study of Parisian prostitutes, their sexual exploits and their sometimes banal lives. While the scenes of prostitution are often tense and difficult to watch, the set-up of the plot does make our two young prostitutes into little more than a plot device and comparison to our less intriguing main character. By the end of the film, we realize we haven’t really learned much about them as true characters and that their haunting situations aren’t nearly as important as how our main character deals with her unloving husband and slacker teenage son. Elles also tries to call on Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, another comparison it just can’t win. Right down to extensive scenes of cooking and housework, Elles tries very hard to bring together the mundane life of a middle-class housewife with the more exotic, exciting life of a prostitute, but this thematic juxtaposition falls flat. These two specific films (along with others which tackle these subjects) are ultimately able to explore these themes without being derivative of other films. Unfortunately, Elles is not.