The Gene Siskel Film Center is presenting the 14th annual European Union Film Festival—its yearly cinematic cornucopia of the best of up and coming Euro films. The fest, which plays March 4-31, will present 64 films—the majority receiving their Chicago premiere—encompassing entries from 24 countries. The opening-night selection, Bibliotheque Pascal, is from Hungary and the closing night selection is The Trip, a road comedy from British director Michael Winterbottom starring Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan (who played gay in Don Roos’ Happy Endings).
In between, the EU Fest doesn’t skimp on the queer content (with last year’s series hosting Chicago’s first screening of Tilda Swinton in director Luca Guadagnino’s melodramatic masterpiece I Am Love and the moving and sexy queer coming-of-age drama House of Boys), and this year’s line-up has plenty of offerings of interest to LGBT film audiences. Lovely Mia Wasikowska, star of Alice In Wonderland, who played the teenaged daughter of lesbian couple Annette Bening and Julianne Moore, will be on hand in support of her new movie, Jane Eyre, which is having its premiere at the fest from UK director Cary Fukunaga (also in attendance) on March 6—just one of the fest’s many highlights.
The two most overtly queer films on tap are To Die Like A Man (March 12 and 16), the hard-hitting drama from queer Portuguese auteur Joao Pedro Rodrigues. It’s a portrait of an aging drag queen saddled with a lot of heavy issues as he nears the end of his life; Fernando Gomes is riveting in the title role. Equally compelling is the sensual, melodramatic Purple Sea (March 12 & 17) from Italy—a complicated lesbian romance gorgeously photographed and based on a true story. Childhood friends Angela and Sara, living on a rocky island off the coast of Sicily in the 19th century, are separated but meet up again as young women. Their intense friendship quickly turns to forbidden passion, which leads to consequences until Angela becomes Angelo—at the behest of her long-suffering mother and her tyrannical husband, who has always yearned for a son.
Tilda Swinton returns in a fanciful German documentary from director Cynthia Beatt called The Invisible Frame (March 20 & 23), in which the gay-audience fave retraces a bike journey she made along the Berlin Wall back in 1988. As she follows the same path 22 years later, the actress muses on her surroundings and the changes in the interim. It’s a philosophical travelogue, pretty and diverting, enlivened by Swinton’s participation. For a dose of heavy theatrics look no further than Applause (March 20 & 27) from Denmark, featuring a sensational performance by Paprika Steen as Thea, a recovering alcoholic stage actress whose appearance in a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? offers an ironic commentary on her offstage life as she struggles with sobriety and an attempt to reconnect with her two young sons, lost in a custody battle. Steen, a blowsy look-alike for the late Natasha Richardson, is bitchy one moment, maudlin and almost pathologically needy the next.
The EU Fest is a great place to discover films raising the bar creatively, and both Amer (March 5 & 9) from Belgium—a nearly wordless, thrilling homage to Dario Argento’s Suspiria and the Italian giallo genre—and The Arbor (March 20 & 24) from UK filmmaker Clio Barnard certainly do that. The former, a visual feast with plenty of Hitchcock-like suspense, garish colors and the gory in your face butchery the genre is famous for, is an unusual treat, while Barnard’s approach elevates what could have been yet another cautionary tale/documentary about the snuffed-out creative life of an artist immersed in excessive drugs and drink (in this case, English playwright Andrea Dunbar). But Barnard’s thrilling techniques—actors lip-syncing interviews with the actual participants, sections of Dunbar’s plays restaged in unusual ways, etc.—involve the audience in Dunbar’s rise and fall (and her checkered legacy), although this decidedly creative approach nearly overtakes the father familiar tale it imparts (A word of caution: The English accents of the participants are so thick one yearns for subtitles.)
Complete festival listings, ticket information, and up to date information on festival attendees and events can be found at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
DVD notes:
—It’s here! Burlesque, the queer-in-all-but-name pastiche musical from out producer Donald De Line and his one-time boyfriend, director Steve Antin, is also out on DVD and Blu-ray from Sony. Although the movie is, ahem, just this side of what I imagine Showgirls the Musical would be, who can resist a guilty pleasure starring the gay icon Cher, returning to the screen after a multi-year absence; diva belter and national anthem mangler Christina Aguilera (making her screen debut); hot, hot, hot, hot Cam Gigandet of Twilight fame; Alan Cumming (badly underused); and the ever-welcome Stanley Tucci (once again playing gay)? Not I. Special features include an alternate opening, alternate musical sequences, director’s commentary, a blooper reel, a historical overview of burlesque and more.
—The late bisexual director Vincente Minnelli created more masterpieces in more genres than any other director of the classic era, but he’s rarely given his due (something to do with his inherent queer sensibility perhaps?). But Minnelli also helmed several offbeat pictures as well. One of them is certainly the 1956 film version of the Broadway hit Tea & Sympathy, the heavily “coded” story of a college boy who wants to be a folk singer and is suspected of being queer by one and all. To help save him from a life of damnation as a homo, the wife of his clearly closeted football coach takes him under her wing and, in the renowned conclusion, into her bed in order to “prove” to the world that he’s no fairy! John Kerr, handsome and tortured, plays the lead and is guided by lovely Deborah Kerr as the coach’s wife. Wordy and dated, the performances and the antiquated social mores of the ’50s are worth checking out for the uninitiated. Three other films from Minnelli’s oeuvre—1955’s The Cobweb (more gay undertones), The Reluctant Debutante (1959) and Two Weeks In Another Town (1962)—are also available from the Warner Archive DVD On-Demand program.
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