I suffer from completist tendencies, which made it difficult to select ten films to preview from this year’s Chicago International Film Festival. Unable to watch every film due to time and availability, I can’t say that these are the best films of the festival, but they’re ten that caught my fancy, either through an affinity for their directors or curiosity about filmmakers and subjects unknown to me.
Days A spiritual sequel of sorts to his 1997 masterpiece The River, Tsai Ming-liang’s first narrative feature since Stray Dogs (2013) returns to the real-life health problems of the director’s recurring star and collaborator Lee Kang-sheng. The film burrows into the lives of Lee and costar Anong Houngheuangsy, a young Laotian immigrant who recalls Lee from decades ago. In long sequences Lee sits ruminatively in the spartan mountaintop locale that he and Tsai share in real life, seeks medical treatment for his ailment, and wanders the streets in a neck brace; similarly languorous sequences show Anong cooking in his threadbare apartment. (Tsai didn’t shoot most of the material with a narrative in mind, instead filming his actors’ real lives and then conceiving a story out of the footage.) About halfway into the film, the two men cross paths at a hotel where they engage in sexual activity; one gleans that Anong is a sex worker and Lee his client. After their encounter, Lee gives Anong a music box that plays the theme from Chaplin’s Limelight, and the two share a meal. Like all of Tsai’s films, this communicates feelings of loneliness and alienation inherent to the human condition; but perhaps more than any other, it revels in the corporeality of Tsai’s performers, finding delicate mystery in even the most banal actions. Per an opening disclaimer, the film is intentionally unsubtitled. 127 min. Streaming only in the midwestern U.S.
There Is No Evil After he released A Man of Integrity in 2017, Iranian writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof was banned from filmmaking (which he defied to make this film) and sentenced to a year in prison; his follow-up feature considers Iran’s death penalty, focusing on those tasked with carrying it out. The film is divided into four sections, each a fable that approaches the subject from a different angle. The first and most provocative vignette follows a seemingly normal Iranian man as he goes about his day, engaging in such mundane activities as grocery shopping and helping his wife dye her hair. Rasoulof generates a certain tension in the story, which erupts in a shocking scene at the end and which sets a tone for the next three sections. These parts focus on conscripted soldiers compelled to carry out executions, and the storytelling becomes more cloying as the film progresses. It’s all very impactful, and Rasoulof elevates the moral tales to the stuff of cinema through allegorical visual compositions and reflective long takes. The content may be a bit heavy-handed at times, but Rasoulof’s style infuses the subject matter with a sense of poetry and moral reckoning that invokes age-old Persian literary traditions. In Farsi with subtitles. 150 min. Streaming only in the midwestern U.S.
