The Reader’s guide to the European Union Film Festival
Over the past-two-decades the European Union Film Festival, presented by the Gene Siskel Film Center, has become a serious rival to the Chicago International Film Festival and a spring counterweight to CIFF’s annual blowout in October. The EU fest may lack the racial diversity and global reach of CIFF, but its programming is just as ambitious if not more so. The 19th edition of the European Union Film Festival opens Friday and runs for four weeks, with 62 new features and numerous personal appearances. Following are some of the highlights, but there’s much more; for a complete schedule visit siskelfilmcenter.org. — J. R. JONES
RLOLO Julie Delpy ( Before Sunset) directed and stars in this crass but quick- witted comedy ( 2015), which might have been titled French Women of a Certain Age. A prickly Parisian (Delpy), vacationing with her outspoken girlfriend (Karen Viard) in a seaside town, gets involved with a local beach bum (Danny Boon). What begins as a typical rom-com takes a left turn, however, with the arrival of Lolo, the Delpy character’s bizarre college-age son, whose attempts to get rid of the suitor grow more elaborate and implausible. Smarter than most Apatow clones, this is an infinitely quotable riot, especially when Delpy and Viard share the screen. In French with subtitles. — ADAM MORGAN 99
min. Sun 3/13, 3 PM, and Thu 3/17, 6 PM.
RNO HOME MOVIE Chantal Akerman’s final film shares some formal concerns with her earlier works; what sets it apart is a stream of love and yearning, regret and loss, from which painful memories resurface. Akerman ( who died in 2015) said
that she prepared for her 1975 masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080
Bruxelles by closely observing her homemaker mother for decades, and indeed this 2015 documentary about the last years of her mother, Natalia, reveals an extraordinarily warm, intimate bond between parent and globetrotting daughter. Long takes of the Israeli desert, paralleled with long takes of empty rooms in Natalia’s apartment, suggest her sense of dislocation as a Holocaust survivor, a condition she struggles to verbalize in her kitchen with a daughter who probes for more. The combination of memoir and abstraction is both cerebral and heartrending. In French with subtitles. — ANDREA GRONVALL 115 min. Sat
3/19, 3:30 PM.
RONE FLOOR BELOW Rudimentary settings, a scoreless soundtrack, and extended takes all locate this Romanian feature squarely within the “new wave” of the aughts, but the story is pure Hitchcock: In the stairwell of an apartment building, a phleg- matic family man (Teodor Corban) overhears the attractive woman in the unit below his clashing with a married man from across the street ( Iulian Postelnicu) and shortly thereafter she’s found dead. (In a creepy shot from an upper landing, the father comes home to crime-scene tape across her door.) Unwilling to get involved, the witness keeps mum during a police interview, but then the suspect neighbor uses his friendship with the man’s son to insinuate himself into the family’s home. Writer-director Radu Muntean ( Tues
day, After Christmas) occupies his characters with trivial matters—the neighbor offers his tech-geek expertise to the son and presses the father for help with a car registration— but the weirdly ambiguous conflict between the two men eventually comes to a boil. Alexandru Baciu and Razvan Radulescu collaborated with Muntean on the script. In Romanian with subtitles. — J. R. JONES 93 min. Sun 3/20, 5: 30
PM, and Thu 3/24, 6 PM.
RTHE PARADISE SUITE For this 2015 drama from the Netherlands, writer- director Joost van Ginkel interweaves the stories of a Bosnian mother, the Serbian war criminal she’s tracking, the Bulgarian model he kidnaps and casts in a sex show, the African immigrant who performs with her, the Swedish conductor who watches them at a tony brothel, and his son (Erik Adelöw in a brilliant debut), a 10-yearold pianist, who spies the Bosnian woman by chance. Music from the conductor’s rehearsal accompanies a masterly montage that lends common pathos to unconnected
acts around the city; ultimately the film’s medley of interpersonal crises widens into a moving vista of modern Europe. Subtitled.
— BILL STAMETS 118 min. Screens on Friday as part of the opening-night program, with a reception after the film. Actor Issaka Sawadogo attends both screenings. Fri 3/4, 6 PM, and Sat 3/5, 8 PM.
RPHANTOM BOY In this moving 2015 animation by Alain Gagnol and JeanLoup Felicioli ( A Cat in Paris), a young cancer patient with the power to leave his body helps a cop whose legs have been broken bring down a criminal mastermind holding New York City hostage. Able to fly anywhere invisibly, but unable to touch anything, the boy acts as a spy for the cop, who’s been marginalized by the force for his reckless methods, and as a guide to the enterprising journalist also trying to save the city from the gangster. The noirish plotline is smart and engaging, but this French film is most powerful for its treatment of the young hero’s illness; in one scene he uses his supernatural ability to eavesdrop on his family as they discuss him. In French with subtitles. — ERIC LUTZ 84 min.
Thu 3/31, 6:30 PM.
RVIVA A young, gay hairdresser (Héctor Medina) who styles wigs for a drag troupe in a Havana nightclub starts supplementing his meager income by taking to the stage himself, but just as he’s discovering the joys of performance, his longabsent father ( Jorge Perugorría) is released from prison, moves in, and forbids him to go near the club. Irish director Paddy Breathnach and screenwriter Mark O’Halloran tell a familiar coming-of-age story in an unfamiliar setting—beautiful, crumbling, time-frozen Cuba. The grinding poverty of the characters, who barter, borrow, and steal to make ends meet, becomes a backdrop to the central story of an alienated father and son trying to connect. Sentimentality creeps into the closing scenes, undermining the film’s tough-minded realism, but Breathnach and O’Halloran show a real affinity for life in Cuba, a land, like their own, where people see better opportunities overseas. In Spanish with subtitles. R, 100 min.
— MARILYN FERDINAND O’Halloran attends the screenings. Sun 3/13, 5 PM, and Mon 3/14, 6 PM.
RA WAR Tobias Lindholm— whose gripping thriller A Hijacking ( 2012) detailed tense negotiations between Somali pirates and Danish shipping executives over a hijacked vessel— brings his exacting, clinical approach to this tale of Danish military forces in Afghanistan. Like the earlier film, this one is divided between two distinct worlds with different power dynamics: for the first half, Lindholm cuts from a company commander (Pilou Asbaek), stationed in Helmand province and charged with protecting innocent Afghanis from the Taliban, to his wife (Tuva Novotny), worrying about him and struggling to care for their small children. Only in the second half, after the commander is accused of war crimes and returns home to stand trial, do these two worlds merge and their respective realities clash, with sobering results. In Danish with subtitles. — J. R. JONES
R, 115 min. Fri 3/25, 6 PM, and Sat 3/26, 8 PM. v