Talking Screens, June 30-July 6, 2023: “Revoir Paris” Glistens | Black Women Heroes of Sci-Fi | Christopher Nolan Redux

Harrison Ford in “Indiana Jones And The Dial of Destiny,” effacing his age

Talking Screens, A Week In Chicago Film, June 30-July 6, 2023

The Siskel Film Center is closed on NASCAR race days July 1-2 and poor air quality from the Quebec wildfires could also persist citywide; check with other movie venues for possible schedule changes.

Jamie Lee Curtis in “The Bear,” facing her character’s age

Two important serials in a single week, the fifth Saturday morning thrill ride, “Indiana Jones And The Title I Can Hardly Bear To Type,” and “The Bear.” “The Bear,” which exceeds all expectations in its depiction of work, service and lingering grief across its ten episodes, took a few months of production in Chicago in the late winter of 2022 and early 2023, while “IJ5,” as the photo files call it, from first release date to last, stretches across just over forty-two-years. Our review of the disappointing fifth “Indiana Jones” production is here.

Also opening: “EVERY BODY,” Julie Cohen’s documentary on the lives of three intersex people. “Woven into the story is a stranger-than-fiction case of medical abuse, featuring exclusive footage from the NBC News archives, which helps explain the modern-day treatment of intersex people.” Opens Friday, June 30 at River East, Newcity, Landmark Century and AMC Evanston.

“Revoir Paris”

Alice Winocour’s “Revoir Paris” works from a fictionalized version of the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks on the Bataclan rock venue. Virginie Efira, who took the 2023 César Award for best actress, plays a Parisian woman who walked out of the rain into gunfire and a lifetime of grief. Her pain is palpable in each instant, especially within the story’s complications. The city glistens even as trauma persists and fragments memory: personal damage eddies, caught with grace in many moments by Winocour. Opens Friday, June 30 at Siskel.

“Matthias & Maxime”

Québécois director Xavier Dolan (“I Killed My Mother,” “Laurence Anyways”) moves into his thirties with “Matthias & Maxime” (2019), getting its first Chicago theatrical showing. “Two childhood best friends are asked to share a kiss for the purposes of a student short film. Lingering doubt sets in, confronting both of them with their preferences, threatening the brotherhood of their social circle, and, eventually, changing their lives.” MUBI presents Reeling Pride Film Showcase, Chicago Filmmakers, Friday, June 30, 7pm.

Repertory highlights (see below): “Nashville“; “Raging Bull“; “Babe: Pig In The City,” Music Box, Saturday, July 1-Sunday, July 2; “Dunkirk“; “Inception“; “Car Wash” (35mm), Doc Films, Friday, June 30, 7pm; Saturday, July 1, 4pm; Robert Altman’s “Come Back To The Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean,” in a newly configured DCP, Drafthouse, Wednesday, July 5, 7:30pm.; Mizoguchi’s timeless masterpiece, “Ugetsu“; and Albert Brooks’ “Lost In America” (35mm) presented by drummer-comedian Jon Wurster. Music Box, Monday, July 3, 7pm.

CHICAGO SEEN

“We Can Be Sheroes” is a presentation at FACETS celebrating Black women heroes of sci-fi, joining with Color Comics for a night of curated screenings and a panel discussion about Black superstars of sci-fi, including: Sonequa Martin-Green, Aunjanue Ellis and Jo Martin. “What can a time lord, a Starfleet officer and a housewife who travels through time and space tell us about depictions of Black women in modern sci-fi? Stick around after the show to find out.” Details at the link. FACETS, Friday, June 30, 6-9:30pm.

REPERTORY & REVIVALS

“Raging Bull”

A new 4K restoration of Martin Scorsese’s 1980 “Raging Bull” plays selected dates at Siskel. I asked screenwriter Paul Schrader around the turn of the century about an aspect of his reputation.

Is it a matter of having concerns that are too arcane, we’re not talking intelligence, are we, too smart for the room? Is that what we’re talking about? Yeah. Look, they like to use the word, “dark.” Y’know, that is the equivalent of the “f” word in Hollywood! Call me a motherfucker, call me a cocksucker, just don’t call me “dark”! Because as soon as you’re called dark, you can be dismissed. If a script comes up, or an idea comes up and everybody’s talking about it in the room and that one person says, “Well, I think it’s a little dark,” and everybody goes, “Oooookay!” [big laugh] On to the next idea! What they mean by dark is inherently serious. They use the word dark ‘cos it’s more pejorative, but what they’re really talking about is, it’s a little too serious. Y’know, you can translate that as being intellectual, but it’s just not quite trivial enough. Now, that doesn’t mean they only make trivial movies, they do make serious movies, but there are fewer and fewer. If you look at a calendar of last year’s films, you can probably pick out the serious films on both your hands. There was a period twenty years ago where half the films or a third of the films that came out were serious films. So it has changed. Siskel, opens Friday, June 30.

“Nashville”

Robert Altman was a conversational wiseacre. He liked to say he knew only one way to conclude the long, winding river of a movie and its tributaries: not just death, but sudden death. (Pity poor Barbara Jean in “Nashville.”) I grew up on a couple-acre patch of green amid rolling farmland in the west of Kentucky—I spent eighteen years there one week, the tired joke goes—and didn’t grow up with movies. I grew up among people. People who talked. And talked. Stories were everywhere. Histories were spoken aloud. Women and men in their eighties and nineties who had sat on the lap of Civil War veterans when they were small. Legacies were alive. Everyone knows and trusts implicitly the basic, indispensable relationships and alliances and mutual associations in a town of a thousand. You’re forced to, through fires, floods, illness, economic slumps. Cemeteries were filled with the names of people you knew who were the successors of the passed. A dozen identical headstones would answer to the same name. One night, young, I saw both “Nashville” on a big screen and “The 400 Blows,” uncut, Janus Films logo and all, on late-night TV. My first exposure, on 35mm to “Nashville” after driving miles and miles from Kentucky north of the Ohio River shared another movie that personally epochal night; only a few hours later, I saw a late-late-night showing of François Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” on the PBS channel in Evansville, Indiana. Radical endings, both. Beginnings for me. There was a path in the darkness ahead, like through the thicket across the way. Stories—movies—still hold weight for me in the smaller, smallest details, such as every aspect of the final, chilling, thrilling shot of “Nashville”: hope under a vast blue sky, under a huge and rippling American flag. Brute, sensational, heart-stopping. Doc Films, Friday, June 30, 4pm; Saturday, July 1, 7pm.

“Inception”

“Oppenheimer” is about to detonate alongside “Barbie,” so there’s a couple of Christopher Nolan pictures at Drafthouse. “Inception” is a hall of mirrors of artistic allusions in the form of a heist thriller that takes place in the space of sleep. The intricate carpentry and lacquering of “The Dark Knight” director’s filmmaking shines when you see it a second time: craftsmanship has pleasures, if not limitless mystery. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dom Cobb assembles a dream team of experts, in the best tradition of heist thrillers, to commit an anti-heist in the dreams of a powerful man: inserting themselves into his subconscious and leaving behind a powerful suggestion. Like Alain Resnais’ aggressive mind loop, “Last Year at Marienbad,” “Inception” circles memories of a past love, which may or may not be “true.” Memory is fallible, dreams are malleable. Like a dream, “Inception” is a Sargasso of esthetic detritus and “paradoxical architecture.” The screenplay’s fractures are both tectonic and architectural. Start by thinking of Philip K. Dick with yuppies instead of hippies. Michael Mann, certainly, the snappy garments of his films echoed in Jeffrey Kurland’s luxurious costumes, as well as a Los Angeles intersection that resembles the site of the epic cops-vs.-robbers of “Heat” (a crossing marked Wilshire and Hope here; Figueroa between Fourth and Fifth in Mann’s film). Kurland’s sleek rags are of a costly moment, post-Jean-Pierre Melville mantles of suits and trench coats and fabrics that have never been in the same room with a polyester blend. Drafthouse, Sunday, July 2, Noon.

“Dunkirk”

Experiential or experimental? “Dunkirk” is arc and fury, geometric action within a watery field of battle, an amphitheater of limitless sky, a sensorium that language, spoken, written language need not enter. Christopher Nolan speaks of his joy in taking this tack: “Telling the story primarily pictorially and through sound and music rather than having people talk about who they are and where they’re from—that was very attractive to me.” Time collapses. There is the presence of fright, the adrenalized now. The soldiers and volunteers in “Dunkirk” fear the unseen, the unspoken. Fear without a face. No politicos, no Jerrys. Menace assembles lavishly cheekboned and becurled men, epicene, nearly ephebic. The knitwear is epic, faultless, hyper-real, the camera knowing desire of texture of that wool that heightens the beauty of young skin. Their cheeks are smooth, clear of grime and hair. Not models, but a sea of faces that become a blur of a single type of face—not one man or another, but men, these men at war, the best of youth tossed into the tempest of war. This blur of beauty is idealized and horrible. Fear felt. All sensation from drench to scorch is fear-inducing, the mortal hug of the will to survive. Land, sea, endless sky, relentless fire, water, water, drowning water, submerging, subsuming, deadly, drowning water. Drafthouse, Saturday July 1, 11am.

“Ugetsu”

“While Kenji Mizoguchi’s reputation had been firmly established in the Japanese film industry by the early 1950s, it was the string of films that he directed in the five or so years before his death in 1956 that would cement his legacy with cinephiles worldwide,” introduces Chicago Film Society’s Cameron Worden. “Key among these was ‘Ugetsu,’ a genre-defying supernatural romance that would afford the director perhaps the most creative freedom of his career. Unfolding in a series of lengthy shots seemingly unbound by gravity (cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa claimed that seventy percent of the film was shot using a camera crane), ‘Ugetsu‘ has endured as one of cinema’s greatest ghost stories in large part due to how Mizoguchi’s imagery transforms otherwise mundane scenes into something ineffable and otherworldly.” Chicago Film Society at NEIU, Wednesday, July 5, 7:30pm.