Talking Screens, August 11-17, 2023: Ira Sachs Brings Sexy Back | Bobi Wine is Fine | A New Nicole Bernardi-Reis Film

“Passages”

Talking Screens, A Week In Chicago Film, August 11-17, 2023

Opening this week: “Passages“; “The Last Voyage Of The Demeter“; “Bobi Wine: The Peoples’ President“; and “With This Light.” In repertory and revival, the “Black-and-Chrome” edition of “Mad Max: Fury Road”; “Valley Girl,” “Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood” on 35mm; and “Missing.” Plus: Reeling 2023 announces its opening night attraction.

In “Passages,” Ira Sachs’ trio of characters caught up in a bisexual triangle discover the permeable borders between sensations of desire. Movies need the touch of a hand—from artists, between characters. “Passages” has that and more. German filmmaker Tomas (Franz Rogowski) has finished a new movie; at the wrap party, his husband, British graphic artist Martin (Ben Whishaw), isn’t in the mood to dance with him, and he catches sight of Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a schoolteacher whose boyfriend had worked on the picture. They dance. Boyfriend leaves, Martin leaves. They dance, they leave together, they fuck.

Sachs says “Passages” is about “love and its complexity and intimacy.” From the start of his career, Sachs has been an emperor of the cool remove: he’s a keen observer, but hardly detached. The key couple of sex scenes in “Passages” are shot in unbroken long takes that are urgent fumble and rush and finish that pin his characters, and their bodies, to the physical world, of acts, facts and intertwined figures. Tomas’ first straight fuck is also his first straight fun and he’s curious and impassioned and immediately ready to badger his partner with the latest connivance. Agathe is large eyes and monumental smile, an iconic face holding the screen, while Tomas looks like he was born in eyeliner. (One of them wears pink, pointed, frosted nails, but my notes don’t indicate whether they were his or hers.) Whishaw, too, holds and denotes his space: these are stellar performances. Sachs finds actors who fill his dramatic ellipses of his storytelling, and his central trio is no exception; they excel at simply being these characters, whether still or in tempest. (Our full review is here.) Sachs will appear at Friday night screenings. Opens Friday, August 11 at the Music Box.

“The Last Voyage of the Demeter,” directed by André Øvredal (“Troll Hunter,” “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark”), is an adaptation of “The Captain’s Log,” a chapter from Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” Opens Friday, August 11 in theaters.

“Bobi Wine: The People’s President”

Moses Bwayo and Christopher Sharp’s “Bobi Wine: The People’s President” is a portrait of courage (and outrage) that belies the rhetorical tempests of American electoral campaigns, following African superstar musician, activist, former member of parliament and opposition leader Bobi Wine and his wife, Barbie, on his campaign to end the thirty-five-year reign of brute Ugandan strongman Yoweri Museveni in the 2021 presidential election. This is retail politics: dissent and the battle for democracy move hand-to-hand as Wine’s music speaks for the people of Uganda, but not loudly enough for him. The documentary, a dynamic, disquieting portrait of what it takes to oppose authoritarianism, even at the risk of your life and that of your family, and in street warfare across the land. Opens Friday, August 11 at Siskel.

“With This Light”

“With This Light” from Laura Bermúdez and Chicago filmmaker Nicole Bernardi-Reis [Newcity Film 50 Hall of Fame], captures the example of Sister Maria Rosa Leggol, who, for over seventy years, helped over 87,000 Honduran children escape poverty. The film traces Maria and Rosa, two young women in Sister’s programs as they hope to navigate “the uncertainty and dangers of modern Honduras.”  We spoke to the directors: How has this portrait’s place in the world changed since beginning the film? 

Bernardi-Reis: We started this film in early 2019, to say it’s a different world is a huge understatement! There’s been so much trauma, so much keeping us apart, that it’s hard not to feel overwhelmed. This story is about a woman who has survived some of the darkest moments in the last hundred years of her country, and she never lost her joy or her faith in people coming together to help others. In taking the film to audiences, we’ve discovered that people are hungry for that—for a real-life example of how to face these dark times together.

Bermudez: It feels truly amazing, as a Honduran filmmaker, to see it finally coming to international audiences and connecting with people, it’s very heartwarming. The film is a narrative of hope and resilience that is universal. Opens Friday, August 11 at Wayfarer in Highland Park and on video-on-demand on August 15.

Reeling 2023’s opening night will be at the Music Box, Thursday, September 21, with a reception and screening for “The Mattachine Family,” featuring Nico Tortorella (“The Walking Dead: World Beyond”) and Juan Pablo Di Pace (“Mamma Mia!”) in a family story loosely based on the life experiences of couple director-writer Andy Vallentine and writer Danny Vallentine. It’s co-produced by Zach Braff. Tickets here.

REPERTORY & REVIVALS

“Mad Max: Fury Road”

The Music Box presents both of George Miller’s “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015): the original release and the “Black-and-Chrome” regrading, draining color but punctuating the kinetics of the proceedings. “At night we ride through the mansions of glory in suicide machines”: Bruce Springsteen’s lyric from the “Born To Run” album is but one of so, so many cultural touchstones readily cross-referenced and layered upon the layer-upon-layer construction of “Mad Max: Fury Road.” So there’s sound, percussive, restless and singular fury, but does it signify an expressionist masterpiece? Possibly. Pretty much. Okay. Okay. Yes. You have no idea how sleek yet rude, near-mute yet politically assertive a movie can be. But first, the mayhem: “We don’t defy the laws of physics: There are no flying men or cars in this movie,” then-seventy-year-old co-writer-co-producer director George Miller said of his brilliant challenge to other makers of contemporary cinema, his first live-action film in over a decade, built from 3,500 storyboards and 2,700 cuts in just shy of two hours. (1981’s “Road Warrior” had a bucolic 1,200.) This immaculately detailed, onrushing go-for-baroque manifesto is headlong, berserk, bonkers, batshit, boisterous, bountiful and big-hearted. The monumental valleys of the Namib Desert pass for the Australian outback, a backdrop of bold screaming color, its teeming denizens all sickened by radiation poisoning to one degree or another. But beyond the masterful motion, the linear but so-dense canvas, the near-faultless spatial acuity of each action setpiece, the frenetic and terrible beauty of the maniacally precise physical detailing, Miller’s politics also shout. There are kinds of chattel in the world and the future we have prepped for ourselves: water, oil (or “guzzolene,” as it’s called here) and chattel. Mad Max’s forward propulsion—not to call it a journey—is in the service of the escape of Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron, skull cropped, cheekbones often streaked with black oil, equipped with a prosthetic arm) with a procession of fertile women she’s caravanning beyond the wasteland to the green landscape of her youth. Max joins a revolution in the service of woman, and of the future they might build from the ashes of a masculine Inferno. “Look at them,” a character admires, “So shiny. So chrome.”

“Mad Max: Fury Road”

The likenesses you could (and should) impose on this floodstream! The detritus of our civilization, of many civilizations, of Civilization: Details upon details, from each costume to every jammed-together vehicle fashioned from objects that all reek of totem and icon and fetish. John Ford, Terry Gilliam, Budd Boetticher, Buster Keaton, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Peter Weir’s “The Cars That Ate Paris,” “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom,” “Grand Theft Auto,” “Cannonball Run,” Chuck Jones, H. B. Halicki’s original “Gone in 60 Seconds,” Fritz Lang, Bogart, Keaton, Bruegel, Bosch, punk, steampunk and on and on and furiously on. Madness is violence and violence is life and life is madness and the cycle does not abate until death. “Fury Road” is not so much pessimistic but cheerily brutal, as, you have to admit, “Babe: Pig in the City” and “Happy Feet 2” are for the messages they leave the kiddies of generations. George Miller in three sentences: We’re doomed. Keep moving. Be kind. Music Box, Black-and-chrome edition, Frdiay, August 11, 11:59pm; standard manic edition, Saturday, August 12, 11:59pm.

“Once Upon A Time … In Hollywood”

Quentin Tarantino’s melancholy pop-rocket picaresque “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” (2019) is the truest of true “hang-out” movies: key characters spend the greater part of their screen time getting from one place to another, jawing, wandering blissfully, even wantonly to an incessant song score, across a delirious period landscape, a wholly realized world. It’s also a Western, a war movie, and a snow globe, shaken now and again, of Tarantino’s fascination with the filmmaking process. (Is this Tarantino’s template-toss of Howard Hawks’ “Rio Bravo”?) “Once Upon a Time …” is as much a bathysphere of the tactile and ear-caressing and eyeball-grabbing as any sort of narrative armature: Objects, objectified. (The tapestry of reckless riches is akin to the crazy comedy of 1941’s absurdist sketch comedy, “Hellzapoppin’”: You thought that was nuts, look what’s literally around this corner!) “Once …” is also the then-fifty-six-year-old writer-director-producer’s bittersweet and self-aware comedy about the fear of failure and lasting inconsequence, the lingering fear of racketing in middle age toward indelible catastrophe, or at least, onrushing obsolescence. It’s also deeply observant of the vagaries of class strictures and male friendship and the ups and downs and very much ups of artistic exertion. (“You’re Rick Fucking Dalton, don’t fucking forget it” is Rick Fucking Dalton’s mantra.) 160m. (More here.) Doc Films, Friday, August 11, 7pm, Saturday, August 12, 4pm.

In “reformed” film critic Dave Kehr’s collection, “Movies That Mattered,” his contemporary review of Martha Coolidge’s “Valley Girl” (1983) stands out: “The tone is pitched in the seldom-explored realm between satire and romance; Coolidge’s control of that tone is remarkably accurate, and her medium of control is the acting… Traditionally, some of the best American films have been studio assignments that the director has managed to penetrate with his own personality and artistic interests—they aren’t personal films but films that have been made personal. But in the seventies, this whole range of achievement was somehow lost; at the moment, Hollywood directors seem to be divided into two fiercely exclusive camps: those who generate their own material, and those who blindly mount what they’re given. You must be either an auteur (a misapplication of a term originally coined to describe the studio filmmaker with a personality) or a hack. One of the strongest pleasures of ‘Valley Girl’—and it has many—is the sense that the middle ground has been discovered again. It’s an assignment with a lot extra, a frankly commercial film that acquires a warm, personal glow because the director, Martha Coolidge, has taken a personal interest in it. Coolidge has followed the conventions of the genre she’s been given to work with—down to the flashes of female nudity, without which no exploitation film would be complete—but she’s connected with those conventions in ways that freshen and humanize them. ‘Valley Girl’ probably isn’t a project that Martha Coolidge would have generated on her own, but in the end it’s a Martha Coolidge film.” Drafthouse, Saturday, August 12, 3pm.

“Missing”

Costa Gavras’ “Missing” is a father’s journey and a nation’s nightmare:  “American journalist Charlie Horman mysteriously disappears during the 1973 coup in Chile, his father Ed (Jack Lemmon) travels to the country to join Charlie’s wife Beth (Sissy Spacek) in the search to find him. Stymied by absurd bureaucratic red tape and surrounded by tense political unrest, Ed and Beth… slowly uncover the truth about Charlie’s fate.” Costa-Gavras, whose many political thrillers are capped by the breathless “Z,” found a way into Chilean history that does not give short shrift to the coup. 35mm. The screening is presented in collaboration with the Committee to Commemorate the Fiftieth Anniversary of the coup in Chile and the Uri-Eichen Gallery. A panel discussion features Charlie Horman’s widow, Joyce Horman, alongside Janice Teruggi, sister of Frank Teruggi, another American victim of the coup. Siskel, Saturday, August 12, 2pm.