Talking Screens, September 15-21, 2023: The Tyranny of Proud Mediocrity in “A Haunting In Venice” | “Black Girl” is an Essential Masterpiece | Sundance Sweetheart “Scrapper”

Talking Screens, A Week In Chicago Film, September 15-21, 2023

“A Haunting In Venice” and “Dumb Money” are the two notable wide releases of the week.

Chicago Underground‘s thirtieth manifestation continues through Sunday at the Harper Theater; programs and events and parties here.

“Dumb Money”

“Dumb Money,” based on the book “The Antisocial Network” by Ben Mezrich, is a torn-from-yesterday’s-headlines foul-mouthed comedy about a range of people affected by the GameStop stock bubble; there’s tenderness to go along with the astounding accounting of “fuck” and “motherfucker” and the naming of names like Citadel’s Ken Griffin. The casting of the ensemble is bravura: Paul Dano, Pete Davidson, Vincent D’Onofrio, America Ferrera, Nick Offerman, Anthony Ramos, Sebastian Stan, Shailene Woodley and Seth Rogen. Opens Friday in theaters.

Charlotte Regan’s Sundance sweetheart “Scrapper” hails from England but also from the land where hearts are tugged. Georgie (Lola Campbell) is a twelve-year-old girl left to her dreams, living alone in a London flat and working as a bicycle thief after her mother’s death, at least until her father (Harris Dickinson) shows up and brings her down from magic to reality. Short, deadpan and bittersweet, the writer-director’s simple debut is lovingly, beautifully shot by cinematographer-director Molly Manning Walker. Elemental, graceful, and filled with small joys. Music Box, opens Friday, September 15.

“Lighten up, pal, you might have fun!” A character sasses in the elemental claptrap of Kenneth Branagh’s third Hercule Poirot joint, the shadowy provender of “A Haunting In Venice.” They could have been speaking to me! Still, the Sir Ridley Scott co-production ought to bring pings of joy to the admirers of Oscar winner Sir Kenneth’s refined crowd-dandling instincts. (It’s like a seventy-seven-minute Monogram programmer blown out to Sir Ridley scale.)

Halloween in Venice a few years after the Second World War: Poirot is summoned to seance in a palazzo, an empire of mold and traps and secrets, where a young woman had been recently drowned. Cue: multiple suspects related to the family and a storm like a deluge out of summer 2023. The production design is simple (quick, cheap), highlighted by a room festooned with twined bales of periodicals, a modest effulgence of the swampy library of Orson Welles’ “The Trial.”

A man and his mustachio in “A Haunting In Venice.”

It’s a true “un film de” as all of Sir Ken’s hammiest instincts are present, including his accent, more like fiddly Portuguese than ever, matched by the flat performance of Tina Fey as “world’s number one mystery writer Ariadne Oliver.” She’s awful, racing ineffectually over her lines about the life of the mind, even when delivering pleasing chestnuts like “Every murderer is someone’s old friend!” “Scary stories make life less scary,” Fey hopes to purr but with listless enunciation. “You know me, only apples until supper!”

As the swooning medium, Michelle Yeoh, bearing a slopped-on, severely crimped gray bob, gets epic horror close-ups worthy of a startled cockatoo. But even her canted angles are a cumulative don’t: Trust the frame, Sir!

Witnessing the tyranny of proud mediocrity, I sat much too close to the big screen: the huge close-ups that sometimes feel as if the camera could fall over, do no one favors, nor does a sequence with the camera tethered to Sir Ken’s torso like the “Rubber Biscuit” scene with a drunken Harvey Keitel in “Mean Streets.” Still, there are aperçus in Michael Green’s adaptation that made me chuckle, including “Storm waves, not ghosts”; “Color me the gunman” and “Downstairs, there are bees.” Ah, as B-movies in honey drown! And there are others that elicit pleased groans: “I drank when I couldn’t sleep, but I never slept.” More than the many, many jump scares, I appreciate these lines, lines that rip like a rich, proud fart.

Then there’s Sir Ken’s lip beetle; his face piled with a modest drift of colored straw; a lawn cigar performing parkour across his philtrum; his chestnut-dyed bristle of bottle brush, sitting middle of the screen.

It’s the middlest of middlebrow: a thin volume struck off a spinner rack at a backwater Trailways mid-journey 1969, say. Plus: “A Haunting in Venice” runs a judicious 103 minutes. May it gross a small mint. The industry needs more sideshows like this one. With Kyle Allen, Camille Cottin, Jamie Dornan, Jude Hill, Ali Khan, Emma Laird, Kelly Reilly, Riccardo Scamarcio.

“Black Girl”

The week’s most powerful attraction is the six-film Ousmane Sembène Centennial. The roster of groundbreaking titles is led by a new restoration of his 1966 “Black Girl.” “In Africa, we have a lot of strong women,” Sembène, the Senegalese filmmaker often referred to as the father of African cinema, told me in 2004 at the time of his final feature, “Moolaadé.” “I think without them, we would have gone down the drain a long time ago. We have very, very strong women.” He bit down on his unlit pipe. “They are the people who hold society together.” Sembène’s breakthrough 1966 “Black Girl” features Mbissine Thérèse Diop as Diouana, a young Senegalese woman working as a housemaid for “gens blancs” who she then accompanies to France. Is she happy? Not when she’s treated as a slave, chattel, an “other” figure of beauty. Historical importance aside, it’s startling how elementally lyrical, how starkly political, the watchful, heightened naturalism of this essential masterpiece is. The final shot, as Sembène’s credits appear over a just-revealed face, is beautiful and moving and haunting and a grand provocation. In 2004, I said to Sembène, “There’s the line from the poet, ‘Woman is the future of man—’” He continued, “From the poem by Louis Aragon, yes. In one of his poems, Aragon says, ‘Woman is half of the sky.’ I think that’s a beautiful sentence. But it also takes a lot of work, here, somewhere else, northern Europe. But I’m afraid that women in those other cultures also castrate men because they’re too powerful. In Africa, the challenge is to restore love to those women. People say a man can accomplish anything when he finds love in the gaze of his lover. I think that’s all kinds of love. How can we restore that love to women’s faces?” A rhetorical question? One that Sembène answered in 1966 with “Black Girl.” Siskel, September 16-21.

Jaime Vadell as El Conde in “El Conde” from Pablo Larraín / Netflix ©2023

“El Conde” is the latest from Chilean director Pablo Larrain (“Spencer,” “Tony Manero”), who faces late dictator Augusto Pinochet in a black-and-white violent comedy-horror positing him as a 300-year-old vampire. Shot by the semi-retired Ed Lachman (“Carol,” “Lightning Over Water,” “The Virgin Suicides”), which, alone, is enough to draw me in. Streaming on Netflix from September 15.

Season 17 of Asian Pop-Up Cinema! continues with a five-film weekend Hong Kong Showcase at New City 14. Titles and tickets here.

Alejandro Amenábar’s shock-hit 2001 gothic “The Others” debuts a 4K digital restoration from the original 35mm negative. Music Box, September 15-19, 21.

The Music Box presents the pre-Code “The Power and the Glory” (1933), directed by William K. Howard and written by Preston Sturges, which “depicts the rise and fall of the much-despised railroad magnate and ruthless industrialist Tom Garner, played by Spencer Tracy. The blockbuster silent film actress and incomparable comedienne Colleen Moore co-stars as Sally, his wife,” writes the Music Box. “The innovative flashback structure served as the inspiration for the more renowned ‘Citizen Kane.'” Kathleen Rooney will present her novel, “From Dust To Stardust,” inspired by Moore’s life. (Newcity’s interview with Rooney is here.) Saturday, September 16, 11:30am.

“Trust”

“Directed by Hal Hartley” continues on Criterion Channel, including almost all of his shorts and features. “No Such Thing” leaves the channel at the end of September.

Drafthouse repertory includes a 4K restoration of Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange,” Friday, September 15, 9:30pm; Kubrick’s 1962 “Lolita,” Tuesday, September 19, 3:15pm; Wednesday, September 20, 7pm; an unlikely double feature, programmed by filmmaker Nia DaCosta of “Babe: Pig in the City” and “After Hours,” Saturday, September 16, 11am.