Hitting the mid-week mark, the Chicago International Film Festival boasts special guests and anticipated films on Tuesday and Wednesday, October 21 and 22; here are the highlights our film critics recommend in the coming days. Follow along for all our latest coverage of the festival, which runs through October 26.
Emi
Eighteen-year-old Emi (Benicio Mutti Spinetta) loves his motorcycles. We first meet him testing a new motorcycle with Rodolfo (Alejandro Scaravelli), the owner of a repair shop where Emi is doing his apprenticeship. His adoptive father Darío (Luis Zambrowski) even gifts him with a new helmet that he jokingly says makes Emi look Daft Punk-ish. We see Emi ride his motorcycle over and over and over throughout the film, even during the end credits. Motorcycle riding offers him an opportunity to gather his thoughts as he tries to unravel the mystery surrounding the identity of his real parents, an identity that the film pretty much gives away halfway through.
That is the narrative hook into this exploration of the different ways, shapes and forms family takes. For Emi has two: his adoptive one and a surrogate one led by Rodolfo, his daughter Sol and her grandmother. There’s a third family, unseen except for a voice on a cell phone: Sol’s divorced mother who now has a family of her own. The idea behind this film has potential but what writer/director Ezequiel Erriquez Mena has delivered instead is one dull, static conversation after another as Emi plays the role of curious inquisitor as he tries to figure out what makes a family work and how far he can keep up what turns out to be is a charade of sorts. The film's narrative structure is frustratingly repetitive, not to mention the gratuitous, under-developed gay relationship with a character called Claudio that Erriquez Mena tacked on for no good reason. Emi is by far the weakest film I have seen so far of the Chicago International Film Festival’s Latin American film selection.
Emi receives its world premiere as part of the Outlook competition and screens on Wednesday, October 22 at 5:15 p.m. at the AMC Newcity and Thursday October 23 at 5 pm at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Director Ezequiel Erriquez Mena and co-producer Federico Cetta are scheduled to attend both screenings.
Is This Thing On?
In Bradley Cooper's latest directing effort, Will Arnett stars as Alex Novak, a devoted husband and father to Laura Dern's Tess and their two grade-school-aged boys; they live in a beautiful house in the suburbs of New York City and when we meet them, their marriage is already on the rocks. The two seem relatively resigned to their fate, both ready to call it after twenty years of giving it their best. After a particularly off night with Tess and friends, Alex finds himself outside the famed Comedy Cellar where there's a $15 cover charge the doorman is willing to waive if Alex signs up for a five-minute open mic set. So he does, and he bombs.
Meanwhile, Tess reconnects with her past life as an Olympic-level volleyball player. As Tess and Alex navigate their own paths on the road to divorce, they also find themselves intersecting perhaps more than they anticipated and in some very unexpected ways, all of which leads them to reconsider their priorities, both shared and individual. Arnett and Dern shine, creating characters that are deeply lived in and connected in ways that are instantly recognizable to anyone whose life has been so closely intertwined with another's.
Credit, of course, largely goes to Cooper, who helms the film into authentic yet naturally complicated territory without ever taking any of it too seriously. He delights in highlighting the New York comedy scene with cameos and bit parts for several recognizable faces, and he proves himself more than capable of depicting life in all its messy, often funny moments as Is This Thing On? becomes a winsome take on the state of modern marriage, individual identity and recognizing there's still goodness to be found around us even when things are hard. All it takes it a good punchline and willingness to try. (Lisa Trifone)
Is This Thing On? screens Wednesday, October 22 at 5:30pm at Music Box Theater. The film opens widely in theaters on December 19.
The Mastermind
Filmmaker Kelly Reichardt’s visual style can be described in many ways—quiet, subtle, humanistic, etc.—but I think the best way to sum up her approach to storytelling is observational. Reichardt channels realism into her work the way a Vermeer crisply captures every detail of a moment on canvas.
Inspired by a 1972 fine art robbery in Massachusetts, The Mastermind stars Josh O’Connor as James Blaine Mooney, a husband and father of two who we quickly learn is a bit of a schemer. Soon, he’s got a plan to lift four paintings from a single gallery in a local museum; though they get away with the paintings, JB’s struggles have only just begun as the heist becomes the region’s top news story and he realizes he’s in over his head. Reichardt gives us plenty of time to contemplate all that he’s involved in during a dialogue-free extended sequence that follows JB hiding the paintings in the hayloft in the middle of nowhere.
To the wrong viewer, Reichardt’s muted approach makes for perhaps the most boring heist film ever; but to the discerning viewer, what Reichardt is doing is so much more astute, so much more compelling as she breaks down the archetype of a thief and lays bare JB’s shortcomings even as he tries to outwit the authorities. Add to the mix the Mooney family dynamic, including how one of their young sons is inadvertently looped into his father’s dealings, and the proceedings take on a sort of heartbreaking sadness as well.
With a talent for delving into character psychology and allowing their lives to unfold undisturbed before the camera, Reichardt’s filmography has typically focused on interpersonal relationships (or those with pets and live stock, of course). In The Mastermind, JB’s most significant relationship is with himself and his own motives, making the film a fascinating investigation of ego, self-confidence and desperation wrapped up in the drama of an art heist that never really could end any other way than it does. (Lisa Trifone)
The Mastermind screens Wednesday, October 22 at 7:30pm at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Filmmaker Kelly Reichardt is expected to attend.
Rental Family
Set in modern-day Tokyo and directed/co-written by Hikari (37 Seconds), Rental Family traces the fairly lonely life of American actor Phillip (Brendan Frasier, in his first role since his Oscar win for The Whale) who has lived in Japan for a number of years and specializes in playing the token white guy in TV shows and commercials (we find out he was a big deal a few years earlier thanks to a very popular toothpaste spot). After being hired to play a mourner at a fake funeral, he is brought on by a company called Rental Family, which assigns actors to stand-in roles for strangers.
For example, he’s hired by a mother (Shino Shinozaki) to be her young daughters’s (Shannon Mahina Gorman as Mia) American father in order to get her into a top-tier private school; he also pretends to be a journalist interviewing a retired famous actor (Akira Emoto) in order to make the actor feels as if his legacy will be remembered; and his first assignment (which he almost blows) is being a husband to a lesbian, who wants to convince her family that she has to move to Canada after the wedding with her new spouse, when in fact she’s running off with her girlfriend.
The scenarios feature quaint and heartfelt connections, and even though he’s told by his boss (Takehiro Hira) not to get emotionally attached to his clients, he does so in every case, leading to complications with the people who hired him. He also becomes close with a coworker named Aiko (Mari Yamamoto, Pachinko, Monarch), and it soon becomes clear that everyone involved in these emotional transactions is missing some key component in their lives. Like young Mia, Phillip also grew up without a father, so he’s substituting the elderly actor in that role; he never had kids either, and Mia grows quite attached to him. Rental Family has an underlying melancholy with a hint of positivity weaved throughout its fabric. Hikari also takes advantage of Japan’s unique and varied landscape—from neon-soaked cities to its isolated countrysides—by having Phillips and his clients go on various day-long trips to help fortify their sense of self-wroth, and in the process, do the same for Phillip.
The film screens at the Music Box Theatre on Tuesday, Oct. 21 at 6:30pm. At this screening, director HIKARI will receive the Festival’s Spotlight Award. The film opens in theaters on Nov. 21.
Three Goodbyes
Based on a novel by Michela Murgia, Three Goodbyes is set in the part of Rome most tourists don't get to see, the everyday streets, apartments and restaurants inhabited by locals navigating the same trials and tribulations everyone faces: break-ups, family strife, health scares and more. Filmmaker Isabel Coixet (Un Amor) spares us establishing shots of the Colosseum or the Trevi Fountain and instead emerges us in the life of Marta (the great Alba Rohrwacher), a high school gym teacher and, until recently, the girlfriend of Antonio (Elio Germano), a chef. We learn early on they've been together for quite some time, but their energies are mismatched and after a particularly bad fight, they part ways. Grieving the loss of her relationship, Marta assumes her health issues are part of the process, but soon she gets news no one wants to hear and in a moment, her focus and priorities completely shift.
The bulk of Coixet's thougthful and poignant film is spent after Marta's diagnosis as she and those around her grapple with her fate and what it means for the time she has left. Without pivoting too far away from Marta's story, the film keeps a close eye on Antonio's post-break-up life as well, as he begins to question what he gave up and if what they shared might have been what he really wanted all along. British-Indian actor Sarita Choudhury (who apparently speaks perfect Italian!) pops up as Marta's empathetic but realistic doctor, and Marta's sister (Silvia D'Amico) proves a familial foil to Marta's even-temperedness with her own personal drama and strong opinions. But it's Rohrwacher who shines here as a woman confronted with an unthinkable reality, finding herself seeing every relationship and in fact the world around her in a whole new light. There's a sweet, budding relationship with a fellow teacher (Elio Germano) that culminates in some of the film's most vulnerable moments.
Three Goodbyes balances its heavy subject matter with a genuinely soft center, Coixet leading with heart at every difficult turn. As Marta and her friends and family face the inevitable, they also allow themselves to let their guards down in order to ensure nothing remains unsaid. It's a bittersweet but lovely Italian film that hopefully gets the attention it deserves in the US. (Lisa Trifone)
Three Goodbyes screens Wednesday, October 22 at 8:15pm and Thursday, October 23 at 8pm at AMC Newcity.
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