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Listings for Friday, May 16, through Thursday, May 22, 2008
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Jellyfish
The celebrated Israeli author Etgar Keret and his wife, screenwriter Shira Geffen, directed this luminous foray into magic realism, Tel Aviv style. A withdrawn, disheveled waitress (Sarah Adler of Marie Antoinette and Notre Musique), abandoned by her boyfriend and out of step with her busy divorced parents, befriends a little girl who's emerged mysteriously from the sea. Across town, an old woman makes trouble for her Filipino caregiver, and newlyweds find their fragile happiness threatened when the husband is distracted by a seductive poet. The locals drift until the outsiders (the child, the caregiver, the poet) evolve into agents of psychological transference. The overlapping stories pulse with a tidal rhythm, the film's sensibility flowing between serious and wry, and there are memorable turns from Assi Dayan as the waitress's henpecked dad and Tzahi Grad as a cop with a nonchalant attitude toward babysitting. In Hebrew with subtitles. 78 min. -- Andrea Gronvall
This movie is currently playing at:
Music Box
Tearoom
"Tearoom" is slang for a men's room used for sex, and this video by William E. Jones shows tearoom sex in abundance, albeit from the distanced perspective of a concealed camera. Joyless men of various ages and races cast furtive glances as they couple, and by the simple but brilliant tactic of presenting the footage silent, Jones intensifies one's voyeuristic attention to these taboo but notably unerotic images. The closing title informs us that the footage was shot by the police department in Mansfield, Ohio, in 1962--a revelation that equates the viewer with the police. Jones has suggested that this may be "the truest documentary of public sex before . . . gay liberation." 56 min. Also on the program: Mansfield 1962 (2006), a nine-minute short Jones assembled from the same footage. Presented by White Light Cinema; Jones will attend the screenings. -- Fred Camper
This movie is currently playing at:
Sun 5/18, 6:30 and 9:30 PM, Nightingale, 1084 N. Milwaukee, 773-289-4329
The Witnesses
Andre Techine's best work since his mid-90s peak, this briskly paced French drama centers on a handful of characters in 1984, during the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic. Even as a gay doctor (Michel Blanc) nurtures a platonic relationship with a promiscuous young man (Johan Libereau), the doctor's friendship with a writer (Emmanuelle Beart) leads the man into an affair with her bisexual husband (Sami Bouajila), a vice-squad cop. A requiem for the sexual revolution, the film brings to light ugly emotions, but ultimately Techine is less concerned with the bitterness of death than with how the infected and uninfected alike live with HIV and AIDS. This transcends the usual stodginess of period pieces with crucial historical testimony, delivered with verve. In French with subtitles. 114 min. --Steve Erickson
This movie is currently playing at:
Music Box
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