Presented by Facets Cinematheque and French Cultural Services in Chicago, this festival of recent French features runs Friday, December 2, through Sunday, December 11, at Facets Cinematheque, 1517 W. Fullerton. Following is the schedule through Thursday, December 8; a full schedule is available online at www.chicagoreader.com. For more information call 773-281-4114. Unless otherwise noted, all films are in French with subtitles.
R Violent Days
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Four disaffected and economically marginal French people–three guys and the often mistreated girlfriend of one of them–drive to Le Havre for a 50s-style rock concert in this 2004 feature. First-time director Lucile Chaufour juxtaposes intense but stilted performances of songs with fights at the entrance to the concert, and her black-and-white cinema verite close-ups of the characters reflect how hopelessly they’re trapped in their world. This makes their aimless and alienated lives vivid, but they’re not pleasant characters to spend time with. 80 min. (FC) (9:15 PM)
Thirtyfive Something
This first feature by film and jazz critic Thierry Jousse, a former editor of Cahiers du Cinema, seems as obsessed with sound as its hero, a composer and performer of electronic music (Laurent Lucas) who’s preparing an album with a musician friend (Noel Akchote–the focus of Jousse’s first documentary short). After encountering a woman in a telephone chat group, he agrees to meet and have sex with her in a dark hotel room, then spends much of the rest of the movie fanatically and paranoiacally pursuing this mystery figure. Jousse explores the notion that sounds produce visual images by plotting out entire scenes in darkness (an effect lamentably muted by subtitles), yet part of the film’s strangeness, abetted by Michael Lonsdale as an eccentric jazz guru, is that it sometimes seems more theoretical than suspenseful. 95 min. (JR) Jousse will attend the screening. (7 PM)
See listing for Saturday, December 3. Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum will interview director Thierry Jousse at the screening. (1 PM)
