Union leaders

Like a trip to Europe, the Siskel’s annual European Union Film Festival always offers too much to take in in an unreasonably short amount of time; with 59 films showing, even a survey could only hint at the unexpected alleys available for exploration. (Ever long to take a guided tour of Helsinki through vintage Finnish film clips? On March 24, head to Helsinki, Forever, introduced by Jonathan Rosenbaum.) The only practical thing to do may be to offer highlights—and on the evidence previewed, there’s no shortage.

It may say something that one of the best films focuses on difficulties of translation. Winner of the top prize at last year’s Un Certain Regard sidebar at Cannes, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth (March 19 and 22), from Greece, examines a family in which the parents have chosen to raise their children with an entirely different set of definitions for common words—an excellent way, of course, of keeping them housebound and controlled. Hazy on real-world resonance (it’s been read as a metaphor for isolationism), the movie treats its scenario first for pure mystification, then horror, then dark comedy, culminating in a pleasingly cynical punch line.

Linguistic disconnects can be found throughout the fest. In I Am Love (March 14 and 15), you’ll find Tilda Swinton speaking Italian (not dubbed, mind you) as a Russian married to an Italian industrialist, who at the film’s outset is instructed to share his retiring father’s empire with his son. This is director Luca Guadagnino’s attempt to make a contemporary equivalent of the kind of epic that Visconti would have filmed in the early ’60s, albeit with Coplandesque music by John Adams and a restless, colorful, zoom-heavy visual style that owes as much Fassbinder as to the wide-screen prestige picture. At the very least, the film doesn’t lack for the great looks and sounds of deep-dish moviegoing, even if the substance itself sometimes feels a bit fuzzy and clichéd, especially at a scant two hours.

More cognitive dissonance, Around a Small Mountain (March 28 and 29) is, at 84 minutes, New Waver Jacques Rivette’s shortest film. (Three or four hours is more his speed.) Essentially, the film revisits the themes of his masterpieces L’Amour Fou and Out 1—the nexuses between scripting and improv, between theater and life, between madness and sanity—in miniature, and it has the pleasing succinctness (if not the stature) of Shakespeare’s farewell to the theater in The Tempest. The story concerns an interloper (Sergio Castellitto) who helps a circus performer (Jane Birkin) recover from a past trauma, and the film simultaneously has the feel of a confession and of a master juggling with one hand.

Rivette is hardly the only French filmmaker here working in an atypical mode. Catherine Breillat, among others, is on hand with one of her chastest films—there are no scenes that combine sex and rusty garden tools—in Bluebeard (March 13 and 18), an almost too-genteel fairy-tale gloss on the story of the eponymous wife-killer. But no departure is as shocking as Bruno Dumont’s Hadewijch (March 27 and 31), in which the director of Humanité and Twentynine Palms sheds the art-house shock tactics of his earlier films and makes a movie about human beings rather than rutting, asocial beasts.

The main character isn’t quite of this world, but the city she inhabits is. Dumont turns his gaze on a 20-ish girl (Julie Sokolowski) whose faith is so strong and disturbing that the nuns expel her from the convent, sending her home to Paris. Introducing her to a group of fundamentalist Muslims, Dumont tries to discern the line between belief and fanaticism. His ideas are ambiguous (and from what can be ascertained for certain, typically specious), but it’s the first time Dumont’s pretensions don’t get in the way of provocative, even beautiful filmmaking.

The European Union Film Festival runs Friday 5 through April 1.

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