Chicago International Film Festival 2004 Preview Guide, Week One
By Lee Shoquist and Shelley Cameron

The Chicago International Film Festival opens its 40^th anniversary season on Thursday, October 7, at the historic Chicago Theatre with a special evening hosted by Roger Ebert and a screening of "Kinsey," directed by Bill Condon ("Gods and Monsters") and starring Liam Neeson and Laura Linney. A dramatized biography of Dr. Alfred Kinsey and his pioneering studies of human sexual behavior in 1950’s America, the film explores the huge impact of his research on the public and on his own marriage.

Highlights of the festival are a tribute to Annette Benning, on October 8, where the actress will receive a career achievement award prior to a special screening of her new film "Being Julia," and a special screening of "Around The Bend" with star Christopher Walken in person on October 9. The centerpiece will be the truly delightful " Finding Neverland" on October 14, and the grand finale, a tribute to Robert Zemeckis and his new film "The Polar Express," starring Tom Hanks on October 21 at the majestic Cadillac Palace Theatre.

Some highlights of the festival’s first week:

ê ê Highly Recommended.

ê Recommended.

(Denmark) A powerful Danish drama, that takes an absorbing and painful glimpse into the darkness of the human heart. In telling the story of an emotionally damaged, successful architect who decides to shoot himself at the end of an ordinary day, director Simon Staho employs a disarmingly simple technique—shooting the entire film in or around an SUV—to tell a remarkably complex and affecting story.

Thomas (Mikael Persbrandt) seems the picture of success, with a beautiful wife and child. A closer glimpse reveals a man so disconnected from human interaction, beaten down by the daily banality of life, and trapped beneath youthful secrets that his life has closed in on him. He spends the entire day driving around, picking up each person close to his life—son, estranged wife, mistress, best friend, sister, his son’s soccer coach, his own aged mother and finally a young prostitute—and saying final good-byes to each. The secrets that are revealed in the film’s late passages are disturbing; wrenching. The passengers are played by an all-star Danish cast, and in a towering performance, Persbrandt is the man who makes a deal with himself and doesn’t look back. Day and Night is a haunting implosion of the soul. Not to be missed. Swedish with English subtitles. 95 minutes. (LS)

(South Africa/France/United Kingdom) A body thrown from a passing train in Cape Town, South Africa sets the stage for a coming of age film of exceptional sensitivity and intelligence. Involving the possessions found on the dead body—a gun with a single bullet and a small camcorder—the film proceeds to exquisitely detail the effect these possessions have on two young African boys of different ages, and a British girl who befriends them both. Alternately funny and moving, director Ntshavheni Wa Lurli charts the boys’ disparate reactions—the reckless older boy feels powerful by using the gun in every social encounter, while the good-hearted young boy’s artistic heart is awakened by the prospect of using the camcorder to become a fledgling filmmaker. The well-to-do white girl between them is, to her parent’s dismay, pursued by the older boy but feels a kindred spirit to the younger one. They develop a friendship that’s believable and uncommon in the movies, based on a mutual respect and defense of each other’s honor. The girl, particularly, makes some tough decisions in the final third of the film that are bold and seem fresh. Their mutual loyalty is invigorating, as is their common sense of what is right and wrong, both socially and morally. It’s sad, poetic, lyrical and moving. It also contains a revelatory contrivance near the end designed to bring certain motivations together that feels wholly unnecessary. Recommended. 90 minutes. (LS)

ê I Like To Work - Mobbing (Mi piace lavorare – Mobbing)

(Italy) Stinging indictment of labor practices and office politics in modern business, this drama tells the plight of smart, competent worker Anna (Nicoletta Braschi, Life is Beautiful) who is slowly drummed out of her job when new management takes over her company. She’s treated rudely, then given too many duties, then nothing at all to do, and finally she is pitted against a group of men in another department who see her as a spy. Single mother Anna tries to keep all the balls in the air juggling the demands her work, her invalid father, and her pre-teen daughter. Anna’s workplace situation creates problems for her daughter as well.

In the practice known as mobbing, she is systematically humiliated and knocked down one notch at a time until she has a complete breakdown. Reveals in detail how mobbing, in spite of protective laws, circumvents the intention of such laws. No accident that all the bosses are men.

Director Francesca Comencini comments on sexism as well. Anyone who’s ever suffered the helplessness of being sabotaged in the workplace will identify with this film where no less than the dignity of honest work is at stake. Italian with English subtitles. 89 minutes. (SC)

ê ê Tarnation

(United States) Documentary self-portrait of actor and filmmaker Jonathan Caouette, whose unstable family relationships are chronicled from the time he was eleven in 1983 to 2003. After years of shock treatments and a host of hospitalizations, an overdose of Lithium in 2002 left his mother Renee even more damaged. Though voice over narration by Jonathan puts the start of Renee’s problems as an accidental fall when she was 12 years old, revealing home movie clips and old answering machine messages suggest the family had deeper and earlier issues. After a brief early marriage, Renee and son Jonathan, together and separately, ride a roller coaster of sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll, and bizarre behavior.

Undeniably powerful and compelling, with strong evidence of the influence of executive co-producer John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch), it’s a little long on sequences of music video, and a little short on truly illuminating the family’s dysfunction. Using the archives of 160 hours of material Caouette had accumulated that go back to his grandparents wedding in the 1951 and family photos, Caouette has clearly been crafting the film in his head for 19 years, possibly without his knowledge. Marked by fast paced cutting, split and multiple screens, flashy color washes, clips and snips from films and songs of the 1970s and 80s, and effective use of on-screen text, though tough to watch at times, its well worth the effort. 105 minutes. (SC)

ê The Harvest Time

(Russia) Lush cinematography of the Russian countryside soothes and sentimentalizes the bittersweet memories of a young boy. In 1950, he shared a simple sun-filled house with his mother, father, and brother. Reminiscent of Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s silent classic "Earth," director Marina Razbezhkina tells the story of the polarization of Russian peasants and The State, told through strong images. The boy’s hard working mother yearns for a piece of calico cloth. His father, returned from the war without his legs, yearns for the love he once knew. From the viewpoint of the young boy, this narrative film brings to life a few months during that long ago year when his mother still smiled and his father did circus tricks with his legless body to amuse them. When his mother is honored for her harvesting work on their post-war collective farm, the first place prize is the Challenge Red Banner, emblazoned with the faces of Lenin and Stalin. She wishes she’d won the second place: a piece of calico cloth. This honor seems to be the beginning of the end of family contentment. The banner becomes a metaphor for everything his mother has lost or will never have. She guards it from being eaten by field mice, patching it together and giving it the attention she cannot give her husband. The flash of a happy season sustains the boy for a lifetime. Years later, the family’s meager but treasured possessions become so much trash, with no one left to even recall the people in the photos. The profoundly sad conclusion is a moving reminder of the temporary nature of all things. Russian with English subtitles. 68 minutes. (SC)

(Iran) A cantankerous cemetery corpse-washer is the center of this comic-dramatic character study that takes a sometimes funny, sometimes dark look at mortality and life among the dead—in this case, the lives of a handful of cemetery workers in an Iranian cemetery that’s roughly 800 years old. Crotchety Mr. Esfandiar (played by real-life body-washer Abbas Esfandiari) runs a tight ship composed of a young boy who burns (and steals) the clothes and possessions of the dead, and a widow who washes the female dead. When a TV crew comes to the cemetery to film a documentary, Esfandiar’s world goes into disarray and he’s certain his life is coming to an end. He spends the film examining his relationships and attempting (unsuccessfully) to rectify his relations. Directed by Mohsen Amiryoussefi, Bitter Dream is a remarkably wry and funny human comedy set in a morbid place. How much of this film is based on Esfandiari’s own life experience is anyone’s guess, but he’s a commanding and authoritative screen presence as he doggedly dodges the advances of the angel of death, Azrael. The film’s final shot is transcendent. Farsi with English subtitles. 87 minutes. (LS)

(United States) A lively, raunchy urban comedy, Boricua is an impressive achievement for first time director Marisol Torres, whose Chicago-set film successfully juggles a half dozen major characters and social themes at a crowded intersection of Latino city life. At first, Boricua seems derivative and almost unfocused, emulating many ensemble films that crosscut with panache and flash. But the film grows on you until you realize that you’re watching a wholly original ensemble that’s populated with some very appealing young people alternately juggling issues of identity, culture,

sex, and love in some very funny and sometimes touching ways.

It’s an ambitious film that mostly succeeds in tying up its many threads. A few memorable characters include… a corporate sell-out German, who faces racism in white collar America and sells out his culture for advancement. Hairstylist Tata longs to be the queen of Chicago’s Puerto Rican Pride Parade, but harbors a dark secret. Playboy and dealer Willy, is a tangle of conflicts as he experiences love for the first time, with Lola, a smart, sexually-liberated college girl with independence to spare. A tentative courtship between Willy and Lola has some unexpected notes of sweetness then melancholy. The film is assured and entertaining, well acted and performed with zest. English and Spanish with English subtitles. 102 minutes. (LS)

(Germany) Like a bizarre car wreck between Ken Russell, Peter Jackson, Terry Gilliam, Marc Caro, and Jean Pierre Jeneut, Journey into Bliss is an almost indescribable nightmare dreamscape of epic originality and energy. It’s also the kind of film that taxes the viewer by hurtling so much weird, offbeat energy at the screen and stuffing its frame with so much twisted machinery and zanieness it is, at times, almost unbearably…entertaining. The brainchild of German director Wenzel Storch, the "story" concerns a husband and wife sailing the seas on a snail-shaped boat with their cineaste children and a motley band of creatures, including talking tree frogs, owls, a horny rabbit and a piano playing bear!

They settle down on an island populated with libidinous courtesans and ruled by an evil king before orchestrating a political coup. It’s an experience like no other, to be sure, and a supremely confident one that’s a defiantly political, sexual, rudely adult fractured fairy tale to end all others. It’s also a wholly original vision. Love it or hate it, there’s nothing else like it. German with English subtitles. 73 minutes. (LS)

(United States) The Nomi Song, a documentary chronicle that begins as a so-so look at the "downtown" Manhattan club scene in the late 70s, gradually gains depth and power in telling the story of Klaus Nomi, a classically trained German singer whose meteoric rise as a New York performance artist, then international pop singer poised for legend, was cut short by AIDS in the early 80s.

As one former friend recounts of the first time he saw Nomi cross the street pre-fame: "What the f**k is that?" Nomi’s look was an exotic blend of New Wave and Space Invaders. And his voice—opera trained and on display in several of the film’s almost unbelievable clips—could effortlessly soar from fey electronic pop star (he even backed David Bowie on Saturday Night Live) to through-the-roof opera diva on the order of an Italian castrato.

Director Andrew Horn’s tribute is curiously lacking in context—the film would benefit from a broader take on music and culture of the time—but valuable as a comprehensive cult document that, while trained on its subject for 90 minutes, almost fails to crack his mystery much as anyone else at the time did either. The film’s closing coda is one of shattering tragedy that lands abruptly and with a thud, extinguishing the life of "the loneliest person on earth," but not his mystique. 90 minutes. (LS)

ê Nelly (À ce soir)

(France) Affecting story of a young wife and mother whose life is abruptly undone when her husband dies suddenly. Director Laure Duthilleul rationally lays out the irrational emotional fallout inherent in the event. In the four days following his unexpected death, Nelly and her children begin to come to terms with the loss. He had been the village doctor and Nelly, (Sophie Marceau) the visiting nurse in their rural community. Both the doctor’s patients and his family vacillate between anguish and denial as they continue to treat him as if he were still alive. With realism, warmth, and a touch of capriciousness, Nelly, her children, her dead husband’s brother, and the community confront the situation. The golden autumn of the French countryside is highlighted by the cinematography suggesting the renewal that will come in the spring in the cycle of death and re-birth. French with English subtitles. 99 minutes. (SC)

(France) Venerable French star Daniel Auteuil befriends a comically suicidal, lovesick fop whose been dumped by his girlfriend in this sly, sprightly French farce. Brasserie maitre d’ Antoine’s (Auteuil) orderly life is disrupted by the attempted suicide of lovelorn Louis (Jose Garcia), suffering from a "narcissistic injury." To the consternation of his beleaguered girlfriend, Antoine develops an inexplicable responsibility to the neurotic young man and sets out to reunite him with lost love and florist Blanche (Sandrine Kiberlain). What he doesn’t count on is falling for Blanche himself. It’s a story as old as time, but what works here is a perfectly calibrated sense of comedy, both intellectual and slapstick, and three very likable actors in a parade of comically inspired scenes tinged with bittersweet melancholy. It’s a comedy of the heart, and a good one. French with English subtitles. 110 minutes. (LS)

(Germany) Love in Thoughts, based on the true story of a complex relationship between a brother, sister and their mutual friend, which led to murder, is a gorgeous period recreation that only fitfully comes to life. Set amidst the decadence of Germany’s Weimar era, Paul and Gunther are best friends and opposites. Paul is an intellectual writer while counterpart Gunther is a wealthy, bisexual teen locked in an affair with handsome working-class Hans, whom he also shares with his liberated sister Hilde. Paul and Hilde develop an immediate attraction while Paul and Gunther take an oath to destroy anyone responsible for the loss of any love they might experience. They also form a suicide pact. You can guess where the film goes from here. As a youthful coming of age cum crime film, it has little of the lost innocence on display in Andre Techine’s far superior and idyllic Wild Reeds, and fails to dramatize its murderous circumstances in a way that even comes close to Peter Jackson’s crushing Heavenly Creatures. It’s a film of impeccable design, art direction and very little urgency. An artful bore. German with English subtitles. 90 minutes. (LS)

(Germany) In this documentary that almost serves as a film technique course, a young Austrian filmmaker buys a collection of old Super 8 movies from a street vendor and becomes fascinated with their origin. With limited knowledge of their former owner and/or creator—Mr. X—he digs deep to discover a society of senior citizens who once formed the Viennese Club of Amateur Filmmakers. The club, formed in 1927 and most of its members alive today, reunite to watch the movies and offer personal reminiscences on their youthful follies and dreams of moviemaking. It’s a fascinating film that is filled with life and history, time and age, as we see the many old films unfold and their makers describe them. Some of the films are travelogues, some personal stories, and each of them comes together in a poignant final montage. A love letter to making movies as a hobby rather than profession. Recommended. In German with English subtitles. 98 minutes. (LS)

(Brazil) A speedball cocktail shot straight out of Brazil, Up Against Them All is a nihilistic, lurid story of a Sao Paulo family coming apart at the seams. Failed Teodoro is the father and husband to hot-to-trot young wife Claudia, who routinely cheats on him with Julio, stud of the slum-like neighborhood in which they live. Also in the household is Soninha, Teodoro’s nymph-like teenaged daughter of burgeoning sexuality. Complicating matters is the father’s developing relationship with a pious, religious woman, whom he sees as a way out of his amoral life.

Shot with the urgency of a frequently hand-held camera, director Robert Moreira works up a genuine and palpable sense of frustration borne from domestic desperation and decay. Everyone in this world is corruptible, and bloody consequences for adultery and deception are commonplace. The film feels, at times, unbearably raw and honest, hurtling toward a conclusion as dead-ended as the lives on display. It’s an effective drama with some strong stuff, most notably a pitch-black scene in which Teodoro’s true nature is revealed to his unsuspecting girlfriend. If the film is disappointing at all, it’s in a mostly contrived resolution that abandons the characters for the sake of goosing the audience with a surprise perpetrator. Portuguese with English subtitles. 98 minutes. (LS)

(France) The chief attractions of this period piece about a world-renowned conductor and his trip down memory lane, back to the origin of his musical career, are the fine performances and the sumptuous cinematography. Beautiful to look at, however, slim on originality, it tells the familiar story of a teacher who made a difference and changed the course of several lives. When a famous conductor receives word that his mother has died, he returns for her funeral to the village where he attended reform school fifty years earlier. He is unexpectedly presented with a diary written five decades earlier by the unassuming music teacher. The dignified man formed a choir to impose order and to lighten the harsh load of the boys, and was instrumental in developing the conductor’s musical gift. His old classmate and he recall their time at the school. With all the requisite elements of the formula, including the hardened bad boy, the severe headmaster, the disaster, and the triumphant moment, the refined production from director Christophe Barratier makes it worthwhile viewing. French with English subtitles. 95 minutes. (SC)

(Germany) In search of the exact geographic center of the continent, this documentary by Stanislaw Mucha assembles the findings of the film crew in their travels around central Europe. In an astonishing number of towns and villages they find monuments, plaques and markers, each one claiming to be that exact center, several in Germany, but many others in such far flung places as Lithuania, the Ukraine, Poland, and Slovakia. As the filmmakers map each new course and follow new leads, a picture emerges not only of lighthearted warmth and local pride, but also a more serious subtext of the shifting and sometimes disturbing nationalism and intolerance, brought more ambiguously into the foreground because of the contrived path that forms the border between Asia and Europe. Whimsical moments and travelogue camera work add up to a pleasant and provocative experience. German, Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Slovakian with English subtitles. 85 minutes. (SC)

(Israel) A single mother of two teenaged daughters makes a decision to move to a new settlement in this smart and affecting Israeli feature. The film is set in 1981 Jerusalem, but could easily take place in any North American city, with its single mother looking for love and acceptance and delightful teenaged daughters curious about boys. When the youngest girl is sexually assaulted by a band of rowdy teenaged boys, her reputation—and the family’s social standing—are threatened, and the mother must reexamine her priorities and loyalties. At the same time, she’s developed a sweetly tentative relationship with a forty-something, virginal bus driver. Director Joseph Cedar trains a sensitive eye on the mother’s need for a "better life" and how her oblivious selfishness reverberates and shifts the household dynamics. Israeli superstar Yehuda Levi (Yossi and Jagger) turns up in a small role as a soldier romancing the eldest daughter. The film ends on just the right note of sweet hopefulness. Hebrew with English subtitles. 92 minutes. (LS)

(United States) One hundred years after first production of the play about the boy who would not grow up, "Finding Neverland," with its knockout production values and subtle performances come together seamlessly to form a touching, credible account of James M. Barrie and the creation of his immortal classic Peter Pan. Johnny Depp delivers a flawless performance as the diminutive, sensitive author, maintaining his Scottish brogue and gentle manner. Blending magical special effects with an ordinary backyard or walk in the park, director Marc Forester (Monster’s Ball) splendidly takes us to the place where imagination takes flight and we share the creative adventure. The inspiration for the fantasy came from Barrie’s own childhood and later from his close friendship with the Davies family. The film centers on this family, led by widowed mother Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (Kate Winslet), and her four sons as the spark for writing the play. Dustin Hoffman, as Barrie’s theatrical producer, and particularly Julie Christie as Sylvia’s mother turn in marvelous supporting performances to further bolster the whole show, and what a show it is, far superior to so many overproduced but largely unsuccessful biopics. 101 minutes. (SC)

Here’s an extended peek into a few of the festival’s second week offerings, more of which will be examined up-close here next week:

(France) A regal Fanny Ardant struggles with the news that husband Gerard Depardieu has been unfaithful in Nathalie, an effective meditation on the life of a woman who confronts the shock of infidelity not with devastation but rather a cavalier and complex game of sexual entrapment. When Ardant’s well-to-do doctor inadvertently discovers her husband’s dalliance, she’s forced to confront the emptiness of their marriage and integrate the emotional consequences. She wanders into a strip club alone and meets a stunning stripper played by a breathtaking Emmanuelle Beart. Together, they invent a web of sexual entrapment designed to test the husband’s limits, creating an elaborate set-up with Beart’s imaginary alter ego "Nathalie," to surprising consequences. Both women are well developed and their gradually building relationship under such extreme circumstances intrigues. Ardant gives one of the screen’s great listening performances, called on to react to volumes of exposition and all manner of graphic sexual description as delivered by Beart in exchange for healthy sums of cash. The situation is refreshingly free of melodrama and the upscale production values and seriousness of performances go a long way in making the tawdry set-up elegant and tasteful. Ardant learns about Depardieu, and consequently herself, through conduit Beart. Some late surprises are simple to predict, but Ardant and Beart grace this picture with a rare gravity. It’s a dignified, adult film about sex and infidelity. French with English subtitles. 100 minutes. (LS)

(Argentina/France) An indictment of the socio-economic conditions that plague modern Argentina as well as a tale of familial loyalty perverted beyond reason, Buena Vida (Delivery) is an absorbing film that explores the limits of love. Bike messenger Hernan’s family leaves Argentina for Spain and he automatically inherits an empty house. At a gas station, he meets beautiful worker Pato, and the two immediately set up house together. What he doesn’t expect is to find her mother, father and young daughter immediately and surreptitiously moved in to his home without means or direction. To complicate matters, they not only settle down permanently, they turn his home into a bakery—complete with labor organizing and complex factory machinery to create churros—and he has no legal right other than a drawn-out eviction to get rid of them.

A painful comedy, Buena Vida (Delivery) takes a harsh look at how labor conditions in Argentina have squeezed the little man out of business and how a proud and ingenious entrepreneur can be brought low by the economic system, stripped of his ability to not only provide for his family but for his own self-respect. At the same time, there are other more fascinating levels going on between the two leads. How much is one expected to take on for another human being that they love? How much is too much familial loyalty? Where is the line to be drawn? And what do you do when you realize that, beyond all costs, you’ve been emotionally and financially exploited? If you can’t beat them, are they really worth joining? Worthwhile. Spanish with English subtitles. 93 minutes. (LS)

(Mexico) Set in a broken-down contemporary Mexico City, a pair of burnt out and fiercely loyal hustlers who are supposed to represent the eternally youthful Adam and Eve, Adan (Carlos Martinez Baena) and Eva (Christiane Martell) eke out a desperate existence between drugs, tricks, and anonymous sex. If it sounds more exotic than it plays, the film’s highly conceptual approach gets bogged down in directorial indulgence, with endless and often shapeless scenes that go on…and on. There’s an interesting use of extended silence and an overemphasized use of music. Much of it feels experimental, including its use of claymation in the film’s pre-credit sequence to tell the story of Adam and Eve. Both Adan and Eva are pansexual, self-destructive nomads with appetites for wanderlust. There are merits, including some graphically inviting soft-core trysts and a dead-eyed and dead on performance from Martell, whose come-hither, bleached on black visage resembles a hybrid of Marilyn Manson and young Mary Woronov. Adam and Eve, with its remote characters and failure to add up to anything coherent or compelling, covers its emptiness with abundant flesh and a bleak sense of nothingness. Not recommended. Spanish with English subtitles. 100 minutes. (LS)

(Greece) A domestic squabble over a land inheritance is the backbone of Blackmail Boy, a would-be epic tragedy surrounding a contemporary Greek family first shattered by tragedy then divided by a ferocious power struggle over real estate. Following a car accident years earlier that took the life of one daughter and turned the patriarch into a vegetable, mother Magda runs a bake shop and watches over one grown daughter (and son-in-law) and a bi-sexual, raucous teenaged son who carries on illicit affairs with a desperate, aged local drug-addict and an older married neighborhood man. The plot—and there’s a lot of it—kicks in when Magda sells a plot of family land to the city. All hell breaks loose with family members at each other’s throats while manipulations (sexual and otherwise) pile up, and a lot of contrived melodrama comes crashing down on everyone in the final reel. Directors Michalis Reppas and Thanasis Papathanassiou haven’t a clue how to put their ensemble together or what their story is really about, and rely on titillation—the Greek god beauty of their young teenage cipher and his exploits—to disguise the story’s lack of depth and focus. This is shallow, going-through-the-motions storytelling that no one appears much to believe in, laced with broad, silly theatrics. The film is simultaneously overwrought and underdeveloped. Tepid. Greek with English subtitles. 100 minutes. (LS)

(France) Although no film with France’s grand dame Isabelle Huppert—the actress you call on when you need a risk-taker—could be a complete washout (except possibly Curtis Hanson’s The Bedroom Window), Ma Mere, with its story of an unconventional, sexually predatory mother who seduces her seventeen-year-old son (The Dreamers’ Louis Garrell) into a lifestyle of illicit encounters and eventually incest—comes close. Based on the novel by Georges Bataille, a sexually monstrous Huppert charges through the film with a destructive eroticism leaving emotional wreckage in her wake. Helene (Huppert) has led a decadent, hedonistic lifestyle preoccupied with sexual deviancy and little else. On a summer vacation with family on the Canary Islands, she re-connects with her now teenaged son, reeling from the loss of his father. Before long, he’s exposed to his mother’s underworld of sex and pick-ups, increasingly attracted to it—and her. The feeling, unfortunately, is mutual.

After decades in international cinema, sexual neuroses has recently become Huppert’s calling card in films like Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, Benoit Jaquot’s The School of Flesh and a number of recent diabolical excursions with Claude Chabrol. Unfortunately, Ma Mere director Christophe Honore isn’t in the same league as his contemporaries. He’s good at setting up the orgies but falters when it comes to making the often-outrageous behavior believable. Other than Huppert’s wicked, amoral turn, there’s little psychology here worth watching. Voyeuristically we look, more incredulous than shocked, as Huppert piles up her sexual manipulations and deflowered son Garrell becomes increasingly sexually frustrated. Together they go to the brink of the abyss. There’s a big difference between fascinating subject matter and well-written characters. Ma Mere is more pretentious than disturbing; sending its two likeable actors (willingly) off the rails by the time it reaches its lurid (and laughable) conclusion. Terrific actors. Absurd film. French with English subtitles. 109 minutes. (LS)

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