This month I got the chance to attend the Chicago Film Festival, through which I watched ten feature films. These ranged from animation standouts to international prestige films… and quite a lot of coming-of-age tragedy. Here’s my thoughts on five of those films (with the remainder to come in a Part II):
My first film of the festival was All of a Sudden, the latest feature from Ryusuke Hamaguchi, director of the 2021’s International Oscar Winner Drive My Car. At 179-minutes long, Drive My Car was a bit of an overwhelming experience. For a film that received mainstream awards attention, it was uniquely pensive, with quite a literary voice to its dialogue. I recall not being immediately drawn in to it, but by the end being completely glued in for its extended monologues.
With that context, I had high expectations for All of a Sudden. An even longer film at 197-minutes, Hamaguchi shifts to a French setting (though the film is still partially in Japanese), following nursing home director Marie-Lou Fontaine (Virginie Efira) as she struggles to get her staff to accept the new treatment technique of “Humanitude,” and connects with a Japanese playwright named Mari Morisaki (Tao Okamoto).
For a significant portion, the film is really just two strangers getting sucked into a deep conversation with each other. It naturally will be exhausting for many viewers, but I was as enraptured by the conversation as the characters. Even more than Drive My Car, the dialogue can become quite intellectually dense. And it’s true that it literally turns into a lecture on capitalism. But I think Hamaguchi shows a lot of self-awareness – not apologizing for being so didactic, but being willing to have a sense a humor about it, as the film pokes fun of itself at several points. I appreciated the balance of that.
What’s really important for me is that is that beneath all the talk of capitalism and life & death, there is an earnest, emotional connection between the two characters. Marie-Lou and Morisaki are quite easy character to embrace, as two humans committed to humanity. It is a pleasure seeing them bond, even with the sadness hanging over their entire relationship. Efira and Okamoto make a strong screen pair, but the whole supporting cast is also impressive. They display the humanity in all the character present; from the less likable members of the nursing staff to the elderly in their care and the mentally disabled. A lovely score by Samuel Andreyev also contributes to a tender atmosphere.
It would take quite a lot for me to call a film life-changing, so I won’t say that here. But there are some beautiful reflections on life in this film. Whether its blunt conclusions about our capitalist society hold up is a deeper political conversation than I could get into in a short review, but I appreciated it for wading into such heavy territory and having so many thoughtful observations. With their long-run time and verbosity, I understand not everyone will be eager to sit down for a Hamaguchi film. But I feel like he really wears his heart on his sleeve more than some other prestige filmmakers, and in a sense that actually makes his work more accessible than a lot of other art house works.
(Also as an anime fan, I was quite happy when the film makes reference to Isao Takahata’s Pom Poko, one of the most under-appreciated Studio Ghibli films in my opinion.)
The next film I saw was also from a prestigious Japanese director, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s live-action version of Look Back. Look Back was originally a manga from Chainsaw Man creator Tatsuki Fujimoto, and was already adapted as an anime film. I loved the animated Look Back, whose story about two girls dreaming of drawing manga packs a huge emotional punch, and leaves you feeling inspired to create art in spite of the all the hurdles in the way.
2024’s Look Back was not a perfect film, but it did set a high bar for telling this story. I was very hesitant about the idea of a live-action remake, but excited that a director like Kore-eda was tackling it. Unfortunately as I watched this film, I could not get the comparison with the animated version out of my mind, and I came away disappointed by how much it fell short. Not being able to do stuff like bring the girl’s manga life costs it a lot of its personality. And some of the sillier or less realistic moments in this story simply work better in the animated realm in my opinion.
The animated film was a brief 60 minutes, which you could say was unsatisfying, but I also thought was a strength of it. Not getting to spend more time with the characters leaves you feeling appropriately wistful. This version is about 40 minutes longer, and I don’t want to say it’s too long, but I definitely don’t feel like it was improved by that extra time. To be honest, I felt more antsy at times watching this than I felt during All of a Sudden the previous day.
All that said, I still really appreciate the heart of this story, there’s a lot to connect to in it for anyone who wants to create art. While I think the storytelling had more spark in animation, I do think the film looks gorgeous, presenting incredibly serene images of rural Japan. And there is a beautiful, more imaginative sequence near the end of the film I don’t want to entirely give away. Kore-eda also once again shows he can get really endearing performances from child actors, with the younger and older versions of our protagonists all being well cast.
I know someone seeing this without past exposure to the story will likely have a very different experience. For me a lot of its emotional impact was stunted, but I heard so many sniffles during the screening, it clearly was still effective for many. As much as I’ll insist animation was a superior medium for this story, I’m still happy more people will experience it now with the draw of Kore-eda’s vision.
Everytime, a German-language film from Austrian Director Sandra Wollner, is a film I don’t want to reveal too much of, other than it’s a story about people dealing with it an immense loss. It’s also a film that will lose a lot of people with the turns it takes. I was largely on board with its stranger elements, but then left feeling unsatisfied by its conclusion.
However, I did come away excited about Wollner as a filmmaker. She makes a choice early in this film that is incredibly startling, but I think effectively puts you in the same emotional space the characters will be in the rest of the film, dealing with the aftermath of that shock and replaying it in your head. I like that Wollner grounds you into this intimate drama, then turns the dial towards the surreal as you get further in. The central characters are all compelling — but the most impressive casting find was the young actress (Lotte Shirin Keiling) who plays Melli, the younger daughter of the main family. We are tied to her character’s perspective for much of the final portion of this film, and to a large extent it was her screen presence that allows the big swings the film takes towards the end to work for me. (Keilling received a Supporting Acting prize from the Festival Jury, a choice I found surprising but really approve of.) The film is also beautifully shot and well edited, finding strong visuals for reflecting on loss and memory. Even gameplay from Minecraft is incorporated into its visual language, one of the film’s outside the box choices that I really appreciated.
Wollner herself was at the screening I attended, and while she didn’t want to interpret the movie for us, some of what she said did clarify it for me. It seems her aim here was really to depict the experience of grief without attempting to provide an answer to grief. It’s not a story about characters overcoming or moving past the pain of their lost. And I really respect that idea, but I also think that’s why I didn’t feel satisfied at the end. We went through a lot emotionally in this film, but in the end remained at an unresolved place. That’s true to the experience of grief, and there is still a certain beauty to the ending of this film without a typical catharsis having to be there. But as the credits rolled I did feel like I was left dangling, and it’s hard to love a film that leaves you dangling.
The first of four animated films I saw at the festival, Cherry & Virgin is the first feature length film directed by Masanao Kawajiri. It follows a romance between two mangaka – one a professional erotic artist, the other an amateur Boy’s love artist, both socially awkward virgins.
I did not feel enthusiastic about watching this from reading that premise, giving the sometimes clumsy approach to sex anime has and just the inherent cringe potential. But the movie became a must-see to me as soon as I saw what it actually looked like. Both characters see the world through the lens of their manga style, and the the film smashes them (and a bunch of other art styles) together. I loved animation that plays with the medium like that, and visually the movie largely lived up to my hopes. There’s so many clever visual gags throughout the films, I think it’s worth seeing for the playful art style alone if you’re a big anime / manga fan.
One of my turn offs with this type of film is not really wanting to follow a main character simply designed to be a loser audience surrogate. And in many ways the male lead is that, and there are points where he will make you cringe. But there’s enough introspection from the characters on their different gendered POVs to make the story of their relationship worth following, and rooting for them to just hook-up already does become fun (The whole sequence of the characters preparing for / delaying sex is one of the highlights of the film.)
How funny you find the film may depend on how much you get all the subculture in-jokes. I wouldn’t say the film bowled me over, but there are really brilliant, cutting bits. And it helped seeing it with an audience who did get all the jokes, whose laughter helped me realized when something had gone over my head. If you can find that type of audience to watch it with when it releases, I think you can have a lot of fun.
I wanted to watch at least one of the smaller films highlighted in New Directors section of the festival, and I went with the Iranian-German film Head to Head by Ghasideh Golmakani. In this movie, a prestigious Iranian director is filming an illegal production with male actors dressed in traditional women’s clothing, forcing them to experience what actresses in Iranian films go through due to the nation’s cultural restrictions.
This film makes quite clear its fury over the status of women in Iranian film industry, but it also intended as a comedy, and manages to mine decent humor from the escalating tension between the actors and the filmmaking team. The movie really gets fun when the characters end up hitting the road to get away from the authorities, leading to some intense confrontations and awkward interactions.
A lot of the film’s conflict is between the fictional director Bahar and Sina, one of the male actors who is doing the production because he hopes it will lead to him getting a visa. Sina lashes out over the oppressiveness of the clothing and everything Bahar is intentionally doing to push the male actors to break. Sina is frustrating but still a character you can sympathize with. Bahar is easy to sympathize with, but can be frustrating in her own way. While I felt like both characters could have been explored a little further, there is some good character writing there and I especially liked how their dynamic really shifts by the end of the film.
While I was amused by a fair amount of the film, I would be lying if I said the humor always hit for me. Some of what I didn’t find funny may just be cultural, but sometimes it did feel repetitive because there’s only so many different gags you can construct around men wearing hijabs. And while I respected the film’s message, in a sense that also felt repetitive – the film frequently feels like it’s just trying to hit the same points home, rather than getting any deeper into them. While I had those reservations, I still thought it was a culturally interesting, solidly made debut-film.
Tomorrow I will post Part II with my thoughts on more films, including Tangles, Ray Gunn, and La Gradiva.
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