‘Around a Small Mountain’ 4 stars
Being a European filmmaker means never having to worry you’re too old to direct. Manoel De Oliveira is still active at 101, Alain Resnais just had “Wild Grass” released at 88, so why shouldn’t Jacques Rivette, only 82 and like Resnais a French New Wave stalwart, have a new film as well?
Hard to classify or describe, “Around a Small Mountain” is best thought of as an elaborate trifle that can be either beguiling or baffling depending on your point of view.
Even the film’s French title, “36 Vues du Pic Saint-Loup,” has an elusive quality, referencing both Hokusai’s wood-block prints “36 Views of Mount Fuji” and artist Henri Riviere’s “36 Views of the Eiffel Tower.” Pic Saint-Loup, located in southern France, may be less impressive, Rivette appears to be saying, but it is still worthy of our attention.
Which is the same thing he is saying about the characters in his film, all gently wacky, complicit perhaps in some secret joke.
The film begins with Kate (Jane Birkin) standing beside her dead car. Around a curve comes a sports car that first passes her and then comes back. Out comes Vittorio (Italian actor Sergio Castellitto), who fixes Kate’s car and takes off again, all without saying a word. The two meet up again in a nearby town, and this time talk is part of the equation.
Kate is involved with a tiny traveling circus. On a whim, Vittorio attends that night’s performance and so falls in love with the troupe’s “Godot”-like clown act that he interrupts his trip to follow the circus.
It turns out that Kate is only recently back with the group, a return set in motion by the death of her father, who ran the show. She and he had a terrible falling out 15 years earlier that everyone knows about but no one wants to explain to Vittorio.
Eventually that story gets told, but exactly what happened is not the point of the film. Instead, Rivette wants us to think about the importance of not being a prisoner of the past, about how you can get to a place where you can understand and forgive yourself.
No MPAA rating. Running timeL 1:24. In French with English subtitles. Plays Fri.-Thu. at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.
Running time: 1 hour, 24 minutes
Kenneth Turan, Tribune Newspapers critic
‘Delta’ 3 stars
A young man returns home after many years and meets his sister, who works in a bar with her parents, for the first time. Their relationship changes the entire emotional ecosystem of an isolated river community situated on a stretch of the Danube that, in Hungarian director Kornel Mundruczo’s story of forbidden love, lies a long way from Strauss waltzes and nostalgic reverie.
The original leading actor died of a heart attack near the end of filming and Mundruczo started over again, recasting the role with Felix Lajko opposite the excellent Orsolya Toth. As the siblings become friends and then something more dangerous, “Delta” pits a father figure against the son he does not want sniffing around his property. Brutish behavior is seen as an intrinsic part of the order of things in this world.
Seeing “Delta” in the harried context of a film festival (it premiered last year at Cannes) does Mundroczo’s deliberate style no favors. A second viewing of “Delta” gave me a better sense of his visual strengths. Yvette Biro’s dialogue can be almost comically spare, and the movie’s deterministic quality can be stifling. It’s powerful nonetheless.
No MPAA rating. Running time: 1:36. In Hungarian with English subtitles. Plays Fri.-Thu. at Facets Cinematheque.
— Michael Phillips, Tribune critic
The Radiant Child’ 3 1/2 stars
In 1983, filmmaker Tamra Davis struck up an acquaintance with artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, shooting a lengthy interview with him in 1985. Her footage, cut into a 20-minute film, captured a handsome, enthusiastic, articulate young man. Davis realized she had the nucleus of a documentary, tracking down archival materials and the people who knew him before his death at 27 in 1988.
“Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child” is a rich documentary possessing insight and compassion. Basquiat was born into an upper middle-class Brooklyn family. By 17, he found refuge in the teeming Manhattan art and club scene of the early ’80s, and was nudged from graffiti artist to a full-fledged painter, then turned to heroin to maintain “focus.”
No MPAA rating.Running time: 1:30. Plays Fri.-Thu. at the Music Box Theatre.
— Kevin Thomas, special to Tribune Newspapers
