The Chicago International Film Festival kicks off on Thursday, October 13 and runs through Thursday, October 27. My best bets for the first week are a pair of local premieres that fall under the festival’s Special Presentations category.
The best film I’ve previewed from CIFF is also the best film I’ve seen this year period: A Quiet Passion, Terence Davies’ biopic of Emily Dickinson, starring a revelatory Cynthia Nixon (best known as Miranda on Sex and the City) in the lead role. Veteran British director Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives), directing from his original screenplay, traces the life of the immortal poet from her graduation from seminary school at 17 to her death of kidney disease at 55. Although high school English teachers across America have long painted a reductive and simplistic portrait of Dickinson as a depressive recluse, Davies and Nixon go to great lengths to correct this impression, illustrating the passionate and humorous sides of her “rebellious spirit” (much of the dialogue in the first half is as witty as anything in Whit Stillman’s recent Love & Friendship). Best of all, Davies’ elegantly gliding camera provides the perfect visual corollary to Dickinson’s poems, many of which are read exquisitely by Nixon on the soundtrack in voice-over.
Another festival highlight is Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, a darkly comic thriller that is already generating awards buzz for Isabelle Huppert. The great French actress stars as a video game designer who is brutally raped in the opening scene by a man in a black ski mask. Rather than report the incident to police, she becomes an amateur sleuth and attempts to discover his identity in order to exact revenge. Verhoeven gives viewers at least five plausible suspects in the movie’s suspenseful first half but, this being a Paul Verhoeven film, he then prematurely reveals the rapist's identity in order to better direct our focus elsewhere (i.e., on the perverse character psychology and subversive anti-religious themes). Plot-wise, it’s as twisty—and twisted—as provocative earlier Verhoeven films like Basic Instinct and Black Book. Fans of the controversial director’s work can’t afford to miss it.
A Quiet Passion screens on October 16 and October 19 with Nixon attending the latter screening. Elle screens on October 21. For more information, including ticket info and showtimes, visit www.chicagofilmfestival.com.
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