The Moviegoer is the diary of a local film buff, collecting the best of what Chicago’s independent and underground film scene has to offer.
Quite a bit of what I watch outside my home is movies I’ve already seen. Sometimes the experience can be disappointing (which is not to say bad, but I like variety), and sometimes, like this past week, it can be exciting. First, on Wednesday, I saw Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) at the Davis Theater. When I told my friend John of the Oscarbate Film Collective that it was my birthday, he asked me if I would introduce the film with him; so I did (and I definitely rambled).What really made it special is that John had asked Seidelman to record an introduction, and in it she wished me—me!—a happy birthday.
Seidelman’s feature debut, Smithereens (1982)—which in 1982 became the first U. S. independent film at the Cannes Film Festival—had been a revelation for me several years prior, when the Chicago Film Society screened it. Then I saw Desperately Seeking Susan and became a confirmed admirer of Seidelman. In these two films specifically, Seidelman depicts proto-antiheroines: in Smithereens, the main character, Wren, is particularly unlikable, but in Desperately Seeking Susan she—well, both of them (played by Rosanna Arquette and Madonna, who became a superstar during filming)—aren’t really either good or bad, just two women making their way in the world.
I often say that I know I don’t like a film when I find myself questioning its logic, because ultimately, suspended disbelief and all that doesn’t matter. Inspired by Jacques Rivette’s masterpiece Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974), the film has a wacky plot yet makes total sense. In Seidelman’s New York City, it’s perfectly reasonable that a woman could hit her head, forget who she is, get mistaken for someone else (all because of an ad in the personals, mind you), and then later get a job at a magic club after randomly stumbling into it in hopes of discovering her identity. That’s not even a major plot point, merely something that encapsulates the whimsical chain of events.
This logic—or at least an acceptance of a lack of logic—applies also to Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis (2024), which I saw on Friday at the Chicago Theatre with the filmmaker in attendance. I liked it even more the second time around. It’s like a contemporary update on King Vidor’s The Fountainhead (1949), a treatise on progress in both the technological and humanistic senses. The two-hour talk afterward was just as zany, but in a movingly earnest way. (A few weeks ago, during the Q&A following her 2024 film, Castration Movie Pt. 1, filmmaker Louise Weard asked, “Isn’t sincerity the new transgression?”, and I’ve been thinking there’s something to that.) He didn’t want to talk about being a legendary filmmaker. No, he wanted to have an actual discussion with the audience about how to make the world a better place. He even had a whiteboard.
Sincerity is one of my favorite things in cinema. It can elevate the most modest, or the weirdest, or the corniest film to high art. Such a mindset must be applied to what some might deem sleazy or schlocky, such as the work of Spanish filmmaker Jess Franco, whose iconic Vampyros Lesbos (1971) I saw at the Davis Theater, presented by Oscarbate. The film’s sleaziness is its artistry; the women’s at times scantily clad bodies are no different from statues in a museum.
Until next time, moviegoers.
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