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.
In cinema, a director’s control can show up in oppositional ways. For some, it’s exactly what you’d expect: a clear, hands-on influence over every part of a film, visible in the final result. For others, it’s a kind of intentional absence that still leaves its mark.
The former is epitomized in the work of Akira Kurosawa, whose films are the subject of a partial retrospective at the Music Box Theatre. This weekend I saw two of them: The Hidden Fortress (1958), a major influence on the original Star Wars (1977), and Sanjuro (1962), a sequel to Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961). I should be embarrassed that I hadn’t seen either film, but as I’ve discussed in past columns, it’s nice to have blind spots so as to preserve the sensation of seeing something great for the first time.
I was struck by the precision of every frame of these films, especially during Sanjuro, in which the rōnin played by Toshiro Mifune is helping nine young samurai in their struggle amid a corruption scandal in their clan. The young samurai are like the dwarves to Mifune’s Snow White; each scene featuring all the men is carefully composed, the singularity of the rōnin balanced by the nine others within the frame. The attenuated symmetry is just so satisfying. It scratches an itch, as one might say.
The same can also be said of Robert Altman’s artful insouciance. Where the Music Box’s Kurosawa retrospective spans a week, the Gene Siskel Film Center’s Robert Altman Centennial series has been going on for a few months. I’ve seen all of them before but made it out specifically for Altman’s underrated 1982 film Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean on Wednesday, with a special introduction by Chicago International Film Festival founder Michael Kutza. (The film had its U.S. premiere at the festival on September 30, 1982, which, coincidentally, was the 27th anniversary of James Dean’s death.)
Adapted from a play that Altman directed on Broadway, both the present and the past to which it often flashes back take place on the same small set. Still, it doesn’t feel constrained or even all that theatrical, which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing but is sometimes a quality of stage-to-film adaptations that makes them less cinematic. Ironically, because many of Altman’s most iconic films are sprawling in both setting and plot, this nevertheless still feels like its own expansive presence. The cast of the original stage play—Sandy Dennis, Cher, Karen Black, and Kathy Bates, among others less recognizable—reprise their roles and are absolute powerhouses; as in the most iconic Altman joints, each actor, and thereby each character, inhabits their own part of the fictional world.
All this is to say nothing of a core plot point which involves Black playing a trans woman, which is all the more transgressive (no pun intended) for its time because the film is not about that. That one of the characters is trans is just one complexity among many, over which Altman has unobsequious authority.
Until next time, moviegoers.
Reader Recommends: FILM & TV
Our critics review the best on the big and small screens and in the media.
Together is a romantic body horror that gives grotesque shape to the unraveling of intimacy.
Ari Aster’s latest reflects on the paranoia, individualism, and lasting consequences of the 2020 pandemic lockdown.
Oh, Hi!’s insights into modern romance aren’t revelatory, but the delivery is unhinged enough to stick.
A Photographic Memory is a striking documentary portrait connecting mother and daughter.
Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby confronts the realities of sexual assault with biting honesty.
Going Down (1982) is a rarely screened gem of underground filmmaking from Sydney, Australia.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
