Madison's cinema scene is excellent, relatively speaking. On any given weekend, no fewer than four local venues are playing films worth watching. Four Star Video Heaven (on North Henry Street) is the most inexhaustible movie rental joint I've ever patronized. For the outrageous price of $0.00, the Cinematheque continually provides us with opportunities to see films we'll probably never again be able to see. The Wisconsin Film Festival begins on April 15 and it promises to be as stacked with must-sees as it is every year. If you've got an insatiable appetite for cinema, Madison is one of the better places you could be living at the moment. But in the interest of combating complacency, the following ought to be said: We can do better.
Having undertaken a couple of excursions to New York City—which remains the film capital of North America, obscene ticket prices notwithstanding—over the break, I've returned to Madison with a shortlist of recent films that I'd like to see playing here at some point this semester. These four films aren't out on DVD yet, though at least one of them will be very soon. All four are or seem to be (I've only seen two of the four) significant achievements that Madison audiences deserve an opportunity to catch on the big screen.
1. ""35 Shots of Rum"" – This sensuous slow-burner, directed by Claire Denis, tracks a series of subtle changes in the relationship between a Parisian metro conductor and his newly womanlike daughter. Denis' reputation in the U.S. is unfortunately restricted, for the most part, to critics and the occasional scholar; I say ""unfortunately"" because she's responsible for some of the most dynamic and mysterious cinema of the last 20 years. ""35 Shots of Rum"" is said to present an incredibly affecting image of the contemporary family: multicultural, lower-middle-class, fractured and healed several times over. I haven't seen it, but because I'm pretty familiar with the rest of Denis' awesome oeuvre, I can confidently say that Madison would benefit from this film coming here, and I'm not just saying that because I want to see it very, very badly.
2. ""The White Ribbon"" – The latest film by Austrian director Michael Haneke won the Palme d'Or at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival by out-crueling the rest of its extraordinarily brutal competitors. However, the cruelty of ""The White Ribbon"" isn't nearly as graphic as that of those other films, most of which likely won't make it out here ever (with the notable exception of Lars von Trier's ""Antichrist,"" which already played at the Orpheum in December). Instead of overloading our moral circuitry by forcing us to confront the violence that resides in our collective unconscious, Haneke patiently builds a convincing case that the line between ""puritan"" and ""psychopath"" is terribly thin. ""The White Ribbon"" is a Sony Pictures Classics property, leading me to believe that it may arrive here within the next few months. Let's hope so: It's both intellectually rewarding and visually striking—just the sort of film that Madison audiences deserve.
3. ""Police, Adjective"" – If you didn't already know, Romania has been putting together a world-renowned national cinema over the course of the last decade. Corneliu Porumboiu, the writer and director of ""Police, Adjective,"" is at the forefront of the movement that has, somewhat unfortunately, been named the ""Romanian New Wave."" ""Police, Adjective"" is really funny, really smart and really cleverly constructed. Through a series of meandering street scenes, long takes in offices that render tangible the metaphysical activity present in even life's dullest moments, and philosophical conversations that take their sweet time arriving at firm propositions about language and ethics, ""Police, Adjective"" is like an episode of ""Law and Order"" written by a tag team of Jim Jarmusch and Ludwig Wittgenstein. It's a film of ideas, and those ideas are conveyed in a wonderfully accessible and wry way.
4. ""The Wild Grass"" – This, the latest and perhaps last work by legendary French director Alain Resnais (who's 87 years old), is distinct from the other three films discussed here in that it hasn't been distributed theatrically in the U.S. since playing at the 2009 New York Film Festival in September. Resnais is a towering figure in the history of cinema—a contemporary of the French New Wave, an innovative modernist and an unapologetic formalist—and ""The Wild Grass"" is said to be a complete summation of his thematic and aesthetic concerns from the 1940s on to the present. The film is another Sony Pictures Classics property, so it may come here sometime after its initial run in NYC. Fingers crossed.
Obviously the potential audiences for these four films would be relatively limited, even in a culture-curious town like Madison. But that's the thing about any artistic vanguard. The works may speak to a select few, yet what they say and how they say it are sometimes immeasurably important.
Any films missing from this list you want to see playing in Madison? E-mail Dan with suggestions at dasullivan@wisc.edu.
