by Jarrod Jones. With the 59th Chicago International Film Festival in full swing, DoomRocket is here to highlight its choicest selections. In review: Wei Shujun’s Only the River Flows; Ena Sendijarević’s Sweet Dreams; and Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World.
ONLY THE RIVER FLOWS. [China; U.S. Premiere.]
Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” is often heard wafting in over Wei Shujun’s 90s-set murder mystery Only the River Flows, a cozily recognizable soundtrack that gives the director’s skyline shots of small city China an eerie calm. Inversely, his crime scenes are either stone quiet or set to the cacophony of pummelling rain. Shujun is grappling with tonal contradiction — his film never quite strikes dissonant harmony between the grace of living and the harshness of it — but don’t let that throw you. Only the River Flows, adapted from the short story by author Yu Hua, also has a sense of humor about all this, a wryness that transcends the self-importance you’ll often find in the grim, huffy cop dramas that overpopulate screens in the States.
It’s a refreshingly peculiar riff on the police procedural that tosses its grimly determined if somewhat beleaguered detective character (Zhu Yilong) into a bedeviling puzzle. Thrillingly, it’s less interested in cleanly orchestrating its open-and-shut murder case than interrogating how our personal experiences affect how we perceive duty, even sense. Shujun spends as much time relaying the absurdity of routine as he does the pursuit of the film’s murder suspect; here, stress-eating, sneaking a nap, and playing ping pong is just as essential to everyday life as punching in for another frustrating shift.
The details put this over the top for me. Instead of placing Yilong’s strained detective work in an overcrowded police precinct, a place we’ve visited countless times before, Shujun has his coppers set up shop in a crumbling movie theater, a ridiculous shorthand for the ineffectual grandiosity of those in higher official positions that often stymies the subordinates under them who do the real work. Yilong hunts for clues in foggy pastoral settings, yet the mists aren’t just a metaphor for how procedure clouds judgment but a prelude for dreams that seem to be telling him more than he’s ready to know. The conclusions Shujun reaches aren’t viscerally satisfying in that dog-eared crime novel sort of way, but they stick around just as effectively.
6.5 out of 10
Directed by Wei Shujun.
Screenplay by Kang Chunlei and Wei Shujun.
Cinematography by Chengma Zhiyuan.
Starring Zhu Yilong, Chloe Maayan, Hou Tianlai, and Tong Linkai.
Produced by Tang Xiaohui.
Unrated. Contains a smidge of violence and a brief sequence of morbid hallucinations.
SWEET DREAMS [The Netherlands, Sweden, Indonesia; U.S. Premiere]
Change is primed to thoroughly wreck the means of production in Sweet Dreams, the latest film from Bosnian writer/director Ena Sendijarević. It follows a family of Dutch colonialists only just hanging onto their East Indies plantation. Their set-up has, for a time, worked out quite nicely for them: the plentiful sugar keeps the drinks sweet, and they’ve been kept comfortable by the Indonesian villagers who serve them with barely obscured disdain. Things take a drastic turn for the worse following the death of family patriarch Jan (Hans Dagelet), when his wife, Agathe (Renée Soutendijk), rallies their son Cornelius (Florian Myjer) to sail in from the Netherlands with his very-pregnant wife Josefien (Lisa Zweerman). Her hope? To put the striking plantation workers to heel and secure their family wealth — and, of course, her comfort.
But here’s the rub: Jan had for years made himself home in the bed of Agathe’s servant Siti (Hayati Azis, who is the beating heart of this film) and has left his plantation to their illegitimate son, Karel (Rio Den Haas). Karel takes after his father in many distressing ways — he laughs at Jan’s abuse of his workers, who half-share Karel’s heritage and none of his privilege — and Sendijarević often takes care to frame the young boy from underneath, giving him a kingly aspect. Cornelius, a frail but ferocious scarecrow with a wispy mustache and a similar air of churlishness, comes to the East Indies believing he will get what’s coming to him. He’s right in so many inventive, infernal ways.
Through lushly shot photography by Emo Weemhoff, who conveys the closeness of thick jungle air so plainly one can almost feel smothered by it, the heat in Sweet Dreams becomes a rich metaphor for hostility. The sun bakes color into the colonists’s delicate white skin, the mosquitoes blister it (sexually frustrated Josefien seems to take the brunt of their voraciousness), and the ceaseless humidity gives everyone a glistening sheen of exhaustion and/or hunger. You get the impression that it may be more than change out to do in these entitled few. Perhaps it’s nature correcting itself from capitalism’s invasive, destructive presence.
8.5 out of 10
Written and directed by Ena Sendijarević.
Cinematography by Emo Weemhoff.
Starring Renée Soutendijk, Hayati Azis, Lisa Zweerman, Verdi Solaiman, and Hans Dagelet.
Produced by Leontine Petit and Erik Glijnis.
Rated R for some language, violence, and a bit of business with a bedpost.
DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD [Romania, Luxembourg, France, Croatia]
Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World is, appropriately enough, as long and unwieldy as its title. It articulates the frantic, racist, sexist hurly-burly of modern living, with all the attendant tangents, provisos, and nonsequiturs that so often disrupt the rhythm and clarity of these types of conversations. It does take a minute to calibrate with the scorched-earth black-and-white frenzy that powers one exhausting day in the life of Angela (Ilinca Manolache), a production assistant worked to the point of delirium, especially as it keeps splicing in richly colored film textures from Lucian Bratu’s 1981 film, Angela Moves On. By the time Jude’s film hit its first 90 minutes, I was breathless from the scope of it. And I was only halfway through.
Fortunately, Jude’s vision of present-day Romania, a crowded, blustery place where people drive like lunatics, covid still hangs over everything like a thick smog, and Ceaușescu’s destructive presence is still acutely felt, is conveyed with plain-language brusqueness. Angela is a proper tour guide with which to navigate this demented and commodified reality; she tells jokes of varying sophistication and bawdiness to ease frayed nerves (including our own), and the way she operates both her manual transmission and her phone as she hurtles from one work obligation to the next keeps us in a constant state of alertness/agitation. When she breaks into her viral TikTok character Bobita, a vulgar, unibrowed misogynist toad, it’s a clear response/release to all the heinous shit she has to endure on a minute-to-minute basis. (Manolache, by the way, is phenomenal.)
Angela certainly can’t let off steam any other way; work won’t allow it. Any intimacy she gets is achieved in fleeting parking lot bang-out sessions, which offer her a boost of endorphins and momentary respite from her current task: filming people injured at work after keeping ridiculous hours at an unnamed furniture company (Ikea is never evoked, but c’mon), for the purposes participating in a “work safety” video — which, by agreeing to do so, puts the company in the legal clear and the victims’ open lawsuits in jeopardy.
One of Jude’s more unsubtle nods to the perditious nature of this company is the name of its media rep, Ms. Goethe (Nina Hoss), who we discover is the great-great-great-grandaughter of Johann Wolfgang, who wrote “Faust.” It’s blunt, but it’s in keeping with Jude’s philosophies, which traffic in the works of DeLillo, Baudelaire, Žižek, Errol Morris, Eva Wiseman, and Kobayashi Issa, who wrote, “In this world / we walk on the roof of Hell / Gazing at flowers.” Those flowers were paved over years ago.
9 out of 10
Written and directed by Radu Jude.
Cinematography by Marius Panduru.
Starring Ilinca Manolache, Nina Hoss, Katia Pascariu, Sofia Nicolaescu, Alex M. Dascalu, and Uwe Boll.
Produced by Radu Jude, Adrian Sitaru, and Ada Solomon.
Unrated. Rife with raunch and vulgarity. Bodily fluids wind up in places they shouldn’t.
More CIFF 2023 Reviews:
Reviewed: Evil Does Not Exist, Pet Shop Days
Reviewed: Anatomy of a Fall, The Hypnosis
Reviewed: The Boy and the Heron, Dream Scenario
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