Take Two

Chilean film "The Maid" liberates a genre

We think we recognize Raquel (Catalina Saavedra), the titular figure in writer-director Sebastian Silva’s The Maid, right away. She’s a familiar fictive type: The treacherous servant, suspicious, resentful, manipulative, surely up to no good as far as the welfare of her upscale Santiago employers are concerned. They’re privileged, pretty, relatively care-free. She’s plain, middle-aged, and not at all taken in by the condescending pretense of her being almost “one of the family,” even when they celebrate her birthday at dinner one night. A dinner she nonetheless cooks and serves.

topics: actors, landmark theatres, south american film, world cinema

Take Two

Instinct propels "Lion's Den"; a fact-fiction mix animates "24 City"

The best filmmakers working in the neorealist tradition today—the Dardenne brothers, Kelly Reichardt, Ramin Bahrani—turn the ordinary into the extraordinary with deceptive ease. Argentinian director Pablo Trapero has joined them with a growing list of films whose protagonists battle the pressures of the everyday in stories that turn out to be phenomenally unique.

He gained public attention at festivals, including the SF International, in 1999 with Mundo Grua (Crane World), a 16mm black-and-white character study of an ex-musician with an obesity problem attempting to find work in construction. His demons were beef and pasta and his charms, against a wide-open South American sky, were many.

topics: asian cinema, bay area, film festivals, landmark theatres, san francisco international film festival, sffs screen, south american film, world cinema

Report

Recession sidesteps theaters, up to a point

The economic downturn is hurting everyone, right? Yet Hollywood is on pace to break the box-office record it set last year. Likewise, the arthouses are doing steady business. Even concession sales at smaller theaters are generally level. So what’s going on out there?

Landmark Theatres CEO Ted Mundorff reports that in 18 of the first 19 weeks of 2009, the arthouse chain’s ticket sales were up from last year. Nonetheless, he says, "I don’t believe the industry is recession-proof. It’s all about the films. If there were 20 films in the marketplace no one wanted to see, they wouldn’t come to the movies. If we had great movies and we were priced out of the marketplace, people wouldn’t go either."

topics: art film, bay area, distribution, exhibition, independent film, international film, landmark theatres, red vic movie house, roxie

Take Two

Troell in fine form with "Everlasting Moments"

In the early 1970s it looked like Jan Troell was “the new Bergman”—not that Ingmar himself was anywhere near finished yet. Starting out as a cinematographer (a role he’d keep on most of his own films), he made two acclaimed first features before the epic—as long as 6 1/2 hours in some cuts—diptych of 1971’s The Emigrants and 1972’s The New Land. Starring Bergman’s favorite actors Liv Ullmann and Max Von Sydow as poor 19th century Swedish immigrants struggling to reach and survive in the American frontier, both films won numerous international awards and Oscar nominations (including Best Picture for Emigrants).

But Troell was not especially prolific, or flamboyant, with the result that—even in Sweden—he was sometimes taken for granted or simply forgotten. Thus his latest movie Everlasting Moments, which opens at Bay Area theaters today, may well prove for many an introduction to a 78-year-old filmmaker who’s been directing features since 1966.

topics: actors, drama, landmark theatres, reviews, world cinema