The Moviegoer: Good night, Godard

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.

I rarely fall asleep during movies, but this International Women’s Day, I treated myself to a little nap during Jean-Luc Godard’s A Woman Is a Woman (1961) at the Gene Siskel Film Center. I’d had a few drinks at a birthday lunch a few hours prior, the likely culprit for my fatigue, but really, I just don’t enjoy the movie. One thing I did notice during this viewing, however, were several references to one of my all-time favorite filmmakers, Agnès Varda, and a scene during which her short film L’opéra-mouffe (1958) is being shown on a TV in a shop window; a year later, Godard and A Woman star Anna Karina, his real-life lover, would appear in a movie within Varda’s Cléo From 5 to 7 (1962). I may not have gained any newfound appreciation for this particular Godard film, but it was nice to see and hear the references to Varda.

My husband and I did a double feature of A Woman Is a Woman and Atom Egoyan’s latest, Seven Veils (2023), which I enjoyed. I wrote several weeks ago that I was still mulling over an Egoyan film I had seen at Doc Films, The Adjuster (1991), so my interest was piqued by this newest one. Starring Amanda Seyfried as Jeanine, it centers on a remounting of Richard Strauss’s opera Salome. Jeanine takes the helm from Charles, the renowned director who’d initially mounted it, and with whom she’d been having an affair; her childhood abuse at the hands of her father also inspired aspects of his famous staging. Egoyan has mounted his own production of the opera with the Canadian Opera Company four times, and the most recent staging, from 2023, is the one we see in the film. Seven Veils is not perfect, but I’m nevertheless interested in a film with a premise so highly personal to both the filmmaker and his characters. There are also unnerving corollaries between this and Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (2024), which I reviewed for the Reader this week. 

Despite not seeing any films made by women on International Women’s Day, I have been spoiled as of late, seeing several in theaters. Two weeks ago I saw Roberta Findlay’s 1977 protoslasher exploitation film, A Woman’s Torment, at the Alamo Drafthouse (aka “A Worker’s Torment,” in light of recent layoffs ahead of a strike at the theater chain) as part of the Terror Tuesday series. It was a revelation, even as it concealed more than the original hardcore version would have shown. In this homage to Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), exploitation is not just its genre but that against which the murderous protagonist is fighting. And fucking, because there’s still a lot of that, too.

And then last Monday, I went to see the restoration of Zeinabu irene Davis’s Compensation (1999). I’d seen it before, but I felt as excited watching it again as I did the first time, as I imagine others have felt newly watching it. Filmed entirely in Chicago, it centers on the romance between a deaf woman (Michelle A. Banks) and a hearing man (John Earl Jelks) whose love story is transposed between 1910—this part of the film shot as if a silent—and the present day. Its formal ambition is evocative, yet the story and characterizations are tender, almost comforting in their familiarity. Also formally daring were the short film Painéis do Porto (1963) and feature film Trás-os–Montes (1976), which I saw at Doc Films as part of a short series dedicated to the work of Portuguese filmmakers António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro. Trás-os-Montes reminded me of Sergei Parajanov by way of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, folksy yet rigorous in a way not immediately understandable.

Anyway, along this theme of films made by women, on Saturday, March 29, after an 11 AM screening of Jane Campion’s Bright Star (2009), I’ll be in conversation with film critic Marya E. Gates about her new book, Cinema Her Way. Which is the way I like it.

Until next time, moviegoers.