Blood Jump #9.1: Chicago International Film Festival pt.1
The Hypnosis. La chimera. The Zone of Interest.
This week’s issue of Blood Jump is going to be a bit different—namely, it will be three issues. October 11 marked the kickoff this year’s Chicago International Film Festival, which screens over 100 movies in theaters around the city. Between a fulltime day job and my medically bad taste in music, I was able to get tickets for a humble nine of these flicks. I would have loved to have seen entries like new-school heavyweight Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist or up-and-coming sicko Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker, but such is life—these bills won’t pay themselves, and Phish can’t melt its own face off. Que sera.
So, over the next week or so, Blood Jump will consist of three micro-issues, each covering three films screened via the festival. Today, we’re tackling The Hypnosis, La chimera, and The Zone of Interest. Let’s begin.
The Hypnosis
The Hypnosis offers a familiar conceit: A person bets on hypnotherapy to help them solve a problem and ends up getting more than they bargained for. It’s a concept fit for a sketch game—which is likely why we’ve seen it so many times before, from Office Space and The Curse of the Jade Scorpion to The Flintstones and Family Guy. It would be cynical to accuse The Hypnosis of doing nothing to elevate its logline from its 22-minute wheelhouse, and the movie does land a few solid punches toward a TED Talk–flavored economy of startups and self-actualization. It just doesn’t do enough.
Asta Kamma August plays Vera, an assured entrepreneur prepping to pitch a women’s health–app at an investor’s event with her partner, André (Herbert Nordum). Vera and André are as attractive and forgettable as any couple you might meet at an office park’s La Colombe, an upwardly mobile pair of sun-washed Instagram grids. But for all her fintech finesse, Vera is having trouble kicking cigarettes, and she visits a hypnotherapist to help get her smoking under control. I smell a sitcom (premise).
The Hypnosis’s satire aspires toward Ruben Östlund’s school of Swedish cringe and winds up with the aimlessness that made Triangle of Sadness such a slog. The movie’s targets read like an AI-generated word cloud of buzzy ephemera: main character syndrome, toxic therapy culture, virtue-signaling, fragile masculinity. Fair subjects to be sure, but punching up with a shaky fist can be worse for the hand than the jaw it swings toward.
Vera’s hypnotherapist encourages her to tap into her inner child, and she leaves the session confident, carefree, and terminally random, a 2023 Dharma in a world of WeWork Gregs. Her new lease on life proves increasingly disruptive to her pre-therapy presentation plans with André. She goes off-book when the couple first delivers their pitch to the event’s Dorseyan session leader (David Fukamachi Regnfors), she steals milk from the bar and blasts karaoke tracks in their hotel room, she takes a bit involving an invisible dog too far at a networking cocktail hour. There are moments when this game pays off; it’s delightful to watch a group of Patagonia’d Shark Tank wannabees squirm, and André’s reactions to his partner going off the rails are often funny and sometimes crack into the horrors of men in modern relationships. But The Hypnosis is as content to release a thread as it is reluctant to find one, and every solid point it makes on egocentric venture capitalists and self-serving self-help is overshadowed by two other jokes that struggle to find their footing.
Asta Kamma August is the backbone of the whole thing, and she sticks the landing as Vera with enough precision that you’ll wish director Ernst De Geer took more care with his story. August is forced to walk a tightrope, to make Vera as cringe-inducing as she is charming, someone you wouldn’t dream of sharing an elevator with but could watch ad nauseum, and it’s remarkable how far she’s able to stretch in either direction. Here’s hoping she’s off to bigger and better things next.
La Chimera
Grief is most often, if appropriately, a dour trade in movies. The sadness of losing someone can overwhelm the spectrum of the experience so wholly that it’s easy to forget death is also bizarre, often poetic, and sometimes deeply funny. Alice Rohrwacher’s La chimera does not erase the tragedy of grief but also expands its scope beyond a single vantage; the movie sees death cling to threads of history that unspool from ancient earth and extend into the unknown.
Arthur (Josh O’Connor) returns from a jail stint to the Tuscan home of his late lover (Yile Vianello) and her mother, Flora (Isabella Rossellini), who’s sharing her house with her music student and live-in maid, Italia (Carol Duarte). While Arthur navigates the weight of his lost love, he reconnects with the group that landed him in jail in the first place: a gaggle of grave robbers (lovingly christened tombaroli) that tap Arthur’s gift of dowsing Etruscan tombs to pilfer and flip ancient artifacts.
That’s a lot of plot for a movie more concerned with its own spellbound rhythm than its story. La chimera is one of the best marriages of form and function in recent cinema. The movie operates with a sort of practical magic realism—its turns toward the supernatural, like Arthur’s dowsing, feel less suffused with whimsy than a criminal sense of wonder—and meets its trickster content with an army of formal gags: characters break the fourth wall, diegetic songs flip from folky romps to narrative devices, sequences are sped to the clip of Benny Hill chases. The tombaroli are the kind of crusty dropouts that can charm you even after they take your wallet, an old-country intersection of John Waters’s Dreamlanders and Gogol Bordello. Still, for all its penchants toward bedlam, La chimera never forgets the pain of loss. Arthur’s lost love is a dense fog in his own frontal lobe and that of the movie’s, a sobering anchor surviving the circus in the winds above it.
La chimera employs a deliberate concern of history: its subjects walk an earth that covers centuries of life and loss and the art for which they hunt. The movie is deeply indebted to the decades of Italian cinema before it; it weds the playful vulgarity of Pasolini with the formal precision of Fellini (with at least one direct homage to the latter). Cinematographer Hélène Louvart shoots stock with 16mm, Super 16, and 35mm film to weave a tapestry of filmic evolution that amounts to something ultimately timeless, and Isabella Rossellini, here as a matriarch bound to a wheelchair, implies deep textures of 20th and 21st century cinema by her presence alone. For all its awareness of its place in space and time and context, though, La chimera functions in a world utterly of its own. It sees the full spectrum of life and death before it and almost certainly lays the path for torchbearers to come.
The Zone of Interest
In a post-screening Q&A, actor Christian Friedel noted the unique way in which Jonathan Glazer shot much of his latest feature, The Zone of Interest. Rather than filming one scene at a time, Glazer set up cameras throughout the house in which a majority of the movie takes place. Actors performed their scenes as if they were in a living play, and sequences would often take action concurrently. “It’s sort of like a Nazi-house Big Brother,” Friedel recalled Glazer joking.
Like the movie itself, Glazer’s joke might seem crass without proper context (and for many, regardless of context all together). The Zone of Interest concerns Rudolf Höss, the longest-serving SS officer in Auschwitz and one who was largely responsible for introducing a new pesticide used in the concentration camp’s gas chambers. Zone takes its place in a long lineage of holocaust film and literature (it’s loosely based on Martin Amis’s novel of the same name). But The Zone of Interest is deliberately tangential to the atrocities of World War II; instead of chronicling Auschwitz’s horrors, Zone recounts the quotidian life of Höss and his family in their home just outside the camp’s walls.
Like its living-play methodology might imply, The Zone of Interest is in exercise in proximity. Höss and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), live with their children within earshot of their patriarch’s despicable work. Their home is modern and beautiful, replete with an urban bucolic lawn and garden, but pockmarked with reminders of the genocide next door: screams and gunshots waft over the camp walls; officers rinse blood from their boots before visiting; Hedwig shutters the windows to keep the smell of burning flesh from spoiling family dinners. Höss tears his children away from a shallow river once he realizes it’s sullied with ash from the camp’s crematoriums; his oldest studies teeth from slaughtered Jews by flashlight in his bed at night.
Repugnant as they might be, none of these horrors are played with a heavy hand. Instead, Glazer aligns Zone’s perspective squarely with that of the Höss family—the runoff from Auschwitz is merely a pesky distraction from the happy home they’ve built. Like Glazer’s other work, The Zone of Interest is patient, deliberate, and often quiet; in its domesticity, there are notes of Jeanne Dielman’s refusal to let anything happen too quickly. The Höss’s host birthday parties and invite friends for dinner, they pack school lunches for their children and fret about lawn care. Their life is so relentlessly normal that I felt myself lending a queasy empathy when a command to switch camps threatened to remove them from their house (a change that may have moved them from their neighboring Auschwitz and yet one that Hedwig resists in a show of monstrous priority).
The Zone of Interest’s economy of attention has inspired polarized reactions from critics. Jonathan Glazer’s talent is largely without question, and Zone is a formal achievement if nothing else. But to focus on the (often nice) life of a Nazi family instead of the victims of the most notorious atrocity of our lifetime can easily read as an obscene provocation. That’s to say nothing of how relentlessly art and media has covered the banality of evil, and “what would you have done if you were there” is a tired question outside of public high schools—especially given the unfolding tragedies in Gaza. The Zone of Interest’s true focus, though, is not on pedestrian thought exercises, but on the nauseous legacy that undermines even the most pleasant aspects of Höss’s life. A Nazi is likely not susceptible to the abject horror that he perpetrates, but he quivers at the psychic holes punched in the supposed greatness of his history.
Sample Draws
Still reading Swann’s Way and will be for what I’m assuming is the rest of my life.
We tackled all three nights of Phish at the United Center this weekend. A truly joyous experience if that’s your thing. I’m assuming it is not.
Each October, my good friend and horror freak Mike puts together a list of spooky movie recommendations for the rest of our film club (a truly great gift). I’m the other resident sicko of our group, and this year, he got me to take on Martyrs. Like Mike, I can’t in good conscience tell you to watch this movie. It lived up to its reputation, and if you’re unfamiliar with its reputation, stop here. Otherwise, go for it? I guess?
Thank you for reading Blood Jump. The next issue of the CIFF miniseries will hit your cozy little inbox in a few days.
This made me stoked to see Chimera this week!