Imported Goods
Proof that there’s life outside Hollywood: A slew of foreign filmmakers, most of them old pros, are getting their homegrown products shown stateside, some to practically frothing audience anticipation. One of the last vestiges of the French New Wave vanguard, Jacques Rivette is receiving some of the best notices of his uneven career with Va Savoir (Who Knows?). The film, which opens the New York Film Festival, follows the intersecting lives of four Parisians as they rehearse for a play. (Sept. 29)… Innovative director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen, City of Lost Children) returns with a departure from his characteristically gloomy (albeit breathtaking) worlds with Amélie, a romantic comedy that’s become a critical and box office success in Jeunet’s native France. (Nov. 2)… One-time producer of French New Wave films (including Rivette’s Seventies hit Celine and Julie Go Boating) Barbet Schroeder directs Our Lady of the Assassins, the first non-American film for the Iranian-born international director in 16 years. The Spanish-language film is set in modern-day Medellin, Colombia, amid gang violence brought on by the drug cartel. (early fall)… Dark visionary Rintaro directs Metropolis, an anime feature about a futuristic world in which humans and robots coexist, and not altogether comfortably. Based on the Forties manga (Japanese comic book) by Tezuka Osamu. (Nov. 9)… If there’s a heaven, I do hope Kryzystof Kieslowski’s up there, knocking back a cold beer and cheering the auteur theory with Hitchcock and Truffaut. Still waiting for confirmation on that particular vision, but for now we’ll have to make do with another slice of Heaven, the first installment of a trilogy (the other two logically titled Purgatory and Hell) that Polish great Kieslowski was laboring over shortly before his death in 1996. German hyperkinetic director Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) directs from a script by Kieslowski and his writing partner, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, in Tykwer’s English-language debut. With Cate Blanchett and Giovanni Ribisi. (late fall)… The Brotherhood of the Wolf, Christophe Gans’ hugely hyped French actioner about a mysterious beast on the loose, marks one of the first French films to utilize Hollywood-style CGI effects. Hollywood? Harrumph. (Nov. 2)
This article appears in September 21 • 2001.
