This past weekend the Gene Siskel Film Center screened Patrick Wang’s two-part feature A Bread Factory, likely the most original and ambitious American movie to play in Chicago so far this year. (If you missed it, Northwestern University’s Block Cinema is bringing it back on Saturday, May 4.) Part of what makes Bread Factory so daring is how Wang incorporates devices associated with theater—eloquent soliloquies, actors breaking the fourth wall, a chorus that comments on the action—in a manner that feels distinctly cinematic. The film never feels like an adaptation of a play, but rather a unique fusion of the two artistic media; this fusion helps to strengthen Wang’s celebration of art (and specifically theater) as part of any healthy community.
A Double Life George Cukor’s work took an unexpected turn into darkness during the 40s. This film, with Ronald Colman as a Broadway star who succumbs to fits of Shakespearean jealousy while playing Othello, is perhaps the best of the period; it’s a reversal of the role-playing theme that Cukor developed during the 30s, in which a fluid, diffuse personality leads not to happiness and liberation (cf Holiday) but to madness and despair. The screenplay, by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, contains shuddering insights into the psychology of the actor, and Cukor has obtained a multilayered performance from Colman to match the complexity of the conception. Though the plot line tends toward a facile parallelism, Cukor keeps the film dense and vivid through strong imagery and behavioral detail. With Shelley Winters and Signe Hasso (1947). —Dave Kehr
Caesar Must Die The great Italian directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani film the staging of Julius Caesar with inmates of the maximum-security Rebibbia Prison in Rome; the result (2012) is not a straight documentary but an eccentric Shakespeare adaptation, a condensed version of the play assembled from months of rehearsal footage. Throughout, the Tavianis blur the line between fiction and nonfiction filmmaking, ingeniously shooting the prison so that it looks like a set and having the prisoners comment on the action in scripted asides that mimic Shakespearean prose. Ultimately the distinctions between drama and documentary seem less important than Shakespeare’s human insights, which the Tavianis render stirringly immediate. —Ben Sachs v
