When the lineup for a film festival is first released to the public, most of the attention gravitates to the big-ticket titles, most often the latest works from the world’s most celebrated filmmakers. This is understandable, of course, but there can be just as much excitement to be found in coming across the work of a brand-new voice, the kind that could very well go on to become one of those celebrated filmmakers. In recognition of this, the Chicago International Film Festival created the New Directors Competition, a sidebar featuring the first projects of a new crop of filmmakers, all of which are making their U.S. debuts. This year’s iteration consists of 12 films from around the world. While I have not seen all of them, I can assure you that this crop includes at least a couple of titles that I would rank as among my very favorites of the fest’s entire lineup.
The one familiar name among those whose projects were selected for the sidebar is Paz Vega, the Spanish actress who has appeared in such films as “Sex and Lucia” (2001), “Spanglish” (2004) and, somewhat inexplicably, “Rambo: Last Blood” (2019), who makes her debut on the other side of the camera as the writer-director of the drama “Rita.” Set in Seville in 1984, the film is seen entirely through the eyes of its title character (Sofia Allepuz), a seven-year-old girl who lives with her cabbie father (Roberto Alamo), homemaker mother (Vega herself) and five-year-old brother Lolo (Alejandro Escamilla). With her father seemingly preoccupied with Spain’s progress in the European Championship football tournament and her mother busy tending to the house and running errands for her own ailing mother, Rita spends much of her time playing with Lolo and neighbor boy Nito (Daniel Navarro) or in the care of another neighbor (Paz de Alarcon). For a while, all seems well enough but Rita is perceptive enough to begin to sense that certain things are not quite right—the sound of her dad angrily raising his voice at her mother about everything, her mother’s increasingly obvious sense of despair, her brother’s increasingly panicked reactions to their fights (all of which are kept off screen and only heard in snatches). Of course, being a young girl, she is not yet able to fully understand what is going on around her and so she can only go about her life until events build to their sadly inevitable conclusion.
Like a lot of films from actors taking their first shots in the director’s chair, “Rita” is somewhat of a mixed bag. Vega’s screenplay is less a straightforward narrative than a collection of memories as viewed from the perspective of someone too young to grasp what is happening and while this leads to a number of undeniably affecting individual scenes, they don’t quite add up to a fully satisfying story in the end and the laid-back pacing begins to work against it as the direction of the story becomes increasingly obvious. Visually, she and cinematographer Eva Diaz Iglesias do a good job of literally recreating Rita’s perspective by shooting much of the film from lower angles to suggest how she sees the world around her. Perhaps not surprisingly, Vega is at her best here in her handling of the actors—all of the performances are quite impressive and convincing with Allepuz doing exceptional work in the title role and Vega just as strong as her mother. In the end, “Rita” is perhaps not quite a good movie but it does have just enough going for it to make one want to see what Vega can do with her next directorial effort.
Another film centered around children trying to make sense of the senselessness around them is “Listen to the Voices,” the very moving feature directorial debut of filmmaker Maxine Jean-Baptiste. It tells the story of a young boy named Melrick (Melrick Diomar), who has left the suburbs of Paris where he lives with his mother to spend the summer in French Guiana with his grandmother (Nicole Dionar). He loves everything about it—from his conversations with his grandmother to playing soccer in the streets to serving as a percussionist for a local musical ensemble—and dreams idly of being able to stay there all the time. At the same time, the area has its ghosts as well, particularly of his uncle Lucas, who was murdered in those very streets ten years earlier. Although Melrick too young to have really known Lucas before his death, that tragedy continues to have repercussions as those who knew him continue to process their grief in different ways—the self-exile of Melrick mother, the continued desire for violent revenge nursed by Lucas’s best friend Yannick (Yannick Cebret) and his grandmother’s determination to keep on with her life—and soon he too finds himself grappling with the tragedy and how he wants to deal with it.
This description may make “Listen to the Voices” sound like a standard-issue coming-of-age drama and while I suppose it could be described as such in the broadest of terms, it proves to be far more fascinating, both dramatically and formally, than most stories of that ilk. Co-written with his sister, Audrey, Jean-Baptiste mixes together elements of narrative and documentary tell a story that is both achingly personal (it was inspired by the real-life death of a cousin and the three leads are all playing versions of their real-life selves) and universal in its depiction of the terrible legacy of violence and how it continues to linger long after the bodies have been buried and the blood has been scrubbed away. While I have may have made the film sound unrelentingly bleak, there is also joy to be had as well, such as Melrick’s conversations with his grandmother and his falling in with the same musical group that his late uncle once belonged to, and manages to find a way to give us an ending filled with hope that doesn’t minimize the sadder elements. The performances from the three leads are also very good—Dionar delivers a monologue towards the end in which she recounts her experience encountering one of the people responsible for Lucas’s death that might well be one of the very best bits of acting you will see this year, “Listen to the Voices” is a film of quiet but undeniable power and I hope that it gets the kind of distribution that will allow audiences to discover it for themselves.
On a much lighter note, though not without its moments of profundity as well, is “Peacock,” a very funny bit of bizarro dark comedy from writer-director Bernhardt Wenger. The focus of the film is Matthias (Albrecht Schuch), who is one of the heads of My Companion, a firm that will, for a price, supply someone who will fill a void in the lives of their customers. A child in need of a pilot father to show up for a school career day, a charming date to impress one’s friends, a single man who needs a partner in order to land a coveted apartment that is only being leased to a couple—Matthias can be all of those and, to judge by the lavish ultra-modern home he shares with girlfriend Sophia (Julia Franz Richter), business is clearly booming. (The film was reportedly inspired by real-life so-called rent-a-friend companies in Japan.) The catch, however, is that he is so good at his job that between his growing number of clients and the amount of research that he puts into each job to make everything seem as authentic as possible, there is very little time left in the day for him to actually be himself. When Sophia eventually leaves him for this very reason, the realization that he has just lost his last real connection to his true self sends him into a tailspin and his efforts to try to rediscover who he is prove to be hilariously disastrous for business.
With its combination of absurdist humor and societal critique, “Peacock” will no doubt be compared to the works of Yorgos Lanthimos and Ruben Ostlund and while there are some superficial similarities to be had, I found it to be infinitely preferable to either the former’s recent “Kinds of Kindness” or the latter’s entire output. For starters, it is a lot funnier as Wenger comes up with a number of big laughs as he charts Matthias as he goes through his existential crises, ranging from big set pieces (such as his appearance as the “son” of a man whose lavish 60th birthday celebration is meant to win him the presidency of his club) to smaller throwaway bits (such as his call to the outfit where he has rented his pet dog). More importantly, while it has a lot of fun with Matthias as his life, such as it is, begins to unravel, it never makes fun of him per se and avoids depicting him with the kind of snarky contempt that might have made the whole thing rather tedious to watch.
Much of this should be credited to the central performance from Schuch as Matthias—his work here is nuanced and entertaining thanks to both his crack comic timing and his ability to make you feel genuine sympathy for someone who is essentially a self-made cipher. With its solid and essentially universal basic premise, “Peacock” seems like the kind of movie destined to inspire any number of remakes throughout the world, but it is hard to imagine that any of them will be as thoughtful, incisive and flat-out hilarious as the original.