18 CHICAGO READER | JANUARY 20, 2006 | SECTION ONE

Farms

The Growing Connection nowhas 45 sites in the U.S., severalmore sites in Mexico, and newprograms in Nicaragua, the U.S.Virgin Islands, and Kenya. Haitistarts up next month. Overseasprogram costs are covered by avariety of sources, including foun-dation grants and private and cor-porate donations. In the U.S. theschools are responsible for the$1,000 start-up fee, which so farhas proved a deterrent to someotherwise interested classrooms.But Patterson says he’s talking to60 or so Rotary clubs interestedin sponsoring a classroom, and in Chicago the Growing Connec-tion was just adopted as part ofthe After School Matters job-

training program, the nonprofitbehind Gallery 37, which willbring a few more schools into the fold this spring.

On January 13 ten volunteersconvened at a Garfield Parkgreenhouse to assemble and plant60 donated EarthBoxes that inMarch will be the centerpiece ofthe Growing Connection’s latestbig outreach effort, an exhibit atthe Chicago Flower and GardenShow. Under the direction ofNancy Kreith, the master garden-er program coordinator, theyfilled the boxes with potting mix,dampened the mix with a hose,and spread fertilizer down themiddle of each one.

EarthBoxes allow gardeners toextend the local growing season

a little, but Kreith was still a bitworried. “It’s going to be tough toget them yielding fruit byMarch,” she said. “I tried to getstuff with just a 60-day germina-tion.” But, she added, once theplants are flowering they’ll bevery low maintenance.

A friendly tortoiseshell catroamed the damp workbenches,hopping up occasionally to snagsome kibble from a battered glassdish, as the volunteers stretchedthe plastic caps over the boxesand sliced holes through whichthey’d sow the seeds and out ofwhich, in a couple weeks, theplants would poke their heads.

“You just want to make a holewith your hand and push theseeds down in the soil,” said

Kreith. “Here—who wants to docorn?” Peas, mustard, spinach,Swiss chard, Italian long-leafbasil, Intimidator and Wellingtoncucumbers, and three kinds oflettuce all went into the boxes.

Some of the gardeners hadn’tworked with EarthBoxes before,but others were old hands.Nancy Block, a master gardenerwho volunteers at the CookCounty Jail garden, is a convert.She’s demo’d EarthBoxes atschools, garden clubs, civic asso-ciations, and “just about any-place anyone will listen.” She’sthe coauthor of an article onEarthBoxes in this month’s edi-tion of Chicagoland Gardeningmagazine, and she’s currentlyorganizing an effort to send a

slew of the planters to the gulfcoast to help out Katrina victims.“The soil there is poisoned,” shesays. “We just need to do some-thing, and I really believe thatthis little box can help.” v

On Saturday, April 22, there’ll beEarthBox demonstrations at theGarden Faire, a daylong eventsponsored by the University ofIllinois Extension, the ChicagoMaster Gardener Program, and the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences. Call 773-233-0476 for more.They’ll also be demo’d the follow-ing weekend at the Garfield Park Conservatory’s annualGreen and Growing Fair; seegarfieldparkconservatory.org.

EARTHBOXES continued from page 17

CHICAGO READER | JANUARY 20, 2006 | SECTION ONE 19

RATINGSssss MASTERPIECEsss A MUST SEEss WORTH SEEINGs HAS REDEEMING FACET

• WORTHLESS

CAFE LUMIERE ssss

DIRECTED BY HOU HSIAO-HSIENWRITTEN BY HOU AND CHU T’IEN-WENWITH YO HITOTO, TADANOBU ASANO, MASATO HAGIWARA, KIMIKO YO, AND NENJI KOBAYASHI

LOOKING FOR COMEDY IN THE MUSLIM WORLD sss

DIRECTED AND WRITTEN BY ALBERT BROOKSWITH BROOKS, SHEETAL SHETH, JOHN CARROLL LYNCH, JON TENNEY, ANDFRED DALTON THOMPSON

By Jonathan Rosenbaum

“I t’s very difficult to crossnational borders andshoot a film about a dif-

ferent culture. How many filmshave you seen that do that suc-cessfully? There are very few.The reason is very simple. Whenwe look at films [about our owncountry] made by foreign com-

panies, they’renot accurate. . . .But it’s an inter-esting challenge.”

This could beAlbert Brookstalking about themaking of hisfunny new fea-ture, Looking forComedy in theMuslim World,most of it filmedin New Delhi. Butit’s actuallyTaiwanese masterHou Hsiao-hsienspeaking aboutCafe Lumiere,which was shot in

Japan. Both filmmakers arepushing 60, and both prefer film-ing in long shot and extendedtakes. And both their movies areacute, measured observations ofcontemporary life and thought,whether we happen to be basedin LA or Tokyo.

Cafe Lumiere (2003) was com-missioned by the Japanese studioShochiku, which asked Hou tocreate an homage to its mostfamous house director, YasujiroOzu, in celebration of the cen-tennial of his birth. It’s a returnto form for Hou, after the for-

malism of Flowers of Shanghai(1998) and the emptiness ofMillennium Mambo (2001)—and his best film since ThePuppetmaster (1993). It’s also hismost minimalist effort to date,slow to reveal its depths andbeauties, and it marks a rejuve-nation of his art, confirmed byhis subsequent film, the far fromminimalist Three Times (2005),shot in Taiwan.

Cafe Lumiere is a look at every-day Japanese life and how it’schanged since Ozu’s heyday. Ituses some of Ozu’s visual motifs—trains, clotheslines—and it beauti-fully reflects what English criticTony Rayns has called the “persua-sive” unassertiveness that charac-terizes much of Ozu’s late work.It’s an outsider’s view of Japanthat’s really a two-way mirror,because the obsessive preoccupa-tion of its 23-year-old Japaneseheroine, Yoko (Yo Hitoto), a free-lance writer based in Tokyo, isinvestigating the life of Taiwaneseclassical composer Jiang Wenye.Roughly a contemporary of Ozu,Jiang was born in Taiwan andeducated in Japan, then spentmost of the remainder of his life inmainland China. The only musicheard in the film, besides a popsong over the final credits, is aselection of piano pieces he com-posed in Japan during the 1920sand ’30s; they provide a historicaland cultural filter through whichwe perceive the present. Yoko hasjust returned from Taiwan, whereshe’s been researching Jiang’sroots while teaching Japanese.She’s pregnant with the child of

Movies

Reviews

Cafe Lumiere

Outsider ArtistsFilmmakers Hou Hsiao-hsien and Albert Brooks go abroad to look around and within.

RATINGSssss MASTERPIECEsss A MUST SEEss WORTH SEEINGs HAS REDEEMING FACET

• WORTHLESS

Movies Music Art Theater

a26

Cafe Lumiere and Looking for Comedy in the Muslim WorldREVIEW BY JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

CachéREVIEW BY KEVIN B. LEEa

19 a22

a24

FM3’s Buddha MachineVashti Bunyan’sLookafteringFire Engines’ Codex Teenage Premonition

REVIEWS BYDOUGLAS WOLK ANDPETER MARGASAK

Family First?at Skestos Gabriele

Cafe LumiereWHEN MultiplescreeeningsdailyWHERE MusicBox, 3733 N.SouthportPRICE $8.25-$9.25INFO 773-871-6604

Looking forComedy inthe MuslimWorldWHERE Multiplevenues

one of her students, and she tellsher elderly parents that sheintends to raise the child alone—aclear sign of the differencesbetween Japanese life today andthe life chronicled by Ozu.

Taiwan was a Japanese colonyfor 50 years, until 1945, only twoyears before Hou was born, andJapanese culture undoubtedly hada lingering effect on many aspectsof Taiwanese life. Hou, who’s longhad an interest in Ozu, shares theolder director’s fascination withtrains, and in Cafe Lumiere one ofYoko’s friends, Hajime (TadanobuAsano), who runs a used-bookstore, is obsessed with recordingthe sounds of trains.

Like Ozu, Hou is mainly non-

judgmental about his characters,though he does manage to sug-gest over the course of his almostplotless narrative that Yoko andHajime are somewhat indiscrimi-nate collectors whose preoccupa-tion with music and trains showsmore compulsiveness than pas-sion. This may be a critique ofcontemporary life—somethingalso hinted at in the film’sJapanese title, Coffee Jikou, whichmeans “coffee, time, light”—but ifso, it’s a judicious one that onlyadds to the sense of serene clarity.

The clarity of Albert Brooks isfar from serene, and Sony

backed away from distributingLooking for Comedy in the

Muslim World last year afterBrooks refused to change its title.His film is especially welcomenow because it frankly admitsthat most Americans are igno-rant about Muslims and have alot to learn, in contrast with thefew other Hollywood moviesdealing with Muslims—Syriana,Munich—which seem to suggestthat non-Muslim viewers canemerge knowing the score.

Brooks plays a blundering foolheading up a State Departmentstudy of what gets people tolaugh in India and Pakistan, andhe makes a lot of the mistakesAmericans have in the thirdworld, however noble their

REVIEW BYTONY ADLER

GGUULLFF SSHHOORREESSBY CHRISTOPHER MINER

continued on page 20

No Danger of the Spiritual Thing: Short Plays by Beckett

REVIEW BY JUSTIN HAYFORD

20 CHICAGO READER | JANUARY 20, 2006 | SECTION ONE

Movies

intentions. The focus here is lesson those countries than on ourfailure to understand them, buthe pushes self-scrutiny beyondnational terms and into some-thing much more personal.

This is the triumph of Lookingfor Comedy, Brooks’s seventh fea-ture, but it’s also its limitation.The film has competing agendas:Sometimes it critiques myopicself-absorption—for example,Brooks’s character’s failure as acomic performer in New Delhi,where he revives some of his oldroutines even though the localswon’t get the references to thingslike Halloween and ventrilo-quism. Yet at other times it asksus to identify with his bemuse-

ment. To complicate matters fur-ther, Brooks’s real-life concernsabout his own aging and dwin-dling career are front and centerin the opening scene. They plain-ly motivate his character toaccept this muddled assignmentand agree to return with a 500-page report—he hopes it will earnhim a Freedom Medal, boostinghis image. But satire inflected bysharp self-mockery (he’s embar-rassed about being Jewish inIndia) doesn’t always mesh wellwith sentimental genre conven-tions (he sweetly advises hisIndian girl Friday about her jeal-ous boyfriend).

As Brooks has noted, playing asemifictional character namedAlbert Brooks, which he also did

radio and TV. But there’s a sig-nificant difference between the

obnoxiously aggressive Brooks inReal Life and the passively reac-tive one here, and I’m not con-vinced there’s any comic gain.

Since his first three features,Brooks’s energy and inventionhave diminished, perhaps becausehe keeps trying to score commer-cially—an impulse that’s yieldedthe contrived happy endings ofDefending Your Life (1991) andMother (1996), the awkwardguest-star cameos in The Muse(1999), and the determinationhere to be pointed and provoca-tive if never scathing. Still, I likeall of Brooks’s features, which arebrilliantly conceptualized anddeftly executed. This one’s noexception, and some of the laughsare genuinely cathartic. v

Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World

in Real Life (1979), is similar towhat Jack Benny used to do on

continued from page 19

Majid is somehow involved, butthe more he confronts andthreatens the man the more hisinner turmoil over past crimessurfaces, gradually undermininghis mission, his ability to func-tion as a husband and father, andthe audience’s sympathy for him.

More than one critic has notedhow Georges’ contempt for andfear of Majid, as well as hisrefusal to face his own abusivepast, reflects the real-life nation-al crisis that exploded in the sub-urbs of France last November,which stemmed in part fromwidespread ignorance and disre-gard of those suffering from eco-nomic and racial discrimination.Georges’ ignorance isn’t due to alack of knowledge or under-standing; it’s the result of selec-tive memory. Unable to acknowl-edge his past as an abuser, hesees himself as an undeservingvictim. Caché puts its audience ina similar position: amid anabundance of information we’reforced to choose what to focuson, constructing our own versionof the film’s truth.

In one scene Georges, frustrat-ed and distracted after a fruitlessmeeting with the police, is nearlyblindsided by an African biker.As the two threaten to come toblows, Anne tries to defuse thesituation by saying to the biker,“You weren’t looking and weweren’t looking, OK?” It’s aseemingly well-intended peaceoffering, but Anne offers it in thehopes that the two parties willdisengage and carry on their

business of not looking. Theproblem isn’t just a matter of notseeing, but of not wanting to see.

The central narrative questionof who is videotaping Georges—and moreover, how the taping isgoing unnoticed—is never fullyanswered. One particular tape ofGeorges and Majid, shot insideMajid’s apartment without anyexplanation as to how it wasdone, threatens to exhaust theviewer’s suspension of disbelief.Such exhaustion found a voice inat least one critic, Salon ’sCharles Taylor: “Ask anyoneextolling the movie, ‘Who sentthe videotapes?’ and they brushyou off as if you were being hope-lessly conventional. Maybe[director Michael] Hanekeknows that providing the answerto who sent the tapes, i.e., thecollective guilt of France, wouldexpose the movie as the trite lit-tle thesis exercise it is.”

But demanding a straightanswer is as reductive as ascrib-ing the film’s purpose to any sin-gle notion when it has so muchmore to offer. Auteuil and

Binoche convey an unstableemotional core of quiet middle-class security that threatens tocrack at any moment. The film’smeticulous set design managesto be both banal and expressive:a wall of neatly arranged booksand videos in Georges’ homeillustrates his possessive bour-geois relationship to knowledge.His son’s room, featuring vibrantposters of Eminem and soccerplayers and a video-game steer-ing wheel attached to his com-puter, suggests a portal into awholly different personal reality,a world to which his parentsseem largely oblivious. Theseinteriors are shown in wide shotsthat flatten the images—every-thing is seen at once, yet what isactually being shown is left forthe audience to discern. Hanekeis also capable of breathtakinglystylized shots, such as one withGeorges standing in a crowdedelevator with Majid’s son—Georges avoids the son’s gaze,but their reflections in the mir-rored walls create remarkablevisual tension, fragments of

space where individuals stand indefensive isolation.

At the risk of validatingTaylor’s demand for simpleanswers, it should be mentionedthat the film’s final scene, a four-minute shot of a school entrance,contains a highly suggestive clueas to the source of the video-tapes, though to find it requiresconcentrated looking—whichmay be the point. You have tolook even if you’re never surewhat you’re looking for. Andeven if you catch the clue—asmall interaction between twocharacters—there’s still the mat-ter of how to interpret it. Muchof this depends on how oneregards Georges, as well as everyother character in the movie, thepart that each plays in this socie-ty, and how this society mirrorsour own. In other words, Caché isabout how the way we look atpeople—a spouse, a child, ahomeless person, a securityguard—reflects our own humani-ty, exactly the sort of thing thebest works of cinematic artaspire to reveal. v

CHICAGO READER | JANUARY 20, 2006 | SECTION ONE 21

Caché

Hidden inPlain SightWhat Caché has to say is there if you look for it.

By Kevin B. Lee

C aché, the best new fictionfeature I saw last year,opens with what seems like

a standard establishing shot: astationary view of the front of anupscale home. It lasts for threeminutes, with very little move-ment in the frame—but then thefootage is abruptly rewound andreplayed. A cutaway reveals anervous middle-class couplewatching this scene on video. It’stheir house on the screen—thetape was left anonymously ontheir doorstep and it’s impossibleto regard it as anything otherthan threatening. The tapes keepcoming, documenting the fami-ly’s daily life, and the rest of thefilm chronicles the desperatesearch for the originator. But asthis high-concept drama pro-gresses it involves viewers in amore critical conflict, con-fronting and challenging notonly our relationship to the char-acters’ reality, but the reality ofour own lives.

The mysterious tapes threatenthe security of Georges (DanielAuteuil), the host of a literarytalk show; his wife, Anne(Juliette Binoche), a literary edi-tor; and their 12-year-old son,Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky).But as Georges investigates thesource of the tapes he expends asmuch effort hiding his own darkhistory from his family—namelyhis childhood manipulation andabuse of Majid (MauriceBenichou), an Algerian orphantaken in by his parents. Georgessuspects that the grown-up

CACHÉ (HIDDEN) ssss

WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY MICHAEL HANEKEWITH DANIEL AUTEUIL, JULIETTE BINOCHE, MAURICE BENICHOU,ANNIE GIRARDOT, AND LESTER MAKEDONSKY