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PThe Duke of Burgundy

Opens Fri., Feb. 6 at SIFF Cinema Uptown and Film Center. Not rated. 101 minutes.

Tough call if you’re a movie marketer: Do you sell The Duke of Burgundy as a story of a professor who specializes in the study of moths and butterflies, or a tale of a lesbian S&M role-playing relationship? Of course this is a trick question, because this movie is both. It has plenty to interest lepidopterists and kinksters alike.

The film is mostly set in and around a beautiful old house in the countryside (Hungarian, though the film’s in English). We first meet the professor, Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen), as she cruelly bosses around Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna), a younger woman who appears to be her maid. It turns out this ritual of humiliation is not only mutually accepted, but mostly dictated by Evelyn, who enjoys being punished. She insists that they repeat the same game-playing stories, while Cynthia grows more disenchanted with these rules. She has the house and the career, but she looks terrified of losing her pretty young companion, and goes through the paces accordingly. Occasionally we sit in on lectures that appear to involve an all-female club of moth experts, a quirk that confirms how much this movie is its own airtight, self-contained system.

Writer/director Peter Strickland, whose previous film was the devilishly clever Berberian

Sound Studio, is nearly flawless at creating that system. On the one hand, his movie is an incredibly handsome homage to a certain kind of arty erotic picture from the ’70s (the opening credits are wonderfully antique), yet he shows no nudity and generates little salacious excitement. The two actresses are completely locked into this world, never winking at the camera or losing the human vulnerability behind the unconventional, uh, “lifestyle.” At one point the movie pauses for a trippy sequence that directly quotes Stan Brakhage’s classic of experimental cinema, Mothlight (for which the filmmaker pasted bits of real moths onto the film reel), but with a distinctly sexual kick. Amid this hothouse atmosphere, something roots The Duke of Burgundy in a universal subject. However weirdly it might present itself, and whatever Cynthia and Evelyn’s S&M tastes might be, the relationship issues between the two women are pretty mundane: One is getting bored; one is needier than the other; one has money and the other has youth. Dressing these everyday anxieties in bondage gear gives the movie an undercurrent of droll humor, which becomes part of its sneaky appeal. Robert Horton

PHuman Capital

Opens Fri., Feb. 6 at SIFF Cinema Uptown and Film Center. Not rated. 110 minutes.

The waiter bicycling home from a banquet, hit by a bratty rich kid’s SUV late in the slushy December night near Milan, isn’t identified until the final minutes of this fine, damning drama. And his name is accompanied by a payout in euros (an insurance settlement), because financial value and human worth are the twinned subjects of Paolo Virzi’s film (adapted from American writer Stephen Amidon’s 2004 novel, kicked forward to reflect the recent global financial crisis). Two families are affected by the hit-and-run incident: the rich Bernaschi clan, led by slick, harried hedge-fund manager Giovanni (Fabrizio Gifuni); and the middle-class Ossolas, whose wheedling, ambitious patriarch Dino (Fabrizio Bentivoglio) is determined to hustle his way to higher station. If that means cutting corners, he’ll gladly lie to his banker for a loan; and Giovanni’s firm is happy to accept his high-risk investment. Giovanni and Dino become acquainted only because their teenagers are dating (though that relationship isn’t what it seems). What they have in common—with the rest of Italy, Virzi implies—is that everyone is trying to game the system.

The financial preamble, road accident, and aftermath are seen from three separate perspectives over six months. Dino’s avuncular view is self-serving: His second wife Roberta (Valeria Golino—remember her from Rain Man?) is pregnant; and he wants/resents la dolce vita the Bernaschis represent. Inside their mansion, however, we see the gilded discontent of Giovanni’s wife Carla (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), whose loutish son is involved with Dino’s daughter Serena (Matilde Giol). The latter is, along with stepmother Roberta, one of the few characters here not motivated by money, and she brings to the picture a keen moral calculation the adults lack. As we—and the police—gradually gather what happened that fateful night, Serena must decide which family to destroy by telling the truth. Giovanni’s hedge fund is imploding; her father could lose their own home; and she’s discovering a new kind of love far from the Bernaschi estate.

How Virzi resolves these story strands isn’t tightly knotted; this is the kind of flick where a teenager leaves her laptop open for Daddy to read her e-mail while she sobs in the shower. The elegant Bernaschi and earthy Ossola families often feel like they’re in two different movies (by Antonioni and Rossellini, respectively), though that’s partly Virzi’s point: Italy is a nation still divided between those above the law and those trying, with little success, to break the law. When Carla finally tells her husband, “You bet on the downfall of this country, and you won,” we’re not sure if it’s a rebuke or a vindication. But he corrects her: “We won.” They still have their fortune, and only the little people go to jail. Or die in a ditch. Brian Miller

Mommy

Opens Fri., Feb. 6 at Guild 45th. 
Rated R. 139 minutes.

Some movies want to wear you down—an approach that seems logical for, say, a World War II tank picture like Fury. It’s not so obvious why Xavier Dolan’s award-winning Mommy seeks the same effect. This 139-minute domestic drama is a tornado of emotional (and sometimes physical) fury, with occasional joys sprinkled throughout. But man, is it a chore to watch. Dolan, a 25-year-old French-Canadian filmmaker, burns through ideas and situations with the urgency of youth, a blazing rush that creates a sometimes-exciting mess.

Much of the film’s fire comes from a teenager, Steve (Antoine-Olivier Pilon), who suffers from extreme ADHD and acts out in violent ways. He’s home with his single mother, Diane (Anne Dorval), who can’t handle him—no one could. In Dorval’s superb performance, we get a full portrait of this woman: a middle-aged former wild child who is nobody’s idea of Mother of the Year, yet who watches over her son with ferocious, wolf-like attention. Their volatile relationship plays out in an incongruously clean, tidy Canadian suburb. That’s where they meet Kyla (sad-eyed Suzanne Clement), whose life has slowed because of a vocal stutter, and whose suburban-wife boredom is lifted for a spell in her contact with these astonishing neighbors. Scenes tumble across the screen in a helter-skelter way, as though Steve’s mercurial moods were dictating the progress of the movie we’re watching.

The precocious Dolan—who’s already directed five features, beginning with I Killed My Mother—has shot Mommy in a square aspect ratio, which is really going to cause problems for home viewers who must have their widescreen TVs filled from side to side. The overbearing technique (which opens up at a couple of key moments) increases the sense of claustrophobia, I guess, even though your eye gets used to it after a few minutes. One of those moments, late in the film, provides Mommy with one of its finest sequences, a genuinely heartrending fantasy of what the future could be if only Steve were like other people. It’s the kind of daydream a long-suffering mother might allow herself in the midst of an ongoing household nightmare. At times like that, you can see the talent that lies beneath Dolan’s aggressive method, and the promise of something great in his future. Robert Horton

P2015 Oscar-Nominated Documentary Short Films

Opens Fri., Feb. 6 at Sundance Cinemas. Not rated. 81 & 79 minutes.

The law of averages tells us there must be years in which cheerful, silly efforts are nominated in the best documentary short film category. This is not one of those years. Released to theaters in anticipation of the February 22 Academy Awards ceremony, these five shorts—screening in two programs—serve up serious issues and personal essays. Whatever their subject matter, the category is critical for getting attention focused on short films that would otherwise struggle to find a venue for exhibition.

The nominees are longish, as short films go, with the briefest clocking in at 20 minutes. That’s White Earth, one of two U.S. films in the group. It cries out for a longer treatment, because it’s an American story that has developed so quickly it hasn’t gotten the notice (or concern) it deserves: the North Dakota oil boom created by fracking. Director J. Christian Jensen introduces us to children whose parents are chasing work in the oil fields, although these families are still living in trailers. The movie’s just a prelude, but in its central narrator we have a plain-spoken kid who could audition for the next Terrence Malick voiceover role.

Two films from Poland are especially tough to watch. Aneta Kopacz’s Joanna is a beautifully crafted portrait of a young mother dying of cancer, with special attention given to her bond with her bright, articulate son Johnny. Less polished is Our Curse, in which filmmaker Tomasz Sliwinski and his wife Magda document their life with an infant son born with Ondine’s curse, a rare disorder that requires mechanical ventilation during sleep. The unblinking portrait of a child in pain is close to being unbearable to watch.

Perhaps the most artful film of the bunch is The Reaper, a Mexican meditation on the life of a slaughterhouse worker whose job is killing hundreds of cows a day. Director Gabriel Serra focuses his razor-sharp camera on the interiors of the workplace and finds haunting images, from the grimy machinery to the eyes of the doomed cattle. Much more utilitarian in style is Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1 (directed by Ellen Goosenberg Kent, already available on HBOGo), a look inside the Veterans Crisis Line facility where responders handle desperate phone calls from (sometimes suicidal) veterans. Its 40 minutes pass breathlessly, as we move from one tense case to the next. The film’s success stories are overshadowed by its statistics about how many vets commit suicide every day (22) and the fact that since 2001 more military personnel have died by suicide than in battle. If Oscar voters cast their ballots for subject matter—they usually do—this one seems a likely winner. Robert Horton

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