Prior to this year's Chicago International Film Festival, my favorite new film of 2006 had been The Death of Mr. Laserescu. The first CIFF film I got a chance to see (before the fest actually began) was — like that one — from Romania, and became at that point my second favorite. (And note this: something worth paying attention to is happening in Romanian cinema, in case you hadn't started.) Laserescu, which told simply and directly the story in its title, was tense and brooding, with a bracing undertone of humanity and hope, presented nearly in real time. 12:08 East of Bucharest is a bit more complex, formally and emotionally, and is laced with a bone-dry humor that at times reminded me of that deadpan Finlander, Aki Kaurismaki. The central question revolves around a national identity crisis: Did Romania actually have a revolution in 1989, or was the country caught up in events beyond everyone's control — including the shockingly-quickly deposed-and-executed dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu. In this film, it all comes down to whether the crowds of protesters hit the streets before or after the tyrant gave up his office. The issue may seem pedantic and boring to outsiders; a sympathetic outsider, though, will soon understand the matter is one of considerable agonizing in this culture which, like any, longs for heroes and martyrs and glorious national founding myths.

Most of the film is in real-time, a television call-in talk show at a fly-by-night TV studio, the kind some post-Communist entrepreneur might set up in his garage. This owner slash talk host has decided to observe the anniversary of the Revolution with a debate on the question of whether or not it really happened — and the implicit question of what difference it makes. I suspect the prospect of an essentially real-time talk show debate on this question may not sound all that compelling to many non-Romanian viewers. Nevertheless, like The Death of Mr. Laserescu, this film takes what seems to be a monumentally insignificant situation and makes it a window into our common humanity in a subtle, yet powerful way. The lives of the talk show host and his two eccentric guests are sketched in the film's first half-hour, before the show begins, in a style equal parts dignified and wacky. Through their individual predicaments and relationships, we get fast background on a nation that has passed through a convulsive change sixteen years ago — after having endured decades in the grip of an especially benumbing oppression — and is still reeling from it. Yet we also get a glimpse of a sturdy, patient people whose bitter (but not stingingly so) sense of humor helped them survive.

Recent Romanian cinema is a testimony to the vitality of this people and their prospects for the future. Director Cornelieu Proumboiu doesn't like to move the camera (and makes some sly jokes about that in the sequence in the television studio). The first act is a series of static wide shots that reinforce the plainspoken stoicism of the film's tone. The pleasures here are most subtle, perhaps stemming from a perspective that has been forced to learn to look closely and patiently to discover happiness and hope wherever it may be found. That's a perspective most of us could learn much from, if we're willing to look closely and patiently ourselves.  

Along with versions from a more conventional angle of approach, cinematic translations of the Gospel have included a quasi-Marxist setting in Nikos Kazantzakis's He Who Must Die, the Sixties' counterculture in Jesus Christ Superstar, and even heathen Quebekistan in Jesus of Montreal. Where the border lies between cultural conventions that can be updated and essential elements of the story that one shouldn't mess with remains a sticking point. And there will no doubt be some people who get stuck on a few points in this new African translation of the Greatest Story Ever Told. But surely after a century of White Male European monopolization of "Jesus Movies" we can all rejoice in finally getting the chance to approach this Good News for the Poor from the Global South.

Indeed, Son of Man sweeps us so unexpectedly into this well-known narrative, one feels certain it marks definitively the end of the Caucasion Jesus movies, especially the ones that have filtered this story to non-Western cultures. And yet this very African Gospel is set not only so believeably in that culture, but in my own culture — inasmuch as Black Hawk Down seems vastly nearer my world than the swords and sandals of Imperial Rome. The combination of the Jesus story with tribal iconography and contemporary "Rogue State" military and media carries a resounding ring of truth. Herod as a dictator in the mold of Idi Amin or Robert Mugabe has immediate currency, and his "Slaughter of the Innocents" becomes more horribly imaginable here than any other filmed version of this story. Along with the chilling versimillitude of post-colonial violence and oppression, the film shakes the Christmas-card glitter off many individual moments. There's a gorgeous African-flavored Magnificat. The boy Jesus plays with a befeathered, body-painted tribal angel. And the denial by Peter rarely has been depicted with such urgent plausibility.

Meanwhile, breaking the Gospel out of Western forms is important not only for shaking off a long association with white actors in the principle roles (who may well have come to represent, primarily, The Man, rather than the Son of Man), but also in exploding Western thought patterns that tend to subvert the meaning of the central fact of the Gospel — the Incarnation. Son of Man is much less dependent upon ideas and doctrines and exposition-stuffed dialogue and much more adept at communicating with image, music and dance than White Westerners, who have found this so difficult since their Enlightenment. At last, a Jesus film with a sense of poetry, of incarnating meaning in a sensual, poetic, impressionistic way.

Unfortunately, this can be a fault in Son of Man. Midway through the film, I felt the focus blurr a bit: the Christ-figure threatens to dissolve into more of a Gandhi or Martin Luther King -figure. It's not just that his message is of the sort that some might dismiss as a "social Gospel" — for it seems to me that the "dynamic equivalent" of the Beatitudes would be disturbingly social and political for most of us. (Try this one: "When the politicians in Europe and the USA defend trade subsidies and help to restrict the use of medicine through commercial patents, I say we have been lied to..." Wow!) Nor is it that the miraculous is denied (as noted, there are angels and a devil and some terrific healings depicted). Part of the problem may be that the motivations of the key players are left primarily to the viewer, who seems to need to know something of this story beforehand. And while there is plenty of talk about non-violent resistence, there's no sense that the goal is to bring to earth a Kingdom of God — no mention of God at all. If most versions of this story tend to overbalance either side of the God-Man duality, and this one at times favors the latter. And while there is no doubt all those Rogue States (here I include our own) could use a Gandhi or MLK right about now, I suspect some people might leave this film wishing for a Son of Man who is obviously also a Son of God.  

This is the story of an alleged possession by an alleged evil spirit: the strategy a fierce defense of that word "alleged", that is, to present the story in such a way as to leave all possibilities open and leave the conclusion entirely up to the viewer. The treatment is the opposite of a sensational exorcist horror film, deliberately underplayed, just the facts. Actually, the film leaves out a few potentially sensational or incrminating facts in its adaptation of an original case history, possibly to further keep from prejudicing the viewer. An earlier telling of this story in the film The Exorcism of Emily Rose worked less hard to keep a balance, and though it was set as a courtroom drama, ultimately made its own judgments.

Requiem, on the other hand, is so concerned with stepping back from having an opinion, at times it seems virtually without a point of view. The strategy seems sound: to set in motion the conflict between faith and science, with all the varying shades of philosophical commitment among the participants — the family, the college roommate, the boyfriend, the priests (an old liberal and a young conservative), and, of course, the deeply toubled victim — with whatever it was she was troubled by.

The space thereby opened up for balanced examination of the issues in play is refreshing and rare. We are thrust into a profoundly unsettling situation and forced to think for ourselves, without the usual guidance of a heavy-handed film style that spoon feeds us the emotions and opinions we are supposed want us to reflect without thinking. At times, though, I found the unadorned execution less-than-compelling: the discussions between the partisans of starkly different views seemed a little lacking in substance, too brief and too stock to give me a sense of what these different people believed and why their view of events seemed reasonable to them. Requiem has been well-received at the Berlin International Film Festival and elsewhere, but it left me wishing it had given me just a little more to work with.  

Stranger Than Fiction is a postmodern fairy tale in the vein of Groundhog Day or The Truman Show: the aim is a light-hearted (at least on the surface) interrogation of the human condition in both its universal qualities and contemporary particulars. The contemporary particular here has to do with our increased awareness of the constructedness of our life stories, the background narratives whose alleged objectivity has been ever more unmasked as so many fictions. The timeless universal has to do with how humans have always made sense of their existence with narrative, and the troubling relationship of our personal narratives with the painful knowledge that all these must inevitably come to an end. Below the light-hearted surface lie big questions, such as whether life is a tragedy or a comedy, or whether happy endings have anything to do with truth, and how much that matters. Above ground, this is a Will Ferrell movie — the recent more complex Will Ferrell who combines lurching non sequiturs with thoughtfulness, even poignancy. The effect, and the film, are a little uneven; though Will keeps us laughing, the film isn't nearly as good as the discussion of what it tried to do — or of the ideas it wants to tease out.

The narrative goes thusly: protagonist Harold Crick comes to realize he is a character in someone else's story, and that story is giving evidence of proceeding to an unhappy end. He discovers this when he begins hearing voices, or a voice, namely that of the narrator of his story, who narrates everything he does, "accurately, and with a bigger vocabulary." Actually, the narrator, a burned-out author named Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson) doesn't narrate everything, for better and worse. For better, it means Will retains a modicum of freedom, and between bits of narration tries to understand where his life is going, who is taking it there, and whether or not he can stop his author from her stated intention to kill him off. For worse, it means the pressure of that ominous destiny takes over his life, forcing him to change it: but he can't know if any change he might make will be for the better. He gets advice from a literature professor, Dr. Jules Hilbert, played by Dustin Hoffman, who applies literary analysis to Harold's life-in-progress in hopes of figuring out what kind of story he might be in.

I'm not sure director Marc Forester and screenwriter Zach Helm figured out what kind of story they were in. Whether or not the ending of this film fairly faces or dodges the issues it raises, or even undercuts the point it seems to want to make, and whether some important questions are left unasked, will be things people may want to argue about. The film may make more sense when real literary professors and narrative theorists weigh in to help us connect dots between this script and contemporary discussion of the uses and abuses of fiction in our own personal meaning-spinning. That Harold has been given knowledge of his imminent death has, of course, tremendous existential resonance, and whether or not his story gets a happy or tragic ending obviously has deep philosophical implications. But the ambivalence in the ending here makes it seem thrown-together, evidence perhaps that the screenwriter's depiction of writer's block was fairly autobiographical.

Maybe it was just a set dresser's whim, but prominent on Professor Hilbert's shelf is After Virtue, the classic text on postmodern ethics — if that's not a contradiction in terms: and that's the point of the book, finding moral reality in a world of fictions. Like Harold Crick, figuring out what kind of story we're in, what kind of character we are and what kind we'd like to be may the only way forward for any of us in a fictitious world.