This spring Chicago is offering lots of great opportunities to see movies directed by women. The Gene Siskel Film Center is almost done with its series devoted to pioneering American filmmaker Lois Weber, and next month it’ll present a retrospective of films by Lina Wertmuller; Block Cinema wraps up a Chantal Akerman series this week with a screening of From the Other Side on Thursday and a symposium about the director’s work on Friday; Doc Films is in the middle of a series called “Women by Women: Portraits by Contemporary Directors,” which has included such great films as Vagabond, Madeinusa, and Wendy and Lucy; and at the Chicago Latino Film Festival (which started last weekend at the AMC River East), almost a quarter of the narrative features showing were directed or codirected by women. As film culture has traditionally been—and in many respects remains—dominated by men, these local efforts to spotlight female perspectives are encouraging.
The setup is promising. The heroine, Julia (Rosario Dawson), appears in a police station, cut and bruised; a detective shows her evidence that may incriminate her in the murder of the man who once stalked her. Cut to six months earlier: Julia is attending a party thrown for her by her coworkers at a popular website, celebrating her move from the San Francisco Bay area to southern California, where she’s going to move in with her loving boyfriend. With relatively few details, Unforgettable introduces three themes that will prove to be interrelated over the course of the film: professional satisfaction, domestic happiness, and crime. I thought of Crime of Passion here, which deals with a similar thematic matrix. In that film, Barbara Stanwyck’s successful newspaper woman leaves her job in San Francisco to marry a police officer in Los Angeles. She soon chafes under the boredom of suburban life and, to keep things interesting, launches a Machiavellian plot to make her husband a bigwig on the LA police force. Eventually she turns to infidelity and even murder to realize her schemes.
