The Bourne Cinema Conspiracy

DVD Review: Atsushi Ogata's "Cast Me If You Can"

2012-01-28T17:44:00.000-05:00

Cast Me If You Can (Wakiyaku monogatari). 2010. Directed by Atsushi Ogata. Written by Atsushi Ogata and Akane Shiratori. Produced by Atsushi Ogata, Eric Nyari and Eriko Miyagawa. Cinematography by Yuichi Nagata. Edited by Masahiro Onaga. Music by Jessica de Rooij. Art direction by Kazumi Kobayashi. Sound design by Yasushi Eguchi.

Cast: Toru Masuoka (Hiroshi Matsuzaki), Hiromi Nagasaku (Aya), Masahiko Tsugawa (Kenta Matsuzaki), Keiko Matsuzaka (Toshiko Kuroiwa), Tasuku Emoto (Masaru), Edith Hanson (Jane), Ai Maeda (Sakura), Atsushi Ogata (Convenience Store Manager), Akira Emoto (Homeless).

(Note: this review has been cross-posted on Twitch.)

The Japanese title of Atsushi Ogata’s romantic comedy Cast Me If you Can is “Wakiyaku Monogatari,” which translates as “Tale of the Supporting Actor.” The supporting actor in this particular tale, and the main character in this story, is Hiroshi Matsuzaki (Toru Masuoka), a long-time bit player currently playing a cop on a TV drama. He harbors dreams of finally becoming a leading man, and seems close to that opportunity, having been cast as the lead in a Woody Allen remake. He is very good at disappearing into his roles; in fact, he is so good at this that this ability bleeds into his real life, to the point that he is continually mistaken for other people, a running gag that this film makes potent and funny use of. His struggle to assert his own identity is made even more difficult by having to live under the shadow of his father Kenta (Masahiko Tsugawa), a famous playwright. One case of mistaken identity gets Hiroshi embroiled in a tabloid scandal that threatens his big role, and with the help his friend and wannabe spy Masaru (Tasuku Emoto), he sets out to clear his name. In the midst of this chaos, Hiroshi meets Aya (Hiromi Nagasaku), an aspiring actress; while they begin a tentative courtship, Hiroshi’s identity issues and many other distractions threaten their budding relationship.

With Cast Me If You Can, Ogata attempts a mode of filmmaking which is quite unusual in a Japanese context: an American-style romantic comedy. He employs much more subtle humor than the typical zany, variety-show style slapstick which is more common in Japanese comedies. Instead, Ogata grounds his humor in dialog and situations in which he both honors and tweaks romantic comedy formula, which make the humor that much more potent. One great example is late in the film, in which Hiroshi delivers his passionate confession to Aya in the convenience store where she works; while fulfilling its normal function in this sort of film, the location of the scene, as well as its priceless punchline, also cleverly parodies this often clichéd convention. The films of Woody Allen are an explicitly acknowledged influence, not only in the narrative but in several walk-and-talk camera setups. But similarly to the way Ogata handles the romantic comedy genre, this doesn’t at all feel derivative, but is instead nicely woven into the rich fabric of this film. Also remarkable is how exportable and cross-cultural the comedy is here (consciously so; Ogata originally wrote his script in English and translated it to Japanese), and the generosity with which all the characters are treated, which filters down into the smallest roles. The main characters are all surrounded with vivid supporting ones, all of whom make memorable impressions, from Hiroshi’s dwarf-like agent and a flirtatious female arresting officer, to a parallel romance involving a café waitress that plays out in pantomime in the background.

As with any romantic comedy, the success of such an endeavor rises and falls on the chemistry between its leads, and Cast Me If You Can certainly scores here. Toru Masuoka is nicely understated as the hapless victim of mistaken identity, and effectively renders his character’s transformation as love is introduced into his life. But the major standout is Hiromi Nagasaku, who is terrific as a plucky and energetic young woman who is relentless in the pursuit of her dreams, and who lights up every scene she is in with her warm, and irresistibly sunny persona.

Cast Me If You Can is now available on DVD from Seminal Films, and can be purchased at Amazon.

Also, if you're in the L.A. area, there will be a screening and Q&A with director Atsushi Ogata and producer Eriko Miyagawa on March 1, hosted by USC and the Japan Film Society. Click here for screening info.

2011 African Diaspora International Film Festival Review Round-up

2011-11-26T23:28:00.001-05:00

The 19^th edition of the African Diaspora International Film Festival screens in New York from November 25 through December 13, 2011 at Quad Cinema, Teachers College at Columbia University, the Thalia Theatre, and the Schomburg Center for Black Culture. This year’s festival features 63 films from 37 countries. Some of the most interesting and eye-opening selections are the documentaries, a few of which I’ll review here.

An African Election (Jarreth Merz, Ghana/Switzerland, 2010)

Jarreth Merz’s revealing and meticulously crafted film examines in great detail, and with unprecedented access, the inner workings of the 2008 presidential election in Ghana. The election of Barack Obama earlier that year was a major aspirational influence on all participants in the Ghanaian election, who very consciously saw themselves as an important test case and example to the rest of the African continent. The major question was whether an African country, especially one with a long history of rulers seizing power through military coups, could conduct a fully democratic election without it descending into the chaos of civil war. Merz vividly details the twists, turns, and high drama of the 2008 election, especially the contentious period when, with neither of the two major political parties achieving a majority, a runoff election had to be held. Things got especially tense during the runoff, with accusations of fraud and vote tampering flying fast and furious on both sides. And even though a winner was eventually chosen without a bloody civil war, which becomes the cause for celebration (and no doubt, relief), unsettling issues remain unresolved. Not the least of these are the many problems with the voting process itself, which often resulted in long lines and many hours of waiting for people wishing to cast their ballots. Also, a civil war being narrowly averted seems to be a rather low bar with which to measure the success of an election. Still, Merz’s film excels in its penetrating examination of democracy in action, which, while not always a pretty sight to behold, is always fascinating to watch. An African Election will screen for an Oscar-qualifying weeklong run at the Quad, from November 30 through December 6, with shows at 1pm and 7:25pm daily. Jarreth Merz will appear for Q&A sessions on December 2, 3, and 4.

The Story of Lover's Rock (Menelik Shabazz, UK, 2011)

Music documentaries are a frequent fixture at ADIFF, and a great example is this year’s opening night film The Story of Lover’s Rock, which sheds valuable light on an underappreciated and largely neglected music movement in 1970’s and 1980’s Britain known as “Lover’s Rock,” which was a distinct genre of reggae music which originated among black British people who were born to immigrants from Jamaica and other parts of the Caribbean. Lover’s Rock was a softer, more romantic version of reggae that was a sharp contrast to the harder-edged, political, Rastafarian influenced music coming from Jamaica. This music, along with its culture of “sound systems,” (live venues that served as an alternative network to mainstream radio, which mostly ignored Lover’s Rock), and methods of dancing to these baby-making tunes, were an escape from the racism and violence young people experienced at the time. The Story of Lover’s Rock makes a powerful case for this musical genre as a mostly unacknowledged influence on British popular music, which spawned such figures as The Police, Culture Club and UB40. Lover’s Rock music, even though its practitioners are still not widely known outside diehard devotees, remains alive through its travels to other countries, especially Japan, where latter-day fans eagerly embraced this music, and helped revive the careers of some of its artists. The Story of Lover’s Rock will play a weeklong run at the Quad, from November 30 through December 6, with shows at 9:40pm daily. Shabazz will appear for Q&A’s at the Quad on November 30, December 1, 2, and 3.

The First Rasta (Hélène Lee and Christophe Farnarier, France/Jamaica, 2011)

Jamaican reggae music is aesthetically, spiritually and politically permeated by Rastafarian ideology, which revered Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I, and advocated healthy living, organic living, and of course, ganja. Many know at least this much about Rastafarianism; what most may not know about is the story of the man who began the movement, Leonard Percival Howell, who is largely forgotten, even by those who follow a Rastafarian lifestyle. Howell is the subject of the impressively researched and eye-opening documentary The First Rasta, which seeks to uncover the hidden, and governmentally suppressed, history of the man who existed as a constant thorn in the side to Jamaica’s government, both during and after British colonialism. Howell lived his early life as a sailor traveling the world, where he picked up ideas from everywhere he went: Communism, Indian philosophy, Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa movement, the Harlem Renaissance. With this eclectic mix of influences, he began a colony in Jamaica known as Pinnacle, where the guiding principle was self-reliance in every aspect, including farming and even creating a separate monetary system. Howell and his people were often persecuted by the authorities, and Howell spent some time in prison, and was even institutionalized in a mental facility at one point. An especially revealing fact emerges in the documentary: the most well-known aspects of Rastafarianism, wearing dreadlocks and smoking ganja, were directly influenced by Indians living in Jamaica at the time. Howell also had an influence on reggae music as well; Bob Marley, the world’s most famous and celebrated reggae musician, derived his nickname, “Tuff Gong,” from Leonard Howell, who was known as “Gong.” The First Rasta’s most moving passages concern music, much of it sung by now elderly followers of Howell, who are unstinting in their praise of their leader. The First Rasta screens at the Quad in a weeklong run from November 30 through December 6, with shows at 5:25pm daily.

Love Lockdown (Nadia Hallgren, US, 2010)

A little closer to home (New York City, that is) is the short documentary “Love Lockdown,” which addresses the impact of the radio show “Lockdown Love,” which is a forum for loved ones of incarcerated people. “Love Lockdown” follows one woman, Shoshanna, who uses the show to send messages to her boyfriend Felix, the father of her children who is currently in jail, as she anxiously waits to hear if he will be given a 10 year prison sentence. The film sensitively follows Shoshanna’s struggles to cope as a single mother, with the fate of her family, and the possible long absence of the father, threatened with the looming sentence that hangs like a scimitar over all their heads. The voice of the DJ is a conduit for the most impassioned and heartfelt feelings of those like Shoshanna who use it to communicate with their lovers behind bars. Behind this lies the backdrop of the overwhelmingly black and Latino makeup of those incarcerated in U.S. prisons, which of course is its own sad commentary. “Love Lockdown” screens November 27 at Teacher’s College at Columbia University and December 8 at the Schomburg Center, both times preceding Benedict A. Dorsey’s feature The Human Web.

For more information on these and other festival films, and to purchase tickets, visit the ADIFF website.

Preview: "Daggers: The Short Festival of Short Horror Films"

2011-10-19T22:56:00.000-05:00

The third edition of “Daggers: The Short Festival of Short Horror,” a two-hour program of short horror films from around the world, returns to the Museum of Arts and Design in New York on October 20 at 7pm and October 22 at 3pm. “Daggers,” curated by noted film critic Peter Gutierrez, puts a premium on displaying the eclectic nature of the horror film genre, and the diverse directorial talents working in this mode of expression, which is often unrecognized by the general public, who are used to the horror film being reduced to a very narrow set of stereotypical stylistics, mostly of the slasher film variety. “Daggers” admirably works as a corrective to this notion, and finds its chosen directors employing a broad range of stylistic expression, encompassing comedy, gore, surrealism, psychological horror, the musical, animation, and many other artistic modes.

One interesting aspect of this year’s edition is that it affords us the opportunity to see earlier works by film directors who have garnered considerable attention on the film festival circuit. The three films I chose to preview are very intriguing examples. “New Born” is an Israeli film by Navot Papsushado, the co-director (with Aharon Keshales) of Rabies, which is billed as Israel’s first slasher horror film. “New Born” is a much subtler work than that subsequent feature, a moody psychological film about a couple who may or may not have a baby who may or may not be alive or even exist. Two viewings of this film were not quite sufficient for me to completely discern what exactly was going on, but Papsushado does a very good job suggesting just enough allusive, sinister behavior to keep us interested.

“Next Floor,” the clear winner of the three films I previewed, is a sly, sardonic, and satirical French-Canadian film by Denis Villeneuve, who subsequently made two acclaimed features: Polytechnique (2007) and the Oscar-nominated Incendies (2009). The intense drama of those two films are a sharp contrast to “Next Floor,” which features a group of pampered rich partaking of an impossibly opulent meal, with stomach-turning close-ups of knives cutting into animal flesh and seafood, presided over by a maitre d’ who, with the use of a uniquely constructed mansion, turns this feast into an elaborate, sadistic, ritualized sort of carnage. The roles of master and servant are completely flipped around, and while the servants cater to their clients’ culinary desires, they very much have the upper hand and completely control the fates of the diners. “Next Floor,” in conception, editing, and effects, is often breathtaking in its audacity and invention, and is a major highlight of this year’s festival.

“Treevenge” is by Jason Eisener, who went on to make Hobo with a Shotgun, a modern day homage to exploitation movies, and this earlier short is as blunt and unsubtle as that feature. The premise is hilariously brutal and simple: Christmas trees, portrayed in the film as fully sentient creatures, stage a bloody revolt on their sadistic human masters, who cut them down, burn them, and humiliate them with tinsel and lights. It’s the gore-horror version of The Secret Life of Plants. The cheap gore effects and the broad playing by its cast add to this film’s goofy charm.

For more information on these and other films in the program, and to purchase tickets, visit the Museum of Arts and Design's website.

Review: Joe Swanberg's "Art History"

2011-09-27T21:02:00.000-05:00

Art History. 2011. Produced, directed and edited by Joe Swanberg. Written by Joe Swanberg, Josephine Decker, Kent Osborne, Adam Wingard, and Kris Swanberg. Photographed by Adam Wingard and Joe Swanberg.

Cast: Josephine Decker (Juliette), Joe Swanberg (Sam), Kent Osborne (Eric), Adam Wingard (Bill), Kris Swanberg (Hillary).

(Note: this review has been cross-posted on Twitch.)

The filming of a sex scene proves to be no simple process (if indeed it ever is) in Joe Swanberg’s Art History, a complex and unsettling examination of the creative process and the materials involved, both human and mechanical, in the making of art, as well as the psychological pressures that go along with it. Film director Sam (Swanberg) is shooting a sex scene that presumably occurs during a couple’s one night stand. The film opens both in medias res and in flagrante delicto, with a very explicit depiction of the characters having sex, with full frontal nudity by both participants. We immediately know that this is not “real,” as we hear Sam’s off-screen instructions to his actors during the scene. The film within the film has a very different visual style than the one that surrounds it; the film Sam is making is rough-hewn and handheld, not unlike the real Swanberg’s early films. Art History itself takes the opposite stylistic tack, shot almost entirely with long, static takes, and much more meticulously framed and composed, with many scenes resembling iris shots, the image in the center surrounded by a ring of darkness. There are a couple of shots that are strikingly lovely, especially one of a shimmering pool with patterns of sunlight that wouldn’t be out of place in an avant-garde film.

Art History invites us to read it as a self-critique of the film director, or as the title indicates, the creative artist generally, as a sort of vampire who preys on the intimate details of those who are used as the objects of this art. Swanberg himself says as much in his director’s statement, where he writes: “This film is an apology to anyone I have hurt because of the way I work or because of my own emotional recklessness. As the title suggests, I hope all of these instances are in the past.” The atmosphere of Art History is hermetic and claustrophobic; the film takes place entirely in the single location of the house where the film within the film is being made. The only acknowledgement of a world outside the film set is the sound of an airplane that intrudes at one point on the scene.

Juliette (Josephine Decker) and Eric (Kent Osborne), the actors in the scene, are told by Sam to improvise their dialog, during which they reveal details of their personal relationships during their sex scene. Sam is mostly unconcerned with the specific details of this dialog, concentrating instead on the technical details of lighting, sound, and the physical actions of his two actors. The intimacy of the scene bleeds into the “real life” outside the film, as Juliette and Eric explore their real attraction to one another, having actual sex off camera during the shoot. A simultaneously humorous and disturbing moment occurs when Sam turns his attention from checking footage he has shot to peer in on Juliette and Eric as they have sex. The film shoot runs into a major complication when it becomes clear that Sam and Juliette seem to have some sort of an off-camera relationship as well, forming an inchoate and somewhat confusing love triangle. This sex act seems to upset the delicate balance of the shoot, as Sam’s jealousy of Juliette and Eric’s relationship gradually becomes more apparent.

Swanberg has come a long way artistically from earlier films such as Kissing on the Mouth, LOL, and Hannah Takes the Stairs; as interesting as those films were, one still got the sense that Swanberg was working out his stylistics, and that framing and composition were very much secondary concerns. However, Swanberg right now is in the midst of a creatively fecund and boldly experimental phase of his career, and has been incredibly prolific in the past year. Swanberg premiered three films at two major festivals within a month of each other this year: Uncle Kent at Sundance, and Art History and Silver Bullets at Berlin. Another film, Autoerotic (co-directed with Adam Wingard), recently opened in New York, and two more films are set to be released later this year. Art History so far is the only one of these films I’ve been able to see, but if this is any indication of the quality of his other recent work, I’m eagerly looking forward to seeing the rest of them.

Art History is now playing at the reRun Gastropub Theater through September 29. For screening times and to purchase tickets, visit reRun’s website. The film is also included as part of film distributor Factory 25’s box set “Joe Swanberg: Collected Films 2011,” a limited-edition subscription in which buyers will receive four films over the course of a year: Silver Bullets, Art History, and the upcoming films The Zone and Privacy Setting. This release includes bonus materials for each film, including vinyl soundtracks and set photography booklets. For more information, and to order the set, visit Factory 25’s website.

Review: Anne Sewitsky's "Happy, Happy"

2011-09-25T19:41:00.001-05:00

Happy, Happy (Sykt lykkelig). 2010. Directed by Anne Sewitsky. Written by Ragnhild Tronvoll. Produced by Synnove Horsdal. Cinematography by Anna Myking. Edited by Christoffer Heie. Music by Stein Berge Svendsen. Art direction by Camilla Lindbraten. Sound design by Gunn Tove Gronsberg.

Cast: Agnes Kittelsen (Kaja), Joachim Rafaelsen (Eirik), Maibritt Saerens (Elisabeth), Henrik Rafaelsen (Sigve), Oskar Hernæs Brandsø (Theodor), Ram Shihab Ebedy (Noa), Heine Totland (Choral director).

(Note: this review has also been cross-posted on Twitch.)

Anne Sewitsky’s debut feature Happy, Happy, winner of the World Cinema Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is a story involving two couples, infidelity, and marital strife coming to the surface after lengthy repression, that goes down smoothly and easily – in fact, far too smoothly and easily, which is the film’s main problem. Good performances by the four principal actors are subsumed in a scenario that dials the cutesiness and whimsy up to 11, which sits uneasily with material that seems as if it should be more traumatic for the characters. But again, it all goes down easily – not for nothing was this film chosen as Norway’s foreign film Oscar entry.

Kaja (Agnes Kittelsen), a woman who is ever the eternal optimist, despite her rather distant and chilly relationship with husband Eirik (Joachim Rafaelsen), with whom she hasn’t made love in a year – the resistance is all on his end. Another couple, Sigve (Henrik Rafaelsen) and Elisabeth (Maibritt Saerens), moves into the house across from them. All of them live in a remote town, a snowy place far from the city. There doesn’t seem to be much to do in this place, and the main activity in town comes courtesy of the local church; Sigve and Elisabeth were choir singers where they came from, and they join the local choir also. They play board games soon after they meet, revealing the dynamics of both couples. Playing “The Couples Game,” especially, causes Kaja to reveal their lack of a sexual relationship to the other couple, and to reveal herself as someone extremely lacking in guile and completely an open book to everyone. Her neediness and clinging to her husband, as Eirik cruelly tells her one night, is the cause of his recent lack of attraction. However, there is another reason Eirik has distanced himself from his wife, which becomes evident in due course. Similarly, Sigve and Elisabeth moved to this remote place because of a troubled aspect of their marriage that has lain beneath the surface of their outwardly placid demeanor, but which is revealed through their interactions with their neighbors.

All of this sounds like the premise of a Bergmanesque study of troubled marriage (a sort of Scenes from Two Marriages), but Sewitsky and her screenwriter Ragnhild Tronvoll opt for a much lighter tone. This is an interesting narrative tactic, and a potentially intriguing one; unfortunately, this choice renders the proceedings rather saccharine, especially with the device of a male choir that pops up frequently between scenes with songs commenting on the action, functioning as a gospel-singing Greek chorus. Another major miscalculation is the subplot involving Sigve and Elisabeth’s adopted Ethiopian son Noa (Ram Shihab Totland), and Kaja and Eirik’s son Theodor (Oskar Hernæs Brandsø). While their scenes seem intended to represent how their parent’s problems are passed down to their children, they too often (especially when they play “master and slave”) come off as gratuitous, unnecessary distractions from the main storyline.

Happy, Happy opened September 16 in New York and Los Angeles. For more information, visit Magnolia Pictures' website.

"Yeonghwa: Korean Film Today" Review: Yim Soon-rye's "Rolling Home with a Bull"

2011-09-23T00:43:00.001-05:00

Rolling Home with a Bull (Sowa hamkke yeonaenghaneun beop). 2010. Directed by Yim Soon-rye. Written by Park Kyoung-hee, based on the novel "How to Travel with a Cow" by Kim Do-yeon. Produced by Yang Dong-myung. Cinematography by Park Yeong-jun. Edited by Park Kyoung-sook. Music by Roh Young-sim. Production design by Kim Jong-woo. Art direction by Kim Min-jeong. Sound by Seo Young-june.

Cast: Kim Yeong-pil (Choi Sun-ho), Kong Hyo-jin (Lee Hyun-soo), Mek Bo (Han-soo/Peter), Jeon Guk-hwan (Sun-ho's father), Lee Yeong-yi (Sun-ho's mother), Mun Chang-gil (old Buddhist man), Jo Seung-yeon (boy monk's father), Weon Poong-yeon (cow auctioneer), Ahn Do-gyu (boy monk), Jo Moon-eui (policeman), Jeong Weon-jo (Min-gyu), Park Hye-jin (Sun-ho's aunt).

(Note: this review has been cross-posted on New Korean Cinema.)

A humorous, lyrical, and philosophical wonder, Yim Soon-rye’s Rolling Home with a Bull is her best film to date, a superior addition to her already impressive body of work. Essentially a Buddhist parable, its free-flowing peripatetic nature, following the path of a lovelorn, failed poet who seeks to escape his home and his own past, is filled with warmth and humanity, its import growing deeper with multiple viewings. The film at first unfolds in a deceptively realistic mode, but then dreams and allegorical visions gradually take over the narrative, pulling the viewer ever so subtly into the rich fabric of its atmosphere, and making the audience a shotgun rider on the spiritual journey taken by its protagonist.

Sun-ho (Kim Yeong-pil), in the opening scenes, has had just about all he can take with the backbreaking work on his family farm, deep in the countryside of Kangwon Province. His ears ring with the harsh tones of his bickering parents – his irascible, cantankerous father (Jeon Guk-hwan), and long-suffering mother (Lee Yeong-yi) – all day long as they plow the fields with their trusty work bull. Sun-ho’s father harshly criticizes his son’s impractical and fruitless pursuit of poetry and his habit of coming home late drunk every night. His mother hectors him to get married, and to follow the example of other village men who have taken Southeast Asian women as wives; in her mind, the clock is rapidly ticking, as Sun-ho is now nearly forty. (Much of the film’s humor derives from the verbal dueling of Sun-ho’s parents, the father frequently calling his wife a “hag”; this brings to mind the real-life elderly couple of the Korean documentary Old Partner (Lee Chung-ryoul, 2008), which functioned as a paean to bucolic life.) Finally, Sun-ho’s frustration with his parents and his own feelings of personal failure drive him to taking a pickup truck and the family’s bull out on the road, with the aim to sell the bull and use the money to go traveling. The remainder of the film takes the form of a road movie, a familiar staple of Korean cinema, as Sun-ho is forced on a long trip because he can find no buyers for the bull.

The Buddhist content becomes ever more apparent as the story progresses; besides the bull itself, which we are told has great symbolic value in Buddhism, other recurring figures appear: a kindly old monk (Moon Chang-gil) and his “Ohmygod Temple”; a father (Jo Seung-yeon) and young son (Ahn Do-gyu) who beg to ride Sun-ho’s bull in order to gain enlightenment; and, in a late scene, the miraculous blooming of a lotus flower. But the most important recurring figure in Sun-ho’s life is the sudden reappearance of his estranged former lover Hyun-soo (Kong Hyo-jin), who informs him of the death of her husband, who also was Sun-ho’s best friend. Hyun-soo’s choice to marry this friend over Sun-ho, we soon learn, is the cause of his retreat from his former city life in Seoul and a deep resentment that has rendered him unable to pursue any other relationships with women. These characters, and others, serve to guide and instruct Sun-ho on the path he must take to heal his pain and reveal a purpose to his restless wandering.

This is all guided by the unerringly masterful hand of Yim Soon-rye, aided by Park Kyoung-hee’s beautifully written screenplay, based on Kim Do-yeon’s novel How to Travel with a Cow (the film’s Korean title is How to Travel with a Bull), Park Yeong-jun's richly textured cinematography (the Red One digital images nicely capture the beauty of Korea’s countryside), and a well-placed Peter, Paul and Mary folk tune. As usual, Yim elicits great performances, which in this case go well beyond their allegorical function; Kim Yeong-pil and Kong Hyo-jin are especially great in the drinking scenes that most immediately recall Hong Sang-soo in the way their personal histories spill out as easily as the many bottles of soju they consume. And last but not least, the titular bull is a compelling, sympathetic character in its own right; while not achieving the sublime depths of Bresson’s Balthazar, it’s at least in the ballpark.

Rolling Home with a Bull screens at the Museum of Modern Art on September 23 at 4:30 as part of the film series “Yeonghwa: Korean FilmToday,” screening September 22 through October 2. For more information, and to purchase tickets, visit MoMA’s website.

"Yeonghwa: Korean Film Today" Review: Shin Su-won's "Passerby #3 (Rainbow)"

2011-09-21T21:48:00.002-05:00

Passerby #3 (Rainbow). 2009. Written and directed by Shin Su-won. Produced by Shin Su-won and Kim Mi-jung. Cinematography by Han Tai-yong. Edited by Lee Hyun-mee. Music by Moon Sung-nam. Art direction by Kang Ji-hyun. Sound by Lee Taek-hee.

Cast: Park Hyun-young (Kim Ji-wan), Beack So-myung (Si-young), Yi Me-youn (Producer Choi), Kim Jae-rok (Sang-woo), Cho Hyun-sook (Hyun-joo), Yang Jong-hyeon (Ahn Chang-nam), Park Ji-weon, Song Nam-hyeon, Noh Yu-nan (Rainbow band members).

(Note: this review has been cross-posted on New Korean Cinema.)

The trials and tribulations of being a film director, an oft-told tale in movies, gets a unique and lightly surreal spin in Shin Su-won’s Passerby #3 (Rainbow), which can be best described as the slightly milder cousin of Barton Fink. Passerby #3 features an increasingly unhinged protagonist whose attempts at individual creativity are continually ground under the merciless gearwheels of the conventional wisdom of producers and investors, whose ideas of what sells seemingly shift without rhyme or reason. Ji-wan (Park Hyun-young), after catching the filmmaking bug with her first touch of a camera, impulsively quits her day job, going all in to pursue her dream. Cut to: five years later, with a bratty, demanding teenage son (Si-young, played by Beack So-myung), an increasingly impatient husband (Sung-woo, played by Kim Jae-rok), 15 drafts of her script “House of the Sun,” visions of imaginary ants everywhere, and constant producer rejections, Ji-wan has yet to make her debut. Producer Choi (Yi Me-youn), an old friend of Ji-wan’s, provides her with a last lease on professional life by hiring Ji-wan at her company; but alas, the vicious cycle of script changes, rejections and enforced commercial mainstreaming begins anew.

Inspired by the sight of a rainbow in a puddle that may or may not be a mirage, Ji-wan pursues a new idea, a music-themed film called “Rainbow,” which greatly excites her, but unfortunately meets resistance yet again from Choi and the investors. Choi, taking her cue from her bosses, harshly criticizes Ji-wan’s “psychotic” fantasy-laden script and her “shitty imagination,” giving her the rather insulting gift of the book “How to Write a Script,” so that Ji-wan can come up with an alternate idea. Choi soon relents, forced to try to work with Ji-wan’s original “Rainbow” script when a rival production company launches a project similar to the one Ji-wan is currently writing. Unfortunately, Ji-wan’s travails with Choi eventually lead to the bitter conclusion that there are really no friends in the movie business.

Just as Ji-wan is bullied in the pursuit of her art, her son Si-young is bullied in the pursuit of his, by an upperclassman at school who taunts and intimidates him as they practice together in the school rock band, and swipes the new guitar Si-young’s mother bought him. This paralleling of two creative people whose attempts to fully express their talents are thwarted by intimidating forces is but one example of the depth and sensitivity of characterization that vividly breathes life into what could have been an irredeemably clichéd scenario.

Passerby #3 (Rainbow), Shin’s debut feature, which won best Korean film at the Jeonju International Film Festival and best Asian-Middle Eastern film at the Tokyo International Film Festival (both in 2010), is at least partly autobiographical. Similarly to her film’s protagonist, Shin quit her teaching job in 2002 to enter film school and pursue filmmaking while raising two children. Again, like her main character, Shin had also been preparing a music-themed film before making this one, and indeed, many musical elements remain in her story. However, Shin insists that the events occurring in her film are heavily fictionalized. Nevertheless, based on the portrait Shin paints of the Korean film industry here, one could be forgiven for concluding that it must be a miracle that any personal, non-derivative films manage to be made in Korea at all. Passerby #3, of course, is itself proof positive that such films are indeed being made, and are by no means rare. The performances in the film are, for the most part, just as multifaceted as its narrative. Park Hyun-young is especially memorable as the spineless sad sack who eventually finds the courage to be more than a bit player in her own drama, while Yi Me-youn, as the producer, reveals deeper layers that complicate her role as the villainous killer of creativity she initially seems to be. The only character here that feels miscalculated is that of Ji-wan’s son Si-young. As played by Beack So-myung, Si-young comes off as such an obnoxious jerk, and is so merciless in his verbal take-downs of his mother, that it’s difficult to feel sympathy for his artistic struggles. Still, this only slightly mars what is otherwise an affecting, impressive introduction to an interesting new director well-worth watching.

Passerby #3 (Rainbow) screens at the Museum of Modern Art on September 22 at 4:30 and September 25 at 4:30 as part of "Yeonghwa: Korean Film Today," a small but impressive snapshot of recent Korean cinema. A joint presentation of MoMA and the Korea Society, the series runs from September 22 through October 2. For more information on this and other films in the series, and to purchase tickets, visit MOMA's website.

Japan Cuts 2011 Review: Masahiro Kobayashi's "Haru's Journey"

2011-07-21T16:29:00.000-05:00

Haru's Journey (Haru to no tabi). 2010. Written and directed by Masahiro Kobayashi. Produced by Muneyuki Kii and Naoko Kobayashi. Cinematography by Masamichi Uwabo. Edited by Naoki Kaneko. Music by Junpei Sakuma. Production design by Jun'ya Kawase. Costume design by Masae Miyamoto. Sound by Shin Fukuda.

Cast: Tatsuya Nakadai (Tadao Nakai), Eri Tokunaga (Haru), Hideji Otaki (Shigeo), Kin Sugai (Keiko), Kaoru Kobayashi (Kinoshita), Yuko Tanaka (Aiko Shimizu), Chikage Awashima (Shigeko), Akira Emoto (Michio), Jun Miho (Akiko), Naho Toda (Nobuko), Teriyuki Kagawa (Shinichi).

(Note: this review has been cross-posted on VCinema.)

The masterful performance by legendary actor Tatsuya Nakadai is the most obvious central attraction of Haru’s Journey, the latest film by Masahiro Kobayashi. Nakadai plays Tadao, an ornery, cantankerous character close to the end of his life, who despite his age is as impulsive, foolish, and self-centered as any typical adolescent, a fact that is remarked on by other characters in the film. In the nearly wordless opening sequence, Tadao is furiously leaving his home, followed closely on his heels by his granddaughter Haru (Eri Tokunaga), who tries to keep him from leaving. Taking great offense to Haru’s expression of dissatisfaction with their home life – she has been taking care of Tadao by herself in the years following her mother’s suicide – Tadao sets out to look for his long lost siblings, in the hopes that one of them will take him in. Tadao, as portrayed by Nakadai, is a complex character: a man with many faults, a selfish man who has hurt nearly everyone around him, yet is not entirely unsympathetic. Nakadai brilliantly portrays the multifaceted nature of Tadao – the charm and humor that attracts others to him, as well as the many negative qualities that just as strongly repel them.

Haru’s Journey is essentially a road movie, one that begins in Hokkaido (the usual setting of Kobayashi’s films), and winds its way through the towns of Japan’s northern region, as Tadao and Haru visit his siblings, and are summarily rejected by them for various reasons, mostly dealing with the long family history that is gradually revealed in the course of their trip. Kobayashi recasts Ozu’s Tokyo Story in a sense; his film similarly involves a search for familial shelter on the part of its protagonist. But while Tokyo Story concerned itself with intergenerational conflict, Haru’s Journey is more about conflicts within the same generation; Tadao’s siblings are still very angry with Tadao because of the selfish ways they were treated by him in the past and, in some cases, bitterly gleeful over his now humbled status as an impoverished supplicant.

Significantly, even though Tadao is the character we initially focus on, the film is not titled Tadao’s Journey. This is because the true evolution of character occurs within Tadao’s granddaughter Haru, who comes to learn more about him during their trip, and also because she is the catalyst for all that happens. A quietly wrenching scene occurs late in the film, when Haru confronts her estranged father (Teruyuki Kagawa) and demands answers to why he left her mother, an act Haru believes precipitated her mother’s suicide.

On the surface, Haru’s Journey seems to be much more conventional than Kobayashi’s previous austere, formally rigorous works such as Bashing and The Rebirth. However, his new film represents an intriguing marriage of potentially sentimental and melodramatic material with an aesthetic style that pulls back from overheated emotion. Kobayashi makes frequent use of long shots showing the forbidding landscapes he places his characters in, creating a distancing effect that is penetratingly observational. His detached stance toward the characters and events serve to make the more emotional and conventionally dramatic scenes stronger than they would be without the countervailing elements he places around them. Kobayashi makes full use of the talents of Tatsuya Nakadai, as well as the iconic presence he brings to this film, along with his association with such Japanese masters as Akira Kurosawa, Mikio Naruse, Kon Ichikawa, Masaki Kobayashi (no relation to Masahiro), Hideo Gosha, and others. Kobayashi, however, doesn’t allow Nakadai’s legendary status to overwhelm his film, and allows generous space for visual schemes and fruitful interactions with the other characters. Nakadai, with the aid of Kobayashi’s sharp, tough screenplay, never plays to audience sympathies, retaining his character’s hard edges and uncompromising stubbornness. Eri Tokunaga is a subtly powerful presence as Nakadai’s foil, and while she may initially seem to be overshadowed by her veteran co-star, her steadfast and steady presence, as well as the emotional journey her character takes, makes an ever greater impression as the film progresses.

Deeply humanistic yet unsentimental, harshly rendered yet beautiful, Haru’s Journey both draws inspiration from and subtly critiques the sentiments of classic Japanese cinema, and proves, once again, that Masahiro Kobayashi is more than worthy to stand alongside the master filmmakers who created those earlier works. Haru’s Journey, which deals with loss and survival among its themes, gains rather tragic resonance by events outside the film; it was shot in some areas that were devastated by the March 11^th earthquake and tsunami. Appropriately, 50% of the ticket sales from its screening at Japan Society will be donated to the Japan Earthquake Relief Fund.

New York Asian Film Festival 2011 Review: Ryoo Seung-wan's "City of Violence"

2011-07-13T02:55:00.000-05:00

City of Violence (Jjakpae). 2006. Directed by Ryoo Seung-wan. Written by Kim Jeong-min, Lee Won-jae, and Ryoo Seung-wan. Produced by Ryoo Seung-wan and Kim Jeong-min. Cinematography by Yeong-cheol. Edited by Nam Na-yeong. Music by Bang Jun-seok. Martial arts direction by Jung Doo-hong.

Cast: Ryoo Seung-wan, Jung Doo-hong, Lee Beom-soo, Jeong Seok-yong, Ahn Kil-kang, Lee Joo-sil, Kim Byeong-ok, Kim Hyo-seon, Kim Kkobbi.

Ryoo Seung-wan, a favorite and frequent guest of the New York Asian Film Festival, has two films in this year's edition: The Unjust, his latest and one of his best, a sprawling tale of urban corruption and moral corrosion; and a retrospective screening of the swift-moving, down-and-dirty action flick City of Violence. Below is what I wrote on this film when it screened at the 2007 New York Asian Film Festival.

City of Violence, Ryoo Seung-wan’s lean and limber 92-minute noir, is very much a back-to-basics production after his previous, more ambitious films Arahan and his most impressive work to date, Crying Fist. Even though the knee-jerk reaction would be to identify Quentin Tarantino as his principal influence, a much more apt comparison would be the Shaw Brothers epics of the ‘70s, such as The Five Venoms, which Ryoo has expressed his great admiration for. City of Violence is anchored by its incredibly energetic and acrobatic action scenes, choreographed by his lead actor and long-time martial arts consultant Jung Doo-hong.

Jung plays Tae-su, a Seoul detective who returns to his childhood home of Onseong after the murder of Wang-jae (Ahn Gil-gang), one of his old friends. He reunites with his old crew, including Sukhwan (Ryoo Seung-wan) and Pil-ho (Lee Beom-soo). Pil-ho has become a powerful gang boss who, in a bid for legitimate respectability, is working to build a casino to make the town a major tourist attraction. Pil-ho tells Tae-su how the murder occurred (this scene is replayed multiple times, Rashomon-like, throughout the film). However, after visiting Wang-jae’s widow, Tae-su immediately smells a rat, and suspects that he hasn’t been told the entire truth. He decides to remain in Onseong and investigate the murder. Sukhwan, also suspicious, assists Tae-su.

City of Violence is so swift and relentless that one only notices its flaws on later reflection. Tae-su’s sudden realization of Wang-jae’s true killer doesn’t quite make sense, and the flashbacks to his friend’s younger days are rather awkward. However, while watching the film, these weaknesses seem to be minor since the movie contains enough style and verve to overcome them. City of Violence contains two impressive set pieces. One occurs early in the film, when Tae-su is confronted by scores of high-schoolers – uniform-clad schoolgirls, break dancers, motorcycle punks – whom he must fend off, each with their own weapons and fighting styles. The other is the film’s final fight scene in an inn, where Tae-su and Sukhwhan are armed with swords, battling dozens of henchmen (and one woman), and crashing through sliding screen doors and up and down staircases. To put it in musical terms, if Ryu’s previous film Crying Fist was his orchestral piece, then City of Violence is his garage band record: fast, loud, and somewhat ragged, but containing very entertaining and catchy riffs.

City of Violence screens July 13, 3:30pm at the Walter Reade Theater, with director Ryoo Seung-wan in attendance. For tickets, visit the New York Asian Film Festival and Film Society of Lincoln Center websites.

New York Asian Film Festival/Japan Cuts 2011 Review: Hisayasu Sato's "Love and Loathing and Lulu and Ayano"

2011-07-12T03:22:00.002-05:00

Love and Loathing and Lulu and Ayano (Namae no nai onnatachi). 2010. Directed by Hisayasu Sato. Written by Naoko Nishida, based on the book "Women Without Names" by Atsuhiko Nakamura. Produced by Ryoji Kobayashi and Koichi Kusakabe. Cinematography by Kazuhiro Suzuki. Edited by Hiromitsu Yamanaka. Music by Jun Kawabata. Production design and art direction by Kaori Haga. Sound by Ataru Ueda.

Cast: Norie Yasui, Mayu Sakuma, Makiko Watanabe, Ini Kusano, Hirofumi Arai, Aya Kiguchi, Yuji Tajiri.

(Note: this review has been cross-posted on VCinema.)

This year’s New York Asian Film Festival and Japan Cuts festival is graced by new films by two of the “Kings of Pink,” directors who made their name in “pink films,” softcore Japanese sex films. One is Takahisa Zeze’s Heaven’s Story, a sprawling 4½ hour examination of the aftermath of two murders which leaves the pink genre altogether, brimming with passion and ambition. The other is Hisayasu Sato’s Love and Loathing and Lulu and Ayano, which is somewhat more connected to his sex-film roots, since it is set in the porn film industry. Sato’s film is a hard-as-nails examination of this industry, based on Atsuhiko Nakamura’s nonfiction book Women Without Names, a collection of interviews with porn actresses. Accompanied by vertiginous images of Tokyo’s streetscapes, and often peering into puddles and gutters, the film is a quietly disturbing look at how personas are given and created, and how they can be simultaneously liberating and imprisoning. Love and Loathing and Lulu and Ayano is a porn Pygmalion, in which sleazy recruiters and promoters exploit women and trade them as commodities for entertainment value. The women are very much aware of this, but they manage to derive some emotional value from this work and try to navigate through this sordid world and to find some personal space and freedom within it.

Mousy office girl Junko (Norie Yasui) has long been dominated by her sexually profligate mother (Makiko Watanabe), and is a withdrawn, shy presence at her office-drone job. She finds very unlikely liberation from this restricted existence by a porn promoter whom she encounters on the street, who asks her the key question that opens her up to a new world: “Wouldn’t it be fun if you could become someone else?” This someone else, suggested by the director of her first porn shoot, is a blue-haired, sailor suit wearing otaku character named Lulu. She takes to the work very quickly, reveling in the double life she leads and her secret satisfaction that she is not the worthless person her mother thinks she is; strangers watch her, desire her, and send her fan letters. Lulu has a rival in Ayano (Mayu Sakuma), a violent woman who immediately resents Lulu’s meek demeanor and naïveté; however, Ayano eventually warms to Lulu and comes to be protective of her. The stardom Lulu has gained from being in porn also brings its dangers, most pertinently in the form of an overweight otaku (Ini Kusano) who sends Lulu her first fan letter, along with many more, and begins stalking her. Lulu’s predatory promoter takes advantage of Lulu’s willingness to do anything on screen to steer her toward ever more physically dangerous, even life threatening, video shoots. All these situations threaten to completely implode Lulu’s existence.

Love and Loathing and Lulu and Ayano is a sort of a meta-porn, a film that deconstructs the makings of this sort of film, utilizing a plot which could be that of a porn film itself. The repressed woman’s awakening to her hidden sexual nature is a perennial plot of porn and many forms of erotic art. The film is anchored by two fine and convincing performances by Yasui and Sakuma, portraying the newbie and the veteran who both find their own ways of escape from, or at least freedom within, their prisons. Sato explores it all with a hard-edged, unsentimental eye, a nonjudgmental and non-stereotypical stance that makes this a film (mostly) not for titillation, and insistent of the dignity of its characters, and by extension, the real women who work in the sex-film industry. Alternating between steely near-monochrome and lurid color (especially in a very violent and bloody scene near the conclusion), Sato’s film departs from the more extreme imagery and subject matter of his previous work (which depicted bestiality, rape, and most notoriously, self-cannibalism) to deliver an emotionally and psychologically penetrating film.

New York Asian Film Festival/Japan Cuts 2011 Review: Yu Irie's "Ringing in Their Ears"

2011-07-06T03:40:00.000-05:00

Ringing in Their Ears (Gekijouban Shinsei Kamattechan: Rokkun roru wa nari tomaranai). 2011. Written, directed and edited by Yu Irie. Cinematography by Kazuhiro Mimura. Music by Shoji Ikenaga. Art direction by Naoko Hara. Sound by Osamu Shimizu.

Cast: Fumi Nikaido, Kurumi Morishita, Kiyotaka Uji, Yui Miura, Tatsuya Sakamoto, Maki Sakai, Mikito Tsurugi, Keisuke Horibe, Shinsei Kamattechan (Noko, Mono, Chibagin, Misako).

(Note: This review has been cross-posted on VCinema.)

Yu Irie’s last two films, 8000 Miles and 8000 Miles 2, detailed the travails of aspiring Japanese underground hip-hop artists. With his latest, Ringing in Their Ears, Yu shifts to a rock milieu, an expansion of focus, and a leap of structural ambition, offering an Altmanesque multi-character narrative centering on Shinsei Kamattechan, a real-life rock band whose members play themselves. The narrative is driven by a musical ticking time bomb, counting down to an upcoming performance by the band; there is a bit of suspense concerning whether Noko, the band’s mercurial, reclusive lead singer, will even show up for the gig. As with many other details, this reflects reality outside the film; Noko assiduously avoids the press and refuses to participate in band interviews. The narrative strand directly involving the band finds the group at a turning point in their career, having signed to a major label after gaining a large following on the internet. Again, this has a real-life parallel; Shinsei Kamattechan was signed to Warner Music Japan last year after building their following with surreal homemade videos on You Tube, and a successful indie album release. In the film, the band faces the perennial dilemma that comes from being on the verge of mainstream stardom: whether to “sell out” by making a bid for broad audience appeal, or remaining true to the essence of what attracted their fans in the first place, even if this retards their progress in conventional career terms. This choice is presented to the band’s manager by an arrogant, bullying record company executive, who wants the band to change its image and rewrite one of their songs as a positive anthem to encourage hikikomori (pathological social shut-ins) to emerge from their rooms. The manager, almost certain the band won’t go for it, gingerly, and reluctantly, tries to bring up the subject with the group.

While the band prepares for its show, we are taken into the lives of other characters whose crises orbit the group, and who are all connected with this music in some way. Kaori (Kurumi Morishita), an office cleaning lady by day and an exotic dancer by night, is also a harried single mother driven to distraction by dealing with her son Ryota (Tatsuya Sakamoto), who won’t let go of the laptop given him by his estranged dad, and who horrifies his teachers by leading his kindergarten classmates in choruses of very morbid Shinsei Kamattechan lyrics. Kaori wants to take the night off from the club to see the band in concert, but her boss gives her a hard time, threatening to replace her with younger girls. Meanwhile, high-school girl Michiko (Fumi Nikaido) obsessively pursues her dream of becoming a shogi (Japanese chess) champion, which drives a wedge between herself and everyone around her, including her father – who increasingly resents her rebelliousness and who Michiko blames for turning her brother into a hikikomori – and her cheating boyfriend, who gives her a CD of the band’s music to listen to.

The film shuttles back and forth between the band and the parallel storylines, building to a crescendo with an impressively edited final sequence on the day of the show, in which all the narrative lines converge into an ecstatic explosion affirming the power of rock and roll, and most especially the passionate and idiosyncratic brand that Shinsei Kamattechan practices. Their music is a vessel that allows their fans to express their hidden feelings and desires, allowing them to experience epiphanies and to break out of prisons both self-imposed and created by society.

Irie gets major points for ambition and well-drawn characters, but the grand statement he is clearly going for remains elusive, since his style of filmmaking rarely rises above the functional. One hopes for more of a transcendent feeling from this film, for more poetry and less prose. Still, Ringing in Their Ears nicely captures the power of a song, and the myriad ways it can hit listeners in the deepest and most personal places.

Ringing in Their Ears, a co-presentation of the New York Asian Film Festival and the Japan Cuts Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema, screens July 7, 9pm at Japan Society and July 11, 1:30pm at the Walter Reade Theater. For tickets, visit the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Japan Society websites.

New York Asian Film Festival 2011 Review: Lee Seo-goon's "The Recipe"

2011-07-04T17:59:00.001-05:00

The Recipe (Doenjang). 2010. Directed by Lee Seo-goon. Written by Jang Jin and Lee Seo-goon. Produced by Jang Jin. Cinematography by Na Hee-seok. Edited by Kim Sang-bum. Music by Han Jae-gweon. Production design by Jang Seok-jin. Costume design by Kim Heui-ju. Sound by Choi Tae-yeong. Visual effects by Park Eui-dong.

Cast: Ryoo Seung-ryong (Choi Yu-jin), Lee Yo-won (Jang Hye-jin), Lee Dong-wook (Kim Hyun-soo), Cho Seong-ha (Chairman Park), Ryoo Seung-mok (Kim Jong-gu).

(Note: this review has been cross-posted on New Korean Cinema.)

A mystical and magical concoction, much like the doenjang jjigae (soybean paste stew) dish that it revolves around, Lee Seo-goon’s second feature The Recipe hinges on a brilliant bit of narrative misdirection. Choi Yu-jin (Ryoo Seung-ryong), the producer/host of a sensationalistic TV expose program, is tipped by a prospective intern to an odd last statement given by Kim Jong-gu (Ryoo Seung-mok), a fearsome serial killer, on the day of his execution. Jong-gu longingly utters the word “Doenjang.” (This is also the film’s Korean title.) He goes on to express his wish for another bowl of the stew. As we’ve been conditioned to do by so many other films, we expect to be taken into the convoluted past and secrets of this criminal, and indeed, this is the initial path Yu-jin pursues in his investigation. However, to Yu-jin’s and our great surprise, Jong-gu quickly disappears as a significant character and instead the focus shifts to what would in any other film would be a peripheral figure: the woman who made the dish that mesmerized the criminal, allowing this fugitive to be taken in by the police and put to death. This cook is one Jang Hye-jin (Lee Yo-won), and soon the story shifts to Yu-jin’s investigation of her life, and more specifically, the love affair that led to her own death in a car accident. Along the way, Yu-jin learns the intricacies of doenjang making and is told about the metaphysical qualities of Hye-jin’s special brand, which mysteriously attracts butterflies, resurrects deadened taste buds, contains scientifically impossible 100% pure salt, and which proves to be a physical manifestation of her equally pure love for Kim Hyun-soo (Lee Dong-wook). Yu-jin searches for this man, to get to the bottom of the enigma that is Hye-jin’s magical stew.

Free-wheeling mixing and matching of genres is a very much a hallmark of Korean cinema, and The Recipe takes this to a new level. Lee’s film contains many different narrative modes and methods within it: the crime drama, the road movie, the romance, the melodrama, and the ghost story, with some off-kilter comic elements, and even an animated sequence, stirred into the mix. On paper, this would seem like an impossibly unstable object; however, Lee’s sure and steady directorial hand, and the gorgeous and dreamy imagery she lends to her magical-realist tale, prevents it all from sinking into incoherence. Lee Seo-goon, also known as Anna Lee, was the screenwriter (at 19!) of Park Chul-soo’s bizarre and satirical 301/302 (1995), which also had a very strong food-based theme. But where that film depicts psychological imbalance and existential angst, The Recipe has a far gentler and more lyrical tone. The film’s titular dish takes on an allegorical import that goes beyond mere food; its connection to nature and the land, and its representation of tradition and historical memory expands its meaning into a metaphor for the nation itself. Hyun-soo’s status as a dual Korean/Japanese citizen, and the hinted-at colonial legacy which serves to drive the lovers apart, serves to make that metaphor explicit.

The Recipe, among its many other virtues, is a foodie film extraordinaire; it deserves to stand next to films such as Tampopo (1985), Babette’s Feast (1987), and Like Water for Chocolate (1992) as another classic of this genre. Produced and co-written by writer-director Jang Jin (Guns and Talks, Good Morning President), Lee’s second film arrives 12 years after her debut feature Rub Love (1998). Let’s hope this incredibly talented filmmaker doesn’t take nearly that long to make her next one.

The Recipe screens at the Walter Reade Theater on July 5 at 3:45pm and July 9 at 7pm. For tickets, visit the New York Asian Film Festival and The Film Society of Lincoln Center websites.

New York Asian Film Festival 2011 Review: Jun Tsugita's "Horny House of Horror"

2011-06-30T18:06:00.001-05:00

Horny House of Horror (Fasshon heru). 2010. Written and directed by Jun Tsugita. Produced by Hideomi Nagahama and Shin Hayasaka. Cinematography by Shin Hayasaka. Edited by Katsutoshi Usa and Jun Tsugita. Music by Piranha Orchestra. Art direction by Ryuji Hayakawa.

Cast: Saori Hara, Asami, Mint Suzuki, Yuya Ishikawa, Toushi Yanagi, Wani Kansai, Akira Murota, Demo Tanaka, Takashi Nishina.

(Note: this review has been cross-posted on VCinema.)

Jun Tsugita’s pink film/horror hybrid Horny House of Horror goes all Grand Guignol on us with its absurdly copious amounts of blood, which sprays with frequency and gleeful abandon. As such, the film makes full use of the talents of gore effects master Yoshihiro Nishimura (Tokyo Gore Police) to relate its tale of three hapless friends who fall into the clutches of the titular trap for randy male customers. There is a soupcon of social commentary here, mostly dealing with the euphemistic nature of the sort of sex parlor that the film satirizes; as the animated opening tells us, these happy-ending massage emporiums are called “fashion health” centers to get around Japan’s anti-prostitution laws. The film’s Japanese title, Fashion Hell, is a play on words: “hell”/”health.” The purpose of this down-and-dirty, quickie exploitation flick (albeit given a 21^st century digital sheen), is fairly straightforward: to titillate with its abundant female flesh, and to keep us in awe at how creatively flesh can rend and tear on screen. As a horror film, it’s not really all that horrifying: there’s too much of a jocular air for that. Much of the carnage is directed toward the vulnerable male member, the special target of the homicidal sex workers of the massage parlor.

The three victims are friends and amateur baseball players Nakazu (Yuya Ishikawa), Toshida (Wani Kansai), and Uno (Toushi Yanagi). Nakazu has recently gotten married, and his friends incessantly rib him because of the cell-phone based short leash his wife keeps him on. He professes to be a loyal and devoted husband, yet he doesn’t argue too strenuously when his friends drag him to Shogun, the massage parlor that will in short order become an insane charnel house of atrocity. The three are matched up with Nagisa (Saori Hara), Nonoko (Asami), and Kaori (Mint Suzuki), the three girls of the house. The pre-credits sequence shows Nagisa in action with another unfortunate client, who is subjected to a variation of sushi roll dining involving the man’s penis. Think a variation of the denouement of In the Realm of the Senses (1976), but placed at the very beginning. The three women are tasked with collecting the penises of their clients by their boss who monitors them through closed-circuit TV surveillance, for a reason that is never specified. Much like Nakazu, who is slightly less of a pervert than his friends, Nagisa, the newbie sex worker, manages to retain the conscience and revulsion toward her work that her co-workers completely lack. As the men very quickly cotton to the horrible predicament they have gotten themselves into, Nagisa switches sides and battles to escape from her workplace/prison.

The playing is as broad here as one would expect; Shakespearean-caliber performances are definitely not called for. Hara, however, whose background is in hardcore pornography, gives some unexpected gravity to her character. Asami, a veritable veteran of these kinds of films by now, is the force-of-nature spitfire she usually is, her tough-girl pose and her guttural screaming always fun to watch. Tsugita, the screenwriter of Mutant Girls Squad (2010) making his directorial debut, delivers the sex-and-gore goods with maximum efficiency and minimum fuss.

A midnight movie if there ever was one, Horny House of Horror screens at exactly that time on July 1 (with a second screening on July 12 at 10:15pm), preceded by Makooto Ohtake’s short film Dark on Dark. For tickets, visit the New York Asian Film Festival or the Film Society of Lincoln Center websites.

New York Asian Film Festival 2011 Review: Panna Rittikrai and Morakot Kaewthanee's "BKO: Bangkok Knockout"

2011-06-27T13:58:00.000-05:00

BKO: Bangkok Knockout. 2010. Directed by Panna Rittikrai and Morakot Kaewthanee. Written by Dojit Hongthong and Jonathon Siminoe. Produced by Prachya Pinkaew, Akarapol Techaratanaprasert, and Panna Rittikrai. Cinematography by Pipat Payakka and Nontakorn Taweesook. Edited by Saravut Nakajud and Nontakorn Taweesook. Music by Terdsak Janpan. Art direction by Pongnarin Jonghawklang. Production design by Kasi Faengrod. Action choreography and stunt co-ordination by Thana Srisook. Martial choreography by Sumret Muengput. Sound FX and sound design by Snowman Studio. Costume design by Jaruwan Pongpipattanakarn.

Cast: Sorapong Chatree, Supaksorn Chaimongkol, Kiattisak Udomnak, Pimchanok Leuwisedpaiboon, Patrick Kazu Tang, "Fighting Club", Speedy Arnold.

(Note: this review has been cross-posted on VCinema.)

BKO: Bangkok Knockout, the title of Panna Rittikrai and Morakot Kaewthanee’s kinetic B-movie action spectacular, is an unabashedly crude and blunt statement of purpose, much like the film itself. And what is that purpose? To pummel you into submission and keep you continually in awe at the stable of martial artists Rittikrai has put together, blowing past the paper-thin plotting and characterization, the broad, cartoonish humor, and the generally unsubtle nature of the proceedings. And at that it succeeds swimmingly. Rittikrai, fight choreographer and sometime director, has mentored such Thai action stars as Tony Jaa (the Ong Bak films) and Jeeja Yanin (Chocolate, Raging Phoenix). Bangkok Knockout functions as a virtual audition for film audiences, or, more pertinently, a battle between these fighters as to who can be a worthy successor to, or competitor with, those two established stars.

The film rather impatiently breezes through its setup. A bunch of fighters are lured into a competition with a tantalizing prize dangled in front of them: the promise to be stunt performers in Hollywood. Instead, after a huge banquet with drugged food, they find themselves in a cavernous warehouse, the unwitting action figures in a human video game hosted by an arrogant, cigar-chomping American (played by an actor with the amusing name Speedy Arnold), and their arranged battles bet upon by farang high-rollers. There’s a bit of a romantic love triangle between three of the fighters, and a similarly underdeveloped revenge story between two other fighters, but who gives a damn about any of that? The film certainly doesn’t; the bulk of its running time is devoted to the ever more elaborately choreographed, outrageous, and dangerous fights – this is certainly a production that knows what its audience wants and delivers exactly that, with direct, uncomplicated brio. Bangkok Knockout affords us such sensational sequences as: a metal-masked, ax-wielding man on fire; two men smashing each other through an indoor waterfall; two others swinging on a dizzyingly high beam over a highway; and most audaciously, the climactic fight that occurs underneath the chassis of a moving truck. Muay Thai, capoeira, kung fu, tai chi, and any number of other fighting styles – this film has it all, and more. Critical evaluation is almost beside the point for a film like this; the coolness of the fight scenes is both means and end. If pure martial-arts demonstration is your thing, unencumbered by such niceties as plot, complex characterization, and actual acting, then Bangkok Knockout is just what the cinema doctor ordered.

BKO: Bangkok Knockout screens at the Walter Reade Theater on July 2 at 12:15pm and July 9 at midnight. For tickets, visit the New York Asian Film Festival's website.

"Blissfully Thai" Review: Wisit Sasanatieng's "Tears of the Black Tiger"

2011-06-09T18:25:00.002-05:00

Tears of the Black Tiger (Fah talai jone). 2000. Written and directed by Wisit Sasanatieng. Produced by Nonzee Nimibutr. Cinematography by Nattawut Kittikhun. Edited by Dusanee Puinongpho. Music by Amornbhong Methakunavudh. Production design by Ek Iemchuen. Art direction by Akradech Keaw Kotr and Rutchanon Kayangnan. Costume design by Chaiwichit Somoboon.

Cast: Chartchai Ngamsan (Seua Dum, "Black Tiger"), Stella Malucchi (Rumpoey), Supakorn Kitsuwon (Mahasuan), Arawat Ruangvuth (Police Captain Kumjorn), Sombati Medhanee (Fai), Pairoj Jaisingha (Phya Prasit), Naiyana Shiwanun (Rumpoey's maid), Kanchit Kwanpracha (Kamnan Dua, Dum's father), Chamloen Sridang (Sgt. Yam).

Asia Society's essential "Blissfully Thai" film series continues with Wisit Sasanatieng's deliriously psychedelic classic Thai cinema homage Tears of the Black Tiger, screening tomorrow at 6:45pm. For tickets, click here. Below is what I wrote on this film at the time of its extremely belated 2007 US release.

“Nostalgia as future shock,” is how the press notes describe Tears of the Black Tiger, the debut film from Thai writer-director Wisit Sasanatieng. The first Thai film chosen for the Cannes Film Festival, it was purchased by Miramax shortly after its Cannes screening in 2001, but – as was so often the case, especially with their Asian film acquisitions – Miramax proceeded to agitate and frustrate the film’s potential audience by holding back its theatrical release, forcing fans to troll the Internet to search for English-subtitled imports.

Sasanatieng is a major player in the renaissance of Thai cinema that began in the late ‘90s, which also includes Tears of the Black Tiger’s producer Nonzee Nimibutr (Nang Nak, Jan Dara), Pen-ek Ratanaruang (6ixty9, Monrak Transistor, Last Life in the Universe), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Blissfully Yours, Tropical Malady), and Hong Kong-born brothers Oxide and Danny Pang (Bangkok Dangerous, The Eye). Many of these filmmakers (with the exception of Weerasethakul, whose background was in avant-garde film and gallery installations) began in advertising, and Sasanatieng is no exception. He experimented in his commercial work with much of the wild visual tropes and super-saturated coloring featured in his film.

Consisting of equal parts Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah, and the palimpsests of numerous 50’s and 60’s Thai action films, Sasanatieng’s film brilliantly combines cutting-edge technology (much of the film’s bright pastel colors were digitally added in post-production) with nostalgia for the popular cinema of Thailand’s recent past. Tears of the Black Tiger boldly jettisons realism in order to create a uniquely cinematic universe. Making use of such retro-cinema techniques as painted sets, back projection, iris shots and wipes, Sasanatieng has created a visually stunning and self-aware pop artifact. There is a quite bracing spirit of formal playfulness that is reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard and Quentin Tarantino. One great example occurs during the opening shootout, in which the two central gunslingers, attired in the archetypal costumes of Hollywood Westerns, battle seemingly dozens of other gunmen. These antagonists are dispatched en masse, punctuated with enormous, and absurdly fake, bright red squibs of blood. After the film’s hero kills one of them with a bullet that ricochets off several surfaces before landing right between his eyes, a title card appears: “Did you catch that? If not, we’ll play it again.” The sequence then replays at a slightly slower speed and from a different angle, allowing us to follow the bullet’s trajectory. This sort of genre parody/homage is in abundance throughout the film.

The film’s plot is unabashedly melodramatic: Dum (Chutchai Ngamsan), the son of a poor peasant farmer, falls in love with Rumpoey (Stella Mallucci), the daughter of the local governor. Class differences conspire to keep them apart, culminating in Rumpoey’s unwilling betrothal to police captain Kumjorn (Arawat Ruangvuth). During his time apart from Rumpoey, Dum has become a bandit, the titular “Black Tiger,” infiltrating the gang who murdered his father in order to avenge that death. When he learns of the gang’s plan to ambush the governor’s house on Rumpoey’s wedding day, Dum must battle both his romantic rival and his former compadres in order to save her.

This “pad thai Western,” to use critic Chuck Stephens’ description, was conceived as an homage to Thai genre film master Rattana Pestonji, an independent filmmaker active in the ‘50’s and ‘60s who has now been mostly forgotten, both in and out of Thailand. Perhaps this film will encourage repertory houses and film societies to seek out this director’s work, which at least on paper seem to be long overdue for rediscovery. However, Tears of the Black Tiger is not simply an empty post-modern exercise. The obvious affection with which Sasanatieng regards his Thai cinema forbears, not to mention the Western films that influenced them, permeates every aspect of this production. Simultaneously retro and futuristic, Tears of the Black Tiger is a feast for the eyes and ears, an orgy of riotous color and movie-mad delight.

"Breaking the Waves: The Films of Zero Chou" at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

2011-06-07T15:52:00.002-05:00

Taiwanese director Zero Chou is one of the more interesting talents to emerge in recent world cinema. A former journalist who moved into documentary filmmaking in the late 90’s, she is also, by all indications, the only openly lesbian filmmaker in Taiwan. She works very closely with her life partner Hoho Liu, who also serves on her films as cinematographer and co-editor. Chou has a distinctively allusive style that freely shifts between realism, dream imagery, and fantasy, an intensively sensual eye that is attuned to human desire in all its forms, with a special sympathy for those who exists on society’s margins. She has been deservedly acclaimed for her films: Splendid Float won the best Taiwan Film award at the 2004 Golden Horse Film Festival, and Spider Lilies won the Teddy Award for best LGBT themed film at the 2007 Berlin International Film Festival. Five of Chou’s features will screen from June 7 through the 30^th at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, in a series called “Breaking the Waves: The Films of Zero Chou,” organized by the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York. All screenings are free, and Zero Chou will appear in person for introductions and Q&A's at the screenings of Wave Breaker (June 7) and Spider Lilies (June 9).

Corner’s (2001)

This impressionistic documentary about a gay bar in Taipei has many levels, beginning with the voiceover by Hoho Liu (Chou’s partner, co-editor and cinematographer), which is in French. Running throughout the film, this voiceover reflects the feelings of displacement felt by many of the subjects of the film. Mandarin is inadequate to express the feelings Liu wants to express; French gives her the proper words in which to do this. Corner’s is a place where, as one subject says, the patrons can “relax” and freely be who they are. It is a respite from the strictures of conventional society, and the coming of the dawn is a dreaded event, meaning a return, for some, to hidden desires and concealed sexual lives. In one striking sequence, people exit the club into the street, but the framing makes it seem like they are all entering dark closets. The bar was closed after a police raid, so the film also represents a memorial to this place, and what it meant to those who patronized it. There is a very sensual passage in which two women, whose faces we don’t see, are in the process of making love, and as is the case with the film itself, it is a powerful affirmation of desire in the face of societal opposition. The name of the bar itself represents marginalization, being in the corners of society, rather than out in the open.

(June 30 at 6:30pm)

Splendid Float (2004)

The theme of dual lives in Corner’s carries over to Splendid Float, Chou’s second fiction feature and the first in her “Rainbow Colors” series of films, each of which is defined visually by a key primary color, in this case, yellow. This is the color of a T-shirt worn by Sunny, the lover of the protagonist Roy (James Chen), a novice Taoist priest by day and a drag performer, named Rose, at night. Rose performs with a troupe of fellow performers on a traveling float that performs in a different location each night. One night when the truck the float is mounted on breaks down, Rose first meets Sunny (I-chin Zhuon), a very handsome surfer type, at a roadside café. Almost instantly, they act on their attraction to one another, but almost as quickly, they must part from one another. Their separation is sealed shortly afterward when Sunny mysteriously dies by drowning. Torn apart by grief, Rose finds it increasingly difficult to maintain the two separate lives he leads, and he embarks on a quest to learn why Sunny left so suddenly, and throughout the film, he communes with Sunny’s ghost. The narrative is deliberately slim and spare, all the more to concentrate on how Rose grapples with grief, and there are frequent sequences of the drag group performing to appreciative audiences. The film floats freely between the past and present, frequently superimposing time periods visually on top of one another; this is a stylistic hallmark of the entire trilogy. Splendid Float beautifully captures not only the sadness Rose feels, which he expresses through his performance, but the camaraderie that exists among the family of performers that surrounds him, and which provides an anchor and source of comfort that the world outside this nurturing environment lacks. One of Rose’s fellow performers jokingly expresses dread at the coming of the dawn, in which they will no longer be beautiful women, but horrifying hags, transformed by the harsh light of day. The film is awash in glittering rainbows of color that express a hopeful quality in the midst of grief, loneliness, and despair.

(June 16 at 6:30pm)

Spider Lilies (2007)

Takeko (Isabella Leong) and Jade (Rainie Yang), the two women at the center of Spider Lilies, Chou’s intricately layered second feature (the “green” section of her “Rainbow Colors”), have retreated into worlds of their own making as an escape from loneliness and trauma. Their destinies have become intertwined as the result of a massive earthquake that figures in both their pasts. Jade works as a web-cam girl on a sex site, broadcasting from her bedroom, a room adorned with beaded curtains, dolls, and plush fabric to give the illusion of a girlish boudoir. Just beyond Jade’s camera frame, and unseen by her customers, her room is a drab dwelling, the walls stained and peeling. She also lives with her senile grandmother, who in a funny early scene, wanders into the room during one of her web-cam sessions. At the suggestion of a customer who says she should get a sexy tattoo, Jade finds her way to the tattoo studio run by Takeko, and she requests a pattern of spider lilies that adorns the wall of the studio, and matches a tattoo on Takeko’s own arm. Takeko refuses, saying the pattern is cursed. Jade and Takeko first met years ago; Jade remembers their first encounter, but Takeko doesn’t (or claims not to remember). Jade invites Takeko to visit her website, and later excitedly relates on her next web-cam session the story of how they met, hoping that Takeko is one of her online viewers. The film frequently flashes back to both of their pasts, and the earthquake in which they both lost family; Takeko lost her father, and Jade (supposedly) lost her mother. Takeko has retreated into her own world just as Jade has, though her meticulous attention to her tattooing art, spending hours creating designs for her customers and keeping diaries on her creations and who is wearing them. Her tattoo matches her father’s, and she wears it as a unique form of therapy for her younger brother Ching (Shen Jian-hung), who witnessed the earthquake and lost his memory of his identity as a result. Meanwhile, David (Kris Shie), a vice cop assigned to investigate and plan a raid of Jade’s website, has fallen in love with her and delays the investigation as much as possible.

Chou freely melds fantasy and reality, the present and the past, and interior and exterior worlds, to create a very complicated story that is far more elaborately plotted than Splendid Float. The discursive, roundabout style of storytelling here allows Chou to fully explore how members of societal subcultures – online sex workers, tattoo artists, gangsters – plot out their lives on the margins, making worlds much richer than that of the larger society that marginalizes them. While the themes of lesbian desire Chou presents here may be familiar ones, Chou and cinematographer Hoho Liu’s sensually-charged images and bold juxtapositions elevate the experience into an aesthetically intense one.

(June 9 at 6:30pm, director intro/Q&A)

Drifting Flowers (2008)

The “red” section of “Rainbow Colors,” Drifting Flowers is a decades-spanning triptych exploring the romantic and emotional lives of three women at varying stages of their lives, grappling with love, desire, and longing. This film pulls back from the dreamy and allusive style of Chou’s previous features, adopting a more realistic and less stylistically adorned filmmaking style. While Hoho Liu’s cinematography is as lovely as ever, the choice to ground the film more in objective reality exposes its themes as overly familiar, and its issues are too much on the surface and lack the intricate depth of Splendid Float and Spider Lilies. Drifting Flowers remains compelling, however, due to its strong performances and evocative visuals. The three sections of the film are connected by a train passing through a dark tunnel, on which some of the major characters happen to be traveling. It’s a familiar metaphor, but appropriate one for the life passages all the characters go through in the course of their narratives.

Each section is named for the character it focuses on. Two of these characters are May (Pai Chih-ying) and Diego (Chao Yi-lan), who we meet at two stages in their lives. Eight year-old May lives with her blind sister Jing (Serena Fang), who works as a bar singer, with Diego as her accordion and piano accompaniment. Diego’s butch appearance causes May to ask her, “Are you a boy or a girl?” This question gets variously asked by, and of, different characters throughout the film. Diego eventually begins a romantic relationship with Jing, which makes May jealously angry, though she is unsure why she feels that way at this young age. May’s schooling is affected by being kept up all night and sleeping at the bar, since Jing is raising May on her own. After May angrily sends Jing on a dangerous trip outdoors by herself, after having witnessed Jing and Diego kissing the night before, Jing is compelled to leave May permanently with foster parents. The foster mother asks Jing and Diego to stay away from May, since she feels that the environment “isn’t good for a young girl.” The tragedy of the story is that the confluence of May’s jealous feelings and society’s prejudice and strictures drive these sisters apart. Diego’s section, the final part of the film, details her life before she met Jing, exploring her gender confusion and grappling with her attraction to women and her wish to look less like a typical girl. This causes conflict with her mother, who tries to get her to conform to a girlish appearance, and her brother, who objects to Diego inheriting any part of the family puppet-show troupe.

The middle section focuses on Lily (Lu Yi-ching), an old woman with Alzheimer’s at a nursing home, who is visited by Yen (Sam Wang), a gay man who is Lily’s legal husband. Years earlier, they got married to appease their families, while pursuing secret same-sex relationships. Lily in her senility mistakes Yen for her lover, who died years before. Yen is HIV-positive, but refuses to take his medicine because of their vicious side effects. Yen has lost the will to live because of his illness and a cheating younger lover. The film’s last section flashes back on a younger Lily (Herb Hsu), who works as a showgirl on an outdoor stage. The younger Lily encounters the younger Diego, whose family’s puppet troupe is losing customers to Lily’s titillating stage show.

Drifting Flowers shares its languorous pace and melancholy mood with other Taiwanese cinema stalwarts such as Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang, although Zero Chou’s style is more accessible than either of them. The presence of Lu Yi-ching, a regular actor for Tsai, reinforces this connection.

(June 23 at 6:30pm)

Wave Breaker (2009)

A project made for Taiwanese television, Wave Breaker, Chou’s latest feature, departs from the gay and lesbian themes of her previous features, though it is consistent with those other films in its intense identification with those who are different from the larger society. Hao-yang (Yao Yuan-hao), a teacher and surfer, is stricken with spinocerebellar ataxia, a physically debilitating disease that seems similar to Lou Gehrig’s disease, inherited from his late father. Hao-yang’s mother, Shen Li-ping (Xu Gui-ying), a councilwoman, is determined not to let his son die the way her husband did, and insists on putting him in extensive physical therapy, even as Hao-yang’s condition gets progressively worse. As opposed to model son Hao-yang, younger brother Hao-ting is a continual disappointment to his mother, pursuing a music career and refusing to get a regular job, preferring to drive a cab. Wave Breaker, much like Chou’s other films, approaches its narrative in a temporally non-linear way, beginning with Li-ping taking Hao-yang to drown in the sea as an act of assisted suicide, and backtracking to show what led up to this event. Although the film never transcends its status as a “disease-of-the-week” TV movie, it admirably avoids false uplift and refuses to offer inspirational platitudes, showing us the weight of unavoidable tragedy.

(June 7 at 6:30pm, director intro/Q&A)

"Blissfully Thai" Review: Pen-ek Ratanaruang's "Monrak Transistor"

2011-06-03T06:05:00.000-05:00

Monrak Transistor. 2001. Written and directed by Pen-ek Ratanaruang, based on the novel by Wat Wanlayangkoon. Produced by Nonzee Nimibutr and Duangkamol Limcharoen. Cinematography by Chankit Chamniwikaipong. Edited by Patamanadda Yukol. Music by Amornbhong Methakunavudh and Chartchai Pongprapapan. Production design by Saksiri Chuntarangsri. Costume design by Sombatsara Teerasaroch. Sound design by Amornbhong Methakunavudh.

Cast: Supakorn Kitsuwon (Pan), Siriyakorn Pukkavesh (Sadaw), Black Phomtong (Yot), Somlek Sakdikul (Suwat), Porntip Papanai (Dao), Ampon Rattanawong (Siew), Prasit Wongrakthai (Sadaw's father), Chartchai Hamnuansak (Prison guard).

Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s melodramatic musical Monrak Transistor tells the sad, pathetic tale of Pan (Supakorn Kitsuwon), an aspiring singer who, through a series of episodes detailing poor choices and colossal bad luck, is separated from his wife Sadaw (Siriyakorn Pukkavesh). The film begins with Pan imprisoned and forced to excrete a stolen necklace he had swallowed earlier. A prison guard, who happens to be from Pan’s home village, addresses the camera and tells the story of how he ended up in prison. Pan’s story is one of the hoariest of tropes: that of the innocent country naïf who becomes corrupted by the bad old sinful city, in this case Bangkok. But the charm of Monrak Transistor is that the film itself is very much aware of how hackneyed and maudlin that story is, so Ratanaruang impishly plays with it by utilizing narrative devices such as direct address to the camera, as in the prison guard narration, and several instances in which characters briefly give asides to the camera. Another instance of this occurs in an early scene in which Pan sings to Sadaw in her room to demonstrate his love for her; a cutaway shows Sadaw’s angry father (who dislikes and distrusts Pan) listening in on the fully orchestrated song on the other side of the door. Later in the film, in a sequence detailing Pan getting drafted into the military and sent to boot camp training, Pan and his fellow soldiers join in on singing “Mai Leum” (“Never Forget”), a famous Thai love song that becomes a repeated refrain in the film. This song is reprised in a later scene, where some characters return from the dead to sing the song.

The film also has a lot of fun with the contrasts between the rural village and Bangkok, playing up these contrasts to a consciously absurd extent. The outdoor concert, in which we are introduced to Pan as a featured performer on the stage, is populated with a large number of ducks and goats, who seem almost as numerous in the crowd as the humans. Pan cures the back pain suffered by Sadaw’s father with an elaborate folk remedy with fanciful names. This is the environment that surrounds and protects Pan and Sadaw, and is the source of their moral virtue. The government breaks this bond by drafting Pan into the army, and this enforced separation is the catalyst for Pan’s precipitous downfall and Sadaw’s destitution and abandonment. Pan’s pursuit of a singing career is also a corrupting influence, causing him to go AWOL from both the army and his family, and eventually leads to his incarceration. What makes Pan such a pathetic figure is the fact that so much of what happens to him is a function of accident and happenstance. He is almost never an active agent. Whether he has to mop floors for two years in pursuit of his professional singing debut, is propositioned by a skeevy impresario, or is falling into a vat of human excrement, he allows himself to be passively carried along on the tide of machinations done to him by others. Pan always has our sympathy, but he never comes across as very smart.

Monrak Transistor is dedicated to, and is an homage to the spirit of, the famous luk thung (country music) singer Suraphol Sombatcharoen, whose song “Mai Leum” recurs in the film. It has affinities to other Thai films by Ratanaruang’s contemporaries who also mined Thai cinema to fashion their own post-modern nostalgia reworkings. One of them is Wisit Sasanatieng’s Tears of the Black Tiger (screening June 10 at Asia Society), a candy-colored “pad Thai Western” that is cannily referenced in Monrak Transistor; it is the film that plays in a scene at an outdoor theater. (Tears also stars Monrak’s lead actor Supakorn Kitsuwon.) Despite Ratanaruang’s cheeky stylistic games, Monrak Transistor retains a genuinely emotional core, helped in large part by its very attractive cast, including Kitsuwon and Pukkavesh as the central couple, and also the very striking Porntip Papanai as Dao, who becomes an alternate love interest for Pan. (Papanai also portrays the hotel maid in Ratanaruang’s Ploy.) Inventive and beguilingly charming, Monrak Transistor – which premiered in the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes, and was Thailand’s 2002 foreign film Oscar submission – helped greatly to cement Thailand’s prominent place on the world cinema map at the turn of the millennium.

Monrak Transistor screens tonight at 6:45 at Asia Society as part of the film series “Blissfully Thai.” Click here to purchase tickets.

Interview with Shen Ko-shang, Director of "Two Juliets"

2011-05-19T02:48:00.002-05:00

On the opening day of "Taiwan Stories," the Film Society of Lincoln Center's survey of classic and contemporary Taiwanese cinema which wraps today, I sat down to interview director Shen Ko-shang at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York (TECO). Shen directed "Two Juliets," the second section (and my favorite) of the omnibus film Juliets, which reinterprets Romeo and Juliet in contemporary and historical Taiwanese settings.

What was the origin of the Juliets project?

The project was inspired by director Ang Lee, who won an award of $300,000 (US). He wanted to cultivate some new blood into Taiwan’s film industry, so he decided to use this money to do that. He gave the money to his brother Khan Lee, who was the project manager of the Juliets film.

You were a documentary filmmaker before participating in this film. Why did you choose this particular project as your first foray into fiction? Was this a long-standing aspiration of yours?

I’ve always dreamed of being a director of feature films, but it takes a great deal of capital to make this kind of film. I cherish every opportunity to let my voice be heard, and there is a market for documentaries in Taiwan and internationally, so I got involved with documentaries at first. My experience in making documentaries was a great help for this project.

Could you talk about Beigan, the island setting for “Two Juliets”? What was it about this particular location that was attractive to you for this story?

I scouted many locations before I settled on Beigan, but none of them fit the allegorical tone that I wanted for my film. Being an allegory, the story has to be beyond time and space, and very abstract. The island of Beigan is really far away from the island of Taiwan proper, and I found that this island contained all the elements I’d imagined. I even revised my script to reflect the particulars of the setting.

I was very impressed by how intricate your film was, for such a brief running time, being set in two different time periods: the 1980s and the present. Could you talk about how you came up with this particular structure?

Figuring out how to reinterpret the classic story of Romeo and Juliet was a very difficult task. I decided to focus on women’s self-awareness. I highly value women’s persistent attitudes toward love and relationships; I think women are more courageous than men in this respect. The time structure of my film is like a circle. In every relationship we start from love, which eventually comes to an end. But this ending also means the start of a new relationship, so it’s just like a circle. The first two thirds of the film focus on the previous time, or the “old Juliet.” The final part of the film concerns the present time. This is how I chose to deal with the dilemma of love. I purposely made the male character kind of dumb; he’s the only one who doesn’t know that Juliet hasn’t gone crazy.

I was also impressed by your lead actress, Lee Chien-na, who beautifully pulled off the dual role of the two Juliets. This must have been very difficult for someone with no previous acting experience. How did you find her?

Before I started shooting, a lot of people thought I was crazy, because I cast someone who had never acted before, and who has to play two roles in this movie. Lee Chien-na was a contestant on Taiwan’s version of American Idol; she came in 10^th place, I think. So she clearly had singing talent, even though she had no acting experience. I spent a lot of time talking with her, and I could see that she was kind of obsessed with love and passion, and these were the kind of characteristics I was looking for. So I decided to choose her to take the leading role. Before formally shooting, I spent about a month with Chien-na to go over the script, to explore her acting potential. Do you think she performed well?

Oh yes, very much so.

Compared to other actors of the younger generation, I think Chien-na is less “urbanized,” as we’d call it. But you can still feel she’s very energetic and localized. She’s like a stone that hasn’t yet been crafted by other artists.

So she’s more natural, you mean.

Yes, she’s more natural.

Did you sense this about her the first time you saw her?

No, the first time I only thought, she’s pretty! (Laughs) I cast her based on a hunch, and also the way she talked about her previous love experiences. I decided to bet on her. In addition, her upbringing is similar to the character she plays; her real family ran a singing troupe like the one depicted in the film.

It’s very interesting to hear that you drew upon your actress’ real-life experience to shape the character she played. This leads me to wonder how your experience as a documentarian informed the way you made this fictional work.

Before Juliets, I spent about 8 years making documentaries. Because of my abundant experience making documentary films, I’m always in touch with real life and real people. Based on my long-term observations of reality, I imported these images into this film. While I was making the film, I would think of how real people breathe, how real people act, how they sound in the documentaries, and then bring this to the fiction. It’s very funny that when you’re shooting documentaries, you always want to make people more dramatic, but in fiction you want people to look more authentic, more real.

How much leeway did you have while making this film, as far as your interpretation of the Romeo and Juliet concept, and its connection to the other two films? I was struck, for example, by the dominance of the color red throughout all three films. How hands-on was Khan Lee in supervising this project?

I had 100 percent freedom in creating my film. Producer Khan Lee did not interfere at all. Before shooting, we all discussed it, and came up with the concept that the three directors would subvert the classic Romeo and Juliet. Then Khan Lee just left it to the three of us to interpret it in our own way. He completely disappeared from the whole project after that.

"Blissfully Thai" Review: Pen-ek Ratanaruang's "Ploy"

2011-05-15T00:49:00.002-05:00

Ploy. 2007. Written and directed by Pen-ek Ratanaruang. Produced by Rewat Vorarat. Cinematography by Charnkit Chamniwikaipong. Edited by Patamanadda Yukol. Music by Hualampong Riddim and Koichi Shimizu. Production design by Saksiri Chantarangsri. Sound by Akritchalerm Kalaynamtr.

Cast: Lalita Panyopas (Dang), Pornwut Sarasin (Wit), Apinya Sakuljaroensuk (Ploy), Ananda Everingham (Nut), Phorntip Papanai (Tum), Thakaskorn Pradabpongsa (Moo).

A Bangkok hotel is the backdrop for a crumbling marriage, a torrid love affair, and moody languorousness in Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Ploy, a film so ethereal that it nearly floats off the screen. This is a mode Ratanaruang has favored in his most recent films: Last Life in the Universe, Invisible Waves, and his most recent feature Nymph. His films now seem to be experiments in how minimal in plot, how elliptical and allusive in tone, and how much empty space and silence they can bear and still retain audience interest and substance. Judging by some of his recent critical notices, the jury may be out on this, but as for me, I find both Ploy, and its follow-up Nymph, very beautifully made and fascinating, melancholy ghost(ly) stories of a sort.

The storyline of Ploy, such as it is, concerns Wit (Pornwut Sarasin) and Dang (Lalita Panyopas), a married couple returning to Thailand for a funeral, after living for 10 years in the U.S. They arrive at their hotel at a troubled state in their marriage, having grown distant from one another, spending very little time together and no longer having sex, mostly arguing with each other. Wit believes their love has reached its “expiration date,” and Dang suspects her husband of having an affair when he finds another woman’s name and number in his jacket pocket. Unable to sleep (and perhaps as an excuse to get away from his wife for awhile), he leaves their room to get cigarettes and hangs out at the hotel bar. There he meets Ploy (Apinya Sakuljaroensuk), a young woman with a frizzy halo of Afro-like curly hair, who is waiting for her mother to arrive from Sweden. Wit invites Ploy to stay in their hotel room, to get cleaned up and wait for her mother, which greatly displeases Dang, who wishes to rest in privacy after their long trip. As the film progresses, more tidbits of information about Dang emerge: she is a former film star who left the business long ago, and now appears to exist in a deep depression, which she assuages with heavy drinking, and (the film suggests) drugs. While all this is occurring, a separate story details a hotel room tryst between a hotel maid (Phorntip Papanai) and a bartender (Ananda Everingham), a narrative thread which only has peripheral association with Wit, Dang, and Noy’s story, yet gets nearly equal screen time.

The minimalism of Ploy’s narrative allows Ratanaruang to visually indulge in varied ways, favoring long shots of its characters, and empty corridors that reinforce the sense of the drama that plays out against the hotel’s anonymous, antiseptic backdrop. The maid and the hotel bartender serve as a counterweight to the distant and unhappy Wit and Dang, their sexual passion in stark contrast to the married couple who sleep as far apart as possible on their bed. Although the film is named for her, we learn very little about Ploy, and she remains a mystery to the end; never explained, for example, are the bruises around her eye (which mirrors bruises Dang receives late in the film), or the male companion she leaves behind to go to Wit and Dang’s room. Ploy shifts often between dream and reality, deliberately confusing distinctions between the two. At least two major scenes in the film are revealed to be the dreams of Ploy and Dang, and this uncertainty about what we see in the film has a faintly unsettling effect. Ploy ultimately lacks the lasting resonance of superior, earlier films such as 6ixty9, Monrak Transistor, and Last Life in the Universe; still, it has intriguingly odd visual and narrative touches and is never less than lovely to look at.

Ploy screens at Asia Society on May 13 at 6:45pm as part of the film series “Blissfully Thai,” which spotlights key Thai cinema of the past decade, including works by other major Thai directors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul (last year’s Cannes Palme D’or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Blissfully Yours) and Wisit Sasanatieng (Tears of the Black Tiger). Ratanaruang will have a Q&A after the screening, and will participate in a discussion on May 14 at 2pm with Apichatpong Weerasethakul at Asia Society to discuss their work and recent Thai cinema. For info and tickets for Ploy, click here. For info and tickets for Saturday’s talk, click here.

"Taiwan Stories" Video: Q&A with Shen Ko-shang, Director of "Two Juliets"

2011-05-09T10:18:00.000-05:00

Shen Ko-shang, the director of "Two Juliets," the second segment of the anthology film Juliets, introduced his film and did a Q&A after the screening this past Saturday. Video below.

"Taiwan Stories" Review: Chung Mong-hong's "The Fourth Portrait"

2011-05-08T05:45:00.000-05:00

The Fourth Portrait (Di zhi zhang hua). 2010. Directed by Chung Mong-hong. Written by Chung Mong-hong and Tu Hsiang-wen, based on an original story by Chung Mong-hong. Produced by Tseng Shao-chien. Cinematography by Nagao Nakashima [Chung Mong-hong]. Edited by Lo Shih-ching. Art direction by Chao Shih-hao. Sound by Tu Duu-chih.

Cast: Bi Xiao-hai (Zhu Wen-hsiang), King Shih-chieh (Chang), Hao Lei (Wu Chun-lan), Leon Dai (Wen-hsiang's stepfather), Na Dow (Big Gun), Terri Kwan (Huang).

Twice in The Fourth Portrait, Chung Mong-hong’s downbeat, episodic, and almost surreally fragmented second feature, Wen-hsiang (Bi Xiao-hai), the ten-year old boy at the narrative’s center, enters, and emerges from, dark tunnels. The first time, he enters a tunnel to retrieve a shirt that drifts away from him as he washes it at a river. The second time, he is on a train with his mainlander mother Chun-lan (Hao Lei), who retrieves him to live with her, after having abandoned him years before. This act of traversing dark passages neatly serves as a central metaphor for most of the characters in this film, set mostly in depressed backwaters of the Taiwan countryside. Even though The Fourth Portrait is set in the present day, it’s very difficult to tell from most outward appearances, this setting being far from the modern urban landscapes of Taipei. The film’s bright, deeply saturated colors, ranging from lush forest greenery to the neon of a karaoke bar, forms a sharp contrast to the darkness of the characters’ existences.

At the outset, Wen-hsiang has lost his father, and is forced to fend for himself, which he does by stealing others’ lunchboxes from his school. He is caught by Chang (King Shih-chieh), the school’s caretaker, who relates a story of a traumatic experience from his own childhood fifty years earlier when his home was bombed by the Japanese in his native Shanghai. Chang, despite his gruff exterior, begins looking after the boy, taking along with him as he raids a destroyed, abandoned house for objects to sell to earn money to give to Wen-hsiang. Soon after, Wen-hsiang’s mother collects him to live with her new husband (Leon Dai), a fish seller who is instantly hostile to his stepson. The couple also has a baby of their own. Chun-lan lives a rather harsh existence as a marginalized Mainland Chinese immigrant in Taiwan, escaping dire circumstances in her homeland only to end up as a bar hostess servicing surly gangsters and coming home to a churlish, violent husband. One of the film’s best scenes is a monologue Chun-lan delivers to Wen-hsiang’s teacher (Terri Kwan), expressing the travails of her life and the sacrifices she went through to get her hard-earned Taiwanese identity card. A narrative thread that dominates the second half of the film concerns Wen-hsiang’s older brother, who lived with their mother and stepfather, who has now been missing for a long time. Wen-hsiang often dreams about his brother, and his quest to learn what happens to him becomes a growing obsession. In the midst of this rather depressing milieu, some comic relief is provided courtesy of a portly petty thief (comedian Na Dow) who calls himself “Big Gun,” who meets and befriends Wen-hsiang, taking the boy along on his robbery sprees.

The Fourth Portrait takes its title from Wen-hsiang’s penchant for drawing, and is structured around pictures the boy draws of key features of his existence. The film’s tone is markedly different from Chung Mong-hong’s previous feature Parking, which had much more comedy, a sort of Taipei After Hours. Chung’s nonlinear method of telling his story, at least initially, makes it difficult to immediately discern the relationships between people and to connect the episodes that are presented here almost like a puzzle. The necessary information is doled out slowly and gradually over the course of the film, which may cause audience confusion (as it did to at least one viewer at this past Friday night’s screening). Also, one major question remains unanswered: why did Chun-lan separate the brothers in the first place, only taking her older child to live with her and leaving Wen-hsiang to stay with his father? This potential flaw is mostly overcome by Chung’s intriguing stylistics, most especially his visual palette, which is never less than strikingly beautiful. The Fourth Portrait also benefits greatly from brilliant performances all around; Bi remarkably essays Wen-hsiang as a tough, plucky, resilient kid who navigates his harsh world and the troubled adults who inhabit it. Hao Lei, best known for her excellent turn in Lou Ye’s Summer Palace, is just as impressive here as the mother who makes rather ill-advised life choices, yet is never less than deeply sympathetic. Actor-director Leon Dai (Twenty Something Taipei, No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti), who also appeared in Parking, is riveting, adding considerable depth and shading to a character who, at least on paper, would seem to come across as simple a one-dimensionally evil character. The Fourth Portrait, along with Parking, impressively exhibits the considerable range of its director, who is shaping up to be one of the most interesting to emerge in recent Taiwanese cinema.

The Fourth Portrait screens at the Walter Reade Theater today at 3:30. Click here to purchase tickets.

"Taiwan Stories" Review: "Juliets"

2011-05-07T04:00:00.002-05:00

Juliets. 2010. Produced by Khan Lee. Consists of three short films:

Juliet's Choice. Directed by Hou Chi-jan. Written by Hou Chi-jan and Kelly Yang Yuan-ling. Cinematography by Mahua Feng Shin-hua. Edited by Ku Hsaio-yun. Production design by Tsai Pei-ling. Music by Han Cheng-ye.

Cast: Vivian Hsu, Wang Po-chieh.

Two Juliets. Directed by Shen Ko-shang. Written by Shen Ko-shang and Lu Hsin-chih. Cinematography by Tao Chien. Edited by Ku Hsiao-yun. Production design by Tang Chia-hung. Music by pigheadskin.

Cast: Lee Chien-na, River Huang.

One More Juliet. Written and directed by Chen Yu-hsun. Cinematography by Chen Chien-li. Edited by Ku Hsiao-yun. Music by Chris Hou.

Cast: Kang Kang, Liang He-chun.

The omnibus film Juliets consists of three short films set in the 1970’s, the 1980’s (in flashback), and the present day, all riffing on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. As with most portmanteau films of this kind, the quality varies, with the final episode being the weakest. But all three of them, especially the strong opening two sections, are diverting and well-made films, and feature clever closing twists. As the title indicates, the focus, at least in the first two films, is very much on the women in the romantic relationships depicted. Here, they take the initiative, the risks, and find their own strength and agency in pursuing love, much more than the men do.

The first film, Hou Chi-jan’s “Juliet’s Choice,” set in 1970’s Taiwan during martial law, concerns Ju (Vivian Hsu), a disabled young woman who works in her father’s print shop. She is withdrawn and shy, hiding her face behind her hair, and seeming to wish to disappear. She feels trapped within both her body and her circumstances, scarcely venturing out of the shop, and hardly speaking to anyone. However, a possible path of escape emerges in the form of Ro (Wong Po-chieh), a handsome college student who comes to the shop seeking to print banned Marxist materials for his dissident student group. Rejected by Ju’s father, an instantly smitten Ju offers to print the materials surreptitiously after hours. As she travels to the college to deliver the materials, she feels she is getting closer to “Romeo,” as Ro’s friends nickname him. She begins wearing red lipstick and wearing a red dress. (Red is a dominant color in all three films.) But when she suffers a humiliating episode during one of these trips, her reaction leads to the film’s clever emotional twist. Sumptuously shot in a nostalgic glow justly compared to Wong Kar-wai’s films, “Juliet’s Choice” also intriguingly juggles its chronology in a similar fashion to Hou’s previous film, the feature One Day. The film also boasts a strong central performance by pop star Vivian Hsu, boldly cast against type as the awkward and dowdy protagonist.

The second and strongest short, Shen Ko-shang’s “Two Juliets,” ambitiously spans two time periods, the 1980’s and the present, and features a fantastic performance by first-time actress Lee Chien-na, who portrays the two central female characters. The Juliet of the present is suffering from a recent break-up, so much so that she has become suicidal. She drives her father’s cab and picks up an unusual fare: a middle-aged man who is going to a mental asylum where he has gone to find his Juliet, whom he has left there after promising to rescue her from there thirty years earlier, and failing to follow through on that promise. The man’s story as told to the present-day Juliet forms the bulk of the film, an extended flashback which relates the love affair between the man (played in his younger days by River Huang) and Julie (Lee Chien-na). This story hews the closest to Shakespeare’s original story of warring families, as the lovers have to be in secret because of their rival fathers. The young man’s father is a puppetmaster, and Julie’s father is a vaudevillian who runs a show in which Julie is a featured performer. They have their secret trysts in a purportedly haunted house, and they believe they see ghost lovers who also use the house. Julie is much bolder than her lover, and his diffidence and weakness lead to the tragic conclusion to their love story, which extends to the present and the man’s regret and wish to rectify the past. Shen, a documentary filmmaker making his fiction debut with “Two Juliets,” impressively uses a very sophisticated narrative structure that packs an incredible amount of depth and poignancy into its brief running time, and has an acidly clever, emotionally satisfying twist.

The final segment, Chen Yu-hsun’s “One More Juliet,” in stark contrast to the other two films, is a broadly comic tale of a male Juliet (TV personality Kang Kang), who after 28 unrequited love affairs, attempts suicide on the eve of his 40^th birthday. This male Juliet, named Chu Li-ye (say it out loud to get the joke), while trying to hang himself, is drafted by a film crew to join a commercial for a slimming Spanx-like garment made for men. “One More Juliet” gives the anthology’s theme a twist by featuring a gay protagonist, whose Romeo is an extras actor (Liang He-chun) he meets on set. Unfortunately, the frenetic humor here mostly falls flat and is more energetic than clever, and would seem to have more resonance with Taiwanese audiences familiar with its popular comedian star.

Juliets screens at the Walter Reade Theater on May 7 at 1:30 and May 18 at 4pm as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s film series “Taiwan Stories: Classic and Contemporary Film from Taiwan,” a 20-film survey spanning from the 1960’s to the present. Click here to purchase tickets.

2011 New Directors/New Films Reviews: "Attenberg" and "Hospitalité"

2011-04-02T04:51:00.001-05:00

Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari)

From the folks who brought you Dogtooth, Yorgos Lanthimos’ singularly and comically disturbing drama about a strange family that was one of last year’s best films (and was an unlikely Oscar nominee), comes Attenberg, an equally strange and equally brilliant film that provocatively explores familial and sexual relations, mixing the absurd, the melancholic, the political, and the erotic in astonishing ways. The provocation begins with the very first image, of two young women tongue kissing against a peeling wall. These are best friends Marina (Ariane Labed) and Bella (Evangelia Randou), conducting a bizarre sex education session initiated by Marina, who has never had sex herself, but is fascinated with it in an zoological fashion. Her lack of engagement is a function of her extreme closeness with her father Spyros (Vangelis Mourikis), who is slowly dying, but calmly accepts his fate and prepares for his exit from the 20^th century, which he terms “overrated.” Marina watches the nature films of Sir David Attenborough (the film’s title is a phonetic respelling of his name), and imitates animal behavior with her father and with Bella. Into the mix comes an engineer (Yorgos Lanthimos), who Marina uses to take her sexual experience out of the realm of observation and surreal dreams. Tsangari invests her deeply strange scenario with moody visuals, rigorous internal logic, and a strong emotional quality that prevents these characters from becoming mere vessels of weird behavior. This comes through in the strong performances all around, especially Labed, whose justly celebrated turn earned her the best actress award at last year’s Venice Film Festival.

March 31, 6pm (MoMA) and April 2, 1pm (FSLC)

Hospitalité (Koji Fukada)

The idea of the houseguest who turns everything upside down is not new to films; such disparate works as Pasolini’s Teorema and Miike’s Visitor Q explore this notion. Koji Fukada’s debut feature Hospitalité adds dry and deliciously deadpan humor to this scenario. In a sleepy neighborhood in downtown Tokyo, Mikio Kobayashi (Kenji Yamauchi) runs a small printing shop, where he also lives with his wife Natsuko (Kiki Sugino), his young daughter Eriko (Eriko Ono), and his divorced sister Seiko (Kumi Hyodo). Nothing much seems to happen here, yet a xenophobic neighbor wheedles them into joining a neighborhood watch, because of supposed crime being committed by foreigners. Eriko’s lost parakeet is the catalyst for the events that will upend this family’s calm life, which turns out to be a deceptive calm that hides all sorts of secrets. These secrets are uncovered by Kagawa (Kanji Furutachi), who introduces himself to the family as the son of a wealthy benefactor who helped Mikio with his business. He soon insinuates himself into the family and the business, bringing in tow his wife Annabelle (Bryerly Long), who is either from Brazil or Bosnia; it is never clear which. The two function as a neutron bomb that lays bare the hidden tensions that exists behind the seemingly placid façade of polite pleasantries. Writer-director Koji Fukada and principal actors Kenji Yamauchi and Kanji Furutachi are members of the Seinendan Theatre Company, and Hospitalité does indeed have a theatrical quality, as much of the action takes place in the family’s small house, and the film gets much comic mileage out of how the space gets increasingly crowded as events progress. Cinematic values are hardly neglected, however; the surrounding environment is just as vividly drawn as what happens inside the Kobayashi home. What is most remarkable about Hospitalité is how the drama and comedy are so carefully and subtly calibrated; from the start, there is the sense that what seems ordinary and nearly banal is in fact anything but. The film’s success in sustaining this mood is in large part due to its excellent cast, who so skillfully embody the deceptive nature of their characters. Alongside the theater-trained veteran actors Yamauchi and Furutachi, actress and producer Kiki Sugino proves their equal in beautifully essaying her character, who has the most profound change in eventually asserting her own agency. Hospitalité, among is other many virtues, is a potent critique of the insularity and homogeneity that exists in Japanese society, and offers a comically rendered but rather beautiful and hopeful alternative.

April 2, 5:15pm (MoMA) and April 3, 1pm (FSLC)

For more information on these and other festival films, and to purchase tickets, visit the New Directors/New Films website.

2011 New Directors/New Films Review Round-up

2011-03-26T11:12:00.000-05:00

The 40^th edition of New Directors/New Films screens at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s (FSLC) Walter Reade Theater from March 23 through April 3. Below are reviews of some of this year’s selections.

Belle Epine (Rebecca Zlotowski)

Prudence (Lea Seydoux), the 17-year old girl at the center of Rebecca Zlotowski’s Belle Epine, is left adrift and rootless after the recent loss of her mother. She lives in their house with her older sister, and their father is far away, in Canada, and his only presence in the film is an occasional voice on the phone. Numb from the loss, she casually gets into petty thievery; in the opening scene, she is caught shoplifting and forced to strip, along with Marilyne (Agathe Schlenker), who has also been caught, and whom Prudence befriends shortly thereafter. The two make a decidedly odd, yet compatible, pair: Marilyne is worldly and sexually aware, while Prudence is more shy and withdrawn. Eventually Prudence is pulled into the orbit of Marilyne and her friends, and their world of nocturnal, illicit motorcycle drag races. However, her unresolved issues of loneliness, isolation, and aimlessness prevent her from using her new friends to escape from her circumstances. Belle Epine nicely evokes a moody atmosphere, and is intriguingly vague about its specific time period, lending the film a timeless quality. Unfortunately, the subtly exploitative nature of the visual fascination with these nubile and sometimes nude young girls sits rather uncomfortably with the more thoughtful and sensitive aspects of the scenario.

March 24, 6pm (FSLC) and March 26, 1pm (MoMA)

Curling (Denis Cȏté)

Curling revolves around an isolated father and daughter who most live in self-imposed hiding from the rest of the world. Jean-Francois (Emmanuel Bilodeau), the father, when questioned by an eye doctor about her daughter not attending school, curtly replies, “That’s our business, sir.” Jean-Francois carefully constructs a cocoon to protect his daughter Julyvonne (Philomène Bilodeau) from what he perceives as dangerous influences from others. However, the strain of this situation is subtly evident at first, but becomes more pronounced as events slowly unfold. Julyvonne seems a rather impassive girl, nearly autistic, due to her lack of interaction with other children her age. Her discovery of dead bodies in the snow early in the film frightens her at first, but transforms into a rather morbid curiosity and fascination. Jean-Francois works at a bowling alley, where his boss Kennedy (Roc Lafortune) constantly exhorts him to become more outgoing and take up some kind of interest or hobby. Jean-Francois also works at a nearly deserted motel, which is about to be closed by the older couple who runs it because of the lack of customers. Jean-Francois comes upon a grisly discovery of his own, when he comes upon a room whose floors and walls are covered in blood. In most other films, these murders would be the focus, but luckily for us, Curling isn’t most films, and is far more mysterious and intriguing. The characters of the father and daughter, played by an actual father and daughter, are central, especially the father, as interpreted by Bilodeau’s moody and restrained performance, through whose prism the film offers a penetrating psychological portrait. Jean-Francois’ retreat from the world, broken somewhat by his nascent interest in the titular sport, is indicative of a deeper trauma, which the film doesn’t fully explain. Curling’s wintry and beautifully shot landscapes also powerfully illustrate the protagonists’ isolation, and the film’s refusal to spell everything out in the characters’ back stories creates an enigma at its heart that draws us in even deeper.

March 26, 6:15pm (MoMA) and March 27, 3:30pm (FSLC)

Pariah (Dee Rees)

Coming-out stories are a common and familiar staple of gay-themed films, and many of them follow similar trajectories. Dee Rees’ debut feature Pariah, an expansion of her 2007 short film, while on the surface adhering to these patterns, elevates itself by vividly rendering a very specific milieu, and accompanying its scenario with stunning visuals courtesy of cinematographer Bradford Young, who won a prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Pariah itself won the U.S. Dramatic Competition at Sundance. Alike (Adepero Oduye), a 17-year old high school girl, is open to her friends and very secure in her lesbian identity. However, she is compelled to hide this fact from her parents, especially her religious mother Audrey (Kim Wayans). It’s clear that they both strongly suspect the nature of her sexuality, but her mother is in stubborn denial, telling her at one point, “God doesn’t make mistakes.” Alike confides in her best friend Laura (Pernell Walker), who drags Alike to lesbian clubs, even though this is not really her scene. Alike is a burgeoning poet, and the film is punctuated by scenes of her reading her poetry. Audrey’s quest to feminize her daughter leads to Alike’s meeting Bina (Aasha Davis), a daughter of one of Audrey’s friends. Alike is at first resistant, resenting this forced friendship, but soon she warms up to Bina, when they discover common interests. What’s more their friendship goes in a direction that would definitely not please Alike’s mother. Alike’s romantic entanglements and her eventual confrontation with her mother compel her to seek a path to a new life, one in which she can be herself more freely. Pariah is clearly and consciously meant to be an inspirational film for gay teens, but it succeeds in being much more, due to its beautifully drawn sense of place (the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn), and impressive performances by both Oduye and Wayans.

March 26, 8pm (FSLC) and March 28, 9pm (MoMA)

For more information on these and other festival films, and to purchase tickets, visit the New Directors/New Films website.

Korean American Film Festival New York 2011 Preview

2011-03-17T02:04:00.000-05:00

The 5^th edition of the Korean American Film Festival New York (KAFFNY), screening from March 17-20, offers a very eclectic and wide-ranging program that includes classic Korean cinema (1956’s Madame Freedom, opening night with a live re-score by DJ Spooky), a retrospective of documentary filmmaker Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, two films from/about North Korea (the 1978 NK soccer film Center Forward and the recent documentary The Red Chapel), experimental films, and short film programs.

The Kim-Gibson retrospective includes her 1999 documentary Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women, which concerns the plight of women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II. The bulk of the documentary consists of filmed testimony by those who survived, including Kim Hak-soon, who in 1991 was the first “comfort woman” to publicly tell her story to the media, giving others who went through this ordeal the courage to step forward. The most powerful and compelling sections of Silence Broken are of these women relating their horror stories of their treatment by the Japanese, as well as the shame and neglect they suffered after the war when they returned to Korea. Kim-Gibson’s film also gives voice to Japanese commentators who refute the women’s testimony, including a pair of academics and a former Japanese soldier. The film very clearly takes the position that their statements are not at all credible. Other Japanese voices in the film counterbalance this, however: one scholar produces clear evidence of the plan to take comfort women from other countries, including China and Taiwan, to serve Japanese soldiers; a Japanese man who served in the war describes his job transporting the women to their shacks; and a young woman is interviewed who believes Japan should make this part of their history part of the education curriculum. The documentary’s least compelling material is the dramatization sequences, which add unnecessary illustration to the already powerful stories told by the women. In contrast, Byun Young-joo’s trilogy of documentaries focused almost entirely on the comfort women’s recollections, without resorting to such well-worn techniques as dramatization and frequent use of archival footage. Still, Silence Broken is an important and necessary film that documents a still unresolved issue, as Japan to this day has never publicly apologized or offered adequate compensation to those victimized by this shameful episode of history.

Another compelling selection of this year’s festival is Peter Bo Rappmund’s psychohydrography, an hour-long experimental visual essay composed entirely of time-lapse still photography, capturing the flow of Los Angeles’ water supply from the Easter Sierra Nevada mountain source, through the Los Angeles River and the Los Angeles Aqueduct, to the Pacific Ocean. The film’s rich soundtrack, consisting of ambient sound from the area such as whooshing water, wind, and buzzing flies, as well as what sounds like an old LP record stuck in a groove, are an overwhelming and sensuous accompaniment to its unique visuals. The film has a very sculptural feel, and blurs the line between photography and animation, still and moving images. Rappmund was mentored by and studied under such avant-garde cinema icons as Stan Brakhage, James Benning, and Phil Solomon, as well as the brilliant chronicler of L.A. Thom Andersen. Their influence is clearly evident, especially Brakhage and Benning; comparisons can also be made to Godfrey Reggio’s films (e.g. Koayanisqatsi). Rappmund, however, has made a resonant and memorable work that stands fully on its own, and offers beautifully textured sound and image that richly reward repeat viewings.

For more information on these films and other KAFFNY selections, and to purchase tickets, visit the festival website.

PSYCHOHYDROGRAPHY preview 720P from Peter Bo Rappmund on Vimeo.