VIFF, Part 2: Strange Relationships
Round 2.
Barbara Following
Beats Being Dead, the clear stand-out from last year's three-parter,
Dreileben, Christian Petzold's latest is another expert balancing act between detailed, psychologically rich character study and tense, plot-driven dramatic thriller--modes of storytelling that should not be mutually exclusive, but rarely co-exist or merge as satisfyingly as they do here. Similarly, the narrative--centering on an East German doctor, c. 1980, forcibly relocated from Berlin to a GDR provincial town where she secretly schemes to flee to the West--highlights a number of ostensibly distinct categorical pairs: the mental (the interpretative, sleuth-like component of diagnosing and treating patients; sharp analysis of painting and literature; carefully devising a plan for escape while under constant surveillance) and the physical (exhaustion from over-work; a scraped heel from walking and biking around in uncomfortable shoes; wind whipping violently at the heroine's face at the most inopportune of moments); the ideal (the evocative, transporting potential of the literary narrative; of music; of photographs of jewelry, including engagement rings, in a catalogue; of flickers of romantic feeling) and the material (a copy of
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, translated into German, plucked from a charity bin; a freshly tuned piano or a hotel room radio; a small print of a Rembrandt painting tacked to the wall of a make-shift hospital lab); the (physical, material reality of) the East and the (evocative idea of) the West. [Yikes, that was a
long sentence, even by my standards.] Petzold situates the action of his narrative--that is, the things his characters do, or don't do, or possess the agency to do given their circumstances--in the space between these conceptual poles, the space of everyday experience.
Barbara's climax and its
denouement powerfully problematize the neat separation (itself a key term, discussed, tellingly, early on in the film) of these concepts, while confirming that, whatever else he's up to, Petzold has crafted one of cinema's most profound reflections upon the nature and exceptional aspect of the medical profession. This is a marvelous movie, superlative on just about every possible level.
The Last Time I Saw Macao This fiction-doc hybrid (part memoir-travelogue, part would-be noir) co-directed by João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata boasts a number of captivating moments--above all, making me want to visit Macao--but, as an ungainly whole, it's not my cup of tea. The fictional narrative never really gels. It's intriguing in theory, but in execution, it falls flat and just feels superfluous. The intertextual allusions, from von Sternberg to Chris Marker, register as smugly clever, signifying as little more than coy winks to the film-smart. (For non-hardcore cinephiles, the film would probably be borderline unintelligible--which is a problem, in my book.) Finally, from shots of Chinese tourists scurrying about the city's core to sardonic voice-over commentary on Cantonese TV programs to an anecdote about a dog being abducted and cooked, I couldn't help but detect a kind of low-grade Sinophobia at work here. Now, I should note that others with whom I've discussed
The Last Time I Saw Macao argued passionately against this reading; in my view, the film evinces an ambivalence for Portuguese colonialism that at times flirts with nostalgia and a certain vague contempt for Chinese culture. Either way, it's not a good movie.
Like Someone in Love I did not care for
Certified Copy. I know plenty of people did, and that's fine, but for me it just didn't work. It felt schematic and over-conceptualized, Kiarostami seemed out of his groove in Tuscany, Juliette Binoche's movie star aura was a nagging source of distraction, and when the film reached its provocative conclusion, my gut reaction was, "so what?" I am happy to report that I have no such reservations following Kiarostami's second foray outside Iran.
Like Someone in Love is genuinely mysterious in its lucanae, where
Certified Copy felt like a stunt. The new film is "unfinished" in the productive, engaging sense that Kiarostami has advocated as a challenge on paper and masterfully demonstrated on screen throughout his career. Kiarostami smartly enlisted Takeshi Kitano's DP, Katsumi Yanagijima, for his Tokyo project, and the resulting collaboration looks a million bucks, while never not feeling like a Kiarostami movie, with all of the director's unmistakable visual (and aural) motifs harmoniously in the mix. I can't wait to see it again.
The Love Songs of Tiedan Hao Jie's film centers on the art of
er ren tai, a lovely and delightfully bawdy form of folk-singing for two performers that was, for a time, banned during the Cultural Revolution, yet survives to the present in China's Northwest. Hao pulls off a nifty trick here, which never plays as gimmicky: He does not simply tell a story about
er ren tai singers or feature examples of their music in the film, but rather structures his odd, unpredictable, at times touching romantic narrative in a manner that closely mirrors the salient characteristics of the
er ren tai form. In so doing, he implicitly argues that, as the primary mode of entertainment and storytelling in this culture,
er ren tai functioned as the major interpretative lens through which people understood and performed their everyday lives. This may continue to be true, if to a lesser extent, a point suggested by the film's
Platform-esque final act, wherein new, outside elements begin to creep in on the
er ren tai troupe and their audience.
A Mere Life Programmer extraordinaire Tony Rayns compared this one to Bela Tarr in the festival program. It's an apt comparison, especially with regard to the second half of Park Sanghun's radically bifurcated film. The first half plays like a fine, if somewhat run-of-the-mill, kitchen-sink domestic drama. Then one night, the desperately exasperated protagonist, Park, decides to kill himself, his wife, and their young son. The catch is that the following morning, with the lifeless bodies of Park's family members occupying the foreground, Park stirs from sleep and stands up in the rear of this unnervingly long-sustained shot. What follows is as overwhelmingly, unrelentingly bleak as film storytelling gets. But at the same time, it's also strangely beautiful, haunting in its heightened, hazily abstracted perception of a world that we, via this doomed man, should not be seeing. The world of the film should have been switched off when it was switched off for Park's wife and child, and yet, despite everything, we remain in this grim, subjective space because he cannot quite let go--of what exactly? The taste of cherries? In addition to Tarr, there are discernible echoes of Kiarostami's masterpiece, but instead of Louis Armstrong, we get
Kim Doo Soo, my new
favorite Korean folk singer.
Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time Overlong and heavily indebted to superior rise-and-fall outlaw flicks like
GoodFellas and
Carlos, this one's still worth catching for Min-sik Choi's scenery-chewing star turn as a crooked low-level bureaucrat cum full-on
daebu (which the opening text informs us is the Korean term for godfather and, come to think of it, would've made for a cooler title). It's a fun ride for the first hour or so, then begins to sag a bit as it moves into the perfunctory "fall" half of the generic equation, though Choi himself never lets up for a moment.
Riko This one, directed, produced, written, and edited by and starring the very young and very talented Aya Yumiba, would make for a fascinating double-bill alongside
Like Someone in Love, a late-career detour to Japan by a septuagenarian master. Both films center on an obliquely conceived relationship between a young woman and a significantly older man, largely eschewing odd-couple yucks and May-November romantic cliches. As in Kiarostami's film, we're left to fill in the blanks in
Riko, to interact with the spare narrative, to reconcile what Yumiba gives us with what she purposefully, fruitfully withholds. In a film composed entirely of precise and quietly exquisite wide shots, the pair of close-ups, of each lead performer, in the film's final scene is key, as the director herself acknowledged in the post-screening Q&A. Where these two emotionally distant characters, and their peculiar relationship, are going remains decidedly uncertain. What is clearly suggested is that they are coming, slowly but surely, out of their shells--not at all a negligible point. Also, modestly, pretty great, a half-hour short entitled
Permanent Land, dealing with the personal affects of involuntary relocation, screened before
Riko. Directed by Nakae Kazuhito, the film evokes classical Japanese cinema in its mannered economy and its inter-generational familial themes, while engaging thoughtfully with Japan's here and now.
Two Jacks This year's festival has featured a wealth of show-stealing performances, particularly by leading males. Here, Danny Huston, relishing the role of a boundlessly egotistical old-school movie director (with obvious shades of Huston's father) just returned from Africa to early '90's Los Angeles, follows Min-sik Choi and Mads Mikkelsen in substantially outshining their vehicular films. Like
Nameless Gangster, the opening half of
Two Jacks is a lot more enjoyable than the latter portion, in this case, because the magnetic Huston is all but absent, with the story jumping ahead to present-day L.A. and focusing on his filmmaker son, the other Jack of the title. This is apparently inspired by a Tolstoy story, which I haven't read. Having done so might have contributed to my appreciation of Bernard Rose's film--but it almost certainly wouldn't have made me miss Huston any less after he exits the frame.
A Werewolf Boy One of my four year-old son's favorite movies is
The Iron Giant, which I've probably seen no fewer than two dozen times in the past year. When he gets a little older, and can read subtitles and handle mildly scary imagery, I look forward to showing him Sunghee Jo's film, which is as sweet and humane as Brad Bird's animated gem. Spielberg came to mind, too. There's a moment near the end of
A Werewolf Boy that is perfect and unapologetically sentimental in much the same way as
A.I.'s classic final scene. Getting there is a total pleasure.
