Screen Machine

Review: MIFF ‘10: Summer Wars, Love in a Puff

Summer Wars

Dir. Mamoru Hosoda

A teenage boy gets invited to work a summer job with a girl he may have a crush on. A teen romance begins. Once at his job, he finds himself entwined in the sometimes touching, sometimes hilarious, dramas of the girl’s vast extended family. We’re in the midst of an Ozu-esque family drama. Suddenly our hero becomes embroiled in a cyberworld crisis with an A.I. program threatening to destroy the world. We are plunged into an apocalyptic techno-thriller.

This wacky but somehow breezy incorporation of disparate genres is entirely appropriate for a film that is not content to deal with “family” or “technology” as distinct subjects but is rather interested in how these spheres are enmeshed with one another. What is really refreshing about this film is how this theme is elaborated on fairly simply (unlike, say, in Ghost in the Shell) with a setting that, in its no-nonsense quotidian details, is a spot-on representation of contemporary Japan: baseball on the television, advertisements on the trains, ubiquitous mobile phones, etc.

That electronic information systems are integral to modern human existence is not in itself concerning to Hosoda. The horror element is the extent to which we are alienated from the repercussions of our engagement with the virtual, hence the Internet as visualised in this film as a Takashi Murakami-esque cartoon world where people exist as depressingly cute avatars. The shiny meaninglessness of these signs eloquently describe how our own virtual lives are becoming more and more exercises in irony and superficiality: Political discourse gets reduced to 140-character witticisms, activism gets reduced to joining a Facebook group, cultural engagement gets reduced to keeping on top of Internet memes.

If Summer Wars is at all nostalgic, then it’s a nostalgia I can get behind; one that doesn’t insist on a return to Eden but compels us to bring back an ethical framework to postmodern life; one that asks us to take seriously what we have been treating as just fun and games.

- Brad Nguyen

Love in a Puff

Dir. Pang Ho-cheung

So-called art cinema gave up a long time ago on depicting people’s working lives. You could count on the fingers of one hand the number of recognised auteurs of today who care to pay attention to the ever-changing conditions of what it is that most people spend most of their lives doing – namely, working. Let’s try it: Hou Hsaio-hsien, Aki Kaurismaki… I’m out. It is, rather, in the more vibrant commercial cinemas of countries such as Hong Kong and India that we find films and filmmakers interested in work, and the way individual and group identity is caught up in the machinations of working life. Love in a Puff, one of two new films from Hong Kong director Pang Ho-cheung (the other, Dream Home, is also screening at this year’s MIFF), is a terrific example of such a film.

Pang’s film tells the story of a love that blossoms between Jimmy, an advertiser, and Cherie, a cosmetics saleswoman, in the seven days that follow the implementation of a law banning smoking in indoor public spaces and workplaces. They meet amid a group of workers from nearby offices who congregate outside to smoke on their lunch break. The film’s plot, such as there is one, is told largely through text-message exchanges and phone conversations between the couple. They attempt to negotiate their individual desires, their working lives, and the gendered expectations enforced upon them by their respective friendship groups – their love for each other, which develops so simply and so gradually as to be undeniable and unstoppable, exists always and only in relation to a wider social universe. It is the smoking ban that brings them together initially, and consistently throughout the film one finds that it is external social constraints and opportunities that lead the romance along.

Finding a space for their relationship and for personal dignity in a world beset by laws of control and the requirements and indignities of work – this is what Pang’s lovers strive for. It is a situation to which we can perhaps more closely relate than that of many widely released romantic comedies. Love in a Puff truly is a rare achievement – so successful is it at depicting its lovers and the world they live in, that we may hardly notice that this romantic (and R-rated, for foul language) film does not feel the need to show its central couple kiss even once.

- Conall Cash

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