Review: Notes from Tokyo FILMeX 2010: part one
Keisuke Kinoshita's "Carmen Comes Home" (1951)
Living in Japan as an English-speaking cinephile is not always the greatest thing. The cinema scene in Tokyo is very lively but non-English-language films (even those on DVD) rarely have English subtitles. So you can bet that when Tokyo’s premier film festival came around (and one catering to English speakers at that!) I was definitely going to make the most of it. The plan is to see 30 films in 8 days though that may turn out to be optimistic. In any case, here are notes on the films I saw in the first 4 days, written hastily in the order in which I saw them.
Carmen Comes Home
Dir. Keisuke Kinoshita (1951)
To celebrate Shochiku Cinema’s 90th anniversary and Tokyo Gekijo’s 80th, FILMeX is screening films from Shochiku’s golden era of the fifties and sixties. For me, this means an opportunity to discover new auteurs from Japan’s rich cinematic history. I was certainly not disappointed with this film, a comedy about an exotic dancer who returns to her small home town for a visit. Kinoshita throws a lot of different styles into the mix from slapstick to musicals but the film’s real triumph is its use of long takes and wide shots in capturing the complex social dynamics of the town.
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Weerasethakul’s films are not really stand-alone events. As I watched Uncle Boonmee I became increasingly aware that I was watching the film as part of a continuum of Weerasethakul’s work in which he has been continuously transforming himself, introducing powerful symbols, repeating motifs, then reversing the whole system of signification. There are particularly strong echoes from Tropical Malady in Uncle Boonmee with its communion between past and present, fantasy and reality, the world of men and of nature. But if in the former the forces of ancient myth signify fear and death, in the latter Weerasethakul takes ancient (and not so ancient) forms and radically reworks them into something spiritually and politically transformative.
I Wish I Knew
Dir. Zhang-ke Jia
This documentary about Shanghai’s tumultuous history is a disappointment. Jia uses powerful rhetoric in his director’s statement professing a desire to uncover the repressed history of China’s modern history. Yet the material covered, scattered and badly organised as it is, really only covers the excesses of the pre-Deng Xiaoping period, a history that poses no real ideological threat to today’s pseudo-capitalist regime. What’s worse is the aesthetic mundanity of the film, a series of talking heads interspersed with footage of a young, attractive Chinese woman with a chic Mia Farrow haircut who, wearing all white, roams around various urban landscapes. The film’s one highlight is when said symbol of Chinese purity (or Chinese dynamism or whatever) and said symbol’s white T-shirt get caught in a rain downpour.
A Good Man, A Good Day
Dir. Minoru Shibuya (1961)
Shibuya is the other filmmaker highlighted in the Shochiku “Golden Classics 1950s” program besides Keisuke Kinoshita and Yasujiro Ozu, and he is written about at some length in an essay by Chris Fujiwara, provided in FILMeX’s excellent official catalog. This film is a delightful comedy about the travails of an impoverished family, a figure that Kinoshita also picks up in The Portrait. But if Kinoshita perhaps overemphasises the idealised nobility of his impoverished family, Shibuya takes great delight in mining the comic possibilities arising from the duality of his characters, especially the central professor who is at once both a charmingly eccentric genius and an infuriating man-child. Shibuya also proves himself a master of the comic reveal as in a scene where a woman merrily gossips with her friend about the many embarassing faults of her husband from which Shibuya cuts to a wide shot in which we discover that the women are quite blatantly making fun within earshot of the husband himself.
Year Without a Summer
Dir. Chui Mui Tan
This is the first film in competition that I have seen at FILMeX and it is certainly intriguing. A Malaysian tone poem about a man who returns to his sea-side home after leaving for reasons unknown, the film is reminiscent of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s work in its non-linearity, its slow pacing and the combination of social realism and mythic fantasy. At the same, I feel that Year Without a Summer suffers from the comparison, lacking the radical urgency of Weerasethakul’s work. But I could be convinced otherwise.
The Stool Pigeon
Dir. Dante Lam
This in competition film will most probably prove to be the black sheep of FILMeX, being an unabashedly commercial Hong Kong action film about the moral quagmire a policeman enters when he uses a stool pigeon to infiltrate a gang of violent jewel thieves. Dante Lam’s film is overcooked in a way typical of Hong Kong police dramas (with occasionally inspired results, as in a car-chase scene set to Dean Martin’s version of “White Christmas”) and it’s overburdened by a silly subplot in which the police protagonist has a Dark Past from which he seeks salvation, a Dark Past involving syphillis of all things.
The Portrait
Dir. Keisuke Kinoshita (1948)
Shades of Frank Capra in this Akira Kurosawa-scripted film about an idealistic and impoverished painter and his plucky family and the efforts of a real estate broker and his younger mistress to push them out of their house by moving into the extra room. But the film is also an inverted Picture of Dorian Gray with the central character of the mistress haunted by the portrait being painted of her by the artist who sees the goodness and virtue in her. The film might not have been so interesting were it merely about the ability of people with hearts of gold winning over a pair of capitalists but Kinoshita’s film more than exceeds this in exploring the relationship between art and reality and the economic forces that govern it.
The Shrikes
Dir. Minoru Shibuya (1961)
An exceptional film from Shibuya, this film chronicles the relationship between a mother and daughter who have lived separately most of their lives only to be reunited as adults. The film displays remarkably rich and complex characterizations of both mother and daughter and is almost Sirkian in its sophisticated use of framing and camera movement. A tearjerker finale with a devastating close-up of a wad of cash. The whole film, really, is a film about wads of cash. I’d love to see this film again and focus on the film’s critique of the social forces shaping the lives of its two female protagonists.
The Ditch
Dir. Bing Wang
In competition, this film is a stark and brutal portrayal of the lives of men sent to re-education camps after China’s Hundred Flowers Campaign. The camera documents with painful detail the men doing hard labour, a man eating a rat and a man eating another man’s vomit from sheer desperation. Bing Wang has decided to use his particular filmmaking background to bring a documentary aesthetic to his first dramatic feature but he occasionally overdoes the reality effect; Wang loves following characters in long takes Scorsese-style as they move from exteriors, through narrow corridors, into interiors and vice versa. Still, the images are undeniably powerful.
Anti Gas Skin
Dir. Gok & Sun Kim
An absolutely terrible film from South Korea’s so-called enfants terribles. A horror film about four characters with individual Problems who are all after a serial killer terrorising the city who wears a distinctive gas mask. The acting is laughable, the plotting is irrational and the visuals are flat. But what is most embarassing are the attempts at social commentary which may be described simply as an ironic juxtaposition between the claims to righteousness of characters and the reality of their immoral actions. Do the Kim brothers really think they are saying anything particularly deep about society’s ills when they depict a teenager who claims to have been raped but is really a sexual pervert who likes to be strangled a little bit?
Thomas Mao
Dir. Wen Zhu
It’s hard to tell whether Thomas Mao is a bad film or a really intriguing film. For the most part, it’s a cliched and unconvincing odd couple comedy about Thomas, a German painter, travelling through the Chinese countryside who stumbles upon a middle-of-nowhere inn run by Mao, a simple Chinese farmer. But then in the last section a switch is turned and we are transported to a warehouse studio setting and the two actors are playing inverted versions of themselves (actually, their real selves): Thomas is now a sophisticated diplomat who speaks Chinese fluently and Mao is now a celebrated contemporary painter. They talk deeply about contemporary events (the earthquake of 2008, the Olympics) and talk derisively of a mentally disabled friend from Mao’s home town who visits the studio. The ending obviously complicates the film but what is the relation here? Is the final section a critique of the caricatures of the first section? If so, then Zhu is really replacing one cliche (that of the insensitive foreign devil and the backwards Oriental) with another cliche (that of utopian internationalist citizens). But maybe the truth of the first cliche (the exploitation of the downtrodden, the arrogant complacency of the bourgeoisie) is operating within the film to render visible the emerging power structure of social relations in contemporary China.
Peace
Dir. Kazuhiro Soda
An excellent and unpretentious documentary about the work of an old married couple who volunteer in looking after the disabled and infirmed. The film assuredly documents the day-to-day practical realities of delivering welfare to those in need and the network of people, funds and old-fashioned charity on which everything depends. The film is shot on digital and it shows but what Soda loses in cinematic splendour he probably made up for in the lightness and flexibility the camera afforded him and it can only have complemented his obvious talent in observation.
Certified Copy
Dir. Abbas Kiarostami
In the Q&A that followed this film, Kiarostami claimed that this film is actually not concerned with counterfeits or reproductions. The real function of the theoretical debate between Juliette Binoche’s Elle and William Shimell’s James then is to illustrate the rift in understanding between two lovers, a problem Kiarostami told the audience is “eternal”. As in Taste of Cherry, Kiarostami excels in precise framing and editing. He doesn’t always cut on the dialogue or show you what a character is looking at. His is an engaged cinema that compels the viewer to turn over in their mind what it is they are looking at, or even better, the idea behind the image they are looking at. But the idea is not particularly new (nor particularly exciting) and Kiarostami’s “certified copy” of an eternal idea is perhaps overly complex in execution.
Bedevilled
Dir. Cheol-soo Jang
Directed by a former assistant director to Kim Ki-duk, this film if reduced to its synopsis would be easily dismissed as derivative of countless horror films. A young modern woman travels to a remote island populated by backwards hicks. The inhabitants of the island torment another young woman who is slowly pushed to the point of wreaking revenge on the people who have oppressed her. I can see that Bedevilled may attract criticism from some quarters for its graphic violence, even in the name of revenge (in the same way that criticism is levelled in various ways at I Spit on Your Grave or Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45). But there is at least one good idea in Jang’s film: his condemnation not of just immediate violence, but of the violence of silence and apathy. The female protagonist is in fact not free of guilt. The epitome of the self-made modern woman, she is in fact complicit in the oppression of women when she turns her back and pretends not to see.
