Screen Machine

Review: MIFF reviews: Winter Vacation, Tears of Gaza, Zebraman 2

Winter Vacation — dir. Li Hongqi

At the end of Li Hongqi’s absurdist comedy, Winter Vacation, the father of one of the young protagonists launches a scathing tirade against the arrogance of humankind and their stubborn perpetuation of the myth of attainable knowledge. The father, his son explains to a friend, has gone off his medication.

It’s a moment that evokes Michel Foucault’s History of Madness (AKA Madness and Civilisation) and its argument that “modern man no longer communicates with the madman”; instead the dialogue of madness has become “a monologue of reason about madness,” reinforcing our confidence in a rational, enlightened society that is wilfully misunderstood by the insane.

The monologue of reason can be heard throughout this film, as the teenagers, adults and elderly of an urbanised rural Chinese neighbourhood observe the banal rituals of society in a resigned stupor.  It’s only the belligerent children and mad father that demonstrate any form of desire to go beyond their mechanised daily routines. When the nephew of one of the teenagers is asked what he wants to be when he grows up, he responds: “an orphan.”

The teenagers have already been indoctrinated, desiring only to procreate or to “contribute to the struggle to build socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Hongqi has denied this is a ‘political’ film, saying in an interview with Cinema Scope that “politics isn’t this world’s fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is humanity. And humans are the ones who brought politics into the world. But politics not only fails to resolve any problems on this earth, but is also itself a problem because humans place their hopes in politics,” – a statement that many may hear as the ramblings of a madman. — Kim Jirik

Tears of Gaza — dir. Vibeke Løkkeberg

A gripping documentation of the catastrophic impact of war, Vibeke Lokkeberg’s Tears of Gaza weaves through the lives of three Palestinian children affected by the Gaza bombings that took place between December 2008 and January 2009. Accompanied by Lisa Gerrard and Marcello De Francisci’s mournful score, the children’s stories are abruptly uprooted by footage of the bombings. This documentary is not easy to watch. The harrowing footage of civilians being pulled from building rubble is confronting, to say the least. At one point in the documentary we witness a group of men sorting through the debris as flocks of civilians watch in horror. The footage of the bodies recovered is startling. Young children no more the three to four years of age are carried from the building with broken bones and severe burns caused by phosphate.

The content of this documentary is brutal and tears are sure to flow from the eyes of many audience members. A similar experience happened during the 2009 Melbourne Underground Film Festival which screened Cry Freetown, a documentary about Sierra Leone directed by the journalist Sorious Samura. It contained graphic footage of the civil war raging in Sierra Leone in January 1999. Applying guerrilla tactics, Samura risked his life filming the atrocious carnage that took place on the streets of Sierra Leone. Similar to Cry Freetown, Tears of Gaza is clearly meant to shock audience members out of a state of complacency. Towards the close of the documentary we meet a middle-aged man who recounts his personal experience of the bombings. Losing his wife and children after a missile dropped on his house, the man shows us the scars on the body of his only remaining daughter. For him now, the only major concern left is her happiness.

Perhaps one of the major problems with this documentary is that it only shows us one side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Taking sides seems to be one of the major problems rooted in the Gaza conflict. It is difficult not to come out of the screening feeling outrage towards Israel for the military attacks launched in Gaza. These kinds of tactics are illegal and cannot be accepted. Exposed in this documentary are the bodies of three children, shot down by Israeli soldiers. A man standing by the bodies lifts up the sweaters on the children to reveal gunshot wounds in the chest. It was not an accident, he maintains, but murder.

Murder is a word continually thrown around in this documentary, and fairly so. Standing on a beach, lamenting his father’s death, a young boy says, “When my father was murdered, I felt like I lost the whole world.” After losing his father in the conflict, the young boy proclaims that he would like to become a doctor to heal the wounded. A young girl, losing her family in the bombings maintains that she will study hard to become a lawyer so that she can take the Israeli government to court and bring justice for her family and homeland. However painful this documentary may be to watch, one would hope that such a display of violence inflicted on, and amongst innocent children and women could provoke both sides to come to some diplomatic agreement. — Fiona Shewan

Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City — dir. Takashi Miike

For those seeking some fresh disturbance from Takashi Miike, Zebraman 2 may quietly disappoint. A comic-book style action film with a typically saturated aesthetic, its narrative is concerned with the archetypal theme of good vs. evil (read: black and white stripes of the Zebra). This is all set in the apocalyptic future where police brutality is sanctioned by an authoritarian government and its policy of “Zebra Time,” allowing for the total suspension of law for five minutes twice a day. When the hero, Zebraman, is attacked and shot by police during Zebra Time, the standard narrative quest to overpower the evil rulers is set in motion. The film does not diverge from the standard on-screen decadence or narrative mission for social revolution that marks this genre; yet crucially it lacks the unsettling unconscious that might have distinguished it as a Miike film, rather than another installation in the Power Rangers series.

Like any good film of its genre, Zebraman 2 is visually spectacular and appropriately aggressive, with characters that possess the right dose of charged eroticism to seduce the eye. But then I found myself looking upon Zebraman and the Zebra Queen as I had gazed upon Kimberley, Tommy and Rita as a nine-year-old, and I felt struck by the puerile sensibility of the film. I come to Miike to feel disturbed, horrified, nauseated, to have ipecac syrup forced down my throat. Instead I left feeling as though I had been injected with a heavy-dose of generic opium. Zebraman 2 was not the cinematic drug I was looking for. – Lauren Bliss

Email the Screen Machine Staff at screenmachinetv@gmail.com.

→ more articles by Screen Machine Staff