Vancouver International Film Festival 2015: Part Four

A Flickering Truth

Evidence of the lingering effects of a nation’s massive loss of its own artistic heritage abounds in A Flickering Truth, Pietra Brettkelly’s documentary on efforts to salvage the Afghan film archives from years of abuse and neglect. Hauntingly, a man recalls being ordered by the Taliban to burn reels of film or else face death; he sorrowfully describes the now-lost films “bleeding into the ground,” rendering cultural destruction in terms more fit for a mass killing. Elsewhere, Brettkelly contrasts present-day Afghanistan with the remnants of its once-vibrant film industry. Students dressed in black and covered in head scarves watch old footage of an actress running through a field, her hair flowing freely as the screen bursts with bright colours. Yet as striking as these moments may be, the film often seems overwhelmed with the wealth of material, archival or otherwise, and Brettkelly seems to struggle at times with bringing everything into tight focus. Is the film about efforts to screen long-suppressed films in the rural regions, where the threat of the Taliban still lingers? Is it about how the challenge of restoring the film archives mirrors the nation’s larger struggle to return to normalcy after decades of strife? Or is it a tour through the rich but largely forgotten history of Afghan cinema? There are worse crimes for a documentary than having too much to tell the audience, but one nonetheless yearns for more details that sadly never come.

Right Now, Wrong Then 

An artist of Hong Sang-soo’s caliber might balk at being described as a social scientist, but it’s no diminution of the man’s talents to consider Right Now, Wrong Then as something of a behavioural experiment. Divided into two near-identical scenarios, the film follows the consequences of even minute changes in words or actions in a married filmmaker’s flirtation with a young painter. In the first section, the encounter ends poorly, with the filmmaker showering the woman’s work with phony praise and omitting any mention of his marriage until it comes out awkwardly at a drunken get-together (this being Hong, soju remains the river of life from which all things flow), and a disastrous post-screening Q&A completes his humiliation. Hong tinkers with behaviours in the second half and introduces honesty into the equation: the painting critique is perceptive and sincere, the filmmaker’s revelation of his marriage coupled with a confession of love for the painter. The get-together still ends poorly—the filmmaker drunkenly strips at a party—but the duo part ways with a warmth and friendship far removed from the bad feeling and regret of the first section. The lesson is clear: bare your soul, but perhaps not your ass.

Slackjaw 

Scruffy, endearingly odd, and running just 70 minutes, Slackjaw knows when to quit before its charms are exhausted. Essentially, director Zach Weintraub has welded a low-key buddy comedy to a paranoid anti-corporate dystopia—even the soundtrack evokes John Carpenter at his most sinisterly synthetic. The film’s hero, an aimless 20-something musician named Rob, is torn between loyalty to his absent best friend and an old high school buddy who now works for the blandly menacing EV Corp. Signs supporting or protesting the company’s presence cover seemingly every lawn in the neighbourhood until the town mirrors Rob’s own internal conflict between conformity and rebellion. Meanwhile, strange happenings—mysterious figures covered in white sheets, cryptic symbols scattered about on posters—only add to the creeping sense of alienation that threatens to overtake him. Amusingly, this is made literal by the titular affliction, which renders Rob voiceless and forces him to converse through the robotic voice of a text-to-speech program, as if his flirtation with the machinery of capitalism might deprive him of all humanity. For all its low-stakes drama, this gentle affirmation of friendship over finance serves as a thoughtful consideration of how corporatization corrodes community.

Vancouver International Film Festival 2015: Part Two

 Arabian Nights, Volume Two (The Desolate One) 

Arguably the strongest film in the trilogy, the second volume of Arabian Nights is a multi-faceted portrait of community told through tales that bounce from pastoral calm to manic absurdity. The quietest episode in The Desolate One depicts the vagabond ways of Simao Without Bowels, an aging outlaw whose contemptuous loner lifestyle turns him into a mascot for the public’s contempt for the government. This is followed by one of the comedic centrepieces of the series, in which a dispute between a landlord and tenant opens up into a ceaseless string of injustices that seemingly implicate an entire town. The chain of troubles grows to encompass a genie, a talking cow (played by two people in costume), a band of masked marauders, a Chinese millionaire with 13 mistresses, and more. In keeping with the wild swings between fantasy and reality established in the first volume, Miguel Gomes moves from the strange comedy of the court to a delicate profile of the residents of a lower-class tenement block, structured around the fluctuating ownership of a dog named Dixie. Shifting between vignettes both funny and tragic, the film depicts the building as a crumbling world that holds even the dead captive until they are evicted. Even the pets, as the eloquent final image suggests, never really leave.

A Matter of Interpretation 

Lee Kwang-kuk is often pigeonholed as one of Hong Sang-soo’s disciples, but it’s hard to imagine the master making a film quite as whimsical and matter-of-factly surreal as A Matter of Interpretation. Hong’s films often play out like a series of alternate realities placed side by side, with minute variations suggesting the seemingly infinite ways people can utterly fuck up their lives. Lee’s second feature eschews that multiverse comedy of manners, but by telling his story of two actors dealing with the aftermath of their breakup through a maze of interconnected dreams, the director creates a haunting sense of unrealized and impossible fates. Still, for all its sense of loss, this is a work of exceptional lightness, where detectives prefer the imaginative play of dream interpretation to dull forensic science and a person locked in the trunk of a car can be transformed into a mass of balloons. Attuned to the struggles of the artistic life, the film evolves from a relationship comedy into something more idiosyncratic and poignant—a celebration of the shared imaginative space that unites people, whether audience and performer or two lovers that have been separated by a mixture of circumstance and choice, huddling around a dream of fire.

The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes are Not Brothers 

The title of The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes are Not Brothers promises a film far more apocalyptic than the one we get. Still, it suggests something of the disquiet and disorientation that powers this hallucinatory double vision of cultural collision by Ben Rivers. A blast of heavy metal splits the film in two, with the first section following a French film director (Oliver Laxe) working in Morocco. But Laxe soon abandons his shoot and unwittingly stumbles into a Paul Bowles story. Following a beating—in which his tongue is cut out and fed to a dog—the director is dressed in a suit of tin-can lids by four men. His voice reduced to nothing but pained, subhuman sounds, the newly christened King of Tin Cans is forced to dance for the men during a brutal trek through the Moroccan countryside. This section, often shot in claustrophobic close-ups that contrast with the cool distance of the earlier filmmaking scenes, becomes a perverse mirror of the director’s earlier creative endeavours. Whereas Laxe’s film flirted uncomfortably with questions of cultural appropriation and otherness, his transformation into a dancer forces him to become a tool for someone else’s vision and approach this foreign place from a position of submission rather than authority. Beneath the gritty beauty of Rivers’ 16 mm cinematography lurks a classic tale of comeuppance rendered with the frank brutality of a horror film.

The Club 

Having concluded his Pinochet trilogy, Pablo Larrain appears to be casting about for a fresh subject in The Club. What a pity that he’s settled on one of the slowest, fattest fish in the barrel—the Catholic church’s cover-up of pedophilia and other abuses. Inexplicably, he also maintains the grubby video look of No, which was at least justifiable in the context of that film’s mid-1980s setting. Here, it simply cakes an already grey environment in an extra layer of dinge and murk (apparently moral ugliness demands an equivalent visual response). In fairness, there’s certainly some amusement to be found in this story of a group home for excommunicated priests, and Larrain regular Alfredo Castro provides a soulful performance in a role that could have easily collapsed into caricature. Unfortunately, the director seems uncertain in his depiction of the priests, and he succumbs to an easy cynicism that finally renders the film incoherent. He wants to offer a damning reproach to the church’s refusal to acknowledge its hidden crimes, but he also can’t resist meting out some poetic justice. For what purports to be a bleak satire, the film finally strains to comfort rather than disturb.

Vancouver International Film Festival 2013: Part Two

Stray Dogs 

Will no one shed a tear for Miss Big Boobs? The surrogate mother of a homeless brother and sister, she meets a grisly end when the children’s father, drunk and weeping, devours her. (Fortunately, she’s just a cabbage with a face drawn on it, but don’t let that numb you to the tragedy inherent to the situation.) Tsai Ming-Liang fills Stray Dogs with such bizarre touches, which will surely confound viewers expecting a more traditional social-realist vision of poverty. Instead, the director combines a vivid sense of physical reality with a dream-like narrative. The children pass through the city unnoticed; life carries on, unaware of the hungry ghosts that haunt the streets. Tsai pushes his shots to such lengths that they begin to add to this feeling of unreality, and the result is not only a stylistic tour de force but one of the most powerfully direct films in his career. As others have mentioned, poverty is a recurring theme in his work, but the film also poignantly touches on one of his other great concerns—time and entropy, particularly as seen in the aging face of his eternal lead actor, Lee Kang-Sheng. In one of the greatest and most challenging scenes in the entire film, a woman stares at a mural in an empty factory until the rocky shore depicted in the crumbling painting seems to blend with the rubble-strewn floor of the abandoned building. Watch anything long enough and you can glimpse the decay.

Yumen

Part documentary and part performance art, Yumen strives to transform an abandoned Chinese oil town into something poetic and beautiful. In theory, I’m on board for that—let’s make us some art, fuck yeah!—but in practice the po-mo whimsy of rabbits hopping happily amid the ruins and naked people standing on pillars and et cetera tends to drag. Filmmakers Xu Ruotao, J.P. Sniadecki and Huang Xiang are making playhouses out of rubble, leading to a film that feels, perhaps intentionally, like a collection of discarded scenes and half-formed ideas. In its more lucid moments—like the scene of a woman strolling through a crowded market while quietly singing Bruce Springsteen’s “My Hometown”—the film skillfully evokes the loneliness and longing that lie at the heart of this desolate place. People vanish, and art springs up like flowers on a grave. It’s an affecting idea, but the film is too scattershot to fully develop it. Every beautiful and surprising image is balanced with a stale idea—shiny pop songs echoing through dead spaces, faded film stock for a faded memory.

Matterhorn

Diederik Ebbinge’s Matterhorn may be little more than a genial but largely unambitious parody of parochial bitterness, but there’s something to be said for a crowd-pleaser that conducts itself with a little restraint and self-respect. Ton Kas plays Fred, a dour widower living a life so cloistered and lonely one can practically smell the mustiness of his neatly ordered home (the persistent fly forever buzzing around his kitchen is a nice touch). But his life is upended by the presence of semi-mute Theo (René van ’t Hof), who, aside from the occasional animal noise or impolitic outburst, spends most of his time in a catatonic stupor. In a bizarro-Pygmalion setup, Fred makes a project of training Theo in the ways of civilized society, which involves a brief detour through the world of children’s entertainment for reasons better left to the film to explain. Needless to say, the community does not approve, and from there it’s a flurry of cabaret singing, cross-dressing, and fisticuffs before all is right with the world once more. Building a film around the clash between a stuffed shirt and an unkempt weirdo is hardly new, but Ebbinge deftly uses eccentric comedy to keep this paean to tolerance from drowning in sentiment. 

Our Sunhi 

Another assured outing from Hong Sang-Soo, Our Sunhi finds the director sifting through the minutia of romantic entanglement with his characteristic wit and playful sense of structure. It’s another exploration of the sex lives of high-functioning alcoholics, with the focus this time on a young female film student who must parry the unwanted affection of three different men. As always, repetition is key to understanding Hong’s world. Phrases crop up again and again in unexpected places: the clichés of a reference letter from Sunhi’s smitten professor are echoed by two rival suitors, growing more ludicrous with each repetition. (According to everyone, Sunhi has artistic sense, whatever the hell that means.) It’s one of the film’s funniest gags, but also one of its most pointed. Everyone has this woman figured out, yet no one apparently knows the first thing about what she actually wants—least of all Sunhi herself, who seems in the midst of a mid-20s identity crisis of some sort. What else can she do but rebel against the smothering attentions of this love-struck trio? The men hold on to the fantasy, while the real thing slips away.

Vancouver International Film Festival 2012: Part Four

Walker 

The audacity of Tsai Ming-Liang’s Walker lies in its simplicity. Lee Kang-Sheng, Tsai’s favourite actor, dons bright red monk robes and walks down the bustling streets of Hong Kong—but slowly, very slowly. Shots are held for minutes at a time, mirroring the glacial pace of our faux-monk friend, whose every step seems to occur in super slo-mo. At times, this short film resembles a kind of artful “Where’s Waldo?” as Tsai buries the monk deep inside the frame, forcing viewers to scan for that telltale splash of red. Other times he’s front and centre, standing in the middle of a busy street as onlookers gawk and snap photos (the crowd parts around the man, as if repelled by a force field). Either way, every shot is a living tableau, rich in detail and unexpected beauty in a cinematic experience of unparalleled purity.

No 

Style and substance do battle for the heart of modern politics in Pablo Larrain’s No, and the results are about as shocking as an Iranian election. But more than a mordant political satire, Larrain’s retelling of the referendum that brought down Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship is also a brisk, funny piece of high-powered filmmaking. Fortunately, even as he delivers his most mainstream work to date, the director remains his stubbornly eccentric self. The film’s washed-out video aesthetic is just as much a rejoinder to commercial slickness as it is a riff on the dated look of its 1980s setting. The decision to focus on the boldly irreverent advertising campaign against Pinochet yields much humour, while Gael Garcia Bernal’s conflicted adman provides the pathos. His haunted look at the end speaks to the powerful anxieties just beneath the surface of this otherwise jubilant tale. Once he sold freedom—now he sells soap operas.

Mother

First-time director Vorakorn Ruetaivanichkul (or Billy, if you prefer) looks to his own life for inspiration and settles squarely on his mother. No wonder—the woman seems on the verge of self-destructing, with a broken leg and weak kidneys hobbling her body while depression and kleptomania cripple her mind. Billy blends documentary footage of his family with fictional tangents, but the technique is mostly one of expediency (he wasn’t there to film his mother stealing from a grocery store, so he re-creates it with actors instead). Sadly, the jumble of reality and fiction leaves each scene unmoored. A painful sequence where the director captures his mother sobbing helplessly as someone off-camera browbeats the anguished woman over her failings is so isolated from the rest of the film that the powerful emotions stirred up are only muffled. The last thing we see is Billy’s message, “This is what I can do”—an admission of the film’s loving sincerity, as much as its own shortcomings.

Mekong Hotel 

Most films from Apichatpong Weerasethakul feel like overgrown trees deep in the jungle, entangled in the surrounding world and teeming with life. Mekong Hotel, on the other hand, is more like a meagre sapling on a well-groomed lawn. That may be partly due to the film’s unusual origins: based on an old script, it forms the kernel of a larger project currently underway. Everything that you would expect of Apichatpong is here, from the familiar faces in the cast to the flattened mysticism of the story. Scenes of entrail-eating ghosts and thwarted love affairs mix with offhand moments from the film’s own creation, such as the soundtrack being recorded and the director advising his star to wear the tight pants. The director’s fascination with the hazy border between truth and fiction remains, but only in its most rudimentary form. At most, the film holds a passing interest as a sort of sketchbook, offering viewers little more than the unfinished doodles of a keen mind.

In Another Country 

A typical Hong Sang-Soo interrogation of feckless masculinity gets a shot in the arm from a game Isabelle Huppert, providing a welcome dash of culture-clash comedy to In Another Country. That may sound unlikely at first—cultural differences are more often sources of lazy humour—but Hong’s eternal preoccupations ensure the film strays from the ordinary rather quickly. Huppert plays three different French women in South Korea alternately fending off or inviting the advances of the locals in an unending quest for some kind of happiness. The casual tone and goofy bonhomie belies Hong’s meticulous construction, which lays bare the unseen patterns that shape his character’s lives, for good and ill. With its intricate layers of interlaced fictions and dreams, all blurred together with constant repetition, the film could easily be mistaken for a surrealist comedy of manners akin to Luis Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

Vancouver International Film Festival 2011: Part Four

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga 

Has Werner Herzog become a brand? I fear so, because a film like Happy People seems designed almost solely to bank on his credibility as the going master-eccentric of the documentary form. Herzog co-directs with Dmitry Vasyukov and narrates, but he didn't have a hand in filming and it shows in every frame. This documentary about the isolated trappers of the Taiga region of Siberia is prime Herzog material—lonely men facing the majesty and mystery of nature—but it lacks the meditative qualities of his more personal documentaries, to say nothing of his unpredictable questions and endlessly wandering camera eye. The film is by no means terrible, but it is hardly any more distinguished than what you might find on the Discovery Channel on a Sunday afternoon. If anything, the film only proves the unique value of Herzog as a presence in the field. We may learn about the lifestyle and working methods of the trappers, but that’s about it. One imagines that the first question on Herzog’s tongue in this frigid wasteland would not have been how they live there, but rather why. The absence of that particular line of questioning is sorely felt in this mundane, uninspiring effort.

Here There 

Here There, Lu Sheng’s debut feature, weaves together three wayward threads, ranging from a Chinese student in Paris to a reindeer farmer in Mongolia and a young noodle restaurant employee in Shanghai. Lu subtly hints at the links between the three worlds, but he never stresses these ties—this is, after all, a film less about connection than separation. Still, the film’s reluctance to clarify its characters is not always the wisest strategy, especially when trying to cram so much into a slender 90-minute frame. The most notable casualty of this structure is the brief love affair between the restaurant employee and an insurance agent, which ends so suddenly that the tragedy barely even registers. But the cast—consisting of both professional and non-professional actors—acquits itself well with the material, and the final result is a thoughtful, if sometimes underwhelming work.

  
The Day He Arrives 

--> If you’ve ever seen a Hong Sang-soo film, you’ll already know the contents of The Day He Arrives. All the usual elements are here: lonely men, frustrated women, awkward romantic entanglements, and a great deal of social drinking. (At one point during the screening, the woman sitting next to me leaned over and exclaimed, “They must have spent their entire budget on beer!”) Yet Hong continues to refine his world in this latest effort, creating a witty, melancholy film that feels small without ever seeming slight. This time around, we’ve got a director visiting an old friend in Seoul, where he encounters an old flame, an aspiring actress, some film students, a lot of booze, and a perpetually late bar proprietress. In its repetitions, The Day He Arrives suggests a film trying to rewrite itself, struggling to find a combination that somehow breaks its characters free from the monotony of their lonely, blinkered lives. The scenes blur together, revealing a group of compulsive people beholden to their own bad habits, always finding new ways to fall into old traps. It’s life reduced to a series of running gags—hilarious, and pitiless.

It’s the Earth Not the Moon 

Goncalo Tocha begins It’s the Earth Not the Moon with a promise to film each of Corvo’s 440 residents (or 450, estimates vary), and even more—every cow, every pig, every single living thing on this tiny, rustic island off the coast of Portugal. By the time he gets around to filming the village dump with its attendant bird life, you may begin to suspect this is no idle boast. Over three hours and 14 chapters, Tocha explores every conceivable facet of the island—the scenic vistas, the local history (whale hunting used to be a major industry), colourful characters (a dancer performs in a mossy glen), and yes, even the local livestock. As a documentary, the film is almost naively generous, endlessly curious and beautifully expansive. Tocha may lack the ruthless analytical instincts of an editor, but he possesses the fine eye of a painter, and he fills the film with striking images plucked from the endless churn of his many days on the island.

One of the few storylines—if you could even call it that—found in the entire film involves an elderly island resident knitting Tocha a beret similar to those worn by the whale fishermen of old. The beret will allow him to be a genuine Corvo man, the woman explains. Tocha’s obsessive desire to capture the island in its entirety is bound up with his desire to become a part of it, even if local residents seem bemused by the strange presence of this film crew (one woman enters a friend’s house, laughing about these fools following her around). Shots featuring the shadow of the director abound; Tocha exists like a shade on the margins on the film, part of the world and yet not quite within it. The tension is finally resolved in a breathtakingly simple and moving shot of a cloud crossing the sun and swallowing up Tocha’s shadow in a wave of darkness. At last, if only for a flickering moment, he merges with the landscape. Don’t think of this as a documentary—think of it as a documentary maker’s dream.