Change Your Image
arsaib4
yam-mag.com/author/arsaib
twitter.com/arsaib4
filmlefou.wordpress.com/author/arsaib/
Reviews
Haengbok (2007)
Serendipity
Films about the gravely ill tend not to contain many surprises. And when they are not terribly sentimental, trying to wring every possible tear out of the audience, they are far too joyous and upbeat—two equally dishonest and exploitative strategies. I dare say that Happiness (Hængbok) not only espouses milder variations of such emotions but also manages to conflate them in surprising ways. It certainly helps to have someone like Hur Jin-ho at the helm, a director known for quiet, tasteful melodramas such as Christmas in August (1998) and April Snow (2005). Similar to those two films, the overarching plot of Happiness is fairly ordinary—after being diagnosed with Cirrhosis, a hard-living, hard-drinking Seoulite retreats to a sanatorium in the countryside, where he meets a gentle, mild-mannered young woman, a resident patient, who is suffering from a severe respiratory disease, and, as you may have already guessed, the two fall in love—but, once again, Hur's treatment of the material, despite not straying too far from convention, renders it truthful and affecting. He possesses an innate sense of rhythm, a knack for shaping dramatic situations, a sensitivity for unusual relationships. He also has a keen eye for composition and color. And he knows how to draw good, understated performances from extremely popular stars, as he has done here with Hwang Jung-min and Lim Soo-jung. Hur, who, as usual, also co-wrote the film, has imbued his characters with greater complexity this time around, which, in turn, has only added more depth and texture to the narrative.
Apousies (1987)
Infinite Sadness
Absences (Apousies) is a spare, claustrophobic, Bergman-esque study of an emotionally constipated family on the brink of dissolution. Co-written, co-produced and directed by Giorgos Katakouzinos (1943-2013), known primarily for his controversial 1982 hit, Angel, reportedly the first openly gay Greek film, this allegorical story examines the dormant existence of three sisters living alone on the estate of their recently deceased father. Set on the eve of the First World War, the film somberly depicts the last vestiges of a decayed and decadent society—embodied by the father's lavish, imprudent lifestyle, whose resulting financial, moral and spiritual burden has fractured the psyches of those forced to bear it. This moving drama benefits greatly from Stamatis Spanoudakis's soulful score and Tassos Alexakis's gracefully intimate photography, which help expose its underlying core of sadness and regret.
El bonaerense (2002)
Prince of the City
World cinema is littered with parables about big-city vice and corruption seen through the eyes of an innocent outsider who, whether through circumstances or choice, finds him- or herself enmeshed in a world he or she barely understands, yet feels morally obligated to correct. Though the outline of El bonaerense suggests another entry into this dependable, if well-worn, category—it features a reticent provincial (Jorge Román) who, after being scapegoated for a crime, has no other option but to follow his ex-cop uncle's advice who has him enlisted in the disreputable "Policía Bonaerense" in Greater Buenos Aires—its characterizations and internal narrative logic carry the film far beyond the conventional and expected.
Co-written and directed by Pablo Trapero, once a leading light of the so-called Argentine new wave alongside Lucrecia Martel, Martín Rejtman and Lisandro Alonso, the film is not only both grittier and more absurdly comic than most of Sidney Lumet's policiers that are set in and around New York City, it also boldly lacks a character who serves as a moral compass. But it similarly depicts the metropolis as a writhing, slithering organism, consuming everyone and everything in reach. And, likewise, the more intimately detailed the proceedings become, the more they allude to the inefficiency at the greater sociopolitical levels, the bedrocks of institutional dysfunction (and individual corruption).
Shot verité style with an often gorgeously grainy color palette, the film is marked by a pair of sweaty, explicit, almost violent sex scenes that, similar to such moments in Cronenberg's A History of Violence (2005), help illuminate both the underlying behavioral instincts of the protagonist (whose subjectivity remains opaque) and the dynamics of the relationship he shares with his significant other—in this case an older police instructor, one of many lively secondary characters. Offering no easy out for either its subject or the audience, El bonaerense presents a disarmingly disturbing vision of a society that has lost its soul.
Colloque de chiens (1977)
Mysterious Skin
It is hard to imagine a more radical fusion of form and content than what is on display in Dog's Dialogue (Colloque de chiens), among the earliest films the late, great Raúl Ruiz made in France after leaving Chile in 1973. Though inspired by Latin American photo-novels, this sensational tale of murder, lust, suicide and personal and sexual identity suggests nothing if not the most dramaturgically baroque of Fassbinder films (the effect, perhaps, is only heightened by the use of academy ratio and, well, authentic-looking stylings). Yet it is told primarily through (dry) narration over a slideshow of still images, as if Ruiz were paying homage to Chris Marker and La Jetée (1962), which utterly dissolves the inherent melodrama of the content, before reinstituting it with a modernist edge.
Only about twenty minutes long, the film opens with a few live shots of barking dogs—a visual motif along with similarly rendered shots of banal streetscapes, echoing the claustrophobic circularity of the narrative—before a still of a few girls in a school playground is accompanied by the narrator intoning, "The woman you call mum isn't your mother." A variation of this line will close the film, which also contains a number of textual and dramatic repetitions (Ruiz: "I cut out various phrases and made a new story in which the same phrases were repeated in relation to different events. It runs through several times but is always the same phrase that recurs. This is the whole trick"). Shot by future Assayas mainstay Denis Lenoir and featuring Ruiz's first collaboration with the Chilean-born composer Jorge Arriagada, this surprise winner of the French César for Best Short is one of the most rigorous yet satisfying Ruiz films I have seen to date.
The Bling Ring (2013)
Walk of Fame
Few movie characters in 2013 were more disturbingly real than Katie Chang's Rebecca from this fact-based story of the recent crime spree by a clique of SoCal teenagers who broke into the homes of their celebrity idols and snatched millions in jewelry, luxury goods and haute couture. Though they did not leave behind any cash that they found during the process, money was not their primary objective. Unlike the similarly aged characters from Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers, they came from affluent homes and were after something at once more desirable and elusive: fame. And if that meant getting caught—just like their celebrity superstars constantly appearing in court for one reason or another and hogging ample publicity for doing so—then so be it. This sort of an attitude is most thoroughly exemplified in the film by Chang's character, based on someone who was reportedly the ringleader of the group and was similarly of Korean descent. It is unsettling to witness how much of her, from both inside and out, is adopted from those she admires. There are moments when Sofia Coppola appropriately accords Rebecca the same opulent visual treatment that her idols are known to receive in movies and commercials.
It is understandable, however, that it is the character played by Harry Potter alum Emma Watson who has garnered the majority of the attention. Nikki, after all, is based on perhaps the most notorious member of this group, Alexis Neiers, who ended up starting a reality TV show after she was initially charged for the burglaries. And, let's face it, she is portrayed by Watson, the only "name" cast member. But what has not gotten enough recognition is that, unlike Chang's, to me hers is a knowingly derivative performance, deliberately conceived and helped designed by Coppola to highlight or underline the film's raison d'être, best realized by Chang's Rebecca: the lack of self-esteem and sense of self-worth due to our unhealthy obsession with celebrity culture. It is not a unique topic—there have been countless movies, books and talk-shows devoted to it—but few have broached it with more acuity and perceptiveness than Coppola.
Arch of Triumph (1948)
Beyond Borders
Paris, whether real or imagined, has rarely looked so spiritually and atmospherically gloomy on screen as it does in this underrated wartime romantic drama by Lewis Milestone. While the stark chiaroscuro black-and-white cinematography of the venerable Russell Metty certainly plays a hand in painting a bleak portrait of the refugee-laden French capital of the late 1930s, these conditions in the film are also derived from the fact that a good portion of it unfolds during many a rainy night. And it's under such circumstances that our protagonists—the hard-bitten, oft-deported Dr. Ravić (Charles Boyer), a victim of the Nazi regime when he was a member of the Austrian underground, and Joan Madou (Ingrid Bergman), a dispirited Italian-born cabaret singer—meet and eventually fall in love. However, this is neither the cutesy nor the heedless kind of love so often seen in lesser films. It is, rather, of the sort that takes place between two complex, multifaceted individuals who are world-weary, are aware of their strengths and weaknesses, and, most importantly in this case, know that they have little to no control over their impending future. Needless to say, both actors, who earlier worked together in George Cukor's Gaslight (1944), come through with strong, authentic performances; Bergman, especially, as her character grows the most and requires her to depict various shades. To its credit, the film's low-key, matter-of-fact approach isn't merely relegated to the love story; its political intelligence is equally sober and attentive. And the same could be said for Milestone's direction—he does not get many opportunities here to showcase his trademark camera movements. Adapted from a novel by German author Erich Maria Remarque, who also provided the source for Milestone's antiwar classic All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), this rich and engrossing film may have been ignored in its day but is bound to emerge triumphant sooner or later.
Obreras saliendo de la fábrica (2005)
Still Life
Women Workers Leaving the Factory (Obreras saliendo de la fábrica) clearly derives its thematic inspiration from the Lumière brothers' Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895), the forty-six second film that was most likely the first ever to be shown in public, and one whose influence, both direct and indirect, throughout the history of the medium was strikingly collaged by the inestimable Harun Farocki in his 1995 documentary essay, Workers Leaving the Factory.
Directed by José Luis Torres Leiva, who was born in Santiago in 1975, this virtually dialogue-free twenty-one minute gem is primarily comprised of sequence shots. It opens with an image of a factory's smoke stacks before individually introducing the four women workers who make up the cast. The eldest, clearly having health problems, is seen at her locker wincing in pain. The richly detailed sound-design suggests that she also has an inner-ear problem, perhaps caused by the grinding industrial roar to which she is daily subjected. The two younger women are both showcased with fluid, agile camera movements, emphasizing their youth and vitality, as they make their way back to the work stations. Torres Leiva poetically contrasts the women's monotonous life at work with their excursion into a natural environment before closing the film on a poignant note.
Torres Leiva has mentioned the likes of Tarr Béla, Pedro Costa, arūnas Bartas and Lisandro Alonso among his influences, directors who are generally keener regarding the interplay between the textures of sound and image and the sensations this aesthetic conjures up than they are in traditional narrative structures. He has attempted to do likewise in this film, not to mention in his first feature-length fiction, The Sky, the Earth and the Rain (2008). (Besides directing numerous other shorts and experimental videos, he has also completed a few documentary features and featurettes.) Listed by Thai master Apichatpong Weerasethakul as one of his all-time favorites, Women Workers Leaving the Factory is among the more auspicious shorts I've seen in recent years.