APA breaks down some of the Asian (and not-so Asian) film highlights from the 2008 American Film Market, including Missing, Inju: the Beast in the Shadow, Dachimawa Lee, and 100.
Jump to individual reviews: Missing (Tsui Hark), Inju: the Beast in the Shadow (Barbet Schroeder), Dachimawa Lee (Seung-wan Ryoo), 100 (Chris Martinez)
For Clifford Hilo's review of Tokyo Gore Police (Yoshihiro Nishimura), click here.
For APA's reviews of Japanese films at this year's American Film Market, including Still Walking, Tokyo Sonata, Departures, and Lock and Roll Forever, click here.
Missing
dir: Tsui Hark
One hopes that there were forces beyond Tsui Hark's absolute control over this film. One hopes that Hong Kong mafiosos dangled Tsui's producer from one of those elaborately tall Hong Kong skyscrapers by his ankle, demanding that all the dailies from his newest film Missing be turned over to some Don Corleone of the HK underground. One hopes that there was some larger invisible hand reaching into and interfering with a project that could have potentially been so much more. The sad truth of Tsui's Missing is literally how close it came to being perfect, how close it came to being that next American re-make of an Asian film that we like to see so much. Yet one can only speculate about how Missing got to be what it came to be. But the real reason I'm so quick to turn to Oliver Stone conspiracy theories is simply this -- how can I bring myself to blame a man like Tsui Hark who has made such a brilliant half of a film, but who may have been the maestro behind the stinker last half? Missing is like watching a celebrated painter hack apart a masterpiece with an exacto knife once the oils have settled and dried.
It all starts off grandly: sweeping photography of crystalline blue oceans, a sweet underplayed romance between a handsome underwater photographer and a young, fetching doctor with a hip-Asian coif, a trill of mystery with the photographer's headless corpse discovered, a patch of lost cinematic time whose secrets lie underneath the ocean and the only way to surface these memories is through a round of dangerous hypnosis -- and did I mention the ghosts yet? And all of this mash of events and tension demonstrates how brilliant Tsui Hark is as a director, a talent of Spielbergian proportions who's able to weave together cleanly a picture from seven different genres, at least. Tsui does everything with such panache and gripping gestures -- he paints an iridescent blue throughout an apartment by the light of an aquarium, shows a flat scroll of exploding fireworks above an HK skyline, and even brings in creepshow jack-in-the-box edits of misshapen ghouls nearly hugging the heroine of the story. Remember that scene in Jaws where the floating corpse abruptly materializes all of your fear? Yeah, Tsui Hark can do that too.
But here's the bad news: as great as Missing is for the first three-quarters of the film, Tsui manages to implode all that he's worked towards in just under a half-hour. All that superb skin-crawling, psyche-drilling, paranoia-inducing momentum breaks off and leaves you flaccid and bored. Instead, Missing turns pouty-faced, lovelorn, and dumb and starts singing in the tune of Celine Dion. In fact, you can literally pinpoint the souring moment to when the artificial sweet Hong Kong pop starts crooning over the soundtrack about missed connections. Aside from its shoe-horned conclusions, Missing is a stunning film from Hong Kong and shows us that Tsui Hark can still throw his weight around with the Hollywood heavies. One yearns for the day when Hong Kong, that little megalopolis that could, would dethrone all those tastemakers of Los Angeles, and people would substitute the trade word of Johnnie To in the place of Marty Scorsese. Until that day though, one can only pray that Tsui Hark can keep those meddlesome triad gangsters at bay. With courage, Tsui!
Inju: the Beast in the Shadow
dir: Barbet Schroeder
Inju is one of the best films here at AFM. It's a thriller that works in the same contemporary vein as the Parisian noir hook-and-twist Tell No One that recently wowed the arthouse crowds this past summer. And perhaps that it is no coincidence that Inju delivers such an electric vigor because the helmer is none other than the acclaimed French director Barbet Schroeder, famous for Single White Female. Credit is due first and foremost to Schroeder's sensibility for addressing and building an atmosphere that's so incredibly taut and resilient throughout the film. Every image in this film plays out like the strands of a feathered out spider-web. He' s so gifted in the sense that he's able to distribute a sensation of tension and anxiety all throughout the film that no matter where one stands within the story one always feels endangered. Every footstep is a footstep of caution in Inju.
The story concerns a young, brash French crime writer named Alex Fayard who travels to Japan to promote his newest book and hopefully pay homage to the mad, reclusive writer Shundei Oe, whom Fayard admires and had even written his dissertation on. Like any good crime fiction, things begin to unravel rapidly for Fayard, who falls into a mad fascination with a beautiful geiko servant named Tamao, while apparitions of Shundei Oe threaten Fayard's and Tamao's life. Like the sultan seduced by the words of the storyteller Scheherezade, Schroeder skillfully threads us deeper and further into a world of deceit, mistrust, and thickened tensions. And while this film is nothing new, it really excels at matching that older steely, classical noir with its grave obsessions, its l'amour fou, and above all its fascination with a supreme form of violent eroticism. Inju is a pan-fetishist's dream with its Bunuel toe-sucking, its S/M rope pulley sex, or its knothole voyeurism. Yet Schroeder never descends into the straight bump n' grind of pornography, he always reserves a distance in all that is off-screen -- the way the mise-en-scene of a strained expression face or the contortion of a wrapped cord creates an infinite power of expression in both pleasure and pain.
It's certainly true that this film wallows in some absurd Japanophilia enough to rival that of Lafcadio Hearn or some stateside manga otaku fanboy, but all of this Nippon gloss is just for exteriors. At its heart, this film says more about Claude Chabrol and Patricia Highsmith than it can say to anything plainly Japanese. One hopes that Inju will receive a US release in art house theaters or at the very least a presence on DVD. It's gripping filmmaking that restlessly binds and unbinds the nerves -- in a word, it's a spiderweb.
Dachimawa Lee
dir: Seung-wan Ryoo
Can it be said that the Koreans have lost touch with reality? When the cartoon-Brecht antics of Frank Tashlin and Jerry Lewis disappeared from the Hollywood radar around the end of the 1960s, who would have thought it possible that the best candidates to once more assume the position of the global jester would be nearly half a world away in Korea? But that's exactly what director Seung-wan Ryoo is aiming for with his wonderfully broad comedy Dachimawa Lee. It's an espionage flick that deflates and replaces all that serious-minded pomposity of Daniel Craig's James Bond with truly mindless fun. It's rather strange when such a good deal of American film and television roots their aesthetic in intensifying and doubling as a form of reality (MTV's pause-and-chew realism of The Hills, the docu-verite of The Office, and even most recently with Eastwood's grueling-palette in Changeling). Then it is doubly more fantastic to see a Korean film so committed to the mission of altogether rejecting any notion of reality and embracing all that is wild and nonsense -- Dali would right now embrace the Koreans with arms wide-open.
The recipe for Dachimawa is simple but long in the telling: a low grade spy thriller with tortuous plot developments, a leading man who plays his role so unflaggingly straight that he's like a hybrid of Leslie Nielson and Korean television soap opera, gaga potty humor that's invented a portable bidet, and even rough-edged physical comedy that's always flirting with the boundaries of excess (a woman whirled and thrusted around by her hairdo caught in an airplane's rotating propeller blade). Dachimawa is clearly a film of all things too much. And it seems that the director's mind functions only at hyper speeds -- note the first ten minutes of the film that flit through a whole lifetime of experience and makes sure to capture details as weird and beguiling as a close-up of a spy chomping through a large brick of tofu held in the palm of her naked hand. But even the animated, graphic design is something of a wonder, merely a hop and a skip away from the bubble-gum artwork of the Wachowskis' Speed Racer.
Go! Go! Go! seems to be the philosophy of Dachimawa. But laughter has never had ambitions for marathons, and there's a certain point to Dachimawa where nonsense becomes pointless. Nonetheless, Dachimawa for at least its first half-hour is a little miracle for all us who ever wonder what happened to the mad Dionysian spirit of Chuck Jones and Daffy Duck.
100
dir: Chris Martinez
My father avoids Filipino melodramas like they were a disease. He jokes that he can tell that one of my Mom's Filipino soap films is ending because of the sound of everyone in the living room crying. While this seems like a round of conventional homespun wisdom, my Dad's aversion towards Filipino melodramas is rather telling -- these movies are especially saccharine and manipulative, twisting the unsurprising themes of sickness, dying, and unrequited loves until they're sure to yield some amount of stupid bawling. Tears by any means necessary! Then this is exactly why a film like 100 proves so refreshing and remarkable. While lesser Filipino melodramas push-and-yank for strong emotional effects with absurdist situations, 100 yields and flourishes because it never demands of us. It is mature, restrained, and serious about its themes. The film refuses to understand the mechanism of melodrama as a gear to be appropriately shifted into some calculus of moments, but rather what emotions actually register are those that trail after events and expand ever larger with time. 100 is a melodrama that does not rush; like a serenade by Schubert, it is somber in its own slowness.
The story of 100 follows a young Filipina, Joyce, who suddenly discovers that she has cancer and a little more than three months to live. Rather than live trapped in a smog of miserable depression, Joyce decides to compile a series of small and large tasks on some post-it notes stuck to the wall space of her apartment. Some of the things that she takes care of are small and menial: get an in-house massage, vacation to Hong Kong, score some weed, cook your favorite Filipino dishes (this film comes close to being food-porn at times with its ultra-magnified cut-ins of steamy kare-kare). Other tasks are not so easy-going: tell you mother about dying, retrace a lost unfinished love, or buy a coffin. While you're probably rolling your eyes at the similarities that this film has with Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson's buddy geriatric flick Bucket List, it's really only a silly comparison once one ventures beyond those high concept taglines. If Freeman and Nicholson were after some goofball slapstick yuks, 100 is faithful to the sobering questions of living and dying; it stalwartly asks the most philosophically and theologically demanding of humanity's inquiries: what of living?
100 is a hanky-pic, less in the lush, immaculate visions of Sirk, but more so within the Philippine's own longstanding heritage of carving out melodrama as its national signature genre par excellence. Some might turn their noses up at 100 for its maudlin pathos, but while it is a populist film, 100 is as thoughtful in its reflection on life just as any Bergman kitchen quarrel, or Sartrean play, or whatever short story of Flannery O'Conner. Significant meditations on the meaning and value of living and apprehensions about dying are not simply things that the 20th century of arts had discovered and revealed to us in moody writings and tortured paintings. They are thoughts that have occurred to all of us at one moment or another. 100 is a wonderful and rich film because it kneels in obeisance to difficult matters and does not make jokes out of living. In all seriousness, 100 is like the child of Kurosawa's Ikiru, another story about life lived as though through a mirror that constantly groped about for any notion of ethical living. Because it is so sincere about its emotions and character, because it softly wonders about such delicate questions in life that so many other soap operas are quick to lampoon, 100 is a story that is fit to share, one that I will tell my Dad about.