Very Limited Engagements

With the American art house scene becoming increasingly homogenous and institutionalized and the “art” in art house nearly non-existent, we expect local film festivals to bring us those films deemed too difficult, too controversial, or too uncategorizable for the commercial market. In effect, we rely on festivals to bring us the films the economics of American distribution refuse to let us see. For fans of Asian cinema, the AFI Film Festival is traditionally a disappointment, sticking to films that were going to be released theatrically anyway, such as House of Flying Daggers, Ong-Bak, Infernal Affairs, and Bride and Prejudice.

This year's Los Angeles Film Festival -- the less industry-centric of the two major international film festivals in the L.A. area -- looks promising. While the festival disappointed by not including some of the high-profile Asian art films making the rounds at recent European festivals (Hou Hsiao-hsien's Three Times, Hong Sang-soo's Tale of Cinema, Tsai Ming-liang's A Wayward Cloud, Fruit Chan's Dumplings, Jia Zhang-ke's The World, Johnnie To's Election, and Seijun Suzuki's Princess Racoon come immediately to mind), there are some prospective highlights in this year's program. Wong Kar-wai's 2046 is an obvious choice, and even though it's finally going to be released this fall by Sony Pictures Classics, I'm excited to get a sneak peak. The short film program “Before Anime: Japanese Animation 1925-1946” is perhaps the must-see, not only to contextualize Japanese animation in its local history, but to see some rare and important films I'm certain will not be screened again or released on DVD any time soon. Lau Kar-leung's The 36th Chamber of Shaolin is perhaps my favorite Hong Kong film of the '70s, and while I saw it as part of the UCLA Film Archive's Heroic Grace retrospective of Shaw Brothers classics, I'd make a point to catch it again, if only to hear it introduced by long-time fan The RZA, this year's L.A. Film Fest artist in residence.

Two films by Asian-Americans are promising. First is the documentary The Grace Lee Project, directed by a young filmmaker named Grace Lee who seeks out Asian-American women with her same name -- a quirky and inspiring way to explore the heterogeneity of the Asian-American experience. The second is Cavite, a thriller co-directed by Neill Dela Llana and Ian Gamazon, two Filipino-Americans. Since the film follows a young man from San Diego who travels to the Philippines, the film seems to belong to the trend of Asian-American films that deal with “homecomings” to the motherland, yet Cavite seems to resist being simply that, since it is also a relentless political thriller, at least according to the festival program. Hans Petter Morland's The Beautiful Country can't be considered an Asian-American film, but it follows a Vietnamese man born to a Vietnamese mother and American G.I. father on his quest to exploring his heritage. One of my favorite filmmakers Terrence Malick abandoned this project in favor of his highly anticipated Pocahontas film, and the pairing of Nick Nolte and Bai Ling is intriguing. And while I could easily make some anti-Orientalist complaint about the U.S.-Norway co-production, I'll keep my suspicions to myself until I actually see the film.

Whang Cheol Mean's Spying Cam, about two men locked in a hotel room with a video camera, looks like a strong contender for the best Asian indie film in this year's fest, and makes a nice counterpoint to the other Korean film in the program, Kong Su-chang's blockbuster gore-fest R-Point, surprisingly the only Asian film in the festival's “Dark Wave” program.

Before the Flood, the sole Chinese documentary in the festival, interviews residents around the Three Gorges Dam area. The film is probably worth catching, although a documentary on a topic already so well-publicized has a lot of political and cultural baggage to deal with.

Jun Ichikawa's Tony Takitani, which won the coveted FIPRESCI prize at Locarno last year, looks to probe the world of a loner in Japan. Ichikawa deserves to be better known Stateside, so though I know nothing about Tony Takitani, the presence of a film from one of Japan's more interesting recent talents makes it a welcome addition to the festival.

At press screenings, I caught two of the Asian features at the festival. The superior one is Tetsuya Nakashima's Kamikaze Girls, which turned out to be more cute and cuddly than I'd anticipated, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The film explores the dynamics between a “Lolita girl” and a “Yanki” biker chick, members of two Japanese subcultures so distinct to the Japanese cultural landscape that the press kit comes with a full-page color glossary of jargon used in the film. I hope this informative pamphlet is distributed at the festival screenings, not only as an exercise in cultural translation, but to teach Americans the extent to which they are ignorant of the intricacy and diversity of Japanese culture. (Which certain Sophia Coppola films tend to bundle together as a singular laughable oddity.) Through the use of titles, flashbacks, and rococo blues and pinks, Kamikaze Girls playfully brings out the feelings and desires of being alone despite being part of a subculture.

Like Kamikaze Girls, Ann Hu's Beauty Remains makes liberal use of backlighting, but whereas the former film uses the technique to visualize the imaginary veneer of the Lolita lifestyle, Hu's film uses it to provide a childlike, fantasy-like shine, as in the worst of Steven Spielberg. But whereas Spielberg's use of backlighting makes sense in that his films are actually about the fantasies of young boys, Beauty Remains seems to project the fantasies of the Western gaze, giving mainland actress Zhou Xuan more gloss than she really needs, and turning 1949 China into a luminescent romantic fable of two sisters fighting for the same man. The film's press book touts the merits of using American screenwriters to tell a Chinese story, and while I have nothing against that transnational strategy, I'm really not buying it here. James Schamus did it so much better in his Ang Lee collaborations by respecting the fact that there's so much to Chinese culture that he doesn't understand, yet allowing his Euro-American identity to give the films a fresh perspective. Beauty Remains on the other hand is so duplicitous about the way it hides its American roots in that polish of a mythical “China” that it's hard to forgive the film. Having a trite story and derivative visual style doesn't help matters either.

Stay tuned for APA's coverage of the L.A. Film Festival!