Forget the festivals. If you want to see great films in L.A., you better be part of the army of distributors, exhibitors, journalists, and financiers at the American Film Market. Civilians strictly prohibited.
Hana yori mo naho (a.k.a. Hana)
dir: Koreeda Hirokazu
Koreeda and the samurai genre? Yes, thankfully. Tackling the samurai genre entails a lot of baggage from history and cinema, but after Nakano Hiroyuki's SF Episode One and Yamada Yoji's Tasogare Seibei (Twilight Samurai), recent attempts to re/deconstruct (take your pick) the genre, Koreeda's in good company. But if you want to see intense fighting and bodies flailing, obviously the Koreeda + samurai genre equation doesn't say much to you to begin with. Set in 1702 Edo (Tokyo), Hana presents a small, tight-knit lower class community living in wooden shacks and therefore, on the periphery. Though the film works more at the level of ensemble, Aoki "Soza" Sozaemon (Okada Junichi) is singled out in the narrative through his dilemma of fulfilling revenge by killing Kanazawa Jubei (Asano Tadanobu) who killed his father, while harbouring romantic sentiments for one of his neighbours, the widow Osae (Miyazawa Rie). Singling out Soza's life situation is perhaps misleading since the film is about undermining the life-values tied up with the samurai and revenge. Koreeda overturns also the suspense built up in the form of the revenge scheme in a comical way that comments on the theatrics of the "way of the samurai." Though not as intense on the emotions as Nobody Knows, but similar to After Life, Koreeda focuses very affectionately on the everyday interaction of the community members in a series of vignettes, the scene of cleaning the well that comes to involve everyone being exemplary. To say more may make watching the film superfluous, which is far from the case. For future cinematic equations, my next request would be Koreeda + horror genre. --Rowena Aquino
Woman on the Beach
dir: Hong Sang-soo
Thematically and structurally, there's a lot of Power of Kangwon Province in Hong Sang-soo's latest film Woman on the Beach, which observes city people retreating into a picturesque setting for relaxing, drinking, and hooking up. But stylistically, the film is very much part of Hong's recent set of mature films beginning with Turning Gate in 2002. While the usual themes are getting a little old (drinking leads to yelling leads to sexual awkwardness), there's a formal precision reminiscent of Woman is the Future of Man and Tale of Cinema. The use of sudden zoom-ins is especially reminiscent of that latter film, and while the usage here lacks the earlier work's self-reflexive complexity, it's playfully employed here to hide and reveal internal dynamics among friends. Specifically, Woman on the Beach is fascinated with the dynamics of what sociologists call dyads and triads, or sets of two or three people. Hong gives us various scenarios -- two men, one woman; two women, one man -- and explores the possible interactions and retaliations within the triad that occur when only two of the three people get together. The result is somewhat lighter fare than we're accustomed to from Hong, although his trademark theme of personal humiliation still prevails. Also new: Korean male masculinity is further deconstructed, but this time with an international twist. --Brian Hu
I Don't Want to Sleep Alone
dir: Tsai Ming-liang
Although I Don't Want to Sleep Alone has even fewer lines of dialogue than any of Tsai Ming-liang's previous films (we must be in the single digits now), it could be his most accessible feature to date. Tsai still employs his signature long takes and uses no mood music; his characters still drift aimlessly and he still refrains from explaining any of the onscreen actions in terms of psychological causation. What makes I Don't Want to Sleep Alone more emotionally immediate than his previous films is that Tsai has perfected a cinema of the body that speaks to the audience through images of touching and restraint. I hesitate before using the word "universal" to describe Tsai's depiction of human bodies; what it is instead is "sensually simple." The emotions involved in the caring of the sick and the desire of the lonely are plain and clear; it's the intricate way Tsai connects these simple emotions to various spaces (abandoned buildings, work spaces, multi-story apartment buildings) that gives the film a complex sense of what sensuality means to this specific set of characters in their specific socio-economic universe. The linguistically-neutral silences and the shared, overlapping work-spaces are especially important given that this is a film about itinerant workers from Bangladesh and diasporic Chinese encountering each other in culturally heterogeneous Malaysia. It's interesting that Tsai's awaited return to his birthplace of Malaysia after working for years in Taiwan is not a nostalgic return home, but an exploration of a continued sense of displacement. His sympathy is with bodily desires unrooted, dangling, yearning for acknowledgment and reciprocation. --Brian Hu
Nightmare Detective
dir: Tsukamoto Shinya
Any year with a new film by Tsukamoto is always a good year. In Tsukamoto's filmography, Nightmare Detective (Akumu tantei) ups the ante in pivoting narratives on the body, flesh, the urbanscape and alienation. It's even better when Tsukamoto stars in the film, and as "0," he rarefies the line of over-the-edge characters he's appointed himself to portray. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. The film centers primarily on a female detective, Kirishima Keiko (Hitomi) who's determined to make her mark despite the discrimination she encounters among her male colleagues. When cases of what seem like suicide victims severely mutilated come to their attention, Keiko sees an opportunity to prove her worth. Investigations reveal that each suicide victim dialed the number "0" before dying in his/her sleep. At a crossroads as to how to "solve" a case of suicides that may actually be murders, Wakamiya (Ando Masanobu) and Keiko visit the "nightmare detective" (Matsuda Ryuhei) -- so-called since he can enter people's dreams. Keiko and the "nightmare detective" decide ultimately to enter the dream of death and murder conjured by "0," a once-suicidal man who realized that he can enter people's bodies through the depth of empathy he feels in their desire to die -- itself conjured by him -- without doing harm to his own body. Since Vital (2004), Tsukamoto has shifted from the mechanized body of the Tetsuo films to the actual flesh of the psyche. He literalizes and em-bodies the definition of empathy as "the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it." The results: some very, very bloody scenes; the apparent result of communication breakdowns even as we, as bodies and minds, are (supposed to be) more "connected" to each other than ever before. An unsettling scenario, but Tsukamoto's films are at their most powerful when we become conscious of our own bodies and minds while watching the films, squirming, flinching, looking away, staring and holding our breath. --Rowena Aquino
The Old Garden
dir: Im Sang-soo
As in his controversial hit The President's Last Bang, politics is central to Im Sang-soo's latest, The Old Garden. We're presented with shocking re-enactments of South Korea's notorious Gwangju Massacre and the years that follow. These scenes from the 1980s alternate with scenes in the present, during which one of the student demonstrators has been released after 16 years in prison for being a Socialist. Above all, this is a film about the loneliness of the rebel following a failed rebellion. A deflated mix of guilt, blame, sorrow, and withering hope pervades, as the old squadron of demonstrators -- particularly the imprisoned man and his pregnant girlfriend -- move on from the trauma in an emotional daze or with deep psychological scars, left with memories of sunny, youthful dreams dashed by images of charred bodies and police brutality. Much of the film's force is dissipated by the clunky back-and-forth between past and present, which never really develops with any political or dramatic resonance. Further, the emotions never stray from the obvious, a surprise coming from the director of the uncompromising romantic drama A Good Lawyer's Wife. --Brian Hu
The Go Master
dir: Tian Zhuangzhuang
Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon star Chang Chen plays the reticent Wu Qingyuan, who in reality is known as one of the all-time great players of Go, a chess-like game of strategy. What makes Wu's story so compelling is that he was born in China, but moved to Japan at the invitation of Japanese fans of his who wanted to raise the level of Go in their own country. When the Sino-Japanese War breaks out, Wu deals with new questions of patriotism, love, and friendship. But this is no war melodrama. What makes Tian's film so extraordinary is that it doesn't draw direct correlations between war terror and personal trauma, nor does it tightly weave Wu's life into a clear political allegory. In that sense, The Go Master shares an approach with Hou Hsiao-hsien's similar The Puppetmaster, which keeps political and historical change visible in the background, and focuses instead on the life of an artist, whose everyday actions may or may not have anything to do with the war waging around him. An elder player tells Wu, "Go knows no national boundaries." The aura of the game keeps the Chinese-Japanese showdowns in Go tournaments more about sportsmanship than national honor even in wartime, which is a thoughtful sentiment (shared by Jet Li's recent Fearless) given the nations' recent quibbles. Like Tian's previous narrative film Springtime in a Small Town, The Go Master is an incredibly beautiful, quiet, unassuming, and deeply honest about cosmopolitan figures in times of national transformation. --Brian Hu
Exte (a.k.a. Extensions)
Hazard
dir: Sono Sion
These two films by Sono Sion are worlds apart in terms of intimacy and freshness, and perhaps what separates them is the question of a big studio like Toei in charge of distribution while the smaller (and virtually unknown?) Ellen Corporation made possible the making of Hazard on HD, with Eleven Arts for distribution. There's also the more practical reason that the former takes place in Japan while the latter was shot mainly in the streets of New York City. Exte is the Japanese word for "extensions" and is your straightforward horror about the power of hair extensions, especially if you don't know if the original person's hair that constitutes the extensions has a revenge wish. Well, almost no one knows in this film and ay, there's the rub. For Yamazaki (Osugi Ren), a mortician who's obsessed with hair and the only one who knows, the profits from a dead woman's exquisite hair with a life of its own far outweighs the danger it poses to other people's lives. "These other people" are basically hairdressers, notably apprentice Yuko (Kuriyama Chiaki), and their clients. One by one, hairdressers/clients die. As Yuko connects the dots, even the extremely played-out convention of fumbling police who try to solve the crimes is in place. There's nothing left but the equally conventional cathartic and explosive end -- cathartic for the dead woman bent on revenge, explosive for everyone else. As a fan of Sono since Jisatsu Circle (Suicide Club), I was not expecting the standard horror fare that could be released straight-to-video. This is a bit harsh, but the opening sequence's promise of an oblique approach to the horror genre that falls back on conventions was a real let-down.
Redeeming Sono's name is Hazard, a gritty, bilingual (even bipolar) film on hope and disillusionment that centers on the figure of Shinichi (Odagiri Jo). A little girl's voice narrates Shin's sleepwalking existence as a university student in an equally sleepwalking Japan. When he chances upon a book that recounts hazards in New York City, he decides to abandon everything in Japan for America. As a tourist with little knowledge of English, Shin gets bilked of his money and possessions. By sheer luck, he meets Japanese-American Lee (Jai West) and Japanese Takeda (Fukami Motoki), who've carved out a life of middle-degree luxury from selling ice cream spiked with speed. They initiate Shin to their free-wheeling ways that include stealing cars, getting high and holding up liquor stores. Contrary to other roles, as Shin, Odagiri is a strong lead boosted by the different individual characters and styles posed by West and Fukami. As in Kurosawa Kiyoshi's Bright Future, Odagiri seems to deliver best depending on the direction. At times, Odagiri is most convincing when the camera just captures him in thought, a figure in a muddled ground. "Muddled" is the operative word because the free-wheeling days are numbered after a point and "hazard" changes meanings for Shin. The HD video's capacity for long takes while not losing mobility makes the rapid and subtle emotional/spatial shifts in Shin's experiences all the more palpable, which is exactly what's missing in Exte. --Rowena Aquino
Blackout
dir: Ato Bautista
Blackout presents a very small corner of Philippine city life through the eyes of Gil (Robin Padilla), a lowly apartment building owner. The idea of seeing/living through another's eyes is not that simple, as Gil experiences frequent blackouts due to his heavy drinking, a result of the fact that the mother of his child, Nino, left them with no intention of coming back. Over and above this is the mystery of the bloody rear bumper of his car, which he discovers in the film's first sequence between the moments of extreme inebriation to eventual blackout. Who/what did he hit? What's striking outside of the horror/suspense plot is a kind of meditation on the in/ability to see so crucial to the film experience that also informs the technical aspect of the film. The film is filled with "visual" markers such as mirrors, a tenant who has a pair of eyes tattooed on his chest and a sole eye tattooed in the back. Some of the cuts are so rapid as to mimic blinking, or even the blackouts that Gil experiences, which continually disorient his in/ability to see and therefore our in/ability to see. If the subject of seeing sounds a little suspect for a feature film, Bautista manages to fashion a work thick with ominous ambiance that goes beyond horror/suspense conventions; the ending and "answer" to the mystery become secondary to seeing someone's in/sight fall apart. Despite a critique of insularity in the service of atmosphere, at 26 years of age, Bautista promises some exciting Philippine filmmaking. With Blackout, his second feature, produced/distributed by Unitel Pictures, hopefully more people will be exposed to his burgeoning work. --Rowena Aquino
The Unseeable
dir: Wisit Sasanatieng
Several of the distributors at the AFM screening for The Unseeable left half-way through the film. It's a pity, because while the first half is standard (if not sub-standard) Asian ghost fare, the last half hour is a relentless barrage of terror. A young pregnant woman searches for her missing husband and stumbles upon an old two-story house surrounded by a dusty garden. Two or three Miss Havishams reside in the compound, and possibly a few ghosts too. The first half utilizes all of the usual tricks. The camera always reveals a ghost sneaking up behind our protagonist every time the camera makes an unmotivated side movement. And the sound effects annoyingly scream at the audience whenever a shock occurs. But as we move into the big climax, the content gets richer while the style becomes more sophisticated. In one of the film's most impressive thrills, the terrifying noise of invisible strangers making noise circle the audience via the 5.1 Dolby Digital speakers. Just as the film lulls you into the sounds' circular pattern, the sound designer pulls an unexpected punch from the opposite speaker. The Unseeable may not be as experimental as Wisit Sasanatieng's previous films Tears of the Black Tiger and Citizen Dog, but it's just as -- if not more -- emotionally developed. And like those previous films, color and design are of utmost importance, turning a routine horror story into an epic Thai gothic. --Brian Hu
Crazy Stone
dir: Ning Hao
A 180 degree turn from his previous Mongolian Ping Pong, Ning Hao's latest Crazy Stone is a caper comedy about various men after an elusive piece of jade. The large cast makes it difficult to follow the intricacies of the plot, but the tone and 'tude is clear. Impossible coincidences, carefree characters, rock music, neon lights, stylized editing -- the film is going for an ultra-contemporary look and feel that appeals to a large cross-section of the Chinese-speaking world. On those criteria, Crazy Stone succeeds. Its accomplishment is similar to Guy Ritchie's: it shamelessly puts style and attitude above substance and emotion. Where it fails is as a heist movie, which it does try to be. The robbery plots are muddy and unimpressive, the characters' interactions and collaboration are unimaginative, while you never get the feeling that anybody's getting away with anything -- and that's really the essence of the heist movie. In fact, the scenes of conmen in action (particularly one involving a Coke can) are much more enjoyable than the heists themselves, specifically because these scenes show how inspired everyday people can get when there's easy money at stake. --Brian Hu
Ichijiku no kao (a.k.a. Faces of a Fig Tree)
dir: Momoi Kaori
Momoi Kaori's acting roles in the past couple of years includes Miike Takashi's Izo, Memoirs of a Geisha, and Alexander Sokurov's Solntse. Now she can add "director" to her CV with her first foray behind the camera, at a time when it's still pretty rare to come across a woman filmmaker in Japan. Momoi also stars in the film as the mother of the Kadokawi family. On the surface, the Kadokawi family functions like any other family but almost imperceptibly, changes are happening; among other things, the father (Ishikura Saburo) begins to live away from home in order to finish a construction project. His unexpected death brings about transformations in the family's lives in increasing degrees of intensity: the daughter (Yamada Hanako) finds out that she's adopted, moves out and starts over by becoming a writer; the mother goes through her mourning, and eventually remarries (the role of the son gets short shrift). All this seems to be in line for a conventional family drama, but the handling of the almost invisible changes going on in the family and the pure look of the film is nothing near to conventional, despite the chronological time. When your production designer is Kimura Takeo (known primarily for his work with Suzuki Seijun in the 1960s), the result will at the very least be colorful and in this case, visually stunning. The changes in increasing intensity are equaled by the intensities of color, which are almost distracting from the emotional weight that the film seems to want to get across. However, when the direction is itself distracted -- off-kilter angles, lenses and camera distance detached from any narrative purposes -- perhaps it's not such a bad thing. Not to say that "distracted" is negative. As a first feature film, Momoi is surprisingly bold (she also wrote the film's screenplay). But some restraint could go a long way for the next project. --Rowena Aquino
Aachi and Ssipak
dir: Jo Beom-jin
It looks great on paper: a Korean animated film about a city built on poo. If they could pull it off, it could be the best non-Miyazaki animated film since The Triplets of Belleville. Unfortunately, the production falls flat; the toilet humor is mild, the satire obvious. References to U.S. military ineptitude are funny, but don't amount to anything. The same could be said of the anti-constipation ads and the references to an illegal popsicle trade. An anal sex pornographer is the only really redeemable part of the picture; the remainder is just a clueless mash-up of gunfire, explosions, decapitations, dismemberings, mine-car chases, an army of mutants, and of course, projectile diarrhea. I wanted really badly to like Aachi and Ssipak, but by the end, I was too confused to care. --Brian Hu
Nasaan si Francis? (a.k.a. Where is Francis?)
dir: Gabby Fernandez
As Gabby Fernandez's first film based on his own screenplay of the same title in the Ilonggo dialect, Nasaan si Francis? expresses control and creativity, and at the most superficial level, seems like yet another cutting-edge voice emerging from the Philippine filmmaking scene. However, at a closer look and an hour into the film, that control and creativity become repetitive at best and you begin to wonder how this differs from any pop video with "hip" editing that riffs on the Weekend at Bernie's scenario -- dragging around a dead body while pretending that the person's still alive. The Francis (Jeffrey Quizon) in question is a drug-dealer visited at his home by his erstwhile friends Boy (Paolo Contis) and Sonny (Rico Blanco) in need of money. After taking a hit of the drugs he plans on giving to Boy and Sonny to sell, he dies of an overdose and triggers the Weekend at Bernie's scenario. What follows is a hide-and-pretend-he's-still-alive game extended unfortunately to feature-length as those either related to or involved with Francis arrive at his house. Among others, veteran actor Christopher de Leon turning in a semi-comical performance as a thug is wonderful to watch and sustains parts of the film -- his drug haze at a convenience store where, at one point, he's literally inside the refrigeration display case alongside bottles and cans is especially rich. In fact, most of the more interesting actors and characters are left to the side -- like Karl Roy, who plays Francis's druggie buddy and is stoned during most of the film -- which makes it difficult to care how it's all going to end. The problem with Nasaan si Francis? is that while claiming to represent new, innovative work, courtesy of Unitel Pictures and its distribution arm, Unico Entertainment, to diversify products, it falls far too short of expectations. --Rowena Aquino
AFM 2006 recap