By Brian Hu
Thanks to DVD, I've been catching up on smaller recent Asian films that slipped past, either because they didn't get theatrical releases in the U.S. or because their quirky blend of generic and cultural elements kept them from being easily classifiable as either "mainstream" or "art" cinema. Two films in particular were among the most enjoyable experiences I've had watching recent Asian films, and both are about music.
Oddly enough, they both happen to employ the powerful, yet underused, cinematic trick of teasing the audience with a song, before cutting the music off, leaving the listener emotionally, even physically, unfulfilled. Let me explain. Music, in film or otherwise, has the powerful ability to smooth out rough surfaces, to soothe out all discomfort, and to provide stability through rhythm. As scholar Claudia Gorbman writes, film music is able to "bathe the listener in affect," lowering his or her defenses and turning all of film's technical or narrative inadequacies into an integrated, emotional experience.
Throughout his career, Jean-luc Godard has been one of the few directors to understand that the reverse is also true. To cut off a song in the middle is to deprive viewers of that affective comfort. Godard had a political and ethical purpose for this; he wanted to draw attention to the ways we consume pleasure. The two Asian films in question don't yank away the music quite as violently as Godard, but both understand how to utilize this unique cinematic technique, albeit for very different reasons.
Climax: Linda, Linda, Linda (Nobuhiro Yamashita, 2005)
If you're familiar with Yamashita's film, you're familiar with its music. In fact, you're probably singing the title song in your head right now. Time Magazine's Richard Corliss puts it best: "that song, simple and simply irresistible, which neither meditation nor surgery has been able to remove from my head since I saw the movie last year at the Toronto Film Festival. Everybody: Linda, Linda! Linda Linda Lin-da-ah-ah!"
How is it that the film is able to have that profound effect on audiences' memories? For one, the song, a cover of Japanese punk band The Blue Hearts, is truly fantastic, as are all of their songs used in the film. But beyond that, the film knows how to structure the songs within the narrative by giving us just a little at a time.
The song first appears, mostly unannounced, when members of a high school rock band flip through old cassettes for music they can play for the school's big graduation festival. We hear the quiet opening of "Linda Linda" playing through stereo equipment. We can barely make out the notes; all we know is that the chorus has some magnetic power, because as soon as it comes on, the three rockers start wailing in unison, hopping along to the beat in joy.
But then it stops. You're not sure what the song is yet, but you do know it's probably pretty awesome.
The second time we hear a Blue Hearts song (the film uses three), it's playing loudly through a character's headphones. We can't hear it that well, but we instantly recognize. The anticipation builds...
The rock band, made up of four girls (three instrumentalists and a Korean exchange student they found to sing the lead vocal) has decided to practice the Blue Hearts songs for the festival, which is only two days away. The third time we hear the songs is thus in a montage which cuts between the four of them as they practice individually. Thus, we hear the bass line and the drum beat, but only separately. Or we hear the exchange student practicing the words (her Japanese is a little spotty) at karaoke. Hearing each element separately is a clever little tease: we recognize just enough to want to hear them together in all their glory.
The fourth time we hear it is group practice #1. They're not very good yet and totally out of sync. Most ruinous is the fact that the rhythm is off, keeping the audience from truly falling into that soothing lull which music does so well in film.
Group practice #2: The guitarist shows up late, as does the drummer. In cramped Japan, bands don't have the luxury of garages, so rooms are rented. When members are late, time is wasted and practice ends prematurely. So does the music.
Group practice #3: The camera cuts away before the group is warmed up. Group practice #4: The band has to quietly sneak into the school at night to use the practice room, but to evade detection by staff members patrolling the campus, they whisper the songs, drum quietly on books, and play the electric guitar without plugging it in. So we only get the song at half the volume. Group practice #5: Our best view of the Blue Hearts songs thus far, but once again, yank! The film cuts away abruptly in the middle of the chorus.
The ninth time we hear their music is on the roof of the school, but it's just a few chords, played by someone who's not even in the band. It seems everyone who's cool knows the Blue Hearts, and we the audience want to also, dammit!
Group practice #6: Fatigue is setting in and the girls are zoning out. One girl cleans her ear, another is lost in the world of text-messaging. When they finally get back to the music, the camera cuts away to elsewhere on campus, and we only hear the song muffled by distance. When it does cut back and we get to hear the music more clearly, the camera is kept in a long shot, framing the girls in a doorway, diminishing the effect the song.
Group practice #7: By now, the girls are sleep deprived, making mistakes and playing off beat. Through these eleven scenes, we're given the songs in fragments or in shadows of their potential. The film creates desire through the musical tease: a chorus here, an intro there. We think we've pieced it together, but we crave the sonic release of its totality to set our spirits free.
This technique creates a powerful momentum for the narrative (yes, there is one), building anticipation and pushing us forward to the big day. The subplots serve more as delays in the music than as actual narrative information, and it's amazing how the music has the power to whisk away the various conflicts that arise. Here's a movie that doesn't solve its characters problems through dialogue or narrative complexity. It's all in the music, in the magical 12th appearance of Blue Hearts on the big day, and needless to say, it doesn't matter how well they play or not, for the film has built up so much unreleased tension that all of the narrative conflicts (girls' romances, the anxiety of graduation, putting on the festival, Korea-Japan relations, unforeseen fatigue, an injury, some inopportune rain) incredibly vanish when we finally get the full sha-bang, the un-restrained rock-out, the immortal battle-cry of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: Linda Linda Lin-da-ah-ah! It's not surprising that the final Blue Hearts song played in the film is not "Linda Linda," but the aptly titled "An Endless Song," because a movie this fucking awesome should not end, but play on repeat in our mental jukeboxes until the end of time.
Anti-climax: The Heavenly Kings (Daniel Wu, 2006)
And then there's the boy band Alive, a pop quartet so pitiful that we should all be grateful that they find their glorious death in the mockumentary The Heavenly Kings. Like me, you might have heard of them a few years back, and then wished you hadn't. Super-cool actor/model Daniel Wu... in a boy band?! Turns out it was all a big sham by Wu and his crew, which includes fellow actors Conroy Chan, Andrew Lin, and Terrence Yin.
The film, helmed by Wu in his directorial debut, explores what happens when a group of four clearly untalented "singers" fronted by Hong Kong's sexiest hunk try to take the music industry by storm. The brilliance of the film is that it combines footage (some real, some dramatized) of the band fooling fans and media in Hong Kong, Taipei, and Shanghai, with documentary talking-heads footage of actual members of the Hong Kong music industry exposing the truths behind the glamour. The effect is that the film becomes an outsider's experiment to see just how crooked and talent-less the industry really is. So when real superstars Miriam Cheung, Nicholas Tse, and Karen Mok tell the camera that the key to success is playing the media, Daniel Wu and the gang go out with their fake boy band and see if that's really the case. If a mockumentary is a fake documentary, then The Heavenly Kings is a docu-mockumentary, an exciting blend of documentary and fake documentary.
Actual music plays a smaller role in The Heavenly Kings than in Linda, Linda, Linda, and it's not surprising why: the music sucks. However, the continuous side-tracking whenever their leadoff single "Adam's Choice" comes on, as well as the curious absence altogether of the band's second single (I don't even remember what it was called) becomes something like a buried joke within the movie. As in Linda, Linda, Linda, we hear little snippets of "Adam's Choice" -- sometimes part of the chorus, but usually the first seven notes of the instrumental intro -- which sadistically whets our appetite for the whole song.
We hear most of the song during the opening credits, but our attention at that time is focused on the film's animated introduction. As the movie takes off, we hear only fragments. At the press conference during which the members of Alive discuss their new song, all we hear is a brief instrumental. When they shoot the music video and shoot a promotional ad, all we hear is the same short verse. When we first see them perform onstage, they sound so bad that it doesn't actually count as hearing the song. Later live performances contain even less of the song; one actually substitutes the song they sing for another band's song altogether.
We don't actually hear the song in its entirety (including Daniel Wu's rap solo!) until the closing credits, and whew! what a let-down, even with our expectations as low as they already were. The tension (if you can call it that) built up by denying us the song for 80 minutes becomes simply disappointment, disillusionment, disinterest. The music, which Claudia Gorbman reminds us has the power to return us to an innocent, pleasurable state (as closing credits music typically does) fails to do much to save the band, or the movie.
Part of it is that the second half of the film isn't quite as entertaining as the first half (clever industry critique turns into a banal band-on-the-verge-of-breaking-up story). But whether the filmmakers intended it to or not, the failure of the song when it is finally revealed stands for the failure of contemporary Canto-pop in general to generate any genuine pleasure or uplift. If pop is supposed to be fun, obvious, and formulaic, contemporary Canto-pop fails to do even that, just as here, it fails to lull the viewer into believing the ending is anything but a formulaic, VH1-esque tragedy of a rock band.
And that has the totally unexpected effect of giving the film a Godard-ian critical edge. Just as Godard's films deny us (Capitalist) pleasure by denying us the music we crave, The Heavenly Kings shows how, when we finally have it, pop music is nothing but a let-down. The disappointing ending is consistent with the critiques of the industry put forth eloquently throughout the film (but especially in the beginning), where producers, musicians, and song-writers Davy Chan, Jun Kung, and Paul Wong tell stories of how they got screwed by the industry -- or how the "music" is nothing but smoke and mirrors hiding greed and corruption. They, along with superstars Tse, Mok, Yeung, Candy Lo, Chang Chen-yue, and especially Jacky Cheung candidly discuss the manufacturing of star images, the interactions with gossip reporters, the threat of mp3s, the role of karaoke, and the importance of unity. That Jacky Cheung delivers the final zinger against the industry (the best part of the film's final half-hour) during the closing credits is fitting, for it reminds the viewer that in the end, it is an old-school artist like Cheung who symbolizes what's right about pop music, whereas the junk bands that Alive parodies spell nothing but death to creativity and musical pleasure.