By Brian Hu
APA tackles LAFF's programming of Asian and Asian American cinema. This year there's nothing new, but sometimes that's okay. Brian Hu explains.
A crucial scene in Jennifer Phang's Half-Life is prefaced by a moment of levity. A few twenty-somethings are lounging around in a backyard, chatting about this and that. An aspiring artist describes her mixed-media performance piece, while the others struggle to hold back their laughter in the face of the artist's pretension. One of them, Pam, responds by sarcastically acknowledging how "topical" the artwork is. Except Pam accidentally says "typical" instead of "topical," and we the audience laugh at how often these words are interchangeable in the realm of contemporary art.
Unfortunately, that slippage between "topical" and "typical" describes Half-Life well, as it does much of this year's Los Angeles Film Festival -- or at least the Asian and Asian American features chosen to play the fest. For a festival, that's not always a bad thing; after all, you need the typical to define the atypical and innovative. But it's interesting to note how the two terms are not just similar, but can even be simultaneous, as in every moviegoer's nightmare: the "typically topical." I wouldn't want to diminish such important contemporary issues such as war, globalization, and the environment, but when every film brushes against the same touchstones, our collective humanism dulls. (And a numb liberal is no good for anybody).
Every community or nation has its typical topics, and films reflect them. At this year's festival, we have the Cambodian American documentary Coming Together (on Khmer Rouge traumas) and the Korean feature Hello, Stranger (on North-South conflicts). Admittedly, I didn't see either of these films (probably because their descriptions border cliché), so it's possible that they transcend typicality in exciting ways.
An example of this Jia Zhang-ke's awe-inspiring Useless, a mainland Chinese documentary that touches on labor issues, poverty, globalization, art, and the mining industry -- all topical issues in China today. But as he's consistently demonstrated, Jia Zhang-ke, unlike many of his peers, has an uncommon sense for the ripples in society that makes the typically topical full of surprises and wit. In Useless, this at least partially works through Jia's odd structure. The film asks a simple question (what does "fashion" mean in China today?) in three contexts. First, Jia takes us into a textile factory, where fashion is, above all, labor. But the factory is also a microcosm revealing broader social structures: food and medicine, for instance. Second, Jia follows a Chinese fashion designer to Paris, where her avant-garde designs are applauded in the international fashion scene. And lastly, we're in Shaanxi Province (a fixture of Jia's films), where fashion is work, play, and pride to local tailors and their clients.
Jia's signature slow-motion tracking shots across bodies doing everyday things (working, chatting, texting) here have an ironic effect. Jia uses the same camera movement on factory workers sewing for pennies, on fashion models in Paris contemplating the demanding clothes they have to wear, and on bathing coal miners for whom clothes do little to thwart the dust, which settles on their skin like a carcinogious smear. The camera movement becomes a visual rhyme across the three sections, and the way it juxtaposes bodies illuminates Jia's humanism, as well as his critical edge. Everyone wears clothes, albeit for very different social reasons. But underneath the stitches, the frills, and the patches are human bodies trying to get by.
The structure also lets Jia's love of schlock emerge -- another atypicality in a seemingly typical dissection of social structures. And again, it's the structure which enables it. During the second section, the fashion designer tells the camera that every piece of clothing has a story, and she feels an obligation to produce fashions which embody those stories. Her aesthetic and moral intuition is honorable. But her works, though conceptually sound, come off as emotionally empty under the Parisian flashbulbs and spotlights. In the third section, a working-class married couple addresses the camera and, under the filmmaker's insistence, talks about the role clothes play in their romance. The wife's dress is, by Parisian standards, gaudy as hell. But she blushes and shyly divulges that her husband bought it for her, at which we can't help but smile at their sincerity and the fact that this is the kind of "story behind the clothes" that high art could never reveal. Jia's camera then tilts up to their ceiling, which is strewn with kitschy Christmas lights.
It's tempting to call this juxtaposition a castigation of high-fashion, but that would be too easy. What Jia so powerfully conveys is not a hard-and-fast critique of "useless" fashion, but a genuine admiration for the simple beauties that justify these workers' lives: pop songs, Christmas lights, gaudy clothes. A Frankfurt School dismissal of the culture industry would overlook the emotional threads that don't only tie laborers to their work, but also to their family and companions.
Topical Asians
These days, Jia Zhang-ke is a bona-fide film festival superstar, internationally acknowledged as being on the cinematic cutting edge. Thus, not only is his content topical, but his status as an auteur is a matter of much conversation. So much so that if weren't for the fact that he actually makes fantastic films, his presence on the festival circuit would be as a "typical topical" filmmaker -- à la, say, Kim Ki-duk.
There's a similar predictability about festival tributes to those who've passed. This year, the LA Film Festival honors Charlton Heston with Planet of the Apes (an obvious honoree and a very, very obvious film pick) and Ivan Dixon with Nothing But a Man (a somewhat obscure honoree). Honoring Heston in this way is a bit redundant, but spotlighting the relatively-unknown Civil Rights work of Dixon is what makes this "tribute" sidebar so valuable to the film community.
For its third tribute, LAFF chose the late, great Kon Ichikawa (a topical filmmaker) with his 1983 film The Makioka Sisters (relatively atypical, given his oeuvre). I cherished the opportunity to see this lavish Junichiro Tanizaki adaptation on the big screen, especially because it's unavailable on DVD, unlike some of Ichikawa's better known films like The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain. Unfortunately, The Makioka Sisters is far less interesting and entertaining as either of those two films. The narrative is straight out of Jane Austen: a fatherless family seeks husbands for its four daughters in a moment of historical and social change. And as in Austen, what makes it work is the peculiar sense of humor and wit. However, though Ichikawa handles the melodrama well, one feels he's far more excited about the possibility of planting burps of weirdness throughout the otherwise banal proceedings: synthesizer music, jarring jump cuts, etc. These blips in the narrative clamp down the fluid flow of action, forming pressure points in odd places and revealing the unsmooth surface of this typical family melodrama.
These moments kept the film fresh for me, which was in direct contrast to the introduction to the film given by a representative of the Japan External Trade Organization, on hand to present the film and show off the government's acts of cultural goodwill around the world. After mentioning Ichikawa's importance, he described the film as above all having four beautiful actresses, beautiful landscapes, cherry blossoms, and countless kimonos. He's correct on all four counts, but such a description only reduces The Makioka Sisters into the most typical of Orientalist fantasies.
Another kind of festival typicality pervades Kenta (son of Kinji) Fukasaku's X-Cross. Programmed as part of the festival's "Dark Wave" sidebar, X-Cross is an orgasmic blast of J-horror madness. Like countless other cult horror films from Asia, X-Cross begins with sexually-frustrated beautiful girls entering a faraway (and possibly haunted) building. As in The Ring, The Red Shoes, The Wig, and others, there is an object that appears to be possessed (in this case, a cell phone). There is the scholar/expert who attempts to solve the paranormal events. And so on.
Like Noboru Iguchi's The Machine Girl, X-Cross knows exactly what the cult audience wants, and then delivers. Better than Machine Girl is the fact that X-Cross screws with our expectations of the genre. As the clichés get tiresome, the film reveals a trick under its sleeves: a backtracking narrative structure which the suspense with each rewind. By the end, we're not sure what to believe anymore -- the sincerity of the genre film is strewn to bits by quirky blasts of comedy (and a pair of giant scissors that just won't go away).
Similarly, Edmond Pang Ho-Cheung's Exodus takes our expectations of the Hong Kong police procedural and gives it a fabulously smarmy dose of gender politics unseen in recent Hong Kong mainstream cinema. Whereas X-Cross's treatment of gender is pretty black-and-white (men: oppressive, primitive, sickly; women: beautiful, modern, technologically savvy), Exodus imagines a world where men and women are much more difficult to figure out. Tsim, a policeman played by Simon Yam, is reserved, even hesitant, about his profession and his domestic life. His instability is exacerbated by clues surrounding him that there might be a secret society of women trying to exterminate all men. Taking off from the genre play of Basic Instinct and the modernist paranoia of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Exodus expands Pang's trademark fear and mistrust of women to provocative new levels. Better than anyone in Hong Kong today, Pang exploits our expectations of genres in order to reveal their demented flip-side comprised of seemingly illogical quirks and eccentric backstories. For Pang, the typical has a shadow that is anything but.
Hong Kong also provides one of the LA Film Festival's more exciting side-series, a five-picture presentation of Shaw Brothers films. After the Shaw archives re-opened in recent years, and after Quentin Tarantino rejuvenated interest with his Kill Bill films, Shaw Brothers have been as topical a studio as any in the cinephile world today. Interestingly, the LAFF, in conjunction with the UCLA Film & TV Archive, chose not the most obvious Shaw films, although they're all certainly classics. These aren't exactly the first five Shaw Brothers films you'd want to see. More like the sixth through tenth.
Chor Yuen's Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan has pretty much everything a cult audience would ever want in a movie (action, nudity, revenge, gore, lesbians). It's the wuxia genre's baroque masterpiece. The Boxer from Shantung is not one of Chang Cheh's best well-known films, but it's easily among his best. Chen Kwan-tai's character rises quickly in the mob underworld, but to take him down requires many an axe to the torso, drawing blood and shrieks of pain. His sheer rabid intensity in the film's final sequence is the defining example of Chang Cheh's masculine hero. A different Chang Cheh emerges in The Singing Thief, a martial arts musical much-admired for being unlike anything else ever made. Inoue Umetsugu's Hong Kong Nocturne is a much more traditional backstage musical following the exploits of a trio of dancing sisters -- and the men who exploit them. Lastly, Lau Kar-leung's Eight Diagram Pole Fighter is probably Lau at his most passionate and serious. It lends much of its gravity from being the final film by Shaw Brothers' young comic hero Alexander Fu Sheng.
Typical Asian Americans
And by "typical" I mean absent. I admit I didn't watch many films made by non- Asian or Asian American filmmakers at LAFF (since I'm only accredited to cover films for Asia Pacific Arts). However, looking at the cast lists for the films in the festival catalog, I noticed not noticing any Asian American names. I did watch Joshua Safdie's mildly amusing The Pleasure of Being Robbed, which featured newcomer Wayne Chin in a minor role. In the film, Chin plays a contestant in a ping pong tournament (typical Asian representation), but has a sarcastic streak and rather nice rapport with star Eleonore Hendricks (atypical representation).
In my 2006 coverage of LAFF, I played the "spot the Asian" game with the festival, and was disappointed that only one out of the 116 films at the festival was made by an Asian American, especially given that the population of Los Angeles is 10% Asian. This year is only marginally better. There is the aforementioned Asian American short Coming Together, the Harry Kim documentary Dirty Hands: the Art & Crimes of David Choe (which I didn't catch), and Jennifer Phang's Half-Life. It seems that at LAFF, Asian American self-representation is neither typical nor topical.
It was positive sign then that Half-Life was pitched by the festival as something of a special event. The "sold-out" free screening was sponsored by Project:Involve, an admirable collective dedicated to promoting diversity in the American film industry. Half-Life arrives at LAFF with buzz from Sundance and South By Southwest, not so much for its representation of Asian Americans, but for its dream-like use of rotoscope animation.
The animation itself is decently done, and contributes to the film's sense of sci-fi other-worldliness. The problem isn't the execution, but the formula. Rotoscope animation + ambiguous dialogue (as when characters answer questions with other questions) + philosophical weight + vivid cinematography combine into something a little too calculated for me. The symbolism is so heavy, it sinks before it takes off; the tropes of flight and the images of sea creatures grew tiresome fast. Meanwhile, the film is loaded with clichés. I'm sick of angry characters chucking dinnerware at the wall in the middle of dinner; and as far as I'm concerned, Dustin Hoffman's plunge in The Graduate should be the first and last time any character takes a cathartic dive into a swimming pool.
Thematically, the film has all the right elements. What is more topical in America today than homosexuality, ecological disaster, the culture of fear, media sensationalism, mixed-race families, and social decay (it's in the title, in case you forgot)? But it's all pasted together with a film-school deliberateness that's probably much more exciting and meaningful to the filmmakers than to the audience.
A problem is that Phang never explores these topics in any depth, preferring to leave them half-exposed and more symbolically important than actually so. She shrouds the unexplored topical elements in a haze of deliberate ambiguity. She doesn't dissect the environment, the media, or race; she smudges them into a beautiful but diffused aesthetic pattern -- much like a rotoscope blur. Jennifer Phang is a promising director with keen ideas and great ambition. But she's not the philosopher the film demands that she be, and she frequently confuses the typical and the topical.
But why must Phang dwell on "the issues" when her priority is clearly family drama? After all, isn't the trend in Asian American cinema now to make films that are not racially specific, but rather to show that Asian Americans are able to simply exist as mothers, lovers, friends, and neighbors, as opposed to just Asians? Sure, and in many ways, Half-Life is a significant step forward for Asian American filmmaking in the indie world. But when "the issues" are nothing more than decoration to lend an otherwise banal film some apparent gravitas, it can be excruciating, even insulting.
Which is the case for the LA Film Festival as a whole. A few token Asian American films give the festival topical weight, though it remains "topical" (in the pharmaceutical sense). A few key Asian auteurs and genres satisfy the usual urges. LAFF is clearly a festival in search of an identity, but it really played it safe this year. I'm grateful it showed a rare Ichikawa film and Useless, which is already one of my favorites of the year. But as a program, it is far less exciting than it was last year, when the festival programmed the innovative New Crowned Hope series.
This year, the press couldn't stop talking about the festival's "mainstream turn" (given the presence of blockbusters like Wanted and Hellboy 2), a "turn" that is partly forced upon by last year's very strong AFI Fest, which got all of the LA premieres of the exciting art films from Cannes, and partly it's a bit of an exaggeration by journalists trying to concoct a story. In any case, it's not a good sign when a festival can only be topical by appealing to the most typical films of all.
For another perspective, see Clifford Hilo's coverage of LAFF 2008 here.
Published: Friday, July 11, 2008
