LE PREMIER VENU (Jacques Doillon, 2008)

Two figures plunge the viewer in medias res at the start of Jacques Doillon’s quirky, genre-bending, romantic comedy, Just Anybody. Barging out of a restaurant, Costa (a native of these country parts) and Camille (a Parisienne who tags along with him) are disputing a point of difference. They are threshing out a night gone wrong, their first together: Costa sees it as consensual sex; Camille sees it as rape. Yet Camille strangely sees a saving grace in him. For the moment, Costa wants to rusticate and visit his young daughter, and so just as soon, they part ways.

Following Costa to his hometown of Le Crotoy, Camille encounters Cyril, a cop who takes an instant romantic liking to her. They, too, get into a suddenly elaborate conversation. With practiced deduction, Cyril reads between the lines and concludes that Costa, a ‘nobody’ in these parts (a euphemism for sure), raped Camille. It’s a potential ménage-a-trois that is further complicated by Gwendoline, Costa’s long-suffering wife. Along the way, there is an equally quirky array of characters that add comic and cuckoo color to this film.

But Just Anybody is not so much about quick couplings as it is about men and women blundering their way into a proper niche, a sense of redemption. Wrong-headed and deviant, they lead ill-advised lives that seem to be headed nowhere. Seemingly patterned after Jim Jarmusch’s menagerie of misfits, Doillon’s characters are embroiled in a farce that features strange, uproarious, even recidivistic behaviour: a thug who is actuated by chivalry, a cop who stalks a woman and yet refuses to leverage his badge, an urban girl who aids and abets the thug.

Writer and director Doillon depicts a sense of anomie in such a surprisingly infectious and lighthearted manner. Costa commits one felony after another, mugging and robbing his defenseless victims, but his acts seem to be rationalized by some perverse notion of chivalry and responsibility. Camille, who exhibits a measure of urban sophistication, is not above overlooking and condoning Costa’s often shocking crimes. It is she who goads Costa to raise some money, however tainted, as a peace offering to his estranged wife and child for the many years of neglect. Meanwhile, Cyril thinks it’s not undeserved and perhaps normal -- the offshoot of the pursuit of love? -- to be blindsided by violence. The characters are whacked, touched by a crooked sense of moral ambiguity.

The dialogue, scripted by Doillon, is often casual, witty and punchy. But this director seems to be suffering from a paucity of ideas since his prize-winning Ponette (1996) on his way to wrapping up his latest film. Suffice it to say that after all the display of criminal deviancy and feckless behaviour, Just Anybody peters out into a conciliatory end, all too neatly. And perhaps that is the film's overriding but elusive point : however flawed the characters may be, there shines a common humanity -- forgiveness and magnanimity on one hand, contrition and reconciliation on the other. Still one can't shake the cut-and-dried, schematic ending. Doillon must be getting overtures from Hollywood and this must be his calling card. 

Title in English: Just Anybody
 
reviewed: June 9, 2010

MA SAISON PRÉFÉRÉE (André Téchiné, 1993)

A quick advisory to the domestic filmgoer weaned on commercial fare: André Téchiné’s Ma Saison Préférée (My Favorite Season) will surprise and confound you who might still relish the old Filipino paradigm of family dramas – the oversentimental, the histrionic, the overdramatized kind. Téchiné’s film, instead, depicts a portrait of a dysfunctional family without the emotional and cathartic excesses. Family tensions and antagonisms here are negotiated with such sophistication and elegance that one comes away from it with warm, ennobled feelings. 

André Téchiné’s Ma Saison Préférée, a film about cherished memories and idealized pasts, is also a film about misrecognitions: we don’t see from one set of lenses, and therefore don’t see an experience identically. In Téchiné’s shorthand, the seasons simply stand for memory’s mnemonics. Summer beguiles the film’s characters, middle-aged siblings, Emilie (Catherine Deneuve) and Antoine (Daniel Auteuil), for instance, not for the warmth of the sun and days in the park, but for something each of them separately knows.

Some of this film's characters, however, cling too fiercely to their shared memories, jealously guarding not just these memories but those with whom they experienced those special moments – to the point of everyone else’s exclusion. At such times, these memories verge on the pathologic, verge on murking their pure waters. 

Such memories, such ties, tangled and obsessive, lie at the heart of Téchiné’s film. It starts with a premise that seems harmless enough: a family gathering around a mother’s incipient old age and widowhood, but it’s a family, as the story unfolds, freighted with curious bonds.

Adopted into daughter Emilie's home as a result of her incapacitation, Berthe seems ill at ease in her new domicile. Things hint at the incongruous as Emilie finds her mother muttering to herself in the dark at ungodly hours of the night. Is it her infirmities, her unfamiliar surroundings, that make her an unsettled member of the household? When Antoine, Berthe's youngest son, visits for Christmas, the central twist slips in: it rekindles the tight-knit closeness between Emilie and him. Berthe, meanwhile, seems especially responsive to her son, to the detriment of Emilie's family. Family romance, yes – in a way. 

Emilie, a prospering lawyer, and Antoine, a brain surgeon, are seemingly well-adjusted professionals on the surface. But the quirks soon start to show: we find Antoine muttering to himself in the restroom a stream of mantras redolent of psychoanalysis. While Emilie vents her unsettled, sexual emotions on a stranger on a park bench. Emilie and Antoine are in the thick of reevaluating their relationship, their unusual closeness borne out of an intimate childhood. Emilie seems more sure of what it all means, but Antoine seems to value it differently. He seems to dance attendance around her at every chance. And perhaps it explains why Antoine doesn’t see eye to eye with Emilie’s husband.

Berthe, as the film culminates, reconnects more pronouncedly with her own children. A brief but memorable sequence shows the three together on the road recreating their happy journeys in childhood, Emilie and Antoine singing humorous nursery songs. They seem fleetingly happy. They go on along their magical itinerary, retrieving their magical past. Family romance, yes – in a way. 

Ma Saison Préférée adroitly and tastefully renders Antoine and Emilie’s potentially incestuous relationship. Director André Téchiné, who also wrote the screenplay, sidesteps a polemical outcome with assured subtle and lyrical direction, mixing solemn and comic moments. (His light touch gives this film a funny sense of gallows humor at times, as evidenced by Antoine’s suicide attempt.) Téchiné's relish for unorthodox relationships, as films like The Wild Reeds would bear out, is in evidence yet again. Ma Saison Préférée, despite its delicate theme, ends with warm, rarefied feelings. All without the emotional manipulation and exhaustion we are accustomed to. 

Title in English: My Favorite Season

reviewed:  June 13, 2009

BARKING DOGS NEVER BITE (Bong Joon-ho, 2000)

 

 

Eaten, beaten, kidnapped, murdered -- dogs seem to run the gamut of misfortunes in Bong Joon-ho's Barking Dogs Never Bite. Cruel? Moviegoer, take heart: with some strategic and judicious editing, Barking Dogs is a film that keeps animal cruelty to a minimum. Animals figure peripherally here. Man remains the primary subject. As a black comedy, it may barely qualify, despite what might be its potentially polemical imagery. 

Writer-director Bong Joon-ho references the sorry plight of dogs in order to allegorize the abusive deeds of men towards fellow men. What we do to dogs is how we act at home, in the workplace, and in society in general. But Bong refrains from making didactic pronouncements. We simply get to watch characters made neurotic and psychically demoralized by depersonalizing forces in society. We learn of them almost by second hand: The government that shortchanges its retiring employees; the college dean who accepts bribes; the building contractors who have erected a substandard residential complex; the teachers who pay their way to better careers: all these supposedly respectable cornerstones of society. 

Barking Dogs Never Bite mostly takes place in the aforementioned apartment complex. Yun-Ju, an assistant professor who is vacillating between doing nothing or bribing his way to full professorship, must also contend with his pregnant wife’s henpecking. There is also the nagging and incessant barking of a dog somewhere in the building. Locating it, he nervously goes about disposing it. He ends up stashing the dog in the building’s basement, where the maintenance man ultimately finds it, presumably butchers it and cooks it. 

This touches off a series of canine disappearances, and the neighborhood soon blooms with posters of lost dogs. Hyun-Nam, a lowly bookkeeper who works for the city and who dreams of heroism, immediately investigates after witnessing a dog being thrown off a building. The heart of the film, she is closer to catching the culprit than she realizes. 

If stereotypes are to be believed, Koreans are supposed to be redoubtable and fanatical dog-eaters. Dogs are allegedly brutalized in painful rituals before they are finally cooked. Fear and pain aroused in them, culinary superstition says, makes their meat a better, tastier delicacy. Barking Dogs hints at the popularity of dog-eating among Koreans, but does so in discreet and comical ways. But as good satires go, those who seem respectable are worse. Even then, director Bong never makes absolute moral judgments. His film concludes on a peaceful, lyrical note, as if to reconcile the world of good and evil. 

What the film proves to be, meanwhile, is a story well and engagingly told. Bong’s narrative gifts draw on a good mix of genres: comedy, suspense and drama, all in calibrated doses. In succeeding films like Memories of Murder and The Host, Bong would go from strength to strength utilizing these self-same virtues: his visual and narrative ambidexterity allowing his films to defy categorization. Early in his career, he has demonstrated a maturity that few directors achieve in a lifetime. Memories of Murder may be his best so far, but Barking Dogs is a worthy feather in his cap. 

reviewed: October 7, 2009

OLD BOY (Park Chan-wook, 2003)

 

Nominated for the Golden Palm at Cannes in 2003 and settling for the Grand Prize of the Jury, Old Boy is supposed to be an exemplary piece of filmmaking – or at least one that reflects the festival’s long and hallowed tradition as the last bastion of art and non-commercial cinema. Old Boy might be a well-made film – an exemplary well-polished one – but its virtues end right there. When one strips away the clever plotting, its surprising twists and its shock effects, what’s left of Old Boy is little more than a retread of the revenge genre.

Old Boy proffers little food for thought. Here, however, revenge can be as sophisticated as it is envenomed – a revenge recollected in tranquility, a revenge constructed like a three-act drama. The object of this intricate vendetta is Oh Dae-su, a middle-aged family man, who is mysteriously kidnapped and imprisoned in a room for 15 years, framed as his wife’s murderer, and released just as mysteriously. All we are given to see is a short sequence as the film opens of Oh Dae-su at a police station, a boisterous man when he is drunk, and little else. Oh Dae-su, in turn, feels a blind fury against his mysterious jailer: what else consumes him but revenge? What he doesn’t realize is that the vendetta against him is just beginning, everything has been choreographed in advance, and he has no idea who is behind it, let alone the reasons for it.

Judging by this film alone, Park Chan-wook is a storyteller who knows his craft. He has adapted a popular manga with aplomb and made it his own. Old Boy, which also references classic literature like The Count of Monte Cristo, bristles with well-titrated doses of suspense, mystery, and action. Well-paced and incident-packed, it builds with a dramatic crescendo into a shocking climax.

Engrossing are the scenes in Oh Dae-su’s prison room where he is fed and groomed while he is sedated with Valium gas. Attempts at escape go nowhere (shades of Le Trou and A Man Escaped); television becomes his lone window on the world. He devotes much of his time to improving his fighting skills, which will serve him outside in good stead. Once released, Oh Dae-su searches in vain for his daughter, his one remaining family; but what fuels him is the search for his abductor, efforts that would prove bloody and violent. But the avenger’s identity soon becomes apparent. Meanwhile, Oh Dae-su has fallen in love with a young sushi cook named Mido, who looks strangely familiar.

Old Boy’s perverse insight into human nature is touched upon but unfortunately not sufficiently mined. Consuming oneself with visions of revenge may be unfortunate and self-destrucitve according to Sir Francis Bacon, but Old Boy imparts it another spin. Revenge can act as a raison d’etre for those who harbor it. It is a passion that can breathe life into men and in old Boy, it is an obsession that can keep one alive.

The failure of Old Boy is the lack of plausibility of the motive for revenge. The avenger’s identity comes out of left field, someone almost completely unknown. This is probably the fault of the original material that has been slavishly adapted. The reason for the revenge is ultimately juvenile, in more ways than one, and forfeits whatever chance Old Boy could have had in fashioning a modernist statement.

Old Boy, currently being remade by Steven Spielberg for 2010, is the film that burst the Korean New Wave bubble for me. If its triumph in Cannes will make it a long-term template for this nation’s cinema, one is better off looking elsewhere for non-commercial cinema. Meanwhile, Park Chan-wook is laughing his way to the bank, littering his wake with one revenge film after another. 

reviewed: October 5, 2009

FRANZ KAFKA'S A COUNTRY DOCTOR (Koji Yamamura, 2007)

The true way is along a rope that is not crossed high in the air, but only just above the ground. It seems intended more to cause stumbling, rather than to be walked upon -- Franz Kafka. Lines of caution and despair, they provide the epigraph to this startling anime film, inspired by a Kafka short story of the same title. What director Koji Yamamura and his intrepid team of animators do well is take a spare and barebones story by the Czech writer and create a disturbingly oneiric vision of the world like no other.

A Country Doctor takes just over 20 minutes to accomplish its purpose, breathing life as it does into a brooding tale about the human condition. It opens, forebodingly, in a country doctor’s courtyard as he prepares to answer an emergency deep in the night. What complicates his impending journey is a snow blizzard sweeping through the terrain. To add to his woes, his horse has died during the cold, wintry hours. His servant girl Rosa tries to look for a replacement, knocking from door to door, but to no avail. But just as the country doctor starts to rue his luck, a groom comes out of nowhere with a pair of mysterious horses. The groom turns out to be a malicious figure who telegraphs his carnal intentions upon Rosa, alarming the country doctor just as he is about to leave. He has little time to react, it seems, as he is hurried off on his rig.

Arriving at the end of his journey, the country doctor is ushered to the sickbed of a boy , who whispers to him his intention to die. At first the country doctor finds nothing wrong with the child, no fever, no worrying symptom of any kind. But a wound in the boy’s side is revealed on closer inspection; the country doctor just missed it until it is hinted to him. It’s a festering wound, the size of a palm, full of wriggling worms. Stripped naked by the boy’s family, sung to, and made to keep a close vigil on the boy, the country doctor reassures his patient but escapes the sickroom as soon as the boy falls asleep. Naked and freezing on horseback, he rides blindly through icy snow and buffeting winds of the night.

This short précis of the film’s storyline follows Kafka’s prose with close exactitude. Even so, this anime gives free rein to the expansive imaginations of its animators. It’s a combination of story and execution that produces a film ripe with multivocal meanings. The country doctor, who at the end rushes homewards, or nowhere, through blizzards of snow, is plagued with various exigencies, but seems blindly cognizant of them, or chooses to remain ignorant. Neither does it seem probable for him to redeem his servant girl from the groom’s raging lust, nor will he see through his wounded patient’s crucial hours. What does the elusive wound represent? What does the doctor's undressing mean? Who is the groom? Does the country doctor stand, as critics claim, for the modern man too deadened to respond to the real emergencies of existence?

The beauty of Yamamura’s film lies not only in its unsettling story but in its visually gripping evocation of a dream world. Rendered in stark, monochromatic colors, both characters and context evoke surreal and expressionistic 2-d representations that complement its existential themes. The animation revels in modernist touches: distortions and elongations of human figures (faces, limbs and torsos), the elements, and the inanimate. This is all occasioned, it seems, by the particulars of Kafka’s story: the swirly, inky night, the driving snows, the worm-infested wound, the dream-like goings-on. Complemening it all is the ghostly presence of storytellers intoning like the narrators of a Noh play.

Yamamura’s A Country Doctor is a triumph of anime filmmaking that has to be seen to be appreciated and cherished. Without going overboard, it takes here and there, successfully synthesizing all manner of influences: from Frederic Back to Yuri Norstein, from Die Brucke to German Expressionism. Rarely do we encounter adaptations that do justice to their sources. A Country Doctor has the distinction of surpassing its basis, Kafka be damned.

reviewed: July 3, 2010

MIND GAME (Masaaki Yuasa, 2004)

If Japanese animation is riding high in recent times, it seems easy to point to Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli as its most popular exponents. With their films outselling Hollywood products at the top of the box office, Miyazaki and company have become the most recognizable ambassadors of anime at home and abroad. They are, however, not the be-all and end-all of anime. There is a diverse range of anime being churned out of cartoon-crazy Japan. It’s not at all a monolithic tower built by one company. 

If you deem the Ghibli output to be too safe, too timid and too antiseptic, Mind Game can be a good antithesis. Although not an extreme example, Mind Game doesn’t fit any easy category either. In a nutshell, the clash of adult themes and dream logic makes Mind Game either a dazzling watch or a frustrating experience. What is certain is that Mind Game will make you see anime in a different light.

The story is simple enough, but the interstitial spaces in between aren’t. Nishi, an aspiring manga writer, meets Myon, an intimate in high school, after a long time. It's a meeting that rekindles old feelings for Nishi. Myon invites him to the family sushi bar, where yakuza thugs show up looking for Myon’s father. Unable to find their man, the thugs start to raise hell, in the mayhem of which Nishi kills one of them. Nishi, Myon and Myon’s sister escape in a car and are chased through city streets. They overshoot a bridge, land in the river and end up being swallowed by a gigantic whale. They discover not just an old man trapped in the whale’s belly for 30 years, but a veritable world that can provide a certain refuge.

What remains unsaid, however, is that this is just one possibility of the story. It’s not far from the realm of the possible that none of this happened, that Nishi may have been killed instead of the gangster, that Nishi and Myon never met at all, that the entrapment within the whale’s belly is all a figment. Mind Game lives up to the promise of its title and weaves together the real and the possible in one dazzling and astonishing movie. 

While the current run of anime affords us visually and thematically safe and harmless fare, Mind Game offers what is deemed deviant and taboo: scatological humor, buxomy, hentai imagery, the raw and gritty aspects of the underworld, orgies and other plentiful sexual references – all done in a surprisingly none-too-cynical manner. As Robin Nishi, the creator of the manga on which Yuasa based his film, reveals: Mind Game was never meant for the masses but a niche audience. 

It’s a niche that is further narrowed down by the film’s multiple realities, its convoluted bifurcations. The imagery that reels off is like the imagery of a near-death experience (indeed it is, Nishi, in one strand, ascends to what must be purgatory and bargains for his life): the images are staccato-quick, forming split-second trains of montage. Everything literally goes here; one has the sensation that many different anime movies -- dozens, perhaps even hundreds -- are excerpted and spliced together. Mind Game is all about the many possibilities that life presents. It’s about second chances. In Robin Nishi’s words, it’s about “physical death and reincarnation.” And Mind Game fulfills its visual promise to show us world after world of possibilities, the world we are choosing, the world we omit. Whether all these images cohere for us seems secondary. Life, after all, is about taking a leap of faith.

reviewed: July 6, 2009

THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN (Abdel Kechiche, 2007)

 

An old world is fast disappearing in the southern shores of France. Abdel Kechiche’s momentarily elegiac but ultimately celebratory The Secret of the Grain opens on this note of lamentation. Everywhere are signs of obsolescence and decay -- floating junk, rotten boats -- as the camera surveys the fast-changing harbor of Sete. We are listening to an unsentimental annotation of a tour guide about the transformation of this maritime corner on the Mediterranean. Gone is the fish crier, he says, the man who announces the day’s catch. He has been replaced by the mechanical proclamations of computers. Here to one side of the harbor are the mountains of detritus and scrap-iron of old factories. “There used to be ovens in France,” comments the guide, referring to the closure of heavy industries. As if to locate the displaced humans in this equation, he proceeds to describe the torturous, 3-month excursions of old tuna fishers to far-away oceans.

Surely this casual commentary is insufficiently convincing, so the camera cuts to the graying figure of Slimane, a faithful shipyard worker, to give these sad realities a human face. We see him just at the instant when he is summarily eased out of his 35-year job. Slimane is a throwback to the old concierge in Murnau’s The Last Laugh, made obsolete after years of faithful service. In stunned silence, Slimane accepts his fate, silently incredulous that an old, artisanal job such as his can find a quick and equally qualified replacement. The truth is, latter-day economics are striking roots and have made manual labor expendable and his services dispensable. We learn the other manifestations of this new but ruthless and cut-throat world order: the preference for new and illegal immigrants as the workforce where they are needed as they present fewer complications and more profit to employers. As commented on elsewhere in the film, the new capitalists are shifting to more lucrative and less-labor-intensive, post-industrial ventures.

This talk can be all densely suffocating for a 151-minute film and Kechiche shifts to less mechanic, more domestic gears, as he follows Slimane around. Taking his cue from Robert Guediguian’s sociological studies of the working class strata of Marseilles, writer-director Kechiche proceeds to documenting the daily lives of immigrant Arabs in this seaside town in southern France. But lest one forgets, some of the quasi-documentary feel must also derive from Kechiche’s previous film, L’Esquive. It’s a familiarity with this mode of filmmaking that allows him to trace the reticulations of the Arab immigration and assimilation with relative ease.

Whether observing the gatherings of Slimane’s former wife Souad and their four children, and the protective care the graying man receives from his new woman, Latifa, and her feisty daughter Rym, Kechiche never fails to introduce an underlying commentary on the broader picture. His prime narrative strategy is linguistic metaphor. Gathering to partake of a meal of couscous, their dialogue is very pointed and empathic in expounding, for instance, the subject of disposable diapers – a thinly-veiled allusion to the disposability of Slimane in the new economy. Another: Couscous, they remark meaningfully, is the product of love, a labor of love, meant to reference the human touch invested by old artisans.

As the film wears on, the accent soon falls on the family and its crucial role in many aspects of life, at least in Slimane's life. What starts out with the solitary, dour figure of this man soon gives way to a lively ensemble of his extended families and the Arab section of Sete. They may find it irresistible to talk behind Slimane’s back, but there is genuine solidarity originating in these tight-knit circles in his hour of need. The consequences of documentary closeness, however, are such that we are made to witness, for instance, the extra-marital indiscretions of his son Majid and the scene-stealing disaffection of his Russian wife, Julia. We don’t fail to listen to Rym, almost like Slimane’s surrogate daughter, as she defends the old man from his unfeeling sons and often acts as his mouthpiece.

Much of the film’s engaging and endearing payload, however, comes in the last section of the film, when Slimane undertakes a plan to turn an old, dilapidated ship into a couscous restaurant. There is gripping suspense in anticipating whether his efforts will come to fruition on his restaurant’s opening night. But The Secret of the Grain does not fixate on single-handed heroism. To be blunt about it, Slimane comes across as an almost pathetic, ineffectual persona, and there’s a literally breath-taking allusion to De Sica’s Bicycle Thief towards the film’s end that highlights this, as he tries to run after and retrieve a stolen motorcycle.

An allegory about solidarity and the communal values of an older world, The Secret of the Grain sees a sincere volunteerism and a closing of ranks at the film's crucial juncture. Perhaps meant as stabs at the patriarchal nature of Arab societies, many of the well-meaning acts are the gestures of women. Don’t fail to watch through to the end; multivalent and polyphonic, this film makes simultaneous points that are brought home at the conclusion. Full of carousing, music and belly-dancing, the suspenseful – have I used the word yet? -- ending rounds out a tale well-told. In a world fast metamorphosing and phasing out the need for human touch, there is hope in homespun goodness yet.

Reviewed:  June 11, 2010 (Northern Portrait/The Persistence of Vision)