Romance a la Mode

My Blueberry Nights. 2007. Directed by Wong Kar-wai. Written by Wong Kar-wai and Lawrence Block. Produced by Wong Kar-wai and Jacky Pang Yee-wah. Cinematography by Darius Khondji. Edited and production design by William Chang Suk-ping. Music by Ry Cooder. Costume design by William Chang Suk-ping and Sharon Globerson.

Cast: Norah Jones (Elizabeth), Jude Law (Jeremy), David Strathairn (Arnie), Rachel Weisz (Sue Lynne), Natalie Portman (Leslie), Chan Marshall [Cat Power] (Katya), Frankie Faison (Travis), Jesse Garon (Young Poker Player).

My Blueberry Nights opened the Cannes Film Festival last year to profoundly unenthusiastic notices, and when it finally opened in the States earlier this year, the critical reception wasn’t much better. I received my copy of the Hong Kong DVD recently, and after viewing it, I find the overwhelmingly negative reception to this film rather baffling. While I won’t argue that it is his best film (that would be In the Mood for Love), it is a beautiful piece of work that finds the patented Wong style – speeded-up pixilated motion, swooning romanticism, an unerring instinct in finding the perfect song to fit a mood – successfully transplanted to the US. Cinematographer Darius Khondji proves a worthy successor to Wong’s erstwhile collaborator Christopher Doyle, and Wong has retained his most important creative partner, editor and production designer William Chang Suk-ping, to quite salutary effect. The New York diner where the film begins and ends recalls most closely the Hong Kong fast-food joint that was a principal location of Chungking Express. We rarely look at the characters head on: we peer at them through windows, down corridors, through doorways, a voyeuristic style reminiscent of how the characters are viewed in In the Mood for Love. And while Norah Jones is most certainly no Maggie Cheung, as Jude Law is no Tony Leung, My Blueberry Nights can definitely stand, though maybe not as tall, with his other work.

The film is essentially a road movie, its central figure Elizabeth (Norah Jones) taking “the longest way to cross the street.” At the outset, Elizabeth, distraught at her boyfriend leaving her for another woman, stumbles into the diner owned by Jeremy (Jude Law), a cheerful fellow who seems outwardly to have few cares, although later we learn he has his own sad tale of thwarted romance. He pontificates to Elizabeth his unique philosophy which uses the popularity of different flavors of pie to explain human behavior. After one night at the diner after hours, when she cries her eyes out while watching footage of her ex and his new belle taken with Jeremy’s security camera, and passes out drunk afterward, she sets out on a cross country trip to escape her pain. Elizabeth ends up in Memphis, working as a diner waitress during the day, and nights at a dive bar. Elizabeth sends letters to Jeremy periodically, while Jeremy in New York frantically calls every diner in Memphis in an attempt to find her. In the film’s midsection, Elizabeth’s story takes a back seat somewhat to those of people she meets along the way: an alcoholic cop (David Strathairn) pining away and drowning himself in drink over his estranged wife (Rachel Weisz). Later, Elizabeth works at a casino where she runs into a blonde-haired card shark (Natalie Portman). Elizabeth mostly stays silent while she listens to other characters’ laments, which helps to keep Elizabeth an appropriately opaque character, while perhaps making things a little easier for the inexperienced Norah Jones.

Wong uses songs to typically expressive effect, in much the same fashion as the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’” in Chungking Express and Nat King Cole’s Portuguese tunes in In the Mood for Love. Here, Wong makes great use of Cat Power’s “The Greatest” (Cat Power herself shows up in a great scene as Jeremy’s lost love) and Otis Redding’s version of “Try a Little Tenderness.” The marriage of these songs with Wong’s visuals exhibit the old magic we’ve come to expect with his films. A little faded, perhaps, but it’s still there. The narrative situations, scripted by mystery writer Lawrence Block along with Wong, are admittedly a little trite on paper, but Wong’s strength has never been in narrative, but in mood and atmosphere. Comparing what happens in this film to situations in the real world, as many critics seem to have done, is rather pointless because Wong is not presenting a real world, but a facet of his distinctive cinematic universe. Setting the film in such iconic American locations as Memphis and Las Vegas allows Wong to refract such overly familiar locations through a lens that is so adept at creating inimitable, fetishized images such as Jude Law licking the cream off Norah Jones’ lips as she sleeps. My Blueberry Nights, far from the failure it has been widely interpreted as, is instead a beautifully made experiment that takes Wong out of his comfort zone and melds his style successfully to the American landscape.

My Blueberry Nights can be purchased from YesAsia.com.

Cat Power's scene, which could stand alone as a great short film:

"Films from the North" Review: Kim Kil-in's "Hong Kil Dong"

Hong Kil Dong. 1986. Directed by Kim Kil-in. Written by Kim Se Ryun. Cinematography by Hong Sok Jon.

Cast: Ri Yong-ho, Ri Gwon, Ri Ri-youn, Chang Son-hui, Kenpachiro Satsuma.

For a jaded filmgoer like me, discoveries these days are few and far between. However, the cinema of North Korea is truly an undiscovered country. Most cinematic representations of this secretive regime come in the form of documentaries, such as Daniel Gordon's films The Game of Their Lives and A State of Mind, as well as fictionalized renditions of North Korean characters in such South Korean films as Joint Security Area and Shiri. There have been limited studies in English of North Korean cinema, most notably in Hyangjin Lee's book Contemporary Korean Cinema. However, North Korean films have very rarely been shown outside their home country. The most recent North Korean film that got some attention was The Schoolgirl's Diary, which screened last year at the Cannes Film Festival film market. North Korean films have not shown in New York, as far as I know. However, this week the Korea Society afforded viewers a rare opportunity to sample this country's cinema in their film series, "Films From the North," which featured three North Korean films, two from the 1980's (Hong Kil Dong, Bellflower) and one from the mid-90's (My Look in the Distant Future).

North Korean films, much like Chinese cinema in the Mao years, were not simply entertainment, but state ideological apparatus meant to promote the glories of both the "Great Leader," Kim Il-sung, and the "Dear Leader", Kim's son and current leader Kim Jong-il. Also, these films sought to instill proper behavior in the viewer, and provide examples of virtuous, selfless citizens who worked for the country and its people, and forsook selfish personal gain. Kim Jong-il, especially, was and remains the main force behind North Korean cinema. As Columbia University professor Charles Armstrong put it in his opening remarks before the screening of Hong Kil Dong, the first film in the series, Kim Jong-il is in effect the executive producer of every North Korean film, since all aspects of film production are under his very tight control. Kim is also a notoriously extreme cinephile, the owner of a vast collection of films, and also allegedly behind the abduction of South Korean director Shin Sang-ok and his actress wife, Choi Eun-hee. So after having read a little on this cinema, the opportunity to see actual examples was one I couldn't pass up.

Hong Kil Dong turns out to be a rather diverting, if a little creaky, martial-arts action flick surprisingly free of overt ideological content. In fact, with a slight change of costume, this could be a 1960's or 70's Shaw Brothers tale, with its stark, literally black-and-white morality play, and the director using his zoom lens like it was going out of style. In fact, it pretty much was out of style by 1986, at least in the rest of the world. Hong Kil Dong was based on a popular folktale that has been adapted over the years for various media in both the North and South. The title character (Ri Yong-ho) grows up with a major strike against him, as far as the mores of the rigidly class-based Confucian society of the Joseon Dynasty was concerned: he was born the illegitimate son of a high-ranking minister and his concubine. Kil Dong's mother is continually mistreated by the minister’s jealous wife, who tries to eliminate both Kil Dong and his mother by paying a gang of bandits to ambush and kill them. However, they are saved by a kindly wizened martial-arts master who shelters them and takes the young man under his wing, training him to be a fighter. His training is complicated when he saves a minister’s young daughter from the clutches of the same gang of bandits who tried to kill him. He is instantly smitten, but his master sternly warns him against being distracted, and he instead sends her back home. After his training is done, the master sends Kil Dong away, telling him to use his skills in the service of the people. He returns home with his mother, and the minister whose daughter he saved is all in favor of letting them be married, until he learns of his background. Such a breach of class cannot be allowed, no matter what the reason. Thereafter, Kil Dong becomes a North Korean Robin Hood, righting the wrongs done to the people by the corrupt nobility. His enemies are warned of their impending doom by the sound of him playing the flute. When Japanese ninjas invade, he teams with his former enemies and the rest of the citizens to vanquish them. When, after saving the entire country, he is still prevented from marrying the woman he loves, he realizes at long last that there is no place for him in this society, and he gets on a boat with other former citizens to look for a freer place to live.

Hong Kil Dong is punctuated by frequent acrobatic fight scenes that, despite the cheesy effects and obvious wirework, are rather impressive considering the conditions under which it was made. The film’s keen sense of outrage at corrupt leadership, and the protagonist’s decision to flee his oppressive society, makes it very tempting to read in this a veiled commentary on what was happening in North Korea as its fortunes were starting to take a very bad turn. However, as Armstrong pointed out in his opening remarks, it is highly unlikely that its audience would have gleaned this meaning from the film, considering how isolated the country was from the rest of the world, and from other systems of thought other than those propounded by the Great Leader. As unremarkable as the film's plot may be, it nevertheless affords a tantalizing glimpse into a virtually unknown cinema created by an as equally unknown country.

As Far As the "I" Can See

Real Fiction (Shilje sanghwang). 2000. Written, directed, and production designed by Kim Ki-duk. Produced by Harry Lee and Shin Seung-soo. Cinematography by Hwang Cheol-hyeon. Edited by Kyeong Min-ho. Music by Jeon Sang-yun.

Cast: Ju Jin-mo, Kim Jin-ah, Son Min-seok, Lee Je-rak, Kim Ki-yeon, Myeong Sun-mi, Jang Hyeong-seong.

Real Fiction, shot in 200 minutes (after extensive rehearsals) using ten 35mm cameras and two DV camcorders, was conceived by Kim Ki-duk as an experiment, and it’s not an entirely successful one. The skeletal-thin plot concerns a taciturn (as per the case of most of Kim’s protagonists) street portrait artist (Ju Jin-mo), who is known only as “I” in the credits. His work is often insulted by his customers (a man criticizes his accuracy in rendering a photograph, and a woman tears and discards his work after she leaves him), and is shaken down periodically by a trio of petty criminal thugs. He is visited by a young woman (Kim Jin-ah) shooting a video camera. After the artist finishes her portrait, she tells him she has no money for it. “Can I pay you another way?” she says. She leads him to a theater, where a young man, an actor in a play, sits on a bare stage. This leads to a long, bizarre scene in which the actor, while punching and kicking the artist, seems to have psychically picked up on the artist’s tragic story, and his vengeful grievances toward everyone who has wronged him. Thus begins his mission of revenge which continues for the rest of the film, in which the man exacts murderous payback towards all the people who have hurt him. This begins with the actor who has awakened the artist’s rage, when he shoots (and perhaps kills) the actor with a prop gun that turns out to have live bullets.

“I” stalks the streets thereafter, confronting and murdering figures from his past and present: a girlfriend who has been cheating on him, having sex with her lover on top of the flowers she sells in her shop; a fellow former marine who beat him up during their military service; a man who married and then abandoned a woman he loved (who is now the unhappy owner of a comic book shop); the detective who tortured him during interrogation. The young woman with the video camera follows him throughout, and scenes of the young man on his murderous rampage alternate with what seem to be surreptitious shots from the woman’s camera. She remains mostly unseen until the conclusion, when the artist seemingly confronts his video stalker and makes her his last victim … or perhaps not, as the last scenes indicate, making us question all that has come before, and expressing the contradictory sense of the film’s English title. In the end, as I say, the experiment, however diverting, doesn’t quite work. There is a vaguely articulated attempt to say something about the ambiguous nature of artistic representation, and artifice vs. reality, and whether there is a real difference between the two. Maybe, but exactly what is being said is never quite clear, making this a rather diffuse and imprecise work, very much an oddity among Kim’s often exceedingly odd (and perverse) oeuvre.

Real Fiction screened as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s recently wrapped Kim Ki-duk retrospective.

New Directors/New Films 2008 Review: Lee Isaac Chung's "Munyurangabo"

Munyurangabo. 2007. Produced, directed, edited and photographed by Lee Isaac Chung. Written by Samuel Anderson and Lee Isaac Chung. Co-produced by Samuel Anderson and Jenny Lund. Art direction by Jean Kwezi. Sound by Jenny Lund. Original solo music by Claire Wibabara.

Cast: Jeff Rutagengwa (Munyurangabo), Eric Dorunkundiye (Sangwa), Jean Marie Nkurikiyinka (Sangwa's Father), Jean Pierre Mulonda Harerimana (Gwiza), Uwayo B. Edouard (Poet), Narcicia Nyirabucyeye (Sangwa's Mother), Etienne Rugazora (Ngabo's Father), Pierre Claver Kayitsinga (Father's Killer).

A near-classic work of cinematic and cultural alchemy, Munyurangabo is not only the stunning debut of a major talent, but also an expressively beautiful vessel where the voice and experiences of a people scarred by genocide, poverty, and ethnic warfare is given shape through a sensitive outsider who uses these materials to create a work of art that is transformative for both its creators and its viewers. In a similar process recalling Dave Eggers’ recent novel What Is the What, which related the experiences of a refugee who survived the genocide in Sudan, Korean-American Chung, along with collaborators Samuel Anderson and Jenny Lund, improvised this film with his cast, all of whom experienced the Rwandan civil war first hand, losing family members and struggling with the impoverished aftermath. Opening with a quote from the book of Isaiah, this film in its basic outline is a revenge story with biblical overtones. Also, with its rural setting, and many shots of characters framed though doorways, there is more than a hint of John Ford’s westerns.

Munyurangabo (Jeff Rutagengwa) is on a mission to avenge his father’s death by searching for, and murdering his father’s killer. He is accompanied by his close friend Sangwa (Eric Dorunkundiye), who is seeking to reunite with the family he left behind three years earlier, and especially to repair his strained relationship with his father (Jean Marie Nkurikiyinka). Sangwa’s desire to reconnect with his home life immediately clashes with Munyurangabo’s single-minded desire for revenge. He is also more than a little envious of Sangwa’s intact family, since he was orphaned because of the war. Also complicating matters, and creating considerable strife in the village, are the two friends’ ethnicities: Munyurangabo is a Tutsi and Sangwa is a Hutu, each an opposite member of the warring tribes of Rwanda’s civil war. Instead of their friendship being regarded as an example of reconciliation, their relationship is looked on with hostility and suspicion, especially by Sangwa’s father, who angrily admonishes his son: “Don’t you know we’re enemies?” Munyurangabo eventually leaves the village, determined to carry out his revenge, where he meets a poet (Uwayo B. Edouard), who delivers the most moving moment of the film, where he recites directly to the camera a long lament for Rwanda’s violent history. Thereafter this revenge story is transformed into something very different from what it was when it began, as is evident during the film’s lyrical final scenes. Munyurangabo’s experience at this point parallels that of another cinematic character out for revenge: Ethan Edwards, portrayed by John Wayne in John Ford’s The Searchers. Chung’s unerring eye for the perfect visual and musical accompaniment to his narrative, as well as the impressive and truly authentic performances by his cast, come together to create an experience that is truly original and lingers long in the memory.

New Directors/New Films 2008 Review Round-up #2

Epitaph (Jung Bum-sik and Jung Sik)






The Jung Brothers (as the sibling co-directors prefer to bill themselves) use the crowded genre of Korean horror to deliver a visually elegant and beautifully crafted ghost story, evoking ghosts both historical and literal. The framing device and the film narrative proper are set in two distinct historical periods in Korean history. In October 1979, the month of the assassination of dictatorial president Park Chung-hee, an aging doctor, Park Jung-Nam (Jeon Mu-song), is prompted by a photo album to reminisce on his experiences in Anseng Hospital, which is about to be torn down. The bulk of the story takes place three decades earlier, over the course of four days in 1942, at the height of imperial Japan’s stranglehold of colonized Korea. Although this hospital, with its spookily dark interiors and hushed, funereal corridors, was “as quiet as the eye of a storm” during this turbulent period, the historical circumstances of the imperial Japanese government, which sought to suppress all traces of Korean culture, are felt throughout the film, most notably in the hospital architecture, which is a mix of Western and Japanese elements. A major plot device of the film concerns the murders of Japanese soldiers. The Jung Brothers, in their debut feature, display an impressively prodigious command of all elements of their film craft, especially in the art direction, color schemes, and cinematography. Besides the requisite shocks and scares, which are in this context genuinely frightening in some scenes, there are some passages of stunning visual beauty, one example being the scene utilizing Japanese-style sliding doors to depict the marriage of Jung-Nam to a Japanese bride. The conventions of K-horror are successfully transcended, not only because of the film’s visual strategies, but by provocatively paralleling the fictional horror story that unfolds with the all too real horrors experienced by the Korean people in the late stages of World War II. (April 5 and 6)














La Zona (Rodrigo Plá)



The haves and the have-nots are at war in Plá’s dystopian tale, the titular community a walled-in, gated suburbia protected with armed guards and ubiquitous surveillance cameras. When a wild storm breaches the defenses of this wall, allowing a few of the unwashed masses to break in, and for one of them to murder one of the privileged citizens, the rest rally to keep the authorities out of it, and deal with the situation themselves, vigilante style. The film ticks off familiar points dealing with encroaching surveillance, police corruption, and the overwhelming amount of state apparatus necessary to preserve the lopsided balance of rich and poor. However, despite the high-tech veneer, no points are made here that George Orwell hadn’t already addressed six decades ago. (April 4 and 6)








Falling From Earth (Chadi Zeneddine)



An experimental fantasia evoking life during and after the Lebanese civil war and spanning across four decades, Zeneddine’s film contains many arresting and intriguing images. In 2008, an old man (Rafik Ali Ahmad) lives in a bombed out building, collecting photos of various people. Stories of three of them unfold in the course of the film. In 1990, a man deals with the aftermath of his wife’s suicide and his own history of abuse toward his family. In 1975, a security guard begins a bathroom stall correspondence with a mysterious person. In 1982, a woman (Carmen Lebbos) pines for her missing lover. Although the parts don’t quite cohere into a fully satisfying whole, and the ending uses a disappointingly clichéd image, Zeneddine’s impressively fluid images successfully transcend the film’s faults. (April 1 and 2)

A Lost Man (Danielle Arbid)

Despite the singular noun in the film’s title, two men are at the center of the story: Fouad Saleh (Alexander Sidding), a Lebanese man shattered by his experience in the civil war and suffering from memory loss; and Thomas Koré (Melvil Poupaud), a French photographer who prowls the streets at night, drinking in bars and picking up women, using everyone around him as fodder for his photography, practicing a disturbing sort of artistic vampirism. Both men become symbiotically intertwined in Arbid’s erotically charged scenario, as Thomas haunts the night districts of Jordan, incessantly snapping photos during his sexual assignations, pulling Fouad into his world, greedily uncovering the troubled man’s secrets. Inspired by the work of French photographer Antoine d’Agata and American novelist William T. Vollmann, A Lost Man effectively evokes the atmosphere of night life in the border towns Arbid depicts, and while it flirts with orientalist fetishizing of its Arabic characters, especially the women (surprising for a female filmmaker born in Lebanon), the film remains a fascinating and unsettling exploration of the dangers of taboo-breaking in Muslim societies. (April 5 and 6)

New Directors/New Films 2008 Review Round-up

The 2008 New Directors/New Films festival, screens from March 26 through April 6 at the Walter Reade Theater and the Museum of Modern Art. This year’s edition is the strongest in years, collectively providing a potent snapshot of current social, political, and cinematic trends. Civil wars, multicultural life in major cities, the legacies of colonialism, and natural disasters are but a few of the major themes touched upon in this year’s film selections. Quirky and individualistic character portraits are also thrown into the mix, with varying results.

Frozen River (Courtney Hunt)

The opening night film’s central image, the frozen-over St. Lawrence River, over which the protagonist Ray (Melissa Leo) smuggles illegal immigrants over the Canada-U.S. border, is a potent representation of the fragility of the circumstances that Ray and the other film’s characters find themselves in. Their constricted existences, and their struggles to gain some sort of financial and personal stability, resonate between the worlds of the upstate N.Y. trailer park where Ray lives and the Mohawk reservation where Lila (Misty Upham) tries to get back her son from her mother-in-law. Ray’s big dream is to find a new double-wide trailer for herself and her two kids, which is jeopardized when her husband runs off with the money needed for their home. Authority lays a heavy hand on everyone, although it works differently for Indians as opposed to whites. Ray, as a white woman, is able to travel more freely, at least at first, between these two worlds. But as circumstances force them together, their destinies crisscross in an unexpected fashion. Stark, de-saturated colors dominate, as the harsh elements mirror the lives, and often desperate circumstances, of the characters. The Chinese and Pakistani immigrants who are used for money by both sides are the most powerless of all, shuttled back and forth as human cargo and commodities, unwilling pawns in the efforts of the poor to survive. (March 26 and 27)


Jellyfish (Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen)




This gentle comedy crisscrosses the destinies of several denizens of Tel Aviv, creating a portrait of the city that beautifully captures the ebb and flow of their lives. Honeymooners Michael and Keren (Gera Sandler and Noa Knoller) are stuck in a hotel in the city, unable to travel to the Caribbean because of the bride’s broken foot. Joy (Ma-nenita De Latorre), a Filipina caretaker, deals with two very different charges, while feeling guilty over the young son she left back home. Batya (Sara Adler), an aimless young woman is put in charge of a mute little girl (Nikol Leidman) who comes out of the ocean. This scenario flows naturally, without feeling contrived or forced. Beneath the genial, comic tone of the piece is an underlying melancholy and loneliness that comes through, with Joy’s pining for her son, the single woman who lives alone in the same hotel as Michael and Keren, and an actress’ strained relationship with her mother. Appropriately making extensive use of marine imagery as a metaphor for the characters’ desire for connection, Jellyfish offers memorable images and incident (e.g. a hilarious experimental staging of Hamlet), and is a successful transition to cinema for the film’s co-directors, who previously made their names as literary artists. (March 27 and 30)






Wonderful Town (Aditya Assarat)

Set in the Thailand coastal town of Takua Pa, which lost thousands of its inhabitants in the December 2004 tsunami, Wonderful Town represents a beautiful expression of the figurative (and possibly literal) ghosts that haunt this place, still existing in the woozy hangover of the town’s loss. This is a quiet film, full of silent spaces, and hushed, funereal tones, dealing in the contrasts between country and city, history and progress. Ton (Supphasit Kansen), an architect overseeing a new development in town, stays at a nearly deserted hotel, run by Na (Anchalee Saisoontorn), who up to this point has remained safe in the cocoon of her life in town, running her daily errands in the hotel. As Ton, longing for an escape from the hectic bustle of Bangkok, and Na, feeling trapped between mountains on one side of Takua Pa and the sea on the other, are inevitably drawn together, the delicate balance that has existed in this lonely town is upset. The aimless youths riding through the streets on their motorbikes (including Na’s troubled younger brother) become steadily more menacing, and the whispers of gossip grow ever louder. This is an impressive debut, its odd melancholic rhythms encompassing mordant humor, lyrical visual passages, and a conclusion that combines heartbreak and hope. (April 2 and 4)


Trouble the Water (Tia Lessin and Carl Deal)




Ever since the initial calamity and continuing outrage and horrors that resulted from Hurricane Katrina, films on this subject have been a virtual documentary sub-genre. In this extraordinarily moving film, something new and vital is brought to the table: a view from the inside, literally, of the storm. This unique perspective comes courtesy of Kimberly Roberts, a resident of the lower Ninth Ward who brought her camcorder with her as the raging waters trapped her and her family on their roof. Scenes from this footage are inter-cut with her efforts to rebuild her life after the storm, complicated by both bureaucratic barriers and her own difficult family history. The co-directors, who previously worked with Michael Moore, allow this footage to tell their own stories, without a falsely authoritative voiceover, which puts into vivid relief such moving scenes as Kimberly performing her rap song directly to the camera, documenting her life story and her unflagging resilience. (April 3 and 6)







Soul Carriage (Conrad Clark)





UK director Clark delivers a reasonable facsimile of recent Chinese cinema: Xinren (Yang Fen Jun), a young construction worker paid such low wages that he can’t even afford a few beers to entertain his friends after work, is forced to carry the body of his dead co-worker (killed in a workplace accident) to the man’s hometown. He is given some hush money to give to the family, so that the company can keep everything below the radar of the authorities. The rapid industrial creep and lack of humanity prevalent in this vast landscape, represented by the hapless protagonist, a physical manifestation of depression and hopelessness, are duly present. Despite some brief flashes of attempted humor, misery is the dominant mode. However, what one misses is the sort of formal brilliance found in such filmmakers as Jia Zhang-ke, which would have added some substance to what is essentially a shallow outline for a film, rather than a fully realized one. Interestingly enough, Zhang Yang’s recent film Getting Home features a nearly identical basic storyline, but Zhang uses these elements to create a comic story told with much more soul and a firmer grasp of the complexity of the characters depicted than in Clark’s film. Soul Carriage, despite its lofty ambitions, remains an outsider’s view, however sympathetic, that fails to get below the surface of its minimal scenario. (April 3 and 5)

Review: Risa Morimoto's "Wings of Defeat"

Wings of Defeat (Tokko). 2007. Directed by Risa Morimoto. Written by Linda Hoaglund. Produced by Risa Morimoto and Linda Hoaglund. Cinematography by Francisco Aliwalas. Edited by Maya Stark. Art direction by Joe Wu. Animation by Jef Castro. Sound design by Tom Lino. Music by Extreme Music.

Risa Morimoto’s documentary Wings of Defeat sheds valuable light on one of the most notorious yet least understood aspects of World War II, the Japanese pilots known as kamikaze (or in Japanese parlance, tokkotai), considered in the popular imagination to be fanatics who eagerly sacrificed themselves to inflict damage on US personnel, the equivalent of present-day suicide bombers. This film, with a thorough focus, counters these popular notions. While not excusing or making apologies for these soldiers’ actions, the film puts these pilots’ actions into illuminating context. Through interviews with those who survived or abandoned their missions, and by examining the way the kamikazes functioned within the propaganda prevalent in Japanese society at the time, it becomes clear that the strategy of using kamikaze pilots was in large part an act of desperation by Japan’s leadership, faced with an outmanned, losing army lacking in basic resources.

Morimoto adds a personal dimension to this story, relating her discovery that her own uncle had trained as a kamikaze pilot in his youth. Her process of uncovering her family history intersects with her exploration of Japanese wartime history, in both cases revealing stories shrouded in silence, obfuscation, and mythology. Wings of Defeat unfolds in a straightforward, linear manner, which works to its advantage as a fascinating work of journalism that is remarkably nuanced in its approach to this still-sensitive subject. Through interviews with kamikaze pilots who survived their missions (there were in fact hundreds who did so) either through failure or outright desertion, and with U.S. veterans who survived a kamikaze attack on the USS Drexler, a Navy destroyer ship, we learn that the divisions between the two sides are not as pronounced as we would believe. The U.S. veterans reveal a surprising level of understanding towards the kamikazes who attacked them. “We would have done the same thing,” one says, expressing their willingness to sacrifice their own lives if they had been told that would be necessary. The recollections of the former kamikaze are also quite revealing, and a sharp contrast to the popular notions of them as faceless, fanatical automatons. Many of these pilots were drafted unwillingly into this service, often at the last minute and with inadequate training. The kamikazes were glorified in the Japanese popular media, portrayed as noble warriors and saviors of their country, rather than what they truly were, which were unwilling pawns of a last-ditch strategy by a leadership unwilling to admit defeat. Distortions in both Japanese and western notions of these soldiers, on the one hand as self-sacrificing warriors, and on the other hand as mindless fanatics, are given a valuable corrective in this film. Archival footage and original animation also effectively evoke the frenzied propaganda campaign waged by the Japanese government, especially at the late stages of the war, when all Japanese citizens were essentially considered potential kamikaze recruits.

Wings of Defeat screens at Japan Society on March 18, and will be introduced by Morimoto and her co-producer and writer Linda Hoaglund, and a Q&A will follow the screening with the filmmakers and former kamikaze pilots Takahiko Ena and Takeo Ueshima, along with U.S. Navy veteran Fred Mitchell, one of the survivors of the attack on the USS Drexler.

Review: Buichi Saito's "Plains Wanderer"

Plains Wanderer (Daisogen no wataridori). 1960. Directed by Buichi Saito. Written by Gan Yamazaki. Cinematography by Kurataro Takamura. Music by Taichiro Kosugi.

Cast: Akira Kobayashi (Taki), Jo Shishido (Masa), Ruriko Asaoka (Junko), Mari Shiraki (Setna), Yoko Minamida (Kazue), Yuzo Kiura (Kiyosato), Nobuo Kaneko (Kodo), Toshio Egi (Nobuo).

Japan Society’s film series “No Borders, No Limits: 1960s Nikkatsu Action Cinema” continues with Buichi Saito’s 1960 feature Plains Wanderer, screening on March 14 at 7:30. The fifth installment of a popular nine-part series, Plains Wanderer is a sterling example of the “Eastern Western” genre, a popular staple of Nikkatsu action films. These films used the iconography of the American Western, but added unique characteristics of Japanese culture and history, and in the case of Plains Wanderer, crossed it with the gangster film genre. Akira Kobayashi, one of Nikkatsu’s biggest stars, played the wanderer in this series, a lone hero who wanders into various towns, a figure akin to those played by Randolph Scott in Budd Boetticher’s westerns, although Kobayashi was far less taciturn and stoic than Scott.

Taki (Kobayashi), a wandering, singing cowboy, comes upon a village in Hokkaido populated by the Ainu, aboriginal people of Japan. He brings in tow Nobuo (Toshio Egi), a boy abandoned by his mother, whom Taki is searching for. Taki becomes drawn into the conflict the villagers are having with Kodo (Nobuo Kaneko), a rapacious bar owner and developer, who wants to take over their land for tourist construction. Also in the mix is Junko (Ruriko Asaoka), the owner of an arts and crafts shop selling Ainu craftworks, and who is conducting an anthropological study of the Ainu. Her interest is not merely an intellectual one; she loves and wants to protect these people. Her father-in-law Kiyosato (Yuzo Kiura) has mortgaged the Ainu land to Kodo, and he struggles to pay back the loan, but it is soon becomes clear that Kodo is less interested in being repaid than in making profit off the Ainu village land. Junko is engaged to Shigeru, Kiyosato’s dimwitted son. Her doubts about the impending marriage are only exacerbated by the arrival of the dashing Taki. Also complicating matters is Junko’s friend Setna (Mari Shiraki), an Ainu village girl who is in love with Shigeru.

Taki’s main foil is Masa (Jo Shishido), Todo’s wisecracking henchman, who crosses paths with Taki frequently, challenging him to fights. Masa is the sort of wry heavy who would be played in an American Western by Lee Marvin. The Wanderer series, much like other popular Japanese film series such as the Zatoichi series, followed the same template in each film: Kobayashi as the lone figure drifting into town who has a romantic relationship with a local woman played by Asaoka (Kobayashi and Asaoka were in fact a real-life romantic couple for a time), with Shishido as Kobayashi’s antagonist. Kobayashi would also frequently break out into song, making him a pop-music sensation as well as a movie star. In Plains Wanderer, Kurataro Takamura’s widescreen cinematography, featuring Hokkaido’s picturesque landscapes, lends an appropriately iconic Western flavor to the proceedings. What emerges as the film’s main theme is a clash of civilizations: the Ainu, an uncorrupted, pre-modern culture, is threatened by the decadent, Westernized modern world, populated by violent, greedy gangsters. The eclectic mixture of tradition, mythology, and modernism is a recurring feature of the film. Taki in his black leather cowboy outfit and Setna in her Ainu dress both stand out starkly in the modern hostess bar in the city. The American Western influences also contrast with the Ainu rituals depicted in the film, represented by the wizened fortuneteller woman and the bear dance festival, while the film’s conclusion directly evokes the similar ending of George Stevens’ Shane.

English trailer:

Japanese trailer:

Valentine's Day Special: Chen Kuo-fu's "The Personals"

The Personals (Zheng hun qi shi). 1998. Directed by Chen Kuo-fu. Written by Chen Kuo-fu and Chen Shih-chieh, based on a story by Chen Yu-hui. Produced by Hsu Li-kong. Cinematography by Ho Nan-hong. Edited by Chang Dar-lung. Music by Steve Liu. Production design by Wang Yi-bai. Sound by Tang Shiang-chu.

Cast: Rene Liu, Wu Bai, Chen Chao-jung, Gu Bao-ming, Chin Shih-chieh, Shih Yi-nan, Wang Chao-ming, Chen Wen-hsi, Niu Cheng-tse.

In this lightly comic and ultimately poignant film from Taiwanese director Chen Kuo-fu, the city of Taipei is as much a character as the humans in the story. The film gives us a vivid sense of the loneliness that exists within the ultra-modern cityscapes of Taipei (an experience, of course, which is quite common to any large metropolis). The particular lonely woman who is this film’s focus is Du Jia-zhen (Rene Liu, a beautiful performance), an ophthalmologist who decides to put an ad in the personals to seek a husband. The film’s first image is of an eye, in extreme close-up during an examination. Chen reinforces these themes of sight and blindness throughout, both literally (a blind man responds to the ad, who turns out to be one of her patients), and figuratively, in the more general sense of human blindness to each other’s and one’s own motivations. Du, until late in the film, seems blind herself to her own reasons for placing the ad. It soon becomes clear that she isn’t seriously expecting a prospective husband to turn up during her interviews. She uses an alias (Ms. Wu) and leaves nightly messages to a former lover, recounting the details of her search.

Each of Du’s prospects is introduced with an on-screen title, detailing their name, age, and profession. The interviews mostly take place in restaurants and cafes, and they often seem to be the only people in the place, reinforcing the theme of isolation. The men are a colorful lot, to say the least. Du meets up with such curiosities as: a foot fetishist; a pimp; a personal defense salesman who eagerly demonstrates pepper spray and stun guns; a pinball enthusiast; a man who recounts in great detail his passion for excessive drinking and sadomasochistic pornography; a man who turns out to be procuring a wife for his father; and on and on. The camera mostly remains on Du’s face as the men speak, registering her often incredulous reactions to her dates’ antics, such as the pimp’s offer of employment, and his conviction that every woman is a potential whore. One of the few sympathetic males in this film is Du’s old college professor, whom she uses as a sounding board for her frustrations.

What elevates The Personals from being a simple conventional comedy about dating is the palpable sense of melancholy and grief at its core. Du is a deeply lonely person, and one suspects that part of her motivation in placing the ad is simply to have some company, since other than her suitors, we do not see her interact with anyone other than the professor, and a lady friend who turns up briefly to offer advice. Du’s emptiness is so profound it is not even filled when she finally finds someone she likes, and decides to sleep with him. After their lovemaking, the man slowly puts on his clothes while Du sobs in the bathroom.

Despite the film’s intense focus on Du’s character, the reasons for her actions and emotions remain mysterious until late in the film, when certain revelations occur which deepen our understanding of Du’s sadness. These revelations, while reminding us of her isolation, also provide an impetus for Du to break this cycle. The viewer is allowed to share in this as well. For most of the film, we are locked into her viewpoint, watching her encounters with her suitors as a fly on the wall, her intermittent voiceover letting us into her thoughts. However, the last words we hear come from another character, the man Du slept with, leaving an answering machine message expressing his wish to see her again. The man’s voice plays over the image of Du in a cab, with her own descriptive on-screen title, detailing her name, age, and profession. This puts her on common ground with the men she has encountered over the course of the film. It also suggests that she is in fact, not so isolated or different from them, since she, like them, is on a quest to connect with others, to stave off loneliness at least temporarily.

The Personals can be purchased from YesAsia.com.

Review: "Dawn of Japanese Animation" at Japan Society

(Yoshitaro Kataoka's "Danemon's Monster Hunt at Shojoji." Credit: Matsuda Film Production, Digital Meme.)

The film series “Dawn of Japanese Animation,” screening at Japan Society from February 13-16, is a lively, impressive collection of films that is a fascinating glimpse of Japanese pop culture from the 1920’s through the 1940’s, as well as a needed corrective for those who think of Japanese animation as only the stereotypical fare of science-fiction and fantasy stories populated by characters with saucer eyes, the most well-known names being Akira, Miyazaki, and (worse), Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z and those of its ilk. This series reveals that Japanese animation has a long and storied history, stretching back to the earliest days of the cinema. Each day of this four-day series is devoted to a different genre: “Chambara Action and Adventure,” “Horror and Comedy,” “Propaganda,” and “Music and Dance.” As an added bonus, each program of animated short films will be followed by a live-action film of the same genre. Many of these films are silent, and will be accompanied by live-action narration by Midori Sawato, a modern-day practitioner of the art of benshi narration. Benshi were live narrators who accompanied silent films in Japan’s early cinemas.

(Yasuji Murata's "The Bat." Credit: Matsuda Film Production, Digital Meme.)

Long before such figures as Hayao Miyazaki, Katsuhiro Otomo, Satoshi Kon, and Mamoru Oshii made their names in the field of film animation, Japanese filmmakers of the 1920’s and 1930’s developed styles drawing from both Japanese folktales and legends, as well as Western influences such as Walt Disney and Max Fleischer, experimenting freely with drawing methods and approaches to subject matter and genre. One early pioneer was Yasuji Murata (1896-1966), who began his career creating intertitles for animated and educational films before creating his own, and who has several films featured in the series. Murata is a major discovery of this series, revealed as an innovator with a beautiful sense of composition. Animals were major characters in his animations, which were less overtly anthropomorphized than in Disney’s films. In “The Bat” (1930), the smooth-talking title character maneuvers his way through a war between birds and beasts. In “Over a Drink” (1936), a drunk fantasizes an underwater adventure. “Our Baseball Match” (1931) is a play-by-play of a game between tanuki (raccoon dogs, familiar creatures of Japanese legend) and rabbits. In “Sanko and the Octopus” (1933), a fish merchant pursues buried treasure. In a way that was true of much of the animation of this period, Murata’s films emphasize the decorative uses of the animated image, their flat visual fields privileging composition over perspective, and emphasizing smooth, lateral movement rather than the exaggerated motion of American animation. Murata’s cut-out animations were remarkable in the nearly endless variations he discovered in black-and-white lines and shadings. In Murata’s and other animators’ works, there is the heady feeling of an art form being invented and experimented with before our eyes. It is interesting to compare these more freewheeling works with others featured in the “Propaganda” program. In such works as “Momotaro’s Sky Adventure” (1931) and “Momotaro’s Underwater Adventure” (1932), in which the title character of Japanese folklore is pressed into the service of promoting the virtues of Japan’s military, and “Corporal Norakuro” (1934), the playfulness is still evident, but there is a palpable tension between this fun, anarchic spirit and the scenarios involving the cute animals of earlier films now fighting each other to the death.

(Noburo Ofuji's "The Black Cat." Credit: Matsuda Film Production, Digital Meme.)

Another great animator was Noburo Ofuji (1900-1961), whose music-based films were more overtly experimental and built around pure decorative patterns. Such works as “The National Anthem Kimigayo” (1931), “The Black Cat” (1929), “Harvest Festival” (1930), “Spring Song” (1931), and “The Bear Dodger” (1948) were both visually and aurally musical, their animation styles often built around printed song lyrics, and movement of objects, silhouettes, and masks.

(Torajiro Saito's "Kid Commotion." Credit: Matsuda Film Production, Digital Meme.)

The live-action films chosen to accompany the animations also fit the wildly comic nature of many of these films, making use of cartoon-like humor and sight gags. Takeshi Yashiro’s “Fighting in Asura Town” (1936) combines the genres of adventure and romantic comedy, as two journalists save an engineer and his feisty daughter from a gang’s clutches. Torajiro Saito’s “Kid Commotion” (1934) uses class-based satire to tell the tale of its Chaplinesque protagonist’s struggle to find ever more unusual ways to make money for his large family, and to find a midwife for his wife, about to give birth to their seventh child.

(Buntaro Futugawa's "Orochi." Credit: Matsuda Film Production, Digital Meme.)

Another highlight of the series is a rare screening on February 16 at 7:30 of Buntaro Futagawa’s Orochi (1925), an early chambara (sword-play) samurai film featuring Tsumasaburo Bando, one of the most famous actors of early Japanese cinema, who starred in many jidaigeki (period dramas) of this period. This screening will be accompanied by live English benshi narration by actor Leon Ingulsrud.

Additional reading:

Reviews by Grady Hendrix in the New York Sun and David Wilentz in the Brooklyn Rail.

Jasper Sharp's article "Pioneers of Japanese Animation" on the Japanese film site Midnight Eye provides a valuable overview of early Japanese animation. (Part 1 and Part 2)