"Film Comment Selects" Review: Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Retribution"

Retribution (Sakebi). 2006. Written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Produced by Takashige Ichise. Cinematography by Akiko Ashizawa. Edited by Nobuyuki Takahashi. Music by Kuniaki Haishima.

Cast: Koji Yakusho (Yoshioka), Manami Konishi (Harue), Tsuyoshi Ihara (Detective Miyaji), Riona Hazuki (Woman in Red), Jo Odagiri (Dr. Takagi), Ryo Kase (Man on a work boat), Hiroyuki Hirayama (Young detective Sakurai).

Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been one of the most consistently interesting stylists in Japanese cinema. His films can be superficially associated with the “J-Horror” genre, but anyone familiar with his work knows that much of it goes far beyond this catch-all label. His main strength is that he has not been bound to conventional narrative, and in using his adopted genre as a framework, he has been able to experiment greatly within this form to create a unique cinematic space of moody and intriguing images. In his finest work, including Cure, Pulse, Charisma, and Barren Illusion, Kurosawa offers haunting images that resonate well beyond initial viewings. These qualities extend to his ventures outside the genre, such as License to Live and Bright Future.

Unfortunately, Kurosawa seems to have hit something of a rut lately. His last film, Loft, was a disappointment, even though at first glance it contains many of the elements of his previous work: the somber, unsettling mood; the often baffling and near-incomprehensible occurrences, often concerning the fluidity between the worlds of the living and the dead. While diverting at first viewing, Loft left the impression of being a pale retread of much better earlier work.

However, it pains me to report that his latest film, Retribution, is an even bigger and more serious misfire. Just like Loft, everything familiar to Kurosawa’s films is present and accounted for, including his regular lead actor Koji Yakusho, as a detective investigating a serial killer case. And this is exactly the problem. Everything is far too familiar, both from Kurosawa’s own films (much of it, including a crucial plot point revealed late in the film, feels like a remake of Cure), and other clichéd tropes of J-Horror, such as floating female ghosts (the one in this film often lets out an ear-splitting scream).

In Retribution, detective Yoshioka (Yakusho) is called to investigate a series of murders occurring around a construction site. The victims have all been drowned in saltwater, but strangely, all the murders occur far from any saltwater source. He lives alone in a ramshackle apartment, and is often visited by Harue (Manami Konishi), a mysterious young woman whose relationship to Yoshioka is initially ambiguous. We are unsure whether to sympathize with this character, since the film plays with a well-worn idea in this genre, intentionally making us question whether the detective himself has committed these murders. In the film, we see at least two other murders occur, by two different characters, using the same M.O. Again, not to give too much away, if you’ve already seen Cure, it’s easy to guess how these murders are connected to the central case.

The most disheartening aspect of Retribution is the rote and earth-bound quality of the proceedings. What gives Kurosawa’s films their special resonance is the free space he gives himself to explore such themes as alienation and loneliness which gain their power from not being tethered to a conventional plot. However, in this case everything is explained and rationalized away, as if ticking off items on a checklist. Also, there seems to be an odd lack of engagement with the material on Kurosawa’s part. This may be due to the fact that his producer is Takashige Ichise, responsible for the most popular and archetypal examples of recent Japanese horror (Ju-on, Ring, Dark Water). The tension between their disparate sensibilities, however intriguing a concept it may have seemed on paper, definitely works to the detriment of this production. The lyrical visual quality of Kurosawa’s previous works comes through here and there, especially in the scenes in the abandoned sanitarium that serves a crucial site in the film. Also, Kurosawa seems to be making some point about the eagerness of Japanese society to bury the past, indicated by the constant construction and destruction depicted in the film. But this theme remains undeveloped, itself buried in the film’s insistence in shackling everything to its derivative plot.

In short, Retribution is probably Kurosawa’s worst film yet. For other filmmakers, this would be a not-bad effort, but Kurosawa is capable of, and has achieved, so much more. An escape from the J-Horror ghetto, on the order of Bright Future or License to Live, is sorely called for. Let’s hope he can break out of this stagnation with his next film.

News & Notes, 2/19/07

From Variety Asia: intriguing details on John Woo's upcoming film, The Battle of Red Cliff, an adaptation of the classic Chinese epic "The Romance of Three Kingdoms," which will be released in two different versions -- in Asia as a two-part film, four hours in total, and everywhere else as a single two-and-a-half hour film. Hopefully, when this film is finally made, it will lessen the damage to Woo's filmography wrought by films such as Paycheck and Windtalkers.

Also from Variety Asia: The latest film to run afoul of Chinese censors, Li Yu's Lost in Beijing, screened in its uncut version at the Berlin Film Festival, which just wrapped this past weekend; also, some Berlin deals, including Hou Hsiao-hsien's new film Ballon Rouge ("Red Balloon"), a French-language remake, and expansion, of Albert Lamourisse's 1956 film of the same name, which won the Oscar in 1957 for best screenplay, a remarkable and unusual achievement considering the original was only 34 minutes in length and had no dialogue. Definitely something to eagerly look forward to.

Speaking of Berlin, some of the notable winners included: the top prize (Golden Bear) going to Wang Quanan's Mongolia-set "Tuya's Marriage"; Park Chan-wook's new film I'm a Cyborg, but That's OK won the Alfred Bauer Prize for "innovative film." Also, Taiwanese filmmaker Zero Chou won the Teddy Award, which honors gay and lesbian cinema, for Spider Lilies. I saw her earlier film Splendid Float, which I quite liked, two years ago at the New York Asian-American International Film Festival. You can read about the rest of the winners here.

Also in Korean cinema news, there has been a rather disturbing number of high-profile celebrity suicides, the latest being actress Jeong Da-bin, best known for the 2003 TV drama Cat on the Rooftop, whose popularity had apparently waned in recent years. The method of suicide (by hanging) eerily echoed the 2005 suicide of actress Lee Eun-ju (Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Bungee Jumping of Their Own). Even more unsettling, these suicides have inspired copycats. You can read the full story here, in Joong Ang Daily.

"Film Comment Selects" Review: Lin Tay-jou's "Bardo"

Bardo (Chui-si Zao-wu Ai-ge). 2005. Written, directed, photographed, and edited by Lin Tay-jou. Produced by Hsieh Chia-kuen. Music by Lo Song-tze. Sound design by Chou Chen.

This year’s “Film Comment Selects” series got off to a very strong, and unusual, start for me with Taiwanese experimental and documentary filmmaker Lin Tay-jou’s Bardo, a 70-minute triptych about the stages of life death, and rebirth. As Lin himself explains on the film’s website, the film’s title is a Sanskrit word meaning “between two things.” The film’s subtitle, “The Lamentation of the Dying Creatures,” is from a medieval text referring to Christian notions of hell, purgatory, and divine judgment. This mixture of Eastern and Western philosophies informs both the subject matter and structure of this astonishing film. The extreme images and sound design of this work are quite indelible, and amid the images of death, cannibalism, rough sex, decay, rot, and blood that flood the viewer in this film, there is also a hopeful vision of the unending cycle of life’s birth and rebirth. I’ll briefly explore each section of this film, preceded by the filmmaker’s statements regarding each one.

Bardo Part 1:

In this merciless universe, everything is expendable.

When the stream of life is exhausted, does any humanity remain?

Time is short – do the gods have any answers for us?

If all will vanish in the end, then why these unending waves of desire?

In this first, dialogue-free section (as is the rest of the film), the black-and-white misshapen-iris images portray a withered and dead post-apocalyptic landscape in which civilization is not only absent, it’s as if it has never even existed. Men and women in tattered rags wander zombie-like among dead trees sprouting rotten fruit. The sacred and the profane intertwine greatly here, as a Buddhist temple looms over these ravenous and murderous creatures. A woman greedily licks and sucks on a statue of Buddha; the pages of an illustrated erotic book are turned; a man masturbates in front of a painting. The survivors of this unspecified disaster are all appetites and animalistic impulses. The only food in sight is rotten and decayed, and the people feed on their dead. In the climactic sequence, a black rain of what is probably blood comes down on the people as they stop, open their mouths to let it in, and rub it on their bodies. The sounds we hear are chanting, growls, murmurs, electronic music, among others. This first section could superficially be classified as yet another example of the “Asian extreme” vogue so prevalent in recent years. The difference here is that this is not done as a cheap shock tactic, but as an expression of a philosophically rigorous examination of Lin’s themes of the life cycle, and his portrayals of these way-stations between levels of existence.

Bardo Part 2:

Legend has it that at the end of life,

we cross a bridge. Old women on the bridge

offer you a bowl of broth, and drinking it,

you forget all. Since the end has been

reached, why look back? If,

at the end of the bridge,

you forget your own face,

then beyond the Door to Yesterday,

will you find your own footprints?

If all is to be forgotten,

when did we actually live?

In the second section, a dead man revisits scenes from his own life, in the film’s words, “like a movie on fast forward.” Actually, the life-as-film metaphor is taken literally here, in both this section and the one following, as scenes play out on a movie screen, and we see the projectors working. The young man in this section has been killed by riot cops during a protest, and he wanders through these scenes and the ones leading up to his death. He sees his happier days as a young radical, reading a Che Guevara volume with his girlfriend on a hill, and later giving her a cross in his car. He travels to these scenes through theater curtains and doors. However, we see that he is not as principled in his personal life as he is in his political life; his girlfriend catches him with another woman, whom he has given the cross to. Lording over it all is death with his scythe, sitting in the screening room and later waiting to chain him. The sequence culminates in an ultrasound image, reiterating the film’s themes of the circularity of life.

Bardo Part 3:

Babies keep being born in hospital beds; pigs’ heads still drop to the

slaughterhouse floor. Entries, exits, in this wailing sea of blood. Do they

represent life – or death? Do dreams still exist in a gigantic earthquake?

Can a poem be found in the depths of ashes?

The third section begins with a piano’s dulcet tones, and the soft-focus image of a woman sleeping at a desk, her head in front of an open book lined with seashells. This gentle beginning soon gives way to what is perhaps this woman’s dream, as a succession of images of death ensues: slaughtered pigs and frogs; a body being cremated; bloody, dying geese. Also, a man and a woman have auto-asphyxiation sex in a hospital bed, and the sequence climaxes with footage of an actual childbirth. Once again, projected images form the basis of what we see, as the woman looks both into the projector and out to us as viewers. This sequence, and the film itself, ends with the gentle piano tones, and the woman sleeping. After all these images of despair, there is a hopeful note, as the baby is returned to the safety of the womb, and the notion that perhaps all we have seen is just a dream contained within the peaceful, restorative world that we see at the film’s conclusion. Or perhaps both sides of this equation are necessary to maintain the holistic balance of the universe.

Whatever the ultimate meaning of it all is, Lin Tay-jou has created a visually, aurally, and philosophically challenging work that will probably haunt me for weeks to come.

Film Comment Selects!

The cinematic winter doldrums are officially over. It will be quite a busy time for me over the next few months, starting with what has become an essential film series for me: "Film Comment Selects," a selection of recent highlights of world cinema, chosen by the editors of Film Comment. The eighth edition screens beginning tomorrow through February 27 at the Walter Reade Theater. I will be reviewing the films in this space over the next couple of weeks or so. For now, I'll briefly point to a few films that seem especially worthy.

The first is one I just saw, the one that provides the striking image you see above: Lin Tay-jou's Bardo (screening on Feb. 16). A truly unclassifiable and mind-melting experience, Lin's film is a non-narrative triptych that speeds through the cycles of life, death, and rebirth, making use of references to Buddhism, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bible, erotic and religious art. Lin compresses all these elements into a unique and searing vision of death, murder, sex, dismemberment, cannibalism, political protest, and much more, which, despite its often extreme imagery and visceral sound design, culminates in an oddly hopeful notion of the circularity of nature's existence.

Other films to look out for are: Jean-Claude Brisseau's Exterminating Angels (Feb. 14 and 17), which continues his unique depictions of female sexuality that he has explored in previous films such as Secret Things; Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth (above, Feb. 16 and 18), in which I'll see for myself if he is worthy of the hype he's gotten in many quarters, most notably from Mark Peranson in his magazine Cinemascope; Johnnie To's latest in his series of gangster tales Exiled (Feb. 15); the veteran experimental filmmaker James Benning's 13 Lakes and Ten Skies (Feb. 24); Finnish master of the deadpan Aki Kaurismaki's Lights in the Dusk (Feb. 22); Retribution (below, Feb. 17, 18, 19), the latest from Kiyoshi Kurosawa, that is hopefully an improvement upon the visually creepy but utimately baffling Loft; Lou Ye's Tiananmen Square evocation Summer Palace (Feb 17 and 18), which got its creator in major trouble with the Chinese government and a five-year ban from filmmaking; Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, who have created some of the most materially tactile, intellectually rigorous, and downright beautiful cinema creations ever made, are in the series with their final collaboration (after the passing of Huillet last year), These Encounters of Theirs (Feb. 25 and 26); and a film I saw at last year's Tribeca Film Festival, Marwan Hamed's entertaining epic of Cairo history The Yacoubian Building (Feb. 21 and 24).

A busy season and much lack of sleep awaits me. For more info on the series, check here.

The World of Cinema Is Flat

I'd like to call your attention to A.O. Scott's excellent Sunday New York Times piece on the waning profile of foreign language films in the U.S. Scott, along with his colleague Manohla Dargis, has over the past few years become essential reading for me, offering consistently witty, intelligent, and often quite brilliant (for example, Dargis' recent piece on Inland Empire) commentary, which is quite a rarity these days in the landscape of mainstream film reviewing.

Scott's piece is a quite sobering and thorough assessment of the low box office returns and increasing marginalization of foreign-language releases. I can certainly relate to the often lonely situation of having seen a great film from Korea, Japan, China, Indonesia, Roumania, Mali, or wherever, and being met with blank stares when I mention them. Or even worse, not even bothering to bring them up because of the impossibility of having any sort of meaningful discussion about them. However, I'm not quite as pessimistic about the situation as Scott is, which perhaps has to do with the fact that I am of a younger generation that wasn't around for the halcyon cinephilic days of the 60's and 70's. The idea of cinema as primarily a theatergoing experience is very quickly disappearing. And while definitely something is being lost, and obviously a beautiful new celluloid print of a great classic work is to your video IPod as Nobu is to McDonald's, there are some definite gains as well. I enjoy the fact that I can enjoy the latest works of say, Johnnie To, Kim Ki-duk, E J-yong, Peter Chan, or classics such as the lovely Naruse box set from Masters of Cinema without being subject to the whims, fashions and financial pressures of distributors.

Film companies are starting to wake up to this changing cinema landscape, as Manohla Dargis reports in her piece in the same issue. Films such as Hou Hsiao-hsien's Three Times have at least the potential to reach far more people through cable than any small distributor. And perhaps in the end, all of this will come out to a net positive, as audiences become more savvy to the endless variety of world cinema, in all forms, that is available around them, and is as close to them as their laptop, television set, or local film festival. One can only hope.

In Darkest Africa

Earlier today, I caught up with The Last King of Scotland, Kevin Macdonald's adaptation of Giles Foden's novel that is centered around the brutal Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. It screened at the Walter Reade Theater as part of a tribute to Forest Whitaker, who gives a magisterial performance as the wily, charming, and evil Amin, and shows us in a chilling manner how these qualities can coexist in the same man. Whitaker, who recently took home a Golden Globe for his performance, is more than deserving of the fulsome praise he has received so far. Ever since his breakout role in Scorsese's The Color of Money, he has quietly become one of the world's finest actors. From his first scene in the film, in which he pumps up a massive crowd at a rally ("You can oh yeah!"), Whitaker is an electric screen presence as seductive to us in the audience as he is to the feckless Scottish do-gooder he takes under his wing, played by James McAvoy.

So as I say, Whitaker is as brilliant as everyone says. It's what surrounds him that I find highly problematic. Amin is not the main character of either the film or the novel, but instead the film's protagonist, the one we as audience members are invited to sympathize with, is Nicholas Garrigan, a naive, impulsive, and quite stupid Scottish med-school graduate who, looking for a place to practice medicine, picks Uganda at random by spinning a globe and pointing a finger (after first landing on Canada and quickly spinning again). Garrigan, who is picked by Amin to be his personal physician, is apparently a composite character made up of a number of white advisors who were complicit in keeping Amin in power, even as he systematically murdered his own people by the thousands.

However, this insistence of seeing Amin and the events in Uganda through the eyes of this white observer, which is a typical strategy of films that use Africa as its subject, Blood Diamond being the most recent example, serves to render hazy the origins and the specifics of the colonialist legacy and tribal conflicts that conspire to create a figure such as Amin. We walk away from the film no more enlightened about Amin or Uganda than we were when we went in. Yes, Amin was a bad, bad guy, but was there any doubt of that? Is that all Macdonald's film has to say?

Also, I personally find it rather insulting that so many films about Africa (and this is true of other non-Western cultures depicted in films) seem to feel that the audience requires a surrogate to translate the events for us, as if everyone in the audience is white (which is certainly not true in my case). Through the eyes of this usually horrified observer, we are invited to tsk-tsk and say, "isn't that horrible?" And then the credits roll, we throw away our popcorn, and we are no longer required to reflect or do our own thinking, since the filmmakers have presumably already done that for us.

And using such a self-absorbed, thoughtless, and purposely blind character, who makes incredibly stupid moves such as sleeping with one of the wives of his murderous dictator boss (!), truly puts the white surrogate strategy to its ultimate test. In the film's second half, Amin becomes more and more relegated to the background, as the bills come due on Garrigan's dumb mistakes. The film becomes increasingly overheated as the hellish consequences of Amin's desperation and paranoia come to full fruition, and the camerawork of Anthony Dod Mantle (the great Dogma cinematographer) illustrates a Dantean maelstrom, as the bodies (often hacked and mutilated) pile up.

But all this sound and fury generates much more heat than it does light, and in the end, Whitaker's masterful work is put in the service of yet another simplistic, despairing, and unenlightening depiction of Africa. Correctives to this are sorely needed, and luckily there are quite a few available. I refer you to the works of, for example, Senegal's Ousmane Sembene, or Mali's great filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako, whose intellectually and emotionally satisfying Bamako, about the impact of the IMF and the World Bank on Africa, opens at the Film Forum on February 14. I saw this film last year at the New York Film Festival, and Sissako's film deals with the issue of Africa's misery in a complex, rigorous, and formally inventive way, as opposed to Macdonald's film which doesn't even attempt such a task.

Also, if you want to see the real Idi Amin on film, and you're in the New York area, then make your way to the Museum of the Moving Image, where on February 9 and 10, Barbet Schroeder's celebrated documentary General Idi Amin Dada will screen as part of the New York Film Critics Circle's series "Critics Choice: Great Documentaries." More info can be found here.

Last King of Scotland trailer:

The Godfather of "The Godfather": Alberto Lattuada's "Mafioso" Opens in NYC

One of the things that annoy me about many of the film reviews I read and see on TV at this time of year is the constant voicing of the conventional wisdom that January and February are the doldrums of the movie year, and there's nothing worth seeing until the summer and fall. This sort of propaganda perpetuated by many mainstream film reviewers only serves to further expose their eagerness to play into the hands of marketers and PR agents, contributing to the sorry state of discourse on movies in our major media outlets. While it is true that many unambitious, bottom-feeder studio releases are released at this time (often without being screened for critics) the fact is, especially if you live in a major city, that there are always films worth seeing if you're willing to put in a little effort to search them out.

Case in point: Alberto Lattuada's brilliant and entertaining 1962 comedy/thriller Mafioso, opening in New York this weekend at the Lincoln Plaza and the Angelika. Lattuada was a major Italian director who made films from the 40's through the 80's, and has been overshadowed by his more celebrated peers, including Federico Fellini, with whom Lattuada co-directed Variety Lights. However, on the evidence of Mafioso, Lattuada is a figure worthy of rediscovery, and this film is a great introduction to its director. Mafioso is a clear antecedent to The Godfather, but it is no mere historical curio, and has great charms and interest on its own terms.

The great character actor Alberto Sordi is riveting as an auto factory foreman who takes his wife and children to his hometown in Sicily, where he reunites with his large and hilariously expressive family, shrugs off his northern refinement, and reverts to the accent and old acquaintances of his southern life. A darker side emerges, and the film shifts from its initial comic tone as he learns he has to fulfill certain family-based obligations. In deference to the wishes of Rialto Pictures, the film's distributor, I won't reveal more than that. Just know that if you are in New York (it opens next week in LA, and in more cities to come), it most likely is the most entertaining film out there now, and that this is the year's first major re-discovery, of which I hope there is many more to come.

Links:
My Meniscus Magazine review
A.O. Scott (New York Times)
Philip Lopate (Film Comment)
Donato Totaro on the films of Alberto Lattuada (Offscreen)

Mafioso trailer:

Growing Pains

One of my favorite Korean actresses is Moon Geun-yeong, an incredibly cute and engaging young woman I first encountered in Kim Jee-woon's creepy tour-de-force A Tale of Two Sisters, but who gained her greatest popularity in light, romantic comedies such as My Little Bride and Innocent Steps. For me, Moon possessed an irresistible charisma that almost single-handedly redeemed substandard and hackneyed plots, which was certainly the case with Innocent Steps. As Moon turns 20, and pursues her college studies, her career unfortunately seems to have hit a rough patch. Her latest film, Love Me Not, in which she essayed a more serious role as a blind heiress, was a resounding flop upon its release this past November. A television commercial she made shortly after the film's release in an abrupt attempt to sex up her image (see below) also encountered negative reaction, even opening her up to charges of plagiarism, both of her dance moves and the song she sang in the commercial. Moon recently gave an interview to Reuters in which she seems to express frustration with the constant scrutiny of her every move. (Note on the Reuters piece: Moon plays a Korean-Chinese woman in Innocent Steps, not a North Korean as stated in the article.)

My unsolicited career advice to Ms. Moon is simply this: material, material, material. Korea is home to some of the world's most brilliant and provocative writers and directors. Hook up with one of them. For example, I would love to see how someone like Hong Sang-soo would use you. Lee Myung-se, Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-ho, Lee Chang-dong, Kim Ki-duk (now that would be a pairing!), E J-yong ... the list goes on and on. Another good idea would to be to work with a female director, since there are so few of them, and lending your star power to one of their projects would be a great advancement. Directors such as Jeong Jae-eun, Byun Young-joo, or Yim Soon-rye would be a nice match for you. Get on the phone with your agent or manager and demand material that is worthy of your gifts.

You can thank me later.

An Acceptance Speech for the Ages

The only highlight of this year's particularly sleep-inducing Golden Globes ceremony was Sacha Baron Cohen's richly deserved win for Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (one of the greatest titles of cinematic history; it's almost a sacrilege to truncate it), one of last year's very best films. His acceptance speech was a thing of beauty, from which I will quote at length:

"I just want to say this movie was a life-changing experience. I saw some amazing, beautiful, invigorating parts of America, but I saw some dark parts of America, an ugly side of America that rarely sees the light of day. I refer, of course, to the anus and testicles of my co-star, Ken Davitian. Ken, when I was in that scene, and I stared down and saw your two wrinkled Golden Globes on my chin, I thought to myself: I better win a bloody award for this. And then, when my 300-pound co-star decided to sit on my face and squeeze the oxygen from my lungs, I was faced with a choice: death, or to breathe in the air that had been trapped in a small pocket between his buttocks for thirty years. Kenneth, if it was not for that rancid bubble, I would not be here today."

"...And thank you to every American who has not sued me so far."

Ken Davitian's priceless reaction shots were the cherry on top.

Oscar? Are you listening?

A.I. Bezzerides, 1908-2007 R.I.P.

One of the great Hollywood screenwriters, of some of the best films by such auteurist gods as Nicholas Ray (They Drive By Night, On Dangerous Ground), Jules Dassin (Thieves' Highway), and Robert Aldrich, whose greatest work provides the image you see above: Kiss Me Deadly (1955), a major formative film experience for me. This film took the term noir more literally than any other I can think of. The backward credits ("Deadly Kiss Me"); the off-the-wall apocalyptic plot; Ralph Meeker's brutal cynicism; the oddball gallery of characters who made more of an impression in a minute of screen time than many others made in entire films; Cloris Leachman in a trench coat and nothing else ... they truly don't make 'em like that anymore.

Link:

New York Times obituary