2011 New Directors/New Films Review Round-up

The 40^th edition of New Directors/New Films screens at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s (FSLC) Walter Reade Theater from March 23 through April 3.  Below are reviews of some of this year’s selections.

Belle Epine (Rebecca Zlotowski)

Prudence (Lea Seydoux), the 17-year old girl at the center of Rebecca Zlotowski’s Belle Epine, is left adrift and rootless after the recent loss of her mother.  She lives in their house with her older sister, and their father is far away, in Canada, and his only presence in the film is an occasional voice on the phone.  Numb from the loss, she casually gets into petty thievery; in the opening scene, she is caught shoplifting and forced to strip, along with Marilyne (Agathe Schlenker), who has also been caught, and whom Prudence befriends shortly thereafter.  The two make a decidedly odd, yet compatible, pair: Marilyne is worldly and sexually aware, while Prudence is more shy and withdrawn.  Eventually Prudence is pulled into the orbit of Marilyne and her friends, and their world of nocturnal, illicit motorcycle drag races.  However, her unresolved issues of loneliness, isolation, and aimlessness prevent her from using her new friends to escape from her circumstances.  Belle Epine nicely evokes a moody atmosphere, and is intriguingly vague about its specific time period, lending the film a timeless quality.  Unfortunately, the subtly exploitative nature of the visual fascination with these nubile and sometimes nude young girls sits rather uncomfortably with the more thoughtful and sensitive aspects of the scenario.

March 24, 6pm (FSLC) and March 26, 1pm (MoMA)

Curling (Denis Cȏté)

Curling revolves around an isolated father and daughter who most live in self-imposed hiding from the rest of the world.  Jean-Francois (Emmanuel Bilodeau), the father, when questioned by an eye doctor about her daughter not attending school, curtly replies, “That’s our business, sir.”  Jean-Francois carefully constructs a cocoon to protect his daughter Julyvonne (Philomène Bilodeau) from what he perceives as dangerous influences from others.  However, the strain of this situation is subtly evident at first, but becomes more pronounced as events slowly unfold.  Julyvonne seems a rather impassive girl, nearly autistic, due to her lack of interaction with other children her age.  Her discovery of dead bodies in the snow early in the film frightens her at first, but transforms into a rather morbid curiosity and fascination.  Jean-Francois works at a bowling alley, where his boss Kennedy (Roc Lafortune) constantly exhorts him to become more outgoing and take up some kind of interest or hobby.  Jean-Francois also works at a nearly deserted motel, which is about to be closed by the older couple who runs it because of the lack of customers.  Jean-Francois comes upon a grisly discovery of his own, when he comes upon a room whose floors and walls are covered in blood.  In most other films, these murders would be the focus, but luckily for us, Curling isn’t most films, and is far more mysterious and intriguing.  The characters of the father and daughter, played by an actual father and daughter, are central, especially the father, as interpreted by Bilodeau’s moody and restrained performance, through whose prism the film offers a penetrating psychological portrait.  Jean-Francois’ retreat from the world, broken somewhat by his nascent interest in the titular sport, is indicative of a deeper trauma, which the film doesn’t fully explain.  Curling’s wintry and beautifully shot landscapes also powerfully illustrate the protagonists’ isolation, and the film’s refusal to spell everything out in the characters’ back stories creates an enigma at its heart that draws us in even deeper.

March 26, 6:15pm (MoMA) and March 27, 3:30pm (FSLC)

Pariah (Dee Rees)

Coming-out stories are a common and familiar staple of gay-themed films, and many of them follow similar trajectories.  Dee Rees’ debut feature Pariah, an expansion of her 2007 short film, while on the surface adhering to these patterns, elevates itself by vividly rendering a very specific milieu, and accompanying its scenario with stunning visuals courtesy of cinematographer Bradford Young, who won a prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.  Pariah itself won the U.S. Dramatic Competition at Sundance.  Alike (Adepero Oduye), a 17-year old high school girl, is open to her friends and very secure in her lesbian identity.  However, she is compelled to hide this fact from her parents, especially her religious mother Audrey (Kim Wayans).  It’s clear that they both strongly suspect the nature of her sexuality, but her mother is in stubborn denial, telling her at one point, “God doesn’t make mistakes.”  Alike confides in her best friend Laura (Pernell Walker), who drags Alike to lesbian clubs, even though this is not really her scene.  Alike is a burgeoning poet, and the film is punctuated by scenes of her reading her poetry.  Audrey’s quest to feminize her daughter leads to Alike’s meeting Bina (Aasha Davis), a daughter of one of Audrey’s friends.  Alike is at first resistant, resenting this forced friendship, but soon she warms up to Bina, when they discover common interests.  What’s more their friendship goes in a direction that would definitely not please Alike’s mother.  Alike’s romantic entanglements and her eventual confrontation with her mother compel her to seek a path to a new life, one in which she can be herself more freely.  Pariah is clearly and consciously meant to be an inspirational film for gay teens, but it succeeds in being much more, due to its beautifully drawn sense of place (the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn), and impressive performances by both Oduye and Wayans.

March 26, 8pm (FSLC) and March 28, 9pm (MoMA)

For more information on these and other festival films, and to purchase tickets, visit the New Directors/New Films website.

Korean American Film Festival New York 2011 Preview

The 5^th edition of the Korean American Film Festival New York (KAFFNY), screening from March 17-20, offers a very eclectic and wide-ranging program that includes classic Korean cinema (1956’s Madame Freedom, opening night with a live re-score by DJ Spooky), a retrospective of documentary filmmaker Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, two films from/about North Korea (the 1978 NK soccer film Center Forward and the recent documentary The Red Chapel), experimental films, and short film programs.

           

The Kim-Gibson retrospective includes her 1999 documentary Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women, which concerns the plight of women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II.  The bulk of the documentary consists of filmed testimony by those who survived, including Kim Hak-soon, who in 1991 was the first “comfort woman” to publicly tell her story to the media, giving others who went through this ordeal the courage to step forward.  The most powerful and compelling sections of Silence Broken are of these women relating their horror stories of their treatment by the Japanese, as well as the shame and neglect they suffered after the war when they returned to Korea.  Kim-Gibson’s film also gives voice to Japanese commentators who refute the women’s testimony, including a pair of academics and a former Japanese soldier.  The film very clearly takes the position that their statements are not at all credible.  Other Japanese voices in the film counterbalance this, however: one scholar produces clear evidence of the plan to take comfort women from other countries, including China and Taiwan, to serve Japanese soldiers; a Japanese man who served in the war describes his job transporting the women to their shacks; and a young woman is interviewed who believes Japan should make this part of their history part of the education curriculum.  The documentary’s least compelling material is the dramatization sequences, which add unnecessary illustration to the already powerful stories told by the women.  In contrast, Byun Young-joo’s trilogy of documentaries focused almost entirely on the comfort women’s recollections, without resorting to such well-worn techniques as dramatization and frequent use of archival footage.  Still, Silence Broken is an important and necessary film that documents a still unresolved issue, as Japan to this day has never publicly apologized or offered adequate compensation to those victimized by this shameful episode of history.

Another compelling selection of this year’s festival is Peter Bo Rappmund’s psychohydrography, an hour-long experimental visual essay composed entirely of time-lapse still photography, capturing the flow of Los Angeles’ water supply from the Easter Sierra Nevada mountain source, through the Los Angeles River and the Los Angeles Aqueduct, to the Pacific Ocean.  The film’s rich soundtrack, consisting of ambient sound from the area such as whooshing water, wind, and buzzing flies, as well as what sounds like an old LP record stuck in a groove, are an overwhelming and sensuous accompaniment to its unique visuals.  The film has a very sculptural feel, and blurs the line between photography and animation, still and moving images.  Rappmund was mentored by and studied under such avant-garde cinema icons as Stan Brakhage, James Benning, and Phil Solomon, as well as the brilliant chronicler of L.A. Thom Andersen.  Their influence is clearly evident, especially Brakhage and Benning; comparisons can also be made to Godfrey Reggio’s films (e.g. Koayanisqatsi).  Rappmund, however, has made a resonant and memorable work that stands fully on its own, and offers beautifully textured sound and image that richly reward repeat viewings.

For more information on these films and other KAFFNY selections, and to purchase tickets, visit the festival website.

PSYCHOHYDROGRAPHY preview 720P from Peter Bo Rappmund on Vimeo.

2011 Korean Cinema Blogathon: An Interview with Director Gina Kim

My contribution to the 2011 Korean Cinema Blogathon, curated by the great sites New Korean Cinema and cineAWESOME!, is this previously unpublished interview with Seoul-born and US-based filmmaker and video artist Gina Kim, whose films are very much centered on the female body and female desire.  Her keenly observed self-portraits and fictional character studies are both emotionally intense and intellectually rigorous. Kim first gained attention with her 2002 video work Gina Kim's Video Diary, a 157-minute film edited from hundreds of hours of footage documenting her move to the US, her extreme isolation from being alone with no friends and family and speaking little English, and her struggles with anorexia and bulimia.  The film combines performance art and documentary to create a fascinating, intimate self-portrait.  These themes continued with Kim first fiction feature Invisible Light (2003), set in both Korea and the US, telling the stories of two women in each country, connected by an unseen man; one is the woman he has been having affair with, and the other is the man's wife.  Invisible Light, though fictional, retains the confessional, intimate nature of the video diaries, and its focus on the female body: one of the women suffers from eating disorders, and the other is pregnant and must make a decision on whether to keep the child.

Kim moved from the avant-garde, experimental nature of Gina Kim's Video Diary and Invisible Light with Never Forever (2007), a US/Korean co-production set in New York, and influenced by both Hollywood melodramas by Douglas Sirk and, more importantly, by Korean 50's and 60's "Golden Age" films such as Kim Ki-young's The Housemaid (1960), Han Hyung-mo's Madame Freedom (1956), and Shin Sang-ok's The Houseguest and My Mother (1961).  Kim was inspired by the way these films depicted women's struggles to follow their desires, even though the endings of these films thwart and deny the fulfilling of these desires.  Kim wanted to put a similar character in a contemporary setting, but allow the character to go all the way in achieving her desires, and to be completely in control of her destiny.  Never Forever's protagonist is Sophie (Vera Farmiga), a Caucasian woman married to Andrew, a successful Korean-American lawyer (David L. McInnis).  Their marriage is threated by their failure to conceive a child, driving Andrew to suicidal despair, since it is his weak sperm which is the source of their inability to have a child.  Unable to find a solution at a fertility clinic, Sophie has a chance meeting with Jihah (Ha Jung-woo), an Korean illegal immigrant, and come up with an impulsive, radical pan: she pays Jihah to have sex with her so that she can be impregnated -- $300 for each session, with a $30,000 bonus if she conceives.  Although Sophie tries to keep it all a strictly business transaction, these intimate encounters inevitable lead to deeper feelings and a conflict with her relationship with Andrew, who she still very much loves.  Although formally Never Forever is more conventional than Kim's previous films, its depiction of Sophie's character and her trajectory, not to mention the racial aspect of the scenario, complicates it melodramatic story in radical and startling ways.

Kim returns to the video diary format in her latest work, Faces of Seoul, a very personal travel diary assembled from her annual return visits to her hometown.  My interview with Gina Kim was conducted in 2007, shortly after Never Forever's New York premiere as the closing-night film of the Asian-American International Film Festival.

How did you get started in image making and filmmaking?

I don’t really have an artist background in my family; I always thought I would end up in academia like my father.  But when I was a senior in high school, I realized that I loved drawing, I loved painting, and I loved to touch things and to create things, so why can’t I do that for a living?  So after that, I went to art school at Seoul National University, majoring in painting.  But I was more interested in multimedia art, installations, and performance art.  When I was a senior, I took a class in video art, and I was instantly fascinated by this new medium.  I was completely blown away, because you could be so personal and so political at the same time with this medium.  I thought this is what I really wanted to do, because it can be a really powerful tool for what I want to say to the world. 

Obviously, the representation of the female body is a big theme in your work.  So could you talk about the genesis of your video diary?

I started keeping my video diary when I was a senior in 1995, when I first started to take that video art class.  And that was the first time I ever touched a video camera.  I was obsessed with documenting my everyday life from then on.  I was really fascinated by the immediacy of this medium, and how you can present very mundane, trivial things in a beautiful way.  Back then, I was desperately clinging to the last stages of my adolescent life.  I wanted to grow up very badly, but at the same time I didn’t know how to.   I didn’t have any role models as a female artist living in Korea, and I was extremely frustrated.  I just didn’t know what to do, so I made these confessional video diaries every day.  Then I decided to come to California to major in art, and from then on my video diary became a huge part of my life.  When I was in Korea, I had friends, I had family.  But transitioning from Seoul to Los Angeles was a huge cultural shock for me.  I wasn’t really prepared to study abroad at all.  I didn’t speak English, and I had no friends or family.  So the video camera was really all I had.  I kept the video diary almost every day, just so that I didn’t feel isolated and lonely.  I didn’t know what to do with the video diaries for a long time, so I just kept them.  But when I graduated from Cal Arts, I decided to make a video documentary out of this footage, which was something like 800 hours.

How did you go from that to your first feature, Invisible Light? 

Editing the video diaries together was a real labor.  It took me two years, and it was really painful to watch that footage again.  But when I completed it, I could tell that I’d grown out of it completely, and now could consider myself a mature artist, and no longer a little girl struggling to find her own identity in this rough world.  I wanted to carry the themes that I explored with my video diary to the next stage, and to approach a larger audience.  And for me that meant that I should make a feature film.  Because I had to reach a larger audience, what I thought back then was I should be able to put some distance between myself and my work of art.  In my video diary there was no distance between me and the work, it’s like an epic version of narcissism. (Laughs) Actually both projects sort of happened simultaneously, because while I was editing the video diary, some beautiful images would come up to my mind every once in a while, and so I took notes in my journal, and that basically became the script of Invisible Light, which was also about female identity, sexuality, eating disorders, unwanted pregnancy – issues which resonate with my convictions as a feminist artist.

Once again, these themes carry into your new film, Never Forever.  Compared to your other work, Never Forever more closely resembles what people would think of as conventional narrative cinema.  You said that with Invisible Light, you wanted to reach a wider audience, so with Never Forever, was it the same thing?

Yes, definitely.  I think I try to reach larger and larger audiences.  Not necessarily compromising my integrity or the themes or anything, but as I get older, I guess I just want to be able to communicate with more people.

When writing Never Forever, I was hugely inspired by Korean melodramas of the 60’s, and also Hollywood melodramas, like Douglas Sirk’s films, especially All That Heaven Allows, and Written on the Wind.  But at the same time, because of my background, and because of my convictions as an artist, my film is much more character-driven.  And unlike those other melodramas, the female character is the most important element of this film.  Usually, in conventional melodramas, the relationship and how they solve the problems that they face is the key element.  The plot itself becomes the most important thing, and who ends up with who is the most important question in the end.  But I wanted to subvert that, because for me that’s not as important as my female character finding her own identity.  I use the basic grammar of melodrama in my film, but the way I tell the story is rather unconventional, because I focus on Sophie’s character more than anything else, and I try to eliminate everything else that might defuse integrity of that character.

A big element of your film is the interracial relationship, which brings to mind other films, like Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, which both deal with the same issues.  Did these films inspire you when you were writing the script?

I wasn’t really inspired by them when I was writing this film.  It just kind of poured out of me in three days, so I didn’t really think about these issues, like interracial issues, religion, and class.  But after I finished the script, as I was preparing to pitch this project to producers, I was forced to think about similar films so I could make examples.  And from then on I was consciously looking for great films I could make reference to.  And those are the films I could find, like Fassbinder’s film, Hiroshima Mon Amour, [Jean-Jacques Annaud’s] The Lover.  There are some daring films that challenge the stereotypical notions of interracial relationships, but it’s so rare to find [films with] a relationship between an East Asian man and a Caucasian woman.  Hiroshima Mon Amour and The Lover were about the only films I could find.

What is remarkable about your film is the use of space and silence, and how the characters communicate with their bodies primarily.  And this is also connected to the fact that both Sophie and Jihah are in situations where they can’t use their own language very much.  Could you talk a little more about your depictions of communication with the body rather than speech?

Well, my ambition was to make the characters talk through their bodies rather than language.  I wanted to put multiple layers of irony on a female body, so that a mother becomes a whore, a whore becomes a mother, and her language becomes her body.  Sophie’s words can be deceptive, but her body is not.  When she’s making love to her husband, she’s completely submissive, and is just trying to accommodate her husband.  But in the sex scenes with Jihah, it’s completely the opposite.  To make Sophie and Jihah fall in love was a real challenge, because theirs is a very peculiar relationship, it’s like a business transaction.  They don’t meet in the normal sense.  Yes, they have sex, but it’s completely dry and clinical, like a medical procedure.  It was almost like words were forbidden because of their situation.  I felt that each sex scene should show how their feelings for each other are evolving.  For the first sex scene, I had to completely destroy the audience’s usual expectations, which is actually very hard, because Sophie/Vera is a beautiful, blonde woman.  So I had to come up with a clever way to surprise, almost intimidate the audience, even, so that they can be completely overwhelmed by Sophie’s presence and her dignity.  So in that scene, she strips herself in such a stark way that Jihah is completely intimidated, and actually scared, and the audience feels that too.

But as this sexual relationship progresses, they begin to see each other as human beings; at one point, Jihah asks Sophie if he’s hurting her.  Although it’s still a business transaction, a humane interaction starts to happen.  After that, they have their fight in the Chinese restaurant, and their lovemaking for the first time becomes passionate and real.  And I think she’s already pregnant by that point.  And because she’s pregnant, she gets her desire back.  There’s a line in Invisible Light that says, “It’s as if the baby inside me is longing for its father.” 

Could you talk a little more about the two Korean men – Jihah and Sophie’s husband Andrew – and what you were trying to do with the contrast between these two characters, and how this differs from the normal representation of Korean men or Asian men in other films?

A lot of people have asked me why I made Sophie a Caucasian woman.  Although the character of Sophie is somewhat autobiographical in terms of what she’s obsessed with and why she struggles for it, I tried to be very careful not to get too attached to Sophie, because then it becomes just completely narcissistic.  I wanted to put some distance between myself and Sophie so that I could view Sophie objectively as a character. 

As for the two Korean men, before Never Forever, I only dealt with female characters, and I was never really interested in male characters, so that was a big challenge for me with this film.  So I wanted to make those male characters closer to me, people I can identify with, although I am a woman, so that I can portray them as realistic characters.  When you look around the United States, in Western culture in general, East Asian men are completely desexualized.  While black and Latino men are often sexualized, East Asian men are depicted as just these nerds, geeks, computer genius kind of guys.  I also realized that there was this spectrum of stereotypes about Asian men.  On the one hand, there is somebody like Jihah, who is a poor immigrant, who doesn’t speak English very well, who you often see on the streets of Chinatown.  And you wouldn’t necessarily consider them as men who you can have sex with or have any kind of communication with.  We see them as just random laborers, anonymous people on the street, with no lives.  Many of them don’t have visas, so they don’t even exist in a way, they’re just complete outsiders.  All they have is their bodies, and it’s really ironic that they are desexualized, because they are actually very sexual people, because they have healthy bodies, and they utilize them to make money.  So I wanted overturn this stereotype, and portray Jihah as an extremely sexual person.  But on the other end of the spectrum there’s Andrew, who is a very successful lawyer, and one of the very few exceptional East Asian men who can be sexualized in this culture.  They can go out with white girls, because they’re successful, tall, well-built.  Andrew is one of those very rare, very lucky East Asian men who are considered attractive by the mainstream culture.  But again, I wanted subvert this image, and put irony onto his body. His sperm is weak, he’s infertile, and so by definition he’s not a sexual person.  I really wanted to reverse these two opposite stereotypes concerning East Asian men. 

There’s also, obviously, the theme of adultery, which is a very popular subject in Korean films, for example A Good Lawyer’s Wife, and Driving with My Wife’s Lover.  In a Korean context, why do you think this is such a popular subject? 

Because Korean people are extremely sexually repressed! (Laughs) But I think that’s changing, especially among the younger generation. Still, even for somebody like me, who studied and lived in the United States, and who is extremely liberal, when I see my friends getting divorced in Korea, I still find it surprising.  Then I think, wait a minute, why am I surprised?  I mean, people do that all the time, and they should if it makes them happier.  It’s really shameful that even somebody like me thinks that adultery is something really outrageous.  I don’t know, I think it has to do with the Confucian tradition.  I never really believed in that ideology, but still it’s there, I think, in the back of my mind.  And especially for women, they all know that they are free to do whatever they want to do, but in real life, it’s extremely hard to do, they don’t have the courage.  Korean women are facing a lot of dilemmas these days.  For the younger generation, like me, we are different from our mothers’ and grandmothers’ generation.  We had the opportunity to get educated.  But as soon as you graduate from college, if you’re a woman, people will ask you, “So, when are you going to get married?  Who’s your boyfriend?”  And we pretend not to care, and we try not to care, but still it’s very hard not to care about those silly social norms.  And because of that, a lot of women are still repressed, despite being advanced in terms of their philosophy.  They’re very radical, very well educated, very liberal, but they’re still sexually repressed.  And that’s I think why these really outrageous adultery stories are so popular in Korea.

What has been the audience reaction to the film in Korea?

Well, it was widely released, and was very warmly received from critics.  But I was quite surprised, puzzled, and kind of amused by the fact that some Korean men were just really infuriated that this female character is completely different from typical female characters that they see in TV soap operas.  Sophie’s an upper class woman, married, with a perfect life, but she starts this affair with this poor immigrant guy.  But on a TV soap opera, she would get punished, either by the society, by the family, by the husband, or else abandoned by her lover.  Or if she leaves her husband and chooses the lover, they end up living miserably.  But Sophie’s choice is not really about these men, it’s about herself.  So at the end of the film, I completely took the guys out of the picture, so we don’t know for sure who she’s with.  So some Korean guys were really furious about the ending – she was with two guys at the same time, and now she’s alone and happy?!

How do you think your films fit, if they do at all, in the tradition of feminist cinema?  I’m thinking specifically of filmmakers like Chantal Akerman, Yvonne Rainer, Su Fredrich, people like that.

I think it’d be arrogant to compare my films with theirs, because they are just really amazing filmmakers, and I’m not there yet, obviously! (Laughs)  But at the early stages of my filmmaking, when I was making my video diaries and experimental shorts, I was hugely inspired by them.  But these days, I’m really interested in issues of masculinity, too.  Because that’s what really disturbs me these days, especially in Korea, is this disturbed and sort of fucked up masculinity of Korean men, which causes so many problems.  Korean women are actually more advanced than Korean men, who still cling to these pre-modern concepts of sexuality and marriage, which is really unfortunate.  And because of that, they become really violent, not necessarily physically, but psychologically.  And because of that, they enjoy violent movies because of that, and misogynistic culture.  Male fraternity culture is expanding, and is growing more popular each year, which is just really astonishing.  Korea has a turbulent history, with colonization by Japan, and the Korean War, and Korea in a way is still a colony of the United States.  As Korean women, we were able to say that we were the victims, we were able to lament our sorrow.  But Korean men were in a really strange, peculiar situation, because they were the ones who sent the comfort women to Japan and China, they were the ones who made their sisters and daughters fuck U.S. soldiers.  And the men were in this really strange position, because in relation to Korean women, they are bigger, more powerful, the stronger predators.  But in relation to the United States army, or the Japanese empire, they are the feminine figures, they are lesser, they are weaker, they are the victims.  So they are kind of schizophrenic, and their masculinity is really tormented, and they just never really have the chance to reflect and come to terms with themselves, not even to this day, because we’ve never really talked about these kinds of things.  So right now, I’m more interested in Korean men’s psychology, and Korean men’s masculinity, and how it leads to fascism.

What are your thoughts on the current state of the Korean film industry, especially with films like yours, which are not necessarily considered blockbusters?

Since 1999, since Shiri, that blockbuster culture made the Korean industry really blossom, and was expanding every year.  But this year [2007] is kind of a crisis for the Korean film industry.  The money dried up because they made too many films last year [2006], and most of them didn’t break even.  And a lot of financiers, investors, and production companies went bankrupt.  But in a way, I think it’s a phase that we had to go through, because it was expanding too much.  And because of that, there were too many people involved who were not film lovers, who are not really interested in films to begin with, and who just wanted to make a profit out of the film industry.  So now the bubble the industry was in is diminishing.  And now only people who really love films, and who will make films no matter what happens, will stay in this film industry.  It’s sad that it’s not doing well, but ultimately, I’m still optimistic. 

Sabu at Japan Society: "Monday" and "Non-Stop" Q&A

Sabu made his first trip to New York to attend the first three days of his Japan Society retrospective "Run, Salaryman, Run," which continues until February 5. Below are video of his introductions and Q&A sessions for the screenings of Monday and Non-Stop (aka Dangan Runner).





And here's Yasu Inoue's great trailer for the retrospective:

Review: Gregg Araki's "Kaboom"

Kaboom. 2010. Written and directed by Gregg Araki. Produced by Gregg Araki and Andrea Sperling. Cinematography by Sandra Valde-Hansen. Music by Ulrich Schnauss, Mark Peters, Vivek Maddala, and Robin Guthrie. Production design by Todd Fjelsted. Costume design by Tracye Gigi Field.

Cast: Thomas Dekker (Smith), Haley Bennett (Stella), Chris Zylka (Thor), Roxane Mesquida (Lorelei), Juno Temple (London), Andy Fischer-Price (Rex), Nicole LaLiberte (Red-Haired Girl), Jason Olive (Hunter), James Duval (The Messiah), Brennan Mejia (Oliver), Kelly Lynch (Nicole).


Kaboom, the latest film by Gregg Araki, is billed as “The Gregg Araki Movie.”  This strongly indicates that Kaboom can be seen as a sort of career summing-up, marrying the anarchic, subversive, go-for-broke sensibility of early films such as The Living End and Totally F***ed Up with the more sophisticated filmmaking techniques of Mysterious Skin and Smiley Face.  Araki’s last film Smiley Face was a pot-fueled comedy, and Kaboom unfolds as a kind of stoner’s conspiracy-theory fantasy. 

Kaboom opens with a mysterious recurring dream of the protagonist, Smith (Thomas Dekker), a college student who, by his own description is “18 and perpetually horny.”  Although he is attracted to men, he refuses to identify himself as gay, being far more fluid in his sexual identity, having had sex with women as well, including his best friend and classmate Stella (Haley Bennett).  Smith is driven to distraction by his blonde, lunkheaded surfer roommate (Chris Zylka), named Thor (“like the comic”), whom Smith suspects may have homosexual tendencies.  “He’s too into his body,” Smith tells Stella; more suspiciously, Thor has a closet full of color-coordinated flip-flops.  Stella, meanwhile, pursues an ill-fated relationship with Lorelei (Roxane Mesquida), who turns out to be a witch with supernatural powers.  This is far from the only strange thing that happens.  Smith begins getting cryptic notes shoved under his door, such as “You Are The Chosen Son.”  But the craziness truly begins at a party during which Smith eats hallucinogen-laced cookies, hooks up with London (Juno Temple), a wild, free-spirited woman, and meets a red-haired woman (Nicole LaLiberte) he first encountered in his dream.  After the party, Smith is involved in a bizarre incident in which he and the red-haired woman are chased an attacked by men wearing animal masks.  Throughout most of the film, it is unclear whether these episodes are real, or a figment of Smith’s hyperactive, over-sexed imagination.  The story threads eventually come together to form a vast, global conspiracy that is hilariously explained breathlessly by one of the characters late in the film, in which everything we have seen before is revealed to be not what they appear.  This late-film explanation is reminiscent of the latter minutes of a typical Scooby-Doo episode, as villains become unmasked.

Kaboom rides at a brisk pace, continually topping itself with outrageous, hilarious, WTF moments.  Araki’s digital palette is full of lights and bright colors, appropriate to the phantasmagoric, psychedelic nature of the proceedings.  Kaboom is far more fun and far less tedious than Gaspar Noe’s wildly overpraised Enter the Void, another film that attempts to convey the experience of being under the influence of hallucinogenic substances.  Kaboom is also steeped in a polysexual eroticism that challenges the orthodoxies of identifying exclusively with heterosexuality or homosexuality.  This free-wheeling fluidity extends to Kaboom’s narrative, which expands outward from its college campus to implicate the entire world, the last shot illustrating the film’s title.

Kaboom opens today in New York at IFC Center.  Gregg Araki and Thomas Dekker will appear in person Friday and Saturday at the 8:10 and 10:10 shows.  Click here for ticket info. 

"Run, Salaryman, Run!": A Sabu Retrospective at Japan Society

The director, writer and actor Hiroyuki Tanaka, under his nom de cinema Sabu, has created a unique cinematic universe consisting of such types as salarymen, yakuza, punk rockers, samurai ghosts, and other assorted characters who collide in incredibly kinetic and fatalistic plotlines and situations.  Sabu makes great use of these familiar types, often turning them on their heads (his yakuza are often bumbling and inept fools), injecting some freshness in these often stale archetypes.  While not without their flaws, especially in the latter acts where he can’t quite sustain the pace and invention of their earlier sections, Sabu’s films are stylistically riveting, with plenty of inspired and hilarious passages, and they’d never be mistaken for anyone else’s.  Five of Sabu’s ten features will be screened at a retrospective entitled “Run, Salaryman, Run!” screening at Japan Society from January 26 through February 5.  Sabu will appear in person for three of the screenings (Non-Stop, Postman Blues, and Monday), and this series is an ideal introduction to a filmmaker whose work is very rarely screened in the US.

Sabu’s 1996 debut feature Non-Stop aka Dangan Runner (January 29, 7:30pm, Sabu intro/Q&A), as the title of Japan Society’s retrospective indicates, anticipated Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run, which appeared two years later.  Its looping narrative structure, a Chinese box of nested flashbacks and fantasy sequences, also drew many comparisons to Quentin Tarantino’s films.  Perhaps this is the reason that Non-Stop, to the best of my knowledge, is the only one of Sabu’s features to be theatrically distributed in the US.  Non-Stop is essentially a feature-length chase scene, consisting of three runners pursuing one another, all losers in their own way.  Yasuda, a recently fired restaurant worker (Tomorowo Taguchi, best known for the Tetsuo films), attempts to follow through on his ex-girlfriend’s dismissive edict to “be a man” by robbing a bank, but is foiled by his failure to bring a mask to conceal his identity.  He is caught trying to shoplift a gauze mask at a minimart by Aizawa, a junkie wannabe rock star (Diamond Yukai) working there as a clerk, who chases Yasuda out of the store after taking away his gun.  Aizawa is chased in turn by Takeda (Shinichi Tsutsumi), who is owed money by Aizawa for the drugs he bought from him.  As they run, the frequent flashbacks detail their connections to one another, and their respective failures in life that has led to this absurd, nearly endless chase.  One of the most inspired passages consists of a sex fantasy among all three of them inspired by an attractive woman they pass by as they are running, which ends with a yakuza boss puffing on a cigar.  Sabu’s stylistics are already fully in place, his scenario challenging itself to top what comes before in outrageousness and audacity, and while it doesn’t always succeed in doing so, the breezy pace makes it always fun to watch.  The Tarantino comparison is also pertinent in the casualness with which it treats events which in other contexts would be tragic, for example a woman’s accidental shooting death during the chase.

           

Sabu’s next feature Postman Blues (1997) (January 28, 7:30pm, Sabu intro/Q&A) centers on Sawaki (Shinichi Tsutsumi), a postal carrier regarded by most as a faceless vessel for people’s mail, whose simple act of visiting his old school buddy Noguchi (Keisuke Horibe), now a yakuza drug runner, gets him unknowingly embroiled (in now established fatalistic Sabu fashion) in a pursuit by the police.  A comic riff on a Hitchcockian Wrong Man scenario, the police wildly misread what they see during their surveillance, and such clues as the drug package Noguchi smuggles in Sawaki’s mail bag and his severed pinky that mistakenly falls inside, to buildup this worker drone into a fearsome criminal.  Sawaki does indeed transgress the rules, though not in the violent ways the police imagine.  He steals money from one of the envelopes to buy beer, and opens and reads people’s mail.  This leads him to two fateful encounters: with Sayoko (Keiko Toyama), a beautiful and terminally ill woman, and another terminal patient, Hitman Joe (Ren Osugi).  Postman Blues is less breezy and spare than its predecessor, and he slows down the action somewhat to allow Sawaki and Sayoko’s romance to blossom, and to allow for such episodes as the hitman audition sequence.  Postman Blues is full of film references, ranging from a photographic nod to Japanese yakuza-film icon Ken Takakura to a woman who models herself on Brigitte Lin’s trench coat-clad blonde in Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express.  While Sabu does flesh out the characters much more than in his debut film, this does result in a somewhat overlong film and a less sound narrative structure.  Still, Postman Blues does show a remarkable progression in just two features.

Sabu’s fourth feature Monday (January 26, 7:30pm, Sabu intro/Q&A) is the Sabu style refined to near-perfection, detailing the outrageous and outlandish lost weekend of salaryman Takagi (Shinichi Tsutsumi), who wakes up in a hotel room and struggles to piece together how he ended up there.  As he finds such clues as funeral purification salt and a hostess club matchbox, he begins to recall a hilariously convoluted series of events that begins with an exploding body at a funeral, and includes a dead yakuza boss and more dead bodies.  Monday is Sabu’s most fully sustained work that increases in audacity and hilarity without sacrificing its sense of internal logic, and contains perhaps the best sequence of Sabu’s oeuvre, Takagi’s impromptu dance scene in a club with a yakuza’s girlfriend.  Sabu’s most frequent star, Shinichi Tsutsumi, turns in one of his best performances here, brilliantly conveying his confusion and gradual enlightenment in the increasingly perilous predicament he has gotten himself into.

Drive (2002) (February 2, 7:30pm) finds Sabu taking a step back artistically, reverting to his earlier chase antics, with the requisite bank robbers and other colorful characters.  Shinichi Tsutsumi, one again, plays a salaryman, this time named Asakura, who suffers from painful stress-induced migraines.  He is performing his normal afternoon ritual of watching a woman he admires (Kou Shibasaki), a bank teller who goes out for lunch each day at 1pm precisely.  As Asakura watches from the curb, three bank robbers leaving the bank commandeer his car in pursuit of a fourth who double-crossed them and took off with their hard-stolen cash.  Asakura foils their pursuit by stubbornly following all the traffic rules, driving them (literally) to distraction.  Meanwhile, the fourth bank robber unluckily gets stranded by getting his arm stuck in a hole going after his car keys.  Sabu, as usual, increases the outrageousness of the journey, including a punk-rock band, samurai ghosts and soldier ghosts.  The bank robbers are also given unusual character touches; one of them turns out to be a Buddhist philosopher and proselytizer.  There is much kinetic movement but not much resonance in Drive, resulting in a film which evaporates almost as soon as it is over.  There is a bit of strain and exhaustion evident, with its “Can I top this” scenario stretched nearly to breaking.

My personal favorite of Sabu’s films, The Blessing Bell (2002) (February 4, 7:30pm) is, on its surface, the most atypical: the pace is slowed way, way down, and the film follows the journey of Igarashi (Susumu Terajima), a factory worker who comes to work one day to find that his plant has been shut down.  In the single day of the film’s time frame, Igarashi wanders without speaking to anyone, and encounters a number of characters: a dying yakuza, a jailed murderer, a single mother, a suicidal salaryman, an elderly man (director Seijun Suzuki), who turns out to be a ghost.  There is as much humor and strange incident as in any of Sabu’s other films, but he eliminates the chases and outsized antics of the previous features.  What remains is mesmerizing, compelling, and rather beautiful.  Susumu Terajima, a frequent Sabu actor, who usually plays memorable supporting roles, emerges as a contemplative and riveting lead character, his wordless performance contributing to a newfound lyricism that was submerged in Sabu’s other features but comes fully to the fore here.

Along with these five features, Japan Society's Sabu retrospective will conclude with the international premiere of his latest work, the made-for-TV Troubleman, screening on February 5 at 5pm.  For more information on these films, and to purchase tickets, visit Japan Society’s website.

The Top 40 Films of 2009 (10-1)

File this under "Better Late Than Never." Just in time for the end of 2010, here are my picks for the Top 10 films of 2009.

10. Adventureland (Greg Mottola, US, 2009)





9. Up in the Air (Jason Reitman, US, 2009)





8. Medicine for Melancholy (Barry Jenkins, US, 2008)





7. Hunger (Steve McQueen, UK, 2008)

Read my review here.



6. Night and Day/Bam gua nat (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2008)

5. Desert Dream/Hyazgar (Zhang Lu, Mongolia/China/France/South Korea, 2007)

4. You, the Living/Du levande (Roy Andersson, Sweden/Germany/France/Denmark/Norway, 2007)

3. Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso, Argentina/France/Netherlands/Germany/Spain, 2008)

A man working on an industrial freighter asks for leave while his ship is docked at port to return home to see his sick mother and the daughter he has never met.  Having been away for a very long time and essentially abandoning his family, he receives a decidedly chilly reception, especially from his father.  He gives his daughter some money, and takes off again, this time perhaps for good.  This is pretty much the entire plot of Liverpool, the latest (and greatest, so far) film by Lisandro Alonso, a stalwart of a crop of immensely talented filmmakers coming out of Argentina in recent years.  Alonso, to my mind, is perhaps the most intellectually and aesthetically rigorous of them all, his framing and editing as precise and as perfect as any I’ve seen.  His films, the previous ones being La Libertad, Los muertos and Fantasma, are not exactly the most accessible, although Los muertos possesses a frightening and mesmerizing intensity.  They make great demands on audiences, requiring them to pay careful attention to subtle details, and to stick with seemingly monotonous, mundane details, and trust that they will lead somewhere.  Liverpool represents the apotheosis of this strategy, compelling us to stick with the journey of its initial protagonist, a silent, solitary figure who interacts very little with others, and whose most constant companion is a vodka bottle he frequently takes swigs from.  His face is an impassive, impenetrable mask – he undoubtedly lives a harsh, lonely existence, but his expression gives us nothing.  He is a man resigned to his fate, and seems unwilling or unable to do anything to change it.

The film has a binary structure, and the second part of the film begins when the man we have been following disappears again from his daughter’s life, and from the film itself, which now refuses to follow him.  Instead, we stay with the man’s family, and their life on the farm.  The daughter seems to be mentally slow, and has a slight stutter.  The only thing she says to her father is, “Are you going to give me money?”  No emotional reunion here – it’s not that kind of film.  But the film ends on an exquisitely beautiful moment of tenderness.  Without giving too much away, I’ll say that it’s Alonso’s version of “Rosebud.”

2. My Dear Enemy/Meotjin haru (Lee Yoon-ki, South Korea, 2008)

1. 35 Shots of Rum/35 rhums (Claire Denis, France, 2008)

Read my review here.

One of the film's major highlights -- the beautiful dance scene late in the film:

Review: David Kaplan's "Today's Special"

Today's Special. 2009. Directed by David Kaplan. Written by Aasif Mandvi and Jonathan Bines, based on the play "Sakina's Restaurant" by Aasif Mandvi. Produced by Nimitt V. Mankad and Lillian LaSalle. Cinematography by David Tumblety. Edited by Chris Houghton. Production designed by Darcy C. Scanlin. Music by Stephane Wrembel. Songs by Siddharta Khosla. Costumes by Theresa Squire.

Cast: Aasif Mandvi (Samir), Naseeruddin Shah (Akbar), Jess Weixler (Carrie), Madhur Jaffrey (Farrida), Harish Patel (Hakim), Dean Winters (Chef Steve), Kevin Corrigan (Stanton).

What can I say about Today’s Special, opening in theaters today?  Should I start with the good news or the bad news?  I guess I’ll start with the positives.  This film has in its favor a very good cast, starting with its star, Aasif Mandvi of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.  Mandvi co-wrote the script with Jonathan Bines, based on Mandvi’s off-Broadway play Sakina’s Restaurant.  In the film version, he plays Samir, an aspiring French haute cuisine chef who has to take over the family Indian restaurant after his father suffers a near-fatal heart attack.  Mandvi is not exactly a rival to Olivier, but he performs capably alongside the two veteran Indian actors who are his costars: Madhur Jaffrey as his mother; and Naseeruddin Shah as a cab driver/master chef who is best described as the “Masala Whisperer.”  Kevin Corrigan, the stalwart indie film go-to guy, is amusing as usual as Samir’s coworker.  Mandvi is a very funny and brilliant guy on the Daily Show, so I was very much looking forward to seeing how this would translate to film. 

And now, alas, is the part where, as they say in politics, I have to go negative.  In the hands of director David Kaplan, this potentially interesting material is flattened out into the blandest sort of predictability.  I could tell where this was all going to lead from the first frame, and the film does not deviate from this a single iota.  I suspect that this was probably better as a play; the live setting most likely lent some sparks that are utterly missing from the filmed version.  In this context, it is the height of irony that Samir’s main weakness as a cook is that he follows recipes to the letter, rather than allowing his intuitive feel for the ingredients guide how he puts them together.  So much a pity that the film he is in fails to heed this lesson, making it yet another example of a frustratingly underachieving American indie.  It is enough to make one wish that Mandvi had directed the film himself.  Not that this would have necessarily resulted in a significantly better film, but it may have at least have exhibited some sort of a human personality, instead of seeming like a computer program set to “Heart-warming Festival Indie Movie.”  The food looks nice, though; see this film on an empty stomach at your peril. 

Interview with Arvin Chen, Director of "Au Revoir Taipei"

Below is an interview I conducted by email with Arvin Chen, the writer/director of Au Revoir Taipei, which was published in CineVue, the annual magazine of the Asian American International Film Festival. It accompanied my article on the Taiwanese films that screened at this year's festival.

CineVue: Could you briefly describe your background, and how you came to Taiwan to make films?

Arvin Chen: Though my parents are from Taiwan, I was born and raised in the USA, never really thinking that I might one day end up living and working in Asia. Like a lot of American kids, I grew up loving action films, fantasy films, blockbuster stuff. But in my late teens, I began to watch a lot of foreign films, independent films, arthouse films, and though I didn't study film in college (I was an architecture major), by the time I graduated I had gotten really into contemporary Asian cinema: Wong Kar Wai, Hou Hsiao Hsien, and Edward Yang, whose film Yi Yi I saw shortly after finishing with school. Yi Yi was an especially inspiring film to me – it was so (deceptively) simple in terms of storytelling, yet was quite profound and moving and universal. Though I had never met him, I knew Edward Yang through a family friend, and flew to LA to meet with him just to get some advice. I was about to start film school at the time, but Edward immediately dissuaded me (he's not a big fan of film schools), and offered me a job working for him in Taipei. I took the offer and within a few weeks was living in Taipei. I didn't realize it at the time, but I guess Taipei had quite an effect on me – not only was it the first time I lived in another country, but it was also when I first started to think about making films. I eventually still went back to film school some years later, but my time in Taiwan continued to be something that stuck with me.

CV: You've said Au Revoir Taipei is a loose expansion of your earlier short, Mei. Could you describe that film and how you transitioned from that to your feature?

AC: Mei was my final thesis film for graduate school at USC, though it was shot entirely in Taipei. At the time, I had just gotten kind of sick of shooting in LA, and wanted to try something different, yet simple, in a new environment. Mei is really just a very small little love story that takes place in the nightmarkets - a slightly romanticized vision of nightmarkets. I made Mei really thinking of it only as a short, so I was actually surprised, when I began showing it in film festivals, that there were people interested in seeing it expanded as a feature. I had never completed a feature-length script before, so it also seemed natural to take Mei as a starting point (the idea of a romanticized Taipei and young people wanting to leave the city). Unfortunately, I quickly realized that something like Mei really existed best in a 10 minute short – there really wasn't enough story or theme or conflict to be able to last in a 90 minute film. So, the script slowly mutated from a straightforward romance into something a bit more comedic and absurd. I guess you can think of Au Revoir Taipei as Mei, but with gangsters and dancing.

CV: Au Revoir Taipei has been compared by many critics to Woody Allen, especially Manhattan. There are also affinities to the multi-character films of Edward Yang. Are there other less obvious influences or inspirations for your film, for example other Taiwanese/Asian or European films?

AC: As a first time feature filmmaker, it was actually tough not to just want to pay homage to/rip off all my favorite films and directors, so definitely there are many influences from all over the place (early Woody Allen being an especially big influence). French New Wave films were something that I always thought of when writing the film, but I think people may be more surprised to find that Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket, or something like [Jacques Demy’s] The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, or even a more recent Korean New Wave film like [Bong Joon-ho’s] Memories of Murder, were all films that I watched and found inspiring elements I wanted to bring into this film and play with.

CV: What were your experiences apprenticing for Edward Yang? Was there any specific advice he gave you that was helpful to your own filmmaking?

AC: It was just amazing to be around someone who I consider to be – for lack of a better word – a genius, but it was also quite inspiring just to witness firsthand the dedication and hard work it takes to be Edward Yang and to make the quality films that he did. In terms of an experience, it was actually quite difficult since Edward demanded a lot of those around him, and definitely had what you would call an artistic temperament. Edward was a great teacher of everything, but I think that one thing that sticks with me is something he told me the first time we met, which is that "when you know what you want to say, how you say it is not that difficult.” 

CV: Did you face any challenges making films in Taiwan?

AC: The filmmaking itself I would say was no more difficult, or less difficult than filmmaking any where else in the world. It's always tough for similar reasons. The biggest challenge overall was probably trying to convince investors that we could make a film that could play not only to Taiwanese audiences, but also internationally (and vice versa).
  

CV: Do you consider yourself a Taiwanese filmmaker, or an American filmmaker who happens to make films in Taiwan? Or do you not think in those terms?

AC: I've been trying less and less to think in those terms, only because I've realized it makes me over-analyze myself and the kind of films I want to make, and also creates preconceived notions of what Taiwanese cinema and American cinema are. It sounds simple, and perhaps a bit naive, but lately I've been thinking the most productive way to think of my filmmaking in general is just to think...is this the kind of movie I'd like to see?

CV: What has been the reception to the film in Taiwan, and how different are audiences' reactions to the film in Taiwan as opposed to outside Taiwan, if they differ at all?

AC: One of the most encouraging things that have come out of the process of making Au Revoir Taipei is discovering that people all over the world pretty much see our film in the same way, and that what's considered amusing or romantic is the same for everyone. Of course people will always identify with certain characters or moments more, but just having been able to sit in different theatres with different audiences (Taiwanese or non-Taiwanese), I find that the reactions are almost identical. What's more interesting, though, is that in Taiwan Au Revoir Taipei is considered a commercial film, and in the rest of the world and at festivals, it's considered an arthouse film. That may be just how Asian films are viewed outside of Asia (perhaps with the exception of genre and martial arts films).

CV: What are your next projects? Do you envision returning to the US to make films, or do you plan to remain in Taiwan for the foreseeable future?

AC: I had never planned to make another film in Taiwan, but as I was editing Au Revoir Taipei, I kind of stumbled across another idea for a film that I started to really get into – which I basically describe as an homage to Billy Wilder's The Apartment, but set during the Asian economic boom of the 1980s. So, as long as I can find the money to make it, I think that will be my next project. I'd very much like to shoot in the States eventually, but it also seems like right now, there's a lot of exciting things happening in Asia, and it's not a bad place to be for someone just starting to make films.


Arvin Chen's short film Mei:




Clips from an interview with Arvin Chen for Taiwanese television: