Lou's Not Quite News Reports

With Fox News doing all the crazy things it is doing, CNN appears to be the voice of reason and good reporting. Indeed, CNN luxuriate in it reputation. This reputation is far from the truth. Just because you are not as bad as the worst does not make you any good. Take Lou Dobbs for example. Recently he talked about the trade issues between Canada and the US on his program. It is a complex issue that involve a host of laws and international trade organizations and rules. It is certainly something that can use a good exploration. What Dodd did however was just a long rant of “how could Canada do this to us!” There is really no reporting, just reacting. There is no consideration given for any arguments on either side. The only “justification” for the “outrage” is at the every end of the segment: “and the WTO rules for us.” The WTO ruled partially for the US and partially for Canada. This is not really important for the program, but for Lou Dobbs to rely on WTO rulings is hypocritical. Dobbs, along with the US government, has been putting down any international organization that may in anyway rule against the US. They are in favour of the so-call “bilateral” country to country agreements. Nafta is just such trade agreements between countries. Unfortunately Nafta ruled over and again for Canada on the softwood issue. I don’t mind anyone making any argument for or against anyone on any news program so long as a thorough and reasonable argument is made. To talk without consideration and reason is not bad reporting; it is simple not reporting, just running ones mouth.

Lost in Translation

Sometimes a film is hard to watch not because it is bad but because it is almost too good. Lost in Translation is one of those. It is filmed so beautiful and simple that it recalls all the train rides, plane rides, hotels, elevators, bars, streets and people in my past travels. The sense of beauty, loneliness, excitement, alienation and lost is so palpable on screen that it was as if part of me was transported back to Kyoto, Paris, London and any number of places and time. It makes me want to pick up and go; yet, at the same time, afraid of it, afraid of all the coldness of steel, stone and glass. But the loneliness of being isolated in beauty is so attractive in such a self-indulgently perverted way. Everything is tainted with this incomprehensible and fleeting glimmer of desperation. It is almost a suicidal kind of beauty, an act of self-annihilation, to get lost in otherness.

Mail-in What?!

Of all the so-called “deals” we see everyday, none is more a scam than “mail-in rebates.” Why do we need to mail in the forms? They are usually going to numbered mailboxes in a land far away. They usually take months to come back, if they come back at all. They require at least three proofs of purchase and a hand filled form. There is no way to make a follow-up or confirmation. And then, more then once, I received checks in US dollar that would cost me more to cash them. If they really want to make it a “deal” they should just lower the price of the product for the duration of the “rebate.” The company that make my computer and router and Wi-Fi can certainly do things more efficiently. So, the secret mailboxes, the little helpers in the windowless room doing the processing, and the eternity that they take are certainly not necessary. One wonders why so many of these “offers” are out there. Is it because the more hoops they make people jump through the less people would apply for it? And if you apply for it and there will be more chance of mistake and therefore rejections? Is it because if, for any reason, they do not pay you, you have no one to call or write to? And is this not really a scam?

Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks died today. She became a national and international symbol by simply refusing to give up her seat on a bus after a long and exhausting day of work. There were other symbols of the civil right movement in the US, but Rosa Parks is far and away the most beloved. Martin Luther King Jr. may be more inspiring, more missed but there is not the same kind of personal connection with most people like Rosa Park; he is just too great a man, too monumental a symbol. Rosa Parks' action on the bus was simple, personal and in and of itself insignificant. It was simply a chance occurrence onto which forces gathered and made history. In that regard, the gesture is no difference from the shoes in Gettysburg or the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. What happened with the statue of Rosa Parks is really not the gesture itself but what happened afterward. She lived a long and productive life and remained the fine and strong person till the end. The symbol was living until today. The truly remarkable thing is that not only has this symbol not diminished through this long life, it grew because of the life she lived. More than anything, every time the name Rosa Park was mentioned or when cameras focused on her, all the racist arguments became meaningless. How can anyone discriminate against this woman? And if they discriminated or still want to discriminate against people like her, how truly evil they are. It is therefore truly sad to see her go.

Perserving Promiscuity

Once upon a time people eat pretty much the same thing everyday their whole life. I was told that my grandfather ate exactly the same thing everyday even though he was very rich in the second half of his life. I do not know if most people still eat that way, I certainly do not. Neither do my friends. We take it for granted that, living in an international city, eating different foods is just the way it is. It has become inconceivable to be limited to one, or even two, cuisines. Restaurants reflect this promiscuity with “diversified” menus. This sounds good and enjoyable at first but it does not last very long. Pretty soon it is all the same everywhere, classically train chefs make dim sums, dim sum restaurants braise lamb shanks, Japanese restaurants serve pizza, and Italian restaurants cook curries. The fun of changing cuisine is that they are different, but if everybody is doing everybody else’s food, there is no difference. Melting pot is no fun, just a giant undifferentiated goo. What is the fun of promiscuity if everybody looks the same?

Bird Cold

Everybody is afraid of bird flu as if there is nothing else that can kill us. Right now the virus cannot go from human to human yet and we are worry. I am not saying this will not come to be a serious human decease but that it is still only a possibility. The common flu will kill thousands more this year than the bird flu. Some hospital super bug will probably kill more too. It is a strange thing, isn’t it, that we worry about some possible future killer while ignoring the things that are killing us right now? Pandemic is a big word that sounds scary, but we do not need it to kill us. Hey, you, blow your cigarette smoke away for me, thank you.

Do what I say not what I do!

Rumsfeld is again warning China against their large military budget and it has fallen into deaf ears both in China and else where. It is hard to be convincing when you are trying to tell others not to do things that you do much more. It is like telling India and Pakistan not to have nuclear weapons. Even though the message may be correct, without setting an example, it just comes across as hypocritical. The US likes to tell people to be like them. Militarily, China is trying to be more like the US, acquiring the same kinds of capabilities. They see how the projection of military power has helped the US to accomplish its economic and diplomatic goals, and they want it. They see how military technology helps advance civilian technology and economic and they think it is a good thing. To have one power that is doing them is bad enough we really don’t need two. But then, the US, being the one already doing them, is hardly the convincing one to say it. If the US really wants to be the moral leader, they should start by cutting their military budget in half (they would still have by far the largest budget in the world) and destroying all their nuclear weapons. Then, they will have a moral position from which to speak. Well, that is not going to happen, is it?

Flu this!

Having a flu is like having a lesson in anatomy. The virus moves around the human body as if it were a nosy tourist. The nose runs, the head aches, the joints hurt, the stomach upsets, the lung and throat itch, the eyes water, the mouth swells, the muscles tighten and the temperature goes up and down without apparent reason. Medical students should suffer thus, that way no one would fail anatomy. There can be no better study aid.

And they are "free marketers"

Governments in Western Europe and North America preach to the world and their people the virtue of free market economy. They even set up organizations to force feed it to anyone who is hungry. When the same is asked of them, Europe points to cultural heritage and the US simply ignors it. And they wonder why the rest of the world would not follow their lead? You can only sell hypocricy for only so long.

Bonus

Thirty five films later, the VIFF is over. And as a bonus, a bad cold is coming down on me full-force. I guess I won't will the gold pass for next year now that my reward is already here. Someone claim that he/she saw over 110 films in the 17 days of the festival. That is just logistically impossible unless this person keep walking out of films. And that is nothing to boast about. Meanwhile, I need detox.

Tale of Cinema

What do you do with film about a good-for-nothing jerk with a ridiculously inflated sense of himself trying to talk a beautiful actress into a double suicide modeled after a pretentious short film? I don’t know about you, I want horrible violence to visit upon our “hero.” In other words, I want him in a Miike Takeshi movie. I am saying that you can’t have a protagonist like this, but the film better go somewhere with him. Hong Sang-Soo didn’t go anywhere with Tongsu in “Tale of Cinema 劇場傳.” In the end, it was just a pale monologue: “I have find some reason to live.” Big deal! There is nothing in the heart of its main character and nothing beyond that emptiness. Why even make this film? Pretension is all that I can come up with. Oh, yeah, he did get her drunk and slept with her, something to report to the world, I suppose.

Bonjour tristesse

Melodrama is a long lost art, relegated to the far corners of unadvertised TV movies. It is not that we have gotten more sophisticated and smart, though we very much like to think so. The reason is rather that we have gotten more and more childish and alienated from the pleasure of our emotions. We want so much to understand; yet we cannot accept anything slightly out of the familiar. We consequently mistake confusion for depth, packaging for content. Melodrama is the aesthetics of emotion; it strides to evoke a certain emotion. It indulges and luxuriates in the emotion. At its heart, it is empty; and its vision, shallow. The best melodramas do not pretend to be otherwise, that is not the point. A story as convoluted as the plot of Douglas Sirks’ “Imitation of Life” and all the social issues mentioned, it is focused in doing one thing only—to arrive at the long and gorgeous funeral so we can experience the maximum amount of sadness and pity. It is tragedy in its purist, Aristotelian in nature. All the social injustice and struggle of life serves a collective experience of emotions. The journey to this end must be beautiful as it is an aesthetic experience. Beautiful is the anaesthetic that carries us through the long journey. And nothing is more beautiful than Otto Preminger’s “Bonjour tristesse.” A beautifully restored print was shown at the VIFF. The beauty of the film is blinding and the beauty of Jean Seberg is almost impossible. And its critics are correct: it is shallow and even juvenile. But then it is a film based on a novel by a rich teenage girl about a rich teenage girl’s “tristesse,” how could it be not shallow? It is far better than a shallow thirty years old pretending to have depth. And it is certainly better than seeing a seventeen-year old experiencing life like a sixty-year old. Moment by moment through the film we come to, not so much understand but, experience the “tristesse” born out of that very shallowness of her life. It is not profound by any stretch of imagination, but how beautiful it is, and how triste.

This Sort of Things Just Can't Last, Sadly.

Wrong Side Up

I do not like to watch lovable fools bumbling through life for fun; it is too much like watching torture. So, half way through Petr Zelenka’s “Wrong Side Up (Príbehy obycejného sílenství)” I was ready to do violence to Hanek, just put him out of his misery. But a strange thing happened: I started to come around and silently cheered for the fool. Part of it had to do with him finally standing up, even though just for a moment, to his mother. And part of it has to do with the love Jana as for Hanek. Through her struggle to love (or not to love) him we saw what is unique about Hanek is not the foolishness but his kind and gentle heart. This understanding is easy to say but hard to convey. Zelenka succeed by not playing things for laugh and let the humour be human and meaningful; and that is no small feat.

All Winter Without Fire

Talking about grieve, every character in Greg Zglinski’s “All Winter Without Fire (Tout un Hiver sans Feu)” carries enough to sink a ship. Laure sank into deep depression with bouts of hysteria. Jean masked his shattered self behind fake stoicism. Labionta lived in constant longing for his missing husband. Even the friendly Blerim exploded when the slightest of threats against his sister was perceived. We do not see the worst of the pain directly. We only see it through the tone of their speech and their eyes. This is no doubt thanks to the exceptional case and Zglinski’s ability to capture them. In the beginning Jean appeared to be a rock against the avalanche of sadness; but as the story progressed we realized that his stoicism was not going to save him. Labionta and Blerim, with the Kosovar and Albanian communities’ help, were able to live relatively normal life. Even Laure was able to come to accept the accident and the death of her daughter, after depression and hysteria. We saw in Jean’s eyes just more more pain and guilt. It is as if all the other characters were there to illustrate Jean’s descent into hopelessness. There are times when he could have pulled out of the descent, but he was not able to. In the end, he questioned even his own love. The Swiss Alps never looked so uninviting.

This Charming Girl

Lee Yoon-Ki’s “This Charming Girl 여자, 정혜” is rather unremarkable story-wise. This is not to say the topic of the aftermath of childhood rape is not a worthwhile subject; it is simply that Lee does not offer any new insight into the matter. This does not mean this is an unremarkable film. Lee uses the camera to let us not so much watch our heroine, Jeong-Hae, but be with her. We are never too far and rarely too close to her. We are like the angels in Berlin Alexanderplatz watching over the internal struggle of our character. Slowly we come to understand the pain and struggle of Jeong-Hae’s everyday life. It is this unique and sensitive eye that makes “This Charming Girl” a truly remarkable film. It is so easy to start explaining, to start tapping emotions, to give into anger; but Lee chose to simple let us be Jeong-Hae’s friend. The result is that we understand her experience so much better that any other film on the same subject; and we should thank him for that.

Bab'Aziz

The fortunate thing for me today is that I did not give up on the ending of “One Night” in vain. Nacer Khemir’s “The Prince Contemplating His Soul (Bab’Aziz)” is no doubt the most moving film I have seen these two weeks. Khemir weaved together past, present and future and told a brilliant fable. One of the things that makes this fable successful is the complete absence of the characters’ back-stories. People appears in the middle of the dessert without coming from anywhere. Some of them eventually tell us their stories but reveal nothing about their psychologies. Unencumbered by characterization, Khemir focuses on the purpose of fable—to teach without teaching and to explain what is impossible to explain fully. Weaving the stories together, a Sufis understanding of love and life is slowly revealed to us. In the end, love is found, fear is let go and death is welcomed. Through it all beauty is abound. The result is nothing less than transcendent.

One Night

Every film festival has at least one day where the schedule is so tight that I either miss the beginning or the end of a film. Today is the day. I decided not to watch the last five minutes of Niki Karimi’s “One Night (Yek Shab)” to go see “Bab’Aziz.” One Night is another Iranian night driving film. Its structure is far less complex than “Portrait of a Lady Far Away.” It is basically three confessionals from three men who picked up our heroine. The curious thing about this film is the heroine. We hardly know her or even have a good directly look at her. We learnt the most intimate secret of three men but what is the point? Our key to the whole thing, the heroine, is a blank piece of paper. Something revolutionarily revealing may happen after I left the theatre. Not knowing then is the price I have to pay. The chance of see this film again is slim to none, I will carry this mystery for a long time.

Netto

Robert Thalheim does something interesting in his film “Netto”—he teases the audience with familiar conventions and their expectations. An unhappily divorced husband, who fails in everything he touches, has a gun. We are shown the gun early on and are reminded periodically. Towards the end, when everything has fallen apart, the poor guy holstered the gun and goes to see his ex-wife. All the film viewing experiences tell us that violent is at the door and someone is going to get shot. Thalheim milks this till the very end. As the narrative is very sympathetic, I cannot help but hope that Thalheim will not take the easy and sensational road. This desire turns the whole experience to almost like watching a sports game. The tension is not in the narrative per se but between hope and expectation. I want my team (hope) to win but experience says the other team (expectation) is leading. Fortunately no one got kill and the poor guy found enough in himself and his relationship with his son that he left his gun behind. My team won but I am not sure my excitement complete cover over the otherwise very run of the mill film. Well, it is better than nothing, I guess.

A Rare Sunny Day in Vancouver

L'Enfer

I am not a fan of Kieslowski. He is an excellent director but I find his subject and his camera too formal and affected for my taste. Danis Tanovic brings a more human and compassionate eye to the project. If Kieslowski were alive and made this film as planned, it would have been far more stylized and self-aware. Tanovic instead chose to be more straightforward aesthetically. The result is wonderful. The topic itself, like those of Kieslowski’s trilogy, is dramatic enough that a careful and controlled unfolding is all it needed. Tanovic does not try for cheap drama, so what could have been laughably melodramatic arrives as sympathetic and nuance. It may be a descent into hell, but, as it is an earthy one, there is no need for frozen ponds and brimstones; classical tragedy is sufficient. If the short filmography does not qualify Tanovic as a master of filmmaking, he will certainly be one soon.

Portrait of a Lady Far Away

What is with Iranian films and driving around at night? It seems that every other Iranian film I have seen involve driving around cities at night. Despite this familiarity, they really know how to tell their stories in this format. Ali Mossaffa’s “Portrait of a Lady Far Away (Sima-Ye Zani Dar Doordast)” has the two protagonists drive around Tehran all night. It is an intricate odyssey, and like Odysseus our male protagonist’s plan was to see his wife and son again in the end. He was distracted by a beautiful young Afghan woman and through the journey remembered his youth again, both regrets and dreams. It is all very familiar and classical. What Mossaffa accomplished is tell his story confidently and masterfully. There is no great moment of revelation, no high drama. That is not to say there is no opportunity to do so but Mossaffa chose not to do it that way. Instead the film focuses our attention on the two travelling companions and the slow revealing of their stories. Imperceptibly we are mesmerized by the gentle story telling and the desires we come to understand. It is hard to believe that this is from a first time director.

The Bridesmaid

I never understand Claude Chabrol, or, rather, I never find much to understand in Chabrol’s films. His latest “The Bridesmaid (La Demoiselle d’Honneur)” is just one of those films that seems pointless to me. A mad woman madly in love is a time honoured French obsessions. Betty Blue is probably the best know version. The success of this kind of stories lies upon the attractiveness of the main female character. We have to understand the male character’s attraction to such madness. The Bridesmaid lacks precisely this level of attractiveness. The madwoman is just not mad enough and we do not see why anyone would fall in love with her. Failing to make this connection, the whole film feels forced and false. It just seems that everything, every relationships, are just there for no other reason then generic requirements. It is a film with the barest generic formula and nothing else.

Midwinter Night's Dream

Besides not trusting the camera, i.e. not trusting their own eyes, the sign of unconfident directors is also the distrust of the story. Goran Paskaljevic’s “Midwinter Night’s Dream (San Zimske Noci)” is the product of a director not trusting his story to say whatever he wanted to say. It is a simple set up: three damaged people came together to symbolize a damaged nation. It is a very workable premise. All the director has to do is to set it up and let the story do its work. Paskaljevic, however, does not have confidence in the story itself. Instead he tried to explain it to us with dialogues. When the story is telling us all we need to know, the added dialogues become preachy and condescending. It is sad to see this film because Paskaljevic’s last film Cabaret Balkan was one of my favourite films of the Vancouver International Film Festival of 1999. Maybe he just ran into a story with which he did not feel comfortable.

Le Grand Voyage

Overcompensation is the worst kind of artistic failure because it is a sign of not knowing what one is doing and a lack of confidence. This is doubly so when it comes to a personal story. It may be understandable if a director does not fully understand someone else’s story, but to tell something personal but does not know what to do with it borders on the ridiculous. The sad thing is how many films are over-explained and over-directed. All these director should be made to see Ismaël Ferroukhi‘s “Le Grand Voyage.” It is the story of a father and son’s personal journey, the pilgrimage to Mecca. The father wanted to go before he died and the son did not want to go at all. It would have been easy, indeed tempting, to explain everything: the emotions, the alienations, the resentments, etc. Ferroukhi instead chose to let his camera to do the talking. We see the two hajjis’ relationship changed slowly and emotions erupted briefly, rather than playing them for drama, he allowed the actors and the journey itself to tell the story. The camera captured both with care and no distraction. It was a display of confidence and resulted in a fresh and nuance exploration of Muslim and of faith.

Three Times

The common trait of great directors is the trust they have on their cameras. They plan their shots, set it up, and let the cameras do their work. It requires supreme competence and confidence to do it. The lesser directors want to move things around, cut it this way and that, put in cheesy dialogues and music, just in case their cameras cannot do what they want them to do. Perhaps no one working sets up his camera and let it work better than Hou Hsiao-Hsien 候孝賢. In his new film “Three Times 最好的時光,“ his camera is our eyes. It observed calmly and richly. It’s relative stillness allowed us to see the subtleties and nuances of what was in front—the actors, their characters and their environments. With minimal dialogues, the stories unfolded in a simplicity that allowed the stories’ depth of universality to become clear without the audience realizing. It is a truly a masterpiece, far superior to his last couple of films.

Takeshis'

Not yet sixty, is it too early for Kitano (Beat) Takeshi 北野武 to review his own life? He did just that with his new film “Takeshis’.” It was a fascinating settling of account, of sort. Almost no one is excluded; producers, co-stars, rivals, Yakuzas, agents, police, neighbours, mah-jong players, fans, etc., even Takeshi himself and the characters he played. Marked by his trademark sense of dark deadpan humour, he killed almost every one of them more then once. In the end, it was a note explaining the nihilistic Yakuzas he plays so famously. It is unique to see such a negative self-portrait. It makes me wonder how he goes on doing what he is doing. Maybe that is why he made this film before he arrives at the end of his career, he just have to vent somehow. His subconscious asserted itself and made this a far more interesting film than Zatoichi.

The Miracle of Candeal

Fortunately for me today there is Fernando Trueba’s “The Miracle of Candeal.” While its narrative can be confusing at times, the music it documents comes through brilliantly. The film talks much about history, of the music and of the black people, and it does offer background and insight into the music. This link to the past by music is, the film suggest, the source of the Miracle of Candeal—the successful home grown revitalization of the once slump. That is a very simplistic and naïve view. It also does other people in the community a disservice. As a documentary, however, it matters little with the great music played and the wonderful musicians playing them. One learns more about the people from their music than anything else in the film partly because of the directorial failure to explain in any depth and mostly because of the music itself.

Changing Destiny

Another award winner, another puzzling disappointment. Daniele Gaglianone won the Tiger at Rotterdam with the film Changing Destiny (Nemmeno il Destino) this year. It is blinding, dazzling, and psychologically complex in the sleep inducing sense. The music and camera works are so energetically pointless that it may appear to some as innovative and powerful. It would have been so if the story were successful; unfortunately, it is not. To use the story of one to represent a group is a common narrative method; even so, it works only if we, the audience, are convinced that the others in the group share the more or less the same story we are told. In this film, this is hardly so. Ferdi’s alcoholic father, we are told, is the only worker that had not died from cancer from their old contaminated plant. So, Ferdi’s difficulties with his father are more an exception than the norm. Alessandro too has a mother who was a ward of the church who was given over to a brutal man for marriage. There is no mention of other people like her. So, instead of a film that talks about the destruction of a society and its members, it is a few randomly put together hard-knock stories that do not make any cohesive points. Not only are the main characters juveniles, so too is the skill of the filmmaker.

Stolen Life

Sometimes you see a film and wonder if that is the right film because you have such different opinion than someone else. Li Xiaohong’s “Stolen Life 生死劫” received the Best Narrative Feature Award in the Tribeca Film Festival back in April. I saw it today and for the life of me I have no idea how it has won any price at all. It is not a particularly bad film. It competently tells a far from unusual story pretty straightforwardly without offering anything new. The actors performed reasonably well but they have done better works; Zhou Xun 周迅, for example, was far better in “Suzhou River 蘇州河” and “Baober in Love 戀愛中的寶貝” playing similar characters. The New York press has already made a mistake by called it a banned film while it was so new at the time that it had not applied for the approval for theatre release. I am afraid the Tribeca Festival made a mistake in calling best of anything. It is at best a very average narrative.

El Metodo

It is almost impossible for a political film to be absorbing and convincing when from the very beginning it lets its audience know what it is trying to say and how it is going to say it. Narrative fiction relies very much on a conceit—that is, at least for the moment, believed to be real. What the conceit is not there, it is more conducive to analysis than absorption. The best example for this is the plays by Bertolt Brecht. The Argentine director Marcelo Pinyero’s film “The Grönholm Method (El Método)” is one of the rare narratives that is clear in its objectives and analysis yet thoroughly absorbing in its characters and story. As much as Brecht protested against empathy, his best plays are absorbing in the same way. Without a certain level of empathy, it is difficult to access the story; and, the alienation effect is best used to control this empathy from overwhelm reason. While "El Método" has much less alienation than Brecht may like, it does achieve enough of a distance for the audience to apply their critical thinking.

The Volatile Woman

Japanese filmmakers have a unique talent in telling a perverse story normally and a normal story perverse. A good example is Kumakiri Kazuyoshi’s 熊切和嘉 “The Volatile Woman 揮発性の女.” The relationship between the gas station owner and the robber is full of perverted violence—he started by trying to rape her and later she sabotaged his moped and stabbed him to keep him around. Through a sympathetic yet calm camera, Kumakiri made the whole story look normal and even warm. We are able to see the sadness, the loneliness and the isolation of the gas station owner through our eyes and not ears. She desperately needed someone with her and we understand and sympathize with her. Even the robber, we saw his weakness and his sympathy and then care for the older gas station ower. A relationship that is usually considered wrong in every level became more like a heart warming romantic tale. We want them together; we even approve the perverted relationship. It is no small feat that Kumakiri quietly make us understand and accept something we usually think wrong just by observation, no melodrama, no lecture, just compassion. He made us human again.

Hearts, Beating in the Dark

Nagasaki Shunichi’s 長崎俊一 new film “Hearts, beating in the dark 闇打つ心臓” is not so much a remake of his 1982 cult classic of same name but a look back at it. The two original actors, Muroi Shigeru and Naito Takashi, were invited back to play the same characters 20 years older. They met again and by chance ran into a young couple that were having the same experience as they had 20 years ago—they are on the run after killing their infant daughter. Naito wanted to punch the younger man to extract so form of punishment for the act that was not punished. The three stories, the meeting of the older couple, the younger couple’s day and night, and the production, therefore intersect in the film. The true centre is Naito’s characters (both the man he plays and he as himself). Towards the end of the film, Naito twice tried to punch his younger version but could not. He wanted punishment for the crime of his youth, but after living through both the crime and its aftermath, he cannot deal out the punishment. His character eventually saved the young couple from a failed suicide. Nagasaki, 20 years after the original film attracted controversy over his film’s characters and the absence of punishment for a horrible crime, answered his critics. He was not there to judge but to understand to present the understanding. The pain, guilt and regret of the characters are what are interesting. It was as if Nagasaki was asking us “can we as humans really judge this story after we understood.” His answer appears to no. This is a wonderfully thought-provoking film I have seen so far in the VIFF.

All Stars are Beautiful, Even that One!

The old saying, “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder,” needs a fundamental update. The new version should be “beauty is on the pages of the mediator.” Not very beautiful people, even ugly people, it does not really matter, can considered beautiful after a couple magazine covers or movies. In North America, the best example is, of course, Paris Hilton. In the films I have seen the last few days, the Korean megastar Bae Yong-Jun is also presented as a fine example. The film itself is well made but ultimately forgettable, so is his star. He is not bad looking guy but he will not stand out in a picture of 100 randomly chosen Korean men. Because he was in a few widely popular soap dramas on TV, he is a megastar in East Asia. Hundreds of middle-aged Asian women lined around the block three times yesterday waiting to see Bae in the film. It was quite a sight.

Operetta Tanuki Goten

It is starting to look that musical is what old masters turn to. Last year we saw Alain Resnais’ “Pas Sur La Bouche,” and this year we have Suzuki Seijun’s 鈴木清順 “Operetta Tanuki Goten 狸御殿.” Both are formal exercises in musical in the operetta tradition. They are fluffy, fun, lovely to look at, and ultimately not saying much of anything at all. It is as if they both get back to their childhood to re-experience the innocent fun of youth. Tanuki has received some bad reactions in film festivals and it is understandable. The film is structured like a Kabuki plays and so the scenes are by nature surreal and the narrative truncated. The story also resembles classical Japanese fairytales. That could have been well received if it remained “authentically” so, whatever that means. But Suzuki made film in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, so his music includes rap, pop, classical as well as traditional. It all seems a crazy mash of cultures and genres. If we look at the director, however, we realize that this is perhaps an accurate summery of a life in film—on a classical format are attached a multitude of influences. It may lack harmony, and often not very well held together, but in old age the director had found the fun and love for filmmaking. It is lovely in its sense of fun and the child in himself that old man found.

Days and Hours

It takes a lot of narrative confident to film the mundane and tedious everyday life with understated realist tone and let the horrible past and emotional truth slowly seep through the everyday. Pjer Zalica did just that in his film “Days and Hours.” In the beginning nothing happens, a horrible thing that happened seven years ago was mentioned, the old couple’s late son was mentioned, and past relationships were mentioned. There was no emotional outbreak and no visible anger and pain, just a subtle sense of lost permeating everything and everyone. It is only when we realized that this is after all a film from Bosnia and these were Muslim there. The “thing” they mentioned in passing and the “thing” that killed the son was the same—the civil war of Yugoslavia. Without we knowing up, the sense lost permeated us also. There was nothing dramatic, just the inescapable everyday. We see everything starts to take on a deeper meaning with overtly being told. We start to see the pain the characters carry with them. And in the end when family and neighbourhood were able to embrace each other and enjoy life a little bit, we too are relieved and healing. The apparent simplicity of this film quietly communicated the horrible past, its bitter consequences and the hope and future a nation just starting to move towards tentatively. It is a great achievement indeed.

M.A.I.D.

Most people in North America do not have maid and do not spend a moment of their time thinking about it. In Asia, however, most city people, from middle-class upwards have maids. A friend from Hong Kong once told me that she did not like to lunch with her sisters because all they talked about was their maids. It goes without saying that these maids are exploited in most ways imaginable. The Thai film M.A.I.D., directed by Yongyoot Thongkongtoon, is a refreshingly funny look on the relationship between the maids and their masters and mistresses. A special investigator in the Prime Minister’s office recruited his maid to go undercover to investigate corruption involving a minister and two businessmen. The government’s future was entrusted to four bumbling maids—two from the countryside and two from Myanmar. While the film trades mainly on stereotypes, it is still refreshing in its warmness towards the maids. In the end, all the masters are corrupt dirty old men and all the mistresses pretentious fools. The table is turned a little when in the end the maids saved the day and open a school for other maid to learn how to do their jobs—self-defence, blackmail, and stealing. The film does such a good job that in the end we agree that the lessons are not only understandable but also necessary. It may seems a lowbrow slapstick to North Americans but I do not think my friend’s sisters would laugh too much towards the end of the film.