Rewatching Wong Kar-Wais February 25, 2009

Days of Being Wild (Wong Kar-Wai, 1990)

From now on, we’re one minute friends.

Right from the opening scene when Leslie Cheung first enters Maggie Cheung’s convenience store with his swagger and uttering lines that in any the hands of any other director would’ve come across as ridiculous and unintentionally funny, but here turn out to be one of the most memorable lines in the film, I wondered why I hadn’t rewatched this film for so many years. I really don’t remember loving this so much the first time I watched it. While I still think that the themes explored in this movie are dealt with even better in Wong Kar-Wai’s later films, this movie is still pretty special. I love the 60s aesthetic of the movie and the recurring obsession with time – the loss of time, waiting, memory and falling in love at the wrong time. It’s hopelessly romantic and filled with a poignancy and  a sense of sadness and longing that just kills me.

Fallen Angels (Wong Kar-Wai, 1995)

Since roujin already posted so many awesome screenshots from this movie, I resorted to using the New Yorker graphic instead. I don’t think I can add anything new to all of the stuff people have already said about this movie. I remember loving it the first time I watched it but this time, I am simply blown away by the experience. Just before joining my PhD program, I had an opportunity to instead live and work in Hong Kong. Watching this movie, I felt wistful for that day for the very first time in years. If Chungking Express is the movie I want to marry and have babies with, Fallen Angels is definitely the brief encounter I’ll never be able to forget. Epitome of cool.

Oshima at HFA – Part 1 February 25, 2009

Death By Hanging (Nagisa Oshima, 1968)

I recently watched my very first Oshima film at the Harvard Film Archive over the weekend. I really wasn’t sure what to expect and went to it mostly because several people over on the Filmspotting boards gave me enough virtual nudges to make me brave the snow and haul myself over to the movie. When the film began, I found myself wondering to myself what the fuss was all about. It seemed like a straightforward ‘message’ film about the abomination that is the death penalty with an additional layer criticizing Japan’s treatment of Koreans providing some variation on the theme (so much so that right at the start of the film, we are pretty much asked point blank to state our position on the issue of death penalty). Then, just as I was settling down into complacency, the movie took a completely unexpected turn. The prison sentenced to death simply refuses to die. Plus, he has no memory of the crime he has committed in the meantime. Now, this is where things started to get really interested and subverted all of my expectations. What started off like a documentary-style retelling of a man being led to his death suddenly turns surreal and even tends towards the absurd.

Over the next two hours or so, we see the guards perform endless re-enactments of the prisoner’s crime to try and get him to confess to his crime yet again. All of this feels completely staged and outrageous and I found myself struggling to discern the line between fantasy and reality at this point. All of this is depicted in this really provocative way and is so over-the-top that it elicited some rather uncomfortable laughter at least from the audience I was watching it, which I guess was the point. Stylistically, I loved the use of these long, smooth takes to depict these re-enactments.

Basically, over the course of the film, Oshima manages to give the film so many layers that it is difficult to even keep track. These re-enactments serve to highlight not just the political but also the psychological, moral and even metaphysical implications of these events while managing to stay darkly funny all the time.

It took me a while to get used to the Oshima’s style and all the absurdist stuff but by the end, I was quite into the film and regretted not watching more of the earlier films from this series.

Wild Reeds February 25, 2009

Wild Reeds (André Téchiné, 1994)

I had some seriously high expectations going into this one. After all, pixote had named it his #2 film of all time. Plus, it belongs in my favorite genre – coming-of-age films and features young and good-looking protagonists! So, did this live up to my sky-high expectations or had I just set myself up to be underwhelmed?

Wild Reeds is the story of four young people caught exactly at the point where they are on the cusp of adulthood and adolescence, an age that seems to capture the imagination a lot of filmmakers but one that seldom gets portrayed just right. The film’s title comes from The Oak and the Reed, a fable by La Fontaine that is the subject of a classroom lesson. Firstly, I was mistaken in thinking that Wild Reeds was just a coming-of-age film. It’s so much more than that. It’s a period piece about a very particular place and time – i.e. A small town in Southwest France right around the end of the Algerian conflict. Consequently, it also ends up being a political allegory. Plus, its a movie about starting to get comfortable with one’s own sexuality. It’s also a character study of four individuals caught in a love quadrangle. But all of this is secondary to what the film is really really about, namely, the intimacy and joy that friendship offers even as one is going through all of the insecurities and uncertainties that inevitably accompany the process of growing up.

Okay, so I admit, this is definitely one of the best coming-of-age films I’ve seen. I think what really makes it so great is how intimate and real and detailed it all feels. By the end of the film, I felt like I had gotten to know these characters as friends and I was genuinely invested in their future. The film doesn’t offer any easy answers nor does it offer any reassurances that everything has been resolved neatly. Rather, it shows us how these characters have matured and grown stronger during the course of the film thereby offering us hope that even though life will continue to challenge them, their ability to love and connect and change will help them get through quagmire we call life. I am amazed at the way Téchiné manages to completely do away with melodrama, downplay the tragedy and even let the political stuff remain solidly in the background and focus almost completely on the evolving relationship between these four characters. Plus, these characters always feel like completely realized, living and breathing human beings. Human beings that are thoughtful, intellectual and feel everything intensely. I love every one of them!

Another really exceptional thing about this film is the way the entire story unfolds. We seem to be merely following characters along as each scene just flows seamlessly into the next and I didn’t even realize at what point I got so attached to these characters. Even though, on the surface, these characters seem to inhabit personalities and positions that are seemingly at odds with one another (gay and straight, male and female, Communist and right-wing, French and Algerian), the portrayal of how they are drawn to each other by the shared outsider status and their circumstances is completely credible and one of the most authentic depictions of budding friendship I’ve ever seen on film. Despite the obvious downplaying of the dramatic elements in the film, I was able to feel the same sense of urgency towards every new sensation and emotion that the characters in the film are bound to feel at their stage in life.

Élodie Bouchez, oh Élodie Bouchez – where do I even begin. Why wouldn’t everyone be in love with her! She is youthful and joyous in parts, mature beyond her years and sober in others, compassionate at times and bitterly hurtful in others, but through all of this she never loses her luminescence and beauty. Her character really forms the emotional core of the film and she seems to carry that burden with such grace and ease. Seriously, I don’t think this movie has any weak performances but Élodie really stands out. Oh and Stéphane Rideau is HOT!

Ultimately, nothing spectacular ever really happens in Wild Reeds. These are simple events in the lives of normal characters and maybe that’s why this has so much emotional resonance because the film never trades authenticity for drama and never turns manipulative or false. At the end, I was left with the feeling that every relationship in this film, no matter how deep and close it felt, was ultimately ephemeral.

Yet another film with a perfect ending scene. The camera revolves in a circular pan of the countryside and we anxiously look around but don’t see our protagonists anywhere. Finally, we hear someone whistling and see three friends crossing a bridge with their arms interlinked and we feel comforted that ultimately these kids are going to be alright.

Finally, A movie I didn’t like! February 11, 2009

Transsiberian ( Brad Anderson, 2008 )
Alt. Title: Yet Another Movie about Stupid American Tourists Getting in Trouble on Vacation

Hmmm, today just felt like the perfect weather for a little suspense thriller set in Siberia. Unfortunately, even on a snowy day, when I have nothing else to do and nowhere to go, this movie felt like a complete waste of time. Firstly, the whole people trapped in a train with a bunch of people who speak a foreign language and seem mostly unfriendly and rude has been done to death and even within this familiar trope, Transsiberian seems to have nothing new to add. The first third of the film does nothing to move the plot forward but instead seems focused on what I guess might be considered as character development. And how does the movie do this? By having each of the characters narrate their back story in gory detail to another character. This director clearly believes in Show not Tell. It’s not sufficient for us to discern from their interaction that Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer are having marital problems. Instead, we have to listen to Woody Harrelson discuss these issues with a complete stranger. The entire flirtation between Emily Mortimer and Eduardo Noriega is just horribly trite and annoying.

Once we get through the customary, people getting separated on the train bit, we get to witness Emily Mortimer do a series of brazenly stupid things that just got on my nerves after a while and made me think that she completely deserved all the trouble that was inevitably to come. The film borrows generously from Hitchcock but while the protagonists’ actions always seem justified and consistent in Hitchcock’s films, this movie just elicited much eyerolling and disbelief. I don’t really have much to say about the performances either. Woody Harrelson and Ben Kingsley are okay and Emily Mortimer is just irritating (this may just be because of the way her character is written). Oh and there’s gratuitous male nudity for good measure which brings me to the key question I was left with after watching the movie: If you end up having to borrow the use of a co-passenger’s bathroom while traveling, would you too leave the bathroom door wide open while taking a shower?!

The one possible highlight of the film is the cinematography which beautifully captures the cold stark Siberian landscape. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie just failed to capture my interest in any way.

Another Far East Matchup February 11, 2009

Only Yesterday (Isao Takahata, 1991)
vs.
Tokyo Biyori (Naoto Takenaka, 1997)

So pixote,  a friend from the filmspotting forums,  assigned me the task of choosing between two movies about one of my favorite themes in the world – the power of memory and nostalgia.

Tokyo Biyori

Tokyo Biyori is a film adaptation of Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki’s own account of his marriage to his wife Yoko. The marriage itself seems to have been really passionate and loving but made more challenging because Yoko seems to be suffering from some kind of nervous disorder that causes her to behave rather unpredictably and do some really strange things. The movie plays like a retelling of key episodes from their marriage beginning with what seems to be the episode that triggered off Yoko’s subsequent instability.

So the first half of the movie is pretty much a series of episodes that illustrate Yoko’s problems. Essentially, everything we see is from the point of view of a bereaved husband recalling some of the most difficult times from their marriage. One of the things I really liked about the movie is that Yoko’s actions are never played out for melodrama or to evoke sympathy either for her or for the husband. Even in her most off-kilter moments, Yoko is always recalled with warmth and love. However, I was rather disturbed by this matter-of-fact retelling of an episode where Yoko befriends an 8-year old boy and insists on dressing him up as a girl! Through all this, the husband seems to have been entirely supportive and never seems to lose his devotion to her. There is a subtle hint that the husband being a busy freelance photographer may have been a little neglectful of his wife but other than that, he pretty much does seem like the perfect mate. Maybe it’s just my inherent cynicism that makes me uncomfortable with this portrayal. Secondly, since we never get to see what their relationship was like before all this, we are not privy to all of the stuff that makes this relationship as strong and passionate as it seems to be. Nor do we ever get to understand what could be behind Yoko’s sudden loss of balance. The second half of the movie is mostly about a trip that the couple took to a Japanese inn in a remote town where they spent their honeymoon. There are moments of great tenderness in this part of the movie and here finally we do get to see small glimpses of Yoko’s playfulness and charm and perhaps start to understand why this entire thing works. All of this is further helped by the movie’s score which I quite liked. For me, it was mostly too little too late though and while I did enjoy the movie for its quiet and sweet portrayal of a loving marriage, I never quite got into the characters and never bought into the relationship. So, the entire experience was only partially successful for me.

Another minor gripe – I wish we had gotten to see more of the photographs that the husband took of his wife during their trip to the inn. We learn that he published those pictures as a book of photographs and every time he clicked a photograph, I found myself hoping that the movie would end with a montage of the photographs, clichéd as that sounds.

Unnecessary trivia – During my mostly unsuccessful attempts to find Araki’s photos of Yoko on the internet, I learnt that Bjork is a big fan of his and that, at her request, he photographed the cover and inner sleeve of Telegram. There’s also a documentary about Araki from 2005 called Arakimentari that I am now curious to check out. I am also now rather needlessly curious about Kinbaku!

Only Yesterday

I think we all recognize and acknowledge how powerful memories can be. However, we are seldom able to control what we want to remember or the feelings these memories conjure up inside us. Often we find ourselves remembering not our biggest successes or failures but rather random little things – an embarassing conversation with the boy one liked in class, that ugly dress one was so proud of, a fragment of lyrics from a song heard a long time ago – and what is amazing is how overwhelmingly strong and vivid these memories can be. I never cease to be amazed by how certain seemingly trivial memories never fail to bring a lump to my throat. At first glance, Only Yesterday seems to be just about all of this. We basically follow the introspective Taeko as she takes a vacation from her job in Tokyo and travels to the Japanese countryside. This journey gives her the time and space to reflect on the past and bathe in the glow of childhood memories.

Throughout the movie, we travel in and out of Taeko’s childhood and witness Taeko as a child covering the usual bases of childhood crushes, wanting to fit in, puberty and disagreements with the family. I can’t stress enough just how effective and wonderful these childhood scenes turn out to be. Even while covering extremely familiar ground, Takahata manages to infuse these scenes with so much real emotion and such an incredible amount of detail that every scene in this half of the movie is brilliant.  I love the episode involving Taeko’s crush on another boy in school. The way the entire basketball game plays out perfectly captures all of the discomfort and fear and joy of first love. I love the sequence involving the girls’ emerging puberty and emergence into womanhood; it’s both endearingly funny and sobering. I’m endlessly enamored with Taeko’s short stab at acting. It’s a masterpiece of editing and pop montage. The final moment is deeply redemptive and triumphant and wonderfully sums up Taeko’s whole life.

Through all of this, we also get the sense that Taeko is perhaps less-than-happy with her life in Tokyo and that retreating into the past is her way of not focusing on what is missing from her life in the present. I love that the final epiphany that helps Taeko let go of the past and take a chance at finding real happiness is shared by both the adult Taeko and the schoolgirl Taeko simultaneously and that allows this major turning point in the movie to also contain one of the funniest scenes in the entire film.

As for the present, Takahata never idealizes this life in the countryside that Taeko is so enamored by. He never makes the work seem light or trivial and goes into great detail to explain the process through which safflowers are converted into red dye. This entire sequence is followed by one of the most visually amazing scenes from the movie where all we see is these people picking safflowers as the sun rises from behind the mountains.

Takahata has a really deeply personal and quiet, reflective style that reminded me more than anything else of the Ozu or Apichatpong Weerasethakul films I’ve watched. The past and the present intertwine so smoothly in this movie and almost seem like they’re all dancing to a well-orchestrated tune. They inform and comment on one another constantly and it is this ability, to put us in the characters head and help us see how these memories are affecting them in the present, that makes this movie so special.

Thematically, this movie is more real than most live-action films I’ve seen. So should it have been a live-action movie then? Most definitely not. Takahata totally uses the medium to make this movie even more memorable than it would be otherwise. He uses two very different styles to depict the past and the present. The past is animated very sparsely and I love the way the colors and the details fade away at the edge of the screen mirroring the way we only focus on certain aspects of a memory and the rest is fuzzy and indistinct. All of these scenes look like they’ve been loving painted with watercolors. On the other hand, the scenes from the present use bold colors and are extremely realistic to the point of being almost documentary-like. One of my favorite scenes in the movie is the one that immediately follows Taeko’s first real conversation with Shuji. It’s a scene that’s only possible in an animated movie and best describes the sense of magic that we sometimes feel in real life.

It’s been almost a month since I watched this movie and even at the time, I knew this would almost certainly be a slam dunk. Tokyo Biyori turned out to be a pretty pleasant viewing experience overall but it was absolutely no match for Only Yesterday.

Two short reviews February 11, 2009

Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (Tim Burton, 1985)

Bizarre, whimsical, quirky and just so much fun! Firstly, this movie is just full of things to look at right from the beginning inside Pee-Wee’s apartment all the way to the very end. I was completely caught up in the crazy occurrences and never ceased to be surprised  and entertained by all the strange people Pee-Wee keeps bumping into. I love the bizarre world Tim Burton puts us in and really wish I had watched this as a child!

[Rec] (Jaume Balagueró &Paco Plaza, 2007)

This was genuinely scary in parts and I really liked the way the tension builds up as the movie progresses. However, I felt like I needed to buy into the realism and somehow believe that this was all real footage or something, which I never did and ultimately, I was left with a feeling that I had already watched this movie earlier.

A Couple of 2008 Favorites February 11, 2009

Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2007)

This film doesn’t really have a proper conventional plot or a narrative structure, per se, but instead floats around like the balloon in the film. The awesome thing is that following along on this meandering journey completely pays off because it reveals so much about childhood, about how we tend to live our lives, about everyday interactions between just ordinary people and about the bonds we end up forming with one another. I loved the beginning of the film where Simon is trying to convince the balloon to come to him. Watching this film just made me think about this sense of loneliness and need for affection that we all seem to suffer from. Not the intense, dramatic kind of loneliness but the quiet kind that we tend to ignore and not think about so much. Binoche is really great as usual. I loved the long takes where the camera seems to simply wander around the city or around the cramped apartment. Mostly, this film managed to evoke so many wonderful moments and left me with this really happy feeling. Definitely among my favorites from this year.

En la Ciudad de Sylvia (José Luis Guerín, 2008)

Wow, compared to this movie, Flight of the Red Balloon is intensely dramatic and has a complex plot! The movie has barely a few lines of dialogue and we pretty much just follow this one character around the city as he stares at beautiful women and sometimes sketches their portraits in his notebook. I have to admit that it took me a while to let go of my need to try and look for a ‘story’ in the movie and to just let myself be lost watching these gorgeous women and these complexly layered scenes involving faces and people and trains and streets all at once. Just when I found myself being drawn to something on screen, I would often find that the movie has chosen to focus on something completely different but whatever it moved on to proved to be continuously interesting somehow. At the end of the movie, I felt as though I had just spent some time walking around a beautiful city with someone who has a much much better eye for photography than I do. Pretty great.

p.s. I watched this again a few weeks later and enjoyed it even more on a repeat viewing.

Mauvais Sang February 11, 2009

Mauvais Sang (Leos Carax, 1986)

Rapturous, whimsical, giddy, romantic and even a little intoxicating, this second film from Carax’s Alex trilogy (or is it called the Love Trilogy?) combines his trademark style but this time, surprisingly enough, in what seems like a genre movie. I had read a few fleeting remarks about the film being a heist movie or an allegory on AIDS or something, which could be one of the reasons I avoided it for so long. I should’ve known better. The whole genre thing is just one big McGuffin. Carax uses it merely as a backdrop device which enables him to put his characters in these dangerous and fleeting situations and then explore their emotional state as they navigate these circumstances.

Right now, I am still a little exhilarated from the experience of watching this movie last night. Carax just fills, no floods, this movie with beautiful images. It helps that the cast is uniformly brilliant and that Delpy, Binoche and Lavant are all so young and so good-looking in this film. Delpy looks angelic, Lavant is magnetic and Binoche is stunning in every single frame. Carax takes complete advantage of this and lets the camera linger on their faces in tight close-ups making for some jaw-droppingly beautiful screenshots. This movie sets the precedent for a lot of the awesome stuff in Les Amants but is no less interesting, just more intimate in scale. I love the way this film segues seamlessly and without warning into black and white, into a silent film, the way a brawl turns into a pantomime and that it features this brilliant tracking shot of Lavant cavorting in his usual manic fashion to Bowie’s “Modern Love”. Another special treat is this entire interlude set to the music from Limelight.

Carax’s almost ridiculous romantic sensibility makes for a really magical movie-watching experience. I love this movie!

More 2008 Films! February 11, 2009

Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, 2007)

Firstly, this film is just ridiculously beautiful. Beautiful in a way that it reminded me of Days of Heaven! The first six minutes of this movie are just absolutely awesome and just after watching that, I was all ready to completely fall in love with this movie. I was still with the movie for the first 30-45 minutes and really liked the way we are just thrown into this story where something major already seems to have occurred that we are yet to discover the details of. Aesthetically, I loved this film. Everything just feels perfectly natural and for quite a long time, I was happy to just quietly observe the rituals and routines that these people are engaged in everyday. I loved the way he uses all these everyday sounds to really paint a picture of this place. However, after a while, all the silence and the quiet discussions between the father and someone or the other about his predicament just ceased to interest me. I found myself detached from the film and while the film picks up momentum around the hour and a half mark, the ending left me with mostly bewildered. It obviously reminded me of Dreyer but didn’t carry the same emotional weight for me. All that being said, I do wish I had watched this on the big screen and will definitely revisit it if it plays anywhere close to me. This has also made me curious enough to want to watch the other films by Reygadas.

Reprise (Joachim Trier, 2006)

In complete contrast to the quiet, austere opening of Silent Light, I was pretty pumped while watching the fast-moving, energetic opening sequence of Reprise. While this type of opening montage involving alternate possibilities can often feel lame, it really worked for me in this case. I was excited to see how Phillip & Erik’s lives turn out. I love the basic premise of this movie. Basically an exploration of how it feels to be young, literary and ambitious and maybe even a little pretentious. There are several moments in this movie that I really loved and I liked them so much that if I think of just those scenes, I can probably convince myself that I liked this movie a lot more than I really did. I also really enjoyed the switching back and forth in time wherein the movie takes us to Erik’s past to explain some decision in the present or flashes back to happier times shared by Phillip and Erik. This makes for one of my favorite moments in the movie where after a series of really grim and heavy scenes, someone from Erik’s past appears and completely breaks the tension in the scene. Very cool. Some of the scenes between the boys and their girlfriends felt pretty perfect as well. However, the movie also has parts that I found stupid and annoying. Ultimately, I felt like the film just dealt with these characters and their angst very superficially and never gave me a good sense of what it is exactly that’s plaguing Phillip so much. I liked how stylish the movie is and that it reminded me of Jules et Jim. Except, it also reminded me of how good Jules et Jim is in comparison. So yeah, I recommend it but with some reservations.

Coming-of-Age Double Feature February 11, 2009

Water Lilies (Céline Sciamma, 2007)

I really like films that can transport me to an entirely different world and still make that world feel completely authentic. Water Lilies completely succeeds for me in this respect. We are in the world of these teenage girls who are into synchronized swimming (which makes for pretty pretty screenshots), a world where adults are invisible and boys are almost incidental. I am no teenage french girl but this movie was still so hard for me to watch because Marie’s sadness and the pain that every girl in this film is going through felt totally real to me and totally took me back to when I was 13-14 years old (a time I prefer to forget frankly ). It’s a beautiful film to look at and experience and I liked it a lot. I think this movie would have had a bigger impact on me if I hadn’t watched Ratcatcher so recently. Somehow, despite liking this film a lot, I felt like it borrows enough from other films I love to not feel completely new and different for me. Oh and Adele Haenel is totally awesome as are the other girls.

Times and Winds (Reha Erdem, 2006)

A beautiful and contemplative look at life in a little Turkish village set in the mountains as seen from the point of view of three kids growing up (far too quickly) there.  I am partial to coming-of-age stories and this one is particularly evocative and compelling. The film sets up a really particular mood and while watching it, I was struck by how well it was able to evoke this sense of the inevitability of the end of childhood. The issues that these kids are faced with may be different from things we have ourselves experienced but the emotions ring completely true and stay totally universal. There were several scenes in the movie where I found myself physically cringing because I could actually feel the pain that these children are experiencing. I liked the way Erdem parallels the rhythmic nature of time and the cyclical pattern of human nature. The way we continue to repeat the sins of our ancestors. There is a sense that everyone in this town is stuck and that nothing is moving forward and simultaneously a feeling that these kids are being rushed far too quickly to adulthood. The performances are all really brilliant, especially from the children and I was really happy every time the two boys were on screen together. Their simple, quiet friendship was just so wonderful to watch. The cinematography is superb and the camera keeps lingering on the landscape and pausing on the kids youthful faces, capturing both with incredible beauty. Erdem intersperses scenes in the film with shots of the kids just lying on the ground or asleep someplace outdoors and that imagery feels really powerful. I felt like those scenes actually made the film even more poignant and powerful for me even though they don’t really forward the plot or try to make any sort of major point.

This movie could have quite easily made my Top 5 for this year except for a couple of things. For one thing, I found the score distracting. I loved the quiet nature of the film and the sweeping, dramatic score felt incongruous to me. Secondly, there is this one scene in the movie that doesn’t really ruin the movie, per se, but still felt contrived and predictable and a little manipulative to me. Due to all this, the movie falls a little short of being perfect for me. Nevertheless, a pretty great watch.