Day 2
Two days, 10 films, one post, so I’m inclined to cut to the chase and write
about the movies, though it should be noted that I’m consuming milliliters
of beverages and quick-bite plates of noodles and pizza slices at a rate roughly
equal to Noel’s.
As promised, Day 2 was Asian Auteur Day for me, which any other year would mean
the best day of the festival, but this year started out a little rough. First
up was Hong Sang-soo’s Woman
On The Beach. I didn’t get a chance to see Hong’s last two
movies, Tale Of Cinema and Woman Is The Future Of Man, but the
ones I had seen previously, A Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors and Turning Gate, were both fascinating relationship studies, complicated
by some odd structural choices. (Virgin, for example, basically retold
the same story twice, with the second half resolving itself differently based
on a slight shift in timing.) The new film is far more straightforward, though
presumably more personal, following a director who drags his production designer
and the designer’s girlfriend to the coast in order to help complete an
overdue script. The director and the girlfriend are attracted to each other, awkwardness
ensues, etc. But stripped of those interesting structural hiccups this time around,
Hong’s film struck me as disappointingly flat and banal, just another in
long line of ménage a trois gone south. Still, the director character’s
diagram of the woman’s past dalliances with German men gave me one of the
biggest laughs of the festival. (Update: I just got a report
that virtually all of my critic and cineaste friends like or love this movie,
so don’t listen to me.)
Of course, a sizable chunk of laughs are owed to Borat,
which somehow works despite the fact that it’s loosest imaginable assemblage
of guerrilla-style documentary pranks and scripted scenes. I regret missing the
film’s opening night premiere in the Midnight Madness section. Sasha Baron
Cohen’s arrival in character was apparently an event in itself, but it got
a whole lot crazier from there: The digital projector broke down, Michael Moore
appeared on stage with Cohen and Larry Charles for some improvisational comedy,
and the entire screening had to be rescheduled for the next night, which…um…
didn’t make the rabid MM crowd too happy. (A full account can be found here.)
Some of the laughs in Borat are just puerile fun—without spoiling
anything, there’s a scuffled between Borat and his rotund Kazakh producer
that may be the funniest extended fight scene since “Rowdy” Roddy
Piper in They Live!—and others that draw out the rather unprogressive attitudes
of ordinary Americans. Remember that scene in Da Ali G Show when Borat
leads a country-western bar in a rousing chorus of “Throw the Jew down the
well!”? Wait until you see him at the rodeo; it’s a wonder the guy’s
still alive.
And now back to your regularly scheduled Asian Auteur program: Hirokazu Kore-eda
has yet to make a film I haven’t liked—though I missed the largely
disliked (and undistributed) Distance—and displayed quite a lot
of range with films like Maborosi (an austere and beautiful film about
a widow coping with grief), the sweet fantasy After-Life, and his last
effort Nobody Knows, an affecting true story about resilient children
coping with abandonment. Kore-eda’s new film HANA
is an admirable change-of-pace, set in a small village in 1702, a period when
peace reigned and samurais floundered. Kore-eda follows a weak samurai on a futile
revenge quest and takes the tone of a slice-of-life comedy, not unlike those relaxed,
late-period Shohei Imamura films Dr. Akagi or The Eel. Only HANA is waaaaayyyyyy too relaxed; Kore-eda’s episodic
style, held over from Nobody Knows, does this far less compelling effort
no favors.
Fortunately, that was the end of the disappointments, because the other two auteurs
delivered in a big way: Syndromes
And A Century, the latest enchanting bafflement by Apichatpong
Weerasethakul, who continues the duel, echoing structures of his previous features Blissfully Yours and Tropical Malady. Weerasethakul has a foot
each in the generally incompatible worlds of avant-garde and conventional narrative,
and he seems to be making up his own rules as he goes along. A memoir based on
his parents’ lives before he was born, Syndromes splits neatly
into two halves: The first follows a female doctor in a rural hospital; the latter
follows her male counterpart in an ultra-modern urban hospital. As in the previous
Weerasethakul films, the two halves enter into a sort of dialogue with repeated
phrases and subtle variations. I’d be hard-pressed to decipher a good 2/3
of his symbolic and thematic concerns—his belief in reincarnation is central,
but there are references to art and architecture and shakra and aerobic exercise
that flew over my head. And yet the film is totally mesmerizing and beautiful,
provided that you just surrender to his peculiar style and allow him to work his
magic.
Last but not least from the Far East comes Bong Joon-ho’s The
Host, a genuine monster movie with political undertones that’s
currently breaking box-office records in Korea. And for good reason, too: The
effects are first-rate, the level of visual storytelling craft is right up there
with Spielberg, and Bong has a way of eking humor out of human misery. That’s
the one connection between this and Bong’s previous film Memories Of
Murder, which was about the country’s first serial killer, yet included
tonally bold moments of slapstick comedy. Memories was high on my 2005
Top 10 list; The Host more than justifies my love.
Between the Asian films, I slipped in Stranger
Than Fiction, which is a little like Hollywood co-opting a Charlie
Kaufman script, only better than that sounds. Will Ferrell plays a tax collector
who comes to realize that he’s a character in an author’s novel-in-progress
and that author (played by Emma Thompson) intends to kill him. Though the conceit
does yield some clever stuff—mainly thanks to Dustin Hoffman as a literature
professor who tries to help Ferrell find his way through the narrative—the
movie works best as a romantic comedy in the Joe Vs. The Volcano vein.
Ferrell is restrained and touching as a straight-laced bureaucrat who slowly comes
out of his shell, and Maggie Gyllenhaal exudes relaxed charm and sexiness as the
woman who inspires him. Oddly enough, the whole movie could be interpreted as
a defense of sell-out Hollywood endings, but again, better than that sounds.
I’d hoped to catch up completely, but Day Three (World Cup fever! Unsimulated
fucking! The most stupefying prestige project in years!) will have to wait. Nighty-night.