A threehour Korean drama about poor people struggling to get by, from a director I didn't know before. Well, of course! It's from Locarno! I had one, major problem with this film, but first: The good things. This was a very wellwritten film. Park Jung-bum both wrote, directed and played the main character, and especially first and third role was nicely done. A threehour movie has room for plot, and in this one it just rolled along. So much so that I'll admit to losing the thread after 20 minutes, and only really fully understanding what was going on an hour later. Park plays Jung-chul, who lost his parents in a landslide that also destroyed most of his house, which he's trying to restore. The disaster also turned his sister, Soo-yun insane, so she can no longer take care of her daughter Ha-na. To begin with, Jung-chul and his friends loses their paycheck from their construction jobs, as another man takes off with all their money. After a brawl with the supervisors, who don't think it's their problem, they have to find another job. Jung-chul then finds a job making soy-bricks or something (apparantly, they are making tofu?), and then the film also follows the life of his new boss and the boss' daughter, and at this point I got the tiniest bit confused, as a whole bunch of plotthreads are layed down. But wow, when they return! It seemed theatrical, the way fortunes kept being returned and revelations kept coming. Perhaps Chekovian? But instead of Chekov's gun, there's an open window, and a removed frontdoor, which all of a sudden returns and turns the film upside down.
Yeah, it was also welldirected, with many scenes being done in long takes with handheld cameras following characters around. A bit like the Dardennes, perhaps? The view on laborers without solidarity seemed Dardennian as well, spectres of Rosetta or Two Days, One Night. After Jung-chul is hired, the boss fires two older workers who could only work half as fast. Jung-chul then convinces the boss to hire his friends as well, resulting in the rest of the old crew being let go. There are no unions, no way to stand up to the more well off. It's everyone for themselves, and when fortunes turn, it's time for payback. But now about the problem with the aesthetics: Allow me to talk about color-grading for a bit. Almost every film is digitally color-graded these days, and at times it can be great. But there's also the cliché of the film being made too look only teal and orange, resulting in a boring and uninteresting pallette. I hated the colors in this film as well. We're talking winter in a rural area, so everything is all white sky and white snow, with grey concrete and a bit of black earth. And then so many people wore beige as well, for some reason. There were only a few splashes of color, which can really work, when a stripe of green or red bring light into the grays. Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Winter Sleep kinda uses color that way. But here, all the colors were dark and drab and almost sickly. At one point, a character stands in a purple sweater against a yellow wall. Now, those are complementary colors, had they been lighter it could have been cool and sixties'ish. But an earthly yellow-orange contrasted with dark reddish purple. It looked sickly. So much of the film looked sickly and unwell, including the people. Perhaps it's a Korean thing, because Kim Ki-duk's Pieta looked the same way. With that film, the combination of super-pretentious themes and ugly images made me angry. Here, I was just sad that the images weren't more pretty.
Life May Be (Mark Cousins & Mania Akbari, England/Iran, 2014)
I'm not going to write a whole lot on this one, as it was essayistic and discoursive. Filmmakers Mark Cousin and Mania Akbari exchange filmic letters. I came for Mark Cousin, filmhistorian and maker of the very great series Story of Film: An Odyssey. Yet I wasn't surprised that his contributions were quite overshadowed by those from Mania Akbari, who it turns out I knew about, as she played the main character in Abbas Kiarostami's masterpiece Ten. In Cousin's first letter he talks about Akbari, who she is, that she has directed a bunch of films herself, that she's in exile. Cousin's is a great filmcritic, and as he namedrops Scorcese, Bergman, Miklos Jancso, Bela Tarr, and several more, he makes Akbari's films seem like absolutely must-sees. Visually, he just parks the camera on a hillside watching as fog rolls down a mountain and over a lake for about fifteen minutes perhaps? It's beautiful, like James Benning, only perhaps not quite as good. But then Akbari starts talking about her house in Iran, life in exile in cities all over Europe, artpieces seen and thoughts thought. It's a jolt of energy. Cousin's picks up on the naked people in the artworks, and starts discoursing on the greatness of being naked, and then Akbari makes almost a feminist shortfilm of her waxing her legs and bathing her body, before she runs naked through the streets of London. Cousin's response seems stunned and overwhelmed. I need to watch some more Akbari, she seems amazing! And I don't think Ten will ever be quite the same film.
Field of Dogs (Lech Majewski, Poland, 2014)
Remember this one? The visionary retelling of Dante's Divine Comedy I talked about wanting to see yesterday? Caught it today. Twas quite good. It wasn't really a retelling of Dante, though. The main character listened to Dante on tape, and long segments of the incredible Italian original was recited, with English translation onscreen as well. But the film was about a young former scholar who'd been in carcrash that killed two of his friends, and who now always fell asleep and had weird dreams. But he was a scholar of symbolist poetry, not Dante, and the dreams were more symbolic creations rather than something taken from the Comedy.
It's probably easier to watch the trailer, than for me to explain all the imagery...
So, Eastern-European symbolism, and as the trailer shows: Churches and floating bodies. It has to be Tarkovskian, right? Well, not quite. An important difference is that Eastern Europe is of course not just Eastern Europe, and that Poland is catholic while Russia is orthodox means a lot. Religion in this film is less austere, less iconographic than in Tarkovsky. It's more kitschy and romantic. The style also combines highbrow and lowbrow, discussions of Heidegger and Seneca with imagery from supermarkets and informercials. The whole film is on digital, and not afraid of looking like it. There's also a bunch of CGI, though I couldn't tell you how much. When a chuch is flooded, the water is obviously fake. But are the people? Is the church? When the young man dreams of sitting on a chair on a beach with a bikini-clad babe in his lap, the beach is obviously fake. But then it cuts to the chair standing on a mountain-side, that looks real enough. And then there are the animals, the doves, the snake and the oxen. The doves seemed fine, the big yellow snake that crawls around the supermarked had to be fake, and those two oxen that plow up an aisle had to be fake as well, right? But animal wranglers are credited for every animal at the end.
In the end, the film is unique, but I don't know if I'd call it 'visionary'. Majewski definitely sees images others don't, but I'm not sure how many other would even want to attempt something like this? The film also takes place in 2010, during which time Poland was flooded, the president of Poland Lech Kaczynski was killed in a planecrash, and the ash-cloud from Iceland enveloped the airwaves. It all adds to the apocalyptic mood. And it's as a moodpiece unlike few other that the film is worth seeing.
Also Seen:
Some more competition films, Amir Escandaris visceral documentary on grafitti-artists from Sao Paolo, Pixadores, and in Nordic Competition, Danish director Samanou Acheche's very fine and poetic debut In Your Arms, on assisted suicide.
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