I am a big pile of lies ~ Kingo

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23 March

This is a review of Unforgiven (Yurusarezaru mono) (2013)

It is doubtful that one needs to know the Clint Eastwood original of Unforgiven (from 1992) to appreciate Sang-il Lee’s 2013 tribute version, set on the Japanese island of Hokkaido : one can easily translate a brothel in Wahiro to one in the States, and a ruthless Chief to a sheriff.

What is more likely to attract attention than such comparisons is the sheer beauty of the film, although, because of the samurai component, one is also making mental references to others, such as Kill Bill Volumes 1 (2003) and 2 (2004) and Only God Forgives (2013), neither of which comes off well, especially the latter. The reason being that Tarrantino, as often enough, is so knowing that the result resembles pastiche, rather than homage, and that Winding Refn (as observed) does not even do that skilled work of assimilating his influences.

What an unexpected delight to-night, Sang-il Lee's Unforgiven (Yurusarezaru mono) (2013) ! Immaculately shot and framed throughout.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 19, 2014

Ken Watanabe (as Jubei) leads a very strong cast, and makes thoroughly credible the struggle that he has with staying true to what his deceased wife taught him – essentially, he is in a double bind, because he either ignores the sacrifice that his friend Kingo (Akira Emoto) made, or he honours him and goes against his new way of life. This, of course, will be what Eastwood faced in some form, but Watanabe is wonderfully open to the contradictions that are in Jubei, back to whether to leave his home and accompany Kingo in the first place.

Directorially (Lee also co-wrote the script), the use of flashbacks, following the historical setting of the scene, to illuminate where Jubei’s character has come from is highly effective : we look at the scenes as if he is reliving them, and, because they are in the snow, they have a strong emotional resonance, because we appreciate that the events that we see are in an environment where food, energy and one’s life’s blood are at a premium.

Koichi Sato, as the Chief Ichizo Oishi, is a force of vengeance and retribution with some resemblances to Only God’s Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), but many times better drawn, for all the presence that Chang has. For, just as that film has its genesis in violence towards a prostitute, we see Oishi mete out what seems to be arbitrary justice, only exacting what amounts to a fine, payable to the owner of the brothel, yet beating up those who are seeking a bounty (which, when it is Jubei, reminds of Julian (Ryan Gosling) taking on Chang).

With Chang, there seems, at times, to be little rhyme or reason in his actions (and we doubt that he is truly human), whereas Oishi is demonstrating that he does not value anything other than what threatens the rule of law (as he interprets and enforces it) : if that requires a humiliating and sustained act of brutality to send a message, that is enough justification for him (as, to an extent, it is for Chang, but then everyone would already have heard of him). And, as viewers, we are torn between the disrespected and disfigured prostitute and her comrades in not having justice (because seen as chattels), and between despising how Oishi abuses his power, even if killing people for reward is clearly a form of lawlessness.

No doubt those pulls in different directions are in the original. Here (although the lack of detail in the IMDb entry does not allow credit to be reliably assigned), the performances from those mentioned, all of the bounty hunters, and the injured prostitute and her champion are all very strong, the music is highly effective, and the sense of place and presence is intense. So far, the film has eight nominations, including one for Watanabe, and two for Norimichi Kasamatsu’s cinematography, and they are well deserved for this strong and beautiful feature.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Only God forgives – so you’re dog-meat !

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3 August

* Contains spoilers *

I can't honestly recommend Only God Forgives, because that would be morally and socially reprehensible, but I may see it again. #justsaying
— Mark Liversidge (@MovieEvangelist) August 2, 2013

I doubt that one can look for morality in this tale of Only God Forgives (2013), no more so, say, than in Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi, or Ford’s ’Tis Pity she’s a Whore – not to say that there are not motivations, codes of behaviour, because there are, and it is their inconsistency with each other that leads to conflict, death, slaughter.

Slaughter is the word for it, in its purest sense – despatching a beast with some ceremonial, even if not with the supposed aim of the abattoir to be humane about what is done in the service of butchery. In others’ responses, I detect an air of if not revulsion, then distaste, in wanting to relish this film, not so much as if it were a guilty pleasure as if it were immoral to say that one had watched it – might or would watch it again…

@MissSueFlay Outstanding, but be warned that it's deeply strange and even more violent than Drive. It's a very guilty pleasure.
— Mark Liversidge (@MovieEvangelist) August 2, 2013

I am unsure about whether that is right, whether there is a moral issue, and find myself wondering whether director Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011), which has more propulsion from Ryan Gosling than here (where he plays Julian), is so far away : are we rooting for Gosling’s character Driver because he seems ‘selflessly’ to be risking his own well-being, life, future to protect Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her family, whom he comes to know and then she turns out to have a soon-to-be ex-convict husband ? That excuses the violence, the brutality that, bidden, seem to erupt from Driver, because it is in the knight’s service of a lady ?

We really know little about Driver’s inner life, however he has existed with his underpaid garage job and bare dwellings, because he seems to have no needs other than looking at and knowing Los Angeles and using that in the thrill of his night job – of course, we approve of him, because our film head allows us to reckon that the burglaries / robberies are of a faceless kind where there is no real victim, or, if there is a victim, then Driver is only the driver, and we want him to do what his name says, and get away.

And morality ? Is it really any more present in Drive than in Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003) and Vol. 2 (2004), for, in a world where X is killing Y because of – or to avoid – the death of Z, we stand back, willing The Bride (Uma Thurman) on since she seems more sinned against than sinning. Whatever the history of revenge may be, and whether we choose to trace it back to Aeschylus or to Cain and Abel, the phrase an eye for an eye (and a tooth for a tooth is part of our culture :

Which is where we come to this film’s portentous-sounding title, which has the ring of being a Biblical / Shakespearean / classical text, but without identifiably* being one : do we watch the film, bearing in mind that there seems no evidence that anyone facing, as the case might be, severance, immolation or decapitation (a sort of one-armed bandit of death, if the ‘right’ line of three comes up), appears to be preparing to meet any sort of maker ? If we do, then I think that the issue of immorality disappears – no one here is seeking any sort of forgiveness, only a craven avoidance of death or other penalty.

But not quite everyone : when requested, the man who aided the failed ambush on the police in the eating-place / bar goes into a corner in the shadows and writes his excuse, which is read by Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), and then handed to one of his officers. We have no more notion than that of what the man has to say for himself, and there is then a moment of uncertainty until Chang acts – when he does so, the story moves on, and we do not know what effect, if any, ‘the excuse’ had… Except that, in this respect, the film is explicit about crime and punishment, so can we suppose that he received clemency (of some sort) ?

If by immorality it is not the downward spiral of retribution to which people object (which haunts A Midsummer Night’s Dream just as fully as it does the graphic bloodiness of Titus Andronicus, to which, to King Lear, and to the Sophoclean Theban trilogy of plays concerning Oedipus there is more than a shallow nod), but the tribal, self-appointed justice of the police through the offices of Chang, then I am at a loss to follow the argument or experience the feeling.

The echoes that I have mentioned are there, and I shall explore them at greater length in a separate posting, but musically, in tone, in plot, and in modes that essentially consist of stasis (fixed poses, unblinking gazes, etc.), slow motion (for example, slowly receding down or proceeding along corridors, as if of a maze) and sudden activity (Julian chasing Chang, Chang enacting vengeance, or Chang chasing the man whom he gives a Bob-and-Vic-type treatment) I was hugely put in mind of Enter the Void (2009).

As to music, I found it as unsubtle, because I was fully aware, say, that the only tension in the scene where Mai (Yayaying Rhatha Phongam) seems – if the scene happens in reality, not imagination – to be masturbating in from of Julian after tying his arms to a chair came from the chordal disharmony, which I mentally stripped away, and the visuals were devoid of it. Since, in these terms, the soundtrack was too much on the surface, too obvious, I could not help detaching it at other times, such as the early appearance of Kristin Scott Thomas as Crystal, Julian’s mother, and a moment that, better done, could have been laden with the significance that was sought. With Void, I could likewise not help being aware that the cinematic effect was largely created by an attempt to manipulate the viewer and create sensation that was lacking from the screen itself.

My recollection is of an over-indulgent sense of stasis in that film, connected largely with the use of drugs – as here, drug-induced crime leads to dislocation, mayhem, revenge, and I cannot claim, ever since Robert de Niro was shown stoned in Once Upon a Time in America (1984), to have found those under the influence a source of fascination, whether going ‘to meet the devil’ as Billy (Tom Burke) does, or sitting staring on a sofa. If either film sees itself as a meditation on death or the truths of life, it falls far short for me :

Void felt pretentious, and Only God feels too much like a mash-up to be more than pastiche, whether referencing (slightly) The Matrix (1999) and the film-world that influenced The Wachowskis in making it, or William Shakespeare’s bloodier moments, as well as the softer ones that we see in Julian, both in would-be revenger Hamlet, or in Macbeth, needing Lady Macbeth (equals Crystal ?) to stir him to the pitch where he can murder Duncan.

I believe that Only God is a step or two in the wrong direction from the impact of Drive, which impelled the viewer – this viewer found more in the naivety and yet, with it, un-guessed-at ferocity of Driver than in the sub-Freudian musings behind portraying Billy, Julian, Mai and Crystal.

Our film-maker may believe that he is using reflectiveness and moments of quiet to speak to us, but the techniques are so evident that, unless he intends an alienation to make us step back from the detail of the action and view it as a sort of ballet, as a sort of death-laden dance in the spirit of Greenaway’s The Pillow Book (1996), he simply fires up our critical faculties to unpick what plot there is and whether it hangs together. In that respect, a response very like that to Holy Motors (2012).


More to come


End-notes

* The Internet / Google does not help much here with a search, because it is laden with references to the film, but The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations does.


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A cloudy prospect

This is a review of Cloud Atlas (2012)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

31 March

This is a review of Cloud Atlas (2012)

dear Cloud Atlas the movie, I'm going 2 c u today. please boggle my mind. it's a sunny day and 3 hrs is a long time. nae pressure.
— mark cousins (@markcousinsfilm) March 21, 2013

In his review of Cloud Atlas (2012), Philip French – not at all showing off – seems to give every example that he can think of in films where actors play more than one role. (Thankfully, he did not trouble us with Alec Guinness’ eightfold cameos as members of the d’Ascoyne family.) To French, that historical view may be important, but I agree with the person (was it he ?) who said that one might be too bothered working out which actor / actress is on screen to pay attention to other things.

For me, trying to think of Hugo Weaving’s name (by reminding myself of The Matrix (1999) and its Agent Smith) was not too much for my poor little brain (not, that is, in the way that some of the intense stretches of action were, acting as some sort of overload). Having thought of some counter-examples, I cannot think that the following Tweet is correct in alleging a significance, other than damn’ good fun on the part of cast and crew (Weaving as a nurse to put Ratched in the shade ! ), in these multiple roles (which is properly the stuff of The Hours (2002)) :

As far as I am concerned, the territory that the futuristic parts of the film occupies is that before the time of the trilogy that began with The Matrix, and whose antecedents were ‘filled’ in by the collection of short works that make up The Animatrix (2003). It may be that, with his novel Cloud Atlas (published in 2004), David Mitchell was aware of this material, and has an interest in the ethics, possibilities and implications of AI (Artificial Intelligence) – I almost cannot believe otherwise, rather than that it is a layering on the book from the Wachowskis, who co-wrote and co-directed the film with Tom Tykwer (who was also one of its three composers).

We are shown an agent from Union (Hae-Joo Chang, played by Jim Sturgess) who is seeking to recruit Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae), very much in the same way that Trinity recruits Neo in The Matrix and introduces him to Morpheus : the aim in both cases is to tell the truth about the situation that fellow ‘fabricants’ and humans, respectively, are in, when they are deluded as to the reality of their existence and purpose.

Neo, before he is ‘awoken’, is in one small pod of a huge human power-source for the machine world, but, believing otherwise because of the stimuli provided to his inert, supine body (which generate the matrix in which he seems to be alive), has to be shown the truth, which shocks him. Even more shocking, in a way, is for him to be told that he is the chosen one, just as Sonmi-451 is. In her case, the lies that fabricants such as she have been told, when unmasked, cause her to engage with Union’s cause and to seek to broadcast the truth. (One is almost reminded of the closing scene of The Matrix, where Neo is making the sort of ‘wake-up call’ that was made to him by Trinity at the other end of the film.)

In another era, that of the continuing slave trade in the States, Doona Bae is Adam Ewing’s (Sturgess’) wife Tilda, to whom he returns from the colonies a changed man because of having his life saved by Autua (David Gyasi), a black slave who had stowed away : we do not learn more of it, but Adam and Tilda intend to head eastwards to campaign for the abolition of slavery. Is the multiple-character aspect significant here ? Well, yes, Bae plays both Tilda and Sonmi-451, but, in the former role and in those times, she would probably have been no more visible as a force for change than as Adam’s supporter.

There is thus a link between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twenty-first century in terms of seeking freedom and helping others in that search. Dr Henry Goose (Tom Hanks) would have prevented the latter, but, as Zachry, he helps, rather than hinders, escaping a stricken place, so it would appear that any pattern is not one of direct correspondence, and, if not dictated by logistics, may be little more than fortuitous.

i saw Cloud Atlas...Now I shout it from the highest hills, even told the golden daffodils- it's a glorious multiverse of jodorovsky+Griffith
— mark cousins (@markcousinsfilm) March 21, 2013

Continued as In the clouds


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