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)

Outranking the Gosling film

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22 September

Films with the word 'money' in the title have a ring to them, as in The Color of Money (1986) - or The Taste of Money (2012), one that I would call 'stylish' if that word were not closeted in a relationship with that of 'thriller'.

This film ends - as it began - with the recirculation of money, and what takes place in-between the appearance of two brittle pieces of furniture in an otherwise solid environment, the door to a strong-room and a large receptacle, never goes far from it (in one form or another). I may be quite mistaken that they seemed so obviously stagey, but I do not think so, and I am more tentative about the notion that they are meant to mark off the intervening feature as a conscious framing-device.

However, because the household, family and staff, at the centre of this film is shown with such style, and they live, dress, drink and relax with such fine things, I shall credit it with that notion, because I quite early found myself reminded of the passionate plays of Jean Racine in a way that I did not think that I could walk with when translated to this world - it felt a bit too much like Only God Forgives (2013) again, whereas The Taste of Money turned out to redeem the merit of using universal themes (and reprises a scene where a man who cannot box challenges another to a bare-knuckle fight, but this time with so much grace and beauty in the mise-en-scène).

Not nearly in such a self-conscious, parodic, almost moronic, way as in Winding Refn's latest, this piece of real cinema echoes the chamber plays of Strindberg, the vast, bloody tragedies of Aesychlus' Oresteia, and we follow the fate of the excellently played Joo Young-Jak (Kang-woo Kim) as a thread through the story - chance has a part to play in the unfolding of events, but nothing that is taken for granted, with every detail accounted for in how what someone knew but did not reveal comes to be known as his or her failure to speak.

An initial impression made it seem as though the film were requiring too much to be believed to be happening for the first time, but, as indicated, director Sang-soo Im was taking no indulgence from his audience for granted. Without anything being forced, everything had its place.

The monetary deals at the centre of what unfolds even mirror the real-life activities of a US corporation (Google and the World Brain (2013)), with the Google Books project cavalierly (though not without the assistance of those who should have opposed, or at least questioned what it was doing before giving it) seeming to break copyright and then seek to have its actions made good in accord with the principle that it was pursuing - we hear it said in this film's script that the outline of the deal will be made, and it is for the lawyers to sort out the niceties to make it happen.

Sometimes affectionately, sometimes mockingly, called Mr Joo, we see his journey from filling cases with cash to buy the freedom of the son of his boss, and contenting himself to smell the fresh notes rather than (as licensed) to pocket some for himself, to differing relations to power and money. This is a thoughtful and powerful film, whose strong visuals live on in the mind.


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

Just sheltering ?

This is a review of The Sheltering Sky (1990)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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27 August

This is a review of The Sheltering Sky (1990) in a 70mm print

* Contains spoilers *

Magnificent 70mm The Sheltering Sky (1990) at @CamPicturehouse : brilliant conception, luminous photography, attuned music, JM & DW superb.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 26, 2013

Not least through the experience of being seen in 70mm, with JM being Malkovich, DW Winger, and co-written and directed by Bertolucci.


Another in the Festival Central audience (and from the team at TAKE ONE) gave us:

Plenty to ponder about The Sheltering Sky: gloriously beautiful (and a great 70mm print), occasionally impenetrable, fascinating yet remote.
— Gavin Midgley (@GavinMidgley) August 26, 2013

I am unsure where the impenetrability crept in (if that is what impenetrability does, rather than suddenly shutting the door - or window), but, because I did not experience it, I would be de facto.

I also did not find myself at a remove, that anything was remote : unlike the fascination of, say, the very different Only God Forgives (2013), which comes from the other side of something much more substantial than a bamboo curtain.


Moving on, though in a sense not, there is a strong feeling of Pirandello at a crucial moment, where much more unravels that has gone before - I am thinking, needless to say, of Six Characters, as his best-known work (drama or otherwise) in the UK. Suddenly, the sporadic narrator, who seemed located when first we heard his voice, has a significance that we failed to grasp.

Does everything dissolve back to the point where we have nothing ? No, I still do not think so, hours later, though it might be worth at the original novel by Paul Bowles - I cannot see myself doing more than flicking through to have a feel for the narrative effect. I am left more with a feeling of benevolence, not that what I have engaged with has been insubstantial, the stuff of dreams.

That said, I do believe that there is a point, when Kit (Winger) leaves Port(er) (Malkovich) - and we have been greeted with a shot from then at the start of the film, after some sort of establishing of era and class has been effected by stock footage - and goes off with her little case, where the status of what we then see divides / departs from 'reality'. After all, it does not seem very likely that she would simply abandon him, and what she does is hardly the best way to cope with her position.

The scene in the market, where the flies are back*, the people, into whom or whose culture she has scarcely integrated, throng around her - this becomes the stuff of nightmare from which she wishes, unlike Joyce's Stephen, to escape into her own history.

Probably as long as we will ever know, we have had emperors dreaming that they were butterflies who might be dreaming the emperors, the King in Alice who is dreaming her, and Borges conjuring up a man who does conjuring himself only to find that he is another's creation. At the level of the narrative, Bertolucci's film gives us Port seeming to flee himself (or, at any rate, Tunner**) to take Kit to 'the pass', the view from which explains the title : he describes how it seems to protect, as if like a mantle, whereas she wants to know from what, and what is beyond.

On their initial arrival in the port town, Kit storms off at Port persisting in telling his dream to Tunner. This is where the occasional narration, and the appearance of the narrator, begin. However, beforehand, Port gestures at a white car arriving outside, and says to Tunner that Kit cannot have the white car just be a white car, but it has to mean something - which, in the film that follows, it does.

That impulse as describes by Port to Tunner is there again in Kit's unsettled response to being told about the sky (a half-empty one, not a half-full one), and the anxiety, the jealousy, the guilt surface as they are making love at that spot, and then deny them of a climax, whereas we most want that they should give themselves to each other and shakes off negative impulses. It becomes another such impulse in its own right.


And, finally, Port's sickness, which draws Kit to him : is it, in any sense, real or is it symbolic ? Does it represent the decay of their relationship (Port has been off for the night***, and she has woken from the train journey to find Tunner), which only, when Kit is properly afraid of losing Port, brings her back to him, and is there not quite a strong feel of, for example, Truffaut in Jules et Jim (1962) ?

If seeking to join a camel-train does not also operate on the level of some sort of psychological coping-mechanism, some projection of the self out of the situation into the fantasy of becoming an Arabic man's wife (or mistress), I am misreading this film and what I see it suggesting about these characters.

I do not think so, for, as with that scene on the edge of the cliff, the scenery - shot with real flair and a sense of grandeur by Vittorio Storaro) - feels there not merely for the purpose of telling a story, but is the story, or in inseparable from the story, or the story from it. The grotesqueries of travelling companions (includingly the lovingly obnoxious Timothy Spall), the purgatorial conditions, all of these things operate multiply, and make that quick flick through Bowles' original seem more likely...



End-notes

* Were we, at some level, reminded of the Biblical plague of flies (and / or of such tones in Days of Heaven (1978)) ? Do the weevils in the flour with which the soup has been made likewise say something to us ? (Port and Kit play oblivious to them just to banish Tunner, with his incessant spraying !)

** Played by Campbell Scott, he is George Tunner, irritating, ingratiating, even seductive (but kept at arm's length by his surname ?). He could be all men / suitors / rivals - or none, and just a cipher.

*** Self-destructively, he is not content just to get away with his wallet, but has to show that he has done so.


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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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