Movies into Film
14 Ways of Looking at a Film Festival (part two)
Notes on Pao’s Story, Perhaps Love, Climates, Into Great Silence,
Manufactured Landscapes, Avenue Montaigne, and Private Fears in Public Places
Takeshi Kaneshiro in Perhaps Love (Photo courtesy of Applause Pictures)
I didn’t see nearly as many Asian films at last month’s Portland International Film Festival as I’d hoped I would, and the ones I caught were not all that pleasing, the superb first hour of Hong Sang-soo's Woman on the Beach excepted. My review of that is here, along with a brief notice on the Vietnamese Pao’s Story. To the latter, I’ll only add this bit of Hmong folk wisdom, essential for entering into the primitive otherness that the movie depicts: “The river was murky from the rain yesterday, but it will be clear,” a middle-aged woman tells her teenage daughter, and then she muses, “So it is with people.”
Peter Chan’s tuneless musical Perhaps Love contrives a romance between an emotional cripple (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and a narcissistic non-entity (Xun Zhou, as one-dimensional in this role as she was in Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress). Dancers cavort around in elaborate circus outfits, gold-sequined chorus lines of young women pantomime beguilingly, but the choreography consists of frenzied messes for the most part; worse still, there isn’t a single memorable song anywhere on the soundtrack. Sample lyric: “Hating you was no salvation…let’s just end all our miseries.”
Perhaps Love benefits enormously from Kaneshiro’s fantastic leading man performance. Glowering handsome and soulfully sensitive, he’s as compelling here as in House of Flying Daggers; he’s much better than Chan’s material, which is bad melodrama glossed up in meta-fiction. The movie has great costumes, good lighting, and adequate (though far from his best) cinematography from Christopher Doyle, particularly in a press conference sequence as the constant click and flash of cameras fragments the screen seemingly to pieces. Yet the artistry with which the film is made offsets the monotony of the script only so much. What we’re left with is a love story we cannot believe in. And why can’t we believe in it? Because Xun Zhou, playing an actress named Sun Na, is so spoiled and petulant that no one would remain in love with her for terribly long, certainly not for the duration that Kaneshiro is required to obsess over her. There’s a scene toward the end in which they share a passionate kiss, as (and I admit that this is clever use of sound design) a cassette tape of his recorded rage (dating back a decade or so) accompanies their moment of reconciliation. The sight/sound contrast typifies what’s wrong with Perhaps Love – it’s all relentlessly one-note, too narrowly focused on the same thing (alienation effects) over and over.
I found an even more unconvincing portrayal of despairing relationships in the totally worthless Climates. To quote from my pan in Willamette Week: “A trash movie for art-house hangers-on, this risible drama of connubial crisis features horny, ugly adults desperate for unfortunate sex, and never before has ripped clothing seemed so dull. Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan stars as Isa, a sad, butch nightmare who claims to be ‘still working on my thesis,’ which perhaps offers a clue to his intellectually camouflaged arrested development. His art director wife, as much a cipher as her husband, snags the best dialogue: ‘Zafer? Don’t you have the Aga’s costume for today?’ I admired Ceylan’s previous film Distant, but Climates has no insight into a marriage’s disintegration or anything else.”
It’s almost impossible to talk about what’s wrong with Climates without talking about (or at least to mention in passing) everything that is wrong in film criticism today. I enjoy long takes as much as the next viewer; I find it thrilling when a director has the confidence to park the camera and let us make our own discoveries in the frame. But there has to be something – a guiding intelligence, a point of view to be expressed – that emerges out of these leisurely visions. In Climates, it’s only emptiness on parade, devoid of any emotional content (Heaven forfend!) or discernment of anything beyond the immediate barrenness or sleaziness of the basic set-up. J. Hoberman and the usual cast of phonies were, predictably, all over Ceylan’s threadbare ode to grad students of all ages, elevating it to “1o-best” status and so forth. The most obscene over-praise comes from a critic who shall remain nameless (I’ve picked on him too much already): "Climates will not be easy viewing for those who feel marooned in long-term partnerships, or maybe for any of us who have known the suddenness with which love can turn to revulsion. Of course, the same could be said of Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage or Alan Parker’s Shoot the Moon or Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives, and Climates merits a place alongside them in any inventory of the screen’s wise and disquieting portraits of marital collapse."
No, it doesn’t.
And any critic who would make such a farfetched comparison is A) pedantically showing off, and B) more interested in being a good politician than a critic. There’s genuine pain and violence in the Bergman, Parker, and Allen works, which are also extremely well acted and even entertaining in their own ways. Certainly, each one of those films (or miniseries) involves the viewer. And how do they do that? By daring to risk making us respond emotionally. And how does that happen? Through a combination of specificity and empathy. Thank God for Bloomberg.com’s Iain Millar, one of the very few critics capable of seeing Climates as the rag-doll it is and having the courage to attack the movie: "Little psychological motivation, other than a general dissatisfied malaise, is suggested...Whether Climates works for you probably depends on whether you believe that men and women have little chance of ever finding common ground for communication. If so, go, nod approvingly and take in the lovely scenery."
I only caught two documentaries at PIFF, neither of them a success, though at least both scuttle such narrative antiquities as voice-over narration and headfirst interviews. From WW: “Into Great Silence is the cinematic equivalent of those Stuart Dempster recordings of trombones played in a cistern: Bells clamor and clangor, robed monks roam the corridors of an Alpine monastery, chanting Latin prayers in candlelit ceremonies. The director, Philip Gröning, strives to impart a sense of religious mystery, yet seldom transcends tedium. His point-and-shoot digital video stylings yield wildly erratic results; the surrounding snowy hillsides come off best. In Manufactured Landscapes, photographer Edward Burtynsky specializes in creating aesthetic objects out of insane business decisions (what he calls the ‘accumulated takings of the extraction industries’) and the ensuing human mayhem. We watch as he dispassionately shutterbugs displaced residents, along China’s Yangtze River, who’ve been ‘paid per brick to take their cities apart’ just before rising waters from Three Gorges Dam flood the rubble. Eco-masochists who didn’t get their fill of suffering at Inconvenient Truth or Who Killed the Electric Car? should feel sated by this meandering drone of sheer misery.”
Cécile de France and Albert Dupontel in Avenue Montaigne (Photo: THINKFilm Company)
In general, the entertainment factor wasn’t a major element at this festival. I came across pleasure-for-its-own-sake in scarce quantities, the best example being Danièle Thompson’s unexpectedly delightful Avenue Montaigne. I say unexpected, as Thompson’s prior film, Jet Lag, was failed fluff. Avenue Montaigne, on the other hand, is good fluff: Impossibly French characters flit in and out of a Parisian café between rounds at an art auction, the theatre, and symphony hall; everyone pontificates philosophically on art and love, and all’s well that ends well. The bits of Beethoven and Liszt on the soundtrack are splendidly played, and the film offers us a chance to say goodbye, cinematically, to the late Suzanne Flon, who appears here in her last screen role. Flon, who only a few years ago gave a great lioness-in-winter performance in Chabrol’s The Flower of Evil, has the first words in Avenue Montaigne. She speaks off-screen, and her ravaged voice sounds as low and gruff as a man’s. Recalling her youth, Flon tells a cautionary tale to her granddaughter, who is about to leave their house in the country to try her hand in Paris, just as Flon had decades earlier. Beautifully genderless, Flon’s vocal textures and tones reminded me some of Stewart Stern singing a few lines from “It Ain’t Necessarily So” at the beginning of Going Through Splat, the granular sound of the voice seeming to stem from a 78 in the next world: a bittersweet admonition that our elders are not here for long, and we must treasure them while we may.
No such joy exists in Alain Resnais’ trashy Private Fears in Public Places, a loathsome debacle that, for some reason, was selected as PIFF’s closing night gala – possibly on the hunch that after sitting through this, a sane audience would refuse to sit through yet another bad film. “The low point,” as I wrote in WW, “occurs early – leading lady Sabine Azéma has tomato soup splattered all over her face – then the movie…almost reaches ‘good’ during a late-night conversation between a man and a woman seated across a kitchen table; Resnais uses snow dissolves throughout to elide from one scene to the next, but in this sequence the walls disappear. It snows inside as two strangers bare their souls.”
Beyond that, there’s a soupçon of nice sexual chemistry between Lambert Wilson, as an ex-military man, and Isabelle Carré, as a waif who wears a flower in her lapel, who meet via the personals. Their scenes in a hotel bar, in some frames, suggest a color parallel to the crisp, black-and-white tavern in Hiroshima Mon Amour. If only the movie had more of that and less of André Dussollier’s porn-obsessed old realtor. Dussollier appears to be Carré’s grandfather, though he’s cast as her brother, and his fits of lust over Azéma are positively disgusting. – NPT
March 2, 2007
Movies into Film
©2007, N.P. Thompson
npt [at] moviesintofilm [dot] com