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| Oki's Movie |
Among the South Korean cinema spotlight films at the 2010 AFI Fest was the Hong Sang-soo double bill of his latest work, Oki’s Movie and Hahaha, the latter the winner of the Un certain regard prize at this year’s Cannes International Film Festival.
Hong Sang-soo’s cinema is insular in its visual and thematic preoccupations. His dissection of relationships and friendships between men and women, young and old, parents and offspring, and his attention to form, especially through parallels and repetitions continuously challenge any straitlaced, linear narrative structures, forms, and spectatorship. In turn, they challenge any straightforward approach to writing about them, with their multiple temporalities, perspectives, and intimate interweaving character trajectories. With these two films, Hong affirms the cinema-as-life, life-as-cinema overlap that hinges on the triangular relationship of two men/women and one man/woman on the one hand, and the filmmaker, film, and spectator on the other hand.
Oki’s Movie tells of a young woman’s succeeding set of relationships with a film professor and a fellow film student-filmmaker. Hong presents this love triangle through four short, interrelated films or segments, according to one of the characters’ perspectives. The first three segments present the perspectives of the men, while the last one presents that of the woman. Although the temporalities of each segment overlap, nevertheless there is a subtle chronological development that traces Oki’s romance with Professor Song, its conclusion, and the start of a romance with student filmmaker Jin-gu.
Hahaha takes the premise of the love triangle and multiplies it by two. It is about two male friends, Mun-kyung and Ban-shik, who meet before one of them leaves South Korea. They exchange anecdotes of recent happenings in their lives, as they drink shots; each anecdote is punctuated by a shot. Their meeting is presented through black-and-white photographs/film stills, while their exchanged anecdotes take place unknowingly in the same seaside town of Tong-yeong where Mun-kyung’s mother has a globefish restaurant, and where Jun-shik’s poet friend lives. Because of the smallness of the town, each man encounters at some point each woman who may or may not be going out with one of the other two men. Though unaware of each other’s links and overlaps, the film follows Mun-kyung pursuit of a strong-willed, history-loving woman (Moon So-ri) who in turn is in love with Jun-shik’s young, immature, confused poet friend. Jun-shik, in turn, has his girlfriend join him, even though he is married and has a child.
In Oki’s Movie, one senses the squirming of a turn to lightness in tone and a kind of amusing frivolity that’s less oppressive for all parties (spectator and characters) than in previous Hong films. Among the four film segments, the last one, ‘Oki’s Movie’, is the most memorable, nearly endearing, and wistful. The preponderance of male perspectives of the first three films-segments was getting tiresome, so having the woman’s point of view was refreshing, to say the least. ‘Oki’s Movie’ is also the most literal presentation of Hong’s predilection for parallels and repetitions. For one thing, it is presented as Oki’s student film. Secondly, it consists of Oki visiting Mount Acha on two different occasions, with Professor Song on the first occasion, and Jin-gu on the second. Through voiceover, she compares and contrasts her feelings and everyone’s actions on each occasion, which creates a fifth film per se for the spectator, a film space created by these accumulated points of view with which to reflect ultimately upon issues like positionality, habitus, place, meaning, and their fleeting, yet meaningful qualities, especially in the context of love and romance. In this sense, ‘Oki’s Movie’ is a kind of emotional and intellectual payoff whose meaning emerges only after following the three other film segments. Despite a belaboured feeling due to the film’s literalness in its segmented form, which makes the relationships and characters a little bit forced and ultimately less memorable than the film’s form, it contains what is perhaps one of the most nightmarish Q&A experiences, where an ex-girlfriend’s friend turns the Q&A for Jin-gu’s film into an interrogation of why he broke her heart.
If Oki’s Movie delivers only in spots, in contrast, Hahaha is my favourite Hong film thus far. The entomological-like attention to relationships is still present, as is the attention to place, repetition, parallel, and multiple points of view overlapping dynamically with each other. But this time, Hong presents this musical chair-type of encounters, breakups, pursuits, regrets, and arguments in such an effortless, laughing-at-them-because-he-loves-them way that it’s nearly parodic, and thus charming. Even the formal strategy of showing the friends’ drinking meeting through black-and-white photographs/stills is made jovial, reflecting the playful suspension of time passing in their meeting against the film’s other temporalities contained in the anecdotes. Indeed, their conversation and drinking anchor the film’s criss-crossing and migratory narrative.
The two friends’ opposite personalities complement the film’s juggling act of anguish and unconcern. On the one hand, Jun-shik’s narrative trajectory references by far the most strained, overly intellectual, cynical, tormented male characters in Hong’s oeuvre, so that to call Hahaha a comedy from his point of view would be anything but painful irony. His dry laugh that marks a lot of his scenes comes from a deep, dark corner of his angst-ridden psyche, and gives an explicit demonstration of that painful irony.
On the other hand, providing some of the most endearing comic situations is Kim Sang-kyung as the unemployed filmmaker Mun-kyung. He pursues Seong-ok with all the bumbling, sweet awkwardness of a gangly newborn, and cries with as much abandon for his love for his mother as much as for the historical figure Admiral Yu, whom he mysteriously encounters at one point in the film. During their droll master-pupil conversation, where Mun-kyung is on his knees, he begs Admiral Yu for keys to the doors of inspiration.
With these two films, Hahaha in particular, Hong all but illustrates how he not only has the keys to the doors of inspiration, but he has let us in to share it, with a cool, comical aplomb. RSA
Thursday 4th – Thursday, 11th November 2010
The premiere and longest-running Los Angeles International Film Festival operated by the American Film Institute may be in its 24th year, but this year’s fest was only the second in which it presented free tickets to all screenings to regular festival/film-goers and novices alike. Moreover, this year saw several debut roles: new Festival Director Jacqueline Lyanga, who took the place of pioneering Artistic Director Rose Kuo; and the first ever Guest Artistic Director, David Lynch.
There is a paradox built into being a press badge holder at a film festival where tickets to all screenings (including Special Galas and Opening/Closing Nights) were free. The advantage of a free film festival, especially of AFI Fest’s caliber, is that more people who would otherwise not take the time to watch less accessible cinematic fare get to do so, and engage in that old-fashioned activity called film-going (as opposed to other viewing platforms). The disadvantage is that it must sacrifice the number of screenings and get rid of repeat ones; if one misses a screening, there are no next-day ones to recuperate one’s daily quota of three or four. So the stakes of choosing which ones to attend become higher. Below is a rundown of the hits and misses of my choices.
The number of Asian productions showcased this year was a hearty welcome compared to last year’s slim pickings. Five films constituted the contemporary South Korean cinema spotlight (it would have been six had Kim Ji-woon’s I Saw The Devil not been pulled from the line-up). Im Sang-soo’s remake of The Housemaid (2010), forming a double bill with the original 1955 film directed by Kim Ki-young, takes up the love triangle of a young maid and her rich husband-and-wife patrons, and the familial, socioeconomic havoc of suffering and revenge that it wreaks. Apart from lead actress Jeon Do-yeon looking like she hasn’t aged in ten years, and still showing her dramatic skills, however, The Housemaid is sadomasochistic at best and boring at worst.
Speaking of sadomasochistic, Jang Cheol-so’s Bedevilled (2010) fits this bill to a tee. It traces in painstaking detail a young woman’s experiences of abuse at the hands of her husband, her brother, and matriarchs in an isolated island off of the South Korean peninsula. She eventually takes her murderous revenge on all those who have literally violated her on the island, and continues a spree of violence when she arrives on the mainland. Looked at from the lens of sociopolitical cinema, the film disappoints for not going far enough; looked at from the lens of horror/exploitation, I can begin to fathom why it continues to receive such critical acclaim.
In contrast, Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry (2010) charms and touches at the same time. As in most of Lee’s films, the unfolding of narrative and character delineation is highly meditative. But it’s what makes his films that much more engaging to watch; one accompanies the jolts, epiphanies, and gaps in memory that Mi-ja (the radiant Yoon Jeong-hee) experiences, as her brain slowly succumbs to Alzheimer’s disease. Her decision to take a poetry class to combat the development of Alzheimer’s reconnects her with words and a different level of engaging with the world, which mirrors exactly what the spectator undergoes while watching this film.
Hong Sang-soo’s Hahaha (2010) and Oki’s Movie (2010) were rightly presented as a double bill; I say “rightly,” for seeing two Hong films back-to-back is perhaps the best way to get (re)acquainted with his rigorous film form, and his usual thematic preoccupations of relationship angst. Hahaha was arguably one of the fest’s highlights.
Other Asian fare saw established Japanese filmmakers Takashi Miike and Takeshi Kitano return to form. For Kitano, it’s the yakuza genre, deconstructed and yet made that much bloodier in Outrage (2010). Kitano plays a more supporting role this time around, a subset boss of his own entourage within a large yakuza organization that is in the process of imploding. But this implosion is very much intended in the battle for power that sees the apex of management pitting their subset bosses against each other in a web of lies, jealousy, rivalry, and masculine anxieties. It’s an unrelenting downward spiral of backstabbing (sometimes literally so). Though it does run on a bit, Kitano still has that touch of mixing quiet and suddenly extreme moments of fear/death/ killing to weave an intriguing, violent film universe.
Miike is less attached to a genre than a masterful mode of moody filmmaking. With 13 Assassins (2010), a remake of Eiichi Kudo’s 1963 film of the same name (which is in itself blatantly inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai), he has made one of his undeniable masterpieces. Here, too, is a world of implosion, this time during the Tokugawa era, when the shogun hires a samurai to bring together a group of assassins to get rid of a merciless and fickle young upstart in the shogun’s family. In some films, it may be all about the journey; but in this case, it’s all about the extremely bloody end, expressed by the mantra of “total massacre.” Only Miike could have pulled off a film in which a third of it is about samurais fighting and killing each other; he does so hypnotically and magnetically, with a quality of movement, pacing, and differing degrees of action that is hard to surpass.
Kiarostami’s Certified Copy (2010) also has a mesmeric quality, but of capturing the intimacy of a flawed relationship in public spaces, as if one is driving with the characters, sitting with them at a restaurant, strolling with them in a small Italian town and encountering strangers, and feeling the complicated push-and-pull of emotions, ambitions, disappointments and desires in a marriage. Contributing to this mesmerism is Luca Bigazzi’s soft, dusky cinematography, which dialogues exquisitely with Juliette Binoche’s and William Shimell’s faces, great presence and multilingual dexterity. A definite film of the year for me, as Kiarostami reinforces the power of his simple yet profoundly nuanced humanist, dialogic filmmaking.
One certainly has to give props to John Sayles for initiating a different kind of dialogue with Amigo (2010), which remembers the oft-forgotten Philippine-American War (1899-1912, not 1902). He filmed in the Philippines, worked with a Philippine crew, and assembled a transnational multilingual cast, on a very limited budget. It could have been a great opportunity to think about America’s series of forgotten wars in the context of the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But his politics of remembering are so ponderous and static in narrative structure, dialogue, and performance that the effort seems all but misguided.
More assured was Trapero’s latest, Carancho (2010), which represents well his gritty exposé-like works of marginalized figures in Argentina. The title refers to the vulture-like behaviour of traffic accident lawyers who circle around traffic accident victims to take advantage of them in their cases. One such lawyer falls in love with a young doctor struggling to clock hours to rise up in the ranks, who he frequently encounters due to his scams. It’s a dark, violent, and competitive world (most of the film takes place at night) that Trapero presents, and he does so with a fine understanding of narrative and character. He makes so taut the situations for his shadow-crossed lovers (drug addiction, murder), drawing them to such extremes, that Carancho can be positively called a film noir.
Julia’s Eyes (2010), the second feature-length by Catalan filmmaker Guillem Morales and produced by Guillermo del Toro, also takes place mostly in semi/darkness. It is a visceral and visual take on horror films that deal specifically with vision and eyes (e.g. The Eye). Julia is slowly going blind, despite several eye operations to prevent it. Her ensuing blindness provides the backbone of the film’s suspense, and Morales gets the most out of it as the intense framework for Julia’s independent investigation of her twin sister’s death. This investigation leads her into close contact with a serial killer who is pathologically preoccupied with being un/seen, thus addressing the subjectivity of vision and visual knowledge. An interesting work that should be seen, especially for its sepia-toned colour scheme.
Under Kuo’s leadership, AFI Fest had revamped a diverse and vibrant programming, heightened last year with the “See the Film On Us” free festival project. All in all, this year’s film line-up equaled the quality, exploration, and variety of previous AFI Fests, while it also cleaned up some of the organizational hiccups of ticket distribution and access and crowd control from last year’s inaugural free festival. RSA
