My Wong Kar Wai Experience

In The Mood For Love
Wong Kar Wai
Hong Kong
2001

 

During my sophomore year at the film school, I used to ask my fellow film students about their favorite films ever. Asking them to list at least 10 of their favorite movies, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” was the most common entry among the lists I’ve gathered. Aside from that surprise for I thought that Jim Carrey-Kate Winslet movie is nothing really special than a little above average break-up film of science and romance fiction, Wong Kar Wai films were also present in most of the list. It is right to say that Wong Kar Wai was, at least at that time, our batch’s favorite director.  Out of shame for not seeing any of his films, I started to have a Wong Kar Wai expedition. And I wish I could say it in a nice way but I have really been generally dissatisfied with my Wong Kar Wai experience. My fellow film students claim that it is not hard to fall in love with the director’s steamy visuals and romantic insights and I could never disagree. Yes, Wong Kar Wai has an ostentatious sense of vision and in fact they are most of the time spectacular, and I commend the Chinese director for that. However, I have always been uncomfortable with films that are overly fluid which are exactly his films. At times, you would feel so lost in his movies. It’s as if it has no backbone that would be the major support to have its structure conceivable by the audience. I understand his sentiments about lovers losing sense of times and it might have worked for many people including my classmates though I would prefer to see such films still with solid structure and clearer direction. I find his “2046” the hardest film to watch and understand because it is too cerebral, and consciously obscures fantasy and reality. Together with “Chungking Express”, Wong Kar Wai stipulates the life of a human soul in love in randomly affecting spheres of repressed feelings, misunderstood infatuation, and tainted impulse. Including “In the Mood for Love”, I’ve seen more of his technical inclinations. The director always employs tight editing. This philosophy never worked for me in “2046”, it feels so suffocating and isolating. There has been so much the film wants to shout out loud, its saturated red-orange-gold lighting and mise-en-scene could not be contained by the medium shot to close up shots in the entirety of the movie. In “In the Mood for Love” however, I found more room to breath in its tight cinematography. The two films have similar reasons of the applying such camera theme, I guess what pushed the latter film to more understanding is the fact that it doesn’t bloodily shout anything inside. In fact, “In the Mood for Love” has a gentle treatment of a love affair that is usually treated ungently. Among Wong Kar Wai’s films, “Happy Together” is the most endearing and heartbreakingly compelling. One thing I really like about this Chinese director is his courageous interpretation of unfulfilled love and it has been maximized in “Happy Together”. An aspect about the film that worked for me is that this one feels more a part of the world, it feels more attracted toward other people in the planet, whether a stranger, a fellow race, or a familiar face. This gay film has intense amount of romance, charming enough to love and conservative enough to keep its equation to notional carnal requirements. Above all else, in terms of spatial cinematography this is the most generous. Wong Kar Wai employs long distance shots to extreme long shots giving the film more relevance to the diversity of life.

 Shadows on the wall mimic a jail railing connoting the idea that these two lovers are prisoners of their love.

Focusing on “In the Mood for Love”, its self-contained gorgeousness and his use of metaphor are the film’s most triumphant weapon in the director’s arsenal. Aside from his recurring and parallel love stories, this is the director’s first direct employment of the time that has passed. This film doesn’t provide an accurate point of when the feelings between these characters started. They realized it without expecting it, and without the anticipation, and without the appropriate circumstances in their lives at that point of time, their ending would foretell a fate more indistinct than how they started. An unfulfilled love is where Wong Kar Wai finds artistic and dramatic sanctuary, and he has mastered it overtime. Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” also gave an affirmation about this—that only an unfulfilled love can be romantic. An anti love story can never get wrong. The main reason about the quest for anti love story is because of its revolutionary spirit against the happy ended love stories proliferating commercial cinema. Most of the films which involve a man and a woman that you can classify as quality, art, or award-winning are anti-love stories. What is it about humans that inclines art more to the pain, sorrow, and agony than the joy, happiness, and satisfaction? Is art an apparatus of skepticism and cynicism? Well I guess, being happy, joyful, and satisfied is too easy to bear and doesn’t need much interpretation about it or at least doesn’t find the need to interpret it, and being sad and in pain is too unbearable that we need to deeply express it. Life as we all know is a combination of the good and the bad, the pretty and the ugly, the happy and the sad, and understanding the negative ones needs more effort and seeks different media to communicate, and one medium is film.

This shot is reminiscent of the director's 1997 gay film "Happy Together.

What has also been magnified in the film is the director’s bittersweet observance of the time passed. There is a scene where after several years the main characters go back to the place where they used to be tenants and learn that most of their friends are no longer living there and even the landlady is about to move in America. After that scene, a text reads—that era has passed, nothing that belonged to it exists any more. It’s not a childhood nostalgia, but a longing that occurred in the adulthood—an adult nostalgia that is maturely bitter and serious.

Visually the film is really fantastic, as what I mentioned above “gorgeous” is the best word to describe it. I also love the smoothness of the music employed it, especially with the Spanish accompaniment of “Perhaps”. The film is not bad at all, as any Wong Kar Wai films can be. This is just a matter of personal definition of what is beautiful, significant, and competitive as a whole unit and not by parts. The last part is really heartrending. The story about the old time when they use to whisper a secret at a tree and cover it with mud will be mentioned 4 years after in “2046”. At the ancient Angkor Wat in Cambodia Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) whispers in a ruined wall to tell his love for his neighbor (Maggie Cheung). With an ancient tradition, their love story ends. 

The German Treasure

DOWNFALL

Oliver Hirschbiegel

Germany

2004

There are a hundred and perhaps even a thousand of films about the Second World War, holocaust, and anything that has something to do with probably the world’s most notorious and hated human being ever—Adolf Hitler. This film however doesn’t have its focus on the Fuhrer’s tormenting quest for world domination. It concentrates itself with Germans alone and its featured enemy, the Russians, is conceived distantly and only visually present in few necessary scenes. The usual second world war films in international arena are about the French, Italian, Russian, Japanese, American British, and Germany’s interconnected military maneuvers and tactics or about the soldier’s harrowing experiences, pain, endurance, and importantly the essence that the real heroes and at the same time victims of wars are the soldiers. Never had I really watched a film about the principal culprit of perhaps the most shattering event to occur in the history of the world. Choosing to present the collapse of his mission until his suicide instead of his advent and all the promising auspices of his German supremacy is a groundbreaking statement. Opposed strongly to Leni Reifenstahl’s documentaries such as “Birth of a Nation” and “Olympia”, this is a film that deflates all of the success and greatness Hitler may had have at those films, though Hirschbiegel is prudent enough to give elements of respect for the man who drastically shaped history in this incredible and compelling film.

Aside form the actual downfall of the nation, looking at who Adolf Hitler really was, is the most reasonable aspect to look forward to. As a person who is not a German, who is born in the relatively peaceful times 43 years after Hitler’s death, who is interested enough in history, I think of him as definitely a visionary, but his indulgence to being a German while discriminating all the rest, and the time he was born in history when other countries are as politically operational are both reasons why he can never be the world conqueror he was dreaming of. In the film, he is portrayed as someone plagued with superiority complex, lacking with compassion, especially with the civilians, the common German people outside his direct command who he even mentioned as weak. He is desperate, and in the midst of the toughest and most dire situations he seems insane. While his generals make sense about the real danger of the enemies circling Berlin, he keeps on insisting impossible tactics and order. This is not to accuse he is insane at all, his madness is not impossible to expect in anxious times but in the film itself it, all of the lunacy targets his character like a dagger. His epileptic left hand is not simply cast in Bruno Ganz acting, it also a metaphor of his unsuitability of his grand ambition. The rattling hand is a cataclysmic doom of mankind, and that same hand is his own curse, his own inevitable quagmire.

The horrendous cost of his aspiration may be enough to despise Hitler but it is undeniable that for a time, in his nation, he is the most respected. Looking at Reifenstahl’s “Birth of a Nation” he is a half-God, half-man, and as a German and even any German (If I were a German) Hirschbiegel, can’t deny it. That for a time in Germany’s most significant history, there was someone they believed, adored, and trusted, and that should be enough to give due respects to Hitler even in the most sublime way. In the film, before Hitler dies, he asks that his enemies should never see him dead. Hitler and his wife enter the door with the poison capsule and the gun, the door is shut closed, gun shots are heard. His men enter the room. Camera shows his men carrying covered body of the Fuhrer and his wife. They bring the corpses outside the bunker and place them in a 6 feet deep burrow and burn them. The brutality of their death is never existent on the film at least visually. This is the respect that the director can mostly do particularly following historical accuracies.

The film is brilliant in many ways. The subject matter itself is enough to be riveting, and with its appropriate cinematography of black to gray to olive green, its decent editing, convincing sound and music, I just couldn’t ask for more about its technicalities. I appreciate the gloomy atmosphere the film tries to keep consistent in the bunker and even outside. The manipulation shows as if sun has never risen in the soon to fall city. The scenes where Hitler’s closest and most loyal people are deciding on how to commit suicide are so moving, and when they commit the suicide just like their Fuhrer are so striking. These people would rather die than to surrender their ideologies, and there’s one thing I have realized--there is nothing like being forced to accept your death in the circumstance of losing. The only thing I wish to have been changed in the film is its claim of the secretary’s point of view. It is not true at all, the POV is everywhere. I am not a fan of POV scattering around the place but in this film, I think the unrestricted POV works. This is because these multi-possessed POVs represent the many number of people involved in that downfall. It may be as many as the real number of war victims but this is enough to know that this is not just between Hitler and his ambition. The secretary’s POV is actually useless. Even though he has some scenes where he gets to know the Fuhrer and his surprising goodness, these scenes are hardly contributing to the film’s vastness to be captured into one. The opening and closing documentary footage of the grown-old secretary are by themselves spectacular but they are either not needed or too overrated. Thus, the secretary’s role has been stretched in the promotion of the film and at the mentioned beginning and closing when in fact they become irrelevant when you watch the whole film. I would have chosen to position the POV of this film in a more omnipresent status since an enormous subject matter justifies it.

I find the film haunting and I find myself loving it. Aside from few scenes in “Hiroshima Mon Amour”, this is the film which I have deeply felt the world in its most painful, frightening, and darkest time. The irony of the downfall of Berlin and the triumph of the rest of the world, of people’s desperate survival and their poignant suicides, and of Adolf Hitler’s death and the stolen lives of millions are so effectively translated in this sweeping and terrific film. “Downfall” is a German treasure.

The Rape of a Goddess

Malena
Guiseppe Tornatore
Italy
2000

The film is not really not about a woman, it is about a 12 year old boy, Renato who couldn’t stop thinking about the town’s most beautiful woman--Malena. From the first time he set his eyes on their Latin language professor’s daughter, Renato, with his newly bought bicycle follows her distantly, from the steps of her door, to the streets, to the plaza, to the most secret places she goes, and even to her most private moments at their house. From then on, Malena has always been in the fantasy of the teenage boy. You will have a lot of flashbacks to the director’s earlier films and Vittorio de Sica’s “The Bicycle Thief” and “Shoe Shine”

Directed by Guiseppe Tornatore, the film is promising as it is succulent with the sweet and nostalgic concepts, themes, and subject matters the director has long employed in his  early films such as Cinema Paradiso in 1989. Looking at the charm of childhood, and the excitement of transitioning from a playing child to a masturbating teenager, and the provocation of adult’s irrevocable restrictions to them, it is unthinkable not to create a magical film out of it especially when the form is decorated by a lot of funny and naïve adventures. However, Tornatore doesn’t know how to sharpen his film. It has always been my problem with him even with his award winning “Cinema Paradiso”. He tends to triple the sugar into an already sweet thought, he saturates it, until its thick, and kill his audience with the overindulgence of his childhood films. Tornatore is a master of elements, in an unfortunate way, he includes large doze of elements that irritates the power of his works. They are just so all over the place that you wouldn’t know what to focus on, especially on “Cinema Paradiso”. And in a span of a decade, He hasn’t really improved much, though there is a negligible amount I must say, the coherence of the form of his films is still generally chaotic.

Narrative-wise, it is still also chaotic. You wouldn’t see much scenes about Malena and his father together. The death of her husband could have been the most appropriate time to see the father and daughter relationship. However it has been nayed and we have again missed a huge chance to know more about this woman. Perhaps the basic treatment for Malena’s character is the restriction of her self from the audience, it is understandable since the point of view is with the 12 year old boy who only knew her from a distant. But it shouldn’t be pushed to far, we should still know Malena by creating appropriate scenes to be captured by the subjective eyes of Renato. The part from where her husband died, to the dentist’s controversy, to the suddenly ended love affair with Lieutenant Cadei, the trial and her father’s death is actually the most consistent part in the film for we can thread all this pieces of the puzzle and realize that this is the reason why she has become a prostitute.

Comic treatment has always been at the film, and this confuses me about Italian culture. I need to know why judgment about prostitute is so intense that it even resulted to the town’s women beating up Malena. Narrative-wise it has not been enough to project what those women are accusing her that she is stealing their husbands, and that she is a disgusting human being, and that she deserves to kicked, slapped, and hit by brooms or of something I didn’t get to identify because of the fast editing at that part. Second, she is not the only prostitute in their place, though she may be the most beautiful. Finally, I conclude that this grand, thrilling, and repelling scene where they beat Malena is an inappropriate, disgusting scene pretending to be a brilliant one. The scene itself, without looking into the rest of the entire film, is not even a staggering one. The editing could have been kept calm and embark the minimal editing instead of the usual upbeat transitions for the beating scene. This is the most disappointing scene delivery from a supposedly astounding potential I have ever seen. First and foremost because the motivations for this scene are almost non-existent, and all you could ever ask is why? Second, it didn’t help the film and made it a pretentious film.

The film is also a woman’s nightmare. Aside from being objectified in the entirety of the film by any kind of man, it shows the unfortunate doom of a woman when she loses her husband, or a father, or any man. On the positive side there are two good things about it: one, is that Malena’s beauty has been consistently compared to a goddess as exemplified by the exposure of her breast, and second, there is hope in the point of view of a young man, in Renato’s eyes. Though the latter is a little bit wishful because the film really didn’t show any sign of change that a new patriarch would deal with. I am actually baffled why Renato doesn’t look like he is learning about a woman’s subordination to men, it’s as if the only thing he knows is that he wants to have Malena, that’s all.  He has her in her black and white dreams touching and kissing her. Now that alarms me even more if there is really a development in Renato’s character more than just learning how to masturbate and piss in a woman’s hand bag.

I find the editing a little too flaunty, and just like the director, shows extravagance in their fields and sacrifice its real meaning and contribution to their film. One example I have already mentioned above. There are also some scenes where the film has lapses with the eye level. Cinematography may be better by miles compared to other filmic aspects. The pureness of the Italian sun compliments much the delightful childhood of Renato, and the camera has really captured that pureness. The music has been minimized in “Malena”. You can barely notice music accompanying big scenes. The only exception perhaps would be Josh Groban’s “You’re Still You” on the part where Malena leaves the town and Renato contemplates on a mountain rock overlooking the waters of the sea.

I can’t fully despise the film. I am a fan of these childhood-pinning, nostalgic stories about how much we long for some events that happened in our past. However, the film needs a lot of sharpening in the script, in the treatment, in over-all direction. Therefore I can say that the film is a disappointment. Too bad for the Italians, it has been a long time since a great film came from their nation. Tornatore’s creativity may be grander than De Sica and Fellini, but his films are not even half of De Sica or Fellini’s few mediocre films.

Officially Unofficial

The Official Story
Luis Puenzo
Argentina
1985

 “I just need to know if she is the grandmother of our child or of someone else who doesn’t have the strength to walk in the plaza with a placard.”

Breathtaking in every aspect, that is what “The Official Story” for me is. Winning the Best Foreign Language Film in the 1985 Academy Awards, this film is an outstanding cinematic delivery of concepts such as history, truth, parenting, government coercion, rebellion, friendship and women empowerment. So overwhelming is its discourse about why do we need or want to care about the truth. Is it something that we really need to know to be a better and complete person or is it just that something movies and literature has sugar-coatedly overrated in the disguise of the beauty of emancipation? The content is severely enormous and significant and doing these concepts in film is highly prone to being preachy and obsoletely debative. And the best part of Luis Puenzo’s compelling masterpiece is that it did not fall into the quagmire of becoming a pretentious, know-all, answer-all type of movie when it refused to answer the questions storming the whole film. Existentially-wise, truth is a as relative as anything else and reality is a matter of interpretation, and Puenzo understands that--that the only reality we have is that of uncertainty, and of the unknown.

The combination of feminism and deconstructivism is nevertheless wonderful. Our protagonist, Alicia, is a history professor, she and her husband adopted a child they absolutely treated their own. After a visit from an old friend Anna who has been tortured being a suspected activist and inform Alicia that some pregnant prisoners are killed after they give birth to their babies and give those babies away or even murder as well, Alicia goes into a search for her adopted daughter’s parents. She goes to a church, to a hospital, to a non-Government agency and met an old lady she strongly suspects as her daughter’s grandmother. They never knew if their assumption is correct. We can say Alicia did not triumph over the enigmatic lie the government has created, but the process that she needs to undergo deserves veneration. The awakening, the attempt, and the implied continuous search at the end of the film is what a mother and a wife, whether educated or not, financially-dependent or not,  should need to do to at least feel that they are driving their own lives.

The final scene of “The Official Story” is completely breathtaking and staggering, that single long sequence alone deserves the award bestowed upon on Argentina by the Academy. It is an excellent cornucopia of simple yet intelligent camera movement, subtle lighting, appropriate editing, highlighted sound, feminist battle, knock-out performances, adult and child irony, and most importantly the dialogue about truth. A part of this fantastic sequence is when Alicia’s husband in the most dire confrontation pressed Alicia’s hands against the hedge of their bedroom door and repeatedly hit her head on the door. That sub scene is a loud patriarchal recreation (borrowing the term from my Humanities professor) molded in the socially urgent issue of domestic violence. In every feminist film, there will always be a point where patriarchy (which feminism tries to deconstruct) will be defended and protected. It is usual for a film to have that “point” be shown in the event of a woman’s weakness or indifference, which is very much parallel to how feminists films do it with patriarchy. But the film has brilliantly delineated abusers with men and victims with women. Thus the feminist attack is so straightforward and yet very evident and honest. This is probably the best equation of feminism and patriarchal deconstructivism I’ve ever seen on film especially when taken into consideration the few scenes before and after that. Husbands hurting their wives is not a card down for feminism it is an ace for patriarchal deconstruction which leads to feminism.

Government is driven by politics and is probably the most notorious power the world has ever experienced, and even the most dangerous core to deconstruct even above religion. The “Official Story” is not really scrutinizing government, above all it only deconstructs truth, and government is just a second degree link. The question I have is why Puenzo did not give any insights as to what these desaparecidos (missing ones usually politically) are fighting for. This is very unlikely for a Philippine movie with such theme about political rebellion and killings. All I’ve seen from the film is that people are resisting and the only other characters I’ve known are those who are wanting to know where these desaparecidos are. Maybe Puenzo would not like to touch another earth core-deep issue so he opted to make a boundary of these real desaparecidos out of the film and include only their loved ones looking for them and only speak of them in third person which emphasizes their remoteness. I will not hate Puenzo for that though this allows me to conclude that the film is really about truth and these political issues are more of a background story which for its strong nature seems to be a major element at the foreground but is actually not.

Deconstruction is a rebellion, necessary or capricious, I guess we really don’t need to know. The film is a deconstruction of history in the persona of truth and men representing government but it is not a deconstruction of government. Alicia’s husband works in the government and is a pro-government, anti-activist, rightist person, this somehow represents government but the film plot is not attacking his character as a government representation but as a representation of patriarchy. I never really felt or have seen any scene or sequence where a significant amount of effort is created to show government’s evasion. This may be the consequence of eliminating the real victims (desaparecidos) as it required to eliminate the real suspects which is the government. Thus it created a more solid scope for the film. This is what Puenzo has proved for this film, that he is not persuaded by the tempting dramas around his piece and instead focus on what they need to do. This is not easy because the drama at the circumference of the story is strongly powerful. Yet the resulting product is still awesome.

Another formidable aspect of “The Official Story” is its superb direction resulting to unforgettable ensemble performances whether by veteran actors or as juvenile as a 3 year old kid, aside from the cleanly cut narrative I have already mentioned above. You know that an acting is ineffective when you suddenly or gradually feel awkward every time you catch a glimpse of an actor either with the tone of voice or body movement. I am trying to remember if I ever felt that in this film and I find nay. Perhaps one reason is the thickness of the Spanish accent that it almost automatically carries conviction in these actors throwing their dialogues that is why I feel that I am always compelled to listen. Especially the final scene, I have watched it four times and I find it flawless. The stress on important words, the sighs, the scream, and even the timing of tears rolling down of their cheeks are so amazing that you catch such perfection in a long sequence.

“The Official Story” is one of the closest to perfect films I have ever seen. Nonetheless a sophisticated, powerful and significant film not just of the 80s but even of all time. It has a tumultuously gained perfection of a thought provoking story translated into a well-defined film of a sophisticated and classy visuals. The film employs the quest for the truth storyline and I am deeply satisfied that it has been unresolved in the plotline because the search for answers is continuous. 25 years after the world was in awe of Puenzo’s cinematic intelligence, people are still looking for that elusive word “truth” in their lives and in the world they live in. Will we ever be victorious about that extremely replicated journey? We may not but all I know is that the best questions in life are those that remains unanswered.

The King, the Prince, and the Knights

The Barbarian Invasions

Denys Arcand

Canada

2003

I’ve always had special love about films that are eagerly celebrating life and at the same time scrutinizing it, and “The Barbarian Invasions” is one of those few movies that brim over deep passion over life. The film is not highly plotted, not really eventful to form the larger part of the film but also not that too uneventful to be confused with a head documentary. This sequel to a trilogy of drama-comedy by world famous director Denys Arcand is oozing with Canadian wit that it might have adopted from the French, with strapping opinion about life, and with simple film making investing on great characterization and film content.

The film is highly historical and allegorical which flaunts its intellectual endowment about the world giving these characters’ opinions about the planet we are living in valid, persuading, and something to be thought of. Almost all of the characters, except Nathalie, who is the heroin buddy of Remy, are all highly educated and politically, economically and philosophically opinionated human beings. Most of them are college professors of social sciences that’s why I was not surprised to hear dialogues of resentments like—the history of mankind is a history of horror, which is a statement of scepticism but at the same time declaration of intense observation about the world. The best allegory I have noticed in the film is Remy’s personification of his son Sebastien as “The Prince”—the timeless utopian character of a king by Niccolo Machiavelli. Sebastian, played by Stephan Rousseau, is an estranged son to Remy. Despite that painful fact, and despite his booming career in the international financial scene, and despite his antipathy to the broken family they have because of his father’s mistresses, he still finds it worthwhile to make the remaining days of his father’s life comfortable and forgiving. So Sebastien, using his money, intelligence, and smarts, is able to occupy the whole basement of the hospital for his father, to have a continuous supply of prohibited heroin for his father’s secret medication, to have his father’s previous college students to have paid visits, and accompanied by his charismatic front stage personality, as hugely contributed by Stephan Rousseau’s magnetic performance, he is able to become the epitome of the contemporary “Prince” Macchiavelli has been conceptually formulating centuries ago. The “Barbarians”, as according to Remy are his friends, fellow thinker, fellow socialists. Referring to our history, barbarians are the less civilized human beings, thus making the operational title of the film as the invasion of the less civilized. Since the film is intellectually-compelled, civilization is the intellectual counterpart of the operational title but it is not to say that the group Remy belongs to is a less intellectual bunch of people, rather a group of the alternative and freer thinkers as opposed to the hegemonies such as capitalism perhaps. Therefore, as I understand the film, “The Barbarian Invasions” metaphorically means “The Advent of the Independent Thinkers”.

 

 Liberation and education is at the core of this extremely lovely comedy-drama. Aside from the assistance of the physical element of our protagonist as a college social science professor, and of course his colleagues, and the students, and the university, the film is far above the ground committed to learning and continuous education. The scene where Sebastien asked the police officer what did he study in college and the officer answered Criminology minor in Psychology, and then the officer asked the same question and Sebastien answered Mathematics minor in Economics is the simplest yet most powerful movie scene that insinuated much about a person’s passion and core of intelligence or specialty. The scene where Remy asks his son what particularly he does in his job in London and his son answers him with foreseeable complexity is not a simple question born out of the situation or plain curiosity but more of learning that even on his dying age continues. The scene where Nathalie wanders around the house of Remy where she sees some of the books the now deceased man has used to mention is another powerful scene at least for me. The large acquisition of books all over the wall, Nathalie looking small is like a belated glimpse on who Remy is and its contrast to the seemingly living-in-the-shadow and philosophy/history-allergic Nathalie. Liberation is another significant aspect of the film. Sexual liberation has even been verbally mentioned by Remy which in the conservative and seemingly-virtue-abiding point of view is an immoral aberration, but of course not in Remy’s terms. “The Barbarian Invasions”, which strongly suggests a battle in the title itself, suggests a battle of the liberal against the conformist and what I really admire about the film is that Arcand is still able to make this queer powder keg an adorable and lovely piece of art. The Spanish film which would be released the next year after this one “The Sea Inside” is almost synonymous with “The Barbarian Invasions” in its non-conformist propaganda but the former which is directed by Pedro Almodovar, though visually more superior, is at times verging on obnoxious and subconsciously repelling while the one by Arcand is roughly almost consistently admirable.

The characters building this mirror image of our world society are generally endearing, significant, and unforgettable, especially Sebastien, which I have discussed above in his the-end-justifies-the-means philosophy borrowed by the popular passage from Machiavelli. The protagonist Remy is another lovable film character at least of the 21^st century. Though I generally hate patriarchal objectification of women, his likability makes me forgive that side of his nature. Perhaps, to be more specific, the scene where he reminisce all beautiful women in the world that he has seen on TV and movies, from Maria Goretti who dips her adorable toes on the water, to Francoise Hardy singing on TV, to Julie Christie, etc, that scene is nothing less than a bittersweet longing for the past that is the purest recollection of the most pleasurable guilt every man could ever carry on so deeply. That sincere scene is one of the most sincere I have ever witnessed on any national cinema and that is more than enough for me to forget feminism for the mean time and at most realize the beauty of being objectified. 

One of the more important films of the 21st century definitely, "The Barbarian Invasions" is impeccably emotional that compliments the fissures of the intellectual. Showing a lot of astounding awareness and honest interpretation, this film ranges from sweet to bitter and from painful to pleasurable making it an unforgettable cinematic and human experience.

Artificially Sweet, Don’t be Deceived by the Wrapping

Hansel and Gretel

Yim Pil-Sung

South Korea

2007

 

I think this is going to be the first film to be reviewed here negatively, in most parts. The reason is because “Hansel and Gretel” is a pretentious, sugar-coated, and poorly-told dark fairy-tale aspiring to be as good as the Spanish “The Orphanage” or the Mexican “Pan’s Labyrinth” whose mastery in dark fairy-tale genre have been really competitive and impeccable. However, for Yim Pil-Sung’s work, the premise is actually promising and potent but the entire film is so sleepy and to be blatant it is a disappointment for Koreans attempt to do the dark fairy-tale genre. Two movies in my Top 20 favourite ever are actually Koreans—“Brotherhood” and “Joint Security Area”, because they have a genuinely beautiful understanding of the North and South Korea conflict, of friendship, and of brotherhood—but not yet thrillers like this one.

Stranded in the magical (or cursed) forest where the only place to stay in is the House of Happy Children, Eun-soo, a young husband and soon to be a father discovers the horror that is striving in the house. First, with the sudden disappearance of the children’s parents and the eventual learning that these children are looking for appropriate parents and that the ones he thought who are the real parents of these three children are just strangers trapped in the forest like him, and also another victim of the curse, and his quest for refusing to be another victim begins. But I never really felt that quest. The problem of the film first lies with its poor storytelling, and eventually poor directing. I have always been unhappy about films who are seemingly directionless and swirl its viewers around into circles making you lose your grasp in its narrative—which is a significant aspect of film viewing. That must be the reason why I haven’t appreciated “Trainspotting” and hated my friend who recommended it, but at the end of the day, it will always boil down to the viewer’s preferences. I really didn’t hate that friend of mine though, she recommended me “Bridges of Madison County” and I loved it. What I am trying to say here is that even though we have a certain standard of distinguishing good and bad films, at the core of our judgment is a personal aspect that we will inevitably be employing everytime we watch movies. About the circling-effect that I mentioned a while ago, I understand that the purpose of it in the film is for us to feel the slipping sense of time in the character of Eun-soo and the sense of immortality in the children which late we found out I the film that these children died decades ago. The treatment looks faithful to the coherence the film is supposed to possess at the end of it, but its execution in the film looks so amateurish and even more like a mistake more than an intention. The progress of the tension in the film and/or the revelation of the secrets are so serrated making most of its element so idle and obstructive. 

The flashbacks are so unfortunate and unoriginal. They are just simple cuts to the past, and the past is so uninteresting, so well-worn, and so much a catcall—like the brutally treated children in an orphanage with the overdone dirty place and dirty faces. The strength though of the film is its visuals. The first time I scanned though the film, I am jaw-dropped by its deeply fairy-tale inspired cinematography—the yellow-orange-red-gold combination is so melting in the eye, and all the toys all over the house are so charming and pleasant to the eyes which of course is a contrary to the real thing that is happening in the house. The film also employs a lot of jump cuts. It’s too bizarre to see jump cuts nowadays especially when the situation doesn’t really require it. Jump cuts are not recommended when your scene’s energy level is relatively low and if it is not preceding any such scene. 

I hated the film because it fell into the trap of usual storytelling and common directing when in fact the over-all concept of Hansel and Gretel and its dark treatment gives you a huge chance to make it twisted and brilliant. That kind of film is something a director can play on all his creativity and imagination to make this one a hell of a film. But the product is so pale, weak, and this is something you wish should have been done on a different time, and different team because everything has been taken wrong in this film. A total waste of money and time, there are a lot of scripts waiting to be produced out there and yet this one wastes its opportunity.

“Hansel and Gretel” is of course candidly colored, but everything else is a mistake. I did not see anything new about this dark fairy tale. This one should not be compared to “The Orphanage” and “Pan’s Labyrinth”, they are way too superior in any single aspect of filmmaking.

A Could Have Been Animation Masterpiece

Up

Pete Docter

USA

2009

The 10^th another eye-candy and chicken soup-soul production of PIXAR animations distributed by Walt Disney has kept up to its reputation of being more than a scrumptious visual feast for the children, the young at heart, and for the whole family. “Up” soars way and beyond the sweetest imaginations and talents in this contemporary animation era which I shall call the PIXAR Era. As opposed to the dark and political animations from France, Japan, and even Palestine, American popular animation has for me successfully accomplished the intermediate step of bringing up commercial animations to the pedestal of great films. Entering the more social and bravely the controversial sphere is the subsequent plinth PIXAR could opt though for them not to do it is definitely not a disappointment and could even be one if they do so. The world obviously loves, adores, and more importantly consumes the way they do over the past decade beginning with the lovely “Toy Story” in 1995 to my favourite “Finding Nemo” in 2003 all the way to this Academy Award Best Picture nominee.

A charming entertainment is expected for an old man bringing his house to a mythical Paradise Lost through a hundred thousand balloons together with a chubby and cute grade school boy scout who is a reminiscent of him when he was young.  The film is composed of three parts—the background of the objective, the quest to achieve the objective, and the adjusted objective. Adventure films usually put in most of its strongest elements in the middle part which is the quest. You can take as an example “The Lord of the Rings” and even “Harry Potter”, where the quest for the objective is like 90% of the whole film. In “Up”, the nucleus is its strongest link. Most of the time, adventure films let the quest-part usurp the power of the entire film. “Journey to the Centre of the Earth” perhaps is an example when the journey is triggered by an advanced academic interest by a Geology professor and his nephew’s stride to follow and investigate why his father never came back in the travel to the centre of the earth. The motivation sounds exploratory and sincere but the treatment to the potent of this spur has been taken too negligibly as if the reason looks more of an excuse rather than a real reason. The 180 degree of this narrative flaw is nothing less than “Up”.  

The first part of the film is overflowing with warmth that I have ever witnessed. The childish dreams all of us used to have are simply awakened by the young Carl Fredricksen’s dream of being an explorer to the Paradise Lost and also by his soon-to-be-wife playmate’s imagining of an old house into a flying craft. After a couple of sweet boy-girl playtime on this old house, the two soon grow up, get married, and purchase the old house they used to play at. There are scenes suggesting Carl’s wife’s inability to bear child and those so lovely. There is also a montage where the couple keep s a jar coin-bank with a label reading Paradise Lost, but incidences like tires exploding and trees hitting their roof cause them to break that jar coin-bank and use the coins for something else instead. Until they grow old with their childhood dream of going to the Paradise Lost growing as silver as their hair. Carl finally remembers that romantic adventure to their youthful dream and on an attempt to surprising his wife with a plane ticket to Venezuela, she dies. This is not more than half 40 minutes of the total running time of the film but this part for me is eternal. The visuals are oh so God beautiful. The sophisticated mixture of mushy red, childish yellow and sentimental orange-gold provides the most and best eye-popping pictures I’ve ever seen for an animation. This manipulation of beauty through light, colours, positions, and astounding musical score is completely way beyond my imagination. It is heavenly full of heart and passion, an absolute work of geniuses who deeply adores two simple yet inexplicable human life mystiques—art and love.

With its eye-warming, heart-warming, and soul-warming first part of the film, the hardest thing to do now is not to let the first half eat the rest of the film, which it became short a little. The quest part is not that lovely at least for me. Aside from the fact that it has applied a regular-looking cinematography, the adventures itself is not excellent. To be perfectly honest, I wish the film ends at the part where Mr. Fredricksen’s house flies up and away above the city up until the clouds. I don’t mind seeing it as a short animated feature but for sure PIXAR, Walt Disney and most of the commercial pop-culture consumers would mind. I just wish it could have ended that way, and it would become my favourite short film ever or one of best movies I have seen ever, if not the best. But due to its commercial market and value, that part to where I want to end it is just the beginning of what the public consumers would really consume—the adventure part. 

 

Bringing eternity back in the discussion, I could have felt more eternity for the love of Carl to his wife if it ends that way. The ending could have been heartbreaking, nostalgic, fantastic, and childish. A flying house made possible by a hundred thousand of colourful balloons is the sweetest accolade I could ever employ for my childhood and may also for yours. I love seeing the house soar up high with these helium-filled elastics for this parallels love. That image also is one of the strongest and sweetest imagery I have ever witnessed not just in the history of animation but even in art in general. Mr. Fredrickson is old, he lost his wife even before they could have made their most treasured childhood dream of travelling and exploring Paradise Lost. His wife dreams of building a house beside the top of the falls in Paradise Lost. Their house alone though is endangered of being bought by a multi-million corporate company and even the old man’s stay at their house is at stake after a community incident which made the local government order him to stay at some elderly village. I like to say I know how he feels because it makes me feel alive and more human. On the day that he is supposed to be fetched by the elderly village attendants while as the construction foreman and his boss eyeing for the lot of his house show up with sly faces, the old man launches the balloon out of the chimney, the edges of the house break off against the ground, and with a loud thud of happiness and tone of winning against these people way down of his window, Mr. Fredrickson sets his and his wife’s house into where they really want it to be built. This imagery blows me away, at the same time pierces my heart. We all have childhood-buried dreams and fantasies, and most of them are too fantastic we can literally only take them as a dream. We grow old and our childhood dreams become less and less stellar and brilliant. We wake up one day and we realize how much we want to fulfil a dream that now seems to be extremely distant, and too impossible. I find the film beautifully heartrending because it is a realization that these dreams don’t have a room of achievement in the real world, and that we need a medium to where it may come true—and films provide that, “Up” is a proof. 

 

While I love to dwell on that could-have-been aspect of the film, I would like to talk a bit about the end of the film. I call it an adjusted achievement, Mr. Fredricksen’s goal is to move the house to the Paradise Lost but he ends up doing another adventure and achieving another goal. The part where he sees a note from his wife saying that it is time for him to have a new adventure is another sweet element in the film. This enunciates another endlessly seeming beacon to the old man’s life, with a kid friend, and a yellow retriever, Mr. Fredrickson finds a new dream he never really dreamt of.

I will say that “Finding Nemo” still happens to be my favourite animated film because it is consistently great from the very first 5 minutes until the last second of the movie, and because its background of the quest is heartbreaking, its quest is incredible, and the ending is inspiring. As opposed to “Up” which I totally commend the first part/background of the quest, its quest and ending is good but overshadowed by the first part. Generally I find this blockbuster animation a touching one.

Do you know Bashir?

Waltz with Bashir

Ari Folman

Palestine

2008

“Memory fills the holes with things that never happened.”

The film is about the search for lost memories—memories that are traumatic, something that is related to war and or a massacre. Ari, is a filmmaker who has been suffering from dissociative amnesia for 20 years after he experienced being drafted to the Lebanon War in 1982. He talks to his fellow soldiers of the said war and seek professional help from psychologists and professors to lead him get a bigger and fuller picture of his lost memories.

“Waltz with Bashir” is a perturbing yet stylish, intelligent and psychological, and above all else—a hell of a film. The cinematic experience is really fascinating and one of a kind in every aspect. From its solidly coherent form to its timely and haunting content, the film never felt short of successfully translating the cruelty and dreadfulness of any war. I have seen a lot of war films but this one is outstanding, keeping aside the fact that this is animated which actually gave the extravagant amount of surrealism in the film, the film has a poignant reference in the recurrence of war in the society and in its basic unit—family. There is a scene when Ari is talking to his doctor friend and tell him that Ari has been living in the massacre and war even before he has been drafted in the Lebanon war. Ari’s father also experienced war, it is during the 2nd World War, and since Ari was young he has already been living in the terror of any war could ever bring. This realization is of course disputable but the orientation of the present to the past and the past’s connection to the present is observed in vicious cycle that will continuously inhabit people’s psyche. 

The film has a great form. The documentary style supports the search tremendously. It adds slowly building tension and more expectations that are either correct or wrong. The third person point of view or the filmmaker point of view is perfect since it is from the very beginning we already know that this one is going to be a quest movie. I also love the transition from Boaz’s point of view into Ari’s. The opening scene of the 26 angry dogs gives a strong start for the film, Boaz reveals that this is a dream and Ari later on has been revisited by disturbing flashbacks of his memory. It is from other person’s memory that ours are revisited. The motif of kids is made available since the opening sequel when a mother and child are frightened by the 26 angry dogs, and all of Ari’s friends have all their kids. Children are reference to the open ended but most likely to be doomed future of another war that Ari’s children could be then experiencing.

The first question that may arise after watching the film is why this is made animated. The immediate reason maybe is that it is going to be more affordable. With all the explosion and crane-utilizing shots, the film could be so costly—that is the economic perspective. The artistic reason on the other hand could be that expansive and accessible utilization of surrealism that is the fundamental representation of the war as an experience of our protagonist. The montages on the film which I really admire are too expensive and dangerous to be produced. Like the scene where a tank is driving in a narrow street devastating all the walls it is hitting and crashing all the cars it is stepping on. That scene is accompanied by a song I guess is entitled” Good Morning Lebanon”, and the scene is so beautiful as the tank crashes everything on its way as the song goes—“Good morning Lebanon..too much pain to carry on..good morning Lebanon.. may your creams come true..may your nightmares pass..your existence is a blessing.. Lebanon..you are torn to pieces..you bleed to death in my arms..you are the love of my life..oh my short life..tear me to pieces..I’m bleeding. 

The content the film is tackling is very huge, very timeless, and psychological as well as very social. It’s as if every emotion in the film is bone-seated that at times the deepness of these emotions will give you a hard time which is the surreal and which is the real. The film captured the horror of a war, and that is the best compliment a war film could ever get. "Waltz with Bashir" has been effective because everything is set-up to a soldier point-of-view instead of the generals and high-seating officials' idiosyncrasies. Bashir, the president of Lebanon whose assassination triggered the Sabra Massacre has never really been included in the plot. He never spoke in the film, but his assassination impacted drastically lives of many people including our protagonist. Just an asymmetrical realization, ordinary people cries when popular people grasps their last breath, ordinary people lives are changed even without the slightest sight of these powerful person's shadows.