tokyo!

In TOKYO!, three internationally acclaimed directors spin three tales, each mischievously blending fantasy with reality. In Interior Design, Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) follows a couple crashing a friend’s cramped apartment while attempting to begin their new life in the big city. In Merde, Leos Carax (Lovers on the Bridge) presents a skewed Japanese monster movie that asks, “What if Godzilla was required to go through due process?” And in Shaking Tokyo, Bong Joon-ho (The Host) examines the life of a hikikomori (recluse) who accidentally connects with another human being and the effects of his interaction upon the larger world. The injection of the fantastical into Tokyo!, allows the directors to playfully ask serious questions, making for a profound, yet whimsical experience.

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A masterly cinematic triptych, Tokyo! offers three charming tales that, through their levity, confront a number of social and philosophical issues. Transcending the bounds of what its title normally designates, Interior Design tracks the self-fashioning of a woman who, in response to feeling invisible and unimportant to her boyfriend, traces a line of flight with and into her imagination to locate a feeling of self-worth within invisibility itself. Merde elucidates that the formation of absolute Otherness can erupt only from within the bowels of the space opposed to it. Shaking Tokyo, by pointing to the inability to forget debts to alterity by resorting to absolute reclusiveness, depicts the figure of the hikikomori as one for whom the slightest connect produces seismic reactions. Taken together, the film shorts resonate to produce heterogeneous images of Tokyo such that the city cannot be narrativized within a single frame, but rather, demands situated engagements by multiple constituencies to reveal incredibly rich and overlapping navigations of the cityscape in which diverse sites of intimacy and alienation become im/possible.

three monkeys.

Expanding upon his work in CLIMATES (LVHIFF 2006), Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan delivers another searing psychological drama about the unspoken dynamics in a dysfunctional family. Taking the proverbial “three monkeys” as its title and moral anchor, Ceylan’s newest film is composed of tightly wound secrets; evils that are not seen, heard or spoken, but which wreak a distressing havoc on the characters’ lives. Servet (Ercan Kesal), a wealthy politician, has caused a hit-and-run accident, and persuades his driver, Eyüp (Yavuz Bingöl), to assume responsibility. Eyüp is promised a sizeable sum of money upon his release from prison, but this initial act of subterfuge leads to darker deceits.

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Rather than foregrounding a relatively simple narrative, Three Monkeys works through the silences about active ignorance. Becoming paramount is mood, of which the establishment is not easy. Affection-images abound, but their characters are always to the side, removed from the center of our focus. Lighting is certainly crucial, shifting from the illumination of characters to emphasizing their shadows. And grey clouds, sharing their tones with the earth below, glide across an ominous sky to the deafening sounds of thunder. Indeed, the tempest of nature resonates with that of the domestic, a space penetrated in so many scenes by the blinding light of day filling the home’s interior with nothing but darkness. The melodrama is displaced in the temptation of our senses in a cinematic style that reveals everything that is happening without needing to utter a single word.

let the right one in.

Twelve-year-old Oskar is the victim of relentless bullying. One night, an apparition appears on the decaying jungle gym behind him: Eli, the new girl next door. The two misfits befriend each other, Eli coaching Oskar in bravery, and Oskar awakening Eli’s hunger for love. But Eli, alas, needs something more — blood. Director Tomas Alfredson treats the fantastic as the everyday stuff of life in LET THE RIGHT ONE IN. Though there are moments of gore, Alfredson handles them with a restrained precision, and the eerie stillness of the scenes makes them shudderingly memorable. Though dark themes prevail, the essence of the film lies mainly in the relationship between Oskar and Eli, tactfully portrayed by the talented young actors

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Against the dreary landscapes of a wintery Sweden that evoke a great feeling of loneliness, Let The Right One In locates a sense of belonging not within traditional relationships by summoning vampirically queer sexualities. Oskar, an androgynous boy emasculated by schoolyard bullies, lives under the broken marriage of his parents. Eli, the new “girl” next door, lives with an elderly man initially presumed to be her father through our expectations about kinship but later revealed to be her lover. Though one could assume that Oskar and Eli become friends contrary to Eli’s warning in In their first meeting, perhaps the two share something other than friendship. “Love” also certainly fails as an appropriate descriptive for a deviant relationship that is sexualized without sex, revealed in the film’s transformation of the gender dynamics and removal of overtones concerning sexual propriety of “letting the right one in.” It is Oskar who lets in Eli, a non-penetrative penetration that locates affective attachments not merely within each other but also through a variety of external mediating agents like a victim’s blood shared in their only kiss. It is not a “love” that knows no boundaries; rather, it is precisely because of those boundaries that intimacy between Oskar and Eli grows. Age, gender, and species differentials negotiate themselves through eroticized violence and gentleness as the obscene third parties bringing Oskar and Eli together. By removing heteronormativity as the privileged access point to romance to invite multiple parties and pleasures that pervert the meaning of romance itself, Let The Right One In simultaneously fills us with queasiness and warmth to redistribute the intimate sensible in a forced recognition of queer affects.

children of the dark.

The theme in this case is the drastic fate of Thai children trapped in the machinations of child prostitution and the black market in human organs. This new work from established Japanese director Sakamoto Junji does not console audiences with the idea of events taking place in a far-off land, and points a finger at Japan’s association with the problem, the key grounds for which are shown as apathetic dismissal, the unwillingness to acknowledge problems beyond the borders of one’s own country and the burden of guilt upon those who create the demand for child prostitution and trade in children’s organs.
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An incredibly difficult film to watch, Children of the Dark nevertheless beckons us to swallow its horrific content. Mapping the organizational structure of the Thai child prostitute and organ trade market reveals a tapestry in which a plurality of geopolitical forces are weaved together to form a polychromatic ethnoscape. Consequently, responsibility becomes evermore fugitive. The film, however, certainly doesn’t hesitate to force the audience to reflect on its own complicity. Against all the scenes of subjective violence inflicted by those trading in and those consuming children, the camera often delivers affection-images of the children that summons Emmanuel Levinas’s theorization of the face as that which reveals the precariousness of life. While the face simultaneously tempts destruction and beckons respect, we viewers become responsible for which side of that face shows. In a sequence of images toward the end of the film, the camera records a girl being taken into a hospital where she’ll be killed in the scalping of her heart for an ill Japanese boy. After shifting to a shot of a Japanese reporter helplessly gazing on, the film captures a shot of the girl who turns her face to look directly into the camera. In a final shot that is a close-up of the reporter’s eyes staring into the camera, we viewers fail to watch the film in our passivity; it is not we who simply watch the film, but rather, the film is watching us. This cinematic interpellation forces us into contemplation about our own complicity in the film’s depicted atrocities as well as how averting our eyes to what is visually disturbing onscreen participates in the same violence that is perpetuated offscreen by closing our eyes in ignorance to purchase a bit of comfort that the victimized children lack in so many ways.

the photograph.

25-year-old Sita makes a living as a prostitute in a karaoke bar, but not even this is enough to support her sick mother who is looking after her little girl in the country, nor does she have sufficient funds to pay off her debt to the brutal pimp Suroso. Desperation forces the young woman to find an uninviting but cheap bedsit in an attic room above a photographic studio. Its owner, the taciturn, withdrawn aging photographer Johan, begins to form a part of her life – if in quite a different way from the men she has known until now. The woman resolves to start afresh. When she discovers that the sick photographer only has a few months to live, she decides to fulfill his last wishes.

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So many details of The Photograph contribute to the incredible feeling of hopefulness that shines through all that is dismal. Along with a masterly mise-en-scene which depicts a world of decay (rotting buildings, aging belongings, murky glass and mirrors), the use of lighting and colors, particularly striking in night scenes, function as cinematic renditions of old photographs. Cinema, which enables the viewing of movement but also and more importantly time, here perfectly captures the layers of urgency running through the film’s narrative: Sita, coerced into being a prostitute, worries about her ailing and aging mother as well as her young daughter; Johan, a photographer haunted by unfulfilled promises made in and thus to the past, literally feels death arriving from the fast-approaching future intermittently manifest as so many stumbles in his slow walk. Time indeed ticks for both characters, most explicitly apparent in the long takes of rows of clocks which makes of the present an ever-fleeting moment constantly displaced as the future (the present that will be) instantaneously dissolves into the past (the present that was).

Nevertheless, the film reminds us that the art form foregrounded by its title is an aesthetic genre apropos of resisting the unhindered march of time. As revealed in the denouement in which the expiring Johan requests that Sita shoots his portrait (something revealed earlier to be done only by Johan’s successor which, against Johan’s initial wishes, could only be a young male), photography leaves remnants of the moments which cannot remain. In this scene, Sita takes two photographs, one of Johan (who was just taken by death) alone and one of the two together. When she performatively becomes the successor of the one who just passed on, the film replicates the violences of a temporality constantly in motion. But at the same time, it initiates an alternative temporality that lives beyond one that constantly overcomes itself. By displacing the narrative temporality with an aesthetic one, the film captures all the affective attachments of two people who, in a hopeless world becoming evermore decrepit, managed to share an intimacy in a present, unmoored from the motions of self-expiration, made eternal in its impermanence.

the truth be told: the cases against supinya klangnarong.

In October 2005, Thailand telecommunications giant Shin Corporation, owned by the family of former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, brings an $11-million defamation lawsuit against Supinya Klangnarong, a prominent Thai journalist, university lecturer and media rights activist. She had accused the corporation of colluding with the government. During the tumultuous months of her trial, director Pimpaka Towira, a leading figure of Thailand’s independent film scene, accompanies the level-headed Klangnarong, capturing a portrait of idealism and integrity. The result is a beguiling mix of cinema vérité, personal profile, political exposé and national diary. Proving that freedom of speech and public activism can effect change, THE TRUTH BE TOLD seamlessly combines a fluid experimental style with an engaging narrative structure that comments on the legal, political and constitutional turmoil in contemporary Thai society.

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The Truth Be Told foregrounds, among other things, how legal and political struggles remain not within the public but also reach down into the personal. Rather than showing us just Supinya the activist, we also see Supinya the daughter, Supinya the lonely, Supinya the professor, and so on. Particularly important for the film’s navigation of these multiple selves is the tempering of documentation by distance. Although the camera often closes in on Supinya in both public and private spaces, it also takes care to not be so invasive. In one scene, we begin outside the home of Supinya’s parents. One shot more to get closer, another shot to see the TV playing inside. Then one more before we finally move into the home’s interior. We often view Supinya from the other side of glass panels, partially covered by foregrounded objects, or from a distance within crowds. By inhibiting a clear, full view of Supinya, these cinematic techniques fulfill the film’s documentary function while also retaining the complexity of Supinya’s character – something the multitude of apparatuses of capture depicted within the film would deny.

kantata takwa.

Using animation and live action, three directors turn music, theatre and film into a new unity. The film’s title KANTATA TAKWA (named after the orchestra) stands for the ‘kantata’ of love, comprising of patience, dedication and sincerity – a state of mind that strives for dignity and humanism. As co-director Eros Djarot says: “The central question is: What for? What do we live for in this bloody world? If we can’t answer this question, we’re finished.” Despite the independent status and the experimental nature of the film, it had a relatively large budget thanks to the support of the oil billionaire Djodi Setiewan, who also has a walk-on role in the film. The three directors come together from different backgrounds in their attempt to search for the roots of Indonesian culture.

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While described as an existential, avant garde visualized rock opera, Kantata Takwa certainly retains a political charge. The film, recording a concert that took place during the Suharto regime, testifies to the survival and perseverance of a people subject to the terror of death squads. Indeed, music becomes a way of bearing witness to tragedy: in the words of a song by Kantata & Swami, “I sing to bear witness.” Yet tragedy is not all that is experienced by these endangered peoples. The film often focuses on a silent young woman who attends scenes not only of pain, torture, and death but ones of celebration and joy as well. She is anything but passive; we see her seeing, and it is in those affection-images that our own responsibility as viewers is summoned. The close-ups focus on the woman’s eyes looking straight at the audience such that it is not merely us who are watching the film but the film is indeed watching us. And it is in this return of the gaze that the film interpellates us not as viewers to be entertained but as reflexive subjects to contemplate our own ethical responsibilities in a world rife with violence.

cherries.

The narrative of CHERRIES revolves around the eponymous main character, a mentally handicapped woman married to a lame farmer in Yunnan in the early 1980s. Cherry longs to have a child, and when she stumbles upon an abandoned baby girl one night her dream seems to have come true. Her husband, however, is not so enthralled and quickly finds himself locked out of Cherry’s affections. This beautifully shot film effectively draws viewers into a haunting, emotionally complex story from a side of Chinese life most of us only ever glimpse through a passing bus window.

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With a cinematic style that turns narrative into narration, Cherries loses much of the affective impact delivered through its beautiful visual and audio registers. While it captures the grandeur of Yunnan, the camera also closes in on characters in long takes and still shots framing them in portraits to capture a significance that escapes the overwhelming natural, political, and economic landscapes in which they live. Indeed, the pristine landscape is stained with economic policies committed to the legacy of Mao in which a lame farmer, Ge Wang, and mentally handicapped woman, Cherry, struggle to survive. But survive they do through the new affections they have for a baby, Scarlet, whom Cherry stumbled upon and adopted. Unfortunately, the film mostly progresses through the words of a mature Scarlet reflecting on her mother’s life. The use of narration to develop the storyline runs opposite to Cherry’s life which proceeds through gestures and not words. While possessing much potential, the film ultimately simplified its emotive effects by retreating from the affects of image and sound to the bland securities of speech.

the little heart.

Mai, a girl of 17 lives with her parents, two younger sisters and her brother in a poor village in central Vietnam. While her mother tries hard to feed the family, her father pursues pleasure with his outside affairs. This life of deprivation and misery never brings the family any happiness. Deep in the little girl’s tiny heart, she desires to earn more to help her family. From a family acquaintance, she is soon referred to a so-called tailoring course in Saigon. At the admiration of her peers, especially her younger sister, who is just about 16 year old, Mai leaves the family to seek a better life in the splendid city….Beyond everyone’s belief, she is sold to a brothel…

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This film offers little aside from its repetition of a trite though tragic reality – that of young women who, largely due to drastic socioeconomic conditions, blindly follow a trusted one into what becomes a betrayal that enslaves them within the gulag that is a brothel. The cinematography certainly solicits our sympathy but leaves us feeling rather helpless. Focusing too much on the narrative failed to point accusatory fingers at sites that could be held responsible or changed to prevent the depicted violences from occurring. Remaining a narrative rather than aestheticopolitical experience, the film’s cinematic style situates us within the realm of emotion but fails to translate that emotion into anything more than a slight watering of the eyes.

24 city.

 

Documentary and fiction are sometimes uneasy bedfellows, but having made both back-to-back in many of his film projects (most recently, STILL LIFE and DONG), filmmaker Jia Zhangke finally marries the two media in 24 CITY. In his chronicle of the changing fortunes of a defunct but once glorious aeronautic factory and its workers through talking heads and wordless images exclusively, the documentary strain prevails to simple, yet emotionally reverberating effect. 24 CITY balances the human cost of change with a self-renewing future as witnessed by the re-development project on the demolished factory site. It’s pure clarity and pristine cinematography will appeal to a more serious and aesthetically inclined audience.

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A stunning new film in Zhang Ke’s exploration of the effects neoliberal capitalism plays on modern China, 24 City refuses to reduce the incredibly richness of life to a set of statistics useful only to a biopolitical cost-benefit analysis. Refusing to believe that “life is better” in developing China and that “discontent” perfectly describes any and all negativity felt by those who are anything but “prosperous,” Zhang Ke contests the macropolitics of neoliberal state narratives with the micropolitics of affective intimacy. Interweaving real and staged testimonies to deliver an aesthetic rather than historical experience tells a story not of the “prestige” a worker has in the factory, nor expounds the economic virtues of development. Nor is it a story about memory, although memory becomes a particularly crucial site within which we attend the true lesson of the film: that those involved in some way or another with the inhumanization incurred by factory labor and the transformative effects of capitalist development struggle to survive and retain a sense of dignity with and through each other in intimacies possible within those very degrading conditions. Undoing the generalizations afforded by the heinous dichotomies of individual/collective, capitalist/communist, developing/developed, modern/postmodern, the film liberates not life but lives, lives hidden by rational subsumption to the cold calculations of capital that only makes visible comparative economic success. 26 year-old Su NA points to the chilling irony of developed China–that her parents would never be able to afford an apartment in the housing complex 24 City being built on the grounds of the factory to which they gave all their humanity in labor. But not all. For, as 24 City beautifully illustrates, the brutal conditions of factory work, the violences of the state’s fascist tendencies, and the crudities of neoliberal capitalism and its corollary logics always leave a remnant of humanity behind as they march on: a daughter’s newfound compassion for her parents, the intimacy shared between workers throughout the day and throughout their lives, all the attachments changing space into place, and the narratives of those who refuse to be fodder for development.

The dark always casts a shadow of light.