Directors:

Edward Yang, Zhang Yimou, Rob Zombie, Valerio Zurlini, Andrei Zvyagintsev,

Yaesh, Meni

GOD’S NEIGHBORS

Israel France (127 mi) 2012

Todd McCarthy at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 21, 2012

Meni Yaesh's gritty Critics' Week film owes much to early Chuck Norris movies as it follows three young Israelis patrolling their neighborhood with baseball bats.

What looks at the outset to be a straightforward vigilante movie about a trio of hot-headed religious watchdogs in Israel turns into a worthy study of personal maturation and growth in God’s Neighbors. Shot in a punchy, nervous style in synch with its impulsive young characters, this impassioned low-budget production trades in tough guy behavior and rough street violence of a sort that doesn’t fit comfortably with usual international art house specifications. But the film’s raw power and controversial content make it a good festival item and will ignite strong reactions among Jewish and Israel-minded audiences.

A trio of twentyish skull-capped guys, Avi, Kobi and Yaniv, have taken it upon themselves to police their Bat Yam neighborhood for transgressions against the letter of religious laws. Handy with baseball bats and their fists, they’re particularly hot to go after Arabs who have the effrontery to play loud music and otherwise disrupt the Sabbath, but they’re also rough on more relaxed Jews who keep their stores open too late on Friday nights, don’t dress right and so on (the film’s Hebrew title can best be translated as The Supervisors or The Monitors).

While they pursue Torah studies seriously with a notably inspiring and charismatic rabbi, the boys aren’t exactly exemplars of conservative behavior, as they smoke weed regularly and are generally unruly, answering only to their own overbearingly physical interpretation of doing God’s will. Long sections of the film play like a religiously charged American buddy movie devoted to noisy, rambunctious scenes of young bloods getting high, horsing around, listening to music and trying to find alternative outlets for their raging hormones.

The arrival of an attractive, independent-minded woman, Miri, into Avi’s life causes the expected, and resented, disruption in the young men’s dynamic. Ari wrestles with his desires in predictable ways, but where God’s Neighbors feels fresh is in he portrayal of his intense religious struggle. In a convincing and involving manner, first-time writer-director Meni Yaesh presents Avi’s inner turmoil through the character’s painful internal debate, as the young man attempts to reconcile his interpretation of God’s commandments, his habitual and violent implementation of them and his feelings for Miri and their future.

The result causes a moving and entirely plausible growth of character, one spurred—of course, since this is in part an action movie—by a final round of bloody violence. But the final stretch gives the drama a heft and impressive perspective that are not necessarily evident up to that point.

Director Yaesh freely admits he grew up loving Van Damme and Chuck Norris action movies and there’s more than a trace of this visible in his in-your-face style; if he had come of age in the heyday of Golan & Globus, there can be little doubt he would have started his career with them. But instead, he’s both used genre tropes and gone beyond them, resulting in a scrappy, hard-hitting debut.

God's Neighbours Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily

Israeli first feature God’s Neighbours brings a decidedly punchy touch to its sincere plea for tolerance. Adding a theological dimension to its boisterous take on contemporary Israeli society, Meni Yaesh’s film has energy and confidence to spare, but can’t quite decide how to pitch itself - as likeable comedy or gritty social drama.

The uncertainty is especially problematic since its protagonist veers between being an all-out nice guy and something much harder to accept, a violent religious bigot. The likeability of lead Roy Assaf helps offset the directorial awkwardness, but a schematic approach to the film’s moral issues makes for an ungainly, overtly polemical package. This won’t help sales prospects, though festivals, especially with a Jewish or ecumenical angle, will latch onto God’s Neighbours as a lively stimulus for debate.

Set in the Israeli city of Bat Yam, the film is about a young man named Avi (Assaf), who’s a pretty hip sort of guy - into smoking dope, creating his own dance tracks, and hanging out with his high-fiving buddies.

You’d meet a character like Avi in any streetwise contemporary urban drama - the only difference being that Avi is a devout Orthodox Jew of the Hassidic ‘Breslov’ branch. Together with his friends Kobi and Yaniv, he runs a neighbourhood watch team, which deals out summary justice, often with baseball bats, to anyone who disturbs the peace, breaks the laws of the Sabbath, or otherwise gets on the guys’ nerves.

At one point, they rather menacingly confront a young secular neighbour, Miri (Ziesman-Cohen), and berate her for not dressing modestly enough. But Avi also takes a liking to Miri and - perhaps improbably - she takes a shine to him. The question is whether he’ll have to bend his codes to hers, or vice versa, in order for the two to find happiness.

Continuing a cycle of recent Israeli fictions about Orthodox Judaism and its complexities (including Amos Gitai’s 1999 Kadosh and 2007’s Eyes Wide Open), God’s Neighbours is a direct, rather artless film that sketches its social milieu in bold colours. It offers an intriguing insight into Avi’s Breslov congregation and the Sephardic community he belongs to (in which Miri seems to be the only woman visible for miles).

The film is also strong on the cultural contradiction of Avi and his friends: while espousing the most austere moral values, they also identify themselves with the signs of modern international secularity (trainers, baseball caps, dance music et al).

As the film moves into its increasingly thriller-like final stages, the comedy banter between Avi and pals sits more and more awkwardly, and Yaesh strains awkwardly for hard-edged streetwise immediacy. The director-writer not surprisingly lists GoodFellas among his influences, and the theme of interracial confrontation (brought to the fore when the friends head for a rumble with an Arab gang) brings hints of Do The Right Thing or La Haine.

But the film suffers badly in misjudging its lighter registers: the increasingly cute-meet tenor of Avi’s tentative courtship of Miri is hard to swallow, while some support actors’ manic overplaying capsizes the tenor of realism. Yaesh has made his choice to entertain, but a more sober approach would have done justice to the contradictions of a complex and urgent theme.

Maggie Lee at Cannes from Variety, May 21, 2012

Yaguchi, Shinobu

MY SECRET CACHE

Japan (83 mi) 1997

My Secret Cache / Himitsu no hanazono Aaron Gerow for The Daily Yomiuri

Sakiko (Nishida Naomi), the heroine of My Secret Cache, loves money. Most of us do, too, but Sakiko is a bit single-minded in her affection. After all, when asked out for dinner, she usually just responds, "Why not give me the money you'll spend instead?"

So when Sakiko is kidnapped by bank robbers along with 500 million yen in cash and survives a car crash where the robbers die and the loot is lost in an unknown, watery grotto, it is not surprising that the recovery of all the loot for herself becomes Sakiko's all-consuming obsession.

Dismissed by all who think the money burned in the inferno of the crash, Sakiko stops at nothing to find that cash-filled cave. She goes through exam hell to enter a university geology department that knows that area best. She wins any sports contest she enters to secure its cash prize so she can finance her search. Sakiko will even lie, cheat and steal to get her hands on that hidden treasure.

Films in the vein of It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World would reproach her for such greed and avarice, but director Yaguchi Shinobu's slightly skewed gaze is much gentler. Money gives meaning and direction to Sakiko's life--it makes her endearing in her persistence, resourcefulness, and consistency. It even helps her do the impossible, even if it's just for money.

It also becomes the driving force behind the delightful comedy, My Secret Cache, a kind of vectoral progression running through the film similar to that in Yaguchi's other works. The high-school heroine of his debut feature, Down the Drain ("Hadashi no pikunikku," 1992), was also propelled in a straight line, only hers was incessantly downward as one trick of fate after another hurled her further and further into utter degradation.

But whereas she became victim of the downward velocity of that relentless black comedy, Cache's Sakiko takes that vectoricity and makes it her own. And despite falling down more times than one can count, her progression is ultimately upward, bringing good fortune to herself and to others in her wake. My Secret Cache is a much lighter film than Down the Drain. It is rhythmically woven with a pleasant artificiality epitomized by the intentionally campy special effects. Every shot seems posed and many of Yaguchi's hilarious gags stand alone as independent theatrical sketches.

The film skims along the surface like a hydrofoil, often propelled by transitionary gag lines and images that quickly hurl us from one scene to the next. Never deeply explored, Sakiko is as endearingly one-dimensional as the media images that she always seems to look at, appear in, or even makes, like the little "movie" she produces as she investigates her own kidnapping.

Yaguchi's film is in many ways a pastiche of other movies and TV cliches, wryly playing with images while never pretending to take them or itself too seriously. It treats those cliches and conventions in gentle but slightly warped fashion, always working, as with the casting, against type (this is a film, after all, in which perverse devotion to money is a positive trait). Fashion model Nishida ends up looking more like Hisamoto Masami than Esumi Makiko and the usually serious film director Riju Go is transformed into the womanizing but affable geologist Edogawa.

It is this crooked candy cane quality which may make some overlook My Secret Cache. Especially to many non-Japanese, Japanese cinema is either epically serious or personally tragic, evincing comedy only to ease the oppressive load. But from Enoken to the Crazy Cats, from Morishige Hisaya to Frankie Sakai, this country has a brilliant film comedy tradition both long and deep.

While most of his young contemporaries are filming dark, existential tomes, Yaguchi is one of the few carrying on this comedy heritage. It is heartening that Toho, in cooperation with Pia, has decided to support his talent through the Young Entertainment Square series (YES), which finances productions by young filmmakers like Hashiguchi Ryosuke (Like Grains of Sand).

Given Sakiko's determination to locate her treasure, it's now up to audiences to find the Yaguchi's own secret cache of comedy.

Yamada, Yôji

TORA-SAN 48 THE FINAL

Japan (110 mi) 1995

Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajiro, kurenai no hana Aaron Gerow for The Daily Yomiuri

Just as the rather odd signs of Christmas, at least in Japan--such as Santa appearing the department stores and carols filling the air--peak, two other markers of the season assault Japanese movie screens: Godzilla and Tora-san.

This year, Godzilla is dead, but Tora-san will seemingly live on forever as a Japanese institution.

Tora-san, for those of who have been paying too much attention to Zen and Kabuki to learn about popular Japanese culture, is the incorrigible star of the world's longest running movie series, "Otoko wa tsurai yo." In every episode, the itinerant salesman Kuruma Torajiro (Atsumi Kiyoshi), after making a mess of things at his sister Sakura's sweet shop in Tokyo's shitamachi, travels to different areas of Japan and falls in platonic but unrequited love with a local girl, a role that has been played by some of Japan's biggest actresses.

Director Yamada Yoji's skillful mix of humor and pathos, as well as reassuring predictability, has struck a chord with many Japanese, who have supported the series since its inception in 1969.

As a cultural institution, Tora-san embodies many of the contradictions of Japanese society. As an outsider, Torajiro cannot stand the strictures of Japanese work and family life, his straight-forwardness often undermining society's arbitrary rules.

shitamachi society they depicted. That an outsider serves to represent traditional urban culture is certainly ironic, but it is clear the Tora-san films can only give off their patented nostalgic warmth by depicting a world hopelessly gone. From Torajiro's clothes to the architecture of the Kuruma shop, most everything in these films is out of date. But Yamada acknowledges that, in part so as to sculpt out an idyllic, but petrified world that satisfies the nostalgic longings of many a Japanese.

Reaching 48 episodes with this year's Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajiro, kurenai no hana, the series' nostalgia is beginning to center on itself. While still following the pattern, No. 48 is less a new adventure than a fond recollection of Tora-san's past.

Here he hooks up again with a "madonna" from days gone by: Lily (Asaoka Ruriko), the singer he fell in love with in episodes 11, 15, and 25. Lily, often compared to Tora in her itinerant ways, is the only woman who really loves him. The movie also takes up the problem of Mitsuo (Yoshioka Hidetaka), Sakura's son who had spent episodes 42 through 45 pining after his former classmate, Izumi (Goto Kumiko).

Izumi visits Mitsuo to tell him she is thinking of getting married. When Mitsuo is unable to raise any objection, she stubbornly decides to go ahead with the deed, until Mitsuo arrives to crash the wedding procession.

Run out of town, Mitsuo wanders half-suicidally down to Kyushu until he quite by chance runs into Lily and Tora-san "sexlessly" living together on the Kagoshima island paradise of Amami. Mitsuo is finally able to confess his love to Izumi, but what will happen with Tora-san and Lily?

The story might be juvenile and predictable (what fool would bet on Torajiro marrying Lily at the end?), but the pleasure of watching Tora-san is mostly in recognizing a now familiar world. It is fun simply seeing Tora-san do what Tora-san does, and re-experiencing the pleasures and people we encountered in previous episodes. If our world transforms, it is nice to know that the life of the Kuruma clan does not.

Even when we see Tora-san, in a brilliantly funny take on Forrest Gump, romping around Kobe after the quake, electronically inserted next to Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi, we are rest assured that such a horrible catastrophe could not alter the innocence of Yamada's world.

In certain aspects, the series is beginning to look old: Atsumi looks like he can't do much wandering anymore and Sakura's Baisho Chieko appears painfully aged. To many contemporary eyes, the films' values are conservative and unrealistic and the filmmaking bland and unoriginal. Yet it cannot be denied that the world etched out in the Tora-san movies has become a centerpiece of contemporary Japanese culture. Not because it faithfully depicts that culture: such a "traditional culture" has long since ceased to exist (if it ever did exist in the form Yamada portrays). Rather, it is because many Japanese feel a deep-seated need to believe such a world still surrounds them.

A CLASS TO REMEMBER

Japan (122 mi) 1996

A Class to Remember II / Gakko II Aaron Gerow for The Daily Yomiuri

Tora-san is dead and with him, one would think, an era. But don't pay your last respects just yet. Even if the popular "Otoko wa tsurai yo" series will end with the unfortunate death of Tora's talented performer, Atsumi Kiyoshi, the world embodied in Kuruma Torajiro's adventures will live on the work of director Yamada Yoji at Shochiku. Unfortunately, that is not necessarily a good thing for Japanese cinema.

In the last decade or two, interspersed between regular "Otoko" editions, Yamada has been turning out more "serious," "socially conscious" films like The Yellow Handkerchief of Happiness ("Shiawase no kiiroi hankachi," 1977) and My Sons ("Musuko," 1991) to critical acclaim. His A Class to Remember ("Gakko," 1993) in fact won many of the major Japanese film awards for 1993.

Playing off that film's success, Yamada has now churned out A Class to Remember II. Not exactly a sequel, it shares the last movie's situation and lead actor, but with a different location and cast of characters. A Class to Remember featured the jolly Nishida Toshiyuki as a dedicated teacher at a Tokyo night school, but the sequel sports him as an (equally dedicated) instructor at a Hokkaido school for the mentally and physically challenged.

Ryuhei (Nishida) and his colleagues, the seasoned teacher Reiko (Ishida Ayumi) and the neophyte Daisuke (Nagase Masatoshi), have their hands full trying to educate charges who, as if their disabilities were not enough, cannot seem to succeed in a world that has already written them off.

Bullies force Takashi (Yoshioka Hidetaka) to retreat into a shell and Yuya (Kanbe Hiroshi) only relates to others through violent outbursts. As is de rigeur in a Yamada film, however, human goodness sparks miracles. Takashi and Yuya, supported by the faculty, help each other overcome their problems. Even when the two abscond to see a Amuro Namie concert without permission (the film's framing incident), that just provides the occasion for more laughter, tears, and down-home communal warmth.

Both films offer Yamada the opportunity to address the burning issue of education in Japan. Nishida's dialogue broaches some of these dilemmas, but little he mentions is ever visualized on screen. You could almost say this is a social problem film without a problem.

Bullying, for instance, the pressing issue of our day, is mentioned in the film, but never seen. Visualizing it would seem to sully Yamada's pristine vision. While some characters may suffer the usual human foibles, no one in A Class to Remember II is cruel, or power-hungry, or coldly calculating. Everyone is basically good deep down inside.

It is this utopian vision that made the Tora-san movies delightful. Having no pretense to represent reality, they offered us a superior world to fantasize about. But by proposing to depict a troubled reality without ever showing it, A Class to Remember II is an utter failure as social problem film. Instead of being called to action, audiences just leave the theater with a teary-eyed glow, reassured that all of humanity is good, that reality is already utopia. Yamada's vision is deeply conservative, still producing communal portraits in the 1950s Shochiku-style, but without the brilliant irony of its best practitioners like Kinoshita Keisuke.

Wallowing in a feel-good humanism focused on individuals, his films bypass the truly frightening stories of institutional power, structural corruption, and oppression by the community.

In the end, Yamada is woefully old fashioned. His Up With People world is like Father Knows Best without the retro camp, a Reagan-Bush utopia of fifties suburbia transplanted to shitamachi Japan. That's too bad, given the evident talent of Yamada and his actors, but this is a world that should have ended with its era.

THE TWILIGHT SAMURAI A- 93

Japan (129 mi) 2002

A tender study of character development, highlighted by Hiroyuki Sanada’s beautifully understated performance as the “silent” samurai, very much in the manner of Kurosawa, a man who has lost his wife, whose senile mother doesn’t recognize him any more, but a man who finds more peace and harmony in the beauty of raising his daughters than the fierce combat any practicing samurai would face, so instead he leads a quiet, unassuming life. But a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. This is, after all, a samurai picture. But the brief moments of action, some of which are superb, are overshadowed by a meticulous focus on the details of daily life, and the special affections that evolve between the characters. This is an unglamorous view of a modern day hero in an age of warriors, where a man’s conscience is his guide rather than his sword, but when caught in a pinch, his sword comes in pretty handy too. This is a well-written story with healthy doses of humor, it’s well acted, there’s beautiful photography, with a haunting musical score that provides a nice underbalance until the end of the picture when the credits roll, it’s as if a Japanese Barry Manilow sings an overly optimistic final ballad ("Looks like we MADE it!"). Just overlook that if you will, as it’s the only part of the film that meanders out of character. Otherwise it’s a joy to watch.

Time Out Tony Rayns

Former samurai Seibei (Sanada, last seen in Ring) has lost his wife to tuberculosis; he works as a stock clerk for his clan to support his aged mother and two young daughters. A formal introduction to his best friend's sister Tomoe (Miyazawa, radiantly demure) raises the possibility of remarriage, but Seibei considers himself too poor and Tomoe retreats in emotional confusion. But then he's 'volunteered' to duel with a recalcitrant clan member (Tanaka, a butoh veteran making his film debut) who refuses to commit suicide. He's forced to face this man with a wooden sword, having hocked his real one. Yamada (now 72) based this on three pulp stories by Shuhei Fujisawa and directs it with the same choked back sentimentality he brought to the Tora-san series, playing up the parallels with present day salarymen facing premature retirement and poverty. It looks great (inky chiaroscuro photography, a palette anchored in greys and browns), but it could have been made 50 years ago.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]

"The samurai's day is done," confesses a grizzled veteran swordsman before his showdown with the impoverished hero, Seibei (Hiroyuki Sanada), in the final moments of the elegiac "The Twilight Samurai."

Such scenes are traditionally played with a reverential sense of honor and ritual, but for all the bucolic beauty and gentle humanism in Yoji Yamada's delicate film, there is nothing romantic about this meaningless violence.

In the dying days of the Edo era in 19th-century Japan, life appears idyllic in the rural village where widower and petty samurai Seibei raises his two daughters and cares for a senile mother who can't remember him from one day to the next.

Just off screen, however, famine ravages the country (corpses of starved peasants float down the town's river) and the corrupt feudal caste system is on the verge of collapse and civil war. The Bushido code of the samurai, now wielded by the ruling class as a tool of social control, has become a matter of appearances. That makes the threadbare, rank-smelling Seibei a disgrace to the clan in the eyes of his uncle and a joke among his co-workers at the castle stores.

The philosophical Seibei cares little about what they think. His weary face glows with affection for his apple-cheeked little girls and only his crippling debt seems to stand in the way of happiness when his childhood sweetheart, Tomoe (Rie Miyazawa), comes to visit. She sweeps away the shroud of shadows and throws open the confines of their claustrophobic home.

Then the pacifist swordsman is ordered to execute the retainer of a rogue clan, a man sentenced to death for hewing to his ancient code of honor and loyalty.

Japan's nominee for the 2004 Academy Award for best foreign film and winner of 12 Japanese Academy Awards, this is a leisurely paced and introspective chamber drama of social codes and emotional sacrifice. "The Twilight Samurai" both confronts the contradictions of the Bushido code in the mercenary world of political expediency and celebrates it in its purest form. Seibei is the last honorable man in the twilight of the samurai era.

Midnight Eye Nicholas Rucka

After dedicating a large portion of his life to the wildly popular Tora-san movies, Yoji Yamada seemingly comes out of the blue and creates a fantastic modern samurai flick. Twilight Samurai can best be described as being a kind of Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood's 1991 Academy Award winning western) of Japanese samurai movies. While firmly in the jidai-geki (period drama) genre and playing more towards realism than any sort of stylized samurai mythos, the film tells the story of Iguchi "Tasogare" Seibei ("Twilight" Seibei) a lowly 50-koku samurai who toils under great financial hardship to raise his two daughters and care for his senile mother, after his wife passes away from consumption.

Seibei is an incredibly sincere man with great personal pride and honor - an anachronism in the final years of the Tokugawa era - whom no one can figure out: he is always unkempt, is obviously under great stress, but never complains about his lot in life nor wishes anyone foul. When the beautiful Tomoe, an old childhood friend (and crush), returns to his life, he is conflicted by his feelings towards her and his understanding that because of his 50-koku status, he is unable to marry a woman of Tomoe's standing. But when Tomoe's ex-husband, a violent drunk, shows up and demands that Tomoe return with him, Seibei is drawn into a duel to protect her honor. What is discovered through this duel is that Seibei might appear to be a simple, unkempt man, but he is also a master short-swordsman. Quickly rumors of Seibei's might spreads across the land and he reluctantly is forced to accept a mercenary's assignment from the elder's in his Shogun's house, in order to save both his and his family's 'face'.

With incredible patience Yamada unfolds the tale of "Twilight" Seibei. The film is deliberate, concise and beautiful in its execution. The film harkens back to the heyday of jidai-geki but does so in a different and unique manner. The violence, while still dished out in sharp bursts, has a very real quality typically ignored in chanbara or jidai-geki productions: a perfect illustration of which has Seibei, towards the end of the movie, step over the body of a slain samurai assassin who is now frozen in rigor mortis and engulfed by flies. Somehow, by infusing the film with such 'realism' the story gets anchored and becomes more authentic. By the time we've reached the conclusion and the coda of the movie, we realize that what we've seen is not only the story of Seibei and his anachronistic code of conduct, but also how, (and this is the major similarity to Unforgiven) because of this, he (and his ilk) could no longer function in the rising modern world which regarded the West, material goods and modernization as things to be prized above honor. These themes resonate loudly in Twilight Samurai and helps to elevate Yamada's movie from a mere 'period picture' into something more profound.

The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]

Destined to be overlooked and underappreciated, Yoji Yamada's The Twilight Samurai is a mature, revisionist, Budd Boetticher samurai epic. The genre's battery of traditions takes an evocative, real-world beating; here, 19th-century bushi are shogun functionaries mired in clan accounting and haunted by financial problems. Yamada, a septuagenarian work-horse best known in Japan for his 27-year run helming some 46 contemporary romantic comedies in the "Tora-San" series, set out to make a "realistic" period piece, and so the tale turns on the ludicrous injustice of clan politics, complete with dog-eat-dog task work, managerial humiliation, and pre-scripted hara-kiri. Employees of the New World Order can easily relate.

Iguchi, the titular hero (Ringu vet Hiroyuki Sanada), is a downtrodden nowhere man cowed by his low class stature, his recent widowerhood, and the massive debt incurred because of his dead wife's tuberculosis. With his petty salary garnished and his elderly mother all but completely senile, Iguchi (nicknamed Twilight by his scoffing co-workers) finds solace in his young daughters and apparently harbors, in a culture predicated on manly aggression, no desire to improve his situation. Presumably shortlisted for the Edo period's equivalent of layoffs, the fading warrior sees the fickle finger of fate arrive in the form of Tomoe (Rie Miyazawa), his childhood sweetheart, who's escaping an abusive marriage with a notorious swordsman. Defending her against the drunken lout (though he knows he's too poor to marry her), the modest Iguchi exhibits righteous fighting skills no one ever guessed at, and suddenly his slightly brightening future is put on the chopping block as the clan dissolves into civil conflict and expert assassins are required.

Based on a novel by Shuhei Fujiwara, The Twilight Samurai is not a radical redressing of samurai formula so much as a sensible realigning of its priorities: Honor, ostensibly the end-all of the warrior myth, is matter-of-factly trumped by poverty, parental devotion, romantic love, familial responsibility, even complacent contentment. Yamada shoots his movie with a grandfatherly expertise, never squeezing the drama for juice or distancing us too far from the characters—it's a pleasure to see a movie that makes every shot count, narratively and emotively. (The unceremonious observation of work—Iguchi earning extra money by assembling bamboo insect-specimen cages, as well as meticulously prepping his sword for battle—is just another factor in the movie's commitment to reality.)

At the same time, it's hardly a gritty experience; Yamada's wide-screen images are as ripe and sweet as a Sirkian peach. Fujiwara's story, with its concise yet organic contest between happiness and society, is adroitly crafted, but Samurai's primary blessing is a sense of humane community, where relationships have unexpected depths and individuals' inconsistencies reflect the culture's irrational brutalism. Climactically, a would-be death-defying face-off becomes an exhausted heart-to-heart of commiseration and mourning—punctuated by one exasperated warrior absentmindedly snacking on a fragment of cremation bone. Here, as throughout The Twilight Samurai, the acting is grippingly genuine and several degrees more convincing than its genre can usually accommodate. That Yamada's film was actually nominated for an Oscar earlier this year shouldn't be held against it—even the Academy's import-selecting body can trip on its own Ferrari every now and then and elect somethingsubtle, grown-up, and nourishingly wise.

DVD Times Noel Megahey

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Asian Cinema Drifter Tuna

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filmcritic.com Don Willmott

DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich]

Deep Focus Cinema [Clayton L. White]

DVD Verdict Erick Harper

d+kaz . intelligent movie reviews [Daniel Kasman]

hybridmagazine.com Vadim Rizov

eFilmCritic.com (Collin Souter)

Political Film Review Michael Haas

Movie Gazette DVD Review [Anton Bitel]

EyeForFilm.co.uk Amber Wilkinson

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Kung Fu Cult Cinema Janick Neveu

Guardian/Observer

The Japan Times [Mark Schilling] also seen here: japantimes - review

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Chicago Tribune [Michael Wilmington]

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

New York Times (registration req'd) Elvis Mitchell

Los Angeles Times [Manohla Dargis]

DVDBeaver.com - Review [Henrik Sylow]

LOVE AND HONOR B+ 91

Japan (122 mi) 2006

An old-fashioned interior Japanese chamber drama, told with a delicately understated, yet thoroughly melodramatic touch. Dramatic sentiment is always underexpressed, occasionally rising to the surface, but this is something of a weeper. Opening with a little too much marital bliss, one can only surmise that this happiness is temporary, especially when we learn from the outset that the husband’s job as a low level samurai is to test the feudal lord’s food before he dines. Shinnojo (Takuya Kimura, from 2046) ridicules his own position, believing it is already an outdated custom, and yearns to open a swordsman class of his own. But he is immediately stricken ill from eating out-of-season shellfish and develops a high fever, lapsing into a coma which he survives, but is left completely blind. His beautiful wife Kayo (Rei Dan) is wise enough to hide his sword, as the mood of the film immediately turns dark and somber where Shinnojo starts entertaining suicidal thoughts, as a blind samurai is not only of no use to anyone, but instead becomes a burden to others, something that shames him deeply. When his family meets to decide his fate, they are more interested in maintaining their own customary lifestyle than thinking of him. When Kayo mentions that a fellow samurai Shimada (Mitsugoro Bando), now a local official who had designs on her before she was married, offered his sympathy and his help, they immediately feel relieved of all responsibilities. Some time afterwards, Shinnojo receives more than an adequate compensation from his lordship, a generous offer that surprises everyone. But this is followed by an amusing scene where Shinnojo and another samurai have to wait in the weeds for an official meeting to offer thanks to his lordship, where they spend the entire time swatting mosquitoes until his lordship walks by, pausing, recognizing their bows, but then continues on his way. This scene, though, defines what kind of film this is, as it meticulously details an official adherence to custom, class rank, and an arrogant disregard for those in a lower class.

Shinnojo himself has had a boyhood servant since his own father died, Tokuhei (Takashi Sasano), who turns in one of the better performances in the film, not just a loyal subject, but a humble, good-hearted man who spends his entire life accommodating others. Japanese films are filled with side characters like this, and rarely, if ever, are they recognized. But this film takes great care in developing Tokuhei’s importance to those he serves, where he constantly has to evaluate what he says, where truth is a variable depending on mood and stature, as he can’t exceed his place, but he can’t lie or disappoint either, so he’s always caught in a position where it’s more important not to offend than tell the truth. When Shinnojo discovers through a gossipy aunt that Kayo was seen with Shimada, Shinnojo throws her out of his house on the spot before doing the same to his wife after she is later seen again in Shimada’s company. At this point it turns into a revenge saga, where Shinnojo sharpens his swordsman skills with an old sensei (Ken Ogata) who suspects he intends to fight a skilled samurai and helps him prepare for the inevitable. Death and honor are common samurai themes, but through his sword, honor and pride have regained prominence over feeling like a helpless victim. A man alone, like any Sergio Leone caper, is the only way to prepare for battle, meeting Shimada in some abandoned ramshackle stable. Yamada has an obvious flair setting up this pivotal scene, well-paced, perfectly executed, never losing his objectivity in realizing the moment, which is what it is, and nothing more. The small details of this film characterize its charm, where the obvious isn’t the focus, as there’s no movement to challenge or change the existing structure, but instead what matters is what is often overlooked, where one must be blind not to see.

The Village Voice [Aaron Hillis]

At 76, Japanese writer-director Yoji Yamada is still best known in his homeland for a one-time Guinness Book record-holding series of four dozen films (the Tora-san Series), all with virtually the same plot about a traveling salesman who is unlucky in love. That resolute consistency carries over to Love and Honor, the third leg in Yamada’s melodramatic samurai trilogy (following the Oscar-nominated The Twilight Samurai and The Hidden Blade). Here again are the familiar feudal class themes and low-ranking samurai protagonist: Newly appointed to be a food tester for a local lord, Shinnojo (Takuya Kimura) eats an out-of-season shellfish and goes blind. He falls into suicidal despair, until a chance to exact revenge upon a head clerk who has bedded his wife leads to the trilogy’s third mano-a-mano showdown. If you’ve seen the others, you’ll know not to expect Zatôichi action in this blind man’s duel; Yamada’s refined Merchant-Ivory approach to the Edo era (slow pace, genteel storytelling, restraint) produces more yawning than fawning. At least the guy’s dependable.

Dreamlogic.net [Chris Nelson]

Based on the novel by Shuuhei Fujisawa, Love and Honor (aka: Bushi no ichibun, The Poison Taster) tells the tragic tale of Shinnojo Mimura (Takuya Kimura) a spoiled young samurai, a poison taster for a feudal lord, struck blind after a toxic meal. Thereafter rendered a “useless” person the samurai is rendered housebound, the once fiercely independent and proud man finding himself forced to rely on the kindness of his faithful servant and beautiful wife (Rei Dan), and subject to pity, ridicule, and opportunism by former friends and family. As is the way with things, troubles come in waves, and bad situations have a way of getting worse. Following one particularly despicable digression the samurai is forced to don a sword once more, and defend the honor of both himself and his beloved wife.

Elegant and straightforward in delivery, director Yoji Yamada’s Love and Honor is one of the most interesting and moving samurai films I’ve seen in quite some time. The performances of Kimura and Dan are top notch, perfectly conveying their understated love, and in turn amplifying the emotional impact of their most terrible of situations. Samurai action devotees may be off put by the film’s lack of conflicts, but the film’s finale provides intensity enough to rank with the best. A film of quiet beauty, and a captivating meditation on pride, love, duty, and integrity, Love and Honor is easily one of the best films of 2007. Seek it out.

User comments Author: matchettja from Japan

Do we need to know everything? Would our lives be better if there were certain things we didn't know? These are matters addressed in this story of a samurai family and life in feudal Japan. It was the duty of certain lower level samurai to taste the food before serving it to the lord of the clan in case it might be poisoned. When Shinnojo Mimura, one of the food tasters, eats some tainted sashimi of an off-season shellfish, he falls ill. After a period of unconsciousness, he awakes to find that he is unable to see. At first, he tries to hide the fact from his deeply loyal wife, Kayo, for fear of worrying her. When she understands that, she protests that she is his wife and it is her duty to worry for her husband. However, when she learns from the doctor, who has withheld the truth from his patient, that this blindness is permanent, she also avoids telling her husband, in order to spare his feelings. There are certain truths that are better for us not to confront. Gossip, however, is another matter. When Mimura's busybody aunt comes with news that Kayo has been seen in the company of another man, he throws the aunt out of the house, but he is left with doubts. Is such a thing true about his loving wife? Mimura decides it is something he must know, regardless of consequences, so he sends his servant to follow her and report back to him. The rest of the film deals with what must be done in order to restore honor. It is a fascinating look at life, duty and honor during the samurai era and well worth watching. Takuya Kimura (Mimura), Rei Dan (Kayo) and Takashi Sasano, the loyal but sometimes confounded servant, all give memorable performances.

User comments from imdb Author: DICK STEEL from Singapore

Love and Honor is the concluding chapter to director Yoji Yamada's loose samurai trilogy. Personally, I have enjoyed the other two, Twilight Samurai and The Hidden Blade, because they are extremely well made, and have important stories to tell, rather than focusing its energies onto huge action sets with plenty of sword wielding, and Love and Honor is no different.

Shinnojo Mimura (Takuya Kimura) is a lowly Japanese samurai, who's employed by his clan as a food taster. It's a dead end job with zero job satisfaction, and Shinnojo reveals in a conversation with his wife Kayo (Rei Dan) that he dreams of opening up a kendo dojo of his own, and recruiting students to teach regardless of their caste. It's a noble dream, but one that is cut short when he gets blinded during one of the food tasting sessions, eating sashimi made from fish which is poisonous when out of season.

Like its title suggests, Love and Honor is an intense love story based on those two themes. With Shinnojo handicapped, fears are abound within the family that without a job, they will lose their status and material wealth. And Shinnojo's growing negative attitude toward life doesn't help either. Stress befalls Kayo, and on the ill advice of her aunt, she seeks to find a powerful samurai Shimada (Mitsugoro Bando) to help them out of their plight.

No man enjoys his wife having to bring home the bacon on his behalf, especially not when it involves favours with another man who's vastly superior, not in feudal Japan. It's an interesting character study into the 3 characters, of love, defending of honor, envy, jealousy. And it all comes to an end in what I thought was a very touching finale. As mentioned, don't anticipate any sword fighting action to be a huge spectacle. Rather, the one here seemed to be rather rooted with realism. When it boiled down to the sword, every slash, parry, thrust seemed made with measurable consideration, with forceful purpose. Given Shinnojo's blindness, don't expect Zaitochi styled super-samurai feats, and in fact, Shinnojo's struggles are more to do with things from within.

Takuya Kimura, whom I last seen in 2046, has aged for this role. He looked mature and pretty much left his pretty boy days quite far behind to bring certain gravitas to his character. Rei Dan in a debut is on par with the recognizable female leads in the previous trilogy movies, and is excellent too in her role as like the other female characters, and a memorable one too. And not all's bleak in the movie, with Takashi Sasano's servant character Tokuhei bringing about some light hearted moments with his earnestness and wit.

Samurai movies have been possibly enriched by Yoji Yamada's trilogy contribution, and Love and Honor triumphs slightly over its predecessors to bring the series into a fitting close. Recommended!

The Japan Times [Mark Schilling]

Some directors, like the recently deceased Akio Jissoji, have careers that look from the outside to be wildly eclectic. Jissoji's filmography encompassed everything from the early "Ultraman" shows to the arty films he made for the Art Theater Guild in the early 1970s.

Yoji Yamada, on the other hand, would seem to be the ultimate journeyman, churning out 48 episodes of the Tora-san series from 1969 to 1996 -- a feat that lifted him into the Guinness World Records. In discussing the series, Yamada often compared himself to a noodle cook, who aims for consistency as well as quality.

But Yamada's trilogy of samurai films -- "Tasogare Seibei (The Twilight Samurai)" (2002), "Kakushi Ken -- Oni no Tsume (The Hidden Blade)" (2004), and the new "Bushi no Ichibun (Love and Honor)" (2006) -- differ from much of his earlier work not only in subject matter but treatment and sensibility. The folksy humor and sentimentality that were once Yamada trademarks are seldom in sight. Instead, the dominant mood is autumnal, verging on somber; the stylistics spare, if visually rich.

If Yamada was once a sort of Japanese Norman Rockwell, giving the big audience warm tinglies with his idealized, portraits of national archetypes, he has since become more like Andrew Wyeth: still popular with the masses, but striking deeper, darker emotional chords.

Based, like the first two films in the trilogy, on the fiction of Shuhei Fujisawa, "Bushi no Ichibun" also resembles them in its story arc. Once again, a low-ranked samurai faces character-testing difficulties that he overcomes with the support of a pure-hearted woman, culminating in a sword duel with a rival. In other words, a third serving of soba.

But just as one bowl of noodles is not like the next, "Bushi no Ichibun" stands apart from the other trilogy films. First, its star, Takuya Kimura, is not, like Hiroyuki Sanada of "Tasogare Seibei" and Masatoshi Nagase of "Kakushi Ken," a middle-aged screen veteran, but a youngish TV megastar with limited film experience. Rei Dan, who plays Kimura's wife, is a screen newcomer, in contrast to Rie Miyazawa and Takako Matsu, established stars who played the female leads in the first two films.

Also, the situation of Kimura's samurai, Shinnojo Mimura, is more dramatically desperate. A food taster for his clan's lord, he is poisoned by bad shellfish and goes blind. Though poor by samurai standards, Shinnojo and his wife Kayo (Dan) have a happy marriage, and his career prospects as an expert swordsman are bright until suddenly it all goes crash.

Kayo and the couple's elderly servant Tokuhei (Takashi Sasano) remain devoted, but Shinnojo feels worse than useless. He contemplates suicide, and turns bitter and violent. Kayo, an orphan who married up, can bring no allies to this struggle. Meanwhile, Shinnojo's relatives, beginning with his aunt Ine (Kaori Momoi), are selfish, coldly practical sorts who, at a family conference, tell Kayo to find a powerful patron. She remembers Toya Shimada (Mitsugoro Bando), a clan banto (captain) who had once expressed sympathy for her plight.

Shimada proves to be as good as his word, using his influence to allow Shinnojo to keep his status, income and house. All seems to be saved -- the once light-hearted Shinnojo cracks his first jokes in ages -- but he can't escape the feeling that Kayo is slipping away from him, into the arms of another man. When a rumor confirms his fears, he goes off the deep end -- this time, it seems, for good.

This material is ripe with melodramatic potential, but Yamada films it with a minimum of histrionics. He keeps his scenes, even ones in which crockery is thrown, simple and pointed, with plenty of strong emotion but little overacting.

This sort of paring down is common in films by older directors, but "Bushi no Ichibun" does not share other familiar features of "geriatric" cinema: staginess or outdated-ness. One reason is that Yamada's principal couple is young and he allows them to act that way, instead of sitting on their personalities in the name of auteurist rigor.

Kimura disappears into his role more completely than I would have thought possible, while Dan, a former Star performer in the Takarazuka revue, is a revelation -- thoroughly professional, refreshingly natural. Not an aughties idol or diva, but an actress who could have walked in from a Mizoguchi film.

Also, instead of falling back on the tricks of his earlier career -- Tora-san redux -- Yamada is working in what for him is still a new genre, using new approaches. Even Tokuhei -- whom Yamada could have easily turned into yet other lovable version of Tora-san -- is a hard-bitten character in his own right.

Viewers of the other trilogy films will recognize familiar tropes, including the climactic duel that, true to Yamada's keep-it-real code, has none of the fantastic flash of other films about blind swordsmen, including the "Zatoichi" series. The sword moves are the real deal, the battle intensely personal, the results grippingly final. That is to say, if you liked the first two films, you'll like this one even more. Cooks tend to improve with practice -- and Yamada's third batch of noodles is his best.

Lunapark6

Time Out Chicago (Jonathan Messinger)

Variety.com [Russell Edwards]

New York Times (registration req'd) Jeannette Catsoulis

DVDBeaver.com [Luiz R.]

Yamaguchi, Takayoshi

BREAKABLE B 87

Japan (70 mi) 1993

black & white Japanese ennui with surf guitar along with some haunting imagery

Yamamoto, Masashi

"For Yamamoto, Life Is by the Reel" Interview by Aaron Gerow for The Daily Yomiuri

ATLANTA BOOGIE

Japan (100 mi) 1996

Atlanta Boogie / Atoranta bugi Aaron Gerow for The Daily Yomiuri

Popularized at the turn of the 19th century as a means of training young bodies for the service of the state, the undokai or athletic meet has become a symbol of Japanese schools, companies and local communities--a delightful way to compete and work up a sweat while simultaneously strengthening the body politic.

The affluent residents of Todorokicho in Yamamato Masashi's bizarre new comedy Atlanta Boogie carry on this chauvanistic tradition when they vigorously protest a proposal that their mostly illegal, foreign neighbors be allowed to take part in the local undokai. By definition, such a Japanese institution is no place for them, they seem to say.

In the movie, gaijin participation is secured only when a nouveau riche power broker named Matsumoto (Furuta Arata) and the police chief (Tobayama Bunmei) deviously decide on the undokai as a way of ridding the town of unclean foreigners once and for all. Ignorant of the scheme, Shinohara (Kawamura Kamon), a small-time local shopkeeper and friend of the foreigners, asks the deadbeat Yoshi (Nozawa Hideyuki) and the tough bargirl Yuki (Suzuki Saiko) to organize a team around the inhabitants of Yoshi's cheap, but international boarding house, the Hotel Hyatto.

Their rag-tag team, however, looks to be no match for Matsumoto's gang of hired guns, peppered with former major league and NBA stars. Undaunted, Shinohara and Yuki raise the stakes, challenging Matsumoto to phenomenal bets and hiring both a pro undokai supervisor (Lily Yi) and their own ringers (including tarnished Olympian Ben Johnson--the real one). Events snowball until this parochial Yokohama athletic meet captures a worldwide satellite audience and threatens to top the Atlanta Olympics (ergo the title).

Although concluding with the undokai, Atlanta Boogie is not just an absurd sports movie. Producer Hayashi Kaizo, known for his own international directorial efforts, has gathered together a multi-national cast of Senegalese, Pakistanis, Canadians, and Chinese, as well as a Pan-Asian crew that includes two veterans of Edward Yang's staff: photographer Li Yi-xu and lighting man Li Long-yu.

Epitomized by the eleven languages crisscrossing the film, Altanta Boogie is a cosmopolitan potpourri that follows in the tracks of several other recent "borderless" Japanese movies, from Otomo Katsuhiro's World Apartment Horror to Sai Yoichi's All Under the Moon ("Tsuki wa dotchi ni dete iru," 1993) and Iwai Shunji's Swallowtail Butterfly ("Suwaroteru," 1996).

Beyond focusing on the de-homogenization of Japanese society, such films also seemingly strive for a more international Japanese cinema, one that can survive financially by playing to a foreign, particularly Asian market.

Unlike Swallowtail Butterfly, which was two-and-a-half hours of pretentiously artsy torture, Yamamoto's film carries on the irreverent tradition of the first two. Musical numbers, absurd sets and Furuta Arata's hyperactive performance make Atlanta Boogie a frenetic if not sometimes out-of-control farce.

In fact, the dominant mood of Atlanta Boogie is of a raucous company undokai. In the spirit of other talent agencies turned movie producer like Hori Pro, Atlanta's production company Amuse didn't stop at casting some of its own musical artists in the major roles, it organized cameos by dozens of others, including Kishitani Goro, Tsukamoto Shinya, Nagase Masatoshi, and Bakufu Slump. The resulting musical score is one of the film's most enjoyable aspects.

In the end, Atlanta Boogie can be as fun as, but also as uneven as any undokai, with some performers missing the starting gun and not a few of the gags falling flat on the track. It's like everyone at Amuse just got together one day, ran to their heart's delight and put it all on film.

A skilled comedy director such as Kawashima Yuzo could have pulled this chaos together into a film, but one has the impression that Yamamoto, known for his more serious Robinson's Garden ("Robinson no niwa," 1987) and the unfinished Kumagusu, is not completely up to the task. The producers may have had a laugh at a Japanese symbol, but Todorokicho is far from topping Atlanta.

JUNK FOOD B 87

Japan (82 mi) 1998

Junk Food / Janku fudo Aaron Gerow for The Daily Yomiuri

Street fashion is still in. Teens walk through Shibuya in Tokyo with baggy pants, knit caps, cornrows and so on, assuming the same style as the home boys in the 'hood. It's cool to look the outlaw, to present oneself as an outsider within Japanese society.

A film like Iwai Shunji's Swallowtail Butterfly has celebrated this display of alienness. But even if Iwai's decision to have his Japanese cast speak foreign languages may have presented the image of a multicultural Japan, in the end, the "otherness" the actors assume appears to be more of a pose than a reality. It is just as superficial as the Compton clothing rich Tokyo kids buy in the boutiques in Harajuku.

Yamamoto Masashi, who started depicting Japan's outsiders long before Iwai, does it differently. When he needed someone to play a youth gang leader, he searched out the legendary Onimaru--the king of the streets of Omiya, Saitama Prefecture--and cast him and in his gang, along with a motley pack of real tattoo artists, musicians, street kids, and resident foreigners, in the new film Junk Food. The result is a bitingly real, unpretentious look at Japan's other side.

Yet Yamamoto is not naive enough to think his cinema can expose the truth of the urban jungle. Instead of giving us a serious lecture about reality, he presents a variety of stories, both tragic and absurd, in a myriad of styles that acknowledge the artifice of the present while revealing its hidden underside.

The first extended story, in fact, depicts less the streets than the corporate office: the Tokyo Bay world of glass, chrome, and its facades. Miyuki (Iijima Miyuki), a junkie OL, wakes up in a run down basement apartment next to a man whom she promptly kills after getting her fix. Making herself up as if nothing had happened, she heads to the office only to spend most of her day trying to get her next dose.

Shot in a more professional style with professional actors, this section is appropriately the film's most artificial. It presents a schizophrenic world split between a clean facade and perverse inside, encapsulated by Miyuki who, after all she has gone through, can still return home at night and play the wife to her blissfully ignorant husband.

After this daytime tale, Junk Food moves on to its centerpiece--the stories of the night. There is Hide (Yoshiyuki), in town to pick up the ashes of a dead friend, and have a fling a prostitute named Myan (MIA); Cawl (Ali Ahmed), a Pakistani who stole money to marry his Japanese girlfriend, but then kills her and a fellow Pakistani after his plans go awry; Ryo (Onimaru), a gang leader forced to look for the girl of an unpleasant acquaintance; and more.

Now using a rougher, more documentary form, Yamamoto skillfully weaves these threads together until Cawl and Ryo join Hide and Myan to help pour the ashes of Hide's friend into Yokohama Bay. It is a touching moment--a temporary point of stasis in an urban world perpetually in motion.

The fact that the friend died on the Yamanote Line, circling round and round before anyone noticed, is symbolic of both Yamamoto's whirling movie and a world that ignores the "junk" it creates.

The circle is the defining figure for Junk Food, in part because the two above "acts" are framed by short, video-shot scenes of a blind old woman (played by Yamamoto's own mother) performing her unchanging morning routine. As one day comes to an end, another just starts the whole process over again.

The old woman is, in one way, the mundane that contrasts with the extraordinary events of the other stories. But she is sightless, a disabled figure whom society usually locks away. If she embodies how the alien can become the everyday, Yamamoto's brilliant decision to turn the film back on itself--to have the stories encircle each other instead of moving linearly parallel--helps him to underscore how all that is "alien" to Japan is as much part of the normal as the facade that tries to substitute superficiality for substance.

Junk food, despite the bad rap it gets from the "good" forces of healthy society, is still food. And often tastes a lot better.

Yamashita, Nobuhiro

LINDA, LINDA, LINDA B 86

Japan (114 mi) 2005

A quiet, affectionately told story about a few days in the life of some high school girls at a Japanese High School, girls that all wear the exact same uniform, a white blouse, occasionally a white short sleeved sweater over it, with a dark skirt above the knees with dark socks nearly up to their knees, as if they’re ready for a round of tennis. The pace of the film is slow, the vocabulary is nearly non-existent, with plenty of ums, yeahs, OK, sure, or just no answer at all, resulting in plenty of dead space, which is the charm of the film, as it establishes a feeling of authenticity. Much of the time the girls are just sitting around doing nothing. Despite the fact they’re all mildly attractive, each seems to dwell in a mindset of negativity about themselves, which results in extreme shyness, as no one is willing to take the first step. Instead, they exist in a state of inertia, which pretty much explains high school.

In groups, however, they at least feel like they’re having more fun, even when nothing’s happening. Several girls decide to participate in a pop music club, where they can actually perform in an all-girl band. But three days before the show, two of them get into an argument where the lead guitarist breaks her finger and the lead singer quits. The keyboardist switches to lead guitar and remaining three decide they will carry on if they can find a lead singer, which is done by random selection, another extremely shy girl who turns out to be a Korean exchange student who has never performed in a band before and speaks little Japanese. But not to worry, after being handed a Xerox copy of the lyrics, she takes the honor seriously, entering a karaoke club to practice singing, but she’s refused admittance unless she purchases drinks, which she refuses, but later we see her flailing away. Little do we realize from her initial renditions that the song they’ve selected is the title of the film, a catchy 3 or 4 note Ramone’s sounding tune that was the biggest hit for the Japanese punk band the Blue Hearts, which happened to be written by James Iha, a former member of the Smashing Pumpkins who also wrote the soundtrack.

While nothing earth shattering happens here, there are plenty of small understated moments that accurately reflect the unease of kids who are uncomfortable with themselves, as most of the time we do not see them rehearse the music, which would offer a jolt of high-end energy, instead they occasionally strum their instruments while waiting for someone who hasn’t shown up yet, or we’ll hear an entry chord on the soundtrack that repeats itself softly, like a whiff of a gentle breeze. Despite having little time to prepare, these kids appropriately spend more time together but don’t seem overly worried and easily get side tracked by occasional ventures with unexpected friends or the opposite sex, or several humorous asides, moments where it seems they have all the time in the world, expressed with a kind of carefree spirit that recalls the Beatles in A HARD DAY’S NIGHT. Once the obligatory performance takes place, it’s utterly in context with the established pace and feel of the film, reminiscent of THE SCHOOL OF ROCK, where the performances never feel forced or untrue, but where these kids earn every bit of their small moment onstage to shine. The finale is deliriously upbeat.

Cinematical [Martha Fischer]

Linda Linda Linda was the biggest hit for Japanese rock band Blue Hearts. Even for those who understand only the song's chorus -- predictably "Linda, Linda! Linda, Linda Linda-a!" -- it possesses a catchiness that almost defies logic. As I sit here, fully a week after I heard the song for the first time, I can't remember a waking moment in which I was not quietly singing it to myself. The fact that I'm not remotely annoyed -- let alone suicidal -- is an indication of the song's charm, a trait it has very much in common with the 2005 Japanese film that shares its name.

Nobuhiro Yamashita's Linda Linda Linda is a straight-forward, deliberately understated movie about four girls who form a band for the talent show at their high school's annual Holly Festival. Due to injury and infighting, the membership of the band experiences a shakeup just a few days before the festival: The guitarist leaves with a broken finger, the keyboardist (Kei, Yu Kashii) switches to lead guitar, and a new singer -- a painfully shy exchange student from Korea (Son, Bae Du-na), no less -- is recruited. Lacking the time to rehearse and learn original music, the group decides to perform a set of Blue Hearts covers, highlighted, of course, by Linda Linda Linda. Faced with such a depressingly cliched plot, one could be forgiven for imagining shot after shot of adorable Japanese school girls, mugging cutely and giggling adorably over boys and rock stars. What's so wonderful about Linda Linda Linda, however, is how utterly wrong it proves us.

Instead of something glossy and loud, Yamashita's film is almost aggressively demure. The great majority of the shots of the girls are quiet and still, filmed from so far away that they're barely distinguishable from one another. The four spend a lot of time together and quickly develop a sort of awkward rapport, but there's refreshingly little bonding -- mostly they wait, silently, for one another to show up for rehearsal. Between rehearsals, though, there is time for the confusion of sexual attraction; the awkwardness of first relationships; the absurdity of love declarations, all handled with just the right touch. Not cute or self-conscious, these small scenes are agonizing and painful and funny and shrugged-off, just like they are in real life.

Scored by former Smashing Pumpkin James Iha with a lo-fi simplicity that underlines the film's languid pacing, Linda Linda Linda, is deceptively sharp. Though it has very little in the way of plot, the movie is carefully structured, dominated by contrasting scenes of characters hurrying through packed, busy spaces and slower scenes of isolation in space. As with many of the idle band scenes, the latter are almost uniformly shot from such distance as to render the individuals unrecognizable. They become instead simply figures in space; moving shapes that break up a single-color background. Combine these with the almost event-free sequences of the girls together, the periodic scenes of pre-Carnival bustle, and the footage of the drummer (Kyoko, Aki Maeda) rehearsing alone, and you have a director consumed by the rhythm of his film. And almost impossibly, given just how slow that rhythm is, Yamashita's composition turns out to be both arresting and completely winning. In the end, it's nearly as memorable as its namesake.

Slant Magazine [Rob Humanick]

The press notes for Linda Linda Linda suggest a foreign regurgitation of stale conventions from the American teenage flick. Given that, it's difficult to not expect something of a J-pop remake of Bring It On that substitutes an all-girl cover band for sexed-up cheerleaders. Certainly a case of inappropriate advertising, this purported image inadvertently makes the work itself even more of a surprise—an emotionally attuned look at adolescent life amidst the invisible social structures of high school with an underlying emphasis on gender and cultural barriers to boot, all surprisingly free of manipulation. After the performance-inhibiting injury suffered by a former band mate, a newly assembled foursome of female students must learn a new playlist for the upcoming school festival—a difficult task even when weighed apart from their daily rigors and mandatory doses of high school drama. Linda Linda Linda's moderate adherence to formula is its one truly limiting quality, but even the traditional plotting tactics feel rather subdued and almost natural as a result of the sensitive evocation of time and place, which suggests a life essence to these characters that extends in all directions beyond the time constraints of the film. Director Yamashita has a knack for effective compositions that contrast static foregrounds with active backgrounds—or vice versa—while the understated, geometric framing devices give the characters much-desired room to breathe. There's nothing revelatory here, but the film's earnest indulgences are indeed refreshing, as are its often hilarious throwaway scenes (the funniest of which sees Son, the Korean exchange student recruited as the band's new singer, attempting to overcome her language difficulties in a restaurant where only paying customers are allowed to use the restrooms). More than anything, the film exhorts a sense of nostalgia for the stressful trials of youth that, while often seemingly insurmountable at the time, are so laced with freewheeling joy as to be missed dearly once they've departed (take that, Clerks II!).

Linda Linda Linda (8.0) Luna6 from Lunapark6

Shortly before their performance at the Shibazaki High School Rock Festival, a group of girls that were preparing to play together have now encountered big problems. Moe, the guitarist for the band, has broken two fingers and is now unable to perform at the show. Bandmates and former best friends Rinko and Kei are now not speaking to each other. Immediately after Moe injured her fingers, Rinko tried to recruit a boy into the band and Kei has not spoken to her since then.

When Kei is asked by another classmate if the band will still perform at the show, she decides that they will, but as a new band. Kei will now take over on guitars with former bandmates Kyoko on drums and Nozomi on bass. The girls decide to perform a cover of “Linda Linda Linda” by the Blue Hearts. The problem is that they don’t have a singer and there is only three days left to prepare. The girls decide to pick the first person that they see walking down a corridor from where they are sitting. The first person to walk by is a nerdish guy that wouldn’t fit in with the group. The next person is Rinko the vocalist from their prior band. When Rinko asks if the girls would like play the song that they were practicing in the previous band, Kei says its the Blue Hearts or nothing. Kei then notices another girl walking nearby, named Son, who is a Korean exchange student with only a limited understanding of the Japanese language. When she is asked if she wants to be a singer for their band, Son answers nonchalantly yes – without knowing what she is agreeing to. By the time she is informed exactly what she has agreed to…it is too late. The band is set and now they just have to learn to play “Linda Linda Linda” for the Rock Festival in three days.

The beauty about the film “Linda Linda Linda” consists partially of the things that the film leaves out. Linda Linda Linda is centered around four high school girls that just loves playing music together and the bond that is formed while they play together. The movie doesn’t have any hokey plot twists, overly dramatic events, or sexy scenes to sell the movie. What the movie has is the tranquil type of cinematography that recalls another very good Japanese film named “Sukida,” understated humor that will have you smiling from ear to ear on many occasions, and excellent acting by all four main actresses. There is also the captivating rock performances given by the girls that will have you wanting to jump up and down with their chorus of …”Linda Lindaaa! Linda Linda Linda!!!:

Although all four of the main leads were very good in their performances, Bae Du-Na, as the odd & quirky Korean Exchange student studying in Japan, stole the show whenever she was onscreen. There were quite a few sublime comedic scenes that involved Bae Du-Na acting in that Bae Du-Na manner. One of the more memorable scenes was when she tried to rent a karaoke room and was informed by the cashier that she would have to buy a drink first. The scene was so hilarious in a understated manner, which kind of typifies the cinematic style of Linda Linda Linda. The cashier would talk slowly to Bae Du-Na, realizing that she was not a native speaker. He tells her that “if you want to sing you have to buy a drink.” Bae Du-Na smiles and responds slowly that she doesn’t want to drink, she just wants to sing. The cashier then tells her, “You can’t just sing.” Bae Du-Na pauses, then smiles again and says “This is very weird.” The cashier responds “No its not.” There would be another second or two of silence then Bae Du-Na repeats “I don’t want to buy a drink.” The cashier quickly responded “Then you can’t sing.” A few moments later, Bae Du-Na was in a karaoke room, with drinks on the table and busting out a heartfelt Korean ballad.

The song that the band performed at their high school rock festival was “Linda Linda Linda” originally done by the Blue Hearts. Although I have never heard of the Blue Hearts before, I learned after watching the movie that the Blue Hearts were an actual Japanese punk rock band, popular back in the early 1990’s. I should also note whenever Kyoko (Aki Maeda / Battle Royale) would play the drums, whether it was her tapping out a beat on her textbooks or on the drumkit in their practice room, hearing her play the drums kind of gave me the chills. The same would apply when the band played together. During the finale, when the band finally got to perform in front of their high school, seeing Bae Du-Na give a huge smile to the audience while singing the lines “let’s sing an endless song…for this asshole of a world” was priceless! In case anyone is wondering, the band members could never decide on a name for the band, but at their performance at the festival, Bae Du-Na announced her band as “The Paran Maun,” which is Korean for ….The Blue Hearts. Also, James Iha, of Smashing Pumpkins fame, did an impressive job scoring the soundtrack to the film. The instrumental track that was repeated throughout the film really added a dreamy but uplifting feel to the movie. Kind of like something you would hear in a John Huges film meets New Order’s “Temptation” meets the Smashing Pumpkins “Today” meets Quruli’s “Highway” kind of a way.

“Linda Linda Linda” provides a sublime two hours of memorable moments shared between four very charming characters. For the younger kids that loves rock music, Linda Linda Linda could very well be an inspirational movie for them. For the older folks, Linda Linda Linda allows them to revisit the times when bonds between high school friends were created for the first time. 1, 2, 3, 4…

“Linda Lindaaaa! Linda Linda Lindaaa!!!”

*Viz Pictures is releasing Linda Linda Linda in U.S. theaters. For location and screen times check out http://linda-movie.com/.

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THE DRUDGERY TRAIN (Kueki ressha) C+ 77

Japan (113 mi) 2012

While director Yamashita is perhaps best known for his indie hit LINDA, LINDA, LINDA (2005), an upbeat teenage story about an all-girl high school band, this is about as far away from that film as you can get, perhaps reverting back to his early films which were studies in deadpan absurdity featuring fringe, loser characters who might also be called slackers. Adapted by Shinki Imaoka, this coming-of-age story is based on the Akutagawa Prize winning novel by Kenta Nishimura, a somewhat autobiographical look at a Junior High drop out, Kanta (Mirai Moriyama), who becomes an unskilled manual laborer spending much of his spare time as a prized customer in sex for hire clubs. While admittedly, this is a well made film, the subject matter is often gross and sensationalist, often uncomfortably so, with pee and fart jokes that may not be for everyone. There were plenty of walkouts during the screening, with some people shaking their heads afterwards. Part of the problem is the sympathetic portrayal of an uneducated sex fiend, the son of a convicted sex criminal forced to leave school early to support himself, who is such a maladjusted social deviant, one wonders what the original attraction is to the material? The rhythm of life is well established, especially the dreariness of the daily work routines, where at some point Kanta meets a friend, Shoji (Kengo Koura), a student in vocational school, quickly becoming drinking buddies. Shoji is more mannered, watches what he does or says, and remains somewhat embarrassed to go to sex clubs, but acquiesces out of friendship, while Kanta is raunchy and completely down to earth with no filter whatsoever, thinking his perverse sexual views are completely normal.

With Shoji’s assistance, Kanta meets the woman of his dreams, an extremely cute, used book store clerk Yasuko (Atsuko Maeda, from THE SUICIDE SONG (2007), who surprisingly agrees to be his friend, though they are polar opposites. She is thoughtful and kind, expressing a gentle nature, while he’s more of a brute completely lacking in social skills, literally driving everyone away with his crude nature. Their relationship is more a disaster waiting to happen, but initially, after a dreadful beginning, the film takes a near illusory turn, where the three of them have a swimming sequence that is a pure joy and delight, behaving like little kids. Nonetheless, the film is grounded in the monotony of work, where Kanta is well aware of his educational shortcomings, leaving him few job opportunities and destined, apparently, to live in tiny, over priced cubicles for apartments. When Shoji finds an intelligent and attractive girlfriend at school, his time with Kanta is more limited, who only worsens the situation by going on a thoroughly despicable drunken outburst with the couple that leaves him utterly humiliated, which only isolates him even more, which is followed by even more dreadful behavior with Yasuko. Devastated and alone, Kanta has driven away any semblance of friendship, which becomes even more excruciatingly painful when he encounters a former childhood girlfriend as a sex worker. The scene spiralling out of control into near farce reflects his own inner chaos, continually prone to violence, where his self-destructive streak literally defines his life. The film is bookended by deadpan storefront sequences in front of a sex club, accompanied by a strange musical arrangement by Shinco of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” which is apparently very popular in Japan as a child’s nursery rhyme, where the same melody is given different lyrics, altering the meaning of the song from the drudgery of menial labor to a journey of happiness.

Helter Skelter, Drudgery Train, Umizaru 4: Brave Hearts, Paikaji ... Genkinohito’s Blog

Drudgery Train comes from Nobuhiro Yamashita (Linda, Linda, Linda), and is based on Kenta Nishimura’s Akutagawa Prize-winning novel Kueki Ressha. This character-study stars Mirai Moriyama (Fish on Land, Fish Story), Kengo Kora (The Woodsman and the Rain, Norwegian Wood), and Atsuko Maeda (The Suicide Song), a member of Team A in AKB48 and has got some great reviews. This has to be my favourite trailer from today.

The Drudgery Train: Shanghai Review - The Hollywood Reporter Deborah Young

Young cover-boy Mirai Moriyama breaks out as a working class anti-hero in director Nobuhiro Yamashita’s unconventional coming of ager set in 1988 Tokyo.

An out-of-the-ordinary coming of age story set in 1988 Tokyo, The Drudgery Train reprises the tongue-in-cheek coarseness and cruelty of Nobuhiro Yamashita’s 1999 indie directing debut Hazy Life, once again featuring an irresistible anti-social hero who refuses to become a productive member of Japanese society. Though well directed, this often exhilarating screen adaptation of Kenta Nishimura’s novel feels way too long and under-edited; still, the hypnotic brashness of the young lead Mirai Moriyama should go a long way towards holding teen viewers in their seats until a final, unrevealable clincher rewards one’s faith in him. It opens in Japan July 14.

Charming young rogue Kanta (played by part-time model and emerging actor Moriyama) is a high school drop-out keenly aware of his educational deficit; in fact, between bouts of drinking, whoring, fighting, numbing work and peep shows, he is a compulsive reader in love with books. His back-breaking job as a manual laborer brings him into contact with the slightly better-educated Shoji (Kengo Koura), a hick with a Beatles haircut and puppy-dog looks who is just plain nice.  Though they’re at extreme ends of the human spectrum, opposites attract. Kanta turns Shoji into his drinking buddy, and Shoji gives him the courage to reveal his attraction to college girl Yasuko (Atsuko Maeda) who works in a second-hand bookstore.

Director Yamashita shows fine control over tone, never letting scenes or characters sink into banality; Yasuko, for instance, turns out to be much smarter, deeper and hipper than the prim college girl she first appears to be. With the two boys, she shares a Jules and Jim moment on the beach that makes the heart sing. And when Shoji starts seriously dating a truly prim college girl that, too, feels right and even courageous for the man he’s growing into.

Scriptwriter Shinji Imaoka brings out the darkness not just in Kanta’s heart, but in the fate of the Japanese under-class whose dream of a better life seems like a bad joke. Typical is the story of an older laborer who is excited to find mussels growing along the dock and plans to sell them to restaurants, until he’s shot down by a cynical co-worker; later, an accident on the job puts an end to his optimism. Kanta’s unexpected encounter with his ex-girlfriend who has become a sex worker is along the same disillusioned lines, this time handled with a humorous realism that undercuts its pain. Throughout this over-long film, which drags Kanta over a lot of coals, Moriyama shows the crazy, defiant rudeness of an unconventional hero it would be good to see more of.

'Kueki Ressha (The Drudgery Train)' | The Japan Times Online Mark Schilling

Directors often find themselves boxed in by fan expectations. If a filmmaker who is known and loved for quirky pieces does a serious film or two, fans tend to complain he or she is sliding down a slippery slope toward dreaded respectability.

One who has blithely escaped those expectations is Nobuhiro Yamashita. His early films, such as 1999's "Donten Seikatsu (Hazy Life)," 2002's "Baka no Hakobune (No One's Ark)," and 2003's "Riarizumu no Yado (Ramblers)," were exercises in deadpan absurdity featuring loser heroes, with the sly jokes emerging from true-to-life (if inherently ridiculous) situations.

Following his international breakout with the high school dramady "Linda, Linda, Linda" (2005), Yamashita could have indefinitely repeated its formula of observational humor served up with youthful energy and charm. Instead he tried different genres, such as comic murder mystery ("Matsugane Ransha Jiken [The Matsugane Potshot Affair]" from 2006) and 1970s-era political/personal drama ("Mai Bakku Peji [My Back Page]" from 2011), with varying box-office results.

His newest, "Kueki Ressha (The Drudgery Train)" is something of a throwback to his black comedy beginnings, but deeper as a character study and more adventurous as a film. Based on an Akutagawa-Prize-winning novel by Kenta Nishimura, "Kueki Ressha" resembles films that have been based on the semi-autobiographical fiction of American writer Charles Bukowski, from "Barfly" (1987) to "Factotum" (2005).

The Bukowski character in these films, Henry "Hank" Chinaski, is viewed as a cool loner rebel, despite his marginal existence as a drunk living in rented rooms and working at menial jobs (when he works at all). By contrast, Yamashita's hero, Kanta Kitamachi (Mirai Moriyama), is a loser with absolutely no social skills who blows his warehouse wages on sleazy peep shows and cheap izakaya (pub) booze. He bad-mouths nearly anyone in range once the liquor is in him, while groveling to his disgruntled landlord for another couple days of grace on the rent. Obnoxious and contemptible he is. Cool, he is not. It's hard to imagine Mickey Rourke ("Barfly") or Matt Dillon ("Factotum") clamoring to play him in a Hollywood remake.

In fact, it's a wonder the film got released by major distributor Toei, since in almost every scene, Kitamachi violates the first commandment of a hero in a commercial film: Thou shalt inspire sympathy. But as portrayed by Moriyama, fresh from his success as the similarly socially challenged hero of "Moteki (Love Strikes!)," Kitamachi also happens to be funny and — as a seeming contradiction to everything I've just said, likable in his sheer cussedness.

The story has the ingredients of a typical coming-of-age drama. Kitamachi, a junior high dropout whose father was sent to jail for a sex crime, is toiling as a day laborer in a warehouse when he is befriended by Shoji Kusakabe (Kengo Kora), a new hire who is attending a nearby trade school. A good-natured, straight-arrow oddball, Kusakabe soon becomes Kitamachi's boon companion and social facilitator. When Kitamachi reveals that he has been eying a pretty clerk at a used-book store (without adding that he lacks the courage to say hello) Kusakabe smilingly serves as a go-between.

The clerk, Yasuko Sakurai (Atsuko Maeda), turns out to be interested in the same sort of mystery novels as Kitamachi, who is a devoted, if unlikely, bookworm. Miracle of miracles, they become friends and Kitamachi starts to dream the impossible dream: Unpaid sex with a willing partner. To top it all off, he gets promoted to forklift driver. Life, for once in his 19 so-far-pointless years, is wonderful. Of course it can't last.

In an ordinary film, the ensuing crises — mostly caused by Kitamachi's own rock-headed stupidity, would be growth experiences, leading to a wiser, happier hero. But working from a script by pinku eiga (erotic film) maestro Shinji Imaoka, an original talent in his own right, Yamashita turns this formula on its head, with inspired gags that subvert every "learning moment."

At the same time, "Kueki Ressha" has a realism not found in similar local films with women-less, prospect-less young male heroes. This goes beyond Kitamachi's many superficial resemblances to creator Kenta Nishimura, from his family background to his tastes in literature: He is not the usual slacker comedy cartoon, but a fully realized character whose blunders and crimes are painful as well as funny to witness, since his victims (including himself) are recognizably human and his actions have not-always-pleasant real-world consequences. But the film is not a downer drama, just as it is not feel-good entertainment.

Instead it's a lot like life — though I hope not like yours.

Director Nobuhiro Yamashita's commercial film departure Mark Schilling interview with the director from The Japan Times, July 6, 2012

Yan Xueshu

IN THE WILD MOUNTAINS

China (105 mi) 1985

Pacific Cinematheque (link lost):

Based on a popular story from Jia Pingao's Jiwowade renjia (The People of Jiwowa), Wild Mountains concerns the relationship between two families in a remote mountainous region, where peasants live according to old customs and are very reluctant to change. Huihui, the husband of one family, attempts to introduce mechanized farming to the local fields, but meets with repeated failures -- and the opposition of his wife. He is, however, supported by Guilan, the wife of the other family. Unusual for Chinese literature and tradition is the film's bold ending, with the two couples agreeing to divorces, swapping mates, and forming two new households. China 1985.

Yang, Edward (Yang Dechang)

Yang, Edward World Cinema, also seen here: Edward Yang Bio, Movies List - Famous Quotes and Quotations

Edward Yang is often cited, along with Hou Hsiao-Hsien, as one of the central figures of New Taiwan Cinema. Yang's visual and narrative style is among the most distinctive and spectacular in recent Chinese film. His films are quiet, slow, and use a minimum of dialogue. Western critics often invoke Antonioni, although Yang appears to resent the comparison. In Taiwan, where "different" is read as "foreign," his departure from the norms of classical style are considered a symptom of Western influence. The director, however, attributes his stark style to Chinese origins, particularly his early education in Chinese brush painting. In any case, Yang's films are passionately connected to place, as he consistently addresses the problems posed by modern Taiwanese life.

Notes from the Yang retrospective in Chicago, 1997 (link lost)

A New Day in Taiwan: The Films of Edward Yang

All 35mm Prints!

“A rare opportunity to see the films of an artist who may have more to say about the direction of modern life than any other filmmaker currently working.” —Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

“Yang’s visual and narrative style is among the most distinctive and spectacular in recent Chinese film.” —James Monaco

“The hallmarks of any film by Edward Yang include sophisticated technique, deep seriousness of intent, a wicked sense of irony and humour, and a forceful, clear intelligence. He and Hou Hsiao-hsien have shaped the Taiwanese cinema into a prominent and incredibly rich international presence.” —David Overbey, Toronto International Film Festival

Edward Yang is one of two world-class filmmakers to have emerged from the contemporary Taiwanese cinema. The other, Hou Hsiao-hsien, is master of the rural family, village life, downbeat provincial towns. Yang’s milieu is the modern city -- specifically, Taipei. Taipei Story, the title of one of Yang's breakthrough early films, could be the title of any of his six features. But then, so too could A Confucian Confusion, the title of his fifth feature. Yang’s protagonists -- usually young, upwardly-mobile, middle-class business or professional types; sometimes wayward teens and minor criminals from lower social stratums -- live confusing, contradictory, chaotic, self-deluding lives cut off from the sustenance of their traditional Asian values and swept up in the soullessness and valuelessness of contemporary, urban, Westernized culture. His evocation of this rootless, alienated milieu, and the palpable presence of the alienating city in his films, has drawn frequent comparisons to the work of Antonioni -- although, improbably, Yang has cited Werner Herzog as his chief art-house inspiration. (“All my friend are billionaires now in Seattle,” Yang has joked. “If it wasn’t for Herzog, I’d be a rich man today!”)

Although Taipei may be the specific subject of Yang’s merciless social microscope -- and Taiwan’s unique social/political/historical situation, in the threatening shadow of mainland China, very much a part of the texture of his films -- Yang is a modernist and moralist whose clear-eyed, penetrating vision of contemporary urban life, and the contemporary search for meaning and identity, has universal resonance. His sophisticated narrative style, his complex weaving of seemingly disparate storylines into surprisingly coherent wholes, his intelligence and irony -- and, increasingly, the frantic, almost screwball, dark humour of his work -- mark him as a singular talent, and have earned him widespread recognition as one of the most important artists working in the cinema today.

This retrospective showcases all of Yang’s highly-acclaimed features, and includes a rare presentation of the full-length, Director’s Cut version of A Brighter Summer Day, widely regarded as Yang’s masterpiece.

A New Day in Taiwan: The Films of Edward Yang is a touring series organized by The Film Center at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Thanks to Barbara Scharres, Director, The Film Center.

Edward Yang | Obituaries | News | Telegraph from the London Telegraph, July 3, 2007

Edward Yang, who has died in Los Angeles aged 59, was one of the leading figures of the new Taiwanese cinema that came to prominence in the early 1980s as a direct result of government encouragement.

Unlike his contemporary, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Yang made relatively few feature films, only seven in all. But at least two of them — A Brighter Summer Day (1991) and Yi Yi (2000), also known as A One and a Two — are recognised as masterpieces. The latter won him the best director award at the Cannes Film Festival.

Hou and Yang, both originally from China, were very different film-makers. Where Hou focused on Taiwan's history and rural past, Yang concentrated on its urban present. Together their work amounted to a remarkable portrait of how the island evolved and what it is like to live there today.

Born Yáng Déchāng in Shanghai in 1947, probably on November 6, though some reference works list dates in September of that year, he moved with his parents to Taiwan in 1949, when the Communists took over the mainland. Educated at Taiwan's Chiao-tung University, he obtained a degree in Engineering in 1969 and subsequently an MA in Computer Science from the University of Florida in 1974. At this time he dabbled in film, spending a term on the course offered at the University of Southern California. But he never seriously considered a career in the cinema, and relocated to Seattle to take up a post as a computer designer at the University of Washington.

In 1981 he returned to Taiwan to write and produce The Winter of 1905, a film being made by a former student, Yu Weizheng. This prompted him to seek further work in television, and in 1981 he personally directed Floating Leaf, an episode from the television series Eleven Women.

The following year the Central Motion Picture Company, the state-controlled production and distribution organisation, commissioned a portmanteau picture called In Our Time, designed to put Taiwanese cinema on the map. It consisted of four separate, but eventually connected, stories by different directors. Yang's section, Expectations, depicted a girl on the threshold of puberty.

In Taiwanese terms it was commercially successful, tracing the process of modernisation in the country from the 1960s to the 1980s and its gradual transformation from a predominantly rural economy to an industrial one. Edward Yang identified the importance of In Our Time when he described it as "perhaps the first attempt in cinema to recover Taiwan's past, one of the first films in which we began to ask ourselves questions about our origins, our politics, our relation to mainland China, and so on".

A striking aspect of the Taiwanese new wave was the readiness of its leading lights to co-operate with one another rather than compete. Hou Hsiao-hsien, for example, took time out from his own fast-developing career as a director to play the main role in Edward Yang's Taipei Story (1985). He went further with its successor, The Terroriser (1986), mortgaging his own home to finance his friend's picture. Three years later Yang repaid the compliment by producing Hou's film A City of Sadness.

Yang's first feature film was That Day on the Beach (1983). Ambitious in length and treatment, it made extensive use of flashbacks and voice-overs to explore the heroine's life in metropolitan Taipei.

In essence it was a feminist picture, showing how a woman of strong convictions with an iron will could challenge and prevail over the constraints of a patriarchal society.

Taipei Story was an episodic survey of the progressive urbanisation of a once rather sleepy city and the erosion of traditional values in the face of consumerism. In this film the capital looks and feels brash, studded with skyscrapers and inherently stressful. This was the film that introduced Yang to a wider audience worldwide. His talent was immediately apparent, but better work was yet to come - for example, his next film, The Terroriser.

After 9/11, the title has inadvertently acquired overtones that were never intended, for this is a terroriser not a terrorist. It appears to refer to a prostitute who phones strangers, spreading malice. The film shows how this mindless prank affects a wide range of characters: a detective, a woman novelist with writer's block, a photographer, a salaryman in a dead-end job, a hoodlum.

It was as if Yang was deliberately taking a cross-section of Taiwanese society and illustrating how urban pressures tear lives apart; in fact, it can be inferred that the real terroriser is not the prostitute but modern life itself. This remains Yang's most complex film, not least because he leaves it open-ended. There are in fact multiple endings, in which a single pistol shot has several different consequences.

It was some years before Yang made another film, but A Brighter Summer Day was one of his finest. About a group of rebellious youths, its title is taken from the Elvis Presley ballad Are You Lonesome Tonight? and Yang admitted that to some extent it was autobiographical. The plot, however, is based on an incident that shocked everyone in 1961, when a young boy, suspended from school for joining a street gang, reacted in frustration and murdered his girlfriend.

Yang's film is set in the early 1960s, when the children of the mainlanders who came to Taiwan in 1949 were at odds with native-born Taiwanese youths, and street fights were prevalent. A very long film, running almost four hours, the length was justified by its penetrating analysis of the internal conflicts between different strands of Taiwanese society at a time when the island was in transition and in search of an identity; and after 237 minutes, the very last shot - of a tape carelessly thrown by the police into a waste bin instead of being delivered to the prisoner for whom it is intended - is riveting and profoundly moving.

Yang waited another four years before making his next film, but A Confucius Confusion (1995, his first comedy, satirising the cultural chaos in modern Taiwan, part Chinese, part pseudo-American) was not in the end as sharp as its witty title. Similar criticisms were levelled at Mahjong (1996), another ill-focused comedy about delinquents. But he made a spectacular comeback in 2000 with Yi Yi, a three-hour film at least as rich as A Brighter Summer Day.

It follows three generations of a family caught between a wedding and a funeral, and in particular the head of the family, who unexpectedly runs into an old flame on the day his mother-in-law becomes mortally sick. Can he - should he - try to turn the clock back?

Yi Yi explores all the characters in unusual depth. By the end it is as if we had known them all our lives. It is another comedy, but with a generosity of spirit missing in Yang's two previous pictures.

Edward Yang made no more films, but directed some plays and produced MTV videos.

In later years he was based in Los Angeles but had been suffering for some time with cancer of the colon, of which he died on June 29.

Edward Yang - Films as director: Gina Marchetti from Film Reference

Along with Hou Hsiao-hsien and Wan Jen, Edward Yang stands as one of the most recognized of Taiwan's "New Wave" directors. Part of a torrent of talent that flooded international screens with innovative Chinese-language features from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the People's Republic of China in the 1980s, Yang's work is New Wave in a number of different interpretations of that term. Yang's films resemble European New Wave directors' work because of his commitment to formal experimentation within fiction narratives. This is coupled with an interest in the use of film as social commentary and cultural critique. The films Yang directed in the 1980s, in particular, have been favorably compared to the work of Antonio Antonioni because of their "high modernist" exploration of the barren, urban landscape, and the alienation of the individual in contemporary, bourgeois society, as well as their focus on psychologically complex, female protagonists to investigate these themes dramatically.

Also, as was the case with the French New Wave, the Taiwanese New Wave (and, more recently, contemporary Chinese-language cinema generally) benefitted from very fruitful collaborations among a coterie of talented directors, scriptwriters, producers, and actors/actresses. Perhaps the most striking collaboration in Yang's oeuvre, for example, occurred when the noted director Hou Hsiao-hsien took the lead role in Taipei Story. Hou's portrayal of Lon, a failed businessman, obsessive baseball fan, and perpetual fiance of the film's female protagonist, embodies many of the uncertainties and contradictions of contemporary Taiwanese society: a nostalgia for a past shaped by Japan and America, an ambivalence toward traditional gender and family roles, and an alienation from the political and economic vicissitudes of urban Taipei. Certainly, film director Hou's reputation for films about rural youth and changes in traditional Chinese culture and society in the postwar, post-Japanese era brings a resonance to the character of Lon that other actors could not hope to convey.

Like members of the European New Wave of the 1960s, Yang has a love/hate relationship with American culture, using it for complex intertextual textures (for example, the use of Elvis Presley as a musical and visual presence in A Brighter Summer Day), and aesthetically working against Hollywood through the use of "dead," "negative" space in which "nothing happens" in empty urban landscapes and aggressively long takes. However, despite these similarities, Yang is also a decidedly Taiwanese director, with a commitment to documenting the peculiarities of contemporary Taiwan and situating its society within a global economy and culture. In this respect, Yang's cinema operates as a bridge between Taiwan and the rest of the world. Because of the director's commitment to formal experimentation and interest in finding a niche within a global film culture of festivals and art cinemas, many of his films have done poorly domestically, although they have been lauded internationally. Ironically, as he brings a critical eye to contemporary Taiwan for audiences abroad, that sharp vision has often gone unappreciated at home. Yang's attempt to visualize alienation succeeds all too well and tends to alienate the uninitiated viewer, while winning the praise of intellectuals educated to appreciate a modernist sensibility. Although Yang now has his own production company, several of his earlier, more challenging films were financed by the government-operated Central Motion Picture Corporation, allowing for a freedom of experimentation without the pressing demands of the domestic marketplace.

In most of Yang's oeuvre, women embody the key tensions of modern Taiwan. That Day, on the Beach uses an elaborate narrative structure composed of a frustrated, inconclusive murder investigation and a series of flashbacks to paint a portrait of Lin Chia-li, a woman who escaped the pressures of a traditional, patriarchal household only to find herself again trapped by an empty marriage. Although a corpse that may or may not be her husband prompts her interior investigation, the real substance of the film goes beyond a simple critique of Chinese patriarchy. It looks at contemporary Taiwan, its own uncertain national identity, precarious place in the global economy, and divided political culture through the life of a woman who is both the victim and beneficiary of these monumental social changes.

Taipei Story continues in the same vein. Chin, an unemployed mid-level administrator who has moved into her own apartment against the wishes of her traditional father, must decide whether to marry her fiance, Lon, or move on with her upwardly mobile, female boss, leaving the "old" Taiwan of Lon and her family behind. The final scene, in which Chin is framed against the massive picture window of her boss's new headquarters in an eerily empty office building—a signifier of modernity—as Lon lies bleeding to death in another part of the city, again dramatically portrays the emergence of a new Taiwan in the character of a woman freed by the death of her more traditional lover.

This same theme has an even more bloody enactment in The Terrorizer. Chou Yufen, a writer married to a doctor, Li Li-chung, is cured of her writer's block by the anonymous phone calls of a young Eurasian girl, bored during her recovery from a wound sustained during a youth gang street battle, who tells her that her husband is having an affair. Armed with this lie, Chou Yufen writes a story about her plight and leaves her husband. Passed over at the hospital and misunderstood by his estranged wife, Li Li-chung commits suicide (perhaps after killing his new boss and his wife's lover). In New Wave fashion, the details of his death (or even the fact of his death) remain indeterminate. However, as in Yang's earlier films, as the central, male character fades away, the female characters emerge. However, Lin Chia-li, Chin, Chou Yufen, and even the marginal "White Chick," as the Eurasian girl is called, represent a new world tainted by a vacuous modernity, stripped of affect, and literally deadening.

In his work on The Terrorizer, Fredric Jameson sees the film as combining a modernist and postmodernist sensibility to explore the interpenetration of traditional, national, multinational, and transnational spaces, and thus the hybrid identity that marks contemporary Taipei. It is debatable whether this film marks a significant break with Yang's earlier, "modernist" work or not. However, it is useful to look at Yang's more recent A Brighter Summer Day and A Confucian Confusion as moving in a different direction from the director's work in the 1980s. Keeping Yang's characteristically complex and convoluted narrative structure, the former explores youth gangs in postwar Taiwan and the later looks at contemporary "yuppies" in modern Taipei. Unlike his earlier efforts, A Confucian Confusion is a comedy (albeit a very dark one). Despite the move away from the serious, woman-centered dramas of the 1980s, however, Yang maintains his commitment to examining carefully Taiwan's experience of modernity, taking Taipei from the margins of the globe and putting it within an international framework that makes local issues poignant for a world audience.

EDWARD YANG’S TAIPEI STORIES Steve Gravestock and George Kaltsounakis from Cinematheque Ontario, Jan – Mar, 2008

“Yang is a major filmmaker — and filmmaking poet — by anyone’s standards.” —John Anderson

“Along with Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang, Yang is one of the most visible faces of the Taiwanese New Wave, possibly the most brilliant filmmaking movement in the world today . . . Yang’s ability to show us the world afresh by virtue of his masterful framing and mise en scène cements his position as one of the world’s greatest filmmakers.” —Saul Austerlitz, Senses of Cinema

“The bombs we plant in each other are ticking away.” —Edward Yang

2007 was a trying year for cinephiles. With the deaths of Ousmane Sembène, Ingmar Bergman, and Michelangelo Antonioni (the latter two occurring, remarkably, on the same day), three titans of world cinema ceased to live among us, and we were left to ponder their extraordinary contribution. Each having lived for close to a century, their deaths could hardly be surprising, though still, a blow. The passing in June, however, of Taiwanese master Edward Yang (Yang Dechang) struck with the tragedy of incompletion. Yang succumbed to cancer, at the too-young age of fifty-nine, leaving several longstanding projects in limbo and a sense of having so much more to say. With this complete retrospective, Cinematheque Ontario pays tribute to a man known for his steadfast independence, breadth of vision, and an impressive body of work that ranks among the best in contemporary world cinema.

Since our retrospective on Edward Yang in 1998, he completed only one more film, the nearly three-hour, multi-award winning YI YI (A ONE AND A TWO) in 2000. Perhaps only is inadmissible here. YI YI quickly became the filmmaker’s biggest commercial and critical hit, and announced, on a grand scale and despite his earlier sizeable achievements, a new talent to the world. Yang garnered the Best Director Award at Cannes, and the film became his only theatrical, and later, DVD release in North America. YI YI formed, with Yang’s epic masterpiece, A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY (1991), an astonishing bookend to the Nineties; with these two weighty works alone, Yang’s position as a major director would be assured. It’s tempting, now, in light of Yang’s death, to view YI YI, his poignant family saga, as a summative work featuring many of his main motifs - the tensions between old and new, strained family relations, existential urban anguish, the role of the artist in society - all interlocking like pieces of a puzzle and ultimately forced into submission by the inevitability of the cycles of life. But YI YI was never intended to be a swan song and Yang had several projects on the go, including an American animated feature involving Jackie Chan, which would have either challenged or endorsed the lens of critical auterism. Glancing back to the beginning of his filmmaking career, it becomes clear that Yang was on an auterist path - one that grew in relation to Taiwan’s ever-changing and paradoxical capital, Taipei (his muse?), as well as within a national emerging film movement that firmly took hold in the Eighties and forever changed the evolution of contemporary international cinema.

Born in 1947 in Shanghai, Yang grew up in Taipei at a time when the capital experienced dramatic growth as a result of the millions of mainlanders who fled the Communist revolution in 1949. He later moved to the United States where he studied first computer engineering at the University of Florida, then film for a short, dismaying time at USC, and later worked as a software programmer in Seattle for eight years until, according to an oft-told story, Werner Herzog’s AGUIRRE, WRATH OF GOD sent him down his cinematic Road to Damascus. Soon thereafter, Yang returned to Taipei with renewed interest and faith in the cinema, and in search of possibilities beyond the strictures of commercial narratives and the industry in general. His first foray was as a writer, of Yu Wei-cheng’s THE WINTER OF 1905 (1979). He dabbled in television for a short while before signing on to direct one of the four segments of IN OUR TIME (1982), a landmark portmanteau film that unleashed, along with Hou Hsiao-hsien’s short, SANDWICH MAN, the Taiwanese New Wave. Yang’s thirty-minute contribution, DESIRES, evidenced a bold, new vision, effectively fulfilling the promise of what this seminal film was designed to be -a historic break with the past. Ironically, DESIRES is a period piece, and early blueprint to A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY, which takes place in 1960. The rest of Yang’s oeuvre is resolutely concerned with present-day Taipei, its hybrid and schizophrenic culture (an amalgamation of Western, Japanese, and Chinese influences whose telltale signs are scattered throughout the work), the complexities of modernity, the fear and reality of urban alienation, capitalism’s perpetual ruse and guises, and the decline of family values. Money — its temptation, vulgarity, and elusiveness — is as ubiquitous in Yang’s oeuvre as it is in that of Mikio Naruse.

Yang’s work is commonly split into three periods, his so-called urban trilogy (THAT DAY, ON THE BEACH, TAIPEI STORY, and THE TERRORIZER); his novelistic works (DESIRES, A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY, and YI YI) and his sharp, social satires (A CONFUCIAN CONFUSION and MAHJONG). His first feature, THAT DAY, ON THE BEACH (1983), shot by then novice Christopher Doyle, and starring superstar Sylvia Chang in a breakthrough role, confirmed the beauty and modernist spirit for which his cinema has become known. Following THAT DAY, critics were quick to point out Antonioni’s influence, which Yang continued to deny, citing Herzog’s imprint instead. The episodic structure, irresolution, and female point-of-views that characterize THAT DAY drew comparisons to L’AVVENTURA (not AGUIRRE!), but in this instance, Yang is arguably closer to the Antonioni of IL GRIDO, and closer still to RED DESERT, where the use of metonyms drives the mise-en-scène, creating within-the-frame tensions between tradition and modernity. In fact, Yang’s oeuvre is rife with splits, serrations, diptychs, and delineations; his complex plots and multiplicity of characters revel in the dialectics of history and hierarchy, surely a result of his own amalgamated culture.

TAIPEI STORY and THE TERRORIZER are both pseudo-thrillers, with a gritty, realist feel to them, mordant in their ambivalence toward Taipei and its hardened inhabitants. Despite a marked evolution in his style, Yang somewhat unfashionably maintained the importance of subject matter over form. Indeed, his works can all be viewed as densely layered texts that demand to be seen more than once. “Yang’s script structures,” observed Nick James in Sight & Sound, “insist on such quiet revelation. Each scene peels off like the skin of an onion.” Political and satirical commentaries simmer below the surface of his fiction -but those surfaces are meticulously designed and executed, owing much to Yang’s lifelong fascination with manga . Just as his films include the self-reflexive device of a film (or play) within a film, every composition includes other narratives (whether a message on a blackboard, a videogame or television screen, a Marilyn Monroe or Elvis Presley poster, etc.) making it virtually impossible to decipher all of Yang’s messages in a single viewing. The symbolic import of every object in the frame (the Japanese sword and American record player in A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY, for instance) bears the weight of history and an uneasy transition over time.

His “Tolstoyesque” storytelling (John Anderson) reached its apogee in the elegiac A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY which Jonathan Rosenbaum called “so uncommonly good that Yang’s other very impressive works pale beside it.” Several years in the making, the film, which placed number nine in our Best of the Nineties curators’ poll, combined a real life tragic news event with autobiographical childhood memories spent in Sixties Taipei, and used a troupe of actors whom Yang rehearsed for nearly half a decade. Its tale of street gangs, young love, and family struggle unfolds like a sprawling and speckled fresco whose quietly devastating impact can only compare with fellow new waver Hou Hsiao-hsien’s DUST IN THE WIND and A CITY OF SADNESS. From lamentation to frenetically-paced social satire, Yang’s A CONFUCIAN CONFUSION and MAHJONG display a wild “polyphonic ambition” (Jean-Michel Frodon) and strong, sexy female characters who both partake in and question the superficiality plaguing the Taiwanese metropolis. Its trajectory remaining unaltered, Yang’s career took on cumulative brawn and multi-dimensionality while revisiting many of the same themes. Following the lukewarm reception of A CONFUCIAN CONFUSION and MAHJONG, Yang returned to a calmer place (“maturity,” he called it) and gave us the gem that is YI YI. An elegant and virtuosic family drama with universal appeal and lessons to last a lifetime, Yang’s final film may not be as autobiographical as A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY, but the filmmaker’s true talent lives on in Yang Yang, the little boy who doubly bears his name, and snaps Polaroids of the backs of people’s heads in order to show them what they cannot see. With a bit of yin, and a lot of Yang, YI YI is a perfect way to conclude, albeit much too prematurely.

—Andréa Picard

Edward Yang > Overview - AllMovie also seen here: Bio by Jonathan Crowe (Allmovie, Yahoo Movies)

Edward Yang: Facts, Discussion Forum, and Encyclopedia Article profile page from Absolute Astronomy

Yang, Edward bio from Chinese Film Directors

Filmbug Bio brief bio

The History of Cinema. Edward Yang: biography, filmography, reviews ... Pierro Scaruffi

A Brighter Summer Day Exiles in Modernity, The Films of Edward Yang, by Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader, November 1997, updated on his website here: Exiles in Modernity

Yi Yi: Both a One and a Two George Wu from Senses of Cinema, April 2001

Edward Yang - Senses of Cinema Saul Austerlitz, July 2002

Plural and transnational: introduction Gina Marchetti from Jump Cut, December 1998

New Taiwan Cinema in the 80s Douglas Kellner from Jump Cut, December 1998, also seen here: "The New Taiwanese Cinema," Jump Cut 42 - ucla gseis (pdf)

Context II: The Taiwan New Cinema Abe Mark Nornes and Yeh Yueh-yu in 1995 from Cinemaspace: A City of Sadness--a Hypertextual Multimedia article

Cinematic Remapping of Taipei: Cultural Hybridization, Heterotopias, and Postmodernity Yingjin Zhang, October 2000 (pdf format)

Jonathan Rosenbaum reviews of Edward Yang films Chicago Reader

EDWARD YANG’S TAIPEI STORIES reviews of Edward Yang films from Cinematheque Ontario

• View topic - Edward Yang Edward Yang film reviews ny zedz on the Criterion Forum

Edward Yang: Move over, Ang world class rival coming through ... Jonathan Romney from The Independent, April 1, 2001

Edward Yang: Take Two | Film | The Guardian Duncan Campbell, April 2, 2001

Asia Pacific Arts: Darkness and Light Brian Hu, May 12, 2005

Cinema from the Taiwan Yearbook, 2006

iFilm Connections: Asia & Pacific Trans-Chinese Cinemas Past and Present, essay by Peggy Chiao Hsiung-Ping upon receiving a lifetime achievement award at the 2006 Osian's CineFan Film Festival in New Delhi, India, published May 2007

Remembering Edward Yang Godfrey Cheshire from The Village Voice, the week of June 26, 2007

Taiwanese director Edward Yang dies at age 59 Min Lee from Taiwan News Online, July 1, 2007

GreenCine Daily: Edward Yang, 1947 - 2007. July 1, 2007

The House Next Door: Edward Yang: November 6, 1947-June 29, 2007 Keith Uhlich, July 1, 2007

Paul Harrill Rest in Peace, Edward Yang, from Self-Reliant Film, July 1, 2007

Edward Yang (1947-2007) In Memory of Edward Yang, by Michael J. Anderson from Tativille, July 1, 2007

Ray Pride has commentary and an excellent round-up of links about Edward Yang, Ray Pride from Filmmaker Blog, July 1, 2007

Andrew Chan Edward Yang (1947 – 2007), Movie Love, July 1, 2007

Edward Yang, 59, Director Prominent in New Taiwan Cinema, Is Dead ... Manohla Dargis obituary from the New York Times, July 2, 2007

What Edward Yang Dechang meant to me Kevin Lee from Shooting Down Pictures, July 2, 2007

Edward Yang has died at 59 Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Chicago Reader Blog, July 2, 2007

ScreenGrab: The Nerve Movie Blog - Indie Film News, Reviews and Gossip Edward Yang, 1947 – 2007, by Vadim Rizov, July 2, 2007

Steven Shaviro Edward Yang, 1947 – 2007, from The Pinocchio Theory, July 2, 2007

Taiwan, News - Taiwan mourns Cannes-winning director Edward Yang's ... from the China Post, July 2, 2007

Edward Yang, 59; filmmaker focused on life in the modern Taiwan ... from the LA Times, July 2, 2007

Robert Williamson Edward Yang (1947 – 2007), Access All Asia from Firecracker, July 2, 2007

'Yi Yi' Director Edward Yang Dies at 59 -- Vulture ... July 2, 2007

Guardian Unlimited: Arts blog - film: I will miss Edward Yang Shane Danielson, July 3, 2007

J Robert Parks Edward Yang (1947 – 2007), from Framing Device, July 4, 2007

Thompson On Hollywood: Obit: Director Edward Yang John Anderson, July 5, 2007

Taiwanese Filmmaker Edward Yang Dead at 59 Kim Voynar from Cinematical, July 6, 2007

Yang's 'Yi Yi' a celebration of life Glenn Abel from DVD Spin Doctor, July 7, 2007

Edward Yang and the nature of art. Jesse Le Fou, July 7, 2007

Edward Yang -Times Online from The London Times Online, July 9, 2007

Entertainment | Edward Yang, 59, filmmaker with Seattle ties ... Jeff Shannon from the Seattle Times, July 10, 2007

Asia Pacific Arts: From His Time to Ours overview essay by Brian Hu from Asia Pacific Arts, July 13, 2007

Obituary: Edward Yang | Film | The Guardian Ronald Bergan from The Guardian, July 18, 2007

Edward Yang Obituary by Tony Rayns from The Independent, July 21, 2007

Boston Globe Article (2007) An unexplored legacy of art and romance, by Saul Austerlitz, July 22, 2007

chiseen: R.I.P. Edward Yang Hong Kong Memorial Service photo, July 29, 2007

Edward Yang Follow Your Passion, a Eulogy to Edward T. Yang, by Patrick Y. Yang, August 2007 (pdf format)

Observations on film art and FILM ART : Two Chinese men of the cinema Kristin and David Bordwell, August 4, 2007

Posts tagged A brighter summer day at Cinematical Memorial tributes, August 30, 2007

Edward Yang was rebel of New Wave - Cannes Film Festival - Variety John Anderson from Variety, October 4, 2007

Edward Yang Series Review (Eye Weekly) Edward Yang’s Taipei Stories, by Jason Anderson, March 5, 2008

Edward Yang Series Review (NOW Magazine) Yang’s Taipei Personalities, by Norman Wilner, March 22, 2008

Luminosity in the Darkness: Remembering Edward Yang Stan Lai from Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, March 25, 2008 (pdf format)

The Taiwan Stories of Edward Yang and Wu Nien-jen - Harvard Film ... Harvard Film Archive, Sep-Oct 2008

In Retrospect: Edward Yang's Taipei Stories Steve Garden looks at all of Yang’s films from The Lumière Reader, December 22, 2008

"A Time for Freedom: Taiwanese filmmakers in transition"  essay by Edo S. Choi and Paola Iovene from DOC Films, Spring 2009

Martin Scorsese guides Cannes Classics Rebecca Leffler at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, April 28, 2009

A Rational Mind: The Films of Edward Yang Simon Abrams from Slant, November 17, 2011

A Rational Mind: The Films of Edward Yang" on Notebook | MUBI David Hudson, November 21, 2011

EDWARD YANG: A RETROSPECTIVE – Hammer to Nail Nelson Kim, November 22, 2011

BOMB: Colin Beckett Edward Yang, November 29, 2011

Something like (a) life | coffee gone cold: to cinema, with love November 19, 2015

Surveillance in Asian Cinema: Under Eastern Eyes Taiwan’s Cold War Geopolitics in Edward Yang’s The Terrorizers, by Catherine Liu, 2017 (pdf)

Filming Critical Female Perspectives: Edward Yang's The Terrorizers 21-page essay by Kai-Man Chang, 2017 (pdf)

TSPDT - Edward Yang They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Edward Yang in conversation Shelly Kraicer amd Lisa Roosen-Runge from CineAction, October 1998

The Engineer of Modern Perplexity: An Interview with Edward Yang Robert Skylar interview from Cineaste magazine, Fall 2000

A Family Affair - Film - The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper Interview by Andy Speltzer from The Stranger, January 18 – 24, 2001

The Guardian -- 2001 interview by Duncan Campbell Take Two, from The Guardian, April 3, 2001

Scope | Issue 4 | Book Reviews Edward Yang, by John Anderson, a book review by Corin Depper from Scope, February 2006

Neither Personal nor Political Brian Hu   book review of John Anderson’s Edward Yang, (128 pages), from Film-Philosophy, 2006 (pdf format)

Berry on Taiwan film directors: A treasure island written by Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis (312 pages), book review by Chris Berry from Screening the Past, June 2, 2007

James Tweedie review of Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island book review by James Tweedie from the MCLC Resource Center, October 2007

Edward Yang (1947 - 2007) - Find A Grave Memorial

501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers

Edward Yang - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

YouTube - Edward Yang 1947-2007 YouTube eulogy, the final scene from Yi Yi, Yang’s last film (2:28)

EXPECTATIONS (Guang yin de gu shi) B+ 90

aka: “Desires,” 2^nd episode from In Our Time

Taiwan (30 mi) 1982 co-directors: Tao Te-chen “Little Dragon Head,” Ko I-chen, “The Jumping Frog,” and Chang Yi, “Say Your Name”

Yang’s first film, a suggesting and affecting sketch made for the episodic feature, “In Our Time,” the second of 4 episodes by various directors. It features a young girl, Sylvia Chang, in primary school who develops a secret crush for a young male college student boarder, while also maintaining a friendship with a nerdy-looking friend her own age. This is an extremely tender examination filled with plenty of time, space, and emotion, also what sounds like the music of Chopin.

Expectations Pacific Cinematheque

"Expectations" (also know as "Desire") was Edward Yang's contribution to the 1982 omnibus film In Our Time, a seminal work of Taiwanese New Wave cinema. Yang's piece is a formally impressive, delicately poetic sketch of a young teenage girl as she reaches puberty in the late 1960s. The focus on family trauma, adolescence and sexual awakening prefigures Yang's masterful A Brighter Summer Day. Colour, 35mm, in Mandarin with English subtitles. 30 mins.

User comments from imdb Author: tim777ca

IN OUR TIME (1982) is widely known as the film that evoked Taiwan New Wave Cinema in the early 1980s, followed by a commercially more successful THE SANDWICH MAN next year.

It's an episodic film written and directed by 4 new-comers: Teh-Chen Tao, Teh-Chong (Edward) Yang, Yi-Chen Ko, and Yi Chang. All of them have film education backgrounds. Tao gained a master degree at Syracuse University while Ko got his at Columbia College; Chang graduated from Film Program of a college in Taipei and became a famed screenwriter before making this movie; Edward Yang, who studied at USC for a year, has won international reputation for his later works.

The theme of IN OUR TIME deals with 4 stages in life. The first episode titled LITTLE DRAGON HEAD, directed by Tao, is a stylish depiction of childhood misery in 1950s Taiwan. His camera work is impressive, but the pace a bit slow.

Second episode EXPECTATION, directed by Yang, is a simple realization of young girl's yearning for love, set in 1960s. Also sparked by filmic style, but not much dimension.

Third episode THE JUMPING FROG, directed by Ko, is fast-paced comedy about vigorous college life in 1970s. Some absurd vignettes adding to its flavor.

Fourth episode SAY YOUR NAME, directed by Chang, is a sitcom about identity problems of a young couple in 1980s. Interesting idea, fair performances, and tight direction.

What makes the movie so important in Taiwan film history is that most directors before them learned their crafts under studio system, working their ways up step by step for years. After becoming film directors, they don't have individual style or abilities to write their own screenplays, just make routine productions according to what they learned from veteran director.

On the contrary, IN OUR TIME is a conscious creation by 4 young filmmakers with high-level education backgrounds. They know exactly what they want in every single shot instead of telling stories written by others.

User comments from imdb Author: gmwhite from Brisbane, Australia

In Our Time is a portmanteau film, consisting of four films by four different directors. Along with Sandwich Man (another portmanteau film), it kicked off Taiwanese New Cinema. It represented a bold experiment in film-making, away from escapist romances and action movies - in which competition from Hong Kong was very strong - and towards a truly national cinema, socially, culturally and linguistically aware of the unique Taiwanese situation. The directors were trained in film school rather than through the studio system, and most of the actors were non-professional. This historical importance of this movie makes it hard to evaluate, therefore, purely in terms of entertainment.

The first segment, 'Little Dragon Head', was directed by Tao De Chen, and concentrated on a young boy who was picked on by his parents and his classmates. His only friend is a plastic dinosaur. One can't help but feel sorry for the boy as people and events continually conspire against him, but since the presentation is so subjective (even including a funny dream segment), is this perhaps no more a presentation of infant self-pity? The second segment, 'Expectation', was directed by the then unknown Edward Yang. It appears that his interest in telling women's stories was present from the very beginning. The main protagonist in this tale is a young adolescent girl, who lives with her older sister and widowed mother. One of her friends is a small, bespectacled boy, but when her family takes on a male student as a lodger, she becomes aware of her blossoming womanhood. This story is told with great sympathy for the main character, and is, like the first, presented subjectively through her eyes, elaborated by her imagination.

The third segment, by Ko I-Cheng (Ke Yizheng), takes place in college. The main character is a lively fellow, called 'Fatty' in jest, who spends his time exercising and working as a driver for women who have use of their husbands' cars, but cannot drive. Like the protagonists of the earlier tales, he too seems caught between hopes and dreams, and less promising reality.

The last segment, by Zhang Yi, was also the shortest. 'Say Your Name' is an amusing comedy about a young couple who have just moved into a new apartment in Taipei. Their neighbours seem to assume that anyone they don't know must be a thief, which makes things even more complicated.

There is a definite progression through the four films, in time (from the fifties to the eighties) and in the age of the protagonists (from early primary school to young, working adults). Though the four stories were essentially short films, characterisation was achieved quite well in all of them, at least for the main characters. The young non-actors did well in roles that required them to be themselves rather than impersonate someone else.

Also, the social context of the films is impossible to ignore. Along with the usual problems of growing up, there is also poverty and alienation, also music and traffic jams. Movies had suddenly become art and social commentary, rather than simple entertainment. These are the great strengths of this film. It is a triumph of youth over experience, energetic engagement over complacent distraction.

Having become accustomed to the New Taiwanese style of film-making, it is difficult to appreciate just what a breath of fresh air this film (and Sandwich Man) must have been at the time. Even in sections where production seems a little 'rough around the edges,' this is compensated for by ideas and inventiveness, by the sheer audacity of the experiment.

• View topic - Edward Yang Edward Yang film reviews by zedz on the Criterion Forum, July 30, 2008

New Taiwan Cinema in the 80s Douglas Kellner from Jump Cut, December 1998

Doc Films A Time for Freedom: Taiwanese Filmmakers in Transition, essay by Edo S. Choi and Paola Iovene, Spring 2009

THAT DAY, ON THE BEACH (Hai tan de yi tian)

Taiwan (166 mi) 1983

New Films From Taiwan Dennis Toth from Film Notes from the CMA

One of the most important and critically acclaimed films to be made in Taiwan is Edward Yang's That Day, On The Beach (1983). The film attempts to encapsulate, through the memories and feelings of two female friends, the past 13 years of Taiwanese history. The film's ambitious scale and complex experimental structure started a critical debate which still rages in Taiwan and Hong Kong. It has also been an increasingly influential film on the East Asian cinema, an achievement that speaks well of the promise of the new Taiwanese cinema and its filmmakers.

Chicago Reader (Pat Graham) capsule review

Generally credited with launching the Taiwanese New Wave, Edward Yang's 1983 debut feature broke with conventional narrative formulas to tell a dramatically ragged, formally opened-out story of generational discontent in modern-day Taipei. Two former schoolmates--one a jaded but successful pianist, the other a disillusioned housewife--meet to reminisce about their lives; the secrets they unearth are of a banal, soapy sort, familiar from countless Barbara Stanwyck sagas of the 50s, though Yang buries them in such a dense nest of flashbacks that every revelation seems infinitely more complicated (and confusing) than it ought to. Some interesting bits to be extracted, though the controversy that surrounded the film in Taiwan will likely be lost on audiences here. In German, Mandarin, and Taiwanese with subtitles. 104 min.

THAT DAY, ON THE BEACH Cinematheque Ontario

Shot by Chris Doyle (who has also worked with Chen Kaige and Wong Kar-wai), this contemporary epic about the position of women in Taiwanese society helped change the face of Taiwanese film. Two women - Lin Chia-li (superstar Sylvia Chang, in a breakthrough role) and Tan (Teresa Hu) - meet after many years. Tan, a famous concert pianist, was once engaged to Lin Chia-li's brother, but parental opposition broke up the romance; Lin Chia-li, on the other hand, defied her parents and married for love. Her marriage is far from happy however. As with Yang's other films, the characters are paralyzed by the conflicting forces of modernity and tradition, a battle that wages both outside and within them, especially in the case of Lin Chia-li. Her rejection of a tradition she saw as oppressive has only left her feeling strangely empty. For many critics, THAT DAY, ON THE BEACH is the widest ranging look at what it means to be a woman in contemporary Taiwan. "The subtlety of Yang and Chang merge together to form an irresistible emotional force" (David Overbey, Toronto International Film Festival).

That Day, On the Beach Pacific Cinémathèque (link lost)

Edward Yang's auspicious first theatrical feature announced the arrival a major new directing talent, and stands as a milestone in Chinese cinema. A complex, emotionally-charged contemporary epic exploring the position of women and the conflicting forces of modernity and tradition in Taiwan, the film stars superstar Sylvia Chang in a breakthrough role as Lin Chia-li, an independent-minded woman whose disappointing marriage appears to have ended by the presumed drowning death of her husband. The framing story has her meeting old friend Tan (Teresa Hu), a renowned concert pianist now living in Vienna who was once engaged to Lin's brother. The film is dreamily shot by Christopher Doyle, whose subsequent work with Wong Kar-Wai (Chungking Express, Fallen Angels), among others, has made him one of world cinema's hottest cinematographers. "Its narrative style, multiple intersecting stories and self-reflexive mode marked the film as something entirely new for Chinese cinema. A focus on the emotional lives of two women, and their implicit rejection of patriarchal dominance, was considered taboo-breaking" (Barbara Scharres). "The most ambitious first feature in Chinese cinema for over a decade . . . That Day oozes self-assurance and craftsmanship, with Chris Doyle's photography consistently ravishing the eye, Sylvia Chang giving her best performance to date, and director Yang conjuring up sequence upon sequence of pure cinematic magic" (Derek Elley, International Film Guide). Colour, 35mm, in Mandarin with English subtitles. 166 mins.

That Day, on the Beach (1983) Oggs’ Movie Thoughts

There's an impressive sequence in Edward Yang's debut feature That Day, on the Beach. Jia-li (Sylvia Chang), trapped in an unhappy marriage, is stuck in an elevator with another woman. The woman, dressed in fiery red compared to her dull black, is the paramour of her husband De-wei (David Mao). The scene is tightly shot: Jia-Li is seen in the foreground and through the elevator's mirror, we see the paramour. The motionless scene is followed by their confrontation: the husband, who is abroad for business reasons, has switched their letters and the paramour is returning the letter to her while revealing her secret love affair with Jia-Li's husband. The confrontation retains the quaint and relaxed atmosphere; you can tell that the sequence is simmering with repressed emotions but nothing is ever let out. Life continues as it were, in a constant state of melancholy.

That's basically Yang's theme there. He fills the movie with these quiet moments. He dictates these moments with the clarity and importance of a historical event but none of the overstated dramatics. It is told with straightforward relevance by Jia-Li to her brother's ex-girlfriend (Teresa Hu) years after their last meeting. Yang's film is told through a series of flashbacks all relating to the titular incident in the beach wherein Jia-Li's husband was supposedly drowned to death. The body cannot be located, nor are they sure that the victim was indeed Jia-Li's husband but it is the moment wherein Jia-Li is gripped by a more palpable sense of uncertainty. All her life, she is dragged by the circumstances paved for her but at that exact moment, she's suddenly in a centerpoint in her adult life.

That Day, on the Beach is credited as the starting point of the Taiwanese New Wave and the career of Yang (it is also the first work of Christopher Doyle as cinematographer). It is easily representative of the distinct sensibilities of his nation's contemporary cinema (as continued by Yang himself, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and to a certain degree, Tsai Ming-liang). The film evokes a fathomable ache that inhabits the newly wealthy middle-class of Taipei: the way a lucrative job turns a lovely marriage into an essentially empty and torturous predicament. The film details the effects of the new-found commercialism the economic boom has provided: how designer clothes or sleeping pills are supposed to ease the lack of love in a marital relationship.

Yet above the subtle societal backdrop that Yang points out in the film, it is the empathetically portrayed story of Jia-Li that draws the most interest. Yang clearly understands Jia-Li's predisposition and dilemma. There are flashbacks within the flashbacks that show Jia-Li as a young girl and how she witnesses her mother's subdued nature against her father's sexual trysts. That quiet conversation with her brother just before she escapes from an arranged wedding conjures illusions of a promising future; yet the seduction of a free life does not deliver its supposed promises as Jia-Li furthers lower in the quagmire of shallow living.

But Yang does not dwell in melancholy (although he depicts melancholy so effectively). His interest is humanity's capacity to change which is the reason why Jia-Li's story is told in past tense rather than as a continuing experience. He understands the value of the past (how Jia-Li's decisions since she was a little girl has shaped who she is) but maintains an uncertain but more optimistic stance for the future. He reveals the scars of Jia-Li's life but assures that these wounds are either closed or closing. His confrontations are quiet, painful, and deep but in a way, they are relevant and important in letting go.

Jia-Li would conclude her tale with the death of her brother, wherein he leaves the world with a few acerbic messages on how he has led his life following his father's steps from the profession he chose to the girl she marries. It is an essential end to the never-ending questions that haunted the incomplete soul of the girl that character has abandoned for his decision to be perpetually dictated. It seals that undefinable what-if in the pianist's past, and sufficiently closes that chapter of Jia-Li's life wherein she has been subdued by the men in her life.

The act of communication and revelation releases both female characters from being imprisoned by their respective pasts and male tormentors. Yang plays doting master to his fractured characters that despite the melancholy of their scenarios, he breathes to them that human ability to heal and move on.

Edward Yang died at an early age of 59 leaving the world with films that depicted reality with brutal honesty but with tender humanism. Previous to That Day, on the Beach, I've only seen his quiet masterpiece Yi Yi (A One and a Two), a film that is so rich with nuances that it took me more than one viewings to at least appreciate his sage's interpration of several generations of life blossoming in slow and almost painful grandeur. His death has caused a wave of mournful odes from cinephiles worldwide. I cannot think of a greater way to mourn his sudden passing than to celebrate the feature film that began his illustrious career.

David Dalgleish retrospective

A Rational Mind: The Films of Edward Yang Simon Abrams from Slant, November 17, 2011

• View topic - Edward Yang Edward Yang film reviews by zedz on the Criterion Forum, August 4, 2008

TAIPEI STORY (Qing mei zhu ma) A 98

Taiwan (115 mi) 1985

“How was Los Angeles?”
“It’s just like Taipei.”

—Lon (Hou Hsiao-hsien) from Edward Yang’s Taipei Story

There are moments of brilliance in this stunning, novelistic film, the second of Yang’s urban trilogy, and perhaps his most poetic, presented with several crisscrossing narrative strands, featuring a disintegrating relationship between director/actor Hou Hsiao-hsien as Lon, the only instance where he gives a lead performance, while also collaborating on the script, and Tsai Chin as his longstanding girlfriend Chin, a famous Taiwanese pop star from the 80’s and 90’s, where one of her songs, “Forgotten Time,” Tsai Chin - Forgotten Time - Duration - YouTube (2:41), is heard throughout the INFERNAL AFFAIRS TRILOGY (2002–03) as a recurring theme, and who happened to be married to the director for ten years beginning in 1985, the year of the film’s release, which might explain why she has such a luminous presence in the film. On the surface, they are an up and coming middle class couple that have everything going for them, both smart, prosperous, able to indulge in Western tastes, while pinning their hopes on immigrating to America, where Lon laments, “the worst that can happen is that we can’t go to America,” and then, of course, the worst happens. “I have been making some terrible mistakes lately,” he confesses, as each nurtures a profound dissatisfaction with life in the city of Taipei, an economically booming, neon-lit backdrop of confusion, undermining a sense of rootlessness and despair that affects three generations of residents. Between 1985 and 1988 Taiwan’s gross domestic product (GDP) nearly doubled, creating one of the most intense periods of industrialization the world has ever seen, a period when the oppressive authoritarianism of Taiwan’s government dissolved under the pressure of monetary growth, where the growing strength of the middle class led to the collapse of the one-party rule Kuomintang (KMT) military dictatorship in 1987 that had ruled uninterrupted for forty years since Chiang Kai-shek marched his troops from the mainland to the island of Taiwan in 1949, bringing with him national treasures, including Shang Dynasty bronzes and jades and Ming Dynasty vases from the Forbidden City. To the KMT, Taiwan was simply a way station, a temporary outpost until they could return to their rightful place in charge of running the mainland of China, where they held a deep contempt for the city of Taipei and the Taiwanese, having been a colonial territory of Japan, where everything in Taiwan was considered inferior to the cherished memories of grandparents and elders who held in such high praise their fading recollections of a better life in China, a place many of them would never see again. Over the passage of time, however, they began viewing Taipei as a treasured dream city, though it was also the site of popular protests and student uprisings against the government, culminating with Chiang Kai-shek’s son and heir, Chiang Ching-Kuo finally declaring an end to the KMT military dictatorship, opening an artistic doorway for Hou Hsiou-hsien’s A City of Sadness (Bei qing cheng shi) (1989) and a reclaiming of the city of Taipei emerging from the delusions of the past.

Described by friends as his “Wim Wenders film,” as Yang was deeply influenced at the time by New German Cinema, especially Wenders, Edward Yang remains one of the least seen of the great artists of our generation, described by French filmmaker Olivier Assayas as “the great Chinese filmmaker of modernity,” where a decade after his death and more than 30 years after the film’s release, TAIPEI STORY finally had an American release in March earlier this year in New York, something that was a long time coming. Shown twice in Chicago during a late 90’s retrospective, the film has been restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project from an original negative provided by film director Hou Hsiao-hsien and the Taiwan Film Institute, reconstructing a title sequence that was missing in the original release while anticipating a DVD release. Both Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang were born in 1947 with the same ancestral home, Mei County in Guangdong province, with both families immigrating to Taiwan on the eve of the communist takeover of the mainland two years later in 1949, where Yang grew up in the urban center of Taipei, while Hou spent his formative years in a rural region of southern Taiwan. Yang and his fellow Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien were more friends and collaborators than rivals, working together early on, supporting one another and appearing in each other’s films, where Hou Hsiao-hsien actually took out a second mortgage on his home to finance Yang’s next film, The Terrorizers (Kong bu fen zi) (1986). Together, along with compatriot Tsai Ming-liang, they generated a Taiwanese New Wave in the 1980’s and 90’s, producing films that were more personal, often recounting events from their own autobiographies, including childhood memories or personal experiences, where a collective memory of the past became a thematic preoccupation. After a brief run, the movement fizzled out by the new millennium, producing less than twenty films a year, overshadowed by outperforming Hong Kong films, where theaters in Taiwan have long been dominated by Hong Kong and American films. A perfect example of this is the release of this film, which was not popular with Taiwanese audiences, as it screened in Taiwan theaters for three days before being pulled. Conservative critics railed against it, preferring the Hollywood model of more audience friendly films, where the slow pace, alienated characters, and ponderous nature of the films, often critical of contemporary society, were in direct contrast to the escapist mainstream entertainment that both preceded and followed the movement. But what these directors provided was real, recognizable, everyday people, inspired by Italian neo-realists, often using non-professional actors, removing all aspects of artifice and contrivance from their work while exploring their own lives and recent history. Yang provided modern Taiwanese audiences with something they had never seen before, multiple narratives that only grew more complex, with fleshed out characters whose problems resembled their own, often at odds at how to adapt to such a rapidly changing world.

With a cast and crew of nearly all non-professionals, including the two leads, yet the look of the film is dazzling, even sophisticated, feeling ultra contemporary, even now, thirty years later, where the two stars stand out, as Chin is arguably the most mature female role in Yang’s films, usually writing for younger, more adolescent women, while Hou’s enigmatic performance drives the film. Longtime lovers since an early age, the opening finds Chin, an upwardly mobile, independent career woman who has embraced American style bourgeois values, feeling a sense of liberation, perhaps even entitlement, in search of an apartment in new Taipei, with the young couple examining an empty apartment in the thriving modernity of Taipei, suggesting the possibility of starting something anew, where Chin already has a design in mind where she can put her things while Lon remains aloof and distant. Having recently returned from a visit to relatives in Los Angeles, running a successful fabric business, it’s only a matter of time before Lon takes the plunge and crosses the ocean to join them, as one of the byproducts of the economic boom is the opportunity to send so many Taiwanese students to America, hoping to make a better life for themselves, as there are more opportunities, including Yang himself, who studied and worked in the United States for more than a decade before returning to Taiwan to make films. Lon lives on his former glory as a former Taiwan Little League baseball player on the national team competing internationally at the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where currently Taiwan has won more titles (17) than any other nation, winning their first championship in 1969, where he still keeps in contact with coaches and former members of his team, including Wu Nien-jen, a screenwriter for Hou Hsiao-hsien in the 80’s and 90’s, and also the patriarchal head of the family in Yi Yi: A One and a Two... (2000), seen here as a luckless taxi driver whose wife has a habit of leaving their three kids alone to go gambling, where they act as assistants to the next generation of young stars. While Lon and Chin seem made for each other, something always comes between them, including, as is Yang’s tendency, a host of stories revolving around secondary characters. While in the U.S. Lon made VHS tapes of several baseball games for the coach to watch, but he is equally enthralled watching them himself. Chin, on the other hand, works for a high powered architectural firm as the personal assistant for an executive, Mrs. Mei (Chen Shu-fang), one of the major players who is exiting in an administrative restructuring. Refusing to be just a secretary, Chin gracefully exits as well, waiting for something better to come along, while having a secret affair with one of the architects from the firm, Mr. Ke (Ke I-cheng), who stares out the window overlooking a city of high rises while lamenting, “Look at these buildings. It’s getting harder and harder for me to distinguish which ones I designed, as they all look the same. So it doesn’t make much difference whether I lived or not.” There are occasional moments of humor, eying the new Japanese management team, with Chin being told the new owner is the one wearing glasses, yet every single one of them is wearing glasses. This is arguably Yang’s most Antonioni influenced film, as the relationship between character development and newly constructed architecture feels symbiotic, captured in the emptiness of glass and steel, where windows and glass reflections are a natural part of the landscape, even seen reflecting off Chin’s everpresent dark glasses, with repeated shots of empty rooms symbolizing the interior lives of the characters and the emotional distance in between, revealing a city caught between the past and the present. Similarly, according to Yang in an interview with New Left Review, from John Anderson’s book, Edward Yang - Page 37 - Google Books Result:

A lot of people have tried to brand me as a mainlander, a foreigner who’s somehow against Taiwan. But I consider myself a Taipei guy—I’m not against Taiwan. I’m for Taipei. I wanted to include every element of the city, so I really gave myself a hard time, to build a story from the ground up. The two main characters represent the past and the future of Taipei and the story is about the transition from one to the other. I tried to bring enough controversial questions onto the screen, so that viewers would ask themselves about their own lives when they’d seen the film.

On the surface, Taipei Story represents a kind of poetic or even melodramatic façade. But actually every element of the way we lived then was in the film. So that was the intention.

Great films explore complex contemporary events to help elucidate and elaborate upon intensely personal issues, fundamental issues that we can all relate to, no matter our backgrounds. As Melissa Anderson suggests in The Village Voice, Past and Future Tug at an Unstable Present in a Restored Masterwork ..., “the title of a Hou film from 1989 — A City of Sadness — would make a beautiful alternative for Yang’s portrait of metropolitan malaise.” While Ozu’s TOKYO STORY (1953) was about the abandonment of the elderly in the postwar generation’s pursuit of a new and better life, Yang’s TAIPEI STORY, in comparison, is about the neglect of the young, who are left to fend for themselves in a world their parents didn’t really want, with most of them thinking it was only temporary before they’d return to the mainland, leaving young people apathetic about their future, receiving little support or enthusiasm, where a war-style curfew was imposed under authoritarian rule to deny them what was rightfully theirs as the next generation, denied any and all hope, remaining in a state of limbo. A portrait of urban alienation, Taipei is viewed as a city of contrasts, like Chin’s new apartment with a Marilyn Monroe calendar on the wall and her parent’s dilapidated, old world home, sleek modern office space and old buildings being torn down to make way for the new, westernized bars and Japanese karaoke, where there are repeated scenes of congested street traffic, towering cranes, high rise construction, and modern electronic equipment, expressing confusion, anxiety, and the seemingly unstoppable power of societal transformation. Watching Chin in the old world environment of her father’s home is stunning, as she’s reduced to a subservient role of a servant, being ordered around by her father, providing the food and drinks while keeping her opinions to herself, unable to prevent her abusive father from drinking excessively and gambling the family’s money away. Much of the story is told through Chin’s point of view, as we watch her cope with Lon’s immaturity and ambivalence, seemingly unable to take that next step towards advancement, yet she has to rise above her own father’s abject failures, while also dealing with the ambitious demands of an executive boss. She seems thoroughly capable of juggling two or three things at once, even looking after her wayward younger sister Ling (Lin Hsiu-ling), a dropout, representative of youths who have lost all direction in life, a restless teenager begging her for money, likely for an abortion, while Chin is perfectly at ease hanging out with a younger, more rebellious crowd, seen driving through the city streets at night on motorbikes, passing by a statue of General Chiang Kai-shek in Memorial Square, where one of the young bikers takes unusual interest, literally stalking Chin, sitting on his bike parked in front of her apartment.

One of the scenes of the film is a party sequence, where the music is inexplicably “Footloose, Footloose Final Dance 1984 to 2011 - YouTube, showing the unbridled energy and pure decadence of youth, revealed in a brightly decorated scene with a youthful, impulsive exuberance, but Chin grows weary, becoming despondent, as the musical selection transitions to an unnamed Andante movement from a piano trio, adding a somber mood, exactly as Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata does in a similar scene in Yi Yi: A One and a Two... (2000), completely altering the mood of the film, as the characters grow more introspective, guarding and protecting their emotions, including a walk outside onto the roof, becoming silhouettes dwarfed by giant neon advertising signs that continually remind residents and viewers of the power of money, where there is no escaping this troublesome reality. A decidedly different tone than any of the earlier New Taiwan films, released the same year as Hou’s autobiographical A Time to Live and a Time to Die (Tong nien wang shi) (1985), Yang’s film is one of the first to depict Taiwan as a place with a burgeoning sense of its own identity, culturally distinct and independent of mainland China, becoming a ruthless critique of a fractured culture accompanying Taipei’s economic boom, equally split by a look back as well as forward, driven by a youthful urban angst and alienation, never feeling part of any success story. When Chin finds Lon watching tapes of a baseball game, what’s seen on the screen is a runner caught in a rundown between two bases, unable to move forward or backward, stuck in a no man’s land, reflecting Lon’s own paralysis, refusing to let go of the past, or move ahead, holding onto old friends, bailing them out of jams, including covering a substantial outstanding debt accrued by Chin’s father, handing over what amounted to their future together, a decision that causes deep divisions, perhaps even a mortal blow to their relationship. Angry at her because she still believes in romantic illusions, as if getting married or moving to America would miraculously fix things between them, he storms out of her apartment, more alienated and disconnected than ever, ultimately leading to his senseless death, confronting the stalker waiting out front, giving him a beating, but as the biker follows him on his cab ride home, Lon gets out and beats him up again along a desolate highway, but the young boy frantically stabs him, barely noticeable at first, leaving Lon bleeding to death alone at an isolated bus stop in the wee hours of the night, his only companion a broken down television set that has been thrown out as garbage. He sees his life pass before his eyes, replete with baseball images, superficial, unfulfilling memories unworthy of life or death, juxtaposed against Chin’s discovery of a new job with Mrs. Mei in what seems like acres of new office space in an otherwise empty building, which ends the film as it began, with a new couple inspecting an empty apartment. This film is a poetic, melancholy vision of an eerie void, providing a haunting view of grief and sadness, revealing a colossal amount of empty spaces waiting to be filled.

Taipei Story, directed by Edward Yang | Film review - Time Out Tom Charity

The film that introduced Yang's prodigious talent to the West is a quietly stunning drama which sees the various problems facing a rapidly modernised city reflected in the lives of a dozen or so subtly observed characters. At the centre are a troubled upper middle-class couple: a failed businessman lost in dreams of the past (Hou), and a budding executive whose reaction to redundancy is more in tune with the future. Though there's little in the way of story, Yang's insights and honesty about emotions ensure interest throughout; and it looks absolutely superb.

Taipei Story | NYFF54 - Film Society of Lincoln Center

Edward Yang’s second feature stars Hou Hsiao-hsien (who cowrote the script and mortgaged his house to fund the production) as a former baseball player who has come home to manage the family textile business, and Tsai Chin as his property-developer girlfriend. “The two main characters represent the past and the future of Taipei,” said Yang. “I tried to bring enough controversial questions onto the screen, so that viewers would ask themselves about their own lives.” Taipei Story is early evidence of Olivier Assayas’s assessment of Yang, who died far too young, as “the great Chinese filmmaker of modernity.”  

Taipei Story | Chicago Reader | Movie Times & Reviews Jonathan Rosenbaum

A turning point in the history of Taiwanese cinema, Edward Yang's 1985 masterpiece suggests a rough parallel with Abbas Kiarostami's Close-up in relation to Iranian cinema by virtue of featuring the other key Taiwanese filmmaker, Hou Hsiao-hsien, in a leading role, much as Mohsen Makhmalbaf is featured in Kiarostami's film. Hou, who also collaborated on the script, plays an alienated businessman working for a textile manufacturer who was an ace baseball player in his youth; when his girlfriend (pop star Tsai Chin) loses her job at a computer firm, their relationship begins to crumble. But this couple's malaise is only part of a multifaceted sense of confusion and despair that affects three generations of Taipei residents during a period of economic boom, and Yang's mastery in weaving together all his characters and subplots against a glittering urban landscape anticipates the major themes of his subsequent works. Essential viewing.

TAIPEI STORY Cinematheque Ontario

The title is entirely appropriate: the film is a chilling snapshot of Eighties Taipei, a frenetic boomtown where nondescript buildings go up overnight. Underneath all this apparent prosperity, Yang finds a crushing uncertainty. TAIPEI STORY records the break-up of the longstanding relationship between developer Shu-Chen (played by pop star Tsai Chin) and businessman Lon (acclaimed director Hou Hsiao-hsien). Initially, the couple appears to be riding Taiwan's newfound prosperity, but it soon becomes abundantly clear that they are barely scraping by, and one or two setbacks can completely change their lives. Yang expertly mixes this with a layered portrait of the contrasting values adhered to by the different communities that comprise modern-day Taiwan. The older generation bemoans the lack of morals of the current adult generation, but they're equally confused - and even more terrified. "[A] quietly stunning drama which sees the various problems facing a rapidly modernized city reflected in the lives of a dozen or so subtly observed characters" (Tom Charity, Time Out).

Film Comment: Dan Sullivan Festivals: Il Cinema Ritrovato, July 26, 2016 (excerpt)

Two discoveries, one well-known and the other not so much: The Film Foundation presented its new digital restoration of Edward Yang’s Taipei Story (1985), a masterpiece that historically hasn’t been easy to see in the States. A delicate work of low-key modernism, imbued with fragile melancholia and an astonishing turn by none other than Hou Hsiao-hsien in the male lead, the restoration of Taipei Story will likely go a long way toward reaffirming its rightful place as one of the key films produced in southeast Asia near the end of the 20th century, on a par with Yang’s towering (both in terms of stature and duration) A Brighter Summer Day (1991). Nico Papatakis’s Les Abysses (1963), digitally restored by Gaumont, was a thoroughly startling experience; based on the infamous case of the Papin sisters that also inspired Jean Genet’s The Maids and Claude Chabrol’s La Cérémonie (1995), Les Abysses puts viewers on notice from the get-go with a pre-credit montage that frenetically summarizes the entire plot, albeit in head-spinning disorder.

Cine-File Chicago: Ben Sachs

This rare revival of the great Edward Yang’s (YI YI, A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY) second feature marks the first of several crucial screenings in Doc’s Taiwanese series. The film is notable for starring and being co-written by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, but more significant is the influence of world cinema on Yang’s aesthetic, of which TAPEI STORY is said to be the first mature example. Like Hou, who was born in southern China, Yang was not intrinsically Taiwanese: His family came from the Shanghai middle-class (Having fled just after his birth, during the Chinese Civil War of 1949), and he studied electrical engineering at the University of Florida. This helps to explain Yang’s depiction of Taipei as a distinctly global city—as well as the stinging sense of alienation that defines many of his characters. With the films of Michelangelo Antonioni as his chief inspiration, Yang cultivated a new Taiwanese film style that was, for the first time, in conversation with other national cinemas. Like Antonioni’s L’ECLISSE, TAIPEI STORY soberly contemplates existential angst within the world of modern business, following a woman’s gradual unraveling in work and love. Hou plays her boyfriend, a former Little League baseball star now running a factory.

Taipei Story Pacific Cinémathèque (link lost)

Edward Yang's second feature is an elegant, Antonioni-like tale of urban angst and alienation set in booming, benumbing Taipei, Pop chanteuse Tsai Chin and noted director Hou Hsiao-hsien (Taiwan's other world-class filmmaker) star as an upwardly mobile, profoundly dissatisfied couple. She's a successful career woman; he's a rep for a textile company, restless and clinging to past glories. Their prosperous facade of Western tastes and material comforts provides but flimsy protection when a series of personal and professional setbacks ensue, and their relationship begins to crumble. Yang extracts fine performances from the principals, and serves up a clear-eyed, chilling portrait of contemporary Taiwan adrift between traditional values and modern soullessness. Co-star Hou also collaborated on the script. "A refreshing, intelligent study . . . deftly presented in crisp, telling sequences" (Variety). "As always with the films of Yang, one thinks of Antonioni. The two directors share a rare ability to make cityscapes a major part of the emotional thrust of their films; they share an interest in the subtle tensions that arise in relationships, and an ability to make those tensions vital and dramatic. (Toronto I.F.F.) "A quietly stunning drama . . . Yang's insights and honesty about emotions ensure interest throughout; and it looks absolutely superb" (Time Out). Colour, 35mm, in Mandarin with English subtitles. 115 mins.

"A Time for Freedom: Taiwanese filmmakers in transition"  essay by Edo S. Choi and Paola Iovene from DOC Films, Spring 2009 (excerpt)

Over the course of the decade, Hou Hsiao-hsien's films contemplated the space between the rural and the urban. By contrast, the films of Edward Yang in this period, with one exception, were resolutely urban. Sometimes described as a ``moralist'' because many of his characters seemed in search of ethical frames of reference, Yang was certainly ruthless. In recounting how a successful young businesswoman sees her career perspectives dissolve and her relationship with her boyfriend (played by Hou Hsiao-hsien himself) fall apart, Taipei Story (1985) displays Yang's uncompromising critique of the middle-class with its dissection of its heroine's emotional fragility, vainly disguised behind the sunglasses she sports day and night. As she flees the past, her boyfriend idealistically clings to it, a Confucian rigidity toward which Yang bears still less patience.

Striking a fiercely different tone from the New Taiwan films that had preceded it, most of which depicted small town life and small time dramas, Edward Yang's second feature mounted a ruthless critique of urban culture during Taipei's economic boom. Simultaneously, the film inaugurated Yang's sustained interest in the metropolis as an impacted social landscape. With Hou Hsiao-hsien himself assuming the dramatic lead, and regular Hou collaborator Chu T'ien-wen penning the script, Taipei Story is emblematic of the collaborative, experimental spirit that briefly defined New Taiwan Cinema's early years.

Taipei Story iFilm Connections Asia & Pacific

Ah Lung and Shu-chen are lovers who go back a long way. Ah Lung is in the textile business, Shu-chen is a high-level executive. Ah Lung, a businessman of the old fashion, is a baseball fan and has trophies to prove his former prowess in the game. With Shu-chen, however, he is an emotional bankrupt.

Shu-chen's world is quite different from Ah Lung's. Her father is a failed businessman who spends his time hiding from creditors. He hopes that Ah Lung and Shu-chen will help him out of his financial predicament. Shu-chen's status is that of an upwardly mobile, independent career woman but she cannot disentangle herself from the problems of others close to her. Her younger sister is a dropout, a representative of youths who have lost all direction in life. For them, the economically prosperous environment affords avenues for escape in gambling halls, karaoke oars, discos, pubs, joy-riding, brawls, etc.

However, when the pressure of modern life falls upon any individual, young or old, he or she seeks a way to escape. When Shu-chen loses her job, Ah Lung has to swallow his memories of former glories. The two lovers drift apart in their cultural and social perceptions. Contradictions between them come out to the force. Ah Lung feels helpless in the face of dramatic change as his old-world values and morale give way to materialism, modernization and mechanization. As economic pressures press upon them, the relationship worsens and both feel there is no way out.

One night, in a chance dispute with a young man, Ah Lung is stabbed with a knife; unable to get help, he is left to bleed to death on a lonely street. Shu-chen has found a job with her former employer who thinks of starting big. Inside a large, empty office, Shu-chen contemplates a future even richer in material gains but without the intimacy of personal relationships.

User comments from imdb Author: Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, ireland

Although all Edward Yang's films deal with similar themes, characters and milieux, it has been common to divide his work into three relatively distinct categories - the multi-character panoramas (e.g. 'Yi yi', 'A brighter summer day'); the satiric comedies (e.g. 'A Confucian confusion'); and the formalist, Antonionian studies in urban alienation (e.g. 'The Terroriser'). These latter are the most difficult to watch, with narrative rigorously fragmented, characterisation distant, the ugly, monumental urban backdrop dominant.

On the surface, 'Taipei Story' seems to belong to this category. Its opening sequence is similar to the tone of 'the Terroriser'. A couple are checking out an empty apartment the woman hopes to move in to. Yang emphasises the inchoate nature of the apartment, its emptiness, its forbidding whiteness and angularity - the first thing you notice about an empty apartment is how many walls it has. The woman talks a lot about what she hopes to do with it, but the characters' expressions are as blank as the rooms that surround them. We wonder if the apartment is a projection of their relationship's hollowness, or a sign of its future, its beginning, something to be filled up with life.

Yang's way of filming his characters in this space, blocking them off from one another by walls, framing them in doorways etc., certainly seems to suggest a distance in their relationship. After all, the man is just about to go to America on a business trip - this very ritual of togetherness is shadowed by an upcoming rupture.

As in 'Terroriser', there is something almost metaphysical about this scene, which seems to be about the material (walls, floors etc.). There are traces of previous occupants. The woman talks about what she intends to do with the room. Yet between the past and the future, these characters exist in a very empty present tense, ghosts in the house of predecessors and future selves. This feeling of being and yet not being quite there is quite familiar in Yang's work - we see it in the dream narrative of 'Terroriser', for example. One of his most recurring devices is to film action in window-reflections or mirrors, visualising the theme of alienation so central to his work (alienation from family, work, city etc.), but domesticating it, showing that the bigger alienations start with an alienation of the self. The vast jungle of the skyscraper-laden city is thus a literally monumental backdrop for the human shadowplays that comprise the drama.

As in the best novels, the best films crystallise their thematic and narrative intentions in the opening scene, which is why this sequence is so important. It also structures the narrative to come, which will chart the fragmentation of the relationship, and the separate, doom-laden destinies of the lovers. But although everything points to 'Taipei story' belonging to the third category, there is a humanism at work that brings it closer to the first. In 'Terroriser', the characters' lack of character was a crucial thematic element, but made it difficult for the viewer to be interested in their fate, forcing him/her to concentrate on their formal properties as part of the overall mise-en-scene.

In 'Taipei story', as in 'Yi Yi', we are closer to 3-D characters, we are given insight into their personalities, their histories, their desires, their frustrations. We see them at work, at play, at home. We see them interacting with the city, even as they are defeated by it, rather than simply ground down by it. this is not to suggest a softening of Yang's formal rigour (there is none of the saccharine miramaxmusic of 'Yi yi' for instance), but in this case it is poignantly counterpointed by the characters, used to express their predicament, rather than a more abstract theme. Yang's greatest strength is the way he can turn a teeming city into an empty dreamscape, or turn the familiar everyday into something uncanny by moonlight. He could almost be a Surrealist.

Past and Future Tug at an Unstable Present in a Restored Masterwork ... Melissa Anderson from The Village Voice

A tiny wind-up toy shaped as a Pepsi-Cola can inching its way across a bedside table, Michael Jackson's "Baby Be Mine" emanating from an unseen jukebox while a tussle breaks out during a darts toss in a bar: Even the smallest details are ineradicable in Taipei Story, Edward Yang's aching and anomic second feature, from 1985. The film plays, in a new 4K restoration, for a week at BAMcinématek, in its first proper theatrical run in the U.S. (I first saw Taipei Story last June at a festival of rediscovered cinema in Bologna, Italy; the movie remains the most effortlessly summoned of the dozens of titles, nearly all of them delights of some kind, I took in during my week-long cine-binge of rarities and classics.) It's the third film by Yang — one of the luminaries of the New Taiwanese Cinema — following A Brighter Summer Day (1991) and The Terrorizers (1986), that the Brooklyn rep house has spotlighted in the past year, making available key works from a corpus too little seen in this country; only the intimate multigenerational epic Yi Yi (2000), the seventh, and final, film by Yang, who died in 2007, at age 59, was released stateside. Taipei Story is another study of close ties, or more accurately, of their fraying.

Set during Taiwan's economic boom and the dawn of liberalization in the Republic of China — still under but nearing the end of what would be 38 years of martial law, finally lifted in 1987 — Yang's film centers on the slow disintegration of a relationship, an erosion that mirrors the abrading effects of both tradition and modernization. Taipei Story's loose elegiac tone — never dirgelike, and supple enough to accommodate offhand humor and moments of pure pleasure — is immediately established as a couple walk through an empty apartment; it's unclear at first whether they're moving in or out, starting something or ending it.

Or perhaps doing both at the same time. Attired in mid-Eighties shoulder-padded office chic, Chin (Tsai Chin, a pop star who married Yang the year Taipei Story premiered) imagines where the furniture and appliances will go. "Then you can watch movies on the bed," she tells her boyfriend, Lung (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Yang's fellow eminence in New Taiwanese Cinema, who co-wrote Taipei Story with Yang and Chu Tien-wen and who oversaw the film's restoration). But Chin's vision of domestic coziness doesn't stir much in Lung, whom she's known since high school; pantomiming baseball swings, he's lost in a reverie of his past Little League glory.

Soon to start a new job as the "special assistant" at a property development company, Chin is invested in a future as fragile as the glass panes in the luxury towers that seem to be sprouting everywhere in the city, while Lung is tethered to a past that demands ever paralyzing loyalty. Together they exist in an unstable, overwhelming present. She quits her job after a lawsuit, stemming from sloppy architectural planning, forces the restructuring of her firm. "It's nothing. I need the rest anyway," she coolly announces to a new supervisor of her decision. But that self-possession is belied by her escalating anguish during her sabbatical, distress brought on by a joyless affair with a married former co-worker and by Lung's distance, whether physical or emotional.

After Lung's trip to Los Angeles, where he hopes to secure a position working for his brother-in-law — a voyage that occurs off-screen and chronologically follows the opening apartment walk-through — he returns to the capital city. Employed by a fabrics operation, he's burdened by doubts about his prospects in the States, a country he regards with ambivalence at best. Lung's recounting, calm but disquieting, of his U.S. relative's gun mania typifies Taipei Story's shrewd, understated sociological observations; that scrutiny becomes only more piercing after Lung, multiplying his psychic freight, agrees to help out a hapless Little League buddy and Chin's debt-deluged father — decisions rooted in a code of honor that promises nothing but further misery.

"This long together and you still don't know what I need or what I don't need," Chin cries one night to Lung, whose visits to her place — it becomes clear that he lives elsewhere — he usually spends rewatching the Major League ballgames he taped on VHS. The couple's unraveling, so minutely observed, may register as the tiniest shift in a metropolis that is rapidly morphing, the neon-flashing city an enormous and impassive witness to their tragedy. Chin will try to alleviate her pain by mixing with her kid sister's crew. While this group of teens and twentysomethings dance to "Footloose," she can feign interest in their collective ecstasy for only so long, dropping her head to her arm — a searing gesture of despondence in counterpoint to Kenny Loggins's aggressive cheer.

The presence of Hou, in one of his rare turns as an actor, deepens the melancholy of Taipei Story. In his 1983 film The Boys From Fengkuei, Hou would also explore the vast transformations of Taiwan as evidenced in their effects on a small fishing village; Yang and Hou, the two titans of New Taiwanese Cinema, established themselves as the respective geniuses of urban and rural milieus. But the title of a Hou film from 1989 — A City of Sadness — would make a beautiful alternative for Yang's portrait of metropolitan malaise.

Taipei Story (1985) - The Criterion Collection

Exiles in Modernity | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum, November 6, 1997

A Nutshell Review [Stefan S]

Edward Yang's Taipei Story (1985) depicts a city of sadness and ... Fred Mazelis from the World Socialist Web Site

Senses of Cinema: Saul Austerlitz July 19, 2002

Edward Yang's Taipei Stories | The Lumière Reader a Yang overview by Steve Garden, December 22, 2008

A Rational Mind: The Films of Edward Yang | Feature | Slant Magazine an overview by Simon Abrams from Slant, November 17, 2011

EDWARD YANG: A RETROSPECTIVE – Hammer to Nail Nelson Kin, November 22, 2011

A restored Taipei Story offers a fresh chance to discover the genius of ... Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from The Onion A.V. Club, also seen here: Review: One Couple's Promising 'Taipei Story,' Slowly Undermined ...

• View topic - Edward Yang - Criterion Forum Edward Yang film reviews by zedz on the Criterion Forum, July 31, 2008

Foreigner's Guide to Film Culture in Korea: TAIPEI STORY (Edward ... Marc Raymond

Film Review: Taipei Story | Film Journal International Daniel Eagan

'Taipei Story' review by Jake Savage • Letterboxd

The History of Cinema. Edward Yang: biography, filmography, reviews ... Pierro Scaruffi

Taipei Story Archives – The Paris Review | The Paris Review Dan Piepenbring 

A Living and Breathing 'Taipei Story' – The Highlighter Tristen Calderon

Taipei Story | Featured Screening | Screen Slate Angeline Gragásin

At Filmnomenon [Eternality Tan]

The Taiwan Stories of Edward Yang and Wu Nien-jen - Harvard Film ... Harvard Film Archives, 2008

Edward Yang Retrospective Unveiled, Including New TAIPEI STORY ... James Marsh from Screen Anarchy

Staff Picks: Taipei Story, Robert Altman, Samantha Hunt, and More Caitlin Love from The Paris Review

The New York Review of Books: J. Hoberman February 28, 2017

Sight & Sound: Pam Cook 1985

Channel 4 Film capsule review

Taipei Story captures today's nuance, 32 years after release | Asia Times Richard James Havis, April 18, 2017

Review: One Couple's Promising 'Taipei Story,' Slowly Undermined ... Glenn Kenny from The New York Times

World Cinema Project Volume Two Blu-ray - Martin Scorsese DVDBeaver

Taipei Story - Wikipedia

THE TERRORIZERS (Kong bu fen zi) A 98

Taiwan (109 mi) 1986

I am sometimes convinced that film culture has yet to recover from Yang’s passing.

—Nick Pinkerton from Artforum, Nick Pinkerton on Edward Yang's The Terrorizers - artforum.com / film

THE TERRORIZERS is a deliberately ambiguous third feature, one of the most experimental films of the New Taiwanese Cinema, the third of his urban trilogy movies, following THAT DAY, ON THE BEACH (1983) and TAPEI STORY (1985), which examine the contradictions and tensions of urban life in Taipei, each film revealing less and less narrative form, becoming increasingly experimental in form, more subtle in its perception of urban fears, real or imagined, rootlessness, the lack of continuity with the past, a void in values, all adding up to a severe identity crises for the young and affluent urbanites whose shaky moral foundations leave them vulnerable when trouble hits, despite their so-called economic security. What distinguishes this film is the abstract narrative that weaves in and out of two worlds, one that is happening, and one that is being written about in a novel, so that eventually it is impossible to tell one from the other, a device that feels remarkably original. While this might be Yang’s contribution to the modernist cinema of paranoia, viewing Taiwan in a post-colonial light, where terrorism, violence, and loneliness ensue in an urban web of intrigue. There is a chance encounter from a rebellious Eurasian girl (aka White Chick) who wrecks a marriage with a prank call to a novelist housewife, claiming to be having an affair with her husband, which leads to the novelist’s need to turn to writing to explore her confusion, eventually leading to her marital break-up, causing the focus to then shift to her husband’s confusion.

Loosely following several couples and their unstable relationships, whose lives are affected by seemingly random, incidental events, the film uses natural sound only, creating a complicated seres of seemingly disconnected points of view, never linking viewers to a specific character, instead lost in a mysterious, stream-of-conscious ambiguity. There’s an interesting use of technology, but instead of making things easier to understand, it instead compounds the feeling of disconnectedness. The use of color and production design are striking, giving the film a unique look. Perhaps Yang’s most Fassbinder-like work, sort of his WHY DOES HERR R RUN AMOK (1970), as it uses dark humor and focuses on a married couple, professionals who have the rug pulled out from underneath them, revealing a very tenuous emotional state, very much like Fassbinder, who suggested the German economic miracle of the 1970’s was a mirage. Putting so much faith in monetary gain and status can leave you a prisoner of your own ambitions, a creature of the same habits and routines, a puppet whose strings are pulled by others, without an inner soul to fall back upon for needed strength in times of crises. The metaphor of marriage works very well here, as when a marriage starts to crack, what does one draw upon to reconnect or rebuild? Instead, one partner usually dominates the other, mostly to cover up their own insecurities, causing the other partner to retreat into near silence, as there is nothing to fill that inner void. Sometimes silence is more than some can bear.

Seen a second time around years later in a 16 millimeter projection, it wasn’t nearly as sharp and focused as the original 35mm print, despite some rather extraordinary cinematography by Chang Chan, particularly darkened interior rooms with only the briefest glimpses of light, paralleling the fragile emotional state. There is a beautiful sequence in a photographer’s room, a compelling mix of visual and emotional contrasts, as a young girl walks into the young photographer’s room in the dark, and the light flashes on to just her picture in the light on the wall, where he has sections of the woman’s face pieced together to form her whole face, but when she leaves, the breeze from the open door causes each piece to flutter aimlessly, so the woman’s face all but disappears in a gentle breeze of postmodern darkness and light, giving the sense of an encroaching void broken only by a few strands of light. This film is surprisingly much funnier than remembered, but this second screening was something of a disappointment, feeling more like we were viewing a working copy, largely due to the poor quality of the print, as experiencing it the first time was immensely pleasurable, viewed as something of an artistic revelation, while this viewing includes subtitles flying off the screen in a nanosecond before anyone could possibly read them, while the development of some of the characters is incomplete and sketchy at best, though this may have been exactly the intention. The subject of this film seemed more like an exercise this time around, as there are moments when it doesn’t seem to take itself very seriously, like the final shot, which is something of a joke. Instead, this film feels like a rehearsal for the phenomenal storytelling of A Brighter Summer Day (Gu ling jie shao nian sha ren shi jian) (1991), as the emotional breakdown of the male character in this film, as well as TAPEI STORY, is similar, covering up their inner vulnerability with out of control male bravura, which leads to violence or disaster. What was the line from S’ir’s sister? “You are out of touch with your inner calm.” Well, that pretty much explains this film as well.

The Terrorizers | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Edward Yang's evocative and deliberately ambiguous third feature (1986) pivots on a chance encounter between a rebellious Eurasian girl and a novelist and housewife who decides to leave her husband, a lab technician. As Taiwanese film critic Edmund Wong has noted, the film offers "a refreshing look at Yang's theme of urban melancholy and self-discovery"--a preoccupation running through Yang's early work that often evokes some of Antonioni's poetry, atmosphere, and feeling for modernity. Well worth checking out. In Mandarin with subtitles. 109 min.

THE TERRORIZER Cinematheque Ontario (link lost)

Set in modern-day Taipei where the only constants seem to be ennui and police sirens, THE TERRORIZER is constructed around everyday acts of betrayal. A diffident, self-absorbed novelist coolly dismisses her lover and her husband with the same line; the husband, an ambitious executive, turns in his best friend in a desperate bid to get a promotion; a young hoodlum amuses herself by placing prank phone calls that turn people's lives upside down. The film's sparse style and seemingly disconnected narrative (which reflects the characters' disassociation and makes the film almost unbearably intense) established modernism as a force in Taiwanese cinema. "The film suggests that we all have our ways of “terrorizing” each other, and that we'd all like our lives to be as coherent and resolved as fiction. Yang reaches high, and his aim is true" (Tony Rayns, Time Out). "A dazzlingly accomplished film" (Bloomsbury Film Guide).

The Terroriser, directed by Edward Yang | Film review - Time Out Tony Rayns

Yang's masterly film keeps numerous plot strands going in parallel, finds a high level of interest and suspense in all of them, and dovetails them together into a composite picture plausible enough to make you cry and shocking enough to leave you gasping. The characters span the full urban spectrum: a research scientist jockeying for promotion, a bike-gang hoodlum on the run from the cops, a woman novelist looking for a painless way to end her marriage. Yang sees each of them clearly and with consummate honesty, and notes how their taste in clothes and decor serve to underline their personalities and betray their histories. Neither sociological essay nor soap opera, it's an intensely cinematic movie, finding mystery, pity and fear in every life it scans. The title character is a girl delinquent whose prank phone calls spark off crises in the lives of other characters. But the film suggests that we all have our ways of 'terrorising' each other, and that we'd all like our lives to be as coherent and resolved as fiction. Yang reaches high, and his aim is true.

The Terrorizer Pacific Cinémathèque (link lost)

"There may not be Baader-Meinhof gangs in this part of the world," Edward Yang has said of his complex, highly controlled third feature. "But the bombs we plant in each other are ticking away." A coolly intriguing intellectual thriller in the best modernist tradition of European art cinema, The Terrorizer spins three separate storylines of urban alienation and betrayal from across the social spectrum, and then slowly, enigmatically converges them. A novelist, unhappy with her marriage to a medical researcher, contemplates resuming an affair with an old lover. An amateur photographer records on film a bloody police raid on a gang hideout. A delinquent teenage girl, on the lam from the law, makes a series of crank phone calls that turn people's lives upside down. "Masterly . . . Yang reaches high, and his aim is true . . . Neither sociological essay nor soap opera, it's an intensely cinematic movie, finding mystery, pity and fear in every life it scans" (Tony Rayns, Time Out). "A dazzlingly accomplished film . . . Yang utilizes a bustling urban landscape whose lurking terrors nestle in the souls of the various protagonists" (Bloomsbury). Colour, 35mm, in Mandarin with English subtitles. 109 mins.

Doc Films A Time for Freedom: Taiwanese Filmmakers in Transition, essay by Edo S. Choi and Paola Iovene, Spring 2009 (excerpt)

Over the course of the decade, Hou Hsiao-hsien's films contemplated the space between the rural and the urban. By contrast, the films of Edward Yang in this period, with one exception, were resolutely urban. Sometimes described as a ``moralist'' because many of his characters seemed in search of ethical frames of reference, Yang was certainly ruthless. In The Terrorizer (1986), Yang expanded this deconstructionist project, staging a collision of six characters across a post-industrial landscape, as a bored Eurasian teenager, convalescing in her apartment, implicates each of them in a monotonous pattern of reciprocal betrayals via a few well-placed prank calls. Famously characterized by Marxist scholar Fredric Jameson as the postmodern film, the film was likened by Yang himself to a puzzle where the pleasure lies in rearranging a multitude of relationships between characters, spaces, and genres.

The Terrorizer elaborated Yang's ambition to depart the structural limitations and narrowly domestic concerns of the New Taiwan Cinema. Via an intricate plot, interweaving the vectors of three couples tormented by an anonymous prank caller, and a poetic use of scenic framing, creating the sense of an oppressively circumscribed architectural whole, Yang envisions Taipei's violent interpersonal relationships as the emanations of greater global maladies and competing ideological discourses, a way of seeing that led Marxist scholar Fredric Jameson to call this work the essential postmodern film.

Terrorizers, The iFilm Connections Asia & Pacific

A delinquent Eurasian girl, Shu-an, is kept under lock and key in her room by her mother. To break the monotony of her "incarceration", she makes prank calls on the telephone. Purely by coincidence, the number she calls belongs to that of the authoress Chou Yu-fen.

The prank call arouses Chou's inspiration to create but it also leads her to question the condition of her seven year-old marriages. Ever since she resigned from her job, Chou has been a housewife. The boredom of being a housewife causes her to write. Her husband, Li Li-chung is a conscientious laboratory technician in a hospital. He yearns for a promotion and when a high-level position falls vacant, he resorts to ruthless means to discredit his rival in order to win the post.

Chou Yu-fen decides to move out of her apartment to live alone, ostensibly to avoid prank calls but really to develop an affair with an ex-colleague; she resolves to separate from her husband. Meanwhile, Shu-an has escaped from home and links up with a young boy interested in photography. The relationship is cursory; Shu-an returns to the fold of her ex-boyfriend who has just been released from prison. Both of them set out to swindle easy victims in a sex seam.

Chou wins a literary prize for her novel but her relationship with her husband worsens. Li consults with his childhood friend, a police inspector, about the prank calls - which he believes is the cause of his marriage breaking up. But the policeman is unable to do anything. Li also suspects that his wife is having an affair. Dejected at the turn of events (he has also lost his chances for promotion), Li steals his friend's gun and goes on a killing spree. The violence that subsequently occurs may be real but it may also be a figment of Chou's literary imagination.

User comments from imdb Author: David Lie from Singapore

It is unlikely that Edward Yang would quarrel with those who described him as the Antonioni of the East. But this kind of comparison is perhaps more damaging than helpful since it only engenders perceptions that have little or nothing to do with the filmmaker. If we are to understand Yang at all, we must allow his works to speak for themselves--they must succeed or fail on their own terms. "The Terrorizer" is one of Edward Yang's most accomplished works. In style, concerns, and methodology it differs significantly from the masterworks of Antonioni. Whereas Antonioni prefers to work with a narrower canvas, choosing to develop his characters until they achieve self-awareness, Yang seems to eschew such conventions, offering instead a logic akin to the dream world. "The Terrorizer" is indeed constructed very much like Chuang-Tzu's tale about a man who is unsure if he was dreaming that he was a butterfly or a butterfly who was dreaming that he was a man.

It would be a disservice to think that the ending of The Terrorizer is anything like O. Henry. It is perhaps more accurate to describe the ending as a faux denouement. The use of not a single but a double dream suggests that Yang is fully aware of his Chinese roots even when he is consciously quoting an outsider like Antonioni. It also indicates that he is less interested in the psychology of social behavior than in the actions taken by individuals and the effects they have on one another throughout the social network, regardless of their relations to each other. It is to this end that several couples in an unnamed metropolis of Taiwan are examined: a photographer and his girlfriend living off the wealth of their family; a teenage hustler and her pimp on a downward spiral of crime; an unhappily married novelist who embarks on an affair with a past lover. These three couples, in turn, are connected in some way, tangibly or peripherally, to a policeman, a law enforcer who is powerless to hold the city together, to keep it from coming apart. It is little wonder that everyone is constantly forging new relationships or alliances in a city where obsolescence is the rule.

Just as Antonioni uses dislocation as a means of conveying alienation, Yang chooses to use absentation--the absence of things--as a thematic device. Throughout the narrative one is reminded of the absence of fathers--both socially and politically. It is the absence of leadership. Elsewhere, absentation is employed when the photographer decides to turn an apartment into one huge darkroom which denies him the reality of time while permitting him to create a world of his own. At one point, a teenage girl whom he temporarily harbors asked him if it is day or night. When the camera finally peeps outside the apartment Yang gives us neither day nor night but that brief moment in time when light gives way to darkness or darkness breaks into light. It is here that Yang best captures the logic of that dream world: his protagonists are merely phantoms suspended in time. It is the absence of time. Throughout the narrative one is sometimes puzzled by the seemingly lack of explanations: the initial breakup of the photographer and his girlfriend (witnessed over the soundtrack of "Smoke Gets in Your Eye"); the return of the photographer's stolen cameras; the breakup of the married couple; the status of the policeman with no emotional or physical ties. It is the absence of elucidation. Unlike the works of Antonioni where there is always a central character whose viewpoint mirrors our own, functioning as a filter of reality, Yang denies us of such privilege. The impossibility of identifying with any character may be disorientating but it also serves as a metaphor of a city that has lost its moral compass. It is the absence of a central viewpoint. Absentation is clearly an effective tool in exploring the void that lies at the heart of modern culture--it is the black hole of the human condition.

When the film finally concludes it matters little what portion of it is real or a dream. Or for that matter who the dreamer really is. Fiction is perhaps no more than merely dreams, perfectly realized, and cinema the greatest dream machine ever built.

The Enigma of Edward Yang - Fandor Duncan Gray, October 20, 2016, also seen here: Fandor: Duncan Gray

Surveillance in Asian Cinema: Under Eastern Eyes Taiwan’s Cold War Geopolitics in Edward Yang’s The Terrorizers, by Catherine Liu, 2017 (pdf)

Filming Critical Female Perspectives: Edward Yang's The Terrorizers 21-page essay by Kai-Man Chang, 2017 (pdf)

New Urban Spaces: Films of Tsai Ming-liang : Journal of the Moving ... Michelle Baitali Bhowmik finds Yang’s film as the basis for Tsai Ming-liang’s visual language, from Journal of the Moving Image, December 2008 (pdf)

The Seventh Art [Jimmy Weaver] 8-page essay (pdf), also seen as a video essay from indieWIRE here: VIDEO ESSAY: Edward Yang's THE TERRORIZERS, presented by ...

The City as Escape Room: Yang's 'The Terrorizers' Remains a Puzzle ... Michael Atkinson from The Village Voice, October 19, 2016, also seen here: The Village Voice: Michael Atkinson

Nick Pinkerton on Edward Yang's The Terrorizers - artforum.com / film October 19, 2016, also seen here: Artforum: Nick Pinkerton

Observations on film art : Readers' Favorite Entries - David Bordwell November 23, 2016

"New Chinese Cinemas" reviewed by Yeh Yueh-yu - Jump Cut book review of New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics, edited by Nick Browne, Paul G. Pickowicz, Vivian Sobchack, and Esther Yau, December 1998

411mania.com [Chad Webb]

"The Terrorizers" Film Review - Camera Roll Ho Lin

Foreigner's Guide to Film Culture in Korea: THE TERRORIZERS ...  Marc Raymond

• View topic - Edward Yang - Criterion Forum Edward Yang film reviews by zedz on the Criterion Forum, July 31, 2008

The Terrorizers | Featured Screening | Screen Slate Jon Auman, also seen here: Screen Slate [Jon Auman]

Musings on Movies: Review – The Terrorizers Azrael Bigler

Film Walrus Reviews: Film Atlas (Taiwan): The Terrorizers

The Terrorizers (1986) Tom from The Crazily Obscure World of Cinema Review

Classic Chinese Cinema: The Terrorizers « Taste of Cinema - Movie ... David Zou

A Nutshell Review [Stefan S]

Letterboxd: Mike D'Angelo

The Village Voice: J. Hoberman December 06, 1988 (pdf)

Brooklyn Magazine: Michael Blum October 19, 2016

At Filmnomenon [Eternality Tan]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

Don't Answer the Phone: Edward Yang's - itsamadmadblog - blogger Joe Baker

User comments from imdb Author: gmwhite from Brisbane, Australia

The Terrorizers Blu-ray (Taiwan) - Blu-ray.com

The Terrorizers | Film Society of Lincoln Center

Time Out Hong Kong [Edmund Lee]

Isthmus (Kent Williams) review

Channel 4 Film capsule review

Time Out Hong Kong [Edmund Lee]

The Terrorizers: 'a masterpiece about Taiwan under the influence of ... Kaori Shoji from The Japan Times

The Japan Times [Giovanni Fazio]

A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY A+ 100+

aka: An Incident on Guling Street

Taiwan (237 mi) 1991

Edward Yang, along with Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang, ushered in a new era of Taiwanese cinema. When a retrospective of his work premiered in Chicago in 1997, Yang was present for some of the screenings, acknowledging he lived on the West Coast and was friends and working associates with the Microsoft crowd, receiving a degree in electrical engineering. But a single event changed his life, watching Werner Herzog’s AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD (1972), which emboldened him to return to Taiwan and become a filmmaker. While his friends all became instant millionaires, Yang made films few ever saw during his lifetime, but they left a lasting legacy. Born in Shanghai but growing up in Taiwan, his background is similar to many others of his generation, like Hou Hsiao-hsien, who was born in the same year. A great admirer of Antonioni, Yang became associated with cinema of observance, mostly using medium to long shots, keeping the viewer at a distance from the characters, revealing as much of the surrounding vicinity as possible, allowing them to be judged evenhandedly. While he became recognized for his portrayals of contemporary urban life in Taiwan, tracing the lives of young, middle class workers who become devoured by their rapidly changing environment, often losing their place in life, eradicated by the enormous power of modern day capitalism to simply steamroll over worker’s inability to keep up with the rapidly changing cultural dimensions, leaving many devastated in the wake. Strangely, this film is the only one of Yang’s films to be set in the past, where the intricate layers and novelesque scope is what stands out, ultimately making this head and shoulders above everything else he ever created.

In the late 1980’s, the Taiwan film industry run by the Nationalist Government-owned Central Motion Picture Corporation almost ceased to exist, scaling back their activities, leaving a void for new young directors to fill. Yang’s initial efforts, THAT DAY ON THE BEACH (1982), TAPEI STORY (1985), starring Hou Hsiao-hsien as an actor, and The Terrorizers (Kong bu fen zi) (1986) comprise an urban film trilogy, examining the tensions and contradictions of urban life in Taipei, each one revealing less narrative detail, becoming more increasingly experimental in form. Interestingly, one of Yang’s techniques deliberately leaves out key plot details, intentionally hiding pieces of the puzzle, which forces the audience to involve themselves in the unraveling narrative. Viewed as appetizers for the main course, this film astonishingly took 5 years in preparation, and although completed in 1991, never found a distributor, initially languishing on the shelves unseen, involving a cast of over 100 speaking parts, largely non-professional teen-age actors, where Yang used his position as a drama teacher at the National Institute of the Arts to train most of the cast and crew himself, using 92 different sets, taking place in the poorer Taipei district in 1961, using the filmmaker’s own memories of his adolescence, shot at his high school, inspired by a true incident of a 14 year old boy murdering a 13 year old girl, the first juvenile murder case in Taiwan’s history, the film opens and closes with an old, broken down radio broadcasting the lists of graduating students. In this context of a repressive, militaristic government, the resulting family chaos, the constant threat of gang fights, the need for a good education, and the idea that hard work can bring success, is seen as paramount.

In a film that bears some autobiographic similarity to Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A Time to Live and a Time to Die (Tong nien wang shi) (1985), this film is prefaced in a historical context, with the understanding that Chinese Taiwan was formed in 1949 with several million Chinese being militarily forced by the Communist army to cross over into Taiwan from mainland China, into a world they knew nothing about, so they were required to build their new lives with great insecurity about the future, and this film is about their first generation of offspring. The anxieties of the parents created a world of anxieties for their children, who search for their own greater security and their own self-identity through the formation of street gangs, whose inner turmoil is largely a reflection of the world around them. The Taiwanese identity is revealed to be a sense of perpetual exile.

Edward Yang’s own father fled from Shanghai. Artifacts from other countries have great impact in this film, the use of Japanese samurai swords which are ultimately used as murder weapons, Russian novels are read by teenagers and understood as “swordsmen” novels, a family’s observation that the Chinese fought the Japanese for 20 years only to then live in Japanese houses, listening to Japanese music, an old tape recorder that has been left behind by the WWII American forces is used to adapt American lyrics and American rock ‘n’ roll music for the Chinese, the film features American doo-wop music, first love, cigarettes, gang violence, rebellious behavior, casual dress, the influence of Hollywood motion picture magazines and movies, the voice of John Wayne from Rio Bravo (1959) can be heard in one of the movie theaters, while the title of the film (ironically mistakenly translated) comes from the Elvis Presley song, “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” Elvis Presley- Are You Lonesome Tonight. - YouTube (3:19), a comment on the dark cloud hanging over everyone’s heads, hardly a brighter, summer day.

The film features Xiao S’ir (Chang Chen in his film debut), a fourteen-year old protagonist, the fourth of five children, continually switching back and forth between the two worlds he inhabits, at home with his family or in school, hanging out with various friends, where his best friend seems to be Cat (Wang Chi-tsan), a diminutive kid with plenty of swagger and braggadocio, whose favorite past time is having Xiao Sir’s sister translate Elvis Presley lyrics, where he learns to sing them in the original English language. All wearing identical school uniforms, where each has an identifiable number inscribed, their individuality is expressed in the variety of nicknames, like Threads, Sly, Airplane, Bomber, Tiger, Sex Bomb, Deuce, and even Underpants. S’ir’s father (Chang Kuo-Chu) is seen having to plead with a rigid school administrator, angered after his son is sternly issued a demerit, actually losing his temper, seen afterwards, each walking their own bikes, having a heart-to-heart chat about the implications of their actions, each owning up to their own personal failures while promising to do better, Brighter Summer Day (First Road Conversation) YouTube (1:50).

In an amusing scene, probably as a way to get out of school, both S’ir and Cat are seen high up in the rafters at a movie studio that happens to be right next to the school, as they watch a scene being filmed. While it grows more absurd, with the lead actress arguing about the color of her costume, the director then rightly complains that the film is shot in black and white, so who will notice? Nonetheless the actress insists, stepping behind a dressing screen to change costumes, where both boys get a look from their vantage point, but clumsily reveal themselves. As they are being chased by a security guard, S’ir grabs a large flashlight on his way out, which is used to great effect by the director, reappearing throughout the story, often with ominous implications. The length of the film allows viewers to become easily familiar with navigating the surrounding neighborhood, including the school, shown prominently both during the day and night, the club house run by the Little Park gang, the food stands and bookstores of Guling Street, the pool room and garage used by the 217 gang, and the homes of S’ir and his friends.

For the most part, S’ir is a quiet and studious young boy who happens to develop a crush on Ming (Lisa Yang), the girlfriend of Honey (Lin Hung-Ming), the leader of the Little Park Boys gang, but Honey has been in hiding after killing the leader of the 217 gang. When Honey returns, he befriends S’ir and tells him he spent his time reading “swordsmen” novels, citing War and Peace as his favorite, claiming: “When you look into the past, it looks like the gangs of today.” Honey is a cross between a young Brando and Fassbinder’s Querelle dressed in his sailor’s suit, where he seems to be in a completely different space and time, accentuated by his arrival to a school dance where the kids are standing at attention for the playing of the national anthem, yet he is oblivious to this conformity. Nonetheless we get a chance to hear the irrepressible Cat sing in falsetto, seen standing on a box to reach the microphone, Angel Baby YouTube (1:42). While walking to discuss a peace treaty with Shandong (Alex Yang), the new leader of the 217 gang, Honey is pushed in front of a car, but as he is shoved, the film immediately cuts back to the school auditorium where a Taiwanese band is performing “Don’t Be Cruel” Elvis Presley don't be cruel - YouTube (2:11) to the absolute delight of the screaming kids, probably the happiest moment in their lives.

But this murder leads to acts of revenge, perhaps the most artfully presented sequence of events in the film, the massacre in the night that takes place during a typhoon of rain during one of the many Taipei blackouts that occur periodically throughout this film, as well as another Yang film, TAPEI STORY (1985). Filmed almost entirely in utter blackness, with barely a sliver of light, boys are slaughtering other boys with samurai swords to the heightened sounds of yelling and screaming, yet little can actually be seen, one indistinguishable from another, as instead people are heard attacking, while others are falling, crying, and then silence. S’ir shines his stolen flashlight into the silent darkness, the beam of light leading him past bloodied, dead bodies to Shandong, who is lying on the floor covered in blood, moaning and gurgling with a meat cleaver in his hand. In this scarcest of light, the blades of S’ir’s knife and Shandong’s meet as the only light surrounded by total blackness, until Shandong is left to die. S’ir turns and walks away without a word, led by his beam of light which is all that can be seen until he leaves the room and all light disappears.

In the middle of the night, S’ir’s father is arrested by the secret police for unnamed charges, demanding a full confession on all persons he’s ever encountered since he arrived in Taiwan, including compatriots he knew on the mainland, with suspicions of lingering communist influence, initially allowing him cigarettes where he is alone with his thoughts in an empty room with beams of light streaming in, but then the cigarettes are taken away, the rules are enforced, and the punishment begins. Some are forced to sit on large blocks of ice, where they can be heard moaning, however as the father is a musician, his interrogation features an organ player in the corner singing a song in a boy’s voice that turns into that of a woman’s, soaring into the clouds, a surreal dream of salvation, perhaps, but Edward Yang mentioned there really are people who work with the interrogators as musical inspiration for full confessions. The father works feverishly all night on his confession until he is interrupted in the morning by the sound of someone entering the room, he waves him away claiming he is almost finished and he needs just a little more time, but the voice sternly tells him he can go, hurry, and get out. The camera pans around the room to an open door, which reveals, at long last, life outside, trees, gardens, and flowers. But S’ir’s father is humiliated by this experience, so eloquently expressed as he sits alone slumped over a noodle counter after the interrogation, having spoken to no one, where his wife (Elaine Jin) stops on the street and just stares at him, her eyes in disbelief that this once proud man is her husband, so utterly powerless and alone, looking so much like a stranger, but this incident will forever change their relationship.

S’ir promises to be Ming’s protector forever, and makes his declaration to the sound of a high school band playing an off-key militaristic march. Later, in another extraordinary scene, S’ir questions why Ming can’t just ignore the bad things that happen, this while a procession of tanks drives by, leaving them in a cloud of dust, an ominous reference to the repressive, militaristic government that simply cannot be ignored, A Brighter Summer Day / Gu ling jie shao nian sha ren shi jian (1991) Трейлър YouTube (1:27). Just as S’ir is kicked out of school for accumulating behavior demerits, forcing him to attend the less prestigious night school, his father loses his government job, and with it all sense of family security, both coming under rigid, unbending rules of repressive authority. Each time S’ir has gotten into trouble at school, his father has come to defend him, but this time, when he can find no words to stop the patronizing insults of the education moralizers, S’ir grabs a baseball bat and smashes a light bulb hanging overhead, again he is engulfed in a moral darkness. When he and his father walk home with their bikes afterwards, in a quiet, still moment of shared vulnerability, his father, a shell of his former self, actually blames himself for his son’s troubles.

The anguish, at this point, is only beginning to mount. While viewers are never privy to the business dealings of S’ir’s parents, which are discussed offscreen and intentionally left ambiguous, nonetheless we have some idea of some shady dealings going on, which precipitates an argument between S’ir’s mother and father in their bed, where she suggests he should cut off relations with an old personal friend, that the friend’s name was mentioned during the interrogation, at which point he screams at her that this friend actually helped the family move from the mainland to Taiwan, that women have no idea about the business of men, that loyalty to friends is a duty which must be maintained, a discussion which deteriorates into tears with each realizing now they have no one but each other. Equally haunting is another scene where the father explodes in the middle of the night over some fictitious home intruder, an alarming realization that he is losing all sense of himself. Later, the father loses all control when he brutally beats his eldest son in the mistaken belief he has stolen his mother’s watch, while S’ir sits silently in the dark outside the house with the full knowledge that it is his own theft, not his brothers, that is prompting a beating that his brother is taking on his behalf, which causes his religious, younger sister to remind him that he’s “out of touch with his inner calm” and urges him to accept the salvation of Christ, who absorbed the punishment for the sins of mankind.

S’ir has been studying on his own in an attempt to gain re-admittance to Day School, an unlikely prospect at this point, but achievable, when S’ir hears from others that Ming has had various affairs, including one now with Ma (Tan Chih-Kan), one of S’ir’s best friends, whose advice to S’ir has always been that getting into trouble or losing friendship over a girl is dumb, but S’ir flies into a jealous rage and threatens Ma to keep his hands off Ming, and waits on the street for him after school with a knife, only to encounter Ming instead who again lectures him on his selfish behavior, that he only pays attention to others because he wants others to pay attention to him, which sends S’ir into a blind rage and he stabs her several times right out in the open, in front of hundreds of passerbys who barely take notice. S’ir’s family reacts hysterically to the news of his arrest and is in utter disbelief. There is a beautiful, brief scene where the younger, religious sister is singing in the church choir, but she can’t sing, as tears are streaming down her face. Cat visits the prison where S’ir is incarcerated and attempts to share his joy in successfully contacting Elvis Presley in America, pleading with the guards to give him a tape of the music he sent, pleas that fall on deaf ears, as instead they throw it away, evidence of the missed communication that runs throughout the film. In the end, while the family appears to be cleaning and hanging their laundry out to dry, the radio announces the names of the those students accepted into the Day School, including Xiao Sir’s name, which simply freezes his mother in her tracks, paralyzed at the thought of all that has been lost, as the names continue over the end credits.

For all those Yi Yi: A One and a Two... (2000) fans who don’t understand the complexity of this film, let’s just remind you of the title, “A Brighter Summer Day,” as this is a film for which those words have no meaning, and unlike YI YI, which had the charming optimism of Yang-Yang, an as yet undeveloped child who has a future, YI YI is much more a “perfect” film, everything is neatly examined and explained, where there’s a perfect symmetry, as on whole it’s balanced and feels like a complete experience, but A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY offers no such peace of mind, as it’s a raw emotional roller coaster where the last hour or so is filled with such complete anguish and despair, nearly all the family members have their singular moments where they are the focus of an unending torment of pain, where the understated personal horrors can leave one breathless. Most of the world’s viewing audience have been spared this kind of personal degradation, and therefore have no personal reference points to connect with such despair, but Yang, to his credit, spares no one. The film’s greatness lies in its complete lack of artifice, its meticulously chosen shot and music selection, brilliant imagery mixed with an equally brilliant narrative, a devastating portrait of children on the precipice of darkness, one of the more complex human examinations of the after-effects of a subjugated nation, which is still, at heart, a police state, yet there is a breaking out from the bonds of repression by rebellious teenage kids who have affectations of violence and above all a love of Elvis, freedom, and rock ‘n’ roll.

Time Out London: Geoff Andrew Geoff Andrew

Slow, elliptical, and for the most part understated, Yang's masterly account of growing up in Taiwan at the start of the '60s is as visually elegant as his own Taipei Story and The Terroriser, and as epic in scope as Hou Xiaoxian's City of Sadness (which Yang produced). On the surface, it's about one boy's involvement in gang rivalry and violence (on which level, it's often a little obscure, so numerous are the characters) and his experience of young love. On a deeper level, however, it's about a society in transition and in search of an identity, forever aware of its isolation from mainland China, and increasingly prey to Americanisation. The measured pace may be off-putting, but stay with it - the accumulated wealth of detail invests the unexpected final scenes with enormous, shocking power.

Cine-File Chicago: Ben Sachs May 20, 2016

Along with Hou Hsiao-Hsien's A CITY OF SADNESS and Tsai Ming-liang's THE RIVER, this is one of the supreme masterpieces of the Taiwanese New Wave. "Edward Yang's fourth feature retains an inexhaustible freshness that speaks to viewers the world over," Godfrey Cheshire recently wrote for the Criterion Collection. "Like a Taiwanese REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE made with the gravity and epic sweep of THE GODFATHER, the film, which has more than a hundred speaking parts, is above al a vision, in terms of both place and time. The place is Taipei, Yang's home and the setting and subject of all seven of his features. As for time, we might consider two meanings. The years depicted are 1960-61, a particular juncture in Taiwanese history. But the time we witness is also that of adolescence, with all its inner turmoil, outer self-consciousness, and obsessive quest for identity."

2008 SFIAAFF - A Brighter Summer Day Tony Rayns from the Vancouver International Film Festival

A Brighter Summer Day is a picture of Taiwan at the start of the ’60s as reflected in the story of a 14-year-old boy who kills his girlfriend. This is a Taiwan caught between the pull of mainland China and the lure of the U.S., land of milk and honey where Elvis Presley sings (or does he?) of “a brighter summer day.” It’s also a Taiwan of Communist-spy scares, and a Taiwan where the kids from mainland families have formed street gangs to assert their own identity and to challenge each other for supremacy. Xiao Si’r (Chang Chen, in his first role) does not belong to any gang, although his best friends are members of the Little Park Gang—currently leaderless because its charismatic founder Honey has gone into hiding. When Xiao Si’r first meets Ming he keeps his distance; he knows that she was Honey’s girlfriend. But a friendship develops between them anyway, a friendship that eventually pulls Xiao Si’r to pieces. Edward Yang locates this story at the heart of a vast fresco crowded with warmth, humor, violence and a wealth of intimate detail. For once, “masterpiece” seems the appropriate word. “This film is dedicated to my father and his generation, who suffered so much for my generation to suffer less,” said Yang. “I hope they, the forgotten, can be made unforgettable.”

A Brighter Summer Day (1991) - FilmAffinity Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Reader (capsule review)

Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum: "I have no doubt that the 230-minute version of A Brighter Summer Day--which I was lucky enough to see in Taipei, and which will play at the Film Center on November 15 and 20--belongs in the company of key works of our era: Kira Muratova's The Asthenic Syndrome; Bela Tarr's Satantango; Kiarostami's Close -up, Life and Nothing More, and The Taste of Cherry; and Hou's trilogy--City of Sadness, The Puppet Master, and Good Men, Good Women. (I should add that, ironically, A Brighter Summer Day may also be the easiest of Yang's features to follow as a narrative--even easier than the markedly different 202-minute version Yang was forced to create in order to find a distributor.) Indeed, Yang's film surpasses these other masterpieces in its novelistic qualities, richly realizing a physical and social world as dense with family, community, and other personal ties as any John Ford film, and furnished with more sheer physical presence (including characters, settings, and objects) than any other fiction film I know of from the 90s. It took Yang four years to prepare--much of the time apparently spent training his superb cast, which is mainly composed of nonprofessionals. In fact, this film is so uncommonly good that Yang's other very impressive works pale beside it".

A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY Cinematheque Ontario (link lost)

A powerful epic shown here in its full-length version, A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY is based on a shocking murder that occurred while Yang was attending high school. But it's less about a crime than it is a document of the social upheaval that followed the mass immigration from mainland China in 1949, played out to the beat of Western rock-and-roll. (The title comes from a mistranslation of the lyrics to Elvis Presley's Are You Lonesome Tonight?) Yang focuses on Xiao Si'r, a quiet loner who becomes involved with the local hoodlums, the Little Park Gang, and falls in love with the former leader's girlfriend, Ming. The relationship is doomed from the outset partly because Xiao Si'r is the archetypal adolescent male - he's a strict romantic, unwilling to accept any flaws. Some maintain that the film is both a critique and an elegy for a certain kind of male adolescent romanticism; others prefer to see the film as a portrait of social anomie and hysteria. In truth, no reductive reading could do justice to the grand scale, and even grander emotions, of A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY. "The richest novelistic movie made by anyone during the 90s . . . . A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY is arguably the greatest of all Taiwanese films . . ." (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader).

A Brighter Summer Day Pacific Cinémathèque (link lost)

A work of grand scale and ambitious achievement, A Brighter Summer Day is Edward Yang's most acclaimed feature, and was recently selected in a Film Comment poll of critics and curators as one of the "Top 30 Unreleased Foreign-Language Films of the 90s." It screens here in its full-length, director's cut version, hailed by J. Hoberman of the Village Voice as a "nocturnal masterpiece . . . At once coolly distanced and desperately romantic, this four-hour teenage epic is like an Antonioni version of West Side Story or a Wenders remake of Rebel Without a Cause transposed to 1960 Taipei and set to the music of the Fleetwoods." Inspired in part by an actual murder case that rocked Taiwan, and set to a rockin' soundtrack of Western pop tunes (the title is a mistranslation of lyrics from Elvis's "Are You Lonesome Tonight?"), Yang's richly detailed film chronicles the coming-of-age of young Xiao S'ir, son of a stern civil servant, as he comes into the orbit of a local youth gang, and falls in the love with the girlfriend of gang's gone-into-hiding leader. The social/political milieu is a uneasy Taiwan teeming with millions of anti-Communist immigrants from the mainland, while its younger generation falls increasingly under the sway of American culture. Three years in the making, and featuring over a hundred speaking parts, A Brighter Summer Day is "a vast fresco crowded with warmth, humour, violence and a wealth of intimate detail. For once, `masterpiece' seems the appropriate word" (Tony Rayns, Vancouver I.F.F.). Colour, 35mm, in Mandarin with English subtitles. 240 mins.

"The richest novelistic movie made by anyone during the 90s . . . A Brighter Summer Day is arguably the greatest of all Taiwanese films." -Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

User comments from imdb Author: liehtzu from Korea

Edward Yang's massive four hour epic "A Brighter Summer Day" is one of the true masterpieces of the 1990s and of the "New Taiwan cinema." It's ostensibly the story of a few rival street gangs in '60s Taiwan, but the film is about a single young man's rites of passage in an era in which his country was experiencing a major upheaval. The film is so meticulous in its construction and its feeling of community (its preparation, filming and post-production took several years) that at the same time its length automatically gives it an epic quality it is a remarkably intimate film that is about as far from an epic in the traditional (Hollywood) sense as possible. There are over a hundred speaking parts in the film and it is necessary to stay focused in order to keep track of what's going on and to whom, which is a good trick to make sure your audience is always paying attention. This is the type of film that is not simply watched but EXPERIENCED - the director demands nothing less from his audience. "A Brighter Summer Day" is a very personal vision that recalls both Yang's own childhood and an actual street murder that shook the nation. The film itself slowly and almost hypnotically builds towards this singular act of violence and at the end when it finally arrives it is both shocking and inevitable. "A Brighter Summer Day" keeps with the trend among the finest films to emerge from Taiwan in that it is very pared down - the cast are all nonactors and there is no non-diagetic music. It is beautifully shot, moving from the interiors of houses, schools, and cheap dance clubs to the open fields of the countryside in summertime. Alternating between violence and serenity, the film is a rhythmic and poetic evocation of a particular era. Its ironic title (in that there is no "brighter summer day" for these characters) is taken from an Elvis song that one of the kids sings at a nightclub. It is a truly exemplary modern masterpiece that got no distribution in the West but deserves to be hunted out at all costs by those who love and cherish the film art.

Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]

It's only natural that Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day begins with a shot of a barely-lit light bulb. On the set of a movie, a director reprimands an actress for harping on the color of her dress. "This is a black and white film," he says, one of many references to the symbolic darkness that overshadows the milieu of the film. A Brighter Summer Day is itself in color, but it may as well be monochrome. Much of the film's action takes place at night or inside dimly lit interiors, and it's not unusual for the characters to be confronted by light and its almost political implications. Some of the best images in the film (young boys staring at a rehearsal from a theater's rooftop; a basketball bouncing out of a darkened alleyway) pit light against dark—a fascinating dialectic meant to symbolize a distinctly Taiwanese struggle between past and present. From weapons to watches, objects similarly speak to the present. Like the light, these objects are constant reminders that the past can't be ignored and must be used to negotiate the present. In his article on Edward Yang for the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum praises A Brighter Summer Day's novelistic qualities and the way with which the director realizes a "a physical and social world as dense with family, community, and other personal ties as any John Ford film, and furnished with more sheer physical presence (including characters, settings, and objects) than any other fiction film I know of from the '90s." The film takes its title from a lyric in Elvis Presley's "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" (the singer himself once bemoaned the island's unknown status to the world) and loosely revolves around the death of a young girl by a male classmate. Over the course of the film, Yang evokes the way the military regime in Taiwan has disconnected the island's people—men and women desperately trying to figure out a way to relate to each other and their children despite the constant meddling (whether punishment or validation) of the government. In what is arguably the film's most memorable scene, a young kid in military school asks his teacher, "What should I do?" The emphasis on the "I" is important here and is indicative of Yang's concern for the country's oppression of its people and the limits of their personal freedom. Because Yang's compositions are so uncomplicated, it's easy to dismiss the director as a better storyteller than visualist, but that's to ignore the remarkable way he uses his camera to posit all sorts of emotional and political confrontations. It's in his generous, objective use of long shots and spare but startling close-ups that we see once again the influence of Robert Altman in Yang's aesthetic (see Yi Yi for more proof) and the struggle of the Taiwanese people to accept their history. In essence, Yang uses his aesthetic to bring into the light that which is dark.

Doc Films A Time for Freedom: Taiwanese Filmmakers in Transition, essay by Edo S. Choi and Paola Iovene, Spring 2009 (excerpt)

Even a brief overview of Taiwan cinema in the second half of the 20^th century must take into account its multilingual context. The majority of films produced in Taiwan in the 1950s and early 1960s were in Taiwan's native Southern Min language, and represented locally popular genres such as opera films and romantic comedies. By the 1960s Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Party, the sole ruling party since its ousting from the Mainland by Mao Zeodong's Communist Party, was aggressively enforcing the teaching of Mandarin in schools and the use of Mandarin in cinema and other media. Launched by the state-owned Central Motion Pictures Corporation (CMPC), so-called ``healthy realism'' became the dominant genre. Mostly set in rural Taiwan, these films imagined a harmonious agrarian society, a vision which was often well-received by local audiences, but also represented the ideological whitewash of a repressive government.

Pressured by foreign competition, mostly from the Hong Kong industry, CMPC sought to diversify their production, experimenting with costume melodramas, comedies, and musicals. Pai Ching-jui's romantic comedy The Bride and I (1968) well exemplifies this attempt to compete with glitzier foreign products by toning down ideological content. One of the highlights of this important filmmaker's career and a box office hit, this delightfully self-reflexive work calls attention to the constraints that both political and commercial demands imposed on filmmakers at the time, thus combining light comedy and veiled cultural critique.

With the death of Chiang Kai-shek and the diplomatic isolation that followed the 1971 UN decision to recognize the People's Republic of China, the 1970s marked a dim, claustrophobic period in Taiwanese history, where cookie-cutter escapism prevailed, mostly in the form of adaptations of popular romance novels. But by the 1980s, facing ever-increasing competition from Hong Kong and Hollywood, CMPC inaugurated a ``newcomer policy'' aimed at attracting new talent to the local film industry. This institutional support was crucial for the emergence of the New Taiwan Cinema, whose exponents were given carte blanche, as well as the full wealth of the company's subsidies. Economic imperatives had at last superseded political ones, as the Nationalist Party gradually lost its grip on the country's imagination.

In 1980, Wu Nien-jen, a precocious novelist, found himself hired as a creative supervisor to reinvigorate CMPC's productions. The resulting project In Our Time (1982) inaugurated the New Taiwan Cinema with its quotidian tales of childhood mortification, sexual awakening, and urban maladjustment. It also occasioned the first film from a young former journeyman of television, Edward Yang. But it was Growing Up (Chen Kun-hou, 1983) that first attracted broad critical and popular attention to the movement. Penned by Hou Hsiao-hsien, eventually the movement's most prominent filmmaker, in his first of many collaborations (nearly every work of his career) with another novelist, a young woman named Chu T'ien-wen, Growing Up established some of the movement's key stylistic approaches and narrative concerns, with its subdued manner in relating the story of an adolescent boy grappling with everyday pangs amid Taiwan's fraught provincial context. The same year saw the release of The Sandwich Man, Wu Nien-jen's second omnibus film consisting of three shorts including Hou Hsiao-hsien's first personal project as a director. It was immediately hailed as a ``completely new start for the Chinese cinema of Taiwan.''

Most of the New Taiwan filmmakers, including Hou, Wu, Chu, and Yang were born in the late 1940s or early 1950s, and raised under a military dictatorship with a pro-Mandarin, anti-communist ideology at its core. They witnessed the economic take-off of the 1960s with its rapid social and political transformations. Each represented a different stratum of Taiwan society, and thus a different attitude towards its problems. For their parts the two writers Wu Nien-jen and Chu T'ien-wen were natives, and respectively represented that society's proletariat and literati cultures. On the other hand, the two filmmakers Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang both hailed from the Mainland, their families having fled the Chinese Civil War. The former's clan was rural and working class of the Hakka, a Han subgroup from Southern China, while the latter's family was urban bourgeois from Shanghai, settling in Taipei.

These four individuals outline a representative cadre of a larger group, some trained at home and some abroad. Drawing inspiration from the Hong Kong New Wave or international art cinema, or shaped by their work in television and the popular film industry, they emphasized a naturalistic acting style, location photography, and everyday depictions of Taiwan. Perhaps most importantly, their films returned to the use of Southern Min as their spoken idiom.

Over the course of the decade, Hou Hsiao-hsien's films contemplated the space between the rural and the urban. By contrast, the films of Edward Yang in this period, with one exception, were resolutely urban. Sometimes described as a ``moralist'' because many of his characters seemed in search of ethical frames of reference, Yang was certainly ruthless. As the decade came to a close, the lifting of martial law in 1987 allowed Hou and Yang to push these initial experiments in personal and social articulation even further, and to confront Taiwan's tortured history with even greater scope and honesty. Thus, in 1989 and 1991 respectively, they produced what many historians identify as the movement's finest works, as well as two of the greatest films ever made.

Yang's own synoptic masterpiece, A Brighter Summer Day (1991) in some sense constituted a self-conscious follow-up to Hou's work. Where the former focuses on native struggles, Yang's evokes those of disaffected mainlanders attempting to settle themselves at the dawn of the 1960s amid the crumbling infrastructure of the Japanese occupation, the advances of American cultural imperialism, and the Nationalist government's protracted Communist witch hunt. As with so many New Taiwan films, partly autobiographical, this initiation story focuses on a group of very scared children as they fumble to make sense of a shell-shocked world with only their parents' outdated intellectual hardware to abet them. Its vaulted shots through arches, doorways, and windows, construct an uncertain cosmos where an encroaching darkness threatens the spatial integrity of the action, placing characters perpetually on the brink of further calamity.

A stately theater in its perfect proportions and vaulted mise-enscène, a densely textured novel in its richly descriptive scenario and colorful characterizations, and pure cinema in its acute sense of time's inexorable duration, with frequent analogies to War and Peace, Edward Yang's four-hour Gesamtkunstwerk is one of two definitive works of the New Taiwan Cinema, and one of film history's great masterpieces. The narrative chronicles the experience of Taiwan's transplanted mainland communities seeking security at the dawn of the 60s, and the failure of Confucian morality to comprehend a changed world.

A modern classic made in Taiwan Tony Rayns from The Independent, April 7, 2000

The first title confirmed for competition in this year's Cannes Film Festival was the new film by the Taiwan director Edward Yang. A One and a Two... is Yang's best film since A Brighter Summer Day a decade ago, a funny/sad account of what it takes to keep on keeping on when new-tech companies are crashing, relatives are dying, lovers are fickle and brides are nine-months pregnant. It confirms Yang's status as a contemporary master, so it's good news that the best of his earlier films is finally getting another screening in Britain.

Between midnight and 4am on Sunday night, FilmFour is screening the "director's cut" of A Brighter Summer Day, a film now widely recognised as one of the landmarks of 1990s cinema. It's a lovingly crafted independent film on an epic scale, made in Taiwan at a time when the local film industry had effectively collapsed. This full-length version of the film had a few special screenings at London's ICA eight years ago, and hasn't been seen here since. Its only previous appearance on British television was in a version cut by nearly one hour, shown once on BBC2.

Inspired by real events, the film is set in Taipei in 1960-61. Yang himself was in his early teens at that time, and much of the detail and all of the emotion is drawn from his own memories. To Western viewers of the same age, the setting is oddly familiar and at the same time intriguingly alien. The main characters are high-school kids and their lives follow very recognisable patterns, from the problems with dating and the tensions with parents to the hairstyles, the threads and the Elvis 78s. What's less familiar is the political and social background - and the murderous ferocity of the rivalries between teenage gangs.

Xiao Si'r is a 14-year-old boy, the fourth of five children, a loner and a dreamer. More nights than not he sits up late reading and writing his diary by torchlight in bed, the lower bunk in what was once a linen cupboard. His parents (father a minor civil servant, mother a schoolteacher) are decent, hard-working and hard-pressed financially; they were part of the huge wave of immigrants from mainland China who fled to Taiwan when Mao's communists came to power in 1949. Their children were born in Taiwan, and don't share their nostalgia for a "lost" homeland. The film suggests that the main reason that the children of such parents formed gangs was to give themselves an identity they otherwise lacked as first-generation immigrants.

Xiao Si'r is not a member of a gang, although he's friends with Cat and Airplane, two juniors in the Little Park Gang, who cultivate him largely because his elder sister is good enough in English to copy down song lyrics from their new 78s. This makes him a bystander when trouble starts brewing between the Little Park Gang (whose leader Honey is hiding in the south after killing a rival) and the 217 Gang (the sons of military personnel, named after the number of their housing estate). But he's drawn in anyway when he befriends Ming, the girlfriend of the absent Honey and the most chased-after girl in school. It never crosses his mind to get intimate with Ming, but he feels close enough to her to get jealous when her name is linked with other boys. And this, ultimately, plants the seed of his own destruction.

Edward Yang constructs a vast fresco around these characters, crowding the screen with incident and suggesting how individual actions and screw-ups may be inextricably linked with political and social pressures. Xiao Si'r, for example, clearly takes after his father Zhang Ju, a blinkered and upright man who's unlucky enough to work in one of the 20th century's most corrupt bureaucracies. He teaches his son that he can be whatever he chooses to make of himself. But he himself is crushed the night when secret policemen arrive on his doorstep and haul him off for days and nights of nebulous interrogation about his possible connections with underground communists.

By the time he's allowed to go home, he's a broken man, his morale in shreds and his job in abeyance. Yang doesn't pretend to explain exactly what effect all this has on Zhang's family, but he insists, obviously correctly, that it has a direct bearing on his son's sense of right and wrong, not to mention his attitude towards authority figures.

The most amazing thing about the film is that it got made at all. It took Yang just over three years to research and write the script, find and train the cast (three-quarters of the actors were first-timers, as were two-thirds of the crew) and to shoot and post-produce A Brighter Summer Day - all on a budget not much over $1m. The next most amazing thing is that it sustains its inventions across such a broad canvas. There are nearly one hundred speaking roles, none of them stereotyped, underwritten or otherwise lazily conceived. The combination of complex plotting and Yang's preferences for elision and suggestion over bald denotation make it a film that very much rewards repeated viewings. There is, in any case, too much to take in at first glance and Yang's wide-angle compositions allow the eye plenty of room to explore the frame and find telling, hitherto unnoticed details.

At one level, this is a piece of revisionist historiography: a corrective to the bland official versions of Taiwan's modern history, and one which obliquely clarifies the result - the defeat of the ruling KMT - in the island's presidential election last month. At another, it's a prodigious reclamation of a vanished time and culture.

It's no surprise that the film means most to audiences who know something about Taiwan and especially the peculiar and fraught dynamics of the relations between mainland Chinese immigrants and native Taiwanese Chinese. But the film's international success and critical standing suggest that it means plenty even to those who come to it without that background knowledge.

The English title, A Brighter Summer Day, is a possible mistranscription of a phrase in Elvis Presley's cover of the old standard "Are You Lonesome Tonight?". (It does sound as if Elvis sings "brighter" rather than "bright"; the issue is discussed in one scene of the film.) Whatever, it's the optimism the phrase connotes which is operative throughout the film; every character is driven by his or her hopes for a better future.

In the widest possible sense, it's a film about education. Not just schooling and the pressure to achieve academic results, but also the ways parents bring up their children, peer groups influence individuals and circumstances shape character. That's certainly one reason why many already think of it as a modern classic.

Music and modernity in A Brighter Summer Day Saul Austerlitz from CineAction, Summer 2003

Fredric Jameson, in his essay "Remapping Taipei," describes the experience of modernity thus:

The social totality can be sensed, as it were, from the outside,

like a skin at which the Other somehow looks, but which we

ourselves will never see. Or it can be tracked, like a crime,

whose clues we accumulate, not knowing that we are ourselves

parts and organs of this obscenely moving and stirring zoological

monstrosity. But most often, in the modern itself, its vague

and nascent concept begins to awaken with the knowledge

function, very much like a book whose characters do not yet

know they are being read. (1)

Jameson describes the aesthetic sensation of modernity as requiring the existence of an omniscient presence, who, "rising over miniature roof-tops", (2) connects the disjointed, fragmented experiences of contemporary life, and provides sensations of connection, rhyme, and irony. This is the province of the artist, who alone is capable of converting the random events of daily life into "the material of storytelling, or Literature." (3) Edward Yang, in his 1991 film A Brighter Summer Day, endorses this view of the nature of art. His film provides its viewers with a large-scale vision of Taipei circa 1960 that is consistently denied to its characters. We are given a series of visual and linguistic repetitions and filmic echoes that make connections, which are invisible to the film's characters. A Brighter Summer Day's relationship to the artistic urge similarly reflects Yang's positioning film, literature, and especially music, within the world of the film as revelatory of the complexities of the characters' lives. Yang uses these arts, most importantly music, as a means of rising over those roof-tops, and providing an understanding of daily life impossible to achieve in the real world. Music becomes the central point at which all the characters' lives connect, and their relationship to music illuminates the normally unseen framework of 1960s Taiwanese life.

The traditional and the modern are in constant tension throughout A Brighter Summer Day. Symbols of the two modes emerge everywhere, and reveal a society on the cusp of massive individual and institutional change. A Brighter Summer Day's placement in Yang's filmography, after his critically celebrated films Taipei Story and Terrorizer, both of which are set in present-day Taipei, is worthy of notice. A Brighter Summer Day is a step backward, a journey into the past, and its relationship to the earlier Yang films is one of explanatory prequel. A Brighter Summer Day documents the social and cultural changes that create the modernized, late-capitalist life of 1980s Taipei documented in the earlier two films. Such a task allows Yang the freedom to explore a society on the brink of a great transformation, from a traditionally based way of life to a modernized, urban existence. While the film exists in a number of versions, throughout this essay I will be referring to the 185-minute cut (a 237-minute version is the fullest, and most difficult to find).

The other great transformation shown in A Brighter Summer Day is from cultural domination by a series of invaders, including the Japanese and the mainland Chinese, to a new culture primarily associated with the United States. The film's cultural talismans illuminate this complex intertwining of old and new, Japanese, Chinese, and American influences. A Brighter Summer Day's characters treat their surroundings as archaeological, digging to find artifacts relevant to their contemporary existences. Their commingled presence in the film creates a hybrid existence where the traces of past military invaders mix with those of future cultural invaders.

In a similar vein to Yang's later masterpiece Yi Yi, A Brighter Summer Day takes in a year in the lives of a prototypical Taiwanese family, the Zhangs. However, unlike Yi Yi, A Brighter Summer Day focuses less on family life and more on the trials of one of the Zhang family sons, Zhao Si'r. Si'r is an adolescent wrestling with the complexities of his life, both at home and in school. Due to school overcrowding, many of the less gifted or rowdier students are forced to attend classes at night, and Zhao Si'r is one of them. These students understand their position as relative second-class citizens within the school (and social) hierarchy, and take out their aggression by forming gangs. Si'r and his friends belong to the Little Park gang, whose primary rivals are the older, rougher members of the 217 gang, led by the ferocious Shandong. Little Park's erstwhile leader, Honey, has been exiled for some time at the start of the film, having joined the navy as a means of avoiding jail time. Temporarily replacing him is his younger understudy Sly.

Si'r's presence at the conjunction of family and society allows us a large-scale vision of Taiwanese society circa 1960. Life in the classroom and gang are constantly echoed in the greater society surrounding these small groups. The echoes of history are also always present. Taiwan's 20th century history of subjugation is a palpable presence in the film, with the traces of past invaders everywhere. Early in the film, Si'r's mother complains at the dinner table of the music drifting in from a fruit stand outside, saying, "We fought the Japs for 8 years, and now we live in a Japanese house and listen to Japanese music." Her tone is intensely hitter, reflecting the viewpoint that military victory is useless if followed by cultural defeat.

A Brighter Summer Day's setting in 1960 places it at a moment of triangulated cultural subjugation. The recollections of Japanese role clearly still weigh on the memories of the film's adults, and those familiar with Taiwanese history will immediately grasp that 1960 was during the rule of Chiang Kai-Shek's mainland Nationalists, who had been defeated by Mao Tse-tung and the Communists on the mainland in the 1948 civil war. Still early in its development is the impending cultural hegemony of American films, music, and style. 1960 is a year in which all these factors, those that have departed and those yet to come, can all be seen.

Si'r and his friends have their closest cultural relationship with American rock & roll. Taiwan, not quite a full-fledged member of the modernized world, seems to only presently (in 1960) be discovering the astounding early singles of Elvis Presley recorded in 1956 and 1957, including "Don't Be Cruel" and "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" The music of Presley and other early rock & roll stars galvanizes the adolescents' society, and becomes the primary distinction between themselves and the adult world. Two members of Little Park, Deuce and Cat, are the lead singers of the local band, and their performances become, in many ways, the heart and soul of A Brighter Summer Day. The relationship between performance and reality, between art and existence, forms the essential complex duality of the film.

Other arts are also present in the narrative of A Brighter Summer Day. The filmmaking world is the location of the film's opening scene, when Si'r and Cat hide in the rafters of the studio in the hopes of spotting the lead actress changing. The camera pans upward, slowly making its way up to the top rafter where the boys hide, and when it reaches them, they drop a book, and reveal their presence to the crew. The characters in the film are immediately identified as avid consumers of culture, rather than producers, a situation they attempt to remedy over the course of the narrative. In addition, the process of creative exploration is shown, in this scene, as a far from joyous affair. The lead actress is dissatisfied with the lack of respect shown her, the director is unhappy with his supposedly adolescent 40-year-old actress, and the cast and crew seem both dazed and bored, scanning the room in the hopes of finding a previously hidden exit. In a later scene, the director stops Si'r and his quasi-girlfriend, Ming, as they attempt to sneak out of the studio. He eyes Ming, and offers to give her a screen test, possibly seeing in her a freshness and authenticity absent from his aging, demanding actress. This, of course, is a point in favor of the film we are watching, whose lead actress is the very individual whom the fictional director singles out.

Literature, as well, makes a small but crucial appearance in A Brighter Summer Day. Honey, the returned leader of the 217 gang, talks to Si'r, and tells him that reading "swashbuckle novels" like War and Peace preserved his sanity during the difficult months in the navy. Honey also refers to Napoleon, and to a plot involving an enraged prince, which sounds suspiciously like Hamlet. Honey has discovered, in these works, a sense of history absent from his own life. Literature has imparted to him an understanding of life being lived in the context of history, all the more crucial to a Taiwanese people robbed of so much of their history by foreign interlopers. There is a humorous cineaste's joke in Honey's fascination with historical fiction, as his getup is reminiscent of nothing so much as the return of a particularly malevolent Jacques Demy sailor. Nonetheless, what Honey finds in these books is a sense of identification lacking in his surroundings. Literature identifies his place within the historical continuum, and allows him to take a step back from his own existence and grasp it as a whole. As he says, "I found people in the past were just like us in our street gangs." This discovery encourages Honey to reverse the equation, and provide a similar service to others like him. "If I could write, I'd write a novel for people like me to read in the future."

Yang grants wisdom to Honey, but it is a startlingly ironic bequest, for his understanding comes at the expense of a certain knife's-edge brutality, and he is soon murdered by his rival Shandong. Honey's enlightenment has revealed two important facts about the society he finds himself in: first, that such knowledge is an incredibly dangerous luxury in Taiwanese society of the time, and second, that no one in his immediate surroundings has any want or need for such a luxury. Enlightenment is something that the other members of the 217 gang, and the great majority of the characters of A Brighter Summer Day, cannot afford. Literature, as such, has a mind-expanding capability sorely lacking in any other aspects of these characters' lives, but the wide-angle portrait of society it provides also lessens the finely tuned attention to detail so necessary for survival. As we are shown, the pleasures of literature can be fatal.

Music, however, is the axis on which Yang's film turns. Yang frequently chooses cultural talismans as centerpieces for his films, from baseball in Taipei Story to photography in Terrorizer and Yi Yi. A Brighter Summer Day is the only film in his oeuvre, though, in which Yang expresses any interest in rock & roll as a cultural medium. Specifically, the characters in the film are tied musically and emotionally to the groundbreaking work of Elvis Presley. Elvis as talisman connects A Brighter Summer Day, in at least a superficial way, to American Graffiti and its scores of imitators among American films of the 1970s and 1980s. In this light, A Brighter Summer Day becomes a negative of those American films, a story of cultural and sexual awakening through music that runs parallel to its American cousins. By virtue of Taiwan's gnarled history, and the specific milieu of the film, the story it tells, while superficially similar, is markedly different in tone and scope from the Lucas film. The aura of nostalgia that the two films share is augmented in A Brighter Summer Day by pervasive reminders of the era's harshness- a reality principle absent from the sugar-coated fantasia of American Graffiti.

The relationship between music and life in Yang's film is continually complicated by the way one bleeds into the other. Each of the film's musical performances is surrounded or interrupted by details of the plot that reflect, in one way or another, on the music. In many of the scenes, the performances are ironicized, their yearning romanticism at odds with the threat of violence that is constantly swirling around them. In other scenes, however, the romantic, questing nature of the songs are only intensified by their surroundings, the performance of these songs a direct revelation of the characters' emotions, as in a more traditional musical. A Brighter Summer Day belongs to the backstage genre of musical, in that all the performances are justified by the plot- i.e., a character would never burst into song if not on stage before a paying audience, or emoting into a tape recorder. The songs the characters sing are all American pop songs of the early rock and roll era, and as such the subject matter is almost exclusively love and romance. The selection of these songs, their performance, and their placement within the body of the film, reveal much about the relationships in A Brighter Summer Day.

In the first musical scene, the bumpers to the performance indicate the precise relationship of song to life, and the ways that the songs articulate emotions too complex to be otherwise expressed. The scene opens with Si'r standing across the street from a house, gazing longingly at Ming, the object of his affections, as she enters. The camera is placed directly behind Si'r, aligning our gaze with his. As the scene progresses, there is a slow fade up on the soundtrack of a crooning singer. The singing gets progressively louder, until there is a cut from Si'r's point of view to an interior shot of the performance, with Deuce, one of the leaders of the Little Park gang, serving as lead singer. What is most striking about the band is their remarkable re-creation of an American rock band, circa 1956. Deuce wears a white T-shirt, rolled up to reveal his biceps, and the band's guitarist sports the clunky black glasses favored by American stars like Buddy Holly. Their stage presence is completed by the mural of a lone palm tree and flashing multicolored Christmas lights that serve as decoration. The replica of an American band, while slightly threadbare in stage presence, is assisted by the astonishing imitation of American singing in English, a language which none of the characters in the film (with the exception of Si'r's sister, their song transcriber) evince any ability to speak. Deuce and his sidekick, the falsetto Cat, emit a pitch-perfect imitation of American singers virtually indistinguishable from the genuine product.

Cat replaces Deuce after the first song, and his number is a litany of positive changes in the singer's life, keyed around the repeated phrase "because you love me." As he sings in his pre-pubescent falsetto, Deuce storms offstage and into the concert hall's kitchen, where he engages in a violent, angry altercation with Sly, the gang's other leader, over Sly's indiscretions with Deuce's girlfriend Jade. Deuce attempts to attack Sly with a garbage can lid, and is repeatedly held back from lunging at Sly. Cat dashes offstage between songs to speak to Si'r, standing outside, and informs him that the entire ruckus was his fault, emerging as a result of his having indiscreetly informed on Sly. After imparting this information, Cat dashes back onstage for the next song, whose chorus is, "It's just like heaven, being here with you- you're just like an angel, my angel baby."

The sharp contrast between the innocently romantic tone of the songs and the anguished, tortured nature of the romantic relationships on display is emphasized by Yang's thorough integration of the two realms in this sequence. Neither Si'r's feelings for Ming, nor the complex roundelay of jealousy between Sly, Deuce, and Jade conform neatly to the romantic cliches of pop songs. Music, and art as a whole, as a beautiful lie is a motif that recurs throughout A Brighter Summer Day. The elevated sentiments of the songs are overwhelmed by the violence constantly simmering underneath the surface.

A short shot during the concert sequence provides the key for understanding these adolescents' behavior. Sly walks into the concert hall with a girl on one arm, strutting and emitting a glow of cocksureness while jauntily smoking a cigarette. This brutal parody of gangster/businessman's behavior is an indication of the entire adolescent society's basis in emulation of the adult society surrounding them. The random brutalization experienced in school is repeated in their relationships with each other, with hostility and violence as the only acceptable solutions to the problems at hand. The aping of behavior swings both ways- in an early scene, Si'r's father and his more influential friend confer in a dark corner at a party about the possibility of a promotion, and there is a remarkable similarity between their conversation and that of Si'r and his friends in posture and attitude. We come to understand that they, too, are in gangs of sorts, and that their lives operate by codes just as binding and restrictive as those of their sons. The lives of Si'r and his friends become a microcosm of Taiwanese society as a whole, reflecting the confusion, uncertainty, and violence of everyday life.

In the second performance sequence, the same elements are present, but intensified. Honey appears uninvited outside the concert hall like an avenging angel, hell-bent on starting a ruckus. He arrives during the singing of the national anthem, while everyone is stock-still, standing at attention. Honey's smooth, gliding walk manages to convey the impression of each step being his last without ever pausing. Again, Yang cuts between the ever-escalating fight and the performance inside, utilizing a shot from the side of the stage that includes the swooning girls standing onstage as well as the performers. The third segment of this triangulated sequence (the song performed has a chorus of "it couldn't be anyone else but you") is of the repeated exchange of glances between Jade and Ma, Si'r's new friend. Love and violence intertwine here as in the first sequence, forever inseparable. The music fades out as Honey and Shandong walk together down the darkened, empty road. Honey is talkative and excited, while his counterpart silently lurks behind him. As a car passes them, Shandong shoves Honey into its path, and Honey lets loose a strangled cry in the moment before he is killed. Yang immediately cuts back to the concert hall, where a new band is performing "Don't Be Cruel," complete with Elvis' trademark vocal yelps. The threat and the sadness of violence are ever-present inside the performances of the songs. By virtue of Yang's cross-cutting, the audience possesses an understanding of the harsh undercurrents beneath the songs that the adoring crowds seem to lack. Yang's recurring shots of the cheering (mostly female) audience highlights the growing gap in knowledge between the approving crowds and the film's audience. We (the film's audience) are repeatedly allowed glimpses of the sadness behind the romance, the experience behind the songs' innocence. The songs are not allowed to stand as is, but are complicated by their relationship with the characters' lives, made deeper and sadder by their surroundings.

The only performances left in A Brighter Summer Day, following the two concerts, are Cat's, and both involve a tape recorder rather than an audience. In Si'r's sister's room, surrounded by pictures of Elvis on the walls, Cat records his performance of "Are You Lonesome Tonight?", complete with the mis-transcribed line that provides the film's title. Following the song, Cat tells Si'r about Ma's discovery in his house's attic- a Japanese samurai sword, and a picture of a young American woman. These two artifacts, in addition to the tape recorder, stand as indices of the presence of a melange of cultural imperializers in the film's Taiwan. The place of honor accorded to American music by A Brighter Summer Day's adolescents fits this pattern of Taiwanese cultural domination and reappropriation. These objects are constant reminders of Taiwan's inbetween status, caught between the Japanese, Chinese, and American empires. Rather than attempt to ignore this status, Si'r and his friends seek to celebrate the unique position of "this unknown place," as Elvis Presley refers to Taiwan later in the film.

A Brighter Summer Day shifts its narrative focus at this point, moving away from the members of the Little Park gang toward a concentration on the Zhang family. Si'r's father is taken away by the secret police and interrogated for a number of days, an experience that permanently scars him. He becomes a harsher parent, brutally beating his son Lao Er for the crime of pawning his mother's watch. Si'r is expelled from school, and must spend his days studying for the Day School entrance exam. In the meantime, separated from Ming by his expulsion, he becomes increasingly jealous of Ming's infidelities. His friends all seem to have changed as well- Sly, the former proto-capitalist hothead, has visibly calmed, not even flinching when Si'r slaps him, where in his first appearance in the film, he had brained a terrified boy with a brick. Si'r's frustration at his helplessness, and at the suffering inherent in the world, grows more palpable with each passing moment. While walking with Ming, she tells him to slow down his dogged pursuit of her affections, saying, "We have all the time in the world." Ming repeats word-for-word the interrogator's response to Si'r's father's complaints. The repetition draws a connection between Si'r's father's interrogation and Si'r's relationship with Ming, with both serving as trials by fire that neither can pass.

Si'r meets Ming one more time, promenading with her in a public square. Si'r offers his help in changing her for the better, which raises her ire. Yang cuts to Ming in close-up, angrily telling Si'r, "You're just like all the rest. You can't change me ... You want me to change? I'm like the world. The world will never change." Si'r, in response, stabs Ming, embracing her as the life ebbs from her, her head lolling on Si'r's shoulder. He screams at her, "You're hopeless and shameless," a retort that applies equally, in his equation, to the world at large. Yang cuts from the medium two-shot of their dance of death to a longer shot that takes in the activity surrounding them. The crowd of young people continues enjoying themselves, taking no notice of the catastrophe unfolding in their midst. Life flows on around them, oblivious to their personal tragedy.

In the film's crushing final two scenes, Cat brings his tape of "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" to the prison where Si'r is incarcerated. He pleads with the jailers to bring his tape to Si'r, and as he walks away, we hear the song, and the contents of Cat's letter. Over an image of the prisoners sweeping up the lushly green yard in the dappled midday sunlight, Cat tells Si'r about sending his recording to Elvis Presley, who responded that he was surprised to hear of his music's popularity in "this unknown place", and has sent him a ring. The letter and the song are harshly interrupted on the soundtrack, and Yang cuts from the placid prisoners' scene to the guards' tossing Cat's tape into the garbage.

In a subtle match, the prison guard has the same intricate tea glass as Si'r's school principal. Yang never shows the guard's face, shooting him from the back only, and as a result the two men are joined, becoming the same figure of corrupt, jaded authority. The junked tape stands for all the missed communication of the film, as well as for Taiwan's aspirations as a whole. "This unknown place" loses its innocence, its desire for wholeness amidst the detritus of other empires, in Si'r's tragic fate. We never see Si'r again after he is arrested- he exists only as an absence in the lives of those left behind.

In A Brighter Summer Day's final scene, Si'r's mother and sister listen to the radio as they hang laundry to dry. The camera follows his sister, then pans right to look out a window to the garden, where his mother unfolds clothes. In the middle of unfolding one garment, she freezes, having heard Si'r's name on the list of students accepted for enrollment in the prestigious Day School, in the foreign language department. The credits begin to roll over this final image of a woman frozen in the unbearable awareness of exactly what she has lost. Taiwan, too, has lost- lost its opportunity for change at a crucial moment, choosing instead to follow the path of continued cultural domination that will create the Taiwan of Yang's contemporary films. As per Jameson's dictum, Yang creates a book whose characters do not know they are being read, a realist document of Taiwanese society that provides a God's-eye-view perspective of their lives. In the confluence of the two concluding scenes, Yang provides a unity of the personal and political, cultural and social spheres of the film for a literarily fitting finale accessible only to his viewers, and not his characters. And across the continuum of Yang's oeuvre, the story of modernization, cultural confusion, and personal anguish will continue onward toward the present. The Zhangs will become the Jians of Yi Yi, perhaps more successful than their forebears, but equally disoriented as to their place in Taiwanese society, and the world as a whole.

NOTES

(1) Jameson, Fredric. The Geopolitical Aesthetic. London: BFI Publishing, 1992, p. 114.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Ibid.

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A Brighter Summer Day - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A CONFUCIAN CONFUSION (Du li shi dai) A 96

Taiwan (127 mi) 1994

Like all the books on Chinese history we studied, over 2500 years worth, and most of the recent Chinese-language films that depict the past, poverty and sufferings are central themes. Wealth was never really intended for the people in Confucian doctrines, which enforced more than anything else the central authority’s legitimacy with rigid social structures coated with moral justifications to stress conformism, discipline and personal sacrifices for social harmony and group security. Ironically, this conformism and discipline bore fruit to all these countries in their economic miracles and double-digit annual growths of the past two decades. Suddenly, as a result, we find ourselves in a position where we have run out of Confucian teachings, as well as Western solutions such as Democracy, from which to model ourselves. We may know how to tell the world what to do, as with the human rights issues, but do we know how to tell ourselves what to do for our own future? This confusion has created ever threatening anxieties in all the details of our daily lives...Some went to heaven, some went to hell, and some happily and surprisingly discovered that they had become decent and independent people... Fortunately we do have a word for choice. This is a film about treasuring this final resource of ours to create hope for the future.

—Edward Yang

Yang’s 8 ½, and according to Yang, there is no Chinese translation for the word “irony” or frustration, suggesting under the Confucian order of things, a philosophy developed 2500 years ago that just might be a bit outdated, there is a reason, an explanation, an order to all things. So when something doesn’t fit that prevailing order, one does not get frustrated, one changes to fit the order of all things. This film is a collision course between ancient Chinese beliefs and the current economic trends in modern Taipei, which has accumulated more money in the past 20 years than it did in the previous 3000 years, examining the effect of this rapid change on personal relationships, suggesting emotions are like investments, like money, that one’s financial statements reveal much about their innermost thoughts, that money and emotions are interchangeable, particularly the risk involved. Aren’t emotions dangerous nowadays?

There is frustration galore in this story, where sometimes fake is more real than what is real, such as advertisements versus propaganda – what’s the difference? This is a search for identity among the upwardly mobile, young singles who have no connection to the past, and only a question mark for their future, set in the sleek, anonymous office skyscrapers and condos for the trendy over a few frenetic days in modern Taipei. Molly (Ni Shujun), is a PR executive who acts as a front for her family’s publishing business, is engaged to marry her family’s choice, a bumbling knucklehead, but the heir to a corporate fortune. Molly’s sister hosts a TV talk show, which features only happy talk and slogans like “smile on your way to victory.” Molly rules her company with an iron fist, rewarding loyalty and compliance to her rather superficial demands, causing mass distress among her workers, as the firm is always teetering on the brink of incompetence and financial loss, only to be bailed out again and again by the family fortune rather than sound business practices. One of her coworkers is a childhood friend, Qiqi (Chen Xianqi), who has a perfect relationship with her husband Larry, who represents stability by his unquestioning loyalty to his firm, never questioning whether or not he is happy, as this is the traditional Chinese model for success. But his perfect relationship disintegrates as the boundaries between friend and coworker begin to blur, while Molly and Qiqi always seem to be teetering on the precipice of having an affair of their own, as they seem to be happy only in one another’s company, as only they understand each other, and Qiqi always has that advertisement smile.

Meanwhile, Molly has an affair with Larry, which starts as a scuffle in a dark alley, which leads to an embrace, which leads to an immediate cut to a sea of car lights from an expressway, initially only the sound is heard, but the sound disappears to silence as an alienated novelist sits above the cars on an overpass contemplating suicide. Qiqi befriends him, but then has to fend him off, running away when he becomes fiercely possessive, chasing her down the street on foot when she is trying to escape in a cab, which stops abruptly, the guy runs into the cab in what can only be described as a moment of hilarity and mass confusion, or is it Confucian? Ultimately, Molly and Larry decide to quit, Molly and Qiqi remain friends, but Larry and Qiqi decide to part, yet in the final scene, this relationship has a hope that it may begin again, suggesting love, like art, is something worth holding onto.

The film uses chapter headings, like Godard’s MY LIFE TO LIVE, which interrupts the flow of action and prevents the viewer from identifying too closely with the characters, forcing the viewer to follow the director’s thought process. While this film is advertised as a comedy, there is a sad pathos underneath all of what seems to be the fragile, human failings in each of the characters, who have to use fronts, like skyscrapers, to hide the fragile workings that are taking place inside, hidden and protected from view.

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review

Edward Yang's ambitious and satiric 1994 Taiwanese feature, set over a couple of frenetic days in Taipei, deals with some of the effects of capitalism on personal relationships, weaving a web of romantic, sexual, and professional intrigues among an energetic businesswoman, her reckless fiance, a TV talk-show hostess, an alienated novelist, an avant-garde playwright, and others. As the title suggests, the collision between ancient Chinese beliefs and current economic trends creates a certain sense of vertigo, and this dense comic drama catches the feeling precisely.

Time Out review Tony Rayns

Yang's brilliantly achieved comedy follows a selection of modern urban types through two fraught days and nights rife with misunderstandings and cross-purposes. The specific focus is on Taipei now, a city torn between me-generation aspirations and age-old Chinese ideas of social conformity, but almost everything here could equally well take place in neo-conservative London: Yang's semi-affectionate caricatures of civil servants, business and PR people and the arts crowd are all too recognisable. The new streamlined version of the film is tighter and more provocative than that which baffled most of the comatose British press corps (TO excepted) at Cannes '94; the creative energies that fired A Brighter Summer Day are sparkier than ever.

A CONFUCIAN CONFUSION Cinematheque Ontario

"It's a dangerous time for emotion," says one character early on in the film, but the twenty-something denizens of A CONFUCIAN CONFUSION are completely incapable of suppressing their emotions or their greed. Sleek, chic and hysterical, the film owes more to Preston Sturges than Michelangelo Antonioni, though all of the characteristic Yang themes are present; only this time there is a more luxurious feel to the proceedings. Taipei has a vibrant, cut throat glamour here that it lacks in other Taiwanese films. The film's thesis - stated by an overly earnest, struggling writer - is that if Confucius returned to contemporary Taiwan, everyone would adore him, primarily because they consider him an influential and powerful fraud. And fraudulence is the norm: so-called artists have more in common with businessmen and even the sweetest, most straightforward characters cannot trust themselves. While Yang pillories literally every character, he is clearly sympathetic to the dilemmas they face. "[The] creative energies that fired A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY are sparkier than ever" (Tony Rayns, Time Out).

A Confucian Confusion Pacific Cinémathèque (link lost)

"It's a dangerous time for emotion," says one character in Edward Yang's fabulous first comedy, which follows a dizzying array of rootless characters -- young, upwardly mobile, highly Westernized types all, working in the arts, advertising, media and high tech -- through 56 fraught hours of career crises, shifting sexual relationships and gnawing self-doubt. At the centre of this tangled Taipei Story is Molly (Ni Shujun), head of the family PR business, who is facing an arranged marriage to the dim heir of another corporate fortune. Molly's firing of Feng, an aspiring actress biding time in her employ, is the catalyst that sets the film's chaotic, comic events in motion. A Confucian Confusion is "sleek, chic and hysterical, [and] owes more to Preston Sturges than Michelangelo Antonioni, though all of the characteristic Yang themes are present . . . The film's thesis -- stated by an overly earnest, struggling writer -- is that if Confucius returned to contemporary Taiwan, everyone would adore him, primarily because they consider him an influential and powerful fraud" (Cinematheque Ontario). "[A] brilliantly achieved comedy . . . The specific focus is on Taipei now, a city torn between me-generation aspirations and age-old Chinese ideas of social conformity . . . The creative energies that sparked A Brighter Summer Day are sparkier than ever" (Tony Rayns, Time Out). Colour, 35mm, in Mandarin with English subtitles. 127 mins.

User comments Author: johnnn (no_clock@hotmail.com)

When I first came across 'A Confucian Confusion', I expected nothing much. I was wrong, very wrong. It turned out to be a great movie. On one of your 'average' days, go to a video store, then rent and watch it. I guarantee it will be the best thing on your day. ('Average' here means the rest of the days when you don't win lotto or have a date of your life)

The film looks at a sample of modern Taiwanese life. Edward Yang the director, who won some awards for his later film 'Mahjong', focuses at a different part of the taiwanese society. If in 'Mahjong' he tells the story through the darker gangsters-like fraction of the population, here he puts a light above a 'whiter' group of people, mid to upper class men and women trying to cope with the fast living in the money-driven, ever growing Taipei. And that's all the film's about, a window to some Taipei lives in particular and modern taiwan in general. A society as a result, not necessarily an effect, of the very old Confucian philosophy.

Although this movie is categorized as a comedy, don't expect to laugh out loud during this 90 or so minutes. The most you can get are some subtle smiles and a big one out of satisfaction five minutes after it ends, realizing what a great movie it was.

The comedy may come from some 'very interesting'(bizarre, weird, ultra square, whatever you call it) characters, which make a very interesting but incredibly believable premise. This is possible since the story circles around the showbiz, the 'funny' business.

Excellent performances add a hell lot of greatness to this movie. Well, I couldn't say more. You just have to watch it yourself to appreciate this wonderful film.

Steve Gravestock is a programmer at the Toronto International Film Festival Group, (link lost):

“The traditions of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living” — Karl Marx

The 90s will be remembered as the period when the traditional centres faded and the most unlikely countries established themselves as the key film producers, at least ethically and creatively, if not financially. American studio films have become increasingly tired and reactionary, grotesquely expensive productions that seem to have less and less to do with any reality. And the historical blindness of many of the films is repulsive and baffling. When else but in the 90s could CIA agents be presented as heroes without any trace of irony? The American independent scene has betrayed its earlier promise, turning into a farm system for the studios instead of an alternative voice. Even worse, many of the independent companies have the same ludicrous financial goals as the studios. (The turning point came with Quentin Tarantino’s glib genre rehash Pulp Fiction, which grossed in excess of $100 million, thereby irreversibly skewing the financial expectations around independent cinema.)

European cinema has caught some of the nastier habits of the American industry. The American mania for bloated productions has infected parts of the French film industry (witness the onslaught of costume epics in the last ten years). Other national movements have learned their lesson from QT, rehashing old tricks. Regardless of the potential benefits that Dogme 95 might offer, what after all is it but John Cassavetes on grimy video?

In vivid contrast, and with an amazing economy of means, Iranian and Taiwanese filmmakers have exposed the failings of the dominant cinemas, combining innovative postmodernism with startlingly humanist impulses. Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up, arguably the first great film of the decade, is an astonishingly sympathetic portrait of a desperate con man passing himself off as Mohsen Makhmalbaf, posing questions about celebrity and desire. In Salaam Cinema and A Moment of Innocence, Makhmalbaf plays himself as a tyrant, while setting up an elaborate cat-and-mouse game of reality and illusion which questions the nature of the filmmaking process itself and the power that can come with it. Similarly, Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive L’Amour focuses on those left out of Taiwan’s economic miracle in a stark style that combines trance-like slapstick humour with an unflinching eye and an astonishing sympathy.

Yet even within this group, Edward Yang stands out — largely because he is the only director to emerge in the past decade whose work seems inextricably tied to the period. No doubt, the work of these other great filmmakers also depends on specific historical developments, but formally and thematically their work shares unmistakable similarities with previous movements, from Italian neorealism to the French New Wave.

Conversely, Yang’s films — particularly his two masterpieces, A Brighter Summer’s Day (1991) and A Confucian Confusion (1994) — focus on a very specific late 20th century phenomenon: ahistorical man. Both films are dominated by characters caught in historical and social currents they cannot accept, understand, or discard. It’s this sense of historical alienation that makes Yang’s work seem so vividly contemporary.

Set in the early 60s, following a massive influx of immigrants from mainland China sparked by Mao’s ascension, Yang’s epic A Brighter Summer Day is based on an incident that occurred when a fellow student killed Yang’s teenage girlfriend. The film elaborates on the theme of Yang’s first masterpiece, Taipei Story (1985), which dealt with how certain sections of Taiwanese society were left out of the country’s new prosperity. A Brighter Summer Day is about the roots of that shift.

The fourth child of a low-level, ineffectual bureaucrat, protagonist Xiao Si’r isn’t a good enough student to get into day school, so he’s forced to attend school at night. Cut off from the adult world by schedules and sensibility, the teenagers in the film fend for themselves — creating their own power structure. The teen landscape is dominated by two gangs: Little Park (Si’r’s group) and the 217s.

Crucially, their behavioural models are drawn from Western movies and pop culture/mythology. (The film takes place at the time of the American occupation, and commentators have pointed out allusions and similarities to everything from Rio Bravo to Rebel Without a Cause.) The situation is exacerbated by the response of the parents and educators, who spend more time blaming one another for the kids’ increasingly violent transgressions than figuring out what to do, and the timid nature of the parents. In Si’r’s case, his father is unable to leave the past behind. A lifelong bureaucrat (and presumably a toady) and one of the thousands who fled Mao, he’s incapable of seeing life in different terms.

At the centre of the various conflicts is a dizzying array of competing cultural values that cannot be coordinated or resolved. The film is littered with talismans from various periods of Taiwanese history. Si’r’s father listens obsessively to an old radio which links him, not only to the mainland but to the past and his peasant roots. Other items pop up that suggest dark periods in Taiwanese history, periods of which the characters are only barely conscious. Si’r’s friend Cat finds a samurai sword left behind by the occupying Japanese forces, while Si’r’s family lives in a Japanese-style home built during the occupation. Cat and the rest of the gang are obsessed with American rock and roll — they also find an American tape recorder which they treat as a magic object from the future. Yet they have no idea what the lyrics mean. (The film’s title is a mistranslation of a line from “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”) Si’r’s sister sneers at them for their interest and for not understanding English. These markers suggest a Taiwan that has never had a history of its own, as well as an encroaching period where history is all but forgotten — or at best dimly understood — yet inescapable.

At the centre of things is Xiao Si’r, who, at first glance, may seem like an odd choice for a hero. Inarticulate and morose, largely because of his fear and confusion, he seems more like a cipher than a hero. But his character merely underscores the confusion that permeates Yang’s vision of Taiwan at the time. (It’s evident in his myopia too.) It’s no accident that Si’r’s climactic act of violence is sparked by his girlfriend Ming’s taunt that she’s like this world, she cannot be changed, an infuriating barb that emphasizes his impotence. For Yang, this little documented period in Taiwanese history is crucial, because it represents the country’s loss of its past and its acceptance of a profoundly Westernized future — a development that’s economically beneficial, but potentially fatal in spiritual and ethical terms. (Contrast the complexity of this with the rosy reworkings of the 60s, prevalent in liberal American cinema, or the simplistic hypocrisy of such right-wing entertainments as Forrest Gump.) At the same time, Si’r’s historical specificity is developed in hindsight. He seems as contemporary as any character we’ve encountered in a long time.

A Confucian Confusion takes place three decades later, and things have only become even more confused. Art, business, and politics have become inseparable. Almost everyone is a philosopher and everyone is driven by one principle: self-interest. Money and emotions are interchangeable and indistinguishable. History and tradition are invoked duplicitously to justify characters’ actions. Rich kid Molly is engaged to even wealthier kid Akeem, as a result of an agreement between their parents. Not exactly pleased with the idea of marrying Akeem (who’s more than a little dimwitted and is easily manipulated), Molly strings him along, using Akeem’s money and the cloak of tradition to support her desultory attempts at a career and independence. Celebrated avant-garde artist Birdy uses the rhetoric of democracy to justify his attempt at greater commercial success.

Perhaps the most perfidious character, though, is Molly’s brother-in-law, an author who once wrote romantic bestsellers, but has now decided to be a serious (i.e., downer) thinker. His rebirth has less to do with an intellectual awakening than it does with a midlife crisis, and a vain attempt at self-aggrandization. His latest novel features a reincarnated Confucius who returns to Earth, only to find out he’s admired because everyone thinks he’s succeeded by lying. No one will believe him when he claims to be sincere. (One of the clues that isn’t to be taken at face value is the author’s clear identification of himself with Confucius.) Running throughout the film is the notion that sincerity is a useful professional tool, but a personal flaw. The most genuine character — Qiqi — is exactly what she seems to be, and by the end of the film she’s been rejected by everyone. The situation is even more dire than in A Brighter Summer Day — in the 60s, at least sincerity was possible.

Paradoxically — and Yang is nothing if not an artist consumed by paradox — Yang has created a vision of the present that is both overwhelmingly specific and surprisingly universal. In his films, Taiwan emerges as a country consumed by wealth, greed, and duplicity, out of touch with its past. History and tradition are regularly invoked, but only by those characters most confused and self-serving. In painting a detailed portrait of Taiwan over the last 30 years, Yang has captured the Western mindset almost perfectly. Or at least, better than almost any North American or European filmmaker.

• View topic - Edward Yang Edward Yang film reviews by zedz on the Criterion Forum, August 14, 2008

Confucian Confusion, A Andrea Alsberg from iFilm Connections Asia & Pacific

A Rational Mind: The Films of Edward Yang Simon Abrams from Slant, November 17, 2011

FilmsAsia [Adrian Sim]

Variety (Derek Elley) review

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

MAHJONG (Majiang) A 96

Taiwan (121 mi) 1996

According to Yang, whenever 4 people got together in the old days in China, they always ended up playing the game, Mahjong. This films follows the exploits of the contemporary Taipei underworld of various gangsters, hustlers, jet-setters, and Western expatriates, with names like Red Fish, Hong Kong, Toothpaste, and Little Buddha, Cat, from A Brighter Summer Day (Gu ling jie shao nian sha ren shi jian) (1991), one Westerner speaks English and was a last minute fill-in, so his character appears weak and out of sorts with the rest of the strong cast, but this film also features the incredible Virginie Ledoyen with English, Chinese, and French dialogue here in a collision of cultural identities, the chaos from which the search continues for identity and human value, in this case there is a similarity with the way present-day business dealings in Taiwan mix with the underworld, as represented by Hou Hsiao-hsien's  GOODBYE SOUTH, GOODBYE, and the impact it has on Taiwan art cinema, some of which is financed by gangsters, clearly one of the focuses of this film, which features a son in search of his father, and when he finds him, offers: "You are the most shameless man in a shameless country," claiming there are only two types of people, crooks and dopes, repeating the mantra over and over throughout the film, "Nowadays nobody knows what they want.  You have to tell them," suggesting TV commercials and advertisements simply tell people what to do.  The film features a shockingly violent and powerful murder sequence, forces spinning out of control before changing gears entirely, resolving into a poignant, tender love story.  This emotional mood change is part of what's reckless and exciting in this film, something I found to be a devastatingly cynical, and sometimes hilarious portrait of the dark underbelly of the world of finance and violent crime, offering only the tiniest glimmer of hope...

Time Out review Tony Rayns

Edward Yang's brilliant dark comedy weaves together many characters in present-day Taipei. One desperate businessman faces ruin; another opts out of the rat race and finds a kind of serenity with a woman not his wife. A gang of street-smart boys breaks up. A lost French girl, looking for a man who said he loved her, get a crash course in emotional truths and lies. And one confused boy tries to figure out whether he should love his father or kill him. The various strands of plot are interwoven with phenomenal mastery, and Yang's images are as effortlessly precise as ever. It's his sharpest funny/sad vision of city life yet.

Mahjong Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader

Edward Yang's angriest film (1996) follows various gangsters, hustlers, jet-setters, and western expatriates in contemporary Taipei, focusing in particular on the disappearance of a tycoon who owes $100 million to the local mob and his grown son, who wants to find him. A high-energy mosaic about the way we live, especially during economic boom conditions, with as much emphasis on sexual behavior as on business tensions, this builds to a climax of shocking violence before resolving itself into a poignant love story; the emotional and generic gear changes are part of what's so exciting and reckless about it. In some ways it's a loose remake of Yang's previous feature, A Confucian Confusion, but it succeeds even more in capturing the tenor of our times.

MAHJONG Cinematheque Ontario

Yang's angriest and most provocative film" (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader) follows middle-class con men and petty criminals who wind up getting involved with the real underworld, which turns out to be far less romantic than they anticipated. Like THE TERRORIZER or A CONFUCIAN CONFUSION, MAHJONG is made up of seemingly disparate strands that eventually meet in surprising ways. The film centres on a young French woman who follows her British lover to Taiwan in hopes of continuing their affair. Instead he prefers to while away the time with a Chinese girl, who isn't exactly Einstein. The Parisienne falls into a listless affair with Leun-leun, who belongs to Red Fish's gang. Red Fish has his own problems: underworld thugs are watching him because his father owes them $100 million. Comic and horrifying, poignant and biting, MAHJONG is a vision of hell that argues passionately for the possibility of redemption. "As the characters ricochet through the film it begins to resemble a mad screwball comedy, but its darker vision comes through as well, painting a portrait of a lost generation whose search for a solution causes even deeper problems" (David Overbey, Toronto International Film Festival).

Mahjong Pacific Cinémathèque (link lost)

Taiwanese master Edward Yang's darkly comic latest has been called his "angriest and most provocative film" (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader) and "his sharpest funny/sad vision of city life yet" (Tony Rayns, Time Out). A wealthy Taipei businessman disappears owing a staggering $100 million to local mobsters. Two underworld thugs turn up at a trendy bar tailing the missing man's punk son, Red Fish, leader of a youth gang. Into the menacing mix steps Marthe (Virginie Ledoyen), a naïve young Parisian seeking the Brit boyfriend who skipped out on her . . . "Characteristic of Yang's work and themes, there are no stray characters, and random-seeming events and people are soon drawn into a whole that coalesces from chaos to a story with one central thread -- the search for identity and values" (Barbara Scharres, The Film Center/Chicago). "As the characters ricochet through the film it begins to resemble a mad screwball comedy, but its darker vision comes through as well, painting a portrait of a lost generation whose search for a solution causes even deeper problems" (David Overbey, Toronto I.F.F.). "Comic and horrifying, poignant and biting, Mahjong is a vision of hell that argues passionately for the possibility of redemption" (Cinematheque Ontario). Colour, 35mm, in Mandarin with English subtitles. 121 mins.

User comments from imdb Author: artist_signal

Mahjong (1996) is in many ways Yang's greatest Satire, but has, at the same time, the beating pulse of a real dramatic story. In plays on the perception of Taiwan by foreign entities, urban locales, love, father/son relationships, and of course, themes of business & greed that Yang most vehemently loathes. The story is told through a variety of different viewpoints, but we are centered on a small gang of friends/hustlers, apparently led by Red Fish (Tang Congsheng), and consisting of Luen-Luen (Ke Yulun), a gentle-hearted translator, Hong Kong (Chen Chang of Crouching Tiger fame), a ladies man who is able to charm his way into any woman's pants, and Little Buddha (the same actor who played "Cat" in Yang's A Brighter Summer Day), a fake Feng-Shui expert who is used in the gang's various scams. A French woman named Marthe (Virginie Ledoyen) - Yang plays very craftily on the similarity of the name 'Marthe' with 'Matra', the defunct subway system in Taiwan that is milking the city of its funds - comes to urban Taipei looking for her "lover", a British man named Marcus. The plot eventually shows us Marthe's eventual relationship with Red Fish's gang (and Luen-Luen), but also reveals a variety of interesting narrative twists and turns concerning Red Fish and Hong Kong.

The performances in this piece are great, and Yang really seemed to get a lot out of his actors. A lot of critics complained that the acting from the foreign thesps were inferior, but their performances weren't bad at all, and added a diverse and invigorating "global" flavor to an otherwise "Asian"/Taiwanese film. There is a great quote at the end made by the actor who plays Marcus, where he reflects on how Taiwan will be the height of "western civilization", a political and philosophical reflection on Yang's part. Also, Nien-Jen Wu (he played NJ, the lead, in Yang's Yi-Yi) has a nice turn as a ruthless Taiwanese gangster/hit-man - you really begin to see the breadth of Nien-Jen's skill as an actor: he's really talented.

In addition, Ke Yulun (who made a guest appearance in Yi-Yi as the military-uniform-clad "Soldier" who Lily cheats on) puts out a great performance as a tortured interpretor, drawn by love to Marthe. Tang Congsheng (he's also in Yi-Yi, in a blue-shirt at the N.Y. Bagel Cafe) is also fantastic, and seems to be, in more ways that one, Yang's vehicle in expressing rage against financial/capitalist-driven greed.

The final violent outbreak by Tang Congsheng's character Red Fish is beautifully executed, and Yang could not use violence in a more perfect way. It is a great moment of cinema and is perhaps the most pure, honest, cathartic and emotionally-intense venting of range I have seen in any film of recent memory (or ever, for that matter).

Well, in addition, there are many nice city shots of the bustling urban Taipei, excellent humour (the part where Angela's trio of women, wanting to "share" Hong Kong and paralleling Hong Kong's gang in wanting to share another, previous girl is hilarious), finely-executed suspense camera-work, and some crackling dialogue. The dialogue, as sharp and satirically-witty as it is, is perhaps what I most admire about the piece. It constructs the film with a structure that is at once a strong narrative-driven story and a scathingly brilliant satire. This work may be hard-to-find and a very, very rare piece (as most of Yang's works are), but if you're able to get your hands on it, you will not be disappointed. I hope it is able to live on as a classic piece in its own right, because it is definitely one of the major works of Yang's oeuvre.

• View topic - Edward Yang Edward Yang film reviews by zedz on the Criterion Forum (Page 2), August 18, 2008

Channel 4 Film capsule review

Variety (Derek Elley) review

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

YI YI: A ONE AND A TWO... A 100

Taiwan Japan (173 mi) 2000

Why is the world so different from what we thought it was? —Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee)

Yang opened the 90’s with A Brighter Summer Day (Gu ling jie shao nian sha ren shi jian) (1991) and ends the decade with this film, another humanistic, novelistic masterpiece, nearly three hours long, a slowly evolving story presented sequence by sequence, event by event, in a slow moving, quiet elegance, unraveling layer after layer of the outer and inner worlds of the Jian family in modern Taipei, seen largely through the eyes of the two children. Yang wrote the notes for what would eventually become YI YI 15 years ago when a friend’s father went into a coma, stating: “I knew I was too young at the time, so I put it aside.” There are no spectacular, explosive scenes here, like the massacre in the night of A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY, instead Yang has created a much more poignant, reflective work, a funny, quietly powerful portrait of an ordinary middle class family struggling with their own personal self-doubts and alienation, their long, pent up frustrations, their exploration to find love and meaning in their lives, elegantly presented, deceptively simple, again, as is Yang’s signature, without a hint of artifice, and with an underlying, deeply felt humanism. There is particularly effective use of off-screen sound, as nearly all the angry expletives, or the explosive, unhappy emotional scenes occur off-screen, even a murder sequence, which we never see, while the camera shows us the stillness of life, the rhythms and routines, where everything shown seems to resemble a universality of “normal.” Disappointed by indifferent reviews that continued throughout his life’s work, Yang refused to release the film in Taiwan where, amazingly, the film has never been screened theatrically.

Winner of the Best Director award at Cannes, the story encapsulates the various phases of life itself with excrutiating honesty, masterfully interweaving characters in the manner of Jean Renoir’s carefully observant THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939), finding rhythms of experience that speak to recognizable themes in describing the comic and tragic sides of the human predicament, from birth to first awareness, school, bullying, friendships, first love, break-ups, marriage, employment, infidelity, mid-life crisis, illness, and death, while also exploring relationships of children with their parents, marital partners, and with aging parents. What’s perhaps most surprising is the amount of humor to be found alongside such a full range of emotional tones experienced throughout this complex, yet seamlessly evolving drama. Yang uses non-professional actors for the two most poignant acting performances, the Jian children, Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee) and Yang-Yang Jonathan Chang). Yang himself is seen briefly in the film simulating playing piano at a concert performance featuring his wife, Kaili Peng, playing the cello. She is credited for the film’s music, including the classical piano sequences. A-Di (Chen Hsi-Sheng) and his pregnant wife-to-be (Hsiao Shu-shen) have delayed their wedding several times so that it can take place on the most auspicious day of the year, but as luck would have it, after a somewhat raucous wedding ceremony, things take a turn for the worse. Granny (Tang Ru-Yun) suffers a stroke and remains in a coma throughout the film, where various family members come to talk to her at all hours of the day and night, all except 8-year old Yang-Yang, who has yet to find his own voice, so eloquently expressed at the end of the film, discovering wisdom beyond his years, as he comes to represent the spirit and hope of the director himself.

NJ, played by Wu Nien-jen, 1980’s and 90’s screenwriter for Hou Hsiao-hsien, also co-writer of Yang’s THAT DAY, ON THE BEACH (1983), is A-Di’s brother in law and heads the Jian family, living in a modern, city apartment featuring giant windows overlooking the ever flowing lines of traffic, which are seen constantly moving outside, but are also reflected back against the glass windows. Struggling to find his own voice in a rigid society, NJ seems to be the only mature member of his business associates at a software company, always called the most honest looking in a floundering company heading for bankruptcy, where immediate cash from a new investor is required. NJ leans towards the extremely likeable and intelligent, though often eccentric, Ota (Issey Ogata – a Japanese comedian), a computer games designer, as they develop a friendship, which is conveyed when NJ takes Ota, who expresses an interest in music, to a karaoke bar, and Ota is a big hit, bringing in happy, paying customers while playing superficial hits like “Sukiyaki,” Sukiyaki (Ue o Muite Arukou) - Kyu Sakamoto (English Translation ... YouTube (3:09), but when he starts playing Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” Beethoven-Moonlight Sonata (Mvt. 1) - YouTube (6:08), this leads to utter silence from the patrons and the overall mood of the film changes instantly from exteriors to more deeply probing interiors. Despite his enthusiastic recommendation, the other more unimaginative business partners opt for a more flamboyant female CEO, chosen while NJ is still meeting Ota in Japan, causing embarrassment and humiliation, a merger that proves disastrous, eventually alienating NJ from the firm.

This company friction, along with the stress from Granny’s stroke, his wife’s mother, leads to a personal split between NJ and his wife, Ming-Ming (Elaine Jin, a Yang regular since A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY), who appears to suffer a nervous breakdown, moving to a Zen mountain retreat. The business opportunity to meet Ota, however, takes NJ to Japan where he has what amounts to a second chance opportunity to see a young love Sherry (Ko Su-Yun, aka Kelly Ko) that he abandoned 30 years earlier, someone he just happened to bump into at the wedding. The Japanese sequence is visually one of the most beautiful, contrasting the fluid modernity of an upscale hotel to the stillness of ancient Buddhist relics, which matches the changing moods of the two individuals, who are caught in shifting patterns of darkness and light, beautifully expressed by cinematographer Yang Wei-han. Fond of shooting scenes through windows and glass doors, Yang also carefully keeps his distance from his characters, but evokes a genuine tenderness. This reunion parallels in perfect unison with Ting-Ting’s first date with Fatty (Yu Pang Chang), both occurring simultaneously as the older couple attempts to relive their youth, with conversation from the older couple heard while the young couple is shown onscreen, in a beautifully choreographed expression of dual similarities and overlapping identities. As it turns out, NJ makes the same decision he did 30 years earlier, explaining he wouldn’t need a second chance in life, providing a calm, intelligent voice of reason and maturity in this film, with Ming-Ming also discovering that life is not nearly as complicated as it seems.

While both parents are out of town, Ting-Ting, the 16-year old daughter who has been the go-between delivering messages between the next door neighbor Lili (Adrian Lin) and her boyfriend Fatty, gets the opportunity to go out with Fatty herself, eventually leading to a hotel room, Fatty dressed in black, speechless, with Ting-Ting dressed in white, speechless, until Fatty runs away, revealing “This feels wrong...” Fatty subsequently rebukes her on the street, calling her a dreamer, telling her to leave him alone, just before his troubles escalate off-screen to murder. Ting-Ting is heartbroken and spends hours crying silently in her room, tending to a small plant, a school project, where other student’s plants are already in bloom, but not Ting-Ting’s, so, for consolation, she talks to Granny, still in a coma, at all hours of the night, afraid to sleep herself, asking for forgiveness, believing she is responsible for the fall that led to Granny’s stroke, as she was taking out the garbage that Ting-Ting forgot. Ting-Ting is the heart of this film, and is at the center of one of the most beautifully constructed scenes where she is sleepless and heartbroken, home alone with Granny, only to discover her plant has finally bloomed, while in the next room, she hears a voice. In her mind, Granny is awake making a white origami butterfly and hands it to Ting-Ting, who lays her head on Granny’s lap while Granny strokes her hair. Ting-Ting tells her, “Why is the world so different from what we thought it was?” relaxed with the thought that she can finally sleep now that Granny has forgiven her, but Granny dies while Ting-Ting finally sleeps.

Little Yang-Yang is the soul and comic relief of this film, the stand-in and alter ego of the director, borrowing his father’s camera to take pictures of the backs of people’s heads, then showing them the picture saying it was something they obviously could not see, verbalizing the director's approach to filmmaking: “We only understand half of everything because we can only see what’s in front of us,” and Yang’s camera aptly shows us “the other side” of every situation, an acute artistic observation which parallels the slowly revealed revelations in the small sequences of the film, as one rarely sees the entire picture all at once, instead only bits and pieces are shown a little bit at a time. Yang-Yang is constantly picked on and ridiculed by older girls, one, the leader, is a girl swimmer, and Yang-Yang can be seen sitting in the back at the pool watching her swim. Later, he locks himself in the bathroom holding his breath while submerging his face underwater in the sink. Finally, he actually jumps in the swimming pool with his clothes on, apparently still practicing holding his breath. But Yang-Yang seems most content in a scene right out of REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955), the planetarium sequence. Here, he is sitting against the wall, arms folded, in a darkened educational film room showing clouds and weather when his nemesis, the girl swimmer, opens the door and walks into the light, silhouetted against the screen as lightning explodes behind her, a brilliant scene depicting romance in the dark for a young 8-year old boy, scene from Yi Yi / A One and a Two (2000) - Edward Yang YouTube (1:29). Yang-Yang is perfectly delighted, but also has the final word in this film. He has avoided speaking to his comatose Granny throughout the film, leaving that to other family members, but at the funeral service, it is Yang-Yang who wants to talk to Granny, reading her a letter he wrote, in what is a tearful, yet eloquent, final testimony to sweetness, hope, and light, an elegiac affirmation that will stand as the director’s final testament, as he died from colon cancer before making another film.

YI YI Cinematheque Ontario (link lost)

“The work of a master in full command of the resources of his art. . . . As I watched the final credits of YI YI through bleary eyes, I struggled to identify the overpowering feeling that was making me tear up. Was it grief? Joy? Mirth? Yes, I decided, it was all of these. But mostly, it was gratitude” (A.O. Scott, The New York Times). Named film of the year by the National Society of Film Critics, YI YI also won Yang the Best Director award at Cannes and elicited a torrent of praise for its range of tones, intimate character portraits, complex yet uncontrived narrative, and the mastery of its mise-en-scène. (Yang captures the chaos of life with pitch-perfect versatility in medium shots teeming with hustle and bustle and, in one poignant scene, shooting a weeping woman through a reflecting window pane to emphasize her alienation and sorrow.) The film charts the rollercoaster lives of a Taipei family: deflated NJ, a middle-aged businessman who stumbles across his high school sweetheart; his emotionally volatile wife; their troubled teenage daughter; and Polaroid-toting, philosophically-minded young son, as they navigate weddings, funerals, suicides, illness, and heartbreak. As gentle as it is frenetic, moving nimbly between borderline slapstick and great undercurrents of sadness, YI YI is “wise, delicate and impeccably performed” (Edward Guthman, San Francisco Chronicle). “A marvel of delicacy and humor” (Pete Travers, Rolling Stone).

Yi Yi | Film Review | Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Yi Yi is Edward Yang's celebration of cultural identity and family interaction. The film's brilliance emanates equally from its structure (the story is delicately bookended by two cultural rituals: a wedding and a funeral), the acuteness of its gaze, and Yang's acknowledgement of life as a series of alternately humdrum and catastrophic occurrences, like a flower that blooms in the summer and wilts in the fall; he hopes you will notice it, because seeing is what validates its unique extraordinariness. With the help of his camera, young Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang) attempts to come to grips with the many dualities of the world around him. He takes pictures of people's backsides because he wants to show them what they cannot see. His desire is representative of the film's very philosophy: there is a second side to every story, and the perception of that side promises new awakenings. Yang-Yang's father NJ (Nien-Jen Wu) must confront the reasons why he abandoned his ex-lover at the altar when they find themselves growing closer again. He acknowledges and frees himself of pent-up pains and admits to still loving her. Though she leaves him this time around, her actions are not vengeful. This transcendent moment suggests that the past cannot be undone and that NJ's only hope is to improve upon his present. NJ's cycle of enlightenment ends with the death of his wife's mother, the family matriarch from whom everyone seemingly draws their every breath. Most appreciative of the old woman's loving warmth is NJ's daughter Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee). A flower is the evocative symbol of the girl's headlong search for inner peace. Her fellow classmates laugh at her for overfeeding it but the wilted plant comes back to life after a divine encounter with her grandmother. It's a remarkable moment that conveys the transcendence of the flesh and the transmigration of energies between the living and the dead. This is the essence of Yang's masterpiece, a film whose profound emotional and cultural resonance brings to mind Robert Altman's Short Cuts.

Edward Yang, 1947-2007 | IndieWire CNW from IndieWIRE, July 1, 2007

When I first read that Edward Yang, the Taiwanese director of Yi Yi (A One and a Two) and A Brighter Summer Day, had passed away this weekend at the age of 59, I was selfishly upset -- as a moviegoer, I was angry that an artist of Yang's talent and stature should die at such a young age, taking with him the many movies he had yet to make. Most of Yang's films are difficult to see in this country, and my one hope today is that his death will result in their wider availability. It's small solace that, though we won't get new films, there are still so many Yang films for most of us to discover beyond Yi Yi, the one Yang film available on DVD here (on a fantastic new Criterion disc).

Yi Yi became something of an international sensation earlier in the decade, winning Yang the best director prize at Cannes in 2000 and a best picture award from the National Society of Film Critics the following year, cementing Yang's status as one of the greatest and most important figures in world cinema. No one would have guessed that Yi Yi would end up being Yang's final film (he was working on an animated feature at the time of his death), but in hindsight, it's a fitting close to his career. A film of breathtaking intimacy and sweep, Yi Yi is a small family drama -- it opens with a wedding; it features a birth at its midpoint; it ends with a funeral -- that, in its quietly beautiful, unassuming way, seems to capture the essence of human life as it's lived: the wonder of childhood, the thrill of first love, the desperate loneliness of the city, the frustration of missed opportunity, the sting of lost love, the grace of old age. Almost every shot of the movie is like a work of art -- the astonishing loveliness of Yang's long-shot, long-take compositions can't be put into words. I can't write about Yi Yi without recourse to overused superlatives -- it is, indeed, sublime, a masterpiece in every sense of the word, one of three or four great masterworks of this decade. It's a film that moves me to tears. Warm and funny, enveloping and sad, Yi Yi is a film I'll always treasure, and for that, I'm incredibly grateful.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Emotional Engineering Nick James from BFI Sight and Sound, April 2001

Edward Yang's new panoramic, multi-strand slice of Taiwanese city life A One and a Two... is a uniquely insightful, purely cinematic form of melodrama. Nick James wishes the west could make films as exquisite and artful

The scene is a Taipei wedding just after the ceremony. The party spreads out amid tranquil greenery. Photo smiles are freely sprung, but the jovial air vibrates with more than the usual tension. Manically effusive in a red bow-tie and cummerbund, the groom laughs too loud (this is Taiwan, remember) and the young bride, cunningly draped in white, seems swollen as much with indignation as with unborn child. When the immediate family repairs to the hotel to set up the reception party, a hedge of pink balloons is still being puffed into place.

We begin to work out who is who. There's a small, placid, sad-eyed boy of eight whom taller girls love to pester. The imperturbable middle-aged man of compact build in a discreet grey suit is the boy's father. His wife seems composed but distant. His daughter, a slim teenager in red, attends to her careworn grandma, who is sitting apart. Then the murmur of preparations is broken by a newcomer. A woman in a black dress carrying a briefcase insists on seeing grandma. Soon she is wailing a plea for forgiveness, calling herself unworthy, referring to "that pregnant bitch" as she is half-pushed, half-dragged from the room.

You have to be alert and very observant during the opening minutes of an Edward Yang film. Few, if any, concessions are made to the expectations raised by western cinema. There are no close-ups, you're not nag-narrated by voiceover, no one will explain plot points in the dialogue, and none of the cast will be well known to you. Yang's films are as rich in domestic trauma as EastEnders, but his melodrama is nothing like soap opera. It's a process of tender, sensitive, gradual adult revelation; a cinema that seeps steady doses into your system until you're overwhelmed by its poignancy.

A One and a Two.../Yi Yi won Yang the Best Director prize in Cannes 2000 and has gone on to attract high praise around the world, becoming the first of Yang's many films to be distributed in the US. Watching it for the second time in the same week that I'd seen previews of Captain Corelli's Mandolin and Bridget Jones's Diary - two Miramax-assisted British films - it's undeniably the contrast that strikes home. Regardless of whether the Mira Brits are effective in their own right, I can't help wishing some British cinema would go as much against the prevailing grain. For the only rough western equivalent to the panoramic, allusive films made by Yang and Hou Hsiao-Hsien - directors who came out of the 80s Taiwanese 'New Cinema' - would be the Robert Altman of, say, Short Cuts (although French director Robert Guédiguian's La Ville est tranquille is also in the same ballpark). But Yang's best films, A One and a Two... and A Brighter Summer Day (1991), make Altman look lightweight. I can think of no clearer indictment of dumbed-down Britain than the fact that A One and a Two... has to rely on a limited release by ICA Projects, while in the US it's fairly well known. It should be a must-see film for anyone who claims to be interested in what cinema can attain.

The pivotal figure is NJ Jian -the man in the grey suit in the opening scene (played by Wu Nianzhen, himself a writer of note in Taiwan and the writer/ director of 1994's A Borrowed Life). NJ is a disillusioned computer engineer who works with the groom A-Di, a brother of NJ's wife Min-Min. He wants out because no one, least of all A-Di, takes his sense of integrity seriously. A-Di is impulsive, foolhardy, superstitious, untrustworthy and debt-ridden -which explains why he's marrying Xiao Yan, the new office girl he made pregnant, instead of Yun-Yun, his devoted long-term girlfriend. It is Yun-Yun who upsets grandma at the wedding, so NJ has to drive his mother-in-law home to the family apartment where she'll shortly be found unconscious beside the rubbish bins.

Having dropped grandma off and then taken his son Yang-Yang to a burger outlet because he won't eat the banquet food, NJ is about to board a lift back at the reception hotel when the doors open on Sherry, the sweetheart he jilted nearly 30 years before. She now lives in the US with her American husband, she tells him, handing over her card. They part politely, but shortly after, as NJ waits again for the lift, she comes back, upset, demanding to know why he didn't turn up "that day". He has no sensible answer. But this event parallels Yun-Yun's story.

Meanwhile grandma has had a stroke and is already in hospital by the time NJ and family get back to their apartment. When she's eventually brought home she's still in a coma. Ting-Ting, NJ's teenage daughter, believes it is her fault. While watching her new neighbour Mrs Jiang's daughter Lili embracing local boy 'Fatty' (who is very thin) on the street, she left a rubbish sack on the apartment balcony which her grandma must have then tried to take down to the bins. Min-Min can't cope. The doctor's suggestion that she speak to her mother every day to aid the recovery process exposes the bleakness of her own life. She moves out to study at a temple, leaving grandma to a hired nurse and the rest of the family. Yang-Yang too has nothing to say to grandma because, he says, she already knows what he's thinking.

This lengthy exposition gives some indication of the novelistic complexity of A One and a Two..., but it barely covers the first hour of its near-three-hour running time. Though the film is packed with incident, it's mostly of the everyday, emotional variety. Scenes are often viewed at a distance, through windows, half-closed doors, slender openings, in reflections or even from way off. Ting-Ting's balcony scene, for instance (which happens during the credits), contains just three set-ups. Ting-Ting, while taking the first bag of rubbish out, has just seen Lili meet Fatty by the rubbish bins. From a slightly angled mid-shot of the whole balcony we see Ting-Ting come outside where she drops small rubbish bags into a larger sack. The first cut goes to a full-on long shot of the neighbour's window, which is at a right angle to the balcony, with a huge motorway overpass system in the background. Lili's mother opens the window (on the day she's just moved in) to get a better reception on her mobile phone. The second cut is to a very long shot from the balcony's POV of Lili and Fatty below, tiny in the distance, embracing beneath the flyover. The third cut returns to the first position, where we see Ting-Ting on the balcony gazing down. Then her father's voice calls her from within and she forgets the sack. What's effective about this simple scene is that not only do you get a sense of the neighbour's neglect of her daughter Lili, but that Ting-Ting's switch from doing the chores to contemplating the romantic attachment is more of a revelation because it's divided into separate images, with the moment she notices the couple left off screen.

Yang's script structures insist on such quiet revelation. Each scene peels off like the skin of an onion, giving away only so much at a time. When you get to the core you feel as if you know precisely what it's like to live in the Jians' seemingly average Taipei apartment block. As a former engineer and one-time prize-winning cartoonist, Yang prefers to produce scripts of careful shot descriptions backed by comprehensive psychological character profiles, using collaborators to turn these into the conventional screenplays producers need to raise money. The script's architecture is so strong you feel you understand how each compartmentalised life fits with the others and the way each character achieves a means of escape back into the personal when necessary. Yang keeps sympathy with everyone, without judgement. For instance, though A-Di is shown to be the antithesis of NJ, he is at least a man of action. He makes things happen, even if they are mostly ill thought-out, and the chaos in his wake is churned up with the best intentions.

Music is used adroitly to access the inner life of this model middle-management family and its neighbours (and to give a further clue to the pervasive all-American influence in Taiwan evinced in such fast-food outlets as NY Bagel). Lili plays her mournful cello facing the wall, Ting-Ting plays 'Summer Time' on the piano to her comatose grandma as puberty awakens, NJ sings along to 'Baby It's You' while listening on headphones and bonds with the Japanese games designer Mr Ota at a karaoke bar. The compromise between solipsistic concerns -NJ's hankering to start his life over with Sherry, Ting-Ting's burgeoning puberty, Min-Min's flight to a temple, Yang-Yang's attempt to begin to understand the world -and communal responsibility (taking out the rubbish, talking to a woman in a coma) could hardly be more perceptively drawn than by Yang's insistence on master shots that by maintaining a certain distance give as much weight to the environment as to the characters' state of mind.

Both NJ and Yang-Yang seem to be partly autobiographical. Like NJ, Yang himself was a computer engineer - in Seattle having given up film-making after a year at USC's film school. Only when he'd turned 30 did he decide he'd made a mistake (after seeing a screening of Herzog's Aguirre, Wrath of God), returning to Taiwan in 1981 to write the script for a friend's movie. NJ's son Yang-Yang, as his name would suggest, is A One and a Two...'s auteur figure. Through his struggles with girls and teachers he also supplies most of the comic counterpoint (and this is, at times, a very funny film). Given a camera by NJ, he makes photographs of invisible mosquitoes and the backs of people's heads that are mocked by his teacher as "avant garde". The film's most transcendent moment is his too, when the girl he idolises (the teacher's pet, called "concubine" by the others) stands gorgeously lit and framed by an audio-visual presentation of an electric storm.

There's a lot of mature philosophising in the dialogue as grandma's stroke proves the catalyst for an all-round reassessment. This collection of individuals is coming to the end of one phase of their lives each feeling helplessly alone in the face of the threats and opportunities the future holds. The strong friendship NJ strikes up with Mr Ota, whose designs could solve his company's problems, proves more important to his well-being and life choices than any business arrangement. Meeting Ota -with English as the intermediary language -and sharing their mutual mistrust of the consumer industries and love of music helps NJ to make sense of the way his life has come apart since A-Di's wedding. Ota is the magician of the story; he knows the position of every card in the deck. Yet even he has been burned.

To some extent, then, NJ and his family are suffering the typical aftermath of the Asian economic meltdown. It seems no accident that Yang should make such a mature, reflective and controlled film at such a time. If the frantic social satire of his A Confucian Confusion (1994), which mocked Taiwan's obsession with consumerism as the Tiger economies cranked into top gear, proved an apposite barometer of an economy out of control, the sobriety and tender grief at the passing of harmony in the much more successful A One and a Two... are surely pointers to the means of slow recovery.

That's not to say that the film lacks anger. Only that compared with Yang's other major achievement A Brighter Summer Day - a doom-haunted 60s period epic about a teen crime passionel half remembered from a real incident in Yang's youth (echoed here in the relationship between Lili and Fatty) - A One and a Two...'s sense of a Taiwanese identity crisis between native and mainland Chinese populations and US and Japanese mercantile influences is put more profoundly in a global, perhaps even universal context through the film's use of an 'ordinary' technocrat's middle-class family. Yang still sees Taiwan's insistence on drilling its youth to study science and engineering rather than the humanities as an imposition and a weakness. His quarrel with government agencies and Taiwan's film-funding mechanisms has been almost perpetual, stretching back to the days of military censorship. Now that Taiwan has no film industry to speak of, the struggle is even fiercer.

Yang's way round this in the mid '90s was to form his own company with friends and make use of the young talent he uncovered through his teaching post at the National Institute for the Arts. Since then he has built enough of a network for this director with a self-confessed "very strong will" to persist in film-making under the direst of circumstances. For the moment Yang remains faithful to Taiwan because he says "the costs are rather low." Whether the international critical success of A One and a Two... would tempt him to work in other contexts remains to be seen. He has the example of US/Taiwanese director Ang Lee's more mainstream career with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on the one side, and the more rarefied trajectory of Hou Hsiao-Hsien with Flowers of Shanghai on the other. If he remains true to form, we can be certain Yang will plot a path of his own along the edge of the abyss.

Yi Yi: Time and Space Criterion essay by Kent Jones, March 15, 2011, also seen here: Criterion Collection film essay [Kent Jones]

Yi Yi (2000) - The Criterion Collection

Alone in a Crowd [on YI YI] | Jonathan Rosenbaum March 2, 2001

The Big Bang | L.A. Weekly Manohla Dargis from The LA Weekly, November 29, 2000

Yi Yi: Both a One and a Two • Senses of Cinema George Wu, June 13, 2001

Best of the Decade #13 - Archive - Reverse Shot The Humanistic Condition, by Andrew Chan, December 16, 2009

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Ian Johnston] also seen here: notcoming.com | Yi yi Ian Johnston

Edward Yang (11/6/47- 6/29/07) Noel Vera also discusses BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY from Critic After Dark

Yi Yi: The Best Film You've Probably Never Heard Of – BIG OTHER Greg Gerke from Big Other, January 18, 2013, also seen here: An appreciation

Asia Pacific Arts: Unseen Pleasures Brian Hu from Asian Pacific Arts, July 13, 2006

It's All Relative | Village Voice J. Hoberman, October 3, 2000

Sunday Editor's Pick: Yi Yi (2000) - Alt Screen November 21, 2011

The Sheila Variations [Sheila O'Malley]

Images - Yi-Yi David Ng from Images

“Yi Yi” - Salon.com Charles Taylor, December 1, 2000

Yi yi - Alternate Ending : Alternate Ending Timothy Brayton, April 1, 2008

With 'Yi Yi' Edward Yang Presents a Rich Tapestry of Modern Life ... Sara Boslaugh from Pop Matters, March 23, 2011

Borderless Cinema: Edward Yang's YiYi - The Toronto Review of Books Mark McConaghy, May 9, 2013

Something like (a) life | coffee gone cold: to cinema, with love November 19, 2015

YI YI Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion

In These Times 25/09 -- A Family in Full Joshua Rothkopf from In These Times, April 2, 2001

Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]

The Filmsnobs (Stephen Himes) review

New York Sun [Gary Giddins]

PopMatters review Lucas Hilderbrand

Passion for Movies: Yi yi – A Resplendent Character Study on Our ... Arun Kumar, August 11, 2015

Yi Yi (A One and a Two) Movie Review by Anthony Leong from ... Anthony Leong from Media Circus

Yi Yi Review | CultureVulture Gary Mairs

Yi-Yi (A One and a Two) (2000) - Patheos Jeffrey Overstreet

• View topic - Edward Yang - Criterion Forum Edward Yang film reviews by zedz on the Criterion Forum, July 31, 2008

The History of Cinema. Edward Yang: biography, filmography, reviews ... Pierro Scaruffi

A Rational Mind: The Films of Edward Yang an overview of Yang films by Simon Abrams from Slant, November 17, 2011

A One and a Two - Talking Pictures Alan Pavelin

James Bowman review

New York State Writers Institute - Yi Yi Film Notes Kevin Hagopian

A Nutshell Review [Stefan S]

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) a three-hour exercise in tedium

Film @ The Digital Fix - Yi Yi: Criterion Collection Noel Megahey

Film @ The Digital Fix - A One and a Two (Yi Yi) Mark Boydell, Region 2

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Joel Cunningham) dvd review

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [4/5]

Yi Yi · Film Review Yi Yi · DVD Review · The A.V. Club Scott Tobias

Yi Yi, 2000, Edward Yang | Criterion Close-Up Aaron West from Criterion Close-Up

DVD Talk [David Cornelius]

DVD Verdict (Brendan Babish) dvd review [Criterion Collection]

DVD Times Mark Boydell

DVD.net : Yi Yi (A One and a Two) - DVD Review Madman Cinema

Yi Yi Blu-ray Review - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanasov

Yi Yi | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Glenn Heath, Jr.

Yi Yi - Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Jamie S. Rich, also seen here: CriterionConfessions.com [Jamie S. Rich]

YI YI Criterion Blu-ray Review | Collider David Lane

Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Yi Yi: A One and A Two (2000): “Why is the world so different from ... Anna from Film Grimoire

framingdevice » Edward Yang, 1947-2007 (Yi Yi review) J. Robert from Framing Device

Review: Yi Yi, aka A One and A Two (2000) – scumcinema Topo Sanchez

Yi Yi (2000) Movie Review | BeyondHollywood.com Jacob

Harvey S. Karten review

thirtyframesasecond: Yi Yi (2000, Taiwan/Japan, Edward Yang) Kevin Wilson

Yi Yi - Cinescene Chris Dashiell

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

Yippee For 'Yi Yi' - Newsweek David Ansen, also seen here: Newsweek (David Ansen) review

CANNES REVIEW:  A One and a Two: Edward Yang’s The Meaning of Life Mark Peranson at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 17, 2000

Yi Yi – Review – Jaime Rebanal's Film Thoughts

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Angus Wolfe Murray]

eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [2/5] a long roll of over-exposed film

Films of the decade: “Yi Yi” - Salon.com Vadim Rizov, December 16, 2009, also seen here: Vadim Rizov

Film Comment's End-of-the-Decade Critics' Poll - Film Comment Listed at #3, January/February 2010

A Touch of China: The top 10 Chinese films - The Metropolist Listed at #1 by Jean-Baptiste de Vaulx, August 9, 2014

BBC: Oggs Cruz Listed at #8 for Top Films of the 21^st Century, August 23, 2016

The Guardian -- 2001 interview by Duncan Campbell Take Two, from The Guardian, April 3, 2001

Yi Yi The Movie movie site

The History of Cinema. Edward Yang: biography, filmography ... a detailed film synopsis

The Engineer of Modern Perplexity: An Interview with Edward Yang Robert Skylar interview from Cineaste magazine, Fall 2000

Entertainment Weekly review [A] Lisa Schwarzbaum

Yi Yi Movie Trailer, Reviews and More | TVGuide.com

Variety (Derek Elley) review

BBC - Films - review - A One and a Two (Yi Yi) David Wood

Edward Yang: Take Two | Film | The Guardian Duncan Campbell, April 2, 2001

Golden Scene a group of Asian film reviews, May 2001

The Japan Times [Mark Schilling]

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3.5/5]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold

San Francisco Chronicle [Edward Guthmann]

A Masterwork From Taiwan / "Yi Yi' a compelling, classically made ... Edward Guthman from The San Francisco Chronicle

A Delicate, Confident Look at the Wonder of Humanity - latimes Kenneth Turan

Yang Finds His Stories, Success in the Universal - latimes Scarlet Cheng

A Second Look: 'Yi Yi' - latimes Dennis Lim, March 20, 2011

Yi Yi Movie Review & Film Summary (2001) | Roger Ebert

The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review October 4, 2000, also seen here: Movie Review - - FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW; Of Taiwan's Bourgeoisie ...

The New York Times (Dave Kehr) essay ["The Asian Alternative"] June 6, 2009, also seen here: Dave Kehr

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

Yi Yi Blu-ray - Edward Yang - DVD Beaver

Yi Yi - Wikipedia

CKU/DCCD: Ms. Kaili Peng

Yang Yanjin

KU NAO REN DE XIAO (Troubled Laughter)

aka: XIAO JIE (Little Alley)

China (92 mi) 1979 co-director: Deng Yimin

User reviews from imdb Author: zzmale

The literal translation of the title of this film is: The Smile of the Bitter Person.

This movie made in the first year of the reform in China is a great advocate of reform and personal liberalization via its accurate depiction of the trauma left by the Cultural Revolution, and the success of healing a tiny part of the trauma via the reform introduced.

Movies in China Tani Barlow and Donald M. Lowe from Jump Cut

Yan-ting Yuen

YANG BANG XI: THE 8 MODEL WORKS

Netherlands (90 mi) 2005

Yang Ban Xi: The 8 Model Works Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Admittedly a generous grade, since this documentary's subject matter is inherently interesting to me. Given that all of Chinese pop culture was reduced to these eight Maoist musical extravaganzas during the Cultural Revolution, how did the Chinese people make sense of them? In exploring this topic, Yuen adopts an essayistic approach, and in some ways this is to the detriment of her film. Granted, a more linear format wouldn't be capacious enough to accommodate some of Yang Ban Xi's finest moments, such as the Spike Jonze-like music videos featuring 21st century Chinese kids (hair spiked, ears multiply pierced, wearing ripped t-shirts and baggies) performing hip-hop numbers that interpolate portions of "The White Haired Girl" and "The Red Detachment of Women." That is, Yuen provides a cross-section of urban China's Communist hangover, speaking both to the original performers in the Yang Ban Xi and younger citizens who are receiving these propagandistic curios second-hand. On the one hand, this makes for a much richer cultural document than one would expect, given the topic. Swing a cat these days and you're liable to hit some film trading on the kitsch value of Communist culture, a smug practice that kicked off with East Side Story and has recently fixated on the former East Germany and Warsaw Pact nations. Instead, Yuen backs off, never really making any claims for or against the Yang Ban Xi as artworks. In fact, apart from a few scattered film clips, we barely see them at all. And this is where Yang Ban Xi gets into trouble -- it is so sprawling, speaks to so many different interviewees, and spans so much time and history so unsystematically, that I'm really at a loss to say anything authoritative about these revolutionary operas. We know they were managed by Jiang Qing, Mao's wife. We know that she was one of the Gang of Four, but hell, if you didn't know better you could conceivably come away thinking she composed the Yang Ban Xi with John King and Andy Gill. (Or that Brian Eno wrote "Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy.") And the performed narration by "Madame Mao" (quite reminiscent of Jay Rosenblatt's short film Human Remains), rather than providing sturdier historical context, actually proves to be the one place where Yuen dabbles in snarkiness. She's played as the Red Chinese Cruella DeVil. In sum, Yang Ban Xi is an intermittently satisfying patchwork, its signal achievement most likely to be the highlighting of a vital piece of 20th century cultural history. But for better or worse, this film leaves a lot of intellectual spadework undone.

Yates, David

HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX B- 80

Great Britain USA (138 mi) 2007

A return to form in the Potter film category, opening right off the bat with one of the best sequences in the film, where a sense of dark foreboding literally steps out of the sky in the form of two Dementors whose soul sucking intentions come after Potter and Dudley Dursley, catching all of us off guard, as we’ve barely settled into the film. But it’s a creepy little number reminding us what Harry’s got to deal with *all* of the time, which is a bit unsettling. We catch our breath when the Dursley’s, of course, blame the whole shenanigans on Harry, who has to run away again, but this time only after receiving a strange letter from the Ministry expelling him from Hogwarts for utilizing wizardry in front of a muggle, despite the fact that his actions were required to save their lives. Welcome to what feels like 1984 at Hogwarts, cast in a loathsome totalitarian police state pall, where Harry is placed on trial by the Ministry who are in utter denial over his explanation that a certain Dark Lord has returned, but with the help of Dumbledore, Harry is reinstated, however his life at school is lonelier than ever, as Ministry generated newspaper rumors spread suggesting Harry has fabricated the truth for his own convenience, leaving him feeling completely isolated, a man alone against the universe, which is exactly where Voldemort wants him. So from the opening moments of the film, Harry’s feeling backed into a corner, where he continues to remain throughout the remainder of the film until an unnecessary feelgood ending is tacked on at the end. His precarious state of mind seems to be the focus of this film, much of which is visually dazzling, shown through dream state imagery that includes flashbacks, all alerting him to the presence of evil.

While an inevitable storyline is developing from the opening bell, all leading to another face to face encounter between Harry and the Dark Lord, where it’s prophecied this time that the world isn’t big enough for both of them, that one of them has got to go, which sends Harry into a neverending brood of personal anguish and moodiness, where Dumbledore feels the need to authorize Professor Snape, no less, to provide dream therapy to help Harry eradicate the debilitating yet awesome power of his bad dreams, which seem to be sent by Voldemort, which allows a great deal of suspense to develop through the considerably appealing use of reality alteration. Add to this the Ministry’s hand picked choice for Professor of the Defense Against the Dark Arts, Imelda Staunton in the choice role of Dolores Umbridge, the prudish lady in pink who bristles at the thought that students need to learn any spells and instead teaches that there’s no need for learning any defense, as there’s nothing out there to fight against, where anyone offering a dissenting point of view is immediately disciplined under her sadistic measures. Umbridge eventually has Dumbledore silenced, requiring his magical escape to avoid arrest, placing Umbridge in charge of Hogwarts, who builds a wall of ever expanding rules as a constant reminder that students have no rights, and anything they may choose to do is against the rules. All of this leads to insurrection within the ranks.

Enter the Three Musketeers, who along with a small cadre of students decide that if Hogwarts isn’t going to prepare the students against the dark forces, then they’d have to learn it themselves, appointing Harry in charge of teaching secret lessons of defense due to his accumulating experience in already having to deal with dark powers greater than his own. Fortunately, these are well staged sessions that actually add some fun to the proceedings, allowing kids to be kids again, but it also gives Harry a chance to cozy up next to Katie Leung as Cho Chang, his brief love interest, while also introducing the most surprising newcomer of the movie, enter Evanna Lynch as Luna Lovegood, perhaps the most unique character in the entire series, as she’s more of an outsider than Harry, a character who feels completely outside everyone else’s comprehension, as if she lives in a mysterious universe all her own, similar to Moaning Myrtle in the second episode. But Luna is never predictable, whose spacy, ever mysterious kind-hearted nature disguises her uncommon wisdom, and she’s perhaps the best friend Harry has in this film other than his godfather Sirius Black, the last surviving member of his family who tries to rally his own forces, the Order of the Phoenix, with Harry’s, Dumbledore’s Army, to defend against the inevitable. Even more than the third book, a similar theme throughout is Harry calling upon the strength of his father in times of need, an idealized image which would be hard to stand up to reality, resurfacing most amusingly from Snape’s imagination to explain his utter contempt for the Potters, as Harry’s dad bullied the little brat as a young boy.

Umbridge, of course, discovers the secret meetings with the aid of Malfoy, Cho, and others who confessed during Umbridge’s “truth interrogations,” where she interrogates all the students using truth serum, leading Harry to part ways with his first love, but when she sacks Dumbledore, Harry’s strongest ally, it forces Harry’s hand to act immediately or the events he perceives in his dreams would become reality, or so he believes, which leads him to the Ministry of Magic’s Department of Mysteries, the source of the crystal ball prophecy and the battleground for the return of the Dark Lord, who has commandeered his own forces of evil incarnate. The wands fly fast and furious with wizards flailing in every direction, where in the saddest moment, Harry loses Sirius just as his Order of the Phoenix forces appeared to be gaining the upper hand. Dumbledore comes to the rescue in a flash of green smoke and singlehandedly matches powers with Voldemort, fighting to a standoff where both will fight another day. When the Minister arrives on the scene to witness Voldemort with his own eyes, all previous suspects are forgiven, Umbridge is removed, Dumbledore reinstated, and Hogwarts is placed back on an even keel again with Harry safely back in the fold. This book is an interesting attempt to show how the State teetering on Fascism can attempt to display neutrality in denying hostile forces exist, while signs persist all around them which they are continually forced to deny, then overreact by brutally suppressing free speech, all of which undermines their own credibility and authority. The fight of good and evil has a similar Lord of the Rings feel to it, another book that was written under similar circumstances after Britain had witnessed a war to end all wars, especially when Dumbledore, like Gandolf, enters the military fray and becomes the best wizard warrior on the planet. Unfortunately, despite the brief harmony at the end, as Voldemort is still on the loose, we suspect worse is yet to come.

The Onion A.V. Club Scott Tobias

The latest installment in the Harry Potter series opens with a storm gathering precipitously over the young wizard's head, portending an attack by the Dementors, those soul-sucking wraiths that circle their prey like buzzards. It's moments like these that show how far J.K. Rowling's hero has come from the beginning, when he was delivered from a Dickensian home life into a gee-whiz world of flying broomsticks, whimsical creatures, and other magical enchantments. Now, dark clouds follow him around like Pig-Pen's filth, and being a wizard has become a joyless burden, a destiny that he grimly accepts as his lot in life. Though there are moments of levity scattered throughout Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix, the workmanlike fifth entry in the franchise, the overall feeling is that it sucks to be Harry Potter, and it's only going to get suckier from here on out.

Though he fends off the Dementors, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) gets expelled from Hogwarts School Of Witchcraft And Wizardry for using a forbidden curse in the presence of a "muggle." He wins back admittance on appeal, but many members of the Ministry Of Magic refuse to accept his contention that the evil Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) has returned and plans to engage the forces of good in a battle royal. As a measure to keep Harry and his cohorts in line, the Ministry installs prim taskmaster Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton) as the new professor of Dark Arts, and she keeps them busy with grueling memorization and paperwork. Harry revolts by creating Dumbledore's Army, a group of rebel students who harness their powers in a secret training room. He's also introduced to the Order Of The Phoenix, a clandestine faction preparing for a showdown with Voldemort.

While not all Harry Potter movies are created equal, consistency has been a major priority for the series, to the point where it's become the Prozac of blockbuster franchises—few highs or lows, just a general baseline of pleasing competence. Granted, there's a significant difference between the flat literalness of Chris Columbus' first two entries and Alfonso Cuarón's fanciful Prisoner Of Azkaban, but the films are telling one long story, and inspiration is often sacrificed for continuity's sake. Directed by David Yates, who has a background in British television, Order Of The Phoenix feels a little too complacent at times, though it has moments of visual wit, and it doesn't soft-pedal the dark mood that has eclipsed the series. Save for the thrilling opening sequence, there's not much to remember about the film beyond Staunton (Vera Drake), who masks her bottomless malevolence behind a pasted-on patrician smile. During this transitional stage, Dumbledore's Army and the Order Of The Phoenix prepare for bigger fights ahead—and presumably, more exciting movies, too.

Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]

It's a blasted earth, this green that holds Hogwarts now, and during a scene where our hero wizard is being tortured into forgetfulness for his own good, director David Yates cues a blanket of forgetful snow to fall. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (hereafter Harry Potter 5) is, likes its title suggests, a startling return to form for the series after Alfonso Cuarón's exceptional Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was followed by the insipid contribution of rom-com specialist Mike Newell. Gratifyingly complex and deliciously Freudian, a moment where Harry loses the last of his family--mirroring a moment in the third film where, on the banks of a lake, he almost loses himself--is preceded by an identical progression from the third film in which he's mistaken for his own father. Alas this time, Harry's not able to affect positive change in the guise of his dad; it's the boy becoming the man, frustrated and folded into a world of dread and doom. As drawn in the film, Potter's universe is like Potter's Field, a place where strangers and orphans are buried on the eve of war and a child's unavoidable matriculation into corruption. Harry Potter 5 is dark as pitch: unsettling, unsettled, unresolved, and utterly remarkable.

I can't judge whether neophytes would enjoy the film without having seen the others--there doesn't seem much in the development of Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron (Rupert Grint), or Hermione (Emma Watson) beyond that Harry, after witnessing a murder in the previous instalment, is consumed with impotent rage throughout the first half of the picture--but the story is so steeped in primate logic (sex, blood, vengeance, shame) that a primer is likely unnecessary. Issues of class and race resurface here as they tend to do when the Harry Potter series is at its best, and Harry's much-publicized first kiss with love interest Cho (Katie Leung) is resolved fascinatingly with betrayal and unresolved vindication. But the highlight of the piece finds Harry, in a fit of pique, turning the tables on an inquisitive Snape (Alan Rickman) and discovering that his father as a young man (Robbie Jarvis) was Snape's bully. It's an amazing moment, astonishing in its coldness and complexity--this robbing of a child's illusions of his father existing comfortably shoulder-to-shoulder with an unflagging love of that parent, sobered but un-tempered by the baseness of the father's humanity. There's religion in that revelation--a compassionate religion at that, the father/martyr's transformation into the body of a man making his sacrifice not less but greater. I can't count a lot of instances where I've been more gratified by a children's wonderland, because while Harry Potter 5 tackles a boy's reverence for his father with nonpareil transparency, it makes time to address unjust administrations, the power of an unfriendly press, and the ills of a judicial system hijacked by politics and fast fashion.

The children return centre-stage for this one, freed of the actor's workshop tips imposed on them by Newell. They have an earnestness about them that plays out like what it is (children pretending to be big), but I don't know that children asked to be big would act any differently. Michael Gambon and Imelda Staunton stand out as the two duelling headmasters of Hogwarts School, at which Harry and his friends assemble a small band of students to rail against a blinkered educational system modeled, one stretches, on the Kansas School Board's recommended curriculum. Their aim is to prepare for the coming conflagration against arch big-bad Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes), though their crowning triumph is as a metaphor for how ill-served are our children by a steady diet of pabulum, platitude, and Pollyannaism. In that respect, Harry Potter 5 is its own best example, providing skies that are overcast and villains who emerge, sometimes literally, from the silt in the picture's midnight atmosphere. The picture also boasts a herd of marauding centaurs, riled from the gerrymandering of their territory (Harry Potter 5 with environmental concerns? You bet); a portrait of arrested childhood in a little boy lost left to fend for itself in a dark wood; and, of course, that enduring image of evil in Staunton's pink, Jackie-O suited headmistress, forcing her charges to cut words of repentance into their flesh while ensconced in a Heritage USA-hell forge of animated kitten collector's plates.

The picture is wicked in its satire but not without purpose. It's that rarity of a special effects spectacular that integrates its phantasms into the mundane of the characters' existences, and when it does show off, as in a scene where the students summon their protective avatars, there's real wonder to it. A film that deserves to be called a fairytale (as the third entry did) for all its darkness and useful enchantment, it fulfills its mandate to be exciting in beautifully-crafted set-pieces in a warehouse of glass globes and a circular arena around a whispering portal where wizards mad and divine engage in alien tactical warfare. I like that it ends on a field of sand for its tactile contemporary link to our own imbroglio; and I like that at the end of it, there's a sense inescapable that if Harry should die fighting his shadow, it's because he didn't learn his lessons of control and tolerance well enough from the people he saw as enemy and the situations he perceived as perilous. Harry Potter 5 is the series' The Empire Strikes Back: the good guys get the tar beaten out of them and learn not only that they're a mirror's thickness from being the bad guys, but also that the fathers they're destined to become are not always the heroes of their stories. A film about a lot of things, it draws its power from the Gordian complexity of crafting a legacy through the belief--when every other system and bedrock is filthy with rot and cynicism--in the ability to forget.

eFilmCritic Reviews EricDSnyder

At a mere two hours and 18 minutes, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" is the shortest film in the series -- no small feat, considering the book it's based on is the longest. Subplots have been cut, and some fans will surely be shocked and appalled, but they needn't be. Streamlined though the film may be, the important thing is that it doesn't feel streamlined. It feels like an exciting and fast-paced fantasy adventure -- which is exactly what it's supposed to feel like.

British TV director David Yates is the latest man to walk through the series' revolving door (he'll do "Half-Blood Prince," too), and he brings with him an admirable work ethic. Chris Columbus' first two entries were rambly, and Alfonso Cuaron and Mike Newell had a great deal of fun putting their own imprimaturs on Nos. 3 and 4. If Yates has an identifying mark to his directorial style, I missed it. He's a for-hire director who gets the job done with the appropriate levels of humor, energy, and thrills, but without a lot of time-wasting foolishness in between. Get in, get 'r done, and get out.

And it works. As satisfying as it was to see someone like Cuaron make a movie that was unquestionably "his," I realize now that it's also a pleasure to see someone make a movie in a serviceable, cheerfully anonymous style. Yates, working from an adaptation by new-to-the-series Michael Goldenberg ("Peter Pan"), does just that. The movie works the way a Harry Potter movie ought to. It's not perfect -- a few ends remain loose, a few characters get shafted -- but it's very good.

This episode finds Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) more sullen and tormented than usual. Dreams of Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) plague his sleep. Cornelius Fudge (Robert Hardy), the head of the Ministry of Magic, has spent the summer planting stories in the Daily Prophet that paint Harry as a liar for proclaiming Voldemort's return. "All is well!" cry the headlines. Fudge has staked his career on the false pretense that the wizarding community has nothing to worry about.

To that end, he sends Hogwarts a new Ministry-approved Defense Against the Dark Arts instructor. She is Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton), a deliciously sweet-seeming little woman clad in pink and always wearing a smile on her plump, grandmotherly face. She is, as you might expect, evil incarnate, albeit a kind of evil Harry has never dealt with before. She earnestly believes the party line that Voldemort is gone and Harry is a liar. It's her devotion to goodness that has made her a villain and a zealot. When she turns Hogwarts into a police state, abolishing all extracurricular gatherings and encouraging students to rat on one another, she seems to be doing it out of a genuine (though misguided) desire for law and order.

Part of her campaign is to stop teaching any actual defensive spells in Defense Against the Dark Arts. Everything she teaches is theoretical. After all, since Voldemort is no threat, why on earth would you ever need to use a defensive spell in real life?

Since Harry, Ron (Rubert Grint), and Hermione (Emma Watson) know the truth -- that Voldemort is out there and rapidly recruiting his followers -- they assemble an underground group called Dumbledore's Army. Under Harry's instruction, these students practice defense against the dark arts in secret, preparing for the battle that the Ministry says will never happen.

As usual, the adults are the most entertaining figures in the film. Imelda Staunton is a gleefully wicked addition as Umbridge, and Alan Rickman continues to steal every scene he's in -- often with no more than a raised eyebrow -- as Professor Snape.

But the kids are doing well, too, with Daniel Radcliffe really coming into his own as an actor in this installment. A brief flashback to the previous film reminds us how much he's matured just since then, and he plays Harry's conflicting emotions with impressive range. A significant part of this film's climax deals entirely with Harry's internal struggles, and Radcliffe pulls it off with great maturity.

As I write this, the world is once again experiencing a bout of Potter-mania, with the final book in the series due just 10 days after this film opens. Most of us are probably more excited for that book than we are for this movie, since the book is an unknown commodity and the movie is merely a reenactment of stuff we've already read. But as an appetizer for what's to come -- and a reminder of how magical and entertaining the Harry Potter universe is -- "Order of the Phoenix" satisfies.

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is the fifth of the films based on J.K. Rowling’s phenomenally popular series of books. These led to an also enormously popular series of film adaptations starting with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone/Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001) and continuing through Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005).

I have never been a huge fan of the Harry Potter books or films. You have to credit J.K. Rowling for the fact that she managed to get children reading again in an era of increasing illiteracy. But there are other children’s books that are far more deservous of such success. Rowling’s writing tends to the simplistic and over-written. Her plotting is also heavily reliant on contrived and convenient deus ex machina. And the films, particularly the first two, tended to bury the stories under a surfeit of visual effects, while the increasing length of Rowling’s books (some of the later ones have headed up towards Stephen King-sized tomes clocking in at 1000 plus pages) have meant that the films have come across as hurried in their plotting or with elements that seem confusing to those in the audience who have not read the books first.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix opened to some rather negative “Has Harry Potter lost its magic?”-type reviews. The film was called too dark – clearly by people who have never read the book it is based on – and David Yates’s direction lacking in imagination. Contrary to any of these, I rather liked Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. In fact I’d in fact go so far as to argue that it is the best film in the series so far, even surpassing Alfonso Cuaron’s The Prisoner of Azkaban, which by general consensus remains the popular favourite of the series.

There are some really good things to report about The Order of the Phoenix. It feels like the first of the Harry Potter films to have grown up. While the other Harry Potter films seem caught up in the child-like wonderment of magic tricks and cute effects flying around quidditch fields and the like, this is the first of the films to have placed its focus not on the effects but on the emotions of the characters. (Not that The Order of the Phoenix denies the effects side of things, but they aren’t allowed to overtake the story as they did in Chris Columbus’s two entries).

The emotional journey that the film takes us on is quite a dark one. Where the characters tended to being fairly black-and-white in the earlier films, here their journey contains a good deal more in the way of shades of grey and confronts some quite adult issues. If you want comparisons, you could say that The Order of the Phoenix is to the other Harry Potter films what The Empire Strikes Back (1980) was to Star Wars (1977) – a work that took the light adventure focus of the first film into darker, much more interior and soul-searching places. I particularly liked the speech that Daniel Radcliffe makes where he starts to teach the pupils, telling them there is a difference between what they learned as lessons in class and in having to use this to fight for their lives.

Furthermore The Order of the Phoenix is the first of the Harry Potter films that feels like it works satisfyingly as a story. All of the other films had the feel of being adapted from a book. They often felt like they were hurrying over plot points to bring the film in at a reasonable running time, either that or they dragged dramatically because the film was adhering too faithfully to the book. This is not something you feel you could ever say about The Order of the Phoenix. It feels like a story that exists in its own right as a film. Nor does J.K. Rowling’s writing seem as driven by convenient plotting deus ex machinas as it usually does. You can see the centaurs and Grawp the giant being set up early on in the piece and they conveniently do turn up to get Harry and company out of a scrape, but the rest of the film comes with a feeling of natural dramatic ease.

This is also the first of the films to give more time over to the minor supporting characters and allow them depth and growth. The new character introduced this time is Imelda Staunton’s Dolores Umbridge. Staunton has been made up with the primness of an old dear attending a Country Women’s Institute – in an appealing touch the wall of her room is filled with decorative plates that all feature animate cats. Staunton moves through the film with head held high, perfect manners and a self-satisfied smile, while at the same time wielding authority with an iron fist that would make George Orwell’s O’Brien take a few steps back. She also plays with a peculiar titter at odd moments in a way that manages to be quite unnerving. She gets my vote for Best New Villain(ess) of the Year.

For all the criticism that has been made of British tv director David Yates’s handling of The Order of the Phoenix, there is nothing I can fault in his dramatic staging. (I’d far rather watch another film by David Yates any day than by the perpetually banal Chris Columbus). The scenes with Harry and apprentices being cornered in the aisles of a Ministry basement by Lucius Malfoy and Bellatrix Lestrange comes with a palpable sense of real danger. And Yates does get it all together for a dazzling climactic magic battle between Dumbledore and Voldemort. There’s also the growing sense throughout the story of storm clouds growing on the horizon. It’s the same sense of epic destiny that ran throughout the recent The Lord of the Rings trilogy, of tiny vulnerable heroes standing up against forces vastly larger than they as all the pieces of a jigsaw are positioned into place for a titanic showdown between good and evil. For the first time I’m quite excited to see the next Harry Potter film.

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs)

ReelViews (James Berardinelli)

The Sci-Fi Movie Page James O’Ehley

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

Slant Magazine [Nick Schager]

Cinema Blend [Josh Tyler]

eFilmCritic.com [Erik Childress]

A Nutshell Review Stefan S

The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw)

Interview with Order of the Phoenix director David Yates Amy Raphael

Back to School Andrew Roberts looks back at 70 years of British boarding school movies from Sight and Sound

Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert)

The New York Times (A.O. Scott)

Harry Potter and the Four Directors Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott from the New York Times

'Harry Potter,' Dissected Using video clips, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott contrast themes from the first five Harry Potter films

HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE C+ 77

Great Britain USA (153 mi) 2009 ‘Scope

“Harry, once again I must ask too much of you." —Professor Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon)

Enjoyable and entertaining, though not much action or suspense, as Voldemort is nowhere to be found in this episode, instead Harry turns into a stalker, Ron a love god, and Hermione a blubbering broken heart. Perhaps the first movie in the entire series which is not a stand alone project, which requires some knowledge of the Harry Potter stories, as there is no introductory backdrop explanation. Accordingly, this movie starts in the middle somewhere without a real connection to what came before. This one also seemed to take forever before anything adventurous happened, and seemed instead to content itself with familiarizing ourselves with some of the old characters, now a bit older, especially Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton), and introducing a completely new potions instructor, the scatterbrained Professor Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent), who himself has a connection with both Harry’s parents and Voldemort as a young lad named Tom Riddle (Hero Fiennes-Tiffin, Ralph Fiennes’s nephew), having instructed them all at Hogwarts. With the help of Harry, Professor Dumbledore is successful in luring Slughorn out of his cozy life in retirement, with an alternative motive, of course, as Dumbledore is puzzled by one of Slughorn’s memories that takes place in a conversation with Tom Riddle, one that appears to have been altered by Slughorn himself. Dumbledore, interestingly, keeps a cabinet full of glass vials, each one containing a significant memory which can be emptied into a pool of water and observed, and challenges Harry to try to draw this original memory out of him.

As always, it’s a murky world with signs of immediate danger everywhere, as even Muggles are disappearing, supposedly at the hand of Lord Voldemort.

Arriving late to class, Harry grabs the last text, an old beat up copy which is filled with corrective yet meticulous notes with an inscription, property of the Half-Blood Prince. Even Hermione’s investigative prowess reveals no leads into a possible identity. Harry, however, has got the jump on all his fellow students, as the book is a gold mine of potions. In the meantime, in rather sluggish fashion, Ron has a groupie, Lavender Brown (Jessie Cave), who’s in love with him and drapes herself all over him, including sending him a neverending stream of flirtatious glances, each one of which makes Hermione want to vomit, especially when she can see he’s actually attracted to her. In earlier episodes, Ron would have called Lavender’s behavior “mental,” but now a little older he appreciates all the attention. In much the same fashion, Ron’s sister Ginny (Bonnie Wright, horribly cast in my view because of all the characters in the entire series, she’s perhaps the least interesting), and fellow member of the Quidditch team, becomes the object of Harry’s thoughts. In both instances, Ron is completely oblivious to the feelings of his two best friends. So goes the Three Musketeers. Malfoy, meanwhile is tinkering around in a hidden storage room making things appear and disappear in a secret vanishing cabinet, practicing, we suspect, for some horrible deed, as earlier we see him meet with some of the Death Eaters, an act which has piqued Harry’s curiosity throughout the entire film.

In this version, Professor Snape comes out of the closet, Alan Rickman on his most insidiously worst behavior, delectable to see as pure evil at last, has made a pact with the Death Eaters to carry out Malfoy’s plan (whatever that is), should he stumble. Harry and Draco have a little tête-a-tête in the rest room, with no sign of Moaning Myrtle, by the way, who appears in the book to help revive him, but is left out of the movie version, so it’s up to Snape to bring him back to life after Harry nearly kills him. At a school with rules and punishment, it’s unheard of that Harry was not reprimanded, or even questioned thoroughly, about the near killing of a fellow student. Most students would have been thrown out of school, but not “The Chosen One.” What Dumbledore has stumbled upon is not really explained well, and is only introduced near the end of the film—the magical power of horcruxes, a piece of one’s soul which can be obtained only in the act of killing someone, but which can be stored as an object in the vanishing cabinet allowing a possible re-entry back into the wizard world even after the body is gone, a method which could grant Voldemort immortality. Dumbledore has produced a book and a ring, two of the seven horcruxes, where collecting all seven are needed to finally kill him, once and for all, and leads Harry to a distant underground cave which likely holds a third. Of course there’s no explanation for how he found this place. This is the first real suspense in the entire episode, but it happens all too quickly, as soon we’re back at Hogwarts. Helena Bonham Carter is really excellent as the dementedly evil Bellatrix, who in sing-song fashion reminds Harry that she killed Sirius Black, and has her hand in the burning of the Weasley home. But she was just warming up for the most foul deed in the entire series so far, which was carried off rather matter of factly, without a great deal of suspense, an event which simply ends the movie, as the Three Musketeers solemnly vow to fight on.

Easily the best thing in the film, though barely seen, was once again Evanna Lynch as the notoriously bizarre Luna Lovegood, a girl who mystifyingly remains an outcast at Hogwarts, where Harry is her only friend in the world, but who is without a doubt the most unique and original character in the entire series, along with Moaning Myrtle, of course. The entire Harry Potter mystery seemed to sprout from kids just like her who didn’t fit in, who seemed stuck, not really a part of their parent’s adult world, yet at times outcasts in the kid world as well. Where could they turn? To a world of imagination, of course. To see Luna wearing a lion’s head affixed to the top of her head to attend a Quidditsch match was utterly hilarious, as was nearly every line of dialogue that came out of her mouth. Despite being a space cadet, she has her own self-assured style, perhaps seeing the world behind wildly decorative psychedelic eyeglasses, a seemingly dumb blond bimbo who turns out to have such extraordinary sentient awareness that she’s really the brightest one in the room. She helped save Harry’s life once, and if I was him, I’d certainly add her to the Three Musketeers, but of course, that’s not the way it’s written. She certainly elevates the interest factor in the movie versions, as with perfect comic timing she presents herself as an exotic creature, as if she’s an extinct species from another planet, but she also delights and tantalizes everyone with an unearthly sensuality and an equally amazing sense of awareness where she can sense what’s undetected by others before anyone else can figure it out. This seems to work in the area of feelings as well, as she’s always the most candid and direct character in the film. She obviously sees the world through her own rose colored glasses. Harry would do well to keep her nearby.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Cliff Doerksen from The Reader

Like its predecessors, this sixth installment in the behemoth fantasy franchise outstays its welcome by a bum-numbing half hour; unlike them, it devotes about half its screen time to chaste, multisided romantic intrigues, the boy wizard (Daniel Radcliffe) and his coed cohorts having attained exquisite young adulthood. As usual, the residuum of plot involves Harry's meandering pursuit of various supernatural MacGuffins, without which the forces of darkness are bound to triumph. Director David Yates presides over some gorgeous CGI set pieces, but all the real magic comes from the scrum of ace British character actors (Michael Gambon, Alan Rickman, Robbie Coltrane, Timothy Spall, and the always brilliant Jim Broadbent, who steals the show as a dithering Hogwarts don come out of retirement). For what it is, it's fine.

Review: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Bill Stamets from New City

The Warner Brothers logo looms into view as a gray iron gate. Not quite like the “No Trespassing” sign outside Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu, but still, any unsuspecting soul who wanders into the sixth episode of this fantasy franchise without first reading the source novel by J.K. Rowling may need a wand to unveil throughlines of the ongoing mythology. Sooty aerial wraiths called Death Eaters—whose name suggests they ought to shit everlasting life—conspire to upset a school of kids learning how to wave their wands. There’s a new Professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts on the faculty, and his horny charges are brewing the equivalent of date-rape potions. The title lad (Daniel Radcliffe) wins a vial of Liquid Luck by cheating in class. Teen make-out drama offers respite from a rote plot of good wizards versus bad wizards over ancient grudges and eternal dominion. Screenwriter Steve Kloves and director David Yates shortchange fans of the inventive grandeur that charmed early Potter product. All I look forward to in the seventh film is more screen time for the lovely weirdo Luna, played by Evanna Lynch. With Jim Broadbent, Helena Bonham Carter, Robbie Coltrane, Warwick Davis, Michael Gambon, Alan Rickman, Maggie Smith, Timothy Spall, David Thewlis, Julie Walters, and the expertise of weather consultant Dr. Richard Wild.

Time Out Chicago (Hank Sartin) review [3/6]

At Hogwarts in year six, a young wizard’s thoughts turn to the hot chick in Incantations class, and the potions most of interest are love potions. While Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) skulks around moodily looking strangely like David Bowie in the Thin White Duke era, Harry (Radcliffe), Hermione (Watson) and Ron (Grint) spend an inordinate percentage of Half-Blood Prince obsessing about who’s snogging whom.

Yes, there’s that whole Voldemort problem to deal with, and certainly people are disappearing mysteriously while Dumbledore (Gambon) rumbles darkly but unhelpfully about the dark secrets of Tom Riddle, the boy who would become Ultimate Evil. But the teen leads engage in the rather thin plotting only intermittently, and screenwriter Steve Kloves happily follows their lead.

For Potter-ites, there are plenty of satisfactions to be had, but the fun mostly comes from recognizing plot points from the novel merely suggested onscreen. When Harry finally gets engaged in some action, the climax is suitably exciting and dark, but it feels oddly tacked on after two-plus hours spent mostly in the world of high-school romantic intrigues.

Time Out London (Wally Hammond) review [3/6] also here: Click here to read our exclusive interview with Daniel Radcliffe July 15. 2009

Harry shaves! Harry snogs! But stay your wand, there are other forces of darkness besides late adolescence which are afflicting the poor orphaned wizard of Hogwarts and his hormone-raging contemporaries. For one, Voldemort’s allies, the aerial, ink-trailing Death Eaters, are ravaging London. Ping! Pling! There go the stanchions of the Millennium Bridge! And Harry has hardly been re-admitted to school, following the departure of Mrs Umbridge, last term’s knit-robed Robespierre, when Dumbledore teleports him to Tudor-relic Budleigh Babberton to meet and recruit one-time Potions Master Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent, disguised as a sofa).

False-memory syndrome is at the heart of this next stage of the fight against evil forces: Dumbledore’s phials of stored reminiscences have been polluted, and it is sly Slughorn’s recall of his past tutoring of a Horcrux-fascinated student which may hold a necessary and life-saving corrective.

Longer than the last, the sixth episode of the adventures of the increasingly burdened magic warrior of Privet Drive is a more human affair than its predecessors. It’s as full of the romantic dalliances of the maturing students as it is of warring set-pieces, creature shocks and detours down dark Dickensian alleys. We can already sense the two-part seventh and final saga on the horizon, and the whole less-frenzied affair is tonally and emotionally suggestive of a post-battle re-grouping before a final cinematic assault.

To this end, scriptwriter Steve Kloves, back after a one-film sabbatical, has ably summed up the JK Rowling doorstopper by omitting a major battle and axeing at least one character. Also, the fine, less showy work by new DoP Bruno Delbonnel and Nicholas Hopper’s non-strident second Potter score are in tune with director Yates’s laudable refusal to underline too forcefully moments of triumph and disaster. Togther, they allow space for as much human detail, intimacy, humour and, indeed, pathos as a family magical/fantasy action adventure will allow.

Thus – thrillseekers beware – the film’s memorable scenes are, interestingly, not necessarily the most momentous: the sad, assembled Weasleys regarding their crooked Norfolk tower; a lionine, wind-tossed Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) framed in the Hogwarts tower with all the grandeur of Powell and Pressburger’s ‘Black Narcissus’; poor Emma Watson’s Hermione crying in solitary heartbreak; blonde bombshell Draco Malfoy pitied in a picture of isolated evil. Rupert Grint’s Ron is still the leavening star – striking funny, victorious poses in the series’s last game of Quidditch – but Daniel Radcliffe’s less self-conscious and more self-deprecating Harry runs him a close second.

CNN Showbiz (Tom Charity) review also including: Video gallery: See the stars now and then » and why not: Potter 101: A guide to Harry Potter »

Entering his sixth year at Hogwarts, Harry Potter may not be able to see the finishing line, but he knows it's coming.

In "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," the sixth film in the Potter series, he's like a marathon runner who senses that he's got this course beat: He's still pacing himself, but there's a definite spring in his step.

Potter's confidence seems to be a product of Daniel Radcliffe's authority in the role as much as anything. He's decided he's the hero of the piece, and he's happy with that; Radcliffe plays him with such implacable conviction and such lightness, it's becoming harder to worry about the character's plight.

He can be reckless and impatient, but by now he's essentially untouchable. His chums may be prey to hormonal surges -- buckets of screen time is devoted to Ron's love life and Hermione's lack of same -- but our Harry stays focused. While Ron moons over his girlfriend, every night Potter takes a textbook to bed with him.

This battered book of potions comes with scarily insightful scribbles by a former student, the titular half-blood prince, giving Potter a distinct edge over his classmates and that increasingly conflicted bleached blond, Draco Malfoy. More important, it also gets him in good with this installment's designated dodgy faculty member, Professor Horace Slughorn.

We know the drill by now: Slughorn has special knowledge that Harry must prize out of him, while the teacher's own leanings remain tantalizingly ambiguous. A special guest star in all but name, Jim Broadbent plays this mildewed academic with appropriately Dickensian panache and an undertow of sympathy (first spotted disguised as an armchair, the suspiciously solicitous Slughorn maintains at least one foot in the closet).

Adapted by Steve Kloves and directed (like Potter V, "The Order of the Phoenix") by the efficient, self-effacing David Yates, "Half-Blood Prince" is as brisk and nimble as J.K. Rowling's two-steps-forward, one-step-back narrative stratagems allow.

It risks annoying some fans by axing one significant character and a potential action show-stopper, but it's actually the overarching storyline that feels skimpy; the movie is replete with lovely, inventive design details and idiosyncratic effects work, while Yates' reluctance to pump up the bombast might be counted sweet relief after the latest bout of blockbusting overkill.

A trio of evenly spaced set-pieces do generate enough excitement to make this an iffy proposition for parents with younger kids; in particular Dumbledore and Harry's climactic cave expedition is an intense, nightmarish standout.

But for all this series' constitutional doom-and-gloom, what's truly charming about the Harry Potter movies is the rare privilege of seeing Radcliffe, Rupert Grint (Ron), Emma Watson (Hermione) and the others growing up before our eyes.

We've now had eight formative years -- the first film came out in 2001 -- telescoped into 15 hours or so of tumultuous screen time, and anyone who's stayed the course with them will feel a connection.

Soon it will be time to let these kids go and find their own way in the Muggle world, but what rich, strange and wonderful home movies we'll have to look back on.

Village Voice (Scott Foundas) review

CBC.ca Arts review Rachel Giese

Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]

DVD Talk - Theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review  Richard Scheib 

Cinefantastique  Steve Biodrowski (with spoilers)

Pajiba (Daniel Carlson) review

Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw

Moving Pictures magazine [Eric Kohn]

Slate (Dana Stevens) review

eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [5/5]

New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review

Christian Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review [B+]

Slant Magazine review [2.5/4] Nick Schager

A Nutshell Review  Stefan S.

CHUD.com (Devin Faraci) review

The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review

eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [5/5]

eFilmCritic.com (David Cornelius) review [5/5]

eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review [4/5]

Movie-Vault.com (LaRae Meadows) review

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [2.5/5]

The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review

CineSnob.net (Kiko Martinez) review [B]

hoopla.nu review Mark Lavercombe and Stuart Wilson

Confessions of a Film Critic [John Maguire]  also read an on the set visit and interview with Daniel Radcliffe:  here

Screen International (Fionnuala Halligan) review

Cinema Blend [Katey Rich]

Bina007

Black Sheep Reviews by Joseph Belanger

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

The L Magazine [Henry Stewart]

Channel 4 Film  Catherine Bray 

The Hollywood Reporter review Kirk Honeycutt

Entertainment Weekly review [A-] Lisa Schwarzbaum

Variety (Todd McCarthy) review

Harry Potter fans damn Half-Blood Prince film after test screening Ben Child from The Guardian, March 13, 2009

Amy Raphael gets to the beating heart of The Half-Blood Prince Amy Raphael from The Observer, June 21, 2009

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Andrew Pulver from The Guardian, July 4, 2009

Peter Bradshaw reviews Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince The Guardian, July 17, 2009

Philip French reviews Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince The Guardian, July 19, 2009

Blog: The curse of Harry Potter is infantilising the world David Cox from The Guardian, July 20, 2009

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince world premiere, London photo gallery from The Guardian

The Independent (Ella Thorold, aged 15) review [3/5] July 8, 2009

The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [2/5] July 17, 2009

The Globe and Mail (Liam Lacey) review [3/4] July 23, 2009

Time Out New York (Keith Uhlich) review [2/6]

Boston Globe review [2.5/4] Wesley Morris

The Boston Phoenix (Peter Keough) review

Austin Chronicle (Kimberley Jones) review [3/5]

San Francisco Chronicle (Amy Biancolli) review [4/4]

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review

Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Roger Ebert from The Chicago Sun Times

The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS PT. 1 B 83

Great Britain USA (146 mi) 2010 ‘Scope

These are dark times, there is no denying. —Rufus Scrimgeour, Minister of Magic (Bill Nighy)

The lads have lost their baby fat, their innate cuteness, and their youthful cheery dispositions, turned into young adults through the decade of filming this 8-part series, going all the way back to 2001 for the first release, with the final installment due next summer, making it ten years exactly. Harry is more gaunt than ever, while Ron towers over him both in size and heft, while Hermione continues to remain the most reliable one of the group. What sets this movie apart from the others is it’s completely set apart from Hogwarts, where instead they roam the various countrysides of the world, each one a CGI configured enchanting place, as they keep Harry hidden from Lord Voldemart who has regained his powers and has announced his interest in finding the Chosen One, more than ever resolved to put an end to Harry’s life, something he couldn’t do when he was a baby. As the Dark Forces meet to consider their strategy, Voldemort, showing peculiar favor to his monstrous pet snake Nagini, grotesquely feeding it a captive human to devour, an ominous foreshadowing of things to come, also decides he needs a different wand, as his and Harry’s are veritable twins, thinking this is the missing ingredient to do the job. Infiltrating the Ministry’s plans to hide and protect Harry, Voldemort and the Dark Forces are waiting for him when the Minister of Magic (Bill Nighy) announces the need to move Harry to a safe location, accompanied by Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane), finally showing his gargantuan size, and the ill-tempered “Mad-Eye” Moody (Brendan Gleeson), who casts a spell turning a half a dozen willing suspects into temporary Harry look-alikes, all designed to help confuse the enemy, but instead they are laying in wait and catch Harry offguard, creating significant havoc, even managing to kill Moody and the Minister of Magic right off the bat, both immediately replaced at the Ministry by Voldemort’s minions. In such dour times, the rest of the film is spent trying to hide Harry from the Death Eaters and the opportunistic Dark Forces.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment following the death of Dumbledore in the previous episode is seeing the sadistic Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton) and her goons return to her former position at the Ministry, where all the evil forces are rounding up citizens while she relishes her one true specialty, “truth interrogations.” With posters lining the Ministry declaring Harry Potter as “Undesirable #1,” the threesome makes a daring visit in search of a Horcrux while disguised as lower Ministry officials, where once detected, their deliriously mad escape with evil henchman Peter Mullan hard on their heels is one of the best action sequences in the film, as now even more on alert, the Dark Forces rally to make a final purge of the powers of good. Hermione is the only one prepared for this doomsday strategy, bringing a handbag filled with unending tidbits that come in handy, while Ron and Harry are completely flabbergasted at being so easily discovered, relying on Hermione to find them a safe haven. Establishing a mood unlike any other episodes in the entire series, what this brings is isolation and quiet reflection in remote forest locations, where Harry senses that he needs to follow Dumbledore’s previous instructions for bringing down Voldemort, which requires finding and destroying the Horcruxes, each of which contain a fragment of his soul and are the source of the Dark Lord’s power and quest for immortality. Ron grows instantly weary and frustrated that Harry doesn’t have more clues or useful information to help track them down, actually believing Harry is probably hiding something from him, growing ever more impatient, until the two have a row and Ron actually leaves the side of his best friend, disappearing for a good portion of the film. That leaves Harry and Hermione to struggle alone, including a momentary improvised dance set to Nick Cave's “O Children,” with Harry searching through the flashbacks of his memory and Hermione reading the latest biography on the life of Dumbledore, each of which offers various possibilities.

While there are deceptions, foul play, and evil spells in the midst, one that nearly drowns Harry under the ice while also scaring the pants off of Ron, taunting him with a threatening dark cloud filled with foul images of Harry and Hermione in a naked embrace after they both fully reject him as a friend, all while seeking the missing Gryffindor sword, which may hold a clue in the near impossible destruction of a Horcrux. A new character is introduced, the fashion challenged father of Luna and editor of the magazine The Quibbler who goes by the name of Xenophilius Lovegood (Rhys Ifans), who explains the context of the Deathly Hallows, expressed through charmingly innovative silhouettes that play out like an animated puppet show. Perhaps the most pleasant surprise is the return of Dobby the elf, easily one of the more original characters in the entire series, but one who is only sparingly seen. As always, he figures prominently in the action, showing bravery, heroicism, and gratitude, the kinds of human qualities needed to overcome the powers of evil, perhaps best represented in this episiode by the presence of Bellatrix Lestrange (Helena Bonham Carter), a tricky little customer with a penchant for getting her way, a trademark of the Dark Forces. In that vein, Voldemort is seen robbing the grave of Dumbledore where he believes he’s found the most powerful wand ever created, where his instincts tell him he can now rule the world, which sets the scene for the final showdown, which will be continued in Part 2, expected to be a fullblown 3-D finale.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 Review. Movie Reviews ... Tom Huddleston from Time Out London

Anyone who complained that the previous episode in the ‘Harry Potter’ saga felt too much like scene-setting for the final showdown will be equally disappointed with ‘Deathly Hallows Part 1’. A film with no beginning and no end but a whole lot of expository middle, this is the least satisfying instalment in the series since Chris Columbus folded up his director’s chair.

Bill Nighy’s dour, dandified Minister of Magic sets the tone with a barbed speech bemoaning the state of the magical nation: murders, disappearances and raids are becoming commonplace and no one, it seems, is safe. Least of all our bespectacled hero, who bids farewell to the suburbia of his youth before being whisked away in the film’s only outright action sequence, a dizzying high-speed flying-bike chase through the Dartford tunnel.

The ensuing half hour is business as usual: an entertaining balance of sorcery, slapstick and sweetness, enlivened by a handful of scary scenes and a surprisingly sadistic streak of black humour. But once the kids decide to break out on their own, setting off across the shattered English countryside on the trail of the four remaining shards of the Dark Lord Voldemort’s soul, things take a bleaker turn, and they never quite recover. Part of the problem is JK Rowling’s source material: there are too many characters, too much backstory and too many magical Mcguffins to keep track of. The episodic plot wanders as aimlessly as the children, culminating in the would-be tragic death of a character we’ve barely been introduced to.

On this evidence, the producers’ decision to cut the final movie in two feels like a mistake: despite some undoubted highlights, ‘Deathly Hallows Part 1’ feels like the weaker half of a still-promising film.

Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows: Part 1 | Film | Movie Review ... Tasha Robinson from The Onion A.V. Club

One of the most remarkable aspects of the Harry Potter movie franchise has been the way it’s held onto its core cast, letting audiences watch the actors mature along with the characters and J.K. Rowling’s progressively darker material. But nothing else about the films has been as consistent. Each new director has brought in his own look, tone, and sensibility to book-to-film adaptation. In the latest installment, David Yates (who helmed the previous two films, as well as the final one, due out in July 2011) takes his serious approach to the material to new extremes, making it into the oddest Harry Potter yet: an awkward mating of action-fantasy and a self-reflective indie movie.

Like its immediate predecessor, Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows: Part 1 makes no bones about being part of a longer work rather than a stand-alone film. It begins mid-speech and ends mid-story. With Harry’s chief protector dead and his enemy Voldemort openly taking over, Harry and his closest friends isolate themselves to fight behind the scenes. Lacking allies or sanctuary, they become depressed and aimless, prompting long sequences in which they stare moodily into space; have strained, muttered, pause-packed conversations; or in one case, share a spontaneous melancholy dance to Nick Cave’s “O Children.” A long middle sequence of wandering (and grim, gloomy posing) is set against glorious, Lord Of The Rings-like natural backdrops, which unfortunately just heighten the stiffness. The pacing is endlessly aggravating: It’s just as well Yates didn’t attempt to cram the final book’s action into an eviscerated single film, and it’s admirable how he attempts to stretch out, to patiently build a mood and let audiences feel the characters’ directionless anxiety. But the result is a herky-jerky movie that alternates glacial brooding with unwieldy chunks of exposition and frenzied, rushed battles.

It’s hard to fault Yates too much; apart from a few tweaks, he’s largely following the original book, which also alternated draggy frustration with reams of exposition. But Yates and series screenwriter Steve Kloves only intermittently find ways to make the material spark onscreen. Most of the content of this film is wheel-spinning or conscious setup for the final installment, and that feels apparent at every melodramatic moment.

Philip French's review The Observer

The adjective "dark" has always suggested something sinister, often associated with the Prince of Darkness. But more recently in popular culture, and especially in the movies, it's come to mean deep, serious, mature, dangerous and altogether more truthful, more worthy of intelligent consideration than anything categorised as "light" and thus frivolous and deceptive.

Penumbrously lit by Portuguese-born French cinematographer Eduardo Serra, the latest and penultimate film in the Harry Potter cycle (in fact the first half of JK Rowling's final book) begins with an ominous, Sergio Leone-style close-up of Bill Nighy telling us: "These are dark times." He sounds like any member of the coalition cabinet at the dispatch box, but he is, in fact, Rufus Scrimgeour, minister of magic.

Not long after, he's presenting the orphaned messiah Harry Potter and his two wizardly chums, the upper-middle-class Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) and the lower-middle-class Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), with mysterious inheritances from Dumbledore, their mentor and former headmaster at Hogwarts School for Wizardry. These gifts will assist them in their imminent apocalyptic encounter with the evil Lord Voldemort that will settle the future of mankind.

Now a decade in the telling, the Potter saga is getting a trifle thin, while its heroic trio are developing bags under their eyes and behave like schoolchildren wondering whether they should spend their gap year chasing dragons or hunting for the Holy Grail. Dumbledore is dead and most of the adults make only token appearances, the chief exception being Helena Bonham Carter as Bellatrix Lestrange.

The forces of evil, with Ralph Fiennes's Voldemort in the chair, gather to decide who'll kill Potter, while the forces of good assemble at Potter's suburban home to plan his rescue and transfer to a safe house. After this, Harry, Hermione and Ron are on their own working out how to find the Arthurian sword (predictably lying at the bottom of a frozen lake) that will enable them to vanquish the Horcruxes, Voldemort's airborne cohorts.

Most of the time, the kids are in the wilderness, a dark, wintry place either on the Pembrokeshire coast or in the Highlands. But from time to time, they transport themselves elsewhere. Most particularly, they enter the normal world of the Muggles, now dominated by agents of Evil and resembling a cross between Lang's Metropolis and Dickens's London. There, they take over the identities of three everyday adults in a manner that closely resembles certain sequences of Christopher Nolan's Inception.

In the absence of the eccentric, outlandish staff of Hogwarts and Voldemort's wicked crew, the film becomes a rather pale affair. Harry, Hermione and Ron, personable as they may be, and the bickering adolescent interplay between them, are not sufficiently interesting to hold our attention. The film's succession of remarkable state-of-the-art special effects resembles a fabulous firework display put on by rather spoilt, ageing children at a dull Guy Fawkes party where the adults have all slipped off inside for a drink.

There are some good scenes. In one of them, entirely dependent on special effects, Alastor "Mad-Eye" Moody (Brendan Gleeson) gives a special potion to Harry, Ron, Hermione and half-a-dozen of their contemporaries that turns them all into clones of Harry to lead the Horcruxes on a merry chase around the country. This is "I am Spartacus" Hogwarts-style. In the one truly magical scene in the film, Harry, Hermione and Ron encounter a new character, Xenophilius Lovegood (Rhys Ifans), a Welsh wizard who explains to them the meaning of the sign of the eponymous deathly hallows and relates the resonant fable behind it.

A quest in the Grimm manner in which three brothers are each granted a wish from Death, his story is accompanied by a breathtakingly beautiful animated sequence combining Indonesian shadow theatre with the silhouette figures used in innovative German animator Lotte Reiniger's fairy tales of the 1930s.

Otherwise, Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows Part 1 is an inchoate thing that doesn't stand alone and ends abruptly in medias res. It's overlong, padded out and, to one unacquainted with the novel, incoherent. It is also obvious that a number of scenes were planned for 3D, including the opening, in which the camera floats through the Warner Brothers logo, and an impressive shot of a giant snake crawling down Voldemort's conference table to swallow a victim and with her the audience in the cinema.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One movie review ... Wesley Morris from The Boston Globe

How should we treat “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’’? Warner Bros. offers the instructive “Part One.’’ J.K. Rowling, of course, did no such thing. “Deathly Hallows’’ was the seventh and final novel of the series, and though it weighed the same as a school bus, that, ultimately, was that. The film has split the book, rather crassly, in half. “Part One’’ features the most deliriously inspired moviemaking since “The Prisoner of Azkaban,’’ from 2004, but I’m not sure I believe Warner Bros. is ready to part with a franchise that’s pulled in the equivalent of the gross domestic product of most of the islands in the Caribbean.

They’ve promised to deliver “Part Two’’ next July. But based on the way this first half stretches to 146 minutes, with credits, one can easily imagine Steve Kloves, who’s adapted most of the books, and the talented David Yates, making his third “Potter’’ film in a row, wringing hours of movie from a single page.

“The Deathly Hallows’’ ends as it begins, in Lord Voldemort’s creepy thrall. But the film has enough moments of silence and shots of its three heroes doing nothing so much as looking spiritually put-upon to pass muster at European art houses. On one hand, scenes of Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione (Emma Watson), and Ron (Rupert Grint) trekking through the woods and across moors are precious filler. On another, they’re daring. Before it culminates in a showdown with Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes), who murdered Harry’s parents, the “Harry Potter’’ series detours into a quest narrative in which Harry hunts for and destroys Voldemort’s soul-possessing “horcruxes’’ while Voldemort hunts for him. It’s been impressively divided between derring-do and downtime.

It’s hard to think of another blockbuster devoting so much of itself to its young protagonists’ existential and hormonal angst. (And so little music: Alexandre Desplat’s score often consists only of sounds, and, occasionally, the remote braying of a lone brass instrument.) Ron’s angst is a comic blend of attraction and repulsion. Before he slays a particularly nasty horcrux, he must endure the fantasy it generates, staring at his crush, Hermione, going at it with Harry. The shocking sensuality of the image enrages him enough to destroy its source and will force a few older moviegoers to retrieve eyes popped out of young heads. For Ron’s part, it’s for him to spend the rest of the film thinking what certain paying customers are: She's really hot.

That make-out session looks like a computer made it, but it’s more convincing (and more physically intense) than the big 3-D love scene in “Avatar.’’ In a display of mercy, plans to convert “The Deathly Hallows’’ to 3-D were scrapped. Could no one manufacture enough Real-D glasses to resemble Harry’s? In any case, bits that would have been gimmicky in 3-D are now legitimately scary: Voldemort’s enormous, professor-eating serpent lunging at the screen, say.

Voldemort himself is a diabolical piece of work. One of the achievements of the “Deathly Hallows’’ is that it’s one of the few “Harry Potter’’ films not to feel like a Halloween ball. The actors have always inhabited their roles with requisite whimsy or seriousness. But Fiennes’s Voldemort is a figure of almost biblical proportions. Indeed, the opening scene, with him at the head of a table, presiding over the series’ hideous regulars — Helena Bonham-Carter as Bellatrix Lestrange; Jason Isaacs and Tom Felton as the Malfoys; Alan Rickman as Severus Snape, who appears from ribbons of smoke; the wonderful, growling Peter Mullan as Yaxley — feels like a last supper. (Only the snake eats, but never mind.)

Fiennes’s face remains his behind walls of clammy prosthetic that turn the character into a yogurt-covered peanut. Yet, he emits an evil you rarely experience in mass-market entertainment. It’s all too real. When he says he intends to kill Harry, he means it. That table scene is a brilliant note to strike so soon. Voldemort has always hovered over these movies. But this is the first time Fiennes’s performance has, too. It’s a shame that we spend so much time running from him. We’re appalled and yet seduced.

Luckily, Yates can compensate for a physical lack of Voldemort with a wonderland of set pieces that range from the apocalyptic to the fantastic. An animated interlude explaining the film’s title is told in silhouettes that turn expressionist as the flat surfaces swell in foreboding dimension. The palette and textures are simple — sepia, char, gossamer, lace, and gauze — but unspeakably beautiful.

Like Alfonso Cuarón, who made “Azkaban,’’ Yates and his crew are as visually descriptive as Rowling was with language. One chase through the Ministry of Magic, a vast, unnavigable government space that Harry, Ron, and Hermione visit in disguise, is ingenious, suspenseful entertainment. No direct route exists for any destination. Elevators, for instance, travel laterally before they shoot down or up. The building projects government bureaucracy not simply in its structural convolutions but in its visual conception. The space is a flipbook of modern design history (futurism, rococo, Art Deco, Surrealism) whose open and confined spaces and gleaming black surfaces are an architectural dream of Fascist Italy, Terry Gilliam, and an onyx-tiled Oz. But the ministry’s legislative and prosecutorial doings suggest a heavier, darker conflation: Capitol Hill and Guantanamo Bay. The forest to which Harry and the gang flee is like the forests in all the other “Potter’’ movies but, this time, arriving there from the ministry feels newly loaded: It could be the woods of “The Conformist’’ or “The Godfather.’’

After all these movies, Kloves has found a way to let the adaptations breathe without Rowling’s life-support. The previous film, “The Half-Blood Prince,’’ was abundant with sexuality, hallucinogens, and magic. But its ultimate purpose was to get us to “The Deathly Hallows.’’ Now we’re here, ready to mourn the end, only to have to come back next summer. Why not one 4 1/2- or 5-hour movie? “Harry Potter’’ readers have buns of steel. For a studio so clearly willing to take risks with so many of its movies, this particular movie has a whiff of exploitation. Rowling wrote one epic funeral that Warner Bros. requires us to attend twice.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows ... Sophie Mayer from Sight and Sound, November 26, 2010

Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One - CBC.ca Rachel Giese

Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part 1 Review: The Magic of ... Stephanie Zacharek at Movieline

Movie Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I (2010 ... Brad Brevet from Rope of Silicon

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Jeff Robson]

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 Review | Everybody ... Daniel Carlson from Pajiba

Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]

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The Parallax Review [D. B. Bates]

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 Film Review at Future ... Coco Forsythe from Future Movies

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"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I" ~~ a Cinema Signals ... Jules Brenner

Digital Spy [Lara Martin]

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 - QNetwork ... James Kendrick

DVDTalk.com - theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]

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Cinema Autopsy [Thomas Caldwell]

'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1' Review: An ... Todd Gilchrist from Cinematical

Movie Cynics [The Vocabulariast]

n:zone [Daniel Kelly]

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New York Magazine David Edelstein

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I, The Next Three Days ... Joe Morgenstern from The Wall Street Journal

School Library Journal [Kent Turner]

Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]

Confessions of a Film Critic [John Maguire]

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I Pam Grady from Box Office magazine

filmsoundoff.com [Curt Schleier]

Movie Vault [Dylan Duarte]

DVD Talk [Brian Orndorf] also seen here: The Sci-Fi Movie Page [Brian Orndorf] and here: Briandom [Brian Orndorf]

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 review | Screenjabber Jennifer McKenzie

hoopla.nu [Mark Lavercombe]

Monsters and Critics [Anne Brodie]

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 | CineSnob Kiko Martinez

KSU E-Collegian [Tyler Brown]

Little White Lies Magazine [Adam Woodward]

Filmcritic.com Christopher Null

JWR [S. James Wegg]

Paste Magazine; Josh Jackson

Anthony Lane - The New Yorker (Page 2)

Georgia Straight [Patty Jones]

floatationsuite [Sheila Seacroft]

exclaim! [Allan Tong]

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 -- Film Review - The ... Todd McCarthy from The Hollywood Reporter

Variety.com [Justin Chang]

Peter Bradshaw's review The Guardian

The Guardian UK Xan Brooks

Austin Chronicle [Kimberley Jones]

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Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] also seen here: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1

New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott, November 18, 2010

‘Harry Potter,” Dissected Video analysis by Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott discussing themes in the first 5 movies, from The New York Times, July 14, 2007

A Screenwriter’s Hogwarts Decade Sarah Lyall from The New York Times, November 12, 2010

Horcrux - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Horcrux - Harry Potter Wiki

Harry Potter - Is Harry the last horcrux? - Beyond Hogwarts

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS, PT. 2 B- 81

Great Britain USA (130 mi) 2011 ‘Scope

You and who’s army? —Neville Longbottom (Matthew Lewis)

Pt. 2 begins pretty much where Pt. 1 left off, with Voldemort assuming the seemingly invincible powers by attaining the world’s most powerful wand by raiding Dumbledore’s coffin, leaving the wizard world in a state of flux and Harry still searching for the missing Horcruxes, the secret to dismantling Voldemort’s alleged invincibility. Action sequences are fast and frequent in this segment, where right out of the gate the gang of three are off on another mission together, following clues and tracking down secrets into the farthest corners of the earth, this time leading them to the bank vault of none other than Bellatrix Lestrange, Helena Bonham Carter, easily one of the best characters in the entire series, as the unbridled joy she takes in her malevolence is unsurpassed by anyone. Using the invisibility cloak to hide Harry and a goblin as his accomplice, not to mention ingenious disguises where Hermione assumes the look of Bellatrix, they simply walk right into Gringott’s bank to have a look, where the entry in resembles one of the world’s greatest roller coaster rides. Of course, all doesn’t go exactly as planned, where Hermione even makes a joke about how their ideas never work out as planned, yet it’s a clever opening, a masterful extended sequence, probably the best in the entire film, filled with ups and down delights and surprises, as the audience is immediately reeled into this final chapter.

The title character is given plenty of legroom in this one, with Ron and Hermione fading from prominence, showing up only as needed rather than initiating much of the action. Interestingly, much of this plays out in Harry’s head, where he has past recollections, strange, otherworldy visions, intuitive thoughts about where to seek out Horcruxes, which all but abandoned him in the last meandering episode, but also visions of the current whereabouts of Voldemort, where much of the film turns into what he senses is happening around him, where he’s actually tuning into the totality of his entire life. Hogwarts has been taken over by the dark side, surrounded by life-sucking Death Eaters, with Professor Snape (Alan Rickman) named the headmaster, where students are marched around with military precision like concentration camp victims, ordered by Snape to provide information about Harry Potter sightings or be severely punished, yet the entire group has facial wounds that suggest they have already been tortured. Nonetheless, Harry sneaks into the grounds searching for Horcruxes, where he runs into Dumbledore’s mysteriously bitter brother Aberforth (Ciarán Hinds), also a sister (Hebe Beardsall) that lives inside a painting, who seem to still be holding a grudge against him, where there are illuminating flashback sequences that shed light on their childhood. Still, another Dumbledore joining the fray has to reap positive benefits, even if reluctantly.

Voldemort uses his own version of mind control at Hogwarts, which begins with young girl students screaming in agony at the pain in their ears before an unseen but all powerful voice overwhelms them all, amounting to little more than bullying. However when Harry shows himself, along with his own band of self-taught supporters, Professor McGonagall (Maggie Smith) seems rightfully pleased and aids him in a wand to wand encounter with Snape that runs him off the premises, allowing a spirit of joy to re-enter the premises, at least for the moment. Aligning all the remaining wizard powers of good, McGonagall creates a spell that brings out giant stone chess player like protectors who were created for a moment such as this, as a spell encircles Hogwarts, like a protective bubble, while Voldemort and his Army gather on a nearby hill with a taste of victory in the air. The skies are darkened throughout this final installment, given a very ominous, Macbethian tone which foreshadows the inevitable confrontation of the young wizard and the Dark Lord, where a bloody price is ultimately paid. When his troops charge, the ensuing battle scenes are certainly reminiscent of the filmed version of LORD OF THE RINGS (2001 – 3), which contained an Iliad-like insatiability for blood. But when the spell initially holds them at bay, Neville chortles with joy, claiming yeah, You and Who’s Army?, an amusing reference to a song made famous by Radiohead in 2001, six years before the final book was released, seen here: Radiohead - You and Whose Army? (3:35). The protective bubble is short-lived however, as a near massacre ensues, leaving Hogwarts resembling the look of Rome, London, or Berlin in the aftermath of World War II, with rubble dominating the landscape.

However, behind the scenes, Harry is vigilant in finding and destroying the Horcruxes, each one of which wounds Voldemort, leaving him less confident and overpowering, the first time we’ve seen any hint of weakness on his part. But Harry seems equally drained by each destruction, as if he’s killing off a piece of himself in the process. There’s some interesting unfinished business with Professor Snape, some quite surprising and even a bit confusing, also more examples of the ruthlessness of Voldemort, before the inevitable confrontation has a bit of the magic potion texture of Romeo and Juliet, where life is suspended momentarily to climb into one of the Harry Potter visions, even as he appears dead to the rest of the world, giving Voldemort the apparent victory he has always sought, delighted at the idea he has finally killed off his young nemesis. Neville Longbottom, of all people, the “witless wizard” that conjures up laughs in the Voldemort camp, seen as a weakling throughout the entire series, finally rises to the occasion and sets off a student insurrection against the dark side, refusing to go easily, reuniting Harry’s friends, if only in spirit. Like Tinker Bell, after drinking the poison in Peter Pan, this positive spirit seems to raise Harry from the dead, providing the impetus needed to cross the finish line alive and in one piece. The finale is filled with wizard battle sequences, where even Ron’s mother gets into the action, actually calling Bellatrix a bitch before finishing her off with surprising gusto, but bodies line the grounds afterwards, the inevitable price of war. The aftermath (19 years later) is surprisingly sentimental and a bit lame, suggesting all things end back at the beginning where a new group of wizards has the chance to do it all over again. One of the fundamental disappointments of the finale was the near absent use of Hermione, a post feminist force, Muggle-born, yet considered the most ingenious young wizard in the art of potions, still relegated to the background through most of the final installment along with Ron, though holding hands at the end. Their picture of domestic bliss is more laughable than believable, like something out of the Silent era films 100 years earlier.

In reflecting on the entire series, the cinema itself has not been that outstanding or revelatory, hardly what one would call masterpieces, where only Alfonso Cuarón in PRISONER OF AZKABAN (2004) seemed to be having fun expanding the artistic palette of such a dark and mysterious world, creating a bleaker look, subjecting the audience to deeper terrors, not afraid to delve into the horror genre. The casting has been particularly ingenious, allowing walk on opportunities for some of Britain’s finest actors, bringing their theatrical exaggeration into a children’s realm, as these characters will be forever etched into people’s minds and imaginations for generations, as the success of Harry Potter in books and the movies easily make it the most influential children’s saga in history, having far reaching effects on the benefits of children having an imaginary world that they can continue to explore well into adulthood, where unlike Peter Pan, they can bring much of the charm and magic with them as they grow up. The real standouts in the series are the initial casting of the three friends, as we all watched them grow up and took a decided interest in their real lives as well, as they seem like genuinely good hearted and well-balanced kids where we can only hope for the best, though Daniel Radcliffe as Harry seems bound and determined to build a career outside this series, while the always beautiful Emma Watson as Hermione Granger is already a tabloid sensation, but may find it harder to break away from her brilliant, overly studious character.

Alan Rickman, the sinister man in black, made Professor Snape’s malicious character deliciously humorous, conniving, always overly critical yet intriguing, but also complicated, as he divided his allegiance between the darkness and the light in order to survive the enveloping madness surrounding him. Dumbledore, as written, is the heart of the magical end of the story, divided by two actors due to the premature death of Richard Harris, handing over the duties to the less flamboyant Michael Gambon. The Hogwarts professors are an eccentric lot, but Robbie Coltrane as Hagrid is easily the most lovable, the devoted giant who brought Harry into the wizard world, letting him know how special he was, something every child needs to hear, while of the eccentric friends, no one comes close to the offbeat humor and charm of Evanna Lynch as Luna, a girl who always turned up in strange places where her friendship and loyalty to Harry was unmatched. Julie Walters as the adoring mother of the Weasley clan couldn’t have been more lovingly affectionate. On the dark side, Helena Bonham Carter as Bellatrix proves once again that not only is she a brilliant actress, but her flair for the character enriched everyone else’s part, almost always upstaging Ralph Fiennes as You Know Who, or He Who Must Not Be Named. As for the animated characters, Dobby was simply a wonderful expression of kind-hearted sadness, whose moment of freedom was nothing less than sensational. Perhaps the lamest CGI creation was the completely uninspired Grawp, Hagrid’s dimwitted brother in ORDER OF THE PHOENIX (2007), while the most artistically inspired moment in the entire series was the surprisingly original animated puppet play explaining the origin of the Deathly Hallows in PT. 1 (2010). In the end, however, it’s the inventiveness of J.K. Rowling’s original creation that will stand the test of time, as she invented this strange and fabulous world filled with lovable characters who are forced to stand up to the dark forces, often at their own peril. It’s not often you can grow up with a movie series that takes you through an entire decade of growth development, but this is one of the real successes of the movies, the audience’s identification with the characters as if their lives actually mattered, because for so many kids, they do. That is the sign of exquisite writing, where the unforgettable, magical world they live in, with all the attention to detail, will likely live in our collective imaginations our entire lives.

Chicago Reader [Andrea Gronvall]

The boy wizard (Daniel Radcliffe) clashes with the evil Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) in this bang-up conclusion to the long-running franchise. Wraiths help and confound Harry as he comes to grips with his own dark side and risks the lives of his classmates and teachers by chasing down long-buried clues to Voldemort's weakness. Cinematographer Eduardo Serra underscores the sense of dread with a rich charcoal palette, and the outstanding CGI and 3D effects make the otherworldly threats more corporeal. The scene in which the dark wizards flame-bomb Hogwarts castle recalls the London blitz as portrayed in British movies about World War II; indeed director David Yates has crafted a most patriotic fantasy film with his focus on loyalty, self-sacrifice, tradition, and family. There'll always be an England, it seems, even without Harry Potter.

Time Out New York [Joshua Rothkopf]

“I need to talk to the goblin,” the young man says firmly, no longer a boy or even a teen, really. He’s obeyed instantly. Obviously, we’re still in J.K. Rowling’s wizardly world, but Daniel Radcliffe steps into this one with a decade’s conviction: We’ve seen him shuck off cutesiness and wrestle with adolescence—director Alfonso Cuarón’s third installment, The Prisoner of Azkaban, was a standout. But the final Harry Potter movie, above all others, supplies Radcliffe with the gravitas of not just an epic story come to completion, but some real dramatic heft. Not so bad for a Hogwarts dropout.

Even for those not under Rowling’s spell (how’s that abandoned mine shaft working out?), a noticeable uptick in adult intrigue will be clear: Said goblin conversation is a tense negotiation, followed by knotty chats with a whispery wand-maker (John Hurt), an orotund dark headmaster (Rickman, still killing it with the evil voice) and, eventually, Old No-Nose himself, Lord Voldemort (Fiennes). The latter is still hunting Horcruxes, as are Harry and the gang—these are the bits of treasure that draw them closer to their long-telegraphed death embrace. This time, though, you can actually feel the scrapes of regret and sacrifice on our hero, as well as on one unlikely villain.

Finally, we’re in a siege at a school, Voldemort’s voice echoing scarily in the hallways. This series is so much more than a generation’s stamp; it’s been its escape from a frightening world. And still, Harry’s story is one of embracing destiny and relinquishing power; stewarded by the actorcentric director David Yates and scored by Alexandre Desplat’s supplest orchestral strains, this fleet, triumphant sequel puts people first. I’d call that growing up.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 Tom Huddleston from Time Out London

Talk about transcending your roots. In ten short years (and eight rather long instalments), the Harry Potter series has gone from harmless, derivative boarding-school hi-jinks aimed squarely at bookish pre-teens to Julie Walters calling Helena Bonham Carter a bitch before killing her in cold blood. And that’s not even the nastiest bit – there’s some business here with Alan Rickman and a mean-tempered snake that’ll have even the toughest Potterphiles hiding behind their popcorn buckets.

But despite the increase in bloody violence – and the deaths of several major characters – ‘Deathly Hallows Part 2’ has little of the picturesque doom and gloom that sank its glum, tent-bound predecessor. This is an action movie, plain and simple, and all the better for it: from the breathless opening heist on Gringott’s magical bank to the hair-raising battle of Hogwarts which occupies most of the second half, this is crammed to the rafters with sword-swinging, expletive-hurling, dragon-riding magical mayhem.

The opening act is patchy but enjoyable, as a confusing, backstory-heavy dialogue scene leads straight into the aforementioned bank raid, a spectacular but rather rushed set piece. There’s just enough room for the obligatory introduction of another superfluous supporting character – in this case, Dumbledore’s crotchety brother Aberforth – before Harry and chums break back into Hogwarts and the main narrative kicks in.

Everyone brings their A-game here, notably director David Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves, who balance the source novel’s head-spinning blend of action, emotion and narrative intrigue with absolute confidence: one lengthy flashback sequence midway through is arguably the dramatic high point of the entire series, and even the sugary sweet coda, so mawkish on the page, becomes a thing of quiet beauty. The SFX are phenomenal, bringing to the magical shenanigans a tactile solidity which has been missing in previous episodes, while Yates’s use of 3D is never intrusive, and occasionally breathtaking.

But, as with most of the Potter films, it’s the cast who really deliver: the young leads have never been better, and it’s great to see Yorkshire’s finest, Neville Longbottom (played by Matthew Lewis), relishing the chance to step out of his chums’ shadows. It’s the villains who stick in the memory, whether it’s Rickman’s wondrously tight-lipped turn as the doomed Professor Snape or Ralph Fiennes’s genuinely peculiar but utterly convincing take on evil incarnate.

‘Deathly Hallows Part 2’ is far from a perfect film – the central plot point, the revelation of Harry’s destiny, is badly fudged, and there are a few too many key questions left hanging. But while it’s unfolding, this is just terrific fun: eye-scorching, ear-battering, heart-pounding cinema of pure spectacle.

Slant Magazine [Jaime N. Christley]

After a perfunctory couple of shots lifted from the end of the first installment of The Deathly Hallows, the film begins in earnest with a scene of slow, quiet urgency at an oceanfront cottage that could have been imported from Jacques Rivette's Out 1. The Harry Potter franchise's winding-down films, all four directed by David Yates, rely heavily on such calm-before-the-storm moments as the hour of Voldemort's inevitable defeat draws nigh. As the director himself has evolved from an efficient and vaguely stylish, yet unsure, functionary into the greatest director of blockbuster cinema since Steven Spielberg, the sense of unhurried, supple balance rarely departs from even the busiest, most deafening, most f/x-laden sequences. As a firestorm rages through a seemingly infinite attic space, Yates's camera (presided over by Eduardo Serra, who lensed seven of Claude Chabrol's last eight feature films) circumscribes enough screen space to anchor the chaos to a stabilizing, grounded structure with reassuring x-y axes, giving the viewer the pleasure both of frantic motion and its container.

If that's a little too egghead-cinephile for you folks, bear with me. Essential to understanding the magnitude of Yates's achievement is to deliver him from the lukewarm deathblow of "workmanlike," which is perfectly appropriate for Mike Newell's turn at bat, and far too kind to the toxic Chris Columbus. The fact that Yates marshals a mile-long grocery list of business with the grace and poise of an orchestra conductor, and makes it look easy, isn't just flattery, it's an indication of his method. The unavoidable flurry of activity and getting the treasure and escaping certain death and all that, the prostrate-before-Rowling, infernal importance of each "from the book, do it right" moment, the prestige of a project this scale, all of these symptoms of prideful self-commemoration are inseparable from a nonchalant, wistful distance, an attitude of smallness that calms it down, and gives us, as Ratatouille's Anton Ego might say, a little perspective.

These two indices of scale (macro and micro) are never far apart from one another. There's nothing new, for example, about a horde of bad guys getting ready to storm the good guys' stronghold (curiously, every face in the horde seems to have a sufficient fill lighting; hey, aren't you supposed to make CGI effects dingy and hard to see, as demonstrated in Peter Jackson's movies?), but Yates pivots the whole, expensive panorama on a furtive single step, the squeak of one leather boot as the chief baddie tests Hogwarts's force field. For Yates, casualness and abstraction are inextricable from the emotional force of his direction. Images that have been worn to a nub from overuse (the Cloak of Invisibility, Dementors, Disapparating) reacquire elegance, if they ever had it to begin with. Even the image of Lily Potter being struck down—only one of a thousand moments Columbus fumbled in The Sorcerer's Stone, from which the shot was lifted—gains emotional resonance and abstraction through reframing and repetition. The only sequence that risks getting a summons for excessive exposition (the last dip into the Pensieve) is saved by a fluid, unstable fragmentation reminiscent of Gondry/Kaufman, and the unexpected welling up of longing and heartache in Alan Rickman's brilliant performance. (His is one of the deftest balancing acts of the year, operating as the film does on multiple octaves.)

Deathly Hallows: Part 2 also sounds strange. The horcruxes emit a steady, maddening, low whine, similar to the one heard throughout Lars von Trier's Antichrist. The goblin custodians of Gringotts wield what looks to be a U.S. Army version of a baby's rattle to rend a pale, keening dragon into submission. The alarms at the same institution sound like the protest of a thousand alley cats. There's also the combined timbre of half the British stage—a crowd from which Rickman, Maggie Smith, and Ralph Fiennes distinguish themselves. Sometimes the acting is that of high, dry, scene-stealing camp, and sometimes it's like Yates has read my mind and knows that all I want every now and then is for a character to stand completely still and not say anything.

That in itself may prove a divisive issue. Some will complain that the film doesn't explain every last thing that's happening and why, or provide ample context, blithely assuming you've read the books, and simply plows ahead. Good. I haven't read more than a few chapters of any of the books, except for The Sorcerer's Stone, and that was over 10 years ago, but for a finale like this—in stark contrast to the never-ending conclusion of New Line Cinema's Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Based on the Novel The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien—it's safe to say that less is more. A lot more. Is the story really of such paramount importance at this point? Hogwarts becomes Precinct 13 and Voldemort is the Death Star—there you go. The big picture is backdrop, as Yates, while gently weaving the shuttle of parallel editing between these two major movements, finds limitless opportunity to depict smallness and stillness in the chaos and hubbub, reshaping the bombast and branding around the most minute contours.

Washington Post [Ann Hornaday]

It is finished.

That Biblical reference is fully intended when considering "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows -- Part 2," the final installment of a movie series that surely owes part of its astronomical success to its rich symbolic underpinnings of sacrifice, resurrection and redemption. Feeling at once like an anti-climax and a spot-on send-off, the ultimate Harry Potter movie embodies all the elements that have made the franchise such a sturdy enterprise, from its cream-of-the-crop British cast to its lavish but unfussy illustration of a story that will always be captured best in readers' imaginations.

Picking up precisely where its first installment left off, "Deathly Hallows -- Part 2" finds Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) burying his dear friend Dobby, "A Free Elf," as the tombstone describes him, and setting off on yet another grim journey to find the Horcruxes containing tatters of Lord Voldemort's soul and destroying them, the better to weaken and ultimately defeat the force of darkness also known as You Know Who.

Harry's moment at Dobby's grave sets an apt tone for a largely cheerless quest that will take Harry, Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) from Shell Cottage to the bowels of Gringotts Bank and finally to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where Severus Snape (Alan Rickman) holds sway as the school's humorless headmaster and where Harry will meet his Calvary at the hands of Voldemort, once again brilliantly portrayed by Ralph Fiennes (with that disconcerting blur where a nose should be).

Eight movies into the decade-long series, an outsider might wonder: Where's the joy in "Harry Potter?" Where's the fun? They're there, but couched in weighty millennial struggles between Good and Evil. And by now, such questions are clearly beside the point in a franchise, based on J.K. Rowling's best-selling novels, that has uncannily tapped into the mood of its age, growing up along with a generation that watched the Twin Towers come down on September 11 the same year the first movie came out. There's no denying the primal power of watching a contemporary -- in this case a bookish-looking wizard with the face of a schoolboy and the magical powers of a superhero -- come to terms with death, apocalyptic destruction and the burdensome responsibilities of his own swiftly encroaching maturity.

To their everlasting credit, Warner Brothers and the filmmakers behind the "Harry Potter" movies -- especially screenwriter Steve Kloves -- have taken their stewardship of a generation's ur-myth seriously, infusing the adaptations with the solemnity and meaning that Potter fans expect and deserve. Like its predecessors, "Deathly Hallows -- Part 2" unfolds with the handsome, high-class production values and somberness that have come to characterize the series, creating a movie of adventure, drama and spectacle that, miraculously, never overreaches. (Although this viewer quibbles with the decision to present the final chapter in 3-D, an add-on that feels more like a distraction than an enhancement.)

If early scenes at the beach and the bank feel like so much perfunctory throat-clearing (albeit with a slyly amusing turn from Helena Bonham Carter impersonating herself at Gringotts), the action takes irresistible hold once Harry and his team reach Hogwarts. It's the castle, after all, that defines the spiritual center of the "Harry Potter" movies and that, with Voldemort amassing his troops nearby, stands in dire danger of being overrun. And it's here that Kloves and director David Yates allow Harry and the audience to say goodbye to so many of the series' beloved supporting characters, from the improbably heroic Neville Longbottom (Matthew Lewis) to a calvacade of indelible witches, wizards and magical apparatchiks, including Minerva McGonagall (Maggie Smith), Sybil Trelawny (Emma Thompson) and Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent), as well as Albus Dumbledore's bitter brother Aberforth (an impeccably cast Ciaran Hinds).

"Deathly Hallows -- Part 2" features even more surprise appearances by characters past, adding to an appropriately valedictory tone whereby no loose end is left to flutter. While Harry dutifully seeks to destroy Voldemort and save the wizarding world, he even has his version of a "Luke, I'm your father" moment, when through the mists of a device called a Pensieve he discovers the true nature of one of his most reliably hostile adversaries.

In "Deathly Hallows -- Part 1," Watson's plucky Hermione stole the show, winning the day through cunning and understated capability. Here, and again appropriately, the movie belongs to Harry and Harry alone, as he faces down ultimate evil and tries to save his world from carnage and destruction. That may not be entirely possible: The film's set piece is a fiery, furious battle scene wherein Voldemort and his Death-Eating minions lay waste to Hogwarts. But in Harry's world, rebirth is always in the offing, even when it takes place in the pristine-white environs of an otherworldly King's Cross station.

Watching Radcliffe in this scene is to wonder at the taste, perception and sheer luck of finding three actors who could age from 10 to 21 with such poise, grace and -- not to put too fine a point on it -- attractiveness. Who could have predicted that Radcliffe, Grint and Watson would turn out to be good actors? What are the chances they all three would manage to grow up without losing the appeal that first drew viewers in? Indeed, who would have thought that, especially in Watson's case, she would only grow more fetching, more focused and composed, as the years went by?

"Harry Potter" may be about wizards and wands, Dementors and dragons, spells and sorcery, but the real magic lies in its stars. And with its heartening final note of hope and renewal, "Deathly Hallows -- Part 2" provides an altogether fitting finale to a series that has prized the fans above all. For that, the "Harry Potter" movies deserve thanks and praise -- genuflection optional.

'Harry Potter' Ends With a Bang - Christopher Orr ... - The Atlantic

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 (2011) Tim Dirks Filmsite, also see earlier reviews here: The Harry Potter Films: 1-7

Surrender to the Void-[Steven Flores]

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Ralph Fiennes says Harry Potter's evil Lord Voldemort just 'lonely' Ben Child interviews the actor from The Guardian, July 14, 2011

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Yates, Peter

BULLITT

USA (114 mi) 1968

Time Out review Tom Milne

A thriller which begins, as it means to go on, with a bang. Only minutes after the preliminaries are over, a door bursts open, a shotgun is fired, and the victim is blasted clean off the bed into the wall behind him. The plot, concerning the battle of wits between an honest cop and an ambitious politician for possession of the key witness in a Mafia exposé, is serviceable but nothing special. But the action sequences are brilliant, done without trickery in real locations (including a great car chase which spawned a thousand imitations) to lend an extraordinary sense of immediacy to the shenanigans and gunfights.

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Chuck Aliaga) dvd review [Special Edition]

Steve McQueen is one of the first names that comes to mind when we hear the phrase "Hollywood legend." Up there with the likes of Clark Gable and Cary Grant, McQueen was the actor in the 1960s. However, the "legend" that McQueen most draws comparisons to is the late James Dean. Both men literally loved to live life in the fast lane, especially McQueen, who owned and rode motorcycles and speedy, fancy cars.

Steve McQueen took his love for cars and just plain wildness to the next level by almost always performing his own stunts in his films. Movie producers didn't exactly like his insistence on putting his life at risk during shooting, but this resulted in a finished product that was much more genuine than those in which it is obvious that the movie's star isn't performing the daring deeds.

Unlike Dean, Steve McQueen's early death (he was only 50) wasn't the direct result of his wild personal life. While Dean died in a car accident, McQueen died of lung cancer, the form of which could have been caused by exposure to the asbestos that was in his race car safety suits. Then again, McQueen spent time in the Marines, and could have been exposed to the harmful material then. While Dean's death was pretty cut and dried, McQueen's death remains somewhat mysterious, relegating both legends as cult icons as well.

Arguably the actor's largest success and most memorable film, Bullitt was unleashed in theaters in 1968, giving birth to the term "gritty cop drama," which is thrown around a lot these days. Steve McQueen stars as Frank Bullitt, a no-nonsense San Francisco cop who has been assigned to guard mafia informant Johnny Ross. Frank is leery of his assignment since shady politician Walter Chalmers was the assignee. Frank realizes that it is his duty to follow orders, but that doesn't mean that he won't be careful about who to trust.

This wonderfully exciting, true classic of a film is best known for the car chase sequence that occurs near its halfway point. With McQueen behind the wheel during this exhilarating sequence, he soars through the hills of San Francisco, pursued by gangsters. The editing and Peter Yates' direction here is topnotch, ranking up there with the best of film lore's chase sequences, including the one in The French Connection.

The events surrounding the big chase scene are quite compelling as well, featuring a career-making performance by McQueen, and great work from Robert Vaughn, Robert Duvall, and Jacqueline Bisset. This is a tight action-packed thriller that will have you rooting for one of Hollywood's true heroes the whole way.

Revisiting this classic film today brings about the obvious comparison between Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood, and, more specifically, between Bullitt and Dirty Harry. Both projects were huge successes for their star actors, almost singlehandedly making them Hollywood icons. The comparisons don't stop there, as the titular characters are both gruff, hard-nosed cops who aren't afraid to bend the rules. While Eastwood has made countless films and is now one of our most talented directors (Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby), McQueen died far too young and never had the chance to compile as large a filmography. Still, quality being much more important than quantity, and McQueen's career is untouchable.

Bullitt - TCM.com Rob Nixon

Car chases have been a staple of American film ever since the appearance of the Keystone Kops in the silent era. The ten-minute pursuit in Bullitt (1968), up and down the steep streets of San Francisco (which gave some viewers motion sickness with its dizzying visuals), is regarded as one of the best ever put on film along with those in The French Connection (1971) and The Road Warrior (1981) and remains the one thing most viewers remember about the movie.

But Bullitt is worth repeated viewings for more than just its most famous sequence. A precursor to the explosive action movies of the eighties and nineties, the film brought a modern, technically advanced style to the tough detective movies of a generation before. And Steve McQueen's portrayal of the taciturn, mistrusting police lieutenant is considered one of his best and certainly most iconic.

Frank Bullitt is not your conventional cop, even for so unconventional a city as San Francisco. He dresses sharp and trendy (in costumes that designer Theadora Van Runkle based on the clothes of a handsome, dapper boyfriend she had at the time), drives a souped-up Mustang, and has a chic girlfriend (the beautiful Jacqueline Bisset) whose major interest is modern art. He also has atypical working methods; when a mob witness he is assigned to protect is murdered, Bullitt gets a sympathetic doctor to agree to keep quiet temporarily about the death while he solves the murder, and exposes double-dealings and cover-ups in the process. While the narrative is both intricate and exciting, it actually holds less interest than the film's style, action sequences, and its presentation of McQueen as a different kind of hero for a new age. It was his own favorite film and the one for which he is best remembered, the movie that shot him into superstar status.

By the late 60s, McQueen had become big box office on the heels of his success in The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Great Escape (1963), and The Sand Pebbles (1966). In just a decade, he had risen from TV star (Wanted: Dead or Alive, 1958) to an internationally famous actor with enough clout to form his own production company. Producer Philip D'Antoni had optioned Robert Pike's book Mute Witness for Spencer Tracy, hoping to cast the aged actor in the central role of the luckless New York cop Clancy. When the project at last came to McQueen's attention, Warner Brothers saw the box office potential in it, and a rewrite was ordered to change the lead's name, age and location. That location became the first sticking point between McQueen and Warners, who wanted it shot on the back lot. The star suggested the studio "shove" the picture unless it was done his way. His way, it was. Bullitt became the first film shot entirely on location with an all-Hollywood crew and the first to use the new lightweight Arriflex cameras exclusively.

McQueen also gave the front office headaches by insisting on doing all his own stunts (a skill and bravado immortalized by playwright David Mamet in his 1985 short piece "Steve McQueen"). Yates insists the actor did his own driving (at speeds up to 110 mph) for the chase sequence; other sources say McQueen was furious to awake one morning and find most of the driving had already been shot. Whatever the facts, the film has become part of the legend of the tough, tortured star who enjoyed his success but wanted to be known as a versatile actor, too. Several years later, at the opposite end of the spectrum from Bullitt, McQueen made himself almost unrecognizable behind a beard and heavy clothing to play Dr. Stockmann in his film adaptation of Ibsens's drama An Enemy of the People (1977). The picture was shelved, however, and remained unreleased by the time McQueen died in a Juarez, Mexico clinic, searching for a miracle cure to the cancer that killed him at the age of fifty.

DVD Times Mike Sutton

Dragan Antulov review [8/10]

Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review

American Cinematographer dvd review Jim Hemphill, October 2005

filmcritic.com (Pete Croatto) review [2.5/5]

DVD Review: BULLITT Nathan Williams from Being There magazine

DVD Verdict (David Ryan) dvd review [Special Edition]

DVD Verdict (Ryan Keefer) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]

DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Talk (Adam Tyner) dvd review [4/5] [HD-DVD Version]

DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review [HD DVD Version]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] The Essential Steve McQueen Collection

Classic Film Guide (capsule)

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]

The New York Times (Renata Adler) review

DVDBeaver.com [Enrico]

DVDBeaver.com - Blu-ray-DVD Review [Leonard Norwitz]

JOHN AND MARY B+ 91

USA (92 mi) 1969 ‘Scope

One of the film discoveries of my youth, a quiet European-style film where nothing happens, the kind of film that would never be financed today as there’s simply no action of any kind to speak of and audiences would most likely find it boring, as many did even when I saw it in the theaters nearly four decades ago. Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow star in a one night stand that leads to mostly unanswered questions about one another the following morning, an interior chamber drama influenced by the French New Wave, mostly in the jump cut flashback sequences told out of order or the amusing use of interior monologues where each character thinks something out loud to themselves while what’s said is something altogether different. In this manner, we realize the awkwardness of the characters, but also their plotting, carefully calculated intentions. Both are educated white middle class, fertile Woody Allen territory, who spend most of their time in Hoffman’s roomy New York City apartment which has an unheard of spacious architecture to it, rooms to get lost in with gigantic windows including a circular metal staircase leading to a loft. Mia Farrow especially couldn’t be more charming and is the benefactor of the best lines throughout, written by prolific theater writer John Mortimer who wittily adapts Mervyn Jones’s novel, honing it down to its bare essence. Shot immediately after MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969), which was an actor’s showcase for Hoffman, this is dialed down to near wordless minimalist scenes, as the entire film is exploratory in nature. Despite being nearly unanimously panned when it came out, due to the timeless relevance of the script and the brilliance of the two leads, it has a surprising inner intensity, as it plays out like an Eric Rohmer relationships study.

Only in the flashbacks do we get any hint of what era this is filmed in, as everything else takes place in the hermetically sealed walls of Hoffman’s apartment. It’s interesting how certain scenarios play out in extended scenes, yet they turn out to be daydreams, thoughts that happen in an instant before reality clicks in. Each has had previously failed relationships that continue to play out in their minds, which feel amusingly dated, like some bad Love Boat connection, where there are references to the Vietnam War, Godard’s WEEKEND, angry demonstrations, out of touch politicians who usurp slogans like “make love not war,” but then Cleavon Little has a brief appearance as a young man with a movie camera obsessed with cinéma vérité, who films anything and everything around him claiming it’s teeming with real life! In structure, this resembles the interior architecture of Dreyer’s GERTRUD (1964), also initially thought of as a failure, where characters are unusually guarded and suspicious about entering into another relationship, carefully feeling one another out with skepticism, reflected in shots down long hallways where characters become lost or miniaturized from the exaggerated dimensions of the use of space. Both are considering rearranging the interior designs of their lives but instead talk about the furniture, George Frederick Handel, the advantage of organic eggs, what they would like for lunch of dinner, anything but themselves. People looking for common sense or logic to prevail will be missing the point here as this film is all about the awkwardness of searching for honesty.

Time Out review

Part two of Peter Yates' step-by-step demonstration of his abilities to Hollywood: first the cars (in Bullitt), here the characters (in the archetypal late '60s morning-after-the-night-before movie). Hoffman and Farrow awake to each other in a New York bed and interminably worry, via chat, fantasy, flashback and some trendy cultural reference, whether they should do it again.

Channel 4 Film capsule review

Yates's small and unambitious New York character study has Hoffman and Farrow as a pair who meet, have sex and then have to decide whether they should ditch the baggage they are carrying and start a relationship, or leave it as a one-night stand. There are unforgivably charmless performances from the two fine actors, but they are not helped by the director's fussiness, able to fetishize the city and urban accoutrements, while not giving a damn for his characters. If the main participants in this drab affair come across so uninspired, it will be hard to find an audience who will care.

Filmbrain Like Anna Karina’s Sweater

[NB: In the interest of full disclosure -- John and Mary was actually released in 1969, but it's a 70's film in spirit.]

Manhattan. 1969. Women's liberation, the Vietnam War, and the sexual revolution are hot topics. In a crowded bar, a designer (Dustin Hoffman) overhears a woman (Mia Farrow) cleverly discussing Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend with a few friends. Impressed with her comments, he butts into the discussion and winds up asking the woman if he can buy her a drink. Cut to the morning after. The two have spent the night together, and now the awkward bit begins.

This is the simple premise behind Peter Yates' 1969 film, John and Mary. The genesis of a relationship in the course of a single day. Filmbrain doesn't know how or why this film escaped him for so many years -- it's not only a wonderful film, but a small piece of screenwriting heaven as well. (File under: they don't write them like this anymore!)

The film is somewhat of a precursor to the current day RomCom, just much more intelligent, and not so much Com. Instead of the painful artifice of Nora Ephron types (Harry/Sally), here we have two very real characters navigating their way through the day after a one night stand, trying (subtly) to learn more about each other while at the same time working through their own relationship fears and anxieties. What keeps the film interesting is the non-linear structure -- at times we're not sure if a scene we're watching is in the past, future, or simply imagined. Screenwriter John Mortimer keeps the dialog flowing, but it's short, sharp, and precise. We are granted the luxury of hearing both John and Mary's inner thoughts -- a technique that can be (and often is) disastrous or cloying, but here is used to great effect. The verbal tennis match between the two is quite natural -- this isn't meant to be Edward Albee or William Inge -- rather it's the subtlety of their dialog that winds up revealing more about them. Filmbrain greatly prefers this approach to the Before Sunrise/Sunset model, which (while not bad films at all) feels the need to have the characters constantly saying something interesting and/or profound. Awkwardness between characters is a wonderful thing, and this is what Filmbrain often strives for in his own screenplays.

Both John and Mary are very much products of the time. Mary's a liberated woman who chooses to have one-night stands (something John feels is fine for men, but not women) and is at the same time involved with a married man. She speaks openly about sex, her desires, etc. John, on the other hand, is quite reserved. He lives in an apartment so clean and stylish that Mary is convinced he's married. He likes to cook, listens to classical music in the afternoon, jazz at night, and brass music in the morning. Mary's initial thought is that he's a bore. He, on the other hand, sees her as a wild sex freak who is simply trying to worm her way into his apartment -- something his former girlfriend did, nicely incorporated in a series of flashbacks. Each is continually trying to trap the other one into saying something that will give justification to their doubts, rather than confronting their own cynicism. It's a joy to watch, and doesn't seem dated at all. Relationships, and the angst associated with them, hasn't really changed much since the end of World War II.

What adds to the film's success is the casting -- both Hoffman and Farrow are so suited for their respective roles, and there's a wonderful chemistry between them that never seems forced. Director Peter Yates (a Brit, though many of his films were made in the states) is probably best known for the Steve McQueen film Bullitt, though he did go on to direct a few other interesting films in the 70's, including The Hot Rock, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and the Oscar nominated Breaking Away.

John and Mary is sadly not available on DVD, though it does air regularly on The Fox Movie Channel. Filmbrain would love to hear from others about the film -- please feel free to comment.

KQEK (Mark R. Hasan) dvd review

This flawed but intriguing little film has been maligned a bit over the years as a forgotten dud, made about a year after three of the principles - stars Dustin Hoffman, Mia Farrow, and director Peter Yates – had achieved major box office stardom in The Graduate, Rosemary's Baby, and Bullitt, respectively. The film did nothing to improve nor harm their careers (except perhaps producer Ben Kadish, who more or less disappeared into TV soon after), but its premise of a couple who start getting to know each other after a one night stand is a clever hook.

Based on a novel by Mervyn Jones, John Mortimer's screenplay follows the awakening couple through a roughly 12 hour period, and Yates indulges in some effective flashbacks and flash edits that juggle the time frame to offer a bit of irony between the characters' present day observations on each other – some verbalized, and some heard as narrated thoughts.

The narration is perhaps the least effective indulgence, mostly because the actors' nuances, beautifully milked through editing and superb compositions, convey what we already perceive from our own personal experiences of unsaid, reticent thoughts kept quiet under benign smiles. More audible and balanced in the DVD's pseudo-stereo remix, the narration feels like a gimmick, and may have been written into the script out of fear that the tempi of whole scenes would've been rendered deadly slow (which, given the film's extant pacing, isn't an unreasonable assumption).

The flashbacks, smoothly edited by longtime Yates cutter Frank P. Keller (Bullitt , Murphy's War, and The Hot Rock), also open up the recent and distant past of both characters, and slowly explain reasons for specific suspicions, and counterpoint their hasty assumptions based on biases or hidden prejudices.

Key contemporary elements – Farrow's Mary is a bit of a free-thinking, carefree student, living with a pair of equally sexually rambunctious roommates (including a very young Tyne Daly), and is having an affair with a married Senator – do date the film, particularly a student rally scene where the Senator addresses the student body and attempts to bond with impatient brats wanting justice ‘now!' but her character is clearly meant to offer a stark contrast to Hoffman's John – a furniture designer whose life mandates order, simplicity, and a taste for unadorned art forms, like Bach's brass concertos, which he plays for Mary on his high-end Marantz stereo and linear tracking turntable. (In a bit of obvious product placement, it isn't a coincidence that Yates has cinematographer Gayne Rescher frame receiver's the back-end so ‘Marantz' is crisply visible to audience.)

The problem with John and Mary lies in the play-like banter that also lacks a certain edge; it doesn't need to be verbose, profane, or provocative, but if stripped of flashbacks, what's left feels like a filmed play, lacking the kind of potent, sharp wit that elevated similarly underappreciated gems like Straight On Till Morning and Hoffman – play-like dramas strongly infused with elements of horror, mystery, and bent romance.

Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow are pretty charismatic as the titular couple, and regardless of how one feels the story should end, their volleys and sidesteps provide some humour, intrigue, and frankness in a production clearly designed to exploit the popularity of two stars with an audience wanting an upscale hippy vs. square romance, with overtly adult elements (including references, behaviour, and nudity).

For the DVD, Fox adds a trailer and a set of still galleries (with some of the great poster art, and premiere stills with aging Fox Czar Darryl F. Zanuck among the guests), but the label really should've contacted director Yates for a commentary track, as these tend to be the films directors regard with a certain affection; for Yates, John and Mary was an odd rest between action and caper films, and for the actors, the script was free from the demons, psychoses, and novelty romances in recent films.

Quincy Jones' score is pretty threadbare – aside from Bach extracts and some original source songs (including one by Jeff Bridges!) – but the characters clearly inspired Jones to write one of his best themes that's oddly underused in the finished film. (The soundtrack album contains four theme variations and reconfigurations, including a brassy, Bach-like end title version dropped from the film that would've coloured the couple's situation at the end quite differently.)

Olympia Dukakis has a small role in a flashback as John's mother, and Cleavon Little pops up as a wannabe film director in a super-brief scene. It's easy to dismiss John and Mary, but one gets a sense it managed to affect a few audience members, as the film's first reel is basically a brilliantly choreographed montage: after separately waking up in John's bed, each better half tries to peek at the other's private objects – purses, clothes, bathroom paraphernalia – and Yates has fun without using any dialogue. It's a textbook example of sublime montage, and the sequence was somewhat copied and interpolated in a key seduction scene in Steven Kloves' sultry and very witty The Fabulous Baker Boys, with Jeff Bridges and Michelle Pfeiffer nosing through the other's bedroom and bathroom clutter.

DVD Talk (Paul Mavis) dvd review [3/5]

Time Magazine December 19, 1969

All Movie Guide [Craig Butler]

TV Guide

Variety.com [Variety Staff]

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

THE HOT ROCK

USA (101 mi) 1972 ‘Scope

Time Out review

Donald E Westlake, who also writes under the name of Richard Stark, has quietly been providing material for some of the better American thrillers for some years. Point Blank, The Split and The Outfit, all with similar plots and themes, were adaptations from Stark novels. Like Cops and Robbers, The Hot Rock is by Westlake. Both of them touch on the themes of teamwork and capitalism, crime being just another form of free enterprise. Redford and Segal are both good, parodying their normal images, as the thieves who steal the Sahara Stone from the Brooklyn Museum and spend the rest of the film chasing after it. Like Cops and Robbers it's a lightweight film, but enjoyable nonetheless.

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Rosado) dvd review

If I may borrow a line from a classic Frank Sinatra song, in 1972 when Robert Redford was 35, "it was a very good year." Within a span of twelve months, the future godfather of Sundance starred in three terrific films: Jeremiah Johnson, the witty and still relevant The Candidate (to which a sequel is being mulled) and the highly underrated The Hot Rock, based on Donald E. Westlake's popular book of the same name.

All recently released ex-con, John Dortmunder (Redford), wants is a fresh start. Although his past record as a repeat offender doesn't exactly instill confidence in people like soon to be ex-warden (Graham P. Jarvis), Dortmunder is adamantly sincere about toeing the line, at least on the surface. Mere minutes after walking through the prison gates on the road to freedom, a wildly out-of-control motorist begins to tail him. Climbing to safety on a nearby fence, the car comes to a screeching halt with the mad motorist emerging with warm greetings and salutations. Once John gets his bearings, he realizes this crazy idiot is his brother-in-law Andrew Kelp (George Segal), who wastes no time in securing John's services for a heist.

So much for prison rehabilitation.

However, there is a twist to this robbery in development; a caper with a cause, you might say. In the center ring of the Brooklyn Museum stands one Sahara stone, a sacred African diamond according to continent native Dr. Amusa (Moses Gunn). Anxious to have the piece returned to its homeland, the African businessman wheels and deals Dortmunder into committing to the gig.

Since Andrew is a lock shop owner, he's an instant first pick for John's support staff as two other candidates are considered: Stan Murch (Ron Leibman), an eclectic auto mechanic with a wild streak and a flair for the dramatic. On the opposite end of the spectrum, explosives expert Alan Greenburg (Paul Sands) is so low key, he makes Steven Wright look like Pee Wee Herman. Satisfied with their talents, our dream team's complete, with the first order of business is surveillance, to get an idea of just how much security surrounds the building, followed by the plotting of distraction scenarios and determining weak points.

Heist night arrives and the opening stanza is a doozy. In the grand tradition of knowing how to make an entrance, Murch careens onto the grounds via a perfectly executed car crash that should merit honorary stuntman hall-of-fame status. Emerging out of the wreckage, fake blood and all, Stan hams it up for an audience primarily consisting of museum guards while John and Andrew (already decked out in their snazzy guard uniforms and bemusedly watching from the inside) make their way toward that "hot rock."

Meanwhile, Alan supplements Murch's award-caliber theatrics by playing doctor and creating further diversions up to a point, then changes into security threads to assist Dortmunder and Kelp. But a rousing round of luck gets K.O.'d quickly, thanks to a weighty glass overlay protecting the diamond that the three cannot maneuver properly with Andrew getting bubbled up inside. While attempting to free him, the real guardsmen put two and two together and a melee ensues. Alarms blaring, house lights now illuminated, Kelp makes it out in the nick of time tossing the stone to Alan as the three make a break for it. While John, Andrew and Stan manage to flee, poor Greenberg’s not as lucky, but in an inspired move, he swallows the diamond just before being cornered (who says Three Stooges shorts can't be educational?).

So, it's back to square one as our trio has to figure out where to go from here. Adding to the pressure is the meddling of Alan's sleazy lawyer (Zero Mostel), who says his client will cooperate only if he's successfully sprung from prison. If not, he'll testify against his pals for a lesser sentence. Although not without thrills and chills, the prison daring-do goes a little bit more smoothly than the Brooklyn break-in with Greenberg safely excavated, diamond in hand and all, right? Wrong-o! Much to their dismay (not to mention a very unamused Dr. Amusa), Alan hid the diamond in a detention cell at the police station where he was taken for questioning. With their most challenging round of diamond thievery looming, how will John and his gang get past New York's finest?

If you appreciated the offbeat humor of the original Ocean's Eleven sprinkled with a touch of whimsy, The Hot Rock is built to please. Although mainly hailed for his more romantic roles and "films with a conscience," Redford has always been undervalued for his comedic abilities, which are wonderfully on display here. Eclectic support comes from the peppy Segal, Leibman's speed-loving manic mechanic (you have got to love a guy who gets his kicks from listening to car race soundtrack albums) and the dry wit of Tony winner Paul Sand (anybody remember Friends and Lovers from his TV days?). Nearly trumping this superb assemblage of talent is fellow Broadway legend Zero Mostel, who is nothing short of hysterical in an all-too-brief bit as Alan's legal representation with a surprising personal tie to his client. Also of note: A blink-and-you'll-miss-it glimpse of a very young Christopher Guest (midway through Chapter 20) as a policeman in a pivotal scene, set at a local precinct.

Peter Yates' (Bullitt, Breaking Away) slick direction combined with a witty script penned by Oscar® honoree William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President's Men) and atmospheric cinematography from Edward R. Brown (including a breathtaking aerial sweep through NYC featuring a now-bittersweet shot of the World Trade Center undergoing finishing touches) add to the effectiveness of a ripe-to-be-rediscovered gem.

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review

DVD Verdict (Erick Harper) dvd review

Vern's review

Channel 4 Film capsule review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]

Yeager, Steve

DIVINE TRASH B+ 91

USA (97 mi) 1998

Bright Lights Film Journal Gary Morris

Divine Trash documents what many have suspected — that its subject, John Waters, is the key figure in the post-1960s indie movement, single-handedly creating the midnight movie, busting every taboo imaginable including the fecal nosh, and eclipsing other, more respectable contenders like John Cassevettes or John Sayles in showing how a personal vision can trump a shoestring budget. This insider look at Waters’ career offers loving testimonials from Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley, Richard Kern, and other indie superstars, but the real fascination is in the interviews with Waters’ friends and foes and rare footage taken on the “sets” — often little more than a Baltimore sidewalk, hippie crash pad, or broken-down trailer — of his early films. The “filthiest director alive” emerges as a bit sadistic in his dealings with his absurdly accommodating actors but thoughtful and witty in reminiscing about his glory days as a bargain-basement huckster-artiste. The film focuses mostly on Pink Flamingos and its surreal production circumstances that included stolen props, church screenings, pothead actors starved or nearly incinerated, and a $200 budget. Among the interviewees is everybody's secret favorite character in the film, the “singing asshole,” who appears in shadow, and doesn't “"sing” this time.

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

When John Waters' Pink Flamingos was reissued for its 25th anniversary in 1997, gross-out comedy was just beginning to regain momentum in American multiplexes, with each new entry shrewdly calculated to tip the sacred cows left standing by the previous one. In an environment in which no taboos were left unshattered, the remarkable thing about the underground classic is that it hadn't lost its eternal power to shock. Waters' backwoods carnival of horrors—Edith Massey's shrill woman-child devouring eggs in a crib, the singing asshole, drag queen Divine's notorious shit-eating grin—drove a new generation of jaded viewers to the exits. A fellow Baltimore resident and longtime friend of the director, Steve Yeager brought his camera on set, and his revealing behind-the-scenes footage threads Divine Trash, an exhaustive and laudable documentary that carves out a niche for Pink Flamingos in cinema history. Yeager, who appeared briefly in the film as a reporter, spends a lot of time addressing Waters' formative years, from his boyhood obsession with The Howdy Doody Show to his first viewing of Herschell Gordon Lewis' Blood Feast through binoculars outside a drive-in. At a time when Lewis, Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, Russ Meyer, and Jonas Mekas were emerging as cult icons, Waters and his growing troupe of outcasts were pushing well beyond the boundaries of good taste. Though Pink Flamingos is no more shocking in content than the giant-lobster rape or the crucifixion/rosary-job sequence in his earlier Multiple Maniacs, its puerile genius marked Waters' newfound discipline as a sleaze auteur. Divine Trash assembles a fascinating gallery of talking heads, including cast and crew members, film critics (Mekas, J. Hoberman, Dennis Darmody), and indie stalwarts (Jim Jarmusch, Steve Buscemi, Hal Hartley, David O. Russell) indebted to his on-the-fly, outsider aesthetic. And, of course, there's Waters himself, who handles his role in Yeager's tribute with characteristic modesty and wit. Opening and closing with the dog-feces scene in Pink Flamingos—one subject calls it "the gulp heard 'round the world"—Divine Trash makes a good case for this moment as the ultimate showstopper, a pinnacle never to be equaled or repeated.

Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]

Twenty-five years have passed since John Waters gathered his merry band of Baltimore friends and filmed Pink Flamingos, the outre comic melodrama about the filthiest people alive (with its gross pinnacle being the ingestion of a live dog turd by the 300-pound, drag queen/star Divine). The hilarious and notorious film went on to become a midnight bonanza, a cult classic which stands as one of the watershed movies in the canon of American alternative cinema. Divine Trash documents not only the filming of Pink Flamingos but also the interdependent evolution of the careers of John Waters and Divine, and furthermore provides some context by which to understand these cultural phenomena as subsets within the colorful history of independent filmmaking.

Steve Yeager, the director of Divine Trash, is uniquely positioned to document the whole phenomenon. He was there at the beginning, back before Baltimore could boast its milieu as the filmmaking petri dish for such original and geographically devoted homeboys as John Waters and Barry Levinson. Yeager, who still lives in Baltimore, where he teaches and continues to work in film says, "John and I have been friends for 30-some years. I play a role of a reporter in Pink Flamingos. That's why I was around all the times that I was, participated in the rehearsal process, and really knew what was going on with John and his people. John and I met at a hippie bar [described in Divine Trash as Baltimore's decades-old beacon for weirdos, beatniks, and heads]; we were buying dope from the same dealer."

Indeed, Divine Trash reveals to us the young, long-haired John Waters, well before he morphed into a dapper icon of weirdo cinema on late-night TV talk shows. Through on-camera interviews with Waters, various of his filmmaking cohorts, and knowledgeable commentators, we come to understand the formative elements that shaped the director's career. We learn such things as how Waters was obsessed with filmmaking since he received his first camera at the age of 16; how as a toddler he cajoled his parents into taking him to junkyards to ogle mangled car wrecks; how as a teenager he sat on a high hill by his house and watched gory Herschell Gordon Lewis movies at the drive-in through binoculars; and how as a young adult he'd drop speed and take the train up to New York to watch three films a day. "I think John knew what he wanted to be when he was 12 years old," comments Yeager. "How incredible is that?"

The influences on Waters' filmmaking are many - he absorbed everything from classic European art films to Hollywood studio productions, New York underground movies to grindhouse quickies. His shrewd marketing sensibilities were honed early on, as was his habit of working continually with the same cluster of friends and associates. Chief among them was Divine, aka Glenn Milstead, who is now deceased. Yeager clearly sees the film as "an homage to Divine. I knew Glenn very well. He was a terrific character actor, and he would, as evidenced in John's films, jump in a freezing river and try to swim it. Divine would do anything for John because he believed in him."

Insight is provided by such diverse interviewees as Waters' parents (who provided Yeager with fascinating home movie relics, saying "Here, don't tell John"); underground film stalwarts Jonas Mekas, George and Mike Kuchar, and Ken Jacobs; above-ground fringe filmmakers Paul Morrissey, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Jim Jarmusch, and Steve Buscemi; Waters associates Mink Stole and Mary Vivian Pierce; and indie film observers John Pierson and J. Hoberman.

Divine Trash was awarded the documentary Filmmakers Trophy at January's Sundance Film Festival. It's the award chosen by other directors, a testament to Divine Trash's ability to ignite a passionate contagion for the practice of independent filmmaking.

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer)

CineScene.com (Les Phillips)

Village Voice (Amy Taubin)

Divine Trash Gerald Peary

Variety.com [Emanuel Levy]

New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden

Yedaya, Keren

JAFFA (Kalat Hayam)

Israel France Germany (145 mi) 2009

Jaffa (Kalat Hayam) Dan Fainaru at Cannes from Screendaily

Leaving behind the rigorous style of Or,  for which she won the Camera D’Or five years ago, Yedaya’s first film since then is an unabashed, over-emotional, under-scripted Mediterranean melodrama with plenty of social and political undertones.

While it’s brave of Yedaya to change her style like this, she risks losing her reputation in the process. Her doomed inter-racial Israeli-Arab love story, once again using Ronit Elkabetz and Dana Ivgy, falls outside the arthouse and popular remits and will be a tough sell in both markets.

Jaffa’s schematic plot, predictably developed with stock characters that are never fleshed out, is insufficient to carry her pallid observations on the Israeli-Arab conflict, the status of women and conflict between the generations.

Mali (Ivgy) the daughter of a garage owner in Jaffa, falls for Tewfik (Shalabi) one of her father’s mechanics. The affair is however shadowed by the strained relations between the girl’s father Reuven (Moshonov), his high-strung, rebellious son Meir (Assaf) and his wife (Elkabetz), who seems vaguely dissatisfied with her life and family without any specific reason.

Mali and Tewfik are about to elope secretly abroad and get married, when a fistfight erupts in the garage. Tewfik pushes Meir who falls down badly and dies, Tewfik is sent to jail. Mali wants to abort the child she is bearing him, but thinks better of it at the last moment, does not divulge the identity of the father to her parents, and when the little girl is born, they name her Shiran and move to another part of town. Nine years later, Tewfik is released from jail and contacts Mali.

The real problem, this being a melodrama, is that none of the characters are sufficiently developed to deserve the audience’s full attention. The family conflicts, meanwhile, are banal and obvious, and the evident tension between Israelis and Arabs is barely probed beyond establishing that Israelis are the bosses and Arabs the workers, the older generation taking the situation for granted, the younger one beginning to challenge it.

Ivgy’s commitment to the role is evident, while both Moshonov and Elkabetz, the first better-rounded, the second over-hysterical, offer characters that suggest depths left unexplored. Sadly enough, both Shalabi and Hussein Yassin Mahajneh, who plays his father, are never allowed the space to be more than extras, a strange decision considering the fact that they are the other half of the Israeli-Palestinian equation the film clearly refers to.

Cannes. "Jaffa"  David Hudson at Cannes from The IFC Blog, May 17, 2009

Ray Bennett at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 16, 2009

Jay Weissberg  at Cannes from Variety, May 16, 2009

Yee Chin-yen

BLUE GATE CROSSING

Taiwan France (85 mi) 2002

Blue Gate Crossing Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Stylistically, the very definition of subtle, a film which at first seems technically shoddy (“Was this shot out of focus?”), then just negligibly “realistic,” with no discernible style at all. But soon, you realize exactly how much control and expression Yee is bringing to bear, with shallow focus lending most everything in the frame an internalized glow, as if conjured from a warm memory. Yee also undercuts the surface realism with masterful staging of actions which mutate unexpectedly into something else (e.g., Kerou and Shihao scraping the pilfered mash note off the playground floor with their feet, a gesture which becomes an awkward, vaguely chicken-like pas de deux). It recalls the unobtrusive formalism of early Edward Yang; tonally, it’s the kind of film that Lukas Moodysson’s fans claim he makes, but to my mind really doesn’t – open-hearted, tender, and generous with every last character. At times, it even exhibits shades of Hal Hartley, with its deliberate blockings and repeated, circular dialogue. All the performances are distinct and exacting, especially the two leads. Kerou (Guey Lun-mei), like Hartley’s male heroes, is driven yet impassive, nearly blank. This deadpan strategy plays perfectly against Chen Bo-lin’s Shihao, the affable cool-guy-bad-boy whose reserves of feeling and compassion seem to surprise even himself. Not perfect (a major plot development was so unexpectedly elliptical as to make me wonder if a reel was missing; I’m still on the fence about the tinkly piano score), but a wonderful surprise. The moral of this story: trust Froilan Vispo.

Yellen, Linda

JACOBO TIMMERMAN: PRISONER WITHOUT A NAME – made for TV

USA (100 mi) 1983

Prisoner Without A Name Argentine Nightmare, by Hal W. Peat from Jump Cut

THE LAST FILM FESTIVAL

USA (90 mi) 2015 Official site

A Deadly Last Dose Of Dennis Hopper | Newcity Film Ray Pride

Dennis Hopper has been dead for six years, and the vehicle for his final performance, “The Last Film Festival,” is pretty close to it, showing few signs of what most of us would call life. Hopper plays a film producer named Nick Twain, whose latest movie is so awful, he can only get it shown at the “O’Hi” film festival run in a high school gym by an undertaker. “The Last Film Festival” runs ninety minutes. I wish I had run in the opposite direction with unseemly haste. (It bears no relationship to Hopper’s fascinating excursion into the jungle, “The Last Movie.”) Emmy-winning veteran director-producer Linda Yellen’s lowercase, let’s-play-dress-up stab at the ensemble likes of Robert Altman’s “The Player” and David Mamet’s “State & Main” got advance blurbs from Manhattan antiques Liz Smith (ninety-three), Rex Reed (seventy-seven) and Roger Friedman (fifty-nine), which may say more about her social circle than the critical acumen of this trio of jokers. “The idea for ‘The Last Film Festival’ started with a laugh Dennis and I shared at the Sundance Film Festival,” Yellen was quoted when her film was acquired for distribution. “That spirit of fun and spontaneity that is uniquely Dennis carried through the filming and onto the screen. He would be so pleased that what started as one laugh will now result in so many.” “The Last Film Festival” was completed via Kickstarter. For dogged completists only. With Jacqueline Bisset, Chris Kattan, Jobeth Williams, Leelee Sobieski.

J.B. Spins [Joe Bendel]

It is hard to root against roguish independent producers like Roger Corman, William Castle, and Robert Evans. Nick Twain is definitely cut from similar cloth, but he has fallen on hard times late in his career. Nevertheless, he carries on. In his case, that means flogging a dog’s turkey titled Barium Enigma. Only one film festival has standards low enough to accept it, but a pro like Twain can still spin it into PR gold, if the so-bad-its-baffling film sweeps the awards. Twain intends to make sure of that in Linda Yellen’s The Last Film Festival (trailer here), the late, great Dennis Hopper’s final film, which opens this Friday in LA.

It should be busy festival for Twain. He thinks he has cut a deal with the politically ambitious mayor of O’hi, Ohio to deliver a clean sweep of the O’hi Film Festival’s Golden Spindles (yarn is a big deal in this burg). However, since his ex, the gracefully aging Italian sex symbol Claudia Benvenuti, who largely financed the picture is up for best actress against her co-star, Twain’s current unfaithful starlet lover, somebody is bound to be disappointed.

Further complicating matters, Twain’s Tom Cruise-ish star is missing and a trench coat wearing woman keeps stalking him, claiming she is his love child. That last part is a little embarrassing for Twain, but it will not prevent him from receiving the festival’s humanitarian of the year award—and justly so.

Sadly, Dennis Hopper passed away seven years ago while still filming LFF, unintentionally leaving Yellen in a bit of a bind. Yet, you wouldn’t know it from the final cut. Hopper (who reportedly thought he was in remission until he suddenly and precipitously fell ill), looks reasonably hale and hearty and just oozes devilish charm. He seems to understand all of Twain’s lines are funnier because he is Dennis Hopper (director and star of The Last Movie)—and he’s okay with that. It is just jolly good fun to watch him chuckle his through the film.

Hopper also forges some deliciously arch chemistry with Jacqueline Bisset, a good sport perfectly cast as Benvenuti. In a way, LFF would make a weirdly appropriate double feature with Truffaut’s Day for Night, in which she played the scandalous British starlet. On the other hand, the charismatic Leelee Sobieski is woefully under-utilized as Twain’s possible illegitimate daughter, but it is entirely possible she had more involving scenes with Hopper that were sadly not to be. Unfortunately, Chris Kattan is as annoying as ever as Harvey Weinstein, O’hi’s namesake undertaker and camera-phone snooping film festival president.

The humor of Yellen & Michael Leeds’ screenplay is definitely hit or miss, but again, it is possible many of Kattan’s gags had to stay, due to Hopper’s untimely demise. Frankly, it is rather remarkable how Yellen and the editors, Bib Jorissen and Steve Kraftsow cobbled together such a smooth narrative flow. Ironically but perhaps fittingly, Hopper’s Twain explains to his youthful agent how King Vidor solved a similar problem when Tyrone Power died midway through Solomon and Sheba.

It is nice to finally have LFF gracing screens. It is not perfect, but the overly broad comedic excesses never stick to Hopper (or Bisset). Frankly, it further burnishes his reputation, allowing us to see a sly, slightly screwball side of Hopper we rarely saw in his largely dark filmography. Recommended for Hopper fans and those of us who have been around a few oddball fests, The Last Film Festival opens this Friday (9/30) in Southern California, at the Laemmle’s Royal and Playhouse 7 theaters.

Blu-ray.com [Brian Orndorf]

“The Last Film Festival” is selling itself as the final starring appearance for legendary actor Dennis Hopper, which is really something to celebrate considering the man died in 2010. It’s been a long road to release for the film, and stress shows throughout the effort, which arrives with good intentions but seems unfinished and unfocused. The feature aims to be a satire of the festival experience, taking in the diverse personalities and temperaments of those who participate in such public celebrations of cinema. It’s a topic worthy of an extensive pantsing, playing up anxiety felt by creative forces and snobbery shared by attendees. “The Last Film Festival” doesn’t have the precision to successfully slap around the setting, but it does have Hopper, who’s part of an ensemble trying their best to make sure co-writer/director Linda Yellen has something to work with.

Movie producer Nick (Dennis Hopper) is in a tight spot, trying to drum up interest in his latest production, “Barium Enigma,” which stars one of his mistresses, Chloe (Katrina Bowen). Bringing the picture to the O’Hi Film Festival in Ohio, Nick is stunned to find the title attracting little attention from the press, coming down on an agent (Joseph Cross) in charge of spreading news about the title. Hoping to bring some stardom to the Midwest, Nick flies actress Claudia (Jacqueline Bisset) into town, but her diva antics prove to be overwhelming, adding to the producer’s headache, who’s already worried about his production’s ability to find positive buzz. While festival president, local undertaker Harvey Weinstein (Chris Kattan), inches closer to Claudia, his object of desire, Nick’s woes multiply with the arrival of The Stalker (Leelee Sobieski), a young woman claiming to be his daughter.

It’s been quite some time since “The Last Film Festival” was shot (production dates are unclear, but it looks like it was made around 2009), creating an unusual viewing experience where film festivals weren’t a weekly event, blogs were a desired publicity “get,” Paula Abdul references were hot, and everyone had a flip phone for communication purposes. There’s a time machine aspect to the picture, but Yellen gets down to business quickly, catching up with Nick in his car, juggling priorities as he makes his way to the O’Hi Festival, trying to keep Claudia and Chloe interested in attending, despite their distaste for each other. It’s the big debut for “Barium Enigma,” and no other festival wanted the movie, leaving Nick with no choice but small town Ohio, working his charms on Mayor Marion (an amusing JoBeth Williams) to turn the screening into an event, and one that’s given live coverage by the local news.

Nick’s management of mishaps takes up most of “The Last Film Festival.” He’s struggling with visibility, chastising the agent who doesn’t build up excitement around “Barium Enigma.” There’s a subplot devoted to missing leading man ZZ (Agim Kaba), who gets lost on his way to the premiere, caught up in his own misadventures on the road, leaving the producer with limited star power to entice audiences. And there’s a question of paternity, watching the Stalker emerge from the shadows with a special claim that Nick can’t handle on such an important day, blurring his headspace as an affair two decades ago results in an uncomfortably public introduction between father and daughter. Nick’s plight is passable, but “The Last Film Festival” is better with inside jokes and satiric jabs at festival organization, with O’Hi taking place inside the local high school. Classrooms are turned into screening rooms, and Yellen showcases the variety of pictures on display, some to empty rooms. While humor is lukewarm throughout (Donnell Rawlings portrays a black director who insists on the distinction “African-American” for everything he does), the helmer does find the absurdity of the situation, which is enough to engage, even without laughs.

“The Last Film Festival” could do without condescending jokes about Midwestern ways, finding pokes at Ohio simplicity lame (e.g. Claudia discovers lunch providers aren’t aware of fruit), taking time away from pure Hollywood razzing. Yellen is better with the cast, who deliver adequate work as the helmer struggles with her semi-Altman ambiance, leaving most of the picture’s appeal to the actors. The big draw is Hopper, and he’s committed throughout, delivering a spirited performance that helps “The Last Film Festival” move along, tracking Nick’s increasing panic. Yellen has slapped the effort together with hopes and prayers (and help from Kickstarter), finding various technical deficiencies throughout the viewing experience, but she does have Hopper, and he’s enough to charm, shining in a feature that tees up a promising premise, but lacks sharp humor to follow through on its potential.

How Dennis Hopper Made His Last Movie: Behind the Scenes of 'The Last Movie Festival' Anthony Haden-Guest interviews the director from The Daily Beast, October 4, 2016

It was at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009 that Linda Yellen met Dennis Hopper. Yellen is a producer with twenty credits, including such well-regarded low budget movies as Jacobo Timerman: Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number and Liberace, and she and Hopper were soon deep in movie-talk. 

A crowd coagulated around them. 

“It became so absurd that I said to Dennis, ‘This is one of the best film festivals in the world. I wonder what it’s like at the worst?”

Hopper’s reaction was unexpected.

“He said, ‘That’s a very funny idea. If you like I’ll do it.’

“I said, ‘Seriously?’”

“He said, ‘Of course! If I like the script.’”

It took Yellen two months. She called the movie The Last Movie Festival and the character she created for Hopper was a movie producer called Nick Twain. 

“He’s a once-great producer,” Yellen said. “He knows all the tricks and has to turn around the greatest failure of his career. Otherwise he’ll never work again”. 

This was, as Yellen knew, a provocative role to offer Hopper. He had well and truly been there—and less than a year and a half after their first meeting he would die, at the age of 74.

Hopper was born in Dodge City, Kansas, in 1936 and was still a child when the family moved to Kansas City, Missouri. As a child he liked painting but determined to become an actor, so moved in LA in his teens and shortly got cast in Rebel Without A Cause with James Dean in 1955. He was in another Dean movie, Giant, the following year. 

In 1961 he married Brooke Hayward, who he had met while playing opposite her on Broadway. His youthful interest in art resurfaced and he became a collector of contemporary art, as he revealed in a 1999 interview. 

He bought a Warhol Campbell’s Soup Can print off the wall of the dealer, Virginia Dwan, for $75 and posed for one of Warhol’s Screen Tests series in New York. He also bought a camera became an excellent photographer. 

In 1963 Hopper shot a youthful Warhol, David Hockney, Henry Geldzahler and Jeff Goodman as a foursome and would shoot portraits of the artists Ed Ruscha and Roy Lichtenstein.

Brooke, the daughter of the producer Leland Hayward, was the first of Hopper’s five wives. They divorced in 1969, which was a busy time for Hopper, because being also when he directed Easy Rider, the movie in which he co-starred with Peter Fonda, and which he credited with introducing cocaine to America. 

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The overwhelming success of Easy Rider enabled Hopper to lay back. “He partied for about four years” said Yellen. He was producer and director on his next project, The Last Movie, and starred in it as “Kansas”.

It was released in 1971, got a prize at the Cannes Film Festival but was trashed by the critics, and you’ll find it listed as one of 20 Banned or Otherwise Unavailable Movies You Can Only Watch Online where it is described as “such a flop, the studio tried to erase its memory from the face of the earth.”

Hopper abandoned Hollywood and spent much of the 70s in a haze of drugs and alcohol. 

The rebuilding of Hopper’s movie career began when he played a pothead photojournalist in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.It continued with such movies as Blue Velvet.

He and Yellen’s project was greenly and they began shooting in 2009. It should be noted that, as with The Last Movie, an impending divorce darkened the shoot, but Hopper’s divorce from his fifth wife, Victoria, was way uglier, with her questioning his mental balance and Hopper accusing her of stealing his art.

The shoot nonetheless was tranquil.

“He was extremely polite,” says Jacqueline Bisset, one of the co-stars, a Brit, and longtime Los Angeleno. “He kept to himself. There was a certain tension about him.”

No problems?

“None at all. He could be a little testy. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

The shoot was close to the part of Forest Hills, Queens, where Yellen grew up.

“We would walk around my old neighborhood and talk about anything but the film,” she said. “I once asked him if there was anything ‘that you never did that you wished you had done.’ He said, ‘I’ve never gotten relationships.’”

She confirmed Hopper had occasional spurts of ill-humor, one occasioned by the fact that it was a low budget movie, and she wanted to work quickly.

“I had given him eight pages of dialog. And he was furious,” she said. She added wistfully, “He was shooting pictures all the time. He had so many pictures and so many rolls of film. We all long for those pictures.”

The Last Movie Festival, is appropriately replete with sly movie references, as when the ”baby agent”, as played by Joseph Cross, somewhat channels the Tim Robbins character in Robert Altman’s The Player, the movie which shattered the industry wisdom that movies-about-movies always cratered. 

But the most striking such reference has an eerily unintended reference and that is when ”Nick Twain,” played by a gleaming and robust-looking Dennis Hopper, is talking about his beginnings in Hollywood, which included work on King Vidor’s movie, Solomon and Sheba, and how the star, Tyrone Power, had died during the shoot.

The baby agent asks the Hopper character whether Solomon and Sheba was a hit?

“No. It was a flop,” he says.

Dennis Hopper took a break before the shoot was finished to do a commercial in Italy. He returned very unwell. ”He thought he had SARS virus,” Yellen said.

Hopper still had scenes to shoot but wasn’t up to it and left to recuperate in Taos, New Mexico, where he shared a house with his children. “He lived in a rebuilt cinema,” Yellen says. “How appropriate is that? We were in touch all through his illness which was three months, four months at most.”

Hopper died on May 29, 2010, at his home in Venice, Los Angeles.

The cause, Yellen learned, was a recurrence of prostate cancer.

Yellen, who had recently lost her father and a couple of close friends, one being Lynn Redgrave, was so stricken that she decided the movie was a goner.

The death of a star affects each movie project differently, Tyrone Power vanished from Solomon and Sheba and was replaced by his friend, Yul Brynner. 

Natalie Wood, who drowned before shooting had finished on Brainstorm she was replaced by a stand-in on a few scenes and by sound-alikes for voice.

Bela Lugosi overdosed on formaldehyde after Ed Wood had only shot a few reels of Plan 9 from Outer Space. The lore is that Wood replaced him with his dentist to whom he owed money, ignoring the fact that he was a foot taller.

When Heath Ledger died, The Dark Knight was already being edited and when Philip Seymour Hoffman died most of his part on The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 2 had been shot.

“But you can kinda see in the last scenes that there’s something missing from his performance,” Yellen said.

Her down mood on The Last Film Festival dissipated. This was in part because of frequent inquiries about “what was happening to Dennis Hopper’s last movie” and mostly because so much material existed.

Other actors on the project, who included Bissett, Donnell Rawlings and Leelee Sobieski, supported a Kickstarter campaign, which raised the necessary moolah, and Yellen settled down to post-production. “There were plenty of out-takes with Dennis,” she said. “And there’s so much else going on in the movie. I don’t think you ever do not feel his presence.” It is seamless, also sexual and rowdily funny—so much so that I rather wondered what the reaction has been from the circuitry of film festivals. Had there been any resistance, I asked.

As it happens, yes. “We have found great sensitivity,” Yellen said. “Some of the bigger film festivals have felt it was indecorous to make fun of a smaller film festivals and have privately told us that. Rather than just join in the fun of it they have felt it was politically incorrect. And some of the smaller film festivals have felt that it maybe it shows too much. Because most film festivals are in the business of bringing business to that community, they don’t want anything that shows that it might be anything less than grand.”

That said, The Last Film Festival will be in the Santa Fe festival at the end of October.

“Dennis spent a lot of time in Santa Fe and Taos. And Taos is where he is buried,” Yellen said. The movie just opened in Los Angeles and Chicago. 

“Dennis was buried in an American-Indian graveyard,” Yellen said. “You know what happens at Jim Morrison’s grave in Père Lachaise [the famous Parisian cemetery]. I can see that happening with Dennis. People will bring bandanas from Apocalypse Now, bottles of Jim Beam—things that reference that extraordinary career.”

The Last Film Festival Clip For Dennis Hopper's Final Film | Indie Liz Calvario from indieWIRE

Facets : Cinematheque Schedule: The Last Film Festival

The Last Film Festival' Review | Hollywood Reporter Sheri Linden

'The Last Film Festival' is not a fitting tribute to Dennis Hopper - L Robert Abele from The LA Times

The Last Film Festival - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Yerzhanov, Adilkhan

THE OWNERS B- 82

Kazakhstan (93 mi) 2014

A portrait of miserablism, poverty and gloom, as seen through a surrealist lens where tragedy and dark comedy intersect, where it’s worth noting that the remote nation of Kazakhstan, known as one of the least densely populated nations on earth (only Canada and Australia are lower) with less than 15 people per square mile, yet it has produced two of the most weirdly unusual films to hit film festivals in the past two years, with this coming after Emir Baigazin’s Harmony Lessons (Uroki garmonii) (2013), one of the best directed and edited films from last year. Both are young directors that have graduated from the Kazakh National Academy of Arts, so New Kazakh cinema has become a breeding ground of originality and novelty. Actually THE OWNERS is a follow-up to his previous film, the 67-minute black and white short film CONSTRUCTORS (2013) Constructors | Stroiteli | FIFF | Fribourg International Film ..., shooting in wildly exaggerated colors, where both are low-key, absurdist treatments of the difficulties encountered by individuals that strive to maintain any sense of dignity when they are swallowed up whole by the apathy and indifference of a Kafkaesque Eastern European bureaucracy that may as well be the remnants of a Stalinist Soviet system left behind, as Kazakhstan was the last of the Soviet republics to declare independence following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. While the overall effect is a bit like Kaurismäki, with similar deadpan acting, but it’s not Kaurismäki, leaving something to be desired, namely the wit and zany characters that inhabit a Kaurismäki film. It may be closer in tone to the Yorgos Lanthimos film DOGTOOTH (2009), though stylistically quite different, as both are interested in creating a weird and entirely unusual universe that seemingly exists on its own, as if floating on air, where much of it carries a fantasy oriented atmosphere of surrealist caricature.

Our three orphaned protagonists are introduced by a child’s drawing where we see 25-year old John (Aidyn Sakhaman), the reluctant patriarch, an ex-con who has done time for petty crimes and remains unemployed, his younger teenage brother Yerbol (Yerbolat Yerzhan), a handsome aspiring actor who retains his sense of idealism, and their sickly 12-year old epileptic sister Aliya (Aliya Zainalova) who remains the most innocent of all, where the two younger actors reprise their roles from CONSTRUCTORS. Aliya continually sees the world through a kind of magical realism where people are always smiling and happy, often seen performing dance routines, where this whimsical element is a stark contrast to the gloom that inhabits the rest of the picture. Forced to leave the city when they can no longer pay the rent, they move to a remote village where their deceased mother left them a house, carrying the deed to the property with them. Unfortunately it’s currently inhabited by Zhuba (Bauyrzhan Kaptagai), the alcoholic brute of a brother to the local police chief (Nurbek Mukushev) who has been living there illegally for the past 10 years. In this lawless frontier, possession takes precedence over any existing laws, as Zhuba wages an intimidation campaign and beats the crap out of John after he files a complaint with the police, while a visit to the housing ministry only results in the futility of trying to do anything about it, reduced to a portrait of comic absurdity, a throwback to a faceless and heartless Kafkaesque world where reason never prevails, where grievances remain in a state of limbo for months and problems are left to be resolved by hand-to-hand human combat, resorting to a survival of the fittest Darwinian universe where the weak are stomped on by more powerful Stalinist forces. It’s a bleak and hopeless existence where John eventually gets arrested, where despite the dubious nature of the charges, there are signs that he will never be released, and the younger siblings are forced to survive on their own, where all that is saving them at the moment are Aliya’s charmingly innocent visions.

Duped into signing away ownership of the house, lured by the false promise of John’s freedom, the director likes to line up all the interested parties and shoot them in a tableaux shot where once again they are seen as just actors, where this offers a temporary relief from the descent into oblivion facing this family. Perhaps part of the problem with this film is a similar one depicted in Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012), where the collaborators and perpetrators of the heinous acts of genocide are seen as mere caricatures, lending a cartoonish aura of ridiculousness to their nature that not only influences but overshadows whatever horrors they committed. This exaggerated comical absurdity overwhelms the grotesque nature of their crimes, where the artificiality of style, expressed through extreme violence and Hollywood dreamlike dance sequences with saturated colors, allows them to portray themselves as fools, where they may hide and take cover within the mysterious ambiguities of artistic presentation, where fiction is as distorted as reality. The heartlessness of a Stalinist regime is prevalent in both Kazakh and Russian films, where the stone cold rigidity of the system remains intact, even under the authority of a different nationality. Yerzhanov then abandons any concept of realism and prefers to emphasize the darker more satiric elements of a Kafkaesque society, but in doing so the film makes so many tonal shifts that he loses any visionary claim to authenticity and begins referencing the stylizations of others, from early Kaurismäki to Fellini to Tsai Ming-liang to the comic invention of Wes Anderson, where there’s even a tribute to SCARFACE (1983) and Vincent van Gogh. While the film never seems to work, the fun is watching it stumble all over itself with clever ideas it really doesn’t know what to do with. Yerzhanov’s picture of an absurdly decaying system of authority is saturated in an unreal universe that becomes almost too magical, where there is no question that it is a compelling style, but it grows much too absurd. Does the artistic style of the film equate to emotional truths or human drama, or does it provoke ideas or complex thought? And while it’s visually quite strong and startlingly unique, there’s some question whether it actually offers anything new.

July | 2014 | Jonathan Rosenbaum

12 June (Chicago): As preparation for serving as a “mentor” to student film critics at the Edinburgh Film Festival, I watch online a film they’re assigned to write about, Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s The Owners from Kazakhstan. This is quite a revelation — at least for me, if not, as I later discover, for most of the students. Three city siblings arrive in the county to claim the ramshackle hut they’ve inherited from their deceased mother, and the tragicomic misadventures and forms of corruption that they encounter oscillate between grim realism, absurdist genre parody, and dreamlike surrealism, culminating in a doom-ridden yet festive dance in which both victims and victimizers participate. Unlike the hyperbolic violence that brutalizes the characters of Jia Zhange’s A Touch of Sin by reducing their humanity, Yerzhanov’s use of genre staples actually expands his expressive and emotional palette without foreshortening our sense of the people involved.

Georgia Straight [Janet Smith]

For the second year in a row, one of the standout movies at the fest is from Kazakhstan, of all places! And it’s just as much of a slice of Kafkaesque surrealism as last year’s Harmony Lessons, though it’s by a different director—Adilkhan Yerzhanov.

Two brothers and their sick sister move to their father’s beat-up country cottage after their mother’s death, only to find the aging village bully is squatting there, backed up by his gang of goons and the corrupt local cops. Their fight to keep it takes dark and twisted, near-Lynchian turns. Every frame is a work of art, from the police station where the policemen are dressed in conical party hats to the wheelless car sitting high on a rural plateau. And we haven’t even mentioned the sister’s hallucinations and the sinister man who lurks in a cellar.

The bizarre tale builds to a bleak crescendo, and a larger metaphor for the cruel absurdities that keep the former Soviet country circling in poverty. Bitingly funny, warped, and there’s even a reference to Scarface.

TIFF 2014 | The Owners (Adilkhan Yerzhanov, Kazakhstan ... Michael Sicinski from Cinema Scope

It’s difficult to evaluate a film as aggressively unusual as The Owners. Despite its grating quirks and featherweight jabs at social commentary, it cannot be summarily dismissed. This is the sort of film that is likely to garner not just defenders but a small coterie of genuine fans, folks who see director Adilkhan Yerzhanov as some sort of bizarre visionary. He’s certainly consistent in his preoccupations, as this is his fourth feature film to revolve around familial property rights. At its core, The Owners is a rather typical clash between interlopers from the city (in this case, the Kazakh capital of Almaty) entering a small village and facing systematic xenophobia. Three orphaned kids—eldest brother John (Aidyn Sakhaman), who has done time for petty crime; Yerbol (Yerbolat Yerzhan), the handsome, idealistic middle brother; and Aliya (Aliya Zainalova), the kid sister with an illness that remains unspecified until the final reel—come back to their late mother’s village to live in her old house, deed in hand. Only problem is, the police chief’s family has been squatting in the empty place, and these city kids’ claim means next to nothing in drunken, backwater Absurdistan. As The Owners progresses, Yerzhanov gleefully abandons any claims to realism, operating within an overdetermined, Kafkaesque register that I believe is supposed to read as black comedy. But tonally the film is all over the place, and as you find yourself noticing ideas cribbed from other filmmakers, the sheer incongruity with which they’re jammed together makes the experience something a little less than a game of Spot the Reference. Instead, it seems more like Yerzhanov is acting out of reflex, as if throwing Felliniesque peasant dancing and oily-faced grotesqueries next to a Kaurismäkian al fresco rhythm section, or a painterly play of light inside a ramshackle cottage straight out of the Pedro Costa playbook, is going to result in some rich stylistic mélange. (We even get a Hal Hartley coda.) None of it works, but it does show “work,” and lots of it. So like I say, The Owners will certainly impress a vocal minority. And in the end, that’s fine; Yerzhanov is hardly talentless and there’s nothing aggressively awful here worth getting fired up about. I’d just expect an artist to have a much more developed voice by Film #4.

CineVue [Harriet Warman]

TIFF.net | The Owners

Kazakh The Owners film in Cannes Top 10 - Kaz Khabar

'The Owners': Cannes Review - The Hollywood Reporter Stephen Dalton

Cannes Film Review: 'The Owners' | Variety Alissa Simon

Yi Wen

AIR HOSTESS (Kong zhong xiao jie)

Hong Kong (102 mi) 1959

The Illuminated Lantern [Peter Nepstad]

It was another age, another lifetime ago, but at one point being a stewardess was actually a "glamour" job, one that applicants worked hard to attain. I must admit even today I am blown away by the linguistic skills of some flight attendants on east asian airlines, who must be at least tri-lingual to even be considered for the job. In 1959, they test the women rigorously, to see if they have the right spirit, and most importantly to see if they smile "from the heart." Next comes the "body check." None of this is sexist or anything, is it? And anyway, when's the swimsuit competition?

Lin Keping (Grace Chang) wants to be a stewardess, but her family wants her to get married. "I don't want to be a caged canary," she tells them, "I want to fly in the sky!" And of course, with a smile like hers, she's a shoe-in for the position. And that handsome man dressed as a pilot she met at a costume party, Lei Daying (Roy Chiao), wasn't in costume at all, but in uniform. Romance blossoms on the ground, though in the air Lei does a Jekyl and Hyde routine ("Don't neglect your service attitude!") he admonishes her, sternly.

Her friends, who have names but should probably just be known by their one dimensional character attributes (the shy one, the sexy one, etc.) all have their struggles and triumphs as well on the road to being flight attendants.

Sometimes it all just looks like a tourist brochure, as inbetween flights the girls and boys date while sightseeing in Singapore, Thailand and Taiwan. But it isn't quite a tourist brochure. Most viewers weren't going to get up and fly to those destinations themselves. Rather, it was pure escapist entertainment. Beautiful people, going to beautiful places, seeing the world, falling in love.

Grace Chang, of course, also happens to be a good singer, and she does a handful of musical numbers. While her singing is great, and the music is fun, the way the numbers are staged is painful, almost always involving a room full of people standing in a circle watching her quietly, while she sings with a big self-confident smile on her face. It's all somewhat annoying.

In the end, Grace Chang says words I long to hear a flight attendant say once more: "Have a drink." But alas, it seems even the free cocktails, the last little bit of extra care given to passengers for their fare, has disappeared.

She goes on to explain the moral of this romantic musical, in case you missed it: "It's comfortable, fun, and also safe to take the plane." Let's flying!

[The quality of the Panorama DVD is not very satisfying, with background colors occasionally "strobing" in a distracting, headache-inducing way.]

AIR HOSTESS Keith from Teleport City

Modernity, diasporic capital, and 1950s Hong Kong Mandarin cinema Poshek Fu from Jump Cut, Spring 2007

Yim Soon-rye

THREE FRIENDS (Sechinku)

South Korea (92 mi) 1996

Three Friends Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Tony Rayns

This terrific first feature by one of Korea's very few women directors is focused entirely on young men: three kids from screwed-up families, failures at school and with no real social prospects, looking ahead with dismay at two years of compulsory military service. Yim's story (parts of which are a deliberate challenge to Korean censorship) faithfully reflects social realities at the bottom of the economic scale, but her approach to character and situation is far from grungy social realism. She never forgets that real people laugh, even when there's not much to laugh about, and she roots her underlying anger in her wry awareness that people tend to blame society when they've fucked up their own lives.

User reviews from imbd Author Yongwook Yoo from Montreal, Canada

It is quite an incidence that Takeshi Kitano's 'Kids Return(1996)' has all the same plot to this film and the same releasing date. Both films investigate the serious problem(extremely competitive college entrance and stereotyped curriclum regardless of student's talent and interest) of second-level educational system in Japan and Korea with the perspectives of juvenile delinquencies. 'Sechinku' is focusing on the obsession of military draft which is common amongst the Korean youngster,s while 'Kids Return' is just narrating the casual lives of several different characters who do not have nothing particular upon their graduation of second-level school. 'Sechinku' does not cast any promising message on the future of derelict youth whilst 'Kids Return' could be regarded as a kind of enlightening films rather than critical text. Just in terms of film itself, 'Sechinku' has more succeeded in delineating the realistically personal cross-section of educational problem, however, 'Kids Return' would be superior in the sketch of wandering youths.

Three Friends (Sechinku) Stephen Holden from the New York Times

Life is certainly not easy for social misfits in any culture. But ''Three Friends'' suggests that to be young and different in South Korea can be a profoundly alienating experience. This melancholy movie looks deeply into the lives of three high school graduates who have failed their college entrance exams and find themselves dangerously adrift.

As misfits everywhere tend to do, these working-class youths cling to one another less out of mutual admiration and shared interests than out of desperation for companionship. Kim Taemoo (Kim Hyungsung), the hardiest, is a gifted cartoonist who becomes an apprentice for a company where he is humiliated with mindless drudgery and finds his original ideas stolen by his bosses. After quitting, he goes to desperate lengths to try to avoid the draft.

Cho Sein (Chung Heesuk), a delicate, effeminate youth, lives a hellish existence with his mother, a hairdresser, and an alcoholic, abusive father. The third friend, Kong Seungho (Lee Jangwon), is an obese, bungling video store clerk who fights off his terror of the future with food.

This touching movie, directed and written by Yim Soon-Rye, one of South Korea's only female film makers, is a compassionate examination of the shame that can devastate young people who, for one reason or another, are poorly equipped to play society's game.

At the same time, it offers a sharp critique of the conformist, militaristic culture that turns its back on them.

WAIKIKI BROTHERS

South Korea (109 mi) 2001 (Trailer: 300k)

The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]

Lim Soon-rye's Waikiki Brothers, like Bungee Jumping and many other native narratives, is fraught with the intimate trauma of Korean public schools and the melancholy of outgrowing them. The film patiently observes the dissolution of a dancehall/wedding band as the various members face middle age poor, alone, and unsuccessful; by turns mature and pulpy, Lim's movie possesses a consistent rigor. The troupe's various debacles often take place a room away from where we see them, and always in uninterrupted takes; the start-it-up garage-band myth has never had such a witty and despairing redress.

Waikiki Brothers Kyu Hyun Kim from the Korean Film Page

It took nearly five years for Director Im Sun-rye to return to feature film since her brilliant Three Friends (1996). For anyone who appreciates Korean cinema, the long wait was worth it. Waikiki Brothers was, like Take Care of My Cat, largely ignored in its initial release, but has since developed a very loyal fan base, mostly out of strong word of mouth.

The film chronicles the fate of a shoddy nightclub band named, as you may have guessed, Waikiki Brothers. As it opens, the lead vocal Sung-woo (Lee Uhl), having run out of other options, reluctantly signs a contract with a hotel in his hometown Suanbo, a washed-up resort town, once famous for its hot springs. Along with him for the ride are a bear-like, soft-hearted drummer Kang-soo (Whang Jeong-min) and a lecherous keyboardist Jong-suk (Pak Won-sang). However, Sung-woo's plan for a fresh start is compromised by Kang-soo's addiction to gambling and drugs and Jong-suk's compulsive womanizing. Meanwhile, Sung-woo runs into his old schoolmates, who used to play together in their high school rock band (from which the current band's moniker originated), and the object of his teenage crush, Inhee (Oh Ji-hye). For Sung-woo, these encounters, instead of evoking nostalgia for good old times, serve as rather bitter reminders of the ravages of time, and how becoming an adult means paying the price of having to forget the carefree pleasure of making music.

Im Sun-rye's directorial style may initially strike you as old-fashioned naturalism. She keeps most of her compositions in middle or long distance: there are hardly any close-ups. Any type of technical razzle-dazzle that calls attention to itself -- even jump cuts or interesting color schemes -- has been rigorously excluded. The only flight of fancy she allows is the insertion of Sung-woo's flashback of the naked frolic with his high school buddies into the karaoke video played during the "orgy" sequence. And yet, her "distancing" narrative strategy does not result in the loss of empathy. We are denied voyeuristic pleasure, but we never lose intimate relationships with the characters.

Waikiki Brothers is not lugubrious. It has its funny moments, although none of it is overtly "comedic." During the screening I attended, the sequence where Kang-soo, now a bus driver, begins to uncontrollably weep while berating his erstwhile bandmate brought down the house. The humor rises out of the recognizable absurdity of the situation, not out of any calculated strategy to tickle the viewer's funnybone. On the other hand, without making any fuss, Im allows us to glimpse into the all-too-real suffering and sheer despair of the characters. For instance, Kim Kyung-ho as Sung-woo's guitar instructor presents one of the most convincing and harrowing portrayals of an alcoholic I have seen in any movie. When Sung-woo's former schoolmate (Shin Hyun-jong), fired from the city office job and suicidally depressed, asks him, "Are you happy? You are the only one who is doing what you wanted," the statement is like a stab in the heart. In the end, though, Im wraps up the film with a cautiously optimistic ending that seems to vindicate Sung-woo's dogged commitment to performing music. The movie is mostly cast with relatively unknown theatrical actors, but the acting is for the most part excellent. I only learned later that many small but not insignificant roles in the movie were in fact filled with non-actors: they blend seamlessly with professional thespians. Even Ryu Seung-beom, the only acknowledged "star" in the cast, plays a relatively subdued character, whose story arc has a witty, so-this-is-the-generation-gap-in-Korea resolution.

Waikiki Brothers is a tough, restrained but ultimately compassionate film that you may wish to revisit many times, to relish its flavor that, like good wine, gets better with repeated viewings.

Yin Lichuan

KNITTING

China (100 mi) 2008

Knitting Dan Fainaru at Cannes from Screendaily

An unlikely ménage a trios drifts on the margins of legality while struggling to make a living of sorts in Yin Lichuan's deliberately reticent film. If withholding information rates as an artistic achievement, then Knitting could make a mark in arthouse berths and find its way into the odd festival. But for most this exhausting film will be a struggle.

Daiping (Zhang Yi) lives with Chen Jin (Lu Yulai) when his former mistress Haili (Yan Bingyan) installs herself in their flat and almost takes over the household. She entices him into a series of unspecified petty crimes, while Daiping is left at home to sulk and knit shawls that nobody needs. When Haili leaves with a man from her past, Daiping gets pregnant but before the baby arrives Chen's luck runs out and he is kidnapped by gangsters. Haili returns out of the blue with a tentative promise that things might start getting better.

Yin Lichuan seems to be commenting on China's growing infatuation with money and commerce, how people are forced to stick together to deal with the problems life throws at them and that the streets of the city are not paved with gold, but the script is sketchy on information and makes none of this very clear. As for the characters, Daiping is a passive-aggressive personality and Haili has a good side despite acting like a bully while Chen is a hopeless man, deluding himself that he has authority and gambling his life away on impossible schemes which backfire on him. Nothing is explored nor developed in depth, as if any explanation would be an indulgence.

All three actors tackle their parts gamely, given the limitations imposed by the script, while technical credits are only satisfactory.

Yoon Jong-bin

THE UNFORGIVEN

South Korea (121 mi) 2005

At Cannes, a Look at Italian Politics and a Peek at American Films ... Manohla Dargis from the New York Times

There are several South Korean films at Cannes this year, including "The Unforgiven," an impressive first feature from Yoon Jong-bin. The film, which is screening out of the main competition in a section called Un Certain Regard, follows a sensitive young man (he listens to Belle and Sebastian) through the brutalizing first years of his military service. The film's complex narrative structure cost it some viewers during its first press screening (the scandalously bad projection didn't help), but those who stuck with it were rewarded by a film that, much like Roman Polanski's "Pianist," shows how individuals can be broken by systems of power bit by soul-crushing bit. Mr. Yoon also wrote the script and plays one of the two pivotal supporting roles, as yet another young man who slips under the boot.

The Unforgiven Kyu Hyun Kim from the Korean Film Page

Winner of the FIPRESCI, NETPAC and other awards at the 2005 Pusan Film Festival, The Unforgiven is a feature-length graduation thesis film from undergraduate director Yoon Jong-bin. Despite its rough edges due to technical limitations and a low budget, the film was a smash hit at Pusan, generating wide publicity for the film and giving it a chance to be shown at respectable art-house theaters in Seoul. Unfortunately, director Yoon found himself the object of litigation by the Defense Department, when the film turned out to be a far cry from the heart-warming "story of friendship inside the barracks" the Defense Department had apparently read in screenplay form, before they granted Yoon permission to shoot his film inside the authentic living quarters (Yoon has since acknowledged his act of deception and stated that he will accept the appropriate punishment).

Those who have seen Yim Soon-rye's 1996 masterpiece Three Friends might recall a disturbing sequence in which the protagonist asks one of his friends to smash his shoulder with a piece of wood so that he could avoid being drafted into military service. The reduction of all human relationships into a rigid hierarchy, experienced in the two years of mandatory military service, maintained through small and large violations of private space (both external and internal) as well as small and large mechanisms of enforcement, from casually handed-down insults and corporal punishment to sexual harassment (among men: women are not drafted), casts a very long shadow on the lives of Korean men. And yet, few Korean films, if any, have directly tackled the subject of what really goes on inside the military, and what the experience means for male Koreans. The Unforgiven manages to grapple with this difficult subject, with an admirable level of thoughtfulness and honesty.

With its clever flashback structure, the film has the outline of a mystery, but it is at heart an intimate character study of two figures, Tae-jeong (the charismatic and handsome Ha Jeong-woo) and Seung-young (Seo Jang-won, pictured above, whose feminine beauty and vulnerable yet neurotic glances remind one of a young Christopher Walken). As the film opens, we see Sergeant Tae-jeong beating up a "junior" soldier in the restroom, mouthing tiresome I-am-doing-all-this-because-I-care-about-you cliches. One day he is introduced to Seung-young, a rookie. To their initial delight, they recognize each other as old school chums. Tae-jeong takes Seung-young under his wing and attempts to coach the latter in the "ways of military." But Seung-young, unable to tolerate the rampant unreason and you-gotta-do-it-no-matter-how-stupid- the-order-is (il)logic of grunt life, soon has himself pegged as a troublemaker. When Seung-young resolves to treat a spectacularly incompetent rookie Ji-hoon (played by director Yoon) differently from other "seniors," his stubborn sense of justice leads only to further problems for all concerned.

Director Yoon makes a number of shrewd choices that prevent the film from being mawkish or preachy. Seung-young's character, in particular, is well-drawn: he is not portrayed as a stalwart reformer but as a rather irritating, almost paranoid, nerd. His behavior, such as his refusal, for instance, to be photographed with a dika phone (cell phones with digital camera rigged inside), sets him apart from the rest of Koreans, whose sense of individual privacy is frequently dismantled by their sense of obligation to camaraderie or esprit de corps, or, perhaps more truthfully, their fear of ostracism. Some viewers might be desperately annoyed by Seung-young's inability to tell Tae-jeong just what he wants, but this aspect of his characterization resonated with me absolutely: the portrayal of a Korean man who simply cannot articulate his inner turmoil in an intelligible, rational language is dead-on. Director Yoon's own acting as Ji-hoon also deserves a special mention: he is transformed, without nary a misstep on his part, from a laughable dumb-clown figure, who seemingly "deserves" all the abuse and insults heaped upon him, to a wretched victim of emotional abuse and alienation, whose spiritual despair, when finally displayed in public, hits the viewer in the guts.

The Unforgiven is not without flaws, of course. The film's "mystery" plot and its resolution turn out to be something of a letdown (not to mention predictable), like the "revelation" about Jeong-hye's past in This Charming Girl. One could legitimately question, as Kim Young-jin (Film 2.0) does, the wisdom of Yoon's choice to rely on the "shock treatment" of a climax for generating desired emotional effects. Still, ultimately, The Unforgiven's virtues outweigh its shortcomings. It is neither a professionally polished genre film nor a didactic "message" movie. It is an honest, albeit confrontational, character-driven drama about two types of young men in South Korea -- one who learned to "adjust" himself to the military service and one who could not -- so common, yet so completely ignored by all of Korean popular culture, not just cinema. Whatever its critics may say about it, The Unforgiven is not a straightforward indictment of the Korean military: its "negative" depiction of the institution does not really go beyond describing what is "business as usual." The film's real object of inquiry, as it were, is the tragic price of denial, of shunting aside the absurd, horrid, unjust, and irrational aspect of one's life-experience into a small, dark corner and not talking about it.

Near the ending, Tae-jeong's girlfriend asks him, "How is, what's his name, your military buddy, doing?" and he answers casually, "He's doing okay." Tae-jeong then locks himself in the restroom and keeps repeating the phrase, "He's doing okay, he's doing okay... he is really doing fine..." with his haunted eyes fixed on himself in the mirror. Far more powerful than the J.S.A-like coda preceding the end credits, this scene is one of the most painfully honest renderings of young Korean men I have seen in a Korean film, whose souls are eaten away by the price they paid for having "adjusted" themselves to become good soldiers and upstanding "real men." The Unforgiven is a must-see for anyone who seeks to gain insight into the inner psychology of Korean men, and a stupendously promising debut for yet another talented Korean filmmaker.

Yorkin, Bud

TWICE IN A LIFETIME

USA (111 mi) 1985

Time Out

Yorkin sets up a family drama with Hackman as paterfamilias, Burstyn devoted wife, Dennehy drinking chum, Madigan married daughter, Sheedy unmarried daughter. Having given us the satiric Divorce American Style two decades ago, he now serves up 'Divorce Serious Style', with Hackman falling for barmaid Ann-Margret. But while there is an admirable depiction of 'real' people at work or settling down for the big match with a six-pack, the material is still no more than the great middle class drama of adultery, worked out with its very familiar rows and guilts. The acting, however, is a fascinating primer in just who can handle the medium. Burstyn and Madigan come out as if born to the art.

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)

Gene Hackman as a solid, plain-speaking, blue-collar family man; Ellen Burstyn as his emotionally shriveled, timid wife; and Ann-Margret as the vivacious, warmhearted widow with whom Hackman falls in love. Directed by Bud Yorkin (one of the dominant personalities behind All in the Family), this weightless melodrama exhibits the kind of condescending "fairness" (nobody's right, nobody's wrong--these things just happen, that's all) that is often taken for artistic maturity, but just as frequently reflects a reluctance to engage the material on a deep emotional level. Yorkin skitters along the surface, limiting the characterizations to blandly pleasant TV stereotypes, stifling the situations with psychobabble when the feelings threaten to become unmanageable. You only have to compare it to any random Cassavetes film to know how phony it is, yet this is the sort of comforting phoniness (Yorkin suggests that the wife is better off for being dumped--she'll be able to find herself now) that has always meant box office. With Amy Madigan, Ally Sheedy, Stephen Lang, and Darrell Larson; the screenplay is by Colin Welland (Chariots of Fire).

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Everyday American life is so rare in the movies these days that some of the pleasures of "Twice in a Lifetime" are very simple ones, like seeing a family around a dinner table, or watching a kid sister prepare for her wedding day. The rhythms of life and the normal patterns of speech seemed almost unfamiliar, after all the high-tech thrillers and teenage idiot films I've seen this year. This film was so sensible, perceptive and grown-up that I almost looked for the subtitles. The film stars Gene Hackman as a workingman whose marriage is happy in all the official ways, and dead in the personal ways. His wife (Ellen Burstyn) has centered her life entirely around her home and family to such an extent that on Hackman's birthday she doesn't even want to go out with him. She tells him to go down to the corner tavern and enjoy himself. And she means it. There is a lot missing in this marriage.

At the saloon, Hackman meets the new barmaid (Ann-Margret), and begins a wary process of falling in love with her. He eventually decides to leave his wife and move in with this woman, and his decision causes upheaval throughout his family. His wife is devastated. But the angriest family member is his oldest daughter (Amy Madigan), who bitterly resents the way he's dumping them - especially when her kid sister (Ally Sheedy) is about to get married.

"Twice in a Lifetime" stacks its cards very carefully, and cuts the deck more than once. One of the strengths of the movie is that it allows us to see so many points of view. Hackman has not simply dumped his wife for a sex bomb; the Ann-Margret character has been around the block a few times and operates from a center of quiet realism. It is possibly true that the life and growth has gone out of his marriage. Perhaps he deserves another chance - although the movie is too hasty to assume that his wife does, too, if only she knew it.

The most complicated and interesting character in the movie is Amy Madigan's angry daughter. She's mad about more than the broken marriage. Her husband is out of work, and in her late 20s she feels somewhat trapped by her marriage and children. A lot of her hopes have gone into her kid sister. She wants her to go to college and make a future for herself, but Ally Sheedy is rushing into her own early marriage. Madigan acts as the contact point between the various parts of the story: loving her sister, exasperated by her, standing by her mom, resentfully excluding her father. It's quite an assignment, and as she tries to balance all those demands we see one of the most complex movie characters in a long time (have you noticed how many recent movies assign their characters one duty and one mood and think that's enough?).

The Gene Hackman and Ann-Margret characters are complex, too. They are attracted not by lust but by the promise of a new life. They both feel that when they get up in the morning there's nothing to look forward to all day. This movie knows one of the differences between young love and middle-aged love: Kids often are motivated by romance, but people in their 40s and 50s sometimes are inspired by the most romantic ideal of all - idealism, and the notion that they have found a mate for their minds.

The least-defined character in "Twice in a Lifetime" is the wife, played by Burstyn. Her husband has made his decision and left her to make hers. At first she is simply lost. Eventually she starts picking up the pieces, and she gets a job in the local beauty parlor. She even gets a new hairdo (in one of the movies' most durable cliches). By the end of the film she has started to realize that she, too, was trapped by the marriage. But there is the slightest feeling that her realization owes more to the convenience of the screenplay than to her own growth.

The movie does not have a conventional happy ending. Life will go on, and people will strive, and new routines will replace old ones. The movie has no villains and few heroes. But it has given us several remarkable scenes, especially two confrontations between Madigan and Hackman, one in a bar, the other at a wedding rehearsal, in which the movie shows how much children expect from their parents, and how little the parents often have to give. Growing up is learning that parents are fallible. The people who find that hardest to learn are parents.

Twice in a Life Time Consuming Families, by Elayne Rapping from Jump Cut, March 1986

DVD Verdict [Rusell Engebretson]

DVD Talk [Scott Weinberg]

The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]

Channel 4 Film

Read the New York Times Review » Janet Maslin

Yu Hyun-mok

The Yu Hyun-mok Page - Darcy's Korean Film Page

GUESTS WHO ARRIVED BY THE LAST TRAIN

aka: The Guest Who Came on the Last Train

South Korea (104 mi) 1967

Guests Who Arrived by the Last Train Darcy Paquet from the Korean Film Page

Yu Hyun-mok, described by some as the most intellectual filmmaker of Korea's Golden Age, adapted Guests Who Arrived by the Last Train from a noted short story by Hong Seong-won. As the title obliquely suggests, this film concentrates on a group of people who have trouble adjusting to mainstream society. From a woman running away from her previous life, to a man with a terminal disease, to a pop artist misunderstood by his contemporaries, the film looks on with sympathy and compassionate humor on a set of people who, for whatever reason, just don't fit in.

Yu presents his group of characters in an objective fashion, without focusing too closely on any one person. The characters are linked together in various ways, with their relationships all affected by issues of money. Although we get a sense of their similarities, various walls go up between the members of the group, sometimes with tragic consequences.

An accomplished filmmaker, Yu is very particular about his mise-en-scene, with each scene carefully composed with regard to objects and color. Inanimate objects such as faucets or calendars often take on a meaning of their own, giving us clues about our characters' inner states. On a purely visual level, the film is also quite surprising in the beauty it draws from everyday settings.

Among the large cast is featured two of the most popular stars of the era, both members of the famous "troika" of actresses who first appeared in 1966. The part of Bo-young, a woman who moves in with a stranger and gradually falls in love with him, is played by Moon Hee, a beautiful and much sought-after actress. The first scene of the film, when Bo-young appears in the darkness and follows a man home, is one of its most memorable. The other troika member is Nam Jung-im in the role of Se-jung, who is tormented by issues of inheritence and family money. (The final troika member, Yoon Jung-hee, doesn't appear here but plays the young schoolteacher in Mist).

In an interview, the director noted of this feature, "I thought it rather interesting to present a theme characterized by a repeated process of loss and the restoration of humanity through each of the three main characters. They are people who are one step behind others in society; they are the passengers who hurry gasping onto the last train." At certain points in our lives we can all empathize with that image, however much we may differ with the characters in this film.

Guests Who Arrived by the Last Train ("Makcha-ro on sonnim-deul"). Directed by Yu Hyun-mok. Screenplay by Lee Sang-hyun, Lee Eun-sung. Starring Moon Hee, Lee Soon-jae, Sung Hoon, Kim Sung-ok, Nam Jeong-im, An In-sook, Han Chan-ju. Cinematography by Min Jeong-shik. Produced by Dong Yang Films Co., Inc. 104 min, 35mm, color. Rating received on December 14, 1967. Presented at the 6th Panama International Film Festival.

SCHOOL EXCURSION

South Korea (115 mi) 1969

Yu Hyun-mok's School Excursion (1969) - Darcy's Korean Film Page

Yu, Jessica

IN THE REALMS OF THE UNREAL B 88

USA (82 mi) 2004

A film about fathoming the unfathomable, a glimpse into a tormented and all but unknowable human soul, a recluse who barely spoke, not really known by anyone, Henry Darger, one of the founders of “Outsider Art,” a man who in his lifetime accumulated three photographs of himself, who retreated into his one-roomed apartment where he endlessly documented a 15,000 page epic novel entitled, “The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion,” complete with hundreds of pages of paintings, some as large as ten feet long, depicting angelic child heroines doing battle against their evil adult oppressors. While it was known he attended Catholic Mass more than once a day and took Communion, his face recognized by an altar boy at the church, he spoke to no one. He largely led his life completely immersed in the world of his imagination. In film format, while the pictures are fascinating, despite digital attempts to keep the images moving, actually superimposing some over the Chicago landscapes, they probably don’t do justice to the enormity of the work itself. There are multiple interweaving narratives added, some biographic, others articulated from the pages of his stories, including the voice of 8-year old Dakota Fanning, whose eerie innocence evokes his troubled state of mind, but they are overly wordy with few silences, leaving one a bit overwhelmed, perhaps wondering how does one makes sense of this all? The director intentionally chose not to include references to two books on the man, Michael Bonesteel’s Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings (2000), and John M. MacGregor’s Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal (2002), claiming: “I wanted people to experience Henry’s work as he did, and make up their own minds about it, rather than having it be told to them as something definitive.”

By Andréa Picard Film/Art: Henry Darger, from Cinema Scope

Despite my nagging sense of responsibility, I emphatically do not want to see In the Realms of the Unreal for a second time. In my tarrying, there is silent protest amid internal debate, because my memory, alas, is imprinted, not with images but frustration and hostility toward a film I saw nearly a year ago in a hectic setting at the Cleveland International Film Festival, and which I mistakenly kept referring to as In the Realms of the Senses. The film was Jessica Yu’s much-lauded In the Realms of the Unreal and my slip of the tongue should not be forgiven. (The film was reviewed semi-favourably in the last issue of CinemaScope, as well as enthusiastically in countless publications upon its North American release, effectively reminding me of my objections.) Ostensibly an investigation into the mysterious life of America’s “foremost outsider art” figure, Henry Darger, Yu’s film fails to surmount the realm of speculation, and relies heavily on the same information, like endless overtures with no sign of an end.

In the Realms of the Unreal does not plunge us into the parallel worlds of Henry Darger, as the film’s press kit claims. Instead, it recounts, in staid and unsteady interviews, what precious little is known about a reclusive shut-in who produced what is likely one of the largest manuscripts of fiction, weighing in at a hefty 15,145 pages. Uncovered upon his death in April of 1973 by Darger’s landlords, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion was bound by hand and in 15 volumes. Three additional books were found, containing over 300 drawings, including 87 multi-sheet horizontal panels, many of which feature illustrations on both sides, probably a result of Darger’s relative poverty. Alongside a 5,000-page sequel titled Adventures in Chicago, as well as a 3,000-page autobiography, they form Henry Darger’s body of work—a posthumous discovery that consequentially sent minor ripples through the often picayunish terrain that is art history. While the literary work continues to be read and dissected by a group of scholars, the illustrations have penetrated certain prestigious art circles. His naïve, fantastical drawings have left an indelible mark on contemporary drawing styles, which often blend a childlike aesthetic with dark, suggestive psychological undercurrents, or cutting satire (see, for instance, the collective works from Winnipeg’s Royal Art Lodge, or Torontonian Shary Boyle). This renaissance has found summation in the remarkable success of the graphic novel. Illustration seems to have surpassed painting and photography within a fair number of gallery settings. As contentious and vague (and objectionable) as it is, the term “outsider artist” is most often used to describe untrained (i.e., unschooled, unmentored) artists, sometimes poor and disenfranchised, and those with mental illness. Henry Darger probably fits all of the above criteria, and the air of mystery surrounding his life (few photos of him exist, few meaningful encounters are remembered, etc.) make him a prime cult candidate, not to mention a challenging subject for documentary.

With a significant amount of newfound interest in his life and work, Darger has spawned theatre productions; a few books; an all-girl British band called the Vivian Girls, named after those prancing Coppertone baby princesses with penises who lead the rebellion in Darger’s epic novel; and now Yu’s documentary, five years in the making. Only recently (say, the last ten years), he has been referred to as the “best outsider artist America has produced.” Is this so ironic a statement that it effectively cancels out its own perverse irony? An orphaned, neglected, “feeble minded” poor man is what America has proudly produced? The film tells us how Darger was not offered any kind of assistance nor support, and that he was forced to suffer alone in silence and in relatively abject conditions. And yet, In the Realms prominently features Darger’s former landlords, Kiyoko and Nathan Lerner, who reminisce about rather banal details, his strange comings and goings and his quirks. The Lerners play the role of experts in the documentary, as well as witness to this rather tragic existence.

Add a sadder ending to a sad life when these thoughtful, understanding landlords somehow become the beneficiaries of his estate and give in to the pull of greed. Wouldn’t Darger’s unpublished work, both literary and visual, fall to the State of Illinois in the absence of kin? As a photographer keen to the inner-workings of the art market, Nathan Lerner actively tore apart some of Darger’s work in order to reap the exploits. Yu’s film fails to offer this information, as it is the Lerners who do most of the telling, which is understandable considering the filmmaker had sought full access to Darger’s former apartment, manuscripts, and works in order to make her documentary. There is something amiss here, and it’s more than the potential darker side of Darger’s broken, ailing personality. It’s easy to retain his eccentricities, to read into his obsessive nature and the fact he tried to adopt a child on his own despite barely being able to function as a member of society. So the work was salvaged from the trash bin, rescued by his art-smart landlords who knew not to throw out the drawings and books, and preserved his apartment as-is—recognizing that a mad, potentially brilliant artist was living upstairs from them. (Is this a happy ending?) There are conflicting reports about how the work became disseminated into the art world and into public recognition. The Lerners have indeed donated a vast amount of Darger’s work, especially to the American Folk Museum where the Henry Darger Center (a not-for-profit foundation) was later assembled in 1997. But what about the thievery and exploitation? Should they be dismissed in the wake of the Lerners’ efforts to conserve Darger’s legacy? Some of the works were undoubtedly split (presumably the multi-panels) and sold off as individual pieces. This is what I wanted to learn from the documentary once it introduced the extraordinary circumstances in which Darger had produced a museum’s worth of art.

In the Realms of the Unreal cannot escape similar accusations. Who granted Jessica Yu the right to animate Darger’s drawings, which were most decidedly not storyboards, not meant to be motion pictures? With what legitimacy did she engage child star Dakota Fanning to lend voice to the Vivian Girls, a shocking appropriation of Darger’s work, altering its meaning irrevocably for those who have not encountered his work prior to seeing the film—surely a vast percentage of the audience. It’s not only shameful but ethically wrong. The animation constitutes a significant transformation (read: bastardization) of Darger’s work. With flights of fancy, his drawings leap up off the screen in a real motion that he never intended, adding swift sequence to the two-dimensional illustrations. Naturally one can think of Darger’s drawings as accompanying illustrations to his novel, and they do employ chronology and exhibit typological import. They are most vivid in recounting the story Darger has astonishingly dreamed up, perhaps as a means to escape his own dreary life of solitude, inexperience, and inopportunity. To animate his work, to give his characters voice and plunge them into an orchestral world of sound is to violate his creation. What right does the filmmaker have to interpret his work in such a bold way, all the while repudiating the idea of “interpretation” or “criticism” so not as to lend pretension to her own project? “Eschewing expert opinion,” the press kit proudly declares, the film seeks to immerse us in Darger’s antic world of whimsy provoking a purely emotive response. Yu, consistently throughout the documentary, depicts Darger’s interior battles, as reflected through the drama of both his make-believe and his real worlds. Plenty of inarticulate implications are made in the realms.

While Walter Benjamin long ago signalled his clarion call against mechanical reproduction and its destructive effect on the aura of an original work of art, Yu has systematically stripped the aura from Darger’s work by using it in ways it was probably never meant to be experienced and shown. The fact is, we’ll never know for sure. When I saw the film in Cleveland, I shuffled uneasily in my seat, confounded by the audience’s clear enjoyment of the drawings come to life and the cutesy voice narrating the story. As appalling and reprehensible as it seemed to me, my fellow viewers appeared reasonably entertained and engaged, suggesting that Yu had created a successful documentary that introduced an unknown artist to those not necessarily aware of figures in the art world without iconic status. When the screening finally ended, the audience clapped enthusiastically and began to commiserate about this new person in the world. Guests of the festival were then invited to an art gallery across town to view a large, original, two-sided triptych Darger, which formed the centrepiece to a group show of “outsider” drawings. This was the second Darger I would see in the flesh, the first being a few years ago in Chicago, his hometown. When we arrived, everyone circled around the horizontal, glass-enclosed panel, identifying the characters whose acquaintance they had just made. They were charming, nymphish, and intriguing creatures. The piece had allure with its pleasantly pale palette of light blues, golds, pinks, and carmine, and its various battles and details demanded that one look closely as not to miss an important piece of the puzzle. Suddenly someone cried out, “Can’t you just hear that cute girl’s voice?” Then, like Glenn Gould, I was instantly aware of matching comments overwhelming me from every direction: “I can see their legs moving still,” “It was funny in the film when the girls…,” and on and on it went. The animation had impressed upon people’s minds a certain aesthetic and style that were a composite of Darger and the filmmaker’s vision. Viewers were simply not able to examine Darger’s work without seeing the collaborative effort Yu had forced the work into becoming.

To reconstruct a life is one thing, to do it respectfully is another—think of the authorized versus the unauthorized biography. Perhaps I’m arguing in favour of the memoir, which needn’t necessarily be laden with truthfulness. The best memoirs harbour an unassuming mix of fact (candour and quiet) and fiction (exaggeration, false recollection, embellishment, and open-faced lies). The two bleed into one another, creating an ambiguous heightened form of expression. It becomes almost beside the point to believe everything described in brilliant memoirs like George Steiner’s Errata, J.M. Coetzee’s Youth, and Martin Amis’ Experience, to cite rather recent examples. Books like Speak, Memory annihilate their own truth through pretension and self-aggrandizing myth. Even then, truth doesn’t matter so much, does it? Rather, the verbosity and swaggering feats of a seven-year-old Nabokov did not find that hidden, strange distance of reflection. That painful, sour taste of yearning is oddly absent in Speak, Memory , eclipsed by an abiding precociousness in the throes of self-creation. The telling is too clean, too predicated, too assured. Self-doubt is coloured in self-doubt, clothed in it, but not endured. There is madness in this greatness and it fights with time, against the expiration of consciousness, not existence. Funny that.

In the Realms of the Unreal takes the form of the unauthorized biography, and deep within it lurks a lengthy memoir (little used in the film) and a huge creative cropping (without evaluation or context). Like most overzealous biographers, Jessica Yu has found a sneaky way to invade the world of her subject, but unlike the often-seductive demimonde of most celebrated subjects of biography, the drudgery of Darger’s life remains safely untethered. The alliance is struck through an imposed dialogue with the work, a question of appropriation rather than affinity. Darger is thus resurrected and defeated yet again.

Yu Lik-wai (Nelson Yu)

LOVE WILL TEAR US APART

Hong Kong (114 mi) 1999

Love Will Tear Us Apart Shelly Kraicer from a Chinese Cinema Page

It is difficult for a single review adequately to represent Yu Lik-wai's Love Will Tear Us Apart, but such an extraordinary film is worth the effort. It has so far received decidedly mixed reviews, given its remarkable history to date: it premiered in a "New Asian film and video" sidebar last April at the Hong Kong International Film Festival, and then leapt directly into the 1999 Cannes official competition. I found it on a sloppily transferred commercial VCD (the Toronto Film Festival failed to program it, but Vancouver and Pusan did not make the same mistake).

Yu Lik-wai is a Hong Kong native, Beijing-resident cinematographer (of Jia Zhangke's remarkable Xiao Wu (1998) and Ann Hui's Ordinary Heroes (1999)), who has won awards for his 1996 documentary Neon Goddesses. Love Will Tear Us Apart is his first feature, supported by a grant from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council and by prominent producers Stanley Kwan and Tony Leung Kar-fai (it stars the latter).

If I had to fix Love Will Tear Us Apart on the Chinese film-making map, it would be somewhere between Fruit Chan's romantic meditations on post-1997 HK (for theme) and Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang's essays on urban anomie (for style). The film follows 4 main characters, all former mainlanders resident in HK (reversing the direction of Yu's own migration). Yan Ying (Wang Ming) is a prostitute in her 20s, recently arrived from the North East via Shenzhen. Ah Jian (Tony Leung Kar-fai) runs a small porn video shop. He lives with Yan (Lu Liping), a former dance instructor on the mainland who now, in HK in her 30s, is an elevator operator at a restaurant. And Chun (Chow Chi-sang) is an elevator repairman.

The story follows these four characters, throwing them together in various combinations, testing their reactions to each others' presence. Among the incidents: Jian, rejected by a young lover, threatens feebly to kill himself. Later, he catches sight of Ying shoplifting, and decides to pursue her. Chun is assaulted by Jian and a crony when he declines to rent a porn video. Later, in revenge, Chun attempts to firebomb Jian’s video shop. Yan tells Ying the story of the car accident that killed her son and caused her to lose her right foot. Later, she tells a different version of the story to Chun, who is fixing the elevator where she works. Jian closes his shop. Ying returns to the mainland.

Lu Liping, one of China's best actresses, is perfect as the quietly suffering Yan: her subtle, delicate performance suggests depths of feeling with the most economical of means. Tony Leung Kar-fai is brave to have taken on the unattractive and taxing role of Jian: he creates a complex character whose disreputable and sometimes impenetrable facade masks a deeply troubled spirit. Newcomer Wang Jing makes an impressive debut in the central role of Ying. She is fascinating to watch in a part that demands both wild, choreographed extroversion and still, inarticulate, sequence-shot-length self-absorption. Chow Chi-sang's Chun is the only weak link here, leaving an impression that the scenes involving his character go on for just a bit too long.

A film like Love Will Tear Us Apart deliberately defies description. It is not at all a "whole" film: it shuns narrative, avoids character (in the sense of a character as a consistent, developing sort of identity), is both puzzlingly vague and utterly specific about place, and has an almost casual attitude towards chronology. But these features are what make Yu Lik-wai's debut feature such a striking, impossible to ignore crisis-call in Chinese cinema.

On the surface, it is a chamber piece with essentially four actors, juxtaposed in various ways; and it all takes place (barring a couple of significant excursions, and flashbacks) in what looks like a particularly grim and seedy part of Mongkok. Apart from this surface, what holds it together is its visual style. That and a kind of formal organisation (if it is appropriate to use the word) built out of echoes, recurrences, reverberations of images, colours, situations, and words, that wind their way through the film, lightly touching various characters as they are contained, briefly, in each one's ambit, then passed on, or around, to others, never quite settling, never finally pinned down.

Some of these circulating images:

-- a series of windows, barred with grills, but decorated gracefully, and painted in a gorgeous blue back light, in front of which Ying lingers

-- songs that the characters stop to listen to, rapt, temporarily transported: Teresa Teng ballads, a contemporary HK pop song, a bizarre glitzy TV number, a Maoist anthem

-- faces, obliterated and observed: those of Ying and her roommates, completely masked by a thick white paste; '40s film star Bai Ying's portrait, pinned down in Jian's memory as the perfect face, caught by Ying in a coloured postcard, then scrawled over by Chun

-- dance: anonymous couples in an anachronistically gilded ballroom; Ying's solo, rhapsodic ballet; Yan's memories of teaching social dancing on the mainland; finally, Ying dancing alone in the middle of a mainland disco crowd

-- radio and television, offering a soulless, background illumination and chatter for Chun, Yan, and Ying, and offering each of them a window out of their solitude, though one mediated by mass media's kitsch (the dull call-in sex radio show that Jian listens to, and Chun calls up; Yan's favourite televised epic PRC movies and tacky dance spectaculars)

These sequences of objects, sounds, and lights, knit carefully into the fabric of the movie, restore what is withheld from plot and characterization: the sense of a sustained, comprehensible, fully developed trajectory or structure. As if the film dares not only to show us empty lives, marked by boredom, vacancy, pointlessness, solitude -- lives drained of meaning -- but also refuses to stop there. It's not by any means a boring, affectless film, though it can be challenging for viewers, who have to suspend a sense of narrative expectation, and either fill in the "blanks" themselves, or wait until, eventually, Love Will Tear Us Apart fills one for them, though sometimes with more than one possible "answer".

It is as if the film gives to its viewers, but not its characters, a visible and audible scaffold, full of rhymes and repetitions, saturated with potential "sense", if only we could learn how to unpack it. Jean-Michel Frodon in Le Monde has described Love Will Tear Us Apart as an essay at synthesizing HK and mainland film, which is apt, I think .Hong Kong cinema has been looking outwards, towards the mainland, with a mixture of dread, anticipation, excitement, and denial since the early '80s. As that impetus for filmmaking finally plays itself out, Love Will Tear Us Apart shows a whole new world of possibilities, HK observed from the outside in, through "mainlanders'" eyes.

It is a point of view that fractures, dissolves (tears apart, even) what it finds there. But in doing so, opens up a space for once unimagined (or unimaginable) possibilities. This is the first film I am aware of that dares to map out a way in which a synthesis of Hong Kong and mainland China might release something new, exciting, liberating, full of potential for each territory. 

A revised version of this review appeared in Cinemaya: the Asian Film Quarterly, no. 46, 1999

ALL TOMORROW’S PARTIES C- 69

China (96 mi) 2003

Yes, I expected to hear the Velvets here, as I recall the liner notes claimed this was Warhol’s favorite, “…and where will she go and what shall she do when midnight comes around?” Well, no matter, it wasn’t in the film. Rather than a gothic rock anthem, this is a numbing and ultimately forgettable futuristic film set where people are urged to worship only the future and to forget about the past, which is completely outlawed, such as photographs, music, dancing, even the concept of family. The filmmaker is Jia Zhang-ke’s cinematographer in PLATFORM and UNKNOWN PLEASURES, and visually, this is an extraordinary tour de force, inventing a futuristic wasteland, and some sequences are simply indescribable. But there isn’t an ounce of character development in this film, so really, there is nothing, other than the pictorials, to keep the audience engaged. A disappointment, as this has the potential to be so much more. Rather than the decadence of the 60’s, the title probably refers to all the tried revolutionary parties, particularly poking fun at the Maoists, all of tomorrow’s parties, all resemble failed practices of the past, yet they are recycled in the future as new, and all who disobey are punished and sent to rehabilitation camps. I noted all the credits in the end are in English, not Chinese, so apparently the Chinese government would have nothing to do with the distribution of this film. Unfortunately, it’s not a very radical work.

PLASTIC CITY (Dangkou) D 60

China Brazil Hong Kong Japan (118 mi) 2009 ‘Scope

Where would you see a film like this except at a film festival, as there’s no distributor so it’s not likely to be coming to your neighborhood real soon. While there is a certain amount of daring experimentation, especially in the extraordinary visual palette, someone should consider getting this director a better script to work with, as he has talent galore, but it’s wasted in this hokum. The big surprise for me was the mention of Jia Zhange-ke as an executive producer, even though the director is Jia’s frequent cinematographer, and also the name of Shelly Kraicer (Chinese Cinema Site, by Shelly Kraicer) as a person to thank on the closing credits. I’m more intrigued by their connections, two of the more notable figures in Chinese cinema, than this film itself, which just falls flat. This feels like an experiment gone wrong, a Chinese-Brazilian cultural exchange, where the attempt to make a Hong Kong style gangster movie in São Paulo, Brazil utterly fails to materialize, using a wretched macho drama about who rules the global street markets of mass producing the cheapest, pirate products, drenched with large doses of artificiality that banks on mixing a heavy dose of violence with lurid sex, usually a lethal combination, but much of this is so hopelessly inept, filled with sullen disconnected characters that may as well be interchangeable parts, as this guy just hasn’t a clue with character development. Stuck in a clichéd story with no one to care about, despite occasional visual flair, this film is something of an embarrassment that just goes nowhere, a step down from his equally numbing and ultimately forgettable earlier film ALL TOMORROW’S PARTIES (2003) which at least had a satiric political slant to it.

Though it’s a tired, overworn cliché to even suggest this, I’d say this film suffers from the Brazilian CITY OF GOD (2002) complex, perhaps the template for commercially successful films shot in the slums of Brazil, a film that uses such calculated visceral imagery to glamorize violence that it borders on the cynical manipulation of an advertising campaign—that and a horrendous script in this movie where the audience rarely gets a reprieve from the nihilistic monotony of characters who, when things go bad, simply yearn to die. In a gang infested lifestyle where the rich die young, Anthony Wong (pretty much showing the same hangdog facial expression throughout the entire film) as Yuda is the gang overlord along with his protégé, Kirin (Jô Odagiri) who runs the street operations, using the capitalistic principle that only fake merchandise makes money, so they’ve cornered the market. When competition rolls into town, things get ugly fast. Somewhere in all this are themes of loyalty and betrayal, accentuating the father and son relationship between the two primary gang leaders. Yuda also runs a prostitution ring, where Kirin is linked to one of the girls, Rita, the exquisitely beautiful Tainá Müller (somewhat in the Jayne Kennedy mold), who dreams of obtaining her freedom from this life. This is the kind of film that when Yuda gets arrested and sent to prison, he has his own personal bodyguard serving time with him. Perhaps a bit overwhelming is a metaphoric jungle scenario, literally transplanting part of the film to the jungle where only the strongest survive. All I can think of are cliché’s to describe this world turned upside down, a dark and deeply depressing film, whose only allure is the visual artificiality occasionally on display, such as a choreographed gang revenge fight set atop a giant pedestal looming over the city which has an entirely futuristic look to it just bathed in aesthetics. Shot by Yiu-Fai Lai, the colorful visuals only intermittently jump out at you, as the rest of this overly dour film follows the same sappy narrative that never seems to end, only prolonging the agony.

Special Note – cinematography Yiu-Fai Lai

Asia Pacific Arts [Brian Hu]

Armed with spectacular images (directed by Jia Zhang-ke cinematographer Yu Lik-wai) and a killer premise (“who owns the globalized third world?”), Plastic City turns out to be an overblown disaster that's surprisingly boring and empty of ideas. The visuals, of course, will knock your socks off. The deep reds, greens, and blacks evoke a Brazil of the near-future that's half Dark City, half 2046. But ultimately, Plastic City is the work of a DP-turned-director in the worst possible sense. Yu's previous film All Tomorrow's Parties was similarly sloppy, but the smaller ideas contained the amateurishness, and in fact lent it the aura of art. Plastic City, on the other hand, wants to be Happy Together made by Ridley Scott.

Yu co-wrote the film, and perhaps that's the problem; he has no ear for dialogue, no sense of pacing, and no larger vision beyond the individual canvases of each shot. I often couldn't wait for the camera to change positions because an astonishing composition or visual idea would be guaranteed. But the narrative just would not end. Anthony Wong (on autopilot) and Jo Odigari (exuding otherworldly hotness, but otherwise on autopilot) play a makeshift father/son on the run in the jungles of Brazil. From the genre, you know there will be betrayal, death, or both, but the film just does not know when to let it go. The story is bad pulp. It's like Godard's Alphaville without the irony -- in other words just a sloppy b-film. I'm sad to report that of all recent Chinese films, Plastic City most resembles Chen Kaige's The Promise, another pretentious debacle whose narrative stupidity undermined the visual ingenuity. Though Plastic City boasts cutting-edge talent, The Promise + street cred is still boring and annoying. For better apocalyptic sexiness, there's Chen Zhun FHM spread. It's just as vacuous, but at least funny.

User comments from imdb Author: dontspamme-11 from Canada

First, let's dispel some of the misinformation about this film. It's not "like 300" (there is a scene in the film lasting a few minutes which emulates the aesthetics of "300", which itself mimics the "bullet time" technique in "The Matrix"). There is no relation to "South Park" (???). And the only real similarity the movie shares with "City of God" is that it takes place in an impoverished area in Brazil (and it is increasingly agitating to read reviews about Brazilian films or films that takes place in Brazil which constantly references "City of God").

The story in "Plastic City" revolves around a counterfeit goods smuggler named Yuda (played by Anthony Wong) and his adopted son named Kirin (played by Jo Odajiri), who are facing the end of their business as a result of the economic and political changes of globalization. To facilitate Brazil's integration into the global economic system, Brazilian politicians have initiated an anti-piracy and anti-counterfeiting campaign to clean up the country's international image that threatens the livelihood of some of Sao Paolo's most impoverished communities who depend on this illicit economy for a living. Meanwhile, with permanent relocation of production facilities to third world countries where the cost of labour and production are cheaper, the demand for affordable brand-name and designer products traditionally supplemented by illicit counterfeit merchandise is slowly being filled by surplus or "left-over" goods coming from the factories contracted by brand-name companies that have fulfilled their quotas. A Taiwanese businessman approaches the father and son with an offer that would help their "business" transition from counterfeit import to surplus import (equally illicit). Yuda resolutely rejects the offer, thus starting a "war" that mobilizes politicians, street gangs, and mercenaries.

This premise could have been developed in any number of interesting directions. The problem is that Nelson Yu seems to have gotten bored with just making a political commentary, and decided to focus on telling a story about the relationship between Yuda and his adopted son (that unfortunately turns out to be not very interesting at all). The story ends up being poorly paced as a result of the fixation on interpersonal relationships (that do not always advance anything related to the plot), with the last 1/3 the film stitched together by a series of disconnected scenes meant to convey certain symbolism and metaphors about "tradition vs. modernity" that, quite frankly, I couldn't be bothered to make sense of because neither the story nor the characters made it worth the effort. Anthony Wong does what he can, given the script and the direction he has to work with. Other than admiring his performance, there isn't much else I found entertaining about this film.

User comments from imdb Author: samuelding85 from Singapore

First time movie director Nelson Yu Lik Wai gave his very best shot with his full length feature, Plastic City. With his very best shot, he tried various style of presenting the story. Evenntually, it lead everyone lost in nowhere, which happens to be the opening scene for the movie.

Anthony Wong and Jo Odagiri plays Yuda and Kirin, both were fugitives survived from the guns of Brazilian mercenaries. Set in the modern day Brazil, Yuda owns an counterfeit goods empire, which specializes in counterfeit products and pirated DVDs. Kirin, the godson of Yuda, believes in the philosophy of 'earning real money through selling fake goods'. When Yuda was arrested for manufacturing and distribution of counterfeit goods, Kirin took over the business. Using money and relationships with the military, Kirin pulls Yuda out of the trouble with the law.

Facing the pressure from the police, Yuda abandons his business and starts a new life. On the other hand, Kirin lost his buddies in a gang fight and his girlfriend left him after the fight. He embarks a journey to look for Yuda.

Being a new director, Nelson Yu was given the opportunity to film Plastic City in Brazil, with the support from various film commissions from Brazil. However, we do not get the very best out of the movie.

In some way, Plastic City is a combination of City of God, Lower City, 300 and South Park. Extract the gangsterism from City of God, add in a touch of sexuality from Lower City, blend in some CGI battle scenes from 300 and glazed it with the social issues discussed in South Park. The final product: Plastic City.

Plastic City tried to discuss issue on gangsterism from Lower City, and it barely covers all. The sleaziness from the strip clubs barely shows the link to the story. Gang fights were shot on blue screen, filled with plenty of CGI effects which looks exactly like what one would have seen from 300. Poverty, high crime rates in Brazil and the corrupted government add a little touch to the story.

There is no flow in the storyline, which is hard to swallow. Storyline without any connection and linkage worsens the overall feature of the film. To make it more confusing, scenes were presented in some flashbacks, and a bit of MTV style presentation.

Anthony Wong and Jo Odagiri uses Portuguese for most of their lines, which unfortunately, were performed by the professional dubbing artists. With more than 60 percent of dialog in Portuguese, one can easily spot the movement on the lips failed to match with what was heard. This is a letdown to the audience as one would expect their lines to sound as original as possible.

In overall, Plastic City is only worth watching when you are left with nothing but plenty of F-graded rubbish around you, since you can't go wrong with the acting skills of the two professional actors.

eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [4/5]

Quiet Earth [Bob Doto]

Twitch (Todd Brown) review

A Nutshell Review Stefan S.

Twitch (Todd Brown) review Pat Dahn

The Hollywood Reporter review Ray Bennett

Variety (Derek Elley) review

The Japan Times Kaori Shoji

Yuasa, Masaaki

MIND GAME

Japan (103 mi) 2004

Asian Cinema Drifter Tuna from Asian Cinema Drifter (link lost)

Making its rounds on the festival circuit over on this side of the world, Mind Game is turning heads and blowing minds as a hybrid narrative and experimental anime that recalls anything from Yellow Submarine to Waking Life. Nothing has ever impressed me more than its complete smorgasbord of 2 and 3 dimensional animation styles coupled with an utterly surreal mood that bounces around just as much as the visuals. Don’t fret though because Mind Game’s narrative is more grounded than we'd expect, beginning with the chance meeting of two childhood friends on the subway. Nishi, your average, timid, manga artist loser and Myon, the kind-natured, big-breasted girl he has been in love with since age 9. Having had previously little contact, they talk and Nishi discovers Myon is preparing to marry a simple truck driver named Ryo. Later on, when Nishi, Myon, Ryo, Myon’s sister Yang, and her father are all in the family-owned yakitori bar, a couple yakuza crash the dinner and things go downhill.

And cue a plot that takes us flying through the streets of Tokyo in a high-speed chase, up to heaven to meet the constantly shape-shifting God, down into a whale’s belly to meet a thirty-year long inhabitant, and all around jumping through time in beautifully jarring montages as bookends to the film. The film is a ridiculously fantastical journey that tackles the metaphysics stylishly reminiscent of Waking Life, but with a clear narrative to keep us in touch. It takes a simple drama about a loser reaching back out to his life-long love and making personal changes himself, but drenches it in unique flashbacks, trippy dreams and very magical realism.

However, no one deserves more credit than the animation production company Studio 4°C, who do everything and anything to deliver the visuals to mold the script’s insanity into something tangible. While Production I.G.'s Ghost in the Shell 2 made its mark with a gorgeously slick CGI and 2D mix, Studio 4°C channels a multitude of styles, blends them nearly seamlessly and creates a plain, shocking experience. The variety recalls Gainax's 6-episode FLCL series for sheer creativity, but Mind Game never seems as random as robots growing out of children’s heads.

Mind Game's only detriment for viewers may be its speed and momentum that can be anything from disorienting to unintentionally brisk in fleshing out the characters. Along with that, when it slows down for the final third, we can feel the drop-off from the prior act’s charm and energy and it becomes almost tedious being stuck there along the characters. But along with that, comes the film’s ability to twist the audience’s emotions. It slows down because it wants us to slow down. It wants us moving alongside the main characters on the adventure, and the execution is perfect. It’s this section of the film that answers all of our questions, including the ones we'll ask later, frolics in mindlessly colorful explosions of circus-type clowning around, and sets-up the longest, most frantic climax possible in anime.

And the film's final ten minutes is pure bliss as we reach this perfect level of understanding and appreciation for every little detail, every image, and every second of Mind Game’s soundtrack combining pop, rock, jazz and orchestral arrangements to compliment the experience. The finale is the ultimate overload that has its way of leaving you gasping for air, and poised as ever to re-watch the film the minute you can get your hands on it.

Zahedi, Caveh

I AM A SEX ADDICT

USA (98 mi) 2005

I AM A SEX ADDICT Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion

Caveh Zahedi has struggled to make four features in 15 years. With “I Am a Sex Addict,” he’s inadvertently stumbled onto something trendy. This film combines the voyeurism of reality TV with the comedy of embarrassment purveyed by Larry David on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and Ricky Gervais on “The Office” and “Extras.”

The film’s central character is Zahedi, who plays himself. With “I Am a Sex Addict,” Zahedi calls to mind the early work of Albert Brooks, whose first three films—“Real Life,” “Modern Romance,” and “Lost in America”—are notable for their unrelenting self-laceration. In “Modern Romance,” his character starts out seeming somewhat neurotic and looks like a sociopath by the end. Starting with his fourth film, “Defending Your Life,” Brooks started finding hope for his characters, and his work suffered for it.

Zahedi shows himself in numerous cringe-inducing situations, as when he goes around to every Los Angeles massage parlor he can find, groping receptionists’ breasts. Nevertheless, “I Am a Sex Addict” is an ode to recovery and 12-step groups. For all its wit, the film is far more compelling when exploring Zahedi’s problems rather than his redemption.

“I Am a Sex Addict” begins at Zahedi’s third wedding. He recounts the problems that led to the collapse of his first two marriages. However, the film adopts a digressive style, incorporating elements of documentary that allows for direct address to the audience. While in an open relationship at Yale, he met Caroline (Rebecca Lord), a French woman who needed a green card, and started seeing her. Zahedi split up with his other girlfriend, married Caroline, and moved to Paris. There, he began sleeping with prostitutes. This quickly became a compulsion, one that threatened his relationship with Caroline. He tried many means to defuse his fetish, but nothing really worked. After breaking up with Caroline, he had two other serious relationships, but they, too, were eventually sabotaged by his actions.

Zahedi’s style adopts the rhythms of addiction. Characters often repeat lines from his voice-over immediately after he says them. He shows the passage of time by filming actors in the same position but wearing different clothes. He also calls the film’s relation to reality into question. Zahedi shows stills and home movies of the women his characters are based on and offers information about the actors’ lives. Like her character, one has a drinking problem. He only learned Caroline has appeared in porn when he found her picture on a website after filming her performance; she told him she was a makeup artist.

Why would someone make a film as personal and intimate as “I Am a Sex Addict”? Zahedi doesn’t make it an easy question to answer. He’s both self-deprecating and self-serving. Even at his worst, he’s full of rationalizations. While these are largely full of crap—and he’s self-aware enough to know that—he always seems sincere. The first two-thirds of “I Am a Sex Addict” play like a Brooks film, with the telling difference that Zahedi is trying to charm the audience; in that, he’s closer to Woody Allen. He’s pretty good at it; the film’s very funny. His exhibitionism is deliberately uncomfortable, but there’s a large, disquieting dose of narcissism underneath it. Zahedi seems addicted to self-absorption as much as sex, an obsession that doesn’t stop when he attends Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings.

He eventually comes to an epiphany on an airplane after a disastrous trip to Europe with an alcoholic girlfriend—he’s an addict, not a mere fetishist. “Sex Addict” spends 90% of its running time detailing his screw-ups in excruciating detail, but it devotes little time to his present-day happiness. Its conclusion is disappointing, in large part because it never quite succeeds in explaining what’s so magical about 12-step groups or how exactly one breaks a sexual compulsion’s spell. To its credit, there’s no moralizing about the evils of porn or non-monogamous relationships. Its many sex scenes are unerotic without going to the ugly extremes of Tsai Ming-liang’s “The Wayward Cloud,” or Carlos Reygadas’ “Battle In Heaven.” Genitalia and penetration are hidden behind a black box, which may be a joke.

“I Am a Sex Addict” becomes a lot less convincing as drama when Zahedi tries to turn his life around. Its ending is horribly rushed—his second marriage receives about 30 seconds of screen time. The use of documentary techniques makes one wonder what a film depicting the same relationships, made by Zahedi’s ex-girlfriends and wives, would be like. Even if he’s anything but unwilling to criticize himself, there’s something unsettling about the way he uses actors to speak for a group of real people whose photos he flashes on-screen. Like Allen at his worst—as in “Deconstructing Harry”—“Sex Addict” purports to offer a serious self-examination, but can’t break out from its creator’s overwhelming fantasy life.

caveh-zahedi | Song of Myself: Caveh Zahedi's Cinema of Self-Exposure Song of Myself: Caveh Zahedi’s Cinema of Self-Exposure, by Jason McBride from Cinema Scope, Spring 2006

Of all the filmmakers who I’d want to watch having sex — and that’s a pretty short list, mind you — Caveh Zahedi probably wouldn’t rank very close to the top. In his latest feature, I Am a Sex Addict, however, there is plenty of opportunity to catch Caveh in the act (or the simulation thereof), and the sight is by turns upsetting, exhilarating, and hilarious. Fitting descriptive shorthand for all of Zahedi’s work, an oeuvre that currently consists of four features and three shorts, and in which the ambitious, provocative I Am a Sex Addict can serve as both summa and introduction.

 The San Francisco-based Zahedi has been making movies since the early ’90s, crafting works that defy easy categorization — the filmmaker prefers the term "hybridization" — but which are invariably dubbed autobiographical documentaries. All of these films star the wiry, wild-eyed director (now 45 years old), as well as sundry friends, lovers, and relatives, all of whom play themselves. In many ways, the films prefigure what we now call reality TV, transforming the real — and often the most humiliating, discomfiting aspects of the real — into dramatic situations whose approximate veracity leads to all sorts of ontological head-scratchers. That supposition aside, they’re also funny as hell. Zahedi’s films are largely concerned with his turbulent romantic life and artistic struggles, his fondness for psychedelics, and his penchant for philosophical gab. The occasionally irritating charmer that emerges is a navel-gazing celebrant of the quotidian, who, in his pursuit of an honest existence — and a similarly truthful representation of such — oscillates between self-laceration and self-aggrandizement. "I have this fear that reality isn’t enough…that I’m not enough," Zahedi says, with customary candour, in his 1994 feature I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore — a film which, he also says, proves the existence of God.

Reality may not be enough (reality TV certainly isn’t), but neither is fiction, and, in Zahedi’s films, it’s only their uneasy (unholy?) alliance that approaches something like the truth. Or, at least, approaches life as it’s lived. Zahedi claims to hate documentaries (again, in I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore) and thus all of his films, beginning with A Little Stiff (1991), more often re-enact, or re-imagine, portions of Zahedi’s biography rather than simply capturing them. The size of his filmography belies the fact that for Zahedi, no less so then for Fassbinder, Godard, Kiarostami, or Cassavetes, filmmaking and life are inextricably entwined. Given the incessant presence of cameras in all of Zahedi’s movies (and his subjects’ frequent annoyance at said presence), it’s easy to imagine that Zahedi would happily film his every waking moment if he had the budget. (Such an experiment forms the basis for 2001’s In the Bathtub of the World — more on that later.) Making a movie always means asking "What is the meaning of life?", but then also, "What is the meaning of representing life?"

 In A Little Stiff, which Zahedi co-directed with his long-suffering cinematographer Greg Watkins, Zahedi plays a UCLA film student named Caveh Zahedi who pursues, with self-conscious abandon and not-so-quiet desperation, a fellow student named Erin McKim (playing herself). Deadpan, shot in black-and-white 16mm, the film recalls other American indies of the period (Jarmusch, Jost), but it’s quintessential Zahedi. His comic persona is already fully developed — the articulate stammer, the frequent and mischievous smile, the bulwark of neuroses. Woody Allen and Albert Brooks are obvious antecedents, but there is also a hint of the Godard of Soigne ta droite (1987) and Seymour Cassel’s manic Moskowitz. Zahedi’s wooing of Erin (a process that involves The Smiths, Tarkovsky, and LSD) veers from the bathetic to the endearing, but she remains largely immune to his charms. Critics weren’t — the film received praise from both Janet Maslin and Jonathan Rosenbaum.

With I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, Zahedi adopts a kind of Ross McElwee guise, chronicling a Christmas Eve trip to Vegas with his Iranian father and 16-year-old half brother, Amin. Zahedi, somewhat estranged from both of them (father George having been a womanizer who rarely spent time with young Caveh and Amin being a surly teen), hopes that the trip will bring them closer — and, to ensure this, he brings along a few hits of Ecstasy, believing that the family that gets high together stays together. Little is seen of Vegas, aside from occasional desert vistas and shots of the neon-streaked strip — the film’s presumably teeny budget ($500 of which Zahedi spends to convince Amin to participate) restricts much of the shoot to a cramped hotel room. (Zahedi’s three-person crew, including Watkins, also squeeze in.) After much cajoling ("It’ll open up your heart chakra"), Zahedi convinces George and Amin to drop the E. Or does he? While their behaviour certainly indicates that they’re high — there is much spontaneous laughter, giddy confession, and hugs — the film’s assistant cameraman, Steve, later asserts that neither George nor Amin did actually take the drugs. The ramifications of this moment lend the film a pleasantly vertiginous ambience — is Zahedi’s family pretending to be high or pretending to be pretending to be high? — while dovetailing with Zahedi’s larger concerns of faith, examinations of which bookend the film. Just as Zahedi proposes that God’s hand is felt in every step along this small journey’s way, the filmmaker likewise requires that viewers accept his guidance. Even if what’s on screen isn’t gospel, it’s nonetheless a kind of spiritual truth — if Amin and George didn’t take the drugs, but then acted as if they had to please their son and brother, the effect that Zahedi sought was still achieved. The mere fact that they agreed to be in his film, reluctantly or not, is further proof that some kind of communication barrier had been broken.

 Zahedi’s films are always about performance, but more specifically: how do you perform for others and how do you perform to get others to do something for you? A signature scene in virtually every Zahedi film features the filmmaker pleading with or attempting to convince someone to do something against their will. Such negotiations are commonplace enough behind the camera, but it’s rare the director who exposes his own tyranny. Zahedi’s persistence is generally amusing, but it occasionally morphs into a less-savoury imperiousness that undermines the charismatic, touchy-feely attitude he normally maintains.

It was the former that I remembered from In the Bathtub of the World, a year-long video diary in which Zahedi filmed one minute of his life each day. (The title is taken from a John Ashbery poem — itself plucked from a book that Zahedi claims, in voiceover, would make him a “better person” if he could ever finish it.) The first time I watched the film, the conceit seemed to impair the anarchic spirit that made Zahedi’s earlier work so pleasurable; the man it portrayed seemed similarly stunted, almost sour. Subsequent viewings, however, reveal Bathub to be a gentler, more melancholy film. Of course, Zahedi has shot much more than a minute a day, and the judicious editing of this footage — reducing each day down to an ineffable, 60-second moment — gives the film a compelling and elegiac grace. Given its constraints, Bathtub spans an enormous range of emotion and experience, all of it commonplace but usually quite wryly portrayed: Zahedi obsessing over favourite rock stars (Frank Black, Michael Stipe), dieting, getting stoned (of course), visiting his father in hospital, chasing out pigeons who have somehow infiltrated his apartment, exchanging Christmas presents with his girlfriend Mandy. At the beginning of the film, Zahedi shaves his head — lending him a far more menacing visage — and, as his hair grows back, the sense of renewal that ritual offered devolves into forlorn resignation. "Something’s wrong with my life," he says, shooting himself in a bathroom mirror as Fall becomes Winter, "I don’t know how to live. I don’t know what to do. I’m lost."

 Such confused revelation pervades I Am a Sex Addict, Zahedi’s many-years-in-the-making opus of sex addiction and prostitute fetishism. It’s a film that the director alludes to as far back as I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, but which, due to the vagaries of financing, he’s only recently completed. If there’s one constant refrain in Bathtub, it’s Zahedi’s constant spats with Mandy, and here, in Sex Addict, Zahedi exposes the root of his routine difficulties with girlfriends. Combining his regular tactics — re-enactments, actors playing real people, real people playing real people — with more conventional doc techniques (stock footage, animation), Zahedi traces the ups and downs of his romantic life, and how, beginning in Paris, that life was torn asunder by his overwhelming lust for paid sex. In customary fashion, Zahedi is both entirely self-revealing and self-justifying. He admits his desire to his French girlfriend, Caroline (porn star Rebecca Lord), hoping that such honesty will absolve him of any guilt or responsibility — and free him from acting on his desire. "Is there anything I can do so that you are not tempted?" she asks. Zahedi, who, in Sex Addict, ventures frequently into pure creep territory, replies that she can give him blow jobs more often. She obliges, going down on him thrice in quick succession, each time Zahedi collapsing in louder, more outrageous orgasms. Zahedi’s honesty backfires, of course, especially when he compulsively informs Caroline of all the women he would like to sleep with: "I had hoped that being completely honest would bring us closer together, but I seriously miscalculated." Soon, the filmmaker is jerking off in confessionals — it’s difficult to imagine a more apt metaphor for Zahedi’s entire project — then finally giving into his hooker fantasies. He’s particularly aroused when one prostitute impassively pleads, "Rape me."

When Zahedi moves back to the US, subsequent girlfriends cope with his addiction in various ways. A film student, Christa, is appalled when she learns of Godard’s supposed prostitute fetish but she is thoroughly disgusted when Zahedi confesses to the same. Devin, who he meets at a film festival in Austin, blithely accepts Zahedi’s proclivities, but, on a trip to Europe, is reduced to a sobbing, alcoholic wreck when he takes her with him to a brothel. Zahedi, meanwhile, keeps on justifying his behaviour. After visiting a Los Angeles massage parlour, he claims he’s "had a mystical experience."

 Zahedi’s famous cameo in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001) is the most exciting thing about that film, and, in just a few moments, he manages to unpack both Bazin’s ontology of the photographic image and his (Zahedi’s) own conflicted Christianity. Zahedi’s religiosity must be taken seriously, but it also must be recognized as being, at least occasionally, shtick. His faith in God is no more and no less sturdy than his faith in the verisimilitude of an image — or in himself. Sex Addict is an extremely forthright (and funny, disarming, and brutal) film, but it’s also wholly conscious of its own manipulations and dishonesty. The reality represented in Zahedi’s films — no matter how "confessional" — is always a product of condensation, perspective shifts, and omission. Appeal to a higher power excuses bad behaviour just as an appeal to reality masks all manner of cinematic feints.

Sex Addict concludes with footage from Zahedi’s wedding to Mandy. (In a church — with tissues being used only to dab eyes.) Conventional or not — Zahedi, we learn, has narrated the entire film wearing the tux he will wear into the ceremony — it’s surprisingly tender. Even Zahedi seems touched, and he’s finally relinquished control of the camera and shut his mouth. It’s a pure home-movie moment, but it reveals the filmmaker to be, at heart, a true romantic.

I Am A Sex Addict Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

I Am a Sex Addict Gerald Peary

The rise and fall of Caveh Zahedi. – IFC Alison Wilmore, April 17, 2006

Chronicling the Fantasies and Failings of One Man in 'I Am a Sex Addict' Nathan Lee from The New York Times

Zaks, Jerry

WHO DO YOU LOVE C 76

USA (91 mi) 2008

An enjoyable enough movie, more entertaining than informative, but not nearly what we expect and deserve when it comes to something as profoundly historical as the black migration to the north, forming a pipeline from the Delta directly to Chicago, leading to an explosion of great blues bands, many of whom were recorded by Chess records in Chicago, a no nonsense, blue collar establishment that housed some of the greatest blues players in American history. Made about the same town as another movie telling the Chess records Chicago story featuring the Hollywood elite cast in CADILLAC RECORDS (2008), starring Beyoncé (Etta James) and Cedric the Entertainer (Willie Dixon), among others, so this movie was put on the shelves and not released until more than a year later, and even then to a very limited release. Even the title was changed from the original CHESS to WHO DO YOU LOVE. Having not seen the original, finding Beyoncé too artificial and tabloid driven to be taken seriously, as that movie was surely all about Beyoncé, this smaller indie version is mildly intriguing, perhaps more historically accurate, but still suffers from the same problem, having to release a glamorized version of the birth of the blues clubs on the South side of Chicago, where from the late 40’s to mid 50’s Muddy Water’s country blues evolve into a more urban sound, leading to the pulsating rock “n” roll rhythms of Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry with full-scale electric guitars. Chuck Berry was left out entirely in this version, as were actual Chicago locations, including any reference to the Windy City and its frigid wintry conditions. Instead the film was shot in New Orleans and may as well be set among the swaying palm trees. Much like a typical biopic, the film does a good job showing just how unusual it was for two white brothers to take such an interest in an all black business, initially expressing interest in owning a blues club patronized exclusively by blacks, and then getting into the recording business, aided by Willie Dixon in terms of finding outstanding talent, eventually starting their own studio of Chess records that again produced exclusively black performers. The film never reveals any personal aspects of either Chess brother’s life that would lead them into choosing such a racially select profession, such as perhaps they hung out with black vets during the war and discovered an interest in the blues, or traveled through the South when they were younger and heard Delta blues players. All of that would be pure speculation. His wife is rightly concerned about what he does for a living, finding it odd for a Polish-Jewish white kid to take such an interest in black music, as she worries about the stability of their family while he’s throwing every last dime of their earnings back into the business hoping and praying it will be a success. It could have led to a full scale disaster.

But in this version as well, there’s little authenticity of the raw and gritty nature that became associated with Chess records, how their sound actually captured the hard living feel of the blues, and how their music became associated with south side Chicago culture. There was no archival footage used, despite obtaining permission from the estates of Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley, so the filmmakers had an opportunity to create a small intimate portrait of music legends all gathering together at Chess records, like a musical Mecca, which is what it was, but Chess records was a completely unpretentious studio where famous musicians could be seen painting the walls, plunging toilets, or fixing electrical outlets, anything that needed to be done on the premises., as no one ever made a lot of money. Instead it was all about the music, but this film showed none of that. Instead it portrayed their blues club not as the dive rat hole corner lounge that it was, but as a thriving juke joint filled with customers, as they have always been seen in other movies, like COTTON CLUB (1984), with every note perfect, every hairstyle in place, and where dancers are so professional that they seem to be performing in a Broadway production. That’s simply not the way it was, and this film has a hard time revealing why blacks accepted the Chess brothers in the first place. There were black entrepreneurs. Why didn’t they invest in their own music, as they did jazz clubs and black radio stations? Why was the blues ostracized by successful middle and upper class blacks who felt they were too good for what they considered low down race music, while still fully embraced by the working class, many of whom had recently migrated from the South to the North, lured by what they had heard about Chicago. This film doesn’t get into any of that. While there’s a bit of humor, especially when Muddy Waters shows up late for a recording session and then ribs Leonard Chess about how he’s still got a lot to learn about becoming a Negro. Some of the performances by young, undiscovered actors are terrific, especially David Oyelowo as Muddy Waters, Chi McBride as Willie Dixon, Miko DeFoor as the astounding Little Walter, Robert Randolph as Bo Diddley, Marika Dominczyk as the gorgeous wife of Leonard Chess that he eventually cheated on, and Megalyn Echikunwoke as Ivy Mills, a stand-in for Etta James (who is still alive, by the way), a sensuous composite of many of the female artists that worked for and had affairs with Leonard Chess. Unfortunately there is yet to be a definitive movie about this piece of music history. Perhaps August Wilson’s play Seven Guitars still best captures the essence of the era, accentuating the voices and defiance of once proud blues musicians whose music was basically stolen from them by white record producers like the brothers Chess, leaving a bitter taste in their mouths alongside faded hopes and lost dreams. No, that was not the story told here.

The Village Voice [Nick Pinkerton]

The life and times of Chess Records founder Leonard Chess, and the outsize personalities of his signees—Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Howlin' Wolf, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry—would make a terrific movie. In fact, it did, and it was called Cadillac Records. Well, who wants leftovers? There was obvious wrangling over rights between the dueling Chess biopics: Cadillac got Chuck, and Who Do You Love? got Bo. Etta James is herein rechristened "Ivy Mills" (Megalyn Echikunwoke) and cruelly dispatched with a plot-handy heroin overdose. Chess, played by Alessandro Nivola, is now a far more central figure—or does everyone else just seem more marginal?—while Love?'s restoration of redundant brother/partner Phil Chess shows exactly why he was written out of Cadillac. Nivola plays Chess's self-assurance as off-putting clamminess, and a running gag that requires him to greet everyone as "Motherfucker"—supposedly, this endlessly bemuses black musicians and lets them know he's not like other white guys—goes from awful to insufferable. Also free with its facts, Cadillac understood the complex tangle of personal, racial, and familial loyalties that were behind putting electric blues on wax. Who Do You Love? solves segregation with a harmonica duet, suggesting its proclivity for hot air.

User reviews from imdb Author: hsreviewonlinereviews from United States

"Who Do You Love (2010)" provides a great look into the world of music during the 50's and 60's, showing the audience how Blues became extremely popular and how Rock and Roll was created, so if you can expect anything walking in, it's fantastic music. The cast, including Alessandro Nivola (Leonard Chess), David Oyelowo (Muddy Waters), Chi McBride (Willie Dixon), Jon Abrahams (Phil Chess), Lisa Goldstein (Sheva Chess), Megalyn Echikunwoke (Ivy Mills), and Robert Randolph (Bo Diddley), all put on phenomenal performances, all those that did use their musical vocals singing the classic songs that influenced generations as if they were their own. Jerry Zaks, who as a director has spent most of his career so far on television, has proved to handle a feature film quite well, using very good shots and angles as he had with his three episodes of "Two And A Half Men" (Episodes include "Tucked, Taped, and Gorgeous", "Aunt Myra Doesn't Pee A Lot", and "And The Plot Moistens"). Of the movies I have seen that were written by Peter Martin Wortmann and Robert Conte, this is by far their best, with catchy, funny dialogue and smart, well thought out characters and events (even though based on a true story). The movie depicts the start of a new world of music, something that went on to develop and change into a large amount of mini-genres and has shown all it's listeners a new way to express culture, feelings, actions, opinions, and the world in general. "Who Do You Love" is recommended to everyone, but is a must see for lovers of old blues and classic rock and roll as well as the older audience. 7.6/10

Film Review: Who Do You Love Doris Toumarkine from Film Journal

The second feature film effort from theatrical director Jerry Zaks after a long lapse (the so-so Marvin’s Room was his film bow), Who Do You Love is a satisfying, nicely crafted fact-based riff on pop-music history with a number of tweaks. In its tale of how Chicago’s Chess Brothers—older brother Leonard especially—changed music history, the film, boasting such classics as Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love” and the far mellower “At Last,” deserves the attention of contemporary-music fans.

The film is bookended by a leap forward to a 1955 Alan Freed concert in Brooklyn, where Bo Diddley (Robert Randolph) and band, performing the eponymous hit, establish that the Chess artists are not just successes but are forging a new era in music. Or as Muddy Waters is quoted at the end: “And the blues just had a baby and they named it rock ’n’ roll.”

The body of the film unfolds chronologically, beginning in the late ’40s when Leonard (Alessandro Nivola) and younger brother Phil (Jon Abrahams), the sons of Polish-Jewish immigrants in Chicago, decide to leave the family junkyard business and open a club for the blues music they love.

The club is soon a success as it draws a loyal black clientele. And “the Brothers Chess” win over talented artists like Willie Dixon (Chi McBride), who also serves as Leonard’s mentor and guide. Leonard, far more driven and ambitious than Phil, takes the reins (and their savings) to begin recording his artists.

As Leonard listens and signs (and, in his signature crafty way of jotting unseen numbers on small pieces of paper, reaches monetary agreements with wannabe musicians), Chess Records grows. The lesson learned is that people must be inspired to dance to the music.

Inevitably as happens in the music business, there are hits and misses, both on the professional and personal front. Leonard’s chance meeting with guitar player/singer Muddy Waters (David Oyelowo), newly arrived in Chicago from the Mississippi Delta and so poor he has no guitar, gives a big boost to the label.

But beautiful blues singer Ivy (Megalyn Echikunwoke), a fictional amalgam of the many black singers associated with Chess and ones the real Leonard had affairs with, brings trouble. Leonard begins an affair with Ivy, who eventually has a fatal overdose. Leonard decides to forego a family vacation to travel with his band on the road, where he learns that illegally paying off a radio DJ to play his records really does pay off and a hit is born. But on the homefront, Leonard’s beloved wife Revetta (Marika Dominczyk) and son move out of the family home. As Chess Records and blues gain traction, so does a reconciliation of Leonard with his family.

No number one with a bullet, the film falls short on a few counts. “Location, location, location” may be the mantra of real estate, but here the film’s Louisiana locations are a curse. Geography, like music, evokes atmosphere and the sun-drenched, warm climes of the South on view in Who Do You Love clash with what we want (rightly or not) as a blue/grey, chilly, smoky late-’40s/early-’50s Chicago cookin’ with blues.

Some story lapses nettle, like the nanosecond leap of an impoverished, illiterate Muddy Waters into a brash, cocky success. And why the filmmakers’ diffidence in conveying Ivy as a hopeless drug addict? And although Chuck Berry—synonymous with Chess—only got to the label in 1955, his absence here is regrettable. And, small point, why don’t the film’s Brothers Chess speak with more of that inimitable Chicago accent and its “A”s as broad as Lake Michigan?

Otherwise, the acting, like the soundtrack (also including “Hoochie Coochie Man” and other classics), soars and the musical performances rock. Nivola and McBride are among the standouts, but it’s British actor Oyelowo as Muddy who amazes.

Epoch Times - Movie Review: 'Who Do You Love' Joe Bendel from The Epoch Times, April 13, 2010

It was a family business that introduced America to rock & roll, but it started with the blues. Long a favorite of blues and R&B collectors, Chess Records is now the subject of its second “biopic” in less than two years.

Starting from humble origins, brothers Leonard and Phil Chess became American success stories as the founders of the preeminent blues label.

Their professional ups and downs as well as the family drama behind the scenes are now dramatized in Jerry Zaks’s Who Do You Love, which opens Friday in New York.

As Love opens, there is no mistaking the “Bo Diddley beat” on his signature tune. It drives the young crowd wild and the middle-aged Leonard Chess digs it too. Though a hardnosed businessman, the Jewish immigrant always had a natural affinity for African American music.

A brash dreamer, he often overshadows his easy-going brother Phil (who hardly even appears in the competing Cadillac Records), despite being equal business partners and close siblings.

At various times, Chess and its subsidiary labels recorded some of the biggest names in American music ever, including legends like Chuck Berry, Howlin’ Wolf, Buddy Guy, Little Walter, John Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Koko Taylor, Ramsey Lewis, and Ahmad Jamal. However, Love narrows its focus nearly exclusively on four particular artists.

Blues bassist Willie Dixon was instrumental in the launch of Chess, initially serving as the brothers’ guide to Chicago’s African American music scene and eventually becoming the label’s A & R man. McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters, personified Chess more than any other artist, recording hits like “Rollin’ Stone” that continue to reverberate.

Bo Diddley represents the label’s future in Love as rock & roll’s founding father (since Berry is oddly absent), but he also causes dissension when he challenges Leonard Chess’s somewhat dubious management practices.

As in Cadillac, Leonard Chess again gets involved with a soulful diva that sings “At Last.” For legal reasons that apparently did not apply to the previous film, she is now known as Ivy Mills instead of Etta James, in Love. Wisely though, Love spends less time on this rumored affair, while giving far more attention to the dynamics between Leonard Chess, his brother, and Dixon, their musical go-between.

Cadillac had considerable charm as a big movie-musical spectacular, but Love is more faithful to the historic sounds of Chess. Instead of show casing Beyonce as James, Love gives us old school Muddy and Diddley. Lending it further blues cred, Keb’ Mo’ also appears in a supporting role.

Perhaps Love’s biggest advantage over Cadillac though is Alessandro Nivola as Leonard Chess, instead of the badly miscast Adrian Brody. Though neither actor is a dead-ringer for the legendary producer, Nivola has the right flinty edge for the tough self-made man, whereas Brody largely moped about making mooneyes at Beyonce. However, the real standout of Love is Chi McBride as Dixon. Often funny, but also quite heartfelt, his performance soulfully captures the blues sensibility.

Directed with straightforward economy by Tony Award winner Jerry Zaks, Love moves along nicely, conveying a good sense of the label’s music. Though it feels smaller in scope, record geeks (like me) will most likely prefer Love over Caddy, while mere mortals not intimately steeped in the Chess Records discography should enjoy the solid work of Nivola and McBride as well as the very cool tunes. It opens in New York at the Village East this Friday

CompuServe [Harvey Karten]

Slant Magazine [Jason Clark]

Paste Magazine [Michael Dunaway]

Variety.com [John Anderson]

Time Out New York [David Fear]

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]

New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden

Zalla, Christopher

SANGRE DE MI SANGRE (Blood of My Blood) C+ 78

aka: Padre Nuestro

USA (110 mi) 2007 ‘Scope

Winner of the Sundance dramatic prize, this is an American Spanish language feature, like MARIA FULL OF GRACE (2004), depicting realism as human misery, which features an old man known affectionately as viejo, Diego (Jesús Ochoa), very similar to the doctor as realized by the master of miserablism, Béla Tarr in SÁTÁNTANGÓ (1994), a hermit who shuts himself off from the rest of the world and lives in a state of sealed-in darkness, consuming large doses of alcohol to keep the real world at bay. Despite his gruff nature, befriending no one, trusting no one, he may be the most likeable character in the film, working inconspicuously as a dishwasher in New York City, an old school Mexican illegal who has learned how necessary it is to keep a low profile. The film begins, however, in Mexico with a hand held camera dizzily following a character on the run, dropping money as he goes, apparently a thief who is running away from thugs, somehow slipping over a fence into a warehouse with a US Border Patrol van waiting with other illegals for cash payment on their way across the border to New York City, a trek that passes all too quickly. Meet Juan (Armando Hernández), a false presence throughout the film who has a charming smile, but is a slimy con artist, stealing the identification of another traveler, Pedro (Jorge Adrián Espíndola), who is searching to meet his father in New York City, carrying a sealed letter written by his mother before she died. Instead of Pedro, Juan arrives at Diego’s door pretending to be his long lost son, providing the introductory letter as proof, but he is immediately thrown out by a disbelieving old man. Following him the next morning to work, Juan startles and embarrasses Diego, calling him Papa, conjuring up memories that were better off left behind.

Meanwhile Pedro is alone and adrift in New York City, suckered by a Spanish-speaking prostitute Magda (Paola Mendoza) who wants his mother’s locket, conveniently exiting with it from a corner store after setting him up for shoplifting. But these two run into each another again, becoming a secondary story alongside the father and fake son team, both tracks seemingly heading into train wrecks. And that is the problem with this film, the bleak nature that is telegraphed throughout, a darkened, subterranean world where every scene is a downward spiral that only reinforces our cynical suspicions, becoming thoroughly predictable, removing any element of surprise. Magda is not only a prostitute, but a heroin addict who lives in the basement of a condemned building, reminiscent of Ratso Rizzo in MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969, but not nearly as oily and grimy, and not the least bit desperate. Pedro elicits her continuing help searching for his father, without which there would be no movie, a relationship that simply materializes out of thin air, as any real Magda would dump this guy instantly, but troubles ensue. Meanwhile, Diego, who has kept his wits about him for 17 years in the USA, strangely softens his stance towards this young imposter who additionally pretends to earn money from day labor jobs but is really picking pockets on the subway, all the while searching during the day for where Diego keeps his stash of money supposedly hidden away under the floorboards of his apartment.

Everything comes to a head in a crowded dance sequence, where Juan and his “father” go out with his fellow kitchen coworkers after work, where Juan begins embellishing his stories about his prowess with the ladies, all to earn the admiration of his suddenly interested father. They all get plastered, leading to an intense argument back home where the two are suddenly discussing Juan’s pretend mother, which turns into a blistering affair of pent-up emotions, where one is startled to follow Juan’s sudden interest in a mother he never had, projecting the sorry state of his own life into that scene which literally takes the audience by storm. Diego is overwhelmed by the guilt he feels for the love, abandonment, and ultimate betrayal by this woman who has left a deep emotional wound turning him into a scorned and bitter man. But Juan has his own personal anguish that comes out of nowhere and vents it all on this man as well, where the old man’s remorse comes crashing down on him like a ton of bricks. Despite the admirable authenticity of the moment, it was a long time coming, where the procrastination lessens the impact, as by the time it comes, we’re no longer that interested. Zalla makes the same mistake with the eventual meeting between the false son and the real son. By the time it comes, all suspense leading to that moment has dissipated, as the director has simply deflated the tension. Much of the problem lies with the falseness of a con artist who never really takes anything seriously, who lies and deceives as a matter of routine, a character that simply fails to earn anyone’s sympathy. So when the old man is heartbroken about the supposed truth that binds them together, this bond feels contrived and we find it hard to believe. Nothing in the end rewards the audience’s patience with this film other than our knowledge that the downward spiral will continue.

Political Film Review Michael Haas

After a payoff to an American border agent, a truckload of illegals enter New York, including Pedro (played by Jorge Adrián Espindola) and Juan (played by Armando Hernandez), who are attractive seventeen-year-olds. During the trip, Pedro falls asleep, Juan steals his knapsack, and in Brooklyn assumes his identity as the long-lost son of Diego (played by Jesús Ochoa), whose mother told him was the owner a French restaurant who had been sending regular sums of money home. Diego, however, is a rotund kitchen helper, lives in squalor, and hates Pedro’s mother for twotiming him. At first, Diego has no interest in a son, but Juan cleverly gets money by stealing purses on the subway and charms Diego with his good looks and amusing stories. Meanwhile, Pedro tries to track down his father with the help of Magda (played by Paola Mendoza), a drug-addicted prostitute. Inevitably, the two boys meet again, and an unhappy ending underscores what the film is all about—what illegal immigrants must endure to survive. Directed by Christopher Zalla, the film is also known as Padre Neustro.

Time Out Chicago (Andrea Gronvall)

Winner of the 2007 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury dramatic prize, Zalla’s slick debut feature (originally titled Padre Nuestro) combines the exaggerated pathos of a Mexican telenovela with the grungy look of American neonoir, but its contrived plotting undercuts the emotional payoff.

Hernández (Fast Food Nation) plays Juan, a young Mexican sharpie on the run, who hops onto a coyote’s truck conveniently heading to El Norte. There he meets Pedro (Espíndola, of The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada), a soulful immigrant intent on reuniting with his long-lost father in Brooklyn. Upon arrival, Pedro awakens to find that Juan has ripped off his bag, including an introductory letter to dad from Pedro’s deceased mother.

This idea of identity theft among the disenfranchised is intriguing, as is the reaction of the suspicious father, Diego (veteran Mexican thespian Ochoa), a miserly dishwasher who at first wants nothing to do with the stranger claiming to be his son. The tension between them is riveting; less so is the relationship Pedro strikes up with a junkie hooker (Mendoza) looking to pimp him. That these four lives neatly intersect in New York’s sprawling, anonymous megalopolis may be necessary for the story’s conclusion, but the underlying moral about greed negating opportunity gets detoured.

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]

Crossing the U.S. border illegally comes with its own unique paranoia and feelings of "otherness," but once immigrants arrive in the States, they can often find strength in numbers, by nestling into one of the cities-within-cities that exist apart from the American mainstream. In Christopher Zalla's debut film, Sangre De Mi Sangre, two young Mexicans make their way to New York City and promptly get swallowed up by a thicket of ghettos, bodegas, vacant lots, and job sites. One of the boys, Armando Hernández, tries to get an edge by assuming the identity of the other boy, Jorge Adrian Espíndola, so he can con his way into the home of Espíndola's father, who's rumored to be a wealthy restaurant owner. In actuality, the dad (played by Jesús Ochoa) works in a kitchen, and does odd jobs to make ends meet—not all of them above-board. And while Ochoa is Espíndola's father, he doesn't remember the boy's mother all that well, because she was a one-night-stand that occurred under morally questionable conditions.

Sangre De Mi Sangre edges too close to leaden symbolism with its consideration of absent "fathers" and their lapses. (Zalla seems to be implying that if there is a God, He's kind of a loser.) And though the near-constant hand-held close-ups clearly emphasize the confined spaces of New York's immigrant community, they also lock the movie into a single mode and mood. Sangre De Mi Sangre is an exercise in misery, painting the immigrant life in America as every bit as bleak as what they were trying to escape. (And maybe even worse: Hernández is dismayed to discover that Ochoa has a black-and-white TV, while "back home, everyone has color.") The film seems even more one-note when compared to the recent indie feature Chop Shop, which also follows young immigrant hustlers in NYC, yet takes the time to provide a fuller picture of the city and its opportunities. Zalla prefers to wallow in the dead-end, an approach that's initially powerful, then numbing.

New York Magazine (David Edelstein)

In Sangre de mi Sangre, Christopher Zalla serves up an old-fashioned, sentimental weeper with a sucker punch of urban-immigrant horror. The movie centers on a father’s reunion with a son he never knew he had and how the two somehow break through each other’s calloused cynicism. The twist is that the teen is an impostor, Juan (Armando Hernández), who met the real son, Pedro (Jorge Adrián Espíndola), in a tractor-trailer filled with undocumented Mexicans and stole his backpack and identity. In New York City, Juan talks his way into the squalid apartment of Pedro’s father, Diego (Jesús Ochoa), who he thinks has money stashed away, while Pedro, who’s illiterate and speaks no English, uses what cash he has to hire a trick-turning hophead, Magda (Paola Mendoza), to locate the restaurant where his dad works.

Zalla, a graduate of Columbia’s film school, is talented and single-minded. He needs to lighten up, literally. He frames his characters to bring out all their sweaty desperation, and his palette is dark with splashes of muddy brown; even the street scenes look as if they were shot in a dungeon. The director really piles on the grotesquerie. One look at Magda and you know she’s going to be violated in some disgusting way, and the climactic encounter between the true and bogus Pedros is surprising only because you don’t think Zalla will stoop to such a crude resolution. But he’s sensitive with his actors. The Mexican Ochoa usually plays corrupt cops (Denzel Washington blew him up real good in Man on Fire) and never gets too moist—which makes his final explosion of emotion more powerful. Hernández uses the same smart strategy. Juan’s feeling for his “father” comes from left field, and not through love but fury: He finds himself raging at Diego on behalf of the dead mother that wasn’t his. The nasty old man and the coldhearted thief are shocked by their connection. If only we hadn’t seen it limping toward us out of the darkness for so long.

Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize for Best Dramatic Feature is a prestigious award, but not a positive predictor of box-office or Oscar success—in fact, the award often correlates with low financial returns. Last year’s winner, Sangre de Mi Sangre, can’t take much hope from its two immediate forerunners. In 2005, the prize went to Forty Shades of Blue (over Me and You and Everyone We Know and audience fave Hustle & Flow) and in 2006 to Quinceañera (over Little Miss Sunshine and Half Nelson). Quinceañera made a modest $2.5 million, but it was a smash in comparison with its predecessor, which took in a meager $172,569.

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

indieWIRE Michael Koresky from Reverse Shot

Slant Magazine [Keith Uhlich]

Cinemattraction.com [Robert Levin]

CompuServe [Harvey Karten]

Film Journal International (David Noh)

SANGRE DE MI SANGRE: Q&A with Christopher Zalla Interview by Andre Soares from Alternative Film Guide, May 23, 2008

Variety.com [Robert Koehler]

Chicago Tribune (Tasha Robinson)

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The New York Times (Stephen Holden)

Zandvliet, Martin

APPLAUSE B 86

Denmark (85 mi) 2009 ‘Scope

The spirit of Applause echoes films from the late 60s and 70s.  Indeed I am in search of the emotional drama you found in films back then.  Applause may also seem like it’s from a different time — a cinematic tradition centered on the human soul and on acting.

For me Applause is about betrayal.  About how we as human beings betray the ones closest to us, when we ourselves have been betrayed.  About having difficulties trusting other people and judging what is right and wrong. About the complexity of longing for something better. About reacting as extremely egocentric or extremely helpful, about varying between despondency/discouragement and spite. All in the hope of being seen, heard, and loved.   

— Martin P. Zandvliet (director)

In a surreal coincidence, on the day of actress Elizabeth Taylor's death, the movie seen that night was this Danish film featuring a bravura performance from one of Denmark's leading actresses, Paprika Steen, where the film follows her shattered and deteriorating marriage while at the same time offers glimpses of various segments from her actual 2008 Copenhagen Theatre onstage performance as Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), a role that epitomizes what’s legendary about both Ms. Taylor, who was incredibly only 33 when she played the role, and Ms. Steen who is a more mature 45. The role is so bruisingly iconic in the dramatic repertoire that playing the part is considered a rite of passage in one’s career, as is Hamlet or King Lear for men. With tributes to John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands listed in the end credits, what stands out is the desperately driven, all-in attitude of Steen’s performance, which mirrors Rowlands’ vital need to be loved in A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (1974), especially the scenes with her two children, the older of which, Otto Rieks as William, is her own son. When she bounds across the floor wearing her Viking helmet declaring she is Eric the Red, charging towards her sons who have appropriately been given giant swords and shields, she lovingly creates an imaginary world second to none. How could any kid resist, except - - they do, thinking perhaps their mother is a little bit crazy. She pounces on this thought, exclaiming of course she’s crazy. “Isn’t it cool to have a crazy mother?” They sheepishly are forced to agree with her before she leaps up declaring “I’m Eric the Red again!”

Steen is a product of the Dogme movement, the only actress to work in each of the initial three productions, THE CELEBRATION (1998), THE IDIOTS (1998), and MIFUNE (1999). Needless to say, Steen as Thea is a drama queen in the best sense of the word, which means there’s not a moment in her life when she’s not acting, as she lives for the intensity of every moment, which not everyone can stand, including her divorced husband Christian (Michael Falch), who has custody of both sons, and who has long ago tired of her theatrical outbursts. Thea gave away her rights to custody during an extended alcoholic binge when her behavior towards her children was worse than intolerable. Fortunately they are still young enough that they may barely have any scars or fresh recollections. Christian, on the other hand, is unforgiving, especially when Thea announces her interest in reestablishing custody rights. Visits are fine, when planned and mutually agreed to ahead of time, but nothing spontaneous or improvisational, which is the life blood of her craft, namely living. She spurts out insults about how he’s turned them into little Toys R Us Nazi children, how she barely recognizes her imprint in their personalities any more. From her perspective, they may as well be suffering from the effects of an impersonal and demoralizing foster care system. As Christian, one assumes, is a doctor, and his new wife a psychiatrist, Thea blurts out how the entire medical establishment has conspired against her. The dark humor used throughout the film continually covers up the aches of loneliness and personal torment, where what must hurt most of all is having no one to blame more than herself. That’s the real curse, which feels like a stab in the heart.

A continuing theme of the film is her long walk from the stage to her dressing room, always helped by her young dresser (Malou Reymann) that she’s always trying to fire for the crime of being young, yet she continually shows up in exactly the same place, as pretty and perky as ever, which really must disgust the star of the show, who sulks endlessly about her “dog skin” face, loathing the body that has seemingly turned on her with age as she gulps down another shot of bourbon before she stalks down the hall to take her rightful place onstage in the boozing and brawling of Edward Albee’s play. Thea has the sad habit of reappearing in bars, frequenting the old stomping grounds even as she refrains from taking a drink anymore, seen bored to tears at an AA meeting where she’s forced to actually have to listen to the sad plight of others. It’s in a bar that she meets Tom from Berlin, Shanti Roney, a guy with a sick smile plastered to his face that she orders him to wipe off when they first meet, which pretty much describes their sick affair together, connected by neverending wounds of anguish and pain. Nothing ever goes the way it’s planned, as Thea hurls herself headfirst into her new future with all the gusto and incoherence that defined her complicated past. “I hate ordinary people,” she bellows, but realizes in the same breath that she must learn to live among them, never actually trusting any of them, as if they were a strange breed of mutants, yet continuously it falls back upon her own shoulders and the burden she must bear. It has all come to this, as she’s seen staring at herself in the mirror, smacking her lips with a new sheen of lipstick. There is no one left to blame, all the bridges behind have been burned, leaving her alone once more standing on that precipice, about the take the first baby steps of a new beginning. With her, it’s always opening night.

Applause Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out New York India Bourke

Danish leading lady, Steen, impresses in this intimate portrait of a recovering alcoholic mother, fighting her addiction and ex-husband to re-gain custody of her kids. The film remains undecided about this near intolerable character; managing to show moments of redemptive maternal instinct before she binges once again on the aggressive manipulation of all those around her. The film is slow, subtle and steeped in Northern European sterility. Watching its progression towards an apparently hopeless destination does manage take you close to a point of empathy, and for that, this uncompromising work should be applauded.

David Edelstein on 'No Strings Attached' and 'Applause' -- New ... New York magazine

First Blue Valentine, now, from Denmark, Applause: In less than a month I’ve had to endure two intense psychodramas in which the jittery, handheld camera hovers dermatologist-close to actors’ faces beset by seismic waves of grief and rage. Both have a certain too-muchness, but both, in the end, give you something to see. In Applause, it’s the amazingly named Paprika Steen, who looks like Natasha Richardson if she’d lived longer and much, much harder. Steen is Thea, an alcoholic leading actress appearing onstage as Martha in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? while, offstage, slowly waking up from the nightmare that has been her life. Her ex-husband remarried her opposite number—an unhistrionic psychologist—and she hasn’t seen her young sons in a couple of years. Now she wants them back. Over and over she insists, “I’ve changed”—a line that’s a reliable indicator of someone who hasn’t. Director Martin Pieter Zandvliet cuts in snatches of the Albee play with metronomic regularity—but with an actress this magnificent the scaffolding barely shows. Steen draws a fluid line between Thea-as-Martha and Thea in the “real” world, putting on make-up, pretending to be something she isn’t, trying to achieve some measure of autonomy in the grip of an ungovernable ego. As much of her as there is, you’ll want more.

Box Office Magazine [Sara Maria Vizcarrando]

After her parts in Dogme 95 films like The Celebration and The Idiots it's easy to see why Danish directors adore Paprika Steen: she throws it all in. The level of commitment she provides this small woman-on-self-destruct drama is herculean. Thea (Steen) is an actress of some renown and a semi-recovering alcoholic. As the crisis of detoxing can't overwhelm the crisis of her ego she distracts herself by making wild gestures to reenter her children's lives. Her attempts are so deeply dysfunctional they hurt to watch; that Steen makes the character engaging nonetheless is a considerable feat. The script presents complex enough situations for the characters but the overarching story doesn't feel particularly purposeful. Regardless, anyone interested in acting would have to look hard to find a better performance to study, which suggests the film could find itself an educational market to support the otherwise small theatrical returns it will receive, even with a name like Steen behind it.

Thea is playing Martha in a stripped down version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. It'd be nice to think she's cruel to her stagehand in an effort to get into character (perhaps she drinks backstage to get into character, too) but everyone draws her ire, even the fans that excitedly flirt or invade her space. We never see her co-star, a situation that suggests those strong enough to share her workspace are also smart enough to avoid her. Even in her element she's a mesmerizing fountain of venom. Her ex-husband Christian (Michael Falch) is dangerously patient with her. Remarried to a psychologist and younger woman named Maika (Sara-Marie Maltha), Christian seems not only to have moved on from the harrowing experience of Thea but has provided the two sons they share more secure conditions in so doing. When Thea realizes the gap she's left in her life by leaving her sons she wants to be their mother again, but besides having missed the kid's younger years, she's desperately ill-equipped to care for anyone. Perhaps, as they say, we are each the protagonist of our own lives, but certainly there are healthy bounds to this. Clearly Thea is the demonstration of this protagonist principle gone amuck.

Though the world around Thea presents her in various conditions of tension and resolution, Thea relentlessly builds her experiences around melodramatic highs and lows. When she realizes she's got no capacities as a parent she angles for self-destructive behavior and ends up suffering a wickedly uncomfortable bar pickup. She takes him home, he reminds her they've slept together before and, via a half-assed battle of wills, you feel your interest in her dwindling. This is the larger issue with Applause and the reason the film hinges on its star: without a sizeable actress in the lead the film could border torturous. The feature directorial debut of Martin Zandvliet, Applause has moments of flourish and moments that reach towards something as pared down as Thea's play, but it ultimately can't match the candor Steen brings to the screen. Really, little can.

Applause - kinocaviar.com Diane Sippl

Among the wreck of the theatre crowd

I stand and smile.

They take tragedy so becomingly;

Which pleases me.                                        

 — D.H. Lawrence 

For eleven years the Scandinavian Film Festival Los Angeles (this year, January 9-10 and 16-17 at the Writers Guild Theater, 135 S. Doheny) has filled its Beverly Hills screen with the films submitted to the Academy Awards for Best Foreign-Language Film from five Nordic countries:  Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden.  Yet what is often most exciting at this event, though least expected, is the discovery of a lesser known work — at least in southern California, where audiences would think they’d seen everything.  The SFFLA shows films day and night on both weekends, which allows for a number of accomplished directors to gain new visibility in the “Southland.”  It even lets a first feature break through and shine, perhaps placing a future auteur on the map of world cinema.

It would seem that the obvious goal of a Los Angeles festival focusing on a designated region would be to introduce that cinema to the local audience and film industry, which might also mean the global market.  Yet who expects to have it the other way around — to discover at a festival here what another region has taken home?  And taken not from the Mecca for moguls — the Hollywood of out-sized heroes, star-studded genre packages, and 3-D eye-catchers — but from the discreet neighborhood dwelling (that generally doubled as the shooting location) of a filmmaking “family” related by blood, marriage, bonds of friendship, talent, possibly everything but money.  That would be the household of John Cassavetes, who from the 1960s to the 1980s moved from TV acting to film directing in his own production company, becoming one of La-La-Land’s vast exceptions: a popular, successful, extremely independent film artist.  He wasn’t the first or the last, but Cassavetes has been among the most esteemed and beloved. 

It’s also not the first time that a Dane has worked in the shadow of Cassavetes.  Writer-director Ole Christian Madsen’s Kira’s Reason: A Love Story feels like a clear homage to Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence, perhaps his best known film.  But Cassavetes, a striking and unforgettable actor from the days of classical television with its serious dramas and high style (Johnny Stacatto comes to mind), has also been admired for his directing of films such as Opening Night, which offered an actor’s take on acting, brought poignantly to the big screen.  For his innovative cinematography (he shot the films himself with a mostly handheld 16 mm camera), his piercingly honest and intimate character studies that evolved in seemingly real time and locations through an ensemble of actors (including Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara) who knew each other inside out, and mostly for his sheer sensitivity and insight, Cassavetes became a model for independent filmmaking.  His wife, Gena Rowlands, who most often played the female lead, likewise became a model for acting — intense, tender, outspoken, fragile, bewildering, and true.

So what looks like a digression is really the necessary basis for discussing the inaugural work by a Danish producer, Mikael Christian Rieks, with his new production company, Koncern Film, based on the legacy of Cassavetes.  Rieks is married to highly successful stage and screen actress Paprika Steen, the couple having used their own furniture and even enlisted their son’s acting in a film written and directed by Martin Zandvliet as his first feature, a direct homage to the work of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands.  That debut is called, appropriately, Applause.

The scenario seems familiar enough: a woman has lost control of her life and must regain it to be back in touch with those she loves.  Put another way, Thea is a lauded actress on the stage but is unable to pretend in her everyday life; her feelings spew out unfiltered, especially since she is in the habit of excessive drinking. To make it all worse, she is playing the harsh, extreme, and demanding role of Martha in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a persona as difficult to shake off as to inhabit, even if — and also because — Martha is firmly within Thea’s grasp.  Paprika Steen is an uncanny semblance of Liz Taylor, and often Steen’s acting style for Thea is closer to Taylor’s for Martha than it is to most of Gena Rowlands’ acting for Cassavetes. Nonetheless, Zandvliet’s Applause is every bit a vehicle for Paprika Steen and in fact it was written precisely for her.  The film opens with footage shot directly from the play as it was performed live on stage in Copenhagen by Paprika Steen.  In fact these first lines are uttered in darkness, the unknown that is her life from day to day, moment to moment.  And her black dresses against a white sky, kitchen, bed, or dressing room do as much as her speech to set her apart from everyone else.

Whether she's tossing insults and casting aspersions on her personal assistant who gets her into costume each night, falling asleep at a group therapy session for alcoholics, verbally flipping-off a flirtatious barfly who claims he's been with her before, or loathing herself for her “dog-skin” face, her roles are all too overlapping: the aggressive Martha is really the haughty and raspy prima donna Thea who lapses into the unreliable, selfish, and even ferocious companion or ex-wife.  In this sense the editor's cross-cutting between theater and life hardly registers as such; we're just continually caught up in another moment of Thea's endless repertory and its boundless mirroring effects.

To watch her facial contortions as she sizes up a situation, to see her speak all the words of her mind in the twitches of her face, or  to witness her sputter to a crash in a social nose-dive is to partake in the ceaseless close-ups that bare her soul as they appear in every scene of the film.  Divorced eighteen months and having voluntarily given up custody of her young sons, with whom she was neglectful and even violent in the past, Thea now desperately seeks to win them back, or at least joint custody of them. She's prepared to involve the county in a court order if necessary, but her ex-husband Christian and his new psychologist wife are patient and amenable to family visits as she fights her lonely uphill battle. While her interactions with them are barbed with sarcasm, wit, and scathing humor, it's when we find Thea with her boys that she waxes humble, sensitive, unbearably self-conscious, like Mabel or Gloria in a Cassavetes film. 

In a scene that feels like a direct quotation from A Woman Under the Influence (except that in that film Mabel is dancing with her children as if they are dying swans), Thea pretends with her young sons that they are Viking William and Eric the Red as all three, the boys and their mother, don the helmets, masks, hoods, spears, and shields that are mere props and costumes in their vast imaginary world.  As in the Cassavetes film, there is also a shot of the children collapsing (here on the bed) with their mother into an unforgettable embrace.  And then Thea leaps up with the exclamation, “I'm Eric the Red again!” and all the wild and unpredictable commotion resumes. It's more than a sense of spontaneity, a behavioral or emotional jag, that motivates Thea's actions.  Yes, she feeds off of local intuitions, momentary impulses, some of them disastrous, but she is also an alternative kind of person, and both Cassavetes and Zandvliet would have us grasp this.

If we let down our guards, these filmmakers invite us to shift our own palettes of sensibility, to reprogram our nervous systems, to alter our modes of perception so as to discover new ways of understanding another person.  This is not so as to condone nor even to judge, but to empathize.  And the film achieves it through a very physical, sensual, perceptual approach (as opposed to the conceptual and metaphorical shorthand  used in the visual style and editing of other films).  There is nothing abstract or symbolic about Applause: whether on the stage of the theater or of life's daily interactions, the film assaults us with an intensity of involvement through its relentlessly revealing close-ups, its anxious hand-held camera, and its unpredictable, uncontained, in-the-moment (from second-to-second) performance: performance above all, because the only truth is what is embodied and enacted.  We see Thea sweat out the moves of her misfires with everyone around her in the mixed-up love act that is her art and her life.  We feel her losing the boundaries of safe and conventional behavior all the while she senses the catastrophe that will result.

Whatever D.H. Lawrence said about the “wreck of the theatre crowd,” he also said, “Art is wonderment organizing itself.” The observation applies to theatre, cinema, and Thea herself, finding a way to tap her own integrity as she creates meaning in her life.  In that tossing sea that is Thea, that whirlwind of genuine emotion inseparable from a vital imagination, Applause and Martin Pieter Zandvliet, along with the whole filmmaking “family” of Koncern film, show us that there is someone to love. 

Diva in Distress Kim Skotte from Film Magazine by the Danish Film Institute, May 11, 2009

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User reviews from imdb Author: offdwallnotdrack from United States

User reviews from imdb Author: from United States

Paprika Steen Deserves Applause [Marshall Fine] and at Hollywood and Fine: Click here: This interview concludes on my website.

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'Applause' review: A tour de force performance as an alcoholic ... Stephen Whitty from The Star-Ledger

Los Angeles Times [Betsy Sharkey]

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New York Times [Manohla Dargis] (registration req'd) January 20, 2011

New York Times [Karen Durbin] (registration req'd) October 29, 2010

Zang Yang

SUNFLOWER B 88

China (129 mi) 2005

A Chinese family melodrama that mirrors four decades of changing political climate from the forced work camps of the 60’s Cultural Revolution to the capitalist driven urban modernization of the 90’s. From the director of SHOWER, the film follows different stages in a young boy’s life, from elementary school, teenage, to young adulthood. The film is most convincing in the early stages, when his life as a free-wheeling, unsupervised street urchin in the middle of an overcrowded ramshackle village comes to a halt when his father returns home after 6 years at a labor camp, enforcing strict discipline at home. The tug of war between father and son, or father and mother, continues throughout the film, as what was once a close-knit community where everyone knows everyone else and all are pretty much in the same impoverished predicament becomes a free for all, where the neighbors are pitted against one another, forced to offer bribes to corrupt Party officials in an attempt to obtain approval for the few public housing apartments built near the neighborhood. Eventually, the modern housing developments surround the remnants of what used to be this village, which is continually being demolished, brick by brick, with fewer and fewer residents remaining, until eventually it appears that only two old timers have stayed behind.

Joan Chen plays the mother with an obsessive urge to get an apartment, while Sun Haiying brilliantly plays the father, especially wordlessly in the latter stages of the film, a former painter whose hands were intentionally broken in labor camps, with an obsessive urge to teach his son how to paint, and he strictly oversees his son’s artistic development. The son has an obsessive urge to get the hell out of there with a girl friend, but is constantly delayed by his father’s intervention. All of which means there is continual friction among family members, who are constantly bickering. The film alternates between comic and tragic elements, mixing an energetic social realism in the early part of the film with commercial sentiment later on that tugs at the heartstrings, and probably tries to wrap everything up a little too neatly, though not as one might suspect. Nevertheless, it’s an appealing effort, if only to get such a convincing look at how the Chinese see themselves.

Zarchi, Meir

I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE

aka: Day of the Woman

USA (100 mi) 1978

The Seduction The pornographic impulse in slasher films, by Patricia Erens from Jump Cut, April 1987

Zarhin, Shemi

THE WORLD IS FUNNY (Haolam Mats'hik) B 87

Israel (122 mi) 2012

Damned if I know, the world is funny so I laugh. —Gashash, Israeli comedy trio

One of the more convoluted narratives you’ll ever find at the movies, where the film itself is an amusing play on language and culture, weaving together various strands of people’s lives, utilizing twenty or more characters, all of whom are missing something essential. The director is also a novelist and accomplished screenwriter, digging into Israeli culture to examine the influence of the comedy trio Gashash, the most influential comedy act in the history of Israel, suggesting comedy is a an outlet for dealing with the anxiety of living in the Middle East. Shot in Tiberias, a town in the northern region known for always being sunny, constantly referenced by the comedy trio, where Golan (Eli Finish) runs a radio show that pays tribute to the Gashash, doing bits and pieces of their act on the air as he broadcasts classic skits that are filled with clever, rapidfire wordplay. Assisting him on the show is Zafi (Naama Shitrit), as both of them know the skits inside and out, where she also becomes the film’s central narrator, participating in a writing workshop at the town library, which is a wonderfully inventive device, where she is renowned for devising stories with no end. Without any real narrative, Zarhin instead mixes together vignettes, flashbacks, oral stories, and parts of people’s lives as the connecting tissue of the film, where much of this seems to connect a single family together, several of whom haven’t seen or spoken together in nearly a decade.

Yardena (Assi Levi) works at a travel agency and is shocked to discover she’s pregnant, as she hasn’t had sex with her husband since the death of their daughter while serving in the army several years earlier, becoming consumed with the possibilities of who may have impregnated her without her knowledge. Meron (Dani Shteg) lost his wife in a terrible car accident 8 years ago, while his older son Nessi (Moshe Ashkenazi) has been in a coma since the accident, but is starting to come awake for brief periods, which is something of a miracle, but when he fully awakes he still has the mental capacity of a ten year old. The aforementioned Golan is wholeheartedly in love with Natasha, Ola Schor, and wants to marry her but she is dying from a mostly untreatable form of cancer that leaves her subject to violent outbursts. Golan has given her the complete set of Gashash comedy on DVD’s, which she watches on her computer from her hospital bed, promising to reunite the group for their wedding, as they retired after the death of one of the trio. Golan actually meets several times with Shaike, an original member, suggesting he knows the skits so well that he could play the missing member’s part, but Shaike reveals it’s impossible, a term Golan refuses to comprehend when speaking of his fiancé.

This original often hilarious film is expressed through a heartwarming intimacy, where Zafi literally wanders in and out of people’s lives as a cleaning lady, where her real passion is listening to people’s stories, discovering the things they keep secret or the habits that define them, which she reiterates in the writing workshops, which we learn is a forum for damaged people, where over time secrets are revealed for several of the members, while the others remain a mystery. The film earned 15 Israeli Ophir nominations, the equivalent of Academy Awards, though garnered no wins, as this evocative work may prove to be too difficult for some to follow, though it moves effortlessly between humor and tragedy, most always striking a balance through a quirky, continuously energized script. The use of locations is excellent, the characters deftly realized, where the viewers are sure to experience real passions from the intense personal drama taking place onscreen, as this strange mix is really unlike other films, using a constantly evolving, somewhat experimental narrative, where it often feels like the director is toying with the idea of how to present the material, especially the way the lives are interconnected and eventually come together. As an expression of healing the film is profoundly moving, with likable characters sharing a curiosity about the world around them, especially Nessi, whose wild-eyed innocence becomes synonymous with renewed life or rebirth, like Yardena’s curiously unexplained pregnancy (or Immaculate Conception), a curious plot device in an Israeli film. With so many tragic undertones, the film relies upon the use of humor in the shifting narratives, moving from past to present, becoming overcomplicated with so many characters and a bit absurd at times, but ultimately it’s a clever treatise that incorporates death and tragedy into the multi-layered fabric of the living.

User reviews from imdb Author: Nozz from Israel

"The World Is Funny" has been running for several weeks now, so I guess it is even good enough to overcome a deceptive title. I can easily imagine audiences expecting something like a globe-hopping candid camera movie, but on the contrary the writer-director emphasizes that he is fictionally portraying the one little town of Tiberias and its particular eccentrics, and not always in a rib-tickling way at all. A device linking some of the characters is a story-writing class, and as a device it rings somewhat artificial, but I suppose that putting so many characters and relationships into two hours must require a little squeezing and shortcutting. Probably nothing can convey to non-Israeli viewers the cultural standing of the Gashashim, a trio who were to comedy and Tiberias in Israel what the Beatles were elsewhere to music and Liverpool. The title "The World Is Funny" comes from a catchphrase of the Gashashim, and a veteran of the trio is involved in one of the movie's subplots, playing himself and explaining to an ever-hopeful fan that now that one of the three has passed away, there will never be another performance. The many plot threads, amusing and tear-jerking by turn, mostly coalesce into the story of a single family and enlist the audience's sympathy despite the occasional creak of artificiality. The writer-director's love for Tiberias comes through-- perhaps more clearly than anything concrete distinguishing Tiberias from other towns, but it's an old principle that by concentrating conscientiously on something in particular the artist winds up touching on what's universal.

The World is Funny by Shemi Zarhin - Israeli film & filmmakers Amy Kronish

Screenwriter and director Shemi Zarhin is known for his award-winning films Passover Fever (1995), Dangerous Acts (1998), Monsieur Shlomi (2003) and Aviva My Love (2006).  His latest film, The World is Funny, opened this week in Israeli movie theaters.  All of his films can be characterized as having a complex script, authentic and well-delineated quirky characters, intelligent grappling with issues of gender, and superb directing.  Two of these films, Aviva My Love and Passover Fever have previously been reviewed on this blog.  Aviva My Love and The World is Funny, both take place in Zarhin's hometown, Tiberias.  

Born in 1961, Zarhin studied journalism and public relations and then received a BA (1986) from Tel Aviv University in the Dept. of Film and TV. He taught filmmaking at Tel Aviv University (1989-1994) and at the Sam Spiegel Film and TV School in Jerusalem (1990-1999).  In addition to directing, he is a novelist and an accomplished screenwriter, having written the screenplays for his own films and for others (including co-scriptwriter of one of my favorites -- Ayelet Menahemi's Noodle 2007). 

In his new film, The World is Funny, he uses a type of narrator or story-teller.  She is a muse who goes from house to house, toting her mop and broom, learning people's stories which she uses for her material as a participant in a writing workshop, taking place at the Tiberias library.  The participants in the workshop, a wonderful array of diverse characters, make up the background chorus, like in a Greek tragedy, relating  modern-day fables. This background is provided for the tragic stories of the three main characters -- Yardena is a bereaved mother, having lost her daughter in the army;  Miron has lost his wife in a terrible car  accident in which his older son was badly hurt;  Golan is desperately in love with a woman dying of cancer.  These three people, who have suffered terrible tragedies,  are siblings, whose stories intertwine as the film develops. 

Golan is crazy about the Gashash and seeks out Shaike (from the Gashash) to come and entertain his dying sweetheart. Shaike actually appears in a number of scenes and sings on stage at the conclusion of the film -- singing Naomi Shemer's Lu Yehi, backed up by a children's chorus , giving the otherwise old-fashioned song more of a hip and upbeat melody.

Notwithstanding the vulgarity, this is a quirky film about the fine line between tragedy and comedy, about whether stories reflect reality or reality is just a story being told, about bereavement and family relationships,  about living in the past and not being able to cope with the present, about living in the world of fiction when reality is too difficult to bear.

Variety [Alissa Simon]

With: Assi Levi, Dani Shteg, Eli Finish, Naama Shitrit, Or Ben-Melech, Moshe Ashkenazi, Ola Schor, Yehezkel Lazarov, Shlomi Koriat, Rotem Zisman, Levana Finkelstein, Moshe Ivgy, Dror Keren, Alon Noyman, Avi Grainik, Rotem Abuhav, Israel Katorza, Zdeev Revach, Shaike Levi. (Hebrew, Arabic dialogue)

"The World Is Funny" and wondrously strange in the tender new dramedy from Israeli fabulist Shemi Zarhin ("Aviva, My Love"). Full of quirky charm, this ambitious, multistrand tale about storytelling -- and a fractured family -- unfolds in a friendly Tiberias, Israel, where reality and fantasy cleverly intertwine. Already Israel's top domestic B.O. draw this year, the pic is still in theaters and could do modest arthouse business offshore, especially if it wins the Ophir award for best picture (one of an unprecedented 15 nods) and is named Israel's foreign-language film Oscar submission. Fest play is guaranteed.

Budding writer Zafi (Naama Shitrit) has trouble composing endings to her stories. Instructed by her workshop leader to write about "people with secrets and lies, wounds and diseases," she uses her housecleaning jobs to sniff out interesting tales. Among the narratives she collects and ties together is the sad story of estranged siblings Yardena (Assi Levi), Meron (Dani Shteg) and Golan (Eli Finish).

Travel agent Yardena discovers she is pregnant. Although this should be a happy occasion, she has no idea how it could be possible, as she and her husband haven't slept together since their daughter died during her army service two years ago. Now she must try to figure out who has impregnated her, while trying to come to terms with her repressed grief.

Bitter, angry Meron and his rebellious teenage son, Hillik (Or Ben-Melech), experience a miracle of sorts when Meron's older son, Nessi (Moshe Ashkenazi), awakes from a coma after eight years. But Nessi, now 18, still has the mentality of a 10-year-old, and Hillik and Meron struggle with different methods of bringing him back on course while hiding the dark secret that might just be the key to his recovery.

Golan is a radio host who brings the town together when he broadcasts classic skits by the iconic comedy trio the Gashash, but he is helpless in the face of his own tragedy. His hospitalized girlfriend, Natasha (Ola Schor), has cancer and is not doing well. Instead of facing the painful reality of the present, he focuses on trying to bring the two surviving Gashashim to Tiberias for a reunion performance.

Building on the tales-within-a-tale structure he used in "Aviva," helmer-writer Zarhin, a novelist himself, alternates the orchestration of the siblings' problematic lives with the stories that Zafi's writing group composes. As the members of the group describe their work, their fanciful stories unfold in black-and-white footage. And it soon becomes clear that Zafi is not the only member of the group who is writing from life.

Clearly, the pic's underlying theme is about healing. Zarhin shows how love can both wound and provide remedy, how fiction can make reality bearable, and how humor works as a social tool people use to fix one another. The poignant ending he devises evokes both laughter and tears as it ties together the various story strands in a highly satisfactory way.

Some of the humor is of the painfully human sort, deriving from a cathartic and compassionate acknowledgement of hurtful moments. Other bits are distinctly cultural, like the elaborate wordplay from the Gashash sketches that all of the characters quote, whose refrain, "Damned if I know, the world is funny so I laugh," provides the pic's title. There is also plenty of laugh-out-loud situational comedy. Warm thesping is entirely in tune with the helmer's intent.

Shot on location in a sunny-looking Tiberias, the attractive tech package is polished, with editor Einat Glaser-Zarhin's smooth cutting and composer Jonathan Bar-Giora's evocative score especially worthy of note.

Camera (color/B&W, DV-to-35mm), Yaron Scharf; editor, Einat Glaser-Zarhin; music, Jonathan Bar-Giora; production designer, Yoel Herzberg; costume designer, Li Alembik; sound (Dolby Digital)

Classic Cinemas: Jewish International Film Festival

Israeli comedy sweeps nominations for upcoming film awards ... Haaretz

HaGashash HaHiver - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Zbanic, Jasmila

GRBAVICA

aka: The Land of My Dreams

Bosnia-Herzegovina Austria Germany Croatia (107 mi) 2006

Plain, Pain: Grbavica Yvette Bíró from Rouge, 2006

Zeitlin, Benh

BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD A 97

USA (91 mi) 2012 Official site

I see that I am a little piece of a big, big universe, and that makes it right. —Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis)

A film that comes with accolades, having won awards at Cannes and Sundance, which may play into the audience’s preconceived expectations of what an acclaimed film is *supposed* to be, but if New York has its post 9/11 films, like 25^th HOUR (2002), then this is among the most evocative post Katrina films from Louisiana, the most definitive, of course, being Spike Lee’s journalistic exposé WHEN THE LEVEEES BROKE: A REQUIEM IN FOUR ACTS (2006). One has to wonder what David Gordon Green thinks of this film, which is arguably as good or better than anything he’s ever done, as it’s an original composite of his indie style films (that he all but invented but doesn’t make anymore) like GEORGE WASHINGTON (2000) and the magnificent poetry of Julie Dash’s DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST (1991), which this most closely resembles, especially capturing the harshness and beauty of a remote island culture, using a child narrator throughout whose inner thoughts transcend the poverty-laden conditions of their world with an uncanny elegance and nobility. Though the filmmaker happens to be Jewish from Queens, New York, studying with the great Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, he actually wrote this film with co-writer Lucy Alibar in summer camp when they were both teenagers, where the film is their adaptation of her play Juicy and Delicious, changing the protagonist from a boy to a little girl, before he moved to Southern Louisiana where he’s lived for the past six years and made the short film GLORY AT SEA (2008), which can be seen here: Watch Benh Zeitlin's incredible short GLORY AT SEA YouTube (25:48). Interestingly, the film title, Beasts of the Southern Wild, comes from a 1973 collection of short stories by Doris Betts, also mentioned in the opening line of William Blake’s 1789 poem The Little Black Boy The Little Black Boy by William Blake : The Poetry Foundation.

Apparently dividing audiences along many of the same lines as Terrence Malick’s equally enthralling The Tree of Life (2011), both films couldn’t be more visually intoxicating, rich in atmospheric detail, touching the very soul of man through intensely personal journeys, where the key is developing a shared emotional understanding, like opening a new window to the world around you. This is a fiercely independent feature, shot on Super 16mm by Ben Richardson, which intentionally takes much of the picturesque beauty out of the movie, leaving a naturalistic film that actually feels like the raw edge of the universe, a place where the last inhabitants of earth might dwell. This apocalyptic, end-of-the-world scenario runs throughout the film, which prominently features the possibility of rising floods, toxic environmental conditions, and abandoned children. The entire film is seen through the point of view of a 6-year old girl, Hushpuppy, the sensational Quvenzhané Wallis, just one in a cast entirely comprised of non-professionals, who lives with her drunk and perpetually angry father Wink (Dwight Henry, a local baker in real life) in the squalor of the Delta backwoods, where they live in hand-built corrugated tin structures that resemble dilapidated trailers on a tiny island in the flood plains south of New Orleans nicknamed the Bathtub (fictitiously modeled on a real place, The Island - Isle de Jean Charles), as once another storm hits, the levee was built to protect wealthier residents, while the Bathtub is destined to be submerged under water. “They think we're all gonna drown down here, but we ain't going nowhere.” With this in mind, her father teaches her to be strong, to survive, pretty much forcing her to fend for herself against the elements.

The unique touch here is the inventive use of the imagination, where heightened realism becomes fantasy, which is inherently part of a child’s view of the world, where strange prehistoric monsters called aurochs once ruled the earth that would just as soon eat people for breakfast, where Hushpuppy is driven to find her place in the universe and leave her mark, but she is constantly threatened by these giant creatures that still exist in her mind. She internalizes their presence whenever life is threatened, where they become a symbol of death knocking at the door, and if this film does anything, it provides a rich, atmospheric blend of love and death, where both couldn’t feel more intensely real. This extremely well developed inner realm is the real surprise of the film, where there’s a subtle complexity that just has a way of touching people, where it is the director’s choice to stray away from narrative, to allow the story to evolve without definition, where some may find the community where they live a band of drunken misfits and outcasts, where filth is strewn everywhere, hardly worth caring about, but others may understand it as protecting a nearly extinct way of life, living off the land much like the Indians did, where Wink makes a nearly unnoticed remark about not wanting to eat food from a supermarket, a concept that’s hard for most people to understand. These isolated individuals have a zealously paranoiac view of government as completely untrustworthy, obtained from incidents like The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment — Infoplease.com and centuries of lies and historical mistreatment in Louisiana, where in their view government serves and protects the wealthy and all but ignores the needs of the poor, where so many end up languishing in prison, as Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the world (>: Louisiana's Incarceration Rate "Highest in the World") also (La.'s incarceration rate leads nation - Law Enforcement News). So it’s no surprise those in the Bathtub, both black and white, relish living free in their own homes, outside the reach of government, seen as one of the last bastions of freedom and individuality.

Part of the film’s innate strength is its unpredictability, which beautifully matches the journey of a young child who never knows what’s happening next in her life, where each day brings something new. Rather than depict an idealized world, Hushpuppy’s mother “swam away” when she was young, and her father is extremely harsh, often brutal with her, forcing her to stand up to him or cower in defeat. While these backward ways will not win any new converts, and may resemble uneducated Appalachian hill people who live largely outside the law, raising their own to survive in a hostile and unforgiving world around them, Hushpuppy is both angered and drawn to her father, developing one of the fiercest expressions of loyalty ever conceived on film, which is what makes this unlike other Sundance award winners or indie projects. The subtlety of the writing and direction is remarkable, as this outsiderist community mindset is not immediately apparent, but comes to be understood over time, much like the carefully crafted, meticulously conceived backwoods Ozark community in Debra Granik’s 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #3 Winter's Bone. Both films are closely observed, without an ounce of condescension or moral pretense, carefully outlining the landscape, people, and regional habits. One of the unique aspects of the film is demonstrating how huge the psychic divide is in dealing with the underclass, where even well meaning government officials can’t begin to understand what it means for this group to be separated from their homes. Part of this is likely a self-inflicted trauma of the uneducated that is entirely based on fear of the unknown, but among the many strengths of the film are both the creation of such a startlingly strange and mysterious world of self-sufficiency and also the empathetic tone towards the people living in it, as the audience has no familiarity and knows virtually nothing about this island culture ahead of time, yet the world outside the theater may look altogether different afterwards when coming out of this film.

While the mystically insightful narration, obviously wise beyond her years, cannot compete with the originality of Julie Dash’s film, where an unborn child is among the surrealistic swirl of narrators, this more closely resembles Terrence Malick’s spare yet brutally honest poetry from 12-year old Linda Manz in DAYS OF HEAVEN (1976), quite a standard to live up to, as that performance feels unparalleled. While this is something different altogether, it’s significant that one is reaching into this rarified cinematic air for comparisons, as this film similarly grasps a child’s state of grace and wonder. The music created by Dan Romer and the director is a perfect fit, blending quiet, solitary moments with rousing pieces of Americana that literally soar, like this incredibly uplifting 4^th of July fireworks celebration, BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD: "Stay Right Here" YouTube (1:37). At times, as they float down the river in a makeshift raft, the film recalls the enchantment of The Night of the Hunter (1955) where Lillian Gish reminds us of the resiliency of children, telling us “They abide.” Consider a late scene in a dance club, aka brothel, appropriately enough called Elysian Fields, bathed in a dim light and a near wordless state where Fats Waller music plays in the background. As the women quietly find a child partner to dance with, their bodies swaying with the music, it’s remarkable how much emotion is conveyed with so little effort, where Hushpuppy is mesmerizing to watch as a maternal life-sustaining force is literally breathed back into her tired body. This endlessly provocative and hauntingly beautiful film exhibits a dazzling visual flair along with an unusual tenderness and sensitivity towards the characters, becoming one of the most believable yet impossibly involving dramatic works, literally stringing together seemingly random pieces of interconnected parts all blended together into a magical realist tale that summons the heroic journeys of Odysseus in his perilous, fraught-with-adventure search for home, but experienced here through the eyes of a child mostly knee-deep in mud in the backwoods of the Mississippi Bayou. The film itself is a quest for discovery and a search for meaning, a challenge to our own cynical and condescending views, becoming nothing less than a mythical expression of joy and heartbreak, a ferocious portrait of the will to survive, where only by staring death in the face can you begin to discover the world around you, one of the best expressions of redemptive and transcendent filmmaking seen in the past decade.

Sydney Film Festival: Beasts of the Southern Wild Sean Rom from Trespass magazine

Beasts of the Southern Wild is the kind of film that could only be made by a first time director. No auteur would take the kind of risks of director Benh Zeitlin. In story and direction, this extraordinary film leaps off a fantastical cliff with scrap-yard wings and somehow manages to soar. Its minor imperfections melt away in light of a remarkable and beautifully realised world.

Hushpuppy (an incredible Quvenzhané Wallis) lives with her father, Wink (Dwight Henry), in Bathtub: a swampy, wild Bayou community. We see the industrial outside world from Wink’s makeshift boat constructed out of pieces of cars. “Isn’t it ugly?” he says to Hushpuppy, commenting that nothing could compare to the beauty of their home.

Benh Zeitlin restless camera presents the Bathtub as boisterous and brutal but not lacking in love. The images are so evocative you can almost taste the salty sweetness of the crabs and the resident’s sweaty camaraderie. Hushpuppy is an energetic tomboy angered by Wink’s tough parenting approach but irretrievable bound to him by the fiercest loyalty and love. The subtle way that we come to understand their relationship is testimony not only to writers Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar, but also the actors (most in their first roles). In her debut, Quvenzhané Wallis gives what is undoubtedly one of the great child performances.

To try and describe or categorise Beasts of the Southern Wild is impossible and perhaps beside the point. This is a joyous, startling, mythical and altogether remarkable movie.

The House Next Door [Simon Abrams]

As a Southern-gothic fairy tale about post-Katrina New Orleans, Beasts of the Southern Wild could have easily turned out to be a crass and unwittingly exploitative work. Co-writer/director Ben Zeitlin's fanciful approach to his understandably touchy subject matter theoretically seems glib. Thankfully, every time Zeitlin and co-writer Lucy Alibar threaten to oversimplify their story with mawkishly twee sentimentality, they steer the film's elemental narrative in another direction. The hopefulness that viewers take away from the film, the most buzzed-about title at this year's Sundance, feels earned thanks to Zeitlin and Alibar's focus on their characters' fears of imminent abandonment and annihilation. As a film about the seductive and essential power of hope, Beasts of the Southern Wild is a warm, accomplished, and fitting tribute to the fighting spirit of New Orleans.

This is the film you might get if Terry Gilliam conflated David Gordon Green's George Washington with Alice in Wonderland. We follow Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), a six-year-old girl that lives with her single father, Wink (Dwight Henry), in a remote region of New Orleans only referred to as "The Bathtub." Since Hushpuppy spends much of her time by herself, all of her fears are filtered through a convoluted system of icons and symbols. This proves that she's a product of her environment. She listens to animals and people's hearts because her father has a heart condition, fears cannibalism after a Bathtub resident teaches her that all living things are "meat," and even fantasizes about wild rampaging boars because Wink has a big fat black hog on his farm.

So when the hurricane hits, Wink refuses to leave the Bathtub. This decision is a matter of pride, one whose consequences Hushpuppy has to deal with. Wink tries to boost morale by showing his neighbors that they can overcome any obstacle. But there are always consequences to Wink's stubborn actions. Hushpuppy eventually joins her father in refusing to leave the Bathtub, but only after earning a greater sense of perspective. The giant boars that Hushpuppy constantly imagines are heading toward the Bathtub are her fears of losing Wink, who personifies Hushpuppy's only link to the past. Beasts of the Southern Wild is, in that way, a beautiful fairy tale about survivor's guilt that's about as good as the festival hype would have you believe.

Artforum [Amy Taubin]

A PRIMAL EXPERIENCE of the beginning of the end of the world, Benh Zeitlin’s debut feature, Beasts of the Southern Wild, opens amid chaos and closes with catharsis. Beasts is, above all, a film about girlhood told through the voice, eyes, and ears of a six-year-old. It is not so much a work of magical realism as a depiction of the way the world has impressed itself on the imagination of a particular girl named Hushpuppy (a remarkably concentrated and expressive Quvenzhané Wallis). Hushpuppy lives with her father, Wink (Dwight Henry), and a ragtag bande à part in the Bathtub, a rusting, broken-down shantytown deep in the lush, bountiful Louisiana marshlands, south of the levees that these bayou dwellers rightfully scorn. How much good did such man-made defenses do New Orleans?

Alcoholic and terminally ill but still possessed of the voice and manner of a drill sergeant, Wink is determined to teach his daughter the skills she needs to survive on her own. The bond between the father and the daughter who has already modeled herself on him is the heart of the film. Separation anxiety defines its nervous system. Hushpuppy’s mother is long gone—“She swam away” is how Wink explains it—and her father is dying. One might say that Hushpuppy’s journey involves her coming to terms with death and learning that what has been lost can be reclaimed as memory. While Wink’s lessons are hands-on and occasionally involve some shoving and slapping, which Hushpuppy returns in kind, it is from the local K–12 teacher (no Louisiana school board would have licensed her) that she gets her precocious understanding that “the fabric of the universe is coming unraveled.” When Hushpuppy tries to hide from the hurricane that will flood the Bathtub, she sees in her mind’s eye the icy water from the melting polar caps rushing toward her fragile tropical paradise and with it herds of “aurochs,” giant prehistoric boarlike creatures let loose from their glacial graves. Beasts is an ecological fairy tale, both cautionary and inspiring. It is a measure of the film’s incantatory power that one never thinks, while under its spell, that Hush-puppy’s aurochs are probably just local farm animals gone feral. Ben Richardson’s handheld, often close-up, Super 16–mm lensing plays a major role in immersing us in Hushpuppy’s world by suggesting her immediate whirligig responses to sights and sounds, and the fiercely rhythmic, omnipresent zydeco-inflected score is similarly enveloping.

Beasts evokes as much rapture as pathos. Indeed, for a film that embraces spontaneity and abandon—the wildness in all things—it is exquisitely balanced in its contradictions and filled with rhyming scenes and images. One of the first things we see Hushpuppy do is lay her hand against the body of a pig and cock her head to listen for the heartbeat that marks the difference between sleep and death. Much later, she lies against Wink’s chest as his pulse slows and fades into nothingness. By then she has found, in the film’s most ecstatic, miragelike sequence, the mother for whom she yearns—a prostitute who works on the Floating Catfish Shack. As they dance together in the soft, golden light, Hushpuppy has a vision of herself as an infant being lifted high above her father’s head and returned to safety, nestled against his chest. One intense sensory experience recalls another buried deeper in memory, the immediate and the recollected becoming one in the imagination. Indeed, the entire film hovers between the tumultuous immediacy of the present and the lyricism of a fairy tale.

Should I have mentioned that Hushpuppy and Wink are African-American? While the title Beasts of the Southern Wild embraces every person, animal, fish, insect, flower, and tree in the film, these two characters are the most important “beasts.” The film’s title has a complicated derivation that goes back to a poem by William Blake via Doris Betts’s 1973 short story “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” Betts’s title made its way into a play by Lucy Alibar, which become the starting point for the film’s script, written by Zeitlin and Alibar. Other than being set in the South, Betts’s stories themselves have nothing to do with the film, but, oddly, Blake’s poem, “The Little Black Boy,” does. It begins: “My mother bore me in the southern wild, / And I am black, but O! my soul is white.” Using the voice of an African child, Blake conjures a heaven where flesh (and therefore difference) does not exist. But in this heaven, the little black boy has the moral high ground, because his role is to teach the white colonialist oppressors to love the Africans they’ve oppressed. Did Blake fall into the “magical Negro” trap before that cliché (and its equally reductive critique) even existed? Has Zeitlin, a white filmmaker who went down to the Big Easy in the aftermath of Katrina and made a film that tells a story of black survival, been caught in the same snare? The question must be asked because color blindness does not exist—Blake’s heaven and Zeitlin’s bayou paradise notwithstanding. Is Zeitlin damnably presumptuous in assuming the voice of another? Or does his attempt to conjure a universal subjectivity through the particularities of a black child fall well within the bounds of artistic license? These are questions more easily asked than comfortably answered. One thing we do know: As a young man, Benh Zeitlin fell in love with the black culture of New Orleans and made a film that is a compelling, contagious expression of that love.

At Sundance, 'Beasts of the Southern Wild' Is Standout - NYTimes.com Manohla Dargis, January 27, 2012 (excerpt)

PARK CITY, Utah — Now in its 28th edition, the Sundance Film Festival has eased into a mellower groove, hallelujah and pass the parka. Despite the predictable hazards and hassles, like slip-sliding on black ice and waiting for shuttles in the frigid cold, it no longer is the nightmare it had become back when Paris Hilton and frat types descended. The economic downturn plays a part — there are fewer self-important industry players crowding the scene — as does the affable presence of the festival’s director, John Cooper, who took over in 2009.

These remain uncertain times in the independent-film world, as distributors continue to try to seduce ticket buyers away from the mainstream. Both Magnolia Pictures and IFC Films, for instance, now routinely show movies through video on demand before putting them on the big screen. That they continue to use brick-and-mortar theaters indicates that this strategy works for them, though it’s difficult to know what it means for the future of cinema. Audiences clearly still want to see indie movies in theaters (or at least festivals: last year’s Sundance lured some 45,000 attendees), but getting them to pony up for smaller, starless work remains tough, as suggested by the $1.3 million domestic box-office haul for “Another Earth,” which was picked up at Sundance 2011 by Fox Searchlight.

The evolution of the studio-dependent Fox Searchlight in the past few years has been nothing if not surprising. When Searchlight was led by Peter Rice (he now runs entertainment for Fox television), it released movies that were so alike — quirky and cute were operative descriptors for titles like “Juno” and “Garden State,” which invariably came with head-bobbing alt-rock soundtracks — that its lineup came close to a house style. Under the guidance of Nancy Utley and Steve Gilula, Searchlight since 2009 has edged into more challenging terrain, with titles like “Shame” and “Black Swan.” It’s a risk that largely appears to be paying off, as witnessed by the announcement on Tuesday that one of its boldest recent releases, Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life,” had been nominated for a best picture Oscar.

It’s hard not to think that Searchlight’s success with “The Tree of Life” helped sway the producers of the heavily courted “Beasts of the Southern Wild” to throw in with the company. The standout of this year’s Sundance and among the best films to play at the festival in two decades, “Beasts of the Southern Wild” isn’t an obvious studio-dependent title. Directed by Benh Zeitlin, who wrote the screenplay with Lucy Alibar, the film is a magical realist tale, as well as a hero’s journey, set in a gloriously mythologized part of southern Louisiana nicknamed the Bathtub. There, a 6-year old girl, Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis, a sensational find), lives in a state of grace and wonder with her hard-boozing father, Wink (Dwight Henry), amid wandering (and later cooked) chickens, stumbling drunks and rampaging creatures.

This is the first feature from Mr. Zeitlin, a Queens native who grew up in Westchester County, graduated from Wesleyan University and counts among his influences Mr. Malick, John Cassavetes and Emir Kusturica. After a stint working in the Czech Republic for another inspiration, the animator Jan Svankmajer, Mr. Zeitlin made his way, post-Katrina, to southern Louisiana, where he shot “Beasts” with a collective called Court 13. (“More of an idea than an organization,” as Mr. Zeitlin puts it, Court 13 takes its name from a Wesleyan squash court that he and some friends commandeered.) Shot on Super 16-millimeter film, “Beasts of the Southern Wild” is hauntingly beautiful both visually and in the tenderness it shows toward the characters, who live on the edge and perhaps somewhat in Hushpuppy’s head.

Nothing else at this year’s festival came close to stirring up the excitement and sense of discovery generated by “Beasts,” which predictably also inspired a minor critical backlash and worse. I heard one industry type wonder aloud if Hushpuppy was “retarded or just black and poor.” Happily for that fool, the festival was dominated by the familiar complement of drifty and droopy white young things haplessly bumping into the usual life milestones — divorce, death, desire — their every banality immortalized by handheld digital cameras. The light weight of such cameras no doubt accounts for the ubiquity of handheld cinematography, though in too many titles this approach has become a lazy tool for directors who seem to think that tripod-free camerawork equates realism.

Louisiana Story | Film Comment | Film Society of Lincoln Center Scott Foundas interviews director Benh Zeitlin

Salon [Andrew O'Hehir]

Tiny Mix Tapes [Susanna Locascio]

The Village Voice [Melissa Anderson]

Vulture [David Edelstein]

Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]

The Playlist [James Rocchi]

“BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD” — A ... - Filmmaker Magazine Michael Tully from Hammer to Nail from Filmmaker magazine, June 28, 2012

“Beasts of the Southern Wild” - The New Yorker David Denby

The New York Observer [Rex Reed]

The Atlantic [Robert Levin]

The King Bulletin [Danny King]

TIME [Richard Corliss]

Movieline [Michelle Orange]

'Beasts of the Southern Wild': Untamed ... - The Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Sundance: Apocryphal now Patrick Z. McGavin

Spinoff Online [Katie Calautti]

AwardsCircuit.com [Joseph Braverman]

DVD Talk [Jason Bailey]

NPR [Ella Taylor]

Paste Magazine [Clay Steakley]

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a Film that Deserves More than - Pajiba Caspar Salmon

Film School Rejects [Simon Gallagher]

Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]

Beasts of the Southern Wild | Reverse Shot Elbert Ventura calls it a beautiful lie

Slate Magazine [Dana Stevens] anthropological voyeurism

In the Bathtub of the World | Film Reviews | The L Magazine - New ... Nicolas Rapold from L-magazine calls it insufferably precious, sappy, self-impressed, and pompously titled

Notebook Reviews: Benh Zeitlin's "Beasts of the Southern Wild" on ... Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from Mubi, June 29, 2012 claims it speaks the language of cinema that’s been co-opted by smart, arty advertising in the last two decades, calling it faux-naif, that it pretends to be celebrating gumption and resolve, but is ultimately selling stubbornness and isolationism, calling it bullshit

The Five Worst Indie-Film Cliches In Sundance Darling Beasts Of ... Grierson and Lietch from Deadspin, June 28, 2012 say it’s a good but overrated film filled with indie cliché’s, which they list

The Case Against 'Beasts of the Southern Wild' Tim Grierson from Everybody’s Got One, June 29, 2012

Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) - Critics' Reviews - MSN Movies Glenn Kenny, also seen here from Some Came Running: Conversion narrative

Glenn Kenny, Prompted By A Naysayer Of Beasts Of The Southern Wild, Offers Some New Entries For The “Dictionary Of Received Critical Ideas” Glenn Kenny responds to the critics from Then Came Running, June 29, 2012

A Few More Words on My Tim Grierson responds to Glenn Kenny from Everybody’s Got One, June 29, 2012, reiterating that rather than a model of what independent cinema can achieve, it’s instead susceptible to indie-film cliché’s that it can't fully overcome

SUNDANCE REVIEW: 'Beasts of the Southern Wild' Renders a Child's Mind With Vivid Results Eric Kohn from indieWIRE, January 21, 2012 claims there’s plenty to marvel at, but far less to feel, that it suffers from a muddled assortment of expressionistic concepts

The Christian Science Monitor [Peter Rainer] mixes harsh realism with (unmagical) magical realism and the results are often ungainly

The Reel Bits [Richard Gray]

Reelviews [James Berardinelli]

Emanuel Levy [Emanuel Levy]

Film-Forward.com [Michael Lee]

Movie City News [Kim Voynar]

Noel Murray @ Sundance 2012: Day 6 January 25, 2012, with more extended Sundance coverage here: Sundance

Beasts of the Southern Wild | Review, Trailer, News, Cast | SBS Film Fiona Williams

DustinPutman.com [Dustin Putman]

We Got This Covered [Steven Chaitman]

The Film Emporium [Andy Buckle]

Washingtonian [Ian Buckwalter]

Collider.com [Matt Goldberg]

Nisimazine.eu [Emilie Padellec]

Film School Rejects [Kevin Kelly]

An Online Universe [Sam McCosh]

Badass Digest [Devin Faraci]

Chromeyellow.com [SALG]

Up and Comers [Rebecca Lewis]

TurnStyle [Noah J Nelson]

Twitch [Ryland Aldrich]

Temple of Reviews [Nathan Adams]

RopeofSilicon.com [Brad Brevet]

The 400 Blows [Eric Prindle]

Beasts Of The Southern Wild | Review | Screen Anthony Kaufman from Screendaily

Boxoffice Magazine [Ray Greene]

The 10 Best Movies of Sundance 2012 :: Blogs :: List of the Day ... Michael Dunaway and Jeremy Matthews from Paste magazine, February 2, 2012

The Racked Focus [Maxwell Haddad]

Tonight at the Movies [John C. Clark]

The Oxford American [Levi Agee]

Shockya.com [Perri Nemiroff]

Gawker [Rich Juzwiak]

Eric D. Snider [Eric D. Snider]

The Film Stage [Jordan Raup]

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Anna Bielak]

Film Journal International [Maitland McDonagh]

Sound On Sight [Lane Scarberry]

Film Threat [Michael Nordine]

First Showing [Alex Billington]

Living in Cinema [Craig Kennedy]

HitFix.com [Gregory Ellwood]

No Ripcord [Forrest Cardamenis]

artsHub [Sarah Ward]

Complex [Matt Barone]

Cinema Blend [Katey Rich]

Beasts of the Southern Wild | News | Gambit New Orleans News Ken Korman from Gambit

Sundance 2012: 'Beasts Of The Southern Wild' Wins Top Honors Sandy Cohen from The Huffington Post, January 29, 2012

Sundance 2012. Awards on Notebook | MUBI David Hudson from Mubi, January 29, 2012

Capturing the Southern Wild Before It Disappears a few photographs by Julie Dermansky from Slate, January 18, 2013

Filmmaker Interview Director interview from indieWIRE, January 19, 2012

Ben Zeitlin, director/co-writer of BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD Interview by the NYC Movie Guru, June 2012

'Beasts of the Southern Wild' Director: Louisiana Is a Dangerous ... Jeremy Butman interview from The Atlantic, June 27, 2012

Keyframe: the Fandor Blog [Anna Tatarska] Anna Tatarska interview from Fandor, June 27, 2012

The Huffington Post [Scott Mendelson]

TheHuffingtonPost.com [Michael Hogan]

The Associated Press [Christy Lemire]

USA Today [Claudia Puig]

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Zeldovich, Alexander

TARGET (Mishen) D 55

Russia (154 mi) 2011 ‘Scope

An utter disaster in the making, dreadfully uninvolving, yet it’s two and a half hours long, which feels like an eternity, as this picture just never gets off the ground. While it’s possible the Russian references are too oblique for a Western audience, as there may be specific phrases that a Russian audience would understand all too clearly, but as it stands, this is one of the worst films seen all year. Basically, this is a futuristic rape fantasy, where what starts out as an intriguing idea unravels into a nightmarish chaos of uncontrolled anger and hostility. Set in Russia only ten years in the future, the social classes are more divided, where the rich live in an extravagant luxury where they can afford anything, while the rest suffer offscreen somewhere, where their presence on earth is of little consequence, as they are only necessary to serve the rich. While the influence of the United States is totally absent, China has become an Eastern superpower, a rival of Russia, where there is a transcontinental highway between the nations that is simply a neverending logjam of trucks where police swerve in and out issuing harsh penalties for alleged infractions. In this altogether imperfect world, the super rich are always looking for ways to make their lives even better, where they can make a pilgrimage to a remote location near the Mongolian border, the site of an abandoned astrophysics station which allegedly receives cosmic rays, known as the “Target,” where those exposed, even for a short duration, receive everlasting youth, as from that point on they cease aging. All right, so far, so good.

One feels there are likely smaller chapters to this story, where it might play out better in a serial installment Movie-of-the-Week format, where the element of suspense would create anticipated interest, as people would be curious what would happen next. However in one sitting, the film grows prolonged without ever establishing any tension or suspense. Vladimir Sorokin allegedly worked nearly a decade on this script, supposedly an underground take on Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (really?), but it falls horribly flat, evolving into exasperating dribble in spots, where all too many subplots get thrown into the mix, not one of which ever generates interest. Part of the problem is the dreadfully unappealing characters that only grow more contemptuous over time. Nikolai (Vitaly Krischenko) is the brutal Putin or Stalin figure, a man who crushes his enemies as head of the customs division, responsible for all transport of cargo, which of course is rampant with corruption. Viktor (Maksim Sukhanov) is a Russian Minister of Natural Resources, a man living in European extravagance with a much younger trophy wife, Zoya (Justine Waddell). Also along is Zoya’s brother Mitya (Danila Kozlovskiy), an obnoxious Reality TV host with impressive looks who takes an interest in Anna (Daniela Stoyanovich), who runs a radio show on learning Chinese. Zoya ends up infatuated by Nikolai, where each relationship becomes unhinged due to arousing suspicions and paranoia.

It turns out there’s little science fiction to this tale, as most of that plays out in anticipation of what the viewer expects, where the consequences of the visit has a Macbethian theme, a feeling of invincibility, which initially feels powerful and irrefutably ecstatic, near delirious, developing a ravenous appetite for animalistic sex bordering on brutality, descending into obsessive anxiety about the partner, while in some instances it feels like the brain ceases to function, where a switch overrides all reason and the world is divided into good and evil, where lengthy philosophical quandaries may turn to mush, absolute nonsense, as there are apparent unexplained side effects of the experience that overtake the initial euphoria of everlasting youth. The problem here is that the story lacks vision or insight, as the usual view of Russia is that it is a country defined by a strong and powerful leader, something of a dictator who holds everything in check, where if you remove his influence and toy with the idea of democracy, for instance, the country will immediately descend into chaos. Well this is not science fiction, this has been the view of Russia for the last several hundred years, so to reiterate this fear is hardly something new. While there are a few ravishing location shots, cinematography by Alexandre Ilkhovsky, the mostly discordant music is something of a headache, as is the complete unengagement of the characters that couldn’t hold less appeal. When the screenwriter resorts to babbling nonsense, as if characters have been subjected to electroshock, where life ceases to hold any meaning, it feels strangely like a completely humorless and continually dour apocalyptic version of THE INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956).

Rich On Film [Richard Haridy]

The next film of the day, TARGET was much less successful. This Russian epic is only just starting its run of festivals and we were treated to one of its first few public screenings having not even premiered in its home country yet. Scatted adjectives in my notepad included the words: meandering, unfocused, uninteresting and just plain pointless. For a film with such grandiose ambitions (rich Muscovites travelling to a techno-fountain of youth and dealing with the repercussions of what it actually means to become 'forever young'), the stories it ends up telling are remarkably bland. Everyone is unlikable, has affairs and are just generally unpleasant people. By the time we got to the second or third pointless sex scene set to a jarring opera song I really wanted to get the hell out of the theatre.

If you go back over my list of anticipated films for this years festival you will see that TARGET featured, primarily based upon a singular critics review for the Independent who saw it in Berlin. That critic's name is noted (Jonathan Romney by the way) and will be disregarded in the future as TARGET really is a great disappointment that hopefully will soon be forgotten.

Sight And Sound [Jonathan Romney] (British)

As a rule, critics have learned from bitter experience not to expect revelations from Berlin, especially not from the flaccid and usually middle-brow competition selection. Surprises, if they come, will be from left field – and the one film I saw this year that can genuinely be called a UFO is a Russian science-fiction extravaganza, shown in the Panorama section. Target (Mishen) – ‘The Target’ would be a better translation, to make it sound less like an action thriller – is an extraordinary, flamboyant, hugely ambitious chunk of dystopian futurism.

It’s set in Russia in 2020, when the rich are even richer than now, when Chinese influence is in the ascendent, and there’s a superhighway running across the continent direct from Guangzhou to Paris. Characters include a customs officer – who, presiding over highway traffic, has become fabulously rich – Russia’s Minister of Natural Resources and his trophy wife (British actress Justine Waddell) and her manic reality-show host brother. They all leave a CGI-enhanced futuristic Moscow for a secret astrophysics site on the Mongolian border, in search for the source of youth. They find it, return home… and then things get strange, but certainly not in a predictable manner.

A sumptuously-designed, constantly surprising piece, Target uses the science-fiction genre rather in the way that Alphaville, Stalker and Fahrenheit 451 did, to philosophical effect – although in this case the production values are on a much more sumptuous, Spielbergian / Kubrickian level. Some of the social satire, notably some Fellini-style TV sequences, is heavy-handed, but Target is distinctive in being at once modernistically sleek and traditionally Russian; along with some Solaris-style oases of ruralism, this is one of those films where characters intermittently recite Lermontov poems to each other.

Part state-of-the-nation comment, part disquisition on good, evil, mortality and desire, and wholly a genre cult attraction extraordinaire, Target is a fabulously imaginative work. I’ve never previously encountered director Alexander Zeldovich, although he’s been around a while. Anyway, I’d love some bold UK distributor to take on a film so audaciously defiant of market logic, flouting established genre and art-house logic alike.

Target continues the recent stirrings of new energies from the former USSR, following Sergei Loznitsa’s Ukrainian My Joy, and How I Ended Last Summer, a hit in last year’s Berlin competition. I was also impressed by Innocent Saturday (in the original Russian title, simply ‘On Saturday’), Alexander Mindadze’s evocation of life on the ground in the 36 hours between the explosion of the Chernobyl reactor and the start of evacuation.

The mood of panic, and the sense that escape is too late even before it’s begun, is concentrated in the figure of one man, Valery, an engineer and Party official who makes a desperate and desultory attempt to leave town, then gets sucked into a frenzied wedding party. The film’s style, as the camera pelts wildly on its hero’s heels – across town, through foliage, in and out of hectic dance-floor crowds – is relentless and ultimately exhausting, but there’s a hard metaphoric core in a film that is also about the then-imminent Soviet meltdown. And it was certainly the most purely energetic film in competition.

Screen [Jonathan Romney] (British)

French critics often use the term ‘UFO’ to denote bizarre uncategorisable and unexpected films - in which case Russian futuristic epic Target (Mishen) is a UFO on the Independence Day scale. This bizarre offering from veteran director Alexander Zeldovich will strike many as a folly, but it can justifiably be tagged as visionary, with a boldly conceived dystopian vision dressed in elegant visuals that build up a thoroughly conceived imagining of the near future - with an unapologetically philosophical spin.

Apt reference points might be Minority Report and Solaris, with side orders of The Matrix, Kubrick and even Fellini. The film deserves to acquire cult status at the very least, and while its more cerebral thrust might deter the straight sci-fi market, intelligent marketing could make it a niche hit with discerning audiences open to art-house/genre crossover.

The film is largely set in Moscow in 2020, a sleeker, shinier, CGI-enhanced version of the present. Future Russia is massively influenced by China, with a massive superhighway slicing the country, taking lorries direct from Guangzhou to Paris. And, as in the present, Russia society is divided between the poor and the outrageously wealthy.

Zeldovich’s characters fall in the latter camp. Viktor (Sukhanov) is the middle-aged Minister of Natural Resources, who lives in luxury with his younger wife Zoya (Waddell). Able to afford the impossible, Viktor and Zoya head out on a journey to the Altai mountains where the super-wealthy can access the source of eternal youth -  an abandoned astrophysics facility named the ‘Target’, where they expose themselves to cosmic rays.

Also in the party are Zoya’s brother Mitya (Kozlovsky), a flashy TV host; Nikolai (Kischenko), an alpha-male customs official; and Anna (Stoyanovich), hostess of a Chinese-for-beginners radio broadcast. Returning to Moscow, the group find they have what they asked for - but with not entirely happy long term results.

Massive in conception, the film is an elusive hybrid - less conventional science fiction than a philosophical contemplation of the human condition, good and evil, power, desire and sex (of which there’s a lot, between characters in various permutations).

This is a very Russian film - which means that characters are partial to reciting Lermontov poems. But amid the philosophy, there’s some striking andspectacular future-world imagery, some bold, big-scale motorway action and even a run-in with Chinese gangsters.

An anomaly by Western standards, Target belongs in the great Russian sci-fi/art tradition of writers like Zamyatin and the Strugatsky brothers - not to mention of Tarkovsky. Sleeker and flashier than that great, Target nevertheless has some of the enigmatic Solaris magic, mixed with FX-era glitz, a combination it carries off with breathtaking flair.

The Noise of Time / TNT: Target, the Movie (Alexander Zeldovich ... Grisha Freidin, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Stanford

I saw The Target (Мишень) two nights ago (dir. Alxander Zeldovich, script by Alexander Zeldovich and Vladimir Sorokin. Ren Film, 2011). My friend Tom Luddy was kind enough to lend me a copy after he returned from the Berlin Film Festival where the The Target premiered.

The Target may be strong stuff for some but, I am not among them. For me, this is a visually grating (on purpose, of course) art-house film. Thought provoking? Yes, by the ton, and here is what it has provoked me into thinking.

I understand Vladimir Sorokin's thing, which Zeldovich chose to explore cinematically. It is to puncture the romantic illusion, whether the "good, true, and beautiful" of the 19th-cetury intelligentsia ideology or its later incarnations in socialist realism, and post-Stalin critical art and fiction (say, Solzhenitsyn). But if what you aim at is art, you cannot actually destroy illusion, because in art, illusion is indispensable. What ultimately happens when you try to do away with illusion is that you either stop producing art and have an analytical critique instead, or you simply replace one illusion with another, most likely, the opposite of your original target (pun intended). 

Let's consider the first possibility: The Target is a kind of an allegorical analysis of the human condition in the hydrocarbon-dependent and criminally corrupt Russia of the not-so-distant future. Those deluxe Russians, who have risen to the top of the pyramid and who think they are smart, beautiful and (this is the sci-fi twist, the dystopian part) entitled to eternal youth, are, in fact, ugly, stupid, and have a remarkable short life-expectancy. The sex scenes are abundant, in-your-face graphic, and telling - less fun to watch than a barn yard romance. 

They are Sorokin's version of an old school Russian literature teacher's question to an eighth-grade cretin.

The dialogue goes something like this: 

Tell me, Volodya, did Onegin really love Tatyana? 

Like, teach, I haven't like finished the book yet but I think he like just wanna hump her, you know, like a dog, like from behind...

What these Russian creatures call love, Sorokin and Zeldovich seem to be saying to us, is nothing but an animal urge, not even to procreate, though the central couple (an oil minister "Karenin" and his bored wife "Anna") are trying to conceive - need I say, unsuccessfully - but to dominate, to crush your partner. 

OK. We get the allegory: Putin's or Putin-Medvedev's Russia is nothing but a criminally corrupt enterprise that has no future or, rather, one like the present only slicker and bleaker than today. One of the male characters, played by Vitaly Kishchenko is a sex maniac mafioso and a biker (a "Vronsky" stud type), who looks suspiciously like Putin, especially as he rides his futuristic cruising bike or is transported to his death after his criminal enterprise crashes. 

To add a bit of complexity, the framing message is that USA is nowhere to be seen and the dominant cultural and everything else power is - you guessed it - China. There is an occasional Chinese face but, for the most part, the them is felt through Leonid Desyatnikov's minimalist score, with a bit of a Chinese musical lilt grafted onto it. A lot of people hold similar views, and as they watch this film, I imagine while checking email on their iphones, they may nod approvingly to having their thinking confirmed by the flickering screen.

But if we consider the second possibility, namely, that Zeldovich and Sorokin tried to make an art film (emphasis on art), then the result is a bust. What Target offers is an inverted romantic illusion. In our post-everything age, this means they are preaching to the converted. Indeed, it would be easier to find a snow ball in Hollywood than a potential member of the Target audience who considers the romantic illusion to be true (in a way that, say "money makes the world go round" is true).

My educated guess is that most people, nevertheless, find romance and romantic illusion pleasing. We like romance in the same way that the people who do not believe in Santa find Christmas trees pleasing. Ditto sex. We all know that sex, when seen by an uninvolved spectator, looks ugly - ugly enough, as Freud pointed out at length in The Wolfman, to traumatize a child for life (a Russian child no less!). But most would agree, our voyeuristic inclinations aside, that "doing it" is another matter. This is why the film's dis-illusion,  its attempt at disenchanting the magic of romance, makes for an unsuccessful artistic illusion. We already know: (1) "sex is ugly" and (2) life is ugly, too, not to mention brutish, short, and solitary. The author of Anna Karenina thought so following Hobbes, except unlike Hobbs, he thought that it was the state, not nature, that "made us do it." 

The art historian Ernst Gombrich once quipped that in engaging with art one can either immerse oneself in an the illusion induced by a work of art or subject it to a rational analysis; but it was impossible to "watch oneself having an illusion." The film Target by Zeldovich and Sorokin invite us to watch ourselves being disabused of the illusion that we do not have. 

And yet, the film is worth seeing. I was taken by a few scenes  that experts with a taste for Sots-Art, the post-modern legacy of the Stalinist aesthetic, may find amusing enough to endure the rest of the feature. The shots of the over-the-top affluence of the nouveau Russian country estates evokes the canvases extolling the abundance of Stalin's collective farms and the corresponding Stalinist celluloids. And the village that specializes in selling rejuvenation and life eternal looks suspiciously like Brat's native realm. So, there are a few worthy nuggets in dem da hills, even if it takes a bit of sweating and digging to get to them. A juxtaposition of another political heavy hitter, Balabanov's Cargo 200, and Target would make for an interesting essay (Balabanov's Putin-like biker Alexey Poluyan v Zeldovich's Putin-like biker Kishchenko)... As would juxtapositions of the film adaptations of the greatest nihilistic novel of all times, Oprah's favorite "Anna Karenina." I may actually show Target in class next year when I teach the novel.

PS. 9/5/11. Target has just been screened at the Telluride Film Festival. The NYT critic A.O. Scott called it "an astonishing piece of visionary futurism" and one that caused him to experience "sublime puzzlement." I hope this billing will elicit in some American distributors an equally sublime desire to show Target in the US. 

PPS. September 27, 2011. The film will be shown at Stanford, with a round table discussion to follow on November 10 at 6 pm (venue TBD). Discussants: Alexander Zeldovich, Vladimir Sorokin, Gregory Freidin (Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Stanford), and Tom Luddy (Director, Telluride Film Festival).

Target - Mishen (2011) | Review: Kino

kinokultura.com [Barbara Wurm]

SBS Film [Don Groves]

News: Cerebral Russian SciFi In Alexander Zeldovich's TARGET Todd Brown from Twitch

Phantom of Pulp: To Russia Without Love August 22, 2011

The Reel Bits [Richard Gray]

Target - Movie info: cast, reviews, trailer on mubi.com

Independent [Jonathan Romney] (British) at Berlin, this writer’s third review of the film

Variety Reviews - Target - Film Reviews - - Review by Leslie Felperin

Berlin Film Festival - A Look at the Movies - NYTimes.com Dennis Lim, February 16, 2011

The NYT critic A.O. Scott at Telluride, September 5, 2011

Zelenka, Petr

POWERS – short C 72

Czech Republic (28 mi) 2000

An overlong, erotic story about a magician who loses his supernatural powers in order to save his sister. Mildly amusing, without a great deal of erotica.

Zellner, David

KID-THING B 87

USA (83 mi) 2012

David and Nathan Zellner may be the modern era’s answer to the Kuchar brothers, schlock kings of 60’s and 70’s underground films made for next to nothing, where they similarly began making basement movies in their own backyard as kids, where David went on to film school at the University of Texas in Austin before making films that exist “on the fringes of the indie world,” developing a kind of dark, absurdist humor, offbeat murder mysteries featuring wacky characters with weird accents, and a somewhat outsider’s view towards art. Quoting from a John Rosenblatt article from The Texas Observer, The Zellner Brothers Embrace Awkwardness | The Texas Observer:

They got their first film, Flotsam/Jetsam, into Sundance in 2005 after several years of rejection, but that success sparked a remarkable run. There was the absurdist Southern Gothic Redemptitude in 2006, then 2007’s Aftermath on Meadowlark Lane, in which the brothers scream at each other on a country road while dressed as mariachis. Then came their first Sundance feature-length film, Goliath, in 2008, about a man who slowly unravels when his cat disappears. The short triptych Fiddlestixx followed in 2010, a sort of Technicolor Atari tribute to Samuel Beckett and Japanese variety shows starring a gibbon in a diaper. Then, in 2011, Sasquatch Birth Journal 2, which is, ostensibly, the quite literal video birth journal of a sasquatch.

This latest feature is something of a concept film, like something we might expect from the mischievous mind of British novelist Roald Dahl, a unique portrait of loneliness and a curious exploration into the twisted mind of an unsettled child who is largely raising herself. With no backstory, no mother to speak of, and a father Marvin (Nathan Zellner, the director’s brother, who is also the cinematographer, producer, and sound designer) who is continually asleep, passed out from drinking, or preoccupied with his own affairs, 10-year old Annie (Sydney Aguirre) is free to roam the countryside at will as there is literally no one watching over her, where even when she’s at home she’s alone, so she spends every waking hour being bored, pissed off, strangely curious, mad at others, or acting as a tomboy, viewed as a troubled and rebellious child who acts inappropriately. While she is in nearly every shot of the film, not once do we ever see this child smile.

Seen through a child’s eyes, the naturalness of her isolated world recalls the near documentary realism of Morris Engel’s Little Fugitive (1953), which is largely a wordless odyssey of a 12-year old boy’s experience alone at a Coney Island amusement park, but here there is a seamless blend of the internal and external worlds, where much of what’s happening may all be in her imagination, where at her age it’s hard to tell the difference. The interest of this film is in the minutiae, as it’s a minimalist style where nothing much ever happens, but what we do see is tinged by an everpresent sadness enveloping her world. When she attempts to play with other kids at a local playground, she is rejected and taunted as an outsider, which only leaves her more alone. Told in long, lingering takes, she rides her BMX dirt bike through town, often stealing supplies at the local market before wandering down the dirt roads outside of town through the surrounding woods, where she amuses herself by throwing objects at cars moving down the highway, where drivers are baffled to discover it’s only rolled up biscuit dough, or she shoots things with BB guns or paint guns, or rips apart dead tree bark, nonchalantly destroying anything she stumbles across. But strangest of all is when she overhears a distant voice calling for help, a sound that reverberates with sound effects giving it a mysterious air about it, sounds that only grow louder when she approaches what turns out to be a dark hole in the ground with a person trapped below. Not knowing how to react, she runs away, afraid and thoroughly confused by what she experienced.

Back home, her father is usually embroiled in some less than fascinating discussion with his best friend Caleb (director David Zellner) over a few beers, where to the uninformed much of what you hear is completely unintelligible, but in one drunken argument, Marvin is seen chasing after Caleb with firecracker rockets as Caleb makes a hasty escape in his car, still fending off fired rockets. Needless to say, her father’s parental skills leave something to be desired, where he’s not the kind of comforting adult figure children would turn to, but is approached only as a last resort. Instead, she fends for herself, where you have to see it to believe it the way she makes sandwiches in her own unique way, and after stealing a few supplies, she returns to the hole in the ground, this time introducing herself, bringing supplies, and asking who’s down there, wondering if it’s Satan. When asked if she’ll bring help, Annie’s snappy reply is “Why should I?” The voice in the well belongs to Esther, Susan Tyrell, a fixture in the movie business since the early 70’s, appearing in John Huston’s FAT CITY (1972), but Annie can’t tell if she’s good or evil, running away again, not resolving anything, despite the pleading cries for help. In Annie’s world it’s hard to tell how much time passes, as it’s all strung together like the endless duration of summer vacation which seemingly has no beginning and no end in sight. Annie brings a walkie talkie and drops it down the hole (where it makes no sound), but then disappears as quickly as she arrives, not really knowing what to make of this lady down the hole, thinking maybe she’s down there for a reason. While there are occasional middle of the night conversations, none are very pleasant, as Esther is losing her patience with this little girl, and no one else has come by to help, so her voice only grows more desperate. The growing sense of ambiguity about what’s actually going on is a remarkable aspect of the film, as is the unpredictability factor of not knowing how such a volatile child will react, becoming darkly surreal by the end. As it turns out, both the child and the lady in the well are kindred spirits, two isolated souls dead set on escaping the horror and ugliness of their situation. While Annie’s neglect has perhaps heightened her understanding of loneliness, she’s still caught in the throes of her own inescapable logic and imagination.

Chicago Reader  Drew Hunt

A tomboyish ten-year-old girl (Sydney Aguirre), living in backwater Texas with a distant, dimwitted father (producer/cinematographer Nathan Zellner) who spends most of his time with his equally dim friend (writer/director David Zellner), hears a woman's voice calling for help from the bottom of a well. Unsure of how to handle the situation, the girl doesn't offer any assistance, though she occasionally visits with homemade PB&Js and snacks stolen from the local corner store. Dreamlike and tonally diverse, the film offers a disarming portrait of childhood. The girl's outlandish behavior, which ranges from precocious to outright disturbing, suggests a troubled mental state (as does the disembodied voice of the woman, whose tone grows increasingly menacing), but Zellner handles the material delicately, treating her apparent psychosis like an ill-fated by-product of growing up. This strange yet wistful dynamic suggests Harmony Korine adapting Judy Blume.

The Steve Pulaski Message Board [Steve Pulaski]

Annie is a young girl with no parental supervision, no destined path in life, and is almost morally absent. Her days involve lumbering around her broken, decrepit town either shoplifting, eating, or just riding her bike in solitude. One day, she hears a voice call out helplessly from the bottom of a deep, dark well. It's sounds as if it belongs to an elderly woman who fell down the well and is hungry, desperate, and possibly injured. Annie is now at a quandary; this is likely the most responsibility in terms of choice and decision this girl has ever had and needs to take some position of action before it's too late.

David Zellner's Kid-Thing is an interesting film, solely for the purpose of its protagonist being so unpredictable, reckless, and, yet, so human that it's hard to turn your attention away from her. She is played by Sydney Aguirre, a young newcomer who handles the incredibly difficult role of playing a youth with crippled emotion stunningly. The camera is fixated on her for about seventy-five minutes out of the eighty-three minute affair, and she is never seen smiling or abandoning her default smug expression she has seemingly held forever. We can see quite clearly this is a fault of the broken environment she has inhabited for so long. It's a place - in the backwoods of Texas - that seems to have robbed little Annie of all emotional resonance and empathy.

Kid-Thing reminds me, most of all, of a film that popular trash director Harmony Korine or even transgressive auteur John Waters would make in their heydays. Korine, whose films Gummo and Julien-Donkey Boy are some of the best of the nineties, specializes in the commentary of broken, dismantled youths thanks to hopeless home-lives or community brokenness. His artistic vision would've greatly benefited an already gripping topic. Waters would've likely turned the subject into a short with more grittiness to the material, but no doubt both men would utilize shock-elements in their stories to amplify them to great effects.

Zellner uses the minimalist approach to tell this story, not looking to shock or appall, but to simply amuse, fascinate, and occasional mesmerize us with his talent for making the smaller moments beautiful and the entire picture elegant in its moral-emptiness. Making this material even remotely attractive, let alone watchable, is an achievement in its own right, and Zellner never seems to employ cheap glorification techniques on a story that is fragile and delicate. He, along with his brother, directed and starred in Goliath, another micro-budget independent film that generated much discussion.

Kid-Thing is a peaceful film dealing with subject matter, such as a broken adolescence, loss of innocence, and emotional vapidness, that is often loud and noticeable. This film takes time to build up scenes, many of them in particular, lack a payoff, which isn't always a bad thing. Pay close attention to the facial expressions of characters and the way they recite their lines; this is the first film ever where I don't believe I ever saw a character smile once.

Slant Magazine [Tina Hassannia]

Kid-Thing vividly depicts specific, distinctly tactile childhood experiences: hard gummy candies that almost break your teeth off, the strange joy of finding old curios inside a shed, the power in destroying stuff. Director David Zellner taps into these experiences as if he's trying to evoke a sense of nostalgia for the viewer, underscoring the sensorial impression in discovering new, strange stimuli, like rotting trees, old dust-covered books, and fuzzy worms. This visceral style also makes a broader thematic statement: that there's a point at which a child's curiosity and gaining a sense of mastery over his or her world can become a test of morality. Unfortunately, Kid-Thing fails to substantiate any thought-provoking ideas to an otherwise fascinating premise.

Ten-year-old Annie (Sydney Aguirre) is a stern-faced tomboy who, out of boredom and loneliness, steals from corner stores, attacks dead cows and people with a paint gun, makes prank phone calls, and hurls croissant dough at cars. The film makes the tenuous connection between the dangers of the girl's aimless carousing and her father's abysmal parenting: During the sparse time that he does spend with her, Marvin (Nathan Zellner) passes out from drinking while Annie plays video games, or teaches her the very important life skill of how to hypnotize a chicken. Zellner is interested in showing the disconnect between father and daughter, but he cheaply turns Marvin into a caricature of low-class Americana, a man who diligently scratches lottery tickets, plays with firecrackers, and is unaware that his daughter is in a soccer league.

The film's assumption about parentless environments wreaking havoc on a young girl's moral development raises a larger problem: By making the father a joke, the narrative fails to provide the context necessary to fully validate Annie's increasingly bizarre actions. When she discovers a woman, Esther (Susan Tyrrell), trapped in a deep pit in the forest, she inexplicably fails to help her. Annie's first reaction is to flee, as if out of terror, yet there's no reason for her to be scared of Esther—or the devil, as Annie claims her to be—given the fact that the woman is in no position to hurt her. Annie returns to the pit only out of curiosity, to ask Esther if someone put her in there for a reason. The girl's behavior is practically sociopathic, except that she later brings Esther sandwiches, juice boxes, and a walkie talkie in order to keep track of her well-being.

As those items don't make a sound when Annie flings them into the pit, and the film hints that Esther is only a voice in the girl's head, the woman becomes a metaphor of sorts for Marvin's negligent parenting, which has literally and figuratively trapped Annie both within this unforgiving world and inside her own mind. With its sharp sound design, claustrophobic score (by the Octopus Project), and colorful compositions, Kid-Thing envelops the viewer in an otherworldly, hypnagogic reality that's at once beautiful and frightening. But Annie's moral predicament with Esther and the pit becomes a muddle of confused symbolism and trite psychoanalysis.

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Linc Leifeste]

Kid-Thing is a dream-like fable about Annie (Sydney Aguirre), a young tom-boy growing up devoid of parental guidance or societal integration, allowed to run wild and uninhibited in the woods on the outskirts of Austin, her activity only limited by her stamina and imagination. Told through Annie’s eyes, the story fittingly veers between the realistic and the fantastical, told primarily visually.

Annie lives in a rural home with her father Marvin (Nathan Zellner), who seems basically a well-intentioned (if you’re being generous) but inept father figure who appears to spend more time and communicate more effectively with his goats than his daughter. Borderline moronic, or maybe suffering from some kind of mental illness or addiction problem, he spends a lot of time hanging out with his apparent best friend Caleb (David Zellner), laughing maniacally at inside jokes or frantically scratching off  lottery tickets while Annie sits unnoticed. It’s never explained where Annie’s mother is, but after seeing Marvin a few times, it’s no wonder he’s single.

Annie spends the majority of her time skipping school and running wild in the fields and woodlands that make up her world. It is in the conveyance of her adventures that the film shines, with long wordless shots of her riding her bike through large round bales of hay or terrorizing cow patties and cow carcasses with her paintball gun. She’s also prone to making frequent stops at a neighborhood convenience store, shoplifting whatever items strike her fancy, whether it be lollipops or cans of biscuit dough (which make great projectiles for hurling at passing cars when wadded into a giant ball). And the scene where she hilariously places a prank call to an auto mechanic had me laughing out loud and recalling the childish joy of carrying out such pranks.

While Annie’s behavior definitely tends toward juvenile delinquency, for the most part there doesn’t seem to be anything malevolent or twisted in her behavior (with a couple of notable exceptions, such as when she smashes the birthday cake of a wheelchair-bound young girl right in front of her eyes for no reason). She seems like a smart kid going through the process of growing up unsupervised, pushing her boundaries without much in the way of societally or parentally instilled impulse control. One of the joys of watching the film was the sense of seeing elements of my own childhood play out on the big screen, having grown up in a place and time where unsupervised outside play was often the norm during weekends and summers and fireworks and BB guns (versus paint guns) were readily available.

It is on one of Annie’s trips to the woods that she suddenly hears the voice of a woman (Susan Tyrrell) crying for help. Intrigued and slightly scared, Annie goes to investigate only to find that the voice is coming from an abandoned well. Her first response is to flee but before long she is back and communicating with Esther, a kindly but slightly creepy sounding voice coming up from the well, asking for Annie’s help in getting out. Annie instead leaves only to return sporadically to drop down a variety of food items and eventually a walkie-talkie so that she can communicate with Esther any time she wants. An odd and inappropriate response to the situation, definitely, but in perfect keeping with the character and story.

The Zellner’s combination of oddball moments with quirky humor and visually striking aesthetics struck a chord with me but it is Annie’s character and Aguirre’s striking performance that truly carry the film. Her mix of uninhibited childish enthusiasm, youthful angst and occasional slight menace are a joy to behold.

Cult Fave Susan Tyrrell and the Zellner Bros. On Their SXSW Fable ... Jen Yamato from Movieline

Kid-Thing / The Dissolve Noel Murray

SUNDANCE REVIEW: "Kid-Thing" Is An Eccentric Curiosity - Indiewire Eric Kohn

Flickfeast [Kevin Matthews]

Slackerwood [Don Clinchy]

ScreenDaily Jonathan Romney

The Hitlist at MSN Movies [William Goss]

Kid-Thing (2012) Movie Review from Eye for Film Amber Wilkinson

[Sundance Review] Kid-Thing - The Film Stage Raffi Asdourian

KID-THING (2012) | Daily Grindhouse | Tough Films For The Rough ...

Quiet Earth [Stephanie Ogrodnik]

Kid-Thing | SLUG Magazine Jeanette D. Moses

KID-THING Facets Multi Media

Zellner Bros. site

Zellner Bros. interview Mark Olsen interview from The LA Times, January 23, 2012

Kid-Thing: Sundance Film Review - The Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy

Variety [Ronnie Scheib]

Review: Kid-Thing - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

The Zellner Brothers Embrace Awkwardness | The Texas Observer John Rosenblatt

New York Times

Zemeckis, Robert

USED CARS

USA (113 mi) 1980

Time Out

With their unerring eye for potential, the distributors didn't release this hilarious black comedy to cinemas in Britain. Zemeckis subsequently went on to make Romancing the Stone, Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and loadsa money. Infinitely more caustic than these blockbusters, Used Cars runs on a contemporary screwball motor with a slapstick chassis. Centred on the outrageous rivalry of two car dealerships (both owned by Jack Warden, as twins), it's an amoral celebration of the all-American wheeler-dealer - like Tin Men on speed. Even Jimmy Carter lends his support!

Cagey Films [kgeorge] Kenneth George Godwin (excerpt)

Strangely, Hollywood sometimes inadvertently reveals more about politics when overtly avoiding the subject altogether. Robert Zemeckis’ second feature, Used Cars (1980), written like its predecessor I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978) by Zemeckis and Bob Gale, is a raucous, foul-mouthed comedy which revels in capitalism at a grass roots level. This isn’t the refined greed of unregulated bankers; its the raw greed of ordinary people scrambling to make a buck any way they can – appropriately, as the title declares, in what is traditionally seen as the haven of unscrupulous liars, the used car business. What gives Used Cars its crude energy is its utter lack of any concern for ostensibly moral behaviour. Hollywood tradition had always required some kind of hero, someone driven by the urge to do right; here, however, the “good guy”, salesman Rudy Russo (Kurt Russell), is as immoral and crooked as his nemesis, Roy L. Fuchs (Jack Warden), who runs the lot on the other side of the highway.

Zemeckis and Gale have no interest in the small guy battling corrupt big business; Rudy is scrambling to come up with enough money to buy himself an election because he knows that once in office he’ll be able to make out like a bigger bandit than he already is. When his schemes include hiding the death of his boss Luke Fuchs, Roy’s nicer brother, and deceiving Luke’s daughter, there’s no ultimate comeuppance; Rudy’s crass ambition triumphs, with him getting money and the girl, who turns out to be as willing as he is to bend rules to make a buck. Used Cars gleefully violates all the ingrained rules which governed Hollywood’s treatment of acceptable behaviour for decades. It’s not just that crime is allowed to pay; it’s that it’s no longer even crime, but rather the essence of business. Beneath its casually entertaining surface, Used Cars celebrates the depressing essence of corporate capitalism and the immorality which now rules business and a politics whose only concern is supporting corporate interests.

Cineaste Selects: Forty Years of Favorite Films — Cineaste Magazine Robert Cashill

Feebly marketed as a Smokey and the Bandit-type action comedy in July 1980, then abandoned as roadkill, Used Cars came roaring back to life on HBO less than a year later, which is where I saw it, again and again. In the pre-home video era, pay cable was a godsend, transmitting hard-to-see films like the original Assault on Precinct 13, Mad Max, and Over the Edge to Variety-reading cineastes like myself who were too young to drive. (It’s hard to imagine today’s high school kids avidly discussing The Tin Drum the day after it aired, but we did—mostly the nudity.) For me—and for Pauline Kael, who as I recall also caught up with it on HBO— Used Cars was the great discovery, a movie that grabbed me by the funnybone and never let go. It’s been available on DVD since 2002, with a boisterous commentary track by its never-better star Kurt Russell and co-creators Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale. Back then, however, if it aired at 2 a.m., and I wanted to watch it, I was up through the graveyard shift. Used Cars is my personal definition of Kael’s “movie love.”

A recap—for the uninitiated. The film centers on twin used car dealers in the Phoenix area, gentle, grizzled Luke Fuchs, and his slicker, nastier brother, Roy L., both played to perfection by Jack Warden. When Roy L., the owner of the fancy Auto Emporium, learns that the city fathers plan to construct a new freeway ramp on his property (“It used to be that when you bought a politician in this country, that son-of-a-bitch stayed bought!” he roars), he schemes to get his hands on Luke’s crumbling New Deal lot across the street, which will be a goldmine with all the traffic coming through. In one of the movie’s funniest scenes (“Fifty dollars never killed anyone!”) Luke is bumped off, but New Deal is strengthened by its brazenly conniving employees, salesman and aspiring Senate candidate Rudy Russo, with his “Trust Me” bumper stickers (Russell), superstitious salesman Jeff (the live-wire Gerrit Graham), and strong-arm mechanic Jim (Frank McRae). They secretly bury Luke’s body on the lot—“Chrysler, Ford and GM will be your headstones,” says Rudy, by way of last respects, in a mock-funeral scene parodying the cinema’s Ford, John. Keeping the bad news from his guileless daughter Barbara (Deborah Harmon), they continue to bluff Roy L. and his cronies, while drumming up business with outrageous pirate TV ads, one of which breaks into an address by then-President Carter. Zemeckis comments on the DVD that executive producer Steven Spielberg was scandalized by the juxtaposition of footage of the president with New Deal’s raunchy spot, but, as Rudy explains in the film, “he (the president) fucks around with us, why can’t we fuck around with him?”

Used Cars fucks around with a lot of American sacred cows. Everyone is on the make, or on the take, and greed keeps the political machine well-oiled. The old West of Ford and Hawks is dead as a literal New Deal languishes; the cowboy has been replaced by the huckster; and the cattle drive is swapped out for a rally of 200 rat-trap automobiles, which barrel through the Arizona desert to save the day for the marginally-less-mendacious good guys. (The writers connect the dots on their screwball plot with airtight precision; the film, smartly edited by Spielberg’s cutter Michael Kahn, is a model of comedy construction, with the great, caustic, coherent script that W.C. Fields never really had.) During the commentary, Russell calls that characters Rudy and Barbara, who learn to go with the flow of deceptions, “Bill and Hillary in training”—an interesting observation, but too specific. We’ve all had this kind of training in the back-stabbing, glad-handing side of the American way, and it’s gratifying to see a movie that revels in its comic possibilities while telling it like it is.

Then as now, I love Used Cars because it makes me laugh. The supporting cast, including Joe Flaherty, Dub Taylor, and Al Lewis, is tip-top. Toby, Jeff’s accomplice mutt, is one of the best dogs in movie history. The elaborate car stunts are zestily executed. The DVD identifies Used Cars as “from the director of What Lies Beneath, Forrest Gump, and Cast Away” but that’s the safely middlebrow Zemeckis who joined the Auto Emporium once he and Gale hit it big with the Back to the Future trilogy. I preferred him when he was wallowing in the muck of the New Deal lot, and so will you, if you take Used Cars out for a spin. Trust me.

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BACK TO THE FUTURE

USA (117 mi) 1985

Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, by Jack G. Shaheen, book review by Christian Blauvelt from Jump Cut, Spring 2008

Zenide, Ruxandra

RYNA

Romania Switzerland (94 mi) 2005

Ryna Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Or, The Case of the Mysterious Romanian Film That Nearly Everybody Slept On: Could it be a simple case of arriving at the party a year too early? In the wake of last year's Cristi Puiu film The Death of Mister Lazarescu (a film that impressed me, despite my reservations), Romanian cinema's hot on the festival circuit, but this strong debut from Zenide has gone largely unnoticed. (It played in the Syracuse Film Festival, if that tells you anything.) To be honest, I can understand commercial distributors not knowing what to do with it. As a female coming-of-age story, it's highly ambivalent about the value of attaining womanhood (although the film's bitter conclusion does grant its titular protagonist a wide measure of autonomy). Ryna (pronounced "Reena," and played with stunning self-possession by newcomer Doroteea Petre, who has since gone on to star in fest-circuit darling How I Spent the End of the World) is a 16-year-old girl living in a bumfuck Romanian water town, working as a mechanic at her father's dishonest service station. for reasons that remain largely unarticulated, Dad insists that Ryna keep her hair short and dress like a boy. She's fooling no one; her small but pert breasts poke through her tanktop, and creepy adult menfolk circle her like jackals. One of the things that is intriguing, if a little offputting about Ryna is this conflation of androgyny and sex appeal, and the way it's never worked through or problematized. Zenide wisely refrains from allegorizing her protagonist or staking out a position on gender politics and then subordinating the film's every move to that thesis. But at the same time, this matter-of-fact approach results in severe cognitive dissonance, as if the story is issuing from some bizarre pre-Freudian universe where the "cigar" of forced masculinization is really just a cigar. Even though this oddness is preferable to more conventional avenues that could have made Ryna more marketable (as a "gay film," or a "woman's film"), it speaks to the thinness that ultimately undercuts Zenide's material. Plotwise, there are overdeterminations that almost fail to register as such due to the deft observational realism with which they're performed. But even this is somewhat "off," since Zenide's visual style is painterly and meticulous. Her treatment of the shoreline, of clapboard rural architecture, and the weed-strewn landscape is exacting and remarkable -- both Andrei Zvyagintsev and Kim Ki-duk came to mind -- and yet the story itself is so doggedly small that it cannot bear the nearly mythic weight invested in the mise-en-scène. Still, as rookie-errors go, "too much precision" is one we don't see committed nearly enough. Anyone interested in recent Eastern European cinema should seek Ryna out, and by all means, don't miss Zenide's next film, whatever / whenever it may be. That is, if the major festivals give us the chance next time around.

Zenovich, Marina

ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED AND DESIRED A- 93

USA (99 mi) 2008

A thoroughly engrossing and remarkable portrait of the whole, sad, sordid affair, after which one can only be consumed by sadness, as this is such a meticulously accurate yet searingly blunt version of what’s wrong with the American legal system today where the idea of justice is a dream deferred. While the film offers a degree of sympathy to Polanski, not the least of which is due to his own ravaged past, a Holocaust survivor himself while losing his mother and much of his family to the death camps, it also spells out quite clearly what he was charged with doing, drinking champagne, sharing a Quaalude and having intercourse with a 13-year old girl, all of which he readily admits to doing in the film on archival footage. On a photo assignment from French Vogue Hommes International magazine to shoot young girls, Polanski took one young aspiring model to Jack Nicholson’s vacant home in Bel Air and shot some topless photos in the jacuzzi before deciding there was sexual tension in the air that needed to be explored. Never one to set limits for himself, coming from a dull, overly controlled background in Communist occupied Poland to the buffet-style anything-you-want-you-can-have mentality of the rich and famous in Los Angeles, Polanski took full advantage of the girl, Samantha Gailey, even after she allegedly asked him to stop, which led to the filing of rape charges the next morning. What the film mentions but doesn’t explore is why similar charges were never brought against him previously when he did exactly the same thing with a 15-year old Nastassia Kinski, which was public knowledge, photos in all the tabloids, where he seduced her during another magazine shoot for Vogue, but they were briefly linked romantically. Nothing more was said on that subject other than the fashion shoot itself jumpstarted Ms. Kinski’s career, which is precisely what the young American actress was hoping for.

As Polanski refused to participate in the film, much of the storyline is developed from the investigating police officers and Douglas Dalton, Polanski’s mild mannered attorney who calmly recalls the facts of the case step by step, all the while believing his client would get off with probation. The Los Angeles prosecuting district attorney, Roger Gunson, was equally forthcoming. As neither litigator sought the public limelight but instead stuck strictly to the facts at hand, both offer very credible points of view, and it appears both were well suited towards one another. As the young girl had her own attorney, Larry Silver, who did not wish for his client to take the stand, all indications were that this would be settled out of court ahead of time. Unfortunately, a senior star struck judge, Lawrence J. Rittenband, yearned for the case and once it was assigned to him, he milked it for all it was worth, turning the litigators into puppets in court, as the judge worked out what he intended to do behind the scenes ahead of time, then instructed the lawyers to publicly argue their respective points of view with the outcome already determined. This preposterous sham was all intended to shed a positive light on the judge himself, showing little regard for the victim, the accused, or for justice. Polanski did, in fact, plead guilty to the lesser crime of having intercourse with a minor, not rape, which met the victim’s criteria, as she was not advocating jail time. After various psychiatric reports indicating Polanski was no danger to society, under an agreement worked out by all sides, he was expected to get probation, but the judge, the sole arbitrator in the case, changed the settlement, bowing instead to public pressure and demanded he report to Chino Prison for 90 days of further observation to develop a probationary study, an act which could not be appealed by Polanski’s attorney, as otherwise his client could face as much as 50 years in prison at the discretion of the judge. Polanski cooperated along the way with every doctor and psychiatrist, several are shown who have very favorable recollections of his demeanor, but the judge refused to follow the prison rehabilitation recommendations, as he took a pounding in the press for being too lenient, especially when he was released (fearing for Polanski’s safety) after only 42 days from prison.

Using musical soundtracks from his own films, much of it conveying an altered state of mind, this is interestingly used here to signify Polanski’s mental deterioration. Charles Manson is never mentioned in the film, but the brutal murder of Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, is, including wild media speculation afterwards that Polanski himself must have had something to do with it, as after all, he’s a foreigner responsible for making those weird cult movies like ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968). Mia Farrow, the actress in the film, had nothing but laudatory comments about working with Polanski, as did so many others, but the media frenzy was out of control, driven by a very different incentive, the lucrative business of selling papers. As no one else would hire him, Polanski needed work to pay his legal bills, so he started working on a B-movie in Europe which Dino DeLaurentiis then started financing. Inviting Polanski to attend a local Oktoberfest event in Germany, it made headlines across the globe when he was seated next to an attractive woman, a photo that made all the tabloids, so the judge ordered him to immediately return. Again, behind the scenes, the judge developed his own personal scenario which was intended to get himself favorable press headlines, indicating he would make a harsh public sentence, but then instructed Polanski’s attorney to come to his chambers afterwards where he would immediately amend the order – the problem being, did they trust the judge? All indications were they didn’t, which led Polanski, with the aid of DeLaurentiis, to flee the country in 1978 from which he has never returned. The lawyers on the case, both prosecution and defense, entered a motion describing the illegal actions of the judge behind the scenes and he was immediately removed from the case. However the next judge assigned indicated he would drop all remaining charges for time already served, but only if the court proceding could be televised, a stipulation that Polanski has refused to accept. As a result, the case has no resolution. Samantha Gailey was interviewed extensively in the film and expressed no hostility towards Polanski, all of which begs the question, if it was anybody else other than Polanski, a talented, sympathetic world class filmmaker who survived the Holocaust, but someone else under suspicion of pedophelia, such as R. Kelly to use an example from recent headlines, would we be so forgiving of this crime? This film exposes how a court playing to the public spectacle alters reality, even inside the courtroom, while also subtly exposing our own prejudices as well.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]

Roman Polanski, the Polish-born director of such modern American classics as "Rosemary's Baby" and "Chinatown," survived the Holocaust that killed most of his family, endured authoritarian Communist rule and faced the murder of his pregnant wife Sharon Tate. It was the American media (at its most reckless and sensationalistic) and a judicial nightmare worthy of Kafka that almost destroyed him. Marina Zenovich's documentary on Polanski's indictment on six felony charges (including statutory rape) over his notorious "relationship" with 13-year-old Samantha Gailey doesn't flinch from Polanski's abhorrent actions. The excerpts of police interview transcripts with Polanski and Gailey are disturbing. But behind the headlines was a media-hog judge more interested in public relations than justice, one whose abuse of power appalled both the defense lawyer and the prosecuting attorney. The film walks a fine line between contempt for Polanski's crimes and sympathy for his trials and his screwed-up psyche, and it manages both while showing us why he fled the U.S. rather than face the corrupted judicial circus.

Xan Brooks Polanski gets a fair trial in Cannes, by Xan Brooks at Cannes from The Guardian

Marina Zenovich's documentary about Polanski's 1977 rape charge does not make the director more likeable but is admirably even-handed

Roman Polanski is such a mercurial and evasive creature that we will surely never hear the true story behind his 1977 rape charge and subsequent flight from the US. But Marina Zenovich's documentary, Wanted and Desired, up-ended a few of my own assumptions. The film screened at Cannes yesterday and offers a bleak view of the legal machinations behind the case. Both prosecutor and defender were of the same opinion that the judge (if not the law itself) was an ass.

It's not that Zenovich's film attempts to whitewash its subject. Polanski has never denied having sex with 13-year-old Samantha Gailey and even cheerfully admits he was fully aware of her age at the time. And despite his friends and colleagues lining up to explain what a "charismatic" fellow he is, he remains as defiantly dislikeable as ever. For much of the film Polanski comes across as a preening, insecure smart-aleck. He mistakes amorality for abandon and leaves a trail of mess in his wake.

No, it is simply that the ensuing legal circus risks making him look halfway honourable by comparison. Some might call it karma. Just as it was Gailey's unhappy fate to run up against Roman Polanski in excitable Austin Powers mode, so it was Polanski's unhappy fate to later run up against Judge Rittenband. A star-struck, skirt-chasing buffoon, Rittenband regarded the case as his big moment in the limelight and proceeded to direct its twists and turns like some puffed-up Hollywood martinet. All the really important stuff - the victim, the accused, the search for justice - played a distant second fiddle to the Rittenband ego.

Zenovich also nails the media's handling of the case, and its depiction of the defendant as some "malignant, twisted dwarf"; the foreign interloper with a taste for young American flesh. One friend points out that the press traditionally views Polanski as "a man of darkness" and has always confused the man with his movies. He made The Tenant so must therefore be a transvestite. He made Chinatown and is therefore a paedophile. He made Rosemary's Baby and is thus in league with Satan. When Sharon Tate was murdered by supporters of Charles Manson, the media insisted that he must be at least tangentially responsible.

Wanted and Desired goes some way towards setting the record straight. It interviews most of the people involved in the case, including Gailey herself (who publicly forgave Polanski in 1997). Along the way it paints a portrait of a fascinating, brilliant, untrustworthy man. Polanski was seduced by California and it ate him up. He did wrong and was wronged. That doesn't make him the victim here but it at least merits some sympathy.

Judge the Movie, Not the Man - Los Angeles Times Samantha Geimer from the Los Angeles Times, February 25, 2003

I met Roman Polanski in 1977, when I was 13 years old. I was in ninth grade that year, when he told my mother that he wanted to shoot pictures of me for a French magazine. That’s what he said, but instead, after shooting pictures of me at Jack Nicholson’s house on Mulholland Drive, he did something quite different. He gave me champagne and a piece of a Quaalude. And then he took advantage of me.

It was not consensual sex by any means. I said no, repeatedly, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. I was alone and I didn’t know what to do. It was scary and, looking back, very creepy. Those may sound like kindergarten words, but that’s the way it feels to me. It was a very long time ago, and it is hard to remember exactly the way everything happened. But I’ve had to repeat the story so many times, I know it by heart.

We pressed charges, and he pleaded guilty. A plea bargain was agreed to by his lawyer, my lawyer and the district attorney, and it was approved by the judge. But to our amazement, at the last minute the judge went back on his word and refused to honor the deal.

Worried that he was going to have to spend 50 years in prison – rather than just time already served – Mr. Polanski fled the country. He’s never been back, and I haven’t seen him or spoken to him since.

Looking back, there can be no question that he did something awful. It was a terrible thing to do to a young girl. But it was also 25 years ago – 26 years next month. And, honestly, the publicity surrounding it was so traumatic that what he did to me seemed to pale in comparison.

Now that he’s been nominated for an Academy Award, it’s all being reopened. I’m being asked: Should he be given the award? Should he be rewarded for his behavior? Should he be allowed back into the United States after fleeing 25 years ago?

Here’s the way I feel about it: I don’t really have any hard feelings toward him, or any sympathy, either. He is a stranger to me.

But I believe that Mr. Polanski and his film should be honored according to the quality of the work. What he does for a living and how good he is at it have nothing to do with me or what he did to me. I don’t think it would be fair to take past events into consideration. I think that the academy members should vote for the movies they feel deserve it. Not for people they feel are popular.

And should he come back? I have to imagine he would rather not be a fugitive and be able to travel freely. Personally, I would like to see that happen. He never should have been put in the position that led him to flee. He should have received a sentence of time served 25 years ago, just as we all agreed. At that time, my lawyer, Lawrence Silver, wrote to the judge that the plea agreement should be accepted and that that guilty plea would be sufficient contrition to satisfy us. I have not changed my mind.

I know there is a price to pay for running. But who wouldn’t think about running when facing a 50-year sentence from a judge who was clearly more interested in his own reputation than a fair judgment or even the well-being of the victim?

If he could resolve his problems, I’d be happy. I hope that would mean I’d never have to talk about this again. Sometimes I feel like we both got a life sentence.

My attitude surprises many people. That’s because they didn’t go through it all; they don’t know everything that I know. People don’t understand that the judge went back on his word. They don’t know how unfairly we were all treated by the press. Talk about feeling violated! The media made that year a living hell, and I’ve been trying to put it behind me ever since.

Today, I am very happy with my life. I have three sons and a husband. I live in a beautiful place and I enjoy my work. What more could I ask for? No one needs to worry about me.

The one thing that bothers me is that what happened to me in 1977 continues to happen to girls every day, yet people are interested in me because Mr. Polanski is a celebrity. That just never seems right to me. It makes me feel guilty that this attention is directed at me, when there are certainly others out there who could really use it.

Roman Polanski Documentary Is Deft, Subtle Film | Newsweek ... Cathleen McGuigan from Newsweek magazine, May 23, 2008

There's an enigmatic little scene near the end of "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," the captivating new documentary about the film director. You see a fierce old whale of a man in a chair, banging a drum while an elfin youth jumps and hops to the beats, like a puppet on a string. The hopping boy finally escapes his tormentor by scurrying and tumbling across a field, running toward the Eiffel Tower in the distance. The tyrannized, barefoot kid is Polanski himself, and the footage is from a 16-minute short called "The Fat and the Lean" that he made in 1961, on the brink of his fame as a brilliant new European director. The wordless scene may last less than a minute in Marina Zenovich's documentary, but it sticks with you, and it echoes another clip in her film. This one is from a television interview Polanski did decades later where he says he felt like "a mouse with which an abominable cat was making sport." The cat in question was Los Angeles Judge Laurence J. Rittenband, who'd presided over the director's 1977 criminal case for having sex with a 13-year-old girl. Just before his sentence was handed down, Polanski hopped a plane to Europe. He's never returned to the United States.

That Roman Polanski is a fugitive from the American justice system overshadowed everything in the director's career—at least until he won the best-director Oscar in 2003 for his haunting Holocaust movie, "The Pianist" (which he couldn't pick up in person). Zenovich's film, to be broadcast June 9 on HBO and open in theaters in July, in no way exonerates Polanski. There's a clip at the beginning of the documentary that shows him cheerfully, and a little creepily, admitting that he likes "young women … I think most men do." But the film is more about his punishment, not his crime—and it paints a far more complex picture of what happened than most of us know. The documentary raises questions that are surprisingly relevant: why is America's judgment of Polanski harsher than Europe's—is a crime relative to a culture? And perhaps most current of all: can you separate an artist's personal life from his art? It's the same question you could ask about the rapper R. Kelly, who has finally gone on trial on child pornography charges for allegedly making a video of himself having sex with a girl perhaps as young as 13—yet he's continued to release a string of No. 1 hits during the years it's taken the case to get to court.

Polanski was at the top of his game in 1977, as director of the hugely successful "Chinatown." How his path crossed with Samantha is a classic story of Hollywood aspiration. Her mother, a pretty sometime actress, turned up at parties at Polanski's Malibu house; she agreed to allow her precocious daughter, eagerly launching her own modeling and acting career, to pose for photos Polanski was taking for Men's Vogue in France. He also shot Nastassja Kinski for a magazine—she became, at 15, his lover. That could have rung a warning bell—or signaled a potential career opportunity. The documentary depicts the encounter of Polanski and the victim with a queasy ambiguity. The pair went, with her mother's permission, to Jack Nicholson's Mulholland Drive house—the star was away—and Polanski photographed her topless, then in the Jacuzzi. There was champagne and a Quaalude for refreshments before a trip to the bedroom. When Samantha's mother found out, she called the police. Polanski never denied he'd had sex with her but maintained it was consensual. Samantha said it was not. She also told detectives she'd been drunk before. And she'd had sex before. Polanski was arrested the next day at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

Except for Polanski and the judge, who's dead, Zenovich was able to interview all the key players, including the girl, Samantha Geimer, now a 44-year-old blond mother of three; the straight-arrow Mormon prosecutor Roger Gunson, and, speaking for the first time, Polanski's craggy and distinguished defense attorney, Douglas Dalton. Looking back, they all agree that the showboating judge and the media circus cost the defendant a fair day in court. "People have a right to their own opinion," says Dalton, explaining why he finally agreed to be interviewed. "People don't have a right to their own facts." Judge Rittenband, who'd presided over the Elvis and Priscilla divorce and a paternity suit against Cary Grant, badly wanted to try the case. He loved publicity and the media storm was already at gale force. In clip after clip, Zenovich shows the diminutive Polanski at court, impeccably tailored in a double-breasted jacket, jostling through cameras and mikes like a salmon pushing upstream. Just before the trial was to start, Samantha's attorney helped broker a plea bargain, so she could avoid testifying. In the film, she says the aftermath to the sex was more traumatic than the event: the probing questions of male detectives; the European photographers who staked out her house and junior high school.

Polanski pleaded guilty to "unlawful sexual intercourse"; probation was the recommendation. But the judge began to maneuver behind the scenes: he wanted to look tough for the press, though not necessarily send Polanski to prison. He asked a reporter for advice on what sentence he should give; he gave regular interviews to a Hollywood gossip columnist. The day before the sentencing—despite an agreement with Dalton and Gunson—Ritterband was overheard bragging at his country club that he was going to lock up Polanski for the rest of his life. The next day Polanski was gone, his Mercedes abandoned at the Los Angeles airport. Even the prosecutor now says, "I'm not surprised he left under those circumstances."

Polanski already knew how a media frenzy could taint a criminal case and harm the lives of even the innocent, and how the press could blur the distinction between his life and his art—the dark, edgy, sometimes violent films for which he was acclaimed. Eight years before, when his 26-year-old pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, and four friends were brutally murdered in the couple's Benedict Canyon home, the press went crazy. Before the murders were solved—which took months—many news accounts blamed the victims' rich hippie lifestyle and luridly compared the killings to Polanski's movies. It wasn't just the tabloids—NEWSWEEK described the murder scene as "bizarre," like one of the director's "own peculiarly nightmarish motion pictures." The documentary treats Tate and the killings with delicacy. And along with the wonderful historic footage of Polanski's swinging '60s and '70s life—hey, there's Joan Collins doing the twist!—are sweet home movies with Tate. There's also a clip of a press conference after the killings where a tearful Polanski excoriates "a lot of newsmen who write horrible things about my wife" and says that his brief marriage was "the only time of true happiness in my life." Polanski—that slight, hopping boy—had hidden in Poland during the war after his parents were shipped to concentration camps; his mother died at Auschwitz. As Mia Farrow, who'd starred in Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby," says in the film, "Roman didn't have the blueprint for life that other people had."

Though Polanski, now 74, wouldn't talk to Zenovich on film, he agreed to see her last fall in Paris. She met him in a bar next to his house, where he lives with his wife, actress Emmanuelle Seigner, and their two children. He was on his cell phone helping his son, Elvis, figure out how to tape something on TV. "So many people think they know his story," says Zenovich. If you are one of them, think again. This deft and subtle film is a fitting tribute to a man—like him or not—whose life deserves more than tabloid headlines.

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired | FANZINE (Film) Kevin Killian from Fanzine, August 27, 2008

PopMatters [Bill Gibron]

Roman Polanski: Wanted And Desired Mark Goodridge in Park City from Screendaily

PopMatters [Cynthia Fuchs]

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]

Cinematical [Christopher Campbell]

Filmcritic.com Don Willmott

Cinematical (Erik Davis) at Sundance

SpoutBlog [Karina Longworth] at Sundance

Zoom in Online (Nathaniel Rogers)

Slant Magazine [Nick Schager]

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

The Smoking Gun: Polanski The Predator court records listing the specific criminal offenses charged in the case

CNN.com - Polanski's victim says she wants case resolved - Feb. 25 ... CNN News, February 25, 2003

The Globe and Mail Liam Lacey

Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips)

New York Times (registration req'd) Manohla Dargis, March 31, 2008

The Judge and the Auteur: Revisiting the Polanski Case Charles Lyons from The New York Times, October 16, 2006

Whitewashing Roman Polanski Bill Wyman from Salon, February 19, 2009

YouTube - The Fat The Lean and The Extra (4:02)

Roman Polanski - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Zhang Junzhao

THE ONE AND THE EIGHT (Yi ge he ba ge)

China (90 mi) 1983

One and Eight Ted Shen from The Chicago Reader

This landmark 1984 film signaled the emergence of China's “Fifth Generation,” the first wave of directors to graduate from film academies following the end of the Cultural Revolution. Made at a tiny provincial studio by Zhang Junzhao, it broke new ground in Chinese cinema with its remote locations, bravura visual style, and unsentimental tone. Ostensibly based on an epic poem extolling the bravery of Mao's army, it focuses on eight criminals and a turncoat officer imprisoned by Japanese invaders during World War II. Yet there's not much of a plot; Zhang is far more interested in creating a grimy claustrophobia amid the arid plains of central China and experimenting with theatrical touches such as characters addressing the camera in tight close-ups. The men are both existential animals and paragons of patriotic virtue—like Kurosawa's seven samurai but even more laconic. As progressive as One and Eight must have seemed in China, the soldiers? posing recalls the iconography of socialist paeans in the 60s, as figures set against a harsh landscape suffer gladly for the sake of the motherland.

The Chinese New Wave: The One and the Eight (1983) CineScope

Introduction:

Having recently attended several screenings at the BFI’s Chinese cinema season, including films with less than 100 user votes on iMDB (as good an indicator of obscureness as any), the exciting opportunity arises for me to raise awareness about little-known, seldom-seen films deserving of wider recognition.

Of particular interest to me was the Chinese New Wave strand, so I started with an afternoon screening of The One and the Eight (1983). Directed by Zhang Junzhao and shot by cinematographer Zhang Yimou, this period war drama is regarded as the first film made by the new wave generation of mainland China. However, it displeased the censors and took several years to be re-edited to their liking, by which time other new wave films had been released, such as Yellow Earth (1984). The original version is now almost certainly lost to us, but the released version still shows why it was a major novelty for Chinese cinema at that time.

As is often the case, the context behind the film only elevates our understanding of its importance. Therefore, in this post I want to not only talk about the film but also tell the story of that context, the fascinating background of Chinese cinema, which naturally is linked to the tumultuous history and rich culture of China itself.

A New Wave crashes against the shores of Chinese cinema:

First, let’s sort out an issue of nomenclature. The term ‘new wave’ is used abundantly throughout cinema history, and is often a label attributed not by the filmmakers themselves, but by critics and historians (as was the case for the Chinese New Wave). So, what exactly does a cinematic new wave imply?

If we’re willing to subscribe to the general theory that cinema progresses in cycles of invention and re-invention, where templates for filmmaking are adjusted and innovations introduced (of course with troughs of artistic stagnation in between the peaks too), we can then think of a new wave as a revitalising cycle for cinema. They occur when a generation of directors, writers, actors and other film artists, generally young and with new ideas, come along ready to break the mould. Timing is crucial, the scene must be set for something fresh, for new attitudes and approaches going against what came before (usually when it is felt current conventions have become stale). It is then that new waves appear to turn over the hourglass of cinema history and start a new cycle.

However different the individuals within them may be, these generations tend to share some beliefs about what cinema should be. This was the case for the first set of ‘new waves’ to be given that moniker: the European new waves of the 1960s. But the term could just as well be retrospectively applied to the film movements that came before (German Expressionism, Italian Neo-realism, etc), except maybe cinema was not yet old enough then to be able to usher in something specifically ‘new’. Later on, in the 1980s, a second batch of new waves would appear from countries which had not previously been famous for their cinematic input: the likes of Iran, Taiwan, Kazakhstan, Ireland, Mali, and others, all joining in the ‘new wave’ spirit and feted by international festival circuits and critics.

This brings us to the Chinese New Wave. It was a breeze of fresh air compared to what had come before in Chinese cinema. As a group of films and directors (the main three being Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige and Tian Zhuangzhuang, but plenty of others made interesting films too), this ‘new wave’ embraced new stylistic and artistic possibilities and displayed an eagerness (and ability) to experiment and take risks. The directors involved wanted to move away from the main traditions which had existed in Chinese cinema during the previous 5 or 6 decades, namely the melodrama and the political propaganda film.

Most of all, this new wave could only have happened in the 1980s. There are a number of reasons for this, which remind us that films are not made in a bubble, but are shaped and influenced by external factors. Here are three main reasons why the Chinese New Wave’s moment came at this specific time:

The historical and political context finally allowed it after many years where film production (other than propaganda) had been impossible. Mao Zedong’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, both in 1976, and the slight loosening-up of the political atmosphere under Deng Xiaoping, resulted in giving artists at least a modicum of freedom where before they’d had none. That the moment should come in the brief window of time before the tragedies of Tiananmen Square, and the regime’s reversion to strict clampdown in the late 1980s, was also crucial.

In terms of film culture, the Beijing Film Academy, China’s only film school, was re-opened in 1978, after being closed throughout the Cultural Revolution. The Academy received over 10,000 applications, from all over China, to be part of the first new batch of admissions. Film-making had been repressed for all these years, and now the lid had been lifted at last.

One final ingredient was still missing. As the great film theorist Andre Bazin once put it, great films happen thanks to the fortuitous intersection of the right historical moment and talent. And so the talent arrived, from the Beijing Film Academy. Out of all those applications, the Academy picked just 153. They were a determined bunch, partaking in all-night viewing sessions at the Academy’s library, feeding on whatever films foreign embassies had been kind enough to loan out, in order to move beyond the influence of Chinese and Soviet cinema — the only previously allowed films before 1976. Among them were Chen, Tian and both Zhangs, as well as, incidentally, the artist Ai Weiwei. They graduated in 1982 and collectively would be labelled the ‘Fifth Generation’ (a term indicating their status as the fifth generation of graduates from the Film Academy), but for this post I’ve preferred to use ‘Chinese New Wave’. They had been prevented from expressing themselves for so long, but, after living through the madness of the Cultural Revolution first-hand, they now had a lot to say. Film would be their medium of expression.

Understandably, this new generation of Chinese filmmakers wanted to break with the past. Before knowing what their films should be like, they knew what they should not be like. No more simplistic political propaganda filled with black-and-white certitudes (e.g. “peasants are good”, “bourgeois are bad”, “Mao and the Party know best”, etc.), and no more melodramatic histrionics. The slate would be wiped clean and the aim was now to make films like no other Chinese films before them. Things which had been missing from the earlier Chinese films, subjects, angles, character types, all were now encouraged. This confrontational attitude would mean having to lock horns with the censorship imposed by the Central Film Bureau in Beijing, as One and Eight and its makers would soon find out.

The One and the Eight — A film like no Chinese film before:

The One and the Eight was made in 1983, by a group of Beijing Film Academy graduates (director Zhang Junzhao, art designer He Qun and cinematographer Zhang Yimou) sent by the Central Film Bureau to work at a small regional film studio in Guangxi province, near the border with Vietnam. Again, we see here the fortuitous elements that worked in the New Wave’s favour, because this small studio would allow them far more freedom. Far away from the big cities, they were left to do their own thing. On top of this, Guangxi film studio was understaffed, and desperate for new productions to meet its quotas. The three young men, eager to put all their ideas into practice, happily obliged by immediately setting out to make their own film.

Set in 1939, during the ruthlessly bloody war between China and Japan, One and the Eight is centered around the story of nine Chinese soldiers held as prisoners by their own army under suspicion of conspiring with the Japanese enemy. The ‘one’ of the title refers to the solitary loner amongst the nine; he does not know the other eight and although they gang up on him, he remains strong and steadfast in the face of adversity, maintaining hs innocence. Another telling detail is that he is the only one of the nine prisoners whose real name we learn — it is Wang Jin. The ‘eight’ of the title are a group of eight men, seemingly bandits, far more cowardly and whose treason or desertion is far less in doubt.

The narrative of the film is structured into two halves. In the first section, the nine men are in jail and we are introduced to them, the contrast between Wang and the eight others, and the dynamics between them. In the second half, after the unit comes under attack from the Japanese, most of the regular soldiers are killed, and the nine men are freed in order to fight. The eight men, previously unpatriotic and indifferent to the war, have now had Wang’s bravery rub off on them, and join him to battle valiantly against the attackers.

But what was truly innovative, for Chinese cinema at least, is how the film uses film language (cinematography, framing compositions, depth of field) to get its points across. No more was theatre, opera or other artforms used as a crutch, cinema now would stand on its own two feet and rely on its own unique properties. It is Zhang Yimou’s visuals that tell us all we need to know, about Wang’s honour and innocence, and about the eight’s cowardice and guilt. (Sadly I am unable to offer screenshots of the film — and I must specify that despite the black-and-white publicity stills of the film I’ve added to the post, it is in fact in colour. I’ll have to use my recollection of the cinema screening and my descriptive powers.)

Take the jail scenes for instance: Wang is almost always framed on his own or apart from the others (and also asymmetrically, his head or body not in the centre of the frame) — this is an individual personality, a non-conformist who is assured in his principles. He does not fit in with the eight bandits, and nor can he be neatly scaffolded in the centre of the frame by the compositions. The ‘eight’ on the other hand are often cramped together, sometimes as many as 4 or 5 in the same frame, faces and bodies overlapping. They are a group, a collective; not a cohesive, unified one, but essentially a disorganised rabble. The ‘one’ is thus privileged as the hero of the piece, his innocence and general good nature is made clear, while the ‘eight’ are weak men, confused at best, callous bullies and cowards at worst. Through simple framing patterns, the first part of the film sets up this contrast of individual vs. collective, of conformity vs. non-conformity.

More than this, the cinematography tentatively encodes the political message of the film. It is not that much of a stretch to read a rejection of fundamental Chinese Communist Party doctrines, or at the very least a desire to seriously question them, in this favouring of the individual over the collective. Combined with its unorthodox depiction of a crucial part of Chinese communist mythology (the valiant battle of the Communist armies against the Japanese invaders), it makes it easy to see why the censors were none too pleased. In the second half, and this is perhaps where most of the re-shooting and re-editing was done, the film becomes far more of a patriotic piece, with Wang’s willingness to fight affecting the eight freed prisoners. Scenes amid the barren desert of Hebei province in Northern China, with war-cries and patriotic chants aplenty, now reveal the bandits willingly fighting under Wang’s leadership. The group has been affected and changed by one individual. But the ending undercuts the patriotism, with all but two of the nine falling victim to the war, and the survivors exhausted, exasperated and close to losing sanity.

A Taste of Things to Come:

Of course with the enforced changes it’s hard to say much about the extent of the film’s intended ideological critique, but it looked and sounded (in its sparse but frank, coarse dialogue) like no Chinese film before it. This was enough to provide a springboard for the New Wave filmmakers, and probably just as importantly, it introduced the incredible visual eye of Zhang Yimou. Both of these threads shall be carried on next time when I speak about Yellow Earth, the first real masterpiece of the movement.

The rest of the 1980s and early 1990s would see the Chinese New Wave aim to do nothing less than re-evaluate China’s past and update cinema’s status within Chinese culture. This would mean having to reconceptualise the notion of cinema in their country, by breaking free from politics and propaganda, and proving it could stand by itself as an artform. Hopefully in future posts I can continue to describe their ambitious efforts. Thanks for reading!

Zhang Lu

GRAIN IN EAR

China South Korea (109 mi) 2005

Grain in Ear Adam Hartzell from the Korean Film Page

Two things have stayed with me regarding Zhang Lu's Chinese-Korean co-production Grain in Ear. First, there is how everyone appears to move listlessly through the film, as if walking through a viscuous liquid, or as if carrying a heavy burden, such as Soon-hee's (Ji Liu Lian) excruciatingly slow pedalling of her kim-chee cart across the screen. And second, there is the prevalence of frames within frames, the centering of a doorway within the film frame where we watch what happens on screen and infer what happens beyond the border of the doorway. For those unfamiliar with film theory terms, what happens within the frame is called "diegetic" while that which happens outside the frame is "non-diegetic." What is lovely about Zhang's mise-en-scene is that this frame within the frame sets up a kind of non-diegetic diegetic space that allows for a powerful connection with the events happening both inside and outside our view. And of all the films I saw at the 10th PIFF in 2005, none was more sutured in my brain when leaving South Korea as this one, making me quite happy to hear that it ended up winning the New Currents Award.

Soon-hee is a Korean-Chinese living in China struggling to raise her young son (Bo Jin) on her own. Soon-hee sells kim-chee-ed vegetables illegally, so she positions herself for customers at different remote locations throughout the town to avoid being caught by the police. Soon-hee lives in a tiny subdivided house, the other divide being rented by four young, Chinese, female prostitutes with whom her son will occasionally play when not marching along with his friends in town looking to creatively engage with their desolate surroundings. Reluctant to engage with her neighbors, Soon-hee is approached by different individuals, particularly by men who come with their own agendas.

In its wonderfully slow pace, Zhang demonstrates vividly how stereotypes approach us. How others views about us are imposed upon us and how difficult it can be to excise ourselves from these assumptions. And most frightening is how we are sometimes forced to become these stereotypes. The kim-chee-ed vegetables she sells on the shores of abandoned roads are each man's entryway into Soon-hee's life. Then, through the poor, (il)logical leaps that create stereotypes, they assume things about her that aren't true yet they use their privileged positions to re-position Soon-hee to meet their stereotypes of her. Tragedy upon tragedy occurs in Grain In Ear, but there are moments of tiny positive poignancy that do still emerge. There is the time she buys a kite for her child. And even though the female police officer sees her solely as her ethnicity, (she's only seen Korean-Chinese on TV, never having met one before), and approaches Soon-hee as someone exotic, the moments when Soon-hee teaches her Korean traditional dance and they playfully mess around with each other as fast friends later in the sauna, each are respites for Soon-hee from the impending gloom that overwhelms the film.

Zhang's use of kim-chee as Soon-hee's connection to everyone involved, including herself, is well laid out and adds nicely to a tradition of how food is used in film explored in detail in Reel Food: Essays on Food and Film edited by Anne L. Bower. And his slow, lumbering style is not just for show, for it is syntonic with the environment and lives of the characters on screen. Equally congruent is Zhang's stationary camera, because even though the characters are moving, albeit slowly, they still appear to remain in the same place, further underscored by the kim-chee cart peddling and dancers parading in one direction early on in the film and then later in the opposite direction. We can add to this the non-diegetic diegetic space of the doorways and windows, for both are entry and exit ways, underscoring the feelings of inevitability that trap Soon-hee. And the overall pace of all inactive actions of the majority of the film provide a stark contrast to the speed with which Soon-hee moves at the end of the film. All this amounts to a powerful film about the Sisyphean uphill climb of flat, false assumptions about who we are and can be and what we're capable of when all hope is lost.   

Zhang Yang

SUNFLOWER 88

China (129 mi) 2005

A Chinese family melodrama that mirrors four decades of changing political climate from the forced work camps of the 60’s Cultural Revolution to the capitalist driven urban modernization of the 90’s. From the director of SHOWER, the film follows different stages in a young boy’s life, from elementary school, teenage, to young adulthood. The film is most convincing in the early stages, when his life as a free-wheeling, unsupervised street urchin in the middle of an overcrowded ramshackle village comes to a halt when his father returns home after 6 years at a labor camp, enforcing strict discipline at home. The tug of war between father and son, or father and mother, continues throughout the film, as what was once a close-knit community where everyone knows everyone else and all are pretty much in the same impoverished predicament becomes a free for all, where the neighbors are pitted against one another, forced to offer bribes to corrupt Party officials in an attempt to obtain approval for the few public housing apartments built near the neighborhood. Eventually, the modern housing developments surround the remnants of what used to be this village, which is continually being demolished, brick by brick, with fewer and fewer residents remaining, until eventually it appears that only two old timers have stayed behind.

Joan Chen plays the mother with an obsessive urge to get an apartment, while Sun Haiying brilliantly plays the father, especially wordlessly in the latter stages of the film, a former painter whose hands were intentionally broken in labor camps, with an obsessive urge to teach his son how to paint, and he strictly oversees his son’s artistic development. The son has an obsessive urge to get the hell out of there with a girl friend, but is constantly delayed by his father’s intervention. All of which means there is continual friction among family members, who are constantly bickering. The film alternates between comic and tragic elements, mixing an energetic social realism in the early part of the film with commercial sentiment later on that tugs at the heartstrings, and probably tries to wrap everything up a little too neatly, though not as one might suspect. Nevertheless, it’s an appealing effort, if only to get such a convincing look at how the Chinese see themselves.

SOUL ON A STRING C 75

China (142 mi) 2016

Following on the heels of the Russian revisionist film Paradise (Rai) (2016), this is another example of a nation literally appropriating another country’s language, land, and culture in an attempt to alter the world’s perception of China, which is the occupying force in Tibet. Imagine the Nazi’s making a fantasy film in French about Paris during their WWII occupation, Israel making a mythical film in Arabic about the Palestinians during their armed occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, or Britain making a film in Gaelic about the Northern Irish while under British military rule in the 70’s. A visually stunning film like this, with its panoramic vistas, has a way of elevating one’s appreciation for the ravishing beauty we see onscreen, but completely leaves out any background historical context. Mao Zedong’s Communist Nationalist army took over Tibet in 1950, hailing the act as a liberation from an old, feudal system that included both British and American imperialist influence. Resentment for the Chinese grew in Tibet over the following decade with armed rebellions breaking out. In March 1959 the capital of Lhasa erupted in a full-blown revolt, where asserting Chinese nationalism, anywhere from 200,000 to a million Tibetans were killed and approximately 6000 Buddhist monasteries were ransacked and destroyed, forcing the Dalai Lama, the widely revered Tibetan spiritual leader, to flee to India, where he has lived in exile ever since. China’s assertion for its territorial claim goes back to the 13th century, when both Tibet and China were absorbed into the Mongol empire. Known as The Great Khanate, the empire contained China, Tibet, and most of East Asia, becoming known as China’s Yuan Dynasty. Throughout the Yuan, and subsequent Ming and Qing dynasties, Tibet remained a subordinate principality of China, though it retained varying degrees of independence. The Himalayan mountain range provides a mountainous wall of strategic security for China, while Tibet possesses a significant mining industry, also serving as a primary water supplier. China has invested billions into Tibet and flooded the nation with Chinese immigrants over the past decade where its resources have been included in the economic development plan for Western China known as China Western Development. Like the former satellite nations of the USSR, all answering to Moscow, the needs of Tibetans, who are devout Buddhists, residing in an economic zone described as a Tibet Autonomous Region, now answer to Beijing, ruled by the Chinese Communist Party and are under constant threat by overzealous security forces. This conflict of limitless spirituality and occupying military rule has resulted in the self-immolation of more than 140 Buddhist monks in protest of Chinese rule in Tibet since 2009, as documented by Tsering Woeser, a well-known Tibetan writer and activist, Why Are Tibetans Setting Themselves on Fire? | by Tsering Woeser ..., which includes passages from Tsering Woeser’s Tibet on Fire: Self-Immolations Against Chinese Rule, from The New York Review of Books, January 11, 2016.

That being said, one must be extremely suspect of how China appropriates Tibetan culture, as it is just another form of political exploitation. In the not too distant past, China outlawed filming in Tibet, where actress Joan Chen defied Chinese censors by shooting there in her directing debut film XIU XIU: THE SENT-DOWN GIRL (Tian yu) (1998), an overt condemnation of the Cultural Revolution and winner of seven awards at the Taiwanese Golden Horse Film Festival. While there are current Tibetan filmmakers, such as Pema Tseden’s THARLO (2015) or Sonthar Gyal’s RIVER (2015), who provide an authentic view of life in modern Tibet, the rest of the world remains cultural outsiders. Films about ethnic minorities, and in particular films about Tibet, are subject to special scrutiny in China, where anything filmed in Tibet requires approval by the Tibet Committee of the United Front Work Department which operates under the Communist Party’s Central Committee — not just the state media regulator, as is the case with most films. According to Shelly Kraicer, Toronto film critic and scholar of Chinese cinema, “At the end of the day, everybody is still using and exploiting images of Tibet.” Director Zhang Yang previously directed overly commercial works like SHOWER (1999) and SUNFLOWER (2005), but before making this film he decided to spend a few months living in Tibet in 2013, where some of his experience is captured in the documentary PATHS OF THE SOUL (2015), which follows the Werner Herzog template established in WHEEL OF TIME (2003). While Herzog and his crew travel to a Buddhist pilgrimage site in Bodgaya, India, Zhang, in a part documentary and part fiction film, follows the journey of a group of Tibetan Buddhists on a pilgrimage to Lhasa, the holy capital of Tibet, much of it reflected in continuous repetition of prostrating one’s self on the ground. Zhang’s new film, where all of the actors in the film are Tibetan and speak Tibetan, is based on a story by the prominent Tibetan writer Tashi Dawa, drawing on Tibetan folk traditions and magical realist elements as it follows the adventurous exploits of a man named Tabei (Tibetan actor Kimba) who is brought back to life by a living Buddha after being killed by lightning, offering him penance to cleanse his murderous past and a chance for rebirth. The film follows his elongated and roundabout journey, including a collection of eccentrics he encounters along the way, as he pursues a mission to bring a Dzi bead, or sacred stone, to a mythical holy land. Using a comical, over exaggerated Sergio Leone spaghetti western style, the film continues to view Tibet as a fairy tale land of fantasy and exoticism, leaving out any references to ethnic abuse or signs of a culture repressed, as thousands of Tibetans are being forced to leave their grazing land and an agrarian way of life that is centuries old, replaced by Chinese bulldozers and more widespread pollution, with fear gripping an occupied community, not to mention arbitrary arrests and brutal detentions that continue without due process under Chinese communist rule, including torture and shoot-to-kill policies in effect, many for something so commonplace as flying the banned Tibetan Snow Lion flag.

The film is the exact opposite of that grim reality, painting a picture of staggering opulence, like a reworking of Wong Kar-wai’s visually luxurious ASHES OF TIME (1994), blending Buddhism with Western motifs, set in endlessly vast desert landscapes, all captured in widescreen by cinematographer Guo Daming, featuring sweeping aerial shots, Soul on a String by ZHANG Yang - Trailer - YouTube (1:58). At two and a half hours, this overlong yet epic journey of mythological self-discovery combines two of Dawa’s best-known short stories from the 80’s, Tibet, a Soul Knotted on a Leather Thong and On the Road to Lhasa, featuring a prologue, a shoot-out, a battle-hardened, resurrected criminal on a new mission, where he prefers to be a loner, but along comes a girl named Chung (Quni Ciren), who leaves her sheep and goats behind as she’s smitten by his strange appeal after a night in the same bed, remaining by his side throughout the journey, followed by Pu (Yizi Danzeng), a dwarfish and peculiarly mischievous mute with psychic powers. Following them are two brothers, trigger happy Guori (Zerong Dages), seen in the opening shoot-out, and the more measured older brother Kodi (Lei Chen), as both vow to kill Tabei to avenge the killing of their father. However Guori has a habit of killing a rotating cast of companions named Tabei, leaving behind a trail of wrongful men named Tabei whose killings had nothing to do with the crime, which eventually start to weigh on his karmic consciousness. Also following him are Gedan (Siano Dudiom Zahi), a mysterious stalker who seems to be recording the events on paper and may be the narrator, and Zandui (Solange Nima), a lone wanderer with a goofy dog named General. Many of the secondary characters provide comic relief, growing more ridiculous over time, where all are one-dimensional characterizations, while the film, as resplendent as it may be, is little more than escapist entertainment, featuring swordfights and honor codes that play out in western lore, set against a backdrop of awesome visual splendor. It’s something of a confused curiosity where recurring characters randomly cross paths, reaching for a strain of pop mysticism, with the title referring to the leather string that Tabei wears around his neck that holds the stone, as well as Chung’s habit of counting the days of her romance by tying knots on a leather cord, where both, according to Buddhist teachings, need to free themselves of all earthly burdens and attachments. But that being said, while it’s immaculately gorgeous, there’s really no successful resolution by the end, as the journey simply ends. This may remind some of Tarsem’s THE FALL (2006), a visually extravagant film shot in twenty-five different countries over the course of four years, which is equally breathtaking to look at, but it does a better job of conjuring up images from a 5-year old’s imagination, taking a kaleidoscopic trip literally around the world, extending the limits of storytelling, and doing a better job of blending fantasy and reality, ultimately becoming a much more intimate and rewarding experience.

Review: “Soul on a String” (by Brad) | CFDG Goes To Toronto

The landscapes!  Landscapes that look like nothing else on Earth.  See “Soul on a String” on the biggest screen possible and marvel at the Tibetan terrain that rivals “Lawrence of Arabia” in its depiction of the remote and stunningly beautiful locations.

Set on this landscape is a contemplative Western as interested in mythology as survival.  The story is very basic and involves a magical stone, quests to an ancient land, a revenge vendetta and a love story.  None of this is fleshed out too much and it works mainly as a showcase for the spectacle of nature that is Tibet.

While there are action sequences that do seem influenced by American Westerns, the pacing is relaxed and thoughtful.  There is much that may be specific to Chinese culture, so I am looking forward to a repeated viewing, hopefully on a very large screen.

Soul on a String (China, Zhang Yang ... - Cinema Scope James Lattimer

The amount of enjoyment to be derived from Soul on a String hinges on one’s tolerance for heavily processed images. While all the shots of vast natural vistas, tastefully furnished interiors, and portentous encounters have been painstakingly composed, each and every frame of Zhang Yhang’s Tibetan epic has been flushed through a saturation-heavy colour-grading regime that embraces the garish and the unnatural, which either imbues proceedings with a mythical charge or brings them dangerously close to kitsch, depending on your outlook. Either way, there’s ample time to drink in all the visual opulence on display given that the plot moves forward as leisurely as it does, a story of spirituality, vengeance, and destiny akin to a slowed-down western with heavy doses of the esoteric.

A former killer named Takai is redeemed after finding a magic bead in the mouth of a dead deer and is entrusted with the task of taking it to the fabled Palm Print Mountain, a mysterious, intangible location he will recognize when he finds it. An adoring woman and a cutesy little boy accompany him on his quest, while two brothers whose father he killed are hot on his trail, as is a writer whose attire appears unusually modern in this mythic context. This final plot strand seems to offer justification for the wall-to-wall image manipulation, as dousing everything in the same gaudy hues also serves to smudge the distinction between different time periods. As cars, highways, and light bulbs suddenly intrude, these seeming anachronisms do manage to jolt the plot out of its folkloric torpor for a while, as it gradually emerges that the writer is tracing the course of the legend in the present day. Yet this intriguing insertion of narrative and temporal confusion is ultimately no match for the film’s sluggish pacing, as the interrelated journeys, battles, and life lessons still play out as if mired in treacle. When you’re given so much time to look at the scenery, it helps when it’s worth looking at.

'Soul On A String': Toronto Review | Reviews | Screen David D’Arcy

In Soul on a String, directed by Zhang Yang, a brooding loner treks through the Tibetan landscape to find a resting place for a sacred object that he carries on a string. In the tradition of the American western genre which is one of the film’s inspirations, some killers are determined to get him before he gets there.

This panoramic film – for once the adjective is absolutely precise – won the cinematography award at the 2016 Shanghai Film Festival and Soul on a String is visually stunning. It shares a high elevation and the spirit of revenge with The Revenant, and its heroine played by Quni Ciren has an irresistible appeal, but this Tibetan-language epic will be a hard sell beyond festivals and specialised audiences. Those who find their way to it will see breathtaking surroundings that shape the film’s drama.      

At the drama’s core – or leading its uphill narrative trail – is Tabei (Kimba), a self-described sinner carrying a sacred stone to cleanse himself of sin at the end of his journey. Tabei doesn’t want company, but Chung (Quni Ciren) attaches herself to him, ending up pregnant after she shares his bed. Also along for the ride is diminutive Pu, who can’t speak but communicates with high-pitched squeaks and a guitar-like instrument, all serving a mood of magic realism.

The film’s central pilgrimage plot, which shifts in and out of the present, has plenty of appendages. Two brothers trail Tabei to avenge the killing of their father. They are so ardently vengeful that they kill another man named Tabei who had nothing to do with the crime. That mistaken killing, the butt of a few jokes, gives you a feel for the film’s humor.

Also on the trail are two more brothers, and a solitary traveller, Gedan, with a dog called General who lightens the mood from time to time.

The large cast of Soul on a String may confuse those who watch the film without full concentration, but the ensemble brings variety and personalities to a long hike through the landscape – the film runs almost two and a half hours.

As Tabei, Kimba is as trail-hardened as any Western cowboy, and the weak pressures of political correctness in China make it easy to lock him and Quni Ciren into the conventional warrior and camp cook roles. Ciren brings a hard-bitten humor to the role of Chung, and looks radiant when a scene calls for a campfire, even she’s wearing filthy animal skins.

Secondary characters don’t go much beyond the one- dimensional, a description that could just as easily fit most westerns.

Zhang, who adapted the script with the writer Tashi Dawa (a half-Tibetan writing in Chinese) from several of Tashi Dawa’s stories, focuses on Tibetan folklore and honour codes more than on the local Buddhism and history. In this tale of violent revenge, he avoids the high-flying martial art balletics of so many Chinese period dramas. The fight that provides the film’s crescendo is downright crude, and seems deliberately so.

Some critics on blogs with a Tibetan nationalist bent have faulted the film for a Chinese prejudice – Zhang is Chinese and Tashi Dawa is half Chinese. If so, this is more by omission than commission, using majestic settings to tell conventional stories of sin and the pursuit of forgiveness in a region with a more urgent political tale to tell.

That criticism could still undermine the film’s chances for an audience outside China. The public in North America and Europe that is interested in Tibet tends to look favourably on the Dalai Lama and Tibetan autonomy. That informed audience might just skip this one.That said, the landscape of Tibet, though the lens of DP Guo Daming has rarely looked so striking. It reminds you why the Tibetans are so attached to their land.

Soul On A String | Tibet, Activism And Information

'Soul on a String' Review | Variety Maggie Lee

5 things we learned at the Shanghai International Film Festival - Blog ... Helen Roxburgh from Time Out Shanghai

Review: Soul on a String | Sino-Cinema 《神州电影》 Derek Elley

Tibet Stands Out in China's Entries at Shanghai International Film ... Amy Qin from The New York Times, June 10, 2016

Zhang Yibai

SPRING SUBWAY

China (93 mi) 2002

Spring Subway Shelly Kraicer from a Chinese Cinema Page

Spring Subway is one of the most promising recent debut features from China. First time director Zhang Yibai, who has worked in television and music video, applies his flair for flashy technique to the service of this thoroughly up-to-date offbeat urban romance set in contemporary Beijing.

Zhang, along with screenwriter/producer Liu Fendou, chose to make an officially approved picture, which makes perfect financial sense for this, the first production of the new Beijing-based independent production house Electric Orange Entertainment. With the Film Bureau's approval, Spring Subway becomes a still too rare example of an ambitious independent Chinese film. The filmmakers tread a narrow path blazed by indie production company IMAR's Crazy Love Soup and Shower, both of which were co-written by Liu Fendou. Spring Subway shows how this pathway works: it avoids major state-owned studios; can reach local audiences; therefore boasts a welcome commercial potential; and, as a bonus, retains international appeal. As such, it forms a complementary alternative to the "sixth generation" films that, avoiding the censorship approval process, can't profitably and openly be distributed within China.

Ruggedly handsome Geng Le (In the Heat of the Sun , Beijing Rocks), and currently hot mainland pop-idol Xu Jinglei (Spicy Love Soup) both do the best work yet of their young careers playing a twenty-something couple lost in the doldrums of a seven-year-old marriage that seems to be coming apart for no particular reason. Xu Jinglei plays Xiaohui, who works in a design company and is drawn to a friendship cum affair with a customer (a nice sloe-eyed turn by Zhang Yang, the director of Shower and Quitting). Geng Le plays Jianbin, who just lost his job, but maintains the pretence of going to work by riding the Beijing subway all day. There, he observes a clutch of fellow passengers in the process of tentatively falling in love. The film jumps among these different romances he eavesdrops on: a garrulously jovial pudgy baker woos the equally voluble saleswoman of his dreams; and a curiously shy slacker gropes furtively in the overhead straps with a young commuter's all-too-willing hand. Extra-marital emotional peril looms when Jian Bin finds himself drawn to an injured schoolteacher, whom he gently, though anonymously cares for as she recovers in hospital.

A sense of mute, frustrated yearning pervades the story, most of whose characters seem frustrated in their inability to express their feelings. The central couple could restore their marriage if only they could bring themselves to speak directly to each other, But their strenuous attempts to do anything but talk seem to exhaust their energies, pushing them to find companionship and love elsewhere.

Though Zhang Yibai seems indebted to Wong Kar-wai's stylistic panache and copious use of confessional voice-overs, he's no simple Wong acolyte. Clean, inventive framings constantly counterpoise the emotionally confused characters in a crisp, Ikea-furnished, polished mirror-glass world of tangible contemporaneity. The commodities all know their places: it's just the human inhabitants of Beijing's anonymously post-modern streetscapes who seem lost, fragile, insufficiently clear about who they are and what they want. Zhang is a brilliant montage-maker. He constructs playfully complex scenes (and even an entire closing sequence) out of surprising cuts and contrasts, changes in perspective. He even dares to play with alterations of speed and narrative direction that, in retrospect, seem naturally, directly expressive.

The music by Zhang Yadong (a protégé of China's finest pop singer and Chungking Express co-star Faye Wong) is superb. In no small measure responsible for knitting together the film's unusually disparate elements, Zhang's score gives them shape, a unity of texture and a mutual resonance that makes them sing.

This may be one of the most thoroughly "international" Beijing films yet. With its cappuccino drinkers and sleekly modern settings, it could just as easily be a story from any urban capital: San Francisco, Tokyo, London. Greater than the sum of its parts, Spring Subway whirls forward with a giddy rush of feeling - it's at the same time romantic and post-romantic, which should please both paying audiences and jaded critics - flaunting a new, state of the art flair for the global urban culture all its own.

Zhang Yimou

Zhang Yimou • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Mary Farguhar from Senses of Cinema, May 21, 2002

China and the Oscars Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy from The New York Times, March 25, 1991

Beijing Thwarts U.S. Film Festival William Grimes from The New York Times, September 27, 1995

A Spectacular Tale In Its Mythic Home; 'Turandot' Enters the Forbidden City Erik Eckholm from The New York Times, September 1, 1998

'Turandot' Bids Farewell To Beijing, the 'Home' It Awed and Perplexed Erik Eckholm from The New York Times, September 15, 1998

The Road Home • Senses of Cinema Dimitri Tsahuridis from Senses of Cinema, July 18, 2000

BFI | Sight & Sound | Not One Less (1998) Philip Kemp from Sight and Sound, August 2000

BFI | Sight & Sound | The Road Home (1999) John Mount from Sight and Sound, December 2000

Better Beauty Through Technology: Chinese Transnational Feminism ... Andrew Grossman from Bright Lights Film Journal, January 1, 2002

Chinese feminist film criticism Gina Marchetti reviews Dai Jinhua’s book, Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua, from Jump Cut, Summer 2003

Red Sorghum: A Search for Roots • Senses of Cinema David Neo from Senses of Cinema, October 5, 2003

The “Confusion Ethics” of Raise the Red Lantern • Senses of Cinema David Neo from Senses of Cinema, October 28, 2004

Steamy Times Come to Chinese Films Jean Tang from The New York Times, November 27, 2004

House of Flying Daggers: A Reappraisal • Senses of Cinema Hwanhee Lee from Senses of Cinema, April 15, 2005

The Great Wall Rises (and Falls) at the Met Louis B. Morris and Robert Lipsyte on the opera The First Emperor, a prequel to HERO, from The New York Times, October 1, 2006

A Leap Forward, or a Great Sellout? David Barboza from The New York Times, July 1, 2007

The Pyrotechnic Imagination Arthur Lubow from The New York Times, February 17, 2008

Downsizing a Larger-Than-Life Warlord Allan Kozinn review of The First Emperor from The New York Times, May 12, 2008

The Wizard Behind Beijing’s Opening Night - NYTimes.com David Barboza from The New York Times, August 7, 2008

Behind Beijing’s Opening Night Photo display where Zhang’s film imagery matches his Olympic visualization, August 8, 2008

‘Proud to Be Chinese’ Letter to the Editor from The New York Times, August 8, 2008

Beyond the Fifth Generation: An Interview with Zhang Yimou by Bert Cardullo at the Hong Kong Film Festival, from Bright Lights Film Journal, March 2007

RED SORGHUM

China (91 mi) 1987

Red Sorghum: A Search for Roots • Senses of Cinema David Neo from Senses of Cinema, October 5, 2003

My thinking about culture begins the moment it is in ruins.

– Chen Kaige

Zhang Yimou has been hailed as the most creative and outstanding filmmaker of the Fifth Generation. Zhang and his compatriot Fifth Generation filmmakers (such as Chen Kaige and Tian Zhuangzhuang) were the first post-Cultural Revolution graduates from the Beijing Film Academy (graduating in 1982 this class was labelled the Fifth Generation). They were largely responsible for bringing international recognition to Mainland Chinese films. Prior to the emergence of the Fifth Generation, Chinese cinema was dominated by the production of propagandist films. The Fifth Generation filmmakers challenged the existing system both indirectly and directly; in order to evade censorship, these directors employed the clever use of allegory, symbol and metaphor. In so doing, the Fifth Generation filmmakers have been applauded for their hauntingly beautiful, culturally rich and multi-layered cinematographical language.

Red Sorghum made in 1987 was the first film that Zhang directed. His second film Ju Dou (1990) won numerous prestigious international awards such as the 1990 Golden Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival, the Golden Hugo Award at the Chicago International Film Festival and Best Film at the 1990 New York Film Festival. Ju Dou was also the first Chinese film to be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, at the 1990 Academy Awards. Zhang's third film, Raise the Red Lantern (1991) won five prizes at the 1991 Venice Film Festival, and was also nominated for Best Foreign Film at the 1992 Academy Awards.

Paul Clark, a scholar on Chinese film, writes that the images of China in Fifth Generation films “reflect a profoundly ambivalent nationalism”. This is understandable considering the historical and cultural milieu from which the Fifth Generation filmmakers emerged. This profoundly ambivalent nationalism manifested itself in many of their films including Red Sorghum. Red Sorghum can be aptly described as a film involved in a deep questioning and searching for roots. The film's concentrated focus on folk culture tells a story – or even a “legend”, as the film itself suggests – of the narrator's grandparents. The narrator's obvious Chinese background but anonymous identity seems to imply and encourage a universal, grass roots questioning of the Chinese heritage. The narrator is, in fact, not even sure of who his grandfather is, nevertheless, he likes to believe that it is the character of Grandpa (Jiang Wen), who was one of Jiu'er or Grandma's (Gong Li) bridal sedan-bearers. Inherent in how this story or legend is constructed is a deep questioning of China's roots – who and how did our (Chinese) ancestors come about? This questioning of China's roots and origins is also illustrated in the metaphor of the sorghum – how did the sorghum come to grow in this area (the Northeast of China)? The narrator tells us that no one knows and that it simply grew wildly and naturally. The film's focus on folk culture repudiates or questions the refined and sophisticated notions of Chinese culture; awakening us to more primal instincts.

Red Sorghum's return to grass roots seems to also be a celebration of the carnal. The film invokes many ideas of Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the carnival; essentially a return to basic biological needs such as eating, drinking, defecating, making love and rearing children. From the start of the film, the body and bodily functions are depicted in the unabashed shots of the sedan-bearers' naked, sweat-soaked and dust-covered torsos as they teasingly, but vigorously, jostle the bridal palanquin. And throughout the film, the men are shown in various states of undress in their labours; for example, in the wine-brewing scene, the men are only clad in loin-cloths, and are warned of Jiu'er's approaching presence, and hence are being called to appropriately cover themselves. The scenes of the invocation of the wine god succinctly encapsulate the celebration of the carnal as the characters of the film overtly evoke the Nietzschean celebration of the Dionysian spirit. The semi-nude men displaying their raw masculinity get drunk in the worship of the wine god and chant:

If you drink our wine,
You'll breathe well and you won't cough;
If you drink our wine,
You'll be well and your mouth won't smell bad…
If you drink our wine,
You won't kow-tow to the emperor…

But the crudest example of the celebration of the carnal would be Grandpa pissing into the wine vats; which curiously produces the best wine the winery has ever made. It clearly exemplifies Grandpa's virility. The raw masculinity portrayed in Red Sorghum is a sharp contrast to the traditional (even effeminate) Chinese image of the refined, cultivated and intellectual man that is very much associated with the Imperial Examinations of the feudal system of China. Red Sorghum promulgates a search for roots deeper and more genuine than those of traditional imperial China, as the chant defiantly resonates: “If you drink our wine, you won't kow-tow to the emperor!”

This sharp attack on traditions is not only seen in the seemingly ludic chant above; but more poignantly in the allegory of the leprous winery owner, who represents China's obsolete feudal and patriarchal system – which is depicted as impotent and ineffective. The acerbic criticism is made when we find out that Jiu'er is forced into marriage to a leprous winery owner in exchange for a mule – Jiu'er daringly questions her father's love and even denounces him for such a cruel and callous act. Refusing to be subjected to her ill fate, Jiu'er is only armed with a pair of scissors to guard her dignity; fortunately, the consummation of the marriage never occurs and the leprous winery owner mysteriously dies. The narrator believes that Grandpa is responsible for the death. Jiu'er instead gives herself to Grandpa, who carries her off into the sorghum field and makes a bed out of wild sorghum for her – this is where the narrator's father is believed to have been conceived. The film blatantly criticises the ineffectual and repressive feudal and patriarchal system of China, boldly awakening and beckoning us to the real and genuine realities of our feelings and primal instincts.

The search for roots can also be seen in the landscape represented in the film. Previously, Chinese filmmakers have represented China through the quintessentially southern landscape of water, trees, cultivated fields and cosy settlement. Red Sorghum, however, defies this tradition and is set in the rough northeast Gaomi Township, where Mo Yan, the author of the novel Red Sorghum, comes from. Contrastingly different from the south, Mo Yan describes the northeast as “the most beautiful and repulsive, most unusual and most common, most sacred and most corrupt, most heroic and most bastardly, hardest-drinking and hardest-loving place in the world…”

Zhang has purposefully chosen this harsh environment for the film, challenging the traditional outlook and established notions of China's roots. One of the most memorable images in Red Sorghum is found in the last sequence of the film, where we see the mud-caked half-naked bodies of Grandpa and the narrator's father amongst the corpses. After plotting an ambush and eradicating the Japanese troops, Grandpa and his son (the father of the narrator) are the sole survivors at the end of the film – both these characters' actual names are never revealed and we are introduced to them simply, almost generically as the nameless narrator's father and Grandpa, symbolic representations of the Chinese people. The closing images of mud-covered naked bodies and swaying wild sorghum – with folk songs sung as tributes to Jiu'er and the primal beating of the drum – tell us that the characters' survival and the survival of the Chinese people depend on their ability to shake off the shackles of repression of Chinese culture and return to grass roots.

Chinese feminist film criticism Gina Marchetti reviews Dai Jinhua’s book, Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua, from Jump Cut, Summer 2003

RAISE THE RED LANTERN

China (125 mi) 1991

Better Beauty Through Technology: Chinese Transnational Feminism ... Andrew Grossman from Bright Lights Film Journal, January 1, 2002 (excerpt)

Since the 1919 May Fourth New Culture movement, the idea of a Chinese feminism has been inextricably caught between a struggle for Chinese national identity and the imperialist legacy of imported Western ideas. While there were indigenous attempts at non-Western feminism before May Fourth, such as the gender egalitarianism espoused by the proto-communist Taiping Rebellion, or the female sisterhoods of the Pearl River Delta, the modernity adopted after China’s 1911 Republican revolution quickly established the Western prejudices adopted by Chinese intellectuals. Mainland feminist scholar Wang Zheng (1999, 17-18) has characterized the modern feminism that followed May Fourth as a battle between two kinds of liberal humanism. The first was a socially progressive philosophy positing women as human beings separate from but equal to men¹, and the second a masculinist philosophy in which the "human" in "humanism" was automatically thought of as the educated, modern, First World male that Chinese revolutionaries should emulate. The woman who follows the male slant of this second type of humanism should — in order to achieve equal rights — impersonate and effectively become a neutered man, something like the butch, cross-dressing Republican revolutionary played by Lin Ching-hsia in Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues (1986).

Wang calls this masculinized scenario the "Mulan subject position," after the traditional story of legendary heroine Hua Mulan, who dutifully impersonates a male soldier when her ailing father is unable to fight. It is ironic, though, that the Mulan legend should have become a revolutionary role model for Chinese women, considering the tale actually regurgitates filial piety and other outmoded Confucianisms, and that Mulan must forever alternate between masculine power and female (hetero-)sexuality without being able to synthesize the two.² But the Mulan subject position was only the tip of the iceberg, for revolutionary women’s political problems were in fact argued by male revolutionaries, who saw in the liberation of women a universal, humanist allegory for their own liberation from Confucianism, dynasticism, and other remnants of the ancien regime. Analogously, in the climate of today’s transnational cinema, few female-directed Mainland Chinese films are imported to the West³, and the cinematic window through which we view Chinese "women’s issues" has been forever fogged by the (male) likes of Zhang Yimou.

The Mulan subject position was intensified and institutionalized under Maoism, which equalized the sexes by reducing them to a common denominator of material labor. Mayfair Yang Mei-hui’s video documentary Through Chinese Women’s Eyes (1997) characterizes Maoist gender reconstruction as a unique moment in world history, a time in which the result of state feminism was not only the negation of gender differences but the overall desexualization of both women and men. Yet while women may have enjoyed social power as Maoist leaders, they lacked the autonomous sexuality derived from an individuated female consciousness. Furthermore, the Maoist erasure of gender difference was never an erasure of sexual difference, and was confined mostly to economic roles. To ensure that the butchness of Mulan-ism did not deviate into sexual transgression, homosexuality was pathologized (ironically following Western ideas of sexual pathology) as never before in China’s history. According to Yang’s account, unmarried women over thirty were considered social burdens or sexual abnormalities, and were often demonized as lesbians under Maoist norms of conformity.

The problem for our discussion, however, is that in Chinese film — particularly in the Fifth Generation Mainland films, which apparently ignore bourgeois Western feminism — the ideological tensions between Eastern and Western feminism have often been trumped by visual splendor and depictions of melodramatic female suffering. While representations of feudal suffering were a common tool used by Republican revolutionaries and anti-Confucian Maoists alike to critique Third World primitivism, the persistence of this aesthetic has in film submerged any kind of gendered politics beneath a commodifiable aesthetic of cinematographic prettiness, in which the systems under critique are paradoxically presented romantically, nostalgically, in a word, sexily. Of course, generic images of female suffering are common throughout classical East Asian cinema, as evidenced by Mizoguchi’s ever-suffering heroines, whose proto-feminisms the Japanese new wave, attempting to escape the straitjacket of feudalist aesthetics, considered needlessly romantic. But while I refuse to characterize suffering as an aesthetic particularly "Asian" or feminine, I must still contend with the kind of oriental imagery promulgated by Zhang Yimou, which has fostered an internationally recognized trope of prettified female suffering, and which — ignoring both Western feminism and Chinese Mulan-ism — has been incapable of saying anything innovative about women’s problems in premodern China. If feminism should critique the tyranny of the physical appearances that preserve male and female as biologically exclusive and unequal terms, might it not be ironic for a film — such as Zhang’s Raise the Red Lantern — to purportedly critique patriarchy while burying its themes beneath the similarly exclusive physical appearances of high-class cinematography?

It is not a simple thing to renounce suffering: as entire cultures are founded upon aestheticizing it (Christianity), and others are founded upon shunning it (Buddhism), it remains forever the lowest — and perhaps only — common denominator of universal human experience. As such, suffering has been an indispensable impetus for artistic expression, from Sophocles to Arthur Miller, from Rigoletto to Bessie Smith, from Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919) to the Indian classic Pakeezah (1971). But let us — if only for the moment — try to quit cold turkey the defeatist aesthetic of suffering, and instead see film as the expressly political tool it must be, and has always been. The pathos of suffering will always have its noble place as long as there is tragedy, but what political, feministic good can numbingly repetitive representations of suffering have? If the sarcastic necrology of Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet catalogs with embarrassing clarity the boringly self-flagellating masochism that had plagued pre-Stonewall cinema, why should the lushly photographed fatalisms of films as recent as Thelma and Louise or Red Lantern constitute a legitimate feminism? While we shouldn’t embark on campaigns of naive, freshly scrubbed optimism, the aesthetic of (female) suffering has unfortunately beatified meekness, turning what could at best be martyrdom into self-pacifying euthanasia. People will defend the art of suffering by saying, "At least it is realistic — that is what life is really like!" But I will say, "What good is your mediocre realism if it offers no revelation, no original instruction, and feebly aims to make a grand statement by concluding with the suffering that we already accept as a priori universal knowledge?"

It is now seemingly impossible to comment on the image of (suffering) women in rural Chinese films without placing that commentary within a frame of orientalism and transnational consumerism. E. Ann Kaplan (1991), Rey Chow (1995), Dai Jinhua (1999), Chris Berry (1999), and legions of others have already commented on the commercial appeal of the Fifth Generation Chinese films to First World audiences.⁴ Often, these are rural narratives that romanticize a resplendent aesthetic of rural female suffering as an exportable vision of a China framing its premodern rural history as an international cinematic commodity. As Chow says:

"…the Chinese films that manage to make their way to audiences in the West are usually characterized, first of all, by visual beauty. From Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (1984) to Tian Zhuangzhuang’s Horse Thief, to Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (1988[sic]), Judou (1989), and Raise the Red Lantern (1991), we see that contemporary Chinese directors are themselves so fascinated by the possibilities of cinematic experimentation that even when their subject matter is — and it usually is — oppression, contamination, rural backwardness, and the persistence of feudal values, such subject matter is presented with stunning sensuous qualities." (54)

Elsewhere, Mainland critic Dai Jinhua has argued that because Zhang Yimou has orientalized himself for a Western audience, he assumes a passively feminine position. (1999, 201) That is, just as Western viewers gaze at a mad Gong Li imprisoned within the patriarchal house of Red Lantern, so do we envision a flailing Zhang Yimou trapped within the Western patriarchy and economics of international film distribution. Yet if we really insist on narrowly identifying artists according to passive-aggressive or female-male binaries, we might also say that because Zhang’s films are actively prestigious and economically profitable — and as far as "foreign" films go, these are more prestigiously profitable than most — Zhang’s work can just as easily be coded "male" or "aggressive."⁵ We are then given to wonder that, no longer passive sheep in the post-Mao framework of transnational exploitation, Chinese directors have become complicit in objectifying themselves to and for a Western audience, and have in fact derived elitist auteur status from this complicity. But even if there is some convenience in this commonly perceived East-West/female-male binary, it, as we will see, fails to account for the physical beauties of rural Chinese films that do not make their way to the West, films whose exoticisms are intended for modern Chinese audiences who in the post-Mao era might be reconsidering the values of the premodern culture overanxiously erased during the Cultural Revolution.

Rey Chow has defended Zhang Yimou against Chinese intellectuals, such as Dai Jinhua, who accuse him of selling out to the orientalist gaze by arguing that his emphases on comely, over-composed surfaces are not tricky diversions from "real" meanings that don’t exist, but are meaningful as a sort of "genuine" superficiality, as a semi-deliberate parody of the Western gaze, an "oriental’s orientalism" that tries to juggle self-identity and national identity in a post-imperialist, poker-faced struggle to go beyond the two. While such a self-conscious parody would complicate an attempt to reduce Zhang’s position to "passive" or "feminine," and while a sense a self-consciousness is indeed probably present in Zhang’s later films, such as Red Lantern and The Story of Qui Ju (1992), it seems unlikely that this argument can explain the excessive prettiness of Red Sorghum, for in 1987 the value of the Fifth Generation’s "stunning sensuous qualities" had not yet been fully established as an international commodity ripe for parody. But even if we tentatively accept Zhang’s films as self-parodies, I am not convinced that such non-confrontational parodies are actually effective, for they are so deeply encoded within the oriental aesthetic they allegedly rebel against that they can be mistaken for authenticity — even Chow admits that urban Chinese probably wouldn’t know exactly how accurate are the rural rituals that Zhang "parodies." I would say that parody, hardly a salvation in itself, is rather the obligatory curse of transnational consumerism, a mundane curse that dumbly points out the circuitry of the cross-cultural gaze without being able to disrupt it.

The end result of this oriental’s orientalism is that whatever films such as Zhang’s have to say about women’s issues is overshadowed by what they say about their own international distribution, and by what both Eastern and Western critics must say to rationalize the orientalist spectacle of even watching such films. Moreover, films such as Red Lantern continue in the practice of framing women’s issues within a nonthreatening, non-oppositional aesthetic of static suffering and martyrdom. Indeed, within the triangulation of capitalist distribution, orientalist ogling, and a technologically prettified aesthetic of suffering, what room is really left for an analysis of women’s issues?

The “Confusion Ethics” of Raise the Red Lantern • Senses of Cinema David Neo from Senses of Cinema, October 28, 2004

Chinese feminist film criticism Gina Marchetti reviews Dai Jinhua’s book, Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua, from Jump Cut, Summer 2003

THE STORY OF QIU JU

China (99 mi) 1992

Pacific Cinematheque (lost link)

A surprising but successful stylistic departure from the sumptuous splendours of Red Sorghum, Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern, Zhang Yimou's neorealist The Story of Qiu Ju features a dressed-down Gong Li as a young peasant woman who takes her quest for what she perceives as justice to ever more absurd heights. Her husband has been "kicked in the balls" during a dispute with the village chief; the latter's initial refusal to apologize sets the heavily pregnant Qiu Ju on a serio-comic climb up the legal hierarchy. As she takes her case from village tribunal to the local police to the provincial authorities, it soon becomes clear that her stubborn refusal to accept a compromise decision could have tragic consequences. The Story of Qiu Ju was shot on location in Shanxi village, in a quasi- documentary style, and employing mostly non-professional performers in the supporting roles. Much of the work is said to have been surreptitiously filmed with hidden cameras and mikes, in order to enhance the sense of realism. The screenplay is by Liu Heng, adapting the novel by Chen Yuanbin. The film won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1992. "Brilliantly finessed" (Tony Rayns). China 1992.

TO LIVE

China (125 mi) 1994

FILM FESTIVAL; Zhang Yimou's Comic Ironies on Screen Resonate in Life Janet Maslin from The New York Times, September 30, 1994

Critic's Choice/Film; Mixing Humanity and History to Illustrate the Flux of Family Life in China Janet Maslin from The New York Times, December 2, 1994

SHANGHAI TRIAD

China (107 mi) 1995

Shanghai Triad Shelly Kraicer, an excerpted review from Cineaction magazine

Zhang Yimou's tour through film genres (historical epic, action thriller, psychological thriller, costume drama, country tale, and epic melodrama) has now reached the gangster film. Mob-ruled Shanghai in the 1930's is the setting for the first half of Shanghai Triad [Yao ya yao, yao dao waipo qiao]. Zhang displays a swirl of luxury, violence (although muted), glamorous production numbers (featuring Gong Li), and claustrophobic menace. It's certainly stylish, but doesn't break new ground. What we have instead is a setup for the second half of the film: the main characters (gangster boss Tang (Li Baotian), his mistress Jinbao (Gong Li), who is a famous nightclub singer, and her new boy servant Shuisheng (Wang Xiaoxiao)) retreat to a remote, peaceful island, where the consequences of the first part are played out. The film ends with a return to Shanghai.

Like all of Zhang Yimou's work, this film supports a wealth of possible meanings. As allegory, we have once again a vision of how innocent victims of an all-powerful patriarchal figure (embodied in the gang boss) attempt to survive under its shadow.

Using a slightly narrower focus, one can find a commentary on contemporary post-Communist China. Some historians see a striking similarity between China's current embrace of gung-ho capitalism and its attendant corruption on the one hand, and the free-wheeling commercialism and lawlessness of pre-revolutionary Shanghai on the other. So perhaps the film is a standard cautionary tale, depicting the perils of China's current condition. In this rather literal-minded reading, Boss Tang and his aging cronies could stand for the progressively more enfeebled Chinese leadership of today, brutally wielding power not out of any ideological fervour, but merely in the pursuit of wealth. (1)

Shanghai Triad can also be seen as another showpiece for Gong Li: crafted this time to display her in a sophisticated, international setting. She wears glamorous clothing -- she sings, she dances -- she's given a charismatic character who makes the journey from an extremely unsympathetic character to someone we end up caring for. It's a great, meaty role, but I'm not sure Gong Li pulls it off, this time. She doesn't seem completely to mesh with the character of Jinbao. I'm reminded of what is lacking in some of her Hong Kong film performances: there is a distance, a slightly uncomfortable fit, which never lets one forget that we're watching China's Most Celebrated Movie Star. And I'm afraid that I would have to agree with nightclub patron "Fatty Yu", who observes of Jinbao's stage performace that "she looks better than she sings".

Unfortunately, the film's text (story, screenplay and characterization) doesn't feel substantial enough to support the burden of all its subtexts, of all the cultural work that it is trying to perform. To Live (1994) hinted at a new problem in Zhang's work: the allegorical "point" of that movie -- that the intervention of the Chinese Communist Party into history meant only disaster for the Chinese -- threatened to overwhelm the particularity of its story.

Zhang's earlier films Red Sorghum (1987), Judou (1989), Raise the Red Lantern (1991) and The Story of Qiu Ju (1992) all pack a tremendous emotional punch. Each of their stories is self-sufficient. The affective investment that each inspires can then animate the other registers of meaning (what Fredric Jameson calls "allegorical transcodings") that each generates. But this process does not work well in reverse. Shanghai Triad relies too heavily on the strength of its extra-textual references to support its otherwise thinly drawn story. (2)

_______________

(1). For more interesting, nuanced explorations of the corrosive results of Dengism's "to get rich is glorious", see Zhou Xiaowen's Ermo (1994), and Huang Jianxin's Signal Left, Turn Right (1996), to name just a couple of recent examples.(back to article)

(2) This issue continues to dog the latest films from the mailand. Zhou Xiaowen's The Emperor's Shadow (1996) is a lavishly drawn, epically scaled history of the tyrannical Qin Emperor Ying Zheng, his dependence on his court musician Gao Jianli, and the latter's refusal to put his own art at the service of imperial power. It is no surprise that this very dilemma should preoccupy a film director still trying to work within the PRC film system. In this case, though, it exerts an almost palpable pressure on the film that manages to smother its vitality.

Just the opposite is true for independent filmmaker Zhang Yuan's stunningly successful Sons (1996), a precisely imagined and rivetingly intense family drama/documentary set in contemporary Beijing. In it, two indolent sons burdened by an alcoholic, abusive, and increasingly loony father finally free themselves from his domination: one son strikes him, and the resulting shock drives Dad meekly into a mental hospital. The apparently true origin of this plot lightens the film's burden of allegorical signification (though it's not all that hard to construct one, in retropect), and frees the story to work entirely on its own terms.

for the rest of the article, refer to the current issue of Cineaction (No. 42, Spring, 1997).

FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW; Soulfully Speaking A Universal Language Felt by the Oppressed Janet Maslin from The New York Times, September 29, 1995

FILM REVIEW;Oppressed by Privilege Janet Maslin from The New York Times, December 21, 1995

NOT ONE LESS A- 93

China (106 mi) 1998

BFI | Sight & Sound | Not One Less (1998) Philip Kemp from Sight and Sound, August 2000

Provincial China, the present. Teacher Gao, who runs a primary school in the village of Shuixian, needs a month's leave to tend his dying mother. The mayor finds a substitute, 13-year-old Wei Minzhi. Gao doubts Minzhi can do the job, but no one else is available. Already children are leaving; the former class of 40 is down to 28. Gao promises Minzhi a financial bonus if numbers are no lower when he returns.

Minzhi makes her pupils copy lessons from the blackboard while she keeps guard outside. Zhang Huike, a bright but disruptive boy, causes frequent trouble. Sports officials come to take away Ming Xinhong, a promising runner. One morning Zhang Huike fails to appear; his mother has sent him to the city to work.

Determined to bring Huike back, Minzhi enlists her pupils' help in raising money for the trip to the city. There, she spends her last funds on some fruitless notices. A passer-by suggests she try the television station for help, but Minzhi is refused admittance. Determined, she haunts the gates for a day and a half until the station manager hears about her and allows her to make an appeal for Huike on a current-affairs programme. The show is seen by the manageress of the café where Huike is working. Reunited, the two are taken back to Shuixian by a television crew. The school is inundated with gifts of money, and Huike writes "Teacher Wei" on the board.

Review

Not One Less' director Zhang Yimou made his name with a run of lavish, highly coloured period melodramas starring his then partner Gong Li: Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern, Shanghai Triad and the like. But midway through this sequence of opulent, historical films came The Story of Qiu Ju, a contemporary drama in realistic style, in which Gong Li drabbed herself down to play a peasant woman fighting for justice for her husband after he is assaulted by the village headman. With Not One Less, Zhang returns to the low-key realism of Qiu Ju. Once again a lone female from a peasant village travels to the city and through sheer persistence achieves her goal in the face of bureaucratic obstacles. But where the earlier film assigned the lead roles to professionals, using non-professionals in support, Not One Less is cast entirely from non-professionals, nearly all playing what they are in life: the village mayor is a real mayor, the stationery-store clerk works in a stationery store and so on.

This leads to occasional awkward moments: the mayor in particular has trouble with eyelines, not always looking at the person he's talking to (but presumably at Zhang for direction). In general, though, there's an appealing freshness about the performances, especially in the classroom scenes. Altogether the first half of the film, prior to Wei Minzhi's departure for the city (where she is determined to locate her ex-pupil Huike) works well, featuring a wealth of vivid detail. Teacher Gao, worried Minzhi will waste the poverty-stricken school's supply of chalk, tells her that words on the blackboard should be only "as big as a donkey's turd". Initially sullen and indifferent, Minzhi is increasingly engaged with her pupils as they work out the practical maths involved in raising her bus fare to the city or troop off on an expedition to the local brickworks to earn the money.

But on reaching the city, the film turns steadily more schematic and predictable. Shots of Minzhi and Huike separately wandering the streets, each gazing at food stalls, or of Minzhi asleep on the pavement as pedestrians stride past, are pure Victorian cliché. It's no surprise, then, when the equivalent of the kindly old gentleman - a stock figure in sentimental Victorian literature - shows up. Trying to enter the local television station, Minzhi is blocked by a jobsworth demanding her ID. But when the station manager finds out, he rebukes his employee, sits Minzhi down in his office with a bowl of food and puts her on television to broadcast her appeal. Occasional minor officials may be callously inflexible, but rest assured, those in charge are always ready to help.

Qiu Ju, made after Zhang had run into trouble with the authorities in Beijing, also pushed a message calculated to warm the hearts of the Chinese leadership. But Not One Less, being partly funded by a subsidiary of US-based Columbia Pictures, has two masters to please. So we not only get a clumsy scene where Minzhi and her class share Cokes at the village store ("Coke tastes good," they enthuse), but a feelgood ending that might embarrass Hollywood at its most shameless. Beaming peasants, kindly television crew, cartloads of coloured chalks with which the kids can write suitable ideograms ("Home - Happiness - Diligence") on the blackboard - and a sententious end-title telling us that, while poverty forces a million Chinese children each year to leave school, voluntary contributions have helped 15 per cent to return. All that's missing is the address we should send donations to.

Not One Less Shelly Kraicer, an excerpted review from Persimmon

Zhang Yimou’s ten feature films to date, beginning with Red Sorghum in 1987, have evoked heated attacks and passionate defenses, both within China and in the international film community. Not One Less is no exception. Released in China in early 1999 to official and critical approval and audience enthusiasm, the film hit a roadblock at the Cannes International Film Festival later that year. Although the circumstances are not entirely clear, preselection comments by Cannes officials suggested that the film was seen as being insufficiently antigovernment, and too propagandistic. Faced with his film being relegated to “un certain regard” (the secondary, noncompetitive series), instead of being included in the prestigious “official selection” (the high profile competition at Cannes), Zhang published a letter in the Beijing Youth Daily publicly withdrawing Not One Less (and his other new film, The Road Home) from the festival, and objecting to what he perceived to be a narrowly politicized attitude towards Chinese film: “It seems that in the West, there are always two ‘political criteria’ when interpreting Chinese films, [they are perceived as being either] ‘anti-government’ or ‘propaganda.’ This is unacceptable.”

The film is set in the present, in a small village in Hebei province. When teacher Gao is called home to care for an ailing relative, the village mayor hires Wei Minzhi as Gao’s temporary replacement. Thirteen-year-old Wei is barely older than her students, and her teaching skills are next to nonexistent. But her stubbornness and determination know no bounds. Unsure that the mayor will pay her, Wei focuses on the ten yuan bonus that Gao offers her if all twenty-five students in the class are still there when he returns, and “not one less.”

Gao leaves Wei a piece of chalk for each lesson, which consists of writing a text on the blackboard for the students to copy. Wei’s pedagogical methodology seems largely to consist of locking the students in the classroom and guarding the door from the outside. This works until troublemaker Zhang Huike manages to runs away from school, forced to try to find work in the nearby city of Zhangjiakou to support his ailing, debt-ridden mother. Wei now has a mission: to get to the city, recover Zhang, and thus claim her bonus. But by the time she arrives there, Zhang has disappeared. After exhausting but fruitless attempts to find him, Wei approaches the local TV station, whose manager, impressed by her determination, features her on a top-rated “social problem” program. Zhang sees the show, and the producers return him and Wei to their village, donations and extra chalk for the school in hand.

In outline, the plot seems like a recipe for something merely sentimental. But Not One Less is not just a story about cute kids, helpful adults, and happy endings. These elements are present, though, and do contribute to the “audience-friendly” feel of the film, a quality which accounts not only for its popularity with Chinese audiences, but also for its perceived marketability by North American multinational corporate distributors.

The neorealist elements of Not One Less contribute to its ability to transcend the sentimental. All of the actors in the film are amateurs. Moreover, most play a version of who they are in real life: the mayor is actually Tian Zhengda, a village mayor; the TV station manager is, in fact, the manager of a local station in Zhangjiakou. The two central children, Wei Mingzhi and Zhang Huike, who play characters of the same name, were found in rural Hebei schools after a long search by the director and his team. This semidocumentary aspect of Not One Less—its use of hidden cameras (during Wei’s interactions with crowds in the city, for example), location shooting, and natural lighting—results in a fascinating uncertainty. There is a sort of ambivalence or play between the different genres of realism, staged documentary, and fiction that is reminiscent of recent masterpieces of Iranian cinema (Makhmalbaf and Kiarostami being the two most prominent exponents) [...].

For the full review, please see the current issue of Persimmon

FILM REVIEW; A Substitute Teacher Is Put to the Test Review by A.O. Scott from The New York Times, February 18, 2000

FILM; Beyond Reality, To Truth essay by A.O. Scott from The New York Times, June 25, 2000

THE ROAD HOME C 73

China (89 mi) 1999

BFI | Sight & Sound | The Road Home (1999) John Mount from Sight and Sound, December 2000

Businessman Luo Yusheng returns to Sanhetun in north China after the sudden death of his father, the village schoolteacher. The district mayor tells Yusheng that his mother Zhao Di wants a traditional funeral which entails carrying his father's coffin many miles. The mayor fears there may not be enough local men to perform this job; most have moved to the city. Yusheng finds his mother in vigil outside the schoolhouse and takes her home. As she weaves the funeral cloth, Yusheng recalls the story of his parents' courtship.

Zhao Di is 18 years old and living with her blind mother when 20-year-old Luo Changyu arrives from East Gate to be the schoolteacher. As the village men help him construct a new schoolhouse, Zhao Di weaves some red cloth to be bound around the school's rafters. When the school opens Zhao Di visits a nearby well in the hope of catching Changyu's eye. By the time Changyu visits Zhao Di and her mother for a meal he is smitten; before their romance can blossom, however, Changyu is summoned back to the city for questioning. He leaves Zhao Di a small gift and promises to return. Zhao Di waits for hours when she hears a rumour of Changyu's imminent arrival in the village and develops a fever. Attempting to walk to the city, she collapses. Changyu sneaks home to see her without permission from the political tribunal questioning him. He and Zhao Di are kept apart for a further two years. Once he returns they are never separated again.

Yusheng gives the mayor money to transport his father by foot, but on the day of the funeral hundreds of Changyu's former pupils turn up to carry his coffin. Zhao Di reminds Yusheng of his father's wish that he become a schoolteacher. As a mark of respect Yusheng teaches the village children for one day in the old schoolhouse.

Review

With his recent two films Not One Less and now The Road Home, both modest efforts produced on low budgets, director Zhang Yimou has set himself against the increasingly commercialised grain of contemporary Chinese cinema. But his stated desire to appropriate with these films the vigour of Italian neorealism, the French New Wave and contemporary Iranian cinema is only partially fulfilled.

The Road Home opens with a winding road trip which recalls the opening scene of Abbas Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us. But the similarity is largely superficial: gifted director though he is, Zhang Yimou is unable to match Kiarostami's ability to develop and sustain narrative through camera movement and the deployment of spatial relations on screen. Neither is there any sign of the complex reflexivity that characterises Kiarostami's work.

That said, this is a sincere film which aspires to tell a simple love story - between Zhao Di, a young villager, and Luo Changyu, the local schoolteacher - in a way that celebrates unfashionable virtues such as stoic endurance in the face of adversity, the dignity of rural, unsophisticated folk, respect for family and reverence for education. Zhang reverses filmic convention by shooting the events of the present (in which Zhao Di's son recounts his parents' courtship) in cold monochrome and the past in warm colour, which hints at the shift in sensibilities over the years. The central love story itself is heartfelt and engagingly portrayed by the two young leads who convey in a few chaste smiles the constancy of their romantic bond, and there are numerous touching moments, such as when the image of Zhao Di as a young woman is loosely superimposed on that of her older self. As one would expect, the film is exquisitely photographed by Hou Yong (who shot Zhang's Not One Less) with many breathtaking visual moments, although these are sometimes coarsened by San Bao's plush music.

A director whose work has caused controversy among the Chinese authorities in the past (Raise the Red Lantern was banned for some time in China), here Zhang seems to be taking a swipe at the way traditional forms of education were attacked during the cultural revolution and the way they are it is devalued in modern, materialistic China. Unfortunately, The Road Home doesn't match the emotional force and nuance of the political critique in, say, Tian Zhuanghuang's 1993 film The Blue Kite.

For all its pleasures, The Road Home feels like a minor film from a director in transition. While Zhang's instinct to break free from the encumbrances of Hollywood production and invoke the spirit of more adventurous world cinemas is laudable, it doesn't sit easily with the times in China or indeed with his talents as a director. There is an element of autobiography in The Road Home which may explain its inward-looking nostalgia; hopefully this will recede as Zhang develops a more distinctive voice, one which recaptures the piercing conflicts, memorable characterisations and energy of the dazzling series of films he made in the first half of the 90s.

The Road Home • Senses of Cinema Dimitri Tsahuridis from Senses of Cinema, July 18, 2000

In considering a response to The Road Home, I am thinking how contrived, unnatural and, why not, futile, recent western cinematic productions seem. - Have you seen Bats? - And then, this meeting between Australian scriptwriters and funding bodies, which took place last year, comes to mind. Every story presented by the scriptwriters was convoluted with too many undercover agents and some predictable hairdressers as well. Which makes me wonder: having abandoned simplicity and plain story-telling are we being rather kind in our critical response to the "exotic" films from say China, Iran or Madagascar?

In The Road Home, Zhang Yimou returns to the plateau of his last film, the village school, collaborating with the cinematographer and the music composer from the said Not One Less (1999). With this text though, his dramatics are more affecting and effective. The centre of the story this time is the life and love of the village school teacher and his wife of forty years. Told in flashback by their son, who has returned to the village to arrange the burial of his father, the film is startling in its choice of opening style and scenes. In grainy black and white, we are looking at a jeep driving through snowy mountain roads; the son's homecoming, or maybe an aftershave commercial. - Indeed, throughout the film, the present remains dark, whilst the past/flashback is told in rich and warm colour. - When the son meets the mourning mother, we learn of her desire to bring the coffin from the city back to the village on foot, carried by local men, as is the custom. As importantly though, we discover the story of the parents' courtship, which is known to everybody in the village.

The flashback story begins with the new teacher's arrival in the village and it is propelled when the village beauty tries to attract his attention. By the time the teacher responds, he is taken away 'for questioning' in the city. Before leaving though, he steals the time to leave a little gift, a hair pin to the girl, and promises to return. While away for a long time, the girl takes care of the school and when she hears of the teacher's return, she sets off through snow and windstorms to welcome him. Collapsing in the snow, she is brought home to find the teacher was by her bedside for hours, but because he left the city without permission he is punished, for this is the time of the Cultural Revolution. The teacher will be allowed back to the village in two years' time, and again the girl is waiting for him along the road home when he returns. This is the same road the mother wants the funeral procession to follow when they return the coffin for burial. - I prefer referring to the characters as father/teacher and girl/mother because in my western ears their written names do not correspond to their pronounced sounds. -

I do not want to point to the smallness (read delicacy) of gestures, or the innocence of dramatic construction. Look at the two posters of the movie Titanic, strategically positioned in the old parents' home, maybe as an attempt at sarcasm by Zhang. As for the cinematography, even when in full Cinemascope, I did think it felt somewhat agricultural. No, this is not a film of atmospherics. What we find in The Road Home is perfectly crafted story-telling of irresistible charm. Zhang sees this work a reaction to vulgarity and a return to a chinese - but not only - tradition: the poetic narrative. The magic for this commentator is distilled in the mother's statement: "I cannot read but for forty years I would walk to the school and I would stand outside to hear his voice reading". Cinematically it may be innocent but dramatically it is undeniably affecting. Although I did see the film in a media screening with seasoned viewers, I was not the only one with moist eyes at the end. See if you can resist!

At a higher level, it offers a case for what environment may be fertile for great art. Again reading from Zhang's manifesto: "Look, we think we have it hard here in China, but the pressures of Islamic Orthodoxy in Iran are far worse than anything we have to contend with here. But despite the pressures, Iranian directors succed in making great films." There lies, I believe, the humility of a great creator.

FILM REVIEW; Two Lives In China, With Mao Lurking Stephen Holden from The New York Times, May 25, 2001

FILM; Women of China, Chasing Their Impossible Dreams A.O. Scott from The New York Times, May 27, 2001

HERO B 85

Hong Kong China (99 mi) 2003 Slide Show: The Colors of 'Hero'

In ancient China, before the reign of the first emperor, warring factions throughout the Six Kingdoms plot to assassinate the most powerful ruler, Qin, who yearns to unify the divided nation through bloody conquest. When a minor official defeats Qin's three most powerful enemies, each possessing such skill and prowess that Qin’s entire army could not defeat them, assassins with colorful names like Sky, Flying Snow, and Broken Sword, the official is summoned to the palace to tell Qin the story of his surprising victory, a story which keeps changing as Qin questions him, which is revealed through elaborately colorful, highly decorative and superbly realized martial arts flashback sequences. In something of a Mad Max futuristic reference to the wasteland, we discover: “This land doesn't know a real hero. Yet.”

Enter Jet Li as a character called Nameless, easily the fastest sword in the East, beating all comers with nary a scrape. But what we see is mostly ace cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s eye candy. While there are stunning set pieces with Kurosawa-like horses, warriors and arrows, all looking resplendently ornate, there’s no poetic heart that makes any of this matter. This is a ravishingly beautiful, artistically splendid film that falls flat on its face with such a lightweight script, which so closely resembles the near wordless, exaggerated violence and austerity of Clint Eastwood in those bleak Sergio Leone epics, so cliché-ridden here that the film is reduced to mere spectacle, a film filled with so many flying sworsdmen that after awhile, it just doesn’t matter any more. While this may be about the supposed unity of China into one land, a subject that was clearly covered in Chen Kaige’s 1999 film THE EMPEROR AND THE ASSASSIN, this is instead the highest financed ($30 million) and also the biggest box-office hit in China, offering Yimou a chance to show martial arts technical prowess of such amazing proportion that it had to outdo Ang Lee’s CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON. “We don’t need another hero.”

Hero Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

I actually have very little to add to what Shelly Kraicer says here. (However, Shelly doesn't cite one key scene that seems to be to be a vital example for his thesis. The "battle" between Nameless and Sky, dramatizing the mental component of martial arts with a flourish I'm sure made Tarantino drool, clarifies the force of absence and the dialectic between thought and action.) I found Hero utterly breathtaking, but I admit I'm still puzzled by its politics. The overriding theme is clear -- individual needs, ambitions, claims for independence, etc., must ultimately be put aside in favor of "our land" (or, as I'm told the expression should more properly be translated, "all under heaven"). While this doesn't necessarily imply an allegory for Chinese Communism or its claims of national interest over and above the niggling needs of Taiwan, Tibet, Hong Kong, etc., it's certainly not out of the question. Hero's eye-popping beauty and formal mastery is self-evident, and despite my own political leanings, I am in fact capable of embracing even an outright totalitarian piece of cinema (if that's what Hero is) provided it succeeds on purely aesthetic grounds. But it is a surprising sentiment coming from the man who made Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern not so long ago. It led me to idly consider, just for a moment, that a thin level of irony might be at work. This officially-sanctioned blockbuster sacrifices Zhang's authorial consistency, and four of Asian cinema's most beloved performers, in the service of itself, its sweeping effects and lush color schemes and nationalist message. In the end, the only thing I'm sure of is that Hero is a whirling, kinetic Kantian machine, and it works.

Hero Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine

Hero is a deviation of a sorts for Zhang Yimou, a director who used melodrama and Gong Li to popular effect throughout the '90s and who has yet to outperform the success of his Red Sorghum and Raise the Red Lantern. Now, Miramax is positioning the orgiastic Hero as Zhang's daring answer to Ang Lee's dopey Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The film is less narratively underwhelming but it's infinitely more dazzling and spiritually profound. Crouching Tiger's critical reception was curious at best: Armond White called Lee's imitation of Hong Kong cinema a sincere form of flattening; Kent Jones and Michael Atkinson suggested that the film could be enjoyed regardless of one's relationship to its more authentic precursors like Peking Opera Blues; while J. Hoberman, most tellingly, placed "the fight scenes" from the film on his top 10 runner-up list for that year. Hero is essentially a chamber piece and it employs a Rashomon-like narrative mechanism throughout its 90 minutes that's every bit in service of the film as its sumptuous mise-en-scène, delirious pacing, and eye-popping aerial effects. If Crouching Tiger was lavishly soporific, Hero is almost invasively mood-enhancing. Jet Li stars as Nameless, a warrior who may or may not be conspiring against a Qin warlord with the help of his three would-be assassins (the all-star triad is played by Donny Yen, Maggie Cheung, and Tony Leung). Hero is alive with Chinese history, electrified by the dizzying sensuality of its convoluted love triangle, and ennobled by its acknowledgement of basic Taoist principles (indeed, trust is the film's weapon of choice). Heavily psychological, the color-coded set pieces are paced like musical numbers and suggest the film's art department and superstar cinematographer Chris Doyle are feng shui enthusiasts, and while green curtains seem to exist solely so they could fall deliriously to the ground, there's still an overwhelming sense here that the power of the sword is inextricably linked to the forces of color and nature. Hero is elliptical, primal, radically disjointed, and female-empowering. Everything a wu xia should be…and then some.

Absence as spectacle: Zhang Yimou's Hero Shelly Kraicer from Cinema Scope

About 30 minutes into Zhang Yimou’s new film Hero [Ying xiong], we see two women, Flying Snow and Moon, poised sword to sword, suspended as if by magic in a sea of whirling red, orange, and yellow leaves. Maggie Cheung, In the Mood for Love’s [Huayang nianhua, 2000] cheongsam-sculpted lover, and Zhang Ziyi, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon’s [Wohu canglong, 2001] primly ferocious warrior-maiden, are ostensibly opposing Qin dynasty swordswomen. But in this impossibly beautiful scene, painted in pure colour by Zhang Yimou, photographed as dream poetry by cinematographer Christopher Doyle, and staged as a dance of angels by action choreographer Ching Siu-tung, the two women are aloft, suspended in vortices of twirling leaves. It’s hardly a combat: more like an ecstasy of swordplay, a soaring of the spirit, a dazzle of free flight. To my eyes one of the most beautiful scenes ever recorded on film, it is only one of a profusion of spectacles that Hero offers an audience that should be prepared to be dazzled.

Audience in China have responded to Hero with a fervour that’s completely unprecedented. Helped by availability – the film is playing continuously (as of this writing) in most of China’s first-run urban theatres – and by strict control over illicit DVD copies, which are only now appearing on the streets almost four weeks after Hero’s Beijing premiere in the Great Hall of the People, Chinese audiences have made this the most popular Chinese film ever released in the country. In a weird twist, these bootlegs, shot on video from the back of a theatre, were actually released by the official rights holder, who claimed that they couldn’t wait until the authorized release date without losing substantial sales. It is the second most popular movie release in Chinese history, after the Titanic (1998) juggernaut, and receipts are still rolling in. (The box office of the previous Chinese-language record holder, the dutiful anti-corruption film Fatal Decision [Zhongda xuanze, 2000], was inflated by mass ticket purchases by government work units.) A friend reported in January (with only slight exaggeration) that the traditional Chinese greeting of “Chibao le ma” (literally: “Have you eaten?”) has recently ceded to “Ni youmeiyou kan Yingxiong” (“Have you seen Hero yet?”).

An alarming concentration of star power in front of and behind the camera certainly helps. Starring along with Zhang Ziyi and Maggie Cheung are Jet Li, the most popular exemplar of the swordplay hero in contemporary Chinese cinema, and Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Cheung’s co-star from In the Mood for Love. Leung and Cheung are now Chinese cinema’s dramatic couple par excellence: both A-list movie stars at home, and both arguably the two greatest actors currently working in Hong Kong cinema. Behind the camera, Zhang Yimou is a household name in China, and has been building a popular following in recent years by abandoning controversial art films – unappreciated in China by official censors and mainstream audiences (e.g. Ju Dou [1989], Raise the Red Lantern [Dahong denglong gaogao gua, 1991], and To Live [Huozhe, 1994]) – in favour of less-demanding and non-controversial crowd pleasers like Not One Less [Yige dou buneng shao, 1998], The Road Home [Wode fuqin muqin, 1999], and Happy Times [Xingfu shiguang, 2000].

But Zhang has never before tried his hand at a period genre like the wuxia pian (conventionally translated as “swordplay film” or “martial chivalry genre”). Not to be confused with the kung fu movie, which involves sustained scenes of often brutal hand-to-hand combat with much leaping and kicking, wuxia films exist in a more idealized realm of legendary heroes living marginalized, carefree lives on the edges of everyday society. Weapons of choice are swords, spears, or daggers, wielded with fantastical skill allied to a spectacular ability to leap and soar at will. A typical wuxia pian draws the swordsman into the everyday world in order to fight, reluctantly, but with a firm moral compass, to defend the helpless against corrupt officials or leaders.

The genre has been a regular part of Chinese cinema since the 20s. King Hu launched wuxia pian’s modernist phase with exquisitely crafted, gracefully kinetic works like the recently restored Come Drink with Me [Da zui xia, 1966], Dragon Inn [Longmen kezhan, 1967], and A Touch of Zen [Xia nü, 1971]. It took Hong Kong master Tsui Hark, in collaboration with Hero’s choreographer Ching Siu-tung, to propel wuxia pian into the postmodern era. Their delirious extensions of King Hu’s innovations – including A Chinese Ghost Story [Qiannü yougui, 1986], the Swordsman series (1990-93), and Dragon Gate Inn [Xin longmen kezhan, 1992] – were wildly popular with Chinese audiences, and attracted the attention of a subculture of Western filmgoers and festival programmers. Postmodern wuxia films, in the hands of Tsui and Ching, were critical and radical (though the many followers who cashed in on the new wuxia wave produced more than their share of backward-looking nostalgic pap). Through acceleration, intensification, and distortion, they reconfigured the genre’s key elements in works that were tributes, commentaries, and deconstructions, addressing sources of Chinese culture and film history, as well as Hong Kong’s mutating contemporaneity.

Wuxia pian seems, once again, irresistibly tempting to several internationally celebrated Chinese directors: witness Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time [Dongxie xidu, 1994], Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, and Tsui Hark’s Legend of Zu [Shu shan chuan, 2001]. Even Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien has claimed recently that he wants to join the wuxia club. With Hero, Zhang Yimou addresses the present by looking backwards – and sideways. Backwards to the 90s postmodern wuxia period, and sideways to Hong Kong’s commercial cinema. Systematically absorbing the subversive innovations of Hong Kong filmmakers Tsui Hark and Wong Kar-wai, Zhang simultaneously digs back to his roots and recreates, as wuxia pian, the cinema of pure spectacle and philosophical meditation that he (as cinematographer) and Chen Kaige created, in 1984, with Yellow Earth [Huang tudi].

Spectacle rather than storytelling: this is one key to opening up the complex world of Hero, and to the violently opposing critical reactions that have already greeted it in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Zhang Yimou follows Wong’s strategy in Ashes of Time, cutting off wuxia pian from the firm, stable satisfactions of simple narrative. Wong’s film proceeded by focusing on its characters’ free-floating longing, which seemed only tangentially pinned to a non-chronological, heavily elided, virtually irresolvable “story.” Zhang, on the other hand, gives his film multiple narratives, too many stories. Based on historical accounts, the story in its straightforward version has been made into many films, most recently by Chen Kaige as The Emperor and the Assassin [Jing Ke ci Qin Wang, 1998], and, before him, by Zhou Xiaowen in the superior The Emperor’s Shadow [Qin song, 1996]. Zhang’s version centres on the King of Qin before he conquers the surrounding kingdoms, unifies China, and becomes its first emperor. Four mythical assassins vie to stop the king’s brutal accumulation of power and territory: two lone swordsmen, Sky (Donnie Yen) and Nameless (Jet Li); and two lovers, Broken Sword (Tony Leung) and Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung). Moon (Zhang Ziyi) is Broken Sword’s faithful student.

Hero is a film about storytelling, or, to put it more abstractly, a film that puts narrativity itself into question. The tales its characters tell (recounted alternately by Nameless, and by the King of Qin) are mutually contradictory. Nameless arrives for an audience with the King and tells him a straightforward tale of chivalry: how he defeats the King’s enemies one by one. But the King discovers this to be a false tale, and offers an alternative story, in which Nameless and his adversaries become co-plotters against him. Once the cycle of story/counter-story has started, it’s difficult to stop. Nameless offers a new revision, more complex than either of the preceding two. One effect (salutary to me, but extremely frustrating to some of the audience) of this stream of mutually contradictory stories is to prevent the viewer from investing in the delights and comforts of narrative: a suspension of disbelief; a temporary surrender to the standard rhythms of tension, crisis, and release; a comforting though illusory satisfaction in being able to draw a line between what’s “real” and what’s “imagined” in the diegesis.

Instead of a struggle within narrative, Hero stages a struggle among narratives. It puts control of narrative into question. It’s really all about who gets to tell stories: Nameless or the King. Zhang’s best recent films, The Story of Qiu Ju [Qiu Ju da guansi, 1992] and Not One Less, incarnate this favourite theme: speaking stories to power. Each is constructed as a chain of encounters between its heroine and various avatars of state power. Each celebrates its apparently powerless heroine’s ability to speak to power in such a way as to extract a series of small victories, whose sum adds up to something like a formidable triumph. Nameless, following in their footsteps, is just another hero-storyteller, but all of this yields a sneaking suspicion that there is an autobiographical dimension to Zhang’s fascination with narrators. Zhang is also, of course, a storyteller. He has had to confront power’s counter-narratives quite often in his career. His earlier films, from Ju Dou to To Live, pushed the boundaries of acceptable stories with little caution, and became struggles with authority over who gets to tell the real story, and how divergent it can be from the official line. All were banned from exhibition in China at the time of their release, though only To Live (with its unacceptably critical history of the PRC from 1945 to the 70s) remains officially banned today.

Rather than narrative tout court, Hero offers pleasures more rarified, more abstract and profound: a cinema of spectacle allied to a philosophical program. That program can be provisionally allied with Daoism, a set of ideals and a way of living that finds fullness in absence, transcendence in renunciation, in letting go of struggle, of desires, of the material world. Daoism’s founding texts, the Laozi (Lao Tzu) and the Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu) originated during the Warring States period of anarchy and turmoil, the end of which was marked by the grand unification of China (221 BCE) under Qin Shihuang. (In Hero, he is still years away from this grand conquest, and merely King of Qin.) Hero’s characters, themselves, led by Broken Sword, learn progressively to renounce what they have been striving for, and grow to accept that their goals were merely provisional, way-stations on the path to something greater, though less tangible. All except the King, who alone at the end in possession of his authority has a power now approaching unchallenged hegemony. But this is a power that seems empty, whose value is completely degraded when compared with the understanding his rivals, the assassins, have achieved.

Spectacle, rather than storytelling, teaches Hero’s philosophy. It is difficult to overstate the magnitude of the filmmaker’s aesthetic achievement: the set-pieces crafted by Zhang Yimou, Christopher Doyle, and Ching Siu-tung are as ecstatically kinetic and as rapturously beautiful as any I’ve seen in a wuxia pian. The fight among the leaves; Nameless and Broken Sword’s pure crystalline standoff, suspended above a lake; Nameless and Flying Snow versus a blizzard of Qin arrows; Broken Sword and Flying Snow’s astonishingly convincing battle against 10,000 Qin soldiers guarding the King’s palace: all of these have the power and the beauty to thrill all but the most jaded filmgoer. But they also serve a specific function. They progress, more or less systematically, from closely pictured combat through abstracted jousting to ethereal non-combat, from the ground to the air, from physical conflict to spiritual opposition. As more and more of the material content of the fights/flights is pared away, absence, silence, space, and peace begin to predominate. The film’s most insistent visual motif is the empty circle; a zone of complete emptiness that a hero creates around him or herself, a zone whose authority leaves the hero, invulnerable, isolated, and, at least temporarily at peace.

These ideas emerge in the dialogue, as Broken Sword, then Nameless, learn to articulate the power of renunciation explicitly. In this they are apparently accompanied by the King, who justifies his yearning for absolute power, for control of “all under heaven,” by explaining that this is the necessary condition for peace, defined as an absence of fearful chaos. This is where Hero gets into serious trouble with almost all Chinese critics, who jump all over Zhang Yimou for purportedly building an ideological justification for absolute power, for tyranny as a necessary means to a peaceful end. This is nothing new: the director’s careful balancing act – presenting films that seem to offer enough to win mainstream (and censor board) approval while maintaining their moral autonomy, richness, and provocative ambiguity vis-à-vis power – is always vulnerable to being (sometimes deliberately, by now automatically) misread by all sides.

Viewers who want to align themselves with the world view of the King of Qin will find a paean to Chinese unity and totalitarian brutality, a reading there for the taking (perhaps present for censors looking for an excuse to greenlight Hero’s ideological approval-worthiness). But such an argument is not only circular, it fails to take into account the film’s clear strategy of distributing – hence undermining – the limited authority of any single character, and of the idea of narrative closure itself. Hero celebrates absence as spectacle; it glorifies absolute renunciation and perfect non-violence as preconditions for peace. Like Nameless, it addresses authority, undermining power’s grip on narrativity. As filmed philosophy, it is both historically apt and disquietingly contemporary, challenging any state or empire that strives for total power – both ancient and modern, Chinese and otherwise – with a force and a beauty impossible to ignore.

Hero: China’s response to Hollywood globalization Jenny Kwok Wah Lau from Jump Cut, Spring 2007

Film on Ruthless Dynasty Delights China's Leaders Joseph Kahn from The New York Times, January 2, 2003

Cracking the Color Code of 'Hero' Robert Mackey from The New York Times, August 15, 2005

Hidden Truths in the Court of a King Who Would Be Emperor Manohla Dargis review from The New York Times, August 27, 2004

'Hero' Soars, and Its Director Thanks 'Crouching Tiger' Craig S. Smith from The New York Times, September 2, 2004

HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS B 85

Hong Kong China (119 mi) 2003

Another marital arts follow up to Yimou’s HERO, apparently his latest artistic fascination, but it looks so similar in style that it could literally be the same film. Set at the end of the fading Tang dynasty in 700 AD, the Emperor’s police attempt to infiltrate their biggest enemy, sending soldiers to protect their corrupt government against the secret, revolutionary, underground warriors from the House of the Flying Daggers, who are attempting to assassinate the powerful lords, but the police officials grow more and more interested in the lurid beauty of one young female assassin. Again, the screen is filled with gorgeous imagery, some of it spectacular, such as the ornate costumes with such vividly bright colors, or the dance of the echoes, where the supposedly blind showgirl, Zhang Ziyi, uses her long scarves in a beautifully choreographed ballet to recreate similar sounds in a circle of brightly colored standing drums that matches the sounds she heard earlier when a lord flicks nuts off the drums, or an up and down fight sequence in a bamboo forest where warriors and spears are literally flying through the trees, or a final sequence in the snow that features the leading players all seemingly having to fight to their death. Again, the story and dialogue was silly most of the time, so we only have the enduring images to keep us enthralled, and if that works for you, fine, but it feels empty nonetheless, despite the ravishing beauty of Kathleen Battle’s voice which was employed for the finale.

House of Flying Daggers Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

It seems to me that whether one prefers Hero or House of Flying Daggers will depend on whether you prefer sculpture or wallpaper. That sounds snidely dismissive of Daggers and I don't exactly mean it to be. But Daggers is a White Elephant of the highest order. If I were at home with my books, I would pull the exact Farber quotation about "a frieze in an all-over pattern" or something close to that, because Zhang's visual M.O. here is the repetitive strafing of the screen with thin trees, or bamboo, or strands of tall grass, all in medium close-up, turning nearly every shot into a field of undulating vertical stripes. The strategy tends to backfire, since a painting wouldn't implicitly chide you for your inability to apprehend the color-field immediately. Paintings, naturally, don't move, but Zhang is always hurriedly moving us onto the next ostentatiously splendid set-piece. The bombardment eventually exhausts the eye, whereas Hero's reliance on primary colors and volumetric shapes allowed an abstract world to develop, rather than a throbbing curtain. What's more, Zhang's hyper-realistic autumnal landscapes were so "perfect" as to no longer be beautiful. Like the backdrops my family and I used to get photographed in front of at Olan Mills Studio, Daggers' canned simula-foliage veers into kitsch. What's good about the film, actually, are the moments that embrace visual and narrative stasis, in favor of straight-up pageantry. The "echo game" is a gorgeous highlight, balletic and making the parsimonious most of its Matrix-time CGI cribbings. And while there isn't a fight sequence anywhere in Daggers that compares to the perfectly parsed choreography of Hero, they do provide reasonably successful kinetic diversion, a whirlwind of sharp green dowels and stubby glinting computer blades. The storyline, despite essentially being [MINOR SPOILER] a rehash of Infernal Affairs circa 850 A.D., hit its paces effectively, except that its overwrought, stuck-in-a-moment-you-can't-get-out-of romantic interludes brought Daggers to a screeching halt, once again flattening the film into orangey gauze and forcing us to contemplate the status of our own vision, stuck to the image like flypaper.

House Of Flying Daggers | Review | Screen Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily

Beyond a doubt the most visually ravishing film on offer at Cannes this year, Zhang Yimou’s return to the sword-fighting genre - following last year’s Hero - mixes action, romance and a touch of dance to uneven but often thrilling effect.

Acquired by Sony Pictures Classics in the US, the film is unlikely to be as significant a crossover hit as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (also released in that territory by SPC) but should find a wide and appreciative audience, with a strong female component, given Zhang Ziyi’s turn as a singing, dancing, knife-throwing action femme. Ancillary life should flourish given that many of its action sequences and outrageous stunts are ones to watch again and again in their own right. The film premiered out of competition at Cannes.

The slightly threadbare story is really an excuse for derring-do topped off with love-triangle melodrama. In 859AD, the Tang dynasty is in decline, and the government faces revolt led by guerrilla armies including the ‘House of Flying Daggers’, a Robin Hood-like group now under a mysterious new leader.

The old leader’s daughter is said to be working as a showgirl in a Peony Pavillion house of entertainment, and police captain Leo (Lau) dispatches his lieutenant Jin (Kaneshiro) incognito to check her out. The new girl there is Mei (Zhang), a beautiful blind dancer. The lecherous Yin immediately pounces on her, but when Leo intervenes, Mei proves her credentials by performing the extraordinary Echo Dance, a routine involving scarves, drums and ricocheting beans - a furious bit of virtuoso razzle-dazzle that won spontaneous applause at the press screening.

Mei is arrested only to be released by a mysterious warrior - Jin, prosecuting his duplicitous mission. But as the two go on the run from Leo’s army, they gradually fall in love, while Mei proves a prodigious dab hand at martial arts, flying daggers being just part of her repertoire.

The film loses momentum in its mid-section, the double-crosses and shifts of identity becoming a touch wearying, but the final romantic stand-off gives the film operatic new wings, as the principals confront each other in a snowstorm.

The fact that there are only three main characters - with Song Dandan’s benignly manipulative madam hovering in the background - gives the film a curiously chamber feel. It suffers slightly from knocking us out so decisively in the first act with the Echo Dance, but there are equally flamboyant routines throughout, notably a showdown in a forest, with sharp bamboo projectiles zipping perilously out of nowhere.

The flying daggers of the title also feature heavily in some stunning and downright cheeky digital routines, in which they glide through mid-air like radio-controlled missiles, leaving you wondering whatever happened to the laws of gravity, but you will admire the film’s cheek.

The art direction and costumes are on a level of artistry equal to the action. The Peony Pavillion sequence displays a lushness on a par with Bollywood at its most fanciful, with a gorgeous palette of blues, oranges and subtly-matched deep pastels. Colours themselves effectively become narrative elements: when the members of the Flying Daggers gang eventually reveal themselves, we gasp in part because their costumes are such an extraordinary shade of green.

Digitals allow Zhang Yimou to manipulate settings to genuinely magical effect, as in the finale, where a lush autumnal landscape turns white in seconds, thanks to a sudden snowstorm. The sound design too is stunning and richly complex.

Allowing for the schematic nature of their characters, the three leads generate gusto and charisma, with Lau’s duplicitous cop proving more complex than he first appears, and Kaneshiro’s initially boorish rake becoming a genuinely heroic charmer as events develop. Overall, however, the film belongs to Zhang Ziyi, who takes her action-girl ingenue persona to further peaks of prowess, her proving not just breathtakingly athletic but also a romantic heroine in the grand sense.

Zhang Yimou directs with masterful panache, and seems to have found a far more comfortable mode to work in following the low-budget mawkishness of his late 1990s films such as The Road Home. Audiences susceptible to a heady blend of kitsch, poetic finesse and kick-ass action will have a treat, even if the film does not finally induce the full swoon.

House of Flying Daggers | Exils Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from the Guardian, May 19, 2004

Zhang Yimou's delectable martial arts film House of Flying Daggers transformed jaded festival-goers into a crowd of kids at a Saturday morning picture show. We cheered, we gasped, we applauded wildly, we even discreetly sniffled at the emotional climax.

Like his previous film Hero, this is a drama of chivalry and horseplay in the high classical style, set in China AD859. Hong Kong megastar Andy Lau plays Leo, an uptight army captain called to investigate a disturbance at a brothel. Local wideboy Jin, played by Takeshi Kaneshiro, is forcing his attentions on the bordello's most exotic attraction: Mei, a blind and breathtakingly beautiful showgirl. Mei turns out to be a mover and shaker in every sense: a deadly warrior with sword, knife and spear and an agent of the Flying Daggers underground movement dedicated to bringing down the corrupt, tyrannical Tang dynasty.

Yimou's first set piece - in which Mei demonstrates her exquisite Dance of Echos, which segues into a fight scene - is seat-grippingly exciting and wonderful to look at. Hong Kong fight director Tony Ching mixes "bullet-time" airborne steel weaponry with breathless combat and serene visual effects. The drama triangulates the fortunes of Mei, Leo and Jin to such a degree that I guess Zhang Yiyi (playing Mei) could be forgiven for wondering - as Ingrid Bergman reportedly did on the set of Casablanca - just which of her leading men she was supposed to be in love with. This is a rip-roaringly entertaining film, with echoes of Crouching Tiger. A treat in store for UK audiences.

House of Flying Daggers: A Reappraisal • Senses of Cinema Hwanhee Lee from Senses of Cinema, April 15, 2005

House of Flying Daggers | Reviews | guardian.co.uk Film Peter Bradshaw, December 24, 2004

Silk Brocade Soaked in Blood and Passion A.O. Scott from The New York Times, October 9, 2004

Steamy Times Come to Chinese Films Jean Tang from The New York Times, November 27, 2004

RIDING ALONE FOR THOUSANDS OF MILES

China (107 mi) 2005

read full article » Brian Hu from Asia Pacific Arts

CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER (Man cheng jin dai huang jin jia) B 85

China Hong Kong (114 mi) 2006 ‘Scope Official site [China]

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned

A spectacularly sumptuous looking film, filled with exaggerated excess and spectacle with a musical soundtrack that is nearly entirely wailing voices, easily one of the most colorful films ever made, cinematography by Zhao Xiaoding, art design by Huo Tingxiao, featuring the equally illuminating Gong Li who is shot in a myriad of close ups, all in highly decorative make up and ornamental attire that accentuate her stunning beauty, as if the director is intentionally elevating her stature by offering her this elaborately decorated platform to remind us that at least in his mind, she’s one of the most gorgeous women on the planet. Almost immediately we discover that Gong Li as the Empress is methodically being poisoned in small meticulous doses through a ceremonial duty of taking herbal medicines through her tea, under orders of the Tang Dynasty Emperor (Chow Yun Fat), using the guise of treating her anemia. If ever there was a film that displayed in all its glory the evils of misogyny, this is it. Among the initial images are hundreds of beautiful women, all sleeping side by side in identical quarters, all awoken at precisely the same time with a ritualistic pounding of little drums, all wearing corsets that highlight their cleavage, dressed alike in ornate costumes, and all in the service of one man.

The film is a series of what goes on inside the corridors of the palace, which are filled with mind-altering colors as members of the royal family have their presence announced as they visit from room to room. One by one we meet her three sons, the eldest (Liu Ye) she apparently has been having an affair with, as she is not his birth mother, the second (Jay Chou) is a powerful warrior and army commander, while the third (Qin Junjie) is an out of the loop busy body who is barely noticed. The eldest is also having an affair with the sensuous young daughter (Li Man) of the court physician, both of whom are responsible for administering the herbal poison. The family is united at the Imperial Palace for the coming of the Chrysanthemum Festival, where each seems to be brooding their own plot, not the least of which is the Empress herself who is frantically embroidering thousands of golden chrysanthemum flowers, but also breaks out into sweats and nearly faints on occasion, due to the early effects of the poison. Using a palace spy, she determines the source of her slow death, and vows to get revenge. Meanwhile, however, appearances mean everything, and she may not refuse an order coming directly from the Emperor, so she continues to take her medicine faithfully, all under the careful watch of his minions.

As the oldest son is ineffectual, something of a hedonist, the Empress confides in her second son, who vows to support his mother, promising she will never have to drink another drop of the poison. But the oldest son learns of her plans ahead of time. What happens afterwards can only be described as the collapse of an empire, expressed through the exploits of black dressed ninja assassins who swoop down by ropes from mountaintops or cliffs, or jump down from the palace roofs or ceilings, by the second son’s golden clad army that seeks to retaliate against the Emperor, that march like ants, filling the entire screen, flooding each corridor with wall to wall soldiers, all brilliantly designed by the extraordinary work of action choreographer Tony Ching Siu-Tung. But there is resistance, attack and counter attack, where all we hear is the sound of marching feet as legions lose their lives under incessant volleys of arrows and spears, through hand to hand martial arts sequences, a highly stylized visualization that is overwhelmingly extravagant. And despite the RAN-like mayhem and chaos, an entire field of chrysanthemums covered in bloodied bodies, all signs of death are instantly removed, everything is reconstructed in its entirety within minutes, without a trace of any bloodshed. But the internalized bloodlust remains, the ruthless demand for total and absolute power, where the appearance of calm rules the day only after the utter annihilation of all opposing forces, so that in the end, blood is disguised by the appearance of beauty. Despite the positively breath-defying beauty in this film, it’s covering up a vile and empty landscape.

Slant Magazine [Keith Uhlich]

Zhang Yimou moves ever closer to grand opera with Curse of the Golden Flower, though this garish familial melodrama-cum-action extravaganza plays better in retrospect than it does in the moment. The percussive emotional rhythms of the wonderful House of Flying Daggers are nowhere evident (and, to be fair, we shouldn't expect a distinguished talent like Zhang to merely repeat his past successes), but the abstract, CGI-heavy martial artistry of Golden Flower feels downright inept at times, the effectiveness of its eye-singeing primary color schemes—Minnelli-esque dollops of Black! Gold! Red! clashing like the armies of heaven and hell—often destroyed by and drowned in a dissociative sea of green-screened pixels. All manner of punches are pulled each time Zhang cuts to a sweeping wide shot; when he confines his gaze to the palace of the Later Tang Dynasty Emperor (Chow Yun Fat) and Empress (Gong Li) the film improves by leaps and bounds. Golden Flower is primarily concerned with matters of court intrigue (incest, secret poisonings, illicit affairs, a massive coup d'état) that spiral grandly out of control. These Shakespeare-lite machinations are well-performed by all with an appropriately exaggerated theatricality (there are facial expressions in this film for which the term "to the rafters" might have been coined), but only Gong—her torso wrapped bodice-ripper tight, her face covered in strategically-placed beads of sweat—manages to wring some profundity from the proceedings. Zhang wisely allows Gong's grande dame emoting to carry Golden Flower overall and her post-bloodbath banshee wail is one for the Dragon Lady Macbeth hall of fame.

Blade of Flying Sparks | Village Voice Rob Nelson

Like his Hero and House of Flying Daggers, Zhang Yimou's third global-market gigaproduction makes little sense in narrative terms even after two screenings, but the sets, costumes, and cinematography are so intoxicating that it doesn't much matter. Zhang's interest in the wuxia (martial arts) film may well extend no further than the kick he gets out of constructing ostentatious palaces and then watching from behind the lens as they crumble to the ground—he's a movie director, in other words. As much as Marie Antoinette, Curse of the Golden Flower, set in the later Tang dynasty, circa A.D. 928, pits its cloistered melodrama against the riffraff that threatens to penetrate the royal chambers. It's a battle of genres, and after 90 minutes of mostly talk, talk, talk, ostensibly there to placate bourgeois newcomers to Asian action, the wuxia wins.

The Will Durant quote with which Mel Gibson commences Apocalypto could apply here too: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within." First seen getting dolled up and draped in gold from head to toe while warriors approach her fortress on horseback, Gong Li's medicine-swilling Empress is regrettably anemic—ditto her dialogue. Blame the Emperor (a bored-looking Chow Yun-Fat), who has been peppering his lady's herbal remedies with poisonous black mushrooms. Meanwhile each of three young princes (Jay Chou, Liu Ye, Qin Junjie) is scheming for power or love, the incestuous machinations failing to excite as much as the sight of black-suited, scythe-twirling assassins swinging on ropes toward the palace like Spider-Man on his web. Zhang's impressively acrobatic battle scene culminates in a torrential CGI spear storm that sets out to blockbust and does, even by, say, Two Towers standards.

Until then, the film's seemingly endless revelations of double- and triple-crosses would play like bad mid-'60s Hollywood epic wanking were it not for Zhang's mise-en-scéne, including long blue, green, and orange corridors that suggest a kaleidoscope in a funhouse. (Production designer Huo Tingxiao deserves every award.) Color combos here border on the psychedelic, but alas, they don't inspire Zhang to get trippy with the storytelling. This is the director's flimsiest material to date, and while you'd hope for some sexual frisson in his first film with Gong since Shanghai Triad in '95, her scenes with Chow deliver nothing but more evidence that Zhang is mainly in it for the carpentry and the computer FX. Flying daggers return in full force, but the neato trick this time is the slo-mo spray of sparks from a sword as it scrapes against armor or another blade. A great leap forward in film technology or another example of civilization destroying itself from within?

`Flower' a voluptuous look at Tang Dynasty beauty, rot Michael Wilmington from the Chicago Tribune

Cold cruel passion and wicked court intrigue are portrayed with a sensuous visual splendor in "Curse of the Golden Flower," the latest period film of the great Chinese director Zhang Yimou. It's an incredible film, among the strangest and most overwhelming that Zhang has made. And it unfolds--during the Later Tang Dynasty (923-936 AD), a time of corruption, dictatorship and warfare--with a dark, stylized brilliance and an almost insane excess that will bewilder a good part of the audience and exhilarate others.

Don't judge the film too quickly, though. It really is like almost nothing you've seen before. Zhang has been startling us since his early films, from the sexually intense chamber dramas such as "Red Sorghum" and "Raise the Red Lantern"--both of which starred this film's ravishing empress, Gong Li-- right up to his jaw-dropping recent period action epics "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers." But here, he and his extraordinary action director, Tony Ching Siu-Tung, seem to be vaulting past previous limits and rules.

As we watch, stunned, a bloody Jacobean tide of murder, adultery, incest and rebellion pours through the chambers of a glorious palace, into a courtyard covered with millions of golden cut chrysanthemums. Through the corridors prowl a cast of royal schemers and victims. That sinister ensemble includes an evil emperor (Chow Yun Fat), his desperate wife (Gong Li), his three wildly contrasting sons and heirs (Liu Ye, Jay Chou and Qin Junjie), the troubled imperial doctor (Ni Dahong) and the doctor's bitter wife (Chen Jin) and naive daughter (Li Man), both of whom have secrets that could destroy an empire.

Outside, the passions of that court elite infect the huge legions of warriors under their control, and a storm of conflict rages between rival armies. Two immense companies of slaughter--battalions of flashing swordsmen, deadly archers, leaping ninjas and whirling martial artists--hurl themselves at each other in Busby Berkeley clockwork patterns that seem to have been choreographed by some mad genius of dance and death.

Battle master Ching, one of the finest action directors in the world, surpasses himself here. We never see any individuals among these warriors. Instead, they swing like spiders from the dark cliffs of a mountain pass ambush, or flood over the courtyard in successive waves of turbulent black and gold, leaving heaps of corpses on that mantle of crushed golden petals. These are the nameless, almost faceless minions of tyranny--and Zhang, who co-wrote the script, shows once again how evil can spread like disease among rulers whose power has no sensible limit.

The cast is a memorable ensemble. Among the emperor's brood, Jay Chou, who plays the good, heroic middle son, Prince Jai, is a huge Taiwanese-Chinese pop star who effortlessly holds the screen. Liu and Qin, bookending him as the older and younger brothers, are effectively softer and weaker, like John Cazale's Fredo in "The Godfather." Chen Jin, as the doctor's wife, radiates a bone-chilling fury and melancholy.

With his Clark Gable-style impudent macho and her Greta Garbo-like goddess beauty, Chow and Gong are two of the biggest Asian movie stars ever. And their mutual charisma here shivers the screen, though not in the way you'd expect. Gong does play another victim, her one-time specialty for Zhang. Slowly being poisoned through much of the movie, she projects a vulnerability that makes her role more poignant.

But Chow plays the emperor as a genial bully, with a look that suggests not the brash gangster Chow of "The Killer" and "A Better Tomorrow " but a mean-eyed old character actor such as Albert Dekker in "The Wild Bunch."

Zhang, whose powers are at their height here, gives the interior scenes of "Curse" the dramatic beauty and precision of a Kenji Mizoguchi film ("Yang Kwei Fei"), while his amazing action-director colleague Ching stages the fights with a flair and energy that at times suggests Kurosawa ("Ran") mixed with John Woo.

Those are lofty cinematic comparisons, but, in some ways, this film is near that aesthetic level. It's a work by cinematic geniuses that reveals beauty and terror in a long-ago time with a virtuoso intensity. You won't soon forget its mad, lovely sights and sounds.

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COMING HOME (Gui Lai) B 87

China (109 mi) 2014 ‘Scope Official site [Japan]

An old-fashioned, Hollywood melodrama in the traditional sense, where the strength of the film comes from the powerful performances, reuniting Fifth Generation director Zhang Yimou with celebrated actress Gong Li for the 8^th time where together they produced a series of lavish, highly colorful period melodramas in the 90’s starring his then partner Gong Li in RED SORGHUM (1987), JU DOU (1990), RAISE THE RED LANTERN (1991), TO LIVE (1994), and SHANGHAI TRIAD (1995). It’s been nearly 40-years since the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, and 20-years since the director’s film TO LIVE was banned at home in China after winning the Jury Prize at Cannes and Best Actor for Ge You. Since that time, Zhang Yimou has gone from being a political outcast, straddling the line with authorities, where he was recently forced to pay over a million dollar fine for violating the country’s one-child policy (where he allegedly fathered 7 children with 4 women), to the heralded genius behind the dazzling opening and closing ceremonies at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, where his choreography of a cast of thousands was nothing less than spectacular. No longer the innovative visual stylist of his youth when his early films were banned in China until he made a Party-approved film on a contemporary theme, THE STORY OF QIU JU (1992), Zhang Yimou, in the eyes of some, capitulated to Party authorities and has become more of a master craftsman, defined by his ability to bring organization to the chaos of the collective, directing his re-imagined production of Turandot, Puccini’s most exotic opera set in ancient China, staged at the Forbidden City in Beijing in 1998, which becomes even more daring and visually explosive under his direction, before touring the world after the Olympics in 2009-10 with his reprised version, staging a ballet version of RAISE THE RED LANTERN in 2001, while also leading the production of contemporary Chinese composer Tan Dun’s opera The First Emperor that had its premiere at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 2006. Adapting Yan Geling’s novel The Criminal Lu Yanshi, herself a dancer at age 12 in the People’s Liberation Army during the Cultural Revolution, an author who received her master’s in Fine Arts Fiction Writing at Columbia College in Chicago, it’s a film that looks back at the crimes of the Cultural Revolution with a spirit of haunting resignation, where one character can be heard saying, “It’s all right, it’s in the past now,” reminiscent of the memorable final line from Roman Polanski’s CHINATOWN (1974), “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.” Few Chinese films have addressed what actually happened during the Cultural Revolution, which remains a sticky subject with government censors, and those directors that did, such as Sixth Generation filmmaker Wang Xiaoshuai’s Cultural Revolution Trilogy of SHANGHAI DREAMS (2005), 11 FLOWERS (2011), and RED AMNESIA (2015), did so with official permission, as lacking that authority led him to be officially blacklisted early in his career, while director Tian Zhuangzhuang received a 10-year ban from making films for his blistering critique of the government’s practices during the Hundred Flowers Campaign, the Anti-Rightist Movement, the Great Leap Forward, leading up to the Cultural Revolution in THE BLUE KITE (1993), an extraordinary film that remains banned to this day. Like Tian’s family, whose father was head of the Beijing Film Studio while his mother ran the Beijing Children’s Film Studio, Zhang Yimou’s parents were similarly persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, with both children being sent to countryside re-education farm labor camps. Tian Zhuangzhuang comments on the situation in James Berardinelli’s review, Blue Kite, The | Reelviews Movie Reviews:

I finished shooting The Blue Kite in 1992. But while I was involved in post-production, several official organizations involved with China’s film industry screened the film. They decided that it had a problem concerning its political ‘leanings,’ and prevented its completion. The fact that it can appear today seems like a miracle... The stories in the film are real, and they are related with total sincerity. What worries me is that it is precisely a fear of reality and sincerity that has led to the ban on such stories being told.

Without providing any backstory, the film opens in the early 70’s with the country still in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, centering on the budding career of Dandan (Zhang Huiwen), a promising dancer in the ballet troupe’s rehearsals for the upcoming revolutionary dance performance of The Red Detachment of Women. While she is the strongest dancer, she is not chosen for the lead, as her father, intellectual college professor Lu Yanshi (Chen Daoming), was convicted more than a decade ago for being a Rightist (his crime was that he could speak French!) and sent to a labor re-education camp. Due to that political disgrace, the punishment continues to be passed onto the family. Fuming at the outcome, Dandan finds little sympathy at home from her school teacher mother Feng Wanyu (Gong Li), who thinks she should be more humble in her ambitions. Almost immediately, they learn of Lu’s prison escape, where authorities expect him to try to make it home, warning the family of harsh repercussions should they try to shelter him from the police. Since Dandan barely remembers her father, she’s automatically willing to cooperate, indoctrinated to put party above family, though her mother hesitates at the thought. It comes as little surprise when he appears like a ghost in the night, eluding the authorities who are hovering nearby, but he’s stymied by a locked door, leaving a note to meet him at the train station. What follows is a highly choreographed chase sequence on the crowded platforms of the train station where in dizzying fashion that actually grows comical in its stylized, almost slow-motion repetition, Lu attempts to elude the police who have been tipped that he will be waiting there, while Feng frantically tries to warn him of their omnipresence. All interested parties converge at the same point on a collision course with destiny, as the police push Feng out of the way, bloodying her forehead as they knock her down to grab Lu, overpowering him on the spot as they haul him back to prison. The film jumps ahead several years, as after Mao’s death, many of the previous convictions were revoked in 1979, as Lu is officially pardoned and released from prison, arriving at the train station where he is met by Dandan, who now lives and works at a textile factory. No longer welcome in her mother’s home once she learned it was Dandan who betrayed her father by turning him in to the police, selfishly hoping she might regain the lead in the dance company, but that never happened. When Dandan finally summoned the courage to tell her mother, she’s blindsided by her response, “I’ve cared about no one but you all your life. It’s time I think about your father.” While most of this film takes place inside the seemingly cramped apartment of Feng, who lives a claustrophobic, cocoon-like life, the sequences that come alive the most are the impressive dance scenes with Dandan, where Zhang has a unique ability to brilliantly stage artistic performance, expressed with a stunning beauty. This joyous sense of youthful exhilaration is contrasted by the slow and gentle pace of life from the aging Feng, where Gong Li’s best moments are spent in quiet solitude, exhibiting her own unique sense of rhythm and quiet desperation.

Much to Lu’s surprise, Feng doesn’t recognize him when he arrives back home, immediately throwing him out, confusing him with someone else who once caused her great harm. Even the authorities are confused, as they quickly have to find him alternate housing nearby, fixing up an abandoned storage facility. Watch movies long enough and you’ll become a medical expert on conditions you never knew even existed, as Feng’s condition is described as psychogenic amnesia (Dissociative amnesia), where there is a temporary loss of recall memory anywhere from minutes to years, typically associated with stressful circumstances, usually due to a traumatic event, joining a host of other films that deal with memory loss, from Christopher Nolan’s MEMENTO (2000), displaying a short term memory condition where new memories are never developed, FINDING NEMO (2003), where Dory suffers from short term memory loss, while IRIS (2001), THE NOTEBOOK (2004), Away from Her (2006) and Still Alice (2014) show the devastating progression of memory loss from Alzheimer’s Disease. While Feng remembers she had a husband, she is unable to recognize Lu, who tries a variety of creative techniques to try to jostle her memory. With the aid of Dandan, who is herself wracked with guilt from her own involvement, Lu is able to enter her life as a kind and benevolent stranger, arriving at her door as a piano tuner, playing a song that he hoped she would remember, and later becoming the letter reader, as he’s able to read a stack of letters written by her husband but never sent. While there are moments where it appears they regain the semblance of closeness, it quickly falls apart, leaving nothing short of utter exasperation. Chen Daoming’s dignity and patience throughout is particularly noteworthy, as he’s stripped of his identity, yet continually reaches out for the woman he tragically spent twenty years separated from while in prison, and is thwarted at every step. The overwhelming disproportion of his punishment seems absurd, yet that is the film’s only reference to Mao’s Anti-Rightist campaign of the late 50’s purging the intellectual class, remnants of a former society that had to be re-educated to become a useful part of the new collective. The film completely sidesteps Lu’s alleged crimes and how twenty years of his life were lost for political experimentation, but does show how his family was destroyed in the process, the lingering effects of his punishment passed on to future generations, shifting the focus instead to how he is cleverly able to reunite Feng and Dandan under one roof, but fails in his attempts to be recognized for who he is, as if he remains purged from the past, a ghost that now exists in the collective amnesia of the nation where life goes on.

The film bears a resemblance to Fassbinder’s THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN (1979), especially Feng’s insistence on continually going to the train station to meet her husband, carrying a hand-drawn placard sign so he would recognize her, petrified at the thought of living a life without him, constructing a postwar/post-revolutionary existence that is literally devoid of his spirit, where the heart and soul of her life exists only in memory, which the newly constructed society has little use for once he reappears like a vanished ghost. Fassbinder, however, dealt with his country’s collective guilt in a much bolder fashion, but the Nazi’s lost the war and their hold on power, requiring the construction of a new German identity. It’s hard to believe the same film could have been made had the Nazi’s remained in power, a thought that permeates throughout Joshua Oppenheimer’s two bookend films on Indonesian genocide in 1965, The Act of Killing (2012) and THE LOOK OF SILENCE (2014), where the perpetrators of the crime remain in power today by creating a history of lies and distortions about their own culpability, where the past remains in the past, where questions about their role are met with a similar inability to remember, while in China the same monolithic Communist Party of the 1940’s continues to rule in the modern era as well. The idea of a nation having to learn to live with the horrors and tragedies of the past through a collective amnesia is a bitter pill to swallow and probably makes little sense outside the borders of China. Within China, however, the film may act as a kind of truth and reconciliation committee, where even if history is forgotten, or the tragic consequences minimized, the associating trauma lingers and is never actually reconciled, where Dandan’s eventual maturity does redeem her actions, becoming a helpful participant in building a newly constructed society, while living in the present requires some kind of benign acceptance with everything that came before, murders, mistakes and all, as China is viewed as one large collective family, where they need to reunite around common goals. In the West, however, it’s hard to see this, as evidenced by an excerpt from Shelly Kraicer, long-time Beijing resident from Cinema Scope, TIFF 2014 | Coming Home (Zhang Yimou, China) — Special ...

A series of melodramatically heightened scenes, each directed and shot as if it were for a highlight reel, ensue, as does much audience weeping, if the film attains its objective. Its ideological objective, in this case, is particularly noxious, though not so surprising from an artist who’s given himself so totally over to the Party’s ideological line of the moment. Here, we are to learn that the true accounting of the crimes buried in our (families’ or nation’s) past(s) is impossible; nevertheless, one must live on, happily, domestically, harmoniously. How that lesson can be generalized to apply to the Chinese Communist Party and its current subjects is not so much left to as imposed on the viewers. For an antidote to this depressing line, see Wang Xiaoshuai’s Red Amnesia, also at TIFF, which seems (coincidentally, to be sure) to be conceived as a precise and devastating riposte to Zhang. In Wang’s vision, the past continues to define the present: a life worth living, for Wang, is predicated exactly on the necessity of acknowledging and accounting for past crimes; past traumas, un-repented, can only haunt and pollute the present.

TIFF 2014 | Coming Home (Zhang Yimou, China) — Special ... Shelly Kraicer from Cinema Scope

Admirers of Zhang Yimou’s ground-breaking work from the late 1980s and early 1990s might puzzle over his transformation from innovative artist to state-sponsored populist after seeing his latest domestic hit, Coming Home. A film not without interest, particularly considering it reunites him with his actrice fetiche Gong Li, star of those influential ’90s masterworks (Red Sorghum, Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern, To Live, etc.), as both reach ripe middle age. But maturity seems to have brought not wisdom, but some form of curdled resignation, at least to the director. Gong is her usual commanding screen presence, although she’s shed that mesmerizing primal-force naturalism of her younger years for a more self-conscious, Meryl Streep-esque command of her craft. Still, there’s much to admire in her performance, and in that of the always hard-working Chen Daoming, recently brilliantly impressive in a series of roles portraying post-macho, dignified, yet vulnerable males who enliven blockbuster space with their humane brand of charisma. In this case, he’s Lu Yanshi, persecuted as a “rightist” in various Maoist political campaigns, who after escaping from a labour camp in the late 1950s is betrayed by his family (for their own complicated reasons) and recaptured. After the 1978 reforms, Lu is officially released and tries to return to his wife Feng Wanyu (Gong), but she’s suffering from a form of cinematically enhanced temporary amnesia, and can’t or won’t acknowledge him.

A series of melodramatically heightened scenes, each directed and shot as if it were for a highlight reel, ensue, as does much audience weeping, if the film attains its objective. Its ideological objective, in this case, is particularly noxious, though not so surprising from an artist who’s given himself so totally over to the Party’s ideological line of the moment. Here, we are to learn that the true accounting of the crimes buried in our (families’ or nation’s) past(s) is impossible; nevertheless, one must live on, happily, domestically, harmoniously. How that lesson can be generalized to apply to the Chinese Communist Party and its current subjects is not so much left to as imposed on the viewers. For an antidote to this depressing line, see Wang Xiaoshuai’s Red Amnesia, also at TIFF, which seems (coincidentally, to be sure) to be conceived as a precise and devastating riposte to Zhang. In Wang’s vision, the past continues to define the present: a life worth living, for Wang, is predicated exactly on the necessity of acknowledging and accounting for past crimes; past traumas, un-repented, can only haunt and pollute the present.

Cannes 2014 review: Coming Home - The Guardian Xan Brooks

The ghosts of China's cultural revolution shake their chains and rattle their ivories in Coming Home, a sweet yet suspect romantic drama from director Zhang Yimou, which played out of competition at the Cannes film festival. The first time Lu Yanshi (Chen Daoming) comes haunting, he's a bedraggled, desperate fugitive; the second time, he's careworn and rehabilitated. On each occasion, his wife finds herself unable to open the door and let him inside.

Zhang was the leading light of China's "fifth generation" of film-makers, revered for his pungent epics To Live and Raise the Red Lantern, and subsequently brought into the fold to direct the opening and closing ceremonies at the Beijing Olympics. His new film looks at the cultural revolution more in sorrow than anger, installing the spouses' relationship as a metaphor for the country's stumbling attempt to make peace with its past.

When Chen's dissident professor is released from jail, amnesiac Feng Wanyu (Gong Li) fails to recognise him. It is as if she is practising her own form of state censorship, or perhaps the enormity of his presence makes her unable to see him. Years before, the couples' indoctrinated daughter (Zhang Huiwen) had cut her father's face from all the photos in the family album, which means that there is no visual reminder; no proof that the man is who he claims to be. His wife looks right through him, standing forlornly at the station awaiting her husband's return.

Zhang adapts the tale from a novel by Geling Yan, who also provided the blueprint for his previous picture, The Flowers of War. He handles it sensitively, elegantly, and coaxes some affecting performances from Chen and Gong (although the latter does rather overdo the nervous head-bobbing). But the film is also sentimental and faintly evasive, replete with a plaintive piano score that all but twists our arms behind our backs. Zhang dabs on salve and comforts the afflicted. He lets this intimate, bittersweet reconciliation implicitly stand for the nation at large.

Eventually, Yanshi learns that he must approach his wife with caution, as though he's feeding birds in the garden. He pretends to be a kindly neighbour come to read her husband's letters, or a piano tuner making house-calls. The man means well; the woman's starting to thaw. But he should really have dismantled that annoying piano. It won't stop tinkling and it takes up too much space.

Movie Review: Coming Home -- Vulture Bilge Ebiri

Once upon a time, the filmmaker Zhang Yimou and his then-muse Gong Li collaborated on some of the most momentous works of new Chinese cinema. The films they made were diverse. They included lush, ruthless period dramas like Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern, as well as a neo-neorealist tale of bureaucracy gone haywire, The Story of Qiu Ju. Though ostensibly apolitical, these films nevertheless painted vivid portraits of a society where the status quo — whether it consisted of the traditionalist mores of the past, or the state machinery of the present — was forever stifling. (Their masterful 1994 collaboration To Live actually got Zhang banned from filmmaking for two years by China’s state censors.) The pair — also romantically linked for a while — eventually went their separate ways, though both continued to grow in stature. Zhang became a state-approved filmmaker of (admittedly still pretty great) historical epics like Hero and The House of Flying Daggers, and he also directed the eye-popping and massive opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

I give all this background to help explain my excitement at the idea of these two working together again. Nobody shoots Gong like Zhang does: He’s attuned to her every wince and whimper, her every glance and gesture. While they did reunite about a decade ago, for 2006’s ornate melodrama The Curse of the Golden Flower, there’s something about seeing them paired once more in a social drama, one with a political kick, no less. Coming Home, based on the novel The Criminal Lu Yanshi, opens at the height of China’s Cultural Revolution, with every aspect of life under the sway of an activist party highly sensitive to anything it deems politically incorrect. Feng Wanyu (Gong) lives with her teenage daughter, Dandan (Zhang Huiwen), while her husband, Lu Yanshi (Chen Daoming), is off in prison for an unstated political offense. (One official refers to him as a “sneaky rightist.”) As the film opens, Lu has escaped from prison, and the headstrong Feng seems secretly eager for his return. Dandan, however, hasn’t seen her father since she was 3 and is terrified that his escape could jeopardize her attempts to become a dancer; she’s trying for the lead in the notorious political ballet The Red Detachment of Women. The family is watched by the authorities, but it’s Dandan herself who betrays her father. As Lu waits for his wife by the train station, he’s grabbed by the police; Feng herself, though she witnesses this from afar, is injured in the ensuing scuffle.

All that, however, is mostly prologue. The film then jumps ahead a few years: The Cultural Revolution is over, and Lu has now been granted a release from prison. Dandan, who works at a textile factory, never got the lead in the ballet; her father’s political activities did indeed prevent her. Feng, meanwhile, suffers from an odd form of dementia — one that might have been caused by a head injury, or emotional trauma, or something else. When Lu, the great love of her life, shows up at the door, she has no idea who he is. But she knows who he is as a concept — she understands that she has a husband in prison and that he’s been freed, and she’s even excited for his return. But whenever Lu (or anyone else) tries to explain to her that he is indeed that person, she either doesn’t recognize him or thinks he’s Mr. Fang — an official who may have once taken advantage of her.

Here’s a highly theatrical conceit, the kind of very movie-friendly illness usually reserved for potboilers. But Zhang takes it at face value and treats it seriously. That could be disastrous, and Coming Home is not without its awkward parts: The film’s different movements don’t always fit as well as we might expect, which is surprising, given that Zhang is nothing if not a master of tone.

But there’s a fascinating idea here. More than anything, Coming Home is a film about watching. Early on, the authorities watch Dandan to see if she might know her father's whereabouts. After his escape, before he makes contact, Lu watches his family from afar. Feng witnesses Lu’s seizure when he attempts to return to her the first time. Later, Lu, in an effort to get Feng to remember who he is, stages and restages his arrival at the station, watching her watch him for any signs of recognition. Later, Dandan secretly looks on as her parents enact and reenact this tragic charade. One could even say that the story is defined by the way the idea of looking changes across time. A society where people spied on each other for the momentary demands of politics transforms into one where they spy on each other for the more powerful demands of the human heart. Furthermore, one can sense a metaphor here for what Zhang himself has been doing with his films: restaging the past to influence the present, creating new memories to take the place of older, more painful ones.

But Coming Home works best on a more lived-in, emotional level. It presents a trajectory not uncommon in Zhang's films: a journey from howling passion to somber, almost tragic acceptance. As a director, he loves to play with melodrama, but he loves even more to smother it, to quash his lovers and see if their spirit endures. And nestled within Coming Home is another metaphor, one not about politics or cinema but about love and acceptance — about the things we expect from relationships, and the things in which we ultimately find a kind of muted happiness. As Lu and Feng struggle to reconnect, and find themselves settling for the oddest of dependencies, it’s hard to be unmoved. 

Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Blue Kite Archives - Gail Pellett Zhang Yimou’s Coming Home – Ellipsis or Omission, by Gail Pellett, October 19, 2015

Zhang Yimou returns to the bad old days of the Cultural Revolution J.R. Jones from The Chicago Reader

Don't Be Afraid to Feel: Zhang Yimou's 'Coming Home' Is .. Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice

Slant Magazine [Chuck Bowen]

Coming Home | Reviews | Screen Fionnuala Halligan

'Coming Home' To Heartache And Hope : NPR Bob Mondello from NPR

The Critical Reel [Zachary Cruz-Tan]

Spectrum Culture [Seth Katz]

The Film Stage [Jared Mobarak]

Twitch [James Marsh]

Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]

The Asian Cinema Blog [Agne Serpytyte]

Blu-ray.com [Brian Orndorf]

ArtsHub [Sarah Ward]

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Jennie Kermode]

IONCINEMA [Nicholas Bell]

Daily | Cannes 2014 | Zhang Yimou's COMING HOME ... David Hudson from Fandor

'Coming Home': Cannes Review - The Hollywood Reporter Elizabeth Kerr

'Coming Home' Review: Gong Li Stars in Zhang Yimou's ... Maggie Lee from Variety

South China Morning Post [Edmund Lee]

The Japan Times [Kaori Shoji]

JapanCinema.net [Marcello Milteer]

'Coming Home' a new masterpiece by Zhang Yimou G. Allen Johnson from San Francisco Gate, also seen for the Minneapolis Star Tribune here: Review: China's dynamic duo, Zhang Yimou and Gong Li, re-team on the powerful 'Coming Home'

Zhang Yimou's 'Coming Home' an unforgettable study of loss Robert Abele from The LA Times

Coming Home - Roger Ebert Peter Sobczynski

Review: In 'Coming Home,' a Family Rocked by the Cultural ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times

Cultural Revolution Shaped Xi Jinping, From Schoolboy to Survivor Chris Buckley and Didi Kirsten Tatlow from The New York Times, September 24, 2015

Coming Home (2014 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Wizard Behind Beijing's Opening Night Olympic opening night, from The New York Times, August 8, 2008

Zhang Yuan

EAST PALACE, WEST PALACE (Dong gong xi gong)

China (90 mi) 1996

Time Out review Tony Rayns

The most daring and achieved of all the 'illegal' independent films made in China in the '90s - and quite probably the last, since it prompted the Film Bureau to formally outlaw unauthorised production and confiscate Zhang Yuan's passport. A-Lan, a young gay man, is arrested in a Beijing cruising park and held for overnight interrogation by Shi, a macho but latently ambivalent cop. As he describes his life since childhood and his sexual history, it becomes clear that his stories are actually expressions of his desire for the cop. This realisation makes Shi more aggressive. The film is an intense chamber drama with large resonances: its ultimate implication is that the bond between the people and the authorities in China is essentially a sado-masochist one. This is the closest cinema has ever come to the spirit of Jean Genet, closer even than Genet's own Chant d'amour.

PopcornQ review Gordon Brent Ingram

This variation on the hunter being captured by the prey may well be one ofthe more influential films of this decade on homosexuality, sadomasochism and drag. East Palace, West Palace is an awesome breakthrough for Chinese cinema. Set in a series of imperial parks in central Beijing -- that see a lot of gay male cruising at night -- a young writer is singled out by a guard. After a few run-ins with this one officer, the young man sets himself up to be detained (those handcuffs please!) where he taunts the increasingly interested guard through divulging his personal history and sex life.

This film explores the links between state power and sadomasochism in a way that few would ever dare -- especially in, of all countries, China!!! With lean dialogue and steamy scenes galore (though no sex). The cinematography is powerful in juxtaposing the architectural spaces of the Manchu, nationalist, revolutionary, and current state capitalist periods.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Beijing was the most erotically tolerant of cities and had some of the densest enclaves of homosexuality in the world. Today, while homosexuality is not illegal, per se, many gay men and lesbians are repeatedly arrested for hooliganism, especially around public sex, and some repeat offenders in some areas receive long prison and even death sentences. There are some subtle statements at work about the resonance of the former tolerance of homosexuality invoked through the traditional palace architecture. This awesome film will change the face of both Chinese and gay film.

Gay life in China: EAST PALACE, WEST PALACE Staging Gay Life in China, by Chris Berry from Jump Cut, December 1998

Isthmus (Kent Williams) review

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere

Film Journal International (Kevin Lally) review

Epinions [Ricardo Ramos]

Shadows on the Wall [Rich Cline]

Variety (Derek Elley) review

San Francisco Chronicle (Bob Graham) review

The New York Times (Lawrence Van Gelder) review

Zhao Dayong

Chinese Documentary|Zhao Dayong:Ghost Town

Zhao Dayong, studied at the Oil Painting Department of Shenyang Luxun Academy of Fine Arts, and starts to work for his independent documentary in 2001, has films Street Life (2006), Ghost Town (2008).

BAFICI 2010 - Director\'s Info: brief bio

Born in Liaoning, he studied Oil Painting at Lu Xun Art Academy. He worked as an advertising director, and was a founding editor of Culture and Morals, a journal for the contemporary arts in China. His directorial debut was Street Life (2006).

Zhao Dayong and Zhao Liang win at Hong Kong film festival ... Virtual Review, April 3, 2010

/ HAMMER TO NAIL » Blog Archive » A Conversation with Zhao Dayong Nelson Kim interview, October 7, 2009

Interview: Independent filmmaker Zhao Dayong - GoKunming: Kunming ... Interview from Go Kunming, March 1, 2010

China News: Danwei: Interview with Zhao Dayong | China Digital ... YouTube interview Part 1 (subtitled), March 27, 2010 (7:01)

YouTube - Interview with Chinese filmmaker Zhao Dayong: Part 2 (6:56)

YouTube - Interview with Chinese filmmaker Zhao Dayong (subtitled) (13:57)

New York Times: China's indie filmmaking Indie Filmmakers: China’s New Guerrillas, Kirk Semple from The New York Times, September 25, 2009

The Star: cultural production in China How China is using art (and artists) to sell itself to the world, by Murray Whyte from The Toronto Star, December 9, 2009

GHOST TOWN (Fei Cheng) B 88

China (169 mi) 2008

Guerilla filmmaking out of China, as the director has no official government permission to shoot this film, shot in the small mountainous village of Zhiziluo in the Southwestern Yunan province, near the northern border regions of Myanmar, so this near three hour documentary will not be shown in China. It’s a slow, somewhat uneven effort that takes some getting used to, as there’s no one explaining what we’re seeing other than the actual conversations of the people the camera has chosen to observe. Without talking heads or a political message, the audience is free to draw their own conclusions about what they’re seeing. This is the emotionally detached, Frederic Wiseman school of documentary filmmaking where the director simply chooses a subject and lets his/her cameras roll without censorshop, emotional judgment, or analytic interference. Among the more prominent documentarians using this technique would include Austrian directors Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s OUR DAILY BREAD (2005) and Michael Glawogger’s WORKING MAN’S DEATH (2005), though the work of each is much more meticulously focused on the targeted subjects, the dehumanizing effects of the industrialization of making food and how poverty drives people into taking chances with life threatening working conditions, also Dutch filmmaker Heddy Honigman whose recent documentary OBLIVION (2008) paints a scathing portrait of the slums of Bolivia, whereas fellow countryman Jia Zhang-ke’s PLATFORM (2000), STILL LIFE (2006), or 24 CITY (2008) are fictionalized accounts of reality, using actors to resemble a documentary. An astonishing portrait of a place and its people, shot over the course of several years where the villagers become familiar with the man behind the camera, on occasion mentioning him by name, still there is a muddled focus in this film, where no one speaks of politics or illiteracy, no one speaks of Mao, instead a tiny part of the world is hopelessly riddled with misery and abject poverty, where any evidence of capitalism or socialism is noticeably absent and injustice is an accepted part of their world view, many will find it meandering and enduring.

Shot in three sections entitled Voices, Recollections, and Innocence, the film opens strangely enough at a mountainside Christian church, with a view of enormous mountains off in the distance which serve as a constant background seen throughout the film. This location itself is unique as people are living in dilapidated structures built decades ago where life here hasn’t changed at all. We never see children attend school, few adults have jobs, and most live in conditions of dire poverty. It’s as if the nation’s modernization projects left this remote area to fend for itself, as there’s virtually no street traffic and only on rare occasions do they receive visitors. The camera finds John the Elder, an 87-year old survivor of the Communist purges, where under Mao Zedong (MaoTse-tung) he was sentenced to 20 years in hard labor camps during the 1950’s, but he recalls the early visits of the Chinese missionaries before they were expelled in 1957 and is attempting to carry out their Biblical mission, which may include a bit of rural folk lore thrown in, as he attempts to explain that music and dancing is forbidden in the Bible, but makes no chapter references, so religion is seen as an unquestioned authority, which is why it’s not sanctioned by the government, which remains the country’s sole authority. A bus carrying what resembles the bright red colors of people from Tibet and Nepal visit the church, where blankets and clothing are brought in large quantities, like a religious caravan come to visit, where they join the local villagers all spread outdoors on the one main street sharing rice. Still, the shots inside the church at a packed Christmas service are profoundly moving, accompanied by choral music, though from what I could tell, we never actually see the church choir that seems to be leading the parishioners.

The middle section is the longest, where a guy with a truck and his girl friend attempt to eek out a living by transporting goods and services, which gets a bit ridiculous when they visit a nearby city, as the truck is packed to the gills by people needing a ride, where a street policeman continually insists the people get off the truck which is dangerously overstuffed, but they continue to get back on in plain view of the policeman, who again exerts his authority until eventually they get far enough out of town to collect all the passengers. But his earnings are meager, so in a devastating meeting of the parents, they recommend the couple split up so the girl can be sold in marriage to the highest bidder in order to help her financially strapped family, unfortunately an all too common practice. We later hear the story of another woman who claims she was swindled into marriage but has returned home with her baby, reflecting on the life that could have been, but never happened out of financial necessity. The only out-of-towners that visit the village are two men with a wad of cash looking to buy a bride. The final section follows the lives of abandoned teen children living on their own, trapping birds with sticks and glue, like a Venus fly trap, which they then roast for food, a sequence that parallels the lives of uncared for children with the proliferation of stray animals running the street, as in most instances, there are as many animals shown as people. A statue of former Communist leader Mao Zedong remains in place, as does an electronic hook up with loudspeakers reminding villagers of a former era when they would broadcast quotations from Chairman Mao. Now a distant memory, a forgotten entity, a reflection of a lost paradise which still commands one of the most extraordinarily beautiful vantage points like few places on earth, but what’s misleading is the blank slate of misery that comes with it.

Notable New York, This Week 3/15 – 3/21 - The Rumpus.net (excerpt)

Directed by Zhao Dayong, this tremendously rewarding film illuminates the alienation and marginalization of the denizens of one of China’s countless remote villages. Divided into three parts, this epic documentary takes an intimate look at its varied cast of characters, bringing audiences face to face with people who were unceremoniously left behind by China’s new economy.

Village Voice Nick Pinkerton

Rightly singled out during its NYFF run, Zhao Dayong's loose, baggy monster of a documentary distills six years of footage from Zhiziluo, Yunnan Province—a Mao-era regional seat since abandoned to the elements and native Lisu and Nu minorities—into an three-hour triptych portrait-of-place. The first episode concerns the local Christian clergy, particularly 87-year-old leader "John the Elder" and his semi-estranged son, Yuehan. There is medieval scriptural quibbling over Biblical permission to play guitar and the closeness of genuine martyrdom, as John recollects his 20 years of forced labor after the mass imprisonment of him and his brethren in the crackdown '50s (Dayong has a film about the Nigerian Christian community in Guangzhou in the works). Ghost Town's ungirdled midsection is a series of monologues from drunks and grannies—everyone else is trying to get out of town—before the movie hooks up with adolescent wild child, A Long, first seen in an immersive king-of-the-hill battle. I do not expect to soon find scenes to match Ghost Town's mountaintop funeral, the running along after a rowdy exorcism, or the scanning of faces at the town Christmas chorale. His back to prosperity, Dayong finds hallowed ground.

NYFF 09: "Ghost Town" (Zhao Dayong, China) Acquarello from The Auteurs, October 4, 2009

Composed of three chapters - Voices, Recollections, and Innocence - Zhao Dayong's Ghost Town is a textured, graceful, and indelible panorama of the "other" China, a sobering account of threadbare lives lived in the shadows cast by China's modern day economic miracle and its founding architect, Chairman Mao Zedong, whose imposing statue graces Zhiziluo village's deserted and overgrown town square. Isolated in the mountains of Yunnan Province near the Burmese border, abandoned by Western missionaries after a government purge during the Cultural Revolution, and repeatedly passed over for state-financed development projects since the 1980s, Zhiziluo's few remaining villagers have become figurative ghosts wandering through a rarefied, uncertain landscape in a state of perpetual limbo, searching for transcendence.

In Voices, the ethnic minority Christian community of Lisu and Nu villagers struggle to preserve their faith in the face of emigration, an aging congregation, and cultural despiritualization. But far from a dying culture on the cusp of erasure, what emerges in Voices is a vibrant and devout extended community, reaffirming their faith by returning to their beloved church in an annual pilgrimage to Zhiziluo for a midnight mass to celebrate Christmas with other parishioners.

In Recollections, the face of emigration is embodied by a young couple: one, contemplating moving to the city in search of a better life, the other, increasingly pressured into entering a financially beneficial, arranged marriage (and whose fate is mirrored in the parallel story of a returning Christian pilgrim who has brought her new baby for her first visit to her hometown since being sold into marriage). The dissolution of love is also reflected in the wistful observations of a divorced, alcoholic drifter who pines for his estranged family, even as he continues to alienate himself from their lives with his chronic drinking.

On the other side of village depopulation is the fate on those left behind, the subject of the film's third chapter, Innocence. Abandoned by his family (who, like most working-aged men and women, moved to the city to seek out job opportunities), a twelve year-old boy named Ah Long scavenges for food in the wilderness and tries to retain some semblance of a normal adolescence with his matinee idol pinups, loud music, and wrestling with his playmates. Biding his empty hours participating in a traditional Lisu exorcism ritual, then subsequently attending mass, Ah Long's seemingly incongruous pastime intrinsically reveals what modern China has abandoned in the pursuit of modernization and economic growth: community, family, cultural heritage, and spirituality.

RealTime Arts - Magazine - issue 94 - merely floating in the world Dan Edwards from RealTime Arts magazine, December-January 2009

THE FIRST DECADE OF THE 21ST CENTURY HAS SEEN AN EXPLOSION IN CHINESE DOCUMENTARY PRODUCTION, AS LIGHTWEIGHT DIGITAL CAMERAS HAVE BECOME READILY AVAILABLE AND THE ONCE TIGHT CONTROLS OVER CHINESE LIFE HAVE RELAXED. ZHAO DAYONG’S NEW FILM GHOST TOWN—RECENTLY UNVEILED TO GREAT ACCLAIM AT THE NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL—IS EMBLEMATIC OF A MOVEMENT GIVING VOICE TO STORIES LONG EXCLUDED FROM THE SCREEN.

Ghost Town is set in the small, remote settlement of Zhiziluo in China’s far south, a former county seat now abandoned by the Chinese government. Zhao stumbled upon the town while scouting locations for another project earlier this decade. “After my first trip to Zhiziluo in 2002, I made trips in 2003 and 2004, staying there for two months each time”, recalls the director. “My original plans to make a film there didn’t pan out, but the people made a deep impression on me and my thoughts often went back to them. I returned again in 2006 and filmed there for 12 months in total.”

Zhao achieves an extraordinary intimacy with his subjects, no doubt partly due to the amount of time he spent living in the town, but also through his approach to the filmmaking process. The nature of digital camera technology allowed him to work without a professional crew and instead recruit townspeople to help with the shoot. Zhao explains, “I had three people assisting me, all local villagers. For example, the truck driver who appears in part two of the film often helped me with sound recording. This way I was able to maintain close relationships with people in the village.”

The involvement of locals is implied in the film’s opening moments, when we see a group of villagers engaged in roadworks staring at the camera, jesting with the offscreen operator. We hear a voice exclaim, “Wow, you can see everything through this lens! Now stand up nice and tall! Look this way!”, to which one of the women in shot jokingly replies, “Fine, go ahead and film. But there’s nothing worth filming here”, provoking laughter amongst her companions. From this opening sequence, Zhao’s camera both participates in, and documents life in the town.

The film’s three-hour length is divided into three chapters, each delving into the lives of a different set of characters. “Voices” follows Yuehan, the pastor of the town’s Christian church founded by missionaries in the 1930s. His 87-year-old father, who calls himself “John the Elder”, is also a priest, having been introduced to Christianity directly by missionaries as a young man. John speaks briefly about the persecution he suffered from the late 1950s, when the missionaries were expelled by the Communists and local believers were incarcerated—in John’s case for 20 years. He claims 95% of those arrested didn’t survive their ordeal.

We follow John and Yuehan as they make their rounds and receive visitors, providing a degree of material and emotional support to their followers. Initially the two appear close, but it becomes apparent that a deep rift exists between father and son, arising from the emotional scars inflicted on John during his two decades in prison.

Part two of Ghost Town, titled “Recollections,” traces the strain placed on personal relationships by Zhiziluo’s backwater status and economic stagnation. Li Yongqiang is a hopeless drunk whose wife is seeking a divorce, while the young driver Pu Biqiu faces harassment from local police and suffers from a lack of work. Pu is involved with a local girl, but when cashed-up out-of-towners arrive in Zhiziluo wanting to buy a wife, her parents pressure the girl to leave Pu so she can be married off.

Ghost Town’s final chapter is perhaps the most confronting, as we follow Ah Long, an aggressive 12-year-old living alone, without parental support or supervision. One night he participates in a disturbing exorcism with other male villagers, calling on the “mountain spirits” to drive out the evil possessing two local men. In the film’s concluding sequence, we see Ah Long sitting lost and alone at the back of the church during a service, watching silently as the small congregation sings a hymn.

At one level the townspeople of Zhiziluo are clearly victims of China’s new economic order, which has seen major coastal cities greatly enriched at the expense of rural areas. Zhao resists straightforward socio-economic analysis however, instead implying the aimless existence of the town’s inhabitants is symptomatic of a broader malaise. “Through the town I began to see and reflect on my own life”, Zhao says of his experiences shooting Ghost Town. “A process of self-reflection is, for me, the essence of filmmaking. As I was living with these people I came to realize just how uncertain their lives and fates were. The empty government buildings in which they live do not belong to them, and the fate of the place itself, of its architecture, was also in question. They were merely floating in the world, without any sense of safety and security, and their existential condition was basically no different from my own.”

The town’s church provides some material and spiritual support, but none of the villagers appears particularly committed to Christian beliefs, which seem no less foreign an imposition than the Maoist doctrines of earlier times. At one point a villager asks John the Elder why they are not allowed to sing and play guitar, to which the aging priest can only reply, “This is what the missionaries taught us.” Furthermore, the church appears powerless in the face of forces atomising the personal relations we see in the film. Even the priest Yuehan feels estranged from his father. The last sequence of the orphan Ah Long sitting in the church feels more like a final affirmation of his isolation than a scene of community belonging.

After lingering with Ah Long, the film abruptly cuts to its final image—a statue of Mao standing forlornly outside a deserted building, the paint peeling off his towering form. The statue’s magnanimous, guiding hand raised over the town looks absurd given the social, political and philosophical vacuum we have inhabited for the previous three hours.

Ghost Town doesn’t purport to provide solutions to the situations it depicts, but rather asks viewers to consider, along with the filmmaker and the town’s residents, how we find meaning in a world seemingly without philosophical or ideological bearings. As Zhao Dayong comments, “Film, like painting, is a method and technique of thought. All forms of creativity are rooted in this question—how to think and reflect.” The tragedy is that Chinese audiences are largely excluded from this process. Mainland television broadcasts only state-approved products and commercial cinemas are only permitted to screen licensed films, meaning documentaries like Ghost Town are rarely seen inside the People’s Republic. Fortunately for international audiences, the questions Ghost Town poses resonate far beyond China’s borders.

Getting Back to Roots Lu Chen from DGenerate Films, August 19, 2009

A New Chapter for Chinese Cinema at NYFF DGenerate Films, August 19, 2009

Chris Berry on Ghost Town Chris Berry from DGenerate Films, September 25, 2009

Shelly on Film: What is a Chinese Film? Shelly Kraicer from DGenerate Films, June 2009, revised from September 2007

Ghost Town | Reverse Shot Distant Friends, by Andrew Chan, October 2009

Asia Sentinel - The Grey Area of Chinese Filmmaking Alice Poon from The Asia Sentinal, September 30, 2009

Memoriando: GHOST TOWN February 20, 2010

NewCity Chicago Ray Pride

Ghost Town | Film Review | Slant Magazine Nick Schager

Zhao Dayong's GHOST TOWN at MoMA | Facebook

Chinese Documentary|Zhao Dayong:Ghost Town

NYFF '09 Notebook: 'What's wrong with a little elitism?' - indieWIRE Eugene Hernandez, October 1. 2009

Chicago Reader Andrea Gronvall

GHOST TOWN Facets Multi Media

Filmmaker Magazine | Filmmaker Blog Howard Feinstein from Filmmaker’s magazine, September 23, 2009

Out 1: NYFF 2009: What's Up, Docs? James Hansen, September 25, 2009

Zhao Dayong « the filmlinc blog October 2, 2009

Tativille: 10/02/09 Michael J. Anderson

Shooting Down Pictures » chinese cinema March 30, 2010

Ghost Town | UCLA Graduate Student Association April 8, 2010

MoMA to Showcase Ghost Town by Zhao Dayong as Part of ContemporAsian Art Daily, April 11, 2010

Zhao Dayong and Zhao Liang win at Hong Kong film festival ... Virtual Review, April 3, 2010

/ HAMMER TO NAIL » Blog Archive » A Conversation with Zhao Dayong Nelson Kim interview, October 7, 2009

Interview: Independent filmmaker Zhao Dayong - GoKunming: Kunming ... Interview from Go Kunming, March 1, 2010

China News: Danwei: Interview with Zhao Dayong | China Digital ... YouTube interview Part 1 (subtitled), March 27, 2010 (7:01)

YouTube - Interview with Chinese filmmaker Zhao Dayong: Part 2 (6:56)

YouTube - Interview with Chinese filmmaker Zhao Dayong (subtitled) (13:57)

Variety

TimeOut NY David Fear

TimeOut Chicago Ben Kenigsberg

The Star: cultural production in China How China is using art (and artists) to sell itself to the world, by Murray Whyte from The Toronto Star, December 9, 2009, also seen here: The Selling of Culture in China

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips, April 9, 2010

The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review March 15, 2010

New York Times: China's indie filmmaking Indie Filmmakers: China’s New Guerrillas, Kirk Semple from The New York Times, September 25, 2009

Mao Zedong - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mao Zedong: Biography from Answers.com

Chairman Mao ZeDong - Mao Tse-tung

CNN In-Depth Specials - Visions of China - Profiles: Mao Tse-tung

Dialectical materialism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dialectic - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Great Leap Forward - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cultural Revolution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

On Contradiction from Mao Zedong’s selected works, August 1937

On Practice from Mao Zedong’s selected works, August 1937

On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People from Mao Zedong’s selected works, Febraury 27, 1957

Zhao Liang

PETITION (La Cour des Plaignants)

France China (123 mi) 2009

Petition (La Cour Des Plaignants) Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily

Even Franz Kafka would find it hard to credit the systemic injustice denounced in Petition, an angry and harrowing investigation by Chinese documentary maker and artist Zhao Liang. The film, on which Zhao has been working since 1996, looks at the world of the ‘petitioners’, people who come to Beijing from all parts of China in order to plead their case against injustices, and who find themselves embroiled in a no-exit situation which leaves them homeless, impoverished, even disabled. The film, some of it shot using a secret camera, is an exemplary piece of journalism, and will be a must for television and for festivals, especially those with human rights interests, although theatrical prospects will be limited.

The film looks at the lives of petitioners who come to Beijing to visit its Complaints Office, and who find themselves stuck there for years on end, waiting to air grievances against local abuses of justice. Obliged to wait in the city, without much hope of winning redress, complainants find themselves living in the now-demolished ‘Petition Village’, a shanty town in which poverty reigns. Despite their living conditions, the interviewees generally state their determination to stay and see their case through.

To make things worse, local authorities send their own brutal and unscrupulous representatives, known as ‘retrievers’, to Beijing to dissuade petitioners. The odds against the wronged are so overwhelmingly stacked that one can only admire the determination of the multitudes who persist in their purpose.

Often shooting with a hidden camera, Zhao films and interviews a number of people, following some over the twelve years of the shoot. In particular, providing a narrative thread of sorts, he follows Qi, a woman determined to get justice for her husband’s unexplained death in hospital. In one of the film’s most painful moments, Qi’s daughter Juan decides to leave her mother and start a new life. Her return visit a couple of years later, with a child of her own, results in a painful confrontation – one of those moments at which Zhao’s approach appears uncomfortably intrusive.

The film offers more than its share of horror. Notably, after a woman fleeing from retrievers is run over by a train, other members of the petitioner community salvage her jawbone and a fragment of scalp to use as evidence if her case comes to light. Despite their oppression and the apparent hopelessness of their situation, the petitioners appear to be a tight-knit, mutually supportive community, as well as extremely lucid about their cause and what it represents. Many of them openly voice what seems to be the film’s own unequivocal message, that the current state of corruption in China will only end when democracy comes. 

In the final episodes, we see Petition Village demolished as part of the Olympics building programme, making petitioners’ living conditions even more untenable. The film’s end sequence contrasts their plight with the official image of a modern China projected by the fireworks of the Olympics opening ceremony.

The film offers no spoken commentary on events, but uses occasional captions to fill in additional background. If the situation Zhao depicts seems inexorably grim, hope is offered by the fact that he has succeeded in making this film, and by the fact that his subjects have had the courage to talk openly about their travails.

Zhao Tianyu

DEADLY DELICIOUS (Shuang shi ji) C 72

China (94 mi) 2008

A Chinese horror story that slaps the audience in the face with a gruesome opening, a montage of how to dice and slice fish, especially ones that are still alive. Fresh off of that sickening sound in your stomach, the film turns into a revolting insipid kissing fest between an airline hostess (Yu Nan, a Zhang Ziyi lookalike) and a slick businessman (Francis Ng) who carry on like a couple of overanxious teenagers, whose love fests are always interrupted by his cell phone, claiming urgent “business” is calling him away. Distraught and afraid of losing him, she meets a mystery woman, Jiang Yiyan, whose overly friendly nature might at first arouse suspicions, but as she recommends getting to a man’s heart through his stomach, suggesting various exotic delicacies from her own cookbook, the hostess is only too happy to accept her advice, which includes interminable instructions over a cell phone while she cooks. This turns into a film fest of food dishes which are shown in elaborate detail, one after another. The man’s interest in the girl spikes, but his health deteriorates and trouble brews.

Behind the scenes we discover the mystery woman has an air of Tura Satana about her without the cleavage, as she turns into a demented monster intent on manipulating others by poisoning them with deadly food combinations until they can meekly fall under her control. What starts out as an atrocious film suddenly takes on a different air, as Yiyan’s style is to speak in a softer voice than anyone else, where her ruthless plan and astonishing self control becomes her secret weapon. Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t have the balls to get serious with this idea, as it temporarily veers into Stephen King’s MISERY (1990) territory where Tura Satana wants to have it it all, but instead of creating any sense of plausible tension that might fasten the audience to their seats, this instead turns into a silly, compromised, formulaic exercise that largely disappoints. Of interest however (speaking of compromise), and most likely the reason this less than stellar film was shown at the fest, actress Yu Nan is serving on the main film competition jury.

Zheng, Junzhao

ONE AND EIGHT (Yi ge he ba ge) B 87

China (90 mi) 1983

Essentially a war film, made at a tiny, provincial film studio calling itself the Youth Production Unit, which appears to be a tribute to Kurosawa’s SEVEN SAMURAI, featuring outlaws whose characters evolve from criminal mentality to rather unique, patriotic heroes. All right, so it sounds more like a stripped down DIRTY DOZEN. Supposedly based on a poem depicting the bravery of Mao’s army against the Japanese invaders in WWII, it follows a chain gang of 9 convicts, 8 are ordinary robbers and murderers, while one is a falsely accused Communist army instructor. The prisoners are enclosed inside a tightly constricted, claustrophobic well by their own army in the face of an advancing Japanese force, until circumstances become so dire that they are released to help make a last stand. All perform well in combat, becoming paragons of patriotic virtue. The exaggeration is so complete that the film ends like a spaghetti western, with an enormous musical score adding a lushness to the bravura visual style.

Chicago Reader (Ted Shen) capsule review

This landmark 1984 film signaled the emergence of China's "Fifth Generation," the first wave of directors to graduate from film academies following the end of the Cultural Revolution. Made at a tiny provincial studio by Zhang Junzhao, it broke new ground in Chinese cinema with its remote locations, bravura visual style, and unsentimental tone. Ostensibly based on an epic poem extolling the bravery of Mao's army, it focuses on eight criminals and a turncoat officer imprisoned by Japanese invaders during World War II. Yet there's not much of a plot; Zhang is far more interested in creating a grimy claustrophobia amid the arid plains of central China and experimenting with theatrical touches such as characters addressing the camera in tight close-ups. The men are both existential animals and paragons of patriotic virtue--like Kurosawa's seven samurai but even more laconic. As progressive as One and Eight must have seemed in China, the soldiers’ posing recalls the iconography of socialist paeans in the 60s, as figures set against a harsh landscape suffer gladly for the sake of the motherland.

User comments from imdb Author: zzmale

This movie is based on the novel with the same title: one and eight.

Although everything depicted in the movie is extremely close if not identical to what was described in the original novel, the original novels is still much better.

Obviously, in a movie that is less than two hours long, you certainly can not expect the film crew would include every detail that is in the original novel, but there are still things the film crew could do to improve the quality of this film. For example, one obvious shortcoming of the film crew is its lack of technical knowledge, more gadgets were put into the movie for the visual effect, but some are not the products of the time, or the local region.

Chinese feminist film criticism Gina Marchetti reviews Dai Jinhua’s book, Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua, from Jump Cut, Summer 2003

Zhou Xiaowen

OBSESSION (Feng kuang de dai jia)

China (100 mi) 1989

User comments from imdb Author: zzmale

The literal translation of the title should be: the Price of Madness. This title is more appropriate because it accurately describes the mental state of the female protagonist. People take laws into their own hand when the legal system lags behind.

Representations of democracy in China Blood in the Square: Representations of Democracy in China, by Scott Nygren from Jump Cut, July 1992 (excerpt)

Some of these problems find a different but equally disturbing formulation in Zhou's OBSESSION. In OBSESSION, Qingqing pursues the rapist of her younger sister Lanlan; he is a criminal portrayed as psychotically obsessed with Western pornography and guns. Without assistance from her family, Qingqing herself becomes obsessed with pursuing the criminal independent of the slow official investigation. At the end, she murders the criminal rather than allow the police to take him into custody.

Zhou specifically shot the film on location in Qingdao, a former German possession, in order to set the story in and around Western-style architecture. The rape occurs near a Christian church, and the rapist and his brother are later discovered to live hidden in the church tower, surrounded by racks of guns. In addition, as a film OBSESSION models itself after a Western crime thriller. Western iconography and styles of representation become multiply identified with uncontrollable phallocentric violence. The film assumes that pornography and guns both characterize the West and lead directly to chaos. In this sense, OBSESSION approximates the official denunciations of foreign ideas as "spiritual pollution." Deng's campaign against foreign pollution in 1983-84 failed but has been recently revived, and pornographic "yellow books" produced by Chinese publishers before June 4 to generate profits have again been repressed.[15] Such antipollution campaigns are also disturbingly reminiscent of Japanese attitudes antagonistic to the West during its militarist period, which equated liberal democracy and speculative capitalism with disease and crime.[16]

The concept of Western pollution formulates a partial critique of humanism which cannot be completely ignored, but it derives from a position of patriarchal authority even more severe than that which it criticizes. The imaginary figure of pollution in Asia is a mirror of Orientalism in the West. Both figures displace a repressed and unresolved internal conflict onto the other. Chris Berry has argued that xenophobia circulates among the Chinese in the form of hostility towards everything not of the Han race, which reproduces a racist division within China against ethnic minorities.[17] As in Romania, where the xenophobia promoted by the Ceausescu regime served to mask internal ethnic divisions, the violence which OBSESSION attaches to the West serves to displace a consideration of violence internal to China.

Yet OBSESSION, again like the Western crime genre it imitates, is simultaneously fascinated with the actions it condemns. In a move calculated to attract audiences, Thou originally appended idealized nude sequences of the sisters showering to the beginning and end of the film. However, offical intervention forced the scenes' removal prior to continued distribution in China. The film also invites identification with violence by Qingqing's melodramatic murder of the criminal in excess of police capture. In both cases, a viewer position is constructed wherein transgressive fantasies of voyeurism and vengeance represent a rupture from the social norms of a consensus society, so that regressive fantasy becomes associated with the interiorization of an individualist viewer psychology.

ERMO

Hong Kong China (98 mi) 1994

Time Out review Tony Rayns

This highly entertaining tragi-comedy is the best film yet about the ups and downs of 'modernisation' in the Chinese countryside. The heroine Ermo is a doughty noodle-maker bent on regaining her social status in the village; she sets her heart on earning and saving enough to buy the largest TV set in the country, even if it kills her - which it begins to look like doing. Wry, sexy and very wittily observed, the film sees China now as a tangle of materialism, amorality and left-overs from both feudalism and communism. Buñuel himself couldn't have come up with a more devastating account of stone-ground passions or preservative-free desires.

San Francisco Examiner (Gary Kamiya) review

MODERN CHINA may be rushing headlong into the capitalist future, but some of its citizens have doubts. In "Ermo," director Zhou Xiaowen's somber, spare tale of obsession and greed, to get rich is definitely not glorious.

"Ermo" is not a political film: The issues it addresses are as ancient as human nature. A kind of naturalistic fable, it moves toward its grim conclusion with bleak inevitability. "Ermo" is one of those films that leaves you vaguely dissatisfied when it ends - yet the artistic vision that leads to that dissatisfaction, the film's powerful conveyance of life's banality and sadness, is what gives it its force. "Ermo" lingers in the mind.

The film's plot is as simple and plaintive as the cry of "Twisty noodles!" that is heard as the film opens. Ermo (played with brooding intensity and an appropriately limited emotional range by Alia) is a strong young woman who lives in a village with her considerably older husband, Chief (Ge Zhijun), and their young son, Tiger. Ermo gets up before dawn every day to make the "twisty noodles," which she later sells in the village market. Shots of Ermo at work - kneading the dough with her bare feet, straining to pull down a long handle that forces the heavy dough through a strainer, cooking the noodles in a great pot - recur throughout the film, providing a harshly lyrical counterpoint to the story.

Ermo gets little help from Chief, who is sickly - and impotent - and spends much of his time whining and drinking medicine that he hopes will restore his virility. Still, she tolerates her hard life - until temptation, in the form of her vulgar neighbor's shiny new TV set, enters her world.

Ermo's next-door neighbors are Blindman (so called because of his small eyes) and his wife, Fat Woman (Zhang Haiyan). The Blindman household offers a reverse image of Ermo's domestic situation: Blindman (a sympathetic portrayal by Liu Peiqi) is a hard-working, cheerful truck owner, while Fat Woman is a mean-spirited lazybones who does nothing but lounge around all day in a loud orange coat smoking cigarettes. Jealous of Ermo's son, Fat Woman deliberately throws dirty water on her neighbor's noodles; Ermo retaliates by poisoning Fat Woman's pig.

Blindman begins driving Ermo to the nearest town, where she can make more money selling her noodles. Soon he gets her a better job in a restaurant. Obsessed with money - she is repeatedly shown riffling through a fat wad of bills, an expression of almost hypnotic rapacity on her face - Ermo covets a huge set she sees in a department store, and which draws large crowds who gape uncomprehendingly at football games, '70s sitcoms and other leading American cultural indicators. Ermo's lust for the TV becomes all-consuming, even leading her to give so much blood for cash that she becomes anemic.

At the same time, she begins having an affair with Blindman. When she discovers that he has been subsidizing her wages, however, and he refuses to leave his wife to marry her, she breaks it off, declaring, "I'm not a whore."

Finally, Ermo saves enough to buy the TV. It is carried into her home, where it is placed on the only space available - the bed. Exhausted, Ermo sits like a zombie next to it as half the village crowds in to watch. In a final, haunting shot, the screen fuzzes out after the sign-off; as the empty screen flickers, the cry of

"Twisty noodles" is heard. Mournful and broken though it may be, life goes on.

If "Ermo" was only a story about a woman who becomes obsessed with a TV, it would be nothing more than a cautionary fable with a one-dimensional protagonist. The unhappy love affair that intersects it, however, brings its heroine's full humanity into view, and endows this small tale with a poignant touch of reality.

ERMO Televisuality, capital and the global village, by Anne T. Ciecko and Sheldon H. Lu from Jump Cut, December 1998

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]

Rich Siegel review

Seth Bookey retrospective

Pedro Sena retrospective [3.5/5]

Austin Chronicle (Alison Macor) review [3/5]

San Francisco Chronicle (Peter Stack) review

The New York Times (Caryn James) review

Zhu Wen

SOUTH OF THE CLOUDS B 89

China (100 mi) 2004

There were a few surprises in store for us in this beautifully shot film, as the name of film director Tian Zhuangznuang was listed in the opening credits as a Production Advisor, and there is a dream sequence near the end that has Tian’s imprint all over it. This is a Kafkaesque comic parody of the absurdity of living in China, a gentle, contemplative film shot in a meditative pace, featuring an outstanding performance by Li Xuejian, who is simply a pleasure to watch playing a selfless retiree who wishes to visit a faraway province where he nearly moved in his youth, but events prevented him from ever seeing the Yunnan province, near the Tibet border. Once there, he seems to revel in the slow pace and beauty of the landscape, but the story places him in the odd position of being arrested without committing a crime, challenging the generous spirit of the warm-hearted police captain, beautifully played by Zhuangzhuang himself. What this leads to is a gorgeous portrait of life in the outer regions of China where no one really pays attention to what goes on, leaving one in a temporary state of hibernation with unlimited possibilities. This is a warm, humorous, and loving portrait of a kind, wise, and gentle soul, the kind of person who is easily pushed aside and forgotten in the fast pace of the modern world.

From Sea to Sky: An Interview with Zhu Wen • Senses of Cinema Kevin Lee interview with the director from Senses of Cinema, October 28, 2004

Zinnemann, Fred

HIGH NOON

USA (85 mi) 1952

The Stream of Consciousness in the Films of Alain Resnais (Book Website) by Haim Calev, Chapter One, Suggestion of Thought through Objective Correlatives

A different path in transcending the difficulty of representing the mental life of characters in the film medium, is through structural and dynamic means of cinematic expression.

The most widespread structural device, often used in action genres, is the immediate succession of a mental process in a character's mind by exhilarating external visual action. When placed in immediate vicinity, in the continuum of screen time, the energetic progression of the action serves to hold and carry the emotion generated by the mental flow and provides time to absorb it. The powerful cinematic presence of the action, though unrelated in its content to the mental flow, provides an adequate container to accommodate and embody it. A sequence from the classical western 'High Noon'⁶ should serve to illustrate this strategy.

Sheriff Kane (Gary Cooper) has just married Emmy (Grace Kelly) and has resigned from his Sheriff's duties, as a tribute to her non-violent Quaker creed. While the wedding ceremony is taking place, a gang of bandits comes into town to support Miller, their leader who has just been released from jail and is coming to town on the noon train. Miller has sworn to kill Kane, who had captured him and saved the town from the terror of his gang. The townspeople urge Kane to leave immediately and Kane complies and leaves hastily with Emmy.

Kane is torn between his sense of loyalty toward the townspeople, who have entrusted him with responsibility for their security, and his vow to Emmy to refrain from violence. Leaving town means deserting his duty and abandoning the people, who trusted him, to the terror of Miller and his gang. Staying in town and confronting four professional gunmen means dicing with death. Kane's dilemma would be worthy of a long monologue in a classical theater play or of an elaborate introspective analytical description in a novel.

Instead, a powerful cinematic sequence of external action occurs. Kane and Emmy are seen in a racing carriage, riding hurriedly out of town. The sequence depicts in great detail the movement of their carriage, filling the screen with visually strong shots of its motion. It is seen storming through the town square in a long shot, succeeded by a shot of one of its wheels rolling in extreme close-up in the foreground, while changing views of the town are seen through its dark graphic shape. An over-the-head high-angle shot of the racing carriage is followed by a camera movement revealing the deputy Sheriff gossiping about Kane's cowardly escape. The racing carriage bursts into frame again, filling the foreground with its bulky dark presence, rolling down the road. A travelling shot shows it in a lateral view, then, a closer view of the horses' galloping feet in a low-angle shot fills the frame, followed by the graphic shapes of the rolling wheels. The carriage comes toward the foreground, Kane turns it around, tells Emmy that he is reversing his decision and opting to return to town to confront the bandits. The carriage rides back into town in a series of shots, symmetrically reversing the shots of its ride out of town.

The sequence consists of fifteen shots, out of which the racing carriage is depicted in twelve, filling the screen with its energetic graphic and kinetic presence for two minutes and twenty seconds. The viewer is exposed to an exciting visual experience which serves as a cinematic carrier, designed to contain the mental process in Kane's mind. It would be too far fetched to attribute to it any metaphorical link to Kane's mental process. Suggesting a similarity, lets say, between his racing thoughts and the racing carriage would be an over simplistic. On the other hand, the seemingly coincidental simultaneous occurrence of the two, establishes inevitably a metonymical relationship between them.

Far from being the expression of Kane's mental flow, the racing carriage sequence functions as its external carrier, or its 'objective correlative'. While remaining totally objective to its content, the sequence provides a sensory experience which invokes the mental process and becomes its "crystallization". It is equivalent to the mental process in its intensity, or rather in the intensity of the esthetic experience it evokes in the viewer.⁷ Because of the cinematic stimulation to which he is exposed, and by virtue of the esthetic arousal he experiences, the viewer is in the proper mood to absorb the intensity of the mental flow in Kane's mind, the torment of his moral dilemma. Moreover, the long duration of screen time dedicated to the racing carriage sequence supplies an opportunity for the viewer to meditate about Kane's mental process and to absorb it.

The 'objective correlative' principle is actually the basis of the dominant main-stream strategy in suggesting mental processes of characters in the cinematic medium. It is very effective in providing a viewing experience easily digested by the viewer, while at the same time inviting his active participation in imagining mental processes in the characters' minds. In this sense it is reminiscent of the strategy of suggesting characters' thoughts through their external activities, facial expressions, gestures, behavior and dialogue, as previously discussed.

Both strategies, complementary to each other, allow a medially adequate and viable way in suggesting the inner life of characters. However, both achieve merely an indirect penetration into the drama that takes place in the individual's consciousness. A direct representation of the flow of thoughts as they stream in a character's mind, the illusion of witnessing their actual occurrence in the fictional here and now on the screen, calls for different strategies.

What A Classic '50s Western Can Teach Us About The Hollywood Blacklist Terry Gross interviews author Glenn Frankel from NPR, February 21, 2017

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY

USA (118 mi) 1953

From Here to Eternity Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York

Half a century after it swept the Oscars, winning Best Picture, Director, Screenplay and two acting prizes (for Frank Sinatra and Donna Reed in supporting roles), From Here to Eternity seems every bit as uncompromising and hard-hitting as it did the day it was released—which is to say, not very. Indeed, it's surprising that we've made it this long without seeing a remake, given how much pussyfooting was required to make James Jones's racy, cynical best-seller amenable to the Hays office: nonstop cursing elided, Maggio's stockade ordeal relegated offscreen, Lorene none too convincingly transformed from hooker to hostess (but with teary-eyed monologue about respectability left intact), etc. As with Kubrick's Lolita, made a decade later, you can sense something tawdry lurking just beneath the decorum.

Alas, Zinnemann wasn't exactly the Kubrick of his era—more like the Ron Howard. Eternity ranks among the director's less ham-handed efforts, but his penchant for nudging remains, most notably in a giggleworthy shot of Lancaster posed conspicuously against a wall calendar that reads December 6, 1941. (For the historically challenged, this is quickly followed by a road sign pointing the way to Pearl Harbor.) Still, give Zinnemann credit, at the very least, for casting Kerr and Reed against type; the tension between their prim bearing and their roiling desires reflects that of the film itself, perpetually torn as it is between civility and profanity. It may not be the movie Jones's novel deserved, but few works would better represent the 1950s in a time capsule

JULIA

USA (118 mi) 1977

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Vienna Film Festival

I can remember being most impressed by Julia when I saw it on TV many years ago, but the years haven't been too kind - it comes across as the kind of stilted, big-budget Hollywood production aimed principally at Oscar voters (with considerable success - nominations and wins duly followed). An episodic, elliptical biopic of playwright Lillian Hellman (Jane Fonda), it focuses on her relationship with lifelong friend Julia (Vanessa Redgrave) - from their childhood (when the pair are played by notably well-cast juvenile performers) through college, and Julia's involvement in Europe's cataclysmic 1930s. Indeed, the focus remains firmly on specific individuals while the monumental events in which they're caught up remain, indistictly, in the background.

Director Zinnemann adopts a thuddingly old-fashioned, flashback-heavy, tastefully-opulent and grindingly reverent approach to the material (when the action moves to Paris, he shows us the Eiffel Tower while an accordion is heard on the soundtrack) invariably shooting Fonda through what looks like a thick gauze. This occasionally produces unintentionally amusing results, especially during a firelit night-scene on a beach, when those gauzy/foggy images of Fonda alternate with crystal-clear shots of Jason Robards (who somehow won an Oscar for his extended-cameo performance as Hellman's on-off partner Dashiell Hammett).

Even the legendary editor Walter Murch has a couple of off-days here - cutting poor Hal Holbrook off mid-sentence ("Wonderful!--") and losing grip of a key scene where Julia and her fellow leftists at a Vienna university are attacked by Nazi thugs. The screenplay is also a problem - Julia often feels like a rather silly picture about a rather silly woman (Hellman brags about not knowing where Idaho is on a map, and later chirrups "I like being famous!"), and of the three acts the opening and closing sections, tracing her development as a writer, suggest a shaky grasp of the creative process: one minute Hammett is delivering a sharp critique of Hellman's latest work, the next he's hailing its rewritten form as "the best play anyone's written in a long time". And what about Dorothy Parker (Rosemary Murphy) - the character makes such a limited impression that it's only when the credits roll that we realise that the innocuous woman who pops up here and there was intended to be the legendary wit.

Things only really click into gear during a thrillerish, sub-Hitchcock second-act in which Lillian has to deliver a mysterious item into the hostile territory of Berlin, and in which the two stars have an touching, all-too-brief reunion in a cafe (it's Fonda's best scene by far, and Redgrave is terrific). Elsewhere, however, there's an evasive air to proceedings - we're told that Hellman achieved literary fame through a play entitled The Children's Hour (we have to take its excellence on trust) though at no point is the lesbian theme of the play mentioned. Then, late on, a drunken interloper makes a lewd comment about how "the whole world knows" about her relationship with Julia - a relationship which, on the evidence we're shown, is never anything other than platonic (although there are two instances of some kind of supernatural/psychic link between the pair.)

Was Alvin Sargent's screenplay rewritten to 'sanitise' out Hellman's true feelings towards her great friend? Or is there something more unusual and interesting going on? The opening voice-over tells us about the concept of pentimento, whereby an artist paints over his original work with a revision (having 'repented'), but the original outlines become visible, over time, through the paint. Are we supposed to regard the film of Julia as an example of pentimento, and to discern the 'actual' story through the rather blurry shapes on Zinnemann's lumpy "canvas"? Perhaps - but this seems like an awfully handy get-out for the film-makers, who could have put all manner of nonsense up on the screen in the hope that viewers would be able to penetrate and see the "masterpiece" hidden within.

Julia The Special Woman, by Martha Vicinus from Jump Cut, August 1978

Julia a response to the article by Elizabeth Hess from Jump Cut, November 1979

Julia. Turning Point Notes on Female Bonding, by Pam Rosenthal from Jump Cut, December 1978

Lesbians in "Nice" Films Claudette Charboneau and Lucy Winer from Jump Cut, March 1981

DVD Talk [Stuart Galbraith IV]

DVD Verdict [Brendan Babish]

UpcomingDiscs.com [David Annandale]

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Zlotowski, Rebecca

BELLE ÉPINE B 87

aka: Dear Prudence

France (80 mi) 2012 ‘Scope

Every generation seems to have a teen angst movie like this one, from THE WILD ONE (1953), REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955), THE 400 BLOWS (1959), to the film this most resembles stylistically, COLD WATER (1994), where the role of Léa Seydoux as Prudence most definitely resembles Virginie Ledoyen, both 16-year olds with absent parents who go on a binge of inappropriate behavior, where Assayas’s film carries more weight and complexity, as it has a better script and his use of iconic music is more cultural and a reflection of the times, while this first time director has a searing lead performance from Seydoux, a girl who will throw herself at anything in order to forget how empty she feels inside, but her life as well as the secondary characters remain largely undefined, where we only view them in passing instead of feel intensely immersed in their lives and affected by the outcome. Prudence is largely indifferent to her circumstances, numb from the recent death of her mother, where in an early scene she’s caught shoplifting, meets another petty thief in holding, Maryline (Agathe Schlenker), where perhaps the shot of the film is watching her on her way out the door, as she hesitates before walking outside, remaining hidden behind a wall while the audience sees Maryline join a group of awaiting bikers, where all the action is interestingly kept out of focus as we see a series of guys on motorcycles doing wheelies, revving their engines, just generally showing off in front of the girl before she climbs on the back of a bike and they all ride away, creating quite a spectacle—apparently arousing Prudence’s interest. Shot by Georges Lechaptois, the film is very much in the style of hand held Steadicam cameras closely following the rhythms and natural movements of the kids, where they have an easygoing attitude about sex and nudity, where frank discussions about sex, especially from the female point of view, are the norm. If ever there was a movie ripe for the song Dear Prudence The Beatles - Dear Prudence YouTube (4:00), this is it, but sadly it was not to be.

Prudence lives alone in her parent’s spacious house with her father continually absent except by phone, where her older sister Frédérique (Anna Sigalevitch) keeps an eye on her, but her life is an open door of new opportunities, expressing little interest in school, where she typically finds parties every night instead. When she runs into Maryline, she expresses an interest in meeting the bikers, who are the kinds of guys more interested in bikes than girls, who will pay attention to girls when they have nothing better to do, but will drop them flat the minute any biking event is happening, where they hold impromptu races every night, some of them daredevil, all illegal, where it’s not uncommon for people to get seriously injured or killed, often due to poor maintenance standards, where the carelessness of one rider will kill another. Somehow, they’re all immune to even talking about this gruesome subject, yakking and having a good time over beers instead, where together they display a 50’s homoerotic camaraderie. It’s never made clear what interest this holds for Prudence except there are cloisters of guys, any number of whom would be happy to hang out with her, so she pretty much has the pick of the litter other than Maryline’s guy. While this is nothing like BAND OF OUTSIDERS (1964), for instance, as it lacks the wild optimism and free-spirited energy and humor of the 60’s and instead projects an endless dreariness and monotony, bordering on fatalism, where kids are simply bored with the same things happening in their lives every day, where the idea of tempting death doesn’t feel like such a bad idea. Any happiness expressed on the screen lasts only for a brief instant, like a quick thrill, whether on motorcycles or in bed, and then it’s over.

There’s only the briefest hint of a storyline, clocking in at only 80 minutes, where sexual attraction may hold the audience’s attention briefly, but then it quickly wanes, as Prudence isn’t really interested in any guy, but that doesn’t stop her from having sex, or even from taking unnecessary abuse, as she can barely tell the difference. There’s a cloud of gloom hanging over her shoulder, where her family is still grieving over her mother’s passing, but Prudence is living like there’s no tomorrow, where her sexual behavior looks like a textbook on how to obtain sexually transmitted diseases. You’d think high school kids should be smarter and more careful, due to increased awareness and available information, but this girl simply doesn’t care what happens to her. Despite the downbeat subject matter, the film has a fresh, near documentary style, where the awkward, uninhibited nature of teenagers is always appealing, and a good deal of the film has an upbeat musical backdrop that throbs and pulsates with a kind of electric energy. Seydoux couldn’t be more committed to the role, where it looks like the part was written just for her, as her smoldering sexuality is always expressed in a low-key, offhanded manner, where she’s comfortable, relaxed, and even nonchalant while naked in front of the camera, but gives an edgy performance of moodiness, forever feeling like she’s lost in a rapidly descending sea-change of self-absorption, where it’s easy to see how everyone misunderstands her, continually thinking she’s selfish, as they’re missing the pain she’s trying so hard to avoid. Of course the inevitable happens, where the end couldn’t be more predictable, even if told in a starkly unanticipated manner, where despite many excellent qualities in this film, especially the unflinching and naturalistic portrait of a glum teenage girl, the script is too bare-bones, never really fleshing out anyone else’s story or offering any new insights into grief or adolescence.

Film-Forward.com [Nora Lee Mandel]

The good girl attracted to the guy racing motorcycles is a trope of adolescent rebellion going back to The Wild One (1953). Debut director/co-writer Rebecca Zlotowski delves unusually deep and sensitively into what drives one French 17 year old to hop on back. The family of Prudence Friedmann (Léa Seydoux) is reeling from the death of the mother, making Prudence feel abandoned and alone, despite relatives who take her into their observant Jewish home. She isn’t just led astray by the bad girl at school. She chooses the dark thrills and excitement of a late-night motorcycle hangout to mask her grief by experimenting with sex and drugs until she can finally, and touchingly, face her mother’s memory.

Slant Magazine [Chris Cabin]

Neither sentimentality nor nostalgia for reckless years gone by can be found in Rebecca Zlotowski's Belle Epine, which makes its tale of teenage rebellion in the face of overwhelming grief fall closer to a sobering character study than a classical youth film. Opening on a strip search of two girls at a local police department, the film quickly asserts the toughness of its heroine, a would-be high schooler named Prudence, played with coiled intensity by the talented Léa Seydoux. They are there for separate crimes, but the girls' fates seem to be tied from that moment; the deal is sealed when Prudence secretly follows her fellow detainee out and privately swoons over the motorcycles (the swarm of revving motors) that come to pick her up.

This isn't a moment of sudden awakening. Prudence has been fascinated by a series of television reports on motorcycle clubs and races being held in the southern suburbs of Paris for some time, but her fellow detainee, who introduces herself as Maryline (Agathe Schlencker), promises entry to their quasi-secretive world. In exchange for this, Prudence offers Maryline keys to her house, which has remained largely vacant since Prudence's mother passed away (under undisclosed circumstances) and her father flew away to grieve alone. Left only to answer to her older sister (Anna Sigalevitch) and her concerned cousin (Anaïs Demoustier), Prudence burrows her way into the motorcycle club's inner circle by throwing parties, listening to their endless lines of biker stories, opening her mouth for one rider and then her legs for another (Johan Libéreau).

It never becomes perfectly clear what the motorcycles mean to Prudence, whether they are representative of the way her mother died or pose a level of danger that pierces through the steel wool that she has draped over her heart. They certainly seem to be more tantalizing than the lessons of Judaism that her aunt, uncle, and cousins attempt to impart to her sister and her at dinner. The requisite hormonal angst of being a teenager is one dependent on physical rebellion as much as intellectual and compounded with a loss that would shake the most devout believer, the swell of emotions forces Prudence to seek immediate terminus but doesn't seem to mind if it comes in the form of gradual resolution or outright oblivion.

It's somewhat disappointing to see Zlotowksi, who wrote the film's smart and nimble script with Marcia Romano, Gaëlle Macé, and Christophe Mura, leaning so heavily (as so many debuting directors have) on the use of Steadicam, but her compositions are negligibly of her own distinct style and the driving sequences, as scored by techno-composer ROB, are completely immersive. Powered by Ms. Seydoux's startlingly strong performance, Belle Epine ultimately offers a concluding cathartic moment for Prudence, but it's not a confessional scene. Even as her stone-wall façade disintegrates into a veil of tears, Prudence retains a large measure of her mystery and we remain unsure as to where exactly she will end up. How exactly this all connects with its current title (which translates roughly to "Beautiful Spine") is in a similar state of uncertainty, but there's no mistaking how one might connect the original title, Dear Prudence, to the song that pleads for its eponymous loved one to show her smile one more time.

notcoming.com | Belle Épine - Not Coming to a Theater Near You Anna Bak-Kvapil

Boasting a robust slate of films already approved by Sundance, Cannes, Rotterdam and Toronto, the 2011 New Directors/New Films festival sets expectations high for its 40th anniversary. Some choices, like director Dennis Villeneuve’s tricky, politically opaque Incendies (Canada’s entry for the 2011 Academy Awards) and Daniel and Diego Vega’s Peruvian character study Octubre (Cannes 2010 Un Certain Regard winner), live up to their reputations. Others, like Anne Sewitsky’s Norwegian comedy of re-marriage, Happy Happy (Sundance 2011 Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema winner) and opening night film Margin Call, a hokey drama about the 2008 market crash, starring heavyweights Kevin Spacey and Jeremy Irons, fall disappointingly flat. There isn’t much in the way of levity or eye candy to be found, favored themes being the melancholy dreariness of daily life and the horrors of political unrest. (With so many selections sharing the same brownish gray color palette, I began to wonder if the projector simply hadn’t been cleaned in a while.) The most high profile films have imminent theatrical release dates, but some of the best entries in the festival are among the least heralded, including the Japanese comedy Hospitalité, and the French coming of age tale Belle Epine. Accordingly, the focus of reviews here will be on the good – and the not so good – in New Directors/New Films selections currently lacking U.S. distribution.

Sixteen-year old Prudence is a rebel with a cause—her mother died sixteen days ago. She is left alone in the family home, with a father away on business and an older sister finding solace with a boyfriend. Prudence, still in shock, can do whatever she likes. She uses her liberty to begin going to the Rungis circuit, a motorcycle racing course on the outskirts of Paris, frequented by rowdy delinquents. Inviting bad girl Marilyne to her house, they throw a party packed with older guys drinking beer. An awkwardly sensual film that brims with nervous adolescent sexuality, Belle Épine relies on the intense presence of rising star Léa Seydoux, who, with her elongated eyelids and defiant jawline, can look boyish and seductive, ferocious and tender. She has a hypnotic visual magnetism, and allows Prudence’s emotional struggle to make sense even with a minimum of dialogue and expression.

Short, impressionistic, and free of narrative fireworks, the film follows an intuitive path, and is set in no specific time but recalling the late 70s. Lingering on small details like wallpaper, stacks of records, and unkempt hair, the film is like a William Eggleston photo in motion. Colors are saturated and resonant, as when Prudence rides on the back of a motorcycle at night, bathed in blue light, the camera picking out her red high heels.

Sheltered Prudence is fascinated by the dangerous life the kids who hang around Rungis lead, as racers fly off of their bikes on sharp turns. Their group has the exciting allure of being entirely different than anything encountered in her protective Jewish family circle. In a shot that recalls Kenneth Anger’s fetishistic biker-themed Scorpio Rising, the boys, in black leather jackets and tight jeans, form a provocative tableau as they work on their motorcycles. They’re a 50s style of bad boy, with vices that include sitting around in diners drinking Coca Cola, and getting tattoos of deceased sisters.

An intensely female story, Belle Épine is comfortable with physicality. Beginning with the opening scene, nearly all the girls disrobe in the film, but their exposure does more than emphasize their encroaching physical maturity. It reveals the vulnerability that lies behind their defensive and sullen posturing. Zlotowski doesn’t have the leering, Pretty Baby gaze of an aging director; here, the fleeting glory of young bodies is tinged with a sense of waste and sadness.

Prudence seems to be living in a liminal netherworld. Her mother (played by Seydoux’s real mother, Valérie Schlumberger) appears to her in a way that manages to avoid the preciousness of magical realism. When Prudence apologizes to her mother for not realizing she was dying, her mother tells her “young girls should not concern themselves with such things.” Colette wrote in her Claudine series, “There is always a moment in the life of young persons when dying is just as normal and seductive to them as living.” Belle Épine traces the arc of this youthful fascination with mortality accompanied by a failure to comprehend its gravity. When the moment passes, Prudence realizes she doesn’t need to pursue death, or even concern herself with it.

Chris Knipp • View topic - Rebecca Zlotowski: Belle Épine (2010 ... Chris Knipp

Quiet Earth [Marina Antunes]

The Film Stage [Kristy Puchko]

Monsters and Critics [Ron Wilkinson]

CineScene [Howard Schumann]

Variety Reviews - Belle epine - Film Reviews - Cannes - Review by ... Alissa Simon

GRAND CENTRAL B- 80

France Austria (94 mi) 2013

Love in the ruins of a nuclear power plant―this isn’t exactly the kind of thing that raises eyebrows in the modern world, and is something of a step back from Zlotowski’s first film, the much more promising Belle Épine (2010), a grim but painfully realistic glimpse at grief through the underbelly of teenage angst. The biggest problem here is the mediocrity of the writing, where the French tend to get stereotyped for making so many adultery dramas, or films that reflect the ordinariness of illicit sexual affairs, a subject that has become so commonplace in French films that it affects the way the rest of the world views French society, as this same theme has continually been exported around the world for decades. The truth of the matter is that what it means in France is completely different than elsewhere, where an American public, for instance, would never stand for a President having an affair on the side, as he’d likely be run out of office (The Impeachment Trial of President William Jefferson Clinton), while the French make a habit out of it (The lives and loves of France's presidents - Telegraph). That being said, there is little this film adds to the subject that we haven’t seen before. Actually made “before” the Palme d’Or winning film Blue Is the Warmest Color (La Vie d'Adèle, Chapitres 1 et 2) (2013), a film that created headlines for being the first gay or lesbian themed film to win the coveted prize, but perhaps more notorious for its long and graphic sex scenes between two young and adorable French actresses. The common denominator in both films is the presence of actress Léa Seydoux who stars in both, though her character is much more subdued here. Zlotowski is a filmmaker that prefers to internalize human emotion, sparing the viewers from heated, overly theatrical performances, where just as important is the class structure and social milieu that the characters operate from, where she’s more interested in presenting realistic, near documentary slices of life. What stands out here is the quality of actors involved, where the smoldering presence of Seydoux is paired with Tahar Rahim, whose grim, hauntingly understated performance took place in the stark prison brutality of Jacques Audiard’s 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #10 A Prophet (Un Prophète). One could easily see this film following immediately on the heels of that one, as it begins with Gary (Rahim) as a man with a criminal past being released from prison, where his employment opportunities are extremely limited. Like a scene from Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), Gary has his wallet stolen by a fellow passenger on a train named Tcherno (Johan Libéreau), where the two become friends afterwards, immediately finding themselves facing similar circumstances in the unemployment line.

Steered towards a training program in the only kind of work that would hire unqualified workers, they find themselves with a team of new recruits hired to work side by side with regular workers for routine cleaning and maintenance inside a nuclear reactor. Much like the rigors of prison life, where every action is supervised and monitored, including the wearing of a measuring device that reads daily radiation levels, scrubbing and cleaning themselves in the showers afterwards, it becomes a series of everyday routines, each day the same as the last, where the tiniest of mistakes can be fatal, becoming a dreary and monotonous life in a meticulously overcontrolled environment. Basically they are the canaries in the coal mines, the guinea pigs sent into the most dangerous places, and once exposed to an unhealthy level of radiation, they are simply replaced by new workers that have no idea what they’re getting themselves into. Seen through the constantly probing eyes of Gary, this hellish existence leads to little satisfaction, but a fairly substantial paycheck. Overseen by an older and more experienced team leader Gilles, Dardennes regular Olivier Gourmet, who is seemingly worn out, exhausted, and at the end of his rope, continually fighting the cost cutting measures of the unsympathetic administrator in charge, Morali (Marie Berto), who is little more than a hard ass who rules with threats and an iron fist. In this mind-numbing existence, Gary’s incentive appears to be to volunteer for the most dangerous risks, accompanied by the biggest paychecks. In this way he quickly earns the respect of his fellow workers, including Toni (Denis Ménochet), from Ozon’s In the House (Dans La Maison) (2012), a veteran worker that he successfully helps rescue at one point. Living in a trailer park environment with the rest of the workers, Toni’s attractive girlfriend is Karole (Leydoux) who also works at the plant and dresses scantily while flirtatiously planting a big kiss on his lips as his group initiation in front of everyone at a communal outdoor dinner where there is celebratory singing and excessive drinking. Soon afterwards the two are taking secret walks into the woods where the nuclear towers seen off in the distance become the background of their furious sexual affairs hidden in the tall grass by the lakeside. The drudgery of work and routine is accompanied by a growing need for a sexual outlet, which becomes a continuing desperation, though Karole still remains close to Toni.

While the film is a nightmarish vision of capitalism, where the least educated and lowest paid workers are the most exploited, it also attempts to express a near suicidal impulse on the part of Gary to take greater and greater risks, as if he realizes the short term duration of the work assignment, where other offers may be non-existent. This fatalistic view adds an oppressively downbeat element, the reasons for which he never shares with Karole, as their sexual trysts are mostly wordless without comment, though she may be equally pessimistic, where her disappearances into the woods at the same time as Gary become more and more obvious, even to Toni, though she at least appears to have alternative possibilities that are never explored. Part of this may be because the entire film is seen only through the eyes of Gary, where none of the other characters are really fleshed out, leaving some degree of dissatisfaction with the way the extremely thin narrative is presented. With a complete avoidance of psychology, the film takes us on ever bleaker paths, where it’s unclear just how seriously exposed to radiation Gary becomes over time, as he stops using his monitor, deceiving the medical personnel by leaving the recording instrument in the changing area. When they finally catch on, he’s immediately discharged, where one can only imagine how this will effect him in the future, but it can’t be good. The dangerous hazards of nuclear contamination have never really been explored in films before, where it’s unusual, to say the least, to compound the risks with a seemingly doomed sexual affair. Both actors are clearly invested in their roles, also Karole’s best friend Géraldine, Camille Lellouche, who gets radiation exposure in her hair and is forced to shave her head, where the majority of the interior drama takes place beneath the surface where the director never really connects the invisible forces at work threatening both the personal and professional lives, where the lifeless artificiality of the drab and colorless interiors of the reactor (shot on digital) contrast mightily with the gorgeous exteriors of the natural world outside (shot on 35 mm). Shot by cinematographer Georges Lechaptois, the exteriors are shot at the four towers of the Cruas Nuclear Power Plant between Marseille and Lyon in Southern France along the Rhône River, while the interiors are shot at the inoperable Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant in Austria, which was built but never used due to the anti-nuclear crusade in Austria and is used largely as a training facility. While love can blossom from a seemingly toxic environment, Zlotowski accentuates the damage, offering a dismally hopeless view of the future, as the finale reveals another batch of new recruits arriving at the plant, taking the place of those that have already suffered too much radiation exposure.

Critic's Notebook [Alex Beattie]

Love is often portrayed as a dangerous game; and yet by setting "Grand Central" against the unconventional backdrop of a nuclear power plant, Rebecca Zlotowski veils her picture in a darker and infinitely more stifling fog of threat. The seeming sterility of the plant lies in stark contrast to the beauty of the burgeoning and forbidden relationship that develops between Gary (Tahar Rahim), a carefree plant rookie desperate to kick out on his own, and confident Karole (an alluring Léa Seydoux), erstwhile fiancée of Gary’s colleague Toni (Denis Ménochet).

Undeterred by the dangers that lurk within the plant — namely the dreaded "dose" of radiation that the workers must encounter each day — Gary betrays a recklessness that also afflicts his personal life. Ignoring a portentous warning sign reading "Don’t give in to curiosity," he takes risks within and without the plant that have potentially life-changing ramifications on himself and those around him.

By pursuing Karole, Gary faces a hostility entirely of his own creation, poisoning the sanctity of what should be a safe environment away from white walls and radiation suits of the day job. Despite the clear chemistry between Gary and Karole, credit to which must lie with the terrific Mr. Rahim and, particularly, Ms. Seydoux, theirs is a tainted love suffused with danger and is one that leads Gary to take terrible risks to ensure their clandestine relationship can continue at whatever the cost.

Throughout, Ms. Zlotowski draws neat visual contrasts between the ponderous and treacherous hardships that Gary endures within the confines of the plant, and Gary and Karole’s illicit trysts which take place in lush, unblemished riverside idylls. Karole is his escape and Gary indeed is hers, although Toni is revealed to be neither as brutal nor overbearing as he might appear, compounding the sense that love’s toxic grip can take anyone in its stifling hold.

"Grand Central" is an original and well-realized reflection on the destructive nature of love. At one point, love is described as the "sickness of youngsters"; and through Gary and Karole’s relationship, Ms. Zlotowski reveals it to be a "dose" that has the potential to cause untold damage. Love is a cruel, unforgiving and yet enticing mistress; and while it doesn’t blind Gary to the consequences of his actions, it does ultimately cost him everything.

Grand Central | ArtsHub Australia Sarah Ward

Trapped in mountains of concrete and metal, and covered in layers of protective latex and plastic, Gary Manda (Tahar Rahim, The Past) does the only job he can find: maintaining nuclear power plants. As trained by supervisor Gilles (Olivier Gourmet, Violette) and veteran Toni (Denis Ménochet, In the House), he joins the hordes of unskilled workers ferried from site to site around the country, monitors strapped to their chest to indicate radiation exposure levels.

In moments away from the thankless, dangerous routine, Gary seeks solace in the only way he can, traversing the overgrown fields that shudder in the shadow of smoke stacks. He is never alone, Toni’s soon-to-be wife Karole (Léa Seydoux, Blue is the Warmest Colour) rolling around by his side. Their connection is physical, free-spirited and sat within nature, a start departure from their daily toil. Their romance is an outlet of escape from their dreary duties, and, of course, completely forbidden.

Grand Central, the second feature from Dear Prudence writer/director Rebecca Zlotowski, is deeply steeped in the juxtaposition of the workplace minutiae and the illicit affair. As co-scripted with Gaëlle Macé (Aliyah), it is deceptively simple in its premise and rewardingly complex in its details, flitting between austerity and expression, and meticulousness and recklessness. The film’s frames overflow with corresponding symbolism – but while its metaphorical leanings are apparent, delicacy and dexterity drives their execution. As seen through a story in which the little that does happen is tinged with the inevitability of serious consequences, the feature is deliberate and intricate in its acts and imagery.

In the narrative that excels as a snapshot of a low-income reality known to few but emblematic of many more, Gary finds a place to belong and a surrogate family in the controlled and hazardous environment, but his very presence is as toxic to his new friends as their surroundings. In the visuals that vibrate with the tension of the setting, Zlotowski plays with speed and focus to draw attention to certain moments, all seemingly minor but none trivial. A visceral soundscape underscores both, filtering snippets of conversation into the mix, echoing with the beeps and sirens of warning, and never afraid to zone in and out. 

Striking, subtle performances further ensure the film never acquiesces to heavy-handedness, as given by a just as impressive cast. Rahim and Seydoux are astutely matched, the former openly ruffled and searching, and the latter fragile beneath her sexual bravado. Though Rahim monopolises the screen in a sympathetic but suitably scrappy turn, the duo simmers with both passion and vulnerability in their scenes together. The resigned Gourmet and imposing Ménochet provide ample support, as does Johan Libéreau (11.6) as the careening, mischievous new friend initiated into the power plant life at the same time, and first-timer Camille Lellouche as the fellow worker who glimpses the devastating worst-case scenario. Contemplative and compassionate, Grand Central garners its texture from their complementary efforts, but the pervading intensity and atmosphere of the feature mimics its primary pairing – and the contrast they continually recall and represent.

Jessica Kiang at Cannes from The Playlist

Director Rebecca Zlotowski scored big in 2010 when her debut feature “Belle Epine” (aka “Dear Prudence”) won the Prix Louis Delluc for best first film, and snagged star Léa Seydoux a nomination for Most Promising Actress at the Césars. Three years on and Seydoux has certainly made good on that promise, with her profile rising ever higher -- in this year’s Cannes she’s one of a select number of actors to have two films in the Official Selection, one of them being her reteaming with Zlotowski on “Grand Central” with Kechiche’s ”Blue is the Warmest Color” in competition being the other. Neatly enough, her “Grand Central” co-star Tahar Rahim also has two Official Selection films, due to his turn in Asghar Farhadi’s competition entry “The Past” (reviewed here). They seem like a strangely perfect pairing, purely in terms of profile and career stage, then, and there is a simple chemistry to their interaction in Zlotowski’s sophomore film that makes a quiet kind of sense. For her part, Zlotowski has turned in a beguiling film that impresses as much for its oddly specific and well-researched setting (the ragtag community of lower-grade workers at a nuclear power plant), as for the romance, and maintains impressive narrative and tonal control right up until an ending that falters just at the final hurdle.

Gary (Rahim) befriends Tcherno (Johan Libéreau) when the latter tries to pick his pocket on a train. They are both headed to a processing station where unemployed and more or less unskilled labourers are being recruited for the bottom-rung jobs in France's nuclear power industry. After a brief training period that has them learn about dosages and safety practices for being around intensely toxic radiation, which their team leader Gilles (Olivier Gourmet) likens to being at war with an invisible enemy, they are put to work on the grunt duties of maintenance and repair that nuclear power plants require. But they also quickly become part of the local community of power plant workers, who live in the temporary porta-cabin accommodations provided, and bond rapidly due to the trusting-each-other-with-their-lives thing that goes on every day. One of the central figures in this little realm is Toni (Denis Ménochet, whom you may recognise from Ozon’s recent “In the House” as well as “Inglourious Basterds”), who lives with his fiancee Karole (Lea Seydoux), who also works at the plant. Toni takes Gary under his wing a little, and Gary discovers a kind of family environment, but the attraction between him and Karole is immediate and mutual, and threatens the stability of the group, even as mistakes start to happen at the plant.

What’s maybe more impressive than the bones of the story though, are the thoughtful, confident flourishes Zlotowski brings to the film, both on the script level and at the shooting stage. Occasionally we drift into slow motion, making a point of a particular moment or mood, while elsewhere the lush island where Karole and Gary have their trysts, and the warmth of the group’s nighttime outdoor dinner gatherings is contrasted with the immense artificiality and ugliness of the chimneys, metal walkways, plastic protective suits and radiation monitors, that make up the prosaic, practical and unromantic backdrop of a working nuclear power plant. In fact, while the performances are strong from leads and supporting cast (especially Rahim, whose role is rather more substantially written than Seydoux’s), what really worked a spell on us was the way Zlotowski delivers what feels like an utterly authentic glimpse into the behind-scenes, below-stairs aspect of a secretive and unfamiliar industry, while never compromising the slightly dreamlike tone. To create a sense of poetry when you’re shooting the hard, worn edges of a staff dressing room, or a decontamination shower, is no mean feat, and both the director and cinematographer Georges Lechaptois deserve praise here.

Both a lot and very little happens -- Karole’s friend Geraldine gets exposed and has to shave her head, Gary risks his own exposure to help Toni, Karole gets pregnant and has to choose between her lover and her fiance, secrets are discovered and jealousies simmer -- but the film’s tonal control means it never feels like the soap opera it could be. In fact you can also read some subtle social critique into its choice of protagonist and milieu -- it’s in many ways a portrait of the kind of trap a young undereducated working class person can fall into. Forced to take a low-paying, dangerous job as a tiny cog in a massive, impersonal industry, which affords little protection for when things go wrong, Gary is an eminently sympathetic figure, whose longing for the kind of familial stability he briefly finds here is all the more potent for being unspoken, and maybe not even consciously acknowledged.

As we mentioned, the film does stumble in its very final moments, opting for an ambivalent ending that lacks the narrative confidence of what had come before. But it’s not the most important thing, and the overriding impression we come away with is much more of the film’s quiet intelligence and empathy up to that point. As critical as Zlotowski may be of the unfair ‘caste’ system on which the nuclear power system works, she has nothing but compassion, and maybe even admiration, for the people who find themselves on the receiving end. The real moral of the story is that no matter if you’re making your life in the shadow of enormous chimney stacks, with danger sirens sounding out regularly, love -- romantic or brotherly -- can blossom, and perhaps even thrive in the most toxic of environments. [B+]

Cannes Review: Tahar Rahim is radioactive in impressive 'Grand Central' Gregory Ellwood at Cannes from Hit Fix, also seen here: Gregory Ellwood

Chris Knipp • View topic - Rebecca Zlotkowski: Grand Central (20

Little White Lies [Violet Lucca]

Sound On Sight Rob Dickie

Grand Central Lee Marshall at Cannes from Screendaily

Domenico La Porta at Cannes from Cineuropa

Grand Central | Cannes Review - Ioncinema Nicholas Bell

Georgia Straight [Craig Takeuchi]

LiveForFilms [Piers McCarthy]

theartsdesk.com [Tom Birchenough]

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Richard Mowe]

Cinematic Concerns [Sebastian Ng]

Cannes Diary, Days 3-5: Coen Bros. Films and Real-Life ... Wesley Morris at Cannes from Grantland

Row Three [Marina Antunes]

Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]

GRAND CENTRAL | siskelfilmcenter.org Marty Rubin

Radio Times [Emma Simmonds]

derekwinnert.com [Derek Winnert]

Daily | Cannes 2013 | Rebecca Zlotowski’s GRAND CENTRAL David Hudson at Fandor

festival had a brief chat with Zlotowski, from the Festival site, May 18, 2013

Grand Central: Cannes Review Boyd van Hoeij from The Hollywood Reporter

'Grand Central' Review: Rebecca Zlotowski's ... - Variety Scott Foundas

Grand Central: an explosive romance with an eye for detail ... The Guardian

Cannes 2013: Grand Central - first look review Xan Brooks at Cannes from The Guardian, May 19, 2013

Read Peter Bradshaw's four-star review of the film The Guardian

Rainy Day Blues: Cannes Report: May 18, 2013 ... - Roger Ebert Barbara Scharres at Cannes

Zombie, Rob

HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES

USA (89 mi) 2003

Time Out review

So this is what it's like to get stuck inside an Iron Maiden album cover. Zombie (not his real name) sings in metal band White Zombie, and despite the hugely promising title this slashathon owes much to the worst of that genre's ethics - crude, male, dull and ugly. The plot is unimpeachable: four bleach-teethed all-Americans on a cross-country jaunt run out of gas and wind up outside Captain Spaulding's Museum of Monsters and Madmen, where the fried chicken is complimentary and the local serial killer is called Dr Satan (also not his real name). Guess what happens next. The success of the Scream franchise has left directors previously unencumbered by such thoughts puzzling over how seriously they should take their adolescent slaughter. Zombie gets caught in the dilemma, referencing The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween and Carrie, while also tossing around fake blood and filmstock as he vainly tries to show there's a director behind this mess.

VideoVista review Ian Shutter

Halloween 1977. Two young couples on a road trip go looking for the truth about a serial killer known as Dr Satan, end up as captives of a bizarre family who prey on innocents (travellers, cheerleaders, and anyone else, including local cops) for amateur cabaret parties, heinous surgical games, grotesque live burial rites, and much else besides...    

Basically Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) meets The Funhouse (1981), this unfortunately lacks the relentlessly claustrophobic intensity of the former, or the eerie freakshow atmosphere of the latter. Hindered by a somewhat confusing and rudimentary plotline, it seems like a product distilled from the avid ramblings of a US horror geeks' convention. It's a clever yet undisciplined movie that's full of novelty, not genius, with a narrative and style that's merely inventive rather than innovative. It stalks the line between campy schlock and appalling brutality, but just stumbles drunkenly around from stage left to right, to tragically plain wrong as drama. It has little or no sense of comic timing and lacks an ability to generate frightening suspense. For these reasons and others, the picture fails to sustain a dark mood, or anything like a coherent tone, for long enough to derive maximum horror entertainment value from its various black comedy set pieces.    

For all his eager harking back to late-1970s' slasher flicks that appeared in the wake of Carpenter's classic Halloween, heavy metal rock star turned director Rob Zombie just cannot avoid being strongly influenced by genre films from the post-video nasties era of the 1980s and early 1990s. In the climactic scenes of House Of 1000 Corpses, helpless survivor Denise (Erin Daniels) struggles desperately to escape from the (haunted?) catacombs, in weird scenes reminiscent of Michele Soavi's memorable The Sect (1991). The risibly necrophiliac Firefly family are not even half as convincing as they need to be to scare viewers into believing all their kidnappings and murderous rage would go unnoticed by locals. They clearly lack anything resembling a publicly presentable 'sociopathic' face to make us viewers think they could ever get away with a speeding ticket, let alone the wholesale sex and mutilation crimes suggested here.    

In its favour, House Of 1000 Corpses does feature several scenes of disturbing horror that are equal to the kinetic delirium of Wes Craven's best work, while its mixed-media visuals range from the grainy pseudo-documentary of reality TV to a richer palette resembling European giallo cinema. Oh well then, I'll just go and watch Craven's The People Under The Stairs (1991) again...    

The British DVD release is anamorphic with a choice of Dolby digital 5.1 or DTS surround sound, in English only. Disc extras are presented full-frame, and consist of a bland making-of featurette, dull behind-the-scenes footage, casting and rehearsals, interviews with cast and crew (including Billy Chainsaw meeting Rob Zombie) a batch of Tartan trailers, and a curiously unfunny and sadly annoying in-joke spot, "Tiny Fucked A Stump."

Nitrate Online (KJ Doughton) review

Say what you will about singer-cum-director Rob Zombie, but one thing is indisputable. This hairy, dread-locked, cartoon-scribbling metalmeister, a favorite with bikers, headbangers, and goths, definitely knows his horror movies. For House of 1,000 Corpses, Zombie pays homage to those beloved seventies drive-in shockers that peaked with Texas Chainsaw Massacre before they were later recycled, lampooned, and repackaged with slick marketing as Scream, Blair Witch Project, and other pretenders to the throne of gut-bucket, low brow horror.

A pet project that Zombie nurtured like a paternal overseer until its production wrapped in 2001 (it was then hurled between reluctant studios like a hot potato until Lion’s Gate Films released it), House of 1,000 Corpses is like one of the human skin-suits glimpsed in Silence of the Lambs. Taking an eyeball from this film, and a severed arm from that one, this all-too-familiar cinematic carcass is lovingly sewn from bits and pieces of nearly every grade-B gore classic ever to splatter the screen.

For instance, the movie opens as bubbly friends Jerry, Denise, Bill, and Mary pull into a seedy gas station helmed by Captain Spalding (Sid Haig). A grotesque, roadside carny, he decorates his macabre filling stop with mounted animal heads, freaks of nature (the fish-man, anyone?), and musty, dust-coated skeletons. Decked out in garish pancake makeup and a red, white, and blue vaudeville suit, Spalding looks like a political campaigner gone frighteningly round the bend. Oh, and did I mention that this clown-faced, pot-bellied Okie also markets a special blend of fried chicken? Right away, images of Motel Hell, Psycho, Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Funhouse come to mind.

Later, when the four doomed travelers are abducted by a leering family of rotten-toothed, white-trash scuzzballs, things veer into serious Texas Chainsaw territory. Or is this Deliverance? Or perhaps Mother’s Day? Uh, Last House on the Left?

What comes next is a nonstop smorgasbord of unpleasant torment and disturbing, decaying imagery. Zombie’s film is in a different world from the humor-heavy, effects-laden energies spurting from the minds of directors Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator, From Beyond), Sam Raimi (Evil Dead- and later, Spider Man) and Peter Jackson (whose pre-Lord of the Rings horror classics included Dead Alive and Bad Taste). House of 1,000 Corpses has its bloody scenes, but the imagery is more doomy than graphic. In this sense, its aesthetic is more in line with the early works of Wes Craven (Last House on the Left) and Tobe Hooper, whose Texas Chainsaw set the standard. Looking back, Hooper’s milestone had very little blood. Its power was conjured forth by quick-cuts to a clucking chicken, a dilating pupil, or a demented old man trying to clutch a sledgehammer.

Meanwhile, the Corpses cast is a casket-full of seventies icons. Karen Black, the busty, cross-eyed star of Capricorn One and In Praise of Older Women, appears as a slutty matriarch named Mother Firefly. In need of some serious dental work, you can almost smell the halitosis emanating from her vile mouth.

House of 1,000 Corpses is one of those genre films that seem impervious to reviews. If you’re into the particular types of dingy, dank depths that Zombie prefers to inhabit, this unashamed genre flick will probably satiate such cravings. If you’re of more delicate sensibilities – well, the title alone will probably be enough to scare you off.

CultureCartel.com (Jeremiah Kipp) review [1.5/5]

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [2/5] Richard Scheib

DVD Times Michael Mackenzie

Horror Express review Scott W. Davis

Monsters At Play (Lawrence P. Raffel) review

VideoVista review Tom Matic

Cinescape dvd review Brian Thomas

The Horror Review [Horror Bob]

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

Movie-Vault.com review [1/10] Scott Spicciati

PopMatters (Jesse Hassenger) review

DVD Crypt [Mike Long]

PopMatters [Bill Gibron] 3 Disc Collector’s Set, including THE DEVIL’S REJECTS

Mark Reviews Movies (Mark Dujsik) review [1.5/4]

Bloody-Disgusting review [4/5] Brad Miska (Mr. Disgusting)

Jerry Saravia review [2/4]

Mike Bracken review [2/5]

Beyond Hollywood review Nix

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]

Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]

The Village Voice [Alex Pappademas]

Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [0.5/5]

hybridmagazine.com review Reed Oliver

FilmJerk.com ("The Real Dick Hollywood") review [C-]

JackassCritics.com ("The Grim Ringler") dvd review [7/10]

Dreamlogic.net [Chris Nelson]

DVD Times [Tiffany Bradford]

DVD Talk (Geoffrey Kleinman) review [1/5]

DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Guido Henkel

DVD MovieGuide dvd review David Williams

DVD Talk (G. Noel Gross) dvd review [4/5] [Special Edition]

DVD Talk (John Sinnott) dvd review [3/5] [Blu-Ray Version]

eFilmCritic.com (Brian McKay) review [3/5]

eFilmCritic.com review [4/5] Ultimate Dancing Machine

eFilmCritic.com (Scott Weinberg) review [2/5]

Classic Horror review Matt Mulcahey

Cinescape review Abbie Bernstein

HorrorTalk SuperNova

Moda Magazine (Kage Alan) dvd review

eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [1/5]

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [1/5]

filmcritic.com (James Brundage) review [1.5/5]

CultureCartel.com (Lee Chase IV) review [0.5/5]

The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [F]

One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [F]

Exclaim! dvd review Chris Gramlich

Dark Horizons (Garth Franklin) review

CineScene.com (Ed Owens) review

Premiere.com review Peter Debruge

Entertainment Weekly review [C+] Owen Gleiberman

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [2.5/4]

channel4.com/film [Daniel Etherington]

Variety.com [Scott Foundas]

BBC Films review Jamie Russell

Guardian/Observer review

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [0.5/5]

Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas) review

The New York Times (Dave Kehr) review

THE DEVIL’S REJECTS B+ 91

USA Germany (109 mi) 2005 Director’s Cut (109 mi) Official site

Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these! —Baby Firefly (Sheri Moon Zombie), as she exposes her breasts

Rob Zombie makes true grindhouse films, immensely entertaining schlock films filled with buckets of blood and gore, raunchy redneck humor and more than its fair share of nudity as well, where his vision is unusually bleak and uncompromising, distinguished by an encyclopedia of film references from 70’s drive-in movies, a love he shares with fellow director David Gordon Green, not to mention Quintin Tarantino, where what really stands out is his superb use of period music and his ability to make that connect to whatever is happening onscreen. This is a film that begins by describing the most despicable humans on the planet, the Devil’s rejects, suspected of as many as 75 murders, where they are considered a serial killing family, so Zombie shows sawed off body parts in the refrigerator and naked corpses lying around the premises, even in the beds of family members where they sleep as the police move in for an early morning raid, but not before a strange presence is seen dragging one of those corpses through the forest undetected by the arriving police. In this way, we are introduced to the potential tagline: the family that slays together stays together. We have seen images of white trash before, but nothing that revels in this level of depravity, perfectly captured by the familiar opening guitar chords and the soulful yearning for freedom expressed in the Allman Brother’s song “The Midnight Rider.”

Well, I've got to run to keep from hidin',
And I'm bound to keep on ridin'.
And I've got one more silver dollar,
But I'm not gonna let 'em catch me, no,
Not gonna let 'em catch the Midnight Rider.

This is a new take, however, cutthroat murderers whose only aspiration appears to be “live free or die,” representing a fierce independent streak that defies all moral grounds, people that exist so outside the lunatic fringe element that they live and kill like nihilist underground gods, so evil that no earthly force can contain them. In a vicious firefight where they more than hold their own, wearing armor suits and masks to deflect the bullets, one from the family is dead and their mother is captured, while two escape through an underground drainpipe, but 4 policemen are killed and seven more are injured. And it’s only just begun. The two escapees are Otis and younger sister Baby, Bill Moseley and the director’s wife, Sheri Moon Zombie, the Firefly clan who alert their dad, Sid Haig as Captain Spaulding, a horrid man in a clown’s face with terrible teeth and an even worse disposition, as he takes no shit from anybody and almost always has the last word, sparing no one with his wrath of venom. Initially we see him in a dream sequence having sex with former porn star Ginger Lynn Allen, a girl ballsy enough to pull a gun on him which delights him to no end until he wakes up and sees the overweight whale in bed next to him. But a phone call from Baby alerts him to get out of there where they can all meet at some dive in the middle of nowhere, where the three of them, all using Marx Brothers aliases, go on the run.

When the cops call in a movie expert on the Marx brothers to identify their connection, it gets a bit ridiculous with the fun this movie is having with its own story, a spin-off of Zombie’s first, HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES (2003), using the same Firefly characters, but this is really opening new territory, using a variety of slo mo shots, split screens, fade outs and freeze frames, and some particularly effective dialogue. Many will be disgusted at how revoltingly sadistic this film can get, reminiscent of the loathsome antics seen in Haneke’s FUNNY GAMES (1997), where people are held at gunpoint against their will and made to perform acts of humiliation and depravity, where Otis actually utters “I am the devil, and I am here to do the devil's work.” It only gets sicker and nastier over time, especially when they decide to leave their handiwork for the maid to clean up, but rather than focus on the wretched horror, which there’s plenty of, this plays out more like a western where there is mounting tension that builds between the outlaw gang and the sheriff, William Forsythe, who has a personal bone to pick against this family, as they killed his brother in the earlier movie and now he only seeks revenge, using a foul-mouthed pair of outlaw bikers, including Danny Trejo, to set them up, a man who proudly proclaims “it takes a roach to catch a roach.” One of the best developed scenes in the film is a weird montage at that motel in the middle of nowhere where to the music of Terry Reid’s “To Be Treated,” Captain Spaulding is distracted by a mixture of cocaine, booze, and pot, and the thought of naked women running around the premises, creating a dreamlike scenario of heaven in hell. Like Haneke, there’s a bit of a rewind here where the evil doers get a taste of their own medicine by an equally deranged sheriff who spouts Old Testament fire and brimstone as he hopes to hasten their pathway to eternal damnation, "Lord, I am your arm of justice," but little does he know they’re all already there. The finale is a mixture of BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967), THE WILD BUNCH (1969), and THELMA AND LOUISE (1991), where Zombie doesn’t leave it to your imagination, he lets you see the bullets fly to Lynyrd Skynyrd's classic anthem "Free Bird."

If I leave here tomorrow
Would you still remember me?
For I must be travelling on, now,
'Cause there's too many places I've got to see.
But, if I stayed here with you, girl,
Things just couldn't be the same.
'Cause I'm as free as a bird now,
And this bird you can not change.
Lord knows, I can't change.

Bye, bye, its been a sweet love.
Though this feeling I can't change.
But please don't take it badly,
'Cause Lord knows I'm to blame.
But, if I stayed here with you girl,
Things just couldn't be the same.
Cause I'm as free as a bird now,
And this bird you'll never change.
And this bird you can not change.
Lord knows, I can't change.
Lord help me, I can't change.

—Lynyrd Skynyrd, “Free Bird” (1973)

Music Soundtrack

1. Midnight Rider - Allman Brothers Band
2. Shambala - Three Dog Night
3. Brave Awakening - Terry Reid
4. It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels - Kitty Wells
5. Satan's Got to Get Along Without Me - Buck Owens & His Buckaroos
6. Fooled Around and Fell in Love - Elvin Bishop
7. I Can't Quit You Baby - Otis Rush
8. Funk #49 - James Gang
9. Rock On - David Essex
10. Rocky Mountain Way - Joe Walsh
11. To Be Treated - Terry Reid
12. Free Bird - Lynyrd Skynyrd
13. Seed of Memory - Terry Reid
14. I'm at Home Getting Hammered (While She's Out Getting Nailed) - Banjo & Sullivan

Time Out New York review Joshua Rothkopf

While its psychos-on-the-lam plot is tired, rocker Rob Zombie's latest, a retro-trashy companion piece to his 2003 House of 1000 Corpses, is a giant leap forward stylistically. Like some lost exploitation roughie from the deepest, darkest 1970s, it recasts Zombie's obvious fondness for Southern backwoods villainy into a fittingly crude 16mm context, complete with lovably, intentionally shoddy sound work. The look and feel of this film is a total nightmare, and some of the most effective American mood-making in years.

The Village Voice [Benjamin Strong]

If in retrospect musician Rob Zombie's 2003 directorial debut, House of 1,000 Corpses, reads like a yee-hawing harbinger of last fall's red-state triumph, then its sequel, The Devil's Rejects, is the smug Republican victory lap. In Corpses, a competent if unoriginal slasher movie, hipster travel guide researchers get lured into a lethal roadside attraction run by a family of psychopaths whose members are each named after a different Groucho Marx character. Here, the Firefly clan—led by Sid Haig's Captain Spaulding—kill more wantonly, as they flee arrest for murders committed in the original film. Whereas Corpses was not without a sense of humor, Rejects is not without Confederate histrionics, including its indefatigable taste for Southern-rock standards played over slow-motion shotgun carnage. When the highway finale at last arrives, one still has to endure nearly every bar of "Free Bird." By rubbing your nose in this hillbilly mayhem, Zombie all but dares you to acknowledge your liberal elitism, simply because just now, in Dubya's America, you don't happen to find anything particularly funny or lovable about stupid, dangerous provincials.

Time Out London review

It may be damning with faint praise to say that this horror sequel-of-sorts is a substantial improvement on director Rob Zombie’s derivative fan-boy debut, ‘House of 1000 Corpses’. Yet it is undeniably tougher, more ambitious and less tongue-in-cheek, stealing its nightmarish tone and anti-heroic stance from movies such as ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’, ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ and ‘The Wild Bunch’. But Zombie’s glorification of the feral Firefly family’s murderous cross-country rampage is undermined by a myopic, adolescent amorality: he sees them as symbols of a rebellious, individualist American spirit.  It doesn’t help that the brutalising redneck trio – clown-faced pater familias Captain Spaulding, son Otis and daughter Baby – are played by bad actors: Sid Haig, Bill Moseley and Zombie’s wife, Sheri Moon. All three are eclipsed by veteran genre favourites Geoffrey Lewis, Ken Foree and William Forsythe, the last of whom plays a sheriff unhinged by his lust for Old Testament-style vengeance. This is the kind of unedifying spectacle likely to appeal to brain-dead sickos who think Charles Manson was a misunderstood messiah, rather than a degenerate, manipulative psychopath.

Entertainment Weekly review [C+] Owen Gleiberman

Rob Zombie, the founder and lead savage of White Zombie, isn't the first rock star to direct a horror movie (let us all pause for a moment to forget Dee Snider's Strangeland), but he's the first to put his pierced-punk death-metal demon credo right up on screen, turning horror into a depraved rock & roll blood feast. In The Devil's Rejects, Zombie's second effort as a grade-Z-and-lovin'-it auteur (the first was 2003's House of 1000 Corpses), he directs like someone who has spent far too much time soaking up the most psychotic images of violence he can find: Chainsaw (natch) and Cannibal Holocaust, Manson docs and Faces of Death videos, Natural Born Killers and I Spit on Your Grave.

The Devil's Rejects, a wild-ass road movie of down-home slaughter, recalls many other tales of homicidal sadists in the rocky American Southwest. The difference is that Zombie doesn't pretend to be on the side of the victims. He makes no bones about his identification with the sexy outlaw serial killers, a brother and sister played by the hippieish Bill Moseley and the Marilyn Chambers-like Sheri Moon Zombie (the director's wife), who commit many squalid and hideous acts, terrorizing their victims with knives, axes, and shotguns, all in the name of sociopathic cool. They're the movie's ''rock stars'' incarnate. Zombie's characters are, to put it mildly, undeveloped (he features two kinds of women: sexy young sluts and beat-up old whores), but there's no denying the leeringly grotesque egghead-devil charisma of Sid Haig, who returns from House of 1000 Corpses as Captain Spaulding, the clown so ugly you forgot to laugh.

The Devil's Rejects Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

It's perplexing to me how some critics (Gleiberman, Benjamin Strong of the Voice) think they can so clearly read Zombie's politics and sympathies off the surface of The Devil's Rejects, a film so saturated in end-of-the-world nihilism as to render moot any taking of sides. True, the neo-Groucho Marxist anarcho-satanists (Sid Haig, Sheri Moon Zombie, Bill Moseley) do get most of the funny lines (and, frankly, just as many clunkers -- I'm not convinced that RZ is quite as clever as he thinks he is). But isn't this just par for the corpse? From Texas Chain Saw Massacre to Hannibal Lecter ("Senator . . . Love your suit!), and especially the psychopaths of Kubrick (Alex, Jack Torrance, Sgt. Hartman), those characters representing the absolute cancellation of the laws of morality have to exhibit a certain seductive appeal. Otherwise, where's the ambivalence? What are the stakes? So I don't see Zombie's film as some kind of "Republican victory lap" so much as a re-exploration of the depths of hopelessness and anti-humanist carnage that in part gave rise to 70s exploitation cinema in the first place. This isn't the Mickey Spillane-meets-Itchy & Scratchy Show posturing of Sin City. It's a ritual blood-letting -- that is, letting the Red States run red. And, in a way, it's the return of the hipster repressed. How do we forge bonds? Well, some of us mock those we deem inferior. But why stop there? By blowing their fucking heads off, aren't the Devil's Rejects cultists being considerably more honest? It hardly seems immoral to explore this problem -- annihilating the other as a form of kinship -- within the relative safety of a cheap but meticulous Z-grade outlaw picture. And if The Devil's Rejects is somehow vulcanized against liberal elitism as its critics charge, this is mainly because it proposes something that the film intelligentsia reflexively rejects from the get-go -- that a man who calls himself Rob Zombie, a man whose rock band came to prominence when Beavis and Butt-Head declared them "cool," a man who demands that we take Lynyrd Skynyrd with deadly seriousness, is in fact an artist.

Twitch review Canfield

I'm posting a separate piece on exploitation movies as a way to chime in on the discussion we've been having here at Twitch. But I can't help but review this movie this week without dipping into some of the same territory. This sequel to Rob Zombie's first film House of a 1000 Corpses is radically different in tone and style easily emerging as the better of the two; but better at what? Like the old tag line that asks us to tell ourselves “It's Only A Movie, Only A Movie, Only A Movie," Rob Zombies newest film asks us to find solace in the fact that, after all, a sick joke is just a sick joke. Perhaps the best thing for you to know about this film is that it ain't for the faint of heart or those with no sense of black humor.

Did I get the joke? Oh yes. Anybody who takes The Devil's Rejects too seriously should be locked in a hotel room with Captain Spaulding and forced to… Well the point is, that Zombie is aware his characters are despicable, sociopathic renegades and that they are for all practical purposes irredeemable. But he's also aware that the irony surrounding their behavior is thick enough to cut with a knife (pun intended). Even if there were no dialogue in the film the soundtrack would tell you that loud and clear. Southern Rock pervades as if it was a character in the film sounding out amusingly inappropriate grace notes at the most inopportune times. It's the sort of lyrical touch that the road movie is all about but here Zombie turns it on it's head by setting what the eye sees and what ear has heard at such odds that we realize the joke is on us; these guys not only deserve to die (don't we all) but we NEED them to.

Don't worry if you didn't see House of 1000 Corpses. As sequels go The Devil's Rejects pretty much stands on it's own. The Firefly family led by Captain Spaulding is on the run after the police discover their crimes from the first film. Momma Firefly has been captured but standing resolute even in the face of William Forsythe as a brilliantly self-righteous and sadistic sheriff whose thirst for justice is overshadowed by his thirst for revenge.

The film is peppered by a simply beautiful range of cameos. Dawn of the Dead's Ken Foree, Michael Berryman from The Hills Have Eyes, EG Daily, Halloween's PJ Sowles and Helter Skelter's Steve Railsback are all in this film and I'm pretty sure I didn't catch everybody.

There are great action scenes and shootouts and lots of over the top dialogue but the films deadliest weapon is the way Zombie walks the fine line between camp and discomfort. In one scene a woman is asked to strip and is molested in front of her husband. As played the content is actually fairly tame. If I listed it you wouldn't be all that shocked. But the scene is almost as disturbing as a similar moment in Michael Haneke's great film Funny Games. We are cast into the deadly seriousness of what is going on for a breath or two and then cast back out into the "family" of the Firefly's.

Likewise a sequence involving the torture of the Firefly's almost elicits sympathy for them, something I would have thought was impossible by that point in the film. And yet Zombie is clearly going for the grimmest of grins not furrowed brows and ultimately I'm not sure how I feel about myself and my own sense of humor after watching the film. The Devil's Rejects may just be the best American horror movie in years precisely because I'm unsure of who I'd feel comfortable recommending it to.

Am I the sort of person who can just enjoy The Devil's Rejects? This question may miss the point. Captain Spaulding, like any good clown, would spot the irony in a second. Maybe what makes me most uncomfortable is the kinship I feel with Zombie and company. I wouldn't invite Spaulding to do my kids birthday party but I didn't mind the road trip.

Ruthless Reviews review Matt Cale

I Viddied it on the Screen [Alex Jackson]

PopMatters [Bill Gibron] 3 Disc Collector’s Set, including HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES

The Horror Review [Horror Bob]

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]

AboutFilm.com (Carlo Cavagna) review [B]

Mike Bracken review [4/5]

Movie Gazette (Anton Bitel) review [9/10]

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young]

American Cinematographer essay ["All in the Family"] Jon Witmer

Beyond Hollywood review James Mudge

PopMatters (Ryan Vu) review

FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [A-] also seen here: OhmyNews.com [Brian Orndorf]

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3/5] Richard Scheib

Reverse Shot [Nick Pinkerton] Summer 2005

Pajiba (Phillip Stephens) review

Bloody-Disgusting review [4/5] Brad Miska (Mr. Disgusting)

The Onion A.V. Club review Keith Phipps

filmcritic.com (Nicholas Schager) review [4/5]

Monsters At Play (Lawrence P. Raffel) review

Exclaim! review Cam Lindsay

Eye for Film (Gator MacReady) review [4/5]

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review George Wu

eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [2/5]

Classic Horror review Nate Yapp

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Matt Serafini) dvd review

DVD Outsider Slarek

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3/4]

DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [4/5]

DVDActive (Greg Dedrick) dvd review [9/10]

DVD Verdict [Adam Arseneau]

DVD Verdict [Patrick Naugle] Unrate Version

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo

DVD Verdict (Patrick Naugle) dvd review [Unrated Edition]

DVD Times [DJ Nock] Special Edition

DVD Talk (G. Noel Gross) dvd review [4/5] [Special Edition]

DVD Times [Michael Mackenzie] Director’s Cut

DVD Talk (John Sinnott) dvd review [4/5] [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir]

Kamera.co.uk review Antonio Pasolini

Jerry Saravia review [3/4]

FilmStew.com [Kevin Biggers]

CHUD.com (Devin Faraci) review

One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [C]

CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review

CHUD.com (Alex Riviello) dvd review

eFilmCritic.com (Luke Pyzik) review [2/5]

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [0.5/4]

eFilmCritic.com (Collin Souter) review [1/5]

The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [F]

Soundtrack.net soundtrack review [score] Messrob Toikien

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [3/4]

Variety (Justin Chang) review

Guardian/Observer

BBCi - Films Nev Pierce

Boston Globe review [2.5/4] Ty Burr

The Boston Phoenix review Tom Meek

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3.5/5]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker

The Seattle Times (Jeff Shannon) review

San Francisco Chronicle [Peter Hartlaub]

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

Ebert & Roeper (video)

The New York Times (Dana Stevens) review

HALLOWEEN B 86

USA (109 mi) 2007 ‘Scope

An ultra violent, certainly more than some can stomach as the waves of ferocious violence can feel relentless, yet occasionally scintillating remake of the original story, actually re-imagining a good part of it as: Michael Myers – the Early Years. In this version, ten-year old Michael is the product of a trailer trash upbringing, where his mom is a pole dancer and her low-life boyfriend is a crude, tormenting, invective hurling Neanderthal brute who is so nauseatingly ugly and over-bearing, easily one of the more despicable characters in recent history, that we actually root for Michael when he becomes one of the original targets. But initially Michael, the wonderfully impressionable Daeg Faerch, walks around the house in a clown’s mask as something of a closeted free-wheeling spirit, as he’s actually cheerful picking up wayward animals, spending a lot of time alone in his room with them, where he is taunted by his aggressive older sister who kids that he must be masturbating with them. He’s bullied by a couple of kids at school, which only makes his mom more and more pissed when she is routinely called into school due to his erratic behavior. When a shrink shows her Michaels’s collection of snapshots of maimed animals, like his own personal photo album, claiming these are early symptomatic signs of troubled behavior, she is in utter denial about her son’s condition. Just as we in the audience begin to realize how profoundly disturbed he is, Zombie eloquently reveals how Michael snaps in a series of initial killings wearing his clown’s mask that have an almost ballet-like precision, precipitated by an exquisite montage that begins with the sound of Nazareth’s “Love Hurts” as we see his mother’s pole dance in a seedy bar lead into Michael’s unforgettable first taste of murder, cued once again by Carpenter’s unmistakable musical theme. His promiscuous sister’s boyfriend provides the mask Michael eventually chooses above all others, as he finds her lying in a state of undress in her room having sex with her boyfriend when she’s supposed to be trick-or-treating with Michael. In the aftermath, Michael’s mom returns home one evening and discovers Michael calmly cradling his little baby sister in his arms on the front steps while the inside is nothing but blood and carnage.

Malcolm McDowell assumes the Donald Pleasance role of the treating psychiatrist (Wouldn’t it have been nice to see Carpenter himself in the role?), but he’s not nearly as weird or creepy as Pleasance, and in fact is deadly dull in his attempt to actually befriend Michael, who claims he can’t remember a thing that happened before launching into his eerie 14-year silence, refusing to utter another word to anyone, eventually becoming a hulk of a man who spends all his free time in his cell building his own collection of paper maché masks. It’s interesting that Zombie takes the time to show a relationship developing between one of the guards, who began as a custodian, who actually treats Michael with kindness and respect, yet when he makes his inevitable prison break, he’s treated just as ruthlessly as the rest. While the body count rises, each death brutally realized, they don’t appear to be exaggerated or exploited for gore’s sake, but are within the context of Michael’s twisted mentality, as he’s become a giant hulk of a man with a lifetime of pent up rage and anger. Unfortunately, true to the traditional slasher genre, semi-clad women in bed with their boy friends send him into a sexually repressed murder spree, which in this film happens like clockwork. Earlier, when his mother witnesses her son’s handywork first hand at the hospital, after the psychiatrist unadvisedly leaves a nurse alone in a room with Michael, she later goes home and shoots herself, the sound reverberating offscreen.

By the time he’s back in Haddonfield, where he finds his old mask and knife buried beneath his home, Zombie repeats much of the original Carpenter images of Michael stalking the three high school girls giggling and playing around, but especially Laurie (Scout Taylor-Compton), who we come to realize is his younger sister that survived earlier, now adopted into a new family. Once we’re on familiar turf, it’s inevitable that this film version suffers in comparison, as Jamie Lee Curtis was simply much smarter in the role of Laurie, and Carpenter spent the backdrop of his film familiarizing her with the audience. So when things started to go haywire, the audience felt what Laurie felt, especially her terror. In this version, the giggly girls smile so obnoxiously and with such an artificial streak, set to an almost Lennon Sisters (Nan Vernon) sounding version of “Mr. Sandman,” their lives appear to be part of a demented Barbie doll dream, so we see them as Michael, once more behind his mask, sees them, as overly pampered, promiscuous little play things that are asking for trouble. As a result, the fear factor just isn’t there in this movie, which is instead awash in more predictable blood and violence, yet beautifully framed in the picturebook setting of a safe suburban refuge.

With the murders usually captured through heightened offscreen sounds and a frenzy of movement from a handheld camera, brilliantly shot in ‘Scope by Phil Parmet, the film alerts the audience with just the slightest visual cues off in the corner of the screen, as a shadow moves into place behind the next potential victim. There’s a certain humor in listening to the Blue Oyster Cult’s rendition of “Don’t Fear the Reaper” during two murders, and a horrible fear associated with a siren-like sound loop that plays over another, which has a similar sound association to PSYCHO’S shower music, but by the time Michael stalks Laurie, the film grows especially tedious because as a victim, she’s really not much fun. Instead the movie only seems to get louder as the body count rises. Jamie Lee Curtis continued to outsmart him, terrorized at every turn, but she managed to keep her wits about her. Not so here, as this Laurie plays a screaming helpless victim all the way, pursued by a psychopathic killer who’s not sure he wants to kill his younger sister, but instead hands her a childhood picture of them together. This momentary pause to the carnage bears a resemblance to King Kong and Fay Wray, but the noise and ferocious blood splattering continues. The police force is completely ineffective, the treating psychiatrist as well, so when Laurie is also a bust, at least theatrically, all the familiar figures become lame in Zombie’s hands, which is a huge disappointment, especially considering such an imaginative first half of the movie.

The final sequence of the film ironically features Laurie in a sexually compromising position with her brother.

The Village Voice [Nathan Lee]

Rob Zombie's Halloween isn't quite a remake of John Carpenter's 1978 slasher masterpiece. The first hour, which vividly and viciously imagines the dirt bag childhood of an abject little psychopath named Michael Myers (the exquisitely wormy Daeg Faerch), might be considered a prequel. Yet even when it kicks in on familiar turf—Michael's escape (slash) from the loony bin (strangle) and hunt (slaughter) for his sister Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton)—Zombie's up to something all his own. Horrific as it is, Halloween isn't so much a horror film as a biopic, and a superb one at that. The life and times of a fictional monster may not be as respectable a subject as a historical monster like, say, Idi Amin or Truman Capote, but Zombie's portrait is every bit as reverent, scrupulous, and deeply felt as any Oscar grubbing horrorshow. Note the strange circumspection, the discipline of tone, the utter lack of snark, the absolute denial of gore-for-gore's sake. (Yes, Eli Roth, there is such a thing as "torture porn"—and you're a dumb dirty perv.) Can you feel the love? If anything, Zombie indulges too much sympathy for the devil; his Halloween deepens Carpenter's vision without rooting out its fear.

The Onion A.V. Club [Steven Hyden]

It could be argued that every slasher film since the original Halloween is a remake of John Carpenter's supremely suspenseful 1978 masterpiece. Like its curiously indestructible anti-hero Michael Myers, Halloween remains a perfectly realized killing machine, and its frightful shadow looms just a bit larger with every failed attempt to match it. Coming off the singularly demented The Devil's Rejects, writer-director Rob Zombie seemed like an ideal choice to at least bring something different to the material, which makes his official Halloween remake all the more disappointing. Boasting more dead bodies, naked breasts, and vulgarity than Carpenter's version, Zombie's Halloween comes up short where it matters most—it just isn't that scary.

It's a frustrating failure, because it gets off to a good start, with Zombie giving the young Michael Myers some actual human characteristics and complexity, and even making him sympathetic in a crazy-kid-who-never-had-a-chance kind of way. At home with stripper mom Sheri Moon Zombie and drunken step-dad William Forsythe, the angel-faced Myers could be one of any number of weirdo kids in the late '70s who liked Kiss and killed his pets. Alerted to Myers' probable insanity after a dead cat is found in his schoolbag, psychiatrist Malcolm McDowell fails to step in before the little maniac kills four people, condemning himself to the criminal hospital he will inevitably break out of 15 years later.

The first half of Halloween crackles with the same queasily effective combination of extreme violence and pitch-black humor that made The Devil's Rejects so indelible even among its detractors. (Forsythe, in particular, is hilariously disgusting.) But around the time Myers breaks out and heads back to Haddonfield to hunt down Laurie Strode (played by Scout Taylor-Compton) and her promiscuous (and conveniently topless) friends, Halloween begins to feel less like a Rob Zombie film and more like yet another interchangeable dead-teenager movie. It's too bad Zombie didn't just borrow elements from the first Halloween to tell his own story, like every other slasher-film director, rather than doing a straight remake. It's tough enough not to think of Carpenter whenever his iconic piano theme comes on the soundtrack, but Zombie plays it surprisingly safe by simply recreating the original film's action with pumped-up violence. As the body count grows, the suspense lessens, rendering the overly drawn-out final battle between Myers and Strode tedious where it used to be unbearably tense. This latest unsuccessful stab at Carpenter's masterwork just proves that the original Halloween is as unbeatable as its masked leading man.

Slant Magazine [Nick Schager]

Rob Zombie's gut understanding of what makes '70s horror so great—its volatility, its nihilism, its unrepentant, take-no-prisoners viciousness—is unfortunately glimpsed in only short, sporadic bursts in Halloween. Unlike The Devil's Rejects, which captured the grungy spirit of his favorite grindhousers, the musician-turned-filmmaker's updating of John Carpenter's seminal 1978 slasher flick skews in the opposite direction, attempting to tonally distance itself from its source material by replacing Carpenter's eerie, otherworldly menace with grim, brutal realism. In that Zombie had virtually no other approach at his disposal, it's an understandable course to take, rooting the saga of Michael Myers—which, after seven sequels, had long since devolved into cartoonish supernatural garbage—in the twisted headspace of its iconic boogeyman. That one can rationalize Zombie's decision to focus his redo—well, the first half anyway—on Myers's upbringing doesn't, however, mean that such a strategy is wise, or that it works. And despite the director's comprehension of what makes serial killers (and horror films) tick, as well as a few exceptionally composed moments, it too frequently doesn't work.

Zombie spends the opening portion of Halloween charting young Myers Myers (Daeg Faerch) as he spirals into madness, a line of attack that might have proved more sound were it not for the stock psychological explanations trotted out for his insane behavior. Ronnie (William Forsythe), the broadly conceived, misogynistic white-trash boyfriend of Myers's warm-hearted stripper mom (Sheri Moon Zombie), hurls homophobic invectives at the young boy, while his skanky older sister (Hanna Hall) mocks him about jerking off with the aid of his pet rat. Given his anger and humiliation over Mom's pole-dancing profession (which becomes the root of his anti-female-sexuality modus operandi, and about which bullies mercilessly mock him), Myers naturally isn't up in his room fondling his pets but eviscerating them. As child psychologist Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) explains, such behavior is the byproduct of a "deranged mind," and in the case of serial killers, it's also rather textbook. Zombie dramatizes the typical forces and proclivities that prefigure compulsive killing, but in doing so, he reduces Myers from ominous myth to psychotic man—surely his intended goal, and yet one that serves little valuable purpose, since what makes Myers terrifying is the black, mysterious incomprehensibility of his "evil."

Still, it's during this section that Zombie's own auteurist imprint is most strongly felt, such as during Myers's initial foray into human slaughter, when shots of spinning treetops and a final aerial image of Myers observing his handiwork from the corner of the frame expertly visualizes his descent into hellish malevolence. A motif about façades presents itself through Myers's increasing reliance on homemade masks as a means of hiding his own true, ugly nature, as well as via a later attack in which, after the grown madman drags a topless girl (Halloween 4 and 5 alum Danielle Harris) back inside a house's front door, the camera momentarily lingers on the building's quiet, serene exterior. The sadism that lurks beneath seemingly tranquil surfaces is a topic intriguingly touched upon by Halloween. Nonetheless, once the hulking adult Myers (Tyler Mane) escapes confinement and goes in search of baby sis Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton), rote slasher-film routines largely take precedence. These are made all the more mundane by the narrative underdevelopment of Loomis (especially, his similarities to Myers) and Laurie, with the latter's establishing scenes failing to elicit substantial sympathy for her plight and, consequently, much interest in her primal scream-punctuated fate.

Myers's no-nonsense blunt-force tactics—stabbing and strangling victims, smashing through walls—are mirrored by Zombie's use of sharp cuts augmented by sonic crashes, and his avoidance of outlandish, gimmicky kill sequences lends the film a measure of fierce severity. Mostly, however, this harshness doesn't result in suspense (much less outright scares), both because Zombie refuses to push things into the sadistic territory of his prior work, and because awkwardly shoehorned-in cameos from various Devil's Rejects alums and assorted B-movie staples regularly disrupt any unsettling mood. Ultimately, this bifurcated Halloween finds Zombie struggling to further his own personal directorial voice while also remaining true to Carpenter's classic. It's a tense tug-of-war that's never fully reconciled, though if the origin-story early going is wracked by deficiencies, it's also characterized by a desire for innovation; the ferocious but predictable latter half and its general, obedient adherence to stale genre tenets, on the other hand, merely confirms that—as Nazareth croons over a strange, discomfiting early montage—"Love Hurts."

Halloween (2007) Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus

It wasn't until the end credits of Rob Zombie's head-banging Halloween remake that I had the chance to chuckle. Buried in that pile of scrolling text was a credit for an Alice Cooper song that I missed during the actual movie: "Only Women Bleed." Oh, indeed. I'd consider it a droll joke, bordering on self-deprecation, if only I felt confident that Zombie's film had the presence of mind for reflexivity, or even a sense of humor. I'm still not sure what to think of Zombie's (ironic? who can tell?) use of cheeseball power ballad "Love Hurts" to score a sad montage earlier in the film -- if it's meant to be hilarious, it's the only thing that is.

In fact, the most remarkable thing about Halloween may be that it seems almost completely devoid of human feeling. Beyond the extended, surprisingly detailed prologue that sets up Michael's general misanthropy -- he's the product of a broken home partly defined by a stripper mom and a promiscuous older sister, but mainly dominated by the casual, couch-bound cruelty of a stepdad who calls him a pussy because the animals he tortures are too easy to kill -- Zombie has expressly foregone the niceties of character development. To complain about this perhaps misses the point. As surely as John Carpenter's movie was about the babysitter Laurie Strode, Zombie's is about the killer Michael Myers. And once the film moves out of prequel territory and sets to recreating the events seen in the original, Zombie's approach to the material feels a lot less unique. Carpenter made savvy use of negative space inside the widescreen frame to isolate his prototypical final girl, building the audience's identification with her while ratcheting up the tension, but Zombie stages rote little cardboard-diorama deathtraps, paying only a few moments' attention to what the characters are doing before sending his masked killing machine into the frame to slash them. The results aren't boring, exactly, but it almost feels like a deliberate withholding of cinematic pleasure -- like Michael Haneke directing Halloween 9.

Barring a scarily effective sequence that has Laurie (a pleasantly nerdy Scout Taylor-Compton, who may well vault out of this film into much bigger things) slamming the door on a fast-lumbering Michael and then retreating to cower in the bathroom as a couple of ineffective cops race into the house and failing to rescue her, the film only perks up in the death scenes, as young and old Michael alike power their way through flesh and bone. And, specifically, it only comes to life as Michael is killing women. One moment of real feeling comes as genre veteran Dee Wallace Stone, a trooper as she approaches 60, crawls across the carpet on her hands and knees, sobbing, as Michael attacks. Many of the killings are erotically charged, as three out of four attractive young women featured strip for sex before their brutal murders. (Further, before 10-year-old Michael slashes his recently naked sister to death, he runs his fingers up the back of her thigh, suggesting some kind of connection between her blatant sexuality and his own murderous disquiet.) The original Halloween has been charged with bearing a moral lesson about promiscuity, making virginal "good girl" Strode the only teenager to survive Michael's suburban rampage, although Carpenter denies it. But it's hard to discern any authorial commentary within Zombie's steely, bad-ass replication of that approach. It seems clear only that he's aware of the assumed slasher-movie conflation of sex and bloody death, respects the grindhouse tradition of copious female nudity, and intends to deliver on both counts, in spades. (Danielle Harris, also a trooper, spends at least two minutes, most of them post-attack, topless on screen.)

It's no surprise that women don't fare too well in a classic slasher movie, but Zombie's approach is so resolutely hard-boiled -- so expert in its evocation of grindhouse scuzz -- that it feels exploitative. And if you have a look at the unfinished workprint that leaked onto the Internet, it's clear that test-screening audiences saw a film that was even more cynical and fundamentally unfriendly to their sensibilities. The first cut of Zombie's Halloween featured a fairly graphic rape sequence, with two orderlies violating a female sanitarium inmate in Michael Myers's cell. It's easy to imagine how a test audience would react to that scene; it's been replaced by less rape and more murder. But even if you believe that a rape scene in a Halloween movie is gratuitous, its inclusion served at least two purposes. It gave Zombie a chance to show the audience how he feels about rapists. (He's against them.) And, by giving Michael Myers the opportunity to end the lives of a pair of particularly brutish and nasty characters, it also substantially humanized him as a kind of anti-hero.

The climax of the workprint version of the film is also very different from the one in release. In the workprint, about a dozen cops converge on the old Myers house as Michael holds Laurie hostage. Dr. Loomis appeals to whatever humanity remains latent behind the killer's mask to convince him to let her go. Feeling some vestigial twinge of brotherly love, Michael relents -- and, as Loomis leads the weeping girl away from him, the gathered police open fire. It's a classic final-reel redemption of a very bad man, followed immediately by his death at the hands of uncaring authority -- another indication of the twisted esteem in which Zombie, who has walked that extra mile after all to understand and dramatize an origin story for the character, holds Michael. (Like The Devil's Rejects, Halloween renounces traditional movie morality as it applies to people who are clearly the bad guys.)

The released version of the film is arguably more compelling dramatically, and thus it automatically represents a compromise in Zombie's vision. The modified version of Michael's sanitarium escape shows him massacring a group of guards, including the one (Danny Trejo) who was always kind to him. Denied his role as unwitting avenger of a woman's rape and made to cruelly murder the only man he could remotely think of as a friend, Michael loses some of the mythic stature Zombie clearly aimed to assign him. The very ending of the theatrical release is also fairly effective as drama. After a pistol-packing Loomis is removed from the action by Michael, who takes him on like Roy Batty confronting Eldon Tyrell near the end of Blade Runner, a sobbing Laurie is left to fend for herself. Straddling a stunned Michael on the front lawn of the abandoned Myers house (if you take her woman-on-top position as a sexual metaphor that harks back to young Michael's attraction to his older sister, it's a clever and subtle idea), she just keeps pulling the trigger of Loomis' gun until she finds a bullet in one of the chambers and sends that fucker barreling into Michael's forehead. Instead of expressing satisfaction or muttering a catch phrase, Laurie just looks up and screams bloody murder. Fade to black.

If the famous ending of Carpenter's film, in which the apparently dead boogeyman disappears into the shadows, presumably to resurface again in the dark corners of someone else's surburban paradise, is about the persistence of evil in the modern world, then the ending of this one is about damage -- the way insanity moves, like a virus or a parasite, from host to host. Even if Laurie has triumphed, Zombie is sure she'll never be the same. (In fact, she may never stop screaming.) I appreciated this, but this sudden concern for Laurie was out of step with the rest of the film. It wasn't until I watched, and thought about the even more Michael-centric workprint version, that I realized why. Zombie just isn't interested in nerdy babysitters, or even their saucier teenaged friends. It's not that he hates women or that he takes any special pleasure in their degradation and murder -- at least not beyond that of a horror aficionado driven to pay tribute to his formative influences. (He probably likes topless women; so sue him.) But he likes Michael Myers. He likes him, like he likes Rufus T. Firefly, a little more than he should. And it's that kind of unwholesome but guileless sympathy for the devils that gives Zombie's wholly unpretentious films their auteurist spark.

Halloween is far from being a good film. In fact, for some of the reasons I've detailed above along with others I haven't, I think it's a mess. It is not, however, boring. Where horror is concerned, I think Zombie is a big ol' cinephile who lacks the chops to execute on the screen everything that's going on emotionally and intellectually inside his head. The Devil's Rejects, his best movie to date by a country mile, was more interesting as a western -- inspired by movies like Bonnie and Clyde, Charly, Two-Lane Blacktop, and the entire Sam Peckinpah catalog -- than it was as a horror movie. As an artist, Zombie has an interesting and unusual affinity for losers -- characters that are uncharitably known as white trash. We know that he can do disturbing. With the help of his wife, Sheri Moon, he can figure out sexy. If he can free himself from the sense of nostalgia that has defined, and sometimes straitjacketed, his work to date, he could add emotionally affecting to his bag of tricks and come up with something truly bracing. Rejects came frustratingly close. And Halloween is, well, it's kind of lousy. But he'll have to do worse than this before I give up on him.

Fangoria.com Michael Gingold

Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs)

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

Movie Vault [LaRae Meadows]

Beyond Hollywood Brian Holcomb

eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin)

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)

Classic Horror Nate Yapp

The Horror Review [Horror Bob]

Horrorwatch.com Jareprime

Dr. Gore's movie reviews

Movie Cynics [The Vocabulariast]

Best-Horror-Movies.com [Don Sumner]

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]

Los Angeles Times (Tasha Robinson)

The New York Times (Matt Zoller Seitz)

HALLOWEEN 2

USA (105 mi) 2009 Unrated Director’s Cut (119 mi)

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Halloween 2 (2009) John Kenneth Muir

Director Rob Zombie's latest horror film raises a question that nobody was dying to have answered. Is it possible to make an absolutely brilliant horror movie that everybody -- and I mean everybody -- despises?

His sequel to a remake, Halloween 2 (2009), is such a film. It has outraged horror enthusiasts, paying audiences, and critics around the globe, and it will likely be reviled, dismissed, and spit upon for decades to come.

Why? The movie is an absolutely unsparing and bleak, balls-to-the-wall expression of Zombie's personal vision of humanity as irredeemably corrupt and sleazy. It is the cinematic equivalent of a middle-finger directed at the audience. Zombie was essentially offered a blank check from Malek Akkad to pursue his personal vision on this Halloween sequel, and that's precisely what he does. Relentlessly.

To wit, there is only one even marginally likable human being in the entire film: Brad Dourif's Sheriff Brackett. Everyone else is literally scum-of-the-earth. Once a dogged hero, Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) is portrayed here as a horny, exploitative fame seeker, both a fraud and a suck-up.

Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) isn't a heroic final girl either. Rather, she is shrill, self-absorbed, mentally cracked, and teetering on the verge of violent psychosis. She is not noble, likable or heroic in any sense. She expresses every situation with the epithet "fuck this." It ought to be a bumper sticker.

Even lovely, long-suffering Annie (Danielle Harris) is impatient, crass, and utterly rude in the way she expresses herself. She has a moment in the film when she is being confrontational with a helpful police officer and is so mean and nasty that you begin to wonder: how has it come to this? Are we a nation of rage-a-holics, just ready to go off on anybody, at anytime?

It isn't just individuals that are corrupt and worthless. Zombie hates authority in general, and that comes through loud and clear too. The police (even as led by kindly Dourif) are portrayed as impotent...useless.

Psychotherapy (as represented by Laurie's psychologist, Margot Kidder), is ribbed as a touchy-feely waste of time. And journalists? They just want more grist for the mill.

I'm not saying any of this commentary is utterly untrue or always off-the-mark in terms of our world. Only that there is nothing to lighten the mood here; no character to really identify with, follow, or admire as an entrance point into Zombie's uncompromising vision.

The result is plain. There is not a sliver of happiness in Halloween 2; no light, and no hope. No joy exists in this white-trash world of pain, death, betrayal and murder. Ideas like grief, sadness, redemption, tragedy or fear are only things to be joked about on late night TV with Weird Al Yankovic. Nobody is going reach out and give someone else a helping hand.

The only place Laurie finds even the barest measure of relief or happiness in Halloween 2 is in the bottle; in alcohol consumption. When she gets falling-down drunk at a Halloween party, that is the only opportunity in which she can "let go" of the pain that dominates her existence. And even here, director Zombie doesn't grant the audience respite: he undercuts Laurie's moment of beer-induced cutting-loose by cross-cutting it with images of Michael Myers strangling one of her best friends in the back of the van. Even when pain is made numb by booze, suffering goes on elsewhere in the world.

So...did I mention the movie is bleak?

It goes even further. Zombie continues his systematic dismantling of the Halloween "brand" by removing Michael's mask from most of the action and reavling him to be simply....a psychotic giant with a Grizzly Adams beard. And then the screenplay firmly identifies the root causes of Michael's homicidal rage: He often hallucinates the ghost of his mother (Sheri Moon Zombie), who tells him he must unleash a "river of blood" to bring her back to life. Michael accommodates this wish, but now we have a clear motivational window onto his homicidal soul: he's a Momma's Boy extraordinaire. Accordingly, Halloween 2 may just be the biggest paean to mother love in the horror genre since Hitchcock's Psycho (1960).

It is perhaps strange to talk about violence being enjoyable or entertaining, or suspenseful, but the violence in previous Halloween films has always been depicted at a more removed, subtle, culturally decent level. Carpenter's initial film relied on suspense (and musical zingers), not blood shed, to achieve terror. And the most of the follow-up films didn't linger on the suffering of Michael's victims either. Zombie also turns this franchise convention upside down

Early in the film, we follow Annie -- wounded by Myers --to the hospital, and watch in nauseating, realistic close-up as the doctors wash, drain, sew-up and otherwise tend to her knife wounds. It is a document of misery. And it goes on for several minutes. Is it realistic? Yes. Is it pleasant to watch? No.

Similarly, Michael proves not merely violent in this film, but brutally sadistic: he literally turns one victim's face into unrecognizable pulp. And though, in Halloween, there was dialogue indicating that Michael Myers ate a dog, Zombie decides to show us that feast here. He cross-cuts between a scene of Dourif chowing down pizza, pretending to be a neanderthal man, with Michael Myers ripping apart the flesh of a dead dog...and eating it. Again, it's not scary...just kind of nauseating.

The grounds to which to dislike Halloween 2 are all here in abundance. The "fun" horror of Halloween has been replaced by a lingering, gruesome close-up view of pain, suffering and death. Who could possibly find "enjoyment" in that?

And the heroic characters we have lived with and grown up with for thirty years -- Loomis and Strode, particularly -- are made not just into more fallible, recognizable humans, but utterly despicable ones.

And sans his iconic mask -- and now given to primal grunts of effort during his kills -- Myers is no longer a mythic, larger-than-life threat. He's just a run of the mill Dahmer or Bundy.

The Shape no more. The Bogeyman no more. This Michael is mankind as the ultimate monster.

Given all this, it is difficult to imagine someone who has liked other Halloween films liking this one. Zombie's movie -- the tenth in the durable and now predictable horror franchise -- wilfully and determinedly undercuts every image, every character, every concept of the property as it has existed for three decades. Anyone expecting a fun, jolting horror experience will be disappointed. This film is a bucket of cold water in the face.

Yet at the same time, I found Halloween 2 absolutely absorbing. It is undeniably the unfettered vision of one committed, empowered artist. It is uncluttered by committee-thinking; unburdened by the desire to please the audience, and it is absolutely extraordinary in terms of the visuals, and especially the editing. As a critic, I often deride horror movies that take the safe route; the run-of-the-mill, conventional approach. You can't accuse Rob Zombie of that pitfall here. Nothing in Halloween 2 is run-of-the-mill. So while the whole movie feels like you've spent two hours circling a dirty toilet bowl, it's an exquisitely-filmed toilet bowl. Zombie has a great eye for every nauseating, degenerate detail. His world feels real, complete and powerful.

So yes, Halloween 2 is skanky, skeezy, corrupt, degenerate and excessive. But you know what? I really admired it once I accepted it. I couldn't let go of John Carpenter's Halloween while watching Zombie's 2007 remake, in part because Zombie re-staged much of the action from the classic 1978 picture in slavish -- and inferior -- detail. His original "vision" was corrupted by his need to pay homage to what Carpenter clearly did better.

Wisely, Zombie's Halloween 2 doesn't imitate Carpenter's work (or the 1981 sequel) in any substantive fashion after an early chase in a hospital. Instead, Zombie freely pursues his inner demons and does his own thing with a minimum of creative interference. Pleasence's Loomis and Curtis's Strode couldn't exist in this cinematic hell...but the beauty of that is that they don't have to. Zombie populates his Halloween 2 with the "people" he sees in that world, and while I would never, ever want to live in that world, it's all of a particular piece. It's unified ugliness, at least.

Furthermore, Zombie provides two pitch-perfect scenes that argue cogently for this franchise's right to exist in this dark, depressing realm. I didn't expect intellectual gamesmanship from Zombie, not when he so frequently prefers a bludgeon, but it's there in glorious detail.

In the first instance, Zombie stages a scene between Laurie and her psychologist in the office. Behind them,on the wall hangs a big Rorschach poster. It is white in the center, black around the edges. Laurie is asked what she sees in it, and she replies that she sees a white horse (a reflection of Michael's vision of his mother). Fine. But if you look closely at that Rorschach spot, there's something else the audience sees: a big white spot, with two black "eyes."

What we are looking at, no doubt, is a kind of Rorschach version of Michael Myers' famous Shatner mask. It is a ghostly white face...upon which our fear is reflected. Laurie's psychologist establishes the blot could be "whatever you think it is," and that is Zombie's specific "out" in choosing and executing this narrative, stylistic path. He has looked at the Rorschach-like mask of the Shape and then written this movie based on what he saw. In his head. This vision of Michael Myers is what Zombie imagined in the lines of that famous, Rorschach-like mask.

Later in Halloween 2, there's a scene in which Annie, Laurie and Sheriff Brackett share a pizza together for dinner. Brackett starts to discuss the great actor Lee Marvin, and the actor's fantastic, colorful, romantic films of the 1960s-1970s: Cat Ballou, The Professionals, Paint Your Wagon. Well, the two teenagers sharing this conversation with Brackett look as though he has just shit diarrhea on their dinner. They don't know who Lee Marvin is; and furthermore, they don't care. That artificial world of musicals, westerns and movie decorum is as distant to today's youth as is Ancient Latin. That's not the world they live in. That's not the world this movie lives in either.

Again, this is Zombie's studied and important comment upon the Halloween mythos. John Carpenter's Halloween -- with all its brilliant 1970s film values -- is the Lee Marvin in this particular comparison. It is something well-remembered by the older generation but something that -- Zombie suggests -- doesn't carry cultural currency or relevant meaning in the world of today's youth. Musicals are gone. Artifice is gone. Romance is gone. What we have today is ugly, naturalistic entertainment for an ugly world. Zombie seems to understand that fact, and this scene spells it out quite explicitly. In a sense, this Lee Marvin metaphor justifies Zombie's approach to Halloween 2.

In terms of his visuals and editing, Zombie is truly audacious. He intercuts Brackett's discovery of Annie's corpse with home movies of Annie as a happy little girl. It's a breathtaking, and enormously affecting conceit. Without a doubt, it makes you "feel" the impact of this death more than just about any other in the Halloween film cycle. You understand what loss feels like for Brackett. It's heart-rending.

At other times, Zombie ramps up the violence during Michael's rampages so that the very film stock itself seems to convulse and spasm with rage. It's like we're tied into Myer's pulse itself. Some scenes with Michael Myers traversing beautiful natural landscapes alone, or walking through town by moonlight are positively lyrical in presentation. Lastly, the film's final coda -- accompanied by the unexpected and ironic strains of "Love Hurts" -- synthesizes everything we need to understand about this Zombie universe: the pain, agony and psychosis of a life destroyed by violence; of violence brought on by love and hate for...family.

Let me be clear: I would never make a Halloween movie like this. I don't prefer my Halloween movies like this. But it's my job as a critic to give the devil his due: there's something enormously absorbing, immersing and impactful about this die-hard approach to the Halloween universe. There are, indeed, moments of pure genius in this movie. It's widely regarded as a fiasco, I realize, but the director's cut that I watched is a fascinating and bloody work of art.

Once more, my therapist wife Kathryn helped me clarify my thoughts about a movie. After Halloween 2 ended (and after a moment or two of stunned silence), I asked her what she thought. She said "It was absolutely amazing....and I never, ever, EVER want to see it again."

That's exactly how I feel. There are aspects of this one-of-a-kind film that should be lauded (the style; the editing, the unity of vision). But I never ever want to re-visit this hateful, corrupt, hopeless world.

In Carpenter's universe, the terror is iconic; Michael Myers is the Bogeyman and Dr. Loomis is St. George slaying in the dragon. In Zombie's universe, hardcore, bitter reality has replaced such mythic touches to produce a grounded "real" Halloween for our times.

I worry for our times.

The Mask Makes The Monster John Kenneth Muir, April 15, 2009

Zonca, Erick

ALONE

France (34 mi) 1997

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias] (excerpt)

With The Little Thief clocking in at a tight 65 minutes, its distributor has generously added Zonca's earlier Alone, another tale of youthful desperation that could be a precursor to the Dardenne Brothers' Rosetta. Unemployed, homeless, and fiercely determined, Florence Loiret also considers a life of crime when a loaded handgun literally drops in her lap. Though slight and not especially ambitious, Zonca's brisk, unsentimental short subject proves that his talent for showing life on the fly was fully formed even before he got into features.

Village Voice (Amy Taubin) (excerpt)

It's work, not love, that perplexes, frustrates, and infuriates the young women and men in Erick Zonca's films. How do you earn a living without dwindling into a wage slave? How do you make the transition from the fantasies and small freedoms of childhood to the actuality of 50 years of nine-to-five?

With their impressionist palette and vivid acting, Zonca's films have a visual beauty and emotional intimacy not usually associated with the problem of labor. But that is the subject at the core of The Dreamlife of Angels, Zonca's breakout 1998 feature, and his two short films, Alone and The Little Thief. Though neither of the shorts is quite as rich as Dreamlife, they're a provocative double bill.

Made in 1997, the 34-minute Alone is the sketch from which Dreamlife developed. In the space of an hour, a young woman (Florence Loiret) loses her waitressing job, her apartment, and all her possessions save those in her beat-up shoulder bag. When a gun literally falls at her feet during a police raid, she tries to hold up her landlord (Philippe Nahon, the brutish star of Gaspar Noé's I Stand Alone), who laughs at her ineptitude and slams the door in her face. During her rapid descent into homelessness and starvation, the gun presents itself (to her and to us) more as a threat than a way out. In the hands of a lesser director, it would be too crude a narrative ploy, but Zonca savors both the contingency of its appearance in the girl's life and its tactile presence—the way this hard, efficiently tooled object looks in the hands of a fragile, confused woman.

Like the eponymous heroine of the Dardenne brothers' Rosetta, she is willing to do a man's job, and like Rosetta, she hasn't a clue why she can't get one. She has no awareness of the number one rule of the workplace: You can't let your anger show even when the boss or the customers are abusing or rejecting you. But physically and emotionally, this girl has little in common with Rosetta. Rather, she resembles, as does Natacha Regnier's suicidal young woman in Dreamlife, the shame-filled, masochistic adolescents in Robert Bresson's later films.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

The last few years have seen an exciting movement in French cinema to take the cameras back to the streets and create stripped down, documentarylike portraits of an underemployed population trying to survive on the harsh streets.

Sophomore director Erick Zonca, a Seattle International Film Festival "Emerging Master" this year, is deeply entrenched in this movement. His lovely debut feature, "The Dreamlife of Angels," mixes poetic imagery and ephemeral moments of pain and joy with the hard reality of street life.

His latest film, "The Little Thief," takes a more stripped down, clear-eyed approach in its portrait of a restless baker's apprentice who chucks his job for a life of crime in the sunny port town of Marseilles. It's paired with his 1997 short "Alone," about a girl whose frustrated search for work on the streets of Paris leads her to desperate measures.

They make an excellent double bill, two films about troubled teenagers looking for their place in a mercenary world, told in a direct, immediate affecting style.

In "The Little Thief," Esse (Nicolas Duvauchelle) is a surly, sullen working stiff whose contempt finally sends him into what he sees as a glamorous world of crime, only to wind up another kind of apprentice. The big talking tough is little more than a wide-eyed kid in the company of thick-skinned thugs. He's a low-level gopher and a hilariously inept thief, dreamily wandering through the houses he's supposed to be robbing like a curious voyeur rather than searching for valuables.

Shot on the streets of Marseilles, Zonca's imagery is bright and razor sharp, and his style easy and immediate if just a bit disconnected. The film steps back to watch with curious fascination just like Esse, who is more of a cypher than full-blooded character. But Esse can't remain on the sidelines, and ultimately he faces the arbitrary cruelty of his life in a shocking burst of violence.

Zonca's earlier "Alone," a visually softer and more lyrical film, is even more moving. He gets under the skin of Amelie (Florence Loiret), a seemingly tough but ultimately vulnerable young woman who loses her job and her home and spirals into a hole of depression and desperation. When a gun falls, literally, into her hands and taunts her with possibilities she tries hard to ignore -- all she wants is an honest job -- she finally succumbs in a startlingly unconventional and emotionally devastating climax.

In both films, Zonca takes simple tales free of dramatic contrivances and builds them to climactic acts which in other hands might sink into cliché. Britain's social realist director Ken Loach could learn a thing or two from these uncompromising stories of grim lives and scarred but scrappy human spirits.

Alone Gerald Peary, also reviewing THE LITTLE THIEF

Why don't Americans go to European films any more? A theory thrown about (by The New Yorker's David Denby, for one) is that we used to attend these films because of the sexy stories and unrobed babes, but now the almost-X stuff can be found abundantly in our own movies. Why venture into subtitled territory?

There's teensy truth to this vantage. Yet most often, today's American film narratives and European ones don't overlap in the slightest; in no way are they duplicate aesthetic experiences.

"Serious" Hollywood movies (and the bulk of American indies) tend to be character-driven, with speeches, psychologizing, and overdetermined backstory. The shooting style is as simple as TV, and the audience sits back and enjoys. "Serious" European art movies are subtext-driven: minimalist, about what's not said, with emphasis on the formal side of storytelling. The audience is required to be an activist participant, figuring things out from subtle visual clues, and swimming about in a world of moral ambiguity. A mood of pessimism and limited possibilities prevails (class is a definite factor), versus the "Go for it!" optimism of American cinema.

As for sex: the soft-focus, screwing-is-beautiful tone of "adult" American movies (especially when movie stars are involved) is replaced by raw, blunt, not-always-pretty, carnality. Sex as it actually is.

Alone (1997) and The Little Thief (1999), two short films by France's Erich (Dreamlife of Angels) Zonka, are paradigmatically European arthouse works. Forget revelatory flashbacks, or epiphanic oratory. We know nothing, and are offered nothing, about the two marginal, low-of-money protagonists - Alone's young woman, The Little Thief's young man - except the tiny actions that we observe unfolding on screen. They each have a brief conversation with someone of the opposite sex, than a quick cut to a bed. One couple copulates on screen, the other has finished. Both protagonists are shown being fired from jobs - waitressing, working in a bakery - and they both make impulsive decisions which lead them to venture into petty crime. We don't know in either case if their firing is fair or unjust, as the information simply isn't offered to us.

And Zonka makes no judgment on their criminal lives.

We aren't guided if we should root for these principal characters, and we aren't offered explanatory speeches to prove whether they are "good" or "bad." Still, we keep watching addictively because of Zoncka's expert filmmaking, and because we are made privy to curious, subterranean worlds.

Alone is certainly the lesser film, an apprentice piece with too many histrionic, shouted scenes, as the ex-waitress, Amelie (Florence Loiret), sinks low, loses her rented room, has her pocketbook stolen, becomes a panhandler, threatens a taxi driver with a gun. This 30-minute work is most interesting for its section when Amelie hangs out with a foul-mouthed, shopping-bag, post-adolescent (Veronique Octon). Here's a rough draft of the female friendship at the center of Dreamlife of Angels, Zonka's international breakthrough.

The Little Thief, Zoncka's latest, swings to life when the protagonist, "S" (Nicolas Duvauchelle), becomes embroiled with a pack of lowlife thieves in Marseilles. Here's the obverse of classic American gangster films, in which Jimmy Cagney or Edward G, Robinson rose quickly through the mob. The "rise" of "S" means he gets to pimp for a gaggle of prostitutes, then become the personal driver for the gang's meanest member, who viciously sodomizes him. Though he barely speaks in most of the scenes, "S" becomes almost "Americanized": he gains our sympathy, we wish for him a feel-good ending.

THE DREAMLIFE OF ANGELS A 98

France (113 mi) 1998

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

In The Dreamlife Of Angels, director Erick Zonca's rough-hewn, searing debut, Élodie Bouchez and Natacha Régnier (deserving Best Actress co-winners at last year's Cannes Film Festival) play young, working-class women who share an intimate but extremely volatile friendship: They meet over the buzzsaw shriek of sewing machines in a dreary French industrial town and soon take a flat together, both living hand-to-mouth, but with vastly different temperaments. Bouchez, a vagabond who hauls her few possessions around in a rucksack, is nonetheless compassionate and playfully optimistic; Régnier, caustic and world-weary, rages over class injustices, yet finds herself drawn into a self-destructive affair with a rich club owner (Grégoire Colin). The Dreamlife Of Angels captures the subtle evolution of their uneasy relationship, which begins with giddy camaraderie (a scene in which they audition for a job at Planet Hollywood is especially funny) and slowly unravels. Zonca's strikingly organic use of cinema-verite style collects telling snippets from their lives and builds, almost imperceptibly, to a stunning conclusion. Socially conscious, actor-driven, and resolutely minor, The Dreamlife Of Angels may be derived from a familiar French prototype, but Zonca's attention to minor observational detail—sometimes at the expense of dramatic momentum—gives his film a special resonance. Not until the unforgettable final shot does the full impact of the story snap, devastatingly, into focus.

Nashville Scene [Donna Bowman]

There's something uncomfortably elitist about hearing people say that they like foreign films. Surely foreign films can't easily be lumped into a single genre and appreciated en masse. Isn't the cinema of Europe as different from that of Asia as it is from Hollywood? Even the range of French and Italian filmmaking--what people used to mean when they said "foreign film"--encompasses an impossibly diverse world, from the intense detail work of De Sica or Ophuls to the extravagant emotions of Fellini or Clouzot.

Yet a recognizable "foreignness" still pervades films like The Dreamlife of Angels (La Vie Revee des Anges), an approach to story and character that we can characterize instantly as originating outside our borders. The movie seems to have been made for a different audience; it does not bother to provide backstory or give any clues about what its characters are like before they reveal themselves in action. It seems foreign because it breaks the focus-group, test-audience rules that govern the films we see week in and week out, even the so-called "independents." That freedom, expressed here in a slice-of-life story about two young women thrown together through labor and love, is what draws American audiences tired of being analyzed before they reach the box office.

We are dropped into the film in medias res, as Isabelle (Elodie Bouchez) arrives in the French city of Lille to find that the friend she'd counted on staying with has disappeared. (It's only sometime later that we learn that the girl's name is Isabelle and that the city is Lille. Already we've crossed the border--an American film would have given us this information with a helicopter shot, a superimposed title, and, if necessary, a nametag.) Isa shows up for work at a clothing factory and cadges a place to stay from her fellow sewing-machine operator Marie (Natacha Regnier). In a matter of days the two have become friends, teasing strangers in malls and picking up odd jobs together. Their attempts to get into a club for free lead to dates with the club's bouncers, bikers named Charley and Fredo. When Marie starts sleeping with the club owner, a privileged jerk named Chris, Isa disapproves and their friendship grows strained.

At the same time, Isa develops a strange relationship with the owner of Marie's flat, a girl hospitalized in a coma after a car accident. She visits regularly and reads from the incapacitated girl's diary. Slowly Isa and Marie begin to show their true colors, switching places in the audience's mind. Isa, who appeared flighty and shallow in the opening scenes, reveals her ability to make instant but real connections with nearly anyone. But Marie, we discover, barely survives under a crushing lack of self-esteem. She holds herself aloof from what she imagines is beneath her, like begging or handing out fliers, while she squats in a borrowed flat and takes money from her boyfriend. Homeless Isa, it turns out, holds herself together, while Marie goes to pieces.

Nearly every character has unexpressed complexities, the kind that get you discussing who they really were after the lights come up. Is Charley, the leather-studded biker, a secret softie? Or do the crumpled bills he presses into Marie's hands signal his essentially mercenary nature? A more familiar approach to this story--an American approach--would have been to clarify each person's real character traits, if not at the outset, then at least eventually. Yet Erick Zonca, who directed and cowrote The Dreamlife of Angels, leaves to us truly important decisions about who these people are and what their actions mean. And his final shot, a dolly down a row of working women with a pause at each face, introduces a new theme about labor rather than wrapping up any of the themes we've already recognized.

Until the final scenes, it's not clear whether anything we would conventionally term "significant" is going to happen in The Dreamlife of Angels. And for someone who has fallen in love with the film's foreignness, it's possible to view that final significant occurrence as a betrayal--a concession to an audience that demands an ending. Yet it's consistent with the overall message of the film: the human need to instantly judge those we meet versus the impossibility of ever really knowing them.

When the film ended, I found myself saying, "That's the kind of film I like"--and then had to wonder what I meant by that. If it's elitist to enjoy foreign films because as a group they exhibit a refreshing liberty from our expectations, because they tend to have more courage in presenting flawed or unlikable characters and ambiguous situations, I suppose I'm guilty. But I don't just like foreign films, period; I like movies about real people, in all their exasperating, untidy difficulties. The true question isn't about elitism, but about whether the audience to whom American films regularly pander isn't like me--hungry for something more.

Parallel Lives | Village Voice Amy Taubin, June 15, 1999

The Nation (Stuart Klawans)

Salon.com [Charles Taylor]

Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer)

Scott Renshaw

Edwin Jahiel

Images (David Ng)

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

culturevulture.net Arthur Lazere

VideoVista Paul Higson

World Socialist Web Site David Walsh

Harvey S. Karten

Film Journal International (Doris Toumarkine)

AboutFilm.com (Jeff Vorndam)

Bright Lights Film Journal Megan Ratner, reviewing 5 French films about women

Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]

The Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

New York Times (registration req'd) Janet Maslin

THE LITTLE THIEF B+ 92

France (65 mi) 1999

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Pared down to raw formula, French director Erick Zonca's two features, 1998's The Dreamlife Of Angels and 1999's The Little Thief—as well as his 1997 short, Alone, which accompanies the latter—are more or less the same movie. Strongly leftist, set in urban-industrial squalor, and photographed with handheld cameras using mostly natural light, each covers the miserable day-in-the-life routines of young protagonists disillusioned by their dead-end menial jobs. But, predictable as they are in overarching design, Zonca's films are nervy and constantly surprising, charged with a palpable tension of uncertainty, a true sense of life being improvised by the second. With his fine, almost childlike features and an underlying sensitivity that belies his rage, newcomer Nicolas Duvauchelle unmistakably echoes James Dean as the ne'er-do-well hero of The Little Thief. Frustrated by his soul-crushing job as a baker's apprentice, Duvauchelle gets himself fired and takes to the streets, determined to leave the service industry behind and be his own boss. But the disparity between his righteousness and his morality leads to dire consequences when he hooks up with Marseilles gangsters who ironically have a management system as oppressive as any in the workaday world. Since it focuses so intently on a single protagonist with few friends, all extremely tenuous, The Little Thief lacks much of the fascinating psychology of Élodie Bouchez and Natalie Réginier's unforgettable relationship in Dreamlife. But as Duvauchelle gets in ever further over his head, an air of dread settles in that's charged with horrific possibilities. While it's clear from the start that his fate is sealed, the whens and hows are unpredictable, leading to acts of violence staged so matter-of-factly, they seem almost shockingly real. With The Little Thief clocking in at a tight 65 minutes, its distributor has generously added Zonca's earlier Alone, another tale of youthful desperation that could be a precursor to the Dardenne Brothers' Rosetta. Unemployed, homeless, and fiercely determined, Florence Loiret also considers a life of crime when a loaded handgun literally drops in her lap. Though slight and not especially ambitious, Zonca's brisk, unsentimental short subject proves that his talent for showing life on the fly was fully formed even before he got into features.

Village Voice (Amy Taubin) also reviewing ALONE

It's work, not love, that perplexes, frustrates, and infuriates the young women and men in Erick Zonca's films. How do you earn a living without dwindling into a wage slave? How do you make the transition from the fantasies and small freedoms of childhood to the actuality of 50 years of nine-to-five?

With their impressionist palette and vivid acting, Zonca's films have a visual beauty and emotional intimacy not usually associated with the problem of labor. But that is the subject at the core of The Dreamlife of Angels, Zonca's breakout 1998 feature, and his two short films, Alone and The Little Thief. Though neither of the shorts is quite as rich as Dreamlife, they're a provocative double bill.

Made in 1997, the 34-minute Alone is the sketch from which Dreamlife developed. In the space of an hour, a young woman (Florence Loiret) loses her waitressing job, her apartment, and all her possessions save those in her beat-up shoulder bag. When a gun literally falls at her feet during a police raid, she tries to hold up her landlord (Philippe Nahon, the brutish star of Gaspar Noé's I Stand Alone), who laughs at her ineptitude and slams the door in her face. During her rapid descent into homelessness and starvation, the gun presents itself (to her and to us) more as a threat than a way out. In the hands of a lesser director, it would be too crude a narrative ploy, but Zonca savors both the contingency of its appearance in the girl's life and its tactile presence—the way this hard, efficiently tooled object looks in the hands of a fragile, confused woman.

Like the eponymous heroine of the Dardenne brothers' Rosetta, she is willing to do a man's job, and like Rosetta, she hasn't a clue why she can't get one. She has no awareness of the number one rule of the workplace: You can't let your anger show even when the boss or the customers are abusing or rejecting you. But physically and emotionally, this girl has little in common with Rosetta. Rather, she resembles, as does Natacha Regnier's suicidal young woman in Dreamlife, the shame-filled, masochistic adolescents in Robert Bresson's later films.

In their neo-realist use of direct sound, cityscapes, and naturally lit interiors, and in their psychological depiction of youthful anomie, Zonca's films are clearly influenced by Bresson. But Zonca is a more humanist and more overtly leftist filmmaker. He believes in the liberating potential of human interaction, and even in the tentative reemergence of working-class solidarity. In the last scene of The Little Thief, a worker in a bakery calls out to a new hire: "Are you interested in politics? Come to a meeting."

The hour-long Little Thief was made immediately after Dreamlife and turns the tables with a male protagonist. S. (Nicolas Duvauchelle) quits his job as a baker's apprentice for a get-rich-quick life of crime. Although he seems an unlikely candidate, he's recruited by a Marseilles mob and slowly works his way up the hierarchy from being a break-and-entry lookout to taking care of the boss's aged mother to guarding prostitutes to chauffeuring the boss himself. After the boss shoves a gun down his throat and then rapes him, our hero realizes that labor relations are worse in the criminal world than in the straight world. The Little Thief lacks the complex characters of Dreamlife, but it extends the range of Zonca's filmmaking with scenes of punishing, visceral violence.

Reel.com [Rod Armstrong]

Mike D'Angelo <dangelo@panix.com>

Alone Gerald Peary, reviewing THE LITTLE THIEF and ALONE

New York Times (registration req'd) Lawrence van Gelder

JULIA B+ 91

France USA Mexico Belgium (138 mi) 2008 ‘Scope co-director: Camille Natta

Tilda Swinton is all bluster and bravado letting it all hang out with this in your face portrayal of a wacked out floozie in an exceptional, tour de force performance with a director (1998’s DREAMLIFE OF ANGELS) that loves to keep her as the focus of every frame. Her flamboyance defies description, but she’s a hard drinking alcoholic who ends up in a different bed every night and can’t recall how she got there. For the brilliance of her language alone, among the most direct and profane uses of gutter language ever captured on film, she demands and deserves our attention. Zonca’s realist visual style captures life in motion, as there’s a phenomenal energy level captured by his swiftly moving camerawork, using cinematographer Yorick Le Saux, who shot Ozon’s visually impressive 5 X 2 (2004) and Assayas’s BOARDING GATE (2007). No real set pieces to speak of, much of this feels shot on the fly, where Swinton is always running, always hiding from something, where the manic energy at the end of the film is reminiscent of AMORES PERROS (2000). While not completely a success, the narrative lacks cohesion and tends to be wildly free spirited and open ended, as if improvised. Co-written by the director and Aude Py, co-directed by one of the actresses in the film (who played Karen), Camille Natta, much of this feels disjointed from earlier segments, as the movie is literally all over the place where characters appear and disappear with amazing frequency, collecting a sizable cast but never really slowing down long enough to learn much about any of them. Even Swinton as Julia is a force of nature, a continuous blur on the radar screen, but hard to grasp or find sympathy with as she’s so defined by her inner demons.

One of the earliest scenes catches Julia in a dark nightclub in Los Angeles wearing a bright flimsy dress where her body is gyrating to the Eurythmics “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” waking up in a car the next morning with a man just introduced to her as her new boss. As her behavior veers so out of control she’s literally ordered to attend AA meetings, not her strongsuit, but there she meets Kate del Castillo (originally from Mexican soaps on TV) as Elena, who appeals to Julia to help kidnap her son from his rich grandfather who has an order of protection against her, and would likely pay plenty to get his grandson back. Elena’s heartfelt but genuinely bizarre ideas would interest no one, as her skittish incoherency places her one step from the psych ward, but this is the kind of harebrained scheme that works for Julia, a character that feeds off nervous anxiety. There are multiple transitions and leaps of faith where the film turns into a psychotic road movie through the American Southwest, much of it disturbingly uncomfortable where the crisp language is nothing short of phenomenal. Ever vigilant, Julia has to fight her way through roadblocks and police traps, where the police chase through the desert has a visceral feel that suddenly adds social relevance. We’re suddenly trapsing through the back alleys of Tijuana where dogs run free and where criminals and ordinary citizens are nearly indistinguishable, but the camera’s near documentary observations cutting through a mass of humanity are riveting. It’s impossible to put ourselves in Julia’s shoes, as her inclinations to move through such a vividly realized dangerous criminal world are largely outside human comprehension, not to mention dangerously deranged, yet it’s happening, which adds a strange fascination to her ever-shifting, living on the edge persona. Despite some brilliant filmmaking, a sweeping examination cross cutting through a lurid subterranean universe that places us at the scene of the crime through Swinton’s strong as nails character, the movie is more of an impressionistic, fast action thriller that places more emphasis on small, intimate details than on any buildup of Swinson’s character, where we never get a real picture of the kind of person she might actually be, as there are no quiet reflective moments, instead she's always covering it up with macho bravado in order to handle the cutthroats in the film, remaining elusive, emotionally out of bounds and unreachable.

Berlin Film Festival | Salon Arts & Entertainment Stephanie Zacharek (Page 3)

Before I get to my favorite movies of the Berlinale so far -- the festival continues for three more days, although today is my last day covering it -- I need to send up a giant red flag to everyone who loved French filmmaker Erick Zonca's 1998 debut "The Dreamlife of Angels": His new film, "Julia" (his first in English), a sort of remake of John Cassavetes' "Gloria," stars Tilda Swinton as an alcoholic kidnapper who finds redemption -- and it's insufferable. Many of my colleagues have noted that while they dislike the movie, they think Swinton is terrific. It is the sort of performance that people look at and marvel, "She can do anything!" when in fact it's simply a role that's all wrong for her. Cast as a woman who's blowsy, selfish and usually sozzled, Swinton plays down to her character, which isn't nearly the same as playing it. If Satan appeared at the door of my hotel room and offered me, for some outlandish price, the two hours of breathing time "Julia" took from me, I might be tempted to take it.

GreenCine Daily: Berlinale 08. A chronology. David Hudson from GreenCine

Erick Zonca's Julia feels like two films prefaced with a short that might have been called "Portrait of an Alcoholic." Tilda Swinton, who claims to drink very little when at all, plays rip-roaring drunk and maintains her American accent throughout. And that's precisely the sort of thought I found difficult to shake all through the film. I wonder: Is it because I've been such a Tilda fan for so long that, seeing her take on a role so different from the characters she's played in the past, her performance is distracting me from the film itself? Or is there something slightly off about the performance after all? Salon's Stephanie Zacharek holds that "Swinton plays down to her character, which isn't nearly the same as playing it" - but I don't think that's quite it. Maybe what I was doing instead of watching Julia the film was looking for Julia under all the staggering and rebalancing, morning-after blech-ing and underarm wiping.

But then come the two kidnapping stories and we're not going to get through them at all if she doesn't sober up at least a little; she does, and by the time the American kidnapping story literally crashes through the border and becomes a Mexican kidnapping story, the tables are turning so fast and the stakes are so high Julia forgets to juice up entirely.

I was surprised to hear and read so many dumping on this film. There is something sloppy and unfocused about it, but that's partly what makes it work. Julia's wobbly voice matches Julia. Tilda Swinton admirers, and our number is growing in the wake of her recent acceptance speeches at the Baftas and Oscars, will want to catch it regardless of any critical verdict. Favorite moment: Julia's friend (Saul Rubinek), scolding her but with barely concealed love, calls her a big giraffe of a woman. I'll never look at Tilda quite the same way again.

Filmbrain Like Anna Karina’s Sweater

The morning after Julia, Erick Zonca’s third (and first English language) feature was screened for the press at the Berlinale, I bumped into a small group of acquisition folks from several American mini-majors. Each was thumbing through one of the dailies, quickly scanning the coverage of the previous day’s offerings – reviews that (I’ve now learned) can make or break a film’s chance for acquisition. I asked what they thought of Julia, for I hadn’t yet fully come to terms with what I thought of it. After a few quick glances at each other, I heard the following:

"Too long. Has be to trimmed by at least thirty minutes."
"Audiences won’t sit still for this."
"You can’t expect people to invest that amount of time in a character with no redeeming qualities."
"She’s hateful from start to finish. Where’s the entertainment in that?"
"D.O.A."

Their comments reflected the opinions found in the Variety and Screen Daily reviews. When I brought up issues of the film’s art, its homage to Cassavetes, and the brave lead performance by Tilda Swinton, I was met with stares and smirks. Looks that made it all too clear that it’s the bottom line that matters; as if to remind me that this a business, and nothing more. Now, granted, I’m but an infant in the distribution game, but if I should ever begin to toss around such flippant, dismissive statements, or begin to speak of film as pure commodity – kill me.

Greencine’s David Hudson is right when he says that Julia feels like several films in one, and as a result it took me several days to reconcile how I felt about it. I can’t help but wonder if other critics, who had but a few hours to turn in their reviews, would have felt different about it given some time to reflect. Perhaps not, at least judging by Stephanie Zacharek’s über-pan in Salon, where she feels the need to "send up a giant red flag to everyone who loved…The Dreamlife of Angels" and would gladly make a deal with Satan to get her two hours back. Ouch! Were my instincts wrong, even after two viewings? (I caught the film again on the final day of the festival.) It’s possible, but if anything my admiration for the film has grown stronger in the weeks since I’ve seen it.

Contrary to early reports, Julia is not a remake of Gloria, though it is an unabashed tribute to Cassavetes, particularly in its creation of a female lead character that recalls the unforgettable roles he crafted for his wife, Gena Rowlands. Set in a non-descript and bland-looking Los Angeles, the film opens in a dimly-lit nightclub, where we first lay eyes on the 40-something Julia, dancing along drunkenly to The Eurythmics' Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) as she attempts to seduce a married businessman. She's an alcoholic whose flimsy, low-cut dress, costume jewelry, and heavily applied makeup can’t fully hide the fact that she’s past her prime party-girl years. Her days typically begin in a strange bed or in the backseat of a car, dress hiked up, one breast clumsily exposed, and badly hung-over. What passed for sexy the night before looks less so by the cold light of morning. 

Fired from her job, she turns to friend and sponsor Mitch (Saul Rubinek, in a knockout performance), who only agrees to help her if she goes back to AA meetings. It's there that she meets Elena (Kate del Castillo), a young Mexican woman who enlists Julia to help her kidnap her eight year-old son Tom (Aidan Gould), who is now living with his grandfather, a powerful and wealthy businessman. What follows is a kidnapping cum road movie that ultimately winds up as an action-packed suspense thriller. It's both an exhausting and exhilarating 140 minutes, to say the least.

There's barely a moment that Swinton isn't on-screen, and it's clear that Zonca built the film around her. It's her strongest performance to date, and she allows herself to be filmed in ways that few actresses would, going beyond the sweaty-armpits and gut-fat of Michael Clayton, adding cellulite and a sagging bottom to this often-unflattering portrait of a woman on the verge. (I have to say though, it's wonderful to see a "real" woman on screen for a change.) Julia is an unpleasant character, but nothing she does is pre-meditated. She lives in the moment, unable and unwilling to plan ahead, let alone consider the potential repercussions of her actions; a lethal mixture for a kidnapper. As a result, her treatment of young Tom is extremely difficult to watch at times, though her negligence isn't sadistic by nature – she genuinely doesn't see what's wrong with leaving a child sleeping alone under the desert sky, or tying him to a radiator pipe. Some I spoke with in Berlin had a problem watching a character they deemed hateful – something that didn't trouble me at all. I've never subscribed to the particular dictum that lead characters must be likeable, made gospel by the likes of Robert McKee et. al.

Zonca doesn't posit Julia as a victim, nor does he attempt to explain why she's become the woman she is – selfish, solipsistic, and in constant denial. Perhaps this explains why the response to the film has been so vitriolic. Though there are hints at redemption (including a bonding scene with the boy which is terribly out of place), this isn't one of those young-boy-teaches-the-old-drunk-about-the-true-meaning-of-family movies.  (Thank god!) Yet at the same time I think Zonca fails, somewhat, in his efforts at turning Julia into a Cassavetian character.

Julia's downward spiral from mere alcoholic to felony fugitive is all well and good, and like Cassavetes, Zonca doesn't analyze her subjectivity – we're constantly forced to re-examine our assessment of her. However, what's missing is the undeniable humanism of Cassavetes, which found its way into all of his warts-and-all characters. More than Gloria, Julia is closer in spirit to Cosmo Vitelli – another down-on-his-luck character who resorts to a desperate act as means of survival. Yet Zonca doesn't plunge deep enough to properly explore the insecurity, alienation, etc. – the things that make her all-too-human – and she comes off as too much of an absolute, a thing Cassavetes' strove to avoid. The desperation is there, but she lacks the malleability of just about all his characters. Though much like The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Julia manages to succeed as a character-driven study contained within the framework of a genre film.

Visually the film is a treat, and Zonca and cinematographer Yorick Le Saux have truly captured the essence of American cinema of the 70s, with road sequences that recall Mazursky, Schatzberg, and Hellman, particularly in its use of muted colors and overexposed exterior shots, blown-out sunlight and all.

At the moment Julia is without a US distributor, though I imagine that will soon change. It's somewhat amusing that Variety (and others) are calling for the film's running time to be shortened – that's the very issue Cassavetes faced on nearly all of his releases. To shorten it would reduce it to a mere action/suspense flick, and I pray it doesn't come to that.

Screen Daily Dan Fainaru in Berlin

SF360 Tilda Swinton: The 2006 San Francisco International Film Festival "State of Cinema" Address, May 4, 2006

Movieline Interview with Swinton by S.T. VanAirsdale, May 1, 2009

Variety.com [Eddie Cockrell]

Zou Peng

SAUNA ON MOON

China (95 mi) 2011

Cannes 2011. Snapshots: Zou Peng's "Sauna on Moon" Marie-Pierre Duhamel at Cannes from Mubi, May 21, 2011

How can one of the oldest trade on Earth (prostitution) enter modernization in the so-called harmonious Chinese society? Considering that prostitution is officially forbidden. Considering also that corruption can solve (almost) any problem. Wu is a businessman without an opportunity: in his Macau "Chang'e" Sauna business is slow, debts are heavy. Some solutions are at hand: motivate the employees, provide new attractive girls and extended "services." The story involves a small-time pimp and his troupe of girls supervised by single mother Li, a few rich "bosses," some corrupted policemen and a young factory worker.  With the help of genius cinematographer Yu Lik-wai (long-time partner to Jia Zhangke), Zou Peng turns his back on all the possible clichés of the "Chinese film for foreign festivals." No semi-documentary heart-breaking social comedy, no period-oriented conventional melodrama—more a playful follow-up to Jia's witty "sci-fi" scenes in Still Life. Playful yet dramatic, tender and violent, funny and frightening; there are mixed atmospheres in each scene, in each character, in each episode. Plus a range of meaningful, though discrete, signs: some rabbits (since the Chinese hare lives on the moon) and other important animals, a presence of gods and above all Moon Goddess Chang'e (the film's original title) whose legend is about travelling and separation, an attention to dialects (the best way to identify a migrant worker). All the signs and all the characters converge into the finale where bombastic official propaganda about the launching to the moon of the satellite "Chang'e 2" and showdown of characters combine in melancholic resolutions. Right: modernization and harmony have a terrible price. The first to pay it are the girls: the first to be "industrialized" in the great competitive race. No wonder they want to fly away.

Zugsmith, Albert

CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM EATER

USA (83 mi) 1962

Confessions of an Opium Eater Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine

Essayist and critic Thomas De Quincey was born in Manchester on August 15, 1785. He became addicted to opium in his teens and never stopped using the drug until his death in 1859. His inward-turning imagination and nightmarish philosophical ruminations influenced a legion of tormented souls, most notably Edgar Allen Poe and Charles Baudelaire. Though not exactly prolific, De Quincey's canon is important for two works in particular: 1845's Suspiria de Profundis, which loosely inspired Dario Argento's masterpiece Suspiria and its sequel Inferno, and Confessions of an English Opium Eater, a frenzied collection of stories, metaphors and philosophical anecdotes that evoke a man alienated both from society and himself.

Albert Zugsmith, ostracized in Hollywood for his subversive tendencies, is better known today as a producer rather than a director. Between 1956 and 1958, he produced several films, among them Jack Arnold's The Incredible Shrinking Man, Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind and The Tarnished Angels, and Orson Welles's Touch of Evil. But his undervalued film adaptation of De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater certainly deserves a place next to all of these films. The great Vincent Price stars as opium-addict Gilbert de Quincey (relation to Albert unstated), an international adventurer who arrives in San Francisco in the early 1800s and discovers the illegal trade of Asian slave women inside a labyrinthine house of horrors.

Confessions of an Opium Eater is a difficult film to explain, and as such is best experienced as the fever-induced dream that it is. Girls are brought to San Francisco aboard a ghostly cargo ship and dumped on the shore right before a tong war erupts between the slave drivers and the women's rescuers. A white horse magically appears in the distance and helps to save one of the shrieking women, who's ultimately discovered by Gilbert after he's seemingly lured inside the slave house by the gentle swell of the wind (not to mention a nearby shoot-out). Navigating through seemingly endless corridors and underground rivers, Gilbert runs into a series of lowlifes all too willing to listen to his philosophical anecdotes before offering their own bits of wisdom.

Robert Hill's pulpy script makes Thomas De Quincey's philosophical rumblings sound less lugubrious than they often are and certainly puts to shame anything posing as serious philosophical thought in the Matrix films. When Gilbert fails to save Lotus (June Kyoto Lu, who also appeared in John Carptenter's Big Trouble in Little China, inspired in part by Zugsmith's film), they're both locked inside hovering wooden cages. After they fail to reach for each other's hands, they're whisked away as if by magic by a series of pulleys. For everything it has to say about class and the subjugation of women, Confessions of an Opium Eater is mainly about our intrinsic need to make human connections and how easy it is too lose ourselves to a false reality in the absence of such contact.

The feverish use of water imagery throughout the film welcomes a Jungian analysis, if only because so much of the film seems to erupt from the deepest recesses of the subconscious. A remarkable five-minute sequence shot entirely in slow motion evokes Gilbert's maddening, claustrophobic escape from an opium den. He begins inside the den, runs atop a series of beds, and finally breaks through a window and onto a rickety rooftop. A dizzied Gilbert stands on a ledge for what seems like an eternity, a miniscule crescent moon dangling in the distant sky. Gilbert wakes up and Zugsmith reveals that it was all a dream. (Or maybe it's a nightmare?) Indeed, there's plenty of talk in the film about sparring dualities, namely dreams versus nightmares and pessimism versus optimism. Every choice is a road not taken. And every reality may be little more than a product of a pipe dream, and not unlike this beautiful and often bizarre little gem.

Zulawski, Andrzej

POSSESSION B+ 91

aka: The Night the Screaming Stops

France Germany (123 mi) 1981

I make the films about what is torturing me, and a woman serves here as a medium. —Andrzej Zulawski

This is a break up film that operates on its own wavelength, where one is perhaps better served not trying to figure out the logic behind it, as this is a wrenching glimpse into a psychological disturbance of one’s own making, with extremely violent overtones, where projected thoughts appear as reality in a hallucination-tinged, nightmarish otherworld where surrealism blends seamlessly into the world of reality. If Roman Polanski opened a door of psychic terror as a response to sexual repression in REPULSION (1965), Andrzej Zulawski drives a monster truck through the hole and creates one of the truly strangest and creepiest horror films ever made. Shot in Berlin during the heart of the Cold War, Zulawski uses the underpopulated streets of Berlin much like Nicolas Roeg uses Venice in DON’T LOOK NOW (1973), where the exterior locations match the interior disintegration that is taking place, where the film does express the slow decay of logic and human understanding, where without it, what’s left is a no man’s land of symbolism and surrealist dream imagery where it’s hard to find a coherent thought. Adapted from an original screenplay written by the director after his own divorce to Małgorzata Braunek (the Polish star of his first two movies), this perhaps best expresses the near psychic breakdown that occurs after a failed marriage, where the world is a devastating minefield of hidden disasters just waiting to explode, where in your mind there isn’t a moment that goes by without being filled with a paralyzing jolt of fear at the thought of being alone. Wracked with guilt about the internal shame of failure, the horror of one’s own shortcomings and the powerlessness to do anything about it manifests itself in the external reality, which is itself an utter fabrication, a false illusion, as one puts forth a face that has no basis in reality, but is a sham version of how you really feel. In this film, the delirium of the weaknesses take center stage, where humans evolve into different versions of themselves, like perfect wish fulfillment fantasies, or doomed and hideously grotesque creatures that can only hide from the rest of the world while experiencing an insatiable need for love and sexuality.

From the outset, this self-absorbed couple Anna (Isabelle Adjani) and Mark (Sam Neill) meet after an undetermined absence and discover the love is gone, that they have nothing but fear and suspicion in their heads, continually overwhelmed by jealous thoughts that they’re each seeing another, where the gulf between them couldn’t be more pronounced. Mark is horribly overbearing, filled with jealousy and rage, where he always needs to be right and picks away at Anna’s confidence as he doesn’t want her to leave, so he tries to bring her down to his level of pure possessiveness. Anna, on the other hand, has grown disgusted by Mark’s tactics, where he’s grown into something of a monster in her eyes, yet she also hates herself for the effect the break up is having on their young son, as suddenly their entire world is fractured, where anything resembling reality is disappearing before her eyes. Forced into exile, as the Communist authorities in Poland prevented the director from working, banning some of his earlier work and then interrupting his work on the set, much of the film’s deranged style must come from the pure idiocy of how he was forced to completely alter his life for seemingly no explanation whatsoever, creating a surreal and supernatural horror picture that’s artful, often showing pictures of the Berlin Wall, yet so over-the-top that its fascination is the strangely weird universe it creates, much like David Lynch’s ERASERHEAD (1977), which is mind-blowingly peculiar. Jump started by the passions of adultery, Mark’s angered and aroused jealousy matches Anna’s interior descent into her own personal Hell, where insanity doesn’t begin to describe her psychic hysteria in one of the more staggering portraits of derangement onscreen, where she comes under the power and control of a blood and goo covered octopus that may represent her shattered interior world, but she’s subject to spasms and fits and nervous tics afterwards, not to mention a scene with an electronic carving knife, reduced to hysterical fits of madness and acts of murder. Still, despite her ruptured and demonic psychological presence, this does not prevent Mark, who has a breakdown of his own, from wanting her back, as his life is the picture of disorder, his apartment a mess, where their child roams around completely unattended, with things strewn all over the floor, where in a VERTIGO (1958) acknowledgement, his son’s school teacher becomes an exact double of Anna, becoming his picture of perfection and order.

Where this all leads is anybody’s guess, where the real jolt, besides an undertone of a dark and hideous side of human nature, is the phenomenal mix of a brilliant sound design by Norman Engel and Karl-Heinz Laabs, demented and highly bombastic music by Andrzej Korzynski, darkened and decaying production design by Jean-José Richer, and slimy monster special effects created by Carlo Rambaldi a year before he invented E.T. (1982), creating a startlingly bizarre world, not the least of which is Heinz Bennett’s exaggerated caricature of Heinrich, Anna’s supposed lover, a whacked out guru comically portrayed in exaggerated gay gestures who contends he is in perfect balance with the world around him, becoming a grotesque enemy of Mark’s creation. But in the middle of all this crazed mayhem is Anna having sex with the octopus, with its tentacles all wrapped around her, where she’s helplessly in the grasp of something she can’t understand, leaving her anguished and tormented, where perhaps the creepiest scene is witnessing her violent breakdown in a deserted subway station where she literally throws herself against the walls screaming at fever pitch, where her convulsions and grotesque body contortions climax with the emission of strange bodily fluids that ooze out of nearly every orifice of her body in what is likely the strangest on-screen birth ever recorded, surpassed only by her need to take it home and start having sex with it, killing anyone who comes anywhere near her prized creature, muttering things like “God is merely a reflection of evil!” This fractured reality film is a head trip veering into so many different directions that it’s hard to keep them all straight, testing the audience’s capacity to endure such a distinctly unique vision of psychological horror that to many is simply incomprehensible, uniquely shot by Bruno Nuytten, often from weird angles, zooming in and around objects, finding strange and disorienting images and compositions, using a grainy film stock with all color drained from the screen, leaving a grey and lifeless texture, as if in this world all oxygen has been sucked out of the air and life as we know it has disappeared from the earth, where all that’s left is entirely a figment of our imagination. The film was thought of as too wildly grotesque when it opened and for the most part was dismissed, even banned during the 80’s in Britain, but it is so individualistically unique, not necessarily always good, that it must be considered highly provocative, emotionally raw entertainment throughout, even if it is expressed with buckets of blood in a gore fest.

Possession Time Out London

Self-exiled Polish directors - like Walerian Borowczyk - who wind up doing art movies in Paris tend over the years to go over the top in the sex/horror stakes. But Zulawski goes Grand Guignol in one leap with an outrageously sick story, filmed in English, about a schizoid housewife (Adjani, acting like a terminal rabies victim) who deserts husband and lover for an affair in a deserted Berlin apartment with a piece of fungus that grows into a many-tentacled monster and eventually metamorphoses into her husband's doppelgänger. Confused? Don't look for logic, don't ask why Adjani mutilates herself with an electric knife, or why Carstensen (playing a hooker) affects a clubfoot, don't expect any relief from the miscarriage scene (buckets of oozing blood and pus), and above all don't see this on a full stomach. Turkey of the year, even though the main ingredient is pure ham.

Tom Huddleston and David Jenkins Listed as #1 of Top Ten DVD Releases in 2012, from Time Out London

As a film journalist, one hears the expression ‘lost masterpiece’ on a near daily basis. So we were completely unprepared for the sheer, mind-melting ferocity and breathless originality of this savage, politically fuelled 1981 marital breakdown monster movie from Polish director Andrzej Zulawski. Isabelle Adjani’s Cannes-winning performance is in a class of its own, and the entire film plays at a near-unbearable fever pitch, as though it’s perpetually on the verge of simply exploding through your TV screen – if your head doesn’t explode first. Just remarkable.

Recommended for fans of Lars Von Trier, Dario Argento, the ‘Alien’ series.

What we said There are plenty of movies which seem to have been made by madmen. ‘Possession’ may be the only film in existence which is itself mad: unpredictable, horrific, its moments of terrifying lucidity only serving to highlight the staggering derangement at its core. Extreme but essential viewing.

Possession (1981) - FAQ from IMDb

"The movie is an allegory for divorce. The "monster" is actually the product of Adjani's internal guilt, shame and deep sexual desires that have been physically manifested into the external reality. The monster evolves into a replicate of her husband - her idealized husband. Adjani's own doppelganger appears in the form of her lookalike - the school teacher Helen, who is the idealized wife, in Sam Neill's eyes.

At the end, when the monster goes back to the house (After Adjani and Neill are killed) the boy begs Helen not to open the door and then promptly drowns himself in the bathtub - the "idealized" husband and wife are reuniting but the boy senses that it is a doomed marriage, as he already knows the troubles of his family life. That is the symbolic meaning behind the whole world ending at the film's end: they are a dysfunctional family unit destined to end destructively. Nothing in this film is literal. Like I said, it is an allegory.

The film was in part based on director Zulawski's own ruined marriage and the film on some level explores the devastating effects of divorce and the stress upon the children involved. It isn't really much of a "horror" film in the classic sense as it is a psychological drama."

CINE-FILE: Cine-List Brian Welesko

Originally hacked down for American release to a schlocky--and downright absurd--ninety-minutes, POSSESSION has been restored to Zulawski's original cut. The added footage doesn't necessarily make the infamous tentacled-monster sex thing any less nuts, because it still is a shocking sight to behold. But its purpose is more nuanced and creepy when the film really goes off the rails. Drawing from his own divorce, Zulawski's film follows the collapse of Mark and Anna's marriage and the impossibility of Mark ever fully knowing, or possessing, his wife in love. Largely set in an apartment near the Berlin Wall, Mark is confronted with divorce and descends into severe depression. He emerges in a near-psychotic state intending to reclaim Anna and their son. He soon becomes aware of Anna's lover, but after confronting him, both men realize Anna is seeing someone--or something--else. Zulawski keeps the camera in almost constant motion, pushing in and pulling back during confrontations between Mark and Anna as their fights escalate to bloody moments that are somehow both expected and completely terrifying. In one scene, Anna grinds meat as Mark maniacally berates her. The noise of the kitchen rises with the tension and Anna, tired of the diatribe, takes an electric knife to her neck. Paired with scenes of their individual genuine tenderness toward their son, POSSESSION is filled with mirrors. Mark meets his son's schoolteacher, a benevolent doppelganger for his wife, and a double of Mark appears with Anna at the end. Even the setting is exploited for an otherworldly nothingness and an exactness in East and West Germany, itself perversely mirrored. The unrestrained acting--Anna thrashing hysterically could describe many scenes--adds to a heightened reality where Anna's possession is not demonic, but love can be.

Keith Uhlich Time Out New York

There are marriages on the rocks and then there's the fever-pitch nonbliss between Mark (Neill) and Anna (Adjani) in this head-spinning masterpiece from Poland's Andrzej Zulawski (That Most Important Thing: Love). Mere seconds after the unhappy couple reunites outside their Berlin apartment---Mark has been away on some undisclosed bit of business---they're already at each other's throats about abandoned responsibilities and purported infidelities. Their bleating would be the frenzied climax of a good many movies, but Zulawski, whose own divorce reportedly inspired this gaping-wound Rorschach blotch, is out to shatter any and all conventional expectations.

Prepare yourself: Things only get crazier as Mark is consumed by jealous rage, and the manic Anna retreats to a decrepit apartment, where something literally monstrous is gestating. Doppelgngers materialize, Mark has several hilarious run-ins with a spastic karate-chopping horndog, and Anna has a subway-tunnel seizure of such bat-shit intensity that it surely helped solidify Adjani's Best Actress win at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival. Possession incorporates more and more fantastical elements as it goes on---such as a spectacular goo-and-gore-covered creature built by E.T. designer Carlo Rambaldi---but the story somehow remains rooted in the harsh realities of human experience. That the film is much more than a gawk-at-it freak show is testament to Zulawski's talent for making even the most exaggerated behavior resonate with pointed and potent emotion.

Justin Stewart The L-magazine

When the despairing French/German co-production Possession was first inflicted upon limited American arthouse audiences in 1981, it was in a spayed version that its distributors advertised as an exploitation scarefest. In the UK, it was banned with Video Nasty status for almost twenty years. This Film Forum bow is the first stateside theatrical run for the director's cut, a two hours that is at various points unsettling, tedious, and mesmerizing, and impossible to pin to a single genre.

Polish director Andrzej Zulawski was exorcising his own divorce when he wrote this story of a marriage's fresh wreckage, and it feels like it was made in a state of confusion and anger. Sam Neill (looking a bit "Tainted Love"-era Marc Almond) is Mark, a businessman (the particulars are vague but his employers prove murderous) who arrives in Berlin hoping to mend untold rifts with his wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani), with whom he shares a son. After joyless sex and Anna's confession of disinterest in Mark, the latter discovers an affair-revealing postcard that precipitates his first meltdown, a hellward spiral after which the film's initial relative sanity and sobriety never returns. Mark will bloodily confront his rival, Heinrich (a seedy Heinz Bennent), hire a private investigator, and romance his wife's doppelganger. Anna will travel much deeper into madness, culminating in a long gyrating fit in an underground passageway. Their son Bob will go largely neglected, not the only victim of the couple's gothic self-absorption, aptly situated in a scooped-out alternate-universe Berlin (still divided at the time).

The edited version (45 minutes shorter) likely worked better as straight horror, since Possession is in essence an escalating series of jolts and Big Scenes. This longer version is intent on being a bullyingly symbolic crackup drama. Unexceptional conversations are visualized with anxious, busy camerawork. A business meeting receives the 360-degree circling cam, while Neill in a rocking chair is an occasion for feverish rack focus. There's a standard psych-horror lexicon of raw meat, oozing fluids, a carnal tentacle critter, and even a crucifix scene, and these generic additions dull the impact of Possession's several actually rattling ideas and moments. Next to the genuinely magical extant clips from Henri-Georges Clouzot's mad-jealousy drama Inferno, they're only louder.

Mark and Anna's inability to communicate is felt as if in real time. The actors screech and gesticulate into an unedited void. Their arguments are long and ponderous, punctuated by rough dialogue like "Love is not something you can just switch from channel to channel!" and vague thesis statements like Adjani's "Goodness is only a reflection of evil!" In the similarly themed and better-acted Antichrist, chaos also reigns, but Lars von Trier brought a form and control that Zulawski either can't manage or avoids because it'd be inauthentic. Attempting emotionally raw catharsis, Possession's shrieking indulgences too often tip it into hysterical nonsense.

Roger Ebert's Far-Flung Correspondents [Michal Oleszczyk] also seen here: No Exorcist Can Handle Possession

To call it overwrought would be an understatement. Andrzej Żuławski's 1981 masterpiece, butchered upon its original American release and relegated to spurious video-nasty circulation, is now returning in all its hysterical glory, as a part of Brooklyn's BAMcinématek complete Żuławski retro, which will then move to Cinefamily in Los Angeles. Featuring what is arguably the bravest female performance ever put on film - namely, Isabelle Adjani's Cannes-winning turn of shamanistic intensity - the film dares its viewer to enter a trance-like state, in which genres blur and mate to yield a new level of cinematic expression.

"Possession" opens with the end of a marriage: Anna (Isabelle Adjani) tells Mark (Sam Neill) she needs to leave him, even though she doesn't understand why. "Maybe all couples go through this...?", she wonders in their early, perfectly civil nighttime conversation, right before things go really crazy. As Anna becomes unhinged, sneaking off to an unseen lover and professing her newly-found independence in a variety of violent ways, Mark's reduced to mumbling "ma-ma-ma" over the phone, before curling up in a fetus-like position on his bed. Very soon, rows begin and quickly get physical - they involve mutual battering around as well as garish self-mutilation. Not exactly a cinematic shrinking violet, Żuławski casually punctuates one of the couple's shouting matches by throwing an unrelated car crash into the shot, just for added emphasis. It's all like a fast-forwarded Ingmar Bergman film on bad acid; "Scenes from a Marriage" as played in a home-made abattoir.

The movie enters its second, violently surreal act, when we learn of the true nature of Anna's extra-marital tryst: she regularly visits a dilapidated apartment, inhabited by a blood- and sex-starved monster, whom she both nurtures and couples with. Żuławski boldly literalizes the trite 'beauty and the beast' premise when Mark finally witnesses his ultimate trauma, peeking at his wife having sex with the creature - her limbs all mixed up with its tentacles. (The monster's design is courtesy of the great Carlo Rambaldi, who concocted it exactly one year before presenting the world with its ultimate cuddly friend, "E.T. - The Extra Terrestial").

Judging from the above, "Possession" is not exactly the kind of movie you'd expect to have been inspired by real-life events - and yet that's exactly the case. Żuławski wrote the script after his marriage to Małgorzata Braunek (the Polish star of his first two movies) hit the rocks and it was left to him to take care of their son Xawery (nowadays a celebrated director in his own right). With Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" as an alleged source of additional inspiration, Żuławski and his co-screenwriter Frederic Tuten put together a viscerally acute portrayal of male jealousy and rage, which includes a double set of not-to-be-revealed doppelgängers and is ultimately about the perils of personal freedom taken to its extreme.

Shot on location in divided Berlin, the movie makes a great, conspicuous use of wide-angle deep-focus photography, which renders each interior eerily compressed and all exteriors airy and ominous at the same time. "Possession"'s first image is that of Berlin wall itself, and Mark and Anna's place overlooks one of the wall's outposts, with the communist eastern part of the city looming in the background as a reminder of a violated, enslaved reality that the film's Polish director knew all too well (having been kicked out of his country twice). What's more, many shots of the main couple are organized so that the growing division between them is mirrored by dual composition, with Mark and Anna reigning over separate halves of the frame.

Contrary to William Friedkin's "The Exorcist", which relied on (often brilliantly used) horror-genre gimmickry, "Possession" is pervaded by a genuine sense of casual dread and sadness. It's not mere 'Satan' that takes over Adjani's body - it's evil itself, albeit defined in purely secular terms. In a notoriously graphic scene of Adjani's hyperactive convulsions in the Berlin subway, Anna gives birth to something even the director hesitated to define - and yet it's that something that causes the world's fracture in the film.

If one would try looking for comparisons that best describe Żuławski's sensibility, it would probably be wisest to position him mid-way between Brian De Palma and Ingmar Bergman. For all his love of cine-hyperbole, which often makes his movies feel like mere strings of 'grand' sequences, Żuławski doesn't share De Palma's slickness - or his heartlessness, for that matter. Instead of reducing his cinema to formal pyrotechnics, Żuławski remains deeply engaged with the secrets of the human soul, which he perceives as being forever torn apart by violent contradictions. In that alone, he's a deeply romantic director: a passionate explorer of what's most self-destructive about us. And yet, one feels him strive for an elation that would prove redemptive enough to help us carry on despite our deeply divisive desires. Even if "Possession" was once described as "a movie about a woman who fucks an octopus", there's no mistaking the fact that deep inside, Żuławski's cinema is all about searching for grace.

BFI | Sight & Sound | DVD: Andrzej Zulawski's Possession (1981) Michael Brooke, November 2010, also seen here: DVD: Andrzej Zulawski's Possession

Slant Magazine [Rumsey Taylor] also seen here: Possession

Slant Magazine [Budd Wilkins]

DVD Times Gary Couzens

Possession - Deep Focus Bryant Frazer

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]

Thursday Editor’s Pick: Possession (1981) Alt Film Guide

Girls, Guns and Ghouls Boris Lugosi

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Possession (1981)  James Kendrick from QNetwork Entertainment

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Films Deserving of Greater Recognition IY

EyeForFilm.co.uk Chris

Possession Review (1981) - The Spinning Image Graeme Clark

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Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna

Filmstalker (DVD) Richard Brunton

Andrzej Zulawski's "Possession" on Notebook | MUBI David Hudson

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The Man Who Wrote Too Much [Lee Teasdale]

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Possession: Special Edition : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video G. Noel Gross

Nitrate Online (capsule) Eddie Cockrell

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filmsgraded.com [Brian Koller]

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New York Times (registration req'd) Vincent Canby

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Zürcher, Ramon

THE STRANGE LITTLE CAT (Das merkwürdige Kätzchen) B 89

Germany (72 mi) 2014 The Strange Little Cat - KimStim

The film is little more than a day in the life of a Berlin family, meticulously observed with pinpoint accuracy, but what first-time director Ramon Zürcher offers is a radical perspective on ordinary events, where the film is peppered with oddly juxtaposed connections, where even the most banal events are continually seen as slightly askew, where instead of a harmony so perfectly expressed in the brilliant opening shot of Béla Tarr’s WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES (2000), Werckmeister Harmonies - YouTube (10:56), where drunken bar patrons become moons and spinning planets revolving around the sun, Zürcher’s universe is continually seen spinning out of balance with a rhythm of disorder, becoming an absurd comedy of errors. Supposedly conceived at a seminar conducted by retired Hungarian director Béla Tarr, the idea draws upon Kafka’s 1915 novella The Metamorphosis, where a common, ordinary experience turns into an out of whack, surreal fantasy, where realistic events are given an often dream-like quality, but no explanation is ever offered for this most peculiar take on what is otherwise perceived as the mundane and the routine. A minimalist economy of means at only seventy-two minutes, written, directed, edited, and produced by Zürcher, while also providing the sound editing and digital effects himself, the director brings a formal precision to confined space, as the claustrophobic camera offers a fixed position inside a cramped family apartment, placing the viewer in the center of the action as people slide around each other as they move throughout the kitchen in a flurry of activity while fixing themselves something to eat. While the stoic mother (Jenny Schily) continually reminds her precocious daughter Clara (Mia Kasalo) to keep quiet as grandmother is still asleep, since Clara has a habit of screaming at the top of her lungs when the garbage disposal is running, it is nonetheless the mother that turns on every conceivable modern electrical appliance in the kitchen while grinding and roasting individual cups of coffee, squeezing fresh juice out of oranges, disposing of the garbage and preparing food, each one drowning out the conversation with the most disruptive and annoying noise that seems to come in the most inconceivable moments. Equally strange is an early morning visit to fix a washing machine, where a dizzying routine of constant movement is established with people entering and exiting the frame, all jostling for position, with the camera centered upon their waists, often cutting off their heads, becoming a choreography of moving bodies not only coming in and out of the room, but in and out of the front door of the apartment.

Initially the flurry of activity, including a mischievous cat being chased by a much bigger dog, is amusingly off-kilter, where there’s seemingly no rhyme or reason for what’s happening, becoming a strange jumble of chaos that accentuates sight gags and physical comedy, where the film is largely a collection of small moments that grow more absurd with often incomprehensible mutterings from each of the characters, establishing weird personalities, where by the end, human activity is seen as a fishbowl style madhouse where only the cat, with an air of indifference and lack of concern seems the most sane creature in the household. The non-narrative, unpredictability factor gives this the rigorous form and outlandish style of an experimental film in keeping with the director’s Berlin School (films) mentors at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin (Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin), where Zürcher, born in Switzerland, has been a student since 2006. Led by directors including Christian Petzold’s Yella (2007), Jerichow (2008), Barbara (2012) and Beats Being Dead (Dreileben 1 - Etwas Besseres als den Tod) (2012), Thomas Arslan, Angela Schanelec, Christoph Hochhäusler’s One Minute of Darkness (Dreileben 3 – Eine Minute Dunkel) (2012), Ulrich Köhler, Benjamin Heisenberg’s THE ROBBER (2010), Valeska Grisebach’s BE MY STAR (2001) and LONGING (2006), and Maren Ade’s THE FOREST FOR THE TREES (2003) and 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #9 Everyone Else (Alle Anderen) (2009), their films tend to lack mainstream accessibility, where according to German director Oskar Roehler, “They are always slow, always depressing, nothing is ever really said in them (though) they are always well thought of.” The fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989 triggered a collapse not only of political institutions, but many elements of cultural identity, particularly in the former East Germany which simply disappeared overnight, where Berlin became the cultural epicenter of new progressive measures, where in the mid 1990’s, graduates of the German Film and Television Academy emerged with a new aesthetically-driven form of cinema. Abandoning the historical context embraced by most commercially popular German films at the time, films of the Berlin School tend to deal with life in the here and now, refraining from delving into Germany’s dark past, except through ambiguous means. According to Marco Abel from his 2008 article in Cineaste, Intensifying Life: The Cinema of the “Berlin School”, elaborated upon further in his 2013 book, The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School (Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual), this:

“counter-cinema is built around the unusual style of realism employed in the films of this movement, a realism that presents audiences with images of a Germany that does not yet exist. It is precisely how these films’ images and sounds work that renders them political. They are political not because they are message-driven films but because they are made politically, thus performing a ‘redistribution of the sensible’ — a direct artistic intervention in the way politics partitions ways of doing and making, saying and seeing.”

According to David Pendleton, programmer of the Harvard Film Archive,

“In contrast with the markedly affective style of the New German cinema (of the 70’s) — Fassbinder’s melodramas, Herzog’s eccentricity, Wenders’ melancholy — these directors (of the 90’s) exhibit a striking coolness, at least on the surface. In the absence of being told how to feel, the spectator is urged to confront his or her own involvement.”

Zürcher himself has described this film as “a horror film without horror,” as the unique camera angles and protracted use of offscreen sound helps create confusion and disorientation, using alternative methods, among which include whimsical fantasy to help provide a look at a nation that longs for a better future but still hasn't found itself, like it’s still stuck in a labyrinthian puzzle with no exit plan. Unlike the formal rigor of recent German films examining a crisis of faith, Katrin Gebbe’s Nothing Bad Can Happen (Tore Tantz) (2013), punk fascism disguised as religious parable, or Dietrich Brüggemann’s Stations of the Cross (Kreuzweg) (2014), an unwavering doctrine of religious fear and absolutism, Zürcher’s more mischievous film is perhaps closer to the zany universe embellished in Giorgos Lanthimos’s acclaimed DOGTOOTH (2009), where the off-the-wall absurdity is a world unto itself, punctuated by the musical theme of “Pulchritude,” Pulchritude By Thee More Shallows - YouTube (2:36), a hypnotic yet semi-agitated string piece from the San Francisco post-rock experimental indie group Thee More Shallows, whose constantly recurring ballet-like motif resembles the pulsating roar of a surging locomotive engine as it accelerates down the tracks. Over time, the eccentricities of the characters are exposed, making strange remarks, concocting mysterious tales, offering weird commentary, all of which has an aura of randomness about it, creating a spontaneous feel. But despite the quirky imagination at play, where you get the feeling something is always lurking just outside the frame, the question is does it add up to more than the sum of its parts? Perhaps the key is staring at that tired, worn-out face of the mother, like a world-weary Kaurismäki character, whose depressive gaze tells all, or perhaps it’s the pint-sized view as seen through the clever imagination of young Clara, still too young and magical to matter all that much or to be taken seriously by the collection of droll adults in the room, often completely ignored while discovering things all on her own, much like the sleepy dreams and free-spirited rhythms of the cat, who romps around the house when she pleases, yet sees and ignores everything.

White City Cinema [Michael Smith]

Impossible to accurately describe, the strikingly original and primarily non-narrative The Strangle Little Cat is the best German film I’ve seen in years. This is the kind of movie that has no stars, no name director and no trendy subject matter, yet is destined to win a large cult of fans based solely on word of mouth in regards to how amazing it is as a piece of filmmaking. The members of an extended family gather together in an apartment and, over the course of a single day, engage in various activities: fixing a washing machine, conducting an experiment with orange peels, sharing a meal, etc. Like a miniature version of Jacques Tati’s Playtime, however, this movie is really about space and time, order and chaos, images and sounds, and the relationships between people and objects. Everything seems precisely choreographed yet elements of chance undoubtedly come into play, especially where the family’s cat and dog (the ultimate non-actors) are concerned. Several of the characters tell mundane stories, like one where a woman describes a man accidentally touching her foot with his in a movie theater, that are then illustrated by flashback sequences — even though nothing about these stories seems momentous enough to warrant the use of the flashback technique. This in and of itself becomes hilarious, and strangely poignant, like much of the rest of the film. A deceptively intimate masterpiece of cosmic wonder.

In Review Online [Kenji Fujishima]

One of the great joys of film festivals is the possibility of discovering fresh talent in unexpected places. Admittedly, I didn’t go into Ramon Zürcher’s debut feature The Strange Little Cat entirely blind; a couple of fellow cinephiles had spoken highly of it on Twitter, so, finding a free slot in my schedule and not a whole lot of other appealing options, I decided to give the film a shot—and was delighted to come upon, at least upon the basis of this one film, a genuinely fresh voice putting across a vision I don't think I've ever seen onscreen before.

Broadly speaking, The Strange Little Cat is a family comedy, detailing an unremarkable day in a clan’s ordinary life. That, however, doesn't even begin to explain Zürcher’s approach to the material: one that gives surreal emphasis to daily routines, turning everyday habits into Jacques Tati-esque bits of choreographic precision, and generally finding whimsical humor in the mundane with a dryly unsentimental wit. This is the kind of skewed universe in which a bottle in a saucepan is turned into an occasional visual gag, a family member tells a strange anecdote about throwing orange peels on the ground and discovering which side of the peels are heavier, and a girl screams at the top of her lungs every time kitchen appliances start whirring, among other grace notes of those kinds. Through it all, the titular cat roams around this spotless, too-perfect environment, standing above it all with nary a care in the world.

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” Henry David Thoreau famously wrote in Walden—and a similar sense of desperation underpins even the most amusing gags in The Strange Little Cat. One glimpses this early on in an anecdote the matriarch tells about the time in a movie theater that a male stranger put his foot on hers—amusing, but also suggestive of an inner loneliness that barely seems to come out until the film's desolate final shot. Even the near-mechanical precision of the film’s orchestration acquires a darker edge in such a context: domestic life as a never-ending ballet of routine. And yet, even if its perspective is ultimately bleak, the sheer level of cinematic invention acts as a rejuvenating tonic, finding humor and beauty in sadness.

The Poetry of Confined Quarters: Ramon Zürcher's The ... Michael Sicinski from Cinema Scope, also seen here: Cinema Scope [Michael Sicinski]

The first five shots of Ramon Zürcher’s debut film The Strange Little Cat (Das merkwürdige Kätzchen) serve as a kind of miniature map for this relatively short (72-minute), highly unusual work, neatly outlining the spatial compression and sonic misdirection that characterizes its aesthetic approach throughout. (Though in fact, any fragment of Cat could be productively subjected to close analysis and could conceivably serve as a synecdochal emblem for how the film operates as a whole.) After the opening credits (backed by the lovely chamber-pop tune “Pulchritude,” by San Francisco post-rock unit Thee More Shallows), the first shot: a young man (Luk Pfaff) face down asleep on a bed, bathed in early morning sunlight tinted red by a makeshift window hanging. The general ambience is familiar: the bedroom of a now-grown child who has moved away, which has been halfheartedly converted into a utility room but retains a bed for holiday visits. This fellow must be exhausted, because he is dead to the world. He doesn’t stir, even as we hear a cat meowing outside his door.

Second shot: the cat, a healthy-looking orange tabby, clawing at the doorframe. The closed door is a problem, because this spare room (and more significantly, its bed) is a customary hangout for her. She grumbles, and then we hear a high-pitched wail. We assume it’s the cat (whose face is turned away from us), but the pitch of the howl is just a bit off.

Third shot: cut to the kitchen, where we see the mother of the house (Jenny Schily) wryly looking down at the lower left of the mostly white frame.

Fourth shot: her young daughter Clara (Mia Kasalo) looking up at her mother (not in the frame; this is an odd, diagonally organized shot/counter-shot) with her mouth open. She is the one emitting the wail, for no apparent reason, from her seat at the breakfast table. As the shot continues, an unseen male relative begins talking to the mom about the guy we saw sleeping in the first shot. (We learn that his name is Simon.) The fixed frame stays on Clara and her position at the table, while random hands start jutting into the frame, removing dishes from the table.

(There is a structuralist rigour to the way the frame maintains its integrity as it is assailed, but while the plate-clearing might call Akerman to mind, Zürcher is not as interested in labour per se as in the impact of objects and movement within a closed environment; the sequence is far more akin to Michael Snow’s teasing use of domestic scenarios to instigate cognitive dissonance. But a more apt parallel with Zürcher’s use of the kitchen table as a frame of reference for bodies and spatial relationships would be Liu Jiayin’s Oxhide [2005] and Oxhide II [2009]. Though Liu’s films are considerably different in approach—given that their familial “play” and organization of activity reflects a performative reinflection of material with ontological roots in documentary—like Liu, Zürcher employs the family table as both a formal and a behavioural frame of reference.)

The male voice offscreen, still not properly introduced, is Clara’s dad (Matthias Dittmer). As the fourth shot continues and the parents discuss Simon’s arrival, Clara takes up a pencil and paper, preparing to write while she finishes her toast. As Dad takes a plate away from the table, he says “Milk.” We presume that he is offering Clara some milk, but Clara begins writing, very carefully, “milk…” She does the same when her father says, “Salad.” (Are they making a shopping list? Is Clara taking dictation? A brief conversation later will provide the answer.) A brief mention of a trip to the movies is made. (This too will become significant in a subsequent scene.) Hands and arms continue to enter the frame, removing a bottle and a bag of bread from the table. There is an exchange between Clara and her mom about whether or not to feed the sparrows, which provokes an oddly direct attempt to instill parental guilt. And then, when a garbage disposal is turned on, Clara makes her ear-splitting “cat wail” again.

The fifth shot finds Mom and Dad leaning against the sink, then turning off the offending whirr. A new offscreen family member, a young female voice this time, nonchalantly asks, “Is Clara crazy?” to which her mom replies, “Yes.” The voice is of the older daughter Karin (Anjorka Strechel), who continues, “The cat is crazy, too.”

Although not every frame of Zürcher’s film hinges on audio mismatch or playful joshing about with the limits of the film frame, the opening segment I’ve described above (which comprises about two minutes) offers some of the working parameters that will organize The Strange Little Cat. For starters, this is a film that introduces physical spaces and objects and subjects them to various permutations, not unlike a piece of chamber music. Some critics have cited Jacques Tati as an influence on Zürcher, which can certainly be seen in the latter’s sophisticated play with objects. The aforementioned bottle in the kitchen scene, for instance—which will become a recursive motif in the kitchen scenes, which themselves constitute just over half of the film—is introduced so unobtrusively that we most likely don’t even see it until the father’s hand removes it from the frame. It’s not just that the bottle holds no narrative significance until such time as it is removed from the table (it is not a proverbial Chekhovian gun), it’s that it is a cognitively “non-cued” object, the sort of anti-thing that we as viewers tend to tune out of even the most meticulously manicured mise en scène.

Tati’s cinema is filled with such miscues, with items so banal—objects as small as hats and umbrellas, or as massive as entire buildings in a widescreen landscape—that they can lie in wait like beige vipers, nonchalantly occupying the frame for minutes at a time without drawing any attention to themselves, until it’s time to “activate” them. Similarly, Zürcher’s frame contains not just objects of uncertain importance, but individuals whose identity and interrelationships remain strategically unclear for extended durations of film time. In this respect, The Strange Little Cat is most interested in its family as a set of human movements, of comings and goings, and as organizers of space and sound. It’s true that, as Cat develops, we learn more about who these people are and how they connect to one another; the film eventually culminates in a large family meal, and by that time there are more relationships in play, if not a larger unifying context. However, certain of the relationships remain somewhat ambiguous to the very last. In a conventional filmic scenario, this would be considered “bad writing”; here, it’s obviously by design. Zürcher is not concerned with dramaturgy as such: rather, the family members are variables, placed in relation to one another in pairs or sets from scene to scene.

This could be why early observers of The Strange Little Cat have been quick to cite Bresson as well as Tati when trying to get a bead on just what Zürcher is up to. It’s true that the relative lack of affect in both the actors’ performances and the characters’ interrelationships could conceivably call to mind the radically exteriorized and automated behaviour of Bresson’s “models”; similarly, Zürcher’s audio play owes something to Bresson’s explorations of the potentials of offscreen sound as both a wellspring of new forms of cinematic meaning and a source of materialist syntax. But Zürcher is taking these potentials in a stark, oddball direction all his own—and if he evokes such lofty comparisons, it’s because his approach is, on its most fundamental levels, so out of step with how narrative film is usually made. The Strange Little Cat is a film that prioritizes confinement, small movements within that confinement, and the unexpected alleviation of that confinement through imagination and memory; if Tati’s grand subject was modern living and its discontents, and Bresson’s was, to some extent, the articulation of spaces between bodies and things in order to delineate their irreducible singularity, then Zürcher is primarily concerned with the poetry of tight spaces.

The first part of Cat is not only about the kitchen (and the kitchen table in particular), but the squeezing, bumping, and negotiating necessary for a large number of people (plus two pets) to manoeuvre around one another and perform their respective tasks. For example, Mom, Dad, and Karin all edge past each other in the frame, their heads cut off by the medium close-up. (It could be argued that this low, fixed point of view, based on a seated position at the table, roughly corresponds to little Clara’s gaze and stature—more on this below—although Cat is not strictly about this.) They all need something in the space, be it the sink, the dishwasher, or some bit of food. After Karin passes her mother, Mom says, “I have a pimple. I wouldn’t have noticed if you hadn’t squeezed by.” At another point in the scene, Dad picks up the cat, Clara tells him to put the cat down, the cat jumps on the table, and then knocks over a glass (heretofore unseen) that rolls off the table, out of the frame, and shatters.

People enter and exit the apartment as well as the frame. For instance, an uncle (Armin Marewski) and his son Jonas (Leon Alan Beiersdorf) show up, which also affords us some limited mobility beyond the kitchen. Considering its formal play with familial entrances, exits, and embodied points of view, Zürcher’s work is as indebted to Ozu Yasujiro as it is to Bresson or Tati. But ultimately, none of these points of comparison is entirely accurate. The primary modus operandi of The Strange Little Cat is to convey the simultaneous experience of physical constriction within familial space and the psychological efforts to escape that constriction, doomed though they may be. One way to grasp the general pattern of Zürcher’s blocking and composition within The Strange Little Cat is to observe how he clusters and disperses individuals within the frame, like the application and release of pressure on gas in a chamber; then, when conversations or events do occur, there is a quick cut to an outside point-of-view shot, from the vantage point of someone whom we had no way of knowing was even present in the scene. In this way, even the most relaxed interactions are supplied with a kind of naturalized claustrophobia—the sense that every interior in the family apartment has an immediate, hovering “outside” that is just beyond the threshold.

Similarly, the mental escape hatches of recollections and digressive storytelling—the retreat into temporal and spatial realms seemingly beyond the walls of the family home—ultimately find themselves bounded on all sides. Mom’s anecdote about an uncomfortable bodily encounter at the movies temporarily places us inside a flashback, but, of course, the story is about being physically ill at ease, and becoming increasingly hesitant to do anything about it as time goes on. Likewise, Karin’s random comment about how bits of orange peel fall on the ground is visualized by a return (a retreat of sorts) to the airiness of a public park, but immediately before and after the liberating flashback, we see Karin dropping the peels on the kitchen floor, reminding us that she is only “in the park” in her mind. The fact that each of the flashback stories is followed up by one of those eavesdropping POV surprise-cuts only serves as a reminder that the escape the stories provide is wholly illusory.

In addition to the narrow interiors and the brief respites of the anecdotal flashbacks, Zürcher offers a third and final presentational mode, one that is almost entirely non-narrative. The film is subdivided into segments, and in between them Zürcher stops to give us a brief reprise of “Pulchritude” and a visual inventory of various key objects that either have been or will be pivotal as physical motifs, or that Zürcher simply wants us to contemplate as filmic entities unto themselves. In the first such transition, we see the “magic bottle” that spins in the pot on the stove, two bags of recycling, a plastic bag, a hot cup of tea, the orange peels on the floor (crossed diagonally by the cat), a moth on the wall, a glass of milk, a pigeon in a tree, and the neighbour kid (Gustav Körner) playing with his hacky-sack. On one level this simply leads us to the next part of the film, where we see Clara putting empty bottles in the recycling machine, but this entr’acte also goes quite a ways toward explaining Zürcher’s somewhat mysterious title. The interlude is not just a clarification, as if one were needed at this point, that objects in and of themselves are the true subjects of The Strange Little Cat (another point of contact with Tati, Bresson, and Ozu); it also represents a clearing of the decks of human dominance, so that we can witness something we might call “feline time.” The cat sees these things, but they have no meaning for her. Rather, they are both foreign (pure entities with no known use value) and absolutely familiar (part of her “turf”). In Freud’s infamous formulation, these things are both heimlich and unheimlich for the “strange” cat.

As with almost everything else in The Strange Little Cat, these non-narrative interludes will become a recurring motif. If we were to return to the metaphor of considering Zürcher’s film as a work of chamber music, these image-cycles are rondo forms, in contrast to the cramped-movement allegros and the digressive-anecdotal adagios. And as the film evolves, we begin to see that Clara may be something very close to Cat’s governing consciousness, a girl who sees much more than she is seen. (One of the most striking of the non-narrative passages is the one comprised of Clara’s crayon drawings, which show that the girl, too, finds this home odd.) But unlike her older relatives, she possesses no wry detachment; like a little phenomenologist (or a cat), Clara investigates by moving “to the things themselves.”

Perhaps, then, separations and mismatches are the dominant mode of The Strange Little Cat because they represent a kind of liberation within a space in which everything and everyone is virtually on top of one another. And whereas more and more people pile into this tiny space, crowding the frame with body parts and half-meant niceties, Clara can still experience everything around her with the kind of wonder that her drab, drained relations cannot. (Her mother’s depressive gaze is the last image of the film; imagine actually living with Bressonian models.) Like the strange little cat, Clara’s world (and Zürcher’s) holds presumed meanings in suspension, and wriggles around at the knee-level of intentional perception.

The Strange Little Cat - Reviews - Reverse Shot Jeff Reichert

Göteborg Review: 'The Strange Little Cat' A Lovely, Baffl ... Jessica Kiang from The Playlist

The Strange Little Cat / The Dissolve Scott Tobias

TwitchFilm.com [Ben Umstead]

Spectrum Culture [Jesse Cataldo]

Ramon Zürcher : Filmwell - The Other Journal M. Leary, also seen here: The Strange Little Cat (Zürcher, 2013) : Filmwell

Review: The Strange Little Cat is a formally, conceptually ... Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from The Onion A.V. Club

Joshua Reviews Ramon Zurcher's The Strange Little Cat ... Joshua Brunsting from Criterion Cast

My Favorite Film of 2014: The Strange Little Cat - Patheos Jeffrey Overstreet from Patheos

Exclaim! [Robert Bell] (English)

Filmleaf [Chris Knipp]

ArtsHub [Sarah Ward]

The Strange Little Cat Captures the Half-Secrets of Family Life Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice

The Congress, The Strange Little Cat, and The One I Love ... Dana Stevens from Slate

Slant Magazine [John Semley]

[TIFF Review] The Strange Little Cat - The Film Stage Peter Labuza

The Strange Little Cat - Nashville Scene Mike D’Angelo

'The Strange Little Cat' review by Mike D'Angelo • Letterboxd

Das merkwürdige Kätzchen [The Strange Little Cat] - Phipps ...

Critique de L'Étrange petit chat de Ramon Zürcher :: L ... Gregory Coutaut from Film de Culte

Sound On Sight Gregory Ashman

DVDizzy.com - DVD [Luke Bonanno]

Film Freak Central Review [Angelo Muredda]

The Strange Little Cat | Film Review | Tiny Mix Tapes Jafarkas

The Strange Little Cat (Ramon Zürcher, 2013) — Chicago ... Daniel Nava from Chicago Cinema Circuit

ioncinema.com [Blake Williams]

The Strange Little Cat (2013) Movie Review from Eye for Film Amber Wilkinson

The Strange Little Cat - Cineuropa Vladan Petkovic

Review: The Strange Little Cat | Newcity Film Ray Pride

Melissa Anderson on Ramon Zürcher's The Strange Little Cat ... Artforum

The Strange Little Cat - Film Society of Lincoln Center

The best 2014 films that made under $100,000 / The Dissolve

Animal Portraiture: An Interview with The Strange Little Cat ... Steve McFarlane interview with the director from Filmmaker magazine, July 31, 2014

ND/NF Interview: Ramon Zürcher | Film Comment R. Emmett Sweeney interview with the director, March 26, 2014

Hollywood Reporter [Stephen Dalton]

Film Review: 'The Strange Little Cat' - Variety Peter Debruge

The Strange Little Cat: a film so original it has to teach you ... Mike D’Angelo from The Nashville Scene

RogerEbert.com [Sheila O'Malley]

The New York Times [Dennis Lim]

Zurlini, Valerio

There is a film retrospective of Valerio Zurlini’s films making it’s way across the country, I saw them all but two, “The Camp Followers” (Le Soldatesse) from 1965, which is considered among his best, also the 1968 “Black Jesus aka Seated at His Right” (Sedutto alla sua Destra), however both of those films are available on video.

Zurlini was born in 1926 to a well-to-do family from Bologna, trained as a lawyer and was active in theater, he fought with the Italian Liberation Corps from the fall of Mussolini in July 1943 until the liberation in 1945, in this retrospective his film career spreads from short documentaries in 1952 through his final work in 1976; he taught at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome and died in Verona in 1982, leaving behind a comparatively small body of work, but each features a richness, his exquisite style, and the brilliant intensity of Valerio Zurlini.

Zurlini’s uniqueness lies in the way that he always examines the interior, psychological worlds of his characters whose barren lives seem somehow out of place, out of time, caught in a melancholic, existential web, also his brilliant cinematography, his use of painterly images, inspired by the paintings of Giorgio Morandini and Ottone Rosai, his continual artistic references, which include his recurrent use of statues and paintings in all his films, his focus and the attention he pays to details, particularly his set design, and the extraordinary rhythm and pacing of his films, reinforced by his imaginative use of music, working quite often with composer Mario Nascimbene.

LA STAZIONE B+ 92

Italy 1952 – 55

An early documentary film in the style of Chantal Akerman’s “D’Est” or Vertov’s cinema verite, including the sounds and whistles of trains, and a view from on high looking down at passengers waiting for a train, capturing individuals who seem to be caught out of time, similar to Zurlini’s later films such as “The Desert of the Tartars,” revealing a complacency, an involuntarily acceptance of an established, prevailing order, a kind of wordless, avant-garde cinema.

Also on the same program, Zurlini’s 1952 “The Boxers,” featuring the gorgeous cinematography of Tino Santoni, mixing some unusual jazz music with the physicality of boxing, a wonderful feature. “The Market of Faces” also in 1952 reveals several film extras who are waiting to be hired, each with a different perspective. “Soldiers in the City” in 1953 was my favorite, as it had the best written script, revealing an inner life of young men away from home who are lonely, subject to discovery by younger kids looking for a game of soccer, but who eventually break young girl’s hearts, as they are also caught out of place, out of time. “Penny Serenade” in 1954 was the weakest feature, in my opinion, as the script was the most obvious and predictable, a study of organ grinder players from Napoli, who are themselves poor, but their families back home are desperate for money. Finally, “La Stazione” in 1955 was perhaps the most advanced stylistically.

THE GIRLS OF SAN FREDIANO A- 94

(LE RAGAZZE DI SAN FREDIANO)

Italy 1954 (114 mi)

This sort of tongue in cheek comedy is truly unique, an examination of the Italian male persona with fantasy exaggerations that are hilarious, a guy that can't stop himself from picking up women while en route to his dates, women swooning over him, laying awake in anguish, the use of the English-language word "Bob" cracked me up every time it was used, similar to in "Being John Malkovich" when people were thrown out onto the New Jersey turnpike, these comedy bits worked. I couldn't help thinking David Lynch had seen this film once and used it for his Twin Peaks twisted version of "Bob." The collection of women here are gorgeous, Zurlini's exquisite technique is already evident in this early film, and for pure comedy, it was a mixture of 2 later Italian films, Pietro Germi's outrageous Sicilian reflections in his 1964 film "Seduced and Abandoned" and Fellini's 1961 "La Dolce Vita."

VIOLENT SUMMER A 98

(ESTATE VIOLENTA)

Italy 1959 (100 mi)

Jean-Louis Trintignat plays the draft-dodging son of a powerful Nazi in 1943 Italy, in a prelude to Bertolucci's "The Conformist," who falls in love with an older war widow, in an absolutely brilliant performance by Eleonora Rossi Drago, (what else has she ever been in?) and features Zurlini’s most extraordinary scene, one of the better scenes one is ever likely to see, a brilliantly choreographed dance sequence, reminding me of Fassbinder's "The Bitter Tears of Petra Van Kant," where Jean-Louis Trintignant and his newfound love dance and fall in love around a nude male statue, oblivious to the war raging outside, dancing with other partners, eyes glued to each other, while the music of “Temptation” plays, only to end up in each other's arms. There is an extraordinary pacing to the film, an intense love affair, reminiscent of Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Hitchcock's "Notorious," this is a beautifully written, old-fashioned melodrama, the likes of which we just don't see any more.

THE GIRL WITH THE SUITCASE A- 94

(LA RAGAZZA CON LA VALIGLIA)

Italy France 1961 (113 mi)

Zurlini introduces a familiar theme, a futile relationship with an older woman and a younger man, perfected in his earlier film “Violent Summer,” but here Aida, Claudia Cardinale, plays a nightclub singer who is jilted in the opening moments of the film and spends the rest of the film searching for a way out of the stereotypical relationship of a beautiful woman using, and being used, by men, a dependent and unhealthy relationship. When Marcello, a cad who lives in a lavish estate, tells his 16 year old younger Lorenzo, Jacques Perrin, to get rid of the girl, the younger brother’s interest turns from bewilderment to unbridled obsession, as the high-strung, free-spirited girl surprisingly is flattered by his attention and by her belief that he has money, contrasting the obvious class distinction between the two, he lives in a statue-filled estate with his family, she lives alone out of a suitcase in a hotel room. The adults in the film are overly stern and heartless, represented by the familiar Zurlini statues which can be seen throughout his entire body of work; this lifelessness is contrasted against the passion of youth. The relationship comes to a screeching halt with the intervention of the family priest who questions Aida’s motives with such a young and impressionable boy, urging her to move on. This is a brilliant scene where they speak in what appears to be a museum construction area, broken statues lie about with other scattered debris as the priest tries to reconstruct the spiritual direction of the young lovers, urging them to go their separate ways. This leads Aida into the arms of another conniving man who attempts to seduce her with plenty of money and alcohol, but Lorenzo arrives, refuses to butt out, gets his butt kicked instead by the older man, which leads to this extraordinarily long, beautifully evolving scene on the beach where the two lovers are caught up in the mysteries of their own futility, a kind of existential despair, surrounded by the wonderment of nature. This film constantly shifts the focus on who is the victim and who is to blame, in the end there are no answers, just a continuous search.

FAMILY DIARY A 99

(CRONACA FAMILIARE)

Italy France 1962 (115 mi)

Simply put, this film is a stunning and uniquely original work, filmed by Giuseppe Rotunno in what must be the darkest canvas of any film in cinema history, darker even than “The Godfather,” using a filtered, monochromatic texture that makes the print appear tinted or antique, as if Rembrandt was somehow influencing the artistic conception of each frame. My feeling is that this provides an underlying depth or complexity that reaches into the artistry of the viewer’s subconscious.

There is a Bressonian austerity to the film construction, as nothing non-essential is part of this film, yet unlike Bresson, there are two extraordinary acting performances here, Marcello Mastroianni plays Enrico, the tubercular, Marxist older brother who lives on next to nothing contrasted against Lorenzo, Jacques Perrin, the younger brother who had everything provided for him, as he was raised separately by members of the elite aristocracy, sending him to the finest schools, but leaving him ill-equipped to do anything for others. This reminded me of Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers,” where the sisters arrive at the bedside of one sister who is dying of cancer. These women had been fully provided for and taken care of by others all their lives, and they didn’t have a clue how to care for their sister’s needs; they always remained at a distance. Instead, it was the caretaker maid who actually crawled under the covers and physically held and caressed the invalid sister. This contrasting class dynamic is at the heart of this Zurlini film, also his earlier film, “The Girl with the Suitcase,” but here the starkness of poverty is associated with the authenticity of emotion, stripping bare all artificiality, emotions burst onto the canvas like flairs in the night, like color in an otherwise washed-out world, humans are revealed with such a wordless subtlety, with facial expressions, gestures, grimaces, coughs, tears, stares, with the time spent waiting alone, as if the essence of life and the secret of human redemption can be found in these small, magical moments.

I found this to be a brilliant film, the most complex, the most enduring of the Zurlini series, and for me, one of the most intense personal experiences in all of cinema.

THE PROFESSOR A 95

(LA PRIMA NOTTE DI QUIETE)

Italy France (132 mi) 1972

For the record, “Violent Summer” (Estate Violenta) is at or near the level of “Family Diary” (Cronaca Familiare), I missed the viewing of “Le Soldatesse,” but “The Desert of the Tartars” (Il Deserto dei Tartari) his final film, is also a unique, remarkable, and powerful film. Perhaps after those films, “The Professor” (La Prima Notte Di Quiete) is another stunning film, not the least of which is how little time this particular professor, Daniele, Alain Delon, actually spends in class, instead he is a drinker, a gambler, a womanizer, and a bon vivant in the provincial town of Rimini. The party sequences in this film are quite extended, and feature the Zurlini theme of dancers staring daggers at others, NOT their dance partners. He has a long standing love affair with Monica, Lea Massari, who describes the strength of their relationship in terms of their “despair,” an incredibly astute remark, suggesting his newfound flame, the stunningly beautiful Vanina, Sonia Petrova, is a young, unrealistic expectation, as Daniele is really not capable of love, he is instead a tormented soul, and to prove it, she suggests she will commit suicide if he leaves her. So, of course, he walks out on her in an instant only to have second thoughts on route to his new love, perhaps realizing that he really only loves Monica, but dreams of the passions of Vanina, and in his internal torment, makes a crucial, careless, and reckless mistake that costs him his life, he gambles and loses. At his funeral, Zurlini reveals one of his most frequent images, Daniele's casket is surrounded by statues, visualized here as living people who have the appearance of statues, dead souls that he has spent his life rejecting in a vain attempt to discover his own life, but the dead souls prevail in the end – cold, hard, slabs of rock, lifeless, inanimate objects that are permanently in a state of frozen disuse, another visually exquisite film that searches for the internal obsessions and motivations of it's characters.

THE DESERT OF THE TARTARS A 97

(IL DESERTO DEI TARTARI)

Italy France Iran West Germany (150 mi) 1976

This film features one of the most extraordinary locations I've ever seen on film, apparently shot in Bam, Southeast Iran, these giant, snow-capped mountains loom in the distance while closer, a desert fortress rises above what appears to be the remains of abandoned, ancient ruins. In this setting, an outpost on the edge of the desert of the Tartars, overseeing rock, sand, and a perpetual mist, the extraordinary external visual world stands for the internalized world that evolves over time, soldiers at the outpost suffer from mysterious ailments that scientists can not name or cure, a metaphor for fear of the unknown, which eats at the inner core of these soldiers who live in a world abandoned by time. The men train for the inevitable attack that lurks just beyond their eyesight or understanding, there is a sort of desert fever that kicks in, so it is not really known if there is an army out there or if it's all in their mind. The stunning, visual world has been created, once again, from the brilliant mind of Valerio Zurlini.

The film reminded me of two others, Tarkovsky's “Solaris,” where men are sent to outer space only to discover that the planet surface mysteriously interacts with each man's internal memories, also a recent Hungarian film by Peter Gothar called “The Outpost,” an absurdist, Kafkaesque journey where one engineer gets promoted and travels farther and farther away into the outer reaches of the country, bribing nearly everyone she meets just to get there, leaving the comforts of anything remotely resembling normal, and instead she discovers a peculiar outpost at the end of the world where all that is left is a place where the mind plays terrible tricks.

Zvyagintsev, Andrei

THE RETURN (Vozvrashchenie) A 95

Russia (106 mi) 2003

Described by this first time director as “a mythological look at human life,” this is one of the more starkly austere and emotionally spare films one could see, completely absent of anything unnecessary, but always direct and to the point, reminding me of an earlier, somewhat similar film, DISTANT, as the feelings in this film are so grim and remote. The film marks seven days, beginning with the introduction of two young brothers. One day, their father, absent for 12 years, known by only a single photograph, has inexplicably returned. Again, without any explanation, he takes the boys on a journey, presumably a fishing vacation, where they slip further and further away from civilization, into the most remote wilderness, eventually landing on a desolate island where they pitch their tents.

The older brother is glad his father has returned, while the younger brother isn’t even sure if this is his father or not, thinking he may be leading them astray to slit their throats, for all he knows, and sulks and disobeys his father every chance he gets. This father uses few words, but offers severe and sometimes brutal consequences for disobedient behavior, which includes smacking these kids around, bloodying their noses, leaving them out in the rain, which makes them wonder why he’s returned at all. But they’re so used to his absence that they continue to ignore him even when he’s present, seeing him as little more than a stranger. Their rebellion leads to a sort of LORD OF THE FLIES mentality, as if they don’t adhere to his rule, then they’re really turning their backs on all rules, which leaves them in a precarious position.

His absence is never discussed, no questions about his past are ever asked, and little, if any emotion is ever exhibited by the father. His behavior is bewildering, yet the children offer unbelievably authentic performances. Perhaps his absence is seen as an act against nature, and it comes to represent a kind of allegorical spiritual death, and only through the realization of death can one celebrate the meaning of life. For a film that offers few emotions throughout the journey, it certainly pays off with one of the more explosively emotional endings imaginable, as it is wordless, yet moves effortlessly and uncompromisingly to its natural conclusion, summing up the entire film in the last breathtakingly beautiful ten minutes. The original music by Andrei Dergachyov is hauntingly eerie and atmospheric, and at the end, solemn to the core.

The Return Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

While I certainly understand the impulse to read Zvyagintsev's film allegorically, given its opening sequence and conclusion, I would ask its viewers to experiment with taking the tale at face value.  While the mysteriously reappearing father (Konstantin Lavronenko, looking uncannily like a blend of Billy Bob Thornton and NYC cinephile Dan Sallitt) could certainly be understood as a repressed Stalinist inheritance, or patriarchy incarnate, I submit that this character behaves pretty much like my friends' fathers did while I was growing up in the South.  There's a premium placed on taciturn dominance, chilly looks of disapproval, and the occasional unwarranted smack.  This man felt eerily familiar to me.  So while some critics have observed a tonal inconsistency between the father and his two sons' naturalistic depiction, I found it all very much of a piece.  (Ivan Dobronravov is particularly excellent as the suspicious younger son who refuses to play ball with this bizarre new arrangement.)  The incisive creepiness of this father and son reunion is elevated to another level of achievement by Zvyagintsev's exacting direction and visual style.  Again, some have made the obvious comparison to Tarkovsky, which guides one's reception of the film down that allegorical / mythical path.  But while The Return shares certain aspects of Tarkovsky's tone and texture (deep sepias, creating a picture of a world drained of blood; elegantly composed images of picturesque decay; a physical attention to the weight of the elements, of dirt and water and smoke), this film departs from Tarkovsky's roving, alien's-eye camera.  The Return exhibits a crisp, popping style of editing, with each image responding to the composition of the last.  In pace and organization, The Return is like a Tarkovsky film cut to human measure, organized to offer formal support for the drama unfolding before us, not in the service of a grand mystical vision.  While I was somewhat disappointed by where this story ended up -- a narrative development in which the allegorical tendency fights its way back into the boat --, The Return provides the rare pleasure of being in the dexterous hands of a master director.  Good job Russian rookie filmatist bud.

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

Winner of the same Venice Film Festival that gave a decidedly mixed reception to The Dreamers, Andrey Zvyagintsev's The Return is also suggestive of a lost era—the highly crafted allegorical Eastern European art films of the '60s and '70s.

Zvyagintsev, a former actor and TV director, locks on to a compelling story that has both psychological and political resonance. After an absence of 12 years, the father of two adolescent boys abruptly materializes in the home of their pretty blonde mother and, by way of getting acquainted, insists on taking his confused sons on a fishing trip. Rough-hewn, handsome, and casually brutal, the father (Konstantin Lavronenko) seems to be a proponent of tough love. Fifteen-year-old Andrey (Vladimir Garin) is eager for paternal attention, but 12ish Vanya (Ivan Dobronravov)—prone to be picked on, overly attached to his mother, and scared of heights—is considerably less enthusiastic.

The battle of wills commences when the reconstituted family stops in some backwater and Dad sends Andrey to find a restaurant, a task that takes him hours. After a stressful meal, Dad gives the brothers his wallet and then has to demonstrate his fearsome mettle when they're mugged by local urchins. Disgusted Dad is about to send Andrey and Vanya back on the bus to their mother but inexplicably changes his mind. (Is he intentionally cruel? Distracted? Crazy?) At this point, the movie too makes an enigmatic shift in location. Expertly shot by Mikhail Kritchman, The Return unfolds in a somewhat emptied-out world. The look is austere but lush, the color slightly leached. The boys live in an underpopulated settlement in a stylishly povera house; the town where they stop for lunch is largely devoid of human presence; their father takes them through wilderness to a seemingly deserted island. While the natural world is photographed with an elementalism strongly reminiscent of Andrei Tarkovsky, what's most concrete in the movie are the performances. The kids are terrific. While Andrey is wide-eyed and incredulous, pinched, angry Vanya turns out to be the tougher of the two. No less surprising, the taciturn father is not completely uncaring.

The Return begins as a mysterious quest, shades into a discomfiting thriller, then a survival story, and finally a tragic parable. Primordial and laconic, this remarkably assured debut feature has the elegant simplicity of its title. The mode is sustained, the structure overt. Some may be put off by the movie's cool technique and boldly closed form, but it clearly announces Zvyagintsev as a director to watch.

BeyondHollywood.com James Mudge

“The Return” marks the debut of Andrei Zvyaginstev, a Russian film maker who has already been compared by many to his legendary countryman, Andrei Tarkovsky (“Solaris”). It is easy to see why, as Zvyaginestv’s award winning first film has the measured, languid feel reminiscent of Tarkovky’s “Stalker”, combining stunning visuals with a bare bones plot that belies its true emotional and thematic complexity. Rich with symbolism and meticulous design that, for the most part take the place of dialogue, the film works both as a haunting, almost mythic piece of art house cinema and as a gripping thriller which skilfully keeps the viewer in suspense.

The plot follows two young boys, Andrei and Ivan who live in a remote area of Russia with their mother. One day, they return home to be greeted with news that their absentee father, who they know only from an old photograph, is sleeping in the bedroom. The next morning, the father takes the boys on a cross country journey to a remote island in what seems to be a series of tests of their manhood, as well as serving his own, unspoken purpose. Tensions grow as Ivan, the younger of the two brothers, refuse to accept that the silent, often violent man is really their father, whilst Andrei is only too happy to follow unquestioningly. Eventually, in the middle of the harsh wilderness, disaster strikes, with devastating consequences.

The plot of “The Return” is, on the surface, fairly simple. Zvyaginstev, who also co-wrote the script, makes it plain that there is far more going on beyond the simple mystery of the father’s sudden appearance. The writer/director does this very cleverly and without any kind of exposition or cheap revelations. The viewer is given only cryptic visual hints as to the background of the story and characters, though this fits in with the feel of the film perfectly rather than seeming wilfully obscure. Despite this, and its often dreamlike nature, the film has a clear sense of its own logic and as such is wholly convincing and believable, making it far more grounded and realistic than a simple allegory or fable.

“The Return” is, for large stretches, free of dialogue, and Zvyaginstev gradually fleshes out the characters through their actions and subtle nuances. In the case of the two boys, this is more obvious, since the film is clearly seen through their eyes. The unnamed father, however, remains an enigmatic figure throughout, and it is only towards the end that the viewer, like the boys, is given glimpses of any kind of emotional vulnerability beyond the father’s authoritative manner.

This approach works well to generate tension as to the father’s motivations, as like the boys, the viewer is given no obvious reason for either the father’s absence or his return, and can therefore only speculate along with the boys as to whether the father is some kind of psychotic gangster, or indeed their father at all. As the suspicions of the boys mount, spurred on by their father’s at times inexplicable and threatening behaviour, the viewer is irresistibly drawn into their imaginative plotting, and through this, the director explores both the fear of abandonment and the raw, uncomfortable journey into adulthood in an astute, sophisticated manner.

Perhaps the greatest proof of Zvyaginstev’s skill and achievement is that “The Return” is surprisingly moving despite its initial apparent aloofness. The emotional impact of the last part of the film is considerable, and is made all the more so by its unexpectedness. This shows a talent and confidence all too rare in modern cinema — the ability to allow the viewer to become gradually and quietly involved with the characters without resorting to emotional cliché or the trashy tugging of heartstrings.

Visually, the film is stunning, and Zvyaginstev employs a bleak, washed out look that gives the wilderness an eerie, almost surreal feel. He shoots the film in a calm, unhurried fashion, with long, lingering takes of the landscape. As a result, the film is very atmospheric, and the viewer truly feels transported to this cold region where nothing is certain. For the vast majority of the film, there are only the three main characters on screen, and as well as increasing the uncomfortable sense of isolation, this gives the proceedings a timeless, almost ancient feel.

This feeling pervades the whole film, and makes “The Return” a captivating, fascinating experience. Filled with powerful imagery and an understated yet profound psychological depth, it serves not only to draw attention to the emergence of an extremely talented director, but as a superior piece of cinema in its own right.

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THE BANISHMENT (Izgnanie) B+ 92

Russia (150 mi) 2006 ‘Scope

I know what kind of men you are

Easily my favorite line in the entire film, spoken by the wife to her husband, a searing line of dialogue that has immense consequences, and one that the husband completely overlooks, which typifies who he is. Three of the best films on the festival circuit this year have major themes in common, 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, & 2 DAYS, SILENT LIGHT, and this film, where all 3 are sumptuously beautiful, each shot in ‘Scope, all 3 make bold statements highly critical of the male perspective that deal with abortion and/or marital infidelity, yet each approaches the issue through a highly individualistic method which yields uniquely differing consequences for similar human transgressions. But for sheer dramatic power, all three feel like bookends of one another, and when seen at the same festival, they feel like their directors share a similar vision. All reflect a post God is dead world, where existential ramifications have separated man from others and from himself, leaving him dangling precariously on a ledge, alone. The problem here, of course, is that when man goes alone, he’s liable to make mistakes, and who’s there to clean up afterwards when he’s thoroughly messed up his own chance at life? Reduced to one word, these films could be called outrage, faith, and betrayal, all of which sound enormously human.

Unlike others, like D’Angelo who claim its “humorlessness is matched only by its bloated self-importance,” or the legions of others who found this film similarly flawed and overstating to the point of superfluousness, including my friend George who calls it art house pretension, I found this very Russian in nature and highly appealing. And who cares if he used music that has been used before, what’s that got to do with anything? He also used the music of Bach. Yep, it’s been used before, but – so what? It’s how he integrates it into his picture that matters. More importantly, this is one gorgeous film that uses imagery of the highest order, cinematography by Mikhail Krichman, all the sets scrupulously created by Andrei Ponkratov, music by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt and Russian Andrei Dergachyov, which is a mix of emotionally bleak and mystically spare, also Russian liturgical music, and perhaps the most scant use of dialogue to tell his near wordless story, an updated version of William Saroyan’s relatively unknown 1953 novel The Laughing Matter, which is even more Macbethian bleak than this film, as everybody dies. Saroyan is Armenian and may share an Eastern European insight into the male character who typically hides his emotions, refuses to show weakness, and acts with an air of ruthlessness at times just to prove his masculinity. This is key to understanding how the men in this film are depicted.

From a brilliant opening segment following a lone car across an isolated landscape, leading to a drab, industrial city in a downpour of rain, two men meet with few words, where one man yanks a bullet out of the driver, which is all that is ever revealed about what happened. The two men are brothers, where the driver, Mark (Alexander Baluyev), appears to be criminally connected to the underworld, while the other brother Alex (Konstantin Lavronenko, the father in THE RETURN, winner of the best actor award at Cannes), has a wife and two kids, seemingly polar opposites by their social standing, but identical in their terse, overly rigid character, to the point of being unapproachable.

Alex takes his family back to an old family home in the countryside, a place he hasn’t been in 12 years, which is set in idyllic rural isolation (shot in Moldavia), where there are unseen relatives living nearby, but all we see is a lone house in a remote, picture perfect setting, with a wooden bridge leading across a dry river bed, with a modest, but gorgeously constructed church nearby that leads to a cemetery on the top of a hill. One interesting image, simply by the beauty of it, which captivates the older son Kir (Maxim Shibaev), is a man tending to his flock of sheep, which are herded past a plateau on the other side of the bridge. After putting the kids to bed, the husband and wife have a talk where the wife Vera (Norwegian actress Maria Bonnevie) reveals she’s pregnant by another man, whereupon Alex darts out of the house, where there’s a gorgeous pan that follows him through an ever darkening forest. We somehow lose track of time, as a chain of events is set in place after Alex calls to meet his brother Mark, but he mysteriously returns back to the house instead, where we see him hiking alone through empty fields.

But after time passes without a word they have another discussion where they have to decide what to do, this after a chilling visit between Alex and his brother, who indicates he can kill her or forgive her, directing him to a drawer with a gun, telling him both decisions are the right thing to do. In no mood to listen to her, Alex eventually gives Vera an ultimatum, he’ll forgive her if she gets rid if “it,” which leads to the only overt religious references in the film. Sending the kids to the neighbors, Mark calls in the abortionists, images which are mixed with the neighbors reading a passage how love never ends from 1 Corinthians 13, or working at an unfinished jigsaw puzzle of da Vinci’s Annunciation, which depicts (with pieces missing) the angel Gabriel’s message to Mary of her divine pregnancy, while in the background one can hear passages from Bach’s Magnificat, which is the canticle of Mary.

But she lapses into a coma and never recovers, where they call in a doctor who owes them a favor to write a fictitious cause of death, who notifies Mark that Vera’s cause of death was more likely due to an overdose of opiates. Mark refuses to tell his brother what he feels he doesn’t need to know and attempts to help his brother put Vera into the ground as soon as possible, at which point Mark himself has a heart attack, but he orders the doctor to give him something so he can make it to the funeral, a private ceremony between the two brothers and a priest. When they return, Mark is laying in the back of the car where he could be dead or alive, most likely dead, but before they left for the burial, Mark placed in the glove compartment of the car a gun and the pregnancy test that revealed Alex was actually the father, which was uncovered only after her death, as it was laying near her body. Alex, none the wiser yet and still seething inside, immediately takes off for his other brother Robert, who Kir mentioned seeing spending time with Vera, a suspicious point that set Alex off in a jealous rage in the first place, as what’s worse than being betrayed by your own brother? As he reaches the apartment in another deluge of rain, he sits for awhile (which could be one ending) before he picks up the gun and for the first time notices the medical report, grabbing them both without even reading it and sticking them in his pocket. Inside, we see the two brothers across the table from one another with a gun and a medical report on the table next to Alex. Mystery ensues. An A/A- rated film, rivaling the effusive power and spiritual beauty (conspicuously missing) of a Malick film, falling from grace to a B+ once Zvyagintsev adds a pointless extra half hour to the film, wasting the passionate buildup of converging emotions, our sorrow for the silenced voice of Vera, our anger at the ruthless arrogance of men like Alex and Mark and their Russian brotherhood who routinely debase others while honoring a code of silence, and our outrage that one man misreading so many clues leads to such needless destruction. One might call this the sorrow and the pity.

Zvyagintsev had a chance here to make a great film, as its truly bleak nature reflects a raw and anguished Russian soul, where the Russian mother is a Mary figure, with a daughter named Eve, both of whom exude qualities which simply can’t be seen or appreciated by others. For me, she’s also Desdemona, a complete innocent, while her furious husband’s wrath has the feel of Othello without his long-winded speeches, instead he rants internally to himself, exposing his every raw nerve, but never utters a word. His wrath is enormous, however, taking a visual observation provided by his son and turning his own son into Iago. The beauty of this film is how the stage is set for that moment, for that line of dialogue: “I know what kind of men you are,” which has enormous implications. The problem is he then ruins his own picture, as the last 30 minutes are completely unnecessary, telling us what we already know, or can decipher, so the film actually detracts from its own build up to that enormously powerhouse moment where the husband in a blind rage also suspects his brother and drives to murder him as well, leaving us with an image where he discovers at that very moment that he made a serious error in judgment, that he and he alone set in motion a series of tragic events that will leave him blind and rudderless for the rest of his life. Why should there be one minute more? End of film. But no, we then have an explanatory flashback sequence which allows the audience to recover emotionally from that highly ambiguous, yet thoroughly devastating moment when there were literally chills in the air, replaced by a replaying of events that we could already deduce, and finalized by the babushka ladies in the hayfield, an unsatisfying conclusion, providing a completely new change of tone altogether. I’d rather have the timeless image of a brooder wracked by guilt in a Dostoeskian funk anyday over a 1930’s labor union poster image of human solidarity.

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

—1 Corinthians 13

eye WEEKLY [Jason Anderson]

A follow-up to the director's 2003 Golden Lion winner The Return, The Banishment again sees Andrey Zvyagintsev channel the spirit of his much-revered countryman Andrei Tarkovsky but with less compelling and more lugubrious results. Konstantin Lavronenko (also seen in The Return) won the best actor prize at Cannes for his role as a man brooding about the news that his wife's unborn child is not his. A dark cloud hangs over their would-be idyll at his childhood home in the country. Lavronenko's charisma and Zvyagintsev's eye for landscapes are not enough to compensate for the inert narrative.

Chicago Reader | The Reader's Guide to the Chicago International ... Andrea Gronvall

William Saroyan’s story “The Laughing Matter” provided the basis for this chilling domestic drama from Russia, directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev (The Return). The film opens with a shady urban character (Alexander Baluev) seeking his younger brother’s help in sewing up his bleeding arm. When the brother (Konstantin Lavronenko) vacations with his kids and troubled wife (Maria Bonnevie of Reconstruction) at the family’s country place, she suddenly blurts out that the child she’s carrying isn’t his. More wounds will confound this brood when the gangster sibling reappears with a potential solution to the couple’s dilemma. Spare dialogue and long takes add to the sense of foreboding, with Lavronenko (who won the best actor prize at Cannes) keeping his character so buttoned-up you could burst from anxiety watching him consider his revenge, while the verdant landscape devolves from pastoral to sinister in the space of a phone call.

Karlovy Vary International Film Festival | Banishment

Alex takes his wife Vera and their two small children out of town to spend a few days in the house where he grew up, located in an isolated spot in rolling countryside. During their stay, Vera announces to Alex that she is pregnant and that the child isn’t his. Alex, incensed, insists she has an abortion. He sends the children to stay with friends for a few days and, with the help of his brother Mark, makes the arrangements for the operation to go ahead. The whole episode is not without its consequences, however, which force Alex to reflect on the legitimacy of his actions. A much anticipated film by Andrey Zvyagintsev, who won the Venice festival in 2003 with his debut The Return. Inspired by the short novel by William Saroyan (The Laughing Matter, 1953) the film depicts a family in crisis. The director takes us to an indeterminate time and place (the film was actually shot in Moldavia, Belgium and France), and the two main characters are played by Konstantin Lavronenko and star of Scandinavian film Maria Bonnevie.

Andrey Zvyagintsev (b. 1964, Novosibirsk) studied acting at the Novosibirsk Drama School (1984) and then at GITIS in Moscow (1990). He acted in several theatre productions and also appeared in commercials. He was cast in episodic roles for various TV series (Getting Acquainted / Budyem znakomy, 1999) and also in films such as Shirli-Myrli (1995, dir. Vladimir Menshov, screened in Karlovy Vary in 1996). He began working as a director with the TV crime series Black Room (Chornaya komnata, 2000), filming three episodes. In 2003 he debuted with the feature film The Return, which was a hit at several festivals. The strongly spiritual dimension of his narration also characterises his next film The Banishment, for which he again teamed up with cinematographer Mikhail Krichman.

Three Twisty Delights - TIME - Time Magazine Mary Corliss from Time magazine

Abortion is also an important element in The Banishment. Alex (Konstantin Lavronenko) leaves the city to spend two months in a rural family home with his wife Vera (Maria Bonnevie), their two young children and, from time to time, Alex's small-time criminal brother Mark (Alexander Baluev). Not long into their stay, the brooding Vera shatters Alex with this declaration: "I'm pregnant, and it's not your child." This cues his eventual insistence on an abortion. Their marriage has been strained before, but now the seams split, and anything that can go wrong, does.

There are dire surprises and startling revelations to come, as Alex, Vera and Mark hurtle toward and beyond catastrophe. We will not reveal more of the plot in the hope that one day it will be playing in a theater near you . It is truly something to see; for among all the lives to be ruined it is a visual rhapsody, attentive to every nuance in the spectacular land and foliage around the family home, following the lives within as meticulously as it traces the dramatic changes in weather — from clear day to torrential showers — in one of the longest, most intricate and beautiful tracking shots in cinema.

Beyond the exertions of its storyline, The Banishment pries open, and stares boldly into, the chasm between male and female points of view— questions of love and trust, children and parenting. Men watching the film may find Vera's logic vague and infuriating; women may see her as the sensitive soul, and Alex as the dense husband who only thinks he cares for her. Perhaps Alex and Vera cannot see beyond their own needs. Perhaps no one can. In another movie about lost treasures, Charles Foster Kane offers a toast "to love on my own terms. Those are the only terms anybody ever know — his own."

The Banishment (Izgnanie) | Review | Screen Alan Hunter from Screendaily

The Banishment struggles to carry the burden of expectations surrounding the second feature from writer-director Andrey Zvyagintsev. Like his Venice Golden Lion winner The Return, it offers a tale of pride and patriarchy illuminating the dark soul of the Russian male. It confirms Zvyagintsev as a master of mood and composition but the ponderous pacing and epic running time make the film something of an endurance test.

Lacking the precision and intensity of The Return, it is further hampered by an obscurity in the storytelling that occasionally rivals the unfathomable Inland Empire. Sold as a prestige arthouse production, it may carve a modest profile but general audiences are likely to consider it too much of a challenge to suggest any mainstream potential.

The rural setting and tragic tale suggest something as earthy and epic as an Emile Zola novel or something as majestic as Greek tragedy. The actual inspiration for the film is a relatively unknown William Saroyan short story that has been considerably altered in the translation from page to screen.

The contrast between country and city remains. The urban landscapes are as empty and alienating as anything in Antonioni yet it is here that problems are resolved and difficulties made clear. The countryside is much more elemental.

It is here that Alex (Lavronenko) returns after 12 years. Accompanied by his wife Vera (Bonnevie) and their two children, he settles into an old family house. There are fires in the grate, walnut trees in the grounds and it is almost too idyllic to be true.

In any scary movie we would quickly expect the damp stain on the wall and the bedraggled poltergeists crawling along the ceiling. In Zvyagintsev's world, the ghosts of the past are the subject of hints and allegations rather than anything too explicit.

He seems to be a man with a history of violence, drawn from a family predisposed to fracture and heartache. We already know that his brother Mark (Baluev) no longer sees his children. The first scenes of the film have Alex removing a bullet from his brother's arm, no questions asked, no explanations required.

The great moral dilemma arrives for Alex when Vera informs him that she is pregnant and that the child is not his. He must decide what is to be done. His word is law and his instincts spark a chain of tragic consequences.

Perhaps aware of the old-fashioned melodrama in the material, Zvyagintsev has chosen to subvert it by imposing a stifling solemnity on the film. We feel every creaking bedspring and rustle of the leaves as events unfold.

The film even appears to reach a natural conclusion long before the end arrives. It is only late in the proceedings that the film regains its narrative grip with a series of revelations that lend some cohesion to what has gone before and allow us a completely different perspective on events as flashbacks provide us with Vera's side of the story.

Ravishing cinematography by Mikhail Krichman captures the countryside in blinding sunlight, misty mornings and heavy downpours that underline the more elemental nature of the events that unfold. The brooding, pulsing score by Andrey Dergachev and Arvo Part increases the likelihood of comparisons with the films of David Lynch.

All the performances are solid but the stand-out is Norwegian born, Ingmar Bergman veteran Maria Bonnevie who not only seems completely at ease acting in a foreign language but also makes Vera the most compelling and human figure in the film.

The camera scrutinises her in a way that Bergman once reserved for Liv Ullmann and she responds with a performance in which every glance and gesture reveals the plight of a woman whose life has been dominated by a society and a man who always believe they know best.

It is a potent contribution to a flawed film and might just have figured in the deliberations of the Cannes jury if they didn't already have the lead actress from Four Months…, Anamaria Marinca, on their mind.

Film Review - Banishment, The Patrick Z. McGavin frm Emanuel Levy

A tone poem about faith, desire, damaged masculinity and the tragedy of betrayal, Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev’s "The Banishment" is a visually arresting, extremely ambitious follow-up to his prize-winning 2003 debut, "The Return," which won the Golden Lion and other major prizes at the Venice Film Festival.

"The Return" secured Zvyagintsev a place in the front ranks of new generational Russian auteurs. He certainly inhabits the role of the Russian “artist,” conjuring an intense, mystical, poetic and furious exploration of the intricate emotional and blood connections of entwining families.

The filmmaker apparently wants to annihilate the very prospect of failure, of sophomore jinx. “There is a superstition that the second film is always a flop,” he said. “Some call it a drop in energy. Vindication can only come from your work.”

At 159 minutes, the movie requires extraordinary patience, and those inclined to surrender to the film's heavy mood and elusive rhythm are bound to experience a significant revelation. Zvyagintsev is no doubt reaching to find his own language and syntax. The movie extends on the themes of "The Return," though everything is magnified, the scope and sheer range often overpowering.

At the same time, the movie suggests a fascinating synthesis of Andrei Tarkovksy’s final work, "The Sacrifice," and several Ingmar Bergman movies. This formal connection is made all the more explicit by the director’s casting of Norwegian-born Maria Bonnevie, who, with her long blond hair and somber yet beautiful face, suggests an uncanny physical resemblance to the young Liv Ullmann (around "Persona" time).

The movie suffers from structural problems, but it's also gloriously baroque, the imagery so beautiful and evocative that some of the problematic qualities of the storytelling and characterization are mitigated by the imposing reach of the visual style. The tone is more difficult to decipher. Clearly not a realistic feature, its style is more in vein of a dark dream and a haunting reverie.

Adapting William Saroyan’s autobiographical novel "The Laughing Matter," Zvyagintsev works in a strangely abstract vein that withholds telling details about specific period and time. yet the architecture, type of phones and cars used inevitably suggest a story somewhat lost in time.

The serpentine structure of the script creates difficulties and rewards in equal measures, causing both admiration and frustration at characterization, narrative incident, and dramatic conflict.

Opening against a stunning shot of a windswept landscape, "The Banishment" immediately establishes a slightly off-kilter and disorienting tone. An injured man, his left arm damaged from a gun shot wound, seeks solace with another man. The gangster is Mark (Alexander Baluev), and the other man he has sought sanctuary with, Alex (Konstantin Lavronenko, who played the father in "The Return"), turns out to be his brother.

Driven away from his family by the need to make money (the presumed exile of the title, which later also assumes other meanings), Alex returns home to an eerie, almost depopulated Russian town.

Mark encourages his brother to solidify his frayed relationship with his wife (Bonnevie), and young son Kir (Maxim Shibaev) and daughter Eva (Katya Kulkina) by repatriating to the family’s ancestral home left vacant after the death of their father. The gorgeous, elaborate estate is set in beautiful pastoral grounds of the Russian countryside.

With the physical shift, Zvyagintsev and his remarkable cinematographer Mikhail Krichman create some stunning tableaux that sharply contrasts the rolling and open landscapes against the more knotty and twisted geography of the adjacent forest. The filmmakers echo the great Ukrainian director Alexander Dovzhenko ("Earth" among others), drawing out physical distinctions of wind and space to vivify a very concrete physical place.

There is one incredible shot with Alex walking through the twisted foliage of the forest, the landscape jutting diagonally across the screen. Somewhat enigmatically, purposely, the action moves vertically and side to side.

The idyll of the family retreat is quickly ruptured by Vera’s stunning announcement. “I’m going to have a child,” she says. “It is not yours.” Hurt and angry, Alex reacts physically against Vera. He then calls his brother and insists on a meeting, but he never shows up.

Dramatically, "Banishment" undergoes a considerable shift, the perspective changing from the husband and wife to the symbiotic connection of the two brothers. The story encloses on itself, and the conflict is drawn out of the uncertain resolution of Vera’s physical condition and the question of whether she is going to submit to Alex’s request that she terminate the pregnancy.

The movie’s title is also a metaphor for the vast separation of the central couple. “We are strangers to each other,” she says. The conflict yields a highly unpredictable finale, which sharply entwines tragedy and irony. The conclusion also illustrates the movie’s principal failing, namely, that the superiority and dominance of the imagery produces a work almost at war with itself. The glorious and exciting visual style, sound, and score are somehow lessened by the helmer's inability to deepen or sharpen the interior and emotional consciousness of his characters.

That said, every time I was about to give up on the film, Zvyagintsev restored my faith by subverting the dramatic line. In the best example, the movie’s sexual politics, that appear originally to be quite reactionary by presenting a woman being punished for her transgressions, turn out to far more complicated by a revealing and wholly unexpected final act flashback that provides the necessary psychological depth of Vera's figure.

Zvyagintsev sometimes lacks the necessary rigor and concentration in shaping his work more organically. The narrative is sometimes too amorphous and slack, and the intensity of the conflict feels forestalled and even enervated.

"Banishment" was actually shot in Moldova, France and Belgium, and that untraditional locations heighten the movie’s strange sense of displacement and the unfathomable. In the last hour, the movie devolves into a series of interlocking puzzles.

Zvyagintsev provides no easy answers, and the resolution of several pressing questions remains unanswered and lets the spectator fill in the blanks. He shows faith in his audience to make their own conclusions. And as bleak as the movie is, it actually ends with a ray of hope, with a lyrical scene depicting a collective of female farmers singing while working the land.

The director's answers might not be terribly reassuring, but there’s no doubt about the intensity of feeling or depth of passion.

KinoKultura.com [Birgit Beumers]

Movies that make you think [Jugu Abraham]

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young]

DVD Times Noel Megahey

Cine Outsider [Slarek]

The Banishment Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

The Banishment - Talking Pictures Alan Pavelin

IONCINEMA [Nicholas Bell]

SBCCFilmReviews [Richard Feilden]

TheseGloryDays [Al Kitching]

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Jennie Kermode]

CONTEXT - This Week in Arts and Ideas from The Moscow Times Tom Birchenough

ScreenGrab: The Nerve Movie Blog - Indie Film News, Reviews and Gossip Mike D’Angelo

MovieXclusive.com [Justin Deimen]

Screenjabber.com [Michael Edwards]

The Banishment - Movie Martyr Jeremy Heilman

Film4 [Anton Bitel]

Russian returns with a mythic masterpiece - Telegraph David Gritten

The Banishment celebrates new wave in Russian filmmaking - Movies Andrew McCathie May

Andrei Zvyagintsev Nick Holdsworth interviews the director from the Hollywood Reporter

Variety.com [Jay Weissberg]

ELENA B 89

Russia (109 mi) 2011 ‘Scope

Somewhat slight compared to his earlier efforts, THE RETURN (2003) and THE BANISHMENT (2007), this is a subtle film that delves into the heart of the Russian conscience, where a wordless ten–minute opening into the empty expanse of a meticulously clean, thoroughly modern and luxurious yet seemingly cold and sterile Moscow condominium sets the scene for an unsparing examination of class consciousness. Something of a generational morality tale where the future looks hopeless and overly bleak, this is a slow moving character exposé, almost a theater piece, where what’s most significant is the developing interior worlds of the characters, given a very novelesque structure of what turns out to be a modern day variation on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Centered around two main characters, a retired couple, Elena (Nadezhda Markina) and Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov) live in separate bedrooms, each with their own television sets, where every morning she opens the curtains and wakes him up, where her role is carefully defined around the subordinate position of serving him, like a nursemaid, where it’s a portrait of two entirely separate worlds. Extending further is the world of their children, each through previous marriages, where Vladimir’s mostly unseen and distant daughter, Katerina (Elena Lyadova), seems to live a hedonistic and carefree existence, accustomed to being taken care of all her life by the support of her father, while Elena’s aloof teenage son lives in a state of abject poverty with his perpetually idle father and nagging mother in a tenement housing project sitting adjacent to 3 nuclear power smokestacks. The dismal picture of their blighted lives says it all, where Elena is constantly hounded for money, but Vladimir is unyielding when it comes to offering help, wondering why he should support a family whose own father won’t get off his unemployed ass and get a job to help support his own family? When Elena tries to compare her son’s situation with his daughter, Vladimir refuses to hear any more on the subject, claiming even though his sarcastically hostile daughter is no great prize, he’s at least fulfilling his fatherly obligation. What to do about their future is the subject of the film’s moral center, told through alternating characters, one living under the protection of supreme comfort, while the other can be seen traipsing through the graffiti-laden slums to visit her son and grandson.

Having met late in life, their lives were already structured, as Elena was the nurse in the hospital several years ago when they met, and has continued serving that same role in marriage. Something of a control freak, Vladimir is particular about having things exactly his way, where there isn’t an ounce of recognition or awareness of how he’s treating his wife, while she dutifully submits to each and every one of his commands, never expressing any sign of resentment. Under the surface, however, she is boiling at her husband’s refusal to take her family seriously. For all practical purposes, this is the set up, with no other background information provided other than the acute visual detail captured by cinematographer Mikhail Krichman, who worked on the director’s earlier films as well, and the splendid intermittent use of the 3^rd Movement of Phillip Glass’s Symphony #3, a tense and pulsating use of throbbing strings that effectively becomes the voice of the subconscious. Vladimir’s sense of control can be see in this wordless car driving sequence that expresses a rather sophisticated sense of choice, Elena (2011) - Car driving scene - YouTube (2:46), where the haunting Glass music comes in at the end. Shortly afterwards, he suffers a heart attack at the gym, literally forcing him to confront his mortality. One of the best scenes in the film is the hospital visit by his daughter, the simply brilliant Elena Lyadova, who is haughty and cynical, just like her father, but surprisingly eloquent, Elena 2011 - YouTube (5:16), where the cameraman can’t take his gaze off her fascinating performance. This visit seems to solidify his view that he needs to write a will, informing Elena that she will receive a generous monthly stipend, but his daughter will inherit everything else. This sends Elena into a state of flux, her hopes for her son dashed, as she sees Katerina as a spoiled and ungrateful child, someone who couldn’t be less appreciative of her father, only using him for money. With few spoken words between the two of them, Elena has to wordlessly convey the plaguing guilt of the young Raskolnikov, as she wonders if righting a wrong by committing an unthinkable mortal sin is permissible if it’s in pursuit of a higher purpose, where her transformation is chilling.

Like the novel, the film barely touches upon the crime, but lingers instead on the unintended interior consequences of the punishment, where Elena skillfully covers up the tracks of her foul deed, where earlier in the film Katrina understood her well, claiming she played the part well of a mournful and grieving wife, where in the hospital her words to her father haunt the final moments of the film, like a Macbethian witch’s prophecy: “It’s irresponsible to produce offspring that you know are going to be sick and doomed, since the parents are just as sick and doomed.” If Zvyaguintsev films produce anything, they brilliantly foreshadow a bleak future, where Elena struggles with a Mephistophelian choice to prevent a gloomy future for her grandson Sasha, where his parents are elated when she suddenly has available cash to bribe his way into college, rescuing her grandson from the inevitable fate of being forced to join the army, seen as a fate worse than prison. He barely acknowledges her actions however, much like Elena feared Katerina would react, when the director then shows us the real face of the Russian future. As the electricity goes out in the tenement housing projects turning the apartment dark, Sasha goes outside and joins a gang of others waiting for him that get liquored up, and in an exquisite example of the best uses of a hand-held camera, follow the group as they hastily approach a clearing in front of the nuclear power smokestacks with the precision of a military strike, where in a riveting sequence they attack a group of outsiders huddling next to a fire, savagely kicking and beating them all to within an inch of their lives, a senseless act of ultraviolence that’s right out of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), a stormtrooping, boot-kicking, neo-Nazi vision of disillusioned youth that’s becoming all too common an occurrence these days, almost always alcohol fueled. Like the wordless emptiness of the opening sequence, the final sequence is eerily similar, with the tenement dwellers now inhabiting the luxurious condo, bringing with them their learned habits of drunken idleness and shirking responsibility, soulless creatures who are literally pretenders to the human race.

Cannes 2011. Un Certain Regard and More Awards David Hudson at Cannes from Mubi, May 21, 2011 (excerpt)

Emir Kusturica and his Jury (Elodie Bouchez, Peter Bradshaw, Geoffrey Gilmore and Daniela Michel) have announced that the Prize of Un Certain Regard is a tie this year between Andreas Dresen's Stopped on Track (image above) and Kim Ki-duk's Arirang. A roundup on the first is on its way, while you can read up on critical reaction to Kim's solo project here.

The Special Jury Prize goes to Andrei Zvyagintsev's Elena (roundup's coming), while the Directing Prize goes to Mohammad Rasoulof for Good Bye (more here).

The House Next Door [Phil Coldiron]

Dramatically inert and conceptually rigorous (though the worth of that concept, that every transaction is either an economic one or an economic one in disguise, is questionable), Andrei Zvyagintsev's domestic non-thriller succeeds more or less in direct relation to how well one jives with its mundane mood. Zvyagintsev's 'Scope compositions pin his characters like flies in the middle of scrubbed clean spaces—a modern bourgeois house, a gym pool, or a hospital—and for most of the film the closest his characters come to conflict is a wife's annoyance at her deadbeat husband's juvenile preference for video games over paternal duties. When the coda arrives and things suddenly descend into a riotous scene of poor youth at war, with ragged handheld photography and a grimy industrial location, it's both an aesthetic relief from the proceeding stuffiness and a thematic jolt in its confirmation of one character's skepticism of the lower class.

Bright Lights Film Journal [Robert Keser]

With all its close attention to how money divides people and splits families, Balzac could have written Andrey Zvyagintsev's Elena, except for the imaginative use of an overdose of Viagra as a murder weapon. The director of Venice's Golden Lion winner for The Return and the still more remarkable The Banishment, Zvyagintsev employs striking visual precision to paint Russia as an unsatisfying and unhappy society, in contrasting strokes of wealth and poverty, refinement, and vulgarity, the elegant and the slovenly. Elena is a matronly nurse and widow, now wedded to a much wealthier man, but regularly traveling from his immaculate residence of marble, tile, and glass to the run-down, garbage-strewn apartment block of her beer-swilling son and her whiny video-game-addicted grandson who needs to buy his way out of military service. The wealthy husband's estranged daughter appears in cold, sullen, and cynical form ("Shit's gotta be tasty. A million flies can't be wrong"). Despite some surprisingly discreet musical nudging from composer Philip Glass, no one in this family seems to learn any productive lessons from class transgression, but the director seems to warn about the triumph of thuggery in Russia's new society. No punishment ensues, except life.

Paste Magazine [Will McCord]

With Elena, director Andrey Zvyagintsev was interested in exploring an uncompromising Darwinian world—as he describes it, “tarantulas in a jar.” It’s a bleak landscape to paint, and he’s done so with only a few characters and a relatively simple story.

Set in Moscow, Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov) is a wealthy, retired man living in a modern, sleek apartment. His former nurse, Elena (Nadezhda Markina), is his wife, but she lives in another room with a separate TV and still treats him like a patient. She wakes him up, brings his breakfast to bed and otherwise serves him like a maid. His daughter, Katerina (Yelena Lyadova), is completely estranged but does show up when Vladimir becomes ill and is hospitalized. The event forces Vladimir to confront his mortality and think about writing his will. Elena must also think about her welfare as she faces the prospect of being widowed even as her son’s family struggles with little money.

Simple and spare, Elena succeeds in creating a dark world. Vladimir’s apartment is shot beautifully with a cold precision. Smirnov’s portrayal of Vladimir is tough, uncompromising and very believable, as is Elena Lyadova’s depiction of his daughter. The score by Philip Glass also adds a cool finish to a frigid environment. However, the story itself is ultimately a bit too thin, with too few chess pieces on the board and therefore too few surprises. Perhaps more involvement with the character of the daughter or more sympathetic qualities given to Vladimir would’ve helped. Whatever the case, Elena could have used a bit more life injected into its sterile, though beautifully shot, confines.

jdbrecords [Jeffery Berg]

Russian filmmaker Andrei Zvyagintsev's Elena hits hard, with its complicated and stark depiction of the have-nots and the have-a lots and its dark depiction of human behavior.  The title character (Nadezhda Markina, in a subtly wrenching performance) is a former nurse, in a passionless marriage with a wealthy, aging former patient Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov).  In Vladimir's cold, spacious dwelling, the couple sleep in separate rooms, watch separate TVs.  Elena's existence is servant-like. Meanwhile, Elena's son Sergey (Alexey Rozin) and his family live a bus and a long train ride away in a run-down, cramped apartment, with a harsh view of nuclear reactors. Mystified at why Vladimir continues to financially support his estranged daughter Katerina (Elena Lyadova, who makes a striking impact in a small role) while her side of the family struggles, Elena tries to convince Vladimir to pay for Sergey's teenage son's college education.  Vladimir is reluctant however to give them any money, incensed that Sergey can't provide for his family.

This is a quiet film but has excellent, unnerving sound design that mines the cacophony of Elena's everyday: the caw of blackbirds, an electric razor, a violent video game, a dripping coffee maker, the horn of a passing train, and snippets of terrible TV dialogue made surrealistic.   Philip Glass's grim, driving score appears in sudden bursts and adds an element of energy and intensity to this slowly-unfolding story. Zvyagintsev's (The Return) direction and Mikhail Krichman's cinematography (the gorgeous widescreen shots lit by the movements of sun and clouds are something to behold) cast a spell and make Elena's desperation and guilt almost palpable.  Sometimes the camera drifts into unexpected scenes that come back later in a sudden punch.  Because of Zvyagintsev's well-orchestrated scenes, I wasn't sure if all of the subtle contrasting images were intentional (a pot simmering while one of the reactors can be glimpsed out the window; the immaculate blue-gray horizontal tiles of Vladimir's kitchen backsplash and the grimy graffitied ones of Sergey's apartment; the burning candle for St. Nicholas and the burning of papers) but I found his visions more complicated than mawkishly tidy. Katerina describes her family as one of "subhuman" "rotten seeds."  It's a familiar story of wealth and the circumstances of birth but made haunting and unforgettable in the hands of the cast and crew and Zvyagintsev.

CANNES REVIEW | Un Certain Regard Closer “Elena” Features Glacial Pace and Intriguing Philosophy Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 22, 2011

Andrei Zvyaguintsev starts and ends his third feature, “Elena,” with the symbolic image of a barren tree, an accurate reflection of the dreary narrative sandwiched between those two shots. All three of the Russian director’s features - alongside “Elena,” he directed “The Return” and “The Banishment” - deal with troubled family life. Only “Elena,” however, explicitly states said trouble before confronting its consequences. His latest work is the most overtly philosophical of the three, less concerned with plot than contrasting values. Terminally slow and simpler than its glacial pace implies, “Elena” is a resolutely minor work, but not without palpable intrigue.

The title character (Nadezhda Markina), an aging, retired nurse, married wealthy Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov) two years before the beginning of the movie. The opening scenes reveal their low key existence, with virtually no dialogue, scant music and only the slightest amount of exposition. Having established that quiet tranquility, Zvyaguintsev gradually digs out the problems beneath it.

Elena’s son from an earlier marriage leans on her mother to ask Vladimir for assistance in supporting his family. But the older man resists, leaning on a stringent work ethic and wondering why her son doesn’t simply find a job. Elena fires back at him by pointing out the support he provides his own estranged daughter, a rebel whose cold worldview echoes that of her father’s. He holds his ground: “I married you, not them,” he says. Markina’s face is tough to read: She takes his reaction into account, but the full impact that Vladimir’s resolve has on his wife’s familial allegiances never becomes entirely clear until she acts out.

Once that happens, “Elena” transitions from an observational character study to the familiar (if uniquely brooding) suspense drama. Elena’s strategy for milking Vladimir’s funds grows increasingly dangerous, and Zvyaguintsev makes it clear that she’s hardly the innocent protagonist facing off against a greedy oppressor. In its best moments, “Elena” turns into an uneasy survival tale about the limits of self-control. Zvyaguintsev’s matter-of-fact style reaches its pinnacle around the halfway mark, when the power relations between Elena and Vladimir appear to radically shift in a sequence so drawn out that the tension never really reaches a breaking point. It just builds and builds, as if in perpetual slow motion.

For a long time, this is a satisfying rhythm, although Zvyaguintsev shows glimmers of a better movie during the single scene in which Vladimir and his daughter exchange a few terse words after a heart attack lands him in the hospital. Glaring back at one another, the two eventually bond over their mutual cynicism. “What’s irresponsible is producing offspring you know will be sick and doomed,” the bitter girl says, to which she receives a smile. Despite its shortcomings, Zvyaguintsev successfully investigates this bleak prognosis, conveying Elena’s discomfort as she battles to avoid an inevitably gloomy outcome. When that last shot arrives, it’s still not clear if she pulled it off.

HOW WILL IT PLAY? The closing night film at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard sidebar was well-received by that audience, but the extreme inaction will make it unattractive to most distributors. It could land a small U.S. distributor willing to take to market this material to an older art house crowd (Kino comes to mind), but the odds of a strong commercial reception are quite low.

Glass Houses by Michael Sicinski - Moving Image Source January 6, 2012

East European Film Bulletin [Moritz Pfeifer]

Slant Magazine [Chuck Bowen]

Elena | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Scott Tobias

Family Ties that Break and Bind in Elena and The ... - Village Voice Nick Pinkerton

Movie Review - 'Elena' : NPR Ella Taylor

Movies that make you think [Jugu Abraham]

Filmleaf [Chris Knipp]

Sound On Sight Zornitsa Staneva

Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]

MonstersandCritics [Ron Wilkinson]

Battleship Pretension [West Anthony]

Elena | Review, Trailer, News, Cast, Interviews | SBS Film Lynden Barber

EFilmCritic [Jay Seaver]

The Review Diary [Satish Naidu]

Cinema-V [Torsten Reitz]

Screen Fanatic [David O'Connell] also seen here: 20/20 Filmsight [David O'Connell]

SBS Film [Lynden Barber]

Independent Ethos [Hans Morgenstern]

IONCINEMA [Nicholas Bell]

Avi Offer [The NYC Movie Guru]

Urban Cinefile (Australia) [Andrew L. Urban]

Hollywood and Fine Reviews » Blog Archive » 'Elena': Slow, slow boil Marshall Fine

Reeling Reviews [Robin Clifford, Laura Clifford]

Bina007 Movies [Caterina Benincasa]

Film Pulse [Kevin Rakestraw]

Elena Howard Feinstein at Cannes from Screendaily, May 20, 2010

The Reel Bits [Richard Gray]

The MacGuffin [Edward Davidson]

CineVue [Patrick Gamble]

Elena | College Movie Review Stephen Davis

Tonight at the Movies [John C. Clark]

Bonjour Tristesse (English)

hollywoodreporter.com [Neil Young]

Elena Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Geoff Andrew

Elena movie review -- Elena showtimes - The Boston Globe Ty Burr

Review: Elena - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Gerald Peary

Elena :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times

'Elena,' by Andrei Zvyagintsev, Set In and ... - The New York Times Stephen Holden

LEVIATHAN (Leviafan) A- 94

Russia (140 mi) 2014 ‘Scope

Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?

or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?

Canst thou put an hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through with a thorn?

Will he make many supplications unto thee? will he speak soft words unto thee?

Will he make a covenant with thee? wilt thou take him for a servant for ever?

Wilt thou play with him as with a bird? or wilt thou bind him for thy maidens?

Shall the companions make a banquet of him? shall they part him among the merchants?

Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish spears?

Lay thine hand upon him, remember the battle, do no more.

Behold, the hope of him is in vain: shall not one be cast down even at the sight of him?

None is so fierce that dare stir him up: who then is able to stand before me?

—Job 41:1 – 10

The first Russian film to win a Golden Globe award for Best Foreign Film (Leviathan by Andrey Zvyagintsev Takes Golden Globe and FIPRESCI Prize) since Sergei Bondarchuk’s WAR AND PEACE in 1969, which went on to win an Academy Award in the same category, while Nikita Mikhalkov’s BURNT BY THE SUN (1994) was the last Russian film to win an Academy Award. Continuing in a series of bold and audacious Russian films that attempt to authenticate the abysmal conditions there, where the remnants of Stalinist brutality are everywhere to be seen, especially the way ordinary citizens continually pay the price for rampant government corruption that continues unabated. Human lives are seen as disposable, murder and lies are condoned, so long as it protects the good standing of those currently in power. While this is a particularly bleak worldview, it’s consistent with the equally distressing themes from other films coming out of Russia, where the most gruesome are Alexei Balabanov’s CARGO 200 (2007) and Sergei Loznitsa’s My Joy (Schastye moe) (2010), but also Aleksei Popogrebsky’s spare and beautiful 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #6 How I Ended This Summer, Boris Khlebnikov’s A Long and Happy Life (Dolgaya schastlivaya zhizn) (2013), both featuring the ruggedness of a barren location, and Yuri Bykov’s equally memorable The Major (Mayor) (2013) and 2014 Top Ten List #9 The Fool (Durak), which prominently feature Dostoyevskian themes of dubious morality on display. In each of these films, Russia is depicted much like a western in the days of the Wild West frontier where there was scant evidence of any civilized rule of law, where men had to stand up for themselves and only the strongest survived, usually through bloodshed. LEVIATHAN, however, is not just a good movie in a similar vein, but it’s particularly well-made, where the acting is superb, the cinematography by Mikhail Krichman is simply astonishing, while the editing and sound design are exceptional, with music from Philip Glass’s opera Akhnaten, Philip Glass - Akhnaten HQ [Prelude; Refrain, Verse 1 ... YouTube (10:46), with that throbbing church organ blasting into the stratosphere at about the four and a half minute mark, where this particular attention to craftsmanship and meticulous detail is rare in cinema today, especially in an era of scarce funding. One of the most important filmmakers working today, Zvyagintsev continues to make relevant films, where his starkly austere and emotionally spare first film THE RETURN (2003) won first prize at the Venice Film Festival and remains his most mystifyingly unique, while THE BANISHMENT (2007) and Elena (2011) are both reflective of his mastery over the medium.

Partly inspired by the real-life incident of Marvin Heemeyer who in 2004 went on a violent rampage demolishing the town hall and the mayor’s property in the small town of Granby, Colorado, supposedly outraged over the outcome of a zoning dispute. Loosely reshaping what happened to resemble an updated version of the Biblical story of Job, Zvyagintsev and co-writer Oleg Negin won the Best Screenplay Award at Cannes, where the story is set on Russia’s far northern coast above the Arctic circle on the Kola Peninsula near the Finnish border, in a small fishing village overlooking the Barents Sea. With the breathtaking beauty of the opening cinematography, what’s immediately striking is the awesome force of nature, where civilization exists on the edge of a wild and uncontrollable sea, where waves are seen crashing against the rocks, and left behind on the shore is an age-old whale carcass that’s likely been there longer than anyone can remember, where its skeletal remains are a reminder of the mortality of human existence. While the outdoor shooting took place in the town of Teriberka, the protagonist is an angry young Russian mechanic named Kolya (Alexei Serebriakov) whose family has been rooted to the same location for generations, living in a decaying and unpretentious wood frame house with windows overlooking the sea. Kolya is as rugged as the land itself, a supremely individualistic man who drinks vodka relentlessly while swearing about the devious nature of the town mayor who for years has been trying to get his hands on their property. A former soldier, Kolya is living with his beautiful wife Lilya (Elena Lyadova) along with a distant and delinquent teenage son Roma (Sergei Pokhodaev) from an earlier marriage. Their best friends and frequent visitors to their home are another married couple, Pacha (Aleksei Rozin), a police officer and fellow drinking buddy, and his outspoken wife Angela (Anna Ukolova). What’s immediately apparent is the familiarity they have with one another, especially after several rounds of drinking, where no judgments are made as they seemingly embrace one other, flaws and all, like an extended part of the family. But whatever stability exists comes to a crashing end as the scene shifts to the inside of a courtroom where a female judge speed reads his sentence in a thoroughly detached monotone, ultimately deciding to take his land away. Kolya’s response is typical, to drown his sorrows in vodka, while later the equally drunk Mayor, Vadim (Roman Madyanov), in a much more celebratory mood pulls up to his house in a mammoth SUV along with several armed henchmen and screams between the curses, “You don’t have any rights, you never had any rights, and you will never have any rights!”

A new face arrives on the scene, an old army friend Dmitri (Vladimir Vdovichenkov), Kolya’s former senior officer, now a hot-shot attorney in Moscow who has to acknowledge that on the face of it things don’t look good, that the cards are stacked in the Mayor’s favor, instituting a plan to dig up the dirt on the Mayor and confront him with publicizing his misdeeds, which may pressure him to change his mind. While he has some initial success, as Vadim is flabbergasted that some slick Moscow attorney has such high level contacts to expose him, where in desperate straights, Vadim calls in his advisors to double check his options, but despite his pattern of cronyism, they remind him not to get so worked up, that things will work out, while also scheduling a personal appointment with the Orthodox priest, which turns out to be a most curious visit. It’s important to understand that after the fall of the Soviet regime, the Russian Orthodox Church moved in and merged with the State, quickly reclaiming valuable real estate not only from factories and bureaucratic institutions but also from schools and hospitals, where a new church was being constructed seemingly on every street corner. These construction projects were funded by entrepreneurs aligned with the government and more often than not involved bribing local officials, where overnight studying The Bible became a mandatory subject in schools while the head of the Church was wearing a forty thousand dollar wristwatch. This sudden spurt of economic growth as a byproduct of rampant corruption is right out of Fassbinder’s LOLA (1981), where attempts at ethical reform and following the letter of the law are set aside for the sake of expedience. Dmitri is so sure of himself, using the power of the law to empower a David over a Goliath, that he reaps the benefits of an overly grateful friend by sleeping with his wife, something that comes as a shock to the audience, but Kolya has lost all rational comprehension and has veered into delirium and near incapacity from excessive drinking, so he’s oblivious to what’s going on. Dmitri, however, has already asked Lilya to return to Moscow with him, something on the face of it that would sound unthinkable.

While the film is a critique of abuse of power, exposing how capitalism makes for strange bedfellows, while also drawing a larger picture of moral authority, actually bringing in the word of God in order to grasp the profound depths of the situation. Job continually found himself at the mercy of the Lord, who tested his faith by a seeming limitless capacity to endure whatever obstacle God placed in his path. But the parable of the entitled Leviathan taken from The Bible suggests there are powers greater than any man can endure, where death is but one of them. The looming portrait of Putin hanging on the walls of the State offices is impossible to miss. What elevates this particular film from others about corruption is how it connects the Russian Orthodox Church to the power of the Russian State, where their common interests are not for the benefit of people needing their services, but instead becomes an undaunted power grab, much like Henry VIII declaring himself the Supreme Head of the Church of England, where absolute power can do whatever it wants, steal, lie, kidnap, murder, inflict harm, declare war, or act irrationally and still continue to get away with it. While Dmitri will soon discover he lacks this ultimate authority, he was nonetheless deluded enough to believe for a moment that he did through the power of law. The fatalism of Roma and his friends, resigned to forever being outsiders, is the fate of the next generation knowing their future is doomed under the same unquestioned authority. Lilya is perhaps the most anguished soul of them all, largely because she has the capacity to envision a better life, as Russia toyed with the idea of a democracy, but also watched that vision go down in defeat at the hands of absolute power, where she is similarly forced to accept a world with no future while capitulating to those who would take everything away from her in the process. Kolya, on the other hand, has fended off every disaster with a sorrow rooted deeply within his Russian soul, but all that’s left is an instilled blindness, a brutal punishment with no chance of spiritual ascension, where drunken excess numbing the pain is the only way to endure the present, where there are simply no more thoughts about tomorrow. In dramatic fashion, Zvyagintsev stages a drunken shooting party like The Last Supper, a vodka-fueled picnic where Kolya and his brethren of friends display spectacular humor at the Kafkaesque absurdity of their lives living in a Russian “shithole,” which is a mere fantasy or prelude of freedom, allowing their exaggerated, out of control behavior to grow to grotesque levels of excess, while the real events that matter will soon follow afterwards, where their lives are about to unravel, twisted into unrecognizable pieces of their former selves, beleaguered characters broken by an indomitable wind that blows over the land.

Leviathan review – a compellingly told, stunningly shot drama Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian

The great trial of Job is reborn in this magnificent Russian movie, first seen at Cannes this year. Leviathan is a tragic drama, compelling in its moral seriousness, with a severity and force that escalate into a terrible, annihilating sort of grandeur. Zvyagintsev combines an Old Testament fable with something like Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice; it also has something of Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront or Robert Rossen’s municipal graft classic All the King’s Men. Kolia (Alexey Serebriakov) is a car mechanic with a modest property on prime real estate: a beautiful spot on the Barents Sea, but a crooked mayor called Vadim – a wonderful performance from Roman Madyanov, looking something like Boris Yeltsin – wants this land, and hits Kolia with a compulsory purchase order. Kolia’s old army buddy Dimitri (Vladimir Vdovichenkov), now a slick Moscow lawyer, has an incriminating file on Vadim that he promises will induce Vadim to back down, but attempting to blackmail Russia’s well-connected gangster class is fraught with danger. Leviathan shows a world governed by drunken, depressed men: everyone is drowning in vodka and despair. Kolia is at the centre of a perfect storm of poisoned destiny, at the focal point of smart lawyers, aggressive politicians and arrogant priests. The title refers to Hobbes’s Leviathan, the classic work about liberty and the state, and also the whale. A Dostoyevskian-looking priest speaks to Kolia about enduring his trials like Job, submitting to God’s will, as mighty as the great beast of the sea: “Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a fish-hook?” Yet Kolia has become not Job, but the beached whale itself. Stunningly shot and superbly acted, especially by Madyanov, this is film-making on a grand scale.

Russia, a Whale, and a Way of Life Moulder in Leviathan ... Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice

Where we come from defines us more than we even realize: That’s the idea implicit in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s somber, sturdily elegant drama Leviathan, in which a mechanic who has lived on the same parcel of land all his life — as his father and grandfather did before him — resists being forced out by his town’s corrupt mayor.

Kolia (Alexeï Serebriakov) resides with his young wife, Lilya (Elena Liadova), and son Roma (Sergueï Pokhodaev) in a simple but striking house overlooking the Barents Sea in Russia’s far north. Seemingly out of nothing but greed and spitefulness, the town’s mayor, Vadim Shelevyat (Roman Madianov), has long been angling to seize Kolia’s land for himself, and he’s just about succeeded: Kolia’s lawyer friend Dmitri (Vladimir Vdovitchenkov) has come up from Moscow to mount a last-ditch effort to block Vadim’s efforts, but the future is looking grim. Kolia is drinking way too much, Roma has become sullen and isn’t doing well in school, and Lilya seems to be drawing away from her husband, even as he’s on the brink of losing everything. In short, bureaucracy has ruined his life.

But Kolia hasn’t lost hope, and his determination is the solid, steady mechanism that keeps Leviathan moving. This is a dense, multilayered picture, one firmly rooted in a specific landscape, a dramatic coastal spot dotted with the carcasses of decrepit fishing boats, as well as the magnificent skeleton of one long-dead whale: All are reminders of everything the sea can give, or take away. Lilya works at a fish-processing plant — we watch as a procession of headless, gutted bodies flop onto a seemingly ceaseless conveyor belt, symbols of the monotony and uselessness that all human beings must resist. But Zvyagintsev (The Return, Elena) isn’t so much griping about the anxieties of living in modern Russia as he is lamenting the way life is changing everywhere: The worth of any patch of land is assessed only by its cost per acre. Who cares how many lives it has sustained over the years?

Leviathan — which took the best-screenplay prize at Cannes earlier this year — may be steeped in despair, but it’s not a heavy-handed sermon. Zvyagintsev injects some humor, some of it politically risky, in sly, unexpected ways: A show-bizzy portrait of Putin, glowing with false benevolence, hangs above the desk of that fat-cat mayor; a jovial local cop, celebrating his birthday with a vodka-fueled picnic on the beach, sets up a makeshift shooting gallery consisting of portraits of former Russian leaders. But the heart and soul of Leviathan is Serebriakov’s Kolia, who carries deep sorrow in his eyes and on his shoulders, even as he fends off defeat for longer than you’d imagine possible. Zvyagintsev, who grew up in Siberia, has said, “If my film is rooted in the Russian land, it is only because I feel no kinship, no genetic link with anything else.” Kolia is the living embodiment of that land: He’s everything that can’t be washed away by the surf, or by the greed and ambition of mankind at its worst.

Slant Magazine [Chuck Bowen]

Leviathan might be the most ironically beautiful film of the year. There's barbed pain in its beauty—feelings of constriction and of deep, cosmic futility. The landscapes particularly affirm this sense of existential hopelessness. Director Andrey Zvyagintsev and cinematographer Mikhail Krichman forge images that are always strikingly composed of a highly differentiated foreground, middle ground, and background. The foreground will often feature snapshots of domestic life that are either set in a home or in exteriors of its surrounding village; the middle ground will elaborate on said domesticity with specifics such as cars, buildings, bookshelves, flowers, and lamps; and the background will often be composed of a natural landscape that's visible from the vantage point of the foreground by virtue of a framing window or open door. Pivotally, all of the images' planes are almost always in focus at once, which encourages an audience reaction that's contemplative yet uneasy. The characters' vulnerabilities, the inadequacy of their homes to offer protection (a recurring theme in Zvyagintsev's work), is emphasized simultaneously along with the rapturous beauty of the textures that define this not-so-firma terra.

The story, small in scope, is a concentrated political chamber melodrama that's reminiscent of the plot that drove Zvyagintsev's previous film, Elena. Nikolay (Aleksei Serebryakov) is a struggling handyman at war with Vadim (Roman Madyanov), the mayor of a small Russian coastal town, over the impending seizure of the former's land by the community to use as a site for a new public center. Nikolay recruits an old military buddy, Dmitriy (Vladimir Vdovichenkov), to serve as his counsel for a countersuit against the town for unfair real estate practices, but this is widely understood, especially by Zvyagintsev, to be a meaningless pretense for what is truly a glorified dispute with the mafia. Vadim is established, in terms that are eerily undefined, to be corrupt and capable of profound cruelties, and he's also murkily in bed with the local church, which supports the seizure while offering pitiful platitudes to those who might be rendered homeless by the process. The game's rigged, in other words, and Nikolay's only hope is to play prison rules, which Dmitriy honors with dirt on Vadim that ultimately proves beside the point. Mixed up in all this is Nikolay's very obviously bored and anguished wife, Lilya (Elena Lyadova), who's having an affair with the shifty, hypocritically self-righteous Dmitriy.

Remarkably, Leviathan is even bleaker than it sounds, and far less plot-driven (most of the above is established in the first 45 minutes). Telling, pointed references to the Book of Job and to figures such as Boris Yeltsin often brutally convey the director's assertion that rampantly obvious government corruption leads to a profound dissolution of proletariat morale that basically equates to godlessness. God may or may not be up in the sky, but this unyielding misery is right here, in Nikolay's home, as Vadim destroys him. Vadim likens Nikolay and his impoverished kind to insects, and he's partially right, though he's missing the obvious truth that we're all insects, regarded by the great leviathans of creation and mystery with probable indifference. This is where those gorgeous, richly detailed landscapes reveal themselves to be more than the exertion of astonishingly careful craftsmanship; they are the less tangible complement to the literal leviathan, the great whale that occasionally shows itself, most notably in Lilya's rapturous, heartbreakingly gorgeous, and ambiguous final scene. Zvyagintsev contrasts the grandiosity of his nature reveries with the smallness of the human drama; the community itself even appears to be squeezed into but a fraction of the world the director shows us, and everyone seems to be living on top of one another, equating their self-inflicted damage with God's wrath.

Leviathan is an admittedly bitter brew, and Zvyagintsev's specificity of vision can sometimes resemble a proof being tested, rather than a living, breathing drama unfolding in front of us. But the director's cynicism isn't comfortably settled in amber and offered up as absolute truth. Zvyagintsev never loses sight of the humans, who're allowed to display improvisatory behavior that deepens the majesty of the rigorously orchestrated tableaus. The slowness of the film lowers the audience's guard for moments so wrenching as to court profundity, such as a boozy, macho picnic that turns disastrous, or Lilya's aforementioned moment with the leviathan, or a startling, show-stopping embrace between Nikolay and his disenfranchised son, Roma (Sergey Pokhodaev). This is a big, bold, depressing movie, just in time for the holidays, but it affirms the sentiment that suggests that deep pain is an indication of an active, engaged, positively alive soul. Look to the landscape, for there's hope in it.

“Two Days, One Night” and “Leviathan” Reviews - The New ... Anthony Lane from The New Yorker

One of the hardest things to decide, as you stumble out of “Leviathan,” is whether you have watched a large movie or a small one. Much of the action is stuck on spits of land at the edge of the Kola Peninsula, in northwestern Russia. Moscow is hopelessly distant; one character, offered a chance to move there and begin afresh, scorns the very thought. There are no armies on the march, or international incidents. Rather, the fate of a few citizens, unregarded and often unsavory, lies in the balance. Many conversations start and end around a kitchen table. Why, then, should we be left with such an impression of grandeur, limitless suffering, and wrath?

Kolya (Aleksey Serebryakov) lives near the shore, in a ramshackle house where his family has dwelt for generations; we see it in old photographs on the wall. He has a beautiful wife, Lilya (Elena Lyadova), and a teen-age son, Roma (Sergey Pokhodaev), from an earlier marriage. Father and son express their mutual love in fisticuffs, sometimes playful, sometimes not. The house is menaced by the mayor, a squat and unrelenting brute named Vadim (Roman Madyanov). He wants to develop the site, and what the mayor wants he gets. In an extraordinary scene, a judge reads out a ruling in favor of Vadim against Kolya, rattling forth the words at a pace that would put Danny Kaye to shame, while the camera slowly worms toward the bench.

Into this setup comes Dmitriy (Vladimir Vdovichenkov)—a buddy of Kolya’s, now a lawyer, and the closest thing to a sophisticate that the film can supply. He challenges Vadim, and even tries to blackmail him with a file of former sins; imagine how well that works. One of the great virtues of “Leviathan,” and a source of its surprising spaciousness, is how zealously the director, Andrey Zvyagintsev, takes time to follow minor characters to a point where their predicaments strike a major chord. It happens with Dmitriy, who, not because he is dashing but simply because he seems different, lures Lilya into bed; it happens with Lilya, whose desperation swells at every turn; and it happens, unforgettably, with Roma, a spitfire of confusion and resentment, who spends his evenings with a gaggle of other youths, learning how to drink.

Dear God, the drinking. The people in this movie put away vodka like marathon runners taking on water. Without it, who could stand the pace? Alcohol is for every occasion: to toast, to mourn, to oil the wheels of a fight. Policemen are among the champion boozers. “Are you O.K. to drive?” a woman asks her husband. “I’m a traffic cop, aren’t I?” he replies. The blend of clear liquor and tar-black humor is served up without cease, most lavishly at a birthday celebration by the sea, where the wives cook chicken while their menfolk, as drunk as lords and armed like mercenaries, loose off weapons at will. The targets are framed portraits of former Soviet leaders, brought along for fun. The movie itself is taking comic potshots here, but what stays in the air, once the scene is over, is a whiff of unmanageable wildness, as though the edges of civilization had been clawed. If Zvyagintsev begins and ends “Leviathan” with seascapes, and with the smash of waves against eroded rocks, he is not showing off his majestic setting. He is reminding us that everything, stones and nation-states, can be eaten away.

The best one-liner in “Leviathan” comes in the opening credits: “With support from the Russian Ministry of Culture.” Reportedly, as much as thirty-five per cent of the budget was supplied by government funding. This is like Kazakhstan using oil revenues to pay for “Borat.” Hardly any aspect of the body politic emerges from “Leviathan” unscarred, starting with the picture of an almost smiling Vladimir Putin that hangs behind the desk in Vadim’s office. He and the town’s priest enjoy an amicable dinner, and the mayor is present, together with his fur-draped wife, for the rousing sermon that the man of God delivers at the climax, clasping Russia and its resurgent pride to the bosom of the Orthodox Church. The weather in this movie may be peculiarly mild, but make no mistake: a moral permafrost has set in.

As for the title, it refers to many things: the fearsome view of constitutional order propounded by Thomas Hobbes, in 1651; the skeleton of a whale, stranded and whitened on the beach; and the monster named in the Book of Job, of whom the Almighty says, “Lay thine hand upon him, remember the battle, do no more.” Kolya’s decline, as he wrestles with the bulk of official power, is indeed Biblical in its swiftness, but at least Job wound up with a thousand she-asses. Our hero can hardly keep himself in hooch. “Leviathan” is a tale for vertiginous times, with the ruble in free fall. There must be thousands of stories like Kolya’s right now, lives folding and collapsing, upon which Zvyagintsev could cast his unfoolable eye. Despite that, he is not primarily a satirist, or even a social commentator; he is the calm surveyor of a fallen world, and “Leviathan,” for all its venom, never writhes out of control. His compositions keep their poise, and the sight of a digger destroying a house, chomping away at furniture and walls, is presented in a long and tranquil take. All ages, and all habitations, are ripe for wrecking; Roma and his mates—Russia’s future—hang out in the hull of a ruined church, around a fire. “Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward,” Job was told, and we watch those same sparks, rising peacefully into the dark.

Leviathan - KinoKultura Julian Graffy, 2015

Lyudmila Ulitskaya Against the State - The New Yorker Masha Gessen from The New Yorker, October 6, 2014

Russia: Man vs. System - The New York Review of Books Masha Gessen, December 26, 2014

Orthodox Church unholy alliance with Putin - Telegraph Adrian Blomfield, February 23, 2008

How Vladimir Putin helped resurrect the Russian Orthodox ... Mark MacKinnon from The Globe and the Mail, January 15, 2014

Leviathan movie inspired by Heemeyer dozer rampage Lance Maggart from Sky-Hi Daily News, February 3, 2015

The Oscar-Nominated Film Hollywood Loves, But the Russian Government Hates Ethan Gates from The New Republic, February 8, 2015

“Leviathan”: A tragic, ironic masterpiece from Putin's Russia ... Andrew O’Hehir from Salon

World Socialist Web Site [Dorota Niemitz and David Walsh]

Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]

Leviathan - Reviews - Reverse Shot Eric Hynes

Sight & Sound [Ryan Gilbey] November 28, 2014

ReelTalk [Frank Wilkins]

Andrei Zvyagintsevs Cannes winner Leviathan is a ... - HitFix Guy Lodge

Leviathan / The Dissolve Scott Tobias

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Writing: Movies [Chris Knipp]

Toronto 2014 Review: LEVIATHAN Takes A ... - Twitch Kurt Halfyard

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Review: Fighting city hall has dire consequences in the ... Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club

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IONCINEMA [Nicholas Bell]

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Leviathan (2014) Matt Page from Bible Films Blog

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Sound On Sight (Zach Lewis)

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Leviathan | Chicago Reader Ben Sachs

MUBI [Adrian Curry] movie posters

Leviathan director Andrey Zvyagintsev: ‘Living in Russia is like being in a minefield’ Shaun Walker interview from The Guardian, November 6, 2014

'Leviathan': Cannes Review - The Hollywood Reporter Leslie Felperin

Variety [Peter Debruge]

An Oscar Russia really doesn't want to win David Gillespie from Reuters, February 1, 2015

Leviathan review – Andrey Zvyagintsev's outstanding tale of ... Mark Kermode from The Guardian

Oscar-nominated Leviathan upsets officials in native Russia ... Shaun Walker from The Guardian, January 16, 2015

Russian film awards snub Oscar nominee Leviathan for best picture Ben Beaumont-Thomas from The Guardian, January 26, 2015

'Leviathan' Film Pleases Cannes, Disliked by Russian Culture Minister The Moscow Times, May 23, 2014

'Leviathan' Controversy Reveals Bruised Egos Natalia Antonova from The Moscow Times, January 19, 2015

Russian Orthodox Church Says 'Leviathan' Panders to Western Prejudice The Moscow Times, January 21, 2015

Leviathan's Zvyagintsev: Controversy in Russia Shows Film 'Touched Something' The Moscow Times, January 29, 2015

'Leviathan' Picks Up 6 Awards at Russian Film Ceremony The Moscow Times, February 4, 2015

'Leviathan' Makes $110,000 in Russian Premiere The Moscow Times, February 8, 2015

Controversial Russian Film 'Leviathan' Won't be Shown in Pskov | News The Moscow Times, February 10, 2015

Toronto Film Scene [Jordan Adler]

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'Leviathan' movie review: From Russia with buzz - The ... Ann Hornaday from The Washington Post

Why a Russian film nominated for an Oscar is stirring angst at home Karoun Demirjian from The Washington Post, February 11, 2015

The Cleveland Movie Blog [Milan Paurich]

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Open up mighty 'Leviathan,' see bleak Russia's soul - Los ... Kenneth Turan from The LA Times

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Leviathan Movie Review & Film Summary (2014) | Roger ... Godfrey Cheshire

'Leviathan' Turns on a Modern-Day Job - The New York Times Manohla Dargis

Moscow Was Urged to Annex Crimea Before Ukraine President's Fall, Report Says Neil MacFarquhar from The New York Times, February 25, 2015

DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]

Russia's roadmap for annexing eastern Ukraine 'leaked from Vladimir Putin's office' Adam Withnall from The Independent, February 25, 2015

The Great Ukraine Conspiracy Revealed? Anna Zemtsova from the Daily Beast, February 25, 2015

Zwick, Edward

GLORY

USA (122 mi) 1989

Time Out review

Glory heralds the bravery of the American Civil War's first black fighting unit. Most of the emphasis has gone into evoking a firm sense of period: screenwriter Kevin Jarre reveals less talent for full-blooded characterisation and dialogue. Led by white officers headed by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (Broderick), the men set off from the North for confrontation, which culminates in the bloody storming of a Confederate fort. Among the soldiers (and giving the best performances) are a calm gravedigger (Freeman) and a belligerent runaway slave (Washington). Voice-over narration makes effective use of the real-life Shaw's correspondence, but in terms of authenticity the battle sequences are truly impressive. Marching across open fields amid cannon-shot, or plunging into hand-to-hand combat, the stark clarity of Freddie Francis' cinematography combined with Zwick's intimate style evokes immediacy and fear.

Turner Classic Movies review Paul Tatara

Edward Zwick’s Glory (1989), a Civil War historical drama starring Matthew Broderick, Denzel Washington, and Morgan Freeman, is especially memorable for its attention to physical detail— the cinematography and production design are both breathtaking. But Zwick’s story, which is based on real events, also deals with the plight of African-American troops during the War Between the States, a topic that, quite shamefully, is barely touched upon in this country’s history books. For that reason, the film is more challenging than your average Civil War picture. Many of the narrative’s key battles are fought between men who are supposed to be comrades in arms.

Broderick is Union Gen. Robert Gould Shaw, a baby-faced Bostonian who’s assigned to lead the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Army, the first Black fighting regiment in the war. The men of the 54th are a scruffy collection of former and escaped slaves. We follow the men - including a rebellious, deeply embittered escaped slave named Trip (Washington), and a wise, emotionally-measured gravedigger named Rawlins (Freeman) – as they’re turned into soldiers. But first, they have to be accepted as human beings by the often brutal military officers that are training them. The men’s inner and outward battles will finally come to a head during a horrific suicide mission at Carolina’s Fort Wagner.

Zwick was careful when filming Glory not to turn it into a Black story with a more commercially convenient white hero. “We didn’t want this film to fall under that shadow,” Freeman said. “This is a picture about the 54th Regiment, not Colonel Shaw, but at the same time the two are inseparable.” In order to assure accuracy, Zwick hired Shelby Foote, who would later become a semi-household name courtesy of Ken Burns’ popular 1990 PBS nine episode documentary The Civil War, as a technical advisor.

It’s interesting to note that Washington was reluctant to take on his role in Glory. “I had a lot of reservations about doing something like [Glory],” he said in a 1990 issue of Ebony magazine. “My father-in-law was a principal at one of the top Black high schools in North Carolina and he always told me the worst thing that ever happened was integration. In a lot of ways I agree with him, because we have gotten further and further away from (Black) culture.” But he finally recognized that Glory gave him a shot at “an honest portrayal, a fully realized character.” He accepted the role, of course, and won an Oscar® as a result.

In 1995, when he was promoting Courage Under Fire (1996), Zwick said he was unhappy about having to go to the Department of Defense to get help with his Gulf War picture. The generals wanted him to change a few scenes to their liking, and this infuriated him. He said he was convinced that this sort of government interference arises when bureaucrats with no writing experience try to shape a narrative that they’re incapable of judging. And he used his experience on Glory to prove his point.

“[Glory] is shown today in Officer Candidate School as an example of the tribulations of leadership and as inspiration to the rank and file,” he said. “Had I originally shown that script – which describes racism, a whipping by a junior officer, incidents of all sorts of insubordination and questionable treatment – to the Department of Defense, I do not think at that time they would have been able to support it.”

Zwick’s stance was that fact-based motion pictures such as Glory and Courage Under Fire require conflict, or they simply don’t work. “Without conflict,” he continued, “without a more textured portrait, you would have a recruiting film. That’s fine when someone is making ‘Be all that you can be commercials,’ but that’s not drama.”

Glory received widespread critical praise upon release with Variety proclaiming that it "has the sweep and magnificence of a Tolstoy battle tale or a John Ford saga of American history." Vincent Canby, The New York Times film critic, concurred, writing "Glory is the first serious American movie about the Civil War to be made in years. There haven't been that many anyway - D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915), Buster Keaton's The General (1927), David O. Selznick's Gone with the Wind (1939) and John Huston's The Red Badge of Courage (1951). Almost everything else has been balderdash...Although Glory employs the devices of fiction and sometimes is as brightly colored as a recruiting poster, it seems as severe as a documentary alongside those earlier films...Glory is celebratory, but it celebrates in a manner that insists on acknowledging the sorrow. This is a good, moving, complicated film." In addition to Denzel Washington's Best Supporting Actor Oscar®, Glory was nominated for four other Academy Awards including Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Film Editing, Best Sound and Best Cinematography (by Freddie Francis); it won in the latter two categories.

Peter Reiher essay also seen here: Peter Reiher

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [4/4]

eFilmCritic.com (Andrew Howe) review [5/5] also seen here: Film Written Magazine (Andrew Howe)

filmcritic.com (James Brundage) review [4/5]

Movie-Vault.com (Dan Smith) review

Rambles [Tom Knapp]

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice dvd review [3.5/5] Michael Dequina

The Digital Bits dvd review Bill Hunt and Brian Ford Sullivan, 2-disc Special Edition

DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Shawn Harwell, 2-disc Special Edition

A Guide to Current DVD (Aaron Beierle) dvd review [Special Edition]

DVD Authority.com (Matt Brighton) dvd review [Special Edition]

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Special Edition] Colin Jacobson

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review [Superbit Edition] [Region 2] Nate Goss

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

Movieline Magazine review Richard Natale

Edinburgh U Film Society [Malcolm Maclaren]

Latino and the Chicano warrior in the U.S. national body Barbara Korte from Jump Cut, Spring 2008

Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review [A] [Special Edition] Mark Bernardin

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/5]

Washington Post (Desson Howe) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

THE SIEGE

USA (116 mi) 1998 ‘Scope

Time Out review

This earnest thriller confronts urban terrorism head-on; however, its frightening depiction of bombings and repressive martial law in NY is undercut by muddled political thinking and a conventional storyline. Moslem fanatics are pitted against three conflicting forces of 'good': Washington's FBI anti-terrorism task force, Bening's National Security Agency operation, and rogue army general Willis. Reinforcing a self-conscious sense of fair play, Edward Zwick includes reams of special pleading on behalf of law-abiding Arab-Americans. Brilliantly captured by Roger Deakins' bleached-out camerawork and Steve Rosenblum's urgent editing, the best scenes are those depicting Washington's impotence in the face of a ruthless bombing campaign that culminates in a suicide attack on FBI HQ. Utterly absurd is Willis's slide from gung-ho patriot to 'might is right' megalomaniac, while not even Washington can lend credibility to lines like, 'If we torture this man, we've already lost.'

Exclaim! dvd review Ian Mackenzie

“Imagine if there was an attack on New York City like 9/11,” actor Annette Bening says in one of this DVD’s extra features, “and then it didn’t stop.” Roughly, that’s the premise of Edward Zwick’s “eerily prescient” 1998 constitutional thriller: an escalating series of terrorist attacks leaves NYC caught between the conflicting operating interests of the FBI, the CIA and the American military. Well acted by its all-star cast (including Denzel Washington and Bruce Willis) and proficiently directed, The Siege was meaty entertainment even before history jumped in to grant it special status. So there’s really only one reason for a re-release and that is to re-examine the film through the proverbial post-9/11 lens. Luckily, The Siege is the rare cultural artefact that actually benefits from this exercise. Through the DVD’s four major extra features (three short documentaries and a director’s commentary), the filmmakers show how their film anticipates nearly all of the conditions that led to the real attacks on NYC: a systemic failure of communication between the CIA, FBI, NYPD and military; an infiltration of known Islamic extremists through the U.S. student visa program; and “blowback” from CIA-financed Mujahideen groups involved in the Afghan war against the Soviet invasion. It’s a concise and informative primer, and the filmmakers have a palpable interest in the topical nature of their subject matter Zwick went on to direct last year’s much heavier handed political thriller Blood Diamond. And with its full-scale pyrotechnic depictions of terrorist acts shot on-location in New York, The Siege also sits neatly on the cusp of a major transition in American filmmaking; it’s the beginning of the end for large-scale, on-location set pieces. With the subsequent emergence of high-quality digital effects and NYC’s paranoia, it’s unlikely a major studio is going to be staging grand depictions of terrorism and martial law there anytime soon.

Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review

Terrorist" is a term that the big army uses to refer to the little army. The Siege illustrates that in many cases, depending on the context, the big army is the same as the little army.

The movie begins by showing us actual footage of the aftermath of the bombing of an American military compound in Saudi Arabia, with clips of Clinton condemning the act. As Clinton promises retaliation, the person believed to be responsible, Sheik Ahmed Bin Talal (Ahmed Ben Larby), is kidnapped from the desert kingdom and brought to the U.S. (apparently in violation of international law, which I don't understand given the Noriega and Mir Aimal Kasi incidents). This sparks an Islamic retaliation where devout followers of the Sheik start bombing buses and theatres so they can get him released. FBI agent Anthony Hubbard (Denzel Washington) is in charge of taking out the terrorist cells, but after the first two bombings, the president invokes the war powers act and martial law is imposed in the city. This results a complete suspension of constitutional "rights" as the military, led by General William Devereaux (Bruce Willis), takes over.

Devereaux's methods don't suit Hubbard but since the General is in command, there is no choice. The movie portrays the persecution of Arab-Americans by Devereaux and the military, with mixed results. Director Edward Zwick does not try to diminish the authenticity of what would happen if martial law were imposed in a populated city (even though not much time is spent on this aspect of the film) and the results are effective at times.

The acting is pretty good--in particular Denzel Washington's portrayal of Hubbard is excellent. Some of the lines are highly memorable, including the one about shredding the constitution, illustrating the point that when one uses terrorist tactics to fight terrorists, the other side has already won. The passion in Washington's voice really comes off well. I think this scene, which is followed by the execution of the suspected terrorist, is the most powerful in the movie. Bruce Willis is decent as an arrogant general, but he appears to be hiding a constant smirk. Annette Bening plays the part of a confused American with loyalties to both the American and Islamic sides fairly well.

One of the things that works in this movie is the basis for the plot: As the movie progresses, Hubbard learns that the terrorists were taught how to kill by the U.S. Military in a plan to depose Saddam Hussein (it should be pointed out that during the Iran/Iraq war, it was the U.S. that enabled Hussein [I have no idea why almost everyone uses Saddam Hussein's first name when addressing him in the media. I'm sure the Iraqi newspapers and politicians don't use "Bill" to refer to the U.S. President] to acquire the deadly weapons it accuses Iraq of possessing). But when the operation was pulled out suddenly, on a political whim, this leads to the militants being stranded and massacred by the Iraqi forces. I say all this is because this is an extremely plausible explanation for past and future Islamic terrorist attacks and suggests that the root of all these terror lies within the forces that unleashed it in the first place (in fact, the Kasi incident might well be an instance of this scenario).

The ending is a bit too quick for my tastes. The identity of the final cell is not a big surprise, and how it is taken down is a bit of an anti-climax. Other than that, The Siege is an interesting and thought-provoking film and definitely worth the matinee fare.

In the wake of the recent attacks on September 11, 2001, it's amazing how much foresight this movie had.

filmcritic.com (Don Willmott) review [3.5/5]

Well here's a movie that was ahead of its time. Three years ahead, to be precise. When The Siege came out in 1998, the Arab-American community complained bitterly about the depiction of Arabs as terrorists who were intent on destroying New York. How chilling to realize in retrospect that blowing up a Broadway theater or a city bus would seem positively quaint compared to how things really turned out.

The movie's setup -- Arab-Americans are rounded up in an un-Constitutional manner after a series of terrorists acts in New York -- looks today like a "ripped from the headlines" plot. FBI agent Anthony "Hub" Hubbard and his Arab-American partner Frank Haddad (Tony Shalhoub), whose own son is caught up in the anti-Arab sweep, are in charge of an increasingly chaotic situation in a city that eventually finds itself under martial law, with troops marching in cinematically over the Brooklyn Bridge.

This complex state of affairs, along with the arrival of the somewhat mysterious agent/spy Elise Craft (Annette Bening) offers ample opportunity for discussions, debates, and shouting matches about what is and isn't fair and legal in a time of terror. Things really come to a boil when military commander Major General William Devereaux (Bruce Willis) shows up to take the Dick Cheney position on matters of state (i.e. round 'em up first, sort 'em out later, and don’t bother with Miranda rights), and it eventually becomes clear that he has even more nefarious plans in mind and probably needs to be stopped (like I said, the Dick Cheney position).

The Siege is effective throughout but especially in the early going as the city gets increasingly tense under the terror onslaught. Although it can't help but depict Arabs in a generally negative light (the protesters had a point), it's important to note that the movie comes out of liberal Hollywood, so there are plenty of opportunities for the imprisoned Arab-Americans to make the case that this wouldn't be happening to them if they were black or Puerto Rican. Probably true, although it would have happened if they were Japanese-American in 1942.

All the stars play to type. Washington is serious, focused, and all business. Bening is elegant and mysterious. Willis is Die Hardish but on the side of evil this time. Everything races along dramatically, with twists and turns of motivation along the way that hold your attention until all the final showdowns play out.

What's most interesting watching about The Siege today as opposed to in 1998 is that so much painful history has transpired since, and much of what seemed so extreme and unthinkable back then came to pass just four or five years later. How many uncharged "enemy combatants" were in Guantanamo at its peak? If nothing else, The Siege is a good reminder of just how tenuous our hold on our civil rights can be when fear takes over.

Civil society under siege: terrorism and government response to terrorism in The Siege Helena Vanhala from Jump Cut, Spring 2008

Alex Ioshpe review [9/10]

Salon (Charles Taylor) review

Philadelphia City Paper (Sam Adams) review

Nitrate Online (Sean Axmaker) review

Scott Renshaw review [5/10]

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]

James Bowman review

Serdar Yegulalp retrospective

eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [4/5]

The Aisle Seat (Mike McGranaghan) review

Harvey S. Karten review

MediaCircus (Anthony Leong) review

CNN Showbiz (Paul Clinton) review

Movie Reviews UK review [2/5] Michael S. Goldberger

eFilmCritic.com (Ryan Arthur) review [3/5]

Edwin Jahiel review

Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [C]

Dragan Antulov review [4/10]

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Kevin Clemons) dvd review

DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Guido Henkel

DVD Verdict (Sean McGinnis) dvd review

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [2/5]

DVD Talk - Martial Law Edition (Preston Jones)

Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [2.5/5]

Movie Habit (Marty Mapes) review [3.5/4]

Isthmus (Kent Williams) review

Political Film Review Michael Haas

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [2/5]

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [2.5/5] Chris Gore

Entertainment Weekly review [B-] Owen Gleiberman

TVGuide.Com's Review

Variety (Todd McCarthy) review

The Globe and Mail review [2/4] Rick Groen

The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [2.5/5]

San Francisco Examiner (Walter Addiego) review

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review

BLOOD DIAMOND C+ 79

USA (138 mi) 2006

It’s unfortunate that African history continues to be told in the movies almost exclusively by white people (Zwick also filmed GLORY IN 1989), including an inevitable romance by the white stars as well, as they inevitably leave out core issues when attempting to tell a story about something which whites were intentionally excluded from in the first place. As a result, while meaning well, (I even received an e-mail alert from Amnesty International to go see this film), these end up being exploitive films, as they highlight commercial interests, such as effusive use of automatic machine guns, plenty of action sequences leaving dead or maimed bodies lying on the ground, images of horrific carnage mixed with third world poverty, plenty of huge explosions, and in this film, even a RAMBO-like raid that leaves nearly everyone in the vicinity dead. These are simplistic Hollywood-exploitive films, where the bullets and death toll resemble video games, stooping to all-time depths with the exaggerated use of gangsta rap music to supposedly spoon feed Americans with something they can understand, where the film hides behind the supposed historic reality that so many Africans were murdered or slaughtered, but in fact, this little reality fits perfectly into the Hollywood reality, where they’re used to blowing people away at will whether they be gangsters, soldiers, mercenaries, invading aliens, or now innocent African civilians. In the movie world, they easily blow everyone to bits.

There is an extraordinary story here that gets lost in the film, as that is easily the most boring part of the film, sucking the very life out of the fast-paced action sequences, so it’s basically relegated to only the opening and closing scenes, but is also mentioned during the so-called romance sequences, like this would stir the hearts of these individuals - again, manipulative as ever. It just so happens Leonard DiCaprio is very good in this gritty role as Danny, an expert smuggler, orphaned from the wars of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, where his parents were mutilated and murdered. He now does the highly specialized criminal dirty work for highly funded multi-national corporations who wish to exploit African resources, in this case diamonds. It turns out to be an old colonialist story that is over 100 years old and was much more effectively told in Peter Bate’s 2003 Belgian documentary CONGO: WHITE KING, RED RUBBER, BLACK DEATH, but it didn’t have the Hollywood resources, so fewer people will ever see the better film. Here the story takes place in 1999 during the civil wars of Sierre Leone, where rebel and government forces are fighting a bloodbath over exclusive control of the diamond industry, where as the film aptly reveals, almost all of the dead will in their lifetime never see a diamond. These wars leave the population in utter pandemonium, as men are killed or mutilated, women are raped, and children are stolen to be re-educated (brainwashed) and trained to fight for one side or the other.

Djimon Hounsou, whose real life birthplace is Benin, bordering Nigeria, plays Solomon, who is kidnapped by rebel forces in a raid on his small village and immediately sent to work slave labor in the diamond mines, where men are shot on the spot if caught trying to steal diamonds. Solomon finds a gigantic diamond and is caught by the commander, who happens to be shot and wounded at that very moment from an attack by government forces who round up everyone and send them to prison, but Solomon was able to bury the diamond. In prison, Danny overhears the commander threaten Solomon over “the biggest diamond” he’s ever seen, so Danny buddies up next to him. Their decision to combine forces once again happens during another military raid, when they might otherwise die without each other’s help. It’s a long journey back to that buried diamond, where along the way we witness hundreds dead, a refugee camp of over a million people, and Danny enlists the aid of an American journalist, Jennifer Connelly, another bullheaded, individualistic loner whose skills are needed to get them through military checkpoints. As so much of their lives together comes under fire, this threesome actually develops an interesting moral integrity working together that they wouldn’t otherwise have individually, led by the highly personalized dilemma faced by Solomon, whose performance of single-minded purpose to reunite his family is the emotional powerhouse of the film.

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

De Beers, the Johannesburg-based company with a hammerlock on the world's diamond trade, has been waging a PR campaign for months in anticipation of Blood Diamond, a thriller about the wars waged over—and financed by—the precious stones found in African mines. In one sense, De Beers has reason to worry: Though the company officially condemns the trade in "conflict diamonds," the film lays out a convincing case for how a corporation (called Van Der Kaap here) might launder these gems through back channels. Yet Blood Diamond doesn't really convince as a movie: All that juicy information about unsavory industry practices is relegated to a few ham-handed speeches and title cards sprinkled across conventional action-adventure fare. It's the classic case of a filmmaker having a political message, then awkwardly constructing a story around it.

With much of the intensity that carried his performance in The Departed, Leonardo DiCaprio again does strong work as a reluctant hero in Humphrey Bogart mode. Born in Zimbabwe—or "Rhodeeeezia," as he likes to call the former colony—DiCaprio is a diamond smuggler whose mercenary nature arises from a deep cynicism about Africa in general. With Sierra Leone engaged in civil war, DiCaprio trades guns for diamonds with the brutal Revolutionary United Front rebels, who drive citizens into slave labor and recruit armies of dead-eyed child soldiers. After R.U.F. thugs raze his village, kidnap his son, and force him to pan for stones, Djimon Hounsou gains some leverage when he unearths a honking big pink diamond and hides it from his captors. When DiCaprio catches wind of Hounsou's prize, he proposes to help him find his son if Hounsou leads him to the diamond. The third wheel in this scenario is Jennifer Connelly, a freelance journalist who leans on DiCaprio for a big story on conflict diamonds.

Having a hero that trades on human misery sounds like a bold conceit, but Zwick softens up DiCaprio's character at every opportunity, first by providing two noble partners to stir his slumbering conscience, and later by filling in his sobering backstory. Much like Zwick's Glory and The Last Samurai, Blood Diamond strives to be an "important" film while stopping well short of being genuinely provocative and artistically chancy. Basically, Zwick attaches a well-meaning, self-congratulatory message to a cardboard action movie in which Africans are reduced to noble sufferers or collateral damage. Considering they get no share in the diamond trade, perhaps it's only fitting they don't get a share in a movie about it.

The Village Voice [Nathan Lee]

"T.I.A.," mutters Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio), slouched across a bar in Sierra Leone. It is 1999. As the West obsesses over Clinton's blowjob, the West African nation is mired in a savage civil war. Our hero, a world-weary soldier of fortune, has struck up a conversation with Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly), a foxy idealist reporting on the blood-diamond trade for an American newsweekly. As the ground operative of a vast conspiracy to exploit the country's unrest in the harvesting of precious stones, Danny holds the key to her story—holds it, most conveniently, in a little red notebook he keeps tucked against his cold black heart.

T.I.A., baby. Danny sizes up the lady journalist with his jaded blue eyes. They have witnessed too much on the dark continent to shed a tear. Apartheid, civil war, tribal conflict, human slaughter, global indifference, unquenchable hatred, unimaginable cruelty—yes . . . this is Africa!

Well, yes and no. It doesn't quite roll off the tongue the same way, but a more appropriate acronym in this case would go something like T.I.A.P.U.O.M.A.A.C.Y.W.B.T.T.S.S.O.B.W.P.W.S.H.A.T.I.G.R.B.S.T.W.N.A./O.V.A.: This Is Africa Propped Up Once More As A Colorful Yet Wrenching Backdrop To The Stupid Story Of Boring White People Whose Sham Heroics Are Thrown Into Greater Relief By Surrounding Them With Noble And/Or Vicious Africans.

Directed by Edward Zwick (The Last Samurai) from a screenplay by the author of that legendary sociopolitical treatise K-PAX (Charles Leavitt), Blood Diamond assembles three refugees from central casting around the quest for an egg-sized pink diamond. When Revolutionary United Front rebels rampage through his village, Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou) is wrenched from his family and put to work mining diamonds. Pulling what looks like a giant, rusty crack pipe from the river, Solomon retrieves the rock and sets about hiding it when government soldiers bust in and cart everyone off to jail. Word of the diamond soon reaches Danny, himself imprisoned for the possession of criminally ridiculous blond highlights, and a scheme is hatched to get rich or die trying.

The holy trinity of African adventure-flick clichés—the amoral mercenary, the righteous native, the idealistic reporter—is soon completed by the arrival of Maddy, and everyone heads off into the picturesque jungles, slums, and refugee camps of war-torn Sierra Leone. Endless stretches of witless torpor are interrupted by jarring assaults of violence; the bland Oscar bait of the season bristles to life only at the touch of mass murder. Workmanlike at best, Zwick's generic epic chops show newfound verve whenever there's a deadly set piece to mount: eight-year-old RUF agents mowing down women with AK-47s, innocents shredded to pieces in the crossfire, limbs severed, buildings detonated, cars aflame, shrapnel whizzing through flesh.

It's remarkable that a movie presumably opposed to Western exploitation of Africa exhibits a heartbeat only when slaughtering its anonymous, dark-skinned extras. To be sure, there's splendid momentum to the havoc here, a real thrill in the quickness of death leaping from the jungle, machine gun fire rattling through the ominous bass of gangsta rap. Such excitements would be less unsettling had their spark lit on any larger idea than "Whoa, shit is messed up in Africa." If Zwick and Leavitt intend to draw any parallel with American city life—the crack pipe in the river, the dropping of the word bling—it gets smothered in the tedium of an oppressively cornball script.

De Beers can relax; the only indignation stirred up by Blood Diamond won't be among those who worry about where their jewelry came from, but with audiences incensed by facile politics and bad storytelling. "You might catch a minute of this on CNN," says Maddy of the surrounding horrors, "between sports and weather." After she is confronted by the spectacle of a million refugees, her voice gathers gravitas and declares, "It's a like a whole nation has gone . . . homeless." Connelly is so ready for her "I Am African" poster.

Stuart Klawans | The Nation Stuart Klawans from the Nation

Down to hell Ed Zwick tumbles, over his good intentions. The director of Glory and The Last Samurai has set out willingly for the inferno of 1990s Sierra Leone, where drug-addled child conscripts carried out massacres for a rebel army, using guns bought through the diamond trade. His golden intention: to stir the conscience of moviegoers in the North so they will seek to end such horrors. When Americans go out for a date on Friday night, when they seek holiday recreation, Zwick will appall them with scenes they previously refused to watch on the 11 o'clock news. All he will ask, by way of thanks, is an Oscar or two.

In this way, Zwick has arrived at a substitute hell: the cinematic Styx titled Blood Diamond.

It is long (or, if you prefer, epic), expensively expansive, marvelous to look at (no matter how awful its events) and incorrigibly expository. Considering how much information Charles Leavitt's screenplay dumps into your ears, you might at least expect to leave the theater with a focused analysis. But given the number of clichés Zwick has lavished on the subject, you are more likely to lose track of the argument, so that you'll go away with nothing in mind but triumph and tragedy. The triumph belongs to thrice-noble Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou), who starts out as a poor fisherman but by the end has a briefcase full of cash, a handsome new suit and lip service from a chamber of white diplomats. (So much for the suffering of Africa's people.) The tragedy is that of Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly), a conspicuously hot globetrotting correspondent for The Nation, or some such magazine. By the end, this unlikely figure has filed the biggest story of her career, but at what cost? Maddy will never again ride up and down on mercenary-smuggler Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio)--so tanned, so sweaty, so interesting.

Don't get me wrong: If any onscreen love interest would be worth Jennifer Connelly's attention, it would be Leo, who comes to the role pumped and gives good dialect, too. But why (apart from the obvious reason) should Blood Diamond waste so much time building sexual tension between him and Connelly? With so many chases to cut to, why don't they? Why, as Connelly waits for the inevitable, must she take seriously a role that Karen Allen in Raiders of the Lost Ark played for laughs? And speaking of those chases: How do the stars of Blood Diamond make so many improbable escapes from hails of bullets? You'd think the movie ought to be called Near-Death Experience.

"I know people who say there is something wrong inside our black skins," Hounsou tells DiCaprio at a meditative moment between machine-gun bursts, "and we were better off when the white man ruled." For all of Zwick's good intentions, I see nothing in Blood Diamond to contradict this foul opinion. With exceptions that are painfully few (and painfully stilted), the film's black Africans come booming their blood-lust song straight out of Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo." The white mercenary-smuggler, by contrast, is at heart a soulful fellow, trembling for Connelly's redemptive touch. ("An entire country made homeless," she sighs to him, with her right breast fetchingly displayed.) Anyhow, the white man still seems to rule, since the solution to Africa's problems, evidently, is for several of the species to pass a resolution at a G-8 conference.

But it's up to you to make that resolution binding! As a title explains at the end of Blood Diamond, power ultimately rests in the hands of the consumer. So next time you splurge at Tiffany, Nation reader, demand conflict-free sparklers, lest you add to Djimon Hounsou's troubles. Though maybe you should add to them, so he can get a second briefcase full of cash. Hell, I'm not sure what to do for the guy.

Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]

New York Times (registration req'd) Manohla Dargis

PAWN SACRIFICE C+ 79

USA (114 mi) 2014 ‘Scope

It’s hard not to be completely overwhelmed by Bobby Fischer, a young American chess champion that became the youngest grandmaster ever in 1958 at age 15 (though more than 30 years later, 6 others have achieved this distinction at even younger ages) before becoming the number one ranked player in the world in 1971, advancing to the World Finals in 1972 where at the height of the Cold War in a match that was broadcast around the world he faced Russian champion Boris Spassky and beat the best of the Russians in a sport dominated by Russians since the end of World War II, who consider this their national sport subsidized by the State, receiving plenty of money and support along the way where the leading chess players are treated to the comforts of the highest standard of living available in the nation, where players have staffs of coaches to assist them in their preparations.  Fischer on the other hand was basically all on his own, a young Jewish kid raised by a single mom in Brooklyn, largely self-taught, having grown up playing chess against himself since he had no one else to play. What was perhaps even more shocking was the convincing fashion in which he won, steamrolling his American contemporaries before dominating the Russians to an extent never seen before or since, where even today he is revered as the greatest player that ever lived (along with Garry Kasparov), becoming one of the strangest heroes this nation has ever seen. Despite his brilliance, Fischer refused to defend his title and became a recluse, disappearing from the public eye, falling victim to psychological delusions, paranoid conspiracy theories, and self-hating anti-Semitism that clouded his judgment for the rest of his life, becoming a caricature of his former self. While there have been other portraits of Fischer, this new addition is not among the better efforts, though it’s one of the few to provide insight into his early childhood years, but it grows more troublesome, losing the focus on chess and delving into the psychological idiosyncrasies (including those of Spassky) during the second half of the picture, becoming more like Ron Howard’s A BEAUTIFUL MIND (2001), struggling against his inner demons without any confirming medical diagnosis, where it’s unclear how he can be so focused on the game in some moments but so easily distracted, growing downright delirious in others, literally fizzling out by the end where the film doesn’t really have an ending. Much better works would include Fischer’s own definitive book, My 60 Memorable Games (1969), Ralph Ginzburg’s journalistic essay from Harper's Magazine, January 1962, Portrait of a Genius As a Young Chess Master, Elie Agur's brilliant Bobby Fischer: His Approach to Chess (Cadogan Chess Books) , a much more convincing Liz Garbus documentary Bobby Fischer Against the World (2011), Frank Brady's classic biography of Fischer, Profile of a Prodigy, and his follow up Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - from America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness, provoking an exquisite piece written by Russian chess great Garry Kasparov, published in the New York Review of Books on March 10, 2011, The Bobby Fischer Defense, all of which provide unique insight into this troubled genius. From Garry Kasparov:

Fischer returned from beating Spassky in Reykjavík—the Match of the Century—a world champion, a media star, and a decorated cold warrior. Unprecedented offers rolled in for millions of dollars in endorsement deals, exhibitions, basically anything he was willing to put his name or face to. With a few minor exceptions, he turned it all down.

Keep in mind that the chess world of the pre-Fischer era was laughably impoverished even by today’s modest standards. The Soviet stars were subsidized by the state, but elsewhere the idea of making a living solely from playing chess was a dream. When Fischer dominated the Stockholm tournament of 1962, a grueling five-week qualifier for the world championship cycle, his prize was $750.

Of course it was Fischer himself who changed this situation, and every chess player since must thank him for his tireless efforts to get chess the respect and compensation he felt it deserved. He earned the nickname Spassky gave him, “the honorary chairman of our trade union.” These efforts meant he was often an event organizer’s worst nightmare, but that was not Bobby’s concern. Ten years after Stockholm, the purse for the 1972 World Championship between Fischer and Spassky was an astronomical $250,000, plus side deals for a share of television rights.

It’s barely an exaggeration to say that Fischer’s impact on the chess world was as great financially as it was on the board. The world championship became a hot commodity and as we know, money talks. Chess tournaments and chess players acquired a new respectability, although it did not all outlast Fischer himself. My epic series of matches against Anatoly Karpov from 1985 to 1990 fanned the sponsorship flames into a blaze—we were not going to play only for the greater Soviet glory now that we knew there were millions of dollars to be had. We had learned more from Fischer than just chess. Last year’s world championship match, in which Viswanathan Anand of India defended his title against Veselin Topalov of Bulgaria in Sofia, had a prize fund of nearly $3 million despite receiving no real publicity outside of the chess world. In spite of corrupt federations and no coherent organization among themselves, the top players today do quite well without having to also teach classes or write books while trying to work on their own chess at the same time.

Early on there are poignant images of a kid growing up by himself, alone in his room with his chessboard, often hearing voices at the door which may be real or imagined, where Bobby grows so obsessed with chess that his mother eventually takes him as a 9-year old child prodigy to play an adult grandmaster, which begins his journey into the official hierarchy of the chess world. Without revealing much about his mother Regina Fischer (Robin Weigert), a fiery spirit who spoke 8 languages, had previously lived in Moscow during the McCarthy era and was involved with Leftist political activities, she was a poor single mother trying to pursue a master’s degree in nursing education at New York University while moving her family from place to place and her unfocused young son from school to school—all while being investigated by the FBI as a potential Communist agent. Bobby’s older sister Joan bought him an inexpensive chess set from a candy store when he was age 6, where together they learned the moves, but initially he showed no real interest. A lover of games and puzzles, he scored a genius IQ of 180, but never adjusted to the New York public school system, expelled from one school for kicking the principal and eventually dropped out of high school in his junior year at age 15 when he became a grandmaster, literally consumed with learning chess, seen visiting Russian bookstores for the latest news on the best players, studying all their moves. Regina Fischer had ambivalent feelings toward her son’s chess career, encouraging him to broaden his interests and develop social relations, but when it became apparent that chess was his passion, she supported him fully and was often involved with protests and demonstrations, including picketing the White House when the State Department refused to allow the national chess team to play in the 1960 Chess Olympiad in East Germany. Bobby and his mother, however, butted heads throughout his entire life, both intensely individualistic, where together they remained combative, argumentative and unhappy, which contributed to his social isolation and his obsession with chess, as there was literally no one he confided in or could trust, where his inner turmoil and frustration would at times erupt into violence. Despite his lack of social skills, he was a genius on the chessboard, devoting fourteen hours a day to studying chess, playing matches against himself that lasted for days, where nothing interested him except the sport, rising through the Junior chess championships to the U.S. tournament almost simultaneously, where at the age of thirteen and fourteen respectively he dominated both tournaments, the youngest to ever do so, winning 8 U.S. championship titles in the process. He didn’t just beat people, he annihilated them, where he was once quoted in a Dick Cavett interview, “I like the moment when I break a man’s ego.”

While the film doesn’t delineate between his early successes, certainly one of the more intriguing aspects comes when the director infuses Rockabilly and Surf music with 50’s and 60’s archival footage from the times, linking the rise of Bobby Fischer to a combustible force, becoming America’s greatest propaganda weapon against the Soviet empire, as he was the one American who could actually beat the Russians at their own game, where this is expressed with a surge of energy from period music like the Spencer Davis Group, Spencer Davis Group - I'm a Man - YouTube (2:47). By doing this, Bobby Fischer becomes part of the social landscape of the times, like the select group of astronauts who orbited the earth or the first man on the moon, where his feats were equally indescribable. Fischer didn’t just win a lot of games, what separated him from others was his utter contempt with playing for draws. At the highest levels of competitive chess, players are already so familiar with how each other plays, having studied all their previous tournaments, where the opening moves usually go according to script, even with Fischer, whose emergence onto the world stage was noticed at the highest levels, as he was always on the attack. While the young American upstart was fearless, the Russians called him nyekulturni or uncultured, especially after he accused the Russians of plotting against him by prearranging draws in tournament play, allowing their players easy games to preserve their stamina for the later more difficult matches. This is where the film starts losing its focus, as Fischer is a much more fascinating figure than this film portrays, starting with the vanilla casting of Tobey Maguire as Fischer, a baby-faced, All-American guy synonymous with comic book heroism, hardly the attributes worthy of Fischer, who is a guy so admittedly strange that part of his legend is surmising what dark spirits were swirling around in his head, as he refused all medical treatment or psychological diagnosis, much like a Christian Scientist, disavowing all traces of his Jewish heritage, becoming a rabid anti-Semite, where he seemed most affected by the mistrust and paranoia of the times, driving a wedge between himself and the rest of the world. Into his life walks Michael Stuhlbarg as Paul Marshall, an attorney connected to the music industry who volunteers to work on his behalf, perhaps an FBI mole having deep connections to the inner workings of the White House, where he comes across a bit like John Du Pont in Foxcatcher (2014), a so-called patriot with private philanthropic motives, a man who wants to see America crush the Russians. Beyond that, we haven’t a clue who he is or why the skeptical and always overly alarmed Fischer should trust him, but he does so unwaveringly, as it is through his negotiations that Fischer accomplishes nearly all of his demands. Even after the movie is over, the audiences is left wondering: who is this guy? Similarly, Peter Sarsgaard is Father Bill Lombardy, a chess playing priest that Fischer supposedly respects because at some point in his life he beat the child prodigy, something Fischer never forgot. These two characters are featured prominently in the film, the ones comprising his inner circle, as they are the only two guys that remain by his side every step of the way as he approaches the World Championship, yet throughout it all, we haven’t a clue who they are.

Admittedly, a movie about two guys sitting across from one another at a chessboard does not make for great theater, although Liev Schreiber as the placidly unruffled Boris Spassky is a treat, so while there is this momentous chess match going on, the film foregoes any interest in the game of chess and instead focuses all its attention on the psychological eccentricities of the two men, creating a bewildering sideshow that becomes more prominent than the spectacle itself taking place on the world stage. While the film is purportedly a true story, so much of this is pure conjecture, especially how a film projects one’s state of mind, which is certainly open to interpretation, and despite the myriad of mental health issues associated with Bobby Fischer, the truth is we don’t really know what was going on inside his head, yet this film presents itself as a definitive version of what happened. In doing so, it fails miserably. Maguire is nothing like Fischer, as he’s always too nice a guy, the kind of person that likes to be the center of attention, while what Fischer craved, more than anything, more than the millions in endorsement deals that he turned down, was his anonymity where he could be left alone. We never get that feeling from watching this film, which offers surprisingly little new insight into his character and is afraid to reveal just how shockingly disturbing his condition had become. As riveting as the first half is, the second half dwells on the ponderous nature of some unknown force that simply can’t be explained, becoming a frustrating viewing experience that at best feels incomplete, presenting an all too simplistic, black and white view of the world where the Russians come across as gangsters and thugs, eventually feeling more like a condensed, PG rated version that leaves out many pertinent details about his life, where winning the World Championship actually feels anti-climactic, as the film literally stops after an early turning point in his match with Spassky. What happens afterwards is a downward spiral into oblivion that is left for each of us to surmise, as without the game of chess to focus upon, his condition erodes and deteriorates further, with Fischer becoming an exile, an outcast wandering the globe alone, spewing his venom wherever he goes.

An excerpt by Rene Chun from The Atlantic, December 2002, Bobby Fischer's Pathetic Endgame - The Atlantic:

Bobby Fischer was singing the blues. As he wailed along with a 1965 recording by Jackie (“Mr. Excitement”) Wilson, his voice—a gravelly baritone ravaged by age but steeled by anger—rumbled through the microphone like a broken-down freight train on rusty wheels: “You go walking down Broadway, watchin’ people catch the subway! Take it from me, don’t ask for a helping hand, mmm, ‘cause no one will understand!” With each note he became increasingly strident. “Bright lights will find you, and they will mess you around! Let me tell you, millions will watch you! Have mercy now, as you sink right down to the ground!” Even if you knew nothing about Bobby Fischer, listening to him sing this song would tell you all you needed to know. “There just ain’t no pity. No, no, no, in the naked city, yeah—New York City.”

This unlikely duet, featuring Jackie Wilson and the world’s first and only chess grand master fugitive from justice, was broadcast live, on July 6, 2001, by DZSR Sports Radio, a Manila-based AM station that has embraced Fischer as a ratings booster. In exchange for these rare interviews (Fischer hasn’t given a magazine or TV interview in thirty years), Sports Radio management has happily provided Fischer with hours of free airtime to spin his classic R&B records and to lash out at his enemies, both real and imagined. Fischer categorizes these enemies—including the former New York mayor Ed Koch, both Presidents Bush, and the Times Mirror Corporation—as “Jews, secret Jews, or CIA rats who work for the Jews.”

This radio broadcast was Fischer’s seventeenth in the Philippines. The bizarre karaoke interlude was a departure of sorts, but otherwise the broadcast was no different from the previous sixteen. Fischer’s talking points never vary.

· Bobby Fischer is being persecuted by world Jewry.

· The United States government is a “brutal, evil dictatorship” that has falsely accused Bobby Fischer of a crime and forced him to live in exile.

· Bobby Fischer has been swindled out of a “vast fortune” in royalties by book publishers, movie studios, and clock manufacturers (yes, clock manufacturers), who have brazenly pilfered his brand name, patents, and copyrights.

· The Jews are a “filthy, lying bastard people” bent on world domination through such insidious schemes as the Holocaust (“a money-making invention”), the mass murder of Christian children (“their blood is used for black-magic ceremonies”), and junk food (William Rosenberg, the founder of Dunkin’ Donuts, is singled out as a culprit).

For chess buffs who tune in for some shoptalk from the game’s most revered icon, there is this:

· Chess is nothing more than “mental masturbation.” Not only is the game dead, it’s fixed. Gary Kasparov, the world’s top-rated player, is a “crook” and a former KGB spy who hasn’t played a match in his life in which the outcome wasn’t prearranged.

The No. 1 transgression, however, the thing that has devastated Fischer, embittered him, and made him screech at night, alone in his apartment, is the “Bekins heist.”

· Millions of dollars’ worth of personal memorabilia, painstakingly collected and stockpiled by Bobby Fischer in a ten-by-ten-foot Bekins storage room in Pasadena, California, has been stolen from him in a secret plot involving the Rothschilds (Jews), Bill Clinton (a secret Jew), and unnamed Bekins executives (CIA rats who work for the Jews).

The international chess community, which tracks Fischer’s downward spiral the way astronomers track the orbit of a dying comet, has been monitoring his radio interviews since the first one aired, back in January of 1999. For the most part chess people have for years downplayed the importance of his outlandish outbursts, explaining that Fischer’s raging anti-Semitism, acute paranoia, and tenuous grasp on reality are hyped by the media and misunderstood by the public. In the early 1990s Fischer’s girlfriend at the time said, “He’s like a child. Very, very simple.” A friend who spent a lot of time with him in the 1990s says, “Aside from his controversial views, as a person Bobby is very kind, very nice, and very human.” Another friend, asked how he could stand by someone so blatantly anti-Semitic, replies, “A lot of people wouldn’t care if Michael Jordan was an anti-Semite if they could play a game of Horse with him.”

Many Fischer apologists argue that Bobby Fischer is in fact deranged, and that as such he deserves not public castigation but psychiatric help. They are quick to point out that he was raised in a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, has had close friends who were Jewish, and in fact had a Jewish mother (information he has gone to great lengths to deny). It seems hard to imagine that his hate-filled rhetoric isn’t an unfortunate manifestation of some underlying illness.

But even the Fischer apologists had to throw up their hands when he took to the Philippine airwaves on September 11, 2001. In an interview broadcast this time by Bombo Radyo, a small public-radio station in Baguio City, Fischer revealed views so loathsome that it was impossible to indulge him any longer. Just hours after the most devastating attack on the United States in history, in which thousands had died, Fischer could barely contain his delight. “This is all wonderful news,” he announced. “I applaud the act. The U.S. and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians, just slaughtering them for years. Robbing them and slaughtering them. Nobody gave a shit. Now it’s coming back to the U.S. Fuck the U.S. I want to see the U.S. wiped out.”

Fischer added that the events of September 11 provided the ideal opportunity to stage a long-overdue coup d’état. He envisioned, he said, a “Seven Days in May scenario,” with the country taken over by the military; he also hoped to see all its synagogues closed, and hundreds of thousands of Jews executed. “Ultimately the white man should leave the United States and the black people should go back to Africa,” he said. “The white people should go back to Europe, and the country should be returned to the American Indians. This is the future I would like to see for the so-called United States.” Before signing off Fischer cried out, “Death to the U.S.!”

The United States Chess Federation had always been willing to ignore Fischer’s public antics, no matter how embarrassing. He was, after all, Bobby Fischer—the greatest player in the history of the game. But this was too much. On October 28 of last year the USCF unanimously passed a motion denouncing Fischer’s incendiary broadcast. “Bobby has driven some more nails in his coffin,” Frank Camaratta Jr., a USCF board member, says. The backlash has reached all the way to grassroots chess clubs. “It’s because of Fischer that I’m involved in chess,” says Larry Tamarkin, a manager at the Marshall Chess Club, a legendary New York parlor frequented by Fischer in his teens. “But I can’t help feeling a sense of betrayal, anger, and sadness. You devote your entire life to one player and find out he’s completely off his rocker. It ruins everything. He’s an embarrassment.” Asked about the possibility of a Fischer comeback, Tamarkin can’t conceal his disgust. “We prefer that he doesn’t come back. Because if he does, it will destroy the last vestige of magic.”

In reality the magic has been gone for some thirty years. That’s how long it has been since Fischer played his first and only world-championship match. Why he stopped playing tournaments, and how his life unraveled so pathetically, is a story one can learn only by seeking out those who actually know Fischer. There are surprisingly few such people—and fewer yet are willing to talk. Fischer doesn’t tolerate friends who give interviews. His address book is a graveyard of crossed-out names of people who have been quoted in articles about him.

But some formerly loyal Fischer associates, appalled at his recent behavior, are finally talking about him. They reveal that Fischer’s story doesn't follow the usual celebrity-gone-to-seed arc. He has not been brought low by drugs or alcohol, by sex scandals or profligate spending. Instead he is a victim of his own mind—and of the inordinate attention that the world has given it. Fischer’s paranoia, rage, and hubris have been enough to transform him into an enemy of the state; they have been enough to sabotage a brilliant career and turn a confident, charismatic figure into a dithering recluse; and, sadly, they have been enough to make us forget that when Bobby Fischer played chess, it was absolutely riveting theater, even for those who didn’t play the game.

ArtsGuild [Talia]

During the 1970s, everybody knew the name Bobby Fischer. This young chess genius made headlines for both his incredible game as well as what was considered to be a rather eccentric personality. Edward Zwick’s docudrama Pawn Sacrifice (2013) does more than simply chronicle the life of this individual and does not make attempts to create a sympathetic or particularly likeable character. Instead, it presents its protagonist as true to life as possible, and demands that an audience take responsibility for his ultimate downfall.

“The Match of the Century,” as it was known, pitted American chess master Bobby Fischer (Tobey Maguire) against Russian phenomenon Boris Spassky (Liev Schreiber) and drew more audience attention than any chess game before it. This match came to represent far more than a chess game, as Cold War tension and political ideals inevitably came into play. Although Boris was considered to be unbeatable, Bobby believed himself to be more than up to the challenge. This film focuses not only on the tournament, but also on the demise of Bobby’s sanity as well. Taught paranoia at an early age, Bobby suffered from terrifying delusions that affected his public persona and earned him his reputation as an antisocial and demanding eccentric.

As the iconic Bobby, Maguire presents an accurate representation as opposed to softening his performance or making an attempt to render his character empathetic. Bobby is not likeable, but it is easy to pity him as we watch his brilliant mind turn him against reality and cause him to fear Russian spies at every turn. Peter Sarsgaard delivers a standout performance in the role of a chess-playing priest who becomes Bobby’s mentor. Although this individual appears to have Bobby’s best interests at heart, one cannot help but wonder why more was not done to help and protect Bobby when he was clearly in no mental state to continue in the public eye.

The idea that a game such as chess could attract widespread interest to such an extent is fascinating, especially when one considers the political implications of the match, and Zwick effectively turns this event into an interesting story.Some of the film footage has been shot to appear as though it is real video footage of the historical event, adding a feeling of legitimacy to the work and putting the “documentary” into “docudrama.” The director also shows a bit of Bobby’s backstory, which may be speculation but helps us to understand this individual and get inside of his head – as much as one can understand a mind as brilliant yet as maddened as this one. Although an audience knows that all of the threats that assail Bobby are imagined, the film nonetheless maintains a tense atmosphere through Zwick’s hectic filming, intense music, and dark lighting. The film ends up becoming a bit tedious by its drawn out conclusion, yet I suppose this fault may actually be representative of the nature of the game of chess itself.

Pawn Sacrifice is a well-made biopic that will appeal to those who are interested in the Bobby Fischer story or in the world of chess. An unlikeable protagonist and a story of which we already know the conclusion may prevent mainstream appeal, but the film asks questions that many should consider. While watching the work, I could not help but wonder who was looking out for this young man with clear mental challenges. The public knew of Bobby’s odd demands and eccentric outbursts, yet little appears to have been done to provide him with aid or to take responsibility for him. A sad story overall, Pawn Sacrifice does not offer an uplifting experience, but it does offer a peek at the truth.

Slant Magazine [Oleg Ivanov]

Pawn Sacrifice views Bobby Fischer (Tobey Maguire) as the perfect manifestation of the fear, delusions, and geopolitics of the Cold War. Though born to Jewish parents and actively supported by the American government in his professional efforts, he would become a notorious anti-Semite, blaming international Jewry, the KGB, and the FBI for his failures. The film's thesis, that Fischer's sweeping paranoia was the product of the era's fearmongering and the kind of absolute myopia necessitated by chess, is perhaps too elegant and simplistic to be fully convincing, but director Edward Zwick's decision to present Fischer's life as a political thriller remains perversely engrossing.

Zwick strikes the right balance between showing the world from Fischer's increasingly warped perspective and undermining his outrageous claims by emphasizing his alienation from everyone around him. He's shown as a child surrounded by his mother's communist friends whispering in Russian while their house is monitored by the FBI. Later, during “The Match of the Century” in Reykjavik that pitted Fischer against reigning World Champion Boris Spassky (Liev Schreiber as the rational foil), Richard Nixon calls Fischer to voice his concern. The championship coincided almost exactly with Watergate, and Fischer's fear of government intervention in the match becomes a metaphor for the widespread political entropy that swept through America at the time. The chess virtuoso's suspicion of tapped phones is implicitly linked with his associations with McCarthyism, J. Edgar Hoover, and Tricky Dick, and as such the film makes Fischer's behavior understandable, if not justifiable.

It's best appreciated as a tragicomic profile of a man whose extraordinary talent was undermined by the political reality in which he was enmeshed. 

Though Maguire's Fischer is a kind of anti-Rocky Balboa in nature, he shares Rocky's diminutive physical stature when compared to Schreiber's stoic and statuesque Spassky, who suggests here the Ivan Drago of chess. Though Fischer was quite tall and physically imposing in real life, Maguire always seems smaller than those around him, which noticeably contrasts with Schreiber's Spassky emerging from the ocean like a Russian Adonis and moving through the film with a sophisticated contempt for those around him. Spassky is Fischer's obscure object of desire, the target of his obsessive longing and confused passion, and the camera stands in for Fischer's gaze as it caresses his body and lingers on his impassive face. The libidinal aspect of Fischer's obsession with Spassky is underlined by Fischer's utterly bland encounter with a young prostitute who takes his virginity, but is unable to hold his interest, which immediately reverts to his elusive Russian opponent.

Their opposing depictions are meant to emphasize the rivalry between Fischer and Spassky as part of an intellectual arms race between America and the Soviet Union. Instead, it exudes the jingoistic vibe that characterized so much of the Cold War. Russians are otherized throughout, either as an intentional replication of contemporary American attitudes, Fischer's own distorted perspective, or just the sort of cliché you expect to find in Cold War-set thrillers. This and Zwick's decision to turn Pawn Sacrifice into a conventional sports drama in the middle stretch, lush with slow-motion shots of chess pieces being moved and crowds erupting in jubilation, blunts the film's emotional power, distracting from its political and psychological insights.

Ultimately, the film is best appreciated as a tragicomedy, a profile of a man whose extraordinary talent was undermined by his absurd beliefs and the farcical political reality in which he was enmeshed. The latter is underscored by Michael Stuhlbarg's performance as Fischer's manager, an anxious FBI affiliate who caters to all of Fischer's worst impulses and demands his aid in helping America defeat communism. Pawn Sacrifice is no smear job, but a fairly nuanced portrait of the tension between chaos and genius in Fischer's mind that fostered creation and destruction in equal measure. Like a pawn moving in slow motion with violent precision through a world of growing chaos, the film captures the inseparability of Fischer's talent and madness in what he termed his search for truth through chess.

We Got This Covered [Jordan Adler]

Edward Zwick is a great filmmaker, but he rarely gives you subtlety. Some have criticized his medium-to-large-budget action films – titles that include Glory, Defiance and Blood Diamond – as too simplistic, which would have stained those efforts more if they were not so compelling and exciting. So, to hear that the director was behind a film about the introspective game of chess and its most famous player, the complex and controversial Bobby Fischer, was nerve-wracking. Would the film skimp on the nuances of the New York chess sensation? Could the Last Samurai director figure out a way to depict the game in an inventive way onscreen?

Well, although Zwick has still not managed to find a way to visually communicate the game of wits and cunning, he has still made a biopic and thriller that should entertain those who do not even know how to play chess. Pawn Sacrifice is a stunningly acted and quite accurate drama about a real-life person, improved by screenwriter Stephen Knight’s decision to focus on one central event in Fischer’s life, rather than do an all-encompassing, Gandhi-like biopic.

Tobey Maguire stars as the demanding, arrogant, preening chess player when he was in his twenties. (Suspiciously, Maguire looks just as youthful here as he did when playing Peter Parker 12 summers ago.) The film opens on Fischer in a state of disarray, panting and pacing around a hotel room, ripping open telephones to check if there are microphones inside. He is going slightly mad, and the hazy lighting and superimpositions is a callback to the opening hotel scene from Apocalypse Now. Like Willard from that film, Fischer has no interest in leaving his room. He is paranoid from what is happening outside; however, instead of the heart of Vietnam’s darkness tempting to swallow him up, it is Cold War paranoia that is getting to the American chess grandmaster.

Out of fear and apparent madness, Fischer does not show up for a world title match against his Russian foe, Boris Spassky (Liev Schreiber, in an effortlessly cool portrayal that features almost no dialogue.) News outlets referred to their championship series of matches as “World War 3 on a chessboard,” pitting the USA and the USSR against each other. Zwick spends too much time relying on news reports to explain the global significance of the game, the onslaught of journalistic characters seeming to eclipse those in the principal cast. (It could have been easier for Knight to write a couple lines of dialogue instead of relying prominently on news bulletins for context.)

From this perplexing moment in Fischer’s legacy, we backtrack to his life as a young boy growing up surrounded by Jewish intellectuals near Washington Square. (Young actors Aiden Lovekamp and Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick, who play Fischer as a boy and teenager, are very convincing prodigies.) We see his infatuation with chess and his passion to beat much more seasoned players. When Fischer loses a close match to the head of a New York chess club as a boy, he recoils into the corner and lets out a silent cry. He would continue being a sore loser through his life, blaming his failures on everything and everyone but himself.

Shortly after he becomes the most sought after opponent in the New York chess scene, a pulsating montage of late 50s/early 60s news events pushes us into 1962, when he was the youngest chess grandmaster in American history. Increasingly prolific, as well as inflammatory, Fischer takes aim at the Russian greats, boasting that he has what it takes to be the world’s premiere player. That is easier said than done, as Spassky has an arsenal of intelligence and fortitude that makes him a viciously difficult man to beat. With the aid of two companions, lawyer Paul Marshall (Michael Stuhlbarg) and Father William Lombardy (Peter Sarsgaard), Fischer plans a trip to Iceland to play against the Soviets.

Those supporting players mentioned above are excellent, even if they get little to do but try their best to keep Fischer out of trouble and out of his own head. However, Pawn Sacrifice lives and dies by its depiction of Fischer. Thankfully, Knight’s screenplay does not shy away from the man’s glorious contradictions – he had a mind both incredible and dangerous; he loved gloating to the public but was a nuisance and nut in private. The screenwriter makes one sympathetic and understanding to his social difficulty and paranoia, letting us into his dizzy headspace. Meanwhile, Pawn Sacrifice also hints at his future repugnance as a vagrant and anti-Semite, without making these aspects too distracting.

Acting with a ferocity that evokes his turn from Jim Sheridan’s Brothers, Maguire gives a career-best performance as the brilliant, troubled Fischer. Some could grouse that his grandiose yelling and prickly personality is off-putting, but they would not realize these characteristics were a part of who Fischer was. Maguire flits his eyes, furrows his face and slowly descends from a poise sitting position at a chessboard into hunched impatience.

Unfortunately, as stupid mistakes flummoxed Fischer, a few rock and roll-based anachronisms bothered this critic. In a montage leading up to 1962, we see archive footage of The Beatles landing at JFK, an event that did not occur until 1964. In a scene shortly after, a character compares Fischer with Jimi Hendrix, although that guitarist would not achieve fame for a few more years. Meanwhile, Zwick fails to find a way to depict the game of chess cinematically; as a result, since it is hard to follow the order of moves on the board that would give clarity to the characters’ thought processes, we are left with the performances.

Fortunately, Maguire and Schreiber can say much with very little, although people not well acquainted with the game could get restless during these sequences. In the matches, Zwick enhances the sound effects so that the small details happening around Fischer seem like incessant noise to the film’s audience, as well. (In one match, Fischer is so distracted by the creaks a camera emits and coughs coming from an audience that he demands the game continue in an adjacent ping-pong room.) His yelling would seem obnoxious and his behavior irresponsible, but by closing us into his disoriented mind through visual and aural elements, Zwick makes his paranoia haunt our heads, as well. We understand Fischer’s madness and misery, as well as the mania he ignited.

Bobby Fischer, “Pawn Sacrifice,” and Movies About Geniuses Richard Brody from The New Yorker

Portrait of a Genius As a Young Chess Master Ralph Ginzburg from Harper's Magazine, January 1962

Bobby Fischer's Pathetic Endgame - The Atlantic Rene Chun from The Atlantic, December 2002

FBI targeted chess genius Bobby Fischer and his mother ... Charles Laurence from The Telegraph, November 24, 2002

Who Was Fischer's Father? - Chess.com Bill Wall, March 19, 2008

A Psychological Autopsy of Bobby Fischer - Pacific Standard Joseph G. Ponterotto from Pacific Standard, December 14, 2010

Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - from America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness Garry Kasparov on Frank Brady’s book, Endgame: Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall—from America’s Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness (402 pages), from The New York Review of Books, March 10, 2011

Spectrum Culture [Dominic Griffin]

INFLUX Magazine [Martin Hafer]

[Review] Pawn Sacrifice - The Film Stage Jared Mobarak

Paste Magazine [T. Meek]

Flavorwire [Jason Bailey]

Review: Despite Tobey Maguire and Liev Schreibers ... - HitFix Gregory Ellwood

PopOptiq Max Bledstein

Film-Forward.com [Ted Metrakas]

Cinemixtape [J. Olson]

Fischer King: It's the Chess Master vs. His Own Mind in This ... Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice

Cinema365 [Carlos deVillalvilla]

Movie Shark Deblore [Debbie Lynn Elias]

Battleship Pretension [Tyler Smith]

Cinemablographer [Pat Mullen]

Pawn Sacrifice is Out: What do the Reviewers Say? - Chess ... Peter Doggers from Chess.com

DVDizzy.com [Luke Bonanno]

HeyUGuys [Ian Gilchrist]

JoBlo.com [Chris Bumbray]

Georgia Straight [Ken Eisner]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

Cinemacy.com [H. Nelson Tracey]

Pawn Sacrifice Soundtrack List

'Pawn Sacrifice': Toronto Review - The Hollywood Reporter Jordan Mintzer

Toronto Film Review: ‘Pawn Sacrifice’ Justin Chang from Variety

Pawn Sacrifice review - The Guardian Catherine Shoard

Toronto Film Scene [Sean Kelly]

Metro US [Matt Prigge]

Pawn Sacrifice review: Making chess appear dramatic on ... Calum Marsh from The National Post

Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]

Austin Chronicle [Kimberley Jones]

Review: 'Pawn Sacrifice' - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Pawn Sacrifice - Roger Ebert Godfrey Cheshire

TIFF 2014, Day Three: "The Humbling," "Pawn Sacrifice ... Susan Wloszczyna from the Ebert site

Review: 'Pawn Sacrifice,' Another Take on the Royal Game The New York Times

Zwigoff, Terry

CRUMB A 98

USA (119 mi) 1994

I decided to reject conforming when society rejected me. I’ve heard all that “be yourself” stuff. When I’m myself, people think that I’m nuts. Guess I’ll have to be satisfied with cats and old records. Girls are just utterly out of my reach. They won’t even let me draw them…Yeah, all that changed after I got famous. —Robert Crumb, reflecting on Valentine’s Day thoughts from 1962

How perfectly goddamned delightful it all is, to be sure. —Charles Crumb

This is one of the more remarkably revealing documentary portraits on record, as CRUMB is an endlessly fascinating project that was nine years in the making, six following around Robert Crumb, and three more years editing the film, made at a time when the director himself was penniless and near homeless, with back pain so severe he was contemplating suicide, where the making of the movie may have actually saved Zwigoff’s life. Crumb is easily the most infamous comic artist of the 60’s, the originator of such underground staples as Zap Comix, Mr. Natural, the cover art of Janis Joplin’s Cheap Thrills album, and the Keep on Truckin’ logo, not to mention dozens of other publications which made him a fortune as they were devoured by the psychedelic generation as a symbol of a weird and trippy imagination. A friend to Crumb for over 20 years, both collectors of vintage blues and jazz records, and a member of R. Crumb and his Cheap Suit Serenaders, the band Crumb founded in the early 70’s (Zwigoff plays the saw, cello, Stroh violin, and mandolin), Zwigoff has unprecedented access, examining the artist’s life from many fronts, interviews with family, including former wives and girlfriends, colleagues and friends, various art critics who have differing views of his work, including feminists who find his work fascinating, but troubling, as despite highly amusing satiric threads, his drawings are unflinchingly raw and misogynistic. Described as self-indulgent orgy fantasies, part of an arrested juvenile vision, often little more than masturbatory pornography, including hostility and depraved violence towards women, incest fantasies, a descent into horribly racist caricature with demeaning and humiliating “Mammy” fantasies, where being turned off and disgusted “is” an appropriate reaction to much of his work. Part of Crumb’s unique talent is his ability “not” to censor his art, to let it all out, so to speak, often surprising even himself with the darkness of the material, while part of the film’s unique approach as a documentary exposé is to reveal all the inner demons and not shy away from the provocative controversy. What is indisputable is his drawing ability, which surpasses everyone else doing comic social satire. In nearly every scene, especially walking or sitting around the streets of San Francisco, which are among the best scenes in the film, Crumb carries around a sketch pad and continuously draws portraits of people or situations that attract his interest.

His obsession with drawing started young, as it was actually his older brother Charles who developed a strange fascination with comic books and ordered his two siblings, Robert and Maxon, to make their own comics, initially inspired by watching the movie TREASURE ISLAND (1950), so they wrote pirate adventure tales, often sharing the same frames, responding to what the other wrote. Charles continued dressing like a pirate around town, obsessing for the rest of his life over the young boy actor playing Jim Hawkins, Bobby Driscoll, suppressing his desires, while his younger brother Maxon developed equally inappropriate habits, like molesting young girls in public, sneaking up behind them and pulling their pants down. Easily the strangest and most bizarre aspects of this film are the sequences where Robert visits each of his two brothers, as after unsuccessful suicide attempts, Charles lives on a steady diet of antidepressants with his equally unbalanced mother, who was an amphetamine addict with an abusive and over-controlling husband. Charles remains a total recluse, “Can you give me one good reason for leaving the house?” while Maxon also lives in San Francisco, developing a vow of poverty where he meditates on a board of nails while begging on street corners for several hours each day. Crumb also has two sisters, but both refused to appear on camera. Peeling away layer after layer, the film simply defies belief, where in this dysfunctional family, Robert, sharing an extreme outsiderist sensibility with his brothers, is the least tormented as he has found a socially acceptable outlet for the inner turmoil within. R. Crumb was the right guy at the right time and hit counterculture paydirt during the 60’s, where there was a limited circle of comic artists at the time, where his creative breadth blossomed with his initial psychedelic experience, while his mother and brothers continued to wallow in their mental instability and dysfunction. Unlike the supposed myth, Crumb actually hated the hippie movement, including the Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia, “I never had anything to do with those guys. I hated that music. I went to a couple of their rock concerts and just fell asleep. Found it completely boring, that psychedelic music.”

Having gotten a taste of fame, Crumb continually turned down gigantic offers of money, such as $100,000 to do a Rolling Stones album cover or to appear on Saturday Night Live TV. “After about a year of recognition and all the bullshit of fame and all that, I just said ‘Fuck it,’ and I just started drawing the dark part of myself again in the comics, which I’d always kept hidden before.” Crumb developed such a hostility for the commercial modernization of America, with people walking down the street wearing corporate logos on their clothes, something he found insufferable, so the film actually includes the final months before he and his wife and young daughter move to the south of France, someplace he considers “less evil” than the United States. He also has an older son through another relationship, and both children possess his drawing interest, where he can be seen sharing time and offering comments with each one, interestingly drawing together as a family. Crumb’s love of the past is reflected in two of his projects, 36 Heroes of the Blues drawings, sketching famous blues artists, and A Short History of America seen here: A short history of America - Robert Crumb - YouTube (52 seconds), converting individual black and white drawings to a short film, a montage of old times moving towards modernity set to ragtime music played by Crumb on the piano, as the same pastoral country home is redrawn again and again reflecting the changing times, as horse drawn buggies are replaced by cars, adding more telephone wires, paved streets, and several new stores on the corner until eventually it’s a city street overrun with commercial fast-food enterprises, advertising billboards and busy street traffic, exactly the kind of world he now despises, cynically believing the American Dream is a big lie. His daughter can be heard objecting when Crumb still insists upon a black and white television, though she’s grown up to be a successful cartoonist. Even Zwigoff’s exposé just barely touches on the massive range of diversity in Crumb’s work, from sketchbook caricature portraits to blatantly sexual and exploitive material, where early in the film we hear Crumb confess “If I don’t draw for awhile, I get really crazy, actually really depressed, and suicidal.” While never leaning towards any critical interpretations, the film gives significant screen time to Crumb’s detractors, allowing every view to stand on its own, making this one bold and audacious film that certainly makes the case for art as therapy.

Joshua Klein from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

Anyone familiar with the work of underground comic artist R. Crumb might assume that he has a few screws loose, and indeed they might be right. But the most remarkable discovery made by Terry Zwigoff’s sad, fascinating documentary is that R. Crumb is actually the least strange and best adjusted of three siblings, all of whom reveal an offhand brilliance and creativity yet channel that brilliance into radically contrasting outlets and lifestyles. One spends much of his time meditating on the streets of San Francisco. The other spends most of his time a recluse, holed up at a home with his mother as he battles clinical depression and madness. Both exhibit an artistic inclination and talent at least equal to R. Crumb’s, and the film spends much of its time revealing how a relatively inconsequential shared childhood steered each sibling in different directions.

Crumb, of course, spends most of its duration tracking the rise of R. Crumb as an underground comic icon during the heyday of the American Haight-Ashbury hippie culture in the late 1960’s. Through a series of revealing and shockingly honest interviews, Zwigoff shows Crumb to be contrary at heart. He is a rebel against seemingly arbitrary (and often infuriatingly political correct) rules of art and behavior with a taste for vintage jazz, fashions, and affectations that existed before American culture was gripped tighter by its corporate overseers. Crumb is the quintessential rebel whose form of passive resistance—comics—ironically transformed him into an underground icon.

Crumb marked an auspicious debut for Zwigoff, a longtime fan of vintage jazz and underground comics who eventually parlayed his success as a documentary filmmaker into a feature film, directing Ghost World (which happened to be based on an underground comic by Daniel Clowes, another vintage jazz obsessive). Needless to say, Crumb has as much to say about the lifestyle and attitude of eccentrics like Zwigoff in general as it does about R. Crumb. Specifically, his portrayal of the jaded Crumb in the months before his retirement remains an invaluable document (and in some ways outcome) of the underground ‘60’s comics scene.

Crumb Terrence Rafferty from The New Yorker

Terry Zwigoff's brilliant, scary documentary about the underground-comics artist R. Crumb. While the film is reviewing Crumb's career, from its psychedelic-era heyday to the present, and following him as he goes about his everyday activities, it's also telling a harrowing story about his damaged family. The hero of this picture is both a courageous resister and a shell-shocked casualty of his family's wars, and Zwigoff's portrait carefully preserves that ambiguity. The movie is often funny, but what makes it extraordinary is that it explores, without presuming to explain, the sources of a unique and savage comic sensibility. And it shows us that Crumb's gift—the detachment that allows him to create such hilariously contemptuous images of the world around him (and inside him)—is also a kind of curse, or, at least, a nasty habit.

The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]

At times throughout Crumb, Terry Zwigoff's justly revered 1994 documentary, Robert Crumb and his older brother Charles seem like variations on the same person. So why did R. Crumb escape the madness and sour gray despair of his upbringing to become a husband, father, and countercultural icon, while the similarly gifted Charles lived a joyless existence at home with their mother, ultimately committing suicide? The answer, the film suggests, is that in spilling the contents of his tormented, sexually obsessed psyche onto the pages of his comic books, R. Crumb found a way to exorcise the formidable personal demons that ultimately defeated his brother.

Thanks largely to his close friendship with Crumb, Zwigoff enjoyed remarkable access to his subject, and to Crumb's family and ex-girlfriends. The result is a queasily intimate, revealing exploration of the creative process and prickly personality of an artist whose penchant for self-effacement shoots well past self-deprecation on its way to self-laceration.

So is Crumb's sexually and racially transgressive work a penetrating satire of middle-class American values, or sexist, racist, hateful pornography trying to pass as scathing social criticism? The answer, not surprisingly, seems to fall somewhere between the two extremes. Though clearly enamored of Crumb, Zwigoff entertains both sides of the debate. It's worth noting that Crumb's primary feminist critic comes off as reasonable and intelligent, though a tad humorless, while Crumb's principal aesthetic defender, Time art critic Robert Hughes, comes off like a comically pretentious blowhard straight out of Art School Confidential, Zwigoff's forthcoming satire of art-school pomposity. Though leavened somewhat by Crumb's professional success and current happy home life, Crumb grows darker and darker until it's teetering on the precipice of a bleak emotional abyss. It's an old aphorism that comedy equals tragedy plus time, but in Crumb, the line between comedy and tragedy is as fuzzy as the one the separates genius from madness.

Slant Magazine [John Lingan]

Obviously it's R. Crumb's iconic artwork that justifies the existence of Terry Zwigoff's beloved 1994 film, though the absent initial in the title speaks to what makes Crumb a masterpiece. We learn early on that Robert's illustrative style, sexual fetishes, and scabrous worldview are inseparable from his relationships to the men in his family, particularly older brother Charles, who inspired Robert to draw and who shaped his sense of humor. But while the famous sibling grants the movie its subject and interest, it's arguably Charles—and, to a slightly lesser extent, youngest brother Maxon—who makes the film so devastating and emotionally resonant. Crumb—in a similar manner to Grey Gardens, the closest thing it has to a forebear—is ultimately about a family rather than just its protagonist's eccentricities.

The story of Crumb—Zwigoff laboring for nearly a decade, in failing health, and earning the ire of his subject and close friend—is as well-known among contemporary cineastes as any production legend, and surely accounts in part for the rabid proselytizing we tend to do on its behalf. But if Crumb were merely an interesting film, a bit of outsider-art lightning in a bottle, it wouldn't inspire such fanaticism. It so happens that Crumb is also as compositionally impressive as any documentary I've ever seen, moving from first-person verité revelations to art criticism with the same agility that it switches tones from sexual comedy to existential despair. This means that Crumb embodies the spirit of Robert's work, which often operates simultaneously on so many different emotional levels that it can elicit a different response depending on the viewer's mood at the moment.

Watching Crumb again, I found myself convinced that critics and higher-minded film types must also adore this film in part because it presents a romantic view of a man whose life was, by all appearances, quite literally saved by art. Charles's role in Robert's life is less a foil than a kind of pathetic funhouse reflection; insofar as Zwigoff portrays them, the brothers seem all but indistinguishable in terms of talent, creativity, perversion, blunt honesty, and distaste for the culture around them. But by the mid 1960s, Charles had already begun to buckle under the weight of unbearable social anxiety. By the time shooting begins, he's a virgin bi-monthly bather and unsuccessful suicide who still lives with his mother and has never held a job. And then there's Robert, who's turned down more lucrative mainstream opportunities than most artists will ever see, and who is able to purchase a house in rural southern France just by selling a small suitcase of old notebooks.

The difference, it seems, is that Robert's work, however depraved and sickening it got, was always more generous to his audience. He spends much of the film displaying sketches for the camera, including a drawing from the late '60s that bears his familiar tics: group mayhem, deranged smiles on all the characters, surrealist (read: acid-inspired) flourishes, and what he elsewhere refers to as "the cute curse"—meaning it all looks more wholesome than he intends. Robert recalls a young woman looking at the drawing and remarking on how happy it all seems—a reaction that shocked him, since he meant it to be horrifying.

Even at his most off-putting, R. Crumb's work still invites a smile. This is the quality that endeared him to the Haight-Ashbury crowd, that made his style so influential in advertising, and that makes Crumb—as unsettling a film about comics as could possibly be made—such a friendly, edifying experience. The deeper Zwigoff plumbs his friend's gnarled psyche, the more approachable he seems to us. It becomes hard not to relate to this man who very clearly doesn't want our affection. The film's title sequence, where Zwigoff's visual achievement is first displayed, consists of a few slow pans past the Crumb-inspired commercial merchandise and ephemera that decorates the artist's studio. It's like a pop-art version of "Dickens's Dream," only in place of an aged Victorian gentleman relaxed in a rocking chair, the sequence ends with Robert sitting on the floor, head between his knees, moving gently to the beat of a scratchy 78, his back to the camera. In one graceful gesture, Zwigoff invites us into the world R. Crumb created then reminds us that he doesn't need the company. The rest of the film, particularly its portrait of Charles, shows us how this attitude came to be, and how much great art the world might not have seen had Robert been perhaps one degree more troubled.

A balanced and insightful portrait of a fascinating artist, a wrenching and unvarnished depiction of a tragic family, an incredible statement of friendship, and one of the most inspired depictions of the creative process I've ever seen.

Washington Post [Hal Hinson]

“Crumb,” Terry Zwigoff's unforgettable documentary on Robert Crumb, the underground comic book pioneer and creator of Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat and Zap Comix, is a portrait of a vividly misanthropic artist.

Shot over the course of six years, this extraordinary record focuses on a period in 1993 just before Crumb and family abandoned America for France. Organizing his affairs prior to departure, Crumb sorts though old boxes at his San Francisco house, comments on his career, gossips with old girlfriends and ex-wives, and pays farewell visits to his brothers Max and Charles, back home with Mom in Philadelphia.

All the while, you can hear the rage and self-pity and pain in his snide, adenoidal whine as he denounces the American dream as a rip-off and a lie. And you watch him draw, working his bony, scarecrow fingers in sharp, birdlike movements, translating onto the page what he sees through the dark filter of his satire.

The work itself is brutally—even cruelly—cynical about human desires and motives. As a result, Crumb has something to offend just about everyone. His drawings are a deliberate affront to good taste; that is their purpose. In Crumb's art, the id runs amok, smashing pieties and throwing down the gauntlet at the feet of political correctness.

Women are defiled, objectified and mutilated. In one late cartoon, the author goes so far as to show himself "involved," so to speak, with a headless torso—a fantasy that, he says, freaked out even him. Black women are stereotyped as slutty Aunt Jemimas, such as the monster-thighed Angelfood McSpade.

Though Zwigoff trots out a couple of experts to discuss whether Crumb has "gone too far" with some of this, it's much more important to him that the audience recognize Crumb as a significant artist and not merely an underground cult phenom. To validate his claims he brings eminent art critic Robert Hughes onscreen to declare Crumb a "modern Brueghel." Actually, Hughes seems to have dozed off on this one, unless he sees Crumb's masturbatory obsessions and aggression as mere lusty fun. The German George Grosz is an apt comparison, though Hieronymus Bosch is a better one, especially after Crumb began taking LSD and his cartoons erupted with psychedelic images and stoned conceptualism.

Because he was based in San Francisco and did an album cover for Janis Joplin, Crumb was immediately embraced by the counterculture. But Crumb—who favors straw boaters and canes and wears a look of perpetual nausea—couldn't have been less of a hippie.

Nothing for Crumb is free, not love, not sex, certainly not family. His medium is self-loathing and disgust: for the pretty cheerleaders and jocks who laughed at him in the hallways and rejected him; for the empty, plastic, fast-food, anything-for-a-buck American culture.

One look at his family in Philadelphia and you see why. There, sitting on the bed in his room, unshaven, unwashed and with a mouthful of rotting teeth, is Charles, who ventured into the world only briefly, failed, then returned home never to set foot outside again.

It was Charles who first turned Robert on to comic books—not just reading them, making them. As boys, they created their own world up in their room; Dad was physically and emotionally abusive and Mom was a speed freak. Charles comes off as profoundly disturbed, and his own sense of psychic distress was so great that he infected his younger siblings with it. Actually, compared to Charles and Max, the youngest brother—who begs on street corners and meditates on a bed of nails—Robert comes across as verging on normal. (The artist's two sisters refused to participate in the film project.)

The movie returns to Charles a number of times, and in each encounter he seems worse, more spectral, less in this world. During these powerful, harrowing scenes, Zwigoff presents a picture of family as common affliction. It's perfect, somehow, that David Lynch should be the film's producer, because his "Eraserhead" is the only other film to capture that same sense of domestic claustrophobia and dread.

The value of such merciless satire is that it says "Bah!" to the kitsching of America, and to Hollywood and mass consumer culture in general. At the same time, Zwigoff acknowledges that there is no such thing as a society that would satisfy Crumb; his rancor goes beyond circumstances.

Crumb Reconsidered Criterion essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum, August 10, 2010, also seen here: Criterion Collection film essay [Jonathan Rosenbaum]

Crumb (1995) - The Criterion Collection

Visit the official R. Crumb website.

American Squalor: Crumb • Senses of Cinema Marc Lauria from Senses of Cinema, April 22, 2004

Only The Cinema [Ed Howard]

Reverse Shot [Sarah Silver] Summer, 2006

CriterionConfessions.com [Jamie S. Rich]

Robert Crumb: Survivor « The Hooded Utilitarian Sean Michael Robinson, January 24, 2011

Monthly Stumblings # 10: Alan Dunn Domingos Isabelinho from The Hooded Utilitarian, June 3, 2011

Satire, Racist Imagery, and Robert Crumb Robert Stanley Martin from The Hooded Utilitarian, June 22, 2011

Cheap Thrills Noah Berlatsky from The Hooded Utilitarian, June 23, 2011

Crumbface Noah Berlatsky from The Hooded Utilitarian, January 20, 2012

The Eras of Crumb « The Hooded Utilitarian Robert Stanley Martin from The Hooded Utilitarian, April 17, 2012

Terry Zwigoff's 'Crumb' (1994) | International Documentary Association John Anderson from Documentary Magazine

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GHOST WORLD A- 94

USA Great Britain Germany (111 mi) 2001

Creeps and losers and weirdos, these are our people. —Enid (Thora Birch)

Much like Zwigoff's brilliant documentary exposé Crumb (1995) that focuses on the tragic life of comic artist R. Crumb, who combats the horribly damaged tragedy in his own life with his fiercely savage art, this film perceptively creates sympathy for the lives of social misfits and alienated outcasts who counteract the stigma of social ostracism with biting sarcasm and acerbic wit. One of the better films that provides mood, atmosphere, and comic insight into the acute sensibilities of teenagers, showing how easily they remain stuck inside their self-absorbed worlds, where due to the level of conformity demanded in high school and as major consumers of mass culture, despite their need to be an “individual,” it’s so easy to pass judgment on others who are different, developing social tiers of popularity based on where you fit in. Adapted by the director along with Chicago screenwriter and graphic comic artist Dan Clowes from his original comic book novel by the same name, eight installments serialized in Eightball from 1993–97, the story focuses on the life of best friends Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson), two teenagers that don’t fit in, that both lie outside the social mainstream, yet maintain some degree of sanity by continually mocking and satirically poking fun of others, continually commenting on how fake and shallow the world is with a kind of corrosively sarcastic humor. In this way they carve out their own niche of outsiderist respectability, but once the safety net of high school has been pulled away, they have no one left to target, as they are suddenly thrust into the real world, where at their lame graduation party Rebecca points out, “We'll never see Todd again,” knowing that their targets of playful fun will suddenly disappear. While Rebecca is much more likely to fit into the consumerist “mall world,” doing what’s expected of her though hating every minute, leading a considerably downbeat existence, thinking everybody around her sucks, Enid takes a stand against this blatant conformity, which she does at great risk, as she only alienates herself from everyone she knows, none of whom are smart enough to understand her particular brand of satire, which goes completely over their heads. Enid changes her outfits and looks throughout, making a post modernist fashion statement on the 70’s punk rebellion, complete with green hair, while just as easily shifting to the chic Audrey Hepburn look of the 1960’s.

The irony of it all, despite being among the most clever students, Enid’s graduation is contingent upon passing a make-up class over summer school, having failed art class. Enid has uncanny artistic talent on display, which we see in her diary notebook, which is largely a collection of sketches, and the film itself seems to be a series of vignettes conceived from her astutely keen observation skills. Using deadpan wit to target what’s supposed to be trendy and cool, initially the two friends continue their same old pranks, where they visit a cute convenience store clerk, Josh (Brad Renfro), harassing him for a ride in his car, torturing him with their girlish attention, which is their way of liking a guy. When they visit a local hang out together, it’s a fake 50’s diner that plays rap music on the jukebox, otherwise surrounded by faceless establishments like McDonald’s and Starbucks that litter the suburban landscape, where whatever traits their town once displayed have been sucked out of existence by consumer culture. On a lark, as they have nothing better to do, they decide to harass a guy placing an ad in the Personals, making fun of him, responding to his ad, and then watching him suffer when no one comes to meet him, calling the guy an obvious dork, especially when he gets pissed off afterwards. But they see him again at a rummage sale and learn his name is Seymour, Steve Buscemi in one of his best roles, a guy obsessed with old records, where he has an unsurpassed collection of vintage 78’s, which have little to no use to anyone other than himself. Peculiarly, Enid finds this somewhat fascinating, as rather than a total fuck up, like most deluded and vacuous guys obsessed with sports and Adidas shoes, this guy knows his own interests. While Seymour could just as easily be a Trekkie, he’s instead a hater of over-produced commercial radio and thrives on authentic musical recordings, knowing all the trivial details about lost and forgotten artists, much like these disappearing towns that are being bought out by consumer retail outlets and replicated chain stores.

Enid’s summer school class becomes interwoven with her life, where her over-exuberant teacher, Illiana Douglas, is the exact opposite of the more socially detached Enid, wearing her enthusiasm for self-expression-as-the-meaning-of-art on her sleeve, literally pushing each student to find their inner soul and express themselves. Enid keeps questioning her own identity, showing a preference for the undiscovered world of Seymour’s vintage classics to the contemporary music of her age. Meanwhile Rebecca nags at Enid to find a job, as they’re planning to move in together, but Enid can’t hold a job, as she’s simply too honest with the customers and can’t understand how any self-respecting person would lower themselves to the demeaning tasks required. “It’s not optional!” she’s told when varying from the corporate research designed customer script that attempts to manipulate the customer into spending more money. Enid desperately tries to maintain her integrity when all around her people are losing theirs, including her best friend who finds it much easier to sell out to corporate culture. Enid is a throwback to Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, perhaps universally adored for his refusal to become a phony or submit to the growing adult hypocrisy surrounding him, holding fast to principles easily surrendered by everybody else, including family and friends. The ultimate tragedy, perhaps best expressed by Jason Robards in A THOUSAND CLOWNS (1965), is caving in to the generic conventionality of corporate submission in a mass culture that refuses to embrace originality. Capturing the provocative tone of the underground comic, a film where a clueless video store clerk thinks 9 ½ WEEKS is the same as Fellini's movie 8 ½, Enid is endearingly original, but in life after high school, society has no place for her, reflected in her inability to pass art class, the subject that she actually excels in. Underlying the laughs and the satiric wit are superb performances by Thora Birch and Steve Buscemi, both of whom are at their best here, each on the outer fringe struggling to find a place in the world, both all the more lovable for it.

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Terry Zwigoff successfully transitions Ghost World from graphic novel to film, maintaining Daniel Clowes's singular obsession with small-town adolescent loneliness and the fear associated with adult responsibility. Enid (Thora Birch) is a woman warrior, contemptible but nonetheless sympathetic. She and her best friend Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) believe themselves to be victims to a society that champions cultural homogenization via commercialism. Thus Enid and Rebecca fight to stay sane by reacting to the world around them. Their outré taste in clothing and affinity for pranks are just some of the ways they try to make their lives more interesting. The "ghost world" in question is a nameless town inundated by mini-malls, coffee shops, movie theaters, and people desperately and hopelessly trying to get rid of yesterday's knick-knacks. Enid can't bring herself to sell a toy during a yard sale not necessarily because the potential buyer is a perceived "loser" but because it's easier to keep it than to perceive someone else reinventing the life of something she once held dear. Zwigoff, like Clowes, is concerned with that crawlspace between adolescent fear and adult actualization. Enid and Rebecca spend endless hours poking fun at the people around them, all in the hopes of adding a smidgen of self-worth to their otherwise unhappy lives. Where Clowes's original text focused squarely on Enid's tumultuous relationship with Rebecca in a post-graduation limbo, Zwigoff creates something more palpable with the film's open-ended finale, which evokes Enid's uncertainty now that she has accepted being an adult. Ghost World is a beautiful evocation of the ghostly nature of love, loss, and ultimately memory itself.

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

The overwhelming majority of films based on comic books strain to imitate their sources' flashy graphic elements, usually resulting in a busy mishmash of garish colors, swirling camera movements, grotesque characterization, and excessive special effects. Granted, Daniel Clowes' celebrated graphic novel Ghost World isn't that kind of comic. But director Terry Zwigoff's inspired and achingly funny adaptation aims for something considerably trickier: matching the panel-by-panel rhythms of a universe that's built on the patient accumulation of self-contained, vividly rendered episodes. Like few films since Zwigoff's superb 1995 documentary Crumb, Ghost World sees an underlying poignancy in the lives of outcasts who combat their misery through withering sarcasm and creative misanthropy. Past irony and world-weary beyond their 17 years, Thora Birch and Scarlett Johannson have trouble finding their place among the block apartments, decrepit strip malls, and homogenized neighborhoods of contemporary Los Angeles. They have vague plans to move into an apartment together, but in the meantime, they amble about the city and size up the horrible banalities around them. (An early exchange in which they wonder if the band playing at a high-school dance is so bad it's good, or "so bad it's past good and back to bad again" sums up their disaffection perfectly.) One day, Birch and Johannson alleviate their boredom by arranging a phony date with the author of a personal ad, a middle-aged record collector played by Steve Buscemi. The prank just compounds their depression, but Birch takes an interest in Buscemi—he's not a fashionable loser, but a genuine loser—which causes a subtle rift in her friendship with Johannson, who appears more willing to conform to real-world expectations. Ghost World brims with memorable characters on the periphery: a remedial art teacher (Illeana Douglas) whose touchy-feely, issue-oriented aesthetic is defined by a hilarious experimental video packed with doll parts and crosses; a shy convenience-store clerk (Brad Renfro) the girls love to harass; and Birch's father (Bob Balaban), an ineffectual stiff who operates on a different wavelength than his daughter. If the players outside the film's inner circle come across as two-dimensional caricatures, it's only because Zwigoff and Clowes (who co-wrote the script) are so keyed into their heroes' caustic worldview that they can also recognize its limitations. Most of Ghost World is funny, but the laughs are inextricably tied to the painful alienation and self-loathing that comes with living on society's fringes. In her quest for authenticity, Birch is drawn to Buscemi, but Zwigoff and Clowes are wise enough to know that even something genuine can be a cold comfort.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Ghost World (2001) Leslie Felperin from Sight and Sound, December 2001

An unnamed US suburban town, the present. Best friends Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) are two misanthropic teens fresh out of high school, although Enid has to take a summer-school art class to get her final diploma. She lives with her single-parent father (Bob Balaban), Rebecca with her grandmother. They spend their time hanging out in diners and teasing their friend Josh (Brad Renfro) who works in a convenience store. A prank reply to a 'just seen' personal ad leads to them meeting lonely, middle-aged Seymour (Steve Buscemi), a local man who collects blues and jazz records, and works in a middle-management job for a fast-food chain. Although Rebecca, who plans to rent an apartment for herself and Enid, dismisses Seymour as a 'geek', Enid befriends him and tries to help him meet women.

Seymour lends Enid a 1930s poster featuring racist imagery (produced by the company he works for). She enters the poster in her art-class show, intending it to remind people that such imagery was, until recently, widely acceptable. Meanwhile, Enid's dad starts dating his ex-girlfriend Maxine (Teri Garr) whom Enid can't stand. Rebecca gets a job in a coffee shop to raise rent money; Enid tries working in a multiplex cinema but is sacked after a day. When Seymour starts dating a real-estate agent, Enid becomes jealous and feels put out when he tries to distance himself from her. Her dad announces Maxine is moving in. Enid's art teacher arranges a college scholarship for her, but when controversy erupts over Seymour's racist poster, the school forces the teacher to flunk Enid, causing her to lose the scholarship. The media furore leads to Seymour losing his job.

Enid falls out with the increasingly more conventional Rebecca. One night she ends up going to bed with Seymour and regrets it. When Seymour comes looking for Enid, Rebecca reveals the prank that first brought them together and shows him the cruel drawings Enid made of him in her sketchbook when they first met. He takes a pill overdose but survives. Enid visits him in hospital, showing him subsequent drawings that suggest how much she cares for him. After making up with Rebecca, Enid finds a way out of town.

Review

There's a scene in Ghost World when Enid and Rebecca - the two disaffected suburban teenagers at the centre of Terry Zwigoff's new film - kill some time in a local video store (where trailers for fictional middlebrow fare such as The Flower That Drank the Moon loop drearily, and the clerk offers Nine 1/2 Weeks to someone looking for Fellini's 8 1/2). Browsing listlessly through the titles, the young women pronounce that, 'All these movies suck.' Would they like Ghost World itself, you wonder? Given their territorial pissing on most things, but particularly on anything that packages itself as 'cool' and is aimed at the teen/twentysomething demographic from which they feel estranged, they'd probably even sniff at their own star vehicle. Or at least Thora Birch's acerbic Enid would. Rebecca, played by Scarlett Johansson, might like it more, although she would be angry her character doesn't get to have sex with their friend Josh as she does in the Daniel Clowes' graphic novel, on which the screenplay is based. Viewers less biased than them will be more forgiving, and delight in the film's deadpan wit, softly layered details and deft portrait of suburban anomie.

It's not a perfect film. The bus-out-of-town ending feels pat, like something backers might have insisted on (even though it's in Clowes' original book), and runs counter to the pleasingly rough weaving of its several unresolved storylines. Otherwise, Ghost World adeptly evokes the unbearable dullness of being 18, the precarious power play of female friendship, the torpor born from having to decide what 'other plans' you should make if you're not going to go to college. Considering it was written by a couple of middle-aged guys (Clowes and director Terry Zwigoff), the film's twang of authenticity is even more impressive.

Perhaps because the slow dissolution of Enid and Rebecca's friendship is harder to dramatise on film, the movie departs from the book by creating the character of Seymour, the repressed but angry record collector whose moribund love life Enid tries to resuscitate. ('By the end of the summer you're going to be up to your neck in pussy.') Zwigoff, who directed the superb documentary Crumb about counterculture-cartoonist Robert Crumb, has admitted in interviews that much of Seymour is based on himself. So the temptation to interpret Seymour's sleeping with Enid as a queasy male fantasy is nigh irresistible. Nevertheless, you still have to applaud the unflinching way even their stillborn romance is treated. This is no Lolita for the lo-fi set. Like Robert Crumb, who openly admits and explores his own misogyny in his art, Zwigoff lets the 'weirdness' of Enid and Seymour's relationship trouble as well as charm, while remaining scrupulously non-judgemental.

As the title obliquely suggests, Ghost World is all about detachment. The camera often stands fixed and far back from the action, particularly in the exterior shots as the characters trudge doggedly through the abrasively bright, clearly Southern Californian landscape of scruffy condos and pastel strip malls. The stiff-postured tableaux ring true to Clowes' original black-and-50s-mint-green strips. Cannily, the main performers deliver most of their lines in slack monotones, all the better to set off the script's wit and balance the glistering cluster of varyingly deranged lesser characters - from Bob Balaban's heartbreaking turn as Enid's dad and Illeana Douglas' painfully earnest art teacher, down to a numchuck-wielding loser who haunts Josh's convenience store and an old man who uses a wheelchair just because he's too lazy to walk.

The Shadow of Time Passing: Ghost World • Senses of Cinema Maximilian Le Cain, July 19, 2002

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BAD SANTA B 83

USA (91 mi) 2003

Or in the film vernacular, Fucking Bad Ass Santa - the Coen brothers produced this film, directed by Terry Zwigoff of CRUMB and GHOST WORLD.  The foul-mouthed expletives roll off the tongues non-stop in this film, as alcoholic Santa doesn't give a shit, along with his even more foul-mouthed black dwarf, a terrible tag team act that has their own rat pack tradition of robbing shopping mall safes on Christmas Eve.  Of course all of this is preposterous, and the language is truly funny, especially the dwarf's never-ending, quick witted, expletive-included put-downs of Santa's deplorable behavior.  I absolutely enjoyed the degree of depravity of one fallen man in a Santa suit, played perfectly by sad sack Billy Bob Thornton, and the opening voice-over narration while viewing Santa in a bar as he saunters out into an alley to wretch, up comes the title "Bad Santa," is simply hilarious, but the non-stop input of alcohol is not.  For me, that's just not funny, as it's a habit that in real life kills too many people.  So ho-ho-ho, fuck that shit. 

Bad Santa Michael Agger from The New Yorker

There's something appealing about a dyspeptic comedy with an alcoholic Santa Claus (Billy Bob Thornton), a foulmouthed elf (Tony Cox), and a script that sends up the faux togetherness of the holidays, but this movie is more scatological than subversive. Terry Zwigoff, who directed "Crumb" and "Ghost World," has a knack for finding the grotesque in modern America, and he has a terrific child actor in Brett Kelly, a butterball whose unbreakable belief in the spirit of Christmas carries the film. Yet, once the rude shock of a profane Claus wears off, there's not really much to do except await the next outrageous remark.

THE HIGH HAT | NITRATE: Underground Men Phil Nugent from the High Hat

The rowdy, transgressive spirit of great underground comics is something the whole culture desperately needs a shot of right now. The director Terry Zwigoff has done as much as anyone to bring it into movies, with his his great documentary feature Crumb and his own comic book adaptation, Ghost World. (It’s there, too, in the hedonistic-folkie spirit of his debut film, Louie Bluie, a profile of the late musician Howard Armstrong that grew out of the love of a lost musical culture that links him to Pekar and their mutual buddy Crumb. In fact, Zwigoff can be spotted in the very first story that Crumb illustrated for American Splendor, a sleepy-eyed little fellow with a Fuller Brush moustache who looks as if Crumb rescued him from a jar of formaldehyde.) Zwigoff’s new movie, the instant holiday classic Bad Santa, isn’t actually based on a comic, but in every way it’s an extension of the Zap/Bijou Funnies spirit. The most gleefully transgressive comedy in memory, it’s like something cobbled together by Robert Crumb’s Snoids.

The movie’s title flashes onscreen alongside the image of Billy Bob Thornton, in a Santa Claus suit, throwing up in an alley behind the bar where he’s been throwing ’em back, and all any reasonable person should need to hear is that this opening neither misrepresents what follows nor constitutes its peak. It’s a one-joke movie, but the joke has more electricity and juice in it than most you’ll encounter in any current movie, and Zwigoff and his cast really run with it. Thornton’s character turns out to be a safecracker who works once a year, cleaning out whichever department store he and his dwarf sidekick (Tony Cox) have been playing Santa-and-elf in for a month, so that he can spend the time between New Year’s and Thanksgiving drinking and rutting himself insensible. Thornton has given his fair share of wild man performances in the past; the best of them (such as his recent cameo in the Coen brothers’ Intolerable Cruelty) can be considered sneak previews for this one. He has a way of making his lines sound dirtier than they are, which given some of his lines here has to be considered a godlike achievement.

A sick joke that ends up as an unlikely tribute to the saving resilience of the doomed — Billy Bob finds himself playing father figure to a freakish social leper of a fat kid who would’ve been tortured to death behind the school gymnasium by the Brady kids — Bad Santa is truly a joyous holiday experience for your ass. The only way anyone will top it next year is if someone remakes It’s a Wonderful Life with Harvey Pekar as a George Bailey who lectures Clarence the angel on the injustice of the savings and loan system and political anarchism and persuades him to join him in firebombing Old Man Potter’s mansion.

ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL B 87

USA (102 mi) 2005

Another collaboration with Appleton, Wisconsin native Zwigoff with Chicago based screenwriter Daniel Clowes, similarly adapted, like GHOST WORLD, from another one of his own graphic comic book novels, but while the tone of the humor is dead on, this isn’t nearly as funny or memorable, though there is much to like here. The opening of the film is gangbusters, featuring a moody, self-absorbed Jerome, Max Minghella, maturing from a geeky Suburban kid who likes to draw, but whose face was used as a battering ram by local ruffians, to a naive freshman entering a college art school in New York City, (supposedly based on New York City’s Pratt Institute, as it was the only one with dorm rooms), where we see a dreamy-eyed young man filled with dreams of becoming one of the world’s greatest artists. While initially filled with ambitions and a love of art for art’s sake, he slowly but surely descends through various mood swings directly into a world of commerce. How does one sell his work? What distinguishes a certain artist from another? And just what exactly is art? In class, each student is pitted against the other for recognition, each is dramatically crushed when their works are not instantly appreciated, and they are told only one out of a hundred of them will ever succeed as artists.

Jerome’s room-mates are a quiet, closeted fashion designer and an obnoxious, overweight, can’t keep his mouth shut, over the top wannabe filmmaker who is already in his third year. However, Jerome’s immediate contact is with a fellow art student and college mentor Bardo, Joel David Moore, who keeps dropping out to avoid failure, then re-enters school sometime later to give it another try. He sarcastically sizes up each of the students in the class and assumes Jerome is basically there to get laid, that the art is purely secondary, sending Jerome headfirst towards plenty of ditzy chicks, called “art skanks,” who are too freaked out on their own weirdness to even look his way, and instead falls head over heels in love with the art class model, Audrey, Sophia Myles, whose picture was included in the college brochure. Jerome dreamily follows her around for awhile, thinking they have a groovy thing going, but she suddenly takes more interest in the straightest kid in the class, a frat jock type with a muscular physique, the exact opposite of all the other art geeks. Jerome becomes more and more demoralized, as does his confidence in his work. The classic slide from wanting so much to feeling so little happens instantly.

John Malkovich is perfectly cast as the art teacher, as he slinks around behind the students observing their work, asking them to critique each other to tears, then comes to the rescue as the voice of moderation, while behind the scenes, he is constantly pushing his own career, even to the point of taking self-serving phone calls in class. But as Jerome is going through his emotional nosedive, he comes to ask the professor for advice, but Malkovich seems more interested in cuddling and holding hands than actually having a clue what this kid is going through. Also wonderfully cast is Jim Broadbent as an R. Crumb or Henry Darger-style outsider artist, living in a cluttered dilapidated apartment, needing a swig of slivovitz to keep his nerves on even keel, where he rails against the world with lunatic-fringe ferocity, but he’s a graduate from the same art school so he serves as a shining example of what so-called “success” can bring, a man filled with loathing and self-hate.

Add to this mix the mysterious and unlikely element of a college serial killer on the loose, who is swiftly killing off several of the female students at night, which has the filmmaker in high gear, thinking he can capitalize on the public’s attention with a deliriously pretentious slasher epic. This little plot twist never really gets going, particularly the oafish portrayal of the police, which seems to detract from everything else that is first rate about the film, the casting, the dialogue, the true to form satiric sketch of art school, exposing the pretense from the fraud, as who’s really interested in art anyway unless it can bring them a quick buck? Steve Buscemi is hilarious as the ego-laden proprietor of the local coffee shop, which prominently features one gallery opening after another, discovering rising artists like fashion commodities, who’s in, who’s out? It was wonderful to see Buscemi belligerently roust the cops out of his establishment as they’re attempting to hone in on the serial killer by interviewing customers.

What was really interesting for me was the under the surface romance between the budding art student and the art society-established art model, whose father is a renowned artist, so she pulls Jerome along for the ride through various art gatherings, and then loses him as soon as something better comes along. Whenever he sees or thinks of her, there is a musical leitmotif from the opening of the Adagio movement from Beethoven’s 5th Piano Concerto, which adds an element of grace, refinement, and even reaching for the sublime to his personal state of mind, as if he was swooning at the very thought of her. Interesting that the more Jerome plunges into a self-absorbed state of self-deprecating hatred and contempt, the more successful he becomes in realizing his dreams, both as an artist and as a lover. It was hilarious to see the always beautiful Audrey dumpster diving for one of Jerome’s precious paintings near the end of the film. But what I found most interesting was the film’s sly maneuver to prominently feature the music of Beethoven, one of the world’s greatest artists, and never credit him at the end of the picture. His music and his art, as far as this film is concerned, remains anonymous.

Art School Confidential Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Oh goody -- Mad Magazine does Artforum. Here's a film that's desperately trying to be scathing in its misanthropy, but just ends up looking kind of sad. I spent some time in art school (one useless semester, to be exact), and went to a crunchy-granola hippy school after that, so I'm well versed in ASC's attempted demonology. Hey look, there's the angry lesbian with bad skin. Oh yeah, and there's the dude who's smugly conversant with art-crit jargon. And on and on. But instead of ever feeling the pang of recognition or too-close-to-home indictment, I mostly sat through ASC thinking about who, if anyone, could actually connect with this film enough to find it funny. Granted, I don't want to get all Armond White and start attacking those individuals who seem to me to comprise the target audience of a film I don't happen to like. But I really wonder who this is for. Embittered draftsmen who equate "style" and "personality" in art with formlessness and lack of discipline? Cultural conservatives who think higher ed has been irredeemably shanghaied by limp po-mo nonsense? Comics nerds who think cinema's raison d'etre is point-and-shoot transparency, unfolding stories one set-up at a time with minimal interference? I really don't know. But this is a deeply ugly film on all levels, and although it seems to think it's mining its undergraduate stereotypes for some higher purpose -- "satire," one assumes -- a film with no artistic pretensions whatsoever like Rodney Dangerfield's Back to School actually has a lot more to say about its cultural moment, and ekes out more comedy besides. Daniel Clowes' original comic struck me as little more than a nose-thumbing amusement back in the day, and it turns out not to be much of a foundation upon which to build anything noteworthy or memorable. Only Anjelica Huston manages to retain her humanity. As for the rest? Well, here's the question you must ask yourself. Do you believe that anyone who'd spend 25 years painting triangles is, by definition, an asshole?

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