www.camerastylo.com
www.camerastylo.com
by Derek Lam
Was it journalistic hyperbole that deemed 2003 one of the worst Cannes ever? Judging from what made it to the 41st New York Film Festival, the pickings this year were relatively lean. Not that NYFF 2003 lacked grand statements and auteurial stunts, but few of these proved to be true masterpieces in the manner of such symphonic apotheoses as Yi Yi (Life) or Eloge de l'amour (Love, History, Movies) in years past. But, then, perhaps part of the disappointment was that masterpieces didn't come in this usual, expected form - no ecumenical hymns to This or That aspect of humanity. Instead, the gems this year were the chamber works, smaller, seemingly more modest films that in fact quietly, intimately worked towards a vision of life and the world from the bottom up and the everyday. Their deceptive lack of chutzpah, coupled with a healthy skepticism towards any generalized, epic pronouncement that pretends to speak to one and all, brought a welcome sense of relief when so much bravado this year - directorial ambition, "vision," call it what you will - turned out to be so much bull.
To be fair, among the heavyweights, Clint Eastwood's Mystic River and Lars von Trier's Dogville both boasted the stylistic assurance and sheer craftsmanship of veterans, but one was compromised by an obliging manner towards genre conventions (eloquently defended by Kent Jones in the recent Film Comment) while the other suggested the retreat of a once unpredictable iconoclast into comfortably cultish self-confinement. Suffice it to say that, at its best, Eastwood's film achieved the naïf grandeur of Verdi, its anachronistically somber attitude towards violence a welcome intervention in the culture of Kill Bill. As for Von Trier's annual, po-mo costume party, the theme this year (and one of its many not-so-surprising surprises) was The Threepenny Opera. Fans will appreciate the "same old, same old," in-your-face mannerisms: the over-the-top caricatures of good and evil, the once-provocative, now routine, humiliations for the pure-hearted martyr, the all-too-recycled sense of tongue-in-cheek, directorial mischief. But where will Von Trier go from here?
There were those at Cannes who felt that Gus Van Sant's Elephant was a more deserving film than either Dogville or Mystic River. Did the jury, as Van Sant jokingly observed at a press conference, simply enjoy watching Americans shoot each other? An unhappy ménage à trois involving Abercrombie, Fitch, and Tarr, Elephant dodges its subject matter in favor of the same sort of window-dressing that Van Sant brought to his slick Psycho remake. Expressive touches that aspire to poetry border on the banal (clouds rushing across an ominous sky, a nightmarishly cacophonous school cafeteria), while a parade of high school stereotypes rings false in a manner that testifies less to a conscious, deconstructive approach towards identity as role-playing (as some ardent defenders of the film have suggested) than to a mindlessly prettifying impulse that leaves insufficiently worked-out ideas in its wake. What a telltale sign that it received the imprimatur of a Cannes-jury headed by Patrice Chéreau, theater director par excellence and himself no stranger to immaculate wall-papering (what was that Pauline Kael distinction again between an opera composer and an opera producer?)
Ross McElwee's Bright Leaves doesn't share any of Elephant's artistic pretensions ("Bela who?"), but when the artist involved is not a Godard or a Kiarostami, it's perhaps good to know that no one's out to consecrate his artistic statement on your time. For better or for worse, McElwee never takes himself too seriously, which means Bright Leaves can sometimes come across as too leisurely, ramshackle, and, perhaps, faceless. For sure, next to such fellow cine-essayists as heroic, questing Chris Marker, the hustling Michael Moore, and hammy, affected Nanni Moretti, McElwee may appear a little anonymous. But why not drop in with a neighbor from time to time who's reasonably intelligent, full of common sense, and mercifully devoid of "genius." Better that than the rhetorical onslaught and film student philosophizing of, say, Barbara Albert's Free Radicals or Alejandro González Iñárritu's insanely portentous 21 Grams. Both films suffer from an inflated, near cosmic sense of self-importance, with busy, overwrought surfaces struggling to distract from threadbare notions of Fate, Life, and the Whole Nine Yards. (A close cousin to these less-than-meet-the-eye, triple-forte harangues might be Marco Bellocchio's Good Morning, Night, which like the director's My Mother's Smile two years ago, wastes an intriguing premise on Italian politics and religion by reducing it to merely well-upholstered, pseudo David Lynch-ian atmospherics.)
By contrast, playing at a delicate pianissimo, the finest and most musical film of the 41st New York Film Festival made much of the rest feel like just so much noise. With the most minimal of setups, Goodbye Dragon Inn may not be the most substantial of Tsai Ming-Liang's films, but it exhibits a formal precision and jewel-like perfection that's altogether breathtaking. Consider it Tsai's The Long Day Closes or perhaps his The Last Picture Show. This loveliest of paens to the ritual of filmgoing revolves around the farewell screening at a nearly deserted Taipei movie palace, as splendidly dilapidated and retro in look as the decaying housing estate in Tsai's The Hole. In this phantasmagoric space, Tsai's signature theme of alienated, lonely urbanites who desire and yet fear communication plays out elegantly in two juxtaposing variations, one a bittersweet storyline involving a lovelorn box office attendant (What Time Is It There?'s Chen Shiang-Chyi, remarkably transformed to look like Hsiao-Kang's mother in previous Tsai films), the other a comic one about a young gay man out cruising. Crosscutting between the two plotlines with an acute sensitivity to rhyming patterns and parallel rhythms, Tsai composes visual music of the highest order. The camera might be stationary, but no shot is truly static: each frame is defined by its own rhythm, whether in the form of shifting textures (the billowing of a curtain, the shadows cast by a movie screen), accompanying sound (the hum of a ventilator, film-within-a-film dialogue), or both (the choreographed footfall of the characters, each identified by a particular rhythm to his gait). No living director has a better feel for rendering the sculptural weight of three-dimensional architectural spaces on celluloid via lighting and mise-en-scène, while Tsai's musique concrète orchestration of sounds and noises both for aesthetic and semantic effect is now clearly in the Tati class (one particular gag involving sunflower seeds can only be the envy of Hulot.) And did I mention the eponymous film-within-a-film, lovingly paid homage to even as it's "made strange" in its new context, with a touching cameo by King Hu regular Shih Chuen?
Perhaps the only other film at this year's festival within any distance of Tsai's achievement was Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Distant (Uzak). Set in a frozen Istanbul where a photographer caught in a mid-life crisis finds himself paid an unexpected visit by his country cousin, Ceylan's film uses the setup for a brilliant, allegorical encounter between cultures old and new, as the Third World clashes resoundingly with the West. A fount of peasant reverences, country bumpkin Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak) goes hotheaded defending his kin and feels pity for even a newborn mouse that gets caught in a trap. By contrast, Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir), his coolly urban, modernized cousin - older, desensitized to the point of emotional paralysis - leaves calls about his distant, ailing mother unanswered, while speaking of his ex-wife's abortion in the most casual terms. Throughout, Ceylan keeps himself attuned to the differences in values and tastes between the two characters and the worlds they represent: the calculating, cosmopolitan intellectual who savors Tarkovsky and Bach ("Who's this Bak?" asks his befuddled cousin of his CD collection) as much as he does American porn inhabiting a seemingly different planet than his guileless and naïve village counterpart. Resplendently photographed by Ceylan himself, Distant is remarkably nuanced in its observation of how everyday details and behavior reflect character and values, and more darkly funny a film than some reviews have suggested.
As fittingly absurdist as Distant and equally valid as a statement on the uneasy coexistence of disparate cultures in the globalized present, Jafar Panahi's Crimson Gold feels somewhat crudely schematic next to Ceylan's film, but makes up for it with a journalistic sense of immediacy and outrage that Fuller would have approved of. With his hulking body and sadsack expression, Hussein Emadeddin is perfectly cast as the impoverished Iran-Iraq war veteran and pizza deliveryman whose injured sense of pride leads him to a suicidal bank robbery. As usual, Panahi gives us unusual glimpses of Tehran's cityscape and urban life, and as in Distant, differences in sexual values are considered alongside class and cultural discrepancies, memorably at a middle-class dance where working-class soldiers arrest unmarried partygoers who "sleep during the day and booze themselves at night," as well as in the film's penultimate sequence, a surreal episode in which Hussein finds himself spending an evening at a wealthy expatriate's mansion, replete with Muzak-inflected bathrooms and the latest plasma-screen TV, where the young, well-to-do owner of the house complains, with an American accent, about not getting laid with "local girls" he doesn't understand.
In a post-9/11 world, where American media is saturated with superficial coverage of the "clash of values" between different cultures inevitably considered from a hegemonic perspective, films like Crimson Gold and Distant hold the added value of providing an intelligent, critical perspective on the First World from the Third, their protagonists negotiating with the attendant effects of a globalization whereby the everyday anywhere is increasingly colonized by American commodities (pizza, porn...). (This seems implicitly the case with Tsai's film, its subtext being the loss of a local cinema - literally, in the form of the movie house; figuratively, via what King Hu's cinema represents - in the face of Time Warner.) These films seem to me to have a far greater engagement with the zeitgeist than the official masterpieces this year (Mystic River, Dogville, Elephant, incidentally, all films in that lingua franca, English), which seem relatively old-fashioned in their insistence on an insular, mythic realm where "universal" (or, perhaps, Universal) values struggle to appear valid in today's increasingly decentered international culture.
With that in mind, it's perhaps a good thing that, for whatever reason, the "4th Film by Quentin Tarantino" had its party more than a few blocks away from Alice Tully. Hard to say which simulacrum is more outrageous - Lars von Trier's America or Quentin Tarantino's Japan. What's clear is that the charges of anti-Americanism that befell Von Trier at Cannes (Von Trier's seasoned reply: "As far as I recall, the Americans didn't visit Casablanca when they made Casablanca") won't fall on Tarantino's lap anytime soon. With QT, it's the USA, all the way. Unapologetically having a "Caucausian girl who likes to play with samurai swords" chop down blacks, Asians, and sundry minority baddies in wardrobe stolen from Bruce Lee, Tarantino appropriates from Asian action genres with the eagerness and rapacious abandon of the fusion chef who's out on a whirlwind tour to upmarket various regional cuisines into one huge pan-Asian buffet. (Olivier Assayas's Demonlover now seems like a critique of Kill Bill avant la lettre.) Too bad the smorgasbord ain't better: only intermittently inspired this time around, Tarantino knows only how to pump up the volume when the wit isn't there. The inventiveness of Pulp Fiction prompted more than a few performances with gusto; here, despite some career resuscitations that only Tarantino can think of (Sonny Chiba, Gordon Liu...), the opportunities are wasted with material that half the cast seems to balk at rather than to share Tarantino's conviction in. Death of irony post-9/11? QT missed that one.
Incidentally, one wonders what Ozu would have thought of the Japan currently seen on American screens courtesy of Kill Bill and Lost in Translation. Is there a single Japanese in either film not depicted as some sort of insane Other? Ah, gaijin! In his early, Yankee-philic days, when he still made Hollywood-styled gangster films and comedies, Ozu might have appreciated Tarantino's sensibility. But when you think of the patient family dramas that made Ozu's name, this most resolutely unsexy of great filmmakers, celebrated in a sidebar retrospective at the New York Film Festival, cannot be further apart in temperament from the flashy, superficial Tarantino. For some thirty years, through both comedies and dramas, Ozu observed the minute changes in Japanese societal and cultural values via the microcosm of the family, first in a proletarian setting, later amidst the bourgeoisie. His humanist spirit, gently progressive in matters of sexual and familial politics, was coupled with a loopy, playful formalism that has been well-documented by David Bordwell in his book on the director. Will young cinephiles embrace on the occasion of this centenary the adult pleasures of Ozu's cinema? Possibly not, but then, like a Mozart or a Renoir or a George Eliot, Ozu is a pleasure to be savored, perhaps, without the aid of hormones. Some of those kids who like Kill Bill now might grow up and come around to it, especially once they have kids themselves.
All written material (c) 2003 by Derek Lam