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www.camerastylo.com
by Derek Lam
So who else was disappointed by Millennium Mambo? The summer may be dominated by Cannes for those critics, distributors, and programmers who crowded their way down the Croisette, but for the rest of us, the season is usually one of has-beens and also-rans, with art-house schedules featuring one-off curiosities from last year's festival circuit not quite substantial enough for fall release and minor works from major auteurs denied a debut at their regular haunt of the New York Film Festival. Masterpieces may be few and far between, but it's time to play catch up, and luckily, there have been enough surprises and ideas to mull over so far that one doesn't have to be unreasonably anxious for fall to arrive.
Hou Hsiao-Hsien's latest, part of a proposed trilogy about urban youth and the year 2000, could have been a contender. Like Kiarostami's ABC Africa, it's clearly a transitional work where the director has significantly rethought his style, but not yet to compelling effect. Eschewing his usual wide-angle shots for far more close-ups, Hou is seeking greater intimacy in Millennium Mambo, but perversely his insistence on the sort of rotoscopic camera moves employed so deftly in Flowers of Shanghai combines now with the flattened images to produce an obtrusive and self-conscious visual style that ultimately negates the naturalistic rhythm and sense of real-time passing that Hou continues to seek via his protracted long takes. Questions of style aside, the material is surprisingly thin for a Hou Hsiao-Hsien film: as Jonathan Rosenbaum correctly observed, Hou's usual ability to serve as a "historian of the present" has deserted him on this outing, and despite the fleeting pleasures provided by the presence of Hou stalwart, Jack Kao, Mambo is unlikely to be regarded as a key work in the Hou filmography. If, however, as reports from Cannes this year have suggested, Kiarostami has made good on the promise of ABC Africa with the more fully achieved Ten, there is certainly no reason not to expect the same of Hou's next film.
Besides Millennium Mambo, two other Y2K statements made their way to New York this summer, a somewhat belated two-and-a-half years after the event itself. I missed Shunji Iwai's All About Lily Chou-Chou when it bowed last year at the New York Film Festival, but seeing it now, I can understand some of the hostile critical reactions it was met with. Gorgeously shot on digital HD, Lily begins as a rhapsodic portrait of lonely teenage outsiders connecting through an Internet fan site. There are moments of careless rapture, and Iwai's affinity for music and gift for aria-like outbursts of sheer lyricism (immeasurably aided by generous dollops of Debussy) suggest that, with a firmer grasp of romance or perhaps greater eccentricity, he might become another Jacques Demy or Léos Carax. But alas Iwai has a portentous, half-baked statement to make about the millennial loss of innocence, and after a breathtakingly assembled mini-DV centerpiece depicting a summer vacation that serves as a turning point in the lives of the film's protagonists, the film quickly loses its moorings and its ability to convince as Iwai piles murder upon rape, one ridiculous escalating incident after another, and characters drown in a morass of moody clichés and cartoonish caricatures.
Likewise an apocalypse manqué, Roy Andersson's Songs from the Second Floor seeks to visualize a pessimist's vision of millennial Europe, a continent imagined here as economically depressed and spiritually void. The painterly tableaux often look stunning, and there are a few droll moments here and there, but the problem with Andersson's vision isn't just that it's so schematically and tendentiously bleak (as J. Hoberman seems to have intimated in his review via comparisons with Bergman), but that the generalized targets of his satire are irrelevant to contemporary concerns, if not downright moldy. The jokes about crucifix salesmen belong to another age, and the climactic ritual of human sacrifice misses the zeitgeist entirely. Whatever its problems, Michael Haneke's Code Inconnu was at least more in touch with the pressing issues confronting 21st-century Europe, and however dour and obvious, would have to do for now as the EU's official Y2K nightmare film.
Among smaller offerings, Stanley Kwan's Lan Yu, the Hong Kong director's first Stateside release, is enjoyable if slight. Kwan is a deft director with a gift for understated melodrama and delicate textures, but his ambitions remain modest. Perhaps that's when he does his best work. Those highly aestheticized projects which have won him the most acclaim on festival circuits (Rouge, Actress) seem to me less personal and less revealing of his talent than the group of smaller films (Love Unto Waste, Hold You Tight) to which Lan Yu belongs. A return-to-form after Kwan's own millennial misstep, the hopelessly failed Island Tales, Lan Yu is a delicate chamber piece, reminding one of Kwan's endless infatuation with the fashionable stylishness of his favorite film, The Conformist, but also serving as a testament to the director's ability to render telling moments of tender intimacy and menacing quiet.
What's left to keep one out of the sun? Michael Snow's Corpus Callosum has a late August opening, and Manoel de Oliveira's sublime I’m Going Home finally looks forward to a theatrical run after being picked up by Milestone. Those with a yen for Takashi Miike can expect worse from Visitor Q, although I shall probably pass and wait for the highlights from Cannes to trickle in. The most eagerly anticipated film? Aleksandr Sokurov's Russian Ark. Sokurov, along with Béla Tarr, both recently accorded full retrospective treatment by MoMA, are fast becoming the film festival circuit's favorite cult visionaries. Those who attended the Sokurov retro will not soon forget the gaudily Expressionist sci-fi, Days of the Eclipse (incidentally, subject of one of the key essays in Fredric Jameson's prescient The Geopolitical Aesthetic - still an invigorating read), the haunting elegy The Second Circle, and the opalescent hues of the Dostoevsky-inspired Whispering Pages. I confess that the enigmatic Stone eludes me, and while Moloch seems to me to offer the unusual perspective of looking at an essentially twentieth-century dictator from a nineteenth-century vantage point, Taurus strikes me as very thin brew, less concentrated than any of the other Sokurovs I have been able to see. Russian Ark, though, with its promised 90 minute long-take through the corridors of history, certainly sounds like a feat to behold. One waits, as one does for Unknown Pleasures, Ten, The Son....
One begins thinking about the fall, after all.
All written material (c) 2002 by Derek Lam