Arts & Film

The Man Without a Past (Mies Vailla Menneisyyttä) Dir. Aki Karurismäki The best thing I’ve seen so far in this film fest, managing to be simultaneously laconic and warm. Quick plot summary: “M” (as he is referred to in the credits; played by Markku Peltola) gets beaten up and loses his identity; he then finds a community among the poor of Helsinki. Amnesia is a favourite device of storytellers (see Memento, for instance), of course, so much of the philosophical grounds trodden here have been explored. But whereas in most works amnesia is a cause for agita, this film seems to be a cinematic “oh well”. You can almost feel M shrug and proceed on with life. Today is the beginning of the rest of your life? For M, it really is.

Japón Dir. Carlos Reygadas First things first: why is it that Mexican films seem to have the unique ability, alone among non-English-language films, to have their titles referred to in the original (Spanish) language? I cite Japón, Y Tu Mama Tambien, and Amores Perros as examples. Even films from Spain don’t get that treatment (cf Almodovar’s Talk to Her). Not that knowing what Japón means would make any difference to your understanding of the film anyway - I presume naming a film after Japan when it has absolutely nothing to do with Japan is a reference to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil…

Max Dir. Menno Meyjes Aka the Hitler-as-starving-artist movie. I was afraid that Max would postulate a simplistic spurned-artist-turns-evil point of view, but it turned out to be more complex than that. Hitler (Noah Taylor) is shown as always possessing the evil ideas that he later channeled into murder - his idea of blood purity is chilling with or without the dramatic irony of knowing what happened next. This film was tied up in controversy because of the fact that it dares to show human aspects of Hitler, but I think that’s what makes Hitler’s evil even scarier.

Lovers and Leavers (Kuutamolla) Dir. Aku Louhimies Probably the most Hollywood-like of all the films I’ve seen so far. In part this is because the film itself is about Iiris (Minna Haapkylä), a film buff whose references are all to English-language films (Taxi Driver, Gilda, Star Wars, Bridget Jones’ Diary, etc.); in part because, really, other than the Finnish language, this is standard, albeit well-executed, romantic comedy fare. (Let’s see - perfectly handsome suave boyfriend with whom it just doesn’t click? See Sweet Home Alabama, among others - and yes, I know Lovers and Leavers probably precedes the Reese Witherspoon vehicle; the point is that this doesn’t add much to the formula. Crazy embarrassing mother? See Bridget Jones’ Diary, among others.) This movie really depends on the audience’s own knowledge of films: we understand the characters’ actions only because of the film’s references to so many film conventions. Let’s put it this way: on the way back home I bumped into my brother and he asked me about the film, and the first adjective that came to mind was “pleasant”.

Derrida Dir. Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman I bought a ticket to Derrida because the premise sounded great: is there any way to do a documentary on a major deconstructionist without him inevitably deconstructing the process of filmmaking as it’s going on? And, just as I expected, there were a lot of moments where Derrida commented on the whole oddness of the filming process. Which, of course, led to a lot of meta-filming, with a camera filming the filmmaker filming Derrida. (Actually, at one point we see a shot of the camera following Derrida, then we pull back to get a shot of that second cameraman, so there’s a camera filming a camera filming the filmmaker filming Derrida.) Derrida says sometime in the documentary that the process of winnowing down hours of footage into an hour-long (actually, 90min.) documentary means the documentarians are in a sense being autobiographical - they reveal themselves in the footage they choose to include. Which made me think of the idea that each text - this documentary, in this case - contains its own means of deconstruction, which led to me thinking about things in which each fragment contains a picture of the whole. What is the word for the latter phenomenon? Another question that springs to mind: I think it’s useful to remember that all documentaries are artificial settings, of course (I suppose that’s the quest of Nick Bloomfield et al when they insert themselves into their documentaries), but is there a modern audience that doesn’t recognise the artifice of the situations, and the impossibility of removing the documentarian’s own biases, even in supposedly objective texts? Don’t we recognise this as we read, say, the columns of William Safire in the New York Times? (This should not in no way be taken as approbation of Safire, who as an editorial columnist often displays the lovely ability to blithely ignore facts.) It’s not like the deconstruction is complete - nowhere in the film is it mentioned that Kofman was Derrida’s student. Anyway, back to the documentary: my watch-watch test (i.e. how long it takes before I check my watch to see how much time has passed, which I tend to do when I’m bored) clocked in at about 45 minutes, which is pretty damn good for a documentary.

The Canterbury Tales (I Racconti di Canterbury) Dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini All in all, a bit disappointing coming off The Decameron, which I really enjoyed. Both the Canterbury Tales and the Decameron I think occupy a similar spot in their respective country’s literary history, and indeed share a similar format, with people in differing occupations tell tales. And logically Pasolini works in a similar way here as in The Decameron (which he had made a year earlier), letting each story just pick up when the previous one ends. But something seems lost in the pacing, and in the end it seemed some tales came across better than others. Perhaps as an Italian, Pasolini was more familiar with Boccaccio than Chaucer? The framing device here is Chaucer sitting around his desk, looking busy, which seemed quite weak. Chaucer is played, of course, by Pasolini, and I suppose I prefer the gung-ho painter of The Decameron to non-participant of The Canterbury Tales. And the bad dubbing of the Italian actors detracted further from the enjoyment of the film.

The Decameron (Il Decameron) Dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini Ah, I think the whole idea of a Pasolini retrospective is great, even if the Powers That Be insisted on cuts that meant one of the films (The Arabian Nights) had to be cancelled. On to Pasolini’s version of the Boccaccio classic. I didn’t really like the Ciappelletto story that is one of the two framing stories: yes, I understand, in Pasolini’s version Ciappelletto (Franco Citti) makes the sacrifice that allows the northern usurers and the Church to glorify him and thus prolong their control over the masses. But the Marxism seems a bit overt, and I don’t like being beaten in my head with overt politics (this, incidentally, is my objection to most Michael Moore films - I think he ends up only preaching to the converted). Certainly I thought the class criticism was subtler - and thus better - in the two consecutive stories of Caterina, whose lover, the rich Ricciardo, is merely forced to marry her when they’re caught having sex, and Elisabetta, whose lover is killed by her brothers because the lover is a poor labourer. And of course any sprawling text like the Decameron allows for a wide treatment of various subjects, which Pasolini does very well, full of warmth for the characters - the story of the nuns taking turns screwing the gardener could be read as Pasolini’s take on church hypocrisy, but then the subject of oversexed nuns has been popular since mediaeval times, and it could also just be seen as a really funny story. Actually, the bawdy sex bits in the film were all great, with a sense of play that I thought felt true to the spirit of Boccaccio’s text and to the spirit of mediaeval literature.

A Tale of a Naughty Girl (Manda Meyer Upakhyan) Dir. Buddhadeb Dasgupta About Lati, a prostitute’s daughter who wants to be a student but whose mother wants to marry her off. I thought it was interesting to watch an arthouse Indian film that was set in a small village rather than a bustling city. I must say the film festival booklet’s description made me expect a much more depressing film than it turned out to be - was expecting one of those ’life is awful for women’ pictures. Dasgupta does a good job of balancing the terrible nature of life for the women in the brothel - there’s a nice scene near the end where silently the camera just goes room to room and we see the sleeping awful customers and then the saddened prostitutes - with the idea that life isn’t completely hopeless… Trouble occurred when something happened with the film reel near the end of the show, which meant the organisers had to summon someone to fix the problem. I was sitting near the door to the projection booth, and I was kind of disappointed that it had to be unlocked i.e. there wasn’t a projectionist inside. I know, I know, there aren’t necessarily always projectionists inside anymore, but I like to make believe, Cinema Paradiso style, that we all live in a world of old-school cinemas. Of course, Singapore has no single-screen cinemas anymore so even a dual-screen cinema like Jade is old-school here… Ratio of films with male-peeing scenes to total films seen: 2/2

All the Love You Cannes Dir. Lloyd Kaufman A documentary about Troma Entertainment’s means and attempts to sell their films in Cannes. I love the schlocky nature of their films (The Toxic Avenger, Cannibal! The Musical, Tromeo and Juliet etc.), which is why I went to watch in the first place. Quite revealing about how hard it is for independents to sell at Cannes, and the enthusiasm of Lloyd Kaufman - the founder of Troma - and the Troma Team is infectious. Self-promotion at its best. I loved the moment where Quentin Tarantino says hi to Lloyd - shows Tarantino’s video-geek origins. Doug (who plays Sgt. Kabukiman in the films) really does come across as super-obnoxious - I kind of understand Scott McKinlay’s rage at him. And I know it’s supposed to be part of the cheap feel about the film but I wish they didn’t keep making jokes about Lloyd turning off the camera at important moments, and actually let the camera run… Ratio of films with male-peeing scenes to total films seen: 1/1.

Elephant’s got bass! Dang. Good stuff, more like De Stijl than White Blood Cells with its huge amount of bluesy stuff and the presence of a cover song. I really like “Well It’s True That We Love Each Other”, that final song with Jack and Meg and Holly Golightly singing - nice little banter going on. But nothing really grabbed my gut the way “Fell in Love With a Girl” or “Hotel Yorba” did the first time I heard them…. maybe it needs listen #2. Meg White remains superhot: that pic of her in CMJ’s New Music Monthly? Phwoarr.

Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson Just watched Punch-Drunk Love, which I found captivating - the weird flat quality of L.A. light seems to come through very nicely in the film. I really liked the moment where Barry (Adam Sandler) meets Lena (Emily Watson) in the Hawaii hotel and her leg just automatically lifts up - it’s the moment on the film poster. Why do women’s legs do that upon kissing? Answers on a postcard.

On Wednesday I watched both Catch Me If You Can and The Quiet American, both of which I really enjoyed. The combination made me think about the quality of lighting: there’s something about the light in Catch that seems very 60s - it’s slightly yellow saturated is my guess? Was the light really different back then, or is it that our memories yellow just like photos? Or do our memories yellow because photos yellow? And Quiet American has the familiar (to me) oversaturated colours of the tropics - it’s easy to see how that oversaturated quality of the daytime sun wearies people, makes them retreat into indolence. Or is it just that I’m personally struck by ennui and inertia in a tropical locale that I associate the colours with inertia? Questions, questions. Chris Doyle did the cinematography for Quiet American and was brilliant, as always - there’s a nice languid feel to the work, more like his work in In the Mood for Love or Liberty Heights (one of my favourite ’little’ movies) than Chungking Express.

Dir. Jonathan Demme A French New Wave homage, full of frenetic hand-held work which at one point moved from cool Godard-style work to just headache-inducing. But awful charming, and I like its view of Paris, all seedy and multi-culti. Plus, Thandie Newton is incandescent.

Here’s my traditional end-of-year lists. Like Michael Kinsley, I could never be a completist - we only have so much time, and I can’t devote as much of it to listening as I did back in college days. And money factors in - I don’t get promos all the time anymore! So I admit I still haven’t got round to listening to the Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots or David Gray’s A New Day At Midnight. But of what I did get to hear this year, this is what moved me:

I can’t believe I watched Spider-Man twice in one week. But it was way more fun than an event movie has any right to be, which seems to prove to me that the smart thing to do is not throw $25 million at Arnold and instead spread the wealth on solid character actors. That scene where Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane has just kissed Spiderman and he’s shunting off somewhere is just so good - you can see her girlish excitement at this new guy in her life. As is the slightly teasing tone in Tobey Maguire’s voice when he drops her off and identifies himself as “your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man”. It’s interesting to see the parallels to “Smallville” - geeky teenager trying to get a handle on his new superpowers, awkward relationship to the girl, etc etc.