SFIAAFF 2009: Dirty Hands director Harry Kim
APA talks to director Harry Kim in San Francisco, where his debut film Dirty Hands: the Life and Crimes of David Choe won a special jury prize.
SFIAAFF 2009: Karma Calling director Sarba Das
Director Sarba Das talks about growing up with feet in two cultures, translating that biculturalism into a transnational call-center comedy, and then finding an audience in India.
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A Place of One's Own
HKIFF 2009: A Place of One's Own and No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti
Two new films from Taiwan take to the streets, not via protest in any traditional sense, but by thrusting us into the absurdities of land ownership in Taiwan today.
In 2007, protests escalated in Taipei over the decision by the city government to dissolve Lo Sheng Sanatorium, a longstanding leper community, to make room for a new subway stop and the gentrification that goes with it. The dissent had been raging since 2003, when the city government made the decision to move the colony's 300+ members -- some of whom had been there since the 1930s -- to a nearby medical center. In 2008, the protests ended to no avail. The demolition began, and homes were lost forever.
It's in this context of hopelessness over living spaces that Ian Lou's A Place of One's Own thrives. The film doesn't directly address Lo Sheng, but that sort of deliberateness would go against everything it stands for and depicts so eloquently. As with Singing Chen's God Man Dog, made by much of the same cast and crew, A Place of One's Own has an odd timbre that soothes us with its playfulness. It jumps from story to story, and in each we notice ripples of the absurd. Master Lin (played by Jack Kao) makes giant, elaborate origami houses which get burned down during funerals. His son Xiao Gang passes out real estate flyers in the streets while dressed as a giant tiger. Ex-rock star Mozi gets caught up in a suicide folly that results in “success.”
There are narrative connections between each parallel plotline, but what keeps the intercutting interesting is that each story concerns the problems of housing: scarcity, high cost, feng shui, government intervention. No home is permanent in Lou's film, and as we see Master Lin's elegant paper creations burn to a crisp, we realize that this is at once tragic, ludicrous, and inevitable. It's also profoundly unfair. In A Place of One's Own, we see the government seize property and there's nothing anybody can do about it. But we also see that land developers drive governmental policy, and we see that the rich motivate development.
However, A Place of One's Own isn't solely interested in waging class war. It shows that while some buy property in order to sell it for more, others -- even the rich -- can have deep, spiritual attachments to the land they desire, as with the aging tycoon who wants a peaceful plot of land in which to be buried. In other words, the film doesn't take sides in the socio-economic struggle. It's way beyond that. In fact, A Place of One's Own laughs at protest: an aboriginal struggle against the government's seizure of their land comes off as doomed to failure, while those searching for political meanings in Mozi's music come off as fools who have no idea of what's really behind the songs.
It's no wonder then that the heart of the film is with Master Lin's family. They live in an illegal house (it is not registered with the government), in which Master Lin produces paper houses for the afterlife. The only real properties in A Place of One's Own are those unregulated by officialdom or the secular world. And the joy and humor through which we see the activities of this household depicted -- for instance, for a dead mobster Master Lin makes a giant paper house whose extravagance includes security cameras and guns in every room -- convince us emotionally that this, and not the high-rise apartments that constantly trade hands during the film, is the only space one can actually call home.
Lou's strategy of depicting the struggles over property in contemporary Taipei through its absurdities contrasts with a film like Angela Chang's 2007 documentary Joyful Life which pleas directly for sympathy over the Lo Sheng crisis. Chang takes us in the colony, interviews its residents, and shocks us through the images and sounds of the sick. Joyful Life is effective, but it doesn't resonate as strongly in the aftermath of Lo Sheng. A Place of One's Own sees these struggles as a tone, as spatiality, as superstition, and as a twisted logic -- all of which permeates Taipei, crawling into apartment buildings, roaming down sidewalks, crawling up onto rooftops, resting over a graveyard. Its resigned mockery seems to do more than Joyful Life's furious sincerity now that we know how the crisis played out.
Perhaps there is some middle ground. Leon Dai's No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti, a gigantic leap above Dai's 2002 sex farce Twenty Something Taipei, manages to be forcefully direct while dragging its feet through miles of strangeness. Dai's latest is based on another true story: a man who lives in an unregistered Kaohsiung pier with his young daughter. However, to get an education, the young daughter needs a residence and official recognition as a human being by the state. That would require him to essentially give her up. His only hope for keeping her is to wield what little influence he has with an old classmate who now works in the government in Taipei.
No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti takes the man up and down, traversing the island from Kaohsiung to the northern capitol, seeking solace in bureaucracy. The film alternates between hope, humor, and horror. The film's gritty black and white serves these tones well. Sometimes the monochrome makes the family look like a tender classic Hollywood household. Sometimes the black and white evokes grindhouse terror. This is the flip side to Zhang Yimou's The Story of Qiu Ju, another absurd march toward justice via bureaucracy. Only here there are moments where the absurdity stops being funny.
There is even a protest scene. But the protest doesn't make an argument or take a stance, as one would if one were, say, advocating the human rights of lepers. Instead, the protest scene is pure shock which from a logical standpoint is completely reprehensible, but from an emotional level is justifiably terrifying. In its cruel short moments (repeated twice in the film), the image of a man clutching his daughter, threatening to jump off an overpass, while screaming of society's inequalities, perfectly captures the horrifying despondency of protest regarding property and citizenship in Taipei today. As with A Place of Own's Own, No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti offers no practical solutions, only artful mockery and terror.
Date Posted: 4/17/2009