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AFI Fest 2006: Capsule Reviews
APA breezes through some of the "Asian New Classics" at AFI this year, including two Johnnie To films, the new Pang Brothers thriller, and the biggest Korean movie of the year.
Curse of the Golden Flower
dir: Zhang Yimou
Zhang Yimou’s career has come full circle. While Curse of the Golden Flower superficially resembles two of his previous three films, Hero and House of Flying Daggers, it shares much in common thematically and aesthetically with his earliest films Red Sorghum, Ju Dou, and Raise the Red Lantern. Most surprising is how Zhang’s newest film spirals into an abyss of psychological terror, incest, fratricide, and imperial excess. As in Ju Dou, sexual desire leads to betrayal and familial instability. As in Raise the Red Lantern, the story is mostly limited to the confines of a single opulent compound, where internal fractures are played out operatically on a gilded stage. The few action scenes are forgettable, especially compared with Zhang’s last two martial arts films; but unlike those films, the fight sequences aren’t structured as set-pieces a la song-and-dance numbers in musicals, but rather they’re completely enmeshed in the narrative, serving the dramatic conflicts more than the film spectacle. Those conflicts represent a family (and a nation) on the verge of internal collapse. While hegemony rules, it’s always on the brink of self-destruction from competing interests and forgotten histories that threaten the homogeneity of the nation. In that way, the film can be read as Zhang’s response to Taiwanese and Hong Kong critics who have accused the director of perpetuating the myth of a unified China; call Curse of the Golden Flower the anti-Hero. --Brian Hu
The Host
dir: Bong Joon-ho
Does it live up to the hype? Yes and no. The Host doesn’t transform the monster movie genre, nor does it play with its conventions. Instead, The Host sets a new standard; it is, ultimately, not a revolutionary monster movie, but a flawless one which ensures that all future entries in the genre will be compared to it. Exciting, emotional, hilarious, over-the-top, socially-conscious; the monster is revealed and hidden with such a perfect sense of anticipation and terror. Meanwhile, the affective breaks – where brothers and sister bond over the survival of their family – are provided in just the right dosage: not too much as to drag the film down, not too little as to seem insincere. And like Bong Joon-ho’s masterpiece Memories of Murder, it is for the human conflict and not the action that the film will ultimately be remembered. But then, maybe there is something subversive here. As in Memories of Murder, the shadow of the 1980s student movements looms sullenly over the proceedings. Here, we see the ideal of social protest pitched against the indifference of a government cozying up to the evil Americans whose racist insensitivity is the root of the horror to begin with. And while the best monster movies (and their zombie counterparts) have always been political, what’s refreshing about The Host is how swift and merciless it is as “extreme cinema,” as a Korean blockbuster, as a family tragicomedy, and as a political statement. --Brian Hu
Election
dir: Johnnie To
Election is a hard-driving gangland pic studded with gold chains and old gangster uncles. For all of its grotesque and violent showmanship—the beginning of the film notably includes a scene when one of the brothers assents to eating a ceramic spoon—Election fixates quite intriguingly on the concept of fair and honest election, suggesting that even the Hong Kong underworld suffers from post-1997 democracy anxiety. At no less than three times in the film, portly, stoic gangster don Uncle Teng asserts that the honor of the society is based on the fact that they have had regular elections for over one hundred years. Teng’s stated time horizon corresponds suspiciously with the length of the British colonial period during which Hong Kong enjoyed democratic elections. Political allegory aside, Election is a rip-roaring ride through the Hong Kong filled with appealingly menacing characters like Big D (Tony Leung Ka-fai), a lounge suit-wearing casino impresario with a voice almost louder than his already imposing ego, and Lok (Simon Yam), a quiet, seemingly stable father with cold-hearted sociopath tendencies. Election is bloody, and not for all audiences. After one and a half hours of knife play and heads pummeled by blunt objects, I was longing for the relative peace and tranquility of Michael Corleone’s baptismal day massacre. That being said, To’s Election, however brutal it may ultimately be, will be of great pleasure for action film fans, in addition to offering a surprising corner of support for Hong Kong autonomy. --Aynne Kokas
Triad Election
dir: Johnnie To
The follow-up to Election, Triad Election (aka Election 2) brings the series to the next phase of Johnnie To’s action oeuvre. Although the film is filled with the type of violence that moves mothers to install channel blocks, the film develops To’s earlier political allegories from Election by centering the narrative around the questions of presentation of the democratic process. Triad Election picks up in the final days of the reign of Lok (Simon Yam), Wo Sing Society chairman. With Election’s original cast, and a new guard of Lok’s “godsons” all gunning to take over chairman’s seat, competition within the clan is fierce and personal. Hardly playing the magnanimous godfather, Lok decides to break from tradition and try another bid at the chairmanship. Standing in his way is now successful businessman, Jimmy, clan golden boy and successful entrepreneur in Mainland China, played by the darkly dapper Louis Koo. The film that follows is a doubly gruesome lesson on the perils of infighting. Whereas To’s earlier effort can be seen as an allegory for the sanctity of the democratic process, Triad Election comes down to a very pointed referendum on the importance of executive term limits. Fans of To’s work will appreciate the filmmaker’s ever-innovative approach to gang violence. Squeamish moviegoers beware. Triad Election brings the Hong Kong gangster genre to new levels of gore. However, the menacing culmination of the film happens with a whisper rather than a crash, suggesting that the dirtiest and most sinister gang fights have nothing on Chinese politics. --Aynne Kokas
Time
dir: Kim Ki-duk
A beautiful woman notices her long-time boyfriend ogling other women, so she decides that plastic surgery is the only way to win back his affection. Of course, he’s actually a great guy who truly loves her, which drives her spiraling into self-critical madness. Kim Ki-duk is a master of this kind of masochistic paranoia. He plays with settings, pacing, sex, and structure with such smug delight; there’s nobody quite like him in the world cinema circuit. Unfortunately, this is another case of aesthetic mischief wrapped around thematic emptiness. South Korea is the plastic surgery capital of the world, so you’d expect a film about it to go beyond the obvious anti-artificiality. Worse, Time puts the blame squarely on women: if women would simply notice how great their men are and stop being so damn vain, men would suffer much less. A more socially responsible film would at the very least connect superficiality with media images or with male fantasies. But Kim’s films rarely dissect society, but rather revel in subjecting their characters to all combinations of corporeal mutilations and psychoses. Time is simply a new variation on that same theme. --Brian Hu
Family Ties
dir: Kim Tae-yong
1999’s Memento Mori was a brilliant film trapped by the expectations of the horror genre. In Family Ties, Memento Mori’s co-director Kim Tae-yong shows how, free from any prescribed structure, he can make a film that’s altogether original. The three stories in the film deal with young romance, parental pressures, cheating lovers – in other words, the sort of plots prone to the clichés of family melodrama. But while Kim does skirt with many of these clichés, he maintains a sense of freshness because he never lets the seriousness overshadow the lightness. A joke breaks up the tension, or a tragic scene concludes with a surprising play of digital effects. Also nice is that the actors seem to know they’re in a comedy. Moon So-ri (hands down the best actress in Korea today) in particular steals the show; nobody embodies a character and her mannerisms, gestures, and expressions as Moon does. Also fantastic is Jeong Yu-mi who treads the line between humor and tragedy with precious ease. But ultimately what makes the film work is its big-hearted redefinition of “family.” The stunning final scenes show the centrality of peripheral members (half-siblings, children of ex-lovers) in the constitution of the family, all while retaining the sweet touch of magic that makes Family Ties one of the most refreshing Korean films of the year. --Brian Hu
Luxury Car
dir: Wang Chao
Luxury Car is the story of Li Yanhong (Yuan Tian), a country girl in the Chinese metropolis of Wuhan trying to make it as a karaoke girl. When Yanhong’s father arrives in the city on a search for her missing older brother, Yanhong acquaints her father with all of the unsavory complexities of her life. From her profession (serving wine to men and attending to their egos) to her attire (lounge singer combined with a healthy dose of cocktail waitress), Yanhong’s father, Li Qiming (Wu Youcai), silently attempts to accept his daughter’s new life. During her father’s visit, Yanhong becomes pregnant with her married boss’s child. When Yanhong’s lover dies, leaving her with a substantial sum of money, she finally makes her way back to the countryside to be with her family before the birth of her child. In an intriguing shift in the genre of countryside worker going to the city, Yanhong ultimately returns to a pastoral ideal of the Chinese countryside. Luxury Car will take a prominent place in the cinema about Chinese peasants as one of the first recent films to allow the workers from the countryside to return home, rather than, in the tradition of films such as Ermo and So Close to Paradise, to stay and languish in the city. --Aynne Kokas
Re-cycle
dir: Pang Brothers
Despite the quick finale that wraps the loose-ends together, Re-cycle is actually two films. The first is the girl-among-ghosts scenario where fuzzy objects out of focus in the background could actually be long-haired spirits – in other words, the sort of widescreen shocks that made the Pang Brothers’s The Eye a cult franchise. A writer played by the ever-excellent Angelica Lee works on a horror novel and begins to notice that her life is becoming a lot like the situations in her discarded drafts. The usual Pang tricks abound: scary kids, dark elevators, jarring camera movements revealing some unexpected guests. While the devices are predictable, the terror they build is consistently as scary as anything the brothers have done to date. But then the film slips into something altogether different: the writer enters a fantasy world of ghosts and garbage. In this section, the art direction, make-up, special effects, and eye candy are top notch, but it breaks the momentum created in the beginning by reveling a bit too long in the visuals. A new storyline emerges, but by then, it’s too late. Re-cycle is professionally constructed, ambitious, and at times, clever. But the film is representative of too much of Hong Kong cinema today, where great concepts are haphazardly thrown together, but too calculatedly to benefit from the manic energy of spontaneity that made the 1980s and 90s such a golden period. --Brian Hu
Memories of Tomorrow
dir: Yukihiko Tsutsumi
Ken Watanabe's first venture into producing came about when he stumbled across Hiroshi Ogiwara's novel, Ashita no Kioku, obsessively finished it all in a single night, and immediately knew that he wanted to make this story into a film. The result, Memories of Tomorrow, follows the difficult emotional journey of a successful strong-willed executive who must gradually let go of his pride and self-reliance as his mind gradually succumbs to Alzheimers. The acting is solid; both Watanabe and Kanako Higuchi, who plays his loyal but conflicted wife, elicit empathy for their respective characters. The story doesn't shy away from the difficulties that arise from both sides of the equation -- the afflicted whose frustration, shame, and anger are sometimes misdirected and the caretaker who is desperately fighting to remember the reasons to stick around. While the plot is rather simple and straightforward, the drama is tender and honest -- as confirmed by numerous Alzheimer Association representatives in the AFI audience who made a point to stand up during the Q&A to compliment the authenticity of the storyline and performances. --Ada Tseng
The Banquet
dir: Feng Xiaogang
Date Posted: 11/15/2006