Reviews marked with are of interest to participants of the UW East Asia Center
K-12 teacher program; click on the icon for further discussion of the films.

REVIEWS by Yomi Braester

2046 (Hong Kong) *****
A must see. Not as good in my opinion as Wong Kar-Wai last film, In the Mood For Love, for which this is a sequel, but yet another bold step by a director who manages to surprise every time anew. The film is especially enjoyable for those who have seen In the Mood for Love, since the story told in the former film gets a surprising twist in the sequel. As all of Wong’s films, it is a somewhat confusing plot that may require a second viewing, to which I say, go see it twice! A star-studded film gets the best out of Zhang Ziyi and does wonders with Fei Wong (Chungking Express), who looks in this film as a 21st-century Madame Bovary.

3-IRON (S. Korea) *****
For once, a film that really tries to reinvent cinema, but without any pomp. An urban fairytale that starts much like Tsai Ming-liang's films with the reappropriation of private spaces and of other people's lives and desires turns into a fantasy about the camera's ability to liberate our vision and create new configurations of desire, akin to the one in Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands. By Kim Ki-duk, the director of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring.

36 (France) ***
Many loved this cop film for its unexpected twists; the acting, by Daniel Auteuil and especially Gérard Depardieu, is indeed faultless. Yet the edting, music, mise-en-scene and yes, plot are John Woo rip-offs. If you sawFace/Off, you're in for few surprises. Hong Kong cinema has since gone to more intricate movies, notably the Infernal Affairs series. French style at its best doesn't cover up for the flaws of the unmotivated storyline; I can only thank the film for showing the greatness of recent Hong Kong action.

4 (Russia) ****
In the Russian tradition that a good film is a depressing one, this is a very good film. The movie traces the lives of two men and a woman who meet for a short while in a bar. Each of their lives goes through a Kafkaesque turn. The woman's story, told in more detail, becomes especially gruesome, outdoes Svankmayer in proving just how sinister puppets can be and pulls one on Tarkovski's aesthetic of ruination. The seemingly disjointed stories cohere through the theme of the "4s" -- human clones purportedly made during the Stalinist era. The mass production of lookalikes (puppets, soldiers, piglets) provide a parable on the dysfunction of post-socialist Russia, yet it should also be noted that the blame is laid not on the younger generation but rather on the old one that carries a primal Russian character.

ALMOST TWO BROTHERS (Brazil) ****
A harrowing portrait of underlying class and race prejudice in Brazil's prisons of the 1970s and Rio's favelas (slums), which are shown to be a continuation of the former. A more coherent version of Carandiru (shown at last year's SIFF), the story shifts back and forth between the two settings and draws the connections between the earlier political struggle and the gang wars of the present. A well-executed piece that ends with an unmitigated hopeless view that demonstrates the impossibility of social struggle in Brazil's dehumanizing poverty.

THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED (France) ****
A remake of Fingers (1978), the film (re)captures the character who tries to live up to become like both his deceased mother, a renowned pianist, and his derelict father, who operates at the seamlines between real estate and crime. The film is worth seeing even if only for Romain Duris's acting of a dark, Delonesque character, yet the movie is marred by the focus on noir aesthetic for its own sake and a certain lack of sincerity, especially toward the end.

CAMPFIRE (Israel) ****
Even non-lef-wing Israelis often think of the settlers in the Occupied Territories as loonies, yet this film delegitimizes the settlement movement even more effectively by showing how the messianic fervor is linked with self-righteous, inwardly-violent and above all petty social accounting disguised as concern for the collective. The campfire (in the original Hebrew title, "the tribal campfire") turns out to be the place where the tribe judges dissenters and metes its primeval punishments. The story of a single mother and her two daughters who are drawn into the fervent settlement movement is saved from reductionist politics by superb acting and an intelligent script. The portrayal of the early 1980s is painful to watch - so much suffering owes to the Original Sin of the early days of settlement.

CAPE OF GOOD HOPE (South Africa) ****
A predictable feel-good movie about chance encounters at an animal shelter in Capetown. Race and love relations follow a satisfying and self-evident path to the inevitable ending, yet the human and canine actors' charm ensures the film's success, in its genre.

GAMES OF LOVE AND CHANCE (France) *****
Set in an immigrant suburb in France, the film skirts altogether any anthropological approach. Instead, it tells the story of youth in search of words. The taciturn and awkward Abdelkarim is thrown out by his girlfriend Magali (for his negligence to talk to her) and sees his chance to get closer to another young woman, Lydia, by participating in a play, no less than Marivaux's 18th-century Le jeu de l'amour et du hazard. Some comical situations arise when Abdelkarim finds out that the play, an exponent of French wit (think of Patrice Leconte's Ridicule), isn't his ideal vehicle of self-expression. Skirting the issue (the literal meaning of the original title, L'Esquive) becomes a pervasive, well-explored theme.

GODZILLA: FINAL WAR (Japan) *
So bad that it's good, if you're a cult fan and know the campy references, or otherwise just so bad it's bad. Plotline is minimal and hackney; sets and costumes are cheesy beyond belief; each line in the dialog is memorable in its campiness -- but is often already remembered from other movies (including the inevitable "resistance is futile"). If you can see it with many rowdy friends, or better yet, as it was screened at the festival, in a theater full of screaming college students, it's worth it.

GREEN HAT (Hong Kong / PRC) *****
Two-in-one: a crime story that opens the film and serves as a red herring for the main plot, an exploration of impotence and unfaithfulness in an urban Chinese family. The producer Peggy Chiao hits again in finding a new major talent, in this case the director Liu Fendou, who has proven himself as a talented scipt writer (Spicy Love Soup, A New Beautiful World, Shower).

HEIGHTS (U.S.) *****
The perfect New York fantasy, made the way few films are made now: Chekhovian acting, clean photography, clockwork dialogs. The film achieves nothing new, but it can be shelved along with the best of Ismail Merchant's productions and Glenn Close's performances. Sad to note that this is the last film of Merchant's, who died on May 25.

LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN (PRC) ***
Stefan Zweig’s story, which inspired Max Ophuls’s film of the same title in 1948, returns in this new adaptation by actress-come-director Xu Jinglei. Remakes are fun to watch, especially when the earlier version is by one of the recognized masters of cinema. In this case, I found it painful. The film seems to function as a star vehicle for the director, who also plays the lead role, and as such it succeeds in establishing Xu’s talent and breadth as a better-than-average actress. She is paired with Jiang Wen, the best actor and director I know of in the PRC. The infallible Jiang is cast against type but manages to pull through.
The story of a woman who lives through an unrequited love, going back time and again to a lover who fails to recognize her and her worth, is still captivating, but Xu manages to strip it of all its dark undertones. In Ophuls’s hands, it becomes a story of intransigence in the face of social mores and possible madness. For Xu Jinglei, it is a love story that can be—as it was—launched on Valentine Day. Indeed, Xu’s film takes place in a 1930s China where history does not matter, a China where no one condemns unusual behavior such as a child out of wedlock, and where there is no regulation of public conduct. Is it simply a fantasy on a China that has never existed or blindness fostered by today’s urban Chinese society, consumerist and forgetful?

KEKEXILI: MOUNTAIN PATROL (PRC) *****
Winner of Taiwan’s Golden Horse Award, this spectacular film, shot in the Kekexili (Mongolian: Hoh Xil) plateau in Tibet, tells the story of the self-appointed patrol that tried to put an end to the massive poaching of Tibetan antelopes (Chiru) in the mid-1990s. Told from the viewpoint of a reporter, the film continues the tradition of reportage literature and film focusing on China’s wild west. A captivating and sad story set in breathtaking, unearthly landscapes. Like Platform, it is shot in a quasi-documentary style and inspired by a real documentary, in this case Peng Hui’s Balance. With this film, following the brilliant cop comedy Missing Gun, the director Lu Chuan establishes himself as one of the major forces in PRC filmmaking.

MIDWINTER NIGHT'S DREAM (Serbia) ****
The director owns up to Serbia’s past atrocities in this film, which juxtaposes a war trauma victim and an autistic child. The excellent acting is foregrounded by a script that shuttles between the man’s silences and terse sentences and the child’s nonsensical and repetitive speech. The abrupt ending is a bit weak and points to problems in the plot structure throughout the film, but the overall effect is still touching.

MONGOLIAN PING PONG (PRC) ****
Having watched the film only after SIFF, at the Shanghai Film Festival, I did not review it on time. It turned out to be a very fun film, suitable for all ages. Two Mongolian boys find China's "national ball" - a mysterious white orb - and embark on the way to return it to its homeland. Touching and stimulating to think of cultural differences as viewed through children's eyes.

MY STEPBROTHER FRANKENSTEIN (Russia) ***
War trauma is addressed through the appearance of a 20-year-old unacknowledged son at a Moscow family's doorstep. The resulting situations are thought-provoking, but there is little to hold them together. The final stand-off adds an absurdist streak but only begs the question, to what statement the film might be committed.

NORTH KOREA / SEOUL TRAIN (Netherlands / U.S.) ****
A double bill best viewed together. The first, tracing a day in the life of a seemingly-ordinary North Korean family, starts out as a funny portrait of a normal life strewn with random but persistent effigies of Kim Sung Il and ends up as a macabre and frightening image of the dictatorship as images of missiles permeate the screen. Only when watching the second film, which tells about the underground route for North Korean refugees who live under the danger of repatriation from the PRC, does it become clear that the family described in North Korea is highly privileged. Whereas North Korea imparts an anachronistic sense of Maoist China in its worst days and delivers a timely note on the legacy of hatred to the U.S., Seoul Train manages to be even more scathing in showing the complicity of other governments, including the PRC and even the U.N. in exacerbating the North Korean crisis.

OMAGH (Ireland) ***
A sensitive and well-acted dramatization of the car bomb that tore through the Northern Irish town of Omagh in 1998 and its aftermath. The Omagh bombing was the worst single atrocity in the 30 years of violence, and was compounded by unsavory revelations about the inadequacy of the police investigation. The film presents the events from a single viewpoint, of a victim’s father, pushing aside other personae and neglecting to mention that the man in charge of the bombing was convicted in 2002. After the film ended, I was left wondering what the film contributed to the subject and was tempted to answer, “If it’s an international film festival and it’s an Irish film, it must be about IRA and terror.”

OVERLORD (UK) **
Sorry, well-meaning director: a totally useless film that manages to say little new about WWII, from the viewpoint of a flat character. Yes, war is awful, arbitrary, and unheroic.

PEACH GIRL (China, 1933) ****
Another masterpiece with silent film star Ruan Lingyu. The film integrates poetically the location shots, especially those with the eponymous peach blossoms (the full title is Peach Blossom Weeps Tears of Blood), with shots of Ruan’s expressive face. The story of a girl whom social class keeps apart from her love is not as dramatic as, and more melodramatic than, that of the prostitute-cum-devoted mother in the later Goddess, but there is much to admire in this, one of the only seven remaining films starring Ruan.

PLATFORM (PRC) *****
According to many, the most important film to have come our of the PRC in the last decade. Even though I see this as an unnecessary hyperbole, and even though the short version exhibited at SIFF could be shortened even further, it is indeed a masterpiece. In this quasi-documentary film, Jia Zhangke’s camera (about which he famously said, “My camera never lies”) follows the Peasant Culture Group—a vaudeville troupe—through its tiresome journey through an impoverished northern province (Shanxi, Jia’s home province) from the late 1980s to the late 1990s.
Jia tells the epic story without resorting to the cinematic contraptions of an epic. Only the very personal finds its way onto the screen, alluding in subtle and mind-provoking ways to the larger political and economic context, namely the almost-imperceptible reforms that take place during the same period. While many praise the film, and rightly so, for a realistic description of life in rural China, others prefer the portrayal of the same topic in Wu Wenguang’s documentary Jiang Hu: Life on the Road, released in 1999, only a year before Jia’s film.

RICE RAPHSODY (Singapore) *
An Ang Lee film wannabe that grafts Eat Drink Man Woman (a restaurant owner and her three sons) with The Wedding Banquet (all three turn out to be gay). Substandard acting, homosensationalism, childish jokes, and photography that manages even to take some of the juiciness out of Singapore's amazing foods (how can stall snack such as roti prata be invested with so much pretention?).

THE ROLE OF A LIFETIME (France) *****
A minor yet perfectly balanced piece that uses especially effective script and theatrical acting. A star actress (Agnes Jaoui) hires a help, who realizes, in the process of working for the star, the profound differences between them. The potential clichés on egocentric actors and lovers are skirted for a more sensitive treatment. I am not convinced by the ultimate peace that each character finds - or at least their resignation to their fate - yet the ending comports well with the genre.

SAINT RALPH (Canada) ****
A minor film that turns into a manipulative tearjerker — but does so with Canadian humor and charm that counts for a fun experience. Ralph, a boy of 14 in a Catholic school, needs a miracle and is set to find it in winning the Boston Marathon. The surefire jokes about Catholic dogma, and especially the strict discipline of the order, elicit the expected laughs.

SAVING FACE (U.S.) ****
A comic tear-jerker, a real melodramatic weepie, that is nevertheless endearing. Wil (Michelle Krusiec) and Vivian (Lynn Chen) date despite Wil's mother's insistence that her daughter cannot be lesbian. Full of over-the-top twists, including stopping a wedding in progress, the plot leads to the inevitable romantic climax. If possible, watch the film as I did in a theater filled with members of teh lesbian community. Many were excited enough to whisper loudly, "She's going to kiss her!" The performance of the relatively inexperienced actresses is commendable; Joan Chen appears in a mediocre performance.

THE STORY OF MY LIFE (France) ***
An Amêlie-like story, narrated in the first person, of a man who realizes his emotional inadequacy as a friend and lover. Too flippant, too witty, too artificial, and above all too full of cinematic clichés. Much fun, as long as you can stand fluff.

THE SYRIAN BRIDE (Israel) ****
One of a few successful films made in Israel this year, this production stands out for employing an entirely Arab cast. Watch for charismatic actor Makram Khoury, who learned the Druze dialect of the Golan Heights to fit in with the of the cast. The story of a bride who crosses from Israeli-occupied territory into Syria to marry a man she has never met turns from an exploration of intrafamilial relations to a Kafkaesque account of emotions that need, literally, the stamp of approval.

THIS CHARMING GIRL (S. Korea) ****
The ordinary life of a young woman is exposed as her insensate existence in the aftermath of a pedophile's incestuous rape. The film's climax comes in the final shot, when the heroine, given another chance, fails to register any emotion. Her face, in extreme close-up, drifts in and out of the screen frame, accentuating her utter dislocation. Marvellously acted, in utmost disregard of any cinematic fireworks.

THREE ... EXTREMES (Hong Kong) *****
Unlike the first installation in the pan-Asian horror triple bill series (Three, 2002; directed by Peter Chan Ho-San, Kim Jee-Woon, and Nonzee Nimibutr), the sequel offers three fresh variations on the genre. Box, by Takeshi Miike, starts as yet another Ringu rip-off but continues to explore the long-term effects of sexual abuse and survivor guilt. Fruit Chan, an established director in the realistic, minimal plot genre, surprises and scintillates in his rendition of a script by Lilian Lee (Farewell My Concubine, The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus), which spoofs on the East Asian plastic surgery fad. Chris Doyle's picture-perfect,, almost succulent photography serves as an apt contrast to the macabre cannibalistic plot. I still have to see Cut, by the Korean director Park Chan-wook.

TONY TAKITANI (Japan) ****
Based on a story by Haruki Murakami, the film follows the life of a dull character through short tableaux. The sideway dolly shots that separate one vignette from the other may strike many viewers as poetic; I found them to be a cop-out. The accomplished camera work, in shots such as the one that pans slowly through the texture of clothes in and out of focus, conveys successfully the sense of mourning with which the film is permeated, yet I found the overall effect slightly anesthetizing.

TWO GREAT SHEEP (PRC) ***
The film follows the trend of PRC films that tell in realistic detail the story of simple folks, in this case a couple of farmers in an arid area in Yunnan Province. The man, known for his conscientious concern for public property and funds, is assigned to take care of two imported sheep. His and his wife’s struggle to make sense of the unfamiliar and picky breed gives rise to many comical situations. For me, the most memorable part of the film is its treatment of the affection between the aging and hard-working man and woman.

THE WANDERING SHADOWS (Colombia) ***
Two men who bear the scars of the Colombian war cross paths and learn about pain and compassion. Since the plot reveals many surprising coincidences, it is hard to describe it in detail without giving away the story. In fact, the twists and turns turn to be a bit too fantastic, overwhelming the viewer in the process. Yet the acting is superb, the photography is mostly excellent (why in black and white, though?), and the story reveals the human face of Colombia’s poverty.

WHISKEY ROMEO ZULU (Argentina) ****
Many may not like the film as much as I did and point rather to the implausible love story that frames the main plot, about a whistleblower who warns of safety deficiencies in the Argentinian LAPA Airlines ahead of the fatal crash that kills 67 people. Yet the film is written and directed with conviction that carry through—not surprising, considering that the real story is adapted and directed by the whistleblower himself, Enrique Pinyero. The story of a foretold disaster unravels at a measured pace, showing without excessive dramatization the intricacies of corruption and greed.

THE WORLD (PRC) *****
The title is ironic, as the film takes place in a theme park at the outskirts of Beijing, which sports replicas of monuments from all over the world, such as the Eiffel Tower, the pyramids, and the Taj Mahal. The park’s motto — every day a new world — becomes ironic in view of the plot, which centers on the drudgery and lack of any escape route for the entertainers and maintenance personnel employed in the park. In their strong provincial accents and migrant poverty they seem as out of place against the imposing structures as the Mongolian camel, placed in front of the pyramids mockup. The photography complements the storyline: long tracking shots foreground the limitations of the characters’ mobility, and cinematic allusions parody the characters (as in the case of the Japanese pavilion, where an Ozu-like shot mimics one of the film’s scenes). Some themes and shots (including the one just described) seem a bit forced, yet as a whole the film contributes to Jia Zhangke’s status as an “emerging master.”

YANGBANXI (Netherlands) ****
OK, I'm biased as far as this one goes -- the film deals with a topic close to my heart. The Cultural Revolution (1966-76) was not just a murderous political upheaval; as its name suggests, it restructured Chinese culture. The only condoned stage art were the yangbanxi, or “model plays” described in this documentary. The film manages to skirt some of the thorny issues associated with the Model Plays: on the one hand, they are the best stage art of the Cultural Revolution (if only because of lack of any alternative, but in some ways, in their own merit). On the other hand, they are linked to the political persecutions that claimed the lives of millions. The director Yan Ting Yuen, working for Dutch TV, chose two significant strategies of representation that allowed her a new viewpoint. First, she focuses on the legacy of the Model Plays as it exists today. Yuen interviews some of the actors who starred in the original productions and shows their current occupations - one a ballet teacher, another a real estate agent, yet another appears on TV commercials, using some of the same gestures for which he became known in the late 1960s. Yuen shows also a revival production, starring the same two dancers, now close to 60 years old; she also interviews younger people: those around 40 are drawn to the Model Plays either because they provided - contrary to the intention of the cultural commissars - a moment of sexual awakening; a still younger generation is curious about the plays that were first staged before today's 20-year-old were born. Even though the plays' reception has been depicted in a more nuanced fashion in Carma Hinton's Morning Sun (shown at SIFF 2003), the result is thought-provoking, juxtaposing the generational attitudes to the plays. Surprisingly, the older generation isn't all that nostalgic; rather, the veterans are just as interested in market economy as their children and grandchildren. Second, Yuen interjects into the factual narrative flights of fancy, including imagined monologues by Jiang Qing (Madame Mao) and hillariously appropriate breakdance sequences. On the downside, I wish the Dutch producers took more care with the translation, which is at times jarring and consistently skirts English names and accepted terms: the Model Plays are called "model works" or simply left untranslated, as are, for example, xiaolongbao (Shanghai dumplings), Libao (the Lippo Group).