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Dancer in the Dark
INTRODUCTION
by Derek Lam
The first NYFF this side of the millennium yielded slim pickings from the Amerindies scene (only two films, David Gordon Green's promising debut, George Washington, and Ed Harris's lackluster Pollock), but proved a stunning showcase for East Asian filmmakers, with established auteurs (Nagisa Oshima, Edward Yang, Wong Kar-Wai, Takeshi Kitano) and new talent (Jia Zhangke, Shinji Aoyoma) alike working at the top of their form. Neither of the master Iranian filmmakers (Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf) had a new film this year, but Jafar Panahi brought the harrowing Circle (winner of the Lion D'Or at Venice), and Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine introduced New York audiences to veteran director - and genial on-screen personality - Bahman Farmanara, returning to filmmaking after some twenty years' absence. Two of the festival's films were shot entirely on DV, one a musical spectacular (Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark), the other a personal documentary (Agnès Varda's The Gleaners and I). Another - namely, Raul Ruiz's The Comedy of Innocence - incorporated DV footage as an oddly precocious, possibly psychic child's view of the world.
In the Avant Garde program, Guy Maddin's delirious pastiche trailer, The End of the World, was as exciting as anything in the festival, and the curators managed to pull together some stunning work from such heavyweights as Nathaniel Dorsky, Michael Snow, the Brothers Quay, and even Jean-Luc Godard (the alternately elegiac and funereal Cannes curtain-raiser, Origins of the 20th Century). If in the main festival, films ranged from populist lowbrow (Korea's Chunhyang) to sophisticated postmodern (Dancer in the Dark or Wong's elliptical, fragmentary In the Mood for Love), Edward Yang's Yi Yi - the closest any film this year came to perfection - was that rare masterpiece that appeals to cognoscenti and moderately informed public alike, winning as it did raves from both the Village Voice and the New York Times. Not in itself a prerequisite for greatness, the film's broad appeal nonetheless signaled an intelligent, sophisticated, and deeply humanist form of filmmaking that's become increasingly difficult to achieve. More George Eliot than Hollywood middlebrow, Yi Yi represents a master filmmaker's accomplishment in reaching a wide audience without either dumbing down or compromising his challenging art. It's no mean feat.
REVIEWS
by Derek Lam
Suffering Women, Real and Imagined: Circle, Dancer in the Dark
A portrait of suffering women rooted in a specific social reality, Jafar Panahi's Circle reminds us that a fantasy, musical treatment of the persecution of the fairer sex is indeed something of a luxury. Tracing the stories of a number of women escaped from prison (only to be locked up once again) in contemporary Iran, Circle succeeds both as an indictment of the oppression of women in its particular setting, and as a metaphysical and forcefully schematic narrative in which, as several commentators have already pointed out, the opening shot of a mother giving birth (to a daughter) is equated to the closing shot of the various protagonists coming full circle and ending up back in jail. Departing from the self-reflexivity that characterizes a Makhmalbaf or a Kiarostami, Panahi nonetheless shares with his mentors a heightened consciousness of formal structure. Like two other films at this year's festival – namely, Edward Yang's Yi Yi and Mexico's Amores Perros – Circle distributes its narrative weight and metaphysical burdens among characters of varying age. Proceeding, like Amores, from the young to the old, Circle indelibly establishes its metaphor of lifelong entrapment through a keen observance of everyday detail. Whether attempting to board a bus alone, or trying to smoke a cigarette on the streets, the women in Circle can never elude a seemingly constant, omnipresent policing of their behavior.
In the Q & A session following the screening of Circle, Jafar Panahi spoke of persecution being the lot of women everywhere. Certainly, that wasn't hard to see on the basis of some of the other films at the festival. The eponymous character in Chunhyang gets viciously clubbed and thrashed for refusing to sleep with an abusive governor, and in an even more spectacular and outrageous instance of suffering, saintly virtue, Selma (a.k.a. Björk) finds herself dangling from a noose for trying to save her son from going blind, an incredible act of self-abnegation coupled with an incredulous outcome courtesy of Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark. To offer a suffering woman as spectacle is, alas, nothing new, but von Trier seems determined to out-Puccini Puccini with his sacrificial plotlines and methodical cruelty. As blatantly manipulative as Breaking the Waves, Dancer is melodrama in extremis and in-your-face string pulling. Some will be moved, but I found Dancer more fascinating and exciting than tear-inducing. As an exercise in daring and provocation, its chief virtues remain stylistic: the handheld camerawork is artfully ragged and on the fly, while the many discontinuous cuts give a dizzying sense of time compression. Performances clearly benefited from the vérité intimacy, although the most dazzling use of DV comes in the musical numbers, where, thanks to the low costs of the format, unprecedented, multi-camera coverage gives the song-and-dance routines an almost Cubist plasticity. Yet genuine pain eludes von Trier here as it did in Breaking the Waves. Of his so-called "Golden Heart" trilogy, only The Idiots, the sadly too little seen middle-part, seems to contain some semblance of it. There, perhaps because of the asceticism and the near autobiographical allegory of a group of épatez les bourgeois provocateurs, there's a genuine sense of discomfort that's either obscured by the star power and sheer largeness of a Dancer in the Dark, or that's simply not there. In the more spectacular projects, von Trier's postmodern approach to tugging at the heartstrings may be to have hackneyed devices writ large and for all to see, so that we have something of a cinematic equivalent to "laying bare," or in literary terms, "making strange" of what's all-too-familiar. But to these eyes at least, it's more "say what?" than magic, just like the film's oddball, make believe American setting.
Japanese Auteurs Return to Form: Oshima and Kitano
Preeminent director of the Japanese New Wave, Nagisa Oshima makes a stunning return-to-form in Gohatto. Examining the sexual and social effects a beautifully androgynous young recruit has on his samurai sect in 19th-century Japan, it exhibits a visual elegance and a lucidity of construction that befit a veteran filmmaker. The subject is not new for Oshima (one immediately thinks of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence) but the populist sense of humor is. The most intellectually rigorous and aristocratic of Japan's New Wave filmmakers, Oshima lets loose with some atypically unbuttoned comedy surrounding both the homophobia and the rampant desire "of that leaning" among samurai that benefits immensely from the presence of "Beat" Takeshi. No mean performer in anyone's movies, Kitano confidently assumes center stage of Oshima's detective story structure (itself a populist narrative form), playing sleuth to understand the sudden storm of troubles plaguing the school since the new recruit's arrival. Shot mostly in artificially-lit interiors, Gohatto finds Oshima experimenting with a variety of cinematic techniques – ranging from transition wipes to ironic intertitles – that serve as a reminder of the history of the jidai-geki, or period samurai, film, and for how long it has suppressed the subject of homosexuality as "taboo." The closing image, filmed in an impossibly beautiful location of studio-set artifice, finds Kitano's captain hacking off a cherry blossom branch in stunning slow-motion as he decides to dispose of the new recruit. It's as powerful and indelible an image as any at this year's festival.
Himself rebounding from last year's disappointing Kikujiro, Takeshi Kitano returns to form in Brother, an unusually nimble riff on the criminal "rise and fall" genre that finds "Beat" wreaking havoc in Los Angeles, USA. Playing a yakuza on the run who ends up taking over what looks like half of L.A.'s criminal empire, Kitano is as coolly taciturn as ever. The brilliantly choreographed violence goes from Tarantino-comic to something more detached and sad until, in the memorable final shootout, it acquires an almost operatically tragic dimension. Working for the first time in English and on an international co-production (with Jeremy Thomas, like Oshima before him), Kitano's lost nothing in crossing the Pacific. The editing and time-bending storytelling continue to be as gloriously spontaneous and freewheeling as before, and one or two cross-cultural jokes aside, there appear hardly any concessions to mall audiences, although Kitano acknowledges all the gunslingers in the Wild West before him when he sets the finale of Brother in a lonely diner out in the desert (with an aging Japanese proprietor, no less!) in lieu of the time-honored saloon. His laconic exit – a wad of notes to the owner "for the repairs" – is as worthy as the setting is, of the most eloquent of Westerns.
Auteurial
self-portraits: Agnès Varda and Bahman Farmanara
Taking as her point of departure the cultural practice of gleaning (picking up what's left after the harvest), Agnès Varda makes for congenial company in her DV documentary, The Gleaners and I. Curious but always respectful, Varda introduces, via a series of digressions that nonetheless refer back to the notion of gleaning, a handful of highly sympathetic individuals, ranging from a charming, elderly artist who builds backyard sculptures out of trash, to a young, unemployed biology masters who volunteers his time teaching French at an immigrants' community center. Pretension-free throughout, Varda herself gleans the kinds of subjects that other filmmakers leave behind. Appearing occasionally in front of the camera (as in an amusing attempt to pose as a gleaner in a favorite painting) but always guiding the film through her companionable voiceover and frequent camerawork, Varda proves every bit as enjoyable an authorial presence as fellow filmmaker Bahman Farmanara in Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine. Like Farmanara, Varda muses touchingly, through self-deprecatory humor, on the process of aging (at one point, turning the camera on her weathered hands; at another, including a spontaneous “lens-cap jig” – jittery footage inadvertently taken of the ground when Varda forgot to hit the pause button on her camcorder). Receptive and inclusive, generous in its understanding, The Gleaners ranked alongside Edward Yang's Yi Yi as proof positive at the festival that humanism, for all that the cynics say, is alive and well.
Marking his return to filmmaking after nearly two decades' absence, veteran director Bahman Farmanara's Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine is surprisingly light-hearted and humorous for a film that muses essentially on death. Casting himself in the lead as an Iranian director who returns from abroad to make a documentary on funeral rites, Farmanara has his on-screen persona confronted by the sudden, seeming omnipresence of death, from an aborted fetus left by a hitchhiker in his car to a grave visit-turned-argument with cemetery workers when he discovers that the burial plot reserved for himself next to his wife's grave has been taken up by someone else. Almost charmingly flustered by the vertigo of life spinning out of control (in itself a nice metaphor for the effects of aging), Farmanara's character comically reasserts command when, in a dream sequence, surrounded by friends and colleagues who stage his funeral all wrong, he screams: "Cut!" and wakes himself from the nightmare. Remarkably free of rancor and pain, Smell of Camphor heralds the return to screen of an artist whose temperament, at least on the evidence of the new film, is essentially comic and optimist.
In
the Mood for Love…and War
A yearningly detailed recreation of Hong Kong in the 1960s (shot in parts in Bangkok), Wong Kar-Wai's long-awaited new film is, as its title suggests, pretty much all about mood. Among the most stylistically controlled of the director's films, In the Mood for Love boasts a sensitively calibrated color palette and a meticulous use of textures in the evocation of its period setting. While there's no faulting the director's formal ambitions – in its elliptical narrative, use of off-screen space and sound, and carefully nuanced formal repetitions, it's oddly reminiscent, among recent films, of Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us – Wong's improvisatory methods seem for the first time to have yielded results less compelling than intriguing. Characters are opaque to the point of near abstraction, while the heightened emotions seem oddly detached when not anchored to the kind of behavioral specificities that gave them resonance in earlier films (an effect heightened by Wong's decision to replace his customary voiceovers with the odd intertitle). What's clear is that Wong remains Hong Kong's cultural anthropologist par excellence – his cataloging of uniquely local sights and sounds tended before to get lost on international audiences amidst the films' more universal attractions; here, he gets the atmosphere of a quieter, more neighborly Hong Kong of the past just right, from the back alley noodle stalls to the convivial atmosphere of the couples' Shanghainese boarding house. There's a colonial indolence and sense of propriety in the air that all but disappeared following the riots that shook Hong Kong in the late '60s, where Wong chooses to end his film.
I doubt the pacifist Amos Gitai would approve re-titling his film In the Mood for War, even though Kippur, an autobiographical recreation of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which Gitai served on a medical division, works equal wonders as Wong's film in evoking the sights and sounds (dare we say "mood?") of a particular time and place. Eschewing both the fashionable faux vérité camerawork of a Saving Private Ryan or a Capitaine Conan and the more poeticized conceits of a Coppola or a Terence Malick, Gitai succeeds in the near-impossible, filming battle sequences that avoid visual and aural excitement for something more authentic and grueling. Long takes of seven or eight minutes in duration (frequently static and shot from a distance) convey the sheer tedium of war, as in a particularly memorable instance where Gitai's medical team gets stuck in a bog trying to remove a wounded soldier. Hardly less impressive than the visuals, the soundtrack numbs with its ceaselessly loud drone of helicopter motors, likely to be the closest the movies have come to how war actually sounds on location. Like In the Mood for Love, Kippur may give its characters short shrift, and not many will warm to the (symbolic? metaphysical?) intertwining of lovers that bookends the film. Nevertheless, in its near philosophical approach to verisimilitude and fearsome capacity to produce shell shock in its viewers, Kippur comes closer than most to conveying the impression of combat as literal, physical assault.
Happy Families: Faithless, Eureka, The Comedy of Innocence
The first New York Film Festival this side of the millennium, and not one happy, traditional family in sight. For all the problems that beset the Jians in Edward Yang's Yi Yi, they might still be the healthiest, halfway functioning unit one saw at Alice Tully. At least Liv Ullmann's Faithless allows its traumatized little girl to bail out of her father's suicide pact. Before that, she has to endure adulterous parents releasing their bile and venom within earshot, as they careen towards individual tragedy with scant regard for the child. Shot from a script by Ingmar Bergman, Faithless announces its autobiographical nature from the very start, as aging, solitary filmmaker "Bergman" (played by longtime associate Erland Josephson) tinkers with a music box that plays a tune from The Magic Flute. In an imaginary conversation with figures from his past – chiefly Lena Endre, as his former mistress – he attempts to exorcise from his memory the guilt of an affair where everything went tragically, inexorably wrong. Ullmann's conventional approach hardly surprises, but she gets stellar work from her actors, in particular Endre and Krister Henriksson, who as Bergman's pathologically possessive, younger self, has an oddly mesmeric presence. Its view of humanity may be jaundiced, but Faithless contains a number of genuinely painful moments where the camera's unblinking look is enough to make the viewer himself want to avert his gaze.
Only marginally better parents than the ones in Faithless, those in Eureka are gone from the narrative within the first half-hour. What follows in the three hours or so is a patient and resonant portrait of a surrogate family formed from tragedy, as three survivors from a bus hijacking, the driver (The Eel's Koji Yakusho, excellent) and a teenaged brother and sister, bond and hit the road with a comic, if ultimately disposed, slacker cousin. Though billed as a road movie, Shinji Aoyama's epic drama actually spends a good amount of time in the siblings' New Age farmhouse, where the leisurely pacing and observation of daily routines (such as a mock time-lapse sequence where the trio go to sleep and help each other with their blankets) convey an appropriately eerie sense of ennui. If it all sounds a little touchy-feely, it's not: young women start to end up dead in towns visited by the group, and by the time the film reaches its denouement, there's more than a good deal at stake. One of the few films at this year's festival shot in 'Scope, the film makes surprisingly intimate use of the format, the vast countryside landscapes enveloping but rarely dwarfing the central characters.
The most valiant single mother in this or any other year's festival, Isabelle Huppert has to deal with a young son who declares on his ninth birthday that she's not his real mother, and proceeds to address her on a first-name basis. With near-psychic acuity, the boy asks Ariane to take him to his real mother, thus beginning a Freudian challenge on Solomon’s wisdom. Fittingly absurd, Raul Ruiz's The Comedy of Innocence has its main asset in Huppert's performance. Whether dealing with her oddball rival's claims on motherhood or her toy-car obsessed, psychoanalyst brother, Huppert exhibits a sense of poise that somehow grounds the film's conceits in an emotional reality. And for all its vaguely sinister intimations of incest, the film is, in its own playful, oblique way, really pro-family values, as suggested by a last minute phone call Huppert receives from a long-absent husband/father figure.
From Mao to Leslie Cheung: Platform
Charting an entire decade (from 1979 to 1989) in the lives of young performance troupe members in remote Shanxi, Jia Zhangke's three-hour plus Platform registers the seismic shifts in China's cultural landscape during Deng Xiaoping's era of reform via carefully placed cultural artifacts throughout its episodic narrative. With an eye on the liberalization of sexual relations as China opened up to the West (one girl who speaks coyly of kissing finds herself, a few years later, having to deal with an abortion; a son ultimately urges his long-suffering mother to divorce his adulterous father), Jia has his ensemble cast go from singing about Mao Zedong's birthplace to break-dancing to Leslie Cheung’s "Monica." Subversively ending his portrait in 1989 (the year of the student demonstrations and June 4th), Jia signals the time through an apposite clip about fleeing Hong Kong from John Woo's The Killer, playing on an off-screen, barely noticed TV. Beautifully shot by Yu Lik-Wai (himself director of the estimable Love Will Tear Us Apart) and staged largely in static, long takes, the film suggests the influence of Hou Hsiao-Hsien in more ways than just its loose, anecdotal structure. The keen observance of rites of courtship and instances of frustrated, young love recall something of the poignancy of a film like The Boys from Fengkuei. It will be interesting to note how prevalent these stylistic and thematic traits become as we gauge in the coming years the influence of the Taiwanese director over young and upcoming Asian filmmakers.
Popular
Filmmakers: Im, Iñarritu, and Bianchi
If some of the most impressive films at the festival appealed to sophisticated, postmodern sensibilities, there were still a number of genuine, uncynical crowd-pleasers that provided instinctive, popular filmmaking of intelligence, conviction, and sometimes, surprising ambition. Nothing in the selection, for instance, came more exuberantly, authentically populist than Im Kwon-Taek's Chunhyang. An adaptation of a traditional, eighteenth century tale of young lovers separated by class, it's unabashedly lowbrow entertainment, complete with handsome leads, a mustached villain, and a funny mother-in-law. Im plays it straight, with neither irony nor condescension, and why not? The film's raison d’être is its pansori voiceover, a traditional, sung form of storytelling marginalized in increasingly NBA'd, contemporary Korea. The best and most interesting thing about the movie, it's placed center stage, the brightly colored, pretty visuals serving as storybook illustration to accompany and amplify the pansori singer's performance.
Considerably less conservative in his filmmaking than Im, if displaying a similarly old-fashioned inclination towards popular character types, is Mexico's Alejandro González Iñarritu. Amores Perros boasts bravura, handheld camerawork (by Rodrigo Prieto), a triptych structure of interwoven narratives, and storytelling of wonderfully nervous energy. The protagonists are of the sort that populates pulp fiction and stirs the popular imagination: a slum-kid turned killer out of adulterous passion, a fashion model who becomes wheelchair-bound following a car accident, and, naturally, the lone killer who seeks and finds redemption. Exciting if hardly profound, Amores nevertheless exhibits a sense of scope (the various tales dealing not only with disparate social milieu, but different stages in life) and seriousness of purpose (its last story invoking Cain and Abel with little pretension) that distinguish it from less ambitious, more routine popular dramas.
If not exactly the sort of crowd-pleaser that sends one off to a happy meal, Sergio Bianchi's Chronically Unfeasible still manages to fuel itself on a suitably populist sense of outrage. Nominally revolving around a Sao Paulo restaurant, but really a series of vignettes narrated by a crassly cynical columnist (revealed at movie's end to be moonlighting as a human organ trafficker), it exposes the social and economic problems plaguing Brazil with a brisk, journalistic vigor that recalls political cartooning at its sharpest. Too entertaining and scattershot to serve as a sustained and considered critique, it moves quickly from one target to another and trades heavily on caricatures and stereotypes. But successful muckraking is easy only to those who haven't tried it. That the film caused uproar in nearly every level of Brazilian society is testament to Bianchi's considerable rabble-rousing powers.
Crossover Night: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Probably the first martial arts film to ever feature Yo-Yo Ma on its soundtrack, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is prestigious, respectable "crossover." As much director Ang Lee's homecoming project as Sony's bid for the burgeoning China market, Crouching was shot in Mandarin with a Chinese cast and crew (including composer Tan Dun, world music phenomenon and, like Ma, Sony Classical artist). While undeniably fun, the results resemble more an old-fashioned Hollywood spectacular than anything in the genre pioneered by Chang Cheh and King Hu, and of late, daringly revised by such practitioners as Tsui Hark and Ching Siu-Tung. Best thought of as an enjoyable primer, Crouching gives a hint of what's missing in the ferocious turn of veteran Cheng Pei Pei, who, as the vengeful, betrayed Jade Fox, seems to be in a different, far more anguished movie altogether. Her character's pain and justifiable wrath, so much more striking than the various romances that occupy the film, positively startles Crouching out of its polite manners, reminding us of how much more can be at stake in the genre's strongest films.
All written material (c) 2001 by Derek Lam