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July is the cruelest month...for the serious moviegoer, at least. Except for those lucky enough to make it to Cannes, summer is the worst time for movies. The usual glut of mindless blockbusters goes without saying, but the tendency for distributors to reserve weightier fare for times when one is less inclined to enjoy the outdoors makes the season even more truly one of discontent. Sure enough, summer 2001 carries its share of disappointments: young and promising directors like Tom Tykwer and François Ozon took a stab at more mature filmmaking only to prove that they were not quite ready yet. While most will agree that The Princess and the Warrior is a trial to sit through, Ozon's Under the Sand – highly regarded both here and in France – seems to me a distinctly under-whelming experience. Charlotte Rampling's performance notwithstanding, the material is barely developed and certainly not free of clichés. Surely (and I find myself in sharp disagreement with the French critic Frédéric Bonnaud, who declares himself finally converted by Under the Sand into an Ozon admirer), there was much more to get excited about in the director's earlier, notorious hour-long film, See the Sea, a work of calculated nastiness, no doubt, but alive in a way that the new film, with its strained air of seriousness and overall decorum, is not.
Faring slightly better than either Tykwer or his lauded French colleague, Franco-Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung delivered his first film since 1997's Cyclo, and like his previous features, The Vertical Ray of the Sun carries with it a fair amount of the filmmaker’s signature high art gloss. If Tran's preening aesthetic ultimately threatens to overwhelm his material, the film is still not entirely without merit. Sure, it's neatly schematic, and for all its seriousness, turns out to be quite slight, but at the very least, as J. Hoberman has pointed out, Vertical Ray generates considerable mystery via the tension between the turmoil of its characters' inner lives and the placidity of the film's immaculate surfaces. Still, one waits for Tran's first fully mature work.
For more substantial fare this summer, one had to rely as usual on well-programmed retros. The highlight thus far has certainly been the Walter Reade's near-complete showcase of Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang's film and television work. The series brought the director and his Doinel-like muse, Lee Kang-Sheng, to town, and gave occasion to the "better-late-than-never" New York première of Tsai's masterpiece, The River. Long too little known in America, and primarily for the not quite representative Vive L'Amour, Tsai's work is ripe for reassessment. A stark, modernist poet of urban alienation whose expression is as gaunt and tortured as the romantic Wong Kar-Wai's is luxuriant and wistful, Tsai is a filmmaker of real stature. His quintessential and greatest film is, pace Jim Hoberman, The River, a grim yet enormously compassionate portrait of a dysfunctional, post-Confucian family that is best seen in tandem with its prequel of sorts, Tsai's debut film, Rebels of the Neon God, which shows the family at an earlier stage of disintegration. Detractors find the anguish in Tsai's work - conveyed via an aesthetic of silences, spaces, and often static long takes - too extreme to take seriously, but Tsai's very precise use of locations and commentary on specifically Taiwanese idiosyncrasies in fact distinguish his work from the more generalized ennui occasionally found in late Antonioni and Bergman. The very accomplished Rebels has no distributor in America, but The River does: my advice is to run out and see the film (now playing at Cinema Village) before it disappears.
Perhaps one day Rebels will return as part of the BAM's "Best Undistributed Film" series. This summer, the program gave those who missed them the first time around an opportunity to catch such must-sees as Jia Zhangke's quietly epic Platform and Chantal Akerman's intense, hypnotic La Captive. Best of all, it meant screenings of two genuinely curate's egg items: the heady Thai conflation of surrealist experiment and documentary filmmaking, Mysterious Object at Noon, and Alexei Gherman's nightmarish evocation of Stalinist absurdities and horrors, the truly vertiginous Khrustalyov, My Car! Both films would reward repeated viewings, but the latter in particular, dense in every which way with allusions, sight gags, coups dramatic, narrative, staging, and otherwise, certainly needs to be parsed more than once in order to make some sense. Nevertheless, it was impressive enough on first viewing, from the sustained mood of hysteria to the sheer grimness of its black humor, at once aided and abetted by the juggernaut narrative rhythm. Like Mysterious Object at Noon, Gherman's film is one that stays with you long after you've seen it, a far cry from the cheap thrills of a Baise-Moi or a Bully, both amusing enough to watch the first time around, but also quickly digested and forgotten.
As the summer winds down, and one looks forward to the fall, all hope is not lost. August highlight: a series devoted to Portuguese cinema at BAM promises screenings of a handful of works by Manoel de Oliveira, and even the presence of the nonagenarian filmmaker. A master director who began in the silent era and whose latest, I'm Going Home, made grown men cry at this year's Cannes festival, Oliveira makes films that are essential viewing. My advice? Forget about the Coppertone. Take the train down to Brooklyn, and enjoy.
All written material (c) 2001 by Derek Lam