Over the last twenty years, the continent of Asia has produced some
of the most significant feature films in the world, and has been home to most
of the important new film movements: the 5th Generation in the People’s Republic
of China (emerging in 1985), the Taiwanese New Cinema (1983), the Hong Kong
and South Korean New Waves and the remarkable post-revolutionary cinema in
Iran. As usual, this year, the Festival des Films du Monde (FFM) provided
us with a good selection of Asian films from seventeen different countries.*
Also, as if often the case, some of the most highly anticipated titles from
directors such as the Japanese Naomi Kawase, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Takeshi
Kitano, Tsai Ming-Liang (Taiwan), Jafar Panahi (Iran), and Im Sang-Soo (South
Korea) are receiving their North American premieres at the Toronto Festival,
but, hopefully they will all be distributed in Quebec, or, at the very least
be shown in the Festival of New Cinemas and New Medias here in October. In
any event, the FFM showcased number of prominent new Asian films, including
five in the official competition. Of these, the Sri Lankan entry, Ira Madiyama
(Soleil d’Août, directed by Prasanna Vithanage), with its intricate cross-cutting
of three journeys—by a Tamil guerilla on his way home, an educated Sinhalese
woman looking for her downed-pilot boyfriend, and a family of Muslim refugees—should
have won a prize, a sequel to Satyajit Ray’s celebrated Days and Nights
in the Forest (1970) by Goutam Ghose, Aabar Arannye (In the Forest...
Again), from India, contained some beautiful
Bengali moments, while Karsilasma (La rencontre) by veteran Turkish
art filmmaker Ömer Kavur was highly regarded by Montreal critics, and was expected
to win a prize. It
didn’t. For myself, I was sure that Ruoma De Shi Sui (Quand Ruoma avait
dix-sept ans) by first-time Chinese filmmaker Zhang Jiarui and starring a
first-time Hani minority actress, Li Min, would win something, either for
her performance or for the stunning terraced rice paddy landscapes of Yunnan province. But, it was not to be. Perhaps
the jury, which was dominated by old (but not “stupid”) white men, cast their
votes unconsciously in a Eurocentric manner...
Of the many films from Iran on view at the FFM—a perennially prominent
force—I am singling out Parviz Shahbazi’s Nafas-e Amigh (Deep
Breath) for special attention. Surprisingly, given the tough restrictions
on the subject matter of Iranian films, this director has been able
to specialize in stories of mis-spent youth through his first two
features, Travellers from the South (1996) and Whisper
(2000) and now, in his third, and best. Kamran, who has dropped out
of Engineering school and his less-wealthy friend, Mansour hang-out
together, behaving like punks. Riding on
the back of Mansour’s motorcycle, the long-haired Kamran sticks out his right leg and kicks the rearview mirrors off
a line of cars. Never entering the gates of his family mansion, he
scratches up a car, parked outside, bought for him by his parents.
The two steal a car from a frightened woman, and somehow manage to
avoid being arrested by police, who continually stop them on suspicion
of other offenses. They spend their nights in a Tehran hostel and befriend and drink tea with Ashram,
whose identical twin brother boards with him. While Kamran contracts
a mysterious, fatal illness, Mansour pursues a female university student,
Ayda, with whom he has fallen in love. Remarkably, the film is structured
around a drowning incident. The film begins with the camera mounted
on the bow of a boat, travelling across water in a reservoir, surrounded
by beige rocks and cliffs. The off-screen voices of rescuers talk
of a submerged car, and two occupants, wondering if the long-haired
person they are retrieving is a man or a woman, and, as we view a
slow-motion, underwater shot of swirling, jet black hair, an abrupt
cut reveals Kamran emerging from the water of a swimming pool. The
film unravels as a flashback. We are led to believe, firstly,
that the car accident victims will be the two punks, when they drive
towards the reservoir to meet Ayda on a field trip, and secondly that
the victims will be the two young lovers, escaping Tehran after Kamran’s funeral. But, at the end
of the film, they drive past the accident scene, and the narrative
cycle is complete. If we, at the end of this tense road movie, breathe
a sigh of relief, as Mansour and Ayda, no longer visible in their
stolen car, drive upwards into a dense fog, we must wonder if any
kind of future together awaits them...
The last addition to the Cinema of Asia section was one of the very
best films at the FFM: Randa Chahal Sabbaq’s Le cerf-volant,
a Lebanese/France co-production. Listed in the catalogue at 120 minutes,
it only lasted 80, and the denouement was so swift, it felt like a
couple of reels might have been missing. Shown on the last weekend,
when it also won the Jury Grand Prix (2nd prize) at Venice, Le cerf-volant contained an interesting
mixture of satirical comedy and seriousness in its condemnation of
intensely guarded political divisions. For this film, which is set
on the southern border of Israel and Lebanon, Ms Sabbaq made the unusual choice of cinemascope
framing. (Until the 27th FFM, where one could also find a Moroccan
filmmaker choosing to shoot in scope—Faouzi Bensaidi’s Mille mois,
which had won the Prix Premier Regard at Cannes—with equally
surprisingly successful results, I don’t ever remember seeing an Arabic
film made in the very wide aspect ratio of 2.35:1!) The fluidly moving
camera scanning the widescreen frame enhances the distance which has
been artificially created between two Arab villages on either side
of the barbed wire fences. Lamia, a fifteen year old girl living on the Lebanese
side has been promised in marriage to her cousin, living in relative
Moslem orthodoxy, on the Israeli side. On her reluctant walk to her
marriage, she notices a border guard, also
Lebanese, but who could be mistaken as Israeli in his uniform, and
when their gazes meet they apparently fall in love. The simple story,
almost an anecdote, is embellished by the comic attempts of the white-garbed
women at long distance communications via megaphones and binoculars,
again befitting the stretch of cinemascope, and it is framed by Lamia’s heroic, apparently tragic attempt at retrieving her little brother’s
kite from the no-man’s-land minefield.
Overall, the Chinese selections were much better than last year’s.
The least interesting of the three PRC films in the Cinema of Asia
section is the very conventional, but handsomely styled The Story
of Lotus, directed by Qi Jian. More interesting is the socially-engaged
work of realism, Ka La Shi Tiao Gou (Cala, My Dog!), which
looks back on a 1995 law demanding that Beijing dog owners pay an exorbitant license fee.
Beginning with a hand-held, verité-styled chase sequence where
a wife and mother is caught with her unlicensed dog, Cala, and ending
in stillness as the family’s pet is finally driven away, Lu Xuechang’s
film, which had screened in the International Forum at this year’s
Berlin film festival, documents the humanizing of the, apparently
non-dog-loving member of the family, the nightshift-working father,
Lao Er (played charmingly by Gou Ye) over the 18 hours they have to
procure a license. The most interesting of the three films, Pretty
Big Feet is somewhat of an enigma. Filmed by the once-great Xi’an
studio, it recaptures the stark landscape beauty seen in films such
as In the Wild Mountains (1985) and Red Sorghum (1987)
with its dry yellow river bed locations, and features striking individual
shots which transmit great emotional power, e.g., where the central
female character, Zhang Meili (who is “pretty” but has “big feet”)
drags a long rope to raise a bucket of water from a very deep well,
the camera tracks back with her movement, and the wide-angle lens
emphasizes the struggle, and exaggerates the distance travelled. The
tone is very broad and at times melodramatic, but most strangely the
music often reaches a crescendo unmatched by the emotion displayed
in the film’s action. And, fast fade-outs often terminate scenes prematurely.
I am persuaded to think that the film’s director, Yang Yazhou was
trying to find a new, perhaps more authentically Chinese, rhythmic
approach to telling stories and reaching out emotionally to the audience,
but, I can’t be sure of this. Pretty Big Feet was a very successful
film with Chinese audiences, though.
The Zénith d’Or, voted on by the public as the Best Film in the Cinema
of Asia section was given to Watashi No Gurampa (My Grandpa)
directed by Yoichi Higashi (Japan). This was certainly a worthy winner, recounting
a growing relationship between Godai Tomako, a high school girl just
turning 14 and her 68 year-old grandfather, whom she affectionately
refers to using the English term “Grandpa,” and who, she gradually
learns, is being released from prison after serving a 13 year sentence
for killing a Yakuza boss. There is little of cinematic interest in
this film, and I would have cast my vote for something more adventurous,
such as Le cerf-volant, or Deep Breath, or films from
three countries rarely represented in the FFM: Malaysia, Singapore and Armenia. Yau Fang Chu Zu (Room to Let), is a “digital film” and was shown at the festival
on video. Clearly influenced by the Taiwanese work of Malaysian-born
director Tsai Ming-liang, with its long take, interior scenes of alienation,
James Lee’s film, while set in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur,
manages to avoid showing any of its sights—e.g., the majestic twin
towers—restricting our view to a supermarket and the various rented
rooms of a single story house, its exterior and garden. All of the
occupants are ethnically Chinese, out-of-work, “slackers,” and the
film’s action is appropriately slow moving, yet spiced throughout
with droll humour and weird incidents of the fantastic: the ghost
of a young woman haunts the bathroom, a painter disappears while his
sister has his fiancée tied up for years to make her lose weight.
Royston Tan’s 15, is also a digital work but was shown at
the FFM in a 35mm transfer. A first-time feature from Singapore, 15 explores the wayward lives of
five fifteen year-old male punks with remarkable openness
and terrific visual flair: dynamic montage sequences introduce the
characters and computer animation enhances the illustration of drug-taking.
Often, the film has a mock-postcard look. Most remarkably, when two
of the kids prepare to swallow condoms filled with drugs to traffic
them across the Singapore-Malaysian border, their actions seem
to be real. Apparently all of the young actors were actual “street
kids. It is hard to imagine the reaction of local audiences to the
in-your-face rudeness of 15 in the notoriously straight-laced
society of Singapore.
Similarly strong in style, the black and white, 62 minute Armenian
film Vaveragrogh (Documentarist), directed by Harutyun Khachatryan,
straddles the boundary of documentary and fiction. With very little
dialogue (and for the first 20 minutes, none at all), Vaveragrogh
episodically recounts the work of a crew of documentary filmmakers.
The opening, circular tracking shot observes the crew on a pick-up
truck. Offscreen, we hear the cries and shrieks of animals and wonder
what on earth is happening, and in the last sequence of the film,
preceded by the title card “shooting dogs,” a possible answer is given.
In between these sequences of mysterious, intense observation of the
filmmakers themselves and fleeting, extreme cruelty, glimpsed in the
darkness of back alleys, Khachatryan shows us the noisy, rigorous,
mechanized toil of road-building, the ecstasy of lovemaking, the pain
and joy of childbirth, and the shame and misery of penniless beggars,
one of whom provides the film’s only interview subject. It is a tour-de-force
demonstration of the visual and emotive power of cinema.
*If one counts Turkey and Armenia as part of Asia, which the FFM programmers seem to do. One
film from each of these countries was included in the “Cinema of Asia”
section.
This
essay first appeared in a French translation in the journal Séquences
#228, Nov.-Dec. 2003
