Summer Palace

There are long stretches during Lou Ye's Summer Palace (2006) when one feels in the presence of greatness. The film follows its characters during the years leading up to, during and following the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and the exhuberant style was clearly influenced by the French New Wave; but by concerning itself primarily with matters of the heart, the film limits its potential.

Jia Zhang-ke's Platform (2000) may be the greatest of all the Sixth Generation films partly because it finds the right balance between the personal and the political.

The story is narrated by the heroine, Yu Hong (Lei Hao), and the effect is like flipping through the pages of her diary: years pass in a matter of minutes, and the key events seem to happen between the scenes. The movie opens in 1987 in Tumen, a city on the border between China and North Korea. Yu Hong recieves a letter informing her she's been accepted to Beijing University, leaving behind her loser boyfriend, Xiao Jun (Lin Cui). Somewhere in between Tumen and Beijing she decides to never let anyone get too close to her.

At the university rumors begin to circulate that she's a lesbiand or had her heart broken until a friend, Li Ti (Ling Hu), sets her up with Zhou Wei (Xiaodong Guo). After an initial idyll, Yu Hong decides at some point they should break up. She sleeps with one of her professors so she can tell Zhou Wei about it, but later realizes she really loves Zhou Wei and tries to win him back.

After the Tiananmen Square Massacre, Yu Hong drops out of school and returns to Tumen for a time before moving to Shenzhen and then Chongqing. Zhou Wei and Li Ti become an item and move to East Germany.

Although all three characters participate in the Tiananmen Square Protests, the issues behind it are never discussed. Yu Hong seems to go along on impulse rather than any kind of political conviction. At most, one might say the film is about sexual liberation, and what that might entail. At the university, Yu Hong teaches another female student how to masturbate, and in Shenzhen she becomes involved with a married man.

The film was banned by the Chinese government, and while Lou claims this is because it didn't meet the technical standards for sound and image, this doesn't explain why he's been banned from filmmaking for five years. Given the film's timid approach to the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and the fact that films as critical as Jia's The World (2004) and Still Life (2006) were approved, I suspect the ban wasn't for the film's politics but its graphic sexuality. The sex is actually the least interesting part of the movie--not because everything else is esspecially wonderful, but simply because the sex scenes themselves are boring. Once you've seen one, you've seen them all.

What's exciting about the movie is its elliptical handling of narrative and woozy camera style which both recall the films of Olivier Assayas (esspecially Fin aoùt, début septembre [1998] and demonlover [2002]). Many scenes are shot handheld, in low lighting conditions with a shallow depth of field. The bursts of classical music are straight out of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Trois couleurs: Bleu (1993).

Finally, Summer Palace is less than meets the eye. One wonders what a silly girl who blows her chances for happiness has to do with the recent history that serves as a backdrop for the main action. For better or for worse, the film suggests a Chinese Jules et Jim (1962).

The Host

Bong Joon-ho's The Host (2006) is about a big, slimy monster. As such, it's the best film of its kind I've seen. On one level, it is a political allegory in the spirit of Joe Dante and George Romero, but it also works on a much less highfalutin' level as a story about characters we come to root for.

The film opens in a morgue in South Korea where an American pathologist instructs his assistant to empty bottle after bottle of formaldehyde down the drain. When the assistant objects that the drain leads directly into the Han River, the pathologist repies, "The Han River is very broad, so let's be broad-minded about this."

Long story short, a big, slimy monster comes out of the river and attacks humanity; but even before that, the Park family has other problems to deal with. Gang-du (Song Kang-ho) works in his father's food stand and can't afford to buy his daughter, Hyun-seo (Ko Ah-seong), a new cell phone. His brother, Nam-il (Park Hae-il), is a university graduate but can't find a job, and his sister, Nam-joo (Bae Doona), is a champion archer who freezes up during a big competition.

Here, as in Bong's previous feature, Memories of Murder (2003), the director seems to be allergic to subtlety. When Hyun-seo is abducted by the monster and presumed dead, the family shouts and wails and rolls on the floor. Behind the camera, Bong has a taste for lots of camera movement and suspenseful slow motion shots, which are better suited to a film like this than a Korean Mystic River (2003).

If, watching Memories of Murder, one wondered whether the parallels between the story and George W. Bush's reign of terror were deliberate (the movie was based on a true story that happened in the mid-1980's), The Host leaves no doubt. The American military quarantines the area around the Han River and anyone who came into direct contact with the monster, believing they've been exposed to a new virus. When no evidence of a virus can be found, the Americans refuse to let facts get in their way. To combat the monster, the U.S. okays the use of a chemical suggestively named "Agent Yellow," which inspires student protests.

The film has been praised by reviewers as an up-to-the-minute allegory about the times we live in, yet there's something about this tactic of using science fiction to talk about the present that makes my Susan Sontag senses tingle. In her essay "Against Interpretation," Sontag takes the position that sometimes a tank in a Bergman film is just a tank. To ignore The Host's political implications would be an act of denial, but once we start talking about the virus as a metaphor for WMDs, the text becomes divorced from its meanings. And that's when critics start praising horrible films, like Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978), because they agree with the filmmakers' politics.

What I liked best about the movie is its energy. The problem with most Hollywood action movies is that they get bogged down in the special effects, but Bong does a good job of keeping the plot moving.

The Host was a massive hit in South Korea and it's easy to see why: at bottom, this is a superior popular entertainment. It's about characters defined by their strengths and weaknesses who come together in order to pursue a common goal. It's very satisfying.

Away From Her

For a Canadian film, Sarah Polley's Away From Her (2006) is an above average effort--which simply means it didn't make me want to claw my eyes out. If I were a teacher, I'd give it a C+.

It's almost a given that Polley would improve on Alice Munro's short shorty, "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," simply because movies don't have paragraph breaks. Her most significant alteration is to shuffle the chronology so the film begins with Grant (Gordon Pinsent) going to meet Marion (Olympia Dukakis), with their conversation interrupted by flashbacks showing how Grant's wife, Fiona (Julie Christie), decided--against his will--that she should be put in a nursing home when she starts to show symptoms of alzheimers. Grant isn't allowed to visit Fiona during the first 30 days while she's settling in, and when he finally does go to see her, he's shocked to discover she no longer remembers him, having fallen in love with Marion's husband (Michael Murphy), who Fiona believes she knew as a teenager.

Polley expands on the source material in various ways, which results in the story losing some of its focus. As in the original, the other important character is a sympathetic nurse, Kristy (Kristen Thompson), whose husband abandoned her. However, the flashback structure shifts the emphasis of the story so that it's more about memory than absent spouses, making this piece of backstory somewhat gratuitous. When the camera spins around Grant and Fiona in the final sequence, it's impossible not to be reminded of another memory movie, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958).

Writing about the film in CineAction!, Robin Wood wonders whether the subject of alzheimers disease was Polley's first choice. I'm afraid that it was. Polley's "committment to left-wing politics" creeps into the film as kneejerk anti-Americanism, first as an asside when she has Fiona glibly dismiss American cinema as "garbage." Later, while watching a TV news report on the war in Iraq (which is far more graphic than anything you'd ever see on Canadian television), Fiona says to the camera directly: "How could they forget Vietnam?" Clearly Polley thinks this is a profound insight--an amnesiac commenting on another kind of forgetting--but even if it were true (in Vietnam, the U.S. didn't topple a dictator expecting to be greeted as liberators), it has no relevance to the story because, unlike the allegorical amnesia that afflicts Guy Maddin's characters, Fiona is suffering from a specific medical condition.

As a director, Polley lacks the stylistic finesse that Olivier Assayas' brought to similarly timid material in Clean (2004), a French-British-Canadian co-production shot partly in Hamilton. But where Assayas, a former editor of Cahiers du cinéma, draws inspiration from a wide aray of filmmakers from around the world (his demonlover [2002] was compared to David Cronenberg's Videodrome [1983]), Polley appears to want to close herself off to outside influences entirely. Over the closing credits, she uses a k.d. lang cover of a Neil Young song, and one of her additions to the story which I could've done without is a nursing home patient who used to do the play-by-play for the Winnipeg Jets--that is, back when Winnipeg had a team. However, despite her contempt for American garbage (which presumably includes Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, The Darjeeling Limited, Gone Baby Gone, Hairspray, I'm Not There., and Margot at the Wedding to name only a few of my favorites from the past year), Polley only succeeds half-way in doing something different: the slightly over-exposed cinematography, which floods the nursing home with heavenly light, is a convention of recent Hollywood films, and the low ASL and minimal camera movement make it more noticeable when Polley has her characters standing still during dialogue scenes than it would be in an Intensified Continuity film like Jerry Maguire (1996).

There's nothing really wrong with Away From Her. It's consistantly engaging and the four leads are uniformly good (it seems unfair to single out Christie over Pinsent, Dukakis and Thompson). I just didn't feel very challenged by it. In a sense, it's the anti-Marie Antoinette (also 2006). One wants to like Sarah Polley, who was so good in Exotica (1994) and Go (1999), because we feel she's earned it instead of having everything handed to her. (Incidentally, when Sofia Coppola was asked whether her film was a veiled comment on the Iraq war, she replied in so many words: Don't ask me, I'm just a movie director.) And while Polley took a risk in making a film about people different than herself, even if she occasionally uses them as mouthpieces for her political views, Coppola can only empathize with Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) insofar as Coppola turns her into an American teenager. So why is it I can't wait to see Marie Antoinette a seventh time, but probably wouldn't give Away From Her a second go around? I don't want to write an essay on the two films, so let's put it this way: Sometimes the prom queen is smarter and more interesting than the drama kids who define themselves in opposition to what's popular.

Still Life

Jia Zhang-ke's Still Life (2006) is about two characters on parallel tracks that never meet; but unlike Martin Scorsese's The Departed (made the same year)--to name a purely random example--which emphasized the similarities between its two protagonists through cross-cutting, Jia allows viewers the room to make connections for themselves. It's a movie that benefits from multiple viewings.

The film is set against the backdrop of the Three Gorges Dam, a massive engineering project that's displaced over one million Chinese. As the movie opens, Han Sanming (Han Sanming) arrives in Fengjie looking for his ex-wife, Missy Ma (Ma Lihzen), who left him 16 years earlier, taking their infant daughter. A cabbie agrees to take Sanming to the address his wife gave him before leaving, knowing full well that the entire neighborhood's underwater. ("I used to live over there.") While he continues his search, Sanming finds work helping to demolish what remains of the city--including, ultimately, the hotel where he's staying.

A coal miner from Jia's home province of Shanxi, Sanming moves through the film with an implaccable determination that belies his sullen demeanor. He befriends a petty criminal, Brother Mark (Zhou Lin), who quickly intuits that Sanming bought Missy on the black market. "Look around! There are more women than men. Lots of women got sold off." What remains a mystery is why he chose now to look for his ex-wife and daughter after so many years.

While the movie associates Sanming with the parts of the city that are disappearing, Shen Hong (Zhao Tao)--a nurse who's also from Shanxi--tends to gravitate towards newly built, gentrified neighborhoods as she searches for her husband, Guo Bing (Li Zhubing), an engineer who stopped coming home two years before.

As in Jia's previous feature, The World (2004), corruption is nearly ubiquitous in contemporary China. Even before he arrives in Fengjie, Sanming is literally dragged to a sleight-of-hand performance in which the magician promises to reveal the secret to getting rich, converting blank paper into Euros and then RMB. After the performance, several men walk through the audience collecting "tuition." It's implied that the Three Gorges Dam is a similar sort of con but on an infinitely larger scale.

Watching the film, one is reminded of the lost city of Atlantis. As one character puts it, a city with two thousand years of history was demolished in two years; and the western-style architecture replacing it is only designed to last twenty years at the most. When Sanming and Hong both see the same flying saucer, the special effects are, I think, deliberately generic.

The juxtaposition of the two stories recalls the two-part structures of Jacques Rivette's Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974) and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady (2004), which bring together wildly divergent material, inviting the viewer to make comparisons. Here, some of the connections are obvious (both Sanming and Hong are looking for absent spouses), while others--like a young boy who sings acapella in two scenes--are more mysterious.

Still Life, which won the Golden Lion at the 2006 Venice Film Festival, is not a stand alone work. At the same time Jia was making it, he was also working on a non-fiction feature, Dong (also 2006), that's also about the Three Gorges Dam. (According to some reviews I've read, characters from Still Life can be glimpsed in the documentary.) So as much as I enjoyed Still Life, I can't claim to understand it completely, including the title. That said, while I think seeing Dong would clarify some things, I don't think (and wouldn't want) it to answer everything; even after three viewings, it's a film that still holds plenty of secrets, which only makes me more eager to see it again.

Hitchcock's Films Revisited

A few months ago, a seven-minute ad for Freixenet Wine, directed by Martin Scorsese, turned up on the web in which Scorsese filmed a fragment of an unrealized Hitchcock script from the late 1940s, titled The Key to Reserva--in fact, an idiotic pastiche that attempts to squeeze in references to as many of Hitchcock's American films as possible (if there are any references to his British films, which I don't know as well, I've either forgotten them or never got them in the first place). As irritated as I was by it, and in particular the dopey final shot that attempts to reconcile the phoney Hitchcock fragment with a pseudo-documentary of Scorsese talking about the project (a droll send-up of his public persona that's the ad's only redeeming facet) by tossing in another gratuitous reference to The Birds (1963), my initial reaction was to forget I'd ever seen the ad and move on with my life rather than thinking about it too much. After all, if nobody involved in its making did, why should I?

I didn't think about it again until I saw Vanity Fair's annual Hollywood issue, which features stills of contemporary stars in imaginary remakes of several of Hitchcock's American films, with apparently little or no thought put into finding plausible casting choices. One might claim that the disparity between Seth Rogan and Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest (1959) is the whole point, but I can't think of any rationale to explain, much less defend, the picture of Javier Berdem and Scarlet Johansson dressed up as L.B. Jeffries/Jimmy Stewart and Lisa Fremont/Grace Kelly in Rear Window (1954), which makes me wonder if the people making the decisions had even seen the film. Hitchcock famously preferred to use stars with firmly established personas, like Stewart, Kelly and Thelma Ritter, often subtly tweaking them, but unlike Stewart, Bardem has--to his credit--played a much wider range of characters, from macho hunks (Jamón, jamón [1992]) to persecuted gay writers (Before Night Falls [2000]) to psycho looneys (No Country for Old Men [2007]), so seeing him as L.B. Jeffries doesn't mean the same thing as seeing Stewart in the same role. Similarly, is there any actress less like Grace Kelly--less elegant, less glamourous, less sexy--than Scarlet Johansson? Admittedly, Kelly wasn't a great actress like Joan Fontaine (Suspicion [1941]) or Ingrid Bergman (Notorious [1946]), but given the right script, she was perfectly capable of holding her own along side a pro like Ritter. By comparison, watching Woody Allen's Match Point (2005), one almost feels embarassed for Johansson, she's so clearly out-matched by her co-stars.

I could sit here picking apart these mangled tributes all the live long day, but I'm more interested in what's behind these imitations. What, exactly, are they trying to convince us of? In the case of The Key to Reserva, the answer is fairly straightforward: the point is to persuade us to drink Freixenet wine. However, since we never see Scorsese (or Hitchcock, for that matter) drinking the wine, he endorses it only implicitly by agreeing to appear in the ad. Compare this to the ads for Gillette razors featuring Roger Federer, in which we actually see him shaving. There the message is: if you want to be like Roger Federer, you should use this razor. Of course, no one really thinks that, if they use a particular razor, it'll make them a great tennis player, but that's not really what the ad promises. As with any celebrity endorsement, it begins with the agreed upon value that Roger Federer is the top-seated tennis player in the world right now, and therefore, successful. By having him endorse a particular brand of razors, that brand in turn becomes a signifier of a successful person. The Freixenent ad isn't positioning their product as the wine of successful movie directors, but rather, by placing it within the phoney Hitchcock fragment, positions it within another set of agreed upon values--specifically, the glamour of Hollywood's golden age. In other words, the ad is saying: if you want to feel glamourous, you'll buy this wine. It doesn't matter whether the film being referenced is one of Hitchcock's best (Rear Window) or one of his worst (The Man Who Knew Too Much [1956]) so long as the milieu denotes an expensive lifestyle; if memory serves, the two prinicpal locations are the opera and a hotel.

Still, Scorsese's implicit endorsement of Freixenet wine is just as important, not because it makes the product seem more appealing, but because he lends to it a certain respectability. In an earlier entry I wrote about the New Zealand-born animator Len Lye, whose The Birth of the Robot (1936) was made as a prestige ad for Shell Oil; the point of the ad wasn't to get people to buy more gas per se, but to boost the company's image by associating it with an artist like Lye. As precedents to The Key to Reserva, one might point to Scorsese's own video for Michael Jackson's "Bad" from 1986, which was also purposefully too long for regular TV rotation, and "The Hire," a series of eight short films commissioned by BMW and directed by big-name filmmakers like Ang Lee, Tony Scott and Wong Kar-wai. From the way the directors' names are advertised in the Michael Jackson video and the BMW shorts, unlike most three-minute music videos and thirty-second TV spots where the directors remain anonymous, Jackson and BMW almost seems to be whispering in your ear: And you just know they got a huge paycheck for this. Here, the only thing more prestigious than having Martin Scorsese direct an ad for your company (and after winning an Oscar for The Departed [2006], one would assume he's charging a little more for his services these days) is to have him do it in the style of an even more famous filmmaker.

In contrast with The Key to Reserva, which employs anoymous commercial actors rather than stars, the Vanity Fair spread requires celebrities to justify its own existence; presumably, no one would want to see just anyone in a recreation of the shower scene from Psycho (1960), but if it's Marion Cotillard, well, that's another matter. One is reminded of Annie Leibowitz's photographs of celebrities, in which the only reason she's photographing them at all is because they're celebrities. Obviously there's a sense of humor running through her work (I'm amused by her picture of Cristo, wrapped, partly because we can't be sure it's really him), but most of what she does strikes me as utterly inane. There's nothing inherently interesting about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes' offspring that would make it a more worthy subject for a picture than any other child on the face of the earth, but once again, our knowledge of how much Cruise and Holmes were payed for allowing themselves to be photographed with the child (if it were just the child in the photographs, I doubt they wouldn't have sold a single magazine), and how much Leibowitz was payed to take the pictures, is what made the photos worthy of a magazine cover. Nevermind that it was the ugliest baby in the history of the world. I didn't recognize the names of any of the photographers who worked on the Vanity Fair spread, but the high level of technical craft suggests a similar level of time, care and money went into their making. My only question is whether they needed to be made in the first place. I can't help but think of a lighting course I took in my last semester of art school where the students had to take an existing picture and recreate the lighting. I think I'm on safe ground in assuming that none of the photos in Vanity Fair were made for a second-year photography class so that the artist (who was actually a film major) could graduate in the spring rather than doing another semester, but then, if the point is to take a picture of Naomi Watts, why go the extra distance of making her up to look like Tippi Hedren in Marnie (1964)? For the prestige, of course. That Watts is, after all, an Oscar-nominated actress, and therefore a rare commodity, and the technical challenge of reproducing the exact look of a film made forty years ago signal to the viewer that this photo required a great deal of planning, expertise and, above all, cash. Even if the magazine were to, hypothetically, take a loss on the issue--unlikely since it has like a billion advertisements--it would still be worth the cost because of what it does for the esteem of the magazine.

The Key to Reserva and the Vanity Fair spread are both ostensibly tributes to the greatness of Hitchcock's cinema, although the fact that neither bothers to make a distinction between major and minor works should at least raise doubt about this. (I know To Catch a Thief [1955] and North by Northwest were intended as light entertainment, but where does one draw the line between light and inconsequential?) In fact, what both really do is lend respectability to different products--a wine company and a magazine, respectively--by shelling out lots of dough for the most respected (read: best paid) directors, the biggest celebs and decent production values. If anything, Hitchcock is a curious choice since his films weren't especially prestigious when he was alive; Psycho was famously shot on a shoestring budget with a small crew, and he never won a best director prize from the MPAAS. Then again, the quintessential Oscar movie, Gone With the Wind (1939), spends so much time trying to convince us of its importance (acquiring the rights to a then-prestigious novel, craft services for the hundreds of extras, lab costs for a nearly four hour film), as if subconsciously aware that it's utterly without interest on the level of storytelling, that there isn't enough reflected glory left over for anyone else to bask in.