Shock, horror! For the first time in a long and distinguished artistic career, filmmaker John Boorman has made a bad film – and a very bad one at that. Literally hundreds had been expecting COUNTRY OF MY SKULL to be an early highlight of the festival, but nearly all of them walked out of the end of the Saturday morning screening with unhappy or even depressed looks on their faces.
Boorman seems to have been overcome by an attack of do-goodism inflated by a medium-sized case of self-righteousness. SKULL is set in South Africa during 1996 and is based on the reconciliation-and-amnesty hearings that were held under the post-Apartheid regime. The reasoning behind the hearings, which carried the force of judicial rulings, was that anyone who stepped forward to admit crimes of torture and murder committed under the previous regime, and who could prove, or plausibly assert, that the crimes were committed because of orders of superiors, would be allowed to go free. Obviously, in 90 percent of the cases, the pleas were submitted by members of the Apartheid security forces. Guerillas of the African National Congress also pled their cases in a few instances.
SKULL isn’t about the hearings per se, but about the African concept of reconciliation that underlay them. This generous and humane philosophy holds that all human beings are part of one another and so forgiveness is essential for the happiness of all. However, one cannot forgive another for a transgression unless the offender admits his crime.
Such a noble concept! Alas, such a reductive and stupid treatment! The film’s two main players include a South African poet, the daughter of an anti-black farmer, who covers the hearings for South African and American public radio. She’s played by Juliette Binoche, and before you snicker at the idea of a French woman player and Afrikaaner, be advised that she handles both the English dialogue and requisite accent quite well. Beyond that, the emotional transparency she brings to her character gives SKULL whatever emotional life it has (not much).
Far worse is Samuel L. Jackson as a Washington Post journalist who arrives in South Africa ready to cast a blanket condemnation on whites and to cast the hearings as a collective whitewash. A limited actor given more and more to bombast as the years go by, Jackson accentuates the already severe limitations of his cardboard character as he undergoes the wholly expected and completely schematized transition from skeptic to believer. Naturally he and Binoche’s poet-reporter have an affair and Boorman performs several backward somersaults to excuse the married woman’s adultery.
There is a potentially far more interesting figure on the African landscape played by the inimitable Brendan Gleeson. Either a real character or based on one (I can’t remember the real-life person’s name and there weren’t any notes at the screening, Gleeson’s part is that of a monstrous security office who committed so many acts or torture of such wanton brutality and killed so many victims with such bloody enthusiasm, that even within his own service he had the reputation of a psychopath.
Gleeson chooses to play an ideologue rather than a crazed killer, a dramatically intriguing choice. It’s only intriguing, though, as he only gets about 15 minutes of screen time. One suspects his darkly ominous figure took too much time away from the awkward posturing that dominates the film.
There’s nothing awkward about Hong Kong’s INFERNAL AFFAIRS II (Wu jian doo II), the middle entry in directors Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s crime thriller saga. Apparently loosely inspired by the Godfather trilogy, the two directors know the difference between inspiration and plagiarism, and have come up with a movie that is echt Hong Kong action.
Anthony Wong, the living personification of weary frustration and cynicism, plays a police inspector who has spent most of his professional life fighting against the powerful Nagai family Triad gang. He’s “turned” one of the triad’s chief lieutenants into a double agent and also managed to plant a spy high in the Ngaifamily councils.
At the same time, Wong’s own organized crime unit has been infiltrated by an officer who is loyal to one branch of the Ngai organization, though not to the central family.
This hardly begins to describe a plot that reveals itself during 1991, 1995 and 1997, the last being the year of the colony’s handover to China. Various players rise and fall. Come and go, always with violence. In the sequence most memorable of The Godfather – but also uniquely INFERNAL’s own – the Ngai’s eliminate four rival gang leaders all in a single night, Lau and Mak cutting between the sometimes gruesome deaths with bloody beauty.
For a film whose main theme is the rarity of loyalty and the surfeit of betrayal, INFERNAL is a gorgeous film, beautifully shot, with the filmmakers taking full advantage of the wide, ‘scope screen and the opportunities presented by nighttime shooting. INFERNAL AFFAIRS III screens Feb. 8. I can hardly wait.
“Frogs, at least, have the decency to have green skin,” says the male half of the perverse couple in Catherine Breillat’s new film, ANATOMIE DE L’ENFER (Anatomy of Hell). Indeed they do, Mlle. Breillat, indeed they do.
Plowing the well-turned earth she’s been over-cultivating for the last few years, Breillat once again performs a cinematic swoon over the power of female passivity and masochism when it comes to taming male brutality and sadism. This time out her mode of old-fashioned s&m erotica, though we are tipped it’s going to be little tweaked by the opening shot, that of a man performing fellatio on another in the alley behind a gay bar.
Inside the female protagonist, a nameless woman (Amira Casar) tries to cut her wrists in the toilet, but is stopped by a gay man (Rocco Siffredi, the European porn star who was in Breillat’s Romance). On this basis, the two have a relationship at a lonely house near a cliff where waves pound against the rocks, the sort of imagery which made its way from high romanticism down to degenerate romanticism and finally to cheap erotica.
Inside the house, the woman spends her time naked while, at first, the man keeps his clothes on and mounts a verbal assault on the ugliness of the female body. He humiliates her, once by shoving a rake up her butt and, another time, spreading lipstick on her vulva and the mouth of her anus and after that, on her lips. Both times the woman is asleep and doesn’t awake, which makes her a source of envy for unhappily light sleepers.
As the man becomes sexually aroused, though, the tables turn. His penis, as it were, leads him into the power of the vagina, and the woman’s passivity and ability to absorb punishment supposedly ends with her triumphant.
The problem with Breillat is that while she may have a highly developed politics of the bedroom (whether one agrees with it or not) she has absolutely no politics of politics. Watching her punishment-loving heroines, you might think of a slave tethered to a grindstone, sweating, bleeding and pulling night and day, whipped by an overseer and thinking all the while that he’s forcing the man with the whip to lash him.
The freedom of passivity is the freedom not to be free, a game of self-deception that serves that status quo in states of complex, advanced capitalism dominated by state, financial and industrial bureaucracy. Masochists of the world unite, you have your chains to gain.
A TALE OF TWO SISTERS (Janghwa, Hongryun) is a Korean film that keeps you wondering throughout: Is this a Gothic horror story, or a tale of a psychological breakdown. I suppose that makes it Polanski-esque in its way, but director Kim Jee-woon, has his own, personal tight – very, very tight – rein on the compositional and editorial techniques that elude direct comparison.
Two teenage sisters return to their father’s nice country home after one of them, at least, has spent serious time in a mental hospital. Because we’ve seen the hospitalized one only obliquely, we don’t know if its meek Su-yeon or assertive and protective Su-mi whose had the psychological problems.
It’s not long before we’ve been presented with substantial evidence that each is ripe for the loony bin. On their first night home, Su-yeon runs from her room and into Su-mi’s bed when she sees a sinister hand snaking through the door. Before long there’s creepiness in a wardrobe, monstrous-looking babies under the sink, and all manner of Gothic appurtenances cutting capers. There’s even and evil stepmother (or is she evil?)
SISTERS is creepy in the most enjoyable way imaginable, as long as you appreciated the power of a careful, slow build-up and the equally careful, but quicker and quicker unfolding of murderous consequences. The ending is a surprise, though the fact that it’s a surprise is in and of itself isn’t a surprise; any ending would be a surprise considering that convolutions we go through to get there. Kim does play perspective games, alternating between the objective and subjective, and by the time SISTERS was over I wasn’t sure whether he had cheated or not. But by then it was after midnight and I had a walk back to the hotel in the dark.