Weekday Blues Plus One
Major film festivals are notorious for their mid-festival scheduling, the suspicions always being that movies with shakier reputations are left to Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. The idea, I guess, is that the press is stuck in town and will go see anything once the chips are down while, on the weekends, you want to put on “audience pictures” to keep the public satisfied.
If you’re going to make offbeat discoveries, though, these are the days you’ll do it, and Tuesday began with such, the third good Korean film of the festival (and best so far), SAMARIA (Samaritan Girl). Directed by the prolific Kim Ki-Duk, its action starts out like a bizarre combination of saccharine children’s tale and kiddie porn. But Kim shifts tones and strategies so often, and sometimes so radically, that SAMARIA ends up a pointed condemnation of dual social roles of children in Korea, the misleading example of religious myth, a cautionary tale of subsequent psychological disintegration, a depiction of a one-man crime spree, and a family melodrama. Not bad for 95 minutes.
Initially, the two main characters are a pair of 14-year-old girls, Jae-Young and Yeo-Jin. Jae is particular is innocent-looking, but it’s she who has come up with the idea of the pair setting up a two-girl prostitution ring. Yeo goes along with the scheme reluctantly, and only on the condition that she stick strictly to the business end.
But whereas money was the starting point, a larger, more mystical motivation has seized Jae’s imagination. She has been inspired by the story of an Indian courtesan of long ago, Vasumitra, whose lovers all became Buddhist monks after sleeping with her once. Jae wants to offer similar comfort to her customers and so her fund-raising turns into a bizarre calling, one that immediately jars with her alternately creepy (before) and brusque (afterwards) clients.
Kim dares to show us the two girls nude, but only washing together in a public bath. It serves a dual purpose; we see just how young they really are, but also how, in their simple, pre-erotic intimacy, how truly innocent they are. It’s only after a shocking turn of events, when Yeo suddenly replaces Jae as the leading character in the film, and her father, a police detective, emerges to take a leading part, that the films violent shifts begin.
After three Koren films in four days, it becomes apparent that many, though hardly all, Korean filmmakers share a similar shooting style. The camera is placed at a middle distance from the characters, whose gestures and physical actions are minimal, and so magnified. It’s not deadpan, but stoic, as if anything can be contemplated with unperturbed sobriety. Not many cinemas have that gift.
The mono-monikered Japanese director has come up with an odd little number in HARD LUCK HERO. The number is twi, or maybe six depending on your pointof view. Two young actors, Sakamoto Masayuki and Nagano Hiroshi play three pairs of friends who get in trouble in the same club where a yakuza boss is staging an illegal Thai kickboxing match.
The first duo is the corner man for a visiting Thai fighter who decides not to show up. He desperate drafts his just as desperately unwilling kitchen-worker buddy into entering the ring, the chief inducement being that the Thai was scheduled to take a dive in the second round anyway. This vignette is played broadly, but very well, and is as funny as it strives to be.
The second section is still funny, though a bit less so by design. Two businessmen go to the club on a lark only to end up chased by the police after the cops bust the place for illegal gambling. Finally, in a straight-out serious section, two young gang members try to steal some money from likely-looking targets in the crowd, but end up on the run after one of them is shot.
Technically the film is very well done and is at its best when it’s trying straight-out for laughs, the broader the better. But Sabu’s serious side is harder to take seriously than his comic aspect, at least in HARD LUCK HERO, and when he actually turns sentimental at the end, well, at least you have the memory of what came before.
Speaking of the half-successful, this may be a good time to bring up French filmmaker Cedric Kahn’s FEUX ROUGES (Red Lights). Kahn takes no longer than the first shot to tell us he’s up to Hitchcockian affairs, not the first director to make than homage and not the first to shoot himself in the foot doing so.
Jean-Pierre Darroussin plays an insurance executive who’s supposed to meet lawyer-wife Carole Bouquet at a café and then set off to Bordeaux, to pick the kids up from summer camp. But Bouquet is late, so Darroussin has one drink then another and another. Even after Bouquet shows up, and then after they hit the road, Darroussin continues to sneak large shots of whiskey, becoming surlier as the drive goes on, if not otherwise apparently drunk.
But then he starts stopping at roadside bars to keep himself fired up and takes them way off course. After Dannoussin cops one particularly long drink, he comes out to discover Bouquet gone. Well, there’s one thing and another, bap bap bap, a before you know it, Dannoussin is giving a ride to a surly guy who we know right away is an escaped convict. Even Dennoussin, as drunk as he is, figures that one out.
This is where the movie should go into suspense overdrive, but instead it putters along in second. One problem is that Kahn doesn’t seem to believe we’ll understand that Dannoussin has a drinking problem unless we get montages of the process of having a drink each time the man has one poured. Kahn even over-explicates silence, an achievement I wouldn’t have thought possible, and certainly am now convinced is undesirable.
FOLLE EMBELLIE (A Wonderful Spell) is a French film about a small group of inmates who free themselves from an insane asylum just as the Germans invade in 1939. If that’s not enough to condemn the film to your mind, be informed that the movie asks big fake questions about freedom and purpose, to which it gives little fake answers. Oh, yes, it has that kind of “beautiful” cinematography that is drained of all life. It condemns itself. Dominique Cabrera directed. I shall pass on.
Angela Robinson, the instantly likable young director of D.E.B.S., leaped onto the stage before the screening of her film to announce that her film had been at last year’s festival as a short and Sony had given her the money to turn it into a feature and she wanted to thank (fill in one of a dozen Sony executives here).
I have to blame my own inertia for not getting up and walking out right then. For what followed was 90 minutes of a single joke strreeetched out to meet some suit’s idea of something for the hip market.
The idea isn’t bad – you can see how the short could have been quite winning. A posh academy for girls is actually training them as superspies; as work-study, the older girls actually go out on the job in foursomes. One of these working young ladies becomes the object of affection by a villainess who, we discover, isn’t so bad at heart, just misunderstood. In fact, she’s very nice, and the D.E.B.S. girl herself has, you know, those feelings.
Well, full stop. And I do mean full stop. For an hour and a half.
Yes, it was mid-week at the festival by the time the day was over. So SAMARIA was a wonderful gift, indeed.