Only China and the USA
It may seem strange for an American film critic to go all the way to Berlin and end up watching American films, but it would be even stranger to go all that way and spend a whole morning not watching any films. So…
Anyone with a hint of political savvy knows that the violent factional groups that spun out of the New Left belong not to the history of politics, but to the history of crime. At the very least, if you want to make a case that they were fundamentally political organizations, rather than the collective narcissistic spasms of middle-class adventurists with no respect for life, you have to do that – make a case. A filmmaker certainly has to do more than just plunk a camera down in front of survivors in obvious need of self-justification and let them blather on and on.
That’s very nearly all director Robert Stone does in NEVERLAND: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SYMBIONESE LIBERATION ARMY. Recounting the group’s notorious string of crimes – the assassination of Oakland’s first African-American school superintendent, bank robberies, and, sigh, the Patty Hearst kidnapping – Stone isn’t able either to bring a new perspective to bear on the events or to place them in socio-political context (of course, if he did the latter, he’d reveal just how trivial his subject is politically). He even allows members of the group to spout off about the historical importance of their demands for a free food giveaway, which they describe, with no irony, as the first time the plight of the hungry had been brought to the American public. Honestly, you’d laugh if it didn’t make you want to cry.
More interesting is Stone’s investment in some of the SLA myths. The two SLA talking heads in the movie insist that Donald De Freeze, the escaped African-American convict who was demonstrably the group’s leader was in fact not the leader, but an equal member of a collective. Stone has performed no original – nor any substantial second- or third-hand – material on De Freeze’s life, failing to shed light on the SLA’s principle motivator. Talk about acing another black man out of his own history, even if it is infamy.
Stone also doesn’t spend as much time on any of the other SLA victims as he does on Hearst. Granted, he doesn’t see her as much of a victim, but is this woman worthy of all this attention? Is this what documentaries about American social movements have come to?
The next American film in the docket was THE FINAL CUT, starring Robin Williams in his Repressed Mode, which at climax times always leads to either Warmed Up or Boiling Over Robin (this is opposed to Sentimental/Childlike Robin or Manic Robin). Williams has been using a lot of Repressed Robin over the last few years, apparently under the mistaken impression that he projects intensity on screen. He doesn’t. More like lethargy.
It’s not drifting off but drifting on that’s the subject of 26-year-old Omar Naïm’s debut feature. In the near future (near enough that you can hold on to important bits of your wardrobe), people who can afford it will have organically-based audio-video devices implanted in their kids’ noggins. As the offspring grow, their whole lives will be thus recorded and, once they die, edited by special sworn-to-secrecy cutters to be shown at their memorial services.
This set-up isn’t so much ridiculous as a sci-fi notion as it is completely absurd as a workable dramatic premise. No parent in his or her right mind would ever saddle a child with such a useless, yet invasive, toy. Perhaps realizing this, but only after entering production, Naïm spends most of the movie thrashing about looking for some plot to hang on his very bad idea. He comes up with an anti- recording device underground and a dirty corporate lawyer’s incestuous pedophilia, but decides to keep them around only as subplots (one left hanging at that). No, he figures the really good stuff would be a personal crisis for Williams’s character, which means either the performer looking blank or looking blank and getting slapped by Mira Sorvino.
The movie is shot by Tak Fujimoto, and as you’d expect from the master of shadow and dark, THE FINAL CUT has what could have been an effectively gloomy coloration. If only the young director had had even a slim notion of how to set up his camera! Dede Allen is listed as one of two editors, and one assumes that she was brought in to perform emergency surgery. The operation was a failure but the patient lived.
So much for the homeland. The day’s two final films were from China and, while they weren’t outstanding, they were pretty good, the kind of film a first rank festival needs in quantity to be a success.
Director Zhu Wen is only in his mid-30s, but he sure knows how to integrate the attitudes of old age’s eve in the warp and woof of a film. The serio-comic, Mandarin-language SOUTH OF THE CLOUDS (Yun De Nan Fang) follows a mildly cantankerous, 61-year-old retiree named Xu (Li Xuejian) from his northern industrial town to Yunnan in the south.
Like Xu in preparation for his trip, Zhu’s film takes its time getting started. We see him hanging out with a friend who insists some home-made exercises are the key to healthy longevity and arguing over money with his daughter.
The arguments over money are symptomatic of SOUTH OF THE CLOUDS’s subtlety. Xu’s daughter is an exercise instructor who wants her father to lend her the money to open her own place. She’s not greedy, but she’s an adult, she’s the child (of three or four) who has stayed at home to take care of dad – so why not? Xu doesn’t want to surrender his nest egg and, besides, his money is for his trip.
But what’s the trip all about? Xu stubbornly refuses to tell anyone, not his daughter, not the businessman the daughter arranges to meet Xu in Yunnan, nor any of the other people whose paths’ he crosses. Cleverly, we only learn what it’s all about in a beautiful dream which itself approaches the subject obliquely. This is not to leave the impression that SOUTH OF THE CLOUDS is in any way allusive; Xu’s lengthy involvement with a false charge of consorting with a prostitute is about as concrete – and funny – as can be.
Wen’s compositional style sneaks up on you with similarly padded feet. His images are often symmetrical and often extend deep into the rear of the frame, but the technique is not immediately apparent for two reasons. For one thing, his keeps the compositions loose, so that the characters never look visually imprisoned. More importantly, the compositions are completely built around the presence of those characters, and since that presence is always fleeting (in recognition, perhaps, of life’s transitory nature), you get the feeling that those carefully-weighed film pictures dissolved soon after they are emptied of a human presence.
Ann Hui’s films have never been noted for their compositional values, either casual or otherwise. But a shaggy quality that looked like the work of a neophyte 25 years ago is now obviously the deliberate style of a seasoned veteran.
Hui also likes to give her own personal twists to genres now and then, usually with a dollop of feminism. GODDESS OF MERCY (Yu Guan Yin) is thus typical of Hui’s work in several ways.
For one thing, the plot nearly defies description: Within one reel, a major character reveals a secret identity, and the action crosses huge swaths of Chinese territory while remaining essentially an intimate story of star-crossed love. On top of all that, despite significant action scenes, GODDESS OF MERCY is, at heart, a melodrama.
At its core is An Xin (Vicki Zhao), a former uniformed office of a sort of Chinese version of the American Drug Enforcement Agency. While the obvious feminist point may seem to come in her capacity for action, women warriors past and present are actually common in Chinese film, especially in the Hong Kong tradition which nurtured Hui.
The feminism here resides, rather, in the way love for An Xin motivates the romantic action rather than her yearning for any particular man. During the course of the movie, a newspaper reporter, gigolo, and smuggler which each declare his love for An Xin and go to various, extreme depths to demonstrate it, either negatively or positively.
In the midst of the gun battles and romantic complications, An Xin finds the time to have a baby, an umpteenth complication that might have seemed ridiculous in other hands but Hui’s. This may be where her shaggy style helps. Working between the formalized and ersatz documentary style, she’s worked out a personal approach that makes even her extreme narrative turns appear plausible, at least in the moment. How much this or that individual film amounts to requires meditation after the fact. But in the moment of watching, an Ann Hui movie can be an engrossing experience.