This Week at the Movies

Another big weekend on the movie front. Naruse, Bresson, and 2 significant Asian films - very nice.

More Naruse: Mother and Late Chrysanthemums. Probably not much I can add to my previous comments, so I'll leave it at another confirmation of their greatness. These two have been available on video - I don't know if they are in print anymore, but they might be kicking around the more enlightened video stores.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang **1/2 - entertaining trifle, playing miscellaneous metafictional games with detective movies, buddy movies, Hollywood movies.... amusing, with Robert Downey Jr. in a very welcome large role - but just another movie, really.

Three Extremes *** - an anthology horror film, with segments directed by Fruit Chan, Park Chan-wook and Takashi Miike. Chan's piece ("Dumplings") features Bai Ling selling rejuvenating dumplings to Miriam Yeung. What might those dumplings contain? Fans of Anthony Wong in the Untold Story (or Maggie Cheung in Dragon Gate Inn) might be able to guess. It's witty, rather gruesome, and might stand as a warning against back alley abortionists, if such a thing is needed. Park's segment ("Cut") is the most conceptual - a famous director is kidnapped by a jealous extra, who whines that the director is not only rich, famous, a genius, but he's a good guy as well. He sets up a terrible choice for the poor man, to try to force him to be evil for once in his life. It's very metafictional, almost an allegory, arch and gory, and of a piece with Park's Vengeance films (one of which is reviewed below) - the price of a guilty conscience again.... Finally, Miike turns in what is a rather conventional seeming horror film of nightmares, dreams, hallucinations, circus tents, and exotically beautiful but sad young women ("Box") - or something like that. It's sleek and mildly deranged, but never quite goes off the deep end the way his films inevitably do. And then - it does..... Taken together - it's good - it's not great. All three segments work, and there are some nice echoes between the first two (which are even linked through the sound editing), but there's not much more to say about it. The Miike section is probably the best on its own - the Park section is probably the most interesting in relation to his other films.

Mouchette ***** - for my money, Bresson's best. Story of a teenaged girl in a nasty home situation, an outsider at school, who suffers from all sides until she takes matters into her own hands. I found that I was remembering it wrong - I thought I remembered that Mouchette was always alone in the film - that's not true. She is never alone (almost never alone) - she is surrounded and can't get away from people. Her sick dying mother, her drunken lout of a father, the bullying kids at school, the cruel teachers, the preying men, the nosey busybodies of the town.... She can't get away - she can't even go to fetch a bottle of milk without everyone nagging at her. She is pressed down down down, and every offer of kindness comes with a cost or is snatched away.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance **** - This might be the best Korean film I've seen. (The closest contender is Memories of Murder.) The story is roughly - a deaf mute factory worker has a sister who needs a kidney - he can't donate hers because their blood types don't match, so he tries to buy one on the black market - only to lose one of his and the money that would pay for her operation. So he and his anarchist girlfriend decide to kidnap the daughter of his boss (who recently fired him.) This goes as well as one could possibly hope until the sister finds out - she does not condone kidnapping, and takes drastic measures to stop this one. From there it is all bad, as vengeance leads to vengeance, and everyone is drowned in a torrent of blood, death, piss, water (yes, there is a motif there.)... Park talks about these film as being about guilty consciences: "My films are stories of people who place the blame for their actions on others because they refuse to take on the blame themselves." (Quoted by Filmbrain - I'm not sure of the original source.) It's clear. Everyone in this film behaves badly - and everyone here definitely has good reasons - but what they do is very dumb, careless, selfish - and every act is ruthlessly punished by someone else with a guilty conscience. That's basically what happens in Oldboy as well - there's a circle of punishment and vengeance, with every act adding to the list of sins to be avenged or expatiated. To this is added politics and religion - more politics than religion here, with the conflicts between rich and poor, the relationships between employers and employees, the interest in how people live, the rich and the poor. All made a bit more explicit by the ravings of Ryu's anarchist girlfriend... The same political themes are present in Oldboy, with the resentment between the rch kids and poor kids and so on - and in his segment of Three Extremes. ("Cut", though, makes the guilty conscience theme - and the religious themes - even clearer. Along with more overt references to one of the best thrillers ever made - High and Low.) These themes were present in Oldboy - but seem clearer in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance - or maybe it's just the cumulative effect of seeing both.

In any case - Sympathy... is the real deal. And so, I think, is Park. I've now seen 3 1/2 of his films - he has a relatively distinct style and set of concerns, but each film looks and feels different. The style in Sympathy fr Mr. Vengeance is much plainer, more direct than in Oldboy, and far more basic and harsh (though also a bit more experimental) than in the fairly slick Joint Security Area. And "Cut" adds a Kubrickean [is that a word? is there any excuse for that kind of word?] look, and heaps of metafiction to the brew... (And from what I've read, in Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, he expands his style again.) He is one of the good ones, and might get to be one of the great ones.