Two Good Ones (and More on the Way)

I should have put up a link sooner, but better late than never - today is the last day of the Slapstick Blogathon at Film of the Year - a treasure trove of posts can be found... I should have come up with something myself - I've been working my way through WC Fields for the last month or so; I saw City Lights this week; watched a couple Buster Keaton films at home - and ended the week with one of the great slapstick performances of the 90s - Takeshi Kaneshiro in Wong Kar-wei's Fallen Angels. That is an almost infinitely wonderful movie, there are so many things to look at and talk about - but this time, thinking about slapstick, I kept waiting for Kaneshiro to come back on screen. He's wonderful - physical, expressive (without speaking), and Wong gives him first class business: wrestling with a pig, dragging his poor customer around by the hair, annoying his father, chasing Blondie with Charley Yeung (who's no slouch as a comedian). Even in repose he is superb - watch his act at Sato's restaurant - his gestures, expressions, the way he gives a thumbs up. Modern updates of silent clowns tend to focus on their stunts and physical prowess, but Kaneshiro here has the grace and physical expressiveness to go with it. He's glorious. As is the film - one of 2-3 best of the 90s.

It is a good season for films: with the Oscar bait starting to filter out, and some first rate revivals and specialty releases. Last week the Brattle had City Lights, Metropolis and Fallen Angels - next week, even better: Pierrot le Fou! Which gets the chance to take back it's place as my favorite Godard film (before the close of voting for the 25 best foreign films), lost because I have seen My Life to Live 2-3 times since the last time Pierrot played. They tend to leapfrog... Meanwhile, the MFA is countering with the "New Crowned Hope" series - featuring, among others, both Tsai Ming-liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (next week, opposite the Godard) and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century, which played this week. And a very fine film it is. Fans of Contemplative Cinema will find much to consider, in its near plotlessness, it's long takes and oblique style, it's meandering and indirect dialogue, when there is dialogue at all, it's white walls and bleached out backgrounds, it's long shots of clouds and skies and smoke and empty fields.... not to mention its deliberate artifice - the twinned stories, with the same cast and similar situations, working a series of oppositions - rural/urban, female/male, natural/artificial (note the way natural places and things in the first half are systematically replaced by man made things in the second half: the orchid farmer replaced by machines making artificial limbs, his farm by the basement of the hospital; Pa Jane's mud baths replaced by a platform shoe; a solar eclipse replaced by a nearly identical image of a vacuum tube sucking up smoke)... It is hard to avoid seeing parallels to other filmmakers: Hong Sang-soo's looping (rather miserable) love stories; Tsai Ming-liang's humor and patience; not to mention an ending that seems closely related to the repeated images of an Eclipse - leaving the characters behind to go to the streets, shooting people exercising in a park - a rather different effect than Antonioni's empty streets and buildings....

Which is probably important. Despite (and because of) all these formal designs, this is an utterly engrossing film - beautifully shot, funny, in a gentle, understated way, and often genuinely, almost surprisingly, moving. It's always human and humane. Weerasethakul has said it is about his parents before they fell in love - I believe him. There is, in fact, more plot than it seems, handled with almost perfect precision. In the first half, the woman seems to be falling in love, but it ends up going nowhere - though not really: Weerasethakul pulls Ozu's old trick of only showing you enough to get the story: her anecdote ends at the point where it should end - when we know there is no future there.... In the second half, the man is also in love - but we see the beginning of the end, as clearly, and subtly, as we do in the woman's story. He won't be asking for a transfer... It's that kind of film - slipping the big points of its plot into the tiniest of cracks, so you probably don't realize what you saw until you've been thinking about it for a couple hours. It's very good. It might be a masterpiece.