The Wily Filipino

The Best Movies I Saw in 2006.

As usual, these include (older) films I got to see only in 2006.

In alphabetical order:

- The Descent (dir. Neil Marshall, England, 2005)
- Linda Linda Linda (dir. Nobuhiro Yamashita, Japan, 2005)
- Tropical Malady (dir. Apichatpong Weesethakul, Thailand, 2004)
- Workingman's Death (dir. Michael Glawogger, Austria, 2005)

And three runners-up:

- Cavite (dir. Neill dela Llana and Ian Gamazon, U.S.A., 2006)
- High Tension (dir. Alexandre Aja, France, 2003)
- Platform (dir. Jia Zhangke, China, 2000)

"The language of cinema is universal." This is Landmark Cinema's introduction to its movies -- a contradiction, however, to how much of the American public seems to like its movie-watching. "Like" is a guess on my part; Jonathan Rosenbaum argues, in essence, that the weekly charts of top ten highest-grossing movies are more of a reflection of how producers, marketers and distributors view the American movie-going public. There's no reason, for instance, that Park Chan-Wook's satisfying but disturbing revenge flick Oldboy would not have cashed in at the box office -- except for the fact that it has subtitles and, most importantly, was relegated only to limited film-festival or one-week runs in North America. (Okay, there are various acts of mutilation and torture, and an animal gets eaten alive -- but surely Jackass Number Two had similar scenes, no?)

While we cultural anthropologists generally dislike so-called "cultural universals," there are surely certain cinematic codes and conventions familiar to the movie-going middle class everywhere. Nobuhiro Yamashita's Linda Linda Linda, a film about Japanese high school girls who form a band, is an excellent exemplification of that "universal language," and therefore runs the risk of an American remake. Hollywood's remaking of Japanese horror movies, for instance -- perhaps testifying to its relentlessly acquisitive nature or its history of appropriating things in its own image -- consistently removes the specific cultural context from which the film emerges, almost as if the American public needed to be shielded from hearing foreign languages or different cultures.

Let me illustrate this dynamic by posing something opposite. I encounter something similar in my introductory sociocultural anthropology classes, where a student would invariably say at the end of the semester that they learned a lot because they could "relate to the readings," or that they could "see themselves in the situations," or, my favorite, that they "learned more about themselves." But my standards in this cinematic case are somewhat different: These lessons are absolutely commendable, but there is something to be said about a perceptual lens that enables one to recognize, appreciate, and understand difference, rather than simply projecting oneself onto the ethnographies. Surely film audiences can do the same, at the same time using those codes of the "universal language" to guard against archaic exoticisms.

(The fact that the band in Linda Linda Linda, called "PARANMAUM" -- Korean, apparently, for "Blue Hearts," the name of the '80s Japanese band whose songs they cover -- is led by a Korean singer who can only speak halting Japanese, her second language, nicely entwines the twin themes of the possibility of intercultural communication with a nostalgia that cannot be shared; "Linda Linda" is not a song from the lead singer's childhood, and despite this (or because of this) by the end she inhabits it and makes it fully her own.)

Linda Linda Linda isn't perfect; it traffics in the usual stereotypes, none of them very deeply fleshed out -- the tough one, the one with a crush, the hesitant outsider (played wonderfully here by my new favorite actress Bae Doo-Na). But unlike, say, Joan Freeman's Satisfaction (terrible) or Alan Parker's The Commitments (better -- it's based on a Roddy Doyle novel after all), there's no anticipation of a big break, no big club date or audience, just a high school basketball court performance on a rainy afternoon. In this respect the dilemmas are charmingly small, but massive in its adolescent context: will they find a place to rehearse? Will they make it to the concert on time? Will they ever get those opening notes right? This is where Yamashita's direction shines; when they finally get to sing their song, the crowd-pleasing scenes at the conclusion are genuinely earned.

It is in the film's series of final frames -- almost-still shots of empty courtyards and hallways -- that the film acquires a particular gravity. With the mystic guitar chords of memory ringing in the background, the film tells us that the high school -- surely one of the more emotionally charged locales, however one might repress it, in a typical viewer's life -- will always be there, even if its temporary residents will inevitably come and go. Spaces only become places once they are animated by the lives and recollections passing through it. The film works in the same way, a testament to the uncanny power of music to anchor the hearer in a fleeting temporal space through a brief, bittersweet burst of nostalgia.

Music runs through Jia Zhangke's Platform as well, and it would probably be in my top four if I had had the chance to rewatch it. At once both intimate and epic in its observation of a traveling rural Chinese theater troupe, the film is also in its way an illustration of how music unsettles and moves people. There's a feeling here of unbounded potential, of China at the brink of its exciting dance with capital. But the way Jia both makes minute observations as well as portrays the characters swept up in larger forces -- combined with how the settings vary from the hugeness of barren mountains to the smallness of cramped lodgings -- betrays a clear ambivalence about what the changes will entail. But the final scene -- involving a teakettle with a whistle that sounds like a train -- is perhaps easy to interpret: the sadness of a generation left behind.

Apichatpong Weesethakul's Tropical Malady, about the budding love affair between a Thai soldier and a country bumpkin, doesn't exactly confound interpretation, as befuddled critics and audiences -- including Quentin Tarantino, who spearheaded the Cannes jury that handed it the "Un Certain Regard" award that year -- seemed to assert. The audiences at Cannes would be familiar with this sort of magic realism as it were -- if not in their own national cinema, then at least through viewings of Hongkong martial-arts/fantasy films, or Japanese ghost stories that have been the staple of recent popular Asian cinema.

What I thought was most jarring is this magic-realist combination with his fiddling around with narrative: the oneiric presentation of events in the first half, and the sudden split in the center. (I liked the plunge into darkness in the middle, as it was reminiscent of my early movie-viewing days at the Agrix Cinema in Los Banos, when the projectionist would take his sweet time switching the reels.) The romance of the first half gives way to… well, the same romance, though pitched on a dream-like mythological level, or retold on an allegorical plane. (Though as I type this, the words "though pitched on a dream-like mythological level, or retold on an allegorical plane" may in fact be erroneous, as the second half may be seen simply as a literal continuation of the earlier narrative.) There's something genuinely risky with what Weesethakul accomplishes here, especially since the plot itself is almost nonexistent, but the viewer's patience will be richly rewarded.

Tropical Malady is undoubtedly a Thai film, though one financed with French money. Cavite is undoubtedly an American film, but one that's quite literally "transnational" in scope. Here's what I wrote about Cavite earlier.

(Cavite deserves a longer blog post addressing previous comments -- one by Darren, who wrote that it was "the best Asian American film since Terminal U.S.A.," and one by my last.fm friend Ardee, who wrote a stinging tirade against the filmmakers regarding art -- and I have more to write about that ending.)

Transnationality is even more expanded in Michael Glawogger's Workingman's Death, about which I wrote previously.
And finally, two horror movies, about which needs no translation.

Here's what I wrote earlier on Neil Marshall's The Descent.

(It's worth noting that American audiences were also "protected" from the ambiguities of the original UK version -- via some trimmed seconds from the ending and throughout -- which dared posit a metaphorical descent as well.)

And finally, a shout-out to Alexandre Aja's High Tension, an absolutely nerve-wracking, taut thriller machine, told with minimal dialogue and an impressive narrative economy. It also boasts of one of the more malevolent villains in recent film history and surely the most gloriously horrific use of a rotary chainsaw in a film. Unfortunately it's marred by a frankly insulting twist at the conclusion and appalling sexual politics. (Even more so, Aja's gift for gore is squandered in his second film, an unnecessary remake of Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes.)

Posted by the wily filipino at February 7, 2007 10:54 AM