The Wily Filipino

When Did I Become Such A Music Fanboy?

SFIFF Note #4.

Jia Zhangke's brilliant new film is no ghost story, but it's nevertheless filled with figures of the walking dead. It's titled Still Life, perhaps an apt title for a movie filled with movement and travel, but towards an imminent entropy.

The setting is Fengjie, the province with the most people affected by China's Three Gorges Dam project. The movie follows Sanming, who has come to town to look for his wife and daughter, who he has not seen in 16 years. An unscrupulous motorcycle rider takes him for a ride to see them at their last-known address, and he discovers that this is now under water, flooded by the dammed river. "Haven't you heard of the Three Gorges Dam?" the driver asks him, incredulously. Sanming barely responds.

It's tempting to dismiss him as merely being some slightly dimwitted yokel, but his slow, deadpan reactions are more likely integral to his acting, as it sets the tone for the film. Sanming shuffles numbly in and out of the frame, mostly disengaged from the swirl around him, as if he (and indeed, the others around him) are perpetually in a state of shock.

It is an apt reaction to what will apparently be four million people displaced (some, if not many, forcibly) from their homes. There is no better visual metaphor for the impending devastation than the gutted insides of apartment buildings, held together only by their near-crumbling frames of concrete, or workers with sledgehammers slowly rendering bricks into dust. The words of apocalypse – "186 m. water level" – painted on the walls, or “OK for demolition” on houses, are constant reminders of the coming flood.

Jia, at least in the three films of his that I've seen so far, is clearly fascinated by the contradictions of modernity as seen in present-day China, and of people swept up in national and global currents well beyond their control. But I place "contradictions" in quotation marks because it's not always clear that they are seen by his characters as such. (There's a bit of a running joke in this vein, where Zhao Tao's character is drinking water in practically every scene.)

In this film, and in The World, for instance, there's a lot of business with cell phones as a medium for communication. But it doesn't change the fact that families are constantly separated and estranged due to the demands of capital. The cell phones, as symbols of progress, can barely assuage the psychological and emotional wounds of labor migration. No technological marvel -- Mao's dream, which entranced him so much that he wrote a poem about it -- could make up for the human and environmental ruin, and Jia's movie intelligently records this sense of 21st-century dislocation.

(Saw the movie with Ben, Jun-dai and Lucia.)

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It hardly seems fair to compare Yung Chang's excellent debut documentary, Up the Yangtze, with work by a master filmmaker like Jia, but the comparison is inevitable: Chang's movie is set further downstream, in Fengdu province. His documentary focuses on the tourist trade, as it follows a girl who works in the kitchen of a cruise boat on the Yangtze ferrying Western tourists -- the apparently willing believers of official government discourse. Yu Shui, renamed Cindy for easier pronunciation, also happens to come from a dirt-poor family of peasant farmers whose riverbank shack is about to be inundated.

Chang has such a remarkable sense of drama and rhythm, for the elegant ebb and flow of the parade of ordinary images before the camera -- so much so that it feels less and less a documentary than a narrative feature. It may not have the desolate poetry of Jia's images, but Up the Yangtze proves there is nothing more gripping or painful than the reality of desolation itself.

SFIFF Note #3.

Alexander Sokurov's latest film, Alexandra, derives its understated humor from its narrative premise: an elderly woman from St. Petersburg visits her grandson, an officer stationed in an army base in Chechnya. This, in and of itself, is already humorous in its faintly comic juxtapositions, as we see her barrelling stubbornly through the barracks, handling an AK-47, clambering in and out of tanks, complaining about how the soldiers don't wash. One touching element is how it seems all the soldiers -- all boys, really -- are eyeing her almost hungrily; it's a hunger, all right, but not for generic female contact, but a precisely maternal one.

And so it continues in this quietly funny vein, until there's a jarring scene of the grandmother walking alongside the occupying army's rumbling tanks, and shots of apartment buildings with the ceilings caved in from bombing, and you realize there is a good chunk of the world for which this is normal. At any rate, the film slowly builds up to its inevitable anti-war message, but it's a complicated and ambiguous one like its characters. Alexandra herself is part of the occupation, after all, and even if she feels a kindred sisterly spirit with the Chechen women, she neither receives nor demands absolution -- not from the viewer, in any case.

Barry Jenkins' Medicine for Melancholy is an uncommonly fine film, and easily one of the best I've seen this year so far. Indie romances don't always sit well with me, probably even well before Natalie Portman gave Zach Braff her headphones, precisely because they follow such a well-worn formula. But Jenkins gets the formula -- for his debut film! -- absolutely right (and more): a kick-ass soundtrack (follow the link and you'll see what I mean), two attractive leads, and a beautiful city.

Halfway through the movie, it didn't seem that this seemingly shaky combination of Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise and Rebecca Solnit's "Hollow City" would work. But it's to Jenkins' credit that Medicine for Melancholy -- essentially a "Sunday morning after the Saturday one-night stand" movie -- pulls this off beautifully. (Visually there are some standout scenes as well, like a rapturous carousel ride, and an extended wordless dance sequence at The Knockout.)

On paper it seems iffy: two hungover twenty-somethings stumble out of bed, have the most uncomfortable breakfast afterwards, and go their separate ways -- the girl ("Angela") to the Marina, the boy (Micah) to the Tenderloin. We know they'll inevitably meet up, and they do, and threaded through all this are earnest discussions on race and class. It seems like an academic treatise, and at times it does (notably, in a visit to the Museum of the African Diaspora), but once it becomes clear that Micah's anger is inextricably tied to place, to a city that has increasingly pushed people of color out in another diaspora of its own (particularly African Americans, a frighteningly tiny 7 percent of San Francisco's population), then the film coheres satisfyingly, in ways deeper and more meaningful than indie romantic comedies usually do.

Oh, and did I mention that it's a love story? And no, I'm not talking about the two leads -- Medicine for Melancholy is a rapturous, bittersweet love letter to San Francisco as well.

SFIFF Note #2.

There's a tiny whiff of the exotic about Lance Hammer's powerful debut film Ballast -- a drama set in the Mississippi Delta, with a non-professional cast -- but that fact works in its favor. Otherwise, the story's nothing we haven't seen before, including the way it's structured: the slow accumulation of details, then some (expected) emotional outbursts two-thirds of the way in that fill out some of the back story. But the way Hammer patiently lets the relationships between people unfold is a welcome change from the way characters are quickly sketched out in American movies.

Nonetheless, the movie -- about a convenience store owner devastated by his brother's suicide (and already I feel I'm revealing too much) -- could probably have taken place anywhere, except that the ghostly blue light of a Mississippi winter plays a central role. This shade of blue colors the sky, the mud, the bare tree branches, the burnt-out trailers, and its haunted characters alike, the latter rendered immobile by their grief, the crippling burden of the rural economy, and the emotional weight of things left unsaid.

Speaking of immobility, Bela Tarr's latest film, The Man from London, is also worth seeing, but good god, it's slow -- slow even for Bela Tarr. The movie has a classic noir setup: ordinary station guard witnesses a crime, comes into possession of a large sum of money, and ponders what to do with it as various characters (the police, the money's true owners, the thief's wife) slowly arrive at the seaside village. But The Man from London an even more spare take on the genre, as if Tarr had hollowed it out, leaving only skeletons and gestures to remain.

Everything I love about Tarr is here: the rumbling ambient sounds, the long back-and-forth pans inside rooms, the almost-constant drinking, a bunch of familiar folks from Satantango, the excruciating repetition of musical motifs -- and yes, a surreal dancing scene with an accordion and balancing things on foreheads! -- but all in all it feels too patently an experiment in form. The (almost) all-Hungarian cast's French and English, it seems, is overdubbed (including Tilda Swinton's French) -- a nice touch to foreground the artificiality of the entire venture, as if no one truly fit their role -- but it seems forced. (It's like the reverse of Eastern Promises, another film masquerading as noir, where you had all these non-Russians playing Russians.) I hate to say this: for fans only. I'd see it again, but beginners should treat themselves to his earlier films instead.