sHadowsNsOunds

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Location: New York, United States

Love, hate, comments, sunshine and daydreams about films.

Friday, March 30, 2007

Reality; Dream; Meditation

Every day, Tae Suk – a young guy in his expensive bike wanders in the different neighborhoods of Seoul. He carries some restaurant take-out menus and purposely places them on the front door lock of arbitrary houses in such a way that without tearing the menu card apart the house owner cannot enter his residence. By the next day, this homeless guy roams again in the same locality to survey which of the menus have left unobserved. This confirms a temporary absence of the homeowner; thus Tae Suk breaks in the empty house and makes him comfortable. He does not steal or creates any nuisance but cleans the respective house, waters the trees, washes clothes, cooks food, eats, sleeps and repairs any broken electrical goods. To keep the souvenir in account, he also takes snaps of himself, usually maintaining the absentee landlord's image (or, say his personality) in the background.

One day he breaks into a big lavish house which is seemingly empty but actually not. The house belongs to a powerful rich businessman; his wife (Sun-hwa) is a former print model. While continuing his usual housekeeping routines Tae suddenly realizes that he is being watched by the lady of the house, who has literally alienated herself from the world by keeping an utter silence, after a violent encounter with her abusive husband (the businessman). With time their unspoken relationship develops in a tacit but intense bond. After confronting (and hitting with golf balls) the cruel husband, Tae takes off again on his bike but this time he is accompanied by Sun hwa. Together, they continue Tae-suk's weird habit of finding and breaking new places to spend each night.

The next act of this film is the most astonishing and I surmise almost all critics will spend 90% of the reviews and discussions on the last thirty minutes or so of the film. We see Tae Suk and Sun hwa are almost forced and fated to be in a relationship; they are reluctant to speak but through the golden silence they can communicate, perhaps in some further level. Tae Suk is homeless in all meanings and for Sun hwa this hazardous but quixotic method of finding homes to stay naturally gives her the impetus of the feeling – freedom. But anyway, after a mishap while changing places to stay, the police trap the duo. Tae is sent to jail (of course Sun hwa's rich husband bribed the cops in a mainstream fashion) and the fugitive wife is back in her house.

While being in jail, Tae by practicing martial arts reaches a higher level of consciousness and thus becomes invisible to the outer world (except, Sun hwa). Others can sense his presence but cannot see him. In the end scenes, we observe Tae and Sun are united again. It is difficult to draw any plausible explanations of the end images. Firstly, the final image of the film is pretty unreal (both are standing on a weight machine where the scale reads zero) which compels the audience to think that Kim-ki Duk is composing a metaphorical unreal world. Truly, the end caption ("It's hard to tell that the world we live in is either a reality or a dream") denotes the same notion. I found this imagery has a resemblance with one scene of Solaris (the Tarkovsky one). Remember, how Kris and Hari were both flying in the space-station, holding each other? As par Tarkovsky, this is the state of being in love; the perfect weightlessness.

Secondly, from the previous ventures of Kim (such as his most renowned film- "spring, summer, fall, winter... and spring") we can draw an analogy; the protagonists of Kim belong to a supernatural place. They achieve the state of self-realization (by hardship, by rituals, by suffering, or by the old school martial arts) and thus they become free of the reality, our daily world.

3-iron is a restrained and subtle effort from Kim (unlike SSFWS). Kim maintained his world of silence and we encounter the delicate transcending journeys of his protagonists where they finally transform themselves for higher humankind. I have not seen his latest two ventures (the bow and time) but eagerly waiting to spot if Kim took some diverse methods to depict his unspoken mystic alienated world.

Bin-jip (3-iron - 2004)
Directed By: Kim ki Duk

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

the Subtle Dangerous game..

In the opening scene of the film Pornography we observe that a polish middle aged artist (Frederic) returns to German occupied Poland after a long time. He is carrying a suitcase (which contains everything and nothing – paradoxically), sitting idle with few polish intellects, smoking and waiting listlessly for the end of the extended war. His close buddy, the writer friend Witold (who is also the narrator of the movie) was planning to visit the country firm of his friend Hippolyte and thus insists Frederic to come along for the trip. Pornography is all about Frederic's stint in the country side and his involvement in a dangerous and perhaps a sort of an inhumane deed.

Bored by the tranquil inactivity of the village life and by the dull routines of Hippolyte's family, Frederic masterminds a risky game between Henia (Hippolyte's teenage daughter) and Carol (a firm boy who also works in the stable); he plans to bring them together as lovers. He arranges every single possible meetings between them, prepares a theatrical romantic circumstance between them (informing them as it's just a rehearsal of a drama) and to make the situation more complicated he insists Henia's fiancé to watch this romance secretly, thus to create a faction between him and Henia. But as the movie unfolds, we find out Frederic's dark past and learn that all his present bizarre actions are actually the resultants of his feelings of guilt about his lost daughter.

Pornography is based on the novel of noted Polish author Witold Gombrowicz by the same title. As I found out form other sources, critics pointed out that the movie plot is pretty much digressed from the original novel. Such as, the character of Weronica, the teen-aged servant girl who evokes the memory of Frederic's lost girl is missing from the novel. Frederic manipulates the juvenile minds of Henia and Carole not only to fall in love but also to take part in a political murder. The consequent toying with the feelings of the others, the recklessness seems to be just a process of hurting himself, to nurture the evil inside Frederic who is deeply depressed and thus a method to prevent him from forgetting his own mistakes.

Kolski represented the war affected Germany occupied Poland in a very sublime way. We don't miss the horrified faces of polish people hiding underground nor we miss the political conflicts between the underground resistance and the army; but all are very subtle. The photography is in particular yellow-green colors and often follows isolated behaviors of animals and insects. Though the treatment of the objects (instincts, animals and human beings) is very soft, Pornography reveals the war-time depressions very cleverly. With repetitive comparison shots between the wartime politics, politics in corrupting naïve minds and the unexciting studies of the animal kingdom, Kolsky reinforces the anxiety of a very difficult time in mankind's history.

Pornografia (Pornography -2003)
Directed By :Jan Jakub Kolski

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Life Caught in the Frame

"People are obsessed with cancer and heart trouble. My disease is work, phone calls and appointments."

The first and only colored scene in the movie illustrates two women (Cleo and a tarot reader) sitting on opposite sides of a card table, while the tarot reader foreseeing Cleo's future. The camera concentrates on the laid cards, and the cards display a premonition of something tragic might happen. The film then slips back to black and white for the rest.

Cleo, a young pop singer waiting for her results from a cancer test (she has to call the doctor at 7 o' clock in the evening for the biopsy report) and the movie reveals her story between five to seven in the evening. The film is almost a real-time description of this two hour in her life; it is around 90 minutes long but pretty much close to the fixed time frame. This is a crucial two hours in Cleo's life and the director (Agnes Varda) meticulously and beautifully crafted the story; Cleo's wandering in the streets of modern Paris, her narcissist behavior and most prominently how she is learning about the true essence of life during this hours. The film is marked by chapters (same as many French new wave films) and emphasizes the progression of time by captions.

Agnes Varda, a prominent figure of the French new wave movement (along with coveted names like Godard, Trauffaut or Rivette) typically displayed a tendency for flat narration with amalgam of reality and clever symbols. Truly the film is very rich with symbols and there are so many thought provoking incidents in the film; capricious Cleo wearing black glasses in the restaurants and searching if people can identify her, opening her pop-singer's wig to disclose her natural self beauty during her sad ness, narrating to her friend (that Cleo might be a victim of cancer) in a dark tunnel, the collective psyche of the city life in Paris; building, staircases, art students, how the passerby observing the main protagonist (here, Cleo) such as they are suggesting to open herself to the world and how everything can be referenced back to the collective contemporary culture in a nutshell, a typical film inside a film (Godard and Anna Karina did a cameo) which critics say – served as a mechanism to pick Cleo up out of her self-obsession and move forward.

Somehow from the center of the film, you will feel a strong resemblance between the protagonists Cleo and Nana in Godard's masterpiece "my life to live". But where as, Nana drags more sympathy from the viewers through the development of the film and Cleo does not, Varda herself is much more sympathetic to Cleo than Godard was to her Nana. Personally, I feel this is again a striking dissimilarity in both the films in treating the main character. May be this is due to the dissimilarity in attitudes of the both directors towards the characters in general.

If you feel interested, also watch Vagabond by the same director. You won't be disappointed.

Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7 -1961)
Directed By :Agnes Varda