One of the most important new voices to have emerged in British cinema in the last decade, Joanna Hogg (who was born in 1960) has so far written and directed three films in which the Forsterian imperative to “only connect” proves a Herculean task for their characteristically repressed protagonists.

In Unrelated (07), the strung-out, fortyish Anna (Kathryn Worth), fleeing a traumatic event in her long-term relationship, joins an old friend and her extended clan in a Tuscan villa. Her unwise attempt to seduce the friend’s teenage nephew Oakley, a troublemaking Adonis played by Tom Hiddleston in his feature debut, brings about her humiliation. In Archipelago (10), Hiddleston plays a much less confident young man whose plan to become an AIDS-prevention worker in Africa is threatened by his well-to-do family’s disastrous holiday on Tresco in the Scilly Isles. His attempt to include the working-class housekeeper in their meals prompts an excruciating display of brattishness in his older sister. The non-appearance of the patriarch ignites the slow-burning rage of the mother.

Exhibition (13), Hogg’s latest, depicts an ending. Married artists D (onetime Slits guitarist Viv Albertine) and H (conceptual artist Liam Gillick) have put on the market the modernist townhouse in Kensington where they’ve lived for 20 years. The decision has filled D with anxiety and triggered a sexual reaction in her. As the dread day approaches, she works on her solo feminist performance routines before the house’s windows; she also wraps herself around the house’s contours as she might have done the baby she’s never had. (Hiddleston has a small role in the film as a solicitous real-estate agent.)

Correlating landscape and interior space with the emotional distances between people, Hogg’s movies can seem reminiscent of Antonioni’s, while their cool, non-judgmental presentation of morally complex behavior suggests Rohmer’s influence. That doesn’t dilute their originality as the work of a vital independent filmmaker who, rare among the Brits, instantly conjures up such arcane terms as “art house” and “auteur.” (All three features are receiving their U.S. theatrical premieres at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.)

Why have your films so far been set in the English upper-middle-class milieu? There are working people in them—the Italian servants in Unrelated, the housekeeper [Amy Lloyd] in Archipelago. Clearly, neither Anna in Unrelated nor D in Exhibition are bourgeois types, yet most of your characters are.

My first thought when you say that is: “Is it more in the eye of the beholder than what’s in my own mind?” But, as much as I don’t like to be defined as someone who would depict a particular class of people, there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s true of Unrelated. I made it after a long time of working in other spheres. I worked in television for about 12 years and felt increasingly frustrated that I wasn’t expressing my own ideas and experience of life. So when I came to write it, I knew I wanted to talk about something personal that came directly from me and occupied a particular landscape, which is middle class. I was aware while writing it that I might be criticized for this. So that was on my mind, though the thought of chronicling a particular class wasn’t.

It carried through into Archipelago, but with Exhibition I felt I wanted to move away from [the middle class] because I was a bit frustrated by being labeled, certainly in the U.K. It’s more apparent there than when I show the films in other countries. We’re particularly class-obsessed, as you know. I thought: “If I take two artists, they don’t fit into any class really.” Except obviously they live in this particular house so they also get described as middle class. It’s not a theme I’m interested in, but I can’t deny it has occurred through going deeply into my own experience.

Why did you choose, in Exhibition, to explore an interior space so intensively?

I’ve spent a long time in each place I’ve lived in and have always had difficulty moving out. That was the starting point. I wanted to put the fear of change into the story. The need for security is the heart of it. As I get older, I find it more and more difficult to change and try to fight it, but it’s reality.

You chose this particular house because you knew the architect?

Yes. I’d met James Melvin in the early Nineties and become friends with him and his wife, Elsa. The house struck me as an almost perfect cube that seemed like a wonderful container for my ideas. I liked the angularity of it and the idea that this postmodern setting was a good stage for a story exploring anxiety around change and memory and dream, all the things that get poured into a house over time. I was inspired by the architecture. There’s a theatricality about it somehow. It’s like a modernist doll’s house and the spiral staircase is its spine. It was built in 1969, but Sauerbruch Hutton [Berlin-based Matthias Sauerbruch and Louisa Hutton] redesigned it in the mid-Nineties. They added elements like the pink sliding doors and a lot of the color that you see; the original house was very monochrome. I think the additions they made increased that sense of theatricality.

It seems some kind of disturbance has prompted D and H to sell. It’s as if there’s a ghost in the house that D is haunted by when she’s alone there at night. Is it, as is usually the case, a psychic projection?

I was using the house as another character, so it has different moods. But, yes, a lot of that is in D’s head. She projects onto the house the idea that it has become quite ghostly, a frightening place to be. The anxieties she has when H suddenly leaves the house, and her suddenly losing control, comes from her perception. I was also interested in the idea of H and D projecting ideas onto each other, which causes some of their misunderstandings. I saw the house as a house of projections, almost like a cinema. I often filmed looking outside into the garden, but projected back is the interior of the house. I saw this inside-out quality as literally cinematic.

Although D and H’s relationship is stable, there are tensions between them, partly attributable to his patronizing attitude to her work, that are manifested in their sexual difficulties. D’s work as a feminist performance artist carries over: when she masturbates while H is sleeping beside her, she can possibly be seen from outside the house, as she is when she dresses up and poses in her clothes room and H watches her from the street. It’s as if the house has become an exhibition space for calculated exhibitionism.

I think D perceives that H is criticizing her and her work, but again that’s in her head. I see him as quite supportive. She’s unable to share her creativity with him because she believes he’s going to be against whatever she’s doing, although he isn’t. I was interested in exploring if it’s her creativity or her life that turns her on and if, when she’s masturbating in that scene, it’s some kind of performance.

I wondered if her masturbating was a form of rebellion against H.

Leading up that scene, she’s been getting very anxious and worrying a lot about what H is doing and losing control of him. Yes, it could be seen as rebellion, but it’s also her way of gaining control while letting go, which seems like a contradiction. I think the crucial point is that she’s unable to let go with him. Sharing her sexuality with him is too much of a challenge for her, so she has to confront that. I think the fact that she allows him to watch her while she’s working feels like a very positive step toward making a connection with him.

Toward the end, D looks out of a window and sees an elderly man holding a baby in the street, which draws attention to her not having children of her own. Is her need to feel sexual related to her childlessness, as is Anna’s desire for Oakley in Unrelated?

Yes, definitely, though they show it in slightly different ways. One of my aims with D was to sort of take Anna further because there was more I wanted to express about childlessness. For me, D’s developing creativity is so important to her because she doesn’t have children. Possibly, if she had had children, she would have become obsessed with them and put all her creative feelings into them. This creative zone connects with her sexuality. I think she probably has some kind of animal need or desire to create something sexual with somebody else. It’s true in both cases. Anna in Unrelated desires somebody she can’t have, and I suggest that with D in a couple of scenes in which she records her dreams and imagines another man that may not be her husband.

This is the first film in which you’ve broken the naturalistic flow. D has memories of her and H returning to the house after their wedding and of sneaking off somewhere to make love. She also has a fantasy in which she sits in an audience watching H interview her on stage. Did you feel it was time to play with narrative?

Yes, I consciously pushed myself to create a more fragmented way of telling the story. I was aware that the other two films had been very linear in their storytelling and I wanted to go into more dreamlike territory and ambiguity, as well.

In all your films, you use extended shots that often linger on the setting after the characters have left the frame. You also favor static medium and middle-distance shots. How did this style evolve—I’m sure it wasn’t when you were working in television.

It was very much not possible in television. Without wishing to sound reactionary, I started trying out ideas I wasn’t allowed to use working on conventional television series because I was always forced to be succinct and not linger on a shot too long and had to move the camera—all those things we see in television. I found it very frustrating because there would always be an executive producer looking over my shoulder and saying: “Well, you know we need to cut away from that quicker.” I knew on some level that when I made my own work I was going to hold scenes for longer, but I wasn’t thinking about developing a style specifically. Making Unrelated, which I had written very conventionally, I discovered for the first time since film school that I was really able to do what I wanted. I would sometimes plan a scene and instinctively let the camera keep running—and find the most interesting part of the scene came long after what was planned. Something would happen that was more interesting, but you had to wait for that moment to arrive.

On Exhibition, I felt I wanted the camera to be more mobile, just as I had the desire to create a more fragmented story structure. I shot a lot of sequences with a Steadicam and did some tracking shots that I ended up cutting during editing because they didn’t feel right for one reason or another, although some survived. I think I will move the camera more in the next film because I don’t like to be defined as a filmmaker who has a certain style. It’s very important as an artist to keep pushing yourself. I want to keep experimenting, even if I don’t always succeed.

Some of your shots are closer than others—for example, when Anna and Oakley are talking in the piazza in Unrelated—but you avoid tight close-ups. Why is that?

It’s for a number of reasons. One is relatively practical, which is that I don’t like to repeat a scene from different angles. I’ll do a primary master shot, so to speak, but then I don’t want to then re-create artificially with a close-up what I’ve just managed to capture very naturally. In television, you’d do a wide shot, a medium shot, and then close-ups, and it would all become very mechanical. So I was moving away from that. But it’s also about my interest in body language. The movement of a body in space often tells you more about a person and what they’re feeling than a close-up. I think you feel more by seeing things from a certain distance. I like seeing dance filmed when it’s in wide shot because I want to see the movement of the feet and the whole body in the space, not cut up. I saw Exhibition as a kind of dance in that house. But I’m not against close-ups and that might be something I’ll play with more in another film.

Are your scripts very tightly written or do you allow for improvisation?

I write scripts—though they’re more like documents—that are very precise. They tell the story, but I don’t write all the dialogue as in a conventional screenplay. I’ll suggest dialogue, but it just gives a sense of the scene. But then I did something new on Exhibition because I was responding to Viv and Liam, neither of whom had performed in a film before. They agreed to do the film without seeing my document, but I felt they needed to see something on paper. On some evenings, after we’d finished shooting, I would write the scenes for the next day, then I would show them that scene half an hour before we started shooting just to give them a sense of what I wanted, but not long enough for them to learn the lines. I didn’t want them to have to worry about getting the lines right. I wanted them just to see a map of what I wanted and that seemed to work really well. I think that’s something I might carry through into the next film, certainly when working with non-actors anyway.

Are you conscious of drawing on the personalities of your actors?

Yes. I’m always interested in creating a character that has something of the person in it, whether it’s an actor or non-actor. It’s one of the reasons I like working with performers who haven’t previously been in any films. I had the privilege of knowing Viv for about 24 years before I made Exhibition, and because of that I was able to draw things out of her. And Kathryn Worth lived and breathed Unrelated. What also helps is that in all three of the films the performers have lived in the places where we were filming. I think that allows me to take things from reality, or things that I observe through the filming, and make them part of the story. I shoot in sequence, which gives me the freedom to add things in and change the course of the story as we proceed.

You often use dissonance in your sound design. For example, the disturbing noises that greet Anna’s arrival in darkness at the villa in Tuscany. It’s just teenagers making a commotion, but it warns her not to tangle with them, which, of course, she does. The street sounds in Exhibition are threatening to D—so, too, the sounds of the house at night.

Sound is really important to me. I’ve worked with the sound designer Jovan Ajder on all three films and we have a very good working relationship. On Exhibition, we pushed the design much further to create almost a kind of music out of the natural sounds around the house. It also reflects how the house itself soaks in sounds from the environment around it. You can be standing in the house and hear sounds like a door shutting or someone walking or shouting, and it feels like that door or that voice is actually within the house. It’s very sponge-like. I was very excited, too, to express D’s anxiety through what I call stories in sound. She’ll hear something quite dramatic happening, but I feel it’s in her head.

How easy or hard is it for you to get financing for your films at this point?

It was very difficult on Unrelated and Archipelago, but then both the British Film Institute and the BBC supported Exhibition. I’m hopeful of getting finance from those two places again and other avenues, too. So I hesitate to say it’s getting easier, but something has definitely changed.

What are you doing next?

I’m traveling back in time. I’m writing a story set between 1980 and 1985. So it’ll be my first period film.

What does it take to make a film maudit? Bong Joon Ho’s futuristic train story Snowpiercer pulls into U.S. theatrical stations this week preceded by several months of speculation on the likelihood that Western audiences would never see Bong’s original cut; the director was for a long time involved in disputes over The Weinstein Company’s proposal to cut the film, and to add opening and closing voiceovers. The film arrives in its original 125-minute cut which gives it a certain skin-of-its-teeth prestige, but also makes it that bit harder not to judge Snowpiercer as a freak “case” rather than a legitimate movie.

In any case, Snowpiercer already sounds so bizarre as to seem as if it were some hypothetical venture, a wild cadavre exquis dreamed up by soju-drunken Korean genre buffs. It’s a postapocalyptic action adventure based on a French graphic novel, shot at Prague’s Barrandov Studios, set on board a futuristic supertrain, and starring Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, Korean star Song Kang-ho, and serial Marvel hero Chris Evans. Writer-director Bong has long excelled at tweaking genre, notably in monster movie The Host (06) and in his super-tantalizing 2003 police thriller Memories of Murder, which pre-emptively out-Zodiac’d Zodiac by four years. It turns out he’s absolutely in his element with Snowpiercer, a genuinely spectacular project that has the imaginative and philosophical dimensions that most blockbusters would never dream of venturing into.

In the world of Snowpiercer, as we’re reminded throughout, “the train is the world.” The film’s flamboyant internationalism, and the fact that Bong has attempted to cram so much imaginative richness into a relatively small package (this is only a 125-minute film, pretty concise in comparison to the excessive Hollywood tent-pole running times we’ve become used to), all this is part and parcel of the film’s ambition. For all its weight and seemingly cumbersome monumentalism, Snowpiercer is actually as streamlined and efficient as the train itself.

The film kicks off, in almost derisory shorthand fashion, with a routine science-gone-too-far premise: humanity launches a scientific strike against climate change and (oops) ends up plunging the earth into a new ice age, killing all life forms except a handful of human survivors. They end up traveling in perpetual motion on a train that girdles the globe, and which is run on strictly hierarchical principles: the plebs travel at the back, in squalid cramped darkness, while the privileged ride up front in opulent splendor. And right up in the front carriage, in fabled isolation, is the driver-god: engineer-inventor-dictator Wilford, whose heavily promoted paternalism holds everyone in its sway. Every few years, however, the back-carriage masses revolt and attempt to charge their way to the front of the train, only to be mercilessly repelled by Wilford’s militia.

There’s something in the film’s beautifully simple dystopia to appeal to everyone: for Western audiences, parallels with Occupy protests against economic and governmental abuses; for Koreans, thoughts of Kim Jong-un in the North and relatively recent memories of the military rule in the South; for cinephiles, the realization that we’re essentially watching Metropolis arranged horizontally rather than vertically.

As a feat of staging, Snowpiercer is one of those dramas that contrive to whip up dramatic momentum despite being restricted to one claustrophobic locale. It’s a tradition that runs from Hitchcock’s Lifeboat to the likes of Cube and The Raid (for static, or relatively static locations); and taking in Speed, Runaway Train, Air Force One, and Lars von Trier’s Europa (closed spaces that actually move). The brilliance of Snowpiercer, and of Hong Kyung-pyo’s photography and Ondrej Nekvasil’s production design, is that the film’s closed space seems to expand as the action moves along the train, from the cattle-car surroundings of the people’s quarters, in muddy shades of brown and green, through a series of ever more bizarre, visually stylized compartments: greenhouse, walk-through aquarium, candy-colored schoolroom, yellow-lit sauna, nightclub carriage with adjacent chill-out room where ephebes loll in fur coats. Once we reach Wilford’s lair, we realize that the Snowpiercer contains everything that any Rotwang-style mad architect or earthly deity could require, all squeezed into the width of a standard-gauge rail track.

Such is the film’s magical impossibility—the conceit that all humanity, or what’s left of it, could be fitted into a single train of apparently normal width, with just one corridor leading from one end to another. Where do the privileged up front actually live? Where are the domestic and engineering staff who presumably keep the train going, clean the place, do the catering—as opposed to the rear-carriage masses, who seem to be tolerated passengers rather than an actual labor pool? Snowpiercer doesn’t make sense in either spatial or social terms—but why should it? As metaphor, conversely, it’s extremely rich—and it’s precisely because things don’t add up logically (even in the minimal way we normally expect them to in blockbusters) that the metaphor works all the better. Snowpiercer is a stark dystopian cartoon, as boldly schematic as Fritz Lang’s pyramid picture of society, or as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 futuristic novel We.

The action is set in 2031, 17 years after the train left the platform, and concerns a revolution that seems likely to get further than its precursors. Its ostensible leader is a wizened sage, cutely named Gilliam (John Hurt, who else?) who’s lost a limb or two over the years; but its real driving force is Curtis (Evans), a tight-lipped tough with a wiry, wisecracking Irish sidekick (Jamie Bell, who gets to use his Billy Elliot athleticism in assorted bursts of whizbang action choreography). Curtis’s intended ally in the uprising is Nam (Song), a Korean security expert who designed the train’s locks, and who’s currently imprisoned in a morgue-style locker, allegedly because of his addiction to a putty-like drug called Kronol; his daughter Yona (Ko Ah-sung, from The Host) has her own crucial destiny.

Trying to block the insurgents’ way is Wilford’s taciturn heavy (Vlad Ivanov, from 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Into the Fog, who I like to think was cast specifically to add appeal to aficionados of somber Eastern European art cinema—now that’s the way to broaden your demographic). The real arch-fiend of the film, though, and the person who imparts the absolute tang of exoticism, is Tilda Swinton as Wilford’s right-hand woman Minister Mason—the latest move in Swinton’s bid to be the female Lon Chaney of our time. Wearing thick spectacles and a gobful of false teeth, and speaking in a broad Northern English accent with extravagantly rolled R’s (“prrre-ordained”), Swinton is a memorable and very funny embodiment of petulant, pompous authority. Her Mason is a prickly, craven apparatchik, forever illustrating the given order with bizarre speeches: the lecture featuring the line “Would you wear a shoe on your head?” is going to become one of those classic quotable oddities, on a par with “I drink your milkshake!” in There Will Be Blood. (Bong co-wrote the script with Kelly Masterson, who’s presumably responsible for the English-language wit.)

As befits its theme, this is an international film that’s, strictly speaking, from nowhere, and that settles nowhere. You can’t quite say that international humanity is represented proportionally—despite a key character played by Octavia Spencer, the train’s population is predominantly white European—although the ending, which is as apocalyptic as you’d hope, makes it fairly clear where Earth’s ethnic future lies. Having two heroes, Curtis and Nam, operating with entirely different agendas is an astute way to maximize appeal to Western and Asian audiences. This also affords a neat brawn/brain dichotomy, with Evans projecting butch scowls through his beard (he’s shot to maximize his sculptural qualities, his face sometimes resembling an Expressionist woodcut), and Song smiling enigmatically through wild hair, offering a more impish variant on the bad-boy hero template. The language issue is smartly dealt with, Nam speaking only Korean that’s instantly translated by a throat-held gizmo, while his choicest wisecracks at Curtis’s expense are kept for the subtitles.

It’s not an entirely smooth ride, which is the point: the film’s fundamental strangeness lies in the disjunctions from carriage to carriage, but the schoolroom scene, with Alison Pill as an eager-beaver pedagogue, comes across as jarringly zany satire. There are some great action scenes along the way: notably a slowed-down axe battle in the dark. Yet not delivering the expected thrills at the expected points is the film’s boldest strategy: just as we think we’re about to reach Wilford and the climax, Bong halts the action and has Curtis deliver a monologue that’s unexpected and oddly touching, and that fills in the backstories of three characters in a most disturbing way. The film gets even more overtly philosophical once we reach the engine room and we discover the principles of social control on which the train’s sealed-in system is run. As for the ending of this wild, entertaining, thought-provoking ride—rest assured, things don’t tie up the way they would if, say, Michael Bay were stoking the engine.

(Oh, and did I mention Ewen Bremner’s arm? You have to see what they do to Ewen Bremner’s arm.)

For every wayfarer who comes to New York with enough spring in his step to sprain a groin, expecting his life to play out like a romantic comedy, there are more than a few million longtime city dwellers with starker mindsets. The latter bunch will probably enjoy They Came Together, a comedy that unravels every convention of the New York–based rom-com and leaves us with a feature-length string of comedy sketches that venture deeper and deeper into absurdity as the film goes on. That may sound like a risky proposition, but miraculously, in the capable hands of writer-director David Wain (with co-writer Michael Showalter), the movie succeeds. It’s a light-hearted film that is smarter than it seems—or as Wain once said, “a deliberately terrible romantic comedy.”

The story is recycled from Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail, but in this version, instead of bookstores, it’s a small candy shop owned by Molly (Amy Poehler), threatened by a candy-conglomerate exec, Joel (Paul Rudd). The pair meet at a Halloween party, both dressed as Benjamin Franklin, but the meet-cute ends in drama when Poehler overhears Rudd say something mean. Their next encounter is at a bookstore, where they bond deeply over their shared love of “fiction books.” The rest is an on-again, off-again marathon that riffs on the standard format and clichés of the genre—an exemplary case of meta-comedy, which if taken up by less surehanded writers, might come off as a long-running inside joke limited to rom-com fans.

Luckily, They Came Together is more accessible, aided by the charisma of Poehler and Rudd (re-uniting over 10 years after starring opposite one another in Wain’s most famous film, Wet Hot American Summer, his 2001 spoof on Eighties comedies set at summer camps). Their subtle chemistry is almost too charming for the level of hilarity at play, and a few glimpses of warm sustained eye contact made me wish I were watching a more nuanced love tale, rather than one that prides itself on over-the-top shticks—for example, a make-out scene in which the couple knocks over every shelf in Molly’s apartment. Other big-name comedians make cameos, and Wain uses this as an opportunity to make fun of typecasting within the genre. When Joel plays basketball with buddies Jason Segel, Keenan Thompson, and Jack McBrayer, it’s apparent what each character symbolizes: Segel is the sex-crazed lothario, McBrayer is the wistful poet, and Rudd becomes “Mr. Combines Traits That Each of Us Represents and Everything Will Be Just Fine.”

Wain and Showalter call themselves hardcore fans of romantic comedies since youth, and it shows in the film’s playful swipes at some of the greats: Ephron, Woody Allen, Mike Nichols. When Molly finally brings Joel home to meet the parents, he learns that they are white supremacists (a nice subversion of the Annie Hall dinner scene), and her mother offers herself to Joel (like The Graduate’s Mrs. Robinson) while Molly and her father hide behind some curtains to see if he passes the loyalty test. In terms of goofiness, these are some of the tamer jokes: another scene involves a waiter at a restaurant who literally has “a pole up his ass,” knocking plates off the tables of screaming patrons.

If there is any deeper agenda at play, it’s to draw attention to the kinks in the idea of a perfect romance. Outside of the main plot, we watch a dinner between Molly and Joel, narrating the story of how they met to their couples friends, Karen and Kyle (the talented Ellie Kempner and Bill Hader). They seem on the verge of divorce, representing the more realistic foil to Molly and Joel’s ideal relationship, and their snarky commentary might be validating for couples in suffering marriages. One of my favorite moments was near the end, when we break away from the frame story—a monologue from Poehler (that interestingly, didn’t get many laughs in the theater), in which she describes how her candy shop went out of business, how she started taking pills, how her relationship fell apart. But before things get too real, it’s back to fantasyland. She and Rudd snap back into their starry-eyed character roles, and fall back in love—just like in the movies.

Bong Joon Ho’s action allegory Snowpiercer is a postapocalyptic variety show of icky violence, gleefully acted political caricatures, herky-jerky pacing, and offbeat sight gags. Or, as the villainous mastermind of Bong’s train-bound dystopia describes the latest insurrection by the underclass that resides in the tail-section: “a blockbuster production with a devilishly unpredictable plot.” FILM COMMENT met with the filmmaker (who also directed The Host and Mother) in New York this week to discuss scenes in depth.

I wanted to start by talking about the moment when the young boy named Chan lights a match. That leads into the torch-carrying scene—when Ewen Bremner’s character carries the torch and passes it along. You get a real sense of the train’s entire tail section working together. It’s a moving evocation of the class struggle that’s at the heart of the film.

Exactly. I don’t know if it’s a saying here in America, but in Korea they say, "One small flame can burn a whole field." I was trying to express that cinematically.

It’s an immensely stirring moment. I’m wondering how that mini-sequence with the torches works within the larger Yekaterina Bridge combat set-piece.

I’m very thankful to be asked this, because people are always like: “What’s the graphic novel? How did you find it?” When I first thought of the idea, I was really happy, but it all comes out of the space of the train. It’s a long and narrow environment and the whole story is about going through the train to the front, but I wanted at one point to go back to the very beginning—almost like what would happen if the rebels left something behind that they had to return for, to go through those spaces all over again. In the Yekaterina Bridge section, I wanted to try everything possible that you might do in a fight on a train, whether it's body-to-body contact using axes, going through a tunnel where the screen goes completely dark and then light again, or using fire.

Of course, cinema is really about light and darkness, and when the light returns, it’s a different kind of light: fire. When the DP [Hong Kyung-pyo] read the script, he loved this particular sequence, and we ended up using real torch light without a single electric lightbulb. It was an adventure doing it that way. I wanted that primitive, almost tribal aspect of the torch, running with a torch. I didn’t want to have laser guns and things like that just because it’s a sci-fi film—I wanted a real earthy feeling. And especially when you see Ewen Bremner running and screaming with the torch you get that. And it all starts from Chan’s small hands and that one match.

Was that part of what initially drew you to the material, that it could hold all kinds of ideas but still have action set-pieces and many varieties of humor in it?

In the original graphic novel the setting is the same, but there’s no idea of revolution at all. The main character’s name is Proloff and it’s really about him—a man from the back, meeting a woman from the middle of the train, and their trip to the front. There’s no Spartacus-type revolt or fighting the system. There’s no Jamie Bell character, no Octavia Spencer character, no Ewen Bremner character—this idea of a group of tail-sectioners making their way forward is not in the graphic novel.

More than making a strict adaptation, I felt you were digesting certain themes, and you had found a setting that could hold the preoccupations you’ve brought to previous films.

I’m friends with the artists of the graphic novel, and they wanted that themselves: they wanted me to do whatever I wanted, to have the freedom to try different things. But of course I retained the spirit of the original that the last survivors of mankind are on this train.

I want to come back to the Yekaterina Bridge sequence, to an earlier moment before the torch sequence: when Chris Evans’s character slips on the fish. When the fish is first introduced, it’s as a threat, an omen of the violence to come: the masked soldiers use their axes to cut it open and spread the blood on their blades. Then, when you reintroduce the fish, its function in the narrative has changed.

[Laughs] Ah, the fish.

It’s noteworthy because the slow-motion continues, and the score is still perched at that high level of drama.

Happy and serious.

Yeah, and it’s almost as if the audience can, or might, “trip on the fish” too.

These moments are what make filmmaking fun and interesting. It wasn’t actually in the script, but when I was making the storyboards, I thought of this idea I mentioned before—a primitive aspect, like tribes in Africa, a ritual before battle to intimidate their enemies. Putting blood on their faces and whatnot. So I came up with this idea of the fish, but I also wanted to bring it back somehow, because it was such a cool concept. We decided to have Chris slip on it. It’s a bit of a strange moment but very natural for me, and Chris took to it immediately. He sort of laughed and said: “We’re doing all this cool action—you want me to slip on a fish? Why not?” We shot it very quickly.

Another similar moment is when the front-section club kid with the angel-wing costume is crushed by giant gears.

It’s a bit grotesque, and I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a chicken slaughterhouse, but you see and hear similar things—even the sound effects of the crunching sound as the feathers are being drawn in. Kind of gross, but I like it. In a way, you’ve picked up on all these images I really favor but a lot of people hate. A portion of the audience. Some. [Laughs]

Those things are what makes the work stand out. They’re tonally polyphonic, combining many different genres and approaches to genre.

Whether it’s a genre or a certain emotion, the effort of maintaining the same tone is foreign and weird to me. I don’t get it. The mixture of all these different things is more like life. I think keeping the same tone throughout is the wrong approach.

When you’re structuring the movie, are you conscious of varying the tonalities from scene to scene?

The bartender over there [in the hotel] mixing cocktails knows what the ingredients are, what the ratios are—they’re making it in a specific way to get the intended result. I’m not like that when I write or when I do the storyboards. It’s only afterward that I notice: “Oh, I’m doing this again.” But it’s not an intentional or conscious effort.

I think what can sometimes disturb audiences about mixing genres or having a lack of consistency in tone is that they’re not being given signposts. Some people actually want, to a certain extent, not only an experience but also to be told how to feel about that experience. Which is more limiting.

I see your point. With my films, sometimes people don’t know whether to laugh or whether it’s a serious scene, and they’ll ask me: “Was it supposed to be funny?” It’s awkward for the audience, though a lot of people do like that about the films. It’s often hard for the marketing team to figure out how to market the film. But it’s inevitable, it’s my tendency, and I feel bad for the people trying to help my film. But I don’t think it’ll change anytime soon.

It’s at the heart of your work and, at times, it’s almost as if a multitude of traditional narrative arcs from different genres have been thrown together and are fighting one another. What can be pleasurably odd (or for some people hard) is the way these moments make sense as they're happening—the fish, or the angel wings, or Alison Pill’s pregnant character firing an Uzi—and then when it’s over, you’re left with something violent or unpleasant. And because of the humor, you question those moments a little bit more, question characters’ motivations and the morality of their actions.

I appreciate the fact that you’re saying it all ultimately makes sense. While making the film, I don’t worry about whether people will get it. But being Korean and living in Korea, it’s a unique society. There’s an expression that describes the Korean mentality: not everything is logical, or not everything makes sense on the surface, but if you look carefully you can get an idea of what’s there. It’s hard to express but this is a very Korean thing.

Do you keep returning to social allegories because you’re trying to express this feeling that’s in Korean society?

I think Snowpiercer is a bit of a different case. I have social commentary in all my films, but because here it’s in the context of sci-fi, it’s more direct and open and the ideas are about capitalism, which is relatable to people from many countries, not just Korea. 

This sense of a capitalistic system where there’s no moral direction whatsoever is incredibly palpable in the movie, almost to the point where it could be off-putting, which is the reason it’s so welcome in an action picture, a work of spectacle.

Ultimately, this is a sci-fi action film on a train, and that’s what I wanted. But I wanted to create action that was unique and different from what you see in standard Hollywood fare. Just in terms of the physical space, the action sequences take place in the long and narrow environment of a moving train, and characters are having head-on collisions with each other, and I wanted to work a lot with that, the torch scene being one example. The political message comes afterwards, when you’re falling asleep at night or think about it for a few seconds—that’s enough. The film is about experiencing this unique setting of the train and enjoying the thrilling action, the cinematic tension.

My experience was that the commentary—that sense of the exploitation and degradation of the lower classes by an upper class that doesn’t care and feeds on the exploitation and degradation—was inextricable from the excitement of the action sequences and the claustrophobia of the entire film.

For example, Ed Harris closes the trap door with the little kid inside of the machinery and says very nonchalantly: “Oh, it can only fit children under 5, blah, blah, blah.” It’s a terrifying moment but it’s something that happens. In Bangladesh when they decommission large ships and break them up for parts, a full-grown adult can’t fit inside, so they use small kids who are under 7 and they work for very little money—it’s very dangerous. If you watch National Geographic, you see this. So in fact it’s not science fiction, it’s something that’s actually happening, which is quite sad.

The character actors you cast in the movie are uniformly striking and play well off each other: Paul Lazar, Clark Middleton, Vlad Ivanov, Tómas Lemarquis.

Thank you for mentioning these actors. Paul Lazar is someone I worked with on The Host and is a friend of mine now. I saw him in Jonathan Demme’s films and was struck by his unique voice and individuality, and the character of Paul in Snowpiercer was written for him. In the case of Clark Middleton, he was a recommendation from the casting director. He was in a Tarantino film and Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock, where he appears briefly but very memorably. I liked his physicality as well, because the idea of his character, the Painter, is that when the rebels are fighting the soldiers, he records it, he’s drawing. I wanted somebody who would be different from the rest of the rebels, who would just record through his drawings.

Vlad Ivanov plays a key role in the film, even though he doesn’t have any dialogue, the “killer on the train,” if you will. If you talk about insanity and how people are crazy in this world, he’s the epitome of that. He works with Cristian Mungiu and was the abortionist in 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days. Casting him was a contribution from one of the producers… It was his idea [gestures at translator]. Tómas Lemarquis was the star of an Icelandic film called Noi the Albino and was very memorable in that, and when I was thinking about the character of Egg-Head, I thought of Tómas because his head is actually the shape of an egg. Without any makeup or need for wardrobe, he has such a unique look that I knew he would be perfect.

The design of the compartments not only corresponds to their purpose on the train but also their place in the narrative. The different shapes and sizes of the compartments determine the pacing of the scenes. The cramped compartments in the beginning make the dialogue heated and pressured, whereas in Wilford’s space it allows for his long monologues and I’m wondering about that conceptual aspect.

Even during the writing of the script, I had to think about the space and locations of the train, how the cars are divided and which car comes after another, because it’s so directly linked to the narrative. I worked intimately with my three concept artists, and this was a case where you couldn’t separate the space from what happens in the narrative—it’s all intertwined.

There’s also the idea of different generations on the train. Curtis [Chris Evans], Gilliam [John Hurt], and even Nam [Kang-ho Song], they were born on Earth and lived on Earth and then boarded the train. So they often talk about the outside world—saying that there’s dirt under the snow, for example, or John looking out at the train station and saying “Still cold.” But Yona [Nam's daughter] or Tim [the son of Octavia Spenser's character], they don’t know what that world was like. They were born on a moving train and, for example, when Yona’s pulled out of that small drawer [in the morgue-like prison car], she’s so used to these cramped spaces that it’s like she’s waking up in her bedroom. So the characters too are intimately linked to the space.

Does producing an online “pre-make” of Transformers: Age of Extinction disqualify me from writing an impartial review, or does it qualify me more than most? A bit of both, perhaps. My making the video essay Transformers: The Premake was driven in part by the sense that writing a conventional review of Age of Extinction would be a superfluous exercise, given how such franchise blockbusters have effectively pushed film criticism to the margins. Negative reviews of these films amount to a sideshow display of dissent amidst a relentless procession of trailers, fan videos, and opening-weekend box-office reports, and their finger-wagging expressions of contempt are often as formulaic as the films they bemoan. To truly reckon with something like Age of Extinction requires a critical approach that sees it for what it is: not so much a “movie” as a global product brought into being by an emerging transcultural entertainment industrial complex. This was the proposition of The Premake: that the production of the movie told a story more compelling and illuminating than the finished film could or would deliver.

That finished product is now set loose upon the world, and here I am still deliberating whether to evaluate it as a trans-cultural entertainment product or as a work of cinema. Because, as a movie, Transformers: Age of Extinction is in fact a significant improvement over its predecessors—it seems that the fourth time’s the charm. Or perhaps the charm lies in Mark Wahlberg, who contributed mightily to director Michael Bay’s previous (and possibly best) film, Pain and Gain, which dove headlong into his longstanding obsessions surrounding masculinity and success. Here Wahlberg provides surprising gravitas as a struggling repairman, Cade Yeager, who is trying to support his teenage daughter Tessa (Nicola Peltz, who however young is still subject to Bay’s leering eye for bare legs). Reduced to salvaging scrap metal, Cade stumbles upon the injured Autobot leader Optimus Prime, who is in hiding from U.S. government black ops agents seeking to destroy all Transformers after the cataclysm they wrought upon Chicago in the previous Transformers film. Images of American ruin and dysfunction proliferate in the opening scenes: a run-down movie theater; Wahlberg’s home on the brink of foreclosure; a government turned against its citizens in the war on terror; Optimus’ beat-up tractor-trailer carcass as an emblem for the U.S. auto industry on the ropes, in contrast to the shiny Camaros and Corvettes later on display.

Might these images of an America in disrepair, with its heroes desperately seeking redemption and renewal, also stand in for the much-maligned Transformers franchise itself? The desperation of an exhausted franchise is precisely the engine that drives Age of Extinction’s better qualities through an efficiently told story involving the ill-advised plan of a techo-magnate (Stanley Tucci) to build his own army of Transformers. Gone are the sophomoric scenes of comic relief involving Shia Labeouf (since relieved from the franchise) and jive-talking minstrel robots that plagued previous installments (one robo-minstrel remains, but here he makes a plea against exploiting labor). It also helps that the primary villains this time aren’t hunks of animated metal but high-level character actors Kelsey Grammer and Titus Welliver, who bring to their roles as jingoistic CIA officials more genuine menace than any CGI robot has yet to muster.

Cinematically, Bay continues to push the envelope on ultra high-def spectacle. We are treated to an ultra slow-mo close-up of a man’s face getting mauled by the tire of a car passing over him, as well as Cade chasing in vain after his abducted daughter amidst a dazzling whirlwind of debris, in one of the film’s most ingenious uses of 3-D. Yet the emotional effect of seeing a father lose his daughter is not so much supplemented as supplanted by expressive patterns of flying dirt. Bay’s visual talents are formidable without delivering actual dramatic, or even visceral, impact. A set piece in which Cade, Tessa and her boyfriend (Irish heartthrob Jack Reynor, playing the first Texan in film history who speaks with a brogue) walk on wires suspended atop Chicago’s Willis (formerly Sears) Tower ought to induce vertigo, but Bay’s incessant cutting and camera movement keep undermining one’s ability to occupy a shot long enough to feel the threat of falling. The distracting sensory artifice created by 3-D further buffers the spectacle from its potential for inducing sheer terror. In contrast, YouTube footage of the production shot by amateurs on cellphones provides precisely the sensation of actuality, the ontological drama of inhabiting a physical space, that gives the images a weight lacking in the finished movie.

It’s in the film’s half-hour climactic battle in Hong Kong that Bay’s visuals allow the viewer to occupy the frame, as the action threads the narrow gaps between the city’s high-rises. The strong verticality building facades and stairways suggests a very, very expensive update to classic Hong Kong action cinema, the kind that thrived before the colony’s handover to mainland China. The political anxiety of the local HK population expressed in those films are here replaced by more global contentions. At one point Chinese government officials heroically vow “to protect Hong Kong at all costs,” an assertion of dominion that seems conspicuous within a Hollywood film (especially given how darkly the U.S. government is depicted)—until one considers that this is a Chinese co-production aimed at that nation’s booming box office. Hence we have shots of Mark Wahlberg holding a Chinese brand-name protein powder, Stanley Tucci drinking Shuhua milk, and a whopping 30 screen minutes featuring Chinese actress Li Bingbing (though she’s given little to do beyond sipping her branded Chinese bottled water and making eyes at Tucci).

Then there’s the matter of “Hong Kong” the location, which in reality is a composite of shots filmed in Chicago, Detroit, and Hong Kong—a pastiche brought forth by competing incentives and stipulations offered by both China and the U.S. cities to attract movie productions. Those like me who have sampled the amateur footage of each location on YouTube will experience the surreal sensation of seeing the Hong Kong action sequences flip between locations literally from one shot to the next, a transformation of space that I find more thrilling than computer-generated shape-shifting robots. This experience of Age of Extinction—which posits money as the true protagonist of the movie—was the one I expected to have in the wake of my investigation of the production, and it did deliver levels of subtextual coherence that the film otherwise lacks. Still, amidst all the geopolitical production intrigue, somehow a movie got made, and not an altogether bad one at that.

Jersey Boys

“I’m hearing it sky-blue, you’re giving me brown.” This is producer Bob Crewe (Mike Doyle) in the recording booth, addressing a group of session musicians who will eventually be known as Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. It also anticipates the case against Jersey Boys, Clint Eastwood’s screen adaptation of the jukebox musical that opened on Broadway in 2005 and is still running today. The film, like the show, dramatizes Valli and friends’ journey from the mean streets of Belleville to the top of the charts, but any doubt that this is an Eastwood film should be vanquished by the drained, drab palette of the early scenes, which recall the juvenile delinquent milieu of his mentor Don Siegel’s black-and-white Crime in the Streets. Working with Tom Stern, his cinematographer since 2002’s Blood Work, Eastwood has shot Jersey Boys in his favored color scheme, in which no tone appears that you might not find on a particularly weather-beaten cigar store Indian. This is the first full-on musical that Eastwood has directed—though both Honkytonk Man (82) and Bird (88) were musician bios—but Vincente Minnelli it ain’t.

It would appear that Eastwood’s Jersey Boys wasn’t the Jersey Boys that America wanted. I saw it in an otherwise empty theater on a Monday night in Glen Cove, New York, and box-office reports appear to bear out my anecdotal experience. (It is worth remembering that before the High School Musicals, 2008’s Mamma Mia!, and 2012’s Les Misérables, the movie musical was considered a surefire money loser, and had been for almost 35 years.) In this particular case, I am not inclined to blame a film’s under-performance wholly on the imbecility of the philistine public. The movie has a certain amount of bounce in the rise-to-power chapters, when it’s narrated by each of the Four Seasons in turn, but John Lloyd Young, the film’s Valli, who originated the role on Broadway, doesn’t exactly ooze charisma on the big screen, and his deficiency becomes glaring in the section of the film which takes place after the band’s breakup.

That Valli does not come across as particularly knowable or likeable isn’t, however, necessarily at odds with Eastwood’s apparent intentions. The movie’s grand finale surrounds the group’s 1990 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Reunited to perform, wearing old-age makeup presumably provided by the same cut-rate supplier who fitted Leo DiCaprio with dewlaps in 2011’s J. Edgar, the group spin in unison on the stage and are suddenly, miraculously young again—the effect summons unwelcome memories of the music video for Billy Joel’s “The Longest Time.” This is followed by a credits-crawl full-cast blowout that trots through a medley of the hits. And yet, rather than this perfunctory attempt at sending a toe-tapping crowd off on a high note, what sticks in the memory on the way to the car is the number that immediately precedes the induction hullabaloo, Valli rolling out his 1967 hit “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” in front of a crowd for the first time, particularly the way one lyric hangs in the air after the swing of the band has dropped away: “You’re just too good to be true…”

Jersey Boys

The elements of Jersey Boys that seem most to engage Eastwood—who is working from a screenplay by the show’s originators, Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice—are those of “…too good to be true.” Eastwood the director has long concerned himself with pulling back the curtain on the backstage operations of myth creation, bringing the privileged perspective of one who, as an actor, was fashioned into a folkloric hero almost from the get-go. This is an important aspect of J. Edgar, which shows how the eponymous head of the FBI sold the upright, tough “G-Man” to the American public as a counter-myth to the Tragic Gangster, and of Invictus (09), which has Morgan Freeman’s Nelson Mandela creating a fable of South African national unity on the basis of a victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup. (It’s a solid and often touching movie, but kept from being something more by the absence of any lingering doubt as to the worth of unity in the face of still-present crushing economic inequality, or any mention of the questions raised as to the validity of the South African victory.)

One of the most memorable moments in Jersey Boys is a CG crane shot that scales the face of the Brill Building, once the epicenter of the music industry in New York City, the vignettes visible through each window offering glimpses of something like the pop music industry’s factory floor. Eastwood is uniquely qualified to direct Jersey Boys because he has some firsthand experience of this scene, for his sideline in music goes back as far as the LP Rawhide’s Clint Eastwood Sings Cowboy Favorites, released in 1959 on the Cameo Records label of Philadelphia. (An overview of Eastwood’s persistent career-long crooning may be found here.) Eastwood’s Rawhide character Rowdy Yates makes a brief appearance on a television set in Jersey Boys, a tacit acknowledgement by Eastwood that he was part of the same entertainment-industrial complex that The Four Seasons were participant in. (“You talk like an expert,” a flirtatious female says to cocksure Rowdy, and certainly bow-legged Eastwood heeds Valli’s high-pitched commandment to “Walk Like a Man.”) Later, when Valli & Co. take the Rock Hall stage to accept an award for singing songs, many of which advertise a romantic bliss that we do not see evident in any of their actual lives, I had a brief flash of Adam Beach’s laurel-festooned Iwo Jima flag-raiser Cpl. Ira Hayes in 2006’s Flags of Our Fathers saying “I can’t take them calling me a hero…”

No such crisis of conscience occurs in Jersey Boys. And though moments like that Rowdy cameo are so much catnip for the auteurist critics who’ve gradually gathered to Eastwood through the decades, beginning with Tom Allen (New York) and Dave Kehr (Chicago) in the U.S. and Pierre Rissient in Paris, such flourishes are few and far between. When the film turns to Valli’s relationship to his wayward teenaged daughter, Francine (Freya Tingley), its depiction of the late Sixties Village street scene is so wholly inauthentic and plasticine that I half expected a visit to The Pigeon-Toed Orange Peel from Siegel’s 1968 Coogan’s Bluff. Suffice it to say that Jersey Boys is a quite uneven movie with flashes of something better. I suspect that its flaws come from excessive fidelity to the Brickman/ Elice text rather than from its departures, but of course this view won’t be shared by rabid anti-Eastwoodites, ever eager to see the big man stumble or, say, interrogate an empty chair. Despite decades of deconstructing his own legend, Eastwood remains a monumental figure, and as such nothing less will do that to burnish or topple him.

Mrs. Eastwood & Company

Speaking of “Print the legend”: almost certainly the oddest Eastwood-related project to come along since he won his second Best Director Academy Award for Million Dollar Baby in 2004 isn’t 2010’s Hereafter, but rather one in which he had no direct authorial involvement, a serial narrative which he floats on the periphery of, a tall, gaunt figure flashing his boyish grin dutifully, or a famous, gravelly voice on the speakerphone. I am talking about Mrs. Eastwood & Company, what I believe from limited acquaintance with the genre to be a more-than-usually-dreadful reality TV program from the Bunim/Murray Productions sausage grinder, 10 episodes of which aired on E! in summer of 2012.

The brand name is “Eastwood,” but the Pale Rider is scarcely seen; instead the focus is on Dina Eastwood, the former news anchor who he married in 1996, and her household in Carmel-by-the-Sea. The supporting players include Morgan Eastwood, Clint and Dina’s 15-year-old daughter; Francesca Eastwood, Clint’s daughter with the actress who played the “cut-up whore” from Unforgiven, Frances Fisher; and the group Overtone, a kind-of South African Rockapella who Dina acquired during the shooting of Invictus—their harmonies are drizzled all over the soundtrack—and imported to Northern California, and who she functions as the manager for.

A typical episode is comprised of an imposed conflict—Dina wants to get a belly-button piercing; Francesca falls in love with a designer handbag that her drippy, talentless, potato-faced photographer boyfriend wants to destroy for an insipid photo shoot—which is solved by the time the credits roll, with mother, daughters, or both learning a valuable takeaway lesson. Eastwood appeared nowhere on the promotional materials for the show, though he does pop up in a couple of episodes, explaining his pro-gay stance (“…we’re Libertarians…”) over dinner at the Mission Ranch Hotel, the restaurant he owns in Carmel, or attending the wedding of an Overtone member, and giving terse advice on having a happy marriage. “It takes one time to do that,” Eastwood says of adjusting to domestic life. “To get fully tranquilized.” 

Mrs. Eastwood & Company

Someone wasn’t sufficiently tranquilized to maintain the Eastwood marriage. Scarcely a year after the official portrait of the Eastwood family had been broadcast to the American public, Dina entered a rehab facility in Arizona to “receive help with depression and anxiety,” and months later she filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. No less an authority than People magazine’s Raha Lewis cited Mrs. Eastwood & Company, disapproved of by Clint, as having put a strain on the marriage, though given that Dina had been shackled with a prenup, this bit of personal brand-building a la Camille Grammer in the months before a divorce seems like a smart exit strategy. I will not engage in any idle speculation as to what went wrong, though Eastwood’s Any Which Way You Can philandering, at least in his younger days, was the stuff of legend, well-documented by ever-salacious biographer Patrick McGilligan.

It cannot be said that Eastwood is indifferent to women, and fittingly his other great subject, alongside deconstructing pop mythology, is his combined awe and terror at female power, both in wrath and resilience. This begins with the 1971 “Hell hath no fury” double feature of Play Misty for Me and The Beguiled (directed by Siegel, but from a source novel suggested by Eastwood), carries through his wonderful on-screen badinage with lover Sondra Locke in six films bookended by 1976’s The Outlaw Josey Wales and 1983’s Sudden Impact, and continues right down to outright melodramas like The Bridges of Madison County (95), Million Dollar Baby, and Changeling (08). “[I]magine what Martin Scorsese could have done with the material,” a recent Eastwood takedown larded with the meaningless phrase “overrated” and altogether too worthless to link said of Jersey Boys, and in this particular instance the hypothetical may be worth asking, but imagine Scorsese—who, incidentally, greatly admires Eastwood—evidencing anything like the same interest in the opposite sex, even if Eastwood’s interest hasn’t always been benevolent. On screen as in life, Eastwood’s relations with women have been fraught to say the very least—of the Four Seasons who share the spotlight in Jersey Boys, it’s tellingly Vincent Piazza’s neighborhood hustler and habitual lothario Tommy DeVito whom Eastwood seems to have the most feeling for. “Love?” says DeVito. “I’ll be honest; I never knew what that was.”

Love aside, sex by itself can get pretty tricky. Which brings us to the other big recent news in Eastwood studies: two weeks ago, Warner Home Video’s released Tightrope on Blu-ray. Eastwood vehicle Tightrope opened in theaters in August of 1984, around the time that the star’s divorce from his first wife, Maggie Johnson, was becoming final. In the film, Eastwood plays recently-divorced New Orleans police detective Wes Block. Adding to the film à clef bread-crumb trail, Block is doting father to two young girls—the elder of the two played by Alison Eastwood, Clint’s second child with Johnson. This suburban life comprises Block’s daytime existence, but by night, Block—presumably so named because of his tendency to compartmentalize—is out prowling the seedy precincts of New Orleans’s Tenderloin district, looking for an at-large woman killer who’s been preying on sex workers. (In these nocturnal scenes, then-current Eastwood house DP Bruce Surtees pushes stock like crazy to capture images hovering on the edge of pitch-black.)

Tightrope

Block is not impervious to the allure of neon and sleaze himself, and since his divorce has let his inner freak off the leash: he stoically accepts a blow job from a familiar call girl, gets a vibrator-assisted hand-job from another, and even indulges in a little light S/M with his departmental handcuffs. When Block turns down a gay tryst with a queer trick paid off by the killer who Block is tracking—or is it the other way around?—he asks the detective “How do you know if you never tried it?” to which Block responds “Maybe I have.” (Talk about Libertarian!) “[H]ere was the biggest star in the world,” David Denby wrote of Tightrope, “implicating himself in the kind of pathologies that his earlier characters had scornfully eliminated.” (Denby is perhaps thinking of 1975’s The Eiger Sanction. God knows I usually am.)

Tightrope was the first film reviewed by J. Hoberman in the first-stringer slot at The Village Voice, stepping in for the ailing Andrew Sarris, and Hoberman speculated that the film “[was] so personal that Eastwood couldn’t sign it.” There would appear to be some credence to this. The film’s bad double-entendre-laden screenplay and direction are credited to one Richard Tuggle, a name which has a Christian Nyby-ish smell about it. As with Eastwood’s last outing as an actor, 2012’s Trouble with the Curve, credited to the star’s former AD and longtime producer Robert Lorenz, Tightrope appears to be a case of Clint subcontracting out work. (Trouble and Tightrope were made for Eastwood’s Malpaso Productions, so there can be no doubt as to who was boss on both.) Despite Tightrope’s box-office success, Tuggle only managed to accrue one other director credit, on the 1986 action-thriller Out of Bounds, starring Anthony Michael Hall. Tuggle had previously written the screenplay to 1979’s Escape from Alcatraz, Eastwood’s last appearance in front of the camera for Siegel—but while Eastwood never would’ve tried to go over the man he called “Siegelini,” Tuggle’s inexperience apparently prompted Mr. Efficiency Eastwood to side-check him out of the director’s chair.

Like William Friedkin’s Cruising a few years previous, Tightrope (a/k/a Trouble with the Perv) is an attempt at an American giallo. A more instructive point of comparison, however, is James B. Harris’s 1988 Cop, the first screen adaptation of a novel by James Ellroy, a writer fairly obsessed with the violence of men who elect themselves to protect women from violent men. (I’ve written at some length about Cop.) Like Cop, Tightrope is in dialogue with second-wave feminism, in particular the Take Back the Night movement—or at least a screenwriter’s conception of what those things were. It is a movie made up of the basic titillating material of the erotic thriller—the exquisite murders of beautiful women—but in addition to the usual implicit critique visible in the cross-section of society given in the course of a police procedural, male violence is explicitly put on trial by a feminist-identified character.

Tightrope

In the case of Cop, James Woods’s Sgt. Lloyd Hopkins has to contend with Lesley Ann Warren’s feminist bookstore owner Kathleen McCarthy (was someone thinking of Brian De Palma bête noir and Andrea Dworkin cohort Catharine A. MacKinnon?); in the case of Tightrope, it’s Geneviève Bujold’s grandiloquently monikered Beryl Thibodeaux, who teaches classes in women’s self-defense at the Rape Center, and who teams with Block to stop the killer and temper the detective’s own festering misogyny. Lest it be thought that Eastwood’s experiment in ally-dom was a one-off, I should note that shooting for Tightrope was underway shortly before the release of Sudden Impact, the fourth of five films in which Eastwood played “Dirty” Harry Callahan and the only of the series that he directed himself, in which Callahan finds his female counterpart in Locke’s rape victim-turned-avenging angel, whom he allows to fly free at the film’s conclusion.

Tightrope is never subtle in laying out its themes. There’s a scene of Block strolling down a courthouse corridor with a woman, never seen before or again, whose sole purpose in the movie appears to be that of dropping by to explain the title: “…there’s a darkness inside all of us . . . You, me, the man down the street. Some have it under control. The rest try to walk a tightrope between the two.”  Unlike Cruising, Tightrope never suggests that cop and killer are literally one in the same, though its doppelganger theme does put me in mind of a certain exchange from 2002’s Adaptation regardless. (Charlie: “…[Y]ou explore the notion that cop and criminal are really two aspects of the same person. See every cop movie ever made for other examples of this.” Donald: “Mom called it psychologically ‘taut.’”) It is, like Jersey Boys, a movie to be consigned to the great pile of flawed Eastwood films—but Eastwood is to be valued more for his stalwart eccentricity than for his perfection. There are few around who can walk the tightrope between a populist and a personal cinema with such poise.

For sightless performers, it takes a special kind of trust to go before the camera, knowing that they won’t be able to see the results. Chinese director Lou Ye’s recent film, set in a massage center staffed by the blind, implicitly explores this process, as well as love, frustration, and everyday life for the workers. In a number of scenes, the images are even blurred or dimmed in a deliberate attempt to imagine how the blind perceive the world.

It all takes place in the city of Nanjing, where Lou shot Spring Fever (09) during his five-year ban from filmmaking by the film bureau of China’s State Administration for Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), and where that film eventually had its China premiere at the 6th China Independent Film Festival. Since then, Lou has enjoyed a relatively smooth and prolific period of his career, completing three films since 2011. As a pioneer of France-China art-house co-productions, he is a regular recipient of grants and production funding from the National Center of Cinema and the Moving Image (CNC) in France, an influential force in China through its support of emergent and established “independent” filmmakers.

Commercially speaking, it’s a good time to be a fictional filmmaker in China today, though the avant-garde ranks of the last generation of the collectively trained Beijing Film Academy graduates who tasted celluloid filmmaking in the Nineties have been overtaken by more polyphonic and vernacular documentarians, video-makers, and independent festival programmers. Yet Lou’s Suzhou River (00)  and Summer Palace (06) still can’t be shown publicly in China.

FILM COMMENT interviewed Lou Ye about how to visualize the experience of the blind, the prospect of political and commercial censorship, and the explosive domestic box office in China. Blind Massage screens on June 30 and July 2 at the New York Asian Film Festival.

This is your second film shot in Nanjing, though you were born and raised in a family of intellectuals in Shanghai.

Nanjing gives me the impression that it’s more ordinary than Shanghai, but the same as Shanghai. There’s something in there, something deep, that’s invisible but very attractive, which does not change with time.

Did you do any research about the relationship between the blind and cinema? It could be a hypnotic experience for a masseuse to sit in a cinema space.

Yes. For example, I tried to listen to a film in a cinema for the blind like the blind do. This is a film about without sight, so it added various restrictions to many visual aspects. But the film is made for people to see, therefore since the very beginning, we’ve been working within a paradox.

What was the filmmaking like, in terms of visualizing the experience of the blind? Everybody except the nonprofessional blind actors and actresses are in fact able to see...

Actually, I asked the professional actors with sight to be sightless during the shooting. They wore opaque contact lens that rendered them nearly unable to see, and they needed the assistant directors to guide them to their marks during the shooting (for example, Qin Hao who plays Sha Fuming and Huang Xuan who plays Xiao Ma). This is the same as the other blind actors/actresses. Or they closed their eyes (such as Guo Xiaodong who plays Doc Wang) and gave themselves completely to their sense of touch and to the help from the blind actors/actresses around during the blocking and shooting.

And of course, with the participation of the blind actors and actresses, our shooting went beyond the daily routine of a common production. For example, for each set or each location, before the shooting day, there had to be two or three days for all the blind actors and actresses to get familiar with the space and touch all the props on the set under the guidance of a specialized AD for the blind—cups, tables, and chairs. Then we’d be ready to shoot. No grip track nor lighting cable was allowed to run across the set to avoid possible stumbles. Once a prop was in place, it could not be moved or else the blind actors and actress wouldn’t be able to reach it working from their memory. Trying to visualize the experience of being unable to see, with the visually handicapped, was already very exciting itself.

From the beginning, the film doesn’t intend to be funny or entertaining, and this dramatic mood is amplified by the ambient sound scored by Johan Johansson. But my impression of the novel is that it begins with quite a few ironic jokes.  

I prefer to tell you directly what has happened. And I think making this sightless film itself is ironic. On this point, it’s similar to the novel. And the music is also very simple and straightforward.

It’s possible to interpret your use of the sightless as a metaphor for your own relationship to the mainstream world.

To me, the world of the sightless is broader and greater than a metaphor...

Zeng Jian, the cinematographer of Blind Massage, has collaborated with you since Spring Fever. It feels like most of your collaborators come from an independent film background.

Actually, my collaboration with Zeng Jian dates back much earlier. He was the still photographer of Purple Butterfly [03], the editor of Summer Palace [06], and then the cinematographer of Spring Fever [09]. He knows my films very well. Some of my collaborators are from independent film backgrounds, some are not, and they’re all very excellent.

Does the exploding box office in China frustrate you or your production company? Or even lure some of your staff to more commercial filmmaking?

There’s definitely some influence, because everyone is talking about box office with you. I don’t think it’s a bad thing for the Chinese film industry in its early phase. As for my staff, on the contrary, many of them do come from the world of commercial filmmaking. On this point, independent filmmaking is kind of the same as a blind massage center, where people getting tired from making money can take a break.

Do you want to talk about censorship? How did it go this time? Any interesting stories to share?

I don’t want to talk about censorship. This time had nothing different from the previous experience. In general, no matter how the directors here appear to be relaxed, in the face of the censorship, there’s no interesting story, and there won’t be any.

Blind Massage screens on June 30 and July 2 at the New York Asian Film Festival.

Appearing on the scene as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s assistant on Accattone (61), director Bernardo Bertolucci has been everything from wunderkind (The Grim Reaper, 62) to perverted genius (Last Tango in Paris, 72) to Oscar-winner (The Last Emperor, 87) to critical failure (1900, 76). But for the past decade the Italian maestro has been sidelined by health problems that have left him heavily reliant on a wheelchair. Me and You marks the end of this long hiatus with his first Italian-language feature in three decades. Adapted from the novella of the same name by Niccolò Ammaniti, the film picks up where he left off with Stealing Beauty (96), Besieged (98), and The Dreamers (03), returning to explore anew the effects of self-induced confinement.

The willing prisoner this time around is Lorenzo (Jacopo Olmo Antinori), an acne-pockmarked 14-year-old boy whose growing antisocial behavior at school concerns his mother (Sonia Bergamasco) much more than it does him. Covertly ditching a weeklong student ski trip, he sets up camp in a dusty basement for some much-needed time away from Mamma and the therapist she insists he see. But his solitude is soon disrupted by a surprise visit from his heroin-addicted half-sister, Olivia (Tea Falco). A whirling dervish in a faux-fur coat, she holes up in his lair while attempting to kick her drug habit cold turkey.

If set alongside the political charge of The Conformist (70) or the raw sexuality of Last Tango in Paris, Me and You would obviously feel slight. But its sumptuous lighting, atmospheric set design, and kinetic camerawork keep the monotonous setting visually engaging throughout, while the soundtrack—particularly David Bowie’s “Ragazzo Sola, Ragazza Sola,” the Italian version of  “Space Oddity”—is perfectly attuned to that awful mix of angst and loneliness that constitutes adolescence.

FILM COMMENT caught up with the husky-voiced Bertolucci by phone to talk about his directorial past and present, why TV is better than the movies these days, and that ever-controversial stick of butter.

It’s been 10 years since your last film. What was it about this project that spurred you to return to directing?

I hadn’t been active for a long time because of personal health problems with my back. A few years ago I was sure that it was the end of my career as a director. But one day after the MoMA homage—the [2010-11] retrospective I had in New York—Niccolò Ammaniti sent me his novella. I read it very fast—it’s just 100 pages. The film came directly from the book, but in the novella I don’t like the fact that the half-sister dies because she’s a junkie. I couldn’t back that. Every time in a novel, a movie, or a play, when you have a junkie you know already that this person will die before the end. I don’t like this kind of moralistic attitude. I wanted to keep the sister alive, and this is a big change from the novella. I answered very fast that I would do it.

[During shooting] I was in a different POV from my normal POV, but I think one can adapt to something new, and so I adapted. I think I managed to find my balance in a new way.

In nearly all of your films, the characters seem to be in direct conflict in some way with what their society considers “normal.” Is this an experience you feel a personal resonance with?

There is always a kind of identification with the main characters in my movies, and this time I think there was [identification] with both the boy and the girl. It’s ridiculous because I’m 73, and I can show a 14-year-old boy and I can relate to him. [Laughs] By the end of the movie I think you can see a recognition between the two [main characters]—they accept themselves and they recognize themselves, and they love themselves.

Your first experience on a film set was as an assistant to Pasolini on Accattone, something you’ve described as “witnessing the birth of cinema” anew because he had no filmic references. You, by contrast, as a cinephile, have been strongly influenced by other films. Cinema has changed so much since you were first making movies—are you still able to find new inspiration among contemporary filmmakers?

I’d never deny that movies are my daily nourishment, and of course now the scene is quite different. The American TV series—I think I’ve seen them all… One that I enjoy very much is “Rubicon.” I like films that have the timing of the movies of the past—that have the time to record people thinking, or [being] inactive. The camera can be on their face with nothing happening for a long time. Now the editing is different—always cutting as soon as the action ends. In [TV] series, I find the pleasure I used to find in the cinema of the past—they’re not forced to cut. I feel that even in my own movies there’s different timing than in my older work.

The politics of your films have also changed a great deal. Although themes of class are present in the background in this film, compared to your earlier work, which was highly politically charged, politics here are virtually non-existent here. What is the relationship between film and politics and how can you contextualize your more recent works within your personal political trajectory?

There was a long period where politics were one of the most important subjects in my movies and that was because in those days in Italy politics was something belonging to everybody—and it was the most exciting thing going on. There were two big parties—the Catholics and the Communists—and they were balancing each other for a long time. When I did 1900, I really believed in a kind of literal victory of the people, of the popular movement. They were just on the verge of winning an election—we’re talking about the 1980s here. So the politics of my movies were parallel to the politics of the reality that was surrounding me—it was the feeling that things could have changed.

As I said before, politics was the main kind of nourishment. We were going to sleep at night thinking that the day after something could change. We believed we were able to change the world and that’s what I was trying to put in my movies. Today, the new generations are not interested [in politics]. We’ve been so full of scandals and corruption and changing of flags that people have abandoned this great thing, which was very much a part of Italian culture. It’s tragic.  

Sex is also central to almost all of your films. There were many parallels in this film to your previous chamber dramas like The Dreamers, Besieged, even Last Tango. But it’s your most sexually tame film. Incest is faintly suggested but never played out. Did the script ever go through racier iterations?

A lot of people told me that when they saw Me and You, at a certain moment they were expecting the brother and sister to have a kind of incestuous relationship. But these characters are very different from The Dreamers. I wanted to suggest that there is always some kind of interest. These moments of incest between brother and sister, mother and son, et cetera, are always incredibly close [to happening], but I never had the desire to go in that direction here. And for me that was new. It was surprising to see in this movie that this doesn’t happen.

Even in the absence of sex you still maintain a characteristic attention to the human form. There is that beautiful sequence of Olivia playing dress-up and then dancing to David Bowie. I’m curious to know if the controversy with Maria Schneider that followed Last Tango in Paris has changed your approach toward your portrayal of women on screen or the way you work with your female leads.

Last Tango served a totally different need for me. When I started, I didn’t know where I could go with Marlon Brando and Maria. Because there is something that you can't tell in the screenplays—and it’s exactly what’s missing from screenplays—which is the flesh and blood of the real people in front of the camera. The script describes the characters, but when you go to shoot, you try to invent life in front of the camera. I don’t know… My wife says that I could make a cup of tea look sexy.

The fact that people still argue about that film is a testament to its staying power.

When I did that film, nobody could have stopped me. In Italy it had been banned—it couldn’t be shown for I think 10 years after the opening, and I was condemned for two months in prison with suspension. And what you’re saying [about people still arguing about this film], just a few months ago I was at the Cinémathèque Française for a retrospective and someone asked about shooting that scene in Last Tango. It was Marlon’s idea to use the butter. [Maria] knew there was a sex scene, but she didn’t know about the particulars. She was offended that I didn’t tell her, because I wanted her to react like a girl would react to that surprise. And that became a kind of scandal: “You make actors copulate in front of the camera, shame on you.” [People] thought they were really fucking! This is not the only film that I’ve done, but it’s the one that goes on and on and on.

You originally thought about shooting this film in 3-D but ended up doing it in 35mm. A lot has changed during your 10-year absence. What do you think about these new technologies and how they’re shaping the art form?

We did some tests for the film in 3-D, and I loved the tests that we shot but for me the technology was too slow. To shoot 3-D would take almost double the time of shooting in 35mm so I decided not to. But if I were able to do something else... I’m so curious about this technology. I’m so curious to explore digital filmmaking [just] as I explored what film was. Cinema is always coming up with new things. Sound when it was silent, color after black and white.

So you’re optimistic about the future of cinema?

I don’t know. I think that cinema is reinventing itself, continuously changing all the time.  

A guy walks through the snow. He keeps walking. One foot after another. He’s still walking. There he goes, heading up the mountain. Tromp, tromp, tromp. Walking through the snow. You go get a drink. You come back. Not much has changed. He’s still walking. Now he’s sitting down. The snow keeps falling. It covers him completely. You fall asleep. When you wake up, the credits are rolling.

Kwaidan

You have been watching a Japanese movie. 

A lot of people, if asked to reach for a single adjective to describe Japanese cinema, would go with “slow.” Directors like Takeshi Kitano, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Yasujiro Ozu, Shinji Aoyama, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa love to let scenes of people walking, sitting, staring, eating, and waiting unfold for minutes of screen time. Takeshi Kitano’s first film, Violent Cop (1989), was basically a supercut of shots of Kitano walking down city streets. All of these directors use slowness in different ways and for different effects, but recently slowness has become the trendiest of accessories in Japanese movies.

In international cinema circles, the war has long raged between advocates of CCC (contemporary contemplative cinema) who claim that directors like Béla Tarr and Hou Hsiao-hsien are forcing the audience to pay attention in new ways, and other critics who say they’re just boring the crap out of everyone. Jonathan Romney sang the praises of CCC avant la lettre in The Guardian back in 2000 calling it a “…very subjective cinema, a cinema that practically psychoanalyses you—and if you're lucky, cures you of your Hollywood-induced traumas.” 

Throne of Blood

Then, a few years later, in Sight & Sound, Nick James shot back with: “…there are times, as you watch someone trudge up yet another woodland path, when you feel an implicit threat: admit you’re bored and you’re a philistine. Such films are passive-aggressive in that they demand great swathes of our precious time to achieve quite fleeting and slender aesthetic and political effects…”

However you feel about CCC, slow movies are Japan’s middle name. Back in the Fifties, Chinese directors complained that Japanese films were “too slow,” while Japanese directors said the same about Chinese films. The difference turned out to be more about plotting than actual running time: Chinese directors complained that Japanese movies were slow because they were single-mindedly focused on a single, slender plot. Japanese directors called Chinese movies slow because they were too stuffed with incident and subplot, while the main story moved forward inch by agonizing inch. 

There’s a traditional tempo to Japanese art, jo-ha-kyu, originally applied to court music but most famously applied to Noh theater, meaning “slow, fast, end,” or “beginning, break, rapid,” or even, “introduction, scattering, rushing.” Bascially, things start slow, speed up, then end suddenly. It’s taken to an absurd extreme in comedian Hitoshi Matsumoto’s recent R100, which begins as a slice-of-life drama with lots of static shots of a salesman tromping around his neighborhood. Then he hires a team of dominatrixes to torment him in his daily life and for two-thirds of the film it’s a quietly absurd, but still slow-paced, light comedy. Suddenly, without warning, he accidentally kills one of the dominatrixes and in its last 20 minutes the movie becomes a wild 1960s Japanese action film full of assassins, gun battles, international vixens, and car chases. In this case, jo-ha-kyu stands for “slow, slightly faster, batshit crazy.” (You can catch it this month at the New York Asian Film Festival.)

Takashi Miike was challenging this traditional rhythm all the way back in 1999 with Dead or Alive whose opening five minutes crams an entire gang war into the cuisinart, sets it on “liquefy,” and unleashes a tornado of plummeting bodies, goggled assassins, giant lines of cocaine, supermarket shootouts, gyrating crotches, and fast-forward noodle-eating. But while Miike and Matsumoto may have desecrated the temple of slow, they haven’t destroyed it. In fact, it’s become something of a craze.

Despite the worldwide popularity of directors like Miike and Sono, international critics and film festival programmers reserve their biggest prizes for Japanese directors when they make their slowest movies, like Miike’s Hara-Kiri (11), his most turgid movie to date, which was his only film given a long-coveted competition slot at Cannes. And the only people on the planet who seem to enjoy Naomi Kawase’s sleep-inducers (The Mourning Forest, Hanezu, Shara) are the Cannes selection committee who have given every single one of them a competition slot at the festival. This year, her Still the Water premiered there, garnering critical praise that ranged from “Zen calm” and “healing gentleness” (The Guardian) to “soporific” (Variety). 

Slow = Respect is a lesson learned by 2013’s Ask This of Rikyu (13), a very serious movie about Rikyu, one of the masters of the tea ceremony, who was ordered to commit suicide after some political complications. It starts with a shot of two characters sitting next to each other that runs almost a minute and a half before either of them utters a line. Full of endless shots of hands thoughtfully caressing ceramics, it’s studded with pseudo profundities as when the tea master shows up an hour late for an audience with his lord. “You’re late!” a court official cries. “Or perhaps,” the tea master smirks, “I’m early.”

WTF does that even mean?

Every line of dialogue in this movie sounds like a self-important Zen koan rolling off the conveyor belt with a plop. But while Ask This of Rikyu is practically a demolition derby compared to most CCC, it steals plenty of tricks from the genre, using its long takes, slow camera movement, and sparse dialogue to signify that it has serious intentions without actually engaging seriously with anything. 

In a country where 75% of people polled said that Japanese TV was “boring” you’d think that directors would be looking to unearth excitement rather than play into stereotypes about Serious Japanese Cinema. Instead you have Yoji Yamada directing a two-hour-and-15-minute remake of Ozu’s Tokyo Story. It’s a weird kind of groupthink that causes even perfectly charming comedies like The Story of Yonosuke to run a bloated two hours and 45 minutes. 

What’s going on here? Some light is shed on the matter by The Great Passage (13), (also playing at the NYAFF) an actual good movie with an all-star cast directed by Yuya Ishii that was nominated for 26 film awards and won seven of them—a massive achievement for a movie about a dictionary. Starting in 1995, we follow the progress of The Great Passage, a new and more modern Japanese dictionary, that takes 15 years to compile. Its main character is Majime (Ryuhei Matsuda), a shy introvert who is shanghaied onto the dictionary team and discovers that words allow him to break out of his shell and communicate with the woman he loves (Aoi Miyazaki). 

Never sentimental, it’s one of the only movies I’ve ever seen that elicits tears and applause for a scene of copy editing, and it uses an audience-friendly version of CCC—long takes, minimal dialogue, sparse camera movement, long running time—to imbue its gentle comedy with a warm authenticity. But, like Ask This of Rikyu, something’s rotten in Denmark.

There is the argument that maybe Japanese cinema just moves to a different rhythm. Composer Karlheinz Stockhausen celebrated slowness in Japanese culture in his 1974 essay “Ceremonial Japan,” writing:

“Where timing is concerned, the European is absolutely mediocre. Which means he has settled down somewhere in the middle of his range of potential tempi. It is a very narrow range, compared with the extremely fast reactions that a Japanese [person] might have at a certain moment, and to the extremely slow reaction that he might show on another occasion. He has a poor middle range compared to the European.”

The Great Passage

But maybe this once-challenging posture towards audience attention spans has become a calcified pose. To figure out The Great Passage’s attitude towards slowness, it helps to look at its attitude towards women. The women of The Great Passage are there to take care of their hard working men. In this world, women knit and cook, while men proofread, create books, and pull all-nighters in service to a cause greater than themselves. For the women, the cause greater than themselves is their men. When Majime proposes to his girlfriend he doesn’t ask her to marry him, instead he says: “Please continue to look after me.” 

This is presented as a kind of cozy conservative nostalgia for a world where everyone knew their place, and it tips the viewer off to the fact that The Great Passage is utilizing slowness in the service of nostalgia. Here, slowness is portrayed not for any inherent quality, but because the filmmakers are nostalgic for a bygone world that they feel is best evoked by going veeeerrryyyy slooooowly. 

Japanese directors like Takashi Miike, Sion Sono, Yoshihiro Nishimura, and even Go Shibata, the great lost arthouse director of the 2000’s, demonstrate a hunger for life, an appetite for engagement, a tolerance for the mess and spontaneity of the modern world that differentiates them from the men and women making these slow films that have appropriated the values of CCC and repackaged them in audience (and film festival programmer) friendly formats. Japan’s current crop of slow directors appear to be retreating from the messiness of modernity into the protected playground of the past—a decision no different than Hollywood’s choice to remake every single movie ever released in the Eighties. Both industries, Japan’s and America’s, are terrified of the future, and so they reward clinging to tradition, as they praise an abandonment of the new, and seek refuge in the narcotic embrace of nostalgia.

LINKS! LINKS! LINKS!

... Korean actress Sung Hyun-Ah has been charged with prostitution and may have to pay a 2 million won fine (about $1,900). The star of Kim Ki-duk’s Time (06) and Hong Sang-soo’s Woman Is the Future of Man (04) was accused of meeting three times with a businessman at a hotel for sex, for which he paid $50,000. This single charge is the result of a year-long investigation into an alleged prostitution ring involving Korean actresses that encompassed almost 30 performers. Sung, whose past includes a conviction for using ecstasy in 2002 and an authorized book of nude photos, is believed to be challenging the charge and a final verdict is expected on August 8. 

... The blockbuster Wong Jing gambling movie, From Vegas to Macau, was a huge hit at the Hong Kong and Mainland box office (and is currently playing the New York Asian Film Festival) so it’s no surprise that Wong is shooting a sequel this summer. Joining the cast from part one, which includes Chow Yun-fat, Nic Tse, and Chapman To, will be HK powerhouse actors Nick Cheung and Carina Lau.

... Speaking of Carina Lau, her husband, Tony Leung Chiu-wai is rumored to be starring in the new Wong Kar Wai movie that was just announced.

... The highest-grossing Korean film ever released in the United States is, much to the embarrassment of everyone in the world, D-War, comedian Shim Hyung-Rae’s atrocious special-effects extravaganza about Korean dragons attacking modern day Los Angeles only to be driven back by Jason Behr and Robert Forster. The sequel has just received a $10 million investment from the Vista Cay Hotel Group and is supposed to be set in 1969 against the backdrop of the U.S./USSR space race. Given what an amazing job Shim Hyung-Rae has done of making movies set in America’s past, no one can fail to be completely unexcited by the prospect of his latest movie delving once again into U.S. history.

... The sequel to Donnie Yen and Wilson Yip’s SPL is shooting now, and it’s a headache. Donnie Yen and Wilson Yip avoided this sequel and that’s starting to look like a smart idea. Wu Jing, who played the bad guy in SPL, reactivated an old leg injury and had to get crutches, Soi Cheang (who is currently the director) suffered the unexpected death of his older brother, which delayed the production, and there have been numerous other delays for an infinity of other reasons. Nevertheless, most people are willing to be patient since the movie stars Thailand’s Tony Jaa, Hong Kong’s Francis Ng, Sammo Hung, Andy On, and Simon Yam. Great ass-kicking comes to those who wait.

... It’s “a wanton act of terror!” It’s an “attack on our top leadership!” It’s an “act of war!” And it will require a “resolute and merciless response!” What is this thing that threatens to shake the fate of nations? Seth Rogen and James Franco’s new movie about assassinating North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, The Interview. Looks like the good comrade is Hollywood’s newest marketing genius!

…Then again, maybe it’s all just a bunch of Western hype.

... One of Hong Kong’s great directors, Chor Yuen, is now 79 years old and suffering from mild dementia. It’s nothing to worry about, and his doctor says that stimulating his mind and taking some basic medications will do a lot to improve his quality of life. His wife of 47 years, Nan Hong, has decided to spend more time at home to help him remember to take his meds and assist him as his short-term memory goes and his temper occasionally flares up from frustration. Chor Yuen is one of Shaw Brother’s great wuxia directors of the Seventies and Eighties, forging his own style of wuxia movie (based mostly on Gu Long’s novels) that put the emphasis on dark, tangled mysteries taking place in the martial world, full of secret identities, 180-degree plot turns, exotic weaponry, and a general tone of baroque gothic splendour. If you want to get a taste for what he can do, his movie The Magic Blade is screening at the New York Asian Film Festival this month. It’s one of his best, and you can see in it the seeds for decades of Hong Kong flying swordsman films.

Celebrating its 40th anniversary, the Seattle International Film Festival has maintained a welcoming low profile despite its size (at 25 days it is the longest and largest film festival in the country) and growing reputation. Growth is something of an imperative for the modern film festival, which seeks increased relevance each year, more world premieres and red carpets, greater revenues for the host city. Whether intentionally or not, Seattle has remained a cinephile’s delight, and at 40 most closely resembles Toronto’s TIFF—inaugurated as that city’s “Festival of Festivals,” a showcase culled from the festival circuit, also in the mid-1970s—at say 19, before it changed its name and went Hollywood. It’s a good look.

This year SIFF comprised over 450 films, arranged into shop-friendly categories like “Make Me Laugh,” “Thrill Me,” and “Open My Eyes.” The galas and special presentations, including Boyhood, Dior and I, The Fault in Our Stars, and They Came Together, tended to be films on the cusp of wider release. On the last day of the festival, a final screening of the latter, David Wain’s attenuated spoof on the common romantic comedy, filled Seattle’s historic Egyptian theater with the late-brunch crowd. For the following screening, Abuse of Weakness, Catherine Breillat’s brittle survey of self-loss and exploitation, Wain’s rowdy audience was almost entirely replaced with a more somber group.

Regarding Susan Sontag

Notable among the documentaries showing at SIFF was Regarding Susan Sontag, in which Seattle has a small but terribly potent role. It was to Seattle that Sontag traveled in 2004, desperately ill with a rare blood cancer, to undergo an experimental treatment. It was in Seattle, her son David Rieff describes, that Sontag received a death sentence, in a hospital room overlooking Mount Rainier. She screamed when her doctors told her the treatment had failed: “But this means I’m going to die!” Even more than writing, the film suggests, what Sontag most loved to do was live.

Nancy Kates’s documentary is a reflective look at the life of one of the last American writers to persuasively hold the title of “public intellectual.” Executed in standard biographical style, with archival footage (some gems, including her early Sixties walk-on in an obscure French film) and talking heads, Regarding Susan Sontag can’t help but package its subject, and this process of bundling and shaping has its own interests. Kates, for example, spends significant time reconstructing Sontag’s love life, something Sontag’s sister says she kept a kind of half-secret to the end. Kates connects Sontag’s lesbianism, and more broadly her access to gay subculture, to the thinking behind such essays as “Notes on Camp,” and its influence on the thinking that followed. Still, the recurrent appearance of Harriet Sohmers Zwerling—the only remaining point, in addition to Sontag and playwright María Irene Fornés, in an old love triangle—grows uneasy, as though the recollections of one early lover might suggest an entire sexuality.

Trace Amounts

But then it is the nature of even the most objective-minded documentary to slant and ply its subject matter, something that stayed in mind as I watched Trace Amounts, Eric Gladen and Shiloh Levine’s investigation into the possible connection between autism and childhood vaccines. Gladen began researching the subject after connecting his own sudden illness to a possible mercury poisoning, and lays out in coherent and lucid fashion his argument that using mercury as a vaccine preservative is unnecessary and in fact might be doing great harm. Gladen’s great stress on the unreliability of even the “hardest” scientific information and the pliability of facts can’t help but ricochet throughout Trace Amounts, and not strictly in his favor. Which is not to dismiss the information as presented, much of which is alarming, but to point out the difficulty of achieving clarity, especially via documentary, on a subject as personally and politically charged as this one.

Helicopter Mom

SIFF had a few gala presentations—including Jimi: All Is by My Side, John Ridley’s Jimi Hendrix biopic—but only one “Gay-la,” a traditional slot this year filled by the rather tiresome Nia Vardalos vehicle Helicopter Mom. Salomé Breziner’s sexual-identity comedy made its world premiere at SIFF, the story of a mother (Vardalos) so overbearing that she can’t wait for her son (Jason Dolley) to decide whether he’s gay, straight, or somewhere in between, especially not when there is a scholarship for gay students on the line. Where it concerns Vardalos and her truly egregious behavior (she “outs” her son to the entire school and threatens the young woman on whom he is crushing), the tone of this film sours; despite otherwise genial performances this harshness makes the rest of the film tough to enjoy. The handling of the sexual politics in play is similarly glib, making Helicopter Mom an odd choice for a presentation designed to highlight (rather than travesty) LGBT themes.

You Must Be Joking

Another comedy, You Must Be Joking, made its world premiere to less acrid effect. Director and star Jake Wilson collaborated with co-star Sas Goldberg on the story of a woman misspending her youth, and her dreams of being a stand-up comic, working as a Manhattan paralegal. Goldberg and Wilson (who plays her gay best friend) bring the necessary charisma to a story as friendly to canned humor as it is to genuine freshness, making You Must Be Joking distinctly sweet as well as funny.

This year’s program included films from over 70 countries, and the foreign selections made up most of my viewing highlights, notably Polanski’s beguiling Venus in Fur and Rebecca Zlotowski’s vital Grand Central, in which Léa Seydoux and Tahar Rahim play workers in a nuclear power plant who begin an illicit affair. Lucky Seattle to have had them, among many others, to sample from this spring, where any number of festivals were contained, for considered and considerable viewing pleasure, within this single, great big one.

When Richard Lester asked John Lennon, then relatively new to fame, how he had liked Stockholm, Lennon replied: “It was a plane, a room, a car, and a cheese sandwich.” In A Hard Day’s Night, the Beatles don’t even get the cheese sandwiches. At a meet-and-greet with press, waitresses with drinks and food trays pass though the crowd, but the band are the only ones always out of range of the refreshments. If the title A Hard Day’s Night had been coined by the Stones, you can imagine what delirious hedonism it would have implied—a bacchanalian gig at the London Palladium followed by something like the depressive semi-orgy that concludes Joseph Losey’s The Servant. But with the Fab Four, A Hard Day’s Night means something more down to earth—some fun grabbed here and there, but basically a job of work.

Fifty years ago, the title song’s explosive opening chord and the chase sequence that it kicked off (talk about in media res) opened the floodgates to a liberating and entirely new surge of youthful energy in cinema—so the legend goes. It’s true that few films kick off with such a sense of immediacy: the film just starts with a bang (or rather, a Rickenbacker clang) and carries us right along on its rush (as an integral part of the stylistic boldness, the credits proper are left to the very end, set to a montage of Robert Freeman photo portraits). Yet if there was ever a film in which spontaneity was manifestly manufactured, it’s this one—and the manufacture of spontaneity is what this idiosyncratically cynical masterpiece is all about.

Essentially a backstage musical, AHDN is in the long tradition of shows about shows—a tradition that, however much it’s about spinning a mystique around show business, has always revealed entertainment as essentially un-natural, industrial. AHDN has equal affinities with the two great demystifying BBs of the performance trade: Busby Berkeley and Bertolt Brecht. At one moment, John actually shouts “Let’s put on the show right here!” while launching into a band number in front of TV cameras—which may be one of the first ever examples of overt camp irony in pop music culture. AHDN shows the band constantly Putting On a Show Right Here, and demonstrating the time-honored craft of Making It All Look Easy—a craft that the film celebrates even while it highlights the fakery in such routines. Take the early scene in which the band’s performance of “I Should Have Known Better” emerges smoothly, as if organically, out of a card game in the guard’s car of a train. One moment, the boys are shuffling cards happily, with the song on the soundtrack; the next, guitars and drums have suddenly materialized and they’re actually playing the song in this cage-like space while schoolgirl fans (one of them none other than Pattie Boyd) look on.

It’s one of several moments in which a song seems to just happen—Ringo always grinning along in delight, as if at a private joke. Another such moment is a TV theatre where the band are recording a show: they burst in front of the cameras and run through “I’m Happy Just to Dance with You” as if in defiance of the technicians, to demonstrate that they’re playing to their own agenda, not the show’s. The number seems to happen as a band joke at the world’s expense—but what’s concealed in such a “natural” outburst of joyous artistry (and the point is that we all know that it’s concealed) is the professionalism, the clever arrangements, the pre-show rehearsals, even the seasons of hard slog in Hamburg that had allowed this “natural” phenomenon called the Beatles to happen in the first place.

Counterpointed against all the exuberance, against the band’s natural incorrigible tendency to burst forth into non sequiturs (they’re like characters in the Beano comic, and all the adult world their pompous teacher) is the fact, depicted in quasi-documentary fashion, of stardom as demanding graft—almost a form of servitude. A defining moment in crystallizing the band’s gently rebellious image (their soft-edged version of Brando’s “Whaddya got?” in The Wild One) comes when they are told off by a pompous gent in a railway carriage: to his “I fought the war for your sort,” they reply, “I bet you’re sorry you won.” These four lads, we realize, have had a close squeeze in early 1964; conscription in Britain ended in 1960, but the last National Service conscripts didn’t leave the army till the end of 1963. The Beatles represent a new freedom for British youth, but the ghost of the military order (which Lester and Lennon would twit in 1967’s How I Won the War) hovers over their shoulders.

Youth, despite the Cuban heels and cool suits, can still be pressed into service. In this story—co-written by playwright and TV drama stalwart Alun Owen—the band have their own, rather ineffectual commanding officer, manager Norm (pugnacious actor Norman Rossington, who resembles a large cube of beef compressed into a houndstooth suit) assisted by nervy majordomo Shake (lanky British comedy stalwart John Junkin). They’re forever calling the band to order, however ineffectually; the band are expected to stay in their hotel rooms at night replying to fan letters, just as recalcitrant army recruits would be expected to peel potatoes for hours on end.

Probably quite accurately, the film shows the band’s rebellious energies as being sparked by the exploitative, superior attitudes of the mainly upper-middle-class London media types they come into contact with. They exasperate their TV producer (Victor Spinetti), an agonized aesthete in a pre–Malcolm McLaren mohair jumper and matching hair. There’s a weird disjointed, absurdist backstage conversation between John and a woman (Anna Quayle) who seems to know him, but may be thinking of someone else; it’s a melancholy bit of failed flirtation, but the Quayle character is presented as one of the film’s several potentially predatory, usually older women (others include a ludicrously poised woman at the press conference, and a silent woman shooting the boys glances on a train) who presumably wouldn’t think twice about devouring them.

The extremest form of the condescension they face is when George wanders into the office of some media types who specialize in marketing youth culture: when George uses the word “grotty,” the boss tells his minion, “Make a note of that word and give it to Susan” (Susan being the company’s in-house representative of Youth: “She’s a trend-setter, that’s her profession”). It’s a deliciously sour scene, shot by Gilbert Taylor with an eye for exaggerated Continental-chic angularity—and a neat twist (presumably, given Lester’s adroitness, a deliberate in-joke) is that the boss is played by Kenneth Haigh, who only eight years earlier had created the quintessential Angry Young Man, working-class rebel Jimmy Porter, in John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger: a one-man Beatles avant la lettre for British literary culture.

Watched 50 years on, in the crisp and bright new restoration by Criterion Collection that is getting a nationwide theatrical release, AHDN feels fresh in that particular way that films do when you’re far enough away to shake off all those layers of over-familiarity that have mummified them for years. What becomes new again is the way that a film that once embodied the New Thing can begin again to look old—can properly be seen afresh as a snapshot of a bygone era. What we see again in AHDN today is an England that, certainly to British viewers, looked drably antediluvian for years, but now looks as distant and mysterious as ancient Egypt—and yet, close enough to be uncannily recognizable. As a British viewer of (let’s admit it) a certain age, there are elements visible in AHDN that I’m old enough to remember—just. I’m thinking of the Scala Theatre that once existed in the West End; of the joyless grubbiness of London railway terminuses; and of the film’s most exotically bizarre object, the pyramidal milk carton that Norman Rossington buys from a vending machine.

This re-release offers a refreshed glimpse of a long-lost English Atlantis—and a farewell to it. The film shows the Beatles trapped in an antique showbiz universe—performing at the kind of ridiculous variety show that would indiscriminately put together a magician’s dove act, a cheesy dance routine (Lionel Blair, a British hoofer of astounding longevity but proverbial tackiness), and a bit of Viennese light operetta, plus the hot pop act of the moment. But it ends with the band flying away from it, and hoisting their own glamorous flag of jet-setting Sixties modernity—making their exit in a helicopter, from which cascade hundreds of their publicity photos. But they’re still trapped in the day job—at the end of this story, they’re headed not for Shea Stadium and transatlantic glory, but for Wolverhampton, about the least glamorous place a band could expect to set up its amps. You can bet the cheese sandwiches there won’t be anything to write home about.

There is a long-standing tendency on the part of the critical caste, when providing historical context, to assume the voice of a firsthand witness. This allows you to fall back on the accepted version of what a time was with an unassailable air of comprehensive knowledge, and so to discuss how a film might be said to be representative of its own time, or at odds with it. If we are talking about a film made in Britain in the Eighties, for one example, we might spare a word for the miners’ strike, or “Thatcherism,” and let things stand at that. Such an approach gratifies the writer’s ego, because his subject now is no longer merely a film, but world history—even though this dutiful name-check brings us no closer to the reality of what it meant to have a policeman’s truncheon ricocheted off one’s skull in the streets of South Yorkshire, nor any closer to receiving the film as it was first received.

The Big Racket

I have been thinking about such matters over the previous week, because I was at Anthology Film Archives, dutifully attending screenings of a program called “The Italian Connection: Poliziotteschi and Other Italo-Crime Films of the 1960s and 70s.” It’s a series that seemed, in a sense, inevitable, as New York in recent years has hosted retrospectives dedicated to the spaghetti Western and the giallo, with sprinklings of Italian horror-fantasy in between. It was only a matter of time, then, until the other great genre group from the most bustling years of Italian pop cinema, the poliziotteschi (literally, “police-related”), got its moment in the spotlight. Thanks to the efforts of home-video companies like Minneapolis-based Raro Video USA or the dearly departed NoShame, the poliziotteschi has enjoyed a raised profile in recent years, and now it has had its own retro. (Can a full-scale revival of the peplum be far behind? Two weeks of Maciste at Film Society of Lincoln Center?)

Inevitable or no, a great deal of work went into actually making “The Italian Connection” happen. The series was the work of Alessio Giorgetti, Alessio Grana, and Yunsun Chae, collaborating under the auspices of the “Malastrana Film Series,” a non-profit whose announced intention is “to bring to the screen under-seen, under-appreciated genre films from Europe to audiences everywhere.” This is no small undertaking—quoted in a Wall Street Journal article, Film Forum’s Bruce Goldstein attested that his three-week program of spaghettis was “the most difficult series [he’d] ever put together,” and many of the same hurdles he faced, including a “maze of ownership copyrights” and dearth of quality prints, would be a factor in putting together any program based around Italian genre films. The Malastrana gang have gotten good results thus far, however, having previously herded together enough titles for Anthology’s fine 2012 “Giallo Fever!” series. With “The Italian Connection,” they had the help of Cineteca Nazionale, Italy’s national film archive; the Blue Underground DVD label and its head, William Lustig; and Harry Guerro, presumably the “collector in New Jersey” identified in the WSJ article.

Bandits in Milan

The demarcation lines separating the spaghetti Western, the giallo, and the poliziotteschi are by no means hard-and-fast boundaries. The heyday of the spaghetti came first chronologically, and it was singular in that it transposed one national saga (Italian) onto another (American), with dark, southern Italian-looking actors frequently playing Mexican proles, and fair northern-looking actors playing gringo exploiters. A sterling example of the former phenomenon is Gian Maria Volonté’s work in Sergio Leone’s first two Dollars films—and Volonté is in three of the strongest films in “The Italian Connection” lineup, 1967’s We Still Kill the Old Way, 1970’s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (both by Elio Petri), and 1968’s Bandits in Milan (aka The Violent Four, by Carlo Lizzani).

I have some unresolved spaghetti Western issues which, I am wholly willing to confess, are founded in Yankee chauvinism: while I can accept the Paramount backlot as Paris, I can’t accept the Dolemites as Monument Valley. (If a film is going to sweepingly indict a way of life, one should expect some basic fidelity to the facts of what that way of life looked and felt like. It’s hard to trust generalities when the particulars are fudged.) The giallo and poliziotteschi, however, returned Italian genre filmmaking to specifically Italian settings—for the most part, at least. (“Giallo Fever!” entry Perversion Story was shot in San Francisco, while “Italian Connection” had Giuliano Montaldo’s Rio de Janeiro-set Grand Slam.) It is tempting to say that the giallo and poliziotteschi were both, in their way, reflective of repression in contemporary Italian society—the giallo dealing with violence rooted in sexual confusion, the poliziotteschi creating a space that allowed for the expression of political frustration. At times, the two overlap in such a manner as to be practically indistinguishable, as in Massimo Dallamano’s 1974 What Have They Done to Your Daughters?, which not only has a hanging-question giallo title, but a black-leather-clad, dirt-bike-riding assassin who uses a butcher’s cleaver to silence anyone inclined to squeal about a schoolgirl prostitution ring. (It’s also rife with the narrative confusion typical of giallo—after the big reveal of the murderer, myself and three other theoretically intelligent adults couldn’t come to any conclusive opinion as to who the revealed killer actually was.)

What Have They Done to Your Daughters?

While roughly analogous to the American/Anglo/French police procedural tradition, the defining attributes of the poliziotteschi may be boiled down to two words: disorientation and rage. These also happened to be prevalent emotions, at least among a certain segment of the populace, in the years during which the poliziotteschi were at peak popularity. These were, perhaps not coincidentally, also the years when the prolonged postwar reign of the Christian Democracy party was at the height of its venality and flagrant corruption, and when the activity of the Brigado Rosso and other left-wing terrorist/freedom-fighter organizations was at its most fearless and ruthless.

When we try to contextualize these movies, it’s invariably in terms of the Anni di piombo (“Years of Lead”), as surely as “film noir” goes with “postwar” and “Fellini” goes with “Il Boom.” Anni di piombo is an easy term to copy-and-paste into a paragraph and, in so doing, lend yourself an air of learned credibility, but the fact of the matter is that if you were, like myself, born into a relatively affluent and placid society, if the worst thing that has ever happened to you is having to wriggle out of a light jacket while in the driver’s seat of a car at a red light, you don’t have any idea what it all means, and all the dates and figures in the world will only get you so much closer.

Rabid Dogs

Dates and figures being all that we have on hand, let’s roll them out all the same. There was already a healthy running body count on December 12, 1969 when what everyone seems to agree was the big event happened. A bomb went off at the headquarters of the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura in Milan, killing 17 people and injuring nearly 90 more. Responsibility was at first attributed to left-wing anarchists, although in time suspicion fell on the far-right organization Ordine Nuovo, and in decades to come, politically advantageous accusations would be directed towards CIA operatives and the U.S.-NATO intelligence network, all proceedings carried out with the supreme efficacy and competence that has made Italy’s justice system the envy of the free world. (L’affaire Amanda Knox, incidentally, is ready-made for a giallo.) The Piazza Fontana bombing was Italy’s own Haymarket affair—and more than once in poliziotteschi you can find someone bemoaning the fact that Italy has become “Like Chicago.” (There’s even a 1968 film called Roma come Chicago (Bandits in Rome), starring one John Cassavetes.)

The following decade was soundtracked to the beat of daily explosions, bombs in trains and at public demonstrations, firefights between the Brigado Rosso and the carabinieri, activists being hauled in for questioning before taking suspicious swan dives out of police station windows, planned coups, and kidnappings in broad daylight. The most noteworthy of these occurred on March 16, 1978, when Aldo Moro, former prime minister and head of the Christian Democracy Party, was snatched by the Brigado Rosso on Via Mario Fani. Fifty-five days later, after the process of negotiation had become hopelessly stymied, Moro was finally recovered, ventilated with bullets from a 9mm Walther PPK and stuffed into the boot of a parked Renault 4. All of this, it should be added, only covers the overtly politicized violence—dates and figures can’t hope to contain the rest.

The Moro Affair

The killing didn’t stop with Moro—not by a long shot—but this was a tough act to follow. The circumstances of Moro’s seizure and death were put under scrutiny in a posthumous literary deconstruction, 1978’s The Moro Affair, by Leonardo Sciascia. Born in an impoverished hill town in Sicily, Sciascia became a parliamentarian in Rome and Strasbourg, although he was best known during his lifetime, as today, for his efforts as a litterateur, particularly critical of the Christian Democracy power block. Petri’s We Still Kill the Old Way was based on Sciascia’s 1966 novel A ciascuno il suo (To Each His Own), the first of many cinematic adaptations of his work. In the film, a professor investigating a double homicide discovers that the threatening letters received by one of the victims were composed with cut-up headlines cut from L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper. Similarly, The Moro Affair is a work of epistolary deduction: beginning by evoking the still-recent death of his friend, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sciascia reviews and reads between the lines of the “between 50 and 60” letters written by the kidnapped Moro before and after he was tried and condemned to death by his captors, and the official responses that his communiques elicited from his so-called friends in government. The conclusion is that Moro’s execution by the Brigado Rosso was made to suit the political purposes of the Christian Democrat establishment, and that in a system in which control was so total, political violence could only serve to reinforce rather than undermine the status quo. In this, Moro’s ideas are in line with that of two films about leftist terrorism made by preeminent filmmakers of the decade, Claude Chabrol’s Nada (1974) and, particularly, R.W. Fassbinder’s The Third Generation (1979). This political disillusion also fed into the pessimism of the poliziotteschi, which begin with the assumption that the game is rigged, and the house always wins.

The totally amoral lower-class banditti of the poliziotteschi, born and bred in subhuman circumstances, are politically motivated only insomuch as hunger is political. They are more beasts than men—a fact reflected in titles like 1974’s Rabid Dogs and Almost Human. The first-named is the penultimate film by Mario Bava, the dean of Italian horror, who had helped to codify the giallo in baroque, high-gloss thrillers like The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) and Blood and Black Lace (1964). A cinematographer’s son and himself a cinematographer, Bava seems to have approached the story of three seemingly solid citizens hauled off on the lam by three vile desperados as a game—how to create a visually dynamic film almost entirely within the confines of a moving automobile, all short lenses and cramped compositions. Almost Human is the work of the sporadically brilliant Umberto Lenzi, a famously contentious and abusive director who here goads a career-high performance from Tomas Milian, playing a small-time slum footpad with Godfather ambitions named Giulio Sacchi. (Lenzi’s next poliziotteschi outing, 1976’s Violent Naples, merits mention as almost certainly the best movie to include someone having their face shredded by a funicular car.)

Almost Human

Sacchi is inspired to go into business for himself after he botches his part in a professional job and takes a savage beating from his bosses. An excerpt from the Wikipedia plot synopsis captures something of the tenor of the film that follows: “Following a castration threat, the kidnapper/thief goes home to rape his girlfriend.” That girlfriend works for a multimillionaire whom Sacchi decides to relieve of some of his assets by way of absconding with his daughter. Before he’s even put in his ransom request, Sacchi has knifed a policeman for a few lira and forced a young gentryman to fellate him after crashing a party at a country home with a grease gun. This is as good a time as any to mention that, with his shag haircut and aviator glasses, Milan’s Sacchi is a dead ringer for Liam Gallagher. 

Henry Silva’s Commissario Walter Grandi follows the trail of corpses left by Sacchi, but the justice system interferes with Grandi’s ability to punish the guilty, and so he is finally forced to exact vigilante justice on his hated nemesis. The poliziotteschi film wasn’t only a reflection of or reaction to the pervasive sense of political despair, but also to contemporary currents in pop cinema, with Don Siegel’s 1971 Dirty Harry—starring no less an Italian-American icon than Leone’s Man with No Name—a particularly important reference point. While Harry Callahan San Francisco PD inspector is hamstrung by plea-bargaining judges who teach constitutional law at Berkeley, in the poliziotteschi the enemy is an endemic, systematic corruption that has spread to the very highest levels of government, implicating capitalists, clergy, and their allies in the mafia. The totality of this conspiracy is most articulately laid out in We Still Kill the Old Way—and if you think it’s mere paranoia, you might do yourself a favor by reading up on the Mani pulite affair. In such circumstances, the only justice that can be done must necessarily be done outside of the system. Like Commissario Grandi, Martin Balsam’s exasperated title character in Damiano Damiani’s Confessions of a Police Captain finds the only law at the point of a gun, deciding that the best way to deal with Luciano Catenacci’s construction magnate-mobster, who’s survived multiple arrests with no conviction, is to shoot him down in cold blood. (Silva and Balsam are both expatriated Americans; as with other Italian genre films, the poliziotteschi was a home for expat actors who, either because of age, alcoholism, or general career stalling, sought their fortunes in Hollywood on the Tiber.)

Confessions of a Police Captain

Damiani was a Friulian countryman and friend of Pasolinis. He directed one of the most overtly political of the spaghettis, 1966’s A Bullet for the General, as well as, with 1968’s Mafia, a screen adaptation of Sciascia’s most famous novel, The Day of the Owl. (I’ve also long been intrigued by the title of a 1972 crime film that Damiani made with Nero, which might’ve make a good subtitle for this series: The Case Is Closed, Forget It.) Beginning in the immediate postwar period, Damiani cut his teeth in documentaries, and the integration of pseudo-documentary elements is one of the defining elements of the ripped-from-the-Corriere della Sera headlines style of the poliziotteschi. This might be attributed to the legacy of neorealism, unavoidable in postwar Italian cinema—Bandits in Milan director Lizzani was a former assistant to Roberto Rossellini, Giuseppe De Santis, and Alberto Lattuada. Another just-as-likely source, however, are the newsreel overtures frequently seen in American crime films of the 1940s, à la T-Men.

Whatever the case, it is quite typical for a poliziotteschi to open like a case file. Here, for example, is the text that begins What Have They Done to Your Daughters?:

Every day we read or hear about brutal things that happen which appear to have no logical explanation. Only a faithful reconstruction of such incidents can bring to light the dramatic and disturbing truth behind them.

Almost Human

Similarly, after Milian’s Sacchi dies squirming on a heap of garbage in Almost Human, an end-credit title informs us that Commissario Grandi was jailed for taking the law into his own hands. Bandits in Milan—in which Milian appears as the police commissioner, and a volcanic Volonté as the ruthless ringleader of a band of bank robbers—does this one better, beginning with verite-style you-are-there views of a lynch mob riot, then incorporating a barrage of headlines, archival photographs, cheeky on-screen reenactments-within-reenactments, and talking head-style “interviews” with the personnel, in which Milian direct-addresses the camera. The film recounts the events surrounding a messy bank job in which three innocent bystanders were killed; the details are those of an actual case which occurred in September 1967, with Volonté playing Piero Cavallero, the real-life leader of the infamous Cavallero gang. Unlike Giulio Sacchi, Cavallero is sufficiently educated to put a polish of politics on his own murder and extortion. Shrugging off the collateral damage of his raids, Cavallero says: “More people get killed in Vietnam all the time.” (If you’ve ever heard that old phony Wes Craven talk about The Last House on the Left, this may sound familiar.) In its rapid-fire accumulation of damning evidence, its scenes leaping among a slew of different locations which together outline the operations of a society-wide criminal iniquity, Bandits in Milan reminds me of nothing so much as Kinji Fukasaku’s Battles Without Honor and Humanity films. Nearer to home, however, it may be said to build a bridge between the film-inchiesta (film investigation) genre—the best-known example of which is probably Francesco Rosi’s 1962 Salvatore Giuliano, though Lizzani made several films in the mold himself—and the poliziotteschi.

Even poliziotteschi that don’t overtly incorporate documentary and newsreel techniques crib from the documentary aesthetic: Rabid Dogs contains a handful of identifiable set pieces of the sort that one associates with Bava, though for the most part the film finds the director exploring a new, immediate, sensorial style. If, in The Girl Who Knew Too Much, Bava began his own reinterpretation of Hitchcock, Rabid Dogs is his The Wrong Man. Its almost subjective savagery prophesizes the you-are-there thriller of the future—though what for Bava is a cinematographic exercise would become a lazy fall-back routine for less inquisitive minds. The film’s style has been absorbed, through its frothing disgust remains piquant. We can certainly feel the heat of its hate—even if we can only make a gesture towards understanding its roots.

On a gorgeous Friday night in May, on a former railway bridge lit up in neon that overlooks the Arkansas River, the cultural cognoscenti of Little Rock scarfed hot dogs alongside a New York gang leader, a Middle Eastern revolutionary, a Texas goat farmer, and a small army of filmmakers. It was the night after everyone tore into crawfish at a country-punk hootenanny, the night before a dance party in a functioning light-bulb factory, and two nights before a boozy cruise on a riverboat, where any remaining lines between artists and programmers, volunteers and trustees of the Little Rock Film Festival disappeared amid Beyoncé sing-alongs. In between there were films—many very good films—that fueled conversations at those parties, as well as in lobbies and taverns on and around West Markham Street.

Good films, free beer, elevated discourse, and small town resourcefulness—all were in abundance in Little Rock, as they are in regional festivals throughout North America. They certainly were the week prior at the larger Maryland Film Festival in Baltimore, which set up its own self-contained “tent village” within which filmmakers, critics, and pass holders could commune and consume. These two fests are successive stops on the film festival circuit, tucked between April opportunities in Tribeca, Sarasota, and San Francisco, and June ones in Seattle, D.C., and Brooklyn—among still others. All have staked out spots on the calendar, and the good lord and Stella Artois know that good times are to be had on those dates, but to what greater gain? When a film festival has few premieres to offer, no marketplace for the showcasing, selling, or funding of films, and little-to-no national profile, what, beyond filmmakers’ egos and local pride, could possibly be at stake?

Quite a lot, it turns out. While it would be misleading to earnestly equate two vastly different worlds, the adage that “all politics is local” does have resonance within independent film culture, perhaps now more than ever.

With Sundance no longer the feeding frenzy it once was, acquisitions have migrated deeper into the festival calendar. More films have to prove themselves on the spring and summer festival circuit, hoping to gain positive notices, especially from trade publications that overlooked them at previous stops. Furthermore, these festivals grant these films what may be their only screenings in an actual movie theater, as exhibition models continue to move away from theatrical to online platforms. And even if a theatrical release comes to fruition, these festival screenings are likely to provide the largest, and most responsive, audiences they’ll ever have. So it’s not just another screening in another town: with such limited theatrical options, every showing is precious and meaningful.

Meanwhile, as this year’s Maryland and Little Rock film festivals demonstrated, one extended, film-focused spring weekend can do more than temporarily stimulate local spending—it can help shape the geography, and even the architecture, of a city. Which in turn, or at least ideally, tills the terrain for locally grown film culture. 

Ne-Me-Quitte-Pas

In May, the Little Rock Film Festival celebrated its eighth year by moving into a brand-new screening and event space, The Ron Robinson Theater. This 315-seat, DCI-compliant and Dolby 7.1-equipped venue was built to be the flagship of the Central Arkansas Library System’s main campus, but also to host the annual film festival as well as film screenings year-round courtesy of festival founders/directors Brent and Craig Renaud—two local boys (and globe-trotting, award-winning filmmakers) who’ve made very good by growing a transient weekend event into something fixed and physically grounded. The theater wasn’t always brim-full during the festival, but every attendee now knows exactly where to come next May and in the months between for singular cinema like Ne Me Quitte Pas, the Samuel Beckett-meets-Jackass tragicomedy that took home the Jury Prize for Cinematic Nonfiction. The ascent of high-profile small-town festival True/False was unthinkable without its hip hub, the Ragtag Cinema, and now Little Rock has one of its own to build upon.

That’s the idea behind an ambitious, if risky, initiative by the Maryland Film Festival, which has parted ways with the premier art-house of Baltimore, the Charles Theater, to build a place of its own. Last fall, the festival announced that it would be restoring the Parkway Theater, a once-majestic but long-abandoned and bedraggled old movie-house on the corner of Charles Street and North Avenue. The restoration is part of the city’s larger initiative to jumpstart the Station North Arts & Entertainment District, an area that contains upstart galleries, theaters, and the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), as well as a legion of shuttered storefronts. Though it’s going to be several years before the Parkway is shipshape—the plan is to be operational for MIFF 2017—the festival deepened its roots in the district with this year’s event, setting up its tent village two blocks over from the Parkway, and further afield from the Charles, which, according to various accounts, dissociated from the festival in less-than-friendly terms.

For MIFF, the challenge facing this year’s edition (and at least two more to come) is to maintain a coherent identity as well as an air of eventfulness without a true home base. After 16 years on the scene, it’s likely that the festival will be able to survive the instability for a few years, but it might take some more ingenuity than what was on display this time around. Venues were spread out just a little too far for migrating between screenings, and varied in quality from a handsome and spacious university auditorium to a no-frills lecture room dominated by conference tables (jerry-rigged spaces can contribute to the charm of a festival, but there’s little charm to a nondescript classroom). Such diffusion made the tent village, with its locally provided footstalls and charming outdoor space for discussion panels (I participated in a talk that, thanks to a sudden thunderstorm, felt like the denouement of White Squall), a crucial gathering place. After hours, the Lord Baltimore Hotel, which housed most of the guests of the fest and stands far from the Station North district, became the de facto social center.

Young Bodies Heal Quickly

Conditions and logistics may not have been ideal, but MIFF certainly made the best of it in terms of programming. Between formally daring documentaries like Actress, The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga, and Approaching the Elephant (all of which debuted at True/False), and whatsit fiction narratives like Buzzard, Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, and Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, the festival stumped heartily on behalf of true American indies. Two of the best films I saw over the weekend worked at diametrically opposite ends of the formal spectrum, underscoring just how ludicrous it is to hang today’s new waves onto any kind of peg.

Forget pegs, categories, or even genres—Andrew T. Betzer’s Young Bodies Heal Quickly seems to be figuring itself out as it goes. I say seems because it’s all by design, matching the journey of two directionless young boys on the lam with a narrative that hurtles heedlessly forward. At times the film comes across as fable, particularly when the boys bunk up with their estranged and reclusive father for lessons in manhood, and throughout there’s a feel of unreality, of performers playing out these scenarios rather than emerging from them (actors Gabriel Croft and Hale Lytle are identified only as “Older” and “Younger” in the credits). But given the fact that masculinity is both the subject and material reality of the film—Croft gives and takes a beating from first frame to last, while Lytle, the prototypical baby brother, scrambles and mimics and mopes in his wake—the acting out of roles is precisely the point. Such is underscored during an extended final sequence set within a Vietnam War reenactment, where impulses of aggression are given outlet without any sense of parameters or outlet for escape. And neither does Betzer offer us one, instead leaving us to wonder where and how any of it ever ends. 

Wild Canaries

Fresh from its premiere at SXSW, Lawrence Michael Levine’s Wild Canaries sets a Keystone Kops comedy within a millennial relationship meltdown, fluidly toggling between spit-takes and door slams. While Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery is an overt touchstone (a squabbling New York couple get embroiled in what may or may not be a criminal situation involving a deceased neighbor), I was also reminded of the broadly smart larks of Andrew Bergman, in which lightly comedic conceits are repositories for morally muddy human behavior. In addition to proving adept at constructing and choreographing scenes that function as both farce and suspense, Levine proves to be a first-rate comedian, mugging for laughs without seeming vain or desperate for them, and expertly exploiting the Allen/Brooks/Arkin sweet spot where relatable and risible, schemer and put-upon overlap. That such an accessible, classically conceived film should struggle to find distribution says more about the criminally skittish indie industry than it does about the film’s appeal. Audiences ate it up in Baltimore, as doubtless they did The In-Laws and Lost in America decades hence. The difference is that now festivals like MIFF present the best, if not the only, way for big screen-worthy films to be seen.  

Two Step

The following weekend in Little Rock I saw similarly accessible films likewise marooned by the industry’s current mealymouthedness. Nifty Texas noir Two Step gets us acclimated to its community of fully realized and differentiated characters before letting blood flow or bullets fly—which is another way of saying that writer/director Alex R. Johnson dares honor the bygone art of cinematic storytelling. It’s a film in which costs—human, financial, moral—are always fully counted and felt. Anything goes once a depressed college student, a Sontag-haired barfly beauty, and a rangy ex-con scammer drift into the same deadly orbit, but we know exactly how they got there, and what they all stand to lose.

Five Star

Thematically conversant with Young Bodies Heal Quickly but steeped in a very different culture, Five Star tracks a young man’s path-finding in a Bedford-Stuyvesant gang. Starved for male guidance after the death of a father he barely knew, John (John Diaz) comes under the wing of Primo (James Grant), a charismatic gang leader who navigates seamlessly between skull-crushing vengeance and parental tenderness. As with previous feature Welcome to Pine Hill, writer-director Keith Miller not only enlisted nonprofessional actors from the region in which the film was set and shot, but collaborated on conceiving a story that would be evocative of their experiences. Miller’s project may be worthy, but it also makes for good movies. Grant is such a natural in front of the camera that Miller gives him an extended, single-take, cold-opening monologue about prison, parenthood, and regret (all of it autobiographical, according to the actor)—the kind of scene that only a star can pull off.

Grant discussed his checkered past after a screening at the Rep Theater, a handsome double-balconied theater/music venue up Main Street. He marveled at the unlikelihood of his path leading to an art-house crowd in Arkansas, but in truth a film like Five Star belongs here as much as it belongs anywhere. Fifteen yards from the Rep sits R.A.O. Video, an anachronistically cavernous video rental shop with an enviable collection of movies, TV shows, and porn on DVD and, yes, VHS cassettes. No one in R.A.O. seemed to know or care that a world-class film festival was going on next door, but neither had they received the message that only teenage boys watch movies anymore, or that any movie unattached to a superhero or sequel might as well not exist at all. If you took out a U.S. map and pointed to where a giant video store, replete with cheeky subcategories for Jason Statham, Wesley Snipes, and “the Baldwin Brothers,” might still thrive in 2014 (as it has since 1977), it’s unlikely your fingers would stray beyond the coasts.

Stop the Pounding Heart

Nor would you pick the Little Rock Film Festival as the likeliest home for documentarian Robert Greene’s Cinematic Nonfiction sidebar, which included “challenging” fare like Spray & Velez’s Manakamana and Roberto Minervini’s Stop the Pounding Heart. Assumptions about what kinds of films play best where get subverted awfully quickly when you actually watch a movie in communities like Little Rock or Columbia, Missouri, and see people engage enthusiastically with works of formal experimentation and moral ambiguity. Or when you witness actor-subjects Sara and Tim Carlson serving as flawless ambassadors for Stop the Pounding Heart, a film that creates a moody, alien-eyed fiction out of their day-to-day lives as devout Christians on a Texas farm. They’re happy to distinguish between what’s documentary and what Minervini exaggerated or concocted, but only by way of illuminating a work of art they respect and seem to adore. Throughout the weekend Tim and Sara could be seen attending films you might not expect them to care for, but like everyone else in attendance, as well as those visiting from near and far, they were clearly up for it.    

Few movies have challenged the notion that unconventional art belongs only in rarified air as boisterously as Living Stars, another Cinematic Nonfiction entry. Either the year’s most accessible experimental movie or its most avant-garde viral video, Mariano Cohn and Gaston Duprat’s 63-minute charmer is comprised entirely of Argentines dancing to popular songs in their homes and places of work. In April, at the Hot Docs Film Festival, I watched a multiplex audience largely comprised of retirement age Torontonians go apeshit for the thing, a scene that I then saw replicated in Little Rock at Stickyz, an aptly named low-lit BBQ bar populated by hipsters and filmmakers. Outside of Chaplin shorts and maybe The Muppet Movie, I’ve never seen a motion picture elicit such a joyful response.

Living Stars

The film might be impossible to distribute due to licensing costs (Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Daft Punk, Katy Perry are all excerpted, not to mention Right Said Fred, the Spice Girls, and Lionel Richie), but it’s all too easy to imagine distributors taking a pass anyway. What is it? What’s the model? And who’s the audience? In brief: it’s a movie that, when given the chance, many people enjoy. That fewer people have seen a film like Living Stars than would, could, or should have seen it isn’t a problem with audiences—it’s a problem with the business. Until the business gets its problems sorted out, festivals like Little Rock and Maryland are far from being self-contained blips on the film fest calendar. They’re absolutely, utterly essential to film culture. And they respect films, filmmakers and audiences far better than pretty much any theatrical release platform currently in play.

Hong Kong is a very culturally conservative city, so why was the top-grossing movie of this past Chinese New Year Golden Chickensss, the latest installment in comedienne Sandra Ng’s franchise about a somewhat stupid and extremely happy hooker that features a blow-job parlor, actors swallowing big gulps of baby batter, glory shots of 32-G breasts bouncing in super-slo-mo, plenteous dick jokes, and lots and lots and lots of sex for hire?

Golden Chickensss

The short answer is: Chinese culture is full of sex. Of Buddhism’s three “impious acts,” having no children is sometimes considered the worst, and that means having sex gets a lot of cultural attention. Two classics of Chinese literature are Jin Ping Mei (aka The Golden Lotus) a filthy porno book published in 1610, and The Carnal Prayer Mat, another porn novel published in 1675. Doing their part to uphold tradition, Hong Kong has been making sex films for almost 50 years. 

Hong Kong’s earliest sex flicks were the “animal comedies” of the late Sixties and early Seventies, which were basically Porky’s for businessmen. When free broadcast television appeared in 1967, the city was going through political and cultural growing pains, and sex was popping up in nightclubs, which were suddenly offering everything from bodypainting, to lady wrestling, to nude shoeshines.

Lucky Seven

Looking to lure butts into seats by offering what television couldn’t, and inspired by what was going on in the clubs, the “animal comedies” started spurting up on screen. Cheap, fast, tacky, and tasteless, they were about a bunch of guys lusting after the same girl and vying to get her in bed first. How a Strange Hero Thrice Teased an Unruly Girl (68), O.K. (69), Lucky Seven (70), Lucky Seven Strike Again (70), and Triangular Round Bed (70) were basically the forerunners of many far more family-friendly comedies of the Eighties. As the actresses (usually Tina Ti or Lee Hung) bedded politicians, blackmailed them into giving them cash, and lured them away from their wives, they demonstrated a hardheaded business sense, kneeling before their beds and praying “This bed is like a vessel of money” before making whoopee. Meanwhile, the guys spied on them in the showers, drooled over them, stared at their breasts, and hid in closets. It was all pretty chaste, especially compared to what would come later, and scenes of actual lovemaking were almost nonexistent. 

Then came Sampan (69), an Australian film shot in Hong Kong that featured the city’s first full-frontal female nudity. Inspired by its scandalous success, Lee Hung stopped working as an actress and began to produce her own softcore films in 1970, as did Lu Chi, an actor who had played young romantic heroes in the early Sixties and then started producing low-budget sex films for Shaw Brothers. But it wasn’t until the one-two punch of Deep Throat (72) and Chor Yuen’s lesbian wuxia revenge flick, Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan (72), that everyone’s pants came off. In 1973, Lu Chi delivered Sexy Girls of Denmark and Adultery Chinese Style, Kuei Chi-hung’s explicit Shaw Brothers women-in-prison flick Bamboo House of Dolls hit screens, Ho Fan’s Adventure in Denmark came out, and marquee director Li Han-hsiang made Illicit Desire. 

Li Han-hsiang was one of the crown jewels of Shaw Brothers, but he swung between making popular blockbusters and raunchy sex flicks. Illicit Desire was advertised as being full of nudity, but it was actually full of calligraphy, cow-stealing, and diarrhea jokes. However, his later films like Cheat to Cheat (73), Scandal (74), The Golden Lotus (74), Sinful Confession (74), That’s Adultery! (75), and Crazy Sex (76) delivered on the promise of their posters promising plenty of skin and sin. 

Bruce Lee & I

In 1976, Shaw Brothers took a long piss all over the grave of Bruce Lee by producing Bruce Lee & I, a supposed “true story” by his mistress, Betty Ting Pei, who also starred in the movie alongside Danny Lee playing Bruce. Angry that they hadn’t been able to sign the now-dead superstar, Shaw’s film portrayed him as a playboy with a trampoline for a bed, and Betty as a naive girl sexually exploited by various non-Shaw producers. The following year, Shaw cashed in on the real-life starlet sex scandals they’d hinted at in Bruce Lee & I, with The Call-Girls. The first scenes of this movie are actual interviews with Shaw’s stable of stars and directors, who comment on the casting-couch scandals then sweeping through the film industry, before acting out sleazy vignettes of the thinly veiled actresses being exploited; Danny Lee returned as an investigator of these crimes. 

The Eighties didn’t see many erotic films being made because the film business was doing so well that no one needed them. But then, in 1988, a film rating system was established in Hong Kong, with Category III (aka Cat III) set aside for movies that contained nudity, sex, or triad language. Producers pounced. In 1990, out of the 1,200 movies submitted for a rating, 500 were Cat III. Amy Yip appeared in a new iteration of The Carnal Prayer Mat called Sex & Zen which owed a debt to the ribald spirit of the earlier animal comedies and spun off two sequels and, in 2011, a 3-D version. Violence entered the picture with true-crime movies like Dr. Lamb (92) and Remains of a Woman (93) that included plenty of sex with their gruesome gore. Sex and violence were swirled into queasy-making cocktails in semi-true-crime movies like the infamous Red To Kill (94) about a necrophiliac serial rapist who’s headmaster of a school for retarded adults. And Wong Jing gave the genre his own schlocky stamp when he unleashed his Raped by an Angel series, racking up five installments, the first directed by Andrew “Infernal Affairs” Lau.

3-D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy

In the Nineties, as the film business crashed and burned, actresses began to get push-back from audiences for appearing in sex films, and theaters started balking at screening them, realizing that tawdry low-budget Cat III movies didn’t pull in the numbers that a big popular hit would. Today the genre is all but dead. The lure of 3-D made 3-D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy and 3-D Naked Ambition successful, with busloads of Mainland tourists attending special screenings of 3-D Sex & Zen as part of their tour package, but the days when Cat III movies dominated screens are long past. 

Sandra Ng’s Golden Chicken movies are not Cat III, but instead the on-the-border Cat IIB, but they’re almost all that remains of this gloriously ribald tradition in which sex was a big messy playpen where directors could frolic. Asked about her upcoming plans, she claims she wants to produce Golden Duck, a movie about male hookers in Hong Kong, saying that men who sleep with women for money are a common sight these days.

ALL THE FLAVORS OF CAT III

Cat III has as many different genres as the Kama Sutra has positions. Here are a few of the most popular:

The Series

Erotic Ghost Story I

There are so many sex series it’s hard to keep up, but the big ones are the Erotic Ghost Story series, the Sex & Zen series, and the Yu Pui Tsuen (Golden Lotus) series. Of these, it’s not until part two that the filmmakers really start firing on all cylinders. Erotic Ghost Story I is a sweet, retro charmer about some fox spirits learning to have sex with human men. Erotic Ghost Story II (91) is a “WTF was that?!?” movie in which Anthony Wong in a white fright-wig and thick makeup, looking like a refugee from a Kabuki-themed music video, plays a horny demon. Lovers are encased in ice that can only be melted by the smoking-hot naked bodies of their women; there are baths of blood and lots of flying, and it will basically melt your face off. Sex & Zen II (96) contains ejaculation contests, castration, the screen debut of Shu Qi (now a full-fledged movie star who appears in Hou Hsiao-hsien films), and features lines like, “Your vagina is a labyrinth.”

Over the Top

Naked Killer

Cat III is the realm of over-the-top excess, and the granddaddy is Naked Killer (92), Wong Jing and Clarence Fok’s much-loved cult classic about a war between two teams of dueling lesbian hit-women and the man they love. Featuring penis-eating, poisoned lipstick, and exploding hats, this is an endless, all-you-can-eat buffet of cheesy delights. Later, a more restrained all-male version called Cheap Killers (98) appeared. Also from Wong Jing is A Chinese Torture Chamber Story, a parody of the demure period sex film, this time featuring all the exotic tortures of the Imperial court in a movie that centers on a man whose penis explodes when he overdoses on aphrodisiacs. It also features actor Elvis Tsui’s infamous flying martial-arts sex scene. Wong Jing is an expert at getting up to the line, but not quite crossing it. To see what crossing the line feels like, try The Fruit Is Swelling, a sweet story about an 8-year-old girl who wishes to grow up. Boing! Suddenly she’s 18. It’s actually a well-made charmer, until our little 8-year-old (now in a technically legal-aged body, but still…) gets a man to teach her all about bumping uglies. 

Golden Chickens/Golden Ducks

Hong Kong Gigolo

Call-girl and gigolo movies have been around since the dawn of time in Hong Kong, and hostess movies like Bet on Fire (88) take place in nightclub netherworlds where no one ever goes home and dramas revolve around girls paying off their gambling bets and trying to get their customers to order one more bottle of VSOP. But sometimes the genre tries harder in movies like Call Girl 92 with its semi-all-star cast of B-movie beauties: Veronica Yip, Sharla Cheung, Cecilia Yip, and Carrie Ng. To its credit, it’s a well-written and acted movie about female bonding that just happens to also be a melodrama about hookers. Simon Yam starred in a series of gigolo movies in the early Nineties like Gigolo and Whore (91), Gigolo and Whore II (92), and Friday Gigolo (92), but it’s Hong Kong Gigolo (90) that manages to be the male equivalent of Call Girl 92: a drama about men in the sex business that just happens to feature copious nudity.

Girls Without Tomorrow

May We Chat

Then there are the masterpieces, many of which happen to be what’s sometimes known as “girls without tomorrow” movies. Technically, Call Girls 92 is one of these, but those hookers are far too upscale for the gutter operas we’re talking about. People often defend X, NC-17, and Cat III ratings by saying that they allow for movies about adult subjects when, in fact, they usually just allow for more porn. Queen of Temple Street (90), however, justifies the entire genre singlehandedly. Rated Cat III more for its ear-searingly foul language, this drama about a prostitute (Sylvia Chang) trying to make sure her daughter (Rain Lau) doesn’t follow in her footsteps is heartbreak in a can. Rain is determined to self-destruct by any means necessary, and it’s painful to see these two women tear into each other like chainsaws. It’s directed by Lawrence Lau, the poet of Hong Kong street movies, who in 2000 would work with Johnnie To to make Spacked Out, another Cat III movie about schoolgirls selling themselves and trying to make their way in the world. More recent is May We Chat, another movie about schoolgirls on the edge, this one structured like a murder mystery as one of a tight-knit group of thrillseekers go missing and her two friends set out to discover her fate. 

LINKS! LINKS! LINKS!

All’s Well, Ends Well

... Speaking of Sandra Ng, she was just in New York City to get a Star Asia Award from the New York Asian Film Festival. I had the pleasure of conducting three of her Q&As during which she claimed that her favorite movie to work on was All’s Well, Ends Well, said that she had made a lot of her movies “just for the money,” and that her one regret was not having plastic surgery when she was younger. That was kind of depressing, actually.

... Bong Joon Ho’s English-language debut, Snowpiercer, rolled out to 250 theaters this weekend [http://snowpiercer-film.com/screenings] after opening on eight screens last week and hauling in a per-screen average of $21,000 for a total box office take of $171,000. It’s been gaining a lot of critical steam, with Rolling Stone calling it “the coolest movie of the summer.” Who are we to argue with Rolling Stone?

... There’s a lot of concern about what will happen to Japan’s legendary Studio Ghibli now that Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata have retired. A dissolution plan has been drawn up by founder Toshio Suzuki, according to Miyazaki, that would stop production and turn Ghibli into a five-person rights management company. However, things are moving forward for now and the director of The Secret World of Arrietty (10), Hiromasa Yonebayashi, is releasing his second movie, When Marnie Was There, later this month. It’s based on the similarly titled 1968 ghost story by Joan G. Robinson.

... Just what the world needs! Another Bruce Lee film. George Nolfi (The Adjustment Bureau) is on board to direct Birth of the Dragon, slated for release in 2015. The synopsis: “The film is inspired by the true story of Bruce Lee’s historic 1965 duel with Wong Jack Man, China’s most famous kung fu master at a time when San Francisco’s Chinatown was controlled by Hong Kong Triads. The story of the match is told from the perspective of Steve Macklin, a young disciple of Lee, who ultimately joins forces with Lee and Wong to battle a vicious band of Chinatown gangsters.” Translation: this movie is a load of horseshit. The “historic duel” has been described by spectators (and Lee’s wife, Linda) as a sissy slap fight that saw Lee chase Wong around his studio, unable to bring him to the ground. Humiliated by his inability to put down his opponent, Lee started working on his power, hoping that if such an incident occured in the future he’d be able to end it with a quick punch or two. If only he could come back from the grave and deliver those two punches to George Nolfi.

... Want to read a long Wikipedia entry? Try the one for Nora Aunor, the legendary Filipino actress, who most recently scooped up a ton of awards for her performance in Brillante Mendoza’s Thy Womb (12). Want to hear about a bad decision? Nominated to be a National Artist, she was removed from the list of nominees by President Benigno Aquino due to her arrest for carrying meth through the Los Angeles airport back in 2005. 61 years old, Aunor is one of those artists whose struggles with drug abuse is part of her legend, and Filipino commentators are calling her removal from the list “a sad day for Philippine cinema.”

... Last week the Chengdu police SWAT team put up a series of awesome recruitment posters that are totally based on Hong Kong movie posters, and they are 100% Blue Steel. This week, they're showing off their softer side with smiling photos, fun signs they made with magic markers, and crossbows. All hail Chengdu SWAT!

A reassuring article of faith has it that political repression tends to have a salutary effect on art. The classic evidence often cited is the imaginative energy of writers in Stalinist Russia—one of whom, Mikhail Bulgakov, provided in his novel The Master and Margarita a defiant motto for the impossibility of stifling creativity: “Manuscripts don’t burn.” Those three words last year became the title of a clandestinely produced drama by Mohammad Rasoulof, a director who had been arrested in 2010 by the Iranian government, at the same time as his better-known compatriot Jafar Panahi. Manuscripts Don’t Burn, premiered in Cannes last year, was a prime example of the limits of the optimistic tenet quoted above. An exposé of the Iranian government’s systematic victimization of artists and intellectuals, this sometimes laborious Costa-Gavras–like conspiracy thriller was not, by usual criteria, an artistically successful film—but it was indisputably an important one given its content, and given the courage of Rasoulof and his necessarily anonymous collaborators in getting the thing made and exhibited.

A more awkward illustration of the limitations of such resistant or samizdat cinema is Closed Curtain by Jafar Panahi, which debuted in Berlin in 2013. This is Panahi’s second film made behind closed doors. Since 2010, he has been sentenced to six years in prison, placed under house arrest, and banned from making films for 20 years—a ban that, according to the evidence of the work he’s made while defying this ruling, apparently extends even to picking up a camcorder. Panahi’s This Is Not A Film (12) brilliantly explores his experience of house arrest in his Tehran apartment, using his predicament to fuel a self-reflexive inquiry—at once political, philosophical and personal—into what a film actually is, and what it means to prevent someone from filming when that is their profession and their natural activity. (In the film, co-director Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, training his camera on Panahi, comments: “When hairdressers have nothing to do, they cut each other’s hair.”).

Famously smuggled out of Iran on a USB stick hidden in a cake, This Is Not a Film has achieved a totemic status as a contemporary dissident text, but the important factors were its urgency, its cogency, and its undimmed intellectual energy in defiance of despair. In Panahi’s follow-up, however, despair is arguably winning the upper hand, and the undoubted importance of Closed Curtain may unfortunately lie in its hard diagnosis—its suggestion that, left to rely only on his will and his imagination, even a master filmmaker, and an irrepressible-willed individual, may find himself caving in.

Closed Curtain is bookended—“curtained,” if you like—by two brilliant matching long takes that present the central metaphor in no-frills formal terms. The film begins with a frontal shot of a wide picture window looking out on a house’s front yard, a road behind it, and beyond that, an expanse of sea. A metal security grille is drawn across the window, as if across the movie screen, partly obscuring our view. A man gets out of a taxi, walks towards the house, and enters by a side door—but instead of drawing aside the grille, he blocks the viewer in even further by drawing a pair of curtains across the window. The image of the window, and the removed view of the outside world, returns at the very end—and if the film had consisted entirely of such shots, Panahi might have been onto something rigorously marvelous. It’s what comes in between that’s the problem.

The film’s first 18 or so minutes are intriguing. The unnamed man, played by Closed Curtain’s co-director and co-writer Kambuzia Partovi (a director in his own right, and writer of Panahi’s The Circle) closes all the curtains in the large house, adding heavy blackout drapes to the lighter hangings already in place. Another metaphorically potent shot early on has him and his pet dog, Boy, sitting together facing a curtained window that irresistibly suggests a cinema screen forcibly darkened. With his curtains, the man (a writer, we later learn) is both protecting himself from the outside world and making himself a prisoner; he also builds a secret hiding place that’s like a self-made prison within a prison. There’s an explanation for all this: Iran, a TV broadcast reveals, has banned dogs as pets, as Islam regards them as impure; caught with his pet, the Writer has tangled with police, and is now hiding out along with his dog.

All this seems eloquently clear-cut as metaphor: it’s surely inhumane to keep a dog locked indoors, but then that’s precisely what the Iranian government has been doing to many of its human subjects. In fact, it isn’t just metaphor: dogs have indeed been banned as pets in Iran, and owners have had their animals seized by police. But some 20 minutes into the film, things start getting cluttered: a young man and woman, apparently brother and sister, mysteriously appear in the house and claim to be on the run, having attended an illicit party. The man (Hadi Saeedi) leaves to get help, but warns the Writer that his sister—who we later learn is called Melika (Maryam Moghadam)—is suicidal. The next section is a testy duel of patience between the Writer, who desperately wants to be left alone, and the Woman, who repeatedly taunts him, not least about the script he’s apparently trying to write (and which may be the script of the film that we’re actually watching, composing itself on screen as we go along). The Writer suspects that the Woman is a spy, or a reporter who’s exposed him, while we suspect that she’s a figment of his imagination, conceivably a muse out to spur his imagination—or conversely a sort of anti-muse, preventing him from even thinking. “You are desperation itself,” he tells her. “Seeing you dries me up.”

Things get more complicated; the Woman disappears, and the Writer shoots a first-person video on his iPhone, trying to figure out how she got into the house in the first place. Then, about an hour in, Jafar Panahi himself wanders into shot, and things really start to fall apart. Panahi rather heavy-handedly informs us that we’ve wandered into a hall of mirrors when he pulls back a drape and reveals a wall covered in framed posters for his own films—back to front, because we’re literally gazing into a mirror. It turns out that we’re in the director’s own villa by the Caspian Sea, and the filmmaker wanders around glumly and at first silently, while the Writer and the Woman pass in and out of the action like ghosts unseen by Panahi; now, apparently, they’re his figments.

At one point the Woman tells the Writer that killing yourself is a better option than living behind closed curtains, and indeed, suicide seems to tempt Panahi. At one point he stands on his balcony, watching himself wading head-deep into the sea—only for the shot to reverse as he emerges backwards out of the waves (the old “rewind” chestnut, which surely had its defining last word in Funny Games). Talk about mirrors reflecting mirrors: not only does the Woman leave her own iPhone video for Panahi to mull over, but the Writer’s video is then restaged—only this time with Panahi himself and a minimal crew filming the Writer. By this stage, the film has skipped between too many self-reflexive levels for much coherence or meaning to survive—something that was never an issue in the complex but bracingly immediate This is Not a Film. Near the end, an elderly neighbor of Panahi’s—very probably an actual neighbor rather than an actor—reassures the director: “Things will get better, you’ll be able to work again,” adding, “There’s more to life than work.” As if in acceptance of that, the final shot shows Panahi leaving the house, getting in his car and driving off, pausing only to pick up the Writer (or the real Partovi) and his dog.

It’s a satisfying ending to a largely unsatisfying film. In Berlin, some viewers felt that Closed Curtain was an own goal for Panahi: having vividly represented his plight, and that of other Iranian artists, by depicting his house arrest in his Tehran apartment, he was surely testing our sympathy by showing us his very comfortable neo-rustic villa, with its charming views on either side. That’s a frivolous response, of course: internal exile is internal exile, however sumptuous the cell. The real message of Closed Curtain is that Panahi’s will and inspiration seem to be cracking: in a recent interview in Filmmaker magazine, he commented: “Now I feel isolated and can’t work the way I used to work. So I resorted to my imagination and whatever happened, it just happens in my imagination . . . I feel sometimes I’m the prisoner of my own thoughts . . . I’m being forced to internalize everything, and nothing can really manifest itself the way it used to.”

A realist with a vital social curiosity, Panahi has previously thrived exploring the outside world and the energies of both individuals (The White Balloon, 95; Crimson Gold, 03) and groups (The Circle, 00; Offside, 06). Clearly, internalization can take him only so far. This Is Not a Film is superb, but Closed Curtain shows his inspiration unraveling when it’s required to feed on itself: it wouldn’t be too cruel to retitle it This Is Barely A Film. Still, the value of Closed Curtain is the very ineloquence of its cri de coeur. Where its predecessor defiantly showed that Panahi could take it, here the stresses show: they’re tearing him apart, and it shouldn’t happen to any artist.

The style and vigor of Matt Reeves’s CGI spectacular is demonstrated at approximately the 60-minute mark when an Uzi-carrying ape, his face contorted in a battle cry recalling Braveheart-era Mel Gibson, gallops through a wall of fire on the back of a black stallion. The scene might herald the kind of early-2000s action movie that gave Vin Diesel top billing without any semblance of embarrassment. It’s the “cool guys don’t look back at explosions” joke all over again, except instead of a muscly ex-cop or stunt driver, our wicked warrior is a hairy, teeth-baring ape.

The apes-are-just-like-us conceit has its 46th birthday with Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the latest entry in a franchise that spans eight movies, two television series, and an array of books and video games. The original 1968 film played out our similarities to our simian cousins in a deadpan critique of human superiority and creationism—the sort of pessimistic, dialogue-heavy parable its original writer, Rod Serling, made his career out of. While the ensuing four films became increasingly esoteric and campy, 2011’s surprisingly good Rise of the Planet of the Apes emulated its ancestor’s statement-heavy style in a Frankenstein-esque man-creates-monster origin story. The newest film takes a step away from that lineage, favoring the explosive fun of a summer blockbuster over cultural exposé.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes begins with a highlight reel of the decade or so that passed since the previous installment. Excerpts from panicked news reports about CDC quarantines inform us that 99% of the world has been killed by a virus accidentally created in an experimental Alzheimer’s drug trial in the previous film. The drug’s simian test subjects, however, developed extraordinary intelligence. While the death toll caused civilization to crumble into small colonies of people who were immune to the virus, the able-minded apes took to the woods to live free from human contact.

Caesar (Andy Serkis) is the bold, benevolent leader of a clan of apes who communicate in a blend of sign language and broken English. A few miles away in the ruins of San Francisco, a group of surviving humans, led by a former police chief (an uninvested Gary Oldman), are attempting to live without electricity. Leading the mission to restore power is Malcolm (Jason Clarke) and his wife, Ellie (Keri Russell), an architect-doctor power couple dressed in head-to-toe Patagonia who discover the ape community after a chance encounter on a dam scouting expedition. As fate would have it, said dam is on ape turf, and though Caesar doesn’t initially trust humans, he and his most devoted followers are willing to cooperate in an attempt to avoid violence. However, his plans are foiled by one of his most trusted comrades, a heavily scarred ape named Koba, who thinks eradicating man is the only way to survive.

Thus begins a two-hour struggle of trust and power between the humans and the apes, the latter of whom begin to break ranks over differing opinions of their new neighbors. But the most memorable moments in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes have little to do with the path of its narrative. Embracing 3-D for the first time in the series, the movie looks stunning—from the CGI apes, each individualized with specific micro-facial expressions and scars, to the richly gloomy atmosphere (the overcast skies virtually a calling card now for director Matt Reeves). Every drop of rain and luxuriant display of post-apocalyptic decay oozes a sort of tragic elegance that’s a stark contrast to the well-lit labs of the previous film. The effort put into these aesthetic improvements, however, doesn’t happen without some degradation elsewhere. Or, to quote the two middle-aged fans in matching POTA shirts sitting next to me in the theater: “Something’s just missing.”

While the movie ticks off every mark on the summer blockbuster checklist, the human characters are noticeably shallow and consistently overshadowed by their CGI counterparts. Little mention is made of the horrible trauma they’ve endured, and with the exception of a scene in which power is momentarily restored and the group hears music for the first time in years, it’s easy to forget that they once lived normal lives. Reeves, who works off a screenplay by Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, and Mark Bomback, also seems unsure about his stance on the relationship between the humans and the apes. Throughout the film, the characters repeatedly claim that man’s demise was self-inflicted, a disaster born from the cruelty and selfishness that is intrinsic to human nature. But among the survivors, we see nothing but kindness and dedication to the community.

The original film found its punch line in the way the audience hates the simian villains and yet recognizes their own reflections in their actions. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, on the other hand, aligns us with Caesar and the other human-friendly, communicative apes who support peace with mankind. The San Francisco survivors are depicted as such one-dimensional heroes that it’s almost a surprise when Caesar declares, after a piece of treachery by Koba, that “ape is just like man.” But reading into that inconsistency might be like wondering about the mechanics of the cars in The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift. If no longer achieving the same quality of double-edged cultural critique of its predecessors, the new film fits snugly within the multiplex—a gun-toting, horseback-riding monkey riding through $170,000,000 flames.

All the news that’s fit to be lifted from other sites and semi-rewritten:

While you’re busy waiting to see Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria, the director is about to embark on his first American film. Idol’s Eye, which starts shooting in October in Chicago, stars Robert Pattinson, Robert De Niro, and Rachel Weisz. Let’s turn it over to Assayas: “It’s a true crime story, part of Chicago lore. End of the 1970s, burglars confront the Outfit, specifically mob über-boss Tony Accardo—the kind of guys you see in Michael Mann’s Thief, which was inspired by similar characters. I wrote the screenplay based on a Playboy piece by Hillel Levin (“Boosting the Big Tuna”) who also did all the historical research I needed to establish the facts. The interesting part of it is that in the process we discovered Hillel had initially gotten many of the facts wrong, and he ended up completely reconsidering his own reading of the story. I’m bringing my own crew, and the DP is Yorick Le Saux. The title comes from the name of a famous (real) diamond.” ...

Philippe Garrel is set to shoot L’Ombre des femmes (“Women’s Shadow”) next week with Stanislas Merhar, Clotilde Courau, and Lena Paugam in the lead roles. As you might have guessed, it’s another take on love, desire, and the rise and fall of a couple ... Journey to the Shore is the title of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s next project, a road movie adapted from a novel by Kazumi Yumoto. Tadanobu Asano plays a man who returns to his wife (Eri Fukatsu) after disappearing for three years … Israeli video artist Omer Fast takes the Steve McQueen route with his London-set feature debut Remainder. Adapted from a 2005 novel by Tom K. McCarthy, it stars Tom Sturridge as a man who loses his memory after being struck by a falling object and tries to reconstruct his past out of fragmented memories in a series of increasingly extreme actions. Fast describes it as “an elliptical thriller about a person whose past catches up with him when he’s most vulnerable” … Shane Black has teamed up with Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling for The Nice Guys, in which a pair of private eyes investigates the suicide of a fading porn star in 1970s Los Angeles and uncovers a conspiracy “bizarrely rooted in smog and the U.S. auto industry.” Once again Black’s old patron Joel Silver is producing. Let’s hope they can recapture the magic of Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout. I’m being serious … Now that his film about Austrian basements is wrapped, Ulrich Seidl is turning to a historical project set in the 18th century about a real-life Robin Hood figure from northern Austria, although Seidl says “naturally, as it’s a film, we will take all necessary artistic liberties.” He adds: “We had to deal with monarchy, meaning a very repressive state: a state as criminal as criminals themselves. A bit like today." …

It looks like Andrew Bujalski’s ship has finally come in with his next film. Now shooting as you read this, Results is about a pair of personal trainers who land a new client who’s recently become extremely wealthy. Cast includes Guy Pearce, Cobie Smulders, Kevin Corrigan, Giovanni Ribisi… and Anthony Michael Hall … Takashi Miike is hard at work on Yakuza Apocalypse: The Great War of the Underworld, but after that he may make his U.S. debut with The Outsider, an epic story set in post–World War II Japan, chronicling the life of a former American G.I. who joins the yakuza, and slated to star the ready-for-anything Tom Hardy. Meanwhile, Hardy is going to play Elton John in a planned biopic called Rocketman, will play Mad Max in Mad Max: Fury Road, and is currently in the middle of playing the notorious Sixties English identical-twin gangsters Reggie and Ronald Kray in Legend. Does this mean he gets paid double his usual salary? A promising supporting cast includes Christopher Eccleston, Emily Browning, and David Thewlis. On the plus side, it’s a Working Title production; on the minus, it’s directed by Brian Helgeland, who has yet to make a halfway decent film …

Last time we checked, Jean-François Richet was planning a remake of Blame It on Rio. Then we learned he’s also planning Pox Americana, a Western set in New Mexico, about an Army officer and an Indian scout in the 1850s on a mission to assassinate the head of the Navajo nation. Now we hear that, following the success of their 2005 Assault on Precinct 13 remake, Why Not Productions and Richet have wrapped shooting on Blood Father, an adaptation of a 2005 novel by Peter Craig, screenwriter of The Town. Now in postproduction, it stars, uh, Mel Gibson as an ex-con trying to protect his estranged daughter (Erin Moriarty) from drug dealers (in New Mexico again) and co-stars William H. Macy, Diego Luna, and Michael Parks … Ewan McGregor and Mandy Patinkin will star in Phillip Noyce’s adaptation of Philip Roth’s 1997 novel American Pastoral in which a Jewish-American businessman’s world is upended when Vietnam War activist daughter carries out a terrorist act … Meryl Streep will play opera diva Maria Callas in a new HBO movie …

Coen Brothers update: we reported that their new film Hail Cesar, would feature George Clooney as a silent film star acting in an epic set in ancient Rome. We lied! Seems that was an elaborate hoax to throw newshounds off the scent. In fact it’s about a fixer (played by Clooney) in 1950s Hollywood who covers up scandals and keeps the studios’ stars in line, and it also features Josh Brolin, Scarlett Johansson, Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum, Tilda Swinton, and Ralph Fiennes. Meanwhile, the duo are rewriting Steven Spielberg’s untitled Cold War thriller in which Tom Hanks will play an American attorney enlisted by the CIA to go behind the Iron Curtain to negotiate the release of Gary Francis Powers, the U.S. Air Force pilot captured when his U-2 spy plane was shot down …

While Abel Ferrara is about to unleash Pasolini, his film about the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini (played by Willem Dafoe), La macchinazione, which likewise probes the mysterious death of Pasolini, whose corpse was found at a seaplane base in Ostia on November 2, 1975, began shooting last week, under the direction of former Pasolini assistant Davide Grieco. The film details the last three months of the life of the director (played here by Massimo Ranieri), when he was completing Salò, writing Petrolio (an exposé about political corruption at the highest level), and becoming involved with Pino Pelosi. When the negative of Salò was stolen, Pasolini went to the seaplane base to recover it, and walked into a trap. Pelosi was a pawn of the Magliana Gang, a criminal organization based in his home village, who were acting on orders from political puppet-masters. Per Grieco, “Pasolini was killed by Pelosi, who first acted as informant on the theft of the Salò film rolls and then served as bait for the ambush. He was killed because he was investigating the shady dealings of Eugenio Cefis, director of [Italy's largest gas and oil company] ENI and [the agri-chemical conglomerate] Montedison.” ...

James Franco’s 16th (count ’em!) film as director (or co-director) will be The Disaster Artist, about the making of the 2003 cult film The Room, regarded as the “worst movie ever made.” Franco will co-star with his brother Dave. Ryan Moody’s script is based on Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell’s book The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside the Room. Meanwhile, just when will Franco’s Black Dog, Red Dog see the light of day? A follow-up to the actor-director-etc.’s 2012 Tar, in which NYU graduate students made shorts based on the poetry of C.K. Williams, Black Dog likewise is comprised of shorts adapted from a collection of poems by Stephen Dobyns, and directed by 10 individual students. This one features a dream-team cast: Olivia Wilde, Chloë Sevigny, Whoopi Goldberg, Tim Blake Nelson, Dan Hedaya, and, of course, producer Franco … Australian actor/filmmaker Kieran Darcy-Smith, part of the esteemed Blue Tongue gang (Animal Kingdom, Felony, The Rover) and director of Wish You Were Here, is set to make Blackwater, about the rise of the eponymous military contractor whose services to the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan became a source of controversy and legal proceedings …

You’ll be happy to hear that Richard Linklater is keeping busy. He’s now making Larry’s Kidney, based on Daniel Asa Rose’s 2009 book Larry’s Kidney: Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China with My Black Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant—and Save His Life. Add Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis and it sort of speaks for itself. UPDATE: We've just learned through indieWire that per Linklater, "the financing kind of went away." Can anybody get a film made these days? Thankfully Linklater is also at work with animators Femke Wolting and Tommy Pallotta on a remake of the 1964 The Incredible Mr. Limpet, in which Don Knotts played a talking fish. Which means he’s not making Robert Redford’s passion project, an adaptation of Bill Bryson’s 1998 book about two men (to be played by Redford and Nick Nolte) who walk the entire Appalachian Trail. 
Instead, Ordinary Bob has upgraded to helmer Ken Kwapis, he of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and Sesame Street: Follow That Bird. Redford and Nolte play the hiking duo, and Emma Thompson and Mary Steenburgen are also in the cast, but this may be one of the few new films in the pipeline not starring Tom Hardy.

As one of my professors in college was fond of saying, postmodernism isn’t really that modern: the Caribbean began experiencing it in 1492 in the form of syncretism (or, as a more user-friendly definition might go, “religious and racial mash-ups”). Yet due to the Eurocentric ideals of the landowners and ruling classes (who were descended from Europeans), acknowledgment of the importance and value of this (re)mixing was a very long time in coming. One landmark was Gilberto Freyre’s 1933 anthropological study Casa-Grande e Senzala, which argued that Brazil’s society was structured around the dynamics of the plantation: a rich white man living in the big house (casa grande), and the black or indigenous staff in the slave and servant quarters (senzala). Fellipe Barbosa’s Casa Grande, set in modern-day Rio de Janeiro, outlines the precipitous financial decline of the white family living in the big house. As Jean (Thales Cavalcanti) prepares for his college exams, his father Hugo (Marcello Novaes) attempts to hide his bankruptcy from his family, slowly jettisoning little bits of luxury—a car or two, air conditioning at night, the gardener, the chauffeur, and then both maids.

Along the way, the film plays with popularly held opinions about race and class among the wealthy: Hugo tells his son’s friends that appreciating black beauty is a taste one acquires with age; Jean’s first attempts at sex are with one of the maids and with Luiza, his half-Brazilian, half-Japanese girlfriend; family friends disparage the recently imposed college quota system over dinner. An incisive character study that’s never malicious, Casa Grande screens again tonight as part of Latinbeat at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. FILM COMMENT sat down with Barbosa after Friday’s U.S. premiere to discuss the new film, the ongoing changes in Brazilian society, and acting.

The title of your film refers to Casa-Grande e Senzala, and it deals with the same themes that book did. By making this connection, it’s saying that the more things change, the more they stay the same, but a lot of the characters’ discussions in the film suggests that Brazilian society may be less stratified in the future. How do you envision that?

You said it so beautifully, so I’m going to borrow it from now on—“the more things change, the more they stay the same.” My idea was to talk about how the “big house” in Brazil has changed, but has held onto so many dynamics from the past. What’s really changed in Brazilian society through Lula and now Dilma is that the middle class has grown so much, and there’s a lot less poverty. The people who used to consider themselves poor don’t anymore because they can buy the stuff they want. There’s very low unemployment in Brazil—I don’t know the exact number, but it’s less than six percent. Also, in 2012, there was a new law passed that protects the rights of maids, so they’re not nearly as dependent on these jobs as they used to be, and they can leave if they want. That economic freedom is represented in the scene with Noêmia near the end, where she’s trying to leave, but at the same time she can’t—she’s very emotionally attached to the house.

I haven’t been able to finish the book to this day—it’s a difficult book. [Laughs] Well, not difficult… It’s kind of dense and repetitive, and I prefer to read stories rather than sociological treatises. But the beautiful coincidence is that he started writing that thesis as a student at Columbia, which is where I went to film school. The other coincidence is that Joaquim Pedro de Andrade tried to make an adaptation of Casa-Grande e Senzala, and his last partner was my girlfriend’s mother. I have the script at my place—it’s very Macunaíma, a lot more style and allegory than this. And when I premiered the film at Rotterdam, I found out that the last thing that he did with the project before he passed away was to go to Cinemart.

This story is also autobiographical, and you dedicated the film to your family in the end credits. How did you transform your experiences to a fiction film?

I was at Columbia when my father went bankrupt, and that was the time I needed him the most financially. My father hid it from us as long as he could, and I was the last one to know. When I did find out, it was too late, and I had already spent way too much on his credit card. So I had to borrow like everyone else, and I felt like I grew closer with my classmates. When I was Jean’s age, I was a bit embarrassed to be rich.

I really resent not being in Brazil with my family during that time, because ultimately it brought everyone together, and it turned out to be a very positive thing. So the film is sort of a fantasy of what it would’ve been like if I was there at his age. I was also interested in showing how a crisis can transform into opportunity for this young man, and to explore dramatic ironies that can arise from it. The father wants his son to study what he does [law and economics], which is what has led him to bankruptcy, whereas the son just wants to be free and explore the world, and the bankruptcy allows him to do so.

There’s definitely a sense of freedom with the final shot, even though Jean’s essentially repeated the thesis of the book. Can you talk a little bit about how you thought out the difference between interior and exterior spaces, and how the framing reflects the family’s deepening crisis? For example, when you first see the house from the street, it looks huge, and you see Noêmia and Severino standing outside the gate waiting to be let inside. Later on, when the shot is repeated, the house is just as imposing, but only Noemi is waiting there, like chess pieces being taken away.

This film is so different than everything I’ve done in terms of style, because I usually shoot very close to the characters and handheld. So I wanted to try something new, which is a more classical approach, and make the architecture evident. It’s my parents’ house, which they’re still trying to sell 10 years later—like the character, my father is very proud, and nobody is willing to pay what he’s asking for it—but I wanted to treat it like a set, a two-dimensional object, instead of a real place. I also wanted to play with soap opera aesthetics: starting with only one angle for a particular room, and then slowly revealing the counter-shots, or combining them into one with pans. I also wanted to open up clichés, and then put those clichés inside the minds of the characters, or into the audience’s.

It’s a deconstruction in a way. The story is structured around the three servants getting laid off, so how can I show this in an economical way? It’s like you say with the chess pieces, it’s a little game. When the story loses control—after the father falls from the tree (which was a real accident), when there’s a fight—we go handheld. Whenever we’re in the house, we can see everything, because it’s the house’s point of view. Only Natalie has a POV shot, because she’s also seen everything. If we’re outside of the house, we have to be with Jean.

It’s funny that you mention the final scene, because I had another one after it that I cut out, which really gave the film a lot more closure. It was that exact same shot of the house, but with different information. It didn’t give me the same sense of freedom. It was actually my good friend Kleber [Mendonça Filho] who did Neighboring Sounds—we share a lot of the same crew members, we read each other scripts and everything—and when he watched the first cut of the film he said: “Listen, the film has to end the scene before the last one. I’m not going to convince you now, but you’ll figure it out sooner or later.” I also thought of what Lucrecia Martel said: “When you know what the next scene is going to be, that’s when you cut the film.” And in a way I think you could imagine what Jean’s going to do next. So one day I tried to watch the film without the last scene, and I felt so free, like I could finally breathe. All my previous shorts and documentaries had really dark endings, and so I had to deal with audiences feeling really traumatized or really down, and this is the first time I had people leave smiling, and I realized that’s what I want.

Do you see this film being in conversation with Neighboring Sounds, even though you started working on this script many, many years before? Is it touching on something that’s in the air?

I really hope so, because I adore that film. But they’re very different, because mine is more character-driven and Neighboring Sounds is way more conceptual, cerebral. It’s a long conversation we’ve had—I’ve known Kleber for maybe 10 years now—why aren’t we putting ourselves in our films? Why are filmmakers always talking about the poor the victimized? Not that it’s not important to do that; it’s incredibly noble. But it’s not all of society, and most filmmakers are coming from middle- to upper-class backgrounds. Personally, I wanted to confront wealth: not to treat it as something that’s desirable or as a goal for one of the characters, and especially not as a background for comedy, which is common in Brazil. I wanted to ask the question: why do we want so much when others have so little? What’s the advantage of living like that? You become a victim of this bubble it creates. I’m going to show the film in Brazil at the end of July, and I’m very excited to see how audiences react, and if they connect the dots.

Why did you choose not to have a score, and instead have only diegetic music?

When I was shooting the film, I wasn’t thinking about it too much. I knew that I wanted to play with having music that seemed non-diegetic but was actually in the ambience. And I was always open to the idea of having a score, and then I realized I didn’t need it. I thought the music could be a nice way to mark each environment. I’m really concerned about how to distinguish characters when writing. Something that annoys me a lot about contemporary cinema is that they’re so often the same. I like to leave the theater knowing who each character is.

The casting also defines it too, because Jean and Natalie are nonprofessionals, and some of the older actors are soap opera stars. How did you approach working with these two very different styles of acting?

That was probably the greatest challenge. Finding the actors is the most difficult and important thing for me, and I spent the most time doing that. Marcello [Novaes] is a huge soap opera star, but he’s totally discredited among the filmmaking community. He’s never had a chance to play a character like this, but he’s not used to long takes, so it was a huge challenge for him to do a three- or four-minute dinner scene without cutting. Like I said before, I wanted to explore the theatricality and mise en scène, so it wasn’t something I didn’t want to let go of. But for the kids, it was super-easy—they’d never acted before, so they didn’t know anything else. Eventually Marcello got there, and it was beautiful to see him become a cinema actor. He was so happy to do this film, and I’m dying for him to see it.

I had one obstacle in regards to casting: in order to convince the monks to [let us] shoot at Saint Benedict, the lead had to be a student at that school. I went to that school my whole life, so I know what it’s like, what they would or wouldn’t accept. It was risky, because we only had a pool of 60 kids per year, and we went there four years in a row because we weren’t certain when we were going to get funding. During the first three years, there was no Jean there. And then this past year, I had four potential candidates for Jean. Many of them were musicians, which was helpful—Victor wrote the tune he plays on the piano. For many months, I thought it was going to be Victor, and then I switched to Thales [Cavalcanti] maybe three weeks before shooting began. Thales kind of conquered us all. At first we rejected him because we thought he was a little weird, but eventually we were enchanted by him, and I thought that maybe this could be a good arc for the audience in relationship to this character. But I didn’t make this decision alone—I always invited the key crew members over to my place to watch the screen tests, and feel their reaction. It was almost like a voting thing.

I really didn’t know who Jean was, to be honest, because he was kind of like me, but he also could’ve been many things. So I had to isolate the essential qualities of Jean, and I knew that would come through, whoever I casted. Ultimately, what really attracted to me to him is his extreme sincerity that’s almost naïve, and his desperation to be with women, which is really clear on his face—I can really relate to that. [Laughs]

At the end of 2013, Hayao Miyazaki’s purportedly final film, The Wind Rises, soared onto cinema screens, an elegiac, dreamy ode to creativity that was also a fictionalized biography of Jiro Horikoshi, the engineer who built the Zero, the fighter plane that was key to Japanese air power in World War II. At heart, the film tells a Faustian story (complete with Satan in the form of Caproni, the Italian aviation pioneer) about the devil’s bargain that artists and inventors make: they can create something new and beautiful, but how it’s ultimately used is out of their hands. A surgical innovation may relieve suffering, or be used for torture. An airplane can be a thing of beauty, or a weapon of destruction. And a movie may be a moving testament to human ability, or war propaganda. 

Since Miyazaki had the nerve not to open his film with a series of title cards clearly and unambiguously spelling out his opinions on World War II, Japanese nationalism, war crimes, Pearl Harbor, comfort women, the rewriting of the Japanese constitution, the sanctity of American life, the sanctity of Korean life, the sanctity of Chinese life, and whether everyone who was alive in Japan between 1940 and 1945 deserves global condemnation, plenty of other people jumped up to state his opinions for him. Japanese right-wingers accused Miyazaki of being a “traitor” and “anti-Japanese,” while Koreans accused the movie of glorifying a war criminal and being “masturbatory.” Inkoo Kang, a critic for The Village Voice, decried the film as “repellent” and “disgraceful.” And don’t even get started on the doctors who objected to its glorification of smoking. Despite all this outrage, the movie took in about US$120 million at the Japanese box office, but it touched a nerve, especially given current fears that Japan is whitewashing its actions during World War II and adapting a more aggressive international stance. 

Well, if people were outraged by a movie as ambivalent as The Wind Rises, then their heads are going to explode when they get a look at Eternal Zero. Already one of the 10 highest-grossing films of all time in Japan, it’s the rousing, action-packed tale of a reluctant kamikaze pilot. Directed by special-effects maestro Takashi Yamazaki (whose three Always movies meticulously re-created bygone Tokyo and celebrated the lives of average Japanese trying to pick up the pieces after the end of World War II), Eternal Zero begins in 2004 with Saeki (Haruma Miura of J-Pop group Brash Brats) learning that the man he thought was his grandfather is actually his grandmother’s second husband. His real grandfather is Kyuzo Miyabe, a kamikaze pilot who died in World War II. Saeki is a lazy loser who has failed his bar exam a bunch of times, and while he’s amiable enough, he’s got no direction and no drive. The best he can manage when his sister suggests they find out more about grandpa Miyabe is a half-hearted shrug, only getting fully on board with her plan when she offers to pay him. 

Together they track down the men who flew with their grandfather and what they learn is ugly: he’s reviled as a coward and accused of being a traitor to Japan who only cared about saving his own hide. He refused to dogfight and he undermined the war effort, returning from missions with his Zero undamaged while his comrades went down in flames for the glory of the emperor. But there are two people who tell a different story. One, in what might be a nod to Kinji Fukasaku’s Yakuza Papers series, is a yakuza boss who piloted a Zero under Miyabe. The other is one of Miyabe’s fellow pilots who is now dying of cancer. Their take on Miyabe is that he was the best pilot in the Navy, a man who hated the senseless war and avoided dogfights because they were a pointless sign of vanity (wasn’t it better to protect your aircraft from damage or to drop a bomb?). The mystery that drives the movie is why this man wound up going kamikaze.

The yakuza boss calls the kamikaze program “a strategy of insanity,” but it might be more accurately called a strategy of desperation. Kamikaze attacks only began in the final 10 months of the war, and they weren’t very effective. Only 18 percent of the 3,860 kamikaze pilots who died even hit their targets. While some history books depict the kamikaze pilots as heroic volunteers who went out shouting the praises of the emperor, more recent depictions call them “sheep to the slaughterhouse” and in Eternal Zero we’re told that many of them were young and inexperienced, coerced into “volunteering” by their commanders. 

Miyabe’s repeatedly stated life philosophy in Eternal Zero is to “survive at all costs,” and this belief extends to his students whom he purposely fails so that they’re barred from kamikaze duty. He even sabotages their planes so they can’t fly. He refuses to throw his life away on an insane war strategy, and he does everything in his power to make sure that his students survive to the end of the war so that they can rebuild Japan, take care of their families, and have a future. But watching them fly away to die, one after the other, takes its toll and, finally, he has a nervous breakdown. Unfortunately, his depressive drive to kill himself plays right into the Japanese war strategy, and he winds up taking on a kamikaze mission himself, hoping to protect a younger pilot and to extinguish his intolerable existence all in one swift dive. I’m not going to spoil the end of the movie, but Miyabe throws himself into his final suicide mission with gusto, and as the film ended at a recent festival screening, an American audience member, caught up in the excitement of the moment, leapt to his feet shouting “YEAH!”

Populist and problematic, Eternal Zero is an enormously effective movie, full of exciting aerial combat, engaging story twists, and compelling characterization, but it is a Japanese movie, made for a Japanese audience, and for an American, it’s almost shocking to see a film told from such a radically different point of view. World War II is so often considered a story of American exceptionalism that it’s disorienting not to see a single American in a story about it. There are a handful of tiny digital American sailors running around on the decks of ships at Pearl Harbor, and the occasional American fighter plane, but this movie is focused 100 percent on telling a Japanese story about the Japanese war effort and its effect on Japanese people. The bombing of Pearl Harbor is as exciting and bloodless as a video game, but a single bomb hits a Japanese aircraft carrier and suddenly it’s all Barber’s “Adagio,” and slow-motion “Why us?” shots of bleeding men and bodies on fire. 

Predictably, those Westerners who are aware of the film are already complaining, but does every movie have to include every point of view? Some folks have complained that Eternal Zero makes combat look too exciting, but does every war movie have to be antiwar? Many of the most popular war movies deliver the horrors of war, but also take the time to show its attractions. Movies like Apocalypse Now, The Hurt Locker, and Saving Private Ryan deal in plenty of misery and death but they also give us war’s addictive thrills. Movies like Platoon that hammer one note—war is hell—become yesterday’s news in short order. 

I would imagine that the Western garment-rending over Eternal Zero has more to do with the fact that “our” story has been taken from us, and we don’t even merit a walk-on part. “How dare you make a World War II movie in which Americans are faceless targets and not the main characters!” you can practically hear them huffing. Some Japanese directors, notably Miyazaki, have called Eternal Zero “a pack of lies,” but viewing it as a pro-kamikaze movie shows a willful desire not to see what’s actually on screen. 

Miyazaki’s criticism is most surprising to me, because he and Yamazaki absolutely agree on one thing that’s central to each of their films. Both directors yearn for a time when their country overcame its differences, stood together, and actually accomplished great things. They bemoan the younger generation who they see as wasting their lives on trivialities, drifting through the world divided and directionless. That the great thing Japan came together to accomplish consisted of killing large numbers of non-Japanese people in a misguided attempt to expand its empire is a tragedy of the most ironic kind, but it’s not one that’s limited to Japan. I would think that Americans, who seem to feel divided and directionless too right now, and who seem to only come together on military-flavored issues like “Support our troops,” might find Eternal Zero strongly resonant, too. The idea of devoting your life to a cause bigger than yourself, of doing your duty no matter what the consequences, of actually accomplishing something meaningful, is appealing, and it’s a human drive that can be used to accomplish greatness or genocide. It’s one of those uneasy, contradictory realities at the core of who we all are that has paralyzed some generations, and inspired others. I can’t see how there’s anything wrong with exploring this troubling contradiction on film. 

Eternal Zero has no U.S. distributor at the moment but gets its DVD release in Japan next week.

LINKS! LINKS! LINKS!

Transformers: Age of Extinction

... Then again, who cares about exploring the human condition when Transformers 12 is out? China joins America in the race to the bottom by making Transformers: Age of Extinction the top-grossing movie of all time in China.

... Meanwhile, in South Korea: is the box office half full or half empty? According to some headlines, the country is on track to import the lowest number of foreign films on record, bringing a mere 86 into the country in 2013 (33 of which were American) and only 18 so far in 2014. 

Then again, other headlines say that South Korean films made up only 43% of the local box office so far in 2014, down from 2013 when they made up 56%. The sky is falling! Wait, it’s back up again!

Late Autumn

... Whatever the case, South Korean movies are also doing very well (or maybe not so well?) in the romance department. Chinese actress Tang Wei (Lust, Caution) just announced her engagement to Korean director Kim Tae-yong, the man behind the schoolgirl ghost story Memento Mori (99) and generational comedy Family Ties (06). Kim met Tang on the set of his 2009 movie Late Autumn, divorced his wife in 2012, and says his romance with Tang began when he shot a commercial with her in 2013.

... Relations between front-of-camera talent and behind-the-camera talent aren’t so romantic in Hong Kong, however. Wushu champion and actor Dennis To, who played Ip Man in Herman Yau’s The Legend Is Born: Ip Man, recently balked at renewing his contract with his manager and martial arts master, Checkley Sin Kwok-lam, probably because To hasn’t starred in a film since 2011’s The Woman Knight of Mirror Lake. Ultimately, he renewed, then complained when Sin rebuffed a buy-out offer from a Taiwanese investor. Pissed, Sin announced To was expelled as his disciple, but still bound to his five year contract, effectively on ice. To responded with a lawsuit asking for HK$2.16 million in damages because Sin’s company turned down jobs without his permission. A few days later, To made a humiliating public apology, announced he was dropping his suit, paid a seven-figure reparation to Sin, and begged for his forgiveness. The next day, Sin held a press conference and announced that all To ever had to do was ask to be let out of his contract. Without further ado, Sin canceled it right then and there, leaving some people suspicious that a behind-the-scenes deal had been worked out between both parties, and the "falling out" was staged to get around termination clauses in the contract. Expect the Taiwanese investor, or talent manager Paco Wong, to pick up To's contract when a respectable amount of time has passed.

TL, DR: a publicly traded company worked out a behind-the-scenes deal to cancel a talent contract, then avoided all the legal clauses in the contract regarding termination by staging a falling out between the boss and his employee, and an “apology” payment that dealt with any monies owed.

... Over in Japan, director Nobuhiko Obayashi, most famous for his cult mindblower House, is back with a new movie that’s winning rave reviews yet getting little to no overseas festival attention. Seven Weeks, about a family patriarch’s last days as his family gathers around his deathbed, sounds like a far cry from Obayashi’s more psychedelic movies until you read what people are saying about it. Don Brown, writing for The Asahi Shimbun, says: “Numerous domestic dramas are made in Japan every year with little ambition other than capturing the mundaneness of everyday life. But the jaded viewer will be shocked by Obayashi's sprawling family saga and its distinctive stylized approach that diverges into various thematic tangents. The dead appear alongside the living so matter-of-factly that the past and present become a blur.” You can read more here.

... The best thing you can do for yourself right now is to read this extensive history of Jademan, the popular Hong Kong comic book created by the stylishly mustached man of mystery Tony Wong. The Comics Journal has gone all-in on this one, and it’s full of glorious Eighties-era art, men posing with flashy sports-cars, and the Fathomless Sea Palm.

... Finally, as Japan’s cinematic portrayals of its wartime history heat up op-ed pages, the one question on everyone’s mind is: how will China’s dancing aunties respond? These middle-aged women who perform choreographed group dances in public drive folks crazy, but now they’ve added a musical fight with plastic guns against a World War II–era “Japanese devil” to their dances, which will probably calm everyone right down.

Monument Film

During a panel on the evolving dynamic between digital and chemical processes in film restoration and distribution at this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato, Grover Crisp of Sony Pictures noted that for the worldwide release of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 the studio made only 700 film prints (with 500 going to Brazil), while just a handful of years ago, thousands of prints were made for a typical summer blockbuster. The very next evening, in the Piazetta Pasolini of the Cineteca di Bologna, the experimental film legend Peter Kubelka electrified the audience with the filmiest of film programs: his Monument Film (12), composed of his flicker films Arnulf Rainer (58-60) and Antiphon (12) projected consecutively, side by side, and on top of one another in a grand celebration of the formal qualities of film.

Kubelka’s introduction took on an elegiac tone as he bemoaned the rise of digital, as an artist committed to working on film but unable to halt its demise. Such are the contradictions and compromises that the field of preservation and the festival find themselves navigating. Counting shorts, more than 200 movies screen in the lineup each year, and it is a given that more and more are shown digitally, mostly in the form of new digital restorations but also for lack of film prints. A robust selection of titles are still screened in 35mm, with some showing extreme signs of wear.

Night of the Storyteller

Now in its 28th year, Il Cinema Ritrovato (“rediscovered cinema”) brings together archivists, critics, curators, filmmakers, and eager cinephiles for perhaps the most enjoyable and egalitarian week of archival and repertory cinema to be found anywhere in the world. A weekly pass to the fest is 80 Euros, a relative bargain compared to other large international festivals, and it grants the general public virtually the same level of access to its many offerings as anyone else in attendance.

“Rediscovery” can have a number of meanings at Il Cinema Ritrovato. Perhaps the most literal example this year was Robert Flaherty’s Night of the Storyteller (35), the first film shot in Irish Gaelic, restored by the Harvard Film Archive from a 35mm nitrate print found on a shelf there last year. Another example is Why Be Good? (29), a Warner Bros.–Vitaphone feature starring the great silent star Colleen Moore that was thought to be lost for decades but was brought back to light by a pair of persistent historians who knew of a print in an Italian archive. Conversely, Fred Zinnemann’s Oklahoma! (55) could hardly be considered a lost film, but it proved to be new to many eyes, and its restoration was only possible with new digital technology. As 20th Century Fox’s Schawn Belston explained, special processes were developed to address the color fade of the 65mm interpositive and the fact that the Todd-AO version of the film was shot at 30 frames per second.

Maciste all’inferno

In any case, there are simply too many films in the festival to see everything, or even representative samples from each program. It was never lost on me that picking one film over another could mean missing my final opportunity to see something ever again (in a theatrical setting, at least). There were spotlights on Indian films from the Fifties, Germaine Dulac, Polish New Wave Cinemascope films, and films from the Ottoman Empire from 1896 to 1914, and I didn’t see any of them. One strong program was the spotlight on Italian director Riccardo Freda. Averse to both comedy and postwar neorealism, Freda directed popular films across genres including melodrama, horror, period piece, and adventure. My favorites included Theodora, Slave Empress (53), a sword-and-sandal epic about a slave girl who ends up marrying the emperor; the historical melodrama Beatrice Cenci (56); and Maciste all’inferno (62), an entry that finds the recurring Hercules-like hero happening upon a 19th-century-style witch-burning frenzy (why not?).

Another strand of interest was “Cinema at War Against Hitler,” an international selection of films produced during Nazi rule as well as a pair of postwar films. James Hogan’s The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler (43) depicts a Viennese man with a talent for impersonations who is forced to become a double for Hitler. The man’s death is faked and he’s branded a traitor, leading his wife to seek revenge for what has become of her family. John Farrow’s The Hitler Gang (44) might best be described as a Classics Illustrated–style life of Hitler (played by Robert Watson), featuring all the major players and incidents from the Führer’s rise to power including the eager-to-please, ever-frustrated Rudolf Hess (Victor Varconi). The extremely rare Hitler’s Reign of Terror (34) is more intriguing for its backstory than as a finished film, but makes for a fascinating document nonetheless. In 1933, Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. traveled throughout Europe with two cameraman to interview heads of state including the newly elected Chancellor of Germany. The film is comprised of interviews, newsreel footage, and reenactments, one of which depicts Vanderbilt pressing Hitler with the question “And what about the Jews?” When the German ambassador at the time protested its release, the film was pulled from distribution, but it was re-released in 1939 with some I-told-you-so additions by Vanderbilt.

Life Begins Tomorrow

I saw only one film in the festival’s retrospective of German director Werner Hochbaum, Life Begins Tomorrow (33), which emerged as the consensus favorite among his films. The story follows the release of a man from prison, the series of events that prevents his wife from picking him up, and the mistrust that follows. It echoes moments of silent-era Fritz Lang as well as Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a City and Paul Fejos’s Lonesome, and anticipates much of the cinema of Jean Grémillon.

Another often terrific series spotlighted individual episodes from the many Italian omnibus films made between 1952 and 1969. Three stood out for me. Directed by and starring Nino Manfredi, L’avventura di un soldato (62, from L’amore difficile) tracks the currents of sexual desire and repression between a soldier and a woman aboard a train. Luigi Filippo D’Amico’s comedy Guglielmo il dentone (65, from I complessi) stars the incomparable Alberto Sordi as a man participating in a contest to become a television news reader. He’s supremely qualified in every way—poise, eloquence, intelligence—but possesses a set of protruding teeth that are impossible to ignore. In Eduardo De Filippo’s fable-like Cova delle uova (52, from Marito e moglie), Tina Pica plays a peasant woman who obsesses over her hens at the expense of her sickly husband (De Filippo), whom she suspects of malingering. When she discovers that his fever is the perfect temperature for hatching eggs, she becomes much more interested in keeping him in his bed.

In honor of the 100th anniversary of Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, the Cineteca di Bologna hosted a Chaplin conference prior to the festival. There was also a suite of restored Essanay films and an exhibition of art by Léo Kouper, perhaps the artist most associated with illustrating the Tramp in promotional materials.

The Most Wonderful Evening of My Life

No trip to Il Cinema Ritrovato is complete without watching at least one of the nightly films under the stars in the Piazzetta Maggiore, surrounded by thousands of other moviegoers. This year I watched Ettore Scola introduce his The Most Wonderful Evening of My Life (72), starring Alberto Sordi as a somewhat shady fabric salesman who gets stranded at a Swiss lodge inhabited by a group of professionals and aristocrats. He quickly finds himself at the center of an elaborately staged parlor game with echoes of The Wicker Man or The Most Dangerous Game.

Finally, one of the great pleasures of the festival is revisiting a film one may have seen before, even multiple times, in a new restoration and with an audience that is often composed of younger viewers seeing the film for the first time. It was fun to see Vittorio De Sica’s Marriage Italian Style (64) again, and the screening was made even more enjoyable by the extra delight that the mostly Italian viewers seemed to be experiencing seeing their national screen icons Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni together in a great film on a big screen as part of an audience. I’m left to wonder what the quite similar audience in the same theater thought about Rock Hudson’s café brawl set to “The Yellow Rose of Texas” at the end of Giant (56) earlier in the festival. Molto Americano.