actor profiles

animation

book reviews

director profiles

documentaries

experimental &
avant garde

exploitation

film festivals

film noir

film reviews

gay & lesbian

hong kong films

horror

interviews

japanese cinema

music & musicals

silent film

tranny cinema
 
- - - - - -
To be automatically notified when the next issue is posted, join our mailing list.

home | current issue | archives | search | about us | contact | donate | blog | links

Millennium Mambo

page 1, 2

There are no solutions in Millennium Mambo, only merciless clarity. Hou Hsiao-hsien, master of the elegant long-take, turns a piercing eye at the self-destructive life of a restless Taiwan disco-baby on the threshold of the millennium. Trapped in an abusive relationship, rejecting Chinese culture (she and a friend use only western names, Vicky and Jack), she has caged herself in a dead-end world of strobe-lighting, lap dancing, bong-smoking, and Ecstasy-popping, all set to pulsating electro-pop or in the blank silence of surveillance cameras. Aided by lighting of almost palpable physicality from longtime collaborator Mark Lee-Ping, Hou has refined his strategy: with no traditional plot, he fills the space where narrative would be with the drama of behavior, in breathtakingly sustained riffs of jealousy and despair, lengthy sequences where nothing happens except life. How does he do it? Is his secret hidden in the offscreen spaces that he manipulates so well? Shunning facile moralizing, Hou adds a memory dimension by having the heroine narrate from the year 2010. Escaping to a winter film festival in Japan, she presses her face into the foreign snow, perhaps hoping to remake her identity, but Hou cautions that "snowmen melt".

What Time Is It There?

The prize for best performance by a fish unquestionably goes to a large white carp in Tsai Ming-liang’s What Time Is It There?: this aquatic actor not only wins a laugh from one improvisation, but also shares a moving scene of grief with actress Lu Ying-ching. The director finds playfully deadpan comedy as he did in The Hole, yet this film’s substance concerns loss. A mother and son respond differently to the death of the father: convinced that her husband may be reincarnated as a cockroach, the mother seals off the windows and turns their flat into a shrine. The son, a sidewalk peddler of wristwatches, becomes obsessed with a customer passing through on her way to Paris, and then wanders the city to change every clock he sees to Paris time. (If Lee Kang-sheng, the director’s chosen counterpart on the screen, seems especially at home in this role, it’s because he is: his own apartment serves as a major location, and the enigma of his father’s suicide served as the impulse for this film). In a parallel story, the customer arrives in Paris, but faces the loss of her homeland to become a lonely outsider: a fish out of water. With long takes and some extraordinary multidimensional compositions, Tsai also demonstrates his ear for urban sound: breathing, chanting, grunting, chopping, the hissing of a Métro train, the whir of a projector, the crunch of a cookie, and always the dripping of liquids. A striking climactic sequence, suggesting the ending of The Godfather, dynamically intercuts the three principals as each tries to find release in a different form of sex, yet with little satisfaction. While Tsai makes numerous bows to Truffaut, the final shot of a man approaching a giant ferris wheel seems to whisper The Third Man.

No one cracks a smile in The Orphan of Anyang, not even the title infant. Still, it’s understandable since this absorbing underground production from China presents an urban wasteland full of laid-off factory workers, young hookers, and drunken pimps. The authentic camera-in-the-street locations give an eye-opening glimpse into the grubby food stalls, red-lit brothels, and grim prisons, which all seem to be photographed through layers of pollution; this "real" China is a long way from the decorative chinoiserie of Zhang Yimou. Working with mostly non-professional actors, writer-director Wang Chao generates considerable compassion for his down-and-out characters. Choosing a minimalist style with still more long-takes (are they putting something in the food in China?), he occasionally lacks enough technique (or budget) to pull off all his ideas.

Vivid colors, red earth, laughter, communal dancing and surging music are what Abbas Kiarostami finds in ABC Africa when he accepts an offer to document the work of the Uganda Women’s Effort to Save Orphans. With his warmth and curiosity, he establishes an unusual intimacy, poking his lens past beaded curtains into shops, even peering over a student’s shoulders to read his notes. Instead of hiding his videocams, the Iranian filmmaker patiently shows them to Uganda’s army of smiling children and even hands his microphone over to a toddler. Yet he finds a country of mostly women and children, with men aged 15 to 45 all dead from AIDS. One indelible image shows a nurse tearing up a cardboard box to construct a makeshift coffin for a child victim of AIDS, then tying the bundle to a bicycle for delivery. With formal daring, Kiarostami also shoots a five-minute sequence in utter darkness ("We are like blind people"). If he perhaps curtseys to his sponsor once too often, the final montage of children’s faces appearing in the clouds makes up for it.  

The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein

The ambitious, humanistic The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein is a labor-of-love indie, a plea against war that took writer-director John Gianvito six years and thirteen credit cards to make. A cast of nonprofessionals enacts three narratives set in the deserts around Santa Fe: a Chicano Gulf War veteran returns to unemployment, criticism ("You didn’t finish the job in Iraq"), and his own uneasily suppressed rage; a distraught mother searches for her half-Arab children who have disappeared; a middle-class teenager takes to the streets to escape his parents, who are unsympathetic to his peace movement work. These three stories loosely interface, along with various compelling digressions, including an illustration of the militaristic influences on children; sincere and often moving talking-head testimony from peace workers; and a brilliant performance on the oud by Naseer Shemma to memorialize the death of 800 Iraqi civilians in America’s 1991 bombing of the Al-Amiriyya shelter. With nearly three hours of seat time, it’s a good thing that Gianvito is able to balance some awkwardly earnest scenes with stylistically bold visuals: these range from Griffithian iris shots to majestic rainbows to a creative visualization of the Highway of Death nightmare in Kuwait. Although the meaning is not crystal clear, the climax with the fiery destruction of the huge groaning giant at the Burning Man festival makes great sense as spectacle.

January 2002 | Issue 35
Copyright © 2002 by Robert Keser

ACCESS: Wider U.S. distribution is assured for all the films mentioned above, except ‘R Xmas, ABC Africa, The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein, The Pornographer, and The Human Comedy.  Other films that played at the festival and have won distribution include: Mulholland Drive, Waking Life, My First Mister, Italian For Beginners, Intimacy, and the winner of the Golden Hugo as best film: Fat Girl. For a complete list of winners in the festival competition, see: www.chicagofilmfestival.com

ALSO: More film festivals

page 1, 2

home | current issue | archives | search | about us | contact | donate | blog | links