Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay (2011) [BIFF 2012]

It’s odd the way fame or at least the desire for it can fuel people to degrade themselves for recognition. Within the performing arts, this particular ailment for acknowledgement is great. Money may buy happiness, but recognition brings an acceptance and silent membership into a world where our peers and juniors look to us as being “one of them”. In short, to be liked is the greatest and most powerful drug out there and this post-Facebook fountain of youth has now become the greatest source of drama in popular media. From the many film incarnations of A Star is Born (1937, 1954, 1976), Vincent Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), the proliferation of TV musical melodramas, Glee, reality shows, American Idol and The Voice, and the cornucopia of 24/7 entertainment shows doling out the latest celebrity news and gossip.  We live in a Warholian universe where traditional ideals of fame no longer apply. The history of the (in)famous is a gaudy tale of glorious failures, grotesque crimes, and the banal activities of a few pretty people but now every misstep, wardrobe malfunction, and well-rehearsed private moment is documented and regurgitated to us ad nauseam by the media machine.

A peculiar salve for this cult of the celebrity is Antoinette Jadaone’s Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay (2011), a meta-fictional documentary that traces the three-decade career of a bit player in the Filipino film industry and her contribution, be it minor, to her native country’s cinema culture. For those unfamiliar with Lilia Cuntapay her career began in the 1980s in the popular horror film franchise Shake, Rattle, and Roll (1984-present) playing witches, decrepit old women, and vengeful spirits. She was in demand due to her looks. Cuntapay’s long grey hair and sunken facial features gave the actress, as Shake, Rattle, and Roll director Peque Gallaga states, a “pre-Christian, pagan” demeanor. Of course, her strengths eventually became her greatest weaknesses. Horror films eventually went out of vogue, at least the low-budget Filipino variety, and her face soon became so overused that it no longer elicited fear. She became just a footnote, an important figure that can be linked to practically every actor, filmmaker, and production assistant in the Filipino film industry, but nonetheless forgotten by even die-hard cineastes.

Yet Cuntapay is not made to be a figure of ridicule. Jadaone takes great pains to portray all of her desperation, her inflated sense of self, her temper tantrums, her delusions of award grandeur, but all within context. When she gets angry at a young director for making her wait for two whole days on-set and then recasting her right before they shoot her scene, we empathize with her as she sulks afterwards in a cab ride back home. Or, an even better and far more hilarious example is Cuntapay’s visit to the hospital. Filling out the hospital form for her,  Cuntapay’s assistant is seemingly feeding her lines like in a vaudeville act as they debate the exact definition of star, actress, and bit player. All the humorous wordplay is punctuated in the end by a nurse asking our star bit-player for a picture and then ushering her to the front of the radiology line, as all VIPs should be.

Then of course, there are the multiple impromptu fan sessions wherein Cuntapay takes pictures, signs autographs, and hands out t-shirts to a mostly bewildered public. We don’t know whether to hang our heads in embarrassment for Cuntapay’s flagrant attention-seeking behavior or get angry with the philistines around her for being ignorant about the grand matriarch that sits before them. Watching Jadaone’s film I was reminded of two other movies that straddle the opposing styles of cinema-verite and mockumentary, Ramona S. Diaz’s Imelda (2003) and Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown (1999). Just as the protagonists in those films seek to build a cult of self so does Cuntapay, but unlike the characters in those stories, Cuntapay gains some personal insight about her Herzogian drive to attain her literal prize, that ultimately it alone won’t offer her any more validation for her decades of work.

Jadaone’s choice of Lilia Cuntapay might bewilder people that are familiar and un-familiar with her work. Although the woman was connected to practically every person in the Filipino film industry, her contributions to the craft of acting and the art of film are minimal at best. Plus, the woman has lived quite a banal life: seemingly unmarried, doesn’t drink, not an abuser of drugs, prescription or otherwise, save for an occasionally poker game with friends, Cuntapay doesn’t gamble, and she doesn’t have a harem of young men to serve her whims. Yet then it became absolutely clear during a scene in which Cuntapay shows us her suitcase stuffed to the brim with the wardrobe from all her past roles the reason why Jadaone chose Cuntapay as a subject.  The woman lived and breathed films.

No matter how small and inconsequential the part may have been, the woman made her character the center of the drama. A nameless passer-by becomes the key to solving a missing persons case, a baby-obsessed demon possessing a house is more memorable than the mother trying to save her child, and a grey haired woman in the background can catch a director’s attention and put her in a slew of films. Lilia Cuntapay is the patron saint of the under-appreciated film artist. And though she may never become a big-name star with Lilia Cuntapay at the top of the marquee in big bright neon lights, Antoinette Jadaone might extend her 15 minutes of fame before being ushered back into the dark cloud of obscurity.

 (Originally published on October 10, 2012 at VCinema Show Podcast and Blog.)

Lee's Adventure (2011) [PiFan 2012]

The story of Orpheus and Eurydice is a powerful narrative that conveys through the use of fantastical imagery the lengths to which a memory of lost love can drive a person to literally challenge the permanency of death. In the canon of Western literature, it has become the template for all romantic love stories. In the realm of film, French director Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus (1950) is a great example of how to translate the myths of the past to a modern day setting, turning the story of Orpheus and Eurydice into an Atomic Age fairy tale worthy of the pulps. Several decades later, the malleability of the Orpheus myth leads us on a trip to China, a land that is no stranger to myths and legends, but instead of the familiar figures so often seen in fantasy and wuxia, we are transported to a 21^st century world where the fiction found so often in science fiction is now reality.

Starting out as a twenty-minute animated short, Yang Li’s (using the moniker “Excellent Young Pilot”) film quickly gained an internet following in 2009 and its popularity soon had the first-time director working out the logistics for a feature length film. To help get his project off the ground he looked to experienced storyboarder Guo Fan, producer-actor Henry Fong, veteran cinematographer Peter Pau, and the son of Hong Kong legend Jackie Chan, Jaycee, to realize his vision. Unfortunately though, the mix of animation, live action, and CGI left a lot to be desired and Lee’s Adventure (2011) was released to mixed response.

Viewing the film without the baggage and expectations that many Beijingers had, my interest was piqued the moment we see an animated Jaycee Chan racing the cops on an abandoned highway followed by the eerie black of a dark tunnel. Eventually, the excitement dies down and we cut to a foggy pier. Are we seeing something real or an imagined space? Then two figures appear, a man and woman, these two we learn through the pauses in their dialogue are or were lovers. Something outside their control separates them. Time, death, space, biology, sanity, whatever it might be, Devotion Lee (Jaycee Chan) can not be deterred from his Orphic quest to reunite with his beloved Eurydice, the beautiful Fiona Wang in her feature film debut playing the mysterious Wang Qian. This age-old premise is so intriguing unto itself that, if told in a relatively straightforward fashion, it not only could rise to the level of high drama and tragedy, but also fulfill the requisite tropes of unrequited love and melodrama ubiquitous with Asian cinema.

Of course expectations are one thing and reality is another, and Lee’s Adventure suffers from an excess in style and a jarring mix of visual media, e.g. animation and CGI, which just doesn’t gel together as cohesively as it should . The idea of Lee suffering from an invented malady termed Time Perception Disorder (TPN) and illustrated by the use of freeze frames, sped-up action, and shallow focus photography allow us a glimpse into Lee’s very special world, but spectacle alone can’t carry a film. And aside from that, what is TPN exactly? Is it a disease or a super power? Guo Fan and Xiao Bei Zhang, the screenwriters of the film, seem to constantly vacillate between these two possibilities but never quite give us any clear answer. They imbue Lee with the ability to stop, start, and interact with his frozen-in-time environment, but then give the character the crutch of having to take a red pill, mind you not to keep the effects of TPN from destroying his body, but as a way to introduce a prop which will figure greatly in the way Wang Qian meets her tragic end. His powers and the pills are too much of an artificial plot contrivance that Jaycee and Wang’s scenes of convivial bliss are wasted on hackneyed writing.

On the other hand, the film’s use of animation was quite inspiring and I couldn’t help but wish the film had stayed an animated feature. The fantastic elements of the film would not have compromised the believability of the world. A perfect example of this is Lee’s recap of how he got $500,000 RMB to a trio of police officers. Structured as a Hollywood style action trailer featuring big guns, bad foreigners, beautiful women, and a gamut of explosions, the action keeps escalating with the introduction of each new absurd element. The garish colors and corny dialogue are not just effective as both parody but also work as commentary on the Hollywood Blockbuster’s global reach.

Sadly though, these scenes are few and far between and we must eventually return to the proper story, Lee’s obsessive quest to be reunited with Wang Qian, a plot thread that is resolved through the sci-fi trope of time travel. To Li Yang Li’s credit, however, it was refreshing to have time travel via video game be the method by which Lee travels from era to era.  Scenes of Chan’s character clicking away at a game controller look like masturbation sessions, his desire/lust to be reunited with Wang Qian sublimated by playing this video game, an obvious commentary of the current generation’s obsession with the digital/virtual world to the detriment of human interaction. Though Lee is eventually reunited with his Eurydice, I did love the bittersweet twist at the end. With all my complaining about the script I found Lee, now ravaged physically and psychologically by time, getting a moment to catch a glimpse of the ever-youthful Wang, who stands far out of his reach, an example of cinematic poetry. Like Orpheus, Jaycee Chan’s character never got the reunion he wanted, but while the Eurydice in the Ancient Greek myth is doomed to spend an eternity in the underworld. Lee has broken the barrier between time and space and freed her from death. Of course, ironically, in doing so he must pay with his life. Thus the price for Wang resurrection is Lee’s imminent death. The two forever separated again but by different circumstances this time.

At this year’s PiFan, Yang Li’s film won the European Fantastic Film Festival Federation Asian Award (EFFFF), an award given to promote the production of Asian genre film, but ironically Lee’s Adventure could have benefited from a reining in of visual style and a proper once-over of the screenplay. Though not a terrible movie and still worthy of a film fan’s time, the rough edges I mentioned kept me from enjoying the film fully. It is evident that Yang Li has great skill in creating powerful images, but hopefully with his next project, he can inject a bit more substance to his unique style.

(Originally published on August 7, 2012 at VCinema Show Podcast and Blog.)

Super Virgin (2012) [PiFan 2012]

Arrested development seems to be the great malady affecting Millennials worldwide. In the post recession, post-#occupyeverywhere, Doomsday prophecy-obsessed world we live in, what’s the point in growing up when the future that awaits us is, at best, on shaky ground, or worse, possibly nonexistent. The figures of adult authority preaching their "pull yourself up from your bootstraps, find a purpose, get a job, meet somebody nice, get married, and shoot out babies to fuel the machine again" philosophy isn’t unattractive to most people, but how can anyone achieve such “lofty” goals when getting a job has turned into an epic poem?

For the stocky and affable Won-jun (Back Seung-kee), life couldn’t be any sadder. Living with his parents, acting as a gopher for some unnamed business, and the butt of many nasty jokes about his nonexistent sexual experience, he does what weaker men can't. Yet, Back, doing double duty as director and lead actor, is not after high melodrama. For his first feature, Super Virgin (2012), he attempts great pathos by co-opting the myth of Pygmalion and appropriates the Hans Christian Andersen tale of The Ugly Duckling to tell a very funny, but dark romantic fable.

In Super Virgin, Won-jun’s solution to his sexual and romantic drought comes in the form of *pause for drum roll* an avatar. A vessel which he can body jump to whenever he wishes with the assistance of a Nobel prize-seeking engineer/scientist whose unhealthy desire to bed his own female avatar creation is one of many little side jokes that, in the hands of a lesser talent, would just be plain creepy. However, in Back’s film, this one note quirk is weaved into the scientist’s overall backstory, that of an egocentric workaholic who’s so enthralled with his own greatness that his soul mate literally is of his own creation. Designed to have all the physiological features of a human being, these avatars are like us in every way, except for the annoying fact that they are handsomer/prettier than the average person.

Won-jun takes the miraculous gift he has been given and quickly gets to work bedding as many women as possible. With the loss of his sexual innocence, any strong feelings of accomplishment at finally being one of the “beautiful people” or amusement at his skills in seduction laughably involving just randomly propositioning women on the street, are fleeting. Won-jun is ultimately, like all loveable losers, a hopeless romantic and pines for the love of a milquetoast woman, a recent transplant to his hometown of Incheon, who has a mean habit of kicking any man in the balls who stands uncomfortably close to her.

Soon Won-jun is faced with a great predicament, a universal fear that anyone who’s ever fallen in love must face: which mask do we show to the person we love? Is it fair to present a false image as long as our feelings and intentions towards that person are genuine and sincere? The director doesn’t offer a simple answer to this problem. Won-jun’s plight, though unique in very obvious ways, is still something that we can all relate to. The option to either embrace reality in all its ugly awkward glory or choose a false romantic ideal has not just been thrust upon Won-jun; our own interpretations of what we think he should do will ultimately color our interpretation of the film’s open-ended finale.

Aside from the narrative, one of the charms of this film has to be the Z-grade movie aesthetics. Incorporating the usual tropes of on-location shooting, verite style camerawork, and DIY production design, Super Virgin’s cult status is not only guaranteed, but its low budget, 5,000,000 Won (around US$4,500) to be exact, gives the film a unique visual identity. A perfect example of this is the lab where Won-jun goes to transform into his avatar. A production designer working on a bigger budget film would have taken the time to dress the set either in the style of a hokey mad scientist’s lab or as a super high-tech laboratory, both acceptable and familiar settings but nonetheless unoriginal compared to the doodle strewn lived-in space that appears in Super Virgin. Aside from that, the wordless dinner scene between Won-jun and his parents is a hilarious bit of physical comedy, reminiscent of Woody Allen in Annie Hall (1977), illustrating with just a few grunts, awkward nods, and the sound of chewing and slurping just how loving and dysfunctional Won-jun’s family is.

Of all the films I had the great fortune of seeing at this year’s PiFan, many had a healthy mix of comedy, horror, drama, and sci-fi, but only Super Virgin had, in my opinion, a mysterious alchemic blend of genre and art, proving that money and spectacle are no substitute for strong story, sincere acting, and an assured visual style. Talking to the director after the screening, I asked him if he was planning a new film yet and when could we expect to see it, to which he assured me he was and that the release date would be sometime next year. Curious as to who would be cast, he remarked that he would be working with the same group of actors in Super Virgin, comically adding that they were cheap to hire. Whatever his next project may be, hopefully lightning strikes twice.  I anxiously wait for the next Back Seung-kee masterpiece.

(Originally published on August 3, 2012 at VCinema Show Podcast and Blog.)

Gyo (2012) [PiFan 2012]

How does one begin to describe a film like Takayuki Hirao’s Gyo? With an end of the world scenario that revolves around “death stench” gas, marine life that walk on mechanical legs, and a trio of college girls on summer vacation, Gyo has everything necessary for a comedy horror film reminiscent of The Evil Dead franchise. But after a ravenous walking shark smashes into the summerhouse where Kaori (voiced by Mirai Kataoka) and her friends are staying within the first 10 minutes, making quick work not only of the décor but also exposing the cracks in the women’s friendship, all assumptions of the film being kitsch or tongue-in-cheek quickly evaporate.

Combining the claustrophobic elements found in Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) and David Cronenberg during his body horror phase, Hirao’s Gyo, which was originally a popular manga penned by Junji Ito, is a bleak horror tale. It posits a world not only where nature, so fed up from our constant exploitation of it, has decided to fight back by turning our pets, our loved ones, and our food supply against us, but also where the sins of our collective past, specifically our never ending bloodlust to murder anyone or anything we think dangerous to our existence, has come for sweet vengeance. With a brisk runtime of 70 minutes, the anime does not get bogged down in delivering a message or sermonizing for change.  In Ito's world, nothing can avert the end of the world and the only hope for survivors is a quick permanent death.

As I stated earlier, although Gyo is a manga adaptation, the film is not a straight copy. For one thing, in Ito’s version, it is Tadashi, Kaori’s boyfriend, who we follow in the manga. In the film, Tadashi, voiced byTakuma Negishi, gets very little screen time and it is Kaori’s journey to be reunited with Tadashi that drives the entire plot. Beyond that, another main difference is that Ito’s characterization of Kaori is far less flattering: she is a very frail, obnoxious woman whose main role in is to be saved by her boyfriend.

By switching the focus to a female protagonist, Hirao’s version is not only far more interesting because it plays against type to audience expectations of damsels in distress but it also evokes American horror movies which have primarily female protagonists having to fight and survive until the last reel of the film, e.g. Ellen Ripley from the Alien series or Laurie Strode from the Halloween franchise.  In those films, just as the female protagonists are pushed to their physical and psychological breaking points, Kaori also endures a ridiculous series of trials not matched since the time of Job. In fact, the story of Gyo is very biblical, the famous 10 plagues found in the story of Moses being condensed into one big cataclysmic event of otherworldly origins and, instead of the conflict between two very disparate religions, Egyptian versus Israelite, we find science and civilization under attack from nature. In Gyo, the angry God from the Old Testament has judged mankind as unworthy to walk the earth and has decided to clean house.

In contrast to Kaori’s heroic arc, a parallel storyline that follows her girlfriends, who she abandons at Tadashi’s summerhouse in Okinawa, perfectly encapsulates just how barbaric human beings can be to one another when one’s survival is on the line. In fact, the friendship between the hyper-sexualized Erika (voiced by Ami Tanguchi) and chubby milquetoast Aki (Masami Saeki) is predicated mainly by their connection with Kaori.  Their civility to one another quickly vanishes the moment danger in the form of walking rabid fish that begin to stampede on land.

This ever-pervasive pessimism is carried over to the final image of the film, which in itself appears to be a reference to another doomsday story, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kairo (Pulse, 2001). Gyo is not just an effective horror story, but also a warning to all of the future that might await us.

(Originally published on July 30, 2012 at VCinema Show Podcast and Blog.)

Rainbow Fireflies (2011) [PiFan 2012]

At first glance, the poster for Uda Kounosuke’s Rainbow Fireflies, with its series of picture bubbles featuring scenes of various children enjoying the salad days of summer, would lead anyone with even some cursory knowledge of Japanese cinema to probably assume that the film was a drama depicting the every day, a la the work of Yasujiro Ozu or Isao Takahata, and that assumption would be apt. Yet, if the film was merely just a genre retread then I doubt the programmers of PiFan would have chosen it as part of their Ani Fanta series this year. No, although Rainbow Fireflies has a plot that dwells mainly in the quieter moments of drama, which a majority of Japanese films do so well, it tackles the common tropes of young love, loss, and tragic pasts by utilizing the familiar and nostalgic concept of the “time slip” to present a heartwarming magic realist tale.

The main character in the film, Yuta (voiced by Akashi Takei) is a young man stuck nostalgically reliving the moments he shared with his now dead father, constantly replaying the last message that his dad left for him to the point that he begins repeating lines from it when speaking to his mother. His nostalgia has even brought him deep into the mountains hoping to catch beetles where his father had shown him when he was still a boy. During this trek through the wilderness, though he comes upon an old, gnome-like but harmless old man, begging for something to drink. Yuta shares his sports drink with him, an act of kindness that the man repays later by sending Yuta back in time to the year 1977 in an attempt to save Yuta’s life after he takes a nasty fall during a torrential rainstorm. Of course, although saved from certain death, the prospect of living in a different time and place surrounded by strangers isn’t quite appealing, especially not for a boy with a mother who is constantly worried about him.

Luckily for Yuta, on first arriving to the small village, he is welcomed by Saeko, a girl with her own tragic past.  Seeing the confused look on Yuta’s face. she takes it upon her herself to bring him to her house, not as a guest but as her cousin, an act not merely odd because the two just met, but also because everyone in the village including Saeko’s grandmother wholeheartedly believe Yuta to be the person Saeko says he is without question. This makes it possible that there is more to the sleepy village that Yuta has been transported to then just the quaint simplicity of farm life. Has Yuta really gone back in time or could this idyllic small town be a mini-purgatory?

What I particularly loved about Kounosuke’s film, adapted from a novel by Masayuki Kawaguchi, is that it does not fall into the trap of so many time travel narratives (for example, the Back to the Future trilogy),  by having the protagonist meet younger versions of people he knew in the present, wasting valuable screen time by having characters patch up plot holes and time paradoxes. It would have been quite easy to rely on this plot device since Kounosuke establishes early on in the story that Yuta’s father was also a visitor to the village when he was still a boy. Instead, the film deals with loss through the metaphor of the destruction of a village. In scene after scene, we are reminded of how finite this community’s existence is. And as the world outside of the village’s purview grows larger and more dependent on bending rather than bowing to nature, the rituals and small pleasures of small town life are quickly going extinct.

Yuta, although not a dyed in the wool technocrat, is a typical child of the cellphone generation. Bottled water, store bought tomatoes, and an entire childhood spent without having seen a single firefly is a common reality for many children now. Brought to that specific point in the past, Yuta gets to experience a way of life now relegated to nostalgic fantasy by film and television. Although the director, to his credit, doesn’t just portray the animation in a Disney generic style, but shifts from photo-realistic landscape painting to impressionistic slashes of black to abstract blotches of color, forcing audiences to never be completely passive while watching the film.  This makes the film a good blend of substance and style.

Summer was such a wonderful time to be a kid. Those few weeks when the boring routine of school was replaced by the possibility of adventure and just hanging out with friends made the unbearable heat and lack of funds no problem at all. Yet, time moves forward and eventually we are all reduced to nostalgically dreaming of going back to happier days. For producer Toei Animation and Uda Kounosuke, Rainbow Fireflies hits just the right note of nostalgia and sentimentality, depicting the familiar pain of loss and every person’s attempt to burrow into the past for a fleeting sense of comfort. Of course, as any sane person eventually realizes: that which has passed cannot be undone.

(Originally published on July 27, 2012 at VCinema Show Podcast and Blog.)

Young Dudes (2012) [PiFan 2012]

 “We are all the heroes of our dreams”

That is not a piece of dialogue from DJ Ying-Jung Chen’s Young Dudes, though it could have easily slipped from the mouths of either of the male protagonists in the film. Instead, that is a lyric from a song that plays as the three main leads of Young Dudes are running, not so much to get away from something, but rather chasing after the intangible: time.

For Adam (Wang Po Chien), Guy (Abe Tsuyoshi), and their beautiful Ukrainian friend Adele (Larisa Bakurova), as the world slips further into entropic malaise, like all idealists, they take it upon themselves to correct the flaws they perceive to be self-evident in every man, woman, and child around the globe. Of course, their revolution is not based on physical power. No, as true-blue idealists they use the greatest democratizing tool since the invention of the printing press, the Internet, to win over new converts. Making candid video posts extolling their message of togetherness and family and posting it on YouTube and Facebook, this small multi-ethnic band of Merry Pranksters quickly gain a following. A group of followers who, when the end does come, seem to not cower in fear as the old order crumbles, but rather welcomes the opportunity of building something better.

Watching Chen’s film I couldn’t help but look towards several films from the past: Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders (Bande a part, 1964) and the films of Wong Kar-Wai, specifically Chungking Express (Chung Hing sam lam, 1994) and Happy Together (Chun gwong cha sit, 1997).  Whether the director actively sought to emulate these films I don't know, but nonetheless, Young Dudes with each of these films shares similar themes of romantic idealism, pop culture as a form of communication, memory, and time. In particular, like Godard’s Band of Outsiders, Chen's film is built around a triangular relationship, the friendship between Adam, Guy, and Adele. And just as Godard’s characters found comfort in their shared obsession of pulp crime novels, cinema, and jazz, Chen’s modern day protagonists come together due in part to a shared pop culture collective consisting specifically of American pop music, film, and Judeo-Christian mythology, which all play a major role in defining the trio’s philosophic outlook. Where the two filmmakers split off in differing directions though is their viewpoint on youth culture. Whereas Godard saw the relationship between men and women, the generational gap, and the conflicts between the first world and the third world stemming from a struggle for money and power, Chen’s film has a far more romantic viewpoint and reduces rebellion to being an extension of play.

Adam, Guy, and Adele have built a utopian world which consists of mainly themselves and their online followers. Although they post videos and engage the public in flamboyant flash mob style demonstrations, which have them dressing up as Michael Jackson clones to catch the public's attention in the street, we never really see anyone directly challenging or questioning their childish antics. Of course, the primary reason for this is their inability to defend their lofty ideas because they are far too utopian to ever really be feasible in the real world. Most people would probably even brand Adam, the “brains” behind the entire operation, as insane. And though Chen does hint at a brewing conflicting between Guy and Adam as they try to compete for the attention of Adele just as the male friendship in Godard’s Band of Outsiders crumbles with the introduction of Anna Karina’s character into the mix, it’s only sporadically touched upon in Chen’s film. This comprises Young Dudes main weakness: there is no real conflict in the story. It’s merely a film about the end of the world seen through the eyes of beautiful quirky people who have great fashion sense and a lot of time on their hands.  Basically, Chen’s film could be interpreted as Band of Outsiders for the Urban Outfitters clique.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the film has no value.   Ironically, what Young Dudes has in spades is beautiful images. Taking a page from the Wong Kar-Wai visual playbook, Chen has his DP, Patrick Chou, shoot the film in a variety of styles, incorporating slow motion, a panoply of color filters, stark use of light and shadow, and off-kilter camera angles, not to mention the art direction by Art Chen.  The way that the director illustrates the end of the world is also unique in that he does not depict it as a fiery chaotic event. Instead, Chen incorporates surrealistic dream imagery and shows us an Apocalypse which isn't so much a destructive force but rather as a natural process of renewal, making the prospect of the end of days not such a tragic event, but rather a bittersweet conclusion. Aside from the visuals, Young Dudes also has quite a catchy soundtrack which has a mix of songs from various musical eras.  However, instead of just buying up the copyrights to songs, Chen has the Eurasian rock-pop duo Soler do their own unique rendition of each song featured in the film, giving the soundtrack a familiar yet fresh sound.

In conclusion, although the film’s simplistic viewpoint of how to resolve the world’s many problems may have many cinemagoers rolling their eyes, I found myself unabashedly in love with the blend of images and sounds. With the world's continuing obsession with Doomsday prophecies only growing exponentially as the economy and environment rapidly turn against us, it felt good to see a more optimistic point of view.   Hopefully, Young Dudes isn’t the last we’ve heard from DJ Chen.

(Originally published on July 22, 2012 at VCinema Show Podcast and Blog.)

Love Talk (2005)

With five films under his directorial belt Lee Yoon-ki has seemingly become the patron saint of modern female ennui. Just as the Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni utilized Monica Vitti’s detached cool exterior to explore the problems of the nouveau riche in such classic art-house favorites as L’Avventura (1960) and L’eclisse (1962) director Lee has, in the quintet of films he has directed so far, explored similar themes, though in a far less cold and calculated manner. With an unquestionable knack for casting strong female actresses who invest every subtle gesture and pregnant pause with a whole host of conflicting emotions, Lee avoids the trap of histrionic melodrama that so many Korean films have fallen into. Of course, with that statement said not all of his films could be called unequivocal masterpieces.

Debuting in 2004 with This Charming Girl (Yeoja, Jeong-hye, 2004) and gaining critical acclaim in film festivals as varied as Pusan, Berlin, and Sundance, Lee had etched for himself, within the international film community, a reputation for crafting low-key female character studies. Of course, when one uses the terms "low-key", "lo-fi", or even "character study," even the most ardent cinephile can’t help but sneer imagining a film with a meandering storyline, excessive verbal pontificating from characters, and an unrefined visual style. This backlash is due in part to the Mumblecore movement, that emerged in the mid-2000s, a movement that reveled in this particular brand of navel gazing, which of course irked many critics and cinephiles. Lee’s films, though appearing to exhibit all of the tropes from this movement, are far more watchable and also speak to more universal truths about the human condition. Much like all true auteurs, each film in his oeuvre builds upon his previous work. Characters, themes, setting, and even moods are repeated throughout his films, establishing a unique but familiar universe that audiences can visit.

For his sophomore effort, Lee broadens his scope further by going from exploring the mundane daily routine of a female postal clerk in This Charming Girl to the lives of three emotionally damaged Korean expatriates in Los Angeles’ Koreatown in Love Talk, a film which many have labeled as a “flawed but noble effort”. After my initial viewing of the film, I would have to agree with that opinion of the film. Although having all the requisite ingredients necessary in a Lee Yoon-ki film, it falls short do in part to the foreign setting and also, ironically, because of Lee’s unique style of filmmaking.

The America depicted in Lee’s film is a familiar, but empty space. Though his main concern in the film is exploring the lives of three Korean expatriates living in a multi-ethnic Los Angeles environment, his representation of Los Angeles is so generic that the film could have been set in any U.S. city. Unlike his later film, My Dear Enemy (2008), which fully utilized the urban Seoul setting to the point that it became a third character within the narrative, the Los Angeles in Love Talk is unfortunately nondescript. Love Talk may be set in a foreign land but it is far from being a “stranger in a strange land” type of narrative. In fact, it edges closer to being an interior drama wherein the dialogue is sparse and the few lines spoken by the actors offer only snippets to our understanding of the characters we are watching on screen.

The two female protagonists in the movie, Sunny (Bae Jong-ok) and Young-shin (Park Jin-hee), have traveled to L.A. looking not for the American dream, but to escape from a never fully understood emotional trauma. With Sunny working as a masseuse/prostitute and Young-shin holding court as the host of a radio call-in show called Love Talk, it’s ironic that both Sunny and Young-shin have occupations that requires each woman to give their customers/listeners some form of cathartic release, be it physical or emotional since both women are, like many of the female protagonists found in Lee Yoon-ki’s films, emotionally repressed and in a seemingly constant state of catatonia. Though unlike the character played by Kim Ji-Soo in This Charming Girl, both women are neither alone nor are they particularly isolated from people or their environment. Nonetheless whenever a chance for emotional intimacy with someone appears, both women quickly draw away and push their respective partners back. Case in point being our third protagonist in the film, Ji-Seok (Park Hee-soon), who we meet at the very start of the film.  At first, it seems like the two have some history together and that maybe they were or will become lovers, but Ji-Seok is actually Young-shin’s former lover and he has traveled all the way to Los Angeles to win her back.

All of this sounds like a bad cliché melodrama, but Lee does a good job keeping the histrionics to a bare minimum to the point that it becomes nil impossible to actually keep your interest in the story.  Lee’s trademark slow ponderous style makes juggling the three storylines a real chore. If the focus was just either on Sunny, Young-shin, or Ji-Seok the film might have been easier to follow since the narrative through line would be far less cluttered, but as it is, the constant jumping from one emotionally unavailable character to another was quite taxing. This is not to mention the fact that the English dialogue spoken by the Korean as well as American actors is poorly delivered and also quite laughably bad at times. When the veneer of calm placidity finally does begin to crack, especially during one of the only scenes of violence in Lee’s oeuvre, it is quite jarring. It's as if we were watching a movie in a parallel universe with the same characters and story, but directed by a far more conventional filmmaker.

Ultimately, Love Talk can be defined mainly by what it is not. It is not a film about the expatriate experience. It is not a romance, drama, or road movie/travelogue. It can only be tangentially considered a Korean film due to its cast and crew being mainly Korean in ethnicity. It is not a perfect film and though Lee would go on to refine his style and further (and better) explore the many facets of loneliness and emotional isolation, Love Talk is a small misstep from an otherwise talented and brilliant director.

(Originally published on July 3, 2012 at VCinema Show Podcast and Blog.)