Revivre - Im Kwon-taek's 102nd film premieres at the Korean Film Festival this week

Walking into the Event Cinema on George Street, surviving the smell from the Subway fast food outlet, heading for the box office, I noticed a desk surrounded by people in indecipherable tee shirts which on a second glance turned out to be the information point for the 6th Korean Film Festival in Australia. The attractive little program book on offer lists twenty films which will screen in Sydney and Melbourne with decreasing numbers in Canberra, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide. It started in Sydney just a few hours later and I can strongly recommend the film screening in Sydney at 6.00 pm on Friday 14th Revivre (South Korea, 2014), (Melbourne on 4 September) directed by the veteran Im Kwon-taek. Mr Im made his directing debut in 1962 and this is his 102nd film. It premiered at Venice last year and I saw it in Vancouver. In my view it’s a masterpiece, not least for the astonishing lead performance by veteran Ahn Sung-ki. All that may not be the reason it seems to have been bypassed by the major festivals. 

Here is Tony Rayns program note from last year’s VIFF web site.

Neon - David Young (visiting from Sydney) reports on Lawrence Johnston's new film at MIFF

Part of going to film festivals now seems to involve the inclusion of advertising, just like at the "normal" cinema. The crassness of commercial cinema advertising is more than matched at MIFF by a packaged popcorn promotion and the mindlessly stupid ads, by the Victorian Government, for customised number plates. However, they were worth enduring for Lawrence Johnston's dazzlingly colourful doco Neon (Australia, 2015), which covered the subject both informatively and entertainingly. 

Lots of archive photos and motion footage show the history of neon, from the early illumination of Parisian buildings in the 1890s, Nikola Tesla's development of the process of making a neon sign a decade later, the setting up of the Claude Neon company after WW1 in the USA by Frenchman Georges Claude, who spent the 1920s suing anyone who tried to make their own neon signs until expiration of his patents in the early 1930s opened the industry to everybody. 

Hollywood was quick to see its potential as a sign of modernity - who could forget Busby Berkeley's dancers and their neon violins in Gold Diggers of 1933? Las Vegas gets lots of mentions in post-WW2 history, and there is a brief international round up of notable neon advertising, including, naturally, Melbourne's own Skipping Girl. The talking heads are suitably enthusiastic and varied - there are collectors of old signs, artists who work in the medium, and a couple of people who have started their own museums - the Boneyard in Vegas features salvaged 90ft high signs amongst the rocks and sand. Regret is also expressed for the eclipse of relatively eco-friendly neon by the less eco-friendly LEDs and plastic signage now used because of economics. The cinematography is gorgeous but the music is a little overdone at times.

Seymour: An Introduction & Listen to Me Marlon - Peter Hourigan reviews two docos at MIFF

Listen To Me Marlon,  (Stevan Rilay, UK, 2015, Masters & Restorations Section)

Seymour : An Introduction (Ethan Hawke, USA  2014, Backbeat Section)

During a Film Festival, several films can rub up against each other in mutually illuminating ways. This was the case for me with these two films which I saw back-to-back.  (Only needed a change of cinemas).    I’ll start with Seymour: An Introduction, directed by Ethan Hawke.  Its subject is Seymour Bernstein, a classical pianist now in his late 80s who retired from a highly successful  performing career at 50.

Hawke appears several times, when he introduces Bernstein to a small musical soiree, and explains how he came to be making the film.  He had met Bernstein at a dinner party, felt so comfortable talking with the elderly musician about his own sense of incompleteness with his career, and felt impelled to discover why Seymour felt so comfortable with his own artistic life.

So, a major theme emerges clearly – what impels a career in the arts, and why artists frequently are so dissatisfied with their successes.  Now, in a teaching career Bernstein comes across as a wonderfully contented person, still giving wonderful lessons, and enjoying the warmth and enduring affection of past pupils, and the full respect of many including the manager of the rental section of Steinway pianos.

From one of Steinway’s past pupils, an idea emerged that kept playing in my head.  This past pupil, now a concert performer himself, said how it was important for him to keep composing music, and always included one of his own pieces in his concerts.  Which made me think of interesting differences between the creative artist and the re-creative artist.  A concert pianist, after all, spends hours and hours and hours practicing to come closer to expressing the ideas of another person. A performance is, in a way, an interpretation not a full individual creative act.

And perhaps for many actors this some disconnect exists with their impulsion to be creative and the fact that their career involves being a pawn to realise other people’s creative ideas.  Hawke would appear to have found his own ways to handle this, having now written  novels, been involved in the scripts of films he’s appeared in (especially with Richard Linklater) and also directing several films.  But it’s interesting that in Seymour he states his sense of something empty in the career.  Perhaps it this feeling that is the important driving force – the urge to be more and more creative rather than always just re-creative.

 These thoughts from Hawke’s film bounced back in my mind onto Stevan Riley’s film about Marlon Brando.  This film expands on the many docos (most probably not deserving the full “documentary” descriptor) about Brando.  Much of it is built around almost confessional tape recordings found among his estate.  These reveal a Brando almost painfully aware of the emptiness of much of what he had to do, a contempt for many of the people he had to deal.

                

We’re certainly aware of the bad reputation that Brando earned over the course of his career, rewriting scripts, leaving projects,”phoning in performances”, sending an American-Indian proxy to accept an Oscar.  And of desperately sad events in his private life, perhaps culminating with his son’s murder of his half-sister’s boyfriend.

 Listen to Me Marlon does not of course come up with a definitive analysis of Brando, as an artist or as a person. But it does represent his complexity and his lifelong quest for “something”. Perhaps if that “something” could be defined more completely, if it wasn’t so abstract we’d have more contented actors, and actresses (and concert pianists) but then we’d miss the fire that comes from their search.

These two films both communicated aspects of this creative urge in their own way. The Brando film will probably be more widely seen, if simply because its subject is already so well known. But Hawke's film about Seymour Bernstein deserves to be seen just as widely. Even if just for the sheer pleasure of spending time in the company of such a wonderful old man.

Dont Tell Me the Boy was Mad - Peter Hourigan reviews Robert Guedigian's new film at MIFF

DON’T TELL ME THE BOY WAS MAD/Une Histoire de Fou (Robert Guédigian, France, 2015, International Panorama)

Robert Guédigian has had a long career, making many highly enjoyable and satisfying films, many with his wife and muse ArianeAscaride, as well as Jean-Pierre Darrousin.  Many are set in Marseilles, and the situations reflect his own background, his father’s life as a worker on the Marseilles docks, and his own strongly left political views.  As well his family’s Armenian ancestry – a low key element in many of his films until this new film.

The English  title comes from a song one of the characters sings in the course of the film.  The original French title is starker – Une histoire de fou , a story of madness.  In the story to come, it’s not just a boy who is mad, but maybe it’s a whole situation, everyone, every institution, every nation may be deserving of the epithet of “madness”.

The new film has some familiar Guédigian characteristics.  Much of it is located in Marseilles, Ascaride is again the mother in a family with basic working class roots – even if her husband runs a small, ethnically flavoured grocery in a strong working class part of Marseilles.

But Guédigian’s Armenian ancestry is also strongly to the fore here.  The film opens in 1921 with a long prologue, covering the assassination in Berlin that year of the Turkish ambassador, by an Armenian Soghomon Tehlirian.  In sepia monochrome, we view Tehlirian’s trial, and sensational acquittal. This coverage is an effective way of communicating much of the horror of the Armenian genocide. Didactic, yes – but it’s also dramatically appropriate, and convincing, and never feels just preaching for the sake of it.

Then the film leaps to the 1980s, and the home of a family of Armenian ancestry. Most of their community were born after the genocide, in exile, but the bitterness of the event is part of their identity, and Tehlirian is still a poster boy for the young men.  This new generation, itself now several generations removed from the atrocities, feels the world must be reminded that, despite Turkish denials for generations, did take place and has never been atoned for.  How do you wake up the world?  Maintaining the memory?   Church services?  Of violent activism?

We follow a cell of young men, who choose violent demonstrations – understandable, when you see how the French government seems complicit with the Turkish government in silencing information, and use the French police against what could have been peaceful demonstrations.  But justifiable?  The best way? A way without “side effects”?

Ascaride’s politicised son Aram is involved in an attack on the Turkish ambassador’s car in Paris. Gilles Tessier a  young cyclist who has the misfortune to be nearby in seriously injured.   Aram flees to Lebanon.  And Ascaride reaches out to the cyclist who has been injured by her son’s actions. This could have been a dramatically clumsy, over-deliberated piece of plotting, but it works.  It works brilliantly, partly due to the power of the performances.  Humanity and humility, insight and warmth  permeate both these actors.

But it also works because it is also a means of addressing many significant themes, on the topic of actions people take to remind the world of grievances.  What are the justifications of terrorism? Is it always, or sometimes, or never justified?  What are the impacts of such acts – not just on intended victims, but bystanders – and your own family?  How important is this collateral damage in weighing up an action? 

This is perhaps Guédigian’s most complex film.  His humanity is still movingly present, but the way it addresses the Armenian genocide itself is impressive. And add to that the complexity of the questions that he raises about terrorism, ethnic grievances, international complicities in often perpetuating rather than healing these grievances, and so much more.

La Sapienza - Peter Hourigan's review from MIFF

Eugene Green

LA SAPIENZA (Eugène Green, France,  2014, Internaational Panorama)

Director Eugène Green, although he was born in USA (thinking of FORT BUCHANAN’s  Benjamin Crotty was he trying to start a trend?) his films are intensely French, and often feature French cultural treasures – architectural, music, literary.   (I wonder if the accent in his name is actually on his birth certificate?)

LA  SAPIENZA revolves around two couples.  Aleixandre is an outstandingly successful architect, his wife Aliénor although also successful in her own work seems dissatisfied and perhaps a bit alienated (is her name intended as a signifier of this?) with her lot and a sense perhaps a lot is missing in the marriage.  They do go together, however, to Italy when Alexandre wants to do some research on Baroque architect Francesco Borromini.

In a beautiful town on Lake Maggiore in northern n Italy, they meet a young brother and sister when the girl collapses in the park both couples are walking through.  Developments lead to the architect taking (perhaps a bit reluctantly) the 18 year old Goffredo with him to Rome where he will continue his research.  Goffredo is hoping to study architecture himself next year. Aliénor stays behind with Lavinia, feeling some responsibility to see she is really well after the dramatic turn she’d had in the park.

The film shifts back and forth between the two pairs.  The interactions are gentle. Alexandre, perhaps with an air of condescension at first, teaches Goffredo about Borromini as they visit some of his great buildings. But slowly, he himself is challenged by Alexandre’s own fresh, uncorrupted insights and observations. Meanwhile, Aliénor and Lavinia are sharing time, going to a performance in French of a classic, Baroque play by Moliere, talk about their own pasts, share coffees. 

Gradually, imperceptibly, yet dramatically and movingly, all four find new strengths within themselves to move on to the next phases of their lives.  This emerges subtly, convincingly, quietly.

Green’s style is certainly distinctive.  Right from the start, he is confronting his audience with different visual approaches. An early restaurant meal with Alexandre and Aliénor is shot dead square on, the couple’s table a small, seemingly isolated object in the middle – the very middle, symmetrically – in the frame.  When one or other speaks,  he or she is also placed dead centre in the frame, looking directly at the camera. And directed to have a blank, inexpressive, Bressonian face.  Nothing more powerfully evokes the emptiness of their relationship at this point – but I think some viewers found this a bit too confronting for comfort.

One quick Festival viewing is clearly not enough for this film, with its insights into relationships, architecture, the role of the arts in our lives, travel, innocence and experience. And its surface is also to be wallowed in, with its locations in Baroque Rome, and the lakes in North Italy, with a glorious soundtrack with wonderful helpings of Monteverdi.

I came across one review by Godfrey Cheshire on the Roger Ebert.com website  which to me does the film better justice than I can at this stage. 

Fort Buchanan - Peter Hourigan reports on 'a little gem' from MIFF

FORT BUCHANAN (Benjamin Crotty, France/Tunisia, 2014, International Panorama)

The name sounds like it may be a John Ford film – and that the film’s title comes from the facility for the wives of soldiers serving in the army perhaps reinforces that. Perhaps something like Fort Apache?   Well, no.  This is a French film, though the director, Benjamin Crotty was born in USA.

This film is completely set among the wives, talking sex (and sexual tensions and frustrations when husbands are on service out of the country), sharing problems like how to handle the near-18 daughter of one of their number, and then the looming impact on French Government cutbacks on military facilities such as theirs.

In only 65 minutes, this film develops a strong sense of a community, and of the individuals who make up that community.  At one point it shifts from France to Djibouti (though filmed in Tunisia) when some of the wives join their husbands – not all of whom are happy to see their partners. I haven’t mentioned yet, however, that Frank, one of the husbands is black – and after 18 years of marriage he’s not seeing the relationship in the same way as his spouse.  And then I add that Frank’s wife is Roger – and that there is another man in the group of wives….. well, in one way those details misrepresent the film.  Because it is most definitely not a film about race or a film about gay couples.

In fact, part of its success comes from the fact that all the characters are over race or gay marriage as issues.  These are just people, with the same issues of sex, of families, of bringing up children, of hopes and fears of the future, of identity with and outside of a relationship.

This is a little gem that completely took me by surprise.

Monster Hunt - Barrie Pattison reports on the Chinese mega-hit and its low key debut here

Note MONSTER HUNT ( Zhuoyaojì) the biggest grossing ever Chinese made film getting a super soft local launch. It turns out to be a kung fu E.T. This is not without precedent. Think the not so good Stephen Chow CJ7 in 2008.

Director Raman Hui worked on the Shrek films and managed to team up with veteran Chinese producer Bill Kong (CROUCHING TIGER) to get this mix of live action and digital animation together. For a while there it looked as if they’d burned thirty million dollars, when their star got busted for pot smoking and was unofficially banished from Chinese screens. They say that his fellow doper was back in movies after a payoff.

However Hui took the high road of sorts and reshot with singer Jing Boran in the part, near doubling the budget, a colossal gamble which paid off. The result is a progressively more winning mix of live action and digital animation, already their industry’s biggest earner.

Also in the cast is Baie Baihi who the more diligent will have seen in Feng
Xiaogang’s PERSONAL TAILOR, Jiang Wu (TO LIVE, SHOWER & TOUCH OF SIN) and veteran comics Eric Tsang and Sandra Ng who are always welcome.

It’s possible that this will enter the popular movie repeater canon and its also possible that it will never become available again. I’d suggest doubling off to your Multiplex for its one session a day - just in case.