By Brian Hu

APA catches a fraction of this year's Pusan International Film Festival. Part One includes reviews of Forever the Moment, 21 Lotus, and Service.

Skip to our individual reviews:

12 Lotus (Royston Tan)
All Around Us (Ryosuke Hashiguchi)
Exhausted (Kim Gok)
Firaaq (Nandita Das)
Forever the Moment (Im Soon-rye)
My Magic (Eric Khoo)
Ocean of an Old Man (Rajesh Shera)
Plastic City (Yu Lik-wai)
Routine Holiday (Li Hongqi)
Sell Out! (Yeo Joon Han)
Service (Brillante Mendoza)
Still Walking (Hirokazu Kore-eda)
Trivial Matters (Pang Ho-cheung)
Winds of September (Tom Lin Shu-yu)

For our overview of the festival, the market, and the city -- as well as some thoughts on Hong Sang-soo's Night and Day -- click here (http: //www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/081017/article.asp?parentID=99076).

Forever the Moment
dir: Im Soon-rye 

Released before the 2008 Olympic Games, Yim Soon-rye's handball crowd-pleaser loses none of its melodramatic force after the South Korean women settled for bronze at this summer's games. Since the story is inspired by a near-legend penalty shot thriller at the 2004 Athens games, Korean audiences already knew the ending; furthermore, the film was a box office sensation and the subject of much word-of-mouth praise when it came out in January 2008. Despite all this, the Pusan International Film Festival audience was in dead silence in the film's powerful final moments, a reaction that's testament to Yim's effective -- if not masterful -- direction of sports melodrama. From the camera's careful peering at the action, to the amped-up music, to the reverse shots of cheering audience members -- everything is where it ought to be, including our tears. By the end, the roller-coaster finale has overshadowed everything that came before, which is no less effective but far less memorable. The training rituals are nicely done but we've seen better musical montages of weight-training and slow-motion high-fives. Forever the Moment sets up a number of interesting conflicts (male vs. female, youth vs. experience, Western training methods vs. Korean tradition, elite sports vs. working class athletes), but unfortunately it never elaborates further, settling instead for the big patriotic finish. But it's a testament to how well it's done that my being Chinese American didn't stop me from being proud to be Korean.   

All Around Us
dir: Ryosuke Hashiguchi 

It's easy to call All Around Us a film about a couple who attempts to cope with their young daughter's death. Indeed there are enough weighty moments of husband Kanao consoling wife Shoko, who utters crushing lines like "I wanted to do everything right, but I couldn't," as she cries and cries. But that simplification does the film an injustice since the meat of it is in the scenes of joyous banality that orbit the dead weight in the middle. While the narrative is driven by Shoko's pregnancy and then the child's death, what gives it meaning is not the tragedy, but the pleasure of watching two people remain intimate and passionate despite it all. Indeed, we never see Kanao and Shoko's first meeting; when we first encounter them, they are swept away by the possibilities of infidelity during their early months as husband and wife. Here, a wedding is not the outcome of a relationship, it is its prelude. How wonderful it is to see a story take marriage -- and indeed adulthood -- seriously rather than as a liability. 

What makes the film work is its playful use of time: instead of having the narrative dwell on details like death, infidelity, career, and art, it jumps forward months at a time; we watch the couple for a day or two, then the film cuts to a year later. The structure is well-suited for the depiction of a relationship in-motion, not a marriage in a rut. This wispy macro-view (enabled by Lily Franky's stoner-cool depiction of Kanao) gives the film a sense of freshness, and somewhat miraculously, manages to capture changes in Japanese society across the 1990s. As the years propel further, Kanao and Shoko look all around them and find that their problems mean less in this crooked world than their ability to stay together.  

12 Lotus
dir: Royston Tan 

Royston Tan's follow-up to his box-office smash 881 sees the maverick Singaporean on auto-pilot, simply rehashing elements from his previous success. In 12 Lotus, much of the surprise and freshness is gone, and the plot and construction emerge as the banalities they are. The story is as old as cinema itself. A girl singer is managed by her father. Greed, vice, and underworld dealings tear everything apart. Tears and song follow. However, I hesitate before claiming that Tan has gone pop, even if the film does have a cameo from superstar idol Stefanie Sun. When 12 Lotus works, it's terrific. Needless to say, the successful scenes are the musical ones, and though they're plentiful (the film is organized into 12 arias, or "lotuses") they just barely cover up the tiresome storyline and bland characters. An instance where it works is toward the beginning. As little as I was into the drama, when young Lian Hua (Mindee Ong) and Ah Long (Yu Wu Qi) get their 1950s on during the chapter 5 number, I was enamored. From beginning to end, the Hokkien tunes and getai dances are spot-on, and Royston Tan proves a magician at blurring theater, dreams, and everyday life. If only there was more blurring and less sitting around clear-eyed, waiting for the magic.  

Routine Holiday
dir: Li Hongqi 

Routine Holiday opens on a rustic setting, with a father and son staring offscreen. Another man walks into the frame and tries to steal a glance at what's transfixed them. The father points and tells his son: "that is a field." It's a wonderfully obnoxious little scene that makes you laugh at the cold-faced idiocy of everyday banality. Of course that's a field, stupid. But the joke is startlingly sophisticated. Are these characters just that idiotic? Or are they so jaded by everyday life that they think a plain field is an object of fascination? That's the joke running through Li Hongqi's 80-minute dead-pan romp. It's a holiday and everyone's free for the day. But all they can seem to do is go to each other's houses and sit around staring at their glasses of water and wondering what everyone else is doing. In the film's funniest scene, one man tries to tell the kid a riddle. The kid just stares at him blankly. Does he not understand what the man is saying? Or is he above this nonsense? Who the hell knows? In a society where people are trained to work, work, work, playtime is something of a mysterious mission given by employers every few months. Like Aki Kaurismaki and the other symphonist of playtimes Jacques Tati, Li Hongqi (who made the acclaimed So Much Rice) doesn't critique social conventions directly, but has us stare at them like the characters stare at each other. He dares us to laugh at people's vacations. Vacation is not funny.  

Exhausted
dir: Kim Gok 

Michael Hanake meets the Blair Witch Project in Kim Gok's Exhausted, a vicious kick in the pants to everyone in the audience, all in the name of "style." A man meets a mute woman, and as any reasonable person would do in such a situation, makes her his prostitute. But the pimping is the least of our problems. As we get exhausted by the grainy faux-16mm camerawork, the film gets increasingly deranged. The closest thing we get to a sympathetic character is the pimp, simply because he's got too much self-respect to fuck a mute whore. Everyone else is either a gory mess, or a gory mess in disguise. Even the prostitute, which even a thug like Lars von Trier would make likeable, comes off as a delirious scary woman whose shrieks strike like blows to the jugular. 

Kim Gok has seemingly abandoned the Marxist critiques of his short films, going instead for mindless brutality which culminates in an endless bloody freak-show involving, among other things, a pair of scissors going where pairs of scissors should not go. In the middle of the bloodbath, we get an extended long take of the beaten prostitute's near-dead face, but it does not elicit sympathy or pity. In fact, images of the victim only make us shy away in shock. (Indeed, the extended sequence led to continuous walk-outs during the Pusan screening.) The long take invites us to stare, but it assumes we're as sadistic as the victimizer (and the film) is. Meanwhile the sound-effects (mostly a rumbling bassline that shakes the theater) pulsates with pure wickedness. With Hanake, shock creates reflection, which asks that we be critical. Here, we only want to escape. I suppose Exhausted has some virtues; the shots of drilling machines and factories provide a mesmerizing phallic backdrop to the pimp and prostitute's pursuits. But everything else hurts too much. At least Kim Ki-duk lets us breathe. Exhausted makes Bad Guy look like Lady and the Tramp.   

Service
dir: Brillante Mendoza

I'm still not convinced Brillante Mendoza's the global cinema superstar he's often made out to be, but his latest film Service has me warming up to his skills as not just a stylist but also a storyteller. Whereas in Slingshot, Mendoza captured bodies in spaces like no other filmmaker working today but with little sense of purpose, in Service the athletic mise-en-scene gels into narrative energy because it creates momentum forward, not just static dazzle.

I like especially how he connects disparate moments of mundane life in the Philippine slums. Service captures a single day's happenings at a family-owned porno theater. But instead of wading through the tedium of family drama and business dealings, Mendoza strings them together with humor and surprise. The arrival of a friend leads to a fistfight on stairs. The camera follows them, using both close-ups and a tracking long-shot. From a high-angle shot near the ceiling, we see the fight happening at the top of the stairs. Mendoza keeps the stairs and the lower levels in view, because that's where he surprises us with a second simultaneous incident: a robbery is going on downstairs. So one pursuit strings into another and our senses are kept at a heightened daze, as the camera flies from room to room, characters jump over theater seats, and crowds of people enter and exit. Mendoza realizes that architecture can create drama as much as dialogue can; you feel he used not a shooting script but a blueprint to tell this story.

But it's the sound design that truly impresses. We speak often of great location shooting; Service impresses with location recording. As Mendoza stated in the Q/A after the film, the Philippines is a noisy place. But capturing the noise on a soundtrack isn't as simple as pressing record. Mendoza's mix is deliberate and orchestrated to maximize the intensity of the narrative and the texture of the slums. Of course, he overlaps outside noise: police whistles, honking cars, revving motorcycles. But he also allows them to infiltrate the domestic world, reminding us that these domestic squabbles (there is an unwanted pregnancy and a lawsuit involved) have social factors and vice versa. The overlapping soundtracks depict a family never in control of itself or its sense of decency. A kid grows up amidst the moans of pornos, while young lovers have sex as the city outside blares away. By the end of the film, sadness comes not from the presence of filth and depravity (that's all relative anyway), but from the characters' inability to live domestic lives without the infiltration of the public, or have a public existence that's unmarred by their private disputes.

Introduction (http: //www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/081017/article.asp?parentID=99079)  |  Page 1  |  Page 2 (http: //www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/081017/article.asp?parentID=99080)  |  Page 3 (http: //www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/081017/article.asp?parentID=99081)

Published: Friday, October 17, 2008