Jan

SXSW favorite “Tiny Furniture” comes to Minnesota with a thud

“Tiny Furniture” is Lena Dunham’s first feature-length film; and it’s one of those, which a film critic can see, from the opening, that it will not be his cup-o-tea. Just can’t relate to the characters, their lives, stories or attitudes. It’s one world where no one he knows lives. “Tiny Furniture” will appeal to some viewers, the “who” is just a mystery.

Real-life mom counsels real-life daughter in fiction movie

But just because a film grates against a movie critic doesn’t mean that he has to shred it. One high-profile hint: the South by Southwest Film Festival 2010 named it “best narrative feature.” It’s hard to wrap the head around that kudo for a movie that stands out for a void story and flat characters. People often say “it’s in the eye of the beholder.”

Well, Minnesota Film Arts/The Film Society will show this big tiny feature at St. Anthony Main for a week from Jan 28th. Maybe you’ll like this rambling character study, where her story and life are connected only through associative thought.

“Tiny Furniture” offers a series of vignettes, much like Spike Lee’s semi-memoir 1994′s “Crooklyn.” But those vignettes come from nowhere, rarely having a reason to be. The story is shallow, and thrown together. Having finished her degree Aura [auteur, star, Lena herself], returns to her mom’s (who’s also her real-life mom) palatial apartment and support. Aura is a wholly unmotivated slacker who is in a post-coming-of-age stall. Newly rejected by her latest beau, she acts like she’s milking her last school break.

Aura and the cook chat at work

The poster tells us that Aura ‘s “having a very, very hard time,” because she’s a young woman, whom almost no one in her life – her mom, ex-beau, two new might-be beaus or her sister – wants to have or be around her for very long. She gets a nothing job, to get her mom off her back, and flirts with a “New Yorker”-type, existentialist YouTube comic. Ms. Dunham’s personal voice, and the story’s quirks remind us of 2008′s “Gigantic” and actually worked there. “Tiny Furniture” is refreshing, as a first-time movie because Ms. Dunham doesn’t have the typical first-timer’s crisis, where you shake your head at their work’s technical roughness (outside of the narrative, that is).

If we were to score this: 2.5 out of 5.

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Nov

Park Dae-min’s “Private Eye” is a fun South Korean detective yarn, with great twists

“Private Eye” is a great, interesting, smart and amusing South Korean genre detective yarn from director Park Dae-min. It’s title in Korean: “Geu-rim-ja sal-in.” This story takes place in 1910 Seoul, South Korea. A former policeman, now private detective, Hong Jin-ho [Jeong-min Hwang], concentrating on typical, banal cases of cheating lovers, helps a young, talented and ambitious medical student, Oh Yeong-dal [Dal-su Oh] who’s in a weird – awk-weird – situation: this med student finds a dead body (some government official’s son) in a grassy area and brings it home so he can do anatomical practical studies – this, instead of calling the police!

Wow. That is ambition..! …and a gouge in his ethical compass – but this yarn (for amusement not forensic intensity) drives that detail for a chuckled and nothing more. Enjoy and escape with this film. Don’t consider it. Just sit back with some friends and watch.

This is a fun part of the Pan Asian film festival at Minnesota Film Arts. Don’t think about “Private Eye’s” details, and then you’ll be in for some solid entertainment.

If the director, Park Dae-min, chucked about two of the story’s twists, it would be clearer, simpler and that much more potent. And about 20-minutes shorter. Every time the yarn seemed to be two beats from its end, there seemed to be at least one more 10-minute sequence and a new twist opening up. It was like “this just in! – Another story and character twist! One twist involved a suspect who, while cunning and somewhat politic, also had a twin who seemed pretty identical. The array of twists wasn’t bad, but it was tiring, especially when one twist entailed sexual perversion that did nothing to advance the narrative, the characters’ stories, or the potency of either.

Nov

Danish-Korean “The Red Chapel” – a biased, awkwardly amusing “documentary”

A Danish media producer, Mads Brügger, draws two fellow Danes, and Korean adoptees, to perform bad, amateur comedy as an effort at cultural exchange with North Korea. His Korean-born comrades are Jacob Nossell, a self-described spastic, and Simon Yul Jørgensen. The “documentary” is called “The Red Chapel” (“Det røde kapel” in Danish). The exchange is merely a ruse for Mr. Brügger: he wants the opportunity to film inside this sealed state, to record and expose the state’s brutal, repressive system.

The Danish-Korean adoptee "comics": Simon and Jacob

Minnesota Film Arts brought this film into their Pan Asian film festival. You figure: “hey, this could be wild. Different. Never seen this before.”

In the beginning, after having shown just how meager Jason and Simon’s skills are and how amateur their intentions, Mads asks the viewer via voice over: why would North Korea allow a comedy show that’s this bad to go forward unless they intended to exploit it for propaganda? Good question. That’s an interesting premise for a documentary.

How many reality-based, comedic documentaries are out there, or how many political documentaries have been made for laughs? Hmm. This documentary, a guerilla version, is strange. The humor is semi-amusing, more silly than funny. Simon and Jacob are sympathetic and very smart when Mr. Brügger leaves them enough on-screen long enough for this to register.

It’s too bad that Brügger named no non-partisan sources – no sources at all – for his often haunting assertions. His opinions or conclusions are his currency here. He uses no international public documents are cited to corroborate his words. This bodes poorly if this is to be taken as a real documentary, instead of documentary style, or just called verité.

There are documentaries and documentary-style (verité) films. The New York Times’ chief film critic, A.O. Scott, recently wrote about how the description or definition has become murkier and murkier. A “documentary?”: documentaries are essentially long-form journalism. To document. To record and then report.

According to Merriam-Webster:

“to provide with factual or substantial support for statements made or a hypothesis proposed;
especially : to equip with exact references to authoritative supporting information.”

Among Scott’s observations, he recommends that people who watch docs ask themselves what agenda the film or its maker has. In a perfect world, journalism‘s lone agenda is to build a story on a foundation of accurate, reliable and corroborated facts. People can insist that reality TV is documentary, but that hot air coughs up into frost when you consider that those scenarios are contrived and conjured.

The verdict: if you accidentally bump into the DVD, why not take a gander? Otherwise…

Nov

China’s “City of Life and Death” is a brutal, confusing war story

What do you call a film experience that, while interesting and seen on handsome black & white film, you would only do again under duress: “City of Life and Death.” (The title is “Nanjing! Nanjing!” in Chinese.) This film dramatizes the epochal trauma to which Japan subjected their vanquished, the Chinese from December 1937 to March 1938.

This is a heck of a hurdle for an American audience, and especially for young people: American audiences have heard of World Wars I and II, and they remember that those wars were bookends for the Great Depression.

Few people probably remember that while the United States’ experience in World War I began in 1917, while Europe began three years earlier. But it’s too much to hope that most viewers know anything about the Rape or Massacre of Nanking, China, which occurred in 1937-38 – between those big wars, and after our Great Depression. This historical Chinese war film, “City of Life and Death,” is part of Minnesota Film Arts’ festival, In Search of Asia.

While this story isn’t about Nazism, it still is: it shows the Rape of Nanking. The first 30- or so minutes resemble Newsreel footage of the London Blitz: the depraved barbarism to which the Japanese subjected their Chinese foes leaves nary a whole build left resting upright or free from tumult. Basically switch out the Nazis for the Japanese and London, England for Nanking, China. Few people expect to be entertained by Holocaust stories, and only some by war stories, if they are brave enough to portray unromantic realities. “Schindler’s List” is exceptional; it provided warmth and humor to lighten that which is a separate 20-Century horror story.

While a film lover can, in theory, revere or laud foreign countries’ differing narrative and grammatical techniques, the reality can send an American’s mind spinning:

“City of Life and Death” takes at least 40-minutes to reveal its incidental ensemble of personalities. Only half of the ensemble has names that we hear. Also, it’s impossible to distinguish between the Japanese and the Chinese, no patches or flags until the middle. It’s confusing.
And there are three or four title cards, which while stylish and a refreshing hand-written alternative to the usual, are hard to read and remember before the film cuts to the next scene. “City of Life and Death” lacks an obvious narrative structure, where the acts and various plot points are made obvious.
While this story is a little over two hours, it feels, these obstacles make it feel like two and one-half.

Who does the film-maker want or expect to watch this? Or how small of an audience does the film-maker want? Watching this is a chore: like watching “Schindler’s List” with only maybe 10% of its warmth and humor or like gutting it out through the daunting, unrelenting misery that the McCourt family must endure in the first third of “Angela’s Ashes.” The Rape of Nanking is a fascinating topic, especially for people who love history. But why would someone want to watch this?!

It’s remarkable and a controversy in China: that a Japanese grunt soldier, Sergeant Kadokawa, [Hideo Nakaizumi] and others, is shown beyond villainy, as human.
Kadokawa is one of the few characters who has what resembles a subplot. He comes of-age in this hellish time. In the end, his regrets consume him. For example, two survivors of one of the early and many massacre scenes, a man and a boy, who are almost forgotten by the film-makers and the audiences, reappear in the last half hour. He lets the boy and man go to live on, granting them a reprieve from a proforma death sentence. Before doing so, Kadokawa says to the sky, “Life is harder than death.”

John Rabe's assistant

There was also the assistant to Nanking’s answer to Oscar Schindler in Germany makes a strong, defiant stand. After having witnessed his child’s murder and the violation of his wife, he tells his chief executioner “My wife is pregnant again,” with a resigned, although satisfied smile. A beat later, he is dead.

“City of Life and Death” probably appeals to a narrow niche of film-lovers who don’t trip over the kinds of obstacles in a story that were listed above. Other films have tackled this massacre tale and have satisfied their viewers.

If we were to rate this: 2 out of 5.

Nov

Ounie Lecomte’s “A Brand New Life” about a stubbornly loving orphan

Minnesota Film Arts presents “A Brand New Life” (which is “Yeo-haeng-ja” in Korean), from 2009, and French-South Korean film-maker, Ounie Lecomte, as a part of the In Search of Asia series at the St. Anthony Main cinema.

After an adorable elementary school-age girl, Jinhee [Sae Ron Kim], who clings to her dad, is left at orphanage by him, she must find a way to deal with it, but cannot. This, even after being treated well and finding friends.

How would you feel or respond if, at around age 10, your dad broke your heart by lying to you…because he had to?

What if he bought you a new ensemble and said that you two were bound for a trip, but deposited you with an orphanage? According to imdb, Ms. Lecompte’s own story inspired this film.

Jinhee’s dad deposits her at an orphanage, a way station for children whose lives might be lifted if middle-class families claimed them.

She has to deal with A Brand New Life in an orphanage.

From the moment that Jinhee – her beguiling grin that is – appears onscreen, she’s just a sweetie pie. Her effervescence hobbles your objectivity and skepticism. That story would be enough, but wait – there’s more. She just can’t get over the fact that her father won’t return – that this could lead to a more stable life for her.

While 10-years old may be old enough for a child to roll with that sock to the chin, Jinhee isn’t that child. She adores her father, so she refuses to accept her lot, and is doggedly stubborn about not rolling with punches that life has knocked into her. Jinhee’s story is partly one of her emotional arrest in the face of an unenviable situation. She might be Korea’s version of Shirley Temple, or an elementary-age Dakota Fanning if you like.

Jinhee and friend Sookhee chill out over pilfered cake

A key scene happens when the orphans attend church, where Jinhee sees a man whose resemblance to her father hits home. A beat after that, the pastor’s lesson about Jesus asking his father, “why hast thou forsaken me?” tells us just what agony is festering within Jinhee. It’s not that she likens herself to a martyr or as Messiah, but she is still struggling to reconcile her dad’s nasty, loving lie with her reality.

Either you sympathize with her refusal to roll with these punches, or you can find her as her soon-to-be good friend, Sookhee, [Do Yeon Park] will: “a wench,” who needs to stop being a baby! Children do not comprehend or consider their situations as adults do (or as we would like or expect adults to). They’re used to either being good or being punished. She’s being as good as she can muster, but she must still suffer.

Jinhee content with her father (who hasn't a head?)

If a screen title didn’t tell us that this is fiction, taking place in 1975, then the semi-documentary style might nearly have fooled me. But some of the shots are rarely found in documentaries. Otherwise we should compare this to a PBS film from its Point of View series, “Wo Ai Ni, Mommy,” a Chinese documentary on trans”racial” international adoption; there is a lengthy scene where the girl is smack dab in the middle of change. That scene is unsettling, with angst and agony. That’s a hint at why the pastor’s lesson registers with our aggrieved young protagonist.

This story is one that, as with Thomas McCarthy’s “The Station Agent,” from 2003, or other small, personal films, demands that you are patient – frankly, mature – enough to allow it to defy American expectations for pacing. That forecasts a niche audience who will have to seek out the opportunities to watch this. “A Brand New Life” isn’t slow, but is deliberate. It’s charming and quiet. Are you patient enough to let this child’s story unfold before you, or will you shift in your seat wishing that something, something cool would happen? The story defies American cinema’s banal conventions. But it was made by a French-South Korean film-maker.

If we were to rate this: 4 out of 5.

Nov

Anurag Kashyap’s odyssey “That Girl in Yellow Boots” stirs with potency

Minnesota Film Arts’ In Search of Asia festival opened on Wednesday November 3rd with “That Girl in Yellow Boots,” a drama by Anurag Kashyap. At that hour, this was the film’s one showing.

Twenty-year old Ruth [Kalki Koechlin] is a mixed Indian-British girl amid a minor odyssey toward…whom else…her long since light-footed father, for which she finds perverse closure (naw, it ain’t that!) in the end. Ms. Keochlin also co-wrote this story. On a student VISA, she makes her way as a masseuse, and actually does a few legit jobs sans “happy ending” – or handshake as she calls it.

It asks questions of love, which are as interesting as they are awkward, and taboo ones about sexual boundaries.

When she isn’t working as a soft-core hooker, she spars with and then spurns an Indian hustler boyfriend, who seems to only want same as her clients, but authentic intimacy. Essentially she’s an illegal, white British sex worker, whose odyssey – outside from an exploitive and world-widening sojourn in Mumbai – is to pursue the Indian father, whose own figure and face is a mystery to her – and who abandoned family after older sister’s mysterious death. That want for a dad wreaks a cornerstone of Ruth’s morose, exotic reality and lifestyle.

From Indian cinema we expect three-hour plus fantastical musicals where the color palette is often as boisterous as the music. “That Girl in Yellow Boots” is a radical detour from that set of expectations. While Ruth’s story is about love, it’s more about how she protects herself, cordoning herself from intimacy and keeps her control within her own clutches.

Late in her story, after her boyfriend writhes through his self-installed detox, he asks why she does massage; she blurts confiding “because I need somebody..!” She does splendid and remarkable if also typical work of avoiding opportunities for that intimacy (or is it a reckoning) for which she’s hungry.

Her dad, Arjun Patel (which may or may not even be his name), for whose attention she yearns, married Ruth’s mother for perverse reasons different from love: those we know are awkward, those we learn of make our skin crawl, our jaws gape. Her dad is the key to twisting the scimitar, which his abandonment had already shoved into her gut, into a hemorrhaging emotional gouge.

Ruth is in a toxic emotional situation, but she’s no Dorothy visiting Oz; she’s an impressionable youth, but also deftly politic and cunning: She’s solidifying her Hindi in order that no one exploit her. She also knows how and when to offer bribes so that she can work via her student VISA so she can work and avoid jail. Snarky people ward men off from women who have “daddy issues” because enormous messes lay in those women’s wakes. Chris Rock said that a father’s main job: “keep my daughter off the pole.” Ruth’s mindfuck is at least as bad as that reality.

It’s difficult to name comparisons to this story. For the scope of the taboos, which “That Girl in Yellow Boots” picks at hint at “Priest”, from 1994, the self-righteous polemic against Catholicism’s suite of shortcomings, for the rough, incendiary potency. When it comes to director Kashyap’s twist in the final act, consider the ending to Adrian Lyne’s “Jacob’s Ladder,” from 1990, about “a traumatized Vietnam war veteran finds out that his post-war life isn’t what he believes it to be…” per imdb; that messed with your mind and messed you up! That last jerk or twist of emotional perversion in the end here…is at least as profound as what we get from Jacob’s bodybag being zipped up.

Imdb and wikipedia provide some peculiarities and head-shaking confusions in regards to this drama: each describes Ruth’s story as a thriller. I disagree: this is a drama that has brief segment of suspense, in the last act. This falls well short of flirting with an Alfred Hitchcock sensibility.

If we were to rate this story: 4 – 4.5 out of 5.

Aug

“Mademoiselle Chambon” at Minnesota Film Arts

On August 27th, Mademoiselle Chambon, will open at Minnesota Film Arts’ St. Anthony Main Theater. It’s a French film, by Stéphane Brizé, and adapted from a novel by Eric Holder. An elementary school teacher, Ms. Veronique Chambon (Sandrine Kiberlain) clicks with a work-a-day dad, Jean, (Vincent Lindon) whose son she teaches. They click all the way into a tryst.

Mlle Chambon, the teacher, is enrapt with Jean's job talk

The trouble starts after she asks him to talk to her class about his work, construction. He agrees, with a shrug. He comes. He talks. He answers the students’ questions. He has a good time. Ms. Chambon likes Jean.

Love.

Lust.

Mid-life questions.

Wanderlust.

These are at Mademoiselle Chambon’s foundation.

This slowly becomes an affair. Jean and his wife, Anne-Marie, follow a predictable, seemingly content life with their son. They are manual laborers. One in construction, the other in a factory. And then Jean and we meet Mademoiselle Chambon. The predictability and contentment begin to crumble. The film starts in a deceptively daring way: it’s slow and tests our patience, and our typical conspicuous desire for action and fast-paced cutting. From the first POV shot where Jean glances at Ms. Chambon, from behind her as she sits atop a student’s desk, you know what will follow.

This meeting is supposed to be between parents and teacher. He has her undivided attention because his wife has fallen ill at the factory, and is on bed rest at home. The question to be answered: how deftly will, the director, Ms. Brizé execute their tryst? A fundamental and slippery rule of storytelling is to be predictable, but make sure that we’re surprised how it’s delivered. The tranquil and gentle tone and pace could lull us. But the way in which Jean and Veronique’s flirting grows from their lingering, even coy conversations, into something subtly disturbing is refreshing.

Jean and Ms. Chambon

The key scenes are cloaked in the guises of window repair, music appreciation, and where Veronique plays music at Jean’s home, during his father’s birthday. Somehow that scene strikes notes that are sweet, and creepy, at once. These subtle scenes played so that each might go either in the impulsive and lustful path, or the sensible and responsible one. We see what the film and its maker are doing when the duo’s conversations creep into a kind of small talk, which only happens when you can’t yet dare yourself to say what you need to. Jean and Veronique’s relationship is told more through silence, and coy body language than any explicit sentiments, as opposed to a North American movies’ typically forthright sensibilities.

Mademoiselle Chambon awaits destiny or..?

Neither of them is any more “at fault” for their attractions than the other; Jean pursues Ms. Chambon with as much interest as she does him. Ultimately Jean decides how and where their infatuation will go. That decision harkens to Richard Linklater’s mature 20-something romance, Before Sunrise, from 1991, where the défacto duo seriously asks each other whether they want to make love. Shall we do this when we’ll probably want more, and we have no idea if we’ll see each other after?

One more (ok, a few) open question: Each wants the other; each has found something that they lack in that other. Why is this story Mademoiselle Chambon’s; Why is it named for her? Won’t their wanderlust reap or wreak the most upon Jean and his family?

If we’re scoring this, 3.5 to 4, out of 5.

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Aug

“Cell 211″ an uncommon prison riot film, with a love story

Cell 211 is a perverse melding of a charming love story, which turns wistful, and a prison uprising spanning one day, and which might remind you of the Attica prison uprising in 1971. This day in Juan Oliver’s (Alberto Ammann) life can go down as the most absurd and tragic almost first day on the job.

Mistaken identity is at the story’s core: Juan’s injured by an accident, his tour guides, and future peers place him in a newly empty cell, 211, just at the moment that the inmates take the prison – That moment upturns his life. The inmates, and their leader Malamadre (Luis Tosar) mistake him for one of them and he must play along in order to live. If the consequences weren’t dire – death or worse – it would make a black comedy.

Juan and Malamadre in the beginning

This is a Spanish language film, by Daniel Monzón, with bits of Basque thrown in, and subtitles in white. Cell 211 opens on August 6th, in Minneapolis’s St. Anthony Main, for Minnesota Film Arts, where it’ll play for one week.

The opening scene tells you that something awful, even grisly, has just happened. The story starts with a jaw-dropping scene where an inmate begins to mutilate his arms. Most films particularly American ones start viewers off smoothly, this one was like, “eh, why bother?” It sets the tone for an emotional, thematic thrill ride that Hollywood provides only every several years. This came from Spain, so never mind.

Although Cell 211 isn’t a Hitchcockian story, it harkens to one of his stock themes and characters. Juan is the ordinary person stuck in the extraordinary situation. The story’s bizarre ironies and tragic twists are classically Hitchcock, making North by Northwest, from 1959, pop to mind. Specifically a spy’s line, which describes Roger Thornhill’s situation: “It’s all so horribly sad. How is it a feel like laughing?”

You’re plunked into a foreign situation, mistaken for the kind of person you could never be, which fills you with adrenaline as you make yourself a part of a den of murderers and worse. No one wants to live that scenario, but it and this film are a heck of a ride. Unlike in the United States, the prisoners here wear no uniforms, but blue collar, industrial clothing. All Juan has to do to fit in with his new “peers” is to shed accessories that will reveal himself.

Juan after his breaking point

Cell 211 is far better than average for a few reasons: it boasts a semi-complex and refreshing structure, with traces of Japan’s Rashôman, from 1950, and a special use of mistaken identity that allows for perverse and tragic twists, which otherwise would fall flat. The story alternates between three different locations and places in time, and between the tragic and the tranquil: Juan goes to the prison, his imminent workplace, to get his feel of the land. After being injured, he’s caught behind his future “enemies’” lines, and accidentally mistaken for one of them. This chunk of the film mixes with a segment from earlier that day, which builds up to a splendid, and utterly surprising, slight romantic subplot. That’s his love story with his wife. Before he goes to the prison, Juan and his wife chat, mock, and make love to each other.

A different, morose, but also slight subplot balances out the romantic one, where shadowy debriefings with a prison boss and a guard after the incident has passed. The first is taciturn, the other empathetic: morose and shaken. It helped viewers find closure to Cell 211′s chaos.

Now for a little math. Many of the characters are interesting. Five of them are important. Three of those are pivotal: Juan, Malamadre, which sounds like Bad Mother, the inmate who leads the prison’s most violent section, and Elena, Juan’s wife, who plays a incidental, and passive, but pivotal role. The men compete for the lead, at least in our minds. Their personas are disparate, but compel our attention equally. There is Juan, who should probably question working as a prison guard. He’s an affable husband who might not be enough of an Alpha male, seems more like a library manager or a grocer than a prison guard. He belongs in a suburb, mowing his lawn, not mowing down an inmate who has a shank poised against his jugular.

Juan and Malamadre. An incongruent team.

The leader of the uprising, Malamadre, while unsettling at least at first, is more rational and reasonable than we hear at the start. Then again, Hannibal Lector could be a great conversationalist too. Malamadre is quick with violence, but he’ll take the time to step back if talking or thinking will give him what he wants as easily. He’s a brawny, highly intelligent, calculating criminal, with a goatee and a voice that’s so gravelly you wonder how long and intensely he’s been smoking. He’s so well drawn, with such magnetism that, while this is Juan’s story, he and Malamadre become a surprising and unsettling duo. Sometimes they compete for starring attention.

But the barely likely connection between Malamadre and Juan allows the story to broach a very subtle story about the fragility of a moral compass. How easily it can be detoured or perverted. A law man meets a vicious, daunting criminal, then a heart wrenching tragedy strikes and that moral man finds that the road to or line between the moral & legal and their opposites have grayed and frayed in his mind. This, after circumstances put him off-balance and push him toward an abyss that’s darker and more of a hell than merely being caught among those who are hungry, rabid wolves.

As splendid as Cell 211 is, it has problems.

Specific ideas are sacrosanct in film:

You don’t remake Alfred Hitchcock
…or Martin Scorsese, and some others, and
You never have someone attack an obviously vulnerable person. …Unless you do it deftly. This film does it so.

Malamadre and Juan bond hastily and too slickly to convince us. Malamadre’s reputation having preceded his first scene, foreshadows the sort of foe with which the bosses and guards must contend. While Mal is smart, he’s there for a reason. He’s hardened, vicious, and doesn’t mind killing someone, if there’s a purpose. Juan is not. Their bond is forced, but it’s drawn with such care that you won’t notice unless you love to think through or debate that kind of detail.

Few films are flawless. Still, if you’re into grades: 4.5.

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Will Wright. Reporter. arts & public affairs

Tagged with Minnesota Film Arts …