Beauty Matters

The Girl and Death (2012) - Stelling

Recently I came across an article at salon.com titled David Foster Wallace was right: Irony is ruining our culture by Matt Ashby and Brendan Caroll. In it, they talk about our popular culture so completely immersed in irony and lazy cynicism that it has become a hindrance to move forward in art. It's a theme I've been thinking about a lot. I have to admit that I am just as guilty of contributing to creating this environment though. My articles, over the years, have been inundated with sarcasm and dismissive one-liners. I have lost my way to see beauty as it is when it presents itself. Sentimentality has become my enemy and I incessantly mocked whoever embraced it.

The Girl and Death, winner of 2012 Golden Calf Award (The Netherland's Academy Arward) for Best Picture, written and directed by Jos Stelling (co-written by Bert Rijkelijkhuizen), is one of those rare beauties that makes me less cynical. At first, the film might seem ridiculously musky and full of unblemished sentimentality that any trigger-happy reviewer wouldn't hesitate to use the eye-roll emoticon after every other sentence. It plays out like overly melodramatic Chekov. By the end of it though, I was genuinely moved by its unabashed, old fashioned tragic love story full of yearning and nostalgia.

An old Russian doctor (Sergey Markovetsky) travels to Germany to visit an old mansion/brothel he was once familiar with. The mansion is shuttered up and abandoned long time ago. From there on, we are walking down the memory lane some 50 years back.

A young, sensitive Russian student Nicolai (Leonid Bichevin) with a book of Pushkin poems sticking out from his tattered tweet jacket pocket, is on his way to Paris to study medicine. But he falls helplessly in love when he sees the vision of loveliness (as old Pushkin puts it), Elise (Sylvia Hoeks) at the grand mansion.

With the help of Mme. Nina (Renata Litvinova), he tries to woo Elise despite many warnings from everyone that she, along with everything else, belongs to the brutish Count (Dieter Hallervorden) who uses the mansion as a whorehouse and a gambling den for his old friends.

Nicolai delays his departure again and again ceremoniously, to get a chance to get a glimpse of Elise and talk with her. He makes an impression with bouquet of white roses and a Pushkin poem. He is forced out by the count and his henchmen. But he comes back after two years. This time, the Count's henchman beats him to a pulp. Elise breaks the Count's grip and runs to the young student, and brings him back to health. Free but penniless and in mounting debt without the Count's help, Elise is trapped and can't leave the mansion with Nicolai. Oh dear.

One can easily see the attraction here: Elise (embodied by Sylvia Hoeks) is a porcelain doll beauty. She's the kind of woman you don't dare to touch because you are afraid to break her.

Three years pass. Nicolai, now successful and almost comically moustachioed, comes back with vengeance in mind. He wins all the money at the card table while doing all the fancy tricks and whatnot. He throws all the money he wins at the count's face. Then he says "a whore will always be a whore!" in poor Elise's face and leaves. The count has a heart attack and dies.

Elise has tuberculosis and is dying but she still waits for Nicolai to come back. Time passes, everyone leaves the mansion. Elise hides and remains in the empty building for years.

But by the end of all this nonsense, I stopped rolling my eyes. However improbable and moth eaten the story is, one can't deny its beauty. It made me put my guard down and won me over. It's even quite refreshing to see something this old fashioned in this day and age.

It's the first time in a long time that a film put me in a position where I have to reassess my attitude toward looking at the world. It doesn't mean I'll be digging into Douglas Sirk melodramas any time soon. But with The Girl and Death, beauty transcends a corny storyline and cheap sentimentality. Stelling shows that beauty still matters.
The Girl and Death opens April 25th in New York at Cinema Village and May 23rd in Los Angeles at Laemmie Hall via Shadow Distribution.

Teen Life

US Go Home (1994) - Denis


A couple of years before Nenette et Boni, Claire Denis did an hour-long film with the same principal cast (Grégoire Colin, Alice Houri and Vincent Gallo), commissioned by French TV. The series was called Tous les garçons et les filles leur age.... Naturally, US Go Home feels like a younger sibling to N & B- with Colin and Houri playing brother and sister in both. But the film is no less great. It's a pitch perfect movie about teens.

There were guides that Denis had to follow to meet the criteria of the series -- the film has to take place in its directors childhood time, has to be about youth and has to have a song that plays in its entirety. That third rule, for me, thank heavens, provides one of the best movie moment in history (perhaps the second best only to the last scene of, yet another Denis film, Beau Travail)! It's teenage Gregoire Colin in his room dancing to Eric Burdon & the Animals' Hey Gyp.

So the setting of US Go Home is a suburb of Paris in the 60s. It starts with Alain (Colin) quoting the book he is reading, which warns that there is nothing honorable about men who surrender themselves to lust. Whether the passage is having any effect on him remains to be seen throughout the film. Martine (Houri) wants to get laid. She and her sultry Russian friend Marlene (Jessica Tharaud) wants to go to a party at a house where the parents will be away. Martine's mom won't allow it though, unless her older brother Alain accompany them. He begrudgingly agrees. The girls gussy themselves up like crazy. In the middle of the bus ride, the bickering siblings go separate ways - girls to the party and Alain, as usual, to his rich friend's house where older kids mingle. Soon the girls find the said party lame - Parents are still there and everyone's doing samba. The girls then trek to Alain's hangout. There are people smoking, drinking punch and making out on the couch. Music also is rad! Alain ignores them. Pretty Marlene finds dance partners easy, and starts eyeing Alain. It's a little more difficult to find a guy for Martine with her baby face and dark kinky curls.

Teen years are confusing, humiliating, scary times. Desire overwhelms everything. Expectations are never met with satisfaction. After disappointing night, the siblings meet American sailor, Captain Brown, on the road. He wants to give them a ride home and share his last remaining coca cola. Alain, despite his fondness for American rock n' roll, refuses the offer, saying that he is a communist. It's a comment Captain Brown laughs off of. Just like Martine's hollow 'US must go home!' chant, it's something he picked up saying without conviction. Gallo is perfect with his 'I haven't slept in 36 hours' look and asshole nonchalance as a man who is not sad but always miserable. He and Martine bond.

Denis and co-writer Anne Wiazemsky know how to capture all the angst and disappointment and loneliness of teenage years. US Go Home is a tender, thoughtful, emotionally resonant film that happens to be one of Denis's very best.

Taiwan, My Love

Almost Home: Taiwan (2014) - Linchong

Back in March, I had a privilege to attend the sneak preview of Victoria Linchong's lovely documentary Almost Home: Taiwan, at Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center, down in East Village. Armed with handicam, Victoria and her family travels to Taiwan, her parents' homeland, to visit their relatives and pay respect to their ancestors. I've joked with Victoria about how our knowledge of Taiwan is limited to watching master Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien's films. But I wasn't really prepared for the natural beauty of Taiwan in her footage. Amazing mountains in the fog, hot springs, temples, beautiful coastline..., Victoria's travelogue has awakened wanderlust in me like no other films have.

The documentary also serves as a great history lesson. Victoria interviews political figures who were involved in Taiwan's independence movement and even employs funny DIY animation sequences to illuminate Taiwan's very complex and little known history. Linchong managed to strike a fine balance between an intimate, personal travel documentary and political essay. Almost Home is not only a beautiful tribute to her homeland, but also extremely educational film that needs to be seen.

My wife, Nicole Schulman, also contributed to the poster project to help finishing the documentary.
Please visit Almost Home: Taiwan website.


Almost Home: Taiwan - Trailer from Victoria Linchong on Vimeo.

Oppression and Resistance in Silence

Libera me (1993) - Cavalier








How do you convey oppression and resistance without ever uttering words? Alain Cavalier does it beautifully here. Libera me is even more austere than his Therese or any of Bresson films. Grey background doubles as any discernible locations. Non-actors act out in succession of beautifully lit tableaux. No moment is wasted, no thoughts, feelings and gesture go unnoticed. There are two families - a butcher and his three sons and a photographer and his wife who take passport photos which seem to be invaluable commodity in the fascist world, that the film takes place in, where mass killing and torture seem ordinary. They fight against the powers that be. This non-silent-silent film is a wonder to behold. Cavalier seems to be operating on another cinematic level that is guileless and stripped down to its pure elements. I am in awe.

Libera me plays as part of Art of the Real series at FSLC. Please visit their website for tickets.

Preview: Art of the Real Tests Boundaries of Documentary Filmmaking

Film Society of Lincoln Center's inaugural film series Art of the Real - a showcase for nonfiction films that pushes the farthest boundaries of documentary filmmaking, is for me, one of the most exciting film series I have a privilege to be part of, even in New York standards.

It's only been the last couple of years that I've been writing about film seriously, realizing that film medium can go much further than just mere entertainment and that freeing from the dominant narrative structure can be exhilarating.

What started out as a simple question that if there was an adequate name to describe the current crop of shape-shifting postmodern cinema pulled me into the very depth of the cinematic rabbit hole, left me exhausted and confused and exhilarated at the same time. As I was reminded watching Film Socialisme (Godard), Sans Soleil (Marker), Fontainhas Trilogy (Costa), Koker Trilogy (Kiarostami), Tren de Sombras (Guerrin), Tabu (Gomes), A Man Vanishes (Imamura), and Two Years at Sea (Rivers) that I am just scratching the surface of this great artistic medium. At the same time, I feel glad and relieved that there are so much more to explore.

It was Lucien Castraing-Taylor and Verena Paravel's Leviathan screening at New York Film Festival in 2012 where everything clicked for me. Watching the film and noticing French filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux, whose visceral art films which happen to be some of my very favorite film watching experiences, in the audience. They turned out to be good friends. And the subsequent discussion I had with Castraing-Taylor and Paravel reaffirmed me that there could be much more to film as an art form than mere storytelling.

Curated by Denis Lim and Racheal Rakes, and presented in collaboration with the 2014 Whitney Biennial, along with the focus on the Sensory Ethnography Lab, I have no doubt Art of the Real's enthralling lineup would delight serious, adventurous film lovers senses and help expand their minds.

The series include last year's festival favorite Manakamana, works by renowned experimental filmmakers/documentarians - Thom Andersen, Harun Farocki, Robert Gardener, Alain Cavalier, Raymond Depardon, James Benning and more.

The series runs April 11 - 26. For tickets and more information, please visit Film Society of Lincoln Center website.

LUKAS THE STRANGE - John Torres

A girl narrator, friend of a 13-year old Filipino boy named Lukas, whispers to him softly and gives a loose, elliptical narrative to the all together dreamlike, strange film. The narrator tells him that it's the beginning of the film and he doesn't know it yet, but he will fall in love with an actress later in the film. One night, Lukas is told that his father is tikbalang (half-man, half-horse). In turn, his father abandons his family and disappears across the river. There is a film crew in town, casting roles and everyone in town is in a buzz. So goes Lukas the Strange - part documentary, part narrative, part free-association visual essay, part...

Lukas thinks he inherited some super powers and needs to test his abilities. He can run fast, he can jump high. He is bullet proof and has scars to prove it. Meanwhile, his father has settled in neighboring town. He earned a scar when he crossed the river but left his memories behind. The river has magical powers like that. There are videotapes that the narrator girl collected from the river. It contains grainly black and white footage of the actress the narrator talked about in the beginning. Lukas watches and falls in love (at least he tries to masturbate to it).

Shot on 35mm in full frame format, the rural Philippines in rainy season has never been more beautiful. The faces of none actors with out of synch sound (or just made up sound to push along the narrative) gives the film its light, playful tone. Perhaps the dreamest, strangest film about boy entering manhood. Folklore, improvisation, formal rigor...this is good stuff, very much akin to Weerasethakul films.


ACTRESS - Robert Greene

Brandy Burre was an actress who was in The Wire. She gave up acting to have a family, moved to Beacon, NY with her partner, Tim. They have two young children. They own two restaurants/bars. But now in her late 30s, she realizes that being a housewife/mom of two kids is not what she wanted. She wants to get back to the business. Director Robert Greene chronicles trials and tribulations of an actress as she struggles with her life. Brandy's story is nothing really special. A lot of people go through the same family vs career crises. She has an affair, Tim moves out, she looks for a job, battling ageism and stage fright. It couldn't be any more special than a Lifetime channel movie. But that's just it. Because she is a real person, not an actress, it is quite compelling.

There is a scene where Burre putting away toys in the 'toy room', labeling them carefully with label maker. She says, "This is how I express my creativity." Then she says it again, as if reciting a line from a script. It's meta-ness aside, Actress, thanks to Burre's brevity to reveal her life in such a frank way and Greene's intimate approach, is quite mesmerizing experience. I had to imdb Burre and she has one more film under her name after Wire. Good to know that she is working. Hopefully she will retain her freedom by making a living as actress again.


TIME GOES BY LIKE A ROARING LION - Philipp Hartmann

An average German male who was born in the 70s, lives up to be 76 1/2 years. Philipp Hartmann started filming in 2010. He, then 38 1/4, was exactly at the half point of his life. Suffering from chronophobia - fear of passing of time, he made this movie, clocking at 76 minutes, one minute counting as one year of his life. At the half point of the movie, he hurriedly catches up to "now" in a very inventive fashion. This philosophical visual quandary isn't as dry as it sounds. It's warm, funny, and thought provoking.

The still photos of Hartmann's childhood in the beginning, all only half part exposed, are the compilation of the beginning of each film rolls, signifying the images just before his father captured that moment. He visits scientists at the site of atomic clock in Braunschweig. Apparently, because the earth is spinning slower at times, the clock needs to be adjusted a second every 18 months. The scientist futzes around with the switches and says, "Uh oh, I don't think it goes back..." Hartmann travels to the world's largest salt desert in Bolivia and contemplates the absence of time. He sets up situations with actors, narrating scenarios dealing with time. He asks one of his subjects/friends, who is a compulsive gambler about how he feels about ruining relations, his future. The friend replies that as the time passes faster, it hurts a little less. We watch Hartmann's shadow, sitting on a ski lift rolling over the green hills for the last 3-4 minutes of the movie. Contemplative and lyrical, Hartmann's inquiry is sincere and heartfelt rather than clever.


THE ANABASIS OF MAY AND FUSAKO SHIGENOBU, MASAO ADACHI AND 27 YEARS WITHOUT IMAGES - Eric Baudlaire

Paris based visual artist Eric Baudlaire films modern day Lebanon in super 8 at the request of Masao Adachi, a former United Red Army (later Japanese Red Army) member and guerrilla filmmaker. The film juxtaposes the footage of Lebanon and Japan. It is narrated by Adachi and May Shigenobu, a daughter of JRA leader Fusako and a Palestinian guerrilla fighter. Both Adachi and May spent 27 years in hiding in Lebanon, then extradited to Japan in 2001. Their lives are filled with fascinating stories: Adachi, along with Koji Wakamatsu and Nagisa Oshima, plays a pivotal role in Japanese New Wave. But politically more extreme and hands on, Adachi chose a path that led him to devote in Palestine's cause for statehood, lived with guerrilla fighters in Lebanon refuge camps. May, who was born in Lebanon, never had a national or cultural identity until she was a teen, narrates her fascinating story in uninflected English. Their shared stories glide over the city and nature landscapes, film clips and news reels, accompanying the narrative. It's an interesting experiment: borrowing images, not to explicitly match them with someone's memories but to help us to imagine their experience. It's fascinating trip.

The series also plays The Makes, Baudlaire's adaptation of Michelangelo Antonioni's notes on unmade films and The Ugly One, a sort of a sequel to Anabasis.


A THOUSAND SUNS - Mati Diop

Mati Diop, the alluring actress in Clare Denis's 35 rhums directs A Thousand Suns, a dreamy documentary fantasy that encompasses Senegal's past, present and perhaps future simultaneously. Taking cues from her famous Senegalese director uncle (Djibril Diop Mambéty)'s seminal African avant-garde film Touki Bouki, she incorporates the real actor Magaye Liang of that film, now an old man, still living in Dakar, herding cattles, into a fiction and vice versa. New and old collide and co-exist, as Liang watches Touki Bouki on the screen in an outdoor screening projected digitally. He says proudly that the dashing young man on the screen is indeed him. The street kids laugh at him. In that seminal film, Mory (Magaye Liang) stays behind while her lover Anta (Mareme Niang) sails to France. It reflects what happened in real life some 40 years ago, sort of. Magaye tracks down Anta, now supposedly living in America. It turns out she lives in Alaska and works as a security guard on an oil rig or she tells him. The following snowy scene is jaw-droppingly sensual. The film is filled with colors, layers upon layers of hidden stories and rapturous images. I can't wait to see Diop's other work.

The series also plays Diop's Atlantiques which tells the story of a young boy’s tragic migratory voyage over the Moroccan border.


SWEETGRASS - no director credited *Part of Focus on The Sensory Ethnography Lab

My full review here.


FOREIGN PARTS - Verena Paravel, JP Sniadecki *Part of Focus on The Sensory Ethnography Lab

Shot in 2008-2009 in industrial neighborhood of Willets Point, Queens by Verena Paravel (Leviathan) and JP Sniadecki (People's Park) of the Havard's Sensory Ethnography Lab, Foreign Parts presents a rare glimpse into the lives of its inhabitants. Willets Point, in the shadows of 7 Train Line, Citi Field (Mets Baseball Stadium) and the constant planes flying overhead (La Guadia Airport only a stone's throw away) is where cars go die and being gutted and mutilated for their parts to various auto related shops. Without sewage system and sidewalks and most of work force being immigrant workers, you'd think you are in Mexico or some other less developed countries. Paravel and Sniadecki just follow them around as they go about their daily business. There is Joe Ardizzone, a white haired, vocal resident who's been fighting for the city's redevelopment plan, there is Julia, a sweet natured, tiny old lady, and there are Luis and Sara, a couple who live in an abandoned car. They all talk candidly about their lives. The combination of these people's lives and their otherworldly surroundings - mountains of auto parts, unpaved dirt roads, gigantic water puddles, roaming wild feral animals, sonic plane engine and car noise, make Foreign Parts a fascinating concoction.

Travelers and Magicians

Yeelen (1987) - Cissé





Talking about an epic of Biblical proportions, Soulemane Cissé tells a Bambara myth steeped in animism and sorcery I couldn't help but compare Yeelen to Scorsese's Last Temptation while watching it. Like many other folk tales from different cultures, Yeelen concerns a great journey, good vs evil and father-son rivalry. Young sorcerer Nianankoro is on the run with his mother from his all-powerful, vengeful father, Soma. Niananko apparently possesses an amulet (a big gemstone) that belongs to Komo. Niananko needs to go to his uncle/Soma's twin Djigui. During the long journey, he gets friendly with a tribal king and helps him to ward off his enemies with his magic powers. The king requests another favor. His youngest wife is barren and he wants Niananko to fix her infertility. After taking some hallucinogenic roots together, then overcome by desire, Niananko and the young wife of the king does a dirty deedly. Seeing how remorseful the young man is, the chief awards him the girl, who is now pregnant and carrying Niananko's child. In the mean time, Soma is trailing along, with his magic post, carried by two servants, on his way to destroy Niananko.

Yeelen features some beautiful imagery of Mali. Even though the acting is heavily theatrical, all the principals involved have genuine presence and are great at conveying their feelings. Cissé uses simple effects to show sorcerers powers: burning bushes, sound effects, playing the action backward, star-filter effects, etc. The film has a very different sense of lyricism and visual poetry I'm not really familiar with, and it's very refreshing. I dig it.

Grand Illusion

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) - Anderson

Anderson's children's picture book diorama with the ever growing cast of cardboard thin characters continues. This didn't annoy me as much as his other movies however. I think mainly it's because of the apt casting. Anderson fits all these known actors into the carefully designed mold and they fit perfectly. Ralph Fiennes has an impeccable comic timing and has never really been better since forever as Gustav H.; first, the concierge then the owner of The Grand Budapest Hotel deep in the Alps in the made-up republic of Zubrowka. Adrian Brody and Willem Defoe also excel as baddies. Anderson skims over WWII, Nazism and racism uncomfortably but shoves pink cream cakes in our faces whenever it gets awkward. The star of the movie is, of course, the production design. Everything is bathed in warm, if not drab colors that give the movie your parents' rec room carpet familiarity. Some seriously gorgeous matte paintings too. It seems like a logical step for Anderson to move his locale to Europe. First it was stop motion animation, now it's old Europe where his not so American sensibilities lie - money, white, nostalgia. It all fits perfectly. I enjoyed it very much.

Fraternity of Womenhood

Snow Canons (2011) - Diop




Mati Diop, a niece of famous Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty and daughter of a musician Wassis Diop, directs this short film. She is also the luminous actress who starred in one of my all time favorites, Clare Denis's 35 Rhums. She says in an interview that she makes films based on what she finds interesting at that moment. All her films, 4 to date, are very different in subject matter and method I'm told. Snow Canon concerns a slight lesbian romance with the stunning French Alps as a backdrop and its very delicious. A lanky teen Valina (Niala Bal) is left to her own devices in a house overlooking the Alps. She incessantly exchanges texts about boys with her bbf who is traveling in South America. Then an American babysitter Mary Jane (Nour Mobarak) shows up. Smokey eyed and heartbroken, she tells Valina never to fall in love. Valina's sexual curiosity gets the better of her though. Mary Jane is hot. They develop certain physical intimacy. Diop's presentation is never obvious. As they take bath together and play dress up, there is a certain fraternity between them rather than something sexual. Shot in 35mm, the film's gorgeous and less experimental but just as rapturous in its mood and sensuality. There is a nod to a quite a bit of Clare Denis there, not only the appearance of bunny rabbit.

You Don’t Have a Home Until You Leave It

Touki Bouki (1973) - Mambéty







Mory (Magaye Niang) dreams of leaving Dakar and going to Paris with his college student girlfriend, Anta (Mareme Niang). Always on his trusty motorbike with a cow skull attached to the front, Mory is somewhat of a dreamer and doesn't really fit well in a society where young men only talk about revolution. The couple cheats and steals their way through getting tickets for a sea voyage, but Mory has second thoughts at the last minute. He realizes that wherever he goes, he will be like that of a bull in the slaughterhouse with a noose around his neck. That is the legacy of colonialism. It dawns on him that there is no escape, that he might as well stay.

Even though Mory and Anta are from a shantytown, Touki Bouki is not an overtly socio-political condemnation of colonialism or anything. It's definitely there though. There are elements that stress the view of white Europeans on Senegalese but that's beside the point. The film is, first and foremost, fun. It has a very loose structure and fluidity and playfulness throughout. It's very much French New Wave. You can totally see Breathless- Touki Bouki- Leos Carax connection here. The energy combined with colors and sound make quite an arresting experience.

Panorama Europe 2014 at MoMI and Bohemian National Hall

Making films is an all consuming affair: the time and energy and money and talent that put into one film production is staggering. Yet, year after year, tens and thousands films go unnoticed, unseen, not just in this country, but everywhere. Disappearing Act, a New York tradition for the last half a decade, has devoted itself to seek out some of the most daring, noteworthy films from continental Europe, which would've undoubtedly gone undistributed and unseen in the States. I had covered Disappearing Acts in the Past. This year, I got to see 3 films in advance. The series runs April 4 - 13. For a complete list of the films and tickets, go to MoMI website.

Programmed by David Schwartz, Chief Curator, Museum of the Moving Image

Co-presented by Museum of the Moving Image and the European Union National Institutes for Culture, Panorama Europe is a unique showcase of seventeen contemporary European features and a program of short films. Formerly known as Disappearing Act, the newly re-named festival continues the mission of showcasing vital European filmmaking as distribution remains challenging for foreign-language films in the United States. Panorama Europe gives New York audiences what may be their only chance to see these acclaimed films from the festival circuit on the big screen. This year’s festival will take place at Museum of the Moving Image in Queens and at Bohemian National Hall in Manhattan.  

SEDUCE ME (dir. Janko Mandic, Slovenia)

With cheers and a cake, Luka (Janko Mandic) moves out of a youth home where he spent the last 9 years of his life. He finds a lodging and a job at a slaughterhouse with the help of a social worker. His emotionless mother is still alive but he's not in a hurry to see her. At the job, he befriends Ajda (Nina Rakovec), a foreman's daughter who is working there because she has to pay her abusive dad back for the new car she just bought. And the foreman is none too happy about their relationship. Ajda is a thrill seeker and only wants pleasure in life which suits young Luka fine at first, but her willful disinterests in his life and background rubs him the wrong way. While she undresses him, he protests that they don't know anything about each other.

Luka has a good head on his shoulders and a good heart, and is tasting adulthood for the first time. I'm pretty sure Mandic's natural boyish presence will bring out strong paternal/maternal instincts out in the audience. Just like Antoine Doinel and many others before him, Luka makes you root for him as he struggles through life's many incongruities.
The setting of Seduce Me is not a glamorous one. Drab scenery in Ljubljana, Slovenia is seen through the windows of the bus which Luka takes to his even more depressing job. It contrasts with the beautiful forest seen from the train as Luka visits his mother. I interpret the title as Luka crying out for the life ahead of him, the lure of his future. However drab his circumstances are, we know that he is too good and earnest for it and deserves something better. It reminded me strongly of Atmen (Breathing) by Karl Markovics, from a couple of years back. They both are about a good youth trying to survive something called adulthood. Seduce Me is a beautifully written and directed feature film debut by Marko Santic. I'd love to see more from him.


HONEYMOON (dir. Jan Hřebejk, Czech Republic/Slovakia)

In veteran Czech director Jan Hřebejk's new film, the honeymoon period is astonishingly short.
It's the wedding day of a well-to-do, handsome couple, Tereza (Anna Geislerová) and Radim (Stanislav Majer). It's an ideal setting for the happy couple - friends and family, a big lakeside house, nature, booze, dancing and lots of shrieking children. Everyone is having a great time... except for one: a nebbish optician who calls himself Jan. This uninvited guest shows up at the reception, claiming to be Radim's old schoolmate. As the day winds down, Jan's sour talk on the marriage takes a toll on Tereza's mood. He refuses to leave until she opens his wedding present which turns out to be an urn filled with someone's remains. She has to confront Radim about his past and needs to decide if she wants to marry someone she hardly knows.
Honeymoon is a tense drama in the same vein as Thomas Vinterberg's Celebration. The taboo subject here is severe bullying. Hřebejk skillfully drops hints from the beginning that this idyllic setup has a dirty secret. The film asks us just how much of one's past sins others can forgive and live with. It also puts so-called 'masculinity' under the microscope. Jan and his dead friend's experience is a blood curdlingly horrendous one. The savage bullying sequences involving a effeminate boy being forced to dress up as Nastassja Kinski in the flashbacks are heart wrenching. The heartbreaking third act examines that people might never change who they really are. Hřebejk leaves the film open ended, suggesting that the couple's future is uncertain. And thanks to this film, I can't look at Nastassja Kinski the same way ever again.


FISH N' CHIPS (dir. Elias Demetriou, Cyprus)

Elias Demetriou, a citizen of Cyprus, Britain and Greece, tries to navigate through a complicated modern European geo-socio-political landscape. The film's protagonist is Andy (Marios Iannou, giving a down-to-earth, affecting performance here), a Fish n' Chips shop manager in a working class London neighborhood. Andy decides to take a trip back to Cyprus with his aging mom and his East-German girlfriend Karin and her grown-up daughter Emma. Once in Cyprus while crashing at his seemingly well-to-do brother's house, Andy decides to set up a chip shop, only to find out that Cypriots, who are comfortable basking in Mediterranean sun and eating kebabs, have no appetite for thick battered fried fish. After the drug fueled beach party to jumpstart the shop goes wrong and his senile mom goes missing, Andy has to make a choice: does he stay in his native country where he is seen as a foreigner or does he go back to London, where most of his adult life has been spent, where locals still harass him and call him Paki?

Fish n' Chips tells an all-too-familiar, down and out story of an immigrant whose loyalty and cultural identity become at odds. Despite strong, earnest performances by everyone involved, with on-the-nose dialog and a tiresome plot, the film ends up soaked in melodrama.

Honesty is Such a Lonely Word

Nymphomaniac: Vol.2 (2013) - von Trier

It is definitely the worst work by von Trier. All his carrier he has maintained himself as a manic depressive person who is deeply pessimistic about humanity. That's fine, I don't have any problem with that. It only becomes a problem when he repeats himself and has nothing new to say. But he still has a penchant for upsetting people any way he can so he has to go on. Nymphomaniac is as if he made a check list of every offensive and controversial things and checked off one by one: erected penis/close up of vagina- check, fellatio/cunilingus - check, mentioning N* word- check, pedophilia- check, homosexuality - check. The film feels like an obligatory soapbox performance- the cinematic zeal is gone, graphic sex feels flat and not titillating at all. Charlotte Gainsbourg as his mouth piece, he declares the world is full of hypocrites. He is the only honest person in the world. von Trier has become the cinema equivalent of Billy Joel. The ending of this movie is perhaps the worst movie ending I've experienced in my life. It's a total fuck you to the audience. But sadly, it will make money with all the ad campaign and splitting the movie in two parts for no reason, charging separate admissions and whatnot. You lost me von Trier. Perhaps forever.

Train of Life

Snowpiercer (2013) - Bong

Oh man, Zizek will have a field day with this movie. A complete society/biosphere divided by class and those with power and those without, get this, ON A MOVING TRAIN! It's 2031, and the world has frozen over again. The only survivors are the ones on the train. On the tail end of the train are the smelly ragtag of normal people in cramped quarters. The other end, people with power, food and water, the eternal engine and its creator Wilford. Curtis (Chris Evans) and his fellows has a plan to revolt and take over the train. First, they have to patiently wait for the right moment when all four visible doors are opened to the next car. Then they need to bumrush through the heavy security forces with guns to get to Namgung Minsu (Song Gang-ho), a security specialist who designed the security system for the train and knows how to open all the doors up to the front car but for some unknown reason, locked up in the prison section of the train.

Bong adapts the dystopian French graphic novel and makes it pretty exciting and at times, beautiful. There are many set pieces that are just jaw dropping, especially the ax-wielding black hooded baddies against the good guys. Each car shows the excess of the haves, much like Wes Anderson tableaux - an aquarium, pool, steam rooms, goth club, drug den, etc. I love it. It's certainly much less annoying than Matrix and Dark Knight's philosophical posing but any less obvious in its espousing "we have to have the rules otherwise its chaos and anarchy". Snowpiercer is a superb entertainment with lots of international stars including Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, Song and Evans.