The sublime--and creatively slimy--excesses of Japanese provocateur Sion Sono’s
Love Exposure (pictured), a logic-defying battleground between spirit and flesh, sainthood and transgression, introduce us to what some consider de rigueur for inclusion in the New York Asian Film Festival (June 19-July 5), brought to you for the seventh year by the high-energy boys from Subway Cinema. (Most play the IFC Center, some, the Japan Society;
www.subwaycinema.com for more information.) The NYAFF celebrates pop culture, youth, iconoclasm.
The hype, as well as the showmanship behind the scenes and in front of the screen, highlight a camp-cum-hip fun-athon of films from Asia that frequently tickle our funny bones. “Asian films are go!!!” has been their motto since they started at Anthology Film Archives, one of the only events in this town that could get my bony tuchus on chairs that could double as waterboarding. And yet…there’s Hajimi Kasoi’s
Vacation, also from Japan, which is as meticulously sober and introverted as
Love Exposure is beyond the pale. Not all of the festival’s 50 features (plus shorts) can be squeezed snugly into the category of over-the-top. Grady Hendrix, he of the notorious pink jacket, may warm his audience up at the IFC Center with raffles, giveaways, and other high-spirited audience manipulation tactics, but a number of the movies are serious enough to move the feeling in another direction. (He is one of four directors of Subway Cinema, the others being Marc Walkow, Goran Topalovic, and Dan Craft.)
Vacation is austere, unfussy, precise, as spiritual in a Bressonian small-details way as
Love Exposure is in a baroque Catholic fashion. A soft-spoken death-row guard, engaged to be married to a young single mother, is conflicted over whether to accept the “unclean” task of catching and holding an inmate’s legs after his execution by hanging—the convict was his friend—in exchange for a week’s holiday for a honeymoon.
The films—and almost all, being products of Asian culture, involve powerful familial affinities—are mostly unknown here. Only a few are curated from the droppings of other festivals and exhibitions, making this one of the best, and certainly most original, film events in the area. The New York Film Festival shows validated fossils, New Directors/New Films ransacks Sundance, Tribeca seems to program by drawing straws. The NYAFF should be on the tip of every cinephile’s tongue. The best of the fest comes from Japan, with Korea in second place, but there are also new works from Hong Kong to Malaysia, Indonesia to Thailand. Asian films are Go!!, indeed.
Love Exposure is four divine hours of startling direction. A young man (the phenomenal Takahiro Nishijima, as gorgeous as he is agile) sins in order to satisfy the confessional needs of his insatiable priest father, even embarking on a career as a clandestine Peek-a-Panty photographer, yet never forgetting his vow to save himself for his “Maria,” inspired by feverish visions of his beloved dying mother and a statue of the Blessed Virgin. His father’s stepdaughter fits the bill, but she is programmed by an aberrant Christian cult to give up her will. In the meantime, he tries to control the boners he gets only in her company, with the zealots threatening to cut off his offending member. This will never play on the Hallmark Channel.
Vacation is more, shall we say, manly, a story of male loyalty and codes of conduct in an institutional setting. Here it is a prison, but it could just as well be a military installation or a private sports club. When can men show affection to one another, let down their guard? What is worth more, male bonding or a tight relationship with wife and kids? Would you give up one for the other? This is rewarding slow roast, for the gourmet.
The third excellent Japanese film,
All Around Us, by Ryosuke Yashiguchi (
Like Grains of Sand), is a study of a young couple struggling to make a go of it, especially after the death of their infant daughter. There is little clutter, only the profound observation of a passive court illustrator and the controlling artist wife who keeps heading toward the edge of sanity. On a whole other plane is the fascinating if necessarily revolting
Children of the Dark, by Junji Sakamoto. Set mostly in Thailand, it follows a journalist investigating illegal organ purchases that save rich Japanese kids but leave Thai urchins and child prostitutes without hearts. He and some activist women forge the connection between the plentiful children’s brothels in Bangkok and the trade in body parts. This is not a great film but an admirably courageous one, not only in topic but in the choice of harrowing on-screen images of prepubescent boys and girls just before and after sex or, alive and covered with AIDS lesions, dumped in garbage bags.
It’s very strange that in the esteemed Korean director Kim Ki-Duk’s
Dream, a famous Japanese actor speaks his own language while the rest of the cast speaks only Korean. Asian star system and/or economic considerations? I like the film, which blurs the distinction between dream and reality but not for one person: the protagonist’s dreams become the sleepwalking lead actress’s reality. The fellow, Jin (Japanese superstar Joe Odagiri), generates dreams that he believes are real, like witnessing a late-night car crash, but in fact he sleeps through them. She, Ran (Lee Na-Young), awakes and lives them out, but doesn’t remember anything afterward. Both are in turmoil over their most recent relationships, and their actions toward their exes are inconsistent with what they verbalize. The mind does work in wondrous ways; repression is one of our most powerful guiding forces.
You can’t get less oneiric than the potent, relentlessly gritty, and ultraviolent Korean film
Breathless, directed by and starring Yang Ik-june. Yang’s gangster Song-Hoon is irredeemably addicted to violence, some stemming from childhood trauma—he hates his father, who killed his mother—but much of it is a matter of choice. He meets high-school girl Yeon-hee (Kim Khonni), another fearless victim of a dysfunctional, aggressive household, and the two loners find comfort in each other’s presence. Her brother, an aspiring thug himself, treats her poorly; their dad is bonkers after a stint in Vietnam. The narrative is symmetrical. Song-Hoon has a sister, a single mom, with whom he has the opportunity of maintaining some semblance of a family unit. Tragic hero Song-Hoon is too rough and tarnished to survive, but he does plant the seeds of a reinvented family among those who remain behind, including his newly reformed underworld boss, now a barbecue restaurateur.
How weird is that? But then, Asian films are Go!!
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posted by Howard Feinstein @ 6/17/2009 02:01:00 PM
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