I sometimes see, on my trudge up Bancroft Way to the PFA, groups of unabashed students practicing their dance moves in a passageway of one of the campus buildings: is it hip hop? Or Bollywood? Maybe there is no difference anymore. In Love Aaj Kal, when the song-and-dance bits finally arrive in reel 3, we are treated to an amalgam of these styles, one of the many internationalist aspects of this film, set mostly in London, with some excursions to San Francisco and, yes, India.
Aside from these musical asides, the film is a rather artless affair. Comparisons to Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Three Times (its supposed inspiration) don't flatter this hopelessly banal love story.
Bollywood movies, I had heard, were all printed directly from the camera negative (a rather striking trailer from my collection bears this out), so I'd hoped at least to see a dazzling first-generation image. But no, it seems the plague of the digital intermediate has made landfall on the subcontinent, and no measure of computerized whizz-bangery can atone for this decoupling of the image from its hallowed photographic roots. Nor does it help that the lab dipped deeply into its pile of short-ends when manufacturing this print (it was full of lab splices).
My neighborhood theater, the Oaks, will be switching to Bollywood programming at month's end, so I'll soon have ample opportunity to reevaluate India's filmic output, and decide if my colleague Brecht is on target in characterizing it as "white elephant cinema".
About Elly wears its internationalism rather more comfortably than does Love Aaj Kal. With its conventionally naturalistic approach to acting, its shot/reverse shot editing, even its somewhat cold pallette, it breaks with many of the wonderful peculiarities of Iranian cinema, such as rough, presentationalist performances, long takes, and warmly photographed landscapes. And it centers not on children or the aged, but on the romantic entanglements of (young) adults. Indeed, after a pivotal (just offscreen) incident ruptures its somewhat idyllic tone, the film threatens to adopt the conventions of the slasher genre, but manages to extricate itself with nuanced grace.
I only hope director Asghar Farhadi's success in incorporating outside influences into his work doesn't signal an end to the indiginous virtues of Iran's traditional cinema.
Kim Ki-young's The Housemaid, despite its at-times-catastrophic, at-times-merely-unfortunate digital "restoration" turns out to be quite the entertainingly demented little film. A babe-magnet music teacher spurns one of his student's advances, only to find himself seduced by another, whom he had hired as, yes, a housemaid. His young son turns in a wonderfully off-kilter performance, and the seemingly tacked-on ending undermines the whole affair in a manner that must be seen to be believed. As I intimated in my last post, portions of the film as it now exists were sourced from an already-subtitled print. It was deemed necessary to remove these subtitles (and replace them with new ones) and it should be no surprise that the results of this wrong-headed venture were laughably inept and probably far more distracting than the subtitles themselves would have been.
Lino Brocka was a filmmaker whose sophistication far outstripped the modest means afforded his productions. While he seems to have made a virtue of this, even more meager means have been devoted to the preservation of his work, and to this there is no upside. Surviving prints of his films are reportedly in poor condition, and only two were deemed presentable for the SFIAAFF.
Bayan ko: Kapit sa patalim (almost sounds like "capitalism", of which it is a critique of sorts) screened in a somewhat tattered 35mm print, which still admirably showcased the film's quite lovely largely-nighttime photography. Brocka starts by quoting Oshima's Cruel Story of Youth. A man watching a demonstration spots among the participants an old acquaintance, they strike up bit of a conversation, the demonstrator says he's sorry, the onlooker wonders if he shouldn't be the one apologizing. A flashback promises to provide a context for these apologia. The linear story that follows--concerning labor organizing and the conflicts between loyalties and survival instincts it brings out--continues beyond the flashback point, always keeping things interesting, to climax in a bungled burglary, rivaling that in Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket for comical ineptitude, which upturns the tenuous sense of order suggested at film's start.
The evocatively if deceptively titled Manila in the Claws of Neon could only be screened in a dubious 16mm print. This, in combination with Morpheus's unwelcome influence, rather impeded my full appreciation of this effort. We follow the misadventures of an odd-jobbing former fisherman in Manila. He gets some menial construction work and makes some friends, and with the help of the odd clumsily poetic flashback we learn he is hunting for his hometown sweetie, sold into prostitution in the big city. I vaguely recall some sort of tragedy in the denouement, but I can't be sure.... I'd love to see a nicer print of this film, considered by some one of the best of Philippine cinema, let alone Brocka's.