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[This article surveys the 'Asian extreme' titles shown at the festival, plus some of the other thriller/horror/sci-fi/weird titles included in the lineup.]
"What's your function in life?" So growls Vinnie Jones at pretty much everyone (and everything) he encounters in Gen Sekiguchi's amazing new fruit-loop of a movie Survive Style 5+ which, while perhaps not strictly speaking the best of the 200-odd features shown at this winter's Rotterdam Film Festival, must have been the most purely, wildly, deliriously enjoyable. And the event's organisers wouldn't have had any problem answering Jones's menacing query: Rotterdam is secure in its hard-won status as Europe's most cutting-edge showcase of current cinema, boasting a particularly handy emphasis on the far-eastern radical fringe that's come to be known as ‘Asian Extreme.'
Nearly all the current big Japanese, Korean, Malaysian, Thai film-making names - and quite a few from Hong Kong - had their first major international exposure in the Netherlands' relaxed but cosmopolitan port city. Back in 2000 - alongside a Fukusaku (Battle Royale) Kinji retrospective - the festival programmed a trio of pictures from a then semi-unknown workaholic named Miike Takashi: Dead or Alive, Ley Lines, and Audition.
Life for Miike - or, indeed, Rotterdam - would never quite be the same again. Since then he's been a regular visitor to the city during its festival fortnight, earning a rock-star reception from the adoring Dutch public. He was conspicuous by his absence from this year's event (Jan 26 - Feb 6), however, despite the presence in the line-up of his latest crazed epic Izo and also the portmanteau horror Three... Extremes - for which he, Korea's OLDBOY auteur Park Chan-Wook and Hong Kong's Fruit Chan contributed segments.
As it turned out, Miike's no-show was perhaps for the best: Izo was widely, and in my opinion quite rightly, reckoned a sub-par effort. It limped in at a sorry 164th among the 190 features eligible for the Tiscali-sponsored Audience Award, which was won by Iranian crowdpleaser Turtles Don't Fly. And, for me at least, Box - Miike's contribution to Three... Extremes - wasn't any more encouraging. But more on that anon.
Miike's Rotterdam entries seemed all the more drab alongside the other Japanese pictures, of which the aforementioned Survive Style 5+ unsurprisingly ranked highest (at 24th) in the TAA race. I saw it at a packed late-night screening in the vast Pathe megaplex which dominates the city's main square, and it went down an absolute bomb: the end-credits were greeted with a loud, sustained ovation and whoops of delight. This is partly because the picture has one of the most fantastic endings you'll ever see - against all odds, it manages to tie together all the various absurd, seemingly slapdash plot-strands with a chutzpah that will leave your jaw somewhere close to your ankles.
So, what happens in Survive Style 5+? It might be easier to list the things that don't happen in this two-hour pop-surrealistic spectacular whose gallery of weird characters includes a philandering, swaggering celebrity hypnotist with a tiger's-head codpiece; a gangsterish dandy (Miike regular Tadanobu Asano, also to be seen at Rotterdam '05 in Shinya Tsukamoto's audience-dividing Vital) whose attempts to bump off his wife unleash supernatural horrors; a trio of incompetent (and sexually-confused) burglars; a middle-aged salaryman who thinks he's a bird; and a skinhead Cockney hitman-for-hire (you-know-who).
Director Sekiguchi and scriptwriter Taku Tada - neither of whom has ever made a movie before - both hail from the world of advertising, where they apparently hoovered up all the awards going. Their debut will never get any prizes for subtletly - the production design, colour-schemes, sets and costumes are seven shades of berserk. But somehow, it all works: Survive Style 5+ is like the funniest nightmare you've ever had - a one-of-a-kind romp which will dazzle Asian-extreme aficionados - and cult-movie enthusiasts - all over the world in the coming months. Remember where you heard about it first.
Survive Style 5+ wasn't the only Japanese midnight treat on offer - indeed, the organisers programmed a whole sidebar of them under the catchy moniker ‘Rotterdammerung': "exceptionally imaginative and visually spectacular films from Japan, which we have included in a special late-night programme because of their - occasionally bloody - ferocity," according to the official catalogue.
Given this description, it's odd that Rotterdammerung (which actually included the non-Japanese Calvaire and Ab-Normal Beauty) didn't stretch to encompass Shibata Go's The Late Bloomer - by any measure exceptionally imaginative, visually spectacular and bloodily ferocious. An unlikely but effective cross between Henry : Portrait of a Serial Killer and My Left Foot, it stars the severely-handicapped actor Sumida Masakiyo in a remarkable turn as a bloke whose ‘disabilities' prove little bar to his embarking a kill-crazy rampage of revenge against those who've crossed him.
Despite touches of dark humour in Go's script, and some amazing monochrome-video cinematography by Takakura Masaaki, the picture's jagged misanthropic streak was too much for many viewers at the screening I attended - but the sheer number of distressed walkouts suggests that, if you're after a genuinely hardcore, envelope-pushing example of current cinema at its most uncompromising and uncompromised, The Late Bloomer (already hailed in some quarters as "the new Tetsuo") could be right up your alley.
Inoue Yasuo's The Neighbor in 13 - world-premiering in the Rotterdammerung strand - looked like it was going to end up in the same bracingly-dark territory explored in The Late Bloomer, only to wimp out with a duff last-act twist. The intense, downbeat tale of how childhood bullying can have a lasting impact into adult life, it's based on Neighborhood 13, the 1994 manga by ‘Santastic' Inoue (no relation) long hailed in Japan as a classic of ‘psycho-suspense.'
Debutant director Inoue brings all kinds of arty touches to what could and should have been a gritty tale of violent resentment unfolding in a blue-collar urban Japan we seldom see on the big screen. The hero's Jekyll/Hyde split personality is indicated by the fact that two actors play the role, with pin-up Oguri Shun giving way to scarfaced, tough-guy Nakamura Shido when the going gets tough - and the first victims of his homicidal rage is a pesky neighbour played by none other than Takashi Miike, complete with conspicuously phoney-looking hairpiece.
Speaking of Miike: his Three... Extremes chapter Box is a slow, pretentious affair about a mentally disturbed writer troubled by dreams of a tragic childhood incident involving her twin sister. Though infuriatingly enigmatic and glacially-paced, it's nevertheless preferable to Park Chan-Wook's misbegotten contribution Cut, the typically revenge-heavy tale of an egotistical young film-director being held hostage by a demented movie-extra.
Indeed, the only Extremes director to enhance his reputation is the relatively little-known Fruit Chan, previously best known for renegade/underground productions like Public Toilet and Durian Durian. His episode Dumplings aims a little lower than Miike and Park's more self-important offerings, but comes much closer to hitting the target - shot by ace cinematographer Christopher Doyle, this is the pleasingly gruesome story of an ageing actress (Miriam Yeung) who finds an unorthodox cure for wrinkles via delicacies provided by an enigmatic dumpling-cook (Bai Ling). It's the kind of sting-in-the-tail stuff familiar from Roald Dahl's old Tales of the Unexpected series - but rather than seek out the disappointing Three... Extremes, you might be better to hang around for a while as Chan has reportedly expanded it into a full-blown feature.
It's just as well that Chan was able to fly the flag so prominently for Hong Kong with Three... Extremes, as otherwise the territory was overshadowed by entries from Japan and South Korea. In addition to the titles already mentioned, Japan could also boast Kazuaki Kiriya's folie de grandeur sci-fi epic Casshern and Hayao Miyazaki's latest box-office sensation Howl's Moving Castle - a typically eyepopping adventure ("describe it at your peril" warns midnighteye.com's Don Brown of the eponymous ambulatory fort.)
There as a hot-ticket retrospective for unjustly-forgotten ‘lost master' Uchida Tomo (titles such a A Bloody Spear at Mt Fuji, The Mad Fox and The Master Spearman give a flavour of his stuff), plus attention-grabbing debuts from Lee Sang-il (the fizzy but overlong student-revolt comedy 69 Sixty Nine, based on a novel by Ryu [Audition] Murakami) and Takahashi Izumi, whose The Soup, One Morning starts out like a low-key marriage-in-crisis gloomathon only to rapidly head down much more welcome, off-beat avenues - including the most sinister movie sofa since Julianne Moore's toxic settee from Safe.
South Korea's biggest splash was made by Whang Cheol-Mean's sweatily claustrophobic chamber-piece thriller Spying Cam, which nabbed the much-coveted Fipresci Prize awarded by a jury of international critics. The tense, sweaty, enigmatic tale of two blokes holed up - for reasons which only slowly become apparent - in a pokey apartment, Spying Cam is chiefly notable for Yang Young-Cho's powerhouse performance as the more brutish of the two men, though the lo-fi shaky-video cinematography will probably ensure a future on the film-festival circuit rather than in arthouse distribution.
Kim Ki-Duk's 3-Iron (shown here under the title Bin-Jip), however, looks set to elevate the Korean auteur's fast-rising star to a whole new level. While there are moments of unexpectedly savage violence in this story of a mute twentysomething who breaks into people's houses to mend their faulty implements, the picture is unlikely to satisfy the admirers of Kim's more extreme output (Bad Guy, The Isle, The Coast Guard). Everyone else, however, is likely to be bowled over by a picture which combines social comment, drama, romance and comedy (but emphatically not romantic comedy) in thoroughly engaging, effortless style: pretty much a hole in one, if you like.
Aside from Dumplings, the only Hong Kong entry of much note was the latest from The Eye co-director Oxide Pang, Ab-Normal Beauty. Seemingly made with at least one ocular organ on a future Hollywood remake (the US Eye, er, ‘opens' soon), this slightly overcooked thriller stars both members of HK's hot musical duo, the twins Race and Rosanne Wong who record under the semi-StarWars-ish name of R2. Oddly, they don't play sisters here - Race is art-student Jiney, whose finds herself drawn to increasingly morbid subject-matter. Rosane is her best friend Jasmine, who becomes increasingly concerned at Jiney's gruesome photographic work. Pang ends up with a kind ‘Peeping Tom of Laura Mars' as the script lurches into serial-killer territory at the half-way mark: the results are watchable and stylish, if not - ahem- ab-normally so.
The abundance of far-eastern fare isn't the be-all and end all of the Rotterdam Film Festival, however. Notwithstanding the daft omission of Graham Robertson's brilliant US sci-fi fable Able Edwards, there was plenty of ‘western' stuff on offer as well, including Shane Carruth's smug head-scratcher Primer - much less ambitious and accomplished than Robertson's picture, but nevertheless lined up for a UK release this summer.
Equally twisty, but much less hyped and much more satisfying was Romed Wyder's vaguely futuristic paranoid-conspiracy thriller Absolut from Switzerland, in which a computer hacker plotting to disrupt a G8-style meeting of fat-cat governments wakes up in hospital with a gaping hole in his memory: if you can imagine a cross between The Yes Men and The Parallax View, you won't be too far off the mark. Wyder manages to make his picture relentlessly watchable even though we're seldom sure what's going on - though no masterpiece, it's the kind of well-made, low-key effort that deserves wider exposure but so often gets overlooked at festivals where over-ambitious auteurs grab the headlines with their forays into horror/thriller/science-fiction genres.
From Austria, Jessica Hausner's Hotel tries to combine Kubrick's The Shining, Polanski's Repulsion and The Tenant and David Lynch's Twin Peaks: intriguing on paper, sleep-inducing on celluloid. France's Les Revenants (aka They Came Back) also turned out to be a damp squib - Robin Campillo's ill-thought-out parable taking a boringly realistic view of what might happen if, one day, a large number of dead folk came back to life Shaun des morts it certainly is not.
Rather more lively - if not to all tastes - was David Jarab's surrealism-influenced rural-gothic comedy-shocker Fatherland : A Hunting Logbook in which a family of obnoxious Czech aristocrats embark on a hunt for a bizarre, possibly mythic mountain-dwelling species. And there was a surreal flavouring to what was, for me - perhaps the standout picture from Rotterdam '05 (just shading James Benning's hypnotic 13 Lakes): Claire Denis's magnificent, unclassifiable L'intrus (‘The Intruder'), a two-and-a-half hour globetrotting dream about life, love, death, style - and survival.
Neil Young
23rd February, 2005
(written for the April 2005 issue of Impact magazine - click here to order)
click here for a full alphabetical list of films seen at Rotterdam 2005
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