| Rotterdam 2006 : part eight (including Ying Liang's 'Taking Father Home') |
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 Taking Father Home; The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada; What Is It Worth?; Walking on the Wild Side; Yaji and Kita, the Midnight Pilgrims TAKING FATHER HOME [8/10] Sichuan province, 2002. Teenager Yun (Xu Yun) sets off from his rural village to the big city of Zigong in search of his father, who abandoned his wife and children some six years before. He arrives penniless, his only 'currency' being the two geese he carries in a basket on his back. Along the way he receives advice and help from a hardened street-criminal known as 'Scar' (Wang Jie) and from a paternalistic policeman (Liu Xiaopei). When he finally tracks down his errant dad (Song Cijun), he's no longer the wide-eyed boy who arrived from the countryside... The remarkable debut feature by 28-year-old Ying (co-written with Peng Shan), Taking Father Home was made for a minimal 'budget' with a borrowed video-camera, and a 'volunteer' cast and crew. Despite these limitations, the film isn't merely an instance of 'promising' talent: Ying is already pretty much the finished article. He's one of those rare 'naturals' with the camera, presenting his shots with an uninflected compositional eye that gives the viewer a real sense of the story's wide range of locations. We feel we've actually spent time in Zigong, so evocatively does Ying capture its many different neighbourhoods, faces and moods. The dialogue plays a major part in this - the rough-edged English-language subtitles fitting perfectly with the rough-edged verisimilitude of Ying's approach. These translations give the flavour of the (often bracingly foul-mouthed) language as it's actually spoken - and while the subtitling could use a little tidying-up to remove some distracting typos, it would be a shame if the slangy vitality were to be lost in the process. The sound-design is also crucial: in Zigong, the roar of traffic competes with advertising jingles; tannoy-broadcast government propaganda; regular flood warnings; police bulletins and news reports, including a statement that Communist Party general secretary Jiang Zemin has handed over power to the country's new leader Hu Jintao. The inclusion of this particular event clearly isn't accidental: Taking Father Home is about an enormous country in the ongoing throes of a violent, often painful transition - one in which millions of people face upheaval and hardship in the name of the common good. Ying's achievement is to tell a simple human story against such a backdrop, and do full justice to both the 'micro' and the 'macro', to the specific and the general, while taking us into the heart of a society and its culture. [this is a summary of a longer article on Taking Father Home which can be found in full HERE] THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA [7/10] Three Burials Just as The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a mouthful to pronounce, it isn't an easy film to summarise or describe. Set in the present - and, with its US/Mexico-border setting, more of a 'southern,' than a 'western' - it nevertheless harks back to an earlier age of 'horse-operas,' tales of men confronting each other and themselves in stark, remote settings. There's also a Peckinpah feel here and there - most obviously Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, although here it's an entire decomposing cadaver which is being lugged around. Said corpse is that of Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cesar Cedillo), whose sudden death - in suspicious circumstances - devastates his co-worker and best friend, ranch-hand Pete (Tommy Lee Jones, who also efficiently directs). The griefstricken Pete's investigations lead him to racist border-patrolman Mike (Barry Pepper) - whom he kidnaps and forces to disinter Melquiades' remains. The 'three' then set off for Melquiades' home village in Mexico, where Pete had promised he'd lay to rest his friend's body in the event of his death. What starts off as a dour affair, freighted with issues of injustice and scarred by painful tragedy, slowly but gradually reveals its true colours. It never becomes what you could really call a 'comedy' (though there are some surprisingly belly-laughs), but the mood does lighten somewhat as the hazardous odyssey unfolds and the odd relationship between the protagonists evolves. Pete's behaviour is decidedly eccentric - as when he pours antifreeze down the corpse's throat to stave off decay. But there's a certain emotional/psychological logic to his 'crazy' behaviour, one which satisfyingly ties in with Mike's painful progress towards maturity, self-awareness and redemption. Arriaga's suitably-laconic script is, helpfully, rather less tricksy than his work on 21 Grams or Amores Perros, although the preponderance of flashbacks and the use of 'chapter titles' is unhelpful, even confusing. Indeed, audiences might end up wondering how many times Estrada is actually buried, regardless of what the title would have us believe... WHAT IS IT WORTH [5?/10] Rotterdam walkout report I managed just over half of What Is It Worth?, a bitingly cynical analysis of Brazil's current problems in the light of its slavery-dominated history (brilliantly documented in Peter Robb's book A Death In Brazil). The enterprise's sprawling ambition nature is apparent from the fact that the screenplay is credited to four writers, loosely adapting both a short story by Machado de Assis and Nireu Cavalcanti's 'chronicles.' We jump from the present century to previous eras, via a scattershot approach which attempts to take in all strata of Brazilian society from the stinking rich to the stinking poor and their "evident misery." At every stage, injustice is uncovered and laid bare, from the brutalities of slavery to the rather more insidious practices of the 'industry' which has recently sprung up to 'alleviate' child poverty: we're told that every needy kid results in the creation of five jobs; there are 10,000 homeless children on the streets; the number of 'social projects' has increased in only a few years from 14,000 to over 20,000. There's no disguising the anger and bitterness of the filmmakers - or the seriousness of the issues with which they deal. This is ferociously 'engaged' old-school agit-prop cinema, adopting extreme tactics (at times reminiscent of Paul Verhoeven; at others BrassEye's Chris Morris) to shock the viewer into thinking about the issues being raised. While admirable in intent, at times, this desire to unsettle and appal (perhaps inevitably) crosses the line into crassness - this happens during several of the slavery episodes, and also in the modern-day sections such as the scene where children are made to vomit in unison for the purpose of a guilt-inducing television advert. And despite the wide range of locations, time-frames and targets on view, there's a stilted monotonousness to the film (not helped by the fact that one deep-voiced narrator is used to unify the various fragments) which, added to the thudding blunt-instrument nature of Bianchi's didactic/polemic satire, becomes rather wearing rather quickly. WALKING ON THE WILD SIDE [5/10] As a genre-inflected chronicle of troubled, violent youth in today's transitional, hard-knock China, Han's debut feature Walking on the Wild Side isn't devoid of interest - but it pales alongside his contemporary Ying Liang's Taking Father Home (also competing at Rotterdam '06) which covers similar terrain with much more skill and originality. The focus here is on three twentyish lads who live in a coal-mining 'village' that's been utterly ruined by heavy industry - the grimy, grim backdrop here is familiar from Blind Shaft and the futurist-dystopian All Tomorrow's Parties. A minor squabble with another younger 'gang' spirals out of control, culminating in a drunken, vicious attack on a schoolboy which forces the loutish trio to flee in the direction of the nearest major city, Taiyuan. There's soon dishonour among the 'thieves' - and the most 'mature' of the three, Xiping (Bai Paijiang) realises he can't stay on the run forever... The main problem with Walking on the Wild Side is the irredeemably repellent behaviour of the three protagonists. Booze-swilling; whoring; swearing; chain-smoking; gambling; bullying - they wallow in their 'vices' and clearly see themselves as proto-gangmembers rather than the emotionally-stunted, immature fools that they really are. Rather than undercutting their bragadoccio, Han actually seems to endorse and even connive in it, jazzing up their noir-ish 'adventures' with eyecatching cinematography (Xu Wei, Li Hong Jian) and thriller-style music (Sheng Zi). Leading-man Bai may be better looking than his pals, and he does at least show some glimmerings of conscience late in the day - but this really isn't enough to deserve our interest or sympathy. Han's script, meanwhile, is a classic case of debutant's overreach, awkwardly incorporating numerous socially-aware subplots (including a mining disaster) and a confusing array of minor characters. He's clearly moved to anger by the plight of those who suffer from China's breakneck rise to economic 'success,' but his response is a blank-eyed nihilism: "Let's leave this place," someone suggests. "What's the use?" comes the oh-so-jaded reply. YAJI AND KITA, THE MIDNIGHT PILGRIMS [5/10] A smart editor can probably hack a decent ninety-minute thrill-ride out of Yaji and Kita, the Midnight Pilgrims - but at two hours, this is just too much of a good thing. An overstuffed, semi-musical, self-consciously 'cute' romp about two "gay" lovers who jaunt through space and time, it's the kind of anything-goes post-modern craziness that Miike Takashi can often pull off with aplomb (Gozu, Great Yokai War). But even maestro Miike can come a bit of a cropper at times - as his Izo shows, the genre is much harder to pull off than it looks, especially for a first-timer like director/co-writer Kudo. Yaji and Kita certainly starts with a bang: a dream-sequence in which raft-borne bodies float down a river before being 'zapped' in a kind of three-dimensional Tetris. We then meet the effervescent Yaji (Sadao Abe) and Kita (Yosi Yosi Arakawa), residents of Tokyo in the early 19th century when the proto-metropolis was known as 'Edo'. Period detail isn't very high on the agenda, however - before long the pair (having bumped off Yaji's pesky wife) saddle up on a fancy modern motorbike and are speed off towards their destination, which seems to be some kind of wish-granting theme park... It isn't always especially easy to know what's going on or why: the 'plot' is more of a mechanism by which our heroes can discover the (self-explanatory) delights of 'Laugh Inn,' 'Pleasure Inn' and 'Singing Inn.' The dialogue is ostentatiously weird, often amusingly so ("A decomposing-corpse courtesan - meet my perverted fan-club!"); production-design suitably eye-popping. But in the second half the fizzy Dude-Where's-My-Kimono trifle starts to lose its tang as the juvenile whimsy becomes increasingly belaboured and repetitive - cruelly, there's even a fake 'ending' at the 80-minute mark. And while Kudo does deliver a rousing finale, including Dali-esque elephants and a visit to the jawdropping source of the River Styx, it's not quite enough to make Yaji and Kita worthwhile for non-devotees of such East-Asian extravaganzas. Neil Young 1st March, 2005 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ TAKING FATHER HOME [8/10] : Bei ya zi de nan hai : China 2005 : YING Liang (1977) : 101m (timed) feature (video) seen at Cinerama, 1.2.06 (press show; section Tiger Awards Competition) THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA [7/10] : Los tres entierros de Melquiades Estrada aka Three Burials : USA (US/Fr) 2005 : Tommy Lee JONES (1946) : 121m (timed) feature (35mm) seen at Cinerama, 26.1.06 (press show; section Time & Tide) WHAT IS IT WORTH? [5?/10] : Quanto vale ou e por quilo? : Brazil 2005 : Sergio BIANCHI (1945) : c110m feature (35mm) partially seen at Cinerama (walkout at 1hr), 28.1.06 (press show; section Time & Tide) WALKING ON THE WILD SIDE [5/10] : Lai ziao zi : China (Chi/Fr) UK 2006 : HAN Jie (1977) : 92m (timed) feature (35mm) seen at Cinerama, 1.2.06 (press show; section Tiger Awards Competition; world premiere - winner of Tiger Award [with Old Joy and The Dog Pound]) YAJI AND KITA, THE MIDNIGHT PILGRIMS [5/10] : Mayonaka no Yaji-san Kita-san : Japan 2005 : KUDO Kankuro (1970) : 123m (timed) feature (35mm) seen at Venster, 27.1.06 (press show; section White Light) More details on these titles - and all others shown at the 2006 Rotterdam Film Festival - can be found at the IFFR official site ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ A full alphabetical index of all films seen at IFFR 2006 can be found HERE  |
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