film of the day : Wild Tigers I Have Known

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Wild Tigers I Have Known [6/10] I have known/seen. Dir/writ/edit/etc by Cam (Cameron? Camera?) Archer. Sundance-assisted project with rough-edged DV, avant-garde vibe. Producers include Gus Van Sant and Scott Rudin. Shot on video, makes creative use of dissolves, multiple "exposures." Indie-Sundancey provenance hinted-at by presence of indie-queens Fairuza Balk and Kim Dickens in supporting roles. Performances (nicely) uneven: 'child' actors dominate. Kenneth Anger's Elephant; shades of Dear Pillow (Bryan Poyser, 2004). Blood, guts, sweat, semen in Junior High School. Colors exaggerated, occasionally to hallucinatory extremes (neon glow in geeky-sciencey bedroom of protagonist's pal.)
   Main characters are 14/15: Protagonist: unpopular, sensitive, scrawny teen Logan: near-universally suspected of being a "fag." Logan (Malcolm Stumpf) could easily pass for 12; object of his fervid affection, tall, hunky Daniel AKA 'Rodeo' (!) (Patrick White (who wants a 'ride' in his 'chariot'?!)) could easily pass for 16, perhaps 18, 20. Rural surroundings of forests and fields. Dreams: hormonal wooziness (onanism/oneiris.) Fetid reds, blurred images capture hormonal rush of {colossal} youth. Clips of found footage on TV (wrestling; Nina Simone)... general air of a Sonic Youth video (audio sounds like Providence.)  
   Visual distortions abound: impressionistic portrait of anguished youth. Conversations with mother (Balk) : typical dialogue : Malcolm asks "When you're a ghost, will you haunt me?" Dialogue is convincingly stilted. Use of DV is inventive (cf Dominik Graf's Der Felsen aka A Map of the Heart [2002]) exploring the medium's potential (his 20-something technical stumblings = Logan's teen stumblings/fumblings.) Experimental/avant-garde interludes work the best. Scratchy voice-over accompanies hazy images. One foot in Sundance/Indie, other foot in Brakhagey/experimental. All very "worked-over."
   Alex Dos Santos's Glue is contemporary parallel (skinny-effeminate hero likes to play dressup; butchly hetero pal/lust-object; pop music and distorted DV.) Skyfilters capture Logan's mood. 'Rodeo': the dozy object of his affections (a teen Joe Dallesandro?) Acoustica and space-rock on the soundtrack. Logan and Rodeo become friendly: in their hooded tops, from a distance, could pass for 10 and 20 respectively.
   David Lynch influence occasionally keenly felt. Logan calls Rodeo; girl's voice is heard (sounds like Kim Gordon, from Sonic Youth and Van Sant's Last Days) [it's in fact one 'Ruth Elliott']. Phone sex: suspended bulbs go on and off in effective, spookily sensual scene. My Summer of Love / All About Lily Chou Chou... except with boys. 
   "I can feel you more than any ghost would ever dare try": the actual 'Thriller' line is 'ghoul,' but we get the picture. Bored youth: surprisingly, not really a Larry Clark vibe (more intimate, less plot-driven: not much happens). Episodic, fragmentary, elliptical: music-video feel. Coastal excursions: they live in some odd area close to forest and beach. Woozy fragments. Wildness is all around (and encroaching: 'mountain lions' stray onto campus now and again.) Epicene Logan: Chronic Youth. Smudgy, gooey intersection of fears and desires. 
   Logan in drag: looks better; looks like Natalie Portman/Sharleen Spiteri. Gummo air (Fairuza Balk the mom this time, not Linda Manz.) Seventies-ish pursuits (no computers, no cellphones, no internet, no videogames: is this Cam Archer's youth? He says it's about loneliness, isolation and obsession). Logan in blonde wig and lipstick; pal asks "Are you... gay?" Donnie Darko: ludicrous, laughable school pursuits (principal is dead ringer for Sam Torrance.)
   Bruce Weberish shots of Rodeo. Soundtrack a consistent delight, even when the visuals stray into slightly hackneyed form of installation-video experimentalism. Slo-motion sparingly used. Various moments recall Elephant... Dear Pillow... Donnie Darko... L.I.E.... Gummo... Mysterious Skin... but does it escape its manifold antecedents, influences and parallels? Perhaps yes: over end-titles: haunting, lilting song by Emily White: "Wild Tigers I Have Known" brings it home.

It's been 17 years since Nick Broomfield made his first feature film - a little-seen period drama about decadent Brits abroad which was originally entitled Diamond Skulls (a punning reference to the sport of rowing), then renamed Dark Obsession for its US release. It sounds like a misbegotten project in all areas, and no surprise Broomfield returned to the documentary field where he made his name, and has in the intervening years become something of a minor celebrity (Kurt and Courtney, Biggie and Tupac, two films on Aileen Wuornos, two on Eugene Terre'blanche, etc.)
   The whole Diamond Skulls debacle makes it surprising Broomfield has had another crack at a 'narrative' feature: but Ghosts [6/10] has the look and feel of a documentary, and has at least one foot in that camp (informative on-screen titles abound throughout.) It's a behind-the-headlines, human-faces-behind-the-issues, humanistic-extension-of-sympathy affair in the worthy recent tradition of Michael Winterbottom's In This World, Joshua Marston's Maria Full of Grace, etc. Like the former, it features - during the first reel - a hazardous trans-global trek (represented, as in the Winterbottom picture, by a line zigzagging across a map of the world); like the latter, it aims to snare our sympathies by focussing on an attractive young woman.
   In Ghosts, the heroine is Ai Qin - played by Ai Qin Lin who, like all the cast members, isn't a professional actor. Toiling for minuscule pay in the fields surrounding her home in the Chinese province of Fujian, Ai Qin struggles to feed her infant son Bebe. Increasingly desperate, she hears of a way to make what for her seems like very big money: leave her family behind, make a long and hazardous trip to Europe, and find work in Britain as an "illegal." Arriving in the UK, she finds herself under the supervision of the gruffly amiable Mr Lin (scenestealer Zhan Yu) - whose job is what British audiences have come to know by the name 'gangmaster.'
   This term entered common currency in 2004, when 23 Chinese cockle-pickers were drowned by the rapidly-rising tides of Morecambe Bay in Lancashire. And Ghosts is a lightly fictionalised, mildly dramatised account of the events leading up to the tragedy, which focussed attention on the fact that there were many thousands of illegal workers in the UK with minimal protection and minimal pay. It's what Broomfield has called a modern form of slavery, and there's no mistaking the outraged indignation which has motivated him to make a film on such a sadly topical subject.
   He handles the material in a sober, straightforward, quite unimaginative manner. The film begins with the fateful excursion to the Morecambe sands, and as the true horror of the situation dawns on Ai Qin and her colleages Broomfield takes us back one year, to Fujian, tracing how Ai Qin ended up in such a dire situation. His approach is intimate, direct, largely no-nonsense - though he does throw in some occasional directorial "flourishes" (mildly distorted fish-eye lens in one scene; speeded-up camerawork in another) which feel incongruous and ill-advised.
   The most effective such moment is a brief switch to a grainy-DV covert camera deployed (for presumably practical purposes) when Ai Qin and a friend visit a major supermarket. They are startled by the high prices being paid for the spring onions which, they speculate, they may themselves have picked - but, in a neatly ironic touch, are paid too little to afford.
   Even stronger is the Morecambe Bay climax, featuring some disturbingly realistic footage of a van ploughing its way through what looks like the open sea - it's striking work on what's evidently a low-budget production, and we're very much in the shoes of Ai Qin and company, helpless victims of political and economic systems far beyond their control or understanding.
   But Ghosts seldom surprises us or shows us anything we didn't already know or suspect, either about the specifics of the Morecambe Bay tragedy, or about the wider issues. As a work of cinema, it's engaging but nothing remotely out of the ordinary - ideally suited to the small screen rather than the large: the picture was funded by Channel 4, where it will undoubtedly play after a brief arthouse run.
   Before this happens, Broomfield and company might want to reconsider the title: we're clearly supposed to see the migrants as 'ghosts' - invisible workers doing jobs we don't want to do, don't want to know about. But in the film itself, 'ghosts' are how the Chinese refer to the English, and the other Caucasians with whom they interact while working in the UK: a reference to to their white skin, one that unhelpfully carries more than a whiff of (accidental) racism about it.

Neil Young
26th/27th October 2006

WILD TIGERS I HAVE KNOWN : [6/10] : USA 2006 : Cam ARCHER : 81 mins (timed)
GHOSTS : [6/10] : UK 2006 : Nick BROOMFIELD : 95m (timed)

seen 25th October 2006 (public shows) : Wild Tigers I Have Known at NFT (free ticket with press accreditation); Ghosts at Odeon West End (paid £11.00)

index to Jigsaw Lounge's coverage of LFF 2006                 LFF official site