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reviews by Neil Young : 14th February, 2005


Good Morning, Beijing [5/10] seen at Massimo, 18 Nov 04
Zao' an Beijing : China 2003 : PAN Jianlin : 84mins

From the official Torino FF catalogue:
One night in Beijing, two apparently unconnected stories unfold. These stories are based on true facts: Tong's girlfriend has been kidnapped, and - not wanting to pay the ransom - he hires a private investigator to help him find her. Meanwhile, Yue and Hui have been locked up and forced to have sex with many clients all night long.

Director Pan splits his narrative between the two strands: (1) hapless boyfriend on the trail of kidnappers with the gruff aid of what appear to be cops (the catalogue synopsis suggests they're private investigators), (2) masseuse working as a prostitute. Is the masseuse the kidnapped girlfriend? Hard to say, as there's not much dialogue in the "brothel" sections to give us significant clues.

Most of the film is devoted to the car-bound boyfriend's increasingly wild-goose-chase-ish hunt, as he ricochets across Beijing from telephone-kiosk to telephone-kiosk (Good Morning Beijing = Collateral + Phone Booth) following nebulous "instructions" from the kidnappers, while the "cops" look on with bemused resignation as his desperation mounts. This provides the film with its most interesting moments, as the blokes' chat gradually relaxes into a kind of bone-tired up-all-night philosophising which, in the night-town context of an unfamiliar Beijing (this type of movie is usually made in the more glitzy surroundings of Shanghai), exerts a certain grimy appeal. We get a tour of some unlikely nocturnal locales, including the inevitable karaoke bar, and even a visit to a fortune-teller that seems to nod to the tropes established in 40s film noir (Deadline at Dawn is perhaps the most obvious Hollywood parallel).

The ‘brothel' sections are much more sedate and formally precise, making ample use of fixed cameras and a small number of interior settings in an angular, characterless space - the exact location of which is only revealed in the film's striking final shot. Here the atmosphere is "sleepless in Beijing," as the two main female characters spend most of their time - when not "on the job" listening to all-night radio. We have to work quite hard to connect the "dots" of the film's plot - but do they ever really connect?

Good Morning, Beijing doesn't break much ground in terms of style of content - it's distinctly low-wattage as a "thriller", and doesn't really assert sufficient distinctive character of its own to make it as an "arthouse" or festival-oriented project either. Inscrutable and at times off-puttingly torpid, it's of chief interest for its lighting and compositions - ending with a slow-motion zoom that's undeniably intriguing and powerful, but is rather a case of ‘too little, too late.' Good Morning Beijing? Many audience members may already have opted instead for ‘Good Night, Vienna.


The Cat Leaves Home [5+/10] seen at Lux, 18 Nov 04 (walkout)
Inuneko : Japan 2004 : IGUCHI Nami : 94mins

From the official Torino FF catalogue:
Suzu lives with Furuta, her fiance, but one day she leaves home without saying a word. She moves into the apartment of her friend Abe, but he has gone abroad and Yoko now lives in his apartment. Suzu and Yoko, who have kbown each other since childhood and have both always loved Furuta, thus find themselves sharing the same home.

Despite the title, The Cat Leaves Home has nothing in common with acclaimed anime entry The Cat Returns - in fact, it's much closer to the low-key, girls-together, observational Korean festival hit Take Care of My Cat: indeed Iguchi's debut proved one of the "finds" of Torino '04 for many, nabbing the Fipresci prize awarded by a jury of esteemed international critics.

This prize came as something of a surprise to me - I'd lasted about 40 minutes before heading to the exit ("this cat left the cinema" I quipped in my notes). The film wasn't bad by any means, but I'd become tired of this kind of "low-key, observational" far-eastern fare at various festivals around Europe: they're invariably shot on drab 35mm when DV would easily suffice (cf Laundry and Nobuhiro Yamashita's No One's Ark and Ramblers.)

So I may give The Cat another chance if it crosses my path at another Euro fest: this kind of slow-burning, character-based stuff is paradoxically not especially suited to the frenetic, taxing pace of film festivals. At Rotterdam a few months later I stuck with an ostensibly similar Japanese picture, DV-shot marital-crisis chamber-piece The Soup, One Morning - and was amply rewarded for my patience.

The Cat Leaves Home, from what I saw of it, is a pleasant but somewhat forgettable comedy-drama about mismatched flatmates, their dreams and aspirations, their low-wattage romantic liaisons. The most effective moment in the 40 minutes came when Suzu and Yoko bickered over sleeping arrangements - this "futon war" seemingly intended to prefigure an ongoing schism between the two. Suzu's impulsiveness struck me as essentially a screenwriter's contrivance - the main reason why she leaves Furuta in the opening sequence is simply to kick-start the narrative, and the way she accidentally (on purpose?) drops her mobile-phone into the river was also a little to neat for comfort.

The cat of the title still hadn't "left home" by the time I skedaddled, but the eponymous event clearly wasn't going to be very far off, cats being sensitive to simmering tensions between housemates. In any event, the departing moggy seemed to me an unwise allusion to Haruki Murakami's peerless bestseller The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - reminding the audience that this kind of ‘Japanomie' tends to work drastically better in print than it has ever (so far) managed on celluloid.


Endless Night [3?/10] seen at Empire, 18 Nov 04 (walkout)
Notte senza fine : Italy 2004 : Elisabetta Sgarbi : 80mins

I was told by my Italian pals that the reason why Elisabetta Sgarbi's Endless Night - out of which I walked after 15 minutes - was programmed in the main competition at the 2004 Torino Film Festival was more to do with her status and powerful connections (she's a well-known cultural figure, her brother is supposedly some powerful north-Italian politico) than the merits of the movie itself. It's easy to subscribe to this conspiracy-theory explanation, as Endless Night (sadly no connection to the Agatha Christie novel which inspired the guilty-pleasure 1971 Sidney Gilliatt potboiler) isn't even really a movie at all: it consists of a series of long monologues/dialogues in which noted Italian performers Galatea Renzi, Toni Servillo, Laura Morante and Anna Bonaiuto "act out" short stories by Hanif Kureishi, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Amin Maalouf.

Impressive names - and the project itself is clearly unusual and original. But the execution was, for me at least, unbearably static. "Il cinema del parole" - ‘the cinema of words' - became instead an exercise in stilted theatricality, passionate ‘voices in the dark' telling rather old-fashioned tales of dubious dramatic interest. Torino has long been known for its more "experimental" programming - but, in art as well as science, most experiments are doomed to failure. "I should never have set out on this voyage" remarks an early monologuists - heading for the exit, I could only murmur my assent.



Further coverage of Torino '04 on Neil Young's Film Lounge:
Reviews roundup part three : The Boston Strangler, The Big Red One - The Reconstruction, O Abismo
full list of films seen and reviewed
article on Able Edwards, Dead End Run, Left Hand & Yesterday Once More (written for Impact magazine)
stand-alone reviews of Able Edwards and Sideways (written for Tribune magazine)