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reviews by Neil Young : 14th February, 2005


An Estranged Paradise [6/10] seen at Massimo, 21 Nov 04
Mosheng Tiantang : China 2002 : YANG Fudong : 76mins

From the official Torino FF catalogue:
A poetic and detailed meditation: peace, boredom, love and melancholy, a moment before the advent of the information age and the global capital. The young intellectual Zhuzi (Zheng Chun-Zi) lives with his fiancee Linshan (Zheng Hong Qi Wei) in the city of Hangzhou - which means paradise. He is going through a moment of malaise and anxiety which will end when the rainy season is over. His self-realization intertwines with the natural equilibrium of the world: space, time, change, emotions and history unite with the essence of nature...

... whatever that means. Yang's feature debut - filmed over the course of five years on grainy-looking monochrome thankfully isn't quite as airily wide-ranging as that off-putting catalogue synopsis would imply: in fact, this is one of the more approachable Chinese features I've seen at recent festivals. Even its more off-beat touches (the Open University style footage of eels in a tank, which forms part of the prologue) seem evidence of an original, enquiring and visually stimulating intelligence - rather than signs of  the noodling affectation which often afflicts the feature work of acclaimed installation-artists such as Yang.

It's very much a collage of bits and pieces, some of which make "sense" in terms of an unfolding narrative, others only commenting very obliquely on the "action". There's a unifying visual and musical aesthetic, however: delicate (if rough-edged) monochrome and a similarly delicate instrumental score. The cumulative effect is one of graceful, engaging ennui - all dialogue is clearly post-synched, including some deadpan moments of self-aware humour: "Is fishing fun?" someone asks; "Very boring" comes the reply. And there's a distanced narration from the main character Zhuzi that's very low-key but somehow none the less compelling for all that.

Initially a self-obsessed hypochrondiac in the mopey-intellectual mode familiar from arthouse product the world over, Zhuzi becomes more interesting as he relates his two love affairs: his romance with the sweet Linshan, and his illicit fling with Xiaofei. There's a distinctly nouvelle-vague rive-gauche feel to this tale of a bookishly self-absorbed protagonist defining his life in terms of his cityscape and his various women - as with many underground Chinese productions, the sex-talk and physicality (watch for the bit with the hairdryer) is often of a strikingly frank nature.

Only Yang probably knows what An Estranged Paradise is quite supposed to add up to ("five stresses, and four points of beauty") but there's more than enough here to detain us for the film's brief 76-minute running-time. His is a distinctive voice, albeit somewhat wayward at this stage, and it's anyone's guess whether his next feature will head down the paths of narrative development or of further abstraction. If nothing else, he clearly knows how to use and position a camera - the last shot is something of a corker. But best of all is a genuine coup de cinema when a group we've been observing with detachment unexpectedly arrange themselves in front of Yang's lens, family-snap style, instantly transforming the highbrow movie-camera into something rather much more immediate, intimate, real.


The Beautiful Washing Machine [5/10] seen at Romano, 21 Nov 04
Mei li de xi yi ji : Malaysia 2004 : James Lee : 113m

From the official Torino FF catalogue:
Teoh (Loh Bok Lai) has bought a second-hand washing-machine which turns itself on and off whenever it wants, as though it had a life of its own. When the feminine soul (Amy Len) hiding within the appliance wakes up, Teoh begins to exploit it for every household chore, and even rents it to strangers. One of these people, the old widower Wong (Patrick Teoh), welcomes it into his home, to the enthusiasm of his son and the diffidence of his daughter.

The above is a very handy synopsis - because otherwise the "events" shown in The Beautiful Washing Machine would be somewhat difficult to decipher. It was shown at the Torino Film Festival under the rather more alluring Italian moniker La Bellissima Lavatrice - but whatever you call it this is one odd affair, and very much a matter of two unequal halves.

The first section - focussing on the zonked-out Teoh - provides a fine showcase for the talents of the much-hyped writer-director Lee. Aided by skilful editor Grace Tan, he achieves some intriguing compositions via Teoh Gay Hian's Betacam-DV cinematography: the camera is occasionally fixed to Teoh's trolley as he wanders the aisles of his local supermarket in search of a particular brand of chicken sauce he's seen aggressively advertised (in one of the film's few belly-laugh moments) on TV.

At times this first half comes across rather like an engaging South-East Asian variation on consumerist ideas explored rather more brilliantly (and quickly) in Paul Thomas Anderson's epochal Punch-Drunk Love (which, as regular readers of Jigsaw Lounge film reviews should know, is this writer's controversial selection as Greatest Movie Ever Made). But Lee increasingly focuses on Teoh's relationship with his second-hand washing-machine, a consumer-durable whose old-school green colouration makes it look like a refugee from Scandinavian deadpan comedy Kitchen Stories. It's when the mysterious, unnamed, mute woman somehow "appears" out of the washing-machine that the picture starts to lose its way - it doesn't help that Lee inserts a left-field, Mulholland Dr/Lost Highway style narrative "flip" (or rather spin/tumble) around the half-way point, with the focus shifting firmly to Wong and his dysfunctional clan.

Lee is clearly saying something very significant about the role of women in contemporary (Malaysian? capitalist?) society, or perhaps about the crisis of consumerism, or perhaps the breakdown in the family unit. Or perhaps all this and much more (according to Lee, the washing-machine is "a metaphor for gender prison"). Trouble is, the fundamental proposition of the woman from the washing-machine isn't sufficiently strong to carry the weight of so much ideological baggage.

Even worse, Lee loses track of the more basic issues of pacing and storytelling: the film becomes increasingly flat and pretentious - many audiences will probably find themselves nodding off as the second hour unfolds at its leisurely pace. The Beautiful Washing Machine, like its eponymous appliance, annoyingly breaks down to an almost complete halt long before the "cycle" has been completed - only to jerk into life right at the end when Wong returns to the supermarket. The last line of the film - delivered deadpan by a checkout girl bemused by Wong's bulk-buying of canned Guinness - is actually something of a corker, strong enough to put pretty much everything that's gone before into a different, more wryly comic light - if you get my dreft.


Toolbox Murders [6/10] seen at Massimo, 21 Nov 04
USA 2003 (released 2004) : Tobe Hooper : 95m

From the official Torino FF catalogue:
Landed in Los Angeles to start a new life, Nell (Angela Bettis) and Steven Burrows (Brent Roam) house at the Lusman building, a historic Hollywood apartment complex. Shortly after their arrival their nighbors [sic] start to die in horrible ways, seemingly killed by hammers, drills and saws by a misterious [sic] presence behind the walls. Inspired by the film of the same title directed in 1978 by Dennis Donnelly.

"Inspired by"? As Hooper himself states in a comment printed directly below this synopsis in the Torino FF catalogue: "I don't recall seeing the original all the way through, but I hope viewers get a surprise from this film, as we are not doing a remake. Only the title is the same, it's a completely different story; I think it'll be inspiring. I grew up in hotels, my dad was in the hotel business and I always wanted to make a film in a hotel." Curioser and curioser. A "remake" which has almost nothing to do with the original (the ‘toolbox' stuff is very much cobbled-on), and "a film in a hotel" which doesn't take place in a hotel at all: the Lusman is emphatically an apartment block for long-term residents. Such confusions seem all the more glaring because Toolbox Murders is such a straight-ahead, no-nonsense, old-school horror film: there's no "the" in the title, you'll note.

It follows the classic three-act structure: introduce environment and people it with characters / kill most of them off / frenzied climax leading to unmasking of killer. The film is a quite deliberate throwback to old-school slice-and-dice thrills and chills - the Lusman itself, with its "Hollywood gothic" aspects and diabolic architecture (and - another plus - we're actually and visibly in Los Angeles), seems to have come straight from a late-sixties/early-seventies B-shocker cheapie.

We even get the amusingly obligatory sequence in which a character pays a visit to a local historian - who, true to form, turns out to be a scene-stealing, overenthusiastic weirdo (though not weird enough to be anything other than a transparent red-herring). It goes without saying that Hooper - with a genre pedigree second to none among contemporary directors - knows what he's doing with this kind of material, and he has the benefit of a similarly savvy script by Jace Anderson and Adam Gierasch (the latter contributing a suitably menacing supporting turn as a straggle-haired janitor who bears more than a passing resemblance to the White Stripes' Jack White).

None of it exactly hangs together especially well - "there's no why!" someone rasps at one stage - but the ramshackle nature of the enterprise is all part of the fun. Likewise, there's absolutely no way of spotting the identity of the culprit in advance, not that we have time to dwell on such niceties by the time Hooper is barrelling us along through the enjoyably tense finale.

As was widely remarked in Torino, where Toolbox Murders provided a refreshing change from the slow-burning arthouse experimentation so prevalent elsewhere in the programme, Hooper seems to think he's back in 1984 and has made the film accordingly. Only a couple of details betray the present-day setting: the  presence of an internet-obsessed teenager, and the rock-the-house closing-credits number by nu-metal no-marks ‘Shithead'. This latter represents a rare missed opportunity for Hooper, who might have signalled his "debt" to Donnelly's "original" by having the band deliver a rock-the-house cover of that picture's showstopping ‘Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child'...


Further coverage of Torino '04 on Neil Young's Film Lounge:
Reviews roundup part one : The Butterflies are Just a Step Behind, Undertow, Make My Day
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)