| ROTTERDAM Film Festival part FOUR (1st Feb) ‘Survive Style 5+,’ ‘Bombon (El Perro),’ etc. |
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| Sunday, 27 February 2005 | |
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official site : www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com Bombon (El Perro) [7/10] Visits - Hungry Ghost Anthology [4?/10] 69 Sixty Nine [5/10] Survive Style 5+ [8/10] Ab-Normal Beauty [6/10] BOMBON (EL PERRO) : [7/10] aka Bombon (The Dog) Argentina (Arg/Spn) 2004 : Carlos SORIN : 97 mins The noble white dog known as El Dogo Argentino, in the U.S. as the Argentine Dogo, and in France as Le Dogue Argentin, is appreciated by canophiles everywhere for its many abilities and wonderful temperament. The Dogo is the result of an excellent and meticulous breeding program combining ten breeds (boxer, bulldog, bull terrier, dogue de Bordeaux, fighting dog of Cordoba, great Dane, Irish wolfhound, bull mastiff, great Pyrenees, pointer) to create a large game hunter capable of besting such adversaries as wild boar, puma, jaguar and fox. Today, the Dogo is seen worldwide as one of the greatest large game hunters as well as impressing many with its accomplishments in schutzhund, french ring sport and much more. A loyal companion, a guardian of master and home, and the ultimate hunter, El Dogo Argentino is a gentle and noble friend to all. Dogo International website An unashamed crowdpleaser, Bombon (El Perro) is one of the more accessible and gentle films to chronicle the ongoing impact of Argentina's dire late-nineties financial collapse. Like many of his countrymen, Juan Villegas (Villegas) feels the pinch very close to home: he loses his job as a garage mechanic and, as a 53-year-old barely able to read or write, has little realistic prospect of alternative employment. Out on the road one day in the expanses of Patagonia, Juan assists a stranded female motorist who turns out to be a dog-breeder specialising in the Argentinian Dogo (a large, white hunting-mastiff "insensitive to pain"). The breeder offers Juan a Dogo as a thank-you present - and after some deliberation, Juan accepts. He soon discovers that he has a prize specimen on his hands, one which ebullient Dogo-trainer Walter Donado (Donado) reckons has the makings of a champ... Despite its title, Bombon (El Perro) is by no means just a cutesy "dog movie" - Sorin can't be accused of breaking any new ground in terms of cinematic art, and he doesn't entirely avoid manipulative Disneyish bittersweet sentimentality (Nicolas Sorin's score is a touch heavy-handed at times). But his script has rather more ambiguity than you might expect from the early reels, and he's commendably careful to incorporate a realistic appraisal of the economic hardships afflicting Argentina in general and the picturesque, underpopulated Patagonia in particular: "I delete you from the system, it's that simple," sniffs an unsympathetic labour-agency apparatchik. And while, as ‘Bombon' (aka ‘Le Chien'), Gregorio contributes a canine turn that the great Rin Tin Tin would surely have approved, his screen-time is wisely rationed so that he's never allowed to upstage his bipedal co-stars. The hyper-excitable, money-oriented, scene-stealing man-mountain Donado and the diminutive, self-effacing, soft-hearted Villegas make for an unlikely but enormously sympathetic double-act - especially when Bombon rapidly becomes a star in regional dog competitions. Resisting cheap Best in Show gags, Sorin emphasises the incongruity of grown men making their living from such a business - when Juan is amazed at the financial rewards on offer, Walter tells him there's always money to be had in dog-shows, "even in this shitty economy." Sorin is not, of course, advocating dogo-breeding as a panacea for his nation's financial and social ills: his film (co-written by Santiago Calori and Salvador Rosselli) is an upbeat little fable in which the dog is clearly intended to represent not only Juan (the "manhood" of both comes into question) but to some degree the nation of Argentina itself. That's a rather heavy burden to place on the shoulders of a single canine - but the movie's winningly watchable combination of sensitivity, humour, intelligence and energy make it more than suitable for the task. Neil Young 27th February, 2005 (seen at Venster cinema - press show) VISITS - HUNGRY GHOST ANTHOLOGY : [4?/10] : Malaysia 2004 LOW Ngai Yen, James LEE, NG Tian Hann, HO Yu-hang : 108 mins (aka Hungry Ghost Anthology) Rotterdam Film Festival has a high reputation among critics, partly because it so rarely has any problems with print-quality. But something must have gone wrong somewhere down the line with Malaysian spook-story collection Visits, made for local TV to be shown on 14th July, the Chinese ‘Hungry Ghost' festival which is the far-eastern equivalent of Halloween. Rotterdam projected the film on video, and there was a minor glitch with what I presumed must be a DVD disc. This caused a slight jump in the picture every few seconds and a simultaneous tiny gap on the audio track - factors which might not have been massively distracting if the film itself was anything out of the ordinary. One episode of the four was enough for me, however, and I bailed out immediately after. Directed by Low Ngai Yen, 1413 is the twist-in-the-tale story of what appears to be the suicide pact between two schoolgirls who jump off a tall building. One of the girls survives, and while recovering in hospital is plagued by ghostly visions of the deceased - but (needless to say) things aren't quite as they seem. Aiming squarely at the teenage girl market, and clearly influenced by the likes of Ring and Dark Water (yes, we get yet another spectre with long dark hair) Low includes copious amounts of far-eastern ‘J-pop' on her lively soundtrack, and the twist itself wasn't quite what I'd been expecting. But I couldn't quite face another hour or so of jumpy DVD, and fled the cinema - I just hope my fellow critics didn't think I was too spooked by Visits to remain in my seat... Neil Young 27th February, 2005 ("seen" at Cinerama cinema - press show - walkout) 69 SIXTY NINE : [5/10] : Japan 2004 : LEE Sang-il : 114 mins : aka 69 Sasebo, Nagasaki, Japan, 1969: inspired by the iconoclastic example of Dylan, Kerouac, Godard and Che, a band of mildly disaffected teenagers led by the smilingly charismatic Ken (Tsumabuki Satoshi) decide to shake up "the establishment" - i.e. their repressive school and the nearby US military installation. A series of anarchic pranks meets with varying levels of success, until Ken and company focus their energies on mounting a multimedia ‘happening' to combine music, film and theatre. Complications ensue. In the west, novelist Ryu Murakami doesn't yet have the profile of his literary-megastar namesake Haruki Murakami (no relation) but he is on the way, thanks partly to Takashi Miike's adaptation of his Audition, and works like In the Miso Soup - both of which are distinctly envelope-pushing, blood-spattered affairs. So it's a surprise to find that the fizzily nostalgic high-school counterculture comedy 69 Sixty Nine is also based on a Murakami novel: there are a couple of moments of mild violence doled out by a scary PE teacher (whose brutality is played for somewhat uneasy laughs), but that's about it. If anything the film might have been more successful if it had gone down the confrontational If / Clockwork Orange route: what we get instead is an amiably bouncy but inconsequential, somewhat facetious, and decidedly overlong treatment of complex, potentially incendiary, material. This is a shame, as the gangbusters early running promises something far above the ordinary: the animated titles (set to Cream's ‘The White Room') are as good as anything Hollywood has produced this year, and as Ken and his pals are introduced (Trainspotting-style) we settle down for a thrilling, freewheeling adventure propelled by the youthful exuberance of these ‘children of Godard and Jagger'. What we get, however, is closer to Isao Yukisada's overlong, uneven, teen-oriented highschool-chronicle Go from 2001, which likewise didn't really wider audiences that the post-adolescent travails on show fully justified two hours of their time. Nor does 69 really get to grips with its intriguing social context, namely Japan's ambivalent attitude to America - quietly resentful of the ongoing military presence, but (like Wim Wenders' West Germany) heavily influenced by many aspects of its popular culture. It might have helped if director Lee and cinematographer Shibasaki Kozo had managed to capture the look and feel of the late sixties in the way that, say, Richard Linklater nailed the mid-seventies in Dazed and Confused. Instead, 69 Sixty Nine is rather like spending time in an ersatz "sixties" theme-bar decorated with old-fashioned but flimsily inauthentic furniture and posters: the details and the atmosphere just don't feel right. Likewise the music (credited to Tachikawa Naoki and Sakuma Masakazu) which is sixties-ish, but audibly not the real thing: actual tracks from the period are surprisingly few and far between on the soundtrack, perhaps due to copyright issues and/or financial considerations. If nothing else, those sixties theme-bars do often boast excellent jukeboxes - and they can be fun and even intoxicating if you're in the right mood, even if they do tend to serve uninspiring, watered-down drinks which soon wear off (rather than of-the-period hallucinogenics). 69 provides a similarly short-lived ‘high.' Lee, for example, makes little attempt to mirror the film-making styles prevalent in the period: nearly all of his debts are to current/recent cinema, with sequences that nod explicitly to American Beauty, Tarantino, etc rather than Ken's beloved Godard. Our hero does eventually pick up an 8mm camera himself, with intriguingly rough-edged results, but this is somewhat too little and too late. Beneath the picture's hip, slick veneer, Lee's own approach is decidedly non-revolutionary - though perhaps this is intended to convey the idea that, for all their smash-the-state rhetoric, the likes of Ken (an engaging but broad turn from Satoshi) are actually as conservative as their parents. The moments when 69 Sixty Nine aims low for gross-out bellylaughs in the American Pie tradition do count as guilty-pleasure highpoints, with a cat's tail put to amusingly unorthodox use at one stage. But despite such larks, we never quite lose the nagging feeling that Murakami and Lee may not be doing full justice to their teenage protagonists. They ascribe the most flippant of motives to what was, for many people at the time, a serious protest movement - whose laudable goals such as civil rights and the end of the Vietnam conflict. If 69 Sixty Nine is to be believed, all these protesters really wanted was to get into some hot chick's panties: which is perhaps, on reflection, why the picture isn't called 68 Sixty Eight or 70 Seventy... Neil Young 27th February, 2005 (seen at Cinerama cinema - press show) SURVIVE STYLE 5+ : [8/10] : Japan 2004 : SEKIGUCHI Gen : 120 mins "What's your function in life?" So growls Vinnie Jones at pretty much everyone (and everything) he encounters in the two mad hours that comprise the eye-popping fruit-loop of a movie Survive Style 5+ - Maybe not the most substantial, artistic or coherent of the 200-odd features shown at this winter's Rotterdam Film Festival - but surely the most purely, wildly, deliriously enjoyable. 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 music accompanying the credit-roll almost drowned out by the loud, sustained ovation and whoops of delight. We'd all been bowled over by what is hands-down one of the most terrific, exhilarating endings you'll ever see - one which manages to tie together all of the film's 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 non-stop pop-surrealistic spectacular. The gallery of weird characters includes a philandering, swaggering celebrity hypnotist with a tiger's-head codpiece; a gangsterish dandy (tireless Tadanobu Asano) whose attempts to bump off his wife don't (to say the very least) quite work out as planned; a trio of incompetent (and sexually-confused) burglars riding around in a Mystery-Machine-style van; a respectable middle-aged salaryman who thinks he's a bird; and a skinhead Cockney hitman-for-hire (you-know-who) bemused by the eccentricities of modern-day Japan. As you'll probably be able to guess from their hyperkinetic, episodic style, director Sekiguchi and scriptwriter Taku Tada - both newcomers to movies - 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, props and costumes are seven demented shades of berserk (recalling the dementedly perky TV show briefly glimpsed in Lost in Translation). But somehow they manage to sustain it all over to the full two hours: Survive Style is like the funniest nightmare you've ever had, a one-of-a-kind romp which is set to dazzle Asian-extreme aficionados - and cult-movie enthusiasts - worldwide throughout 2005. You heard it here first. Neil Young 27th February, 2005 (seen at Pathe cinema - public show) AB-NORMAL BEAUTY : [6/10] : Sei mong se jun : China / Hong Kong 2004 : Oxide PANG (aka Oxide PANG Chun) : 97 mins The latest from The Eye co-director Pang is a clammy chiller seemingly made with at least one peeper on a future Hollywood remake (the US Eye, er, ‘opens' soon). This slightly overcooked tale of obsession and psychosis stars both members of Hong Kong's hot musical duo R2, the twins Race and Rosanne Wong. Perversely, they don't play relatives - although their similarity is sufficiently striking to make us wonder if some hidden link between the pair is going to be unveiled at a late stage. Race is talented, ambitious art-student Jiney, whose search for "new elements" leads her to increasingly morbid subject-matter - causing her best-pal Jasmine (Rosanne) substantial concern over "those disgusting pictures!". "Maybe I stayed in the darkroom too long," Jiney concedes as her sanity starts to look less than totally secure... Aiming to strike a balance between Tenebrae-ish art-horror cool and multiplex-friendly jolts, Pang ends up with a kind ‘Peeping Tom of Laura Mars'. His script (co-written with Pak Sing Pang) starts off as an intriguing portrayal of incipient psychosis as beautiful-screwup Jiney walks, like so many artistic movie-characters before her, the well-trodden thin line between genius and madness. But then Ab-Normal beauty lurches unexpectedly into lurid serial-killer territory at around the half-way mark: distorted, desaturated, gloomily down-beat visuals take over (stirring memories of mid-90s Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails videos) while Payont Permsith's score likewise abandons its early stately ominousness in favour of unsubtle 80's-style muzak. The going becomes distinctly rocky in the final act, and the picture doesn't really have enough characters (i.e. potential suspects), to function as much of a whodunnit - only viewers with psychic powers of their own will be able to predict the cheaty final-reel unmasking. This isn't a major drawback, however, as Pang has managed to bring a sufficiently distinctive tone to what's essentially quite familiar thriller material: the results are stylish and consistently watchable, if not - ahem - ‘ab-normally' so. Neil Young 27th February, 2005 (seen at Cinerama cinema - press show) click here for review of Rotterdam films seen on the next day (2nd February) click here for full alphabetical list of features seen at Rotterdam '05 official site : www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com
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