for ‘Tribune’: OUR DAY WILL COME [3/10]; POETRY [5/10]

Published on: July 29th, 2011

Our Day Will Come
Director: Romain Gavras

Poetry
Director: Lee Chang-Dong

‘Flame-haired’ Rebekah Brooks has certainly helped raise the profile of ginger folk in recent weeks – a case of red-top/carrot-top, if you like. But wait… are such jocular comments appropriate in the 21st century, or offensive to members of what a (great) Sherlock Holmes story termed the Red Headed League? Simply Red’s Mick Hucknall recently tweeted his views, comparing ‘gingerphobia’ with racism: “Let’s play a game: whenever you read “ginger” try replacing it with “black” or “asian” and see how it reads.”

French director Romain Gavras – son of Z, State of Siege and Missing auteur Costa-Gavras – took the idea to extreme satirical lengths in his nine-minute video for M.I.A.’s ‘Born Free’ single last year, depicting anti-ginger genocide in a splattersome manner that quickly made it an adults-only YouTube sensation. Near-simultaneously, Gavras expanded upon some of the same concepts in Our Day Will Come (Notre jour viendra) – his debut feature, co-written with Karim Boukercha.

It’s the second movie to emerge from Kourtrajmé, a multi-ethnic Paris-based collective of young directors, musicians and artists – five years after Kim Chapiron’s punk-spirited comedy-horror Satan (Sheitan). A stunningly audacious and accomplished debut, Satan - given an insultingly bare-minimum release here – is, for this writer, the best French movie since Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep (1996). Several key personnel from that movie are connected with Our Day Will Come: editor Benjamin Weill, art-director/production-designer Christian Vallat, while acting-wise Satan‘s Olivier Barthélemy (phenomenal as the thicko protagonist) and Vincent Cassel (deliriously over the top as the chief villain) reteam in the principal roles.

Indeed, Barthélemy and Cassel are front-and-centre throughout: Barthélemy as troubled, Arsenal-supporting youth Rémy; Cassel as disaffected psychotherapist Patrick, who becomes Rémy’s mentor as they scour the highways and byways of the grim, under-populated Pas de Calais. Our Day Will Come is thus a road-movie on a road to nowhere, a picaresque of claustrophobic near-inertia as the duo – their close proximity exacerbating and sharpening their neuroses – dream of escaping to a land where red-heads are venerated rather than despised: Ireland, which is “only two hours by ferry” and apparently “contains many zinc mines.”

But whereas the ‘Born Free’ video – in which the Irish Republican slogan Tiocfaidh ár lá (“Our day will come”) is glimpsed on a mural – depicts a Fascistic dystopia of anti-ginger horrors, the prejudices endured by flame-haired Patrick and Rémy are, we soon realise, almost entirely delusional. This blunts whatever force the picture might have had as a parable of contemporary racism, and the picture is quickly hijacked by Cassel’s barnstorming turn as the loquaciously iconoclastic blowhard Patrick – a peevishly misanthropic sort driven to despair by a particularly severe mid-life crisis.

The mentor/mentee set-up is nothing new (the strongest example in recent years remains Dylan Kidd’s Roger Dodger [2002]), and Our Day Will Come is an undistinguished addition to the sub-genre. The sophomoric, larkish atmosphere sits oddly alongside the more nightmarish elements as Rémy and Patrick flee their (imaginary) pursuers, further and further into psychosis. And Gavras’s directorial slickness (boosted by André Chemetoff’s colour-leached cinematography) can’t overcome the deficiencies of his structurally-unbalanced, self-indulgent screenplay, with its numerous flat-footed attempts at off-beat humour. The overriding impression is of a painfully over-stretched short – suggesting that Gavras’s talents might well be better served by sticking to nine-minute court-métrages in future.

Excessive length is the most common problems in current cinema, even in countries where a two-hour running-time is considered the norm such as South Korea. It’s rare indeed to come across a picture from that country that clocks in at 90 minutes or less – one shining exception is Jeon Soo-Il’s masterpiece With A Girl of Black Soil (2007). More typical is the work of highly-acclaimed writer-director Lee Chang-Dong, who has attained lofty status among hardcore cinephiles thanks to Oasis (2002), Secret Sunshine (2007) – both of them 130+ minutes, both landing Cannes’ Best Actress prize.

Many observers reckoned Lee (Korean surnames are written first) was on for the hat-trick with Poetry (Shi) last year, as the film is very much a vehicle for leading-lady Yun Jung-Hee – one of the major stars of Korean cinema’s late-60s/early-70s ‘golden age’. Yun, Moon Hee and Nam Jeong-Im were collectively known as the “troika”, and their workrate during their peak years was beyond Stakhanovite: Yun appeared in 34 features released in 1968, 35 in ’69, 26 in ’70, 31 in ’71 and 24 in ’72. A mere slacker alongside Moon Hee, however, who racked up over 50 movies each year from 1967 to 1970 – these ladies make Gérard Depardieu look like Daniel Day-Lewis.

Given such a filmography, no-one could blame Yun for retiring from the screen in 1994 – but Lee tempted her back with the juicy role of Mija, a plucky pensioner in her late sixties who, diagnosed with the early signs of Alzheimer’s, enrols in a local poetry class (“I do like flowers, and say odd things” she muses). What she learns in the group is a welcome distraction from – but perhaps also an assistance to – her problematic domestic situation, in which she’s raising her feckless teenage grandson Wook (Lee Da-Wit) while his mother sorts out her own difficulties in another town.

Wook is a near-caricature of insolent indolence – and when he does raise enough energy to get out of bed and into the open, it’s only to hang out with his deadbeat pals. Events take a more serious (and melodramatic) turn when Mija discovers Wook and his gang raped a schoolgirl, who subsequently committed suicide. Mija’s meek “investigations” into the tragedy recall Raymond Carver’s terrific short story ‘So Much Water So Close To Home’, inspiration for Ray Lawrence’s Australian drama Jindabyne (2006) as well as a key strand in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993).

Over the course of 139 minutes, Lee shows Mija exploring what her tutor calls “a world of pure potential” – but it isn’t clear just how much potential, or how much poetry, Mija actually uncovers – either in the world, or in herself. The tutor’s assigment – to write a poem in a month – is, somewhat implausibly, fulfilled only by Mija, but what she comes up with doesn’t really illuminate or justify what’s gone before.

Shot in flat, unengaging tones by cinematographer Hyun Seok Kim, Poetry is itself an rather incongruously un-poetic exercise – which may, charitably speaking, have been Lee’s intention. Likewise, it’s hard to know whether the colourfully-dressed Mija is a delightfully dotty granny, or a self-deluding facilitator of Wook’s budding viciousness – and these ambiguities remain murky rather than stimulating. Yun does what she can with the role, but she’s ultimately stymied by Lee’s screenplay – making it all the more ironic that it was the script which was ultimately Cannes-garlanded, rather than the performance.

Neil Young
19th July, 2011
written for Tribune magazine