From the daily archives:

Friday, September 14, 2007

Chaotic Ana (Caótica Ana)

Chaotic Ana (Caótica Ana) (Director: Julio Medem): Chaotic is one way to put it. Train wreck might be more accurate. Annoying, arti­fi­cial, absurd, and by the end, simply appalling. This was a real dis­ap­point­ment. I had been warned earlier in the week by some friends who saw the first screening, but I wanted to see for myself. Unfortunately, Medem has turned all the ele­ments of his pre­vious films up to 11, making this a jumbled mess of coin­cid­ence, chance encoun­ters, per­form­ance art, hyp­nosis and an inter­na­tional cast speaking all the wrong lan­guages. The dir­ector has clearly bitten off more than he can chew, and though the first half was at least watch­able, I was annoyed by what appeared to be a kind of “show-off” atti­tude. Ana (played by the lovely Manuela Vellés) is a raw-talented painter living in a cave with her father on the island of Ibiza. One day, the slightly sin­ister Justine (Charlotte Rampling) arrives and offers to take her to Madrid and be her patron. Once there, she’s esconced in a dec­adent and mys­ter­ious house filled with artists of all kinds. Cue the pre­ten­tious art talk.

Then Ana begins to have powerful flash­backs and through a random encounter with experts in hyp­nosis, is sud­denly the sub­ject of numerous ses­sions exploring her past lives. Then she escapes as a stowaway on her friend’s father’s yacht and ends up in New York City, where both her hand­some young hyp­notist and Justine find her and take her to the desert, to dis­cover her “true” self, the first in a long series of rein­carn­ated women who all die viol­ently at the age of 22. Still with me? There’s more. By the end, there’s even a ludicrous attempt to tie everything into the Iraq war.

Using inter­titles to count down from 10 to 0, as in hyp­nosis, had one pos­itive func­tion. It let me know how much longer I had to endure. Even the sight of often-nude Ana wasn’t enough to make me stop wishing it would end. Medem is a tal­ented dir­ector, but this was just self-indulgent and for that reason, it’s all the more disappointing.

Trailer
Official Site

5/10(5/10)

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A Gentle Breeze in the Village (Tennen kokekkô)

A Gentle Breeze in the Village (Tennen kokekkô) (Director: Nobuhiro Yamashita): Director Nobuhiro Yamashita clearly loved school. His last film, Linda Linda Linda, was set in a high school, and this film is his ode to the rural schools, where primary and middle school stu­dents share the same building. Beautiful and sens­itive Soyo is the only stu­dent in Grade 8 at her school in the idyllic coun­tryside, and there are only six stu­dents in all. That is, until the arrival of Osawa, a cool boy from Tokyo. She’s imme­di­ately smitten with him, and although first love is thrilling for her, it also causes tur­moil in her settled life. But Osawa soon fits in and is embraced by this remark­ably close-knit group of stu­dents. The film covers a period of about 18 months, and all the time, Soyo can feel her child­hood slip­ping away. This won­derful secure bubble will burst one day, but not just yet.

Yamashita has a won­derful way of por­traying a sense of nos­talgia, even while events are hap­pening. It’s clearly an adult per­spective, and it some­times seems odd to see it being felt by teen­agers, but it had me longing for the days when all I had to worry about was my school uni­form. Adult prob­lems hover in the dis­tance. Osawa’s mother has some poten­tially major health issues in a town without a doctor. As well, she has moved back to town with him after her hus­band has left, and there’s a hint that Soyo’s father may be car­rying on an affair with her. But in gen­eral, Soyo keeps all these wor­ries at arm’s length. In her incred­ibly safe and love-filled world, she’s free to explore these new feel­ings for Osawa, all the while knowing that this means leaving behind her child­hood for good. In one incred­ibly poignant scene, after a failed kiss with Osawa, she gently kisses the school’s black­board. It’s a rehearsal for things to come, but also a farewell to some­thing she loves deeply. Among all the gor­geous imagery that the film floats in front of us, that scene speaks loudest and truest.

Here is the Q&A with dir­ector Nobuhiro Yamashita from after the screening (the long pauses are when the trans­lator is whis­pering the ques­tions into his ear):

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Duration: 15:04

Trailer
Official Site

8/10(8/10)

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