Flower in the Pocket (Director: Liew Seng Tat): Just before the screening, I overheard someone praising the Malaysian filmmakers’ ability to tell interesting stories on miniscule budgets and then when the film was introduced, it was revealed that this film was made for US$10,000-$15,000. After seeing this, I can concur with that judgement. In his directorial debut, director Liew Seng Tat weaves a remarkably rich and evocative portrait of an unusual family with an unexplained core of pain. When the film begins we meet Ma Li Ahn and Ma Li Ohm, two young Chinese-speaking brothers living in Kuala Lumpur. We observe their impish play and their difficulties at school, and how they depend on one another. When they do finally get home, the older boy, who appears to be about 9, makes three bowls of soup. The boys eat theirs, and leave the other bowl covered up as they head off to bed.

Later that night, their father Siu comes home. A single father, he works as a mannequin maker, and seems profoundly cut off from human contact, even contact with his own sons. Remarkably, father and sons aren’t even in the same frame for almost an hour. But the boys are resourceful and have each other. They seem to be happy. When they meet the tomboyish Ayu, she takes them home to meet her mother, who feeds them like the almost-feral creatures they resemble. It’s only at this point that the audience realizes how neglected the boys are.

Their father isn’t exactly uncaring, but he almost seems incapable of expressing love. Only later do we get a hint of the wound at the heart of the family, when Siu takes an old photo of a couple out of a shoebox, tears it in two, and tries to swallow the half with the woman’s picture. I assume this is the boys’ mother, but they never seem to ask for her. All this would seem unbearably sad except for the wonderfully impish performances of the brothers. As well, near the end, Siu seems to be making an effort to reconnect with the world, and most importantly, with his sons. There is also a good amount of humour in the film, some of it bordering on the zany.

I believe this may have been my first experience watching a film from Malaysia, and it was enlightening to observe just how multi-racial and multi-lingual a place like Kuala Lumpur is. With so many different cultures clashing, there is plenty of room for misunderstandings, many of which the director plays for laughs. But it’s also a place where people can fall through the cracks, and the scenes where the younger boy struggles in school because he can’t understand the Malay language point out that without family or friends, the modern multicultural city can be a scary place for children.

(7/10)

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Flower in the Pocket

• At the Death House Door (review)
• The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)
• Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Seneesh
• Encounters at the End of the World
• Fuel
• The Garden
• Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts
• I.O.U.S.A.
• In a Dream
• Made in America
• Man on Wire (review)
• Pray the Devil Back to Hell
• Standard Operating Procedure
• They Killed Sister Dorothy
• Trouble the Water (review)

Though I’ve seen just three of the nominated films so far, I’m pretty confident saying I’d be bitterly disappointed if Man on Wire fails to win the Oscar. Like some other commentators, I’m surprised and a bit let down that Yung Chang’s Up the Yangtze (review) wasn’t shortlisted.

Documentarian AJ Schnack (Kurt Cobain: About a Son) is breaking these down over on his excellent blog, All These Wonderful Things.

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Oscar Doc Shortlist Announced

West 32nd (Director: Michael Kang): John Cho (Harold from Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle) plays John Kim, an ambitious young lawyer who offers to represent a Korean teenager accused of a gang-related murder in New York’s Koreatown. His firm wants to raise its profile and he feels by doing this pro bono work, he can advance his career as well. His own Korean background helps convince the boy’s family to sign on, but in reality, he doesn’t even speak the language.

Before he knows it, he’s caught up in an underworld he didn’t even know existed. He meets Mike (Jun Sung Kim), a mid-level gangster trying to move up in the hierarchy, and the two quickly recognize each other’s ambition and begin an uneasy cooperation. But John is soon over his head in a culture he doesn’t really understand, and before long, there are more dead bodies and he’s no closer to winning his case. By the end of the film, any hint of altruism in John’s offer to help is peeled away to reveal that he’s really not that different from the gangsters he’s trying to bring down.

Though Cho is effective as John Kim, it was Jun Sung Kim’s character Mike Juhn who really lit up the screen for me. Unfortunately, the female characters seemed largely decorative, but that seems to be part and parcel of the traditional Korean culture that runs these criminal organizations. The locations in Manhattan and in Flushing, Queens added to the gritty realism of the film, and Kang used many actual Korean-American denizens of the neighbourhoods to further boost the authenticity factor.

Kang has made a slick and effective thriller that, while not particularly original, pays homage to both the American gangster films of the 70s and the more recent wave of Korean crime films. His co-writer is Edmund Lee, a former Village Voice reporter who spent years thoroughly researching gangs and organized crime in New York’s Korean community. As Kang described the project, he started out trying to make a Korean-American version of The Departed and ended up with something more like Mean Streets.

Here is the Q&A with director Michael Kang from after the screening (contains possible spoilers):

Download audio file (west32nd_qa.mp3)
Duration: 14:00

Official site of the film
Director’s blog

(7/10)

Post from: Toronto Screen Shots

West 32nd

Entre les murs (The Class) (Director: Laurent Cantet): I’d been waiting to see this ever since it took the Palme d’Or at Cannes earlier this year. It was supposed to play at TIFF and then the New York Film Festival scooped it, so as far as I’m aware, this was the Canadian premiere of this film, and there was plenty of pent-up demand, with lines snaking down the street outside the Isabel Bader Theatre. It didn’t hurt that the tickets were free, since the film opened the 4th annual Eh! U European Film Festival. This festival offers two weeks of free screenings, so be sure to check out the rest of the lineup.

The film has an interesting backstory. Entre les murs (literally “between the walls”) was originally the title of an “autobiographical novel” by Francois Begaudeau, a teacher of French in one of Paris’ tough “banlieues”. Director Cantet recruited Begaudeau to play himself in a dramatization of the book, using real junior high students to recreate the multi-racial environment of the classroom. The students collaborated with Cantet and Begaudeau and workshopped the film in rehearsals for months before shooting began. Although the film has the look and feel of a documentary, nothing was entirely spontaneous. It’s a remarkable achievement, expressing all the power of documentary while maintaining some dramatic and cinematographic conventions.

One thing that keeps the tension high is the fact that we never leave the school itself. The film covers an entire school year, and we stay mostly with M. Marin (Begaudeau) as he confers with fellow teachers, meets with parents and of course, attempts to teach in the maelstrom of his classroom. His charges range from ages 13-15 and are from all sorts of cultural backgrounds (Morocco, Tunisia, Mali, China and the Caribbean are all represented). As a teacher of French, he’s teaching more than just language, but also what it means to be French. His students push back in every way imaginable. Not only are they generally unruly, but they don’t approve of his teaching methods or his insistence on teaching them things like the imperfect subjunctive, which they feel is from “the Middle Ages.” Although he presents himself as one of the more “progressive” teachers, his exasperation grows over time until he lashes out verbally at two students, which leads to a physical confrontation with another. Cantet’s claustrophobic camera helps you understand Marin’s rage. He feels as trapped in the school as his students, except that he’s outnumbered and no one will listen to him.

Classrooms are like petri dishes of society in general, and Entre les murs does a fine job of poking and stirring the dish just enough to provoke some real drama. But best of all were the small moments of grace, when we get to see the little victories, not so much for Marin, but for his students. Two things stuck with me after watching the film. First, that teaching is hard work; and second, that young people are endlessly capable of surprising us.

Official site of the film
 Trailer

(9/10)

Post from: Toronto Screen Shots

Entre les murs (The Class)

I came across the writing of indie director Alex Cox about a year ago in Film Comment magazine, where he writes a regular column. I’d only seen a couple of his films and had no real idea of what his filmmaking principles were, so to speak. But reading his writing about what films he liked made me want to know more about him. He is also a fine writer, so I knew reading a full-length book from him would be a pleasure, no matter what the topic. But another event occurred recently that made me want to read this even more.

In early 2008, Criterion released his film Walker in a packed special edition DVD. Though I’ve still not seen it, this project fascinated me for many years. Made in Nicaragua with the full support of the Sandinista government in 1987, Walker was about an American who, in 1855, invaded Nicaragua with the intention of annexing it for the US. Considering the political climate of the time, with American-backed “contras” trying to overthrow the Sandinistas, Walker was never going to be a commercial success. But something about Cox’s steadfast and sometimes quixotic support of left-wing causes made us kindred spirits and so it was always on my list of films to see.

In X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker, he recounts stories from the making of ten feature films, including Walker. Beginning with his film school days at UCLA, Cox talks about how he acquired his lifelong resistance to the big studio way of making films. I especially love that in true indie style he draws inspiration nowadays not so much from filmmakers but from hackers and other culture jammers:

Today, an independent filmmaker is a revolutionary fighter, in a prolonged popular war. This is the same war that Free Software and GNU/Linux activists fight against Microsoft; that the Slow Food movement fights against McDonald’s; that independent musicians fight against the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and the Apple Music Store; that Fairtrade activists fight against WalMart and the WTO; that the Zapatistas fight against patriarchal systems of control in Mexico. There are no spoils to be had on this battlefield, and no prospect of a quick and easy victory. Yet, buoyed by belief, and by the lack of a sustainable or sane alternative, the guerrilla soldiers on. In the case of feature films, the battle for an independent, personal art form is already won (thanks to the Mini DV tape and the DVD), lost (thanks to the studios and their admirers), but irrelevant anyway.

Irrelevant because the feature film was the original art form of the twentieth century. It can’t be the original art form of the twenty-first as well. Something that goes beyond it will displace it—some medium equally visual and visceral, but interactive, with multiple narrative possibilities. It’s already being born: out in the same uncharted territory as the computer game, the “readjusted” corporate web site, and the home-made CD of “illegal” MP3s. But the birth won’t be easy, and the new form is destined for a long and hard-fought war.

It’s not all quite that provocative, but I like where he’s coming from. And in his anecdotes from a lifetime making films, you can see how he’s come to embrace the new technologies while continuing to believe in the power of a good story.

Liverpool-born Alex Cox’s directorial credits include Repo Man, Sid and Nancy, and Walker. He also wrote the script for Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and has acted in many of his own and other directors’ films.

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Post from: Toronto Screen Shots

X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker