children

Hansel and Gretel

by James McNally on March 25, 2009

Hansel and Gretel (Director: Yim Pil-Sung): I’m certainly no expert on horror films, never mind Asian horror films, but Yim Pil-Sung’s Hansel and Gretel has more in common with a film like Pan’s Labyrinth than, for instance, Ringu. That is to say, this film functions as much more than a simple scary movie.

Eun-Soo is on his way to visit his sick mother and on the phone with his pregnant girlfriend when he swerves to avoid something in the road. When he wakes up, he is able to crawl from his wrecked car before passing out again. When he wakes again, it is nighttime and a young girl with a lantern is there to guide him to her house deep in the forest. Even before we arrive at the strange house, we know we’re in archetypal fairytale country. Eun-soo is a young man with some family issues. His girlfriend accuses him of not caring about the impending responsibilities of fatherhood, and he reveals a bit later that he and his mother are not particularly close. When the angelic girl introduces him to her siblings and parents, there is clearly something amiss. The adults seem fearful and defer constantly to the children, especially brother Man-Bok. The house seems like something out of an American sitcom from the 50s, filled with candy and toys and garish colours. Eun-Soo is convinced to spend the night, but when he sets out the next day to return to his car, he finds himself back at the house again. So begins a multi-day ordeal and one creepy story.

The film does a masterful job of creating an atmosphere of unease, combining cinematography, score and art direction to convincingly portray this strangely sinister child-centred world. It slowly becomes clear after the “parents” disappear that these kids have no real mother and father, and that they have been luring substitute parents here for many years and trying to convince them to stay. What happens to these luckless surrogates is only partially revealed, but Eun-Soo is soon desperate to return to the family he thought he didn’t need.

Strangely enough, these love-starved “children” end up teaching Eun-Soo a lot about fatherhood, especially when he has to protect them from a malevolent preacher. Like Eun-Soo, the plot does get a little tangled in the woods in the middle section, but the ending is surprisingly moving, and the performances of the three child actors are universally excellent.

Note: Hansel and Gretel is the second theatrical release of Evokative Films, whose founder Stéphanie Trépanier I interviewed recently.

Hansel and Gretel opens in Toronto on Friday March 27 for an exclusive run at the AMC Yonge-Dundas theatre.

8/10 (8/10)

Tagged as: children, horror, korea

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Flower in the Pocket

by James McNally on November 19, 2008

in Film Festivals,Reel Asian

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 (7/10)

Tagged as: #reelasian08, children, fathers-and-sons, malaysia

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Nursery University

by James McNally on April 20, 2008

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Hot Docs

Nursery University (2008, Directors: Marc Simon and Matt Makar): Marc Simon and Matt Makar are both single, childless lawyers who have made a film about the competitive process that parents in Manhattan face getting their children into the best nursery schools in the city. My wife and I went to see this together, and were expecting to be very annoyed with the subjects. You see, we’re also childless, but after more than a decade together, the issue is far from resolved for us, and we both have strong opinions about parenting. Though Toronto isn’t Manhattan, we do have a similar culture of older professionals having children for the first time, and the parents’ general sense of entitlement is nauseating. As well, they’re driven by both guilt and fear to try to give their children every advantage in a very competitive culture. This type of environment usually leads to overscheduled and stressed-out children and parents, and doesn’t necessarily lead to the desired results of fame and fortune for the little ones.

But Simon and Makar have a light touch, and even though the parents ranged from middle-class bohemians living in Greenwich Village to an obviously super wealthy couple living on the Upper West Side, all of them were sympathetic characters, with the possible exception of one couple who could serve as the poster children for “entitled”. All of them knew how ridiculous the process looked, but felt powerless to opt out for fear of putting their beloved child at a disadvantage. And remarkably, all of the children seemed bright and, at least in the final cut, well-behaved.

The strength of the film was that it was not just parent-focused. Administrators and teachers from all of the top schools were persuaded to take part, most at the insistence of the remarkable Gabriella Rowe from the prestigious Mandell School. The pressure on these school directors is enormous, with 15–20 applicants for each available space. The situation has been driven by what the directors refer to as a “post 9/11 baby boom” that has driven tuition rates as high as $20,000 per year and created a market for “admissions consultants” whose services can also cost a family several thousand dollars. The administrators in this film sympathize with the parents, but laughingly dismiss their worries that not getting into the right pre-school will affect their child’s chances of getting into the right college one day.

Though we were prepared to hate these people, my wife and I found ourselves wondering what we would do in their shoes. In Canada, at least, our public school system is still relatively healthy, so we don’t have to worry about which nursery is the right “feeder school” for the primary school we want our child to attend. Large cities like New York also face a tangle of regulations that make starting a new school difficult, not to mention the price of real estate. For the foreseeable future, getting a child into school in the city is bound to be a stressful and expensive proposition. Many couples end up forced to move to the suburbs, despite their desire to raise their children in the cultural richness of New York City.

The film was also careful to balance the stressful process with the reasons why parents endure it. There are many images of the riches of Manhattan, and many more of the joy and delight these children bring to their parents. In the end, these people do it because they love their children and they love their city, and they’ll do whatever they can to ensure that they can keep both. Good luck to all of them.

Here is the Q&A with directors Marc Simon and Matt Makar from after the screening:

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Duration: 13:43

Interview with director Marc Simon in the Wall Street Journal’s Law blog

8/10 (8/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs08, children, education, manhattan, newyorkcity, nyc, parenting

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Autism: The Musical

by James McNally on March 6, 2008 · 1 comment

in Doc Soup,Documentaries,Film Festivals

(Left to right: Neal, Adam, Lexi, Henry, Wyatt)

Editor’s Note: Doc Soup is a monthly documentary screening programme run by the good folks at Hot Docs. It gives audiences in Toronto (and now Calgary and Vancouver!) their regular doc fix each year from the fall through to the spring, leading up to the Hot Docs festival itself.

Autism: The Musical (2007, Director: Tricia Regan): Winner of a slew of audience awards at recent festivals, Tricia Regan’s film sheds light on the mysterious world of the autistic child. Autism is now diagnosed in one child in every 150, and comparatively little research has been conducted into understanding it. Serendipitously, there is an interesting article in this month’s issue of Wired magazine, which postulates that instead of treating it as a disease to be cured, we should be trying to understand autism as just a different type of thinking. This documentary might actually help that process. We meet five different children, and their parents, who help us understand the challenges, but also the potential, of being autistic. At the centre of the film is Elaine Hall, mother of Neal and the creator of The Miracle Project, an organization dedicated to arts education for autistic kids. Elaine gathers a group of children each year with the goal of putting on a musical performance. She adopted her son Neal from Russia, and after he was diagnosed as autistic, her marriage broke up. Neal is perhaps the most affected by his condition, prone to tantrums and unable to speak. But Elaine is energetic and positive and at the first meeting, Regan’s camera pans around the room to encompass the curious kids, but more tellingly, the suspicious (and exhausted) faces of the parents.

The film follows a fairly standard chronological timeline, with titles informing us how close we are to opening night. Along the way, we take detours into each featured child’s story, along with the story of their parents. I found each one incredibly moving, and was pleasantly surprised at the complete transparency and gut-wrenching honesty of the parents. Lexi’s parents split up during the course of filming, and her mother’s brutally frank admissions broke my heart. And Adam’s parents, though still together, are having problems that his father admits are partly a result of his wife’s “monomania” in caring for Adam. I think that these people have had their idea of a perfect life turned so completely upside down by their children that they have no masks anymore. It was refreshing and heartbreaking at the same time. As in Lexi’s mom’s wish that Lexi die before she does. With the difficulty of finding schools and caregivers who understand autism, it seemed a reasonable position.

From the children there are several amazing moments of clarity, but the most piercing came from Wyatt, who wondered why all the kids at the Miracle Project were in “their own little worlds” before admitting that he too spent too much time in his own world, mostly because with no one around to talk to, he became lonely in the real one.

The director admitted in her Q&A that she was brought in to direct by the mother of Henry, one of the featured kids (and the only one to have Asperger’s Syndrome, a milder form of autism), who had envisioned making a film to reach out beyond the “autism community” in order to help people understand and to do something. Autism doesn’t attract the resources that childhood diseases like diabetes do, and dealing with it isn’t so straightforward. Like the deaf community, there is a growing “culture of autism” (represented by people like Amanda Baggs cited in the Wired article) who don’t think autism is a disease that needs a cure at all. On the other side are parents of children like the ones in this film, who just want some help. As the number of kids with autism grows, and they grow older and require more specialized care, the educational system will need to adapt. And so will the culture at large.

The finale is as big and emotional as we might expect. But since we’ve gotten to know the performers over the previous hour, we know the show is not going to be flawless. Instead, the creative anarchy that seems to be part and parcel of autism made the performance, and the entire film itself, that much more inspiring.

Here is the Q&A with director Tricia Regan from after the screening (it gets louder after the first few seconds and then louder still at around the 0:40 mark, so don’t turn up your volume right away):

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Duration: 12:12

Official site of the film

Official site of The Miracle Project

9/10 (9/10)

Tagged as: autism, children

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Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge (The Voyage of the Red Balloon)

by James McNally on September 20, 2007

in Film Festivals,TIFF

Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge (The Voyage of the Red Balloon)

Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge (Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien): I have to admit that as much as I’m familiar with Hou Hsiao-hsien’s name, I hadn’t seen any of his previous films (Three Times (2005) and Café Lumiere (2003) being the most recent). That being said, someone I know told me that in his opinion, most of Hou’s best work was from the 80s and 90s and is actually pretty hard to find. Setting the film in Paris was admittedly a gamble, and deciding to make a sort of homage to Albert Lamarisse’s classic children’s film La Ballon Rouge (1956) an even bigger one. For me, anyway, it didn’t pay off.

We’re dropped into a story with very little exposition. Juliette Binoche plays Suzanne, a voice actor for a puppet theatre and a harried single mom. Her son, Simon, is watched by a new nanny, Song Fang, who just happens to be both Chinese and a film student making a film. So, with an obvious directorial stand-in in place, what happens? Not too much. Song uses Simon in her film project which is very much like the classic film, and we see footage scattered throughout the rest of the main film including, somewhat confusingly, at the very beginning, before we’ve even met the characters. There are also scenes where the titular orb floats outside the apartment when Song is not actually filming. I found its presence baffling most of the time, and the film, like the lives it portrays, as scattered and uneven, though well-intentioned. Suzanne’s living arrangements are messy and her relationships unclear, and by the end of the film, there’s really no sense of resolution. What I did like about the film was its wonderful use of natural light, as well as the corresponding naturalness of the dialogue, with characters repeating dialogue not heard the first time by other characters, and other realistic touches.

But in the end, I wasn’t really moved. My balloon, instead of taking flight, just slowly deflated over the film’s 113 minutes.

Trailer

6/10 (6/10)