Encaptures the freedom and spontaneity intrinsic to being on holiday; Obstacles arise but conflict is largely a force that is easily obfuscated by a temperament rooted in discovery and openness to experience. Exhibits the ephemeral anarchy of day-to-day activity and interaction where sometimes the best-laid plans are untenable and yet through this aforementioned openness, life itself can provide something beautiful. Featuring a strong cast all-around, Brac's film manages to deliver an ethereal experience, one which in many ways channels aspects of Rohmer's vacation films, as it delivers a lovely portrait of youth and experience in which the spatiality of a holiday serves as the perfect setting for encapturing the extemporaneity of life itself.
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Wallows too much in a cynical, lugubrious milieu that when the film's story begins to materialize and attempts to construct something meaningful it largely doesn't work due to the viewer not being emotionally invested in these characters Existentialism as cheap theatrics as opposed to intellectual inquiry. Moorhead and Benson remain highly effective stylists, with Synchronic featuring some beautifully conceived and constructed sequences, but the film's absurd premise feels more a means-to-an-end than an investigation into existence and being. Dramatically one is left not being invested in these characters, and the narrative thrust of the story, despite a singular conceit that unquestionably intriguing. A rare miss from Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson, a filmmaking duo who've I've always appreciated.
Deserves its place among the better Hong Kong immigrant stories to arise in the late 80s/early 90s in response to the Joint Declaration, Mabel Cheung's An Autumn's Tale is a highly effective romance that operates in a way that allows itself to deliver a holistic portrait of its central characters, immigrants, but more importantly, individuals searching for their sense of being in this world. An Autumn's Tale is a love story in which there is not a single kiss; sensuality as a symbol of affection is largely regulated to the periphery of this story between two individuals whose affection for each other and budding romance is viewed through a prism of diasporic milieu. While Cherie Chung's character's struggle for identity amongst a foreign spatiality is more explicitly stated from the onset, Chow Yung-Fat's rough facade only masks his own underlying internal strife, and through this relationship that is the fulcrum of this story, Mabel Cheung rapturously elucidates how love is a confluence of disparate emotions, vulnerabilities, and identities. The journey towards love is not quantifiable or calculable, and these two character's place of transcendence is a direct result of this exchange/confluence. They each struggle in their own way to find comfort not only in this foreign place but within themselves.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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