"The balance of nature gets imbalanced sometimes, I suppose it's man's fault". Phil Karlson's The Big Cat is an effective Western melodrama, an ode to the frontier which synthesizes man with nature through a fish-out-of-water motif. Set in the depression era, The Big Cat effectively encapsulates the epoch, one of desperation which is largely caused by man. Through its narrative arch, the film exhibits in many ways how modernity is a facade, a false pretense which detaches man from its place in nature, and through its rugged aesthetic constructions the film elucidates how self-determinism is detached from man-made dichotomies between rural and urban, modernity and tradition. As stark as it is hopeful, The Big Cat adheres to this notion of personal action while fully acknowledging that when it comes to the natural world there is still plenty of which is out of man's control.
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One of the more overlooked but essential works of post-handover Hong Kong, Nelson Yu Lik-wai's Love Will Tear Us Apart is a somber portrait of the city purveyed through the experiences of mainland emigrants who arrive in Hong Kong seeking a better life. Immersed in a spatial environment that is both familiar yet foreign, Love Will Tear Us Apart's primary focus is on the diasporic working class populace, detailing over the course of its narrative the impermanence of mythmaking when juxtaposed against individualistic experience and intangible tenets of identity. The operatic lens of this film remains grounded literally and figuratively in the way it exhibits the city of Hong Kong - back alleyways, dingy apartments, and the streets themselves take centerstage, with the steel and glass structures of transnational commerce associated with the cityscape of Hong Kong being largely unseen, regulated to the background, beautifully illustrating the city in a way which it is seen by so many who migrate there. Love Will Tear Us Apart through the course of its narrative is not so much a political film - though one can certainly assert their ideology across its narrative - it is one of survival, with the character themselves all sharing moments of both community and conflict. Against the multinational forces of geopolitics and commerce, Love Will Tear Us Apart reminded me of a quote from Ann Hui when she was asked about her characters, Hui replied "It is about survival, that is all". Love Will Tear Us Apart first-and-foremost, encapsulates that sentiment in the treatment of its characters and their journey across its narrative. Sovereignty is a nationalistic concept - an abstraction, one which ultimately does not congeal with the populace, or the human condition itself
Miranda July's distinct creative impulse is undeniable. With her latest film, Kajillionaire, July attempts to contextualize our increasingly detached world, employing a more normative film language that still accommodates her eccentric sensibilities. Kajillionare finds great utility out of the con-artist archetype, wielding its characteristics centered around deceit and self-preservation to tell an ultimately absurdist but at times affecting portrait of a deeply-fractured young woman whose never experienced the altruistic nature of love. A clever, creative construction, Kajillionaire's attempts at emotional truth don't always land with the intended effect, as I still find that July's penchant for the quirky can obfuscates the film's underlying earnest aims. It's an experience void of exposition and the film's final denouement helps alleviate some of its shortcomings when it comes to emotional impact. A brief moment of intimacy, one of pure personal autonomy, represents a beacon of hope for the film's central protagonist in what the filmmaker perceives as a cold, detached world.
Hui's substantive comedic talent is deployed with pervasive utility in Security Unlimited, one of the films which finds Hui at the peak of his efforts, deploying ingenious comedy constructions to a working-class narrative in which Hong Kongers navigate the evolving spaces brought by transnational capital and commerce. Following the exploits of a security agency and a few of its employees attempting to climb the managerial hierarchy, Security Unlimited deploys comedic set-piece after set-piece to provide a comfortable, escapist facade while sub-textually the film excavates truths related to the underlying struggle of the HK and its diasporic populace. The treatment in Hui's work is almost always relatively light-hearted and absurdist, yet through his portrayal of characters whom almost always feel torn between the colonial condition and their lived-in culture, Hui's films manage to be incisive through far more welcoming sensibilities than other film's attempting any such evocation on Hong Kong. Security Unlimited has a sequence where it touches on the migrant crisis post-Vietnam in a way that feels incredibly attuned to what Ann Hui's Boat People would place much more emphasis on with a more dramatic treatment, yet Security Unlimited still invokes similar sentiments about Hong Kong as a city, one viewed with great admiration by the outsider, whether that be a foreign businessman or migrant escaping authoritarianism and bloodshed. Security Unlimited narratively speaking is a straight-forward comedy of likable losers, and while some of these characterizations and their subsequent antics may rub some viewers the wrong way given their actions are almost always tied to selfish-interest, Hui's film manages to keep them affectionate due to dynamic environment of Hong Kong he invokes, one of consistent disruption and change from a litany of influences foreign and domestic, with the main characters of this story being reactionary to their environment, their primary impulse solely rooted in survival in this unique locality which rests between eastern and western influence.
At its onset, Pushing Hands is rough, a film which didactically expounds its thematic relevance related to cultural differences between east vs. west in a way which is borderline offensive in the simplistic binary it cultivates. As the film evolves, Ang Lee's keen directorial sense of space helps dissipate some of the script's more expositional elements, becoming a film that manages to be more nuanced and multi-faceted in the way it illustrates its characterizations, and the disrupted equilibrium of the family dynamics which rests at the fulcrum between east and western influence. General malaise evolves into outright crisis, the weight of familial obligation becomes both a tool for incisive commentary about personal autonomy and how one defines family from a generational approach. A solid film overall, and more importantly one which signals Lee's directional talents which he would go on to further master from here.
An ode to the ancestral home, Achal Mishra's astonishing debut feature Gamak Ghar details the cultural specificity and intimacy of its storyteller while simultaneously transcending such social constructs, delivering a deeply universal experience that captures the ontological nature of home we all construct. Traversing the temporal through a formal structure of vignettes that span decades, Gamak Ghar contextualizes its characters through their relationship with this material environment, offering us glimpses of tragedy and triumph, managing to be grandiose in its scope due to its willingness to not be constrained by linear narrative conventions. Achal Mishra shows directorial precision that is rare for a first-time filmmaker, the camera's gaze letting the setting itself evoke deep-seated emotions through a static lens and careful compositions which provide an unobtrusive but observational eye into the social interactions and emotions that unfold within this environment.
Sleepaway Camp traverses the familial framework of the slasher summer camp archetype with unabashed nihilism, a film that's so uninhibited in its portrayal of teenage social interaction that it feels like a deranged evocation of teenage cruelty. Innocence is a facade, the film suggests - it is written into the text of the film quite literally after all, but it also exists in the ether of Sleepaway Camp, the pleasantries of its characters being artificial, a utility means for their deviant ends.
A beautifully rendered, stylish time-capsule of early 1980s' New York City in which the specificity of the culture and the spatiality of the terrain shines through in every frame. Amos Poe's Alphabet City deploys a lean narrative centered around a mid-level hood in Tony to elucidate its central theme related to gentrification and the diaspora caused by capital's elevated status among the societal hierarchy. Tony's plight is highly allegoric to this specific temporal of New York City, a character stuck between two worlds - his community/home and the desires of his boss, who is symbolic of big business which aims to disrupt communities due to surging land value. In the end, Tony is forced to choose in a sense between his professional and personal lives, and while one could argue the film isn't overtly explicit about its socio-politically commentary, it does delivery a sly tale of class consciousness through its heroes journey. Alphabet City's film aesthetic and grammar is rooted in dynamism, the quick-cut editing along with the expressive lighting inject such visceral energy into this lo-fi picture that it really feels larger than life. Outside of Abel Ferrara, I'm not sure another filmmaker has documented NYC of this era with such an assured gaze.
Brandon Cronenberg remains first-and-foremost an effective stylist, and with his latest film Possessor, the conceptual framework provides ample opportunities for perverse and transgressive artistic constructions. It's always refreshing when a film doesn't feel the need to explain itself, and one Possessor's greatest strengths early on is how attuned it is to submerging the audience into the technocratic fever-dream, one in which the film's low-fi allegory emerges organically across its narrative. Possessor stumbles when it comes to providing an astute exploration of its core thematic intent related to failings of technocratic utopianism & the increasing invasiveness of the employer-employee binary, yet I couldn't help but admire the cinematic language employed here, one rooted in a steady-state of uncertainty between consciousness and the material world, a perfect device for deployment of such themes related to notions of progress brought forth by a technocratic capitalist society. Possessor largely struggles to form an emotional connection with the audience, instead opting for a moody, atmospheric state of dread. Our main protagonist is merely a cog in the larger machine, an individual whose lack of autonomy has been normalized in this social milieu. The film subtextually seems to express concerns about the hubris of tech and innovation when not tied to the larger social apparatus, demonstrating through its narrative arch the coercive effects on humanity which are brought by tech which implicitly disregards the unquantifiable aspects of the human genome. The text of the film can largely be deduced into two souls in confrontation for one body, with one variant reading being related to how even our body itself is perceived as nothing more than a utility by our employer and the larger technological apparatus who attempts to siphon value and in turn profit. While the film never completely congeals across all thematic fronts it navigates, Possessor is a stylish nightmare, a descent into a not-so-distant alternate reality in which one's mind and body are at the service of one's employer - the economic subjugating the social due to its higher place among the hierarchy of society, which leads to friends and family being expendable quite literally in the film's denouement.
Soi Cheang's directorial precision along with Louis Koo's performance bring gravitas to a conceptual framework that could have easily been too far fetched to take seriously and yet Accident works, delivering a rapturously engaging paranoia-tinged thriller which manages emotional sustenance alongside its continuously engaging escapist narrative underpinnings. Near-Hitchcockian in the way the film's narrative unfolds, the film is solely rooted in the subjectivity of our main protagonist, a hitman whose become increasingly convinced there is a hit out for his head. Paranoia is embedded into this film's sense of general unease, and our main protagonist - a hitman who stages elaborate hits via choreographed accidents - in a sense becomes a slave to his own tactical precision, becoming increasingly incapable of deciphering reality from those which he has once choreographed, incapable of grounding the world in objectivity. Accident lives in a space in which the audience simply is uncertain about what they are experiencing for much of its running time, and in the film's resolution - which I won't spoil here - the audience is provided clarity both thematically and narratively. In a sense, Accident subtextually seems to be a commentary on insularity, encapsulating how for our main protagonist's fate is fundamentally rooted in his insular nature, one in which his tactical precision and general vocation has alienated him, inn a sense, from any capability of trusting something he does not control. A highly entertaining piece of paranoia which would make a good double-feature with The Conversation, Accident is a highly entertaining, extremely well-made film that also has some understated thematic weight. Oh, and it features some incredible set-pieces that would make the Final Destination series proud.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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