Tsai Ming-liang: The Hole

Tsai Ming-liang: Fumbling Towards Connection

(Taiwan, 1996)

The Hole stands as one of the best of Tsai Ming-liang's unique case studies of contemporary isolation and alienation in Taipei. Tsai's work is superficially very chilly and philosophically heartbreaking, and this film is no exception, though this film introduces several new elements to his usual style, including a deepening, deadpan sense of humor, a sweeter - if also odd finale, and an ever more elaborate reinvention of antiquated cinematic styles.

Working from slight variations of the theme running through most of his work, The Hole represents a glimpse of urban isolation - in this case between a man and woman who are upstairs/downstairs neighbors - and how varied structures (real or psychological) of modernity wall people off from one another. The two neighbors - urbanist holdouts, of a sort - are the last remaining residents of a public housing project which has otherwise been evacuated (as has much of Taipei) in anticipation of a still-evolving epidemic, described with a sci-fi vagueness that insinuates an apocalyptic magnitude. Here, the woman (the downstairs neighbor) attempts to endure as her apartment is flooded by a prodigious leak from upstairs. A plumber is summoned and he attempts to locate the source of the problem, creating a large hole in the floor, before determining that the problem will be a more time-consuming repair job than he's willing to undetake, given the contextualizing circumstances; he flees, not to be seen again. Already isolated and desperate, the hole linking the two apartments functions first as yet another in a long line of indignities, but soon begins to take on a great symbolic significance.

Tsai's sense of humor, and sense of cinematic history is displayed with a bit more overtness than usual - each of his films have a severely minimalistic quality, constructed of extreme long takes, a very severe minimum of dialogue (Tsai's earlier Vive L'Amour features no dialogue until 30 minutes in, and his later Goodbye Dragon Inn is a showcase of visual storytelling which spins 9 lines of dialogue into a full-length feature film), and a total absence of any sort of musical score. To some degree they are also the cinematic equivalents of a still life - precisely drawn glimpses into characters in an ever more prosperous world who slowly sink into confused, drifting lives. With The Hole, the pallette is slightly more colorful, with jagged and unexpected leaps from reality into phenomenal fantasy. In quirky and highly personal ways, all of Tsai's films reinvent some of the sensibilities of silent film; this film adds to that reworking of cinema's past by also incorporating some of the ideas that power musical films and science fiction, specifically the sense of escapism inherent to both. In something of a commentary on the stresses of contemporary urban life, the severity of a certain strand of sci-fi (think Kubrick) is contrasted against very unexpected musical interludes, whose unreality is very deliberately heightened and exaggerated, to nearly psychedelic levels.

Over the course of this film, something of a relationship evolves between the two neighbors, and the reality is a source of frustration and anger for both, especially the woman. Her rage over the semi-destruction of her residence is aimed at the only visible human target - her upstairs neighbor. Contradictorily, she also happens to find him attractive, and her occasional (and discreetly sexual) daydreams revolving around him are visualized in each of these brilliant, hallucinogenic musical numbers (set to the kinetic and big-band inflected Cantopop of Grace Chang) which explode from the screen in brief bits of sensualistic, surreal romance and humor - quite reminiscent of the big-screen Pennies From Heaven. And for all of the ennui and alienation on display here, Tsai's skewering of late 90s pre-millennial tensions is funny, absurd, and gives this film a very appealing strageness. There's a multitude of readings that could be applied to the film's unadorned title - all of Tsai's films tend to very quietly subvert sexual stereotypes and expected roles, with characters who seem very plainly drawn casually doing the unexpected, and this quality is handled in a very oblique, but also startling fashion here, and the climactic final scene, which develops the theme beautifully, is extraordinary.

Meanwhile Tsai - in typical fashion - also subverts most of the usual expectations or preconceptions Westerners bring to Asian cinema (an absolute absence of any sort of exotic, Orientalistic qualities) with a nonchalant, casually-revealed directness, focusing on both the absurdist tendencies of the human mind, and the most absolute of mundanities. The extreme stillness and quiet in the non-musical sections of this film creates a total demystification of almost everything about his characters, sidestepping backstory or most cultural signifiers, to some degree even sidestepping the limitations of language, in opting to use only a bare minimum of stripped-down dialogue. Taipei itself is not used as a setting in the usual fashion, becoming instead an inscrutable and vague stand-in for the world - this story could be easily recast in any large city, and would express the same overall meaning. This process of stripping away the ephemera, and of considering markers of identity which most would consider to be essential to be essentially mutable and decorative qualities, makes The Hole rather deliberately disorienting, forcing the viewer to engage with isolated characters who are unable to articulate their longings. But this also results in a film which is always fascinating and insightful.

Zhang Yuan: East Palace West Palace

East Palace West Palace: Zhang Yuan's multi-layered liberations

(PR China, 1997)

Released internationally in 1998, Zhang Yuan's East Palace, West Palace was billed as the first gay-themed feature film to be produced in The People's Republic of China. The finished film was shown at European film festivals only after being smuggled out of China, and Zhang was unable to work for several years afterwards, though he has since restarted his film career.

The simple assessment of this as a 'gay' film serves an effective marketing purpose, but also diminished the complex allegorical qualities built into the story, and it - in critical assessments made at the time - tended to leave viewers of any orientation somewhat befuddled. Zhang builds a great amount of the story and tension around stereotypes which are first exploited, but then gradually redefined, which serves to present a sense of homosexuality which is literal at first, but slowly evolves into an elaborate and increasingly stylized commentary upon political power and control, and rapid social change, which in this case is generationally defined and occurring in a tightly controlled and politically closed society. This recasting of seemingly simple sexual situations into philosophical musings about the transformations underway in a society midway between the Tianenmen Square massacre and Communism with Capitalist characteristics seemed lost on most audiences, but was certainly not lost on Chinese authorities, which I would bet is the real reason behind East Palace's difficult birth.

The early scenes of the film are set within a large park in Beijing - a location popular (or notorious) as a gay cruising spot after sundown. Local authorities sporadically arrive to harass whatever men they manage to find, generally inflicting minor verbal degradations upon their victims before releasing them. East Palace presents an evening which unfolds differently, in unexpected, probably inevitable and perhaps transformative fashion.

Protagonist A-Lan (actor Si Han) is rounded up with several other suspects, all of whom flee after submitting to the usual moralistic lecture, framed in a programmatic, revolutionary sort of language which might seem increasingly anachronistic in post-Mao China. The lone exception - A-Lan resists, reading the situation as an intrusion upon his personal freedom, and perhaps as an assault upon what he considers to be an essential identity. The police officer who encounters him (Xiao Shi) has no real sense of how to proceed in dealing with an insubordination which is expressed in the language of liberation (a discourse which sounds familiar in its' language, but not in its' choice of subject matter), but is also expressed with a degree of personal detail that would completely undercut the rather scripted roles both men would seem compelled to play out.

Xiao Shi (actor Hu Jun) arrests A-Lan, and leads him to the nearby park headquarters and begins a verbal interrogation of A-Lan. A-Lan swiftly hijacks this potentially threatening scenario, turning the officer's slurs and questions into a highly detailed autobiography, which A-Lan performs as much as he describes, in an hour-plus display of controlled acting which quickly becomes very memorable. Through this, Xiao Shi - the official or institutional center of power and control - is confronted with the expressive eloquence and self-assurance of A-Lan, and in the face of this confidence (borderline arrogance), his simple assumptions about the mechanics of power and authority, and the inevitable formula behind their construction, steadily erode into an eventual state of confusion. A-Lan, of course, realizes and exploits this, without ever stating it clearly.

If Xiao Shi is a stand-in for state authority (degenerated into chaos and corruption), A-Lan represents a very specific and not necessarily sexual sort of liberation: a genarational shift in power, which might be destabilizing to state authority, which may or may not offer personal liberation, which may or may not repudiate the old order of things. A-Lan seems to accept that future promise may only arrive after present-day sacrifice, and not only does he accept this, he's managed to subvert this, in a manner that radiates power. In this, his seemingly submissive status becomes a mere cover for a renegade, revolutionary toughness.

These qualities would perhaps seem anachronistic to western viewers; a reading of The Celluloid Closet would reveal many rather similar Hollywood scenarios, some played out in a highly regressive fashion. Zhang is certainly aware of this, but he's also crafted a film which retools such stock sterotypes with an eye towards present-day Chinese specifics. This noted, East Palace West Palace is not without its' problems - A-Lan is also married and leading a secret life, a life which he is clear in stating as his essential nature. This day-to-day aspect - the hidden, and persecuted side of gay life in non-Western nations is ignored in this film (in favor of a highly theatricalized unreality), and is a subject in need of some exploration. Nonetheless, this is still a gorgeous, fascinating, complex film deserving of a wider audience.

Ritwik Ghatak: Cloud-Capped Star

Ritwik Ghatak: notes on Cloud-Capped Star

(India, 1960)

The visionary Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak peers into the future, and sees nothing but disintegration. Succeeding at multiple levels, Cloud-Capped Star humanizes this bleak vision - Ghatak places the drama in a Bengali family immediately post-partition, but the complex events developing throughout the film are also something of a howl of outrage at what had become of his divided homeland.

The central figure in this vast melodrama (with some coincidental stylistic resemblances to European new wave and neo-realism, as well) is Nita, the eldest daughter in a once-middle class, intellectual family, driven by the partition of India and Pakistan into refugee status in the slums of Calcutta. Varied family members react in different opportunistic ways to their reduced (and still disintegrating status), and their need to survive, all of which takes an extreme toll on Nita, who ultimately becomes the family's sole breadwinner. The performances throughout are excellent - Supriya Choudhury as Nita is riveting, and Niranjan Roy is particularly strong as Sanat.

Throughout, Ghatak boils human nature and the survival instinct down to the most ruthless basics: this is a compelling and visionary film, but there is virtually no room for lofty ideals or sentimental altruism in the world created here - one mourns what one must, but ultimately one does what one must do to survive. Sentiment and ideals - in this film - are vain luxuries and pretenses, and from the cruelty of such a truism, Ghatak crafted one of cinema's most devastating moral tragedies.

Ghatak claimed very few Western cinematic influences - like Jean-Luc Godard in France and Nagisa Oshima in Japan, his primary concerns were historical and political, and also technical - how to alter cinema to express those concerns in reasonably accessible language? For Ghatak the solution was found in using outdoor locations, natural sound, idiosyncratic editing, and a minimum of the flash seen in Bollywood or Hollywood; in particular, Ghatak favored a casual, unusual use of sound, with exaggerated and highly unrealistic effects, and deliberate (and disorienting) discontinuities between what is seen and what is heard. Visually and dramatically, the expectation of an operatic quality in melodrama (this film - at a fundamental level - is melodrama), is subverted with jagged and unpredictable visual editing; Ghatak was willing to sacrifice conventional continuity in the attempt to drive a certain level of emotional impact. The end result is a film which is dark, very sharply focused in its thematic sensibility, and very morally upsetting.

For all of these reasons, it stands as one of the more obscure global masterpieces out there (there has yet to be an official US release on VHS or DVD), rarely seen or commented upon. This lingering obscurity is highly unfortunate - as a film of moral/social outrage, this may rival Bresson; its' overall feel for the everyday evokes Italian neo-realism; it's willingness to experiment boldly evokes contemporaries Godard or Oshima; in it's concerns with the status of women (another of the many themes explored here) in a society undergoing massive, multidirectional change, it recalls Naruse, Sirk or Mizoguchi.

Ghatak was a film theorist (a published selection of his theoretical writings was translated and published posthumously), translator (he was the first to translate Brecht - a strong influence - into Bengali), marxist writer and Bengali nationalist, he also battled depression, addiction and a number of other health concerns; his own biography is one of great tragedy, and one could possibly read the hopelessness of this film as an extension of his own, and see this as a drive that would have to produce at least one masterpiece (his later Subarna-Rekha is also very much worth a look), even as it brought him to a premature end. For all of its' moral outrage, this film is absolutely compelling - any cinephile (or student of history) would do well to see it.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa: Bright Future

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Bright Future: Moving On

(Japan, 2001)

Kiyoshi Kurosawa is becoming one of my favorite contemporary filmmakers, and the further he gets from by-the-book J-horror (preferring to reach further into less categorizable reaches of his own cinematic imagination), the better I think he is.

Here, deeper meanings mingle with absurdist humor, and the kind of chance occurrences that enliven the fiction of Paul Auster and Haruki Murakami also figure heavily in Kurosawa's films; cinematically, everything from Lynch or Fellini to Dirty Harry can be a point of departure for further exploration.

Bright Future plays like an improved version of Kurosawa's earlier Charisma - more refined, less loony, more serious, and considerably more poetic, but Kurosawa's many thematic concerns - trashing of the environment, a sense of depersonalization (and discreet nihilism) in younger/future generations, the erosion of a society's cohesiveness (especially when that erosion originates in internal dysfunction, and not from some external source) - are handled with great subtlety - the poetically staged final scene also offers his darkest and most ironic visual humor. This is a deliberate contrast to the cross-generational understanding which appears elsewhere in the film, which slowly evolves into a quiet heroism - a quality which pleasantly recalls several past masters of Japanese film, without explicitly referring to any of them. Kurosawa's irony is the sense that - if younger generations have drifted towards a nihilism that could destroy them or you, it is balanced by an equally withering take on the older generations that somehow sold them short; this film in many ways visualizes many senses of letting go of disappointments and judgements of failure, and moving on with life (after presenting some of the consequences for not doing so).

Tadanobu Asano's presence here is somewhat hyped, undoubtedly due to his nascent global stardom, but his performance here is eclipsed by co-stars Joe Odagiri and Tatsuya Fuji, who both deliver dynamic performances of phenomenal range and control.

Mysterious, poetic, beautifully shot (on DV), open to many interpretations, and one of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's finest.

Paul Schrader: Blue Collar

Paul Schrader's Blue Collar: ...And May The Greatest Opportunist Win

(United States, 1978)

A devastating, and great film, unfortunately more discussed than seen or known at this late date.

Blue Collar is celebrated for a number of reasons - the casting is inspired, subverting a standard Hollywood racial casting formula, and director/writer Paul Schrader (his directorial debut; Schrader was already known for writing Taxi Driver) gets unforgettable performances from three leads who apparently didn't much care for each other. Richard Pryor - justifiably famous as a comic - was given few opportunities to display his skill as a dramatic actor, and Blue Collar quickly makes apparent the tragedy of that state of affairs: Pryor's on-screen moments here are electrifying - a tour-de-force of controlled nuances as his character (Zeke) evolves through a million evolutions of moral self-doubt, debate and an eventual corruption; you know this latter outcome will have to be inevitable (as foreshadowed in Zeke's many nervous and angsty moments), even as Zeke seems to fight to hang on to his own ethics. Larger forces are conspiring against him - business, industry, commerce, even the criminal underworld are moving in a specific sort of orchestration, and the fight of this character (and his two equally desperate collegues) to emerge from a simple heist scenario spun wildly out of control is the core of this Machiavellian drama.

From the start, Schrader manages the story very precisely - building drama very carefully, with methodical pacing, sharp and realistic dialogue, and a suitably grimy, documentary-real glimpse of post-industrial decay as it creeps into everyone's day-to-day existances: dirty and raw, filled with unsolveable moral conundrums and a simmering rage over expectations shattered. The musical backdrop for the opening scenes - Muddy Waters' Mannish Boy - effectively sets a mood for the film: sledgehammer blues, harsh and raw, with a sense of rhythm that (in it's utilitarian brutality) evokes industrial processes and sounds, while referring - in oblique fashion - to the men that would be employed by that same industry - degraded, taken for granted, and stripped of a sense of honor perhaps intuitively bound to a sense of masculinity, should a presumed need for such a manipulation surface within the machinations of industry.

Thus established, Schrader's story - which at first might seem to be just another indictment of "the system" or big business (or unions) having their way with the working class - manages instead to inch towards some darker ironies: that mythologized working class may not neccessarily be any more loyal, or moral, than the upper classes that are - in fact - brazenly shafting them - and as the film moves into it's latter half, this nasty paradox, fleshed out with off-the-cuff gallows humor that Pryor (and also Keitel and Kotto) supplies turns the narrative into something ever more claustrophobic.

And alas - yet another irony of this film would be it's general unavailability with the passage of time, as the film has lost (unfortunately) less of its' relevance than one would have hoped. A great film.

Edward Yang: Yi Yi

Edward Yang's Yi Yi: Showing People What They Do Not Know
(Taiwan, 2000)

Edward Yang's Yi Yi is, in my opinion, one of the few real cinamatic masterpieces of the new millennia.

Yang passed away at the end of June 2007, and his creative presence will be very much missed. Though it's an unfortunate coincidence, one major quality of this film is it's autumnal feel, which unifies an elaborate narrative of Chekhovian richness. Throughout the length of this very captivating film, varied characters engage in backward glances through their lives - which primarily takes the form of self-interrogations of regrets and missed opportunities, and the consequences of ill-informed actions, leading up to a certain resignation and forgiveness. This is perhaps most dramatic in the extremely varied and finely nuanced male characters - nearly all of whom (most dramatically patriarch N.J., sliding into a slow-motion, midlife crisis) are essentially poets or philosophers forced by circumstance into more ordinary types of lives which they may or may not find entirely satisfying, and are now beginning to have second thoughts about.

This is the departure point for the narrative of Yi Yi - as this process of self-interrogation develops, how does one reconcile the momentum inherent in ones' path through life with the contradictory tug of instincts that may be pulling you in a different direction? The success, or lack of success, in negiotiating this crisis of identity is the source of nearly all dramatic tension here, and making this intimate, transformative evolution into something vibrant and visual is a daunting idea. Nonetheless, Yang succeeds in stunning fashion, leaving us with a deeply soulful and insightful film. As the narrative unfolds, one will discover two great, pivotal exceptions to the self-analysis undertaken by the many characters present here - N.J.'s magical Japanese dot.com colleague Ota, and his phenomenally precocious 8-year-old son, Yang-Yang; both are intuitive visionaries who've managed to make such instincts work for them in beautiful fashion, and both serve as points of clarity, upon a horizon, which others must move towards.

Structured by ritual, the film begins with a dire wedding and ends with a transcendant funeral, and it feels like a discreet glimpse into something much more expansive - this tightly woven, overlapping narrative combines a humanism and character detail evocative of Satyajit Ray with the kind of tightly choreographed sprawl one would associate with Robert Altman or Jean Renoir; a large number of the scenes that Yang constructs pose intricate questions, leading to a gradual upward modulation in emotional intensity towards the end of the film. Yang - wisely I feel - selected several non-actors for major roles here (other filmmakers or writers mostly); the entire cast has a deep and intuitive grasp of the material, and performances throughout are memorably natural. Yang has a penchant for incorporating incidental scene material as symbolic elements - shooting through windows and against mirrors, and using reflections to undescore emotional points within, and this is breathtaking at several points (watch for the heartbeat in one extraordinary, mostly non-verbal scene). The combination of such a strong sense of visual improvisation within a rather intricate and literary narrative is unusual and quite powerful.

Through it all N.J., the memorable Ota, and Yang-Yang stand as the key characters, with Yang-Yang - who combines a child's directness with an intuitive soulfulness that manages to seem both philosophically ageless and cinematically spontaneous - giving voice to the emotional center of what assorted other characters in this film fumble towards and stumble around (and what Edward Yang, with far more virtuosity, also sought to do): "When I grow up, I want to tell things people don't know, show them stuff they haven't seen."

This great, rich film accomplishes this in glorious fashion.