{"id":2886,"date":"2008-10-13T22:01:38","date_gmt":"2008-10-14T03:01:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=2886"},"modified":"2010-07-27T18:11:54","modified_gmt":"2010-07-27T23:11:54","slug":"vancouver-wrapup-long-play-version","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2008\/10\/13\/vancouver-wrapup-long-play-version\/","title":{"rendered":"Vancouver wrapup (long-play version)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Our final post from this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival. Plenty to talk about, so today you get your money’s worth. Oh, wait….it’s free. So you\u00a0definitel<\/em>y get your money’s worth.<\/p>\n

Kristin here\u2014<\/p>\n

East<\/strong><\/p>\n

If Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf have been the most prestigious Iranian directors, with their features prominent at film festivals, Majid Majidi has been among the most popular. His Children of Heaven<\/em> (1997) and The Color of Paradise<\/em> (1999) both had international success, perhaps largely due to their focus on children and their sentimental, heartwarming stories. The Song of Sparrows<\/em><\/strong> (above, 2008) represents a pleasant development and is the best Majidi film I\u2019ve seen. It\u2019s still sentimental and heartwarming, but there\u2019s also a great deal of humor and some highly imaginative situations that give the film more originality than the director\u2019s earlier work.<\/p>\n

For a start, the film puts children into supporting roles and sticks continuously with Karim, a hard-working father who strives to make extra money to replace his daughter\u2019s hearing aid. Initially Karim works at an ostrich farm, a completely unexpected <\/span>locale that generates considerable humor\u2014until one ostrich escapes and Karim loses his job. His one asset is his motorcycle, which he turns into a cab in nearby Tehran, thereby earning good money. Meanwhile his mischievous son and his friends dream of dredging a covered pond near their village and making money by filling it with goldfish to sell.<\/p>\n

The triumphs and obstacles that Karim and his son meet make up the bulk of the story, though the life of the tiny cluster of houses in which the main family and their neighbors dwell is charmingly depicted.<\/p>\n

The plot of Under the Bombs<\/em><\/strong> involves a Lebanese divorc\u00e9e returning from abroad to search for her sister \"\"<\/a>and son just after the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel. Only one taxi driver is willing to drive her into the southern region, where bombing could re-erupt at any time; he\u2019s from that area himself, and he\u2019s also attracted to Zeina. This simple story, however, is not half as compelling as the environment in which it takes place.<\/p>\n

The film opens abruptly with extreme long shots of bombs going off among residential blocks, and as the two main characters travel through scenes of devastation, there is a vivid sense of the action being staged as the events depicted were actually unfolding. One scene depicts French NATO troops landing with the first relief supplies; another shows coffins being dug out of a mass grave and handed over to grieving family members.<\/p>\n

Director Philippe Aractingi manages to convey something of the sense of outrage that news coverage of the Hurricane Katrina disaster did in the U.S. As Zeina questions shelter inhabitants about her lost relatives, they tell their tales of losing their entire families and of being separated from loved ones. We can\u2019t tell whether these people may be actors or actual people who have suffered the losses they describe, but a cumulative sense of outrage emerges at the Israelis\u2019 willingness to attack residential areas in their fight against terrorists.<\/p>\n

West<\/strong><\/p>\n

Last time I wrote about films from Haiti and Jordan. The festival continued to offer films from countries that have had little or no regular production. El Camino<\/em><\/strong> (2007) hails from Costa Rica, though its director, Ishtar Yasin, is Chilean-Iraqi. The narrative is spare, though not in the enigmatic art-cinema fashion of Eat, for This Is My Body<\/em><\/a>. We are introduced to 12-year-old Saslaya and her younger, mute brother Dario. They live with their grandfather in a shack and scavenge in the local dump. The grandfather sexually abuses Saslaya, and the children set out to find their mother. We watch their journey progress in typical picaresque fashion as they meet people, witness a puppet show put on by a vaguely sinister old man, and wander the streets of the local town. Yet we don\u2019t learn where their mother is, why and when she left. The exposition is minimal, as is the dialogue. Watching El Camino<\/em>, one becomes aware of how much talk most films contain, since the siblings don\u2019t talk to each other or anyone else.<\/p>\n

Finally, nearly 70 minutes into a 91-minute film, the children take a ferry. There the other passengers exchange stories about why they are traveling. Gradually we learn that the early part of the film was set in poverty-stricken Nicaragua, and these people are trying to enter Costa Rica illegally to find work. Saslaya reveals that her mother had left with that goal eight years earlier, after their father died. At last we get some sense of the situation, but the pair\u2019s progress is interrupted once the group goes ashore and are shot at by local authorities. Losing Dario, Saslaya wanders into a town and perhaps an unhappy future\u2014one that may echo what had happened to her mother.<\/p>\n

This simple story is enhanced by poetic, even at times vaguely surrealist images, such as the two men struggling to move a wooden table who keep crossing the children\u2019s path. With so little narrative to follow, we are encouraged to focus on the hardships and occasional pleasures of a culture which seldom figures in world cinema.<\/p>\n

I referred to the two Mexican films that I described in our first Vancouver report as melodramas. Add another \"\"<\/a>to the list with Francisco Franco\u2019s Burn the Bridges<\/em><\/strong>. Two teenagers care for their dying mother in a setting that seems to attract many Latin American filmmakers: a large, decaying mansion. The sister refuses to leave the house, determined to build an isolated world for herself and her brother, to whom she feels an incestuous attraction. He, however, wants nothing more to escape, especially when a tough new kid at school awakens his dawning homosexuality. The action seems a bit overblown at times; I wasn\u2019t always sure whether apparent humor was deliberate or not. But the film and its settings are visually compelling, especially a scene in which the brother and his new friend sneak into a forbidden part of their Catholic school, passing a series of large religious paintings and finally emerging on the roof.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Horten<\/em><\/strong> is a Norwegian film from Bent Hamer, who has emerged as a film festival favorite with his \"\"<\/a>previous Kitchen Stories<\/em> (2003) and Factotum<\/em> (2005). It\u2019s a character study of a fastidious train engineer striving to cope with retirement; the film plays out in an episodic series of encounters that eventually lead to Horten\u2019s acceptance of his new life. The comedy of eccentricity proceeds in leisurely, continually entertaining scenes. Apart from its mainly quiet tone and somewhat slow pace, it presents no art-cinema challenges to the audience. Norway has chosen it as its candidate for this year\u2019s foreign-language Oscar, and Sony Classic Pictures has announced that it will release the film in the U.S. in early 2009.<\/p>\n

Many critics have treated Terence Davies\u2019 Of Time and the City<\/em><\/strong> as if it were a sort of elegiac cinematic salute to his native city of Liverpool. Despite the fact that, following the undeserved commercial failure of his excellent adaptation of The House of Mirth<\/em> (2000), Davies has not made any films, he clearly retains his popularity among aficionados. In fact, however, there is plenty of criticism interspersed with the new film\u2019s lyrical passages. Davies deplores what has become of Liverpool since his childhood there and doesn\u2019t hesitate to assess blame, and he includes harsh comments on religion and on British royalty. He has said<\/a> that he modeled his documentary on those of Humphrey Jennings, and in particular Listen to Britain<\/em> (1942), though Jennings\u2019 films had none of the bitterness on display here. Given, however, that Davies was bullied in his school, grew up gay in a more intolerant era, and has had a stunted filmmaking career, such bitterness is hardly surprising.<\/p>\n

During Davies\u2019s youth, brick row-houses encouraged communities among the working-class families \"\"<\/a>necessary to Liverpool\u2019s industries. Using moving and still footage from the era set to classical music, the director manages to create a poignant sense of the grim conditions these people endured. Modern footage shows these old row-houses in ruins\u2014yet shows the council apartment blocks that replaced them to be in almost equally ramshackle shape. Davies contrasts these with some of the few remaining glorious buildings of Liverpool, mainly columned government spaces through which he cranes his camera. He also filmed candid footage of children, perhaps hinting at the one hope for the future, perhaps displaying those whose youthful memories of Liverpool are now being formed in a far less attractive city.<\/p>\n

Of Time and the City <\/em>marks a welcome comeback, one which I hope will lead to more films by Davies.<\/p>\n

\n

DB here:<\/p>\n

A miscellany<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

The Dragons and Tigers programs continued to bring forth very impressive items. Jia Zhang-ke\u2019s 24 City<\/em><\/strong> offered a meditation on newly industrializing China, in the vein of last year\u2019s Useless<\/em>. Aditya Assarat\u2019s Wonderful Town<\/em><\/strong> was a prototypical \u201cart movie\u201d that handled a doomed love affair with sensitivity and suspense.<\/p>\n

Especially engaging was the new offering from Brillante Mendoza, whose Slingshot<\/em> I admired at Vancouver last year<\/a>. In Serbis<\/a><\/em><\/strong> (\u201cService\u201d), the Family film theatre lives up to its name only with respect to its management. For here, in the sweltering Philippines town of Angeles, the Pineda family screens porn. The movies attract mostly gay men, who service one another in the auditorium, the toilets, and the stairways. While the matriarch Nanay Flor fights a legal battle, she runs the lives of her employees and kinfolk in a milieu teetering on the edge of confusion. The Pinedas live in the theatre, so that the youngest boy must thread his way to school through a maze of transvestite hookers.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mendoza confines the action almost entirely to the movie house. That premise recalls Tsai Ming-liang\u2019s Goodbye Dragon Inn<\/em>, but Serbis <\/em>has none of that film\u2019s nostalgia for classic cinema. Here movie exhibition is an extension of the sex trade, exuberant in its tawdriness, steeped in heat and sweat, prey to randy projectionists and stray goats. Almodovar might make something more elegant out of the situation, but Mendoza\u2019s careening camera yanks us from vignette to vignette, from the complaints of the operatic Nanay Flor to her loafing husband to the lusty projectionist with a boil on his buttock. Crowded with vitality, the film can spare its last moments for a burst of reaction shots that imply a whole new layer of comic-melodramatic turpitude. <\/span><\/p>\n

In other strands of the festival, I enjoyed Nik Sheehan\u2019s lively documentary FlicKeR<\/em><\/strong>, which tells the tale of Brion Gyson, friend to the Beats and especially Burroughs. But the real star is Gyson\u2019s Dream Machine. A turntable that spins a slotted cylinder around a lightbulb, the gadget\u2014reminiscent of the Zootrope and other precinematic toys\u2014proved mesmerizing to artists and countercultural fellow travelers. Marianne Faithful, Iggy Pop, and other worthies attest to the hypnotic power of the Machine, which triggered a drug-free high. Sheehan fills in a patch of important cultural history and may inspire others to tickle their alpha waves with a homemade Dreamer.<\/span><\/p>\n

Almost exactly halfway through Steve McQueen\u2019s Hunger<\/em><\/strong> lies a long dialogue scene in which IRA prisoner Bobby Sands explains to a priest why he has to launch a hunger strike. Over cigarettes the two men debate the cost of pushing tactics to this extreme. Running nearly twenty minutes and relying almost entirely on a protracted profile shot, it\u2019s the first extended conversation in what is largely a film of bits of behavior and glimpses of a harrowing place. <\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a>\"\"<\/a>Hunger<\/span><\/em> starts by showing the morning routine of a guard at Maze Prison. He washes up. Stiff along a wall, he smokes a cigarette. He painstakingly folds up the tinfoil that wraps his lunch. McQueen\u2019s oblique approach to the subject is maintained when we see a new prisoner brought in. Through him we learn of the cell walls whorled with excrement, the unannounced beatings, and the charade of providing tidy clothes for the prisoners to wear on visitors\u2019 day. <\/span><\/p>\n

Comparisons with Bresson\u2019s A Man Escaped<\/em> are inevitable. McQueen is less rigorous and original pictorially, assembling shots based on current image schemas (planimetric framings, selective focus, extreme close-ups, artily off-center compositions, handheld shots for scenes of violence). And he can underscore points a bit too much, as with the repeated shots of the guard\u2019s scabbed knuckles. Still, compared with Schnabel\u2019s conventionally daring Diving Bell and the Butterfly<\/em>, the film is willing to be unusually hard on us. Through his nameless prisoners, McQueen treats both brutality and fortitude matter-of-factly. His experience with gallery-installation video<\/a> seems to have encouraged him to let sheer duration do its job. A patient shot stationed at the end of the corridor waits while a guard, proceeding steadily toward us, clears puddles of urine with a push-broom.<\/span><\/p>\n

Once Sands passes through his revolutionary catechism, the stakes are clear. The rest of the film returns to the dry, nearly dialogue-free atmosphere of the opening as Sands\u2019 strike ravages his body. The objectivity of the opening yields to Sands\u2019 hallucinatory recollections of his childhood as a long-distance runner. Some may see these images, including birds in flight, as clich\u00e9d sympathy-getters, but McQueen\u2019s handling is pretty unsensational. Hunger<\/em>\u2019s quasi-geometrical structure, the sidelong introduction of horrific material, and the almost clinical treatment of Sands\u2019 deterioration invite us to feel, but they also urge us to think about the price of sacrifice to a cause. <\/span><\/p>\n

Genre crossovers<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Some people consider the \u201cfestival movie\u201d a genre in itself–the somber psychological drama with little external action, shot at a slow pace. The stereotype is all too often accurate, but festivals play genre pictures too. Usually these are impure<\/em> genre pictures, more self-consciously artful or ambitious than multiplex crowd-pleasers. Vancouver had its share of such crossover items.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hansel and Gretel<\/span><\/em><\/strong>, a South Korean horror film, played with a classic premise: the happenstance that brings someone from the normal world into a peculiar, isolated household. In this case, a superficial young man lost in a forest stumbles into the House of Happy Children. Here three kids seem to rule their passive, saccharine parents. The situation recalls Joe Dante\u2019s episode of the Twilight Zone<\/em> film, and during the Q & A director Yim Phil-sung acknowledged the influence of that movie, as well as Night of the Hunter<\/em>. Brisk, fast-paced, and boasting remarkable sets\u2014dazzlingly lit, jammed with toys and sweets, and ineradicably sinister\u2014Hansel and Gretel<\/em> could earn cult following in America. Rob Nelson has more here<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Artier, and scarier, was Let the Right One In<\/em><\/strong>, a Swedish film by Tomas Alfredson. Adapting Chekhov\u2019s precept that the gun on the mantle in Act 1 has to go off in Act 3, the film begins with the boy Oskar playing with a knife at his window. Later we\u2019ll learn that his stabbing is a fantasy rehearsal for dealing with the bullies who torment him at school. He meets Eli, a girl who comes out only at night, and their adolescent friendship\/ love affair on the jungle gym of a housing block is intertwined with a series of vampire attacks on a small town. The tautly constructed script develops in gory directions that I found both unexpected and inevitable. The wintry widescreen cinematography is handsome and precise, and may well look better on 35mm than on the somewhat contrasty digital version available for the festival. It will have a limited opening in the U. S. later this month.<\/span><\/p>\n

After School<\/span><\/em><\/strong>, by Uchida Kenji, is an agreeable thriller\u2014somewhat overbusy and implausible in its plotting, but offered with a modesty and assurance that make it worth a watch. The basic situation, of a missing salaryman who may be having an affair, gains suspense by initially restricting our viewpoint to a shabby private detective. Uchida has fun with one of those misleading openings so common nowadays: you think you understand it from the get-go, but when it\u2019s replayed it takes on a new meaning (and explains the title). The final shot, from a surveillance camera trained on an elevator, is a nicely oblique reminder of what seemed at the time a throwaway moment.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Variety<\/span><\/em> characterizes Il Divo<\/em><\/strong>\u2019s genre as \u201c<\/span>Biopic,\u00a0Foreign,\u00a0Political,\u00a0Drama,\u201d which covers all the bases. <\/span>Giulio Andreotti, long-time Italian politico, is the subject of the movie, described by an ironic friend as \u201cone-half of the current Italian film renaissance.\u201d The movie surveys Andreotti\u2019s career after the Red Brigades\u2019 murder of Aldo Moro, which triggered a wave of investigations, tribunals, and assassinations, and it concentrates on years after 1995, when Andreotti was accused of links to the Mafia. The first half-hour feels like a single montage sequence, with murders and huddled meetings whisked past us thanks to rapid cutting, swooping camera movements, and pulsating music. (The eclectic score ranges from Sibelius to Gammelpop<\/a><\/em>.) Imagine the sinuous opening of Magnolia<\/em>, with machine guns.<\/span><\/p>\n

When director Paolo Sorrentino settles down to to presenting straightforward scenes, his florid technique persists (he never met a crane shot he didn\u2019t like), but the action is dominated by Toni Servillo\u2019s lead performance, which is weirdly showoffish in its own way. Servillo\u2019s Andreotti is a rigid, buttoned-up fussbudget, an impassive mole of a man; only his epigrams (\u201cTrees need manure to grow\u201d) suggest a mind inside. The maniacally contained performance is as stylized as a turn by Lon Chaney, and as hard to keep your eyes off. Then again, given the glimpses of Andreotti in this report<\/a> on the Italian response to Il Divo<\/em>, the portrayal seems only a little exaggerated.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course there can be a straightforward genre picture here and there at the festival. The most disappointing instance I saw was The Girl at the Lake<\/em><\/strong>, an Italian whodunit that is only a notch or so above a TV movie. More entertaining was Welcome to the Sticks<\/em><\/strong>, the fish-out-of-water comedy that has become the top-grossing French film of recent years. A postal supervisor is assigned to a remote village where, he\u2019s convinced, the hicks and the freezing cold will make him miserable. Instead he finds warm-hearted people and plenty of fun. The problem is to keep his wife from finding out how much he\u2019s enjoying himself. <\/span><\/p>\n

The item is hammered and planed to the Hollywood template. Plot lines: love affairs, both primary and secondary, complicated by work. Structure: four parts, with a neat epilogue that wraps everything up. Motifs: traffic cops, carillon bells, and food, often treated as running gags. Style: overall, less cutting than we might find in Hollywood (8.7 seconds average shot length), but still huge close-ups for extended passages of dialogue. In all, Wecome to the Sticks<\/em> is sitcom fare that provided, I have to admit, a nice break from a lot of misery on display in the more orthodox festival offerings.<\/span><\/p>\n

Turning Japanese<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In our first communiqu\u00e9<\/a>, I talked about films by Kitano and Wakamatsu. I want to add comments on two more Japanese movies I saw, both of exceptional quality. <\/span><\/p>\n

In All Around Us<\/em><\/strong>, Hashigushi Ryosuke (Like Grains of Sand<\/em>, 1995) tells the story of a fraught marriage. The happy-go-lucky Kanao settles into a job as a courtroom artist for TV news, while Shozo, who works in publishing, is a believer in strict rules for their relationship. Their efforts to have a child end unhappily, and Shozo finds her life unraveling. Domestic troubles, amplified by tumult in Shozo\u2019s extended family, play out while every day Kanao covers soul-destroying criminal cases, many involving assaults on children.<\/span><\/p>\n

The mix of tender sentiments and extreme violence (offscreen, but evoked through chilling testimony) give the film a typically Japanese flavor. Hashigushi filters much of the courtroom horrors through Kanao\u2019s point of view, so that while a defendant berates himself for not killing more people, Kanao watches a mother, and the close-up of her bandaged wrist concentrates all her grief.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The tact of Hashigushi\u2019s handling is on display in a late sequence. As Shozo struggles out of her depression, her family gathers for what apparently will be her grandfather\u2019s final moments. The adults assemble to discuss the situation while children play in a room behind them. Kanao shows them sketches that they take to be of the father in his final moments.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

During their discussion, the adults are distracted by the children shattering an urn in the background.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Here Hashigushi uses staging techniques I\u2019ve discussed in On the History of Film Style<\/em> and Figures Traced in Light<\/em>. Kanao\u2019s display of his sketch favors us; it is centered and frontal. Then, after blocking the children\u2019s play for some time, Hashigushi reveals it\u2014centered and exposed as the adults in the foreground turn to look.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then most of the family leaves. Hashigushi tracks in slowly to the mother\u2019s confession of her misdeeds, and he ends the shot with a close-up of Shoko.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In a film in which the camera moves seldom and without much fanfare, this creates a simple, powerful impact and refocuses the drama on the psychologically fragile Shoko.<\/span><\/p>\n

The film I\u2019ve admired most across the festival is, predictably, Still Walking<\/em><\/strong> by Kore-eda Hirokazu. It relies on a simple situation. Grandpa and grandma celebrate a son\u2019s death anniversary by a visit from the families of their son and daughter. Across a little more than a day, memories resurface and old tensions are replayed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Everything unfolds quietly, and the pace is steady: none of the histrionics, both dramaturgical and stylistic, of the Danish Celebration<\/em> and other psychodramas of dysfunctional families. Still Walking<\/em> is a classic Japanese \u201chome drama\u201d in the Ozu mold. The conflicts will be muffled and nothing is likely to break the placid surface. <\/span><\/p>\n

In a stream of vignettes Kore-eda brings each family member to life, displaying an easy mastery in shifting attention from one to another. Gradually he assembles a group portrait of a domineering father, a good-humored mother, a slightly daffy daughter, a son always compared unfavorably to his elder brother, and in-laws striving to be well-received by the grandparents without alienating their spouses. The spirit of Ozu, particularly Tokyo Story<\/em> and Early Summer<\/em>, hovers over specifics: a dead brother is invoked, the family poses for a picture, and the patriarch, a retired doctor, has a clinic in his home.<\/span><\/p>\n

Kore-eda doesn\u2019t get as much credit as he deserves; he\u2019s often overshadowed by extroverts like Miike Takeshi. That\u2019s partly because his is an art of quietness, shown perhaps in its most extreme form in his first feature, Maborosi<\/em> (1995). At the time I thought it was only one, albeit exquisitely wrought, version of the \u201cAsian minimalism\u201d that sprang up in Taiwan, Japan, China, and even a bit in Hong Kong. I suspect that this trend was largely due to Hou Hsiao-hsien\u2019s masterpieces like Summer with Grandfather<\/em>, Dust in the Wind<\/em>, and City of Sadness<\/em>. A Japanese critic told me that indeed Maborosi<\/em> was criticized as being too Hou-like. <\/span><\/p>\n

Now, after After Life<\/em>, Distance<\/em>, Nobody Knows<\/em>, and Hana<\/em>, Kore-eda has moved to the forefront of Japanese cinema. It seems to me that he maintains the classic shomin-geki<\/em> tradition of showing the quiet joys and sadness of middle-class life while also plumbing the resources of \u201cminimalist\u201d mise-en-scene. <\/span><\/p>\n

In Still Walking<\/em> he works in an engaging, unfussy way. He lets us get to know and like his characters, feeling neither superior nor inferior to them. He builds up his plot more through motifs than dramatic action; a good example is the pop song that the mother loved and that gives the movie its title. The technique, spare but not austere, enforces the relaxed pacing. The film has only around 375 shots in its 111 minutes. While there are plenty of reaction shots and close-ups (the first shot shows women\u2019s hands scraping radishes), some scenes play out in long takes rich in detail.<\/span><\/p>\n

For example, in a three-minute shot early in the film, most of the family is gathered around a table.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The brother-in-law, a used-car salesman, goes out to the garden to play with the children.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Now the family members discuss the dead brother\u2019s widow, who doesn\u2019t come to family gatherings.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When the father declares that a widow with a child is harder to marry off, he is obtusely insulting his son Ryota\u2019s new wife. Kore-eda marks the disruption with a cut to a reverse angle.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This generates another long take, in which Ryo’s wife Yukari deflates the tension by saying she was lucky to get him. The women then rise and clear the foreground, somewhat as the brother-in-law had by going into the garden. As the family talks, we can see him in the distance helping the kids break open a melon.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Ryo talks about his job restoring paintings. It\u2019s clear that the father disapproves of it, wishing that Ryo, like the deceased brother, had taken up medicine. Kore-eda keeps the garden action as a secondary point of interest by having Ryo glance off occasionally.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

But Ryo\u2019s explanation of his job is cut off by the father\u2019s abrupt rise and walk to the doorway, ordering the kids to stay away from one plant.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When the father returns to the table, the nearly two-minute long shot is replaced by a series of singles as Ryo tries to explain his work.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

These shots employ one of Ozu\u2019s staging tactics, settling two characters not directly opposite one another but one space apart. The camera seats us across from each one. As a result, the men can be posed frontally, while now we can watch where their glances go\u2014most often, downward. The new setups let us see that the father and son don\u2019t look at each other much.<\/span><\/p>\n

Instead of moving to these singles right away, as most directors today would, Kore-eda has saved them as a way to articulate the next, more intense phase of the drama. It is arguably a less ostentatious way to raise the tension than the prolonged track inward that Hashigushi uses in All Around Us<\/em>. (Then again, Hashigushi employs that technique at a climactic moment, while this scene we are still rather early in Kore-eda\u2019s film.) The point is the simplicity and delicacy with which Kore-eda deploys traditional elements of craft.<\/span><\/p>\n

It wouldn\u2019t be fair to offer a more intensive analysis of this trim work, since it has yet to be widely seen. In the best of all worlds, it will get an American theatrical release<\/span>.<\/p>\n

In all, another wonderful Vancouver festival. See you there next year?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

FlicKeR<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our final post from this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival. Plenty to talk about, so today you get your money’s worth. Oh, wait….it’s free. So you\u00a0definitely get your money’s worth. Kristin here\u2014 East If Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf have been the most prestigious Iranian directors, with their features prominent at film festivals, Majid Majidi […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,30,103,10,9,19,84,5,59,54,83,99,23,125,126,164,121,24,93,115],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asian-cinema","category-directors-kore-eda","category-directors-mendoza","category-experimental-film","category-festivals","category-festivals-vancouver","category-film-genres","category-film-technique","category-technique-staging","category-narrative-strategies","category-national-cinemas-iran","category-national-cinemas-italy","category-national-cinemas-japan","category-national-cinemas-mexico","category-national-cinemas-middle-east","category-national-cinemas-philippines","category-national-cinemas-south-america","category-national-cinemas-korea","category-national-cinemas-sweden","category-national-cinemas-uk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2886"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9363,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2886\/revisions\/9363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}