{"id":35178,"date":"2016-10-18T09:47:36","date_gmt":"2016-10-18T14:47:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=35178"},"modified":"2016-11-22T10:50:16","modified_gmt":"2016-11-22T16:50:16","slug":"dragons-tigers-and-two-programmers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2016\/10\/18\/dragons-tigers-and-two-programmers\/","title":{"rendered":"Dragons, tigers, and two programmers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"occupation-600\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Yellowing<\/strong> (Chan Tze Woon, 2016).<\/em><\/p>\n

DB here:<\/p>\n

It was Asian film that brought me to the Vancouver International Film Festival <\/a>in 2006<\/a>, when Tony Rayns asked me to serve on the Dragons and Tigers awards jury. Ever since, Kristin and I have been returning; Tony made VIFF North America’s prime venue for cutting-edge Asian film. Name a major director from the region, and you’ll find that Tony scouted his or her early work for Vancouver.<\/p>\n

For some years now, Tony\u2019s co-programmer\u00a0has been Chinese cinema expert Shelly Kraicer, who has been no less energetic in seeking out exciting new films. You can survey their track record by scanning our VIFF blog entries<\/a> across the years.<\/p>\n

Out of the many films in this year\u2019s D & T retrospective, here are five that I especially admire.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Genres redux<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"michael-500\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Godspeed.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Across his career, Kore-eda Hirokazu has been a genre pluralist, but in recent years he seems to have settled into the shomin-geki<\/em>, the bittersweet tale of lower-middle-class life. On the heels of Our Little Sister<\/em> comes another family dramedy, After the Storm<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Once a prize-winning novelist, Ryota (the lanky, lantern-jawed Abe Hiroshi) is now a racetrack addict and a cheap detective not averse to shaking down high-school kids. After his father dies, and under the jaundiced eyes of his mother, he makes feeble efforts to reunite with his divorced wife and his baseball-playing son.<\/p>\n

As usual with Kore-eda, everything flows in simple, unforced fashion, with every shot trimly composed and expertly\u00a0timed. The emphasis falls on the actors, particularly as they\u2019re captured in mundane activities. Ryota\u2019s mother and sister are first seen writing thank-you notes to people who came to the funeral; he swills in fast food and throws away money on lottery tickets.<\/p>\n

\"ryota-400\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Ryota is\u00a0one of Kore-eda’s most objectionable protagonists. He uses his admittedly minimal surveillance skills to spy on his wife, and\u00a0he tries to swipe a family scroll to pawn.\u00a0In an American film, this unlikable loser would pass through an arc that makes him caring, sharing, and on the road to rehab. Instead, as in many Japanese films, the unhappy\u00a0character relapses into childhood\u2014here, curling up with his son inside a playground octopus during a typhoon. It’s his effort to mimic a bonding moment with his father, but does it succeed now? Kore-eda isn\u2019t betting on it.<\/p>\n

Altogether less tranquil\u00a0is Godspeed<\/em><\/strong>, from the Taiwanese director Chung Mong-hung. Chung has given us the horror film Sou<\/em>l (2013), the well-received Fourth Portrait<\/em> (2010), and the lively Parking<\/em> (2008), which I reviewed at an earlier VIFF session<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Godspeed<\/em> is a Tarantinoish excursion into the underworld. It alternates violent scenes of betrayal and reprisals with comic interludes involving a drug courier and the taxi driver he\u2019s hired to carry him to meet the bosses. The film is\u00a0made with great panache, but for me what makes it noteworthy is that the driver is played by the great Michael Hui, dean of sour Hong Kong social satire.<\/p>\n

Hui made his name as a television star before switching to films like The Private Eyes<\/em> (1976), Security Unlimited<\/em> (1981), and our favorite,\u00a0Chicken and Duck Talk<\/em> (1988). Godspeed<\/em>\u00a0revives Hui’s\u00a0comic persona, the tight-fisted, corner-cutting bargainer who isn\u2019t as clever as he thinks. As Old Xu, he reminisces about Hong Kong traffic and marital woes while trying to wangle a high fare\u00a0from the phlegmatic, not overbright drug mule. Their misadventures\u2014stumbling into a funeral, being stuffed into a car boot\u2014serve as a counterpoint to the drug war escalating\u00a0around them. No masterpiece, Godspeed<\/em> is a beguiling exercise and a welcome return to\u00a0a legendary and apparently ageless figure of Chinese cinema.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mysterious, and fun<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"yourself-500\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Another year, another stroll through Hong Sangsoo\u2019s garden of forking paths.<\/p>\n

With compositions that are about as banal as they can be, the films don\u2019t aim to dazzle us pictorially. (Nice lighting, though.) The basics are really<\/em> basic: Straight-on angles, fixed long take two-shots, simple come-and-go pans, an occasional and inexplicable zoom. These are his tools.<\/p>\n

Dialogue and performance drive the action, which consists mostly of chance encounters and conversations in caf\u00e9s, bars, restaurants, and bedrooms. His characters are students, artists, and film directors (usually fairly pretentious ones). Romantic hookups emerge, only to dissolve or play themselves out in parallel worlds, the whole presented in a \u201cstacked\u201d arrangement of modular scenes.<\/p>\n

These scenic blocks display an obsessive, almost never mechanical, recourse to split viewpoints, recursive time schemes, mirror inversions, and whimsically varied replays. I\u2019ve argued earlier that these permutations often test\u00a0our faulty memory for exactly what transpired<\/a> in a scene many minutes before, but it should be noted that sometimes, as in the last stretch of\u00a0Oki\u2019s Movie<\/em> (2010)<\/a>, he\u2019ll set the variations side by side.<\/p>\n

Or maybe just side by side in your head. If the auteur theory didn\u2019t exist, it would have to be invented to account for the effect of Yourself and Yours<\/em><\/strong>. In any other movie, when a man recognizes a young woman in a caf\u00e9, and she says he\u2019s mistaken\u00a0her for\u00a0her twin, we might be inclined to take it as a brush-off. In a Hong movie, the scene makes us think\u00a0back through all his\u00a0other plots that have relied on doubling. So maybe this time he\u2019s found a new variation? Has he got an actual pair of twins who will circulate through the scenes, constantly being taken\u00a0for one another?<\/p>\n

Suffice it to say that the young woman (women?), repeatedly encountering three men who are attracted to her (them?), becomes (become?) the pretext for the usual Hong mockery of\u00a0male vanity and insecurity. The lackadaisical painter Youngsoo is worried about his girlfriend Minjung, who drinks more than he\u2019d like. Moreover, his friend reports that she\u2019s been seen with other men. Quickly enough, we spot her sharing drinks\u00a0with an older man and a film director\u2014who discover that they are old classmates. \u201cThis is mysterious,\u201d the director remarks, \u201cand fun.\u201d None of the would-be Romeos notice that the lady in question is reading Kafka\u2019s The Metamorphosis<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Hong always has another card up his sleeve, and Yourself and Yours<\/em><\/strong>, while not as ingenious as his previous entry Right Now, Wrong Then<\/em> (2015), is satisfyingly teasing. It also yields one of the most flagrantly self-indulgent trailers I know<\/a>: faithful to the movie, but frustrating in just the right ways.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Taking it to the streets<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"street-500\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When college students en masse join a movement for social change, their positions tend to be vindicated in the long run. In the United States, students were right to support movements against nuclear proliferation, against racial discrimination, against American involvement in Vietnam, for women\u2019s liberation and LGBT rights, against the invasion of Iraq, and, right here in Wisconsin, against Republican union-busting and voter suppression. The same pattern can be observed around the world, in student protests in Europe, South America, and Asia. Elders deride students as na\u00efve, but more often than not, student activists critical of the status quo get principled politics right.<\/p>\n

Why? I suspect several causes, including the fact that many (not all) students are reading, thinking, and learning while the general populace trudges through the dull compulsion of everyday labor<\/a>. College flings together students from many backgrounds and may open eyes about how other people live. (Right-wingers worry too much about liberal professors indoctrinating students. In my experience, students are more influenced by their peers than by the likes of me.) And of course the flexible scheduling of college days allows motivated students the time to engage in political action.<\/p>\n

Whatever the causes, it\u2019s no surprise that in Hong Kong, the street protests running from September through December of 2014 were launched by young people. In August the mainland\u2019s Communist Party decreed that instead of direct election of the territory\u2019s Chief Executive, candidates would be chosen by a nominating committee comprised of businessmen and politicians sympathetic to Beijing. In effect, this guaranteed a puppet leader of the type all too familiar in the territory. Students responded by organizing actions similar to the Occupy movement in America. With surprising speed, civil disobedience and sit-down occupation spread through downtown areas of Hong Kong Island and the Kowloon Peninsula.<\/p>\n

Hong Kongers were long considered indifferent to politics, only concerned with scrambling to get ahead and make money. But the world had to notice when tens of thousands of students and ordinary men and women built vast encampments in\u00a0the streets in front of chic shops and noodle restaurants.\u00a0Wearing yellow ribbons and hard-hats, and armed with umbrellas to protect them against sun, rain, and tear gas, they were apparently ready for a long stay.<\/p>\n

This epochal event in Hong Kong history is documented in Yellowing<\/em><\/strong>, a new film by Chan Tse Woon. It was made under the auspices of Ying e chi, a filmmaking collective that has been working since the propitious year 1997, when the British turned the territory over to the People\u2019s Republic. Although framed as a diary, it\u2019s basically a cin\u00e9ma v\u00e9rit\u00e9 account of moments and vignettes of the Umbrella Revolution. The voice-over narration is keenly personal, beginning with home-movie footage of Chan\u2019s childhood and youth, interrupted by his memory of\u00a0repeated promises that democracy would soon arrive.<\/p>\n

\"graduation-400\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Loosely organized, Yellowing<\/em> offers no systematic chronology of events \u00e0 la a PBS program. It\u2019s defiantly local, a snapshot album for Hong Kongers who will recognize each phase of the movement. At the start, some gorgeous nighttime cityscapes are shattered by confrontations with police (\u201cPolice, retreat,\u201d the students chant) and conversations with student organizers in their down time. In the two hours that follow, we spend a lot of that time with young people like the ceaselessly beaming\u00a0Rachel, who\u2019s now considering becoming a civil rights lawyer. We see one boy passing out wristbands reading, They can\u2019t kill us all.<\/em><\/p>\n

Students set up\u00a0tents, squat in pounding rain, organize English classes, and run supply chains across the vast areas of occupation. There are clashes with police and civilians. (\u201cYour flesh and blood belongs to your family,\u201d a man charges.) Chan\u2019s camera captures, helter-skelter, assaults from\u00a0cops and street gangs. There are camera duels, with police filming demonstrators while demonstrators film police. Chan\u2019s voice-over says that he thought his camera would protect him, but he still gets punched in the face. The occupiers practice tactical evasion and passive resistance, but there\u2019s no effort to heroicize them. Many are crying as police\u00a0lead them away.<\/p>\n

Despite the almost casual presentation, you realize how much these kids are risking. Many are poor, some are trying to hang onto a job, and nearly all realize that this will change their lives. \u201cEven if we lose this fight, we\u2019ll lose together.\u201d As for the angry citizens wearing blue ribbons declaring support for authorities, the students are sympathetic: \u201cDon\u2019t you think they need democracy too?\u201d<\/p>\n

The film circles back to the opening, with Daddy-cam shots of children. We hear Rachel writing in reply to a professor who had urged the students to give way for the sake of \u201csecurity,\u201d and to stop being tools of \u201cforeign subversion.\u201d The film lingers on her cheerful, polite suggestion that Mainland domination has replaced British colonialism, and that the children of the future deserve better.<\/p>\n

\"rachel-400\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Most of our politicians and all of our plutocrats will never know the sort of courage that these young people displayed with modest, good-humored tenacity. Unarmed\u2014unlike the Y\u2019all Queda fraidycats who occupied our Oregon wildlife refuge\u2014these unprepossessing kids stood a very good chance of being brutalized\u00a0by a government not known for recognizing the niceties of due process. You feel proud of\u00a0the young people of Hong Kong while watching this heartbreaking, hopeful film. As often happens, the students were both righteous and right.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Not hope, fear<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"attak-2-500\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Ying e chi has often worked with theatres to show independent films, but Yellowing<\/em> has been denied a theatrical release. Instead, Variety<\/em> reports<\/a>, producer Vincent Chui has arranged for guerrilla screenings. Five ticketed shows were held at the Hong Kong Film Archive, in order to qualify for this year\u2019s Hong Kong Film Awards.<\/p>\n

The resistance to Yellowing<\/em> doubtless owes a lot to the controversy surrounding another film, Ten Years<\/em><\/strong> (2015). It won astonishing success in local theatres.\u00a0According to Maggie Lee in\u00a0<\/a>Variety<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0it cost only US$65,000 but earned nearly $800,000 before Beijing realized how subversive it was and blasted it as a \u201cthought virus.\u201d Ten Years<\/em> was nominated for a Hong Kong Film Award, which made the PRC cancel television coverage of the ceremony. When the film won the Best Picture prize, shock waves went through the film community, and it was denounced by producers and executives. It was soon cast out of theatres, but screenings continued in community centers, churches, and outdoor venues. It\u2019s slated for a DVD release<\/a>\u00a0soon.<\/p>\n

Ten Years<\/em> consists of five shorts linked by the premise of local life in 2025. In its dystopian portrayal of Mainland domination of Hong Kong, it\u2019s a fairly direct outgrowth of the Umbrella Revolution. But if Yellowing<\/em> documents the movement\u2019s hope, this film exposes, as many commentators have noted, fear.<\/p>\n

One episode, \u201cExtras,\u201d dramatizes behind-the-scenes scenes political machinations as a sort of noir comedy. Two hapless thugs are hired to stage an assassination attempt that will arouse public support for a new security law. While the men rehearse their gun choreography, the puppeteers debate whether killing or wounding the targets would play better in the media.<\/p>\n

Other episodes are more concerned with the cultural impact of Beijing\u2019s dominance of local life. \u201cSeason of the End\u201d presents scientists searching rubble for signs of now-vanished Hong Kong life, shot in ominously clinical detail. \u201cDialect\u201d presumes that Mandarin is becoming the official language of the territory, and we see a taxi driver struggling to cast off his Cantonese. \u201cLocal Egg\u201d also centers on language. Here a shopkeeper is forbidden to use the word \u201clocal\u201d because it suggests those political factions struggling to keep Hong Kong distinct, or maybe pushing it to become independent. In an echo of the Cultural Revolution, this episode shows schoolkids in uniform arriving with iPads to check shops\u2019 compliance with the list of forbidden words and retail items.<\/p>\n

\"young-guards-400\"<\/p>\n

The most emotionally wrenching episode, \u201cSelf-Immolator,\u201d is a pseudo-documentary. Startling scorch-marks on the sidewalk are the traces of someone who burned to death in protest of government oppression. Through talking heads, a collage of demonstration footage, and some investigation, the film traces how a young man\u2019s hunger strike led to the mysterious self-immolation. Several candidates for the self-sacrifice are canvassed before, in a break with the documentary frame, the protest suicide is shown. In the conclusion, an umbrella is seen aflame, perhaps forming a requiem for the 2014 protests.<\/p>\n

Ten Years<\/em> is a good example of how a film can have social importance because of the moment at which it emerges. Along with Yellowing<\/em>, it will be a lasting memorial to the struggles of Hong Kong people to introduce democracy to China.<\/p>\n

\n

Thanks to Tony and Shelly for all their work in setting up these screenings. In addition, Kristin and I are grateful to Alan Franey, PoChu AuYeung, and Jennie Lee Craig and their colleagues for making our VIFF visit so enjoyable and enlightening. Special thanks to Tallulah for cheerfulness and Lillooet for the waffles<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Thanks to our regular\u00a0attendance at VIFF, we\u2019ve discussed many of Hong Sangsoo\u2019s films; see the director category<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The development of the Umbrella Revolution is traced in this long New York Times story<\/a>. Last August, accused\u00a0student leaders got surprisingly light sentences<\/a>.\u00a0Some of the “localists” and Occupiers won places in the Legco elections and are expected to make waves<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"tony-400\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"shelly-386h\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Tony Rayns and Shelly Kraicer.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yellowing (Chan Tze Woon, 2016). DB here: It was Asian film that brought me to the Vancouver International Film Festival in 2006, when Tony Rayns asked me to serve on the Dragons and Tigers awards jury. Ever since, Kristin and I have been returning; Tony made VIFF North America’s prime venue for cutting-edge Asian film. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[181,30,19,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-directors-hong-sangsoo","category-directors-kore-eda","category-festivals-vancouver","category-national-cinemas-hong-kong"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35178","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=35178"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35446,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35178\/revisions\/35446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}