Voices from next door
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If you think you need to get away from mainstream cinema, the Asian Wave Film Festival provides a good opportunity
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OUT OF THE ORDINARY Among others, the festival showcases Tsai Ming Liang who makes clinical use of the long take
Instinctively, viewers accustomed to the clean, packaged feel of mainstream English cinema, might find the grittier feel of director's such as Tran Anh Hung difficult to digest. But with little of appeal coming by way of mainstream cinema, this is a good time to persevere with alternative sources of cinematic art. Indeed, with the Asian Wave Film Festival by Collective Chaos, that perseverance pays off grand dividends. After all, there is no better example of the tightrope walk between the vulgarity of realistic violence and the beauty of tender innocence than Anh Hung's Cyclo. Cyclo follows the life of the anonymous driver of a pedal driven taxi who gets drawn into a world of petty crime under the watchful eye of a poet-criminal, who also pushes the protagonist's sister into a life of prostitution. This is not a film for the faint-hearted. Images of seemingly pointless violence and acts of sexual depravity populate the tale, broken only by long, overwhelming sequences that showcase the bleakness of life in the poorest suburbs of Vietnam in frighteningly precise detail. However, buried under the overtly disturbing surface — perhaps somewhat too deeply — is a visual and lyrical masterpiece that swings easily between detachment and poetic passion, thus creating a fascinating sense of tension between the sacred and profane. Surreal images such as that of the protagonist lying serenely on the floor after a drug-induced madness, covered in blue paint and bleeding from a self-inflicted bullet wound juxtapose themselves beautifully with mind-numbingly real images such as that of worms crawling through the sewage covering his face after he dives into a sewer to escape the police.
What makes Cyclo so fascinating however, is also what works for Tsai Ming Liang's The River — a style of storytelling reliant on a visual vocabulary rather than an oral one. But where Cyclo brings to the screen a rapidity of action and a certain enthusiasm for life irrespective of circumstances, The River is more content to thrive on an excruciating lack of direction and an overarching nihilism. In both The River and What Time Is It There, which is also being screened at the festival, Ming Liang proves himself the master of the long take, ruthlessly stretching the moment up the very edge of breaking point, and then pushing the audience over. He is the perfect refuge for those disenchanted with modern life, as he presents a highly distilled, minimalist perspective of loneliness and isolation in modern-day Taiwan in a tapestry of images that delve more into darkness than light.
In stark contrast are Wong Kar Wai's romantic 2046 and Kim Ki Duk's magical 3-Iron. 2046, a loose sequel to Wong Kar Wai's 2000 release In The Mood For Love, follows the affairs of a journalist and science fiction writer Chow Mo Wan, a debonair ladies' man who cannot love any of them because of the one that got away. The subject of his writings is 2046, "where everybody goes to recapture their lost memories because nothing ever changes in 2046." Where Tsai Ming Liang and Tran Anh Hung stick rigidly to a linear storytelling format, Wong Kar Wai shows obvious disdain for it, preferring to meander deliciously through interlaced sequences of thought that, like the giant cavity featured prominently through the film, are not and need not be explained. Instead, he sets his energies to capture the beauty of grief, showcasing broken-hearted women in cherubic grace.
In much the same vein is Kim Ki Duk's 3-Iron, which chronicles the rather ambiguous life of a college graduate that breaks into other people's houses and lives there in their absence. The result is a story in which it is next to impossible to distinguish between the real and the illusion. The story and all its characters are strongly rooted in the familiar, accepted rules of the real world, but it still incorporates much that is simply beyond explanation or logic. What is fascinating to watch, is Kim Ki Duk's ability to make the fantastic and the absurd seem natural and understandable, not with special effects or computer graphics, but with the cinematic version of sleight of hand.
Completing the package is Millenium Mambo, an intoxicating melodrama about a nightclub hostess and Last Life in the Universe, a magic-realist film about the cultural bridges we build and our desire to jump off them one day.
The schedule for the Asian Wave Film Festival is as follows: July 28 — Cyclo at 6.30 p.m.; July 29 — Last life in the Universe at 2 p.m.; Millennium Mambo at 4.15pm What time is it there? at 6.45 p.m.; July 30 — The River at 2 p.m., 2046 at 4.15 p.m. and 3-IRON at 7 p.m. All films are being screened at Nani Cinematheque, Centre for Film and Drama, 5th floor, Sona Towers, Millers Road. Entry for the festival is by membership only. For details call 25203932. or log on to www.collectivechaos.org.
RAKESH MEHAR
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