BUSAN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024 KNOWING THE SCORE

Busan International Film Festival in South Korea is now almost 30 years old and now, past the hump of covid, it is back in action attracting filmmakers and film community largely from Asia but also internationally. Under new management and trying now to shed some of the politics and implosions that have hampered its development, BIFF continues to provide one hub for art house cinema. The new management under Chairman Park Kwangsu, one of the filmmakers of the Korean new wave in the 1980s/90s understands this point and promises some big changes for the next edition. We shall see.

In the meantime, some brief thoughts about some of the films on show by order of star ranking.

*****ABEL (Elzat Eskendir, Kazahkstan) - powerful, Rumanian inflected mise en scene (Elzat's favourite directors are Rumanian Christoph Mungiu, and Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni) of corruption and its devastating effect on ordinary herders (sheep, horses) during the dismantling of collectivization in 1993 soon after the fall of the Soviet Union.  Yerlan Toleutay is the old herder who is humiliated by greedy ex-party apparatchiks and turns in a masterful performance. He is also one of the scriptwriters. ABEL announces a new talent from an area where we have seen dribs and drabs of intriguing signs of emerging cinematic life. This film will not do it single handedly but has done a splendid job of announcing that talent in Central Asia is growing and will not be ignored.

****CLOUD (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan) - another poignant commentary on contemporary life by one of Japan's contemporary masters. A young man is ruthless in the on-line re-selling business (he buys cheap in person and sells for high profit on-line) but his sins eventually catch up on him as the sellers he has bought cheaply from, discover his identity and pursue him with the intention of killing him. Amidst all of this is the shifting loyalty (not love, one assumes) of his young girl friend. Kurosawa likes to insert episodes towards the end of his films that overturn expectations - that is a narrative driven by not so much a plot twist as an unexpected trope. It doesn't always work but in CLOUD he presents a magnificent "surprise" in the form of a very extended gun fight scene between the protagonist and his assistant, and the disgruntled seller who are after him. Together with the switched loyalties of one of his previous re-seller "mentors" and his girlfriend, the film is reminiscent of a Hollywood noir, a kind of review of the B-movie of the 1940s/50s when love was doomed by betrayal. Some of the framing and expression of the actors take on a kind of Walshian gravity, of gestures with consequence as in movies like WHITE HEAT. 

* DON'T CRY BUTTERFLY (Dương Diệu Linh, Vietnam) - there was some noise about South East Asian film really moving into its own this year and a number of selections from Vietnam, Indonesia and a closing film from Singapore (with French and Japanese actors) confirmed this phenomenon - at least in the numbers game. On the creative front, not so convincing. Exhibit A is this work from Vietnam about a wife who uses voodoo to try and get her philandering husband to love her again. Apart from the absurdity of the plot (why would the woman do that? Just be done with the husband and find yourself!), the film is badly directed by which I mean the filmmaker cannot decide or is too incompetent to navigate the contrasting modes of the film - from a badly shot, numbingly dull social realist kitchensink drama, to the visually pretty (in a biscuit tin way) visuals without meaning. This movie is all surface, and when it delves into family secrets etc it's done with such a plodding rhythm that you really ask yourself: who cares? Unfortunately this film won recognition in Venice Critics Week, was shown in Toronto, and heralded in Busan as part of the South East Asian film wave. If this is a shining example of the new South East Asian cinema then it is doomed.

DOCUMENTING - TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024

The Toronto International Film Festival 2024 edition had all the bells and whistles one would expect from North America’s largest and most important celebration of film. With world premieres (this year the festival opened with David Gordon Green’s family drama NUTCRACKERS) and North American premiers the festival is now an established venue for Oscar campaigns.

But it is away from all the glitz and glamor and obsession with awards and red carpets that one finds the real languages of cinema. This year in Toronto those tongues were found in the documentary sections, films that revive some hope for the future of cinema.

First, it has to be admitted that the future of cinema is a long game - in the literal sense of the term. The two exceptional documentaries this year were Wang Bing’s YOUTH (three parts including Spring, Hard Times, and Home Coming with a combined running time of about 10 hours) and EXERGUE - DOCUMENTA 14 (868 minutes structured into 14 chapters and shown in three parts of around four to five hours each in Toronto). The works were included in Berlinale 2024 but these screenings marked their North American premiere.

Wang Bing is an epic filmmaker of the intimate. From his debut nine hour opus WEST OF THE TRACKS some 20 years ago, he has developed into an astute and unassuming observer of human behavior in relation to surroundings. In YOUTH the surroundings are the textile industrial centers of Anhui province. It is very much of an armpit experience - sweaty, crowded, messy, discarded clothes and belongings all over the place. Crumbling edifices house both factories crowded with sewing machines, and workers’ dormitories where the young workers navigate an existence between instant noodles, total concentration on cell phones (and chargers), and trying to keep warm in what seem to be very well used comforters. If you want to know why circa 2016, Chinese goods were cheap, the deprivations of the workers and their environment provides at least a partial answer.

This is not to say that the workers are miserable. All aged around 16 to 24, they seem positively chirpy most of the time - maybe it’s the camaraderie, and being away from their equally crowded family abodes and situations that give them energy. It’s like leaving home for the first time and discovering a certain freedom despite the relentless drive for the machinists to make their quota of for example, sewing purple bow ties onto kids’ clothes. How long each worker’s long and hard work can last is anybody’s guess but it surely cannot be more than a few years.

But it’s not the living and working conditions that are central to YOUTH. One can always make observations from any point of view about the environment and still reach no real useful deduction. The core of YOUTH it seems to me is the future prospects for this generation, the first really industrialized youth of China. That there do not appear to be any prospects or discussions of ambition, goals and the future is as distressing as it is apparent. Even in HOMECOMING the third part of the trilogy, going home at Lunar New Year is to be looked forward to but it’s a short term goal whose main purpose is to eat and throw firecrackers around bleak fields. And while a wedding is conducted with the requisite ceremony, it seems almost like a dream in passing because soon after it’s back to work (but isn’t this the same around the world?) The fundamental question that Wang Bing seems to ask (and it has to be an assumption because nowhere does the filmmaker make any direct comment) is what does the future hold for this generation? 

Given that these films were made in the mid-2010s, enough time has passed now to see what has happened to all these people. Their youth may have passed and I hope Wang Bing will go back to find what has been lost. (Though he does not seem to have a habit of going back to the sites of his original films).

Thoughts about the future also underlie EXERGUE, a 14 and a half magnum opus which follows Adam Szymczyk the appointed artistic director for Documenta 14 (2017) and his team of curators as they seek out artists (though their minds seem to be quite well made up by the time we join them in early 2016), battle with the German bureaucracy which funds just over half of hit major art show (to the tune of around EUR 37 million), and grapple with holding the event (100 days exhibitions) in both Kassel (where the event was born in 1955) and Athens - a city chosen by Syzmczyk to pair with Kassel. 

Obviously (though not necessarily to everyone in the film), holding Documenta in a second city would require if not double the costs then a considerable increase in the current budget. Money looms as a factor throughout the documentary but one supposes due to confidentiality such budget meetings between the artistic director and his institutional and political bosses are noticeably absent.

Instead,  Dimitris Athridis, operating as a one man film crew and creative, focuses on the selection and preparation Szymczyk faces with his curatorial team that reflects some of the pressures on them from the bosses above. Athridis gets over the inability to film confidential closed door meetings by focusing much on Szymczyk who was the original inspiration for this film voyage. He is an interesting study, not only in the role of curator as protagonist - instead of artist as protagonist with curator as enabler - but also in his own self-regard and image. He looks - in partly gaunt, thin stature - like a mid-career David Bowie and has the body movements to reinforce it. When dancing in his staff parties, he flops his hair against its natural drape as he ripples fluidly on his own. When singing in band (where he also seems to play piano) he reminds not only of Bowie but also of the late Ian Curtis of Joy Division. Indeed both Bowie and Curtis point to a certain narcissism and self-image that Szymczyk sometimes evokes.

While much of the film follows quite compellingly the ins and outs of choosing works, handling artists, looking at venues, negotiating with the Athens museum, it is only in the last chapter that we see some of the pressures that Szymczyk has probably been dealing with throughout the curation tenure. He talks on the phone to someone (his wife? We only see her briefly) about how he has not been around, that their relationship is under stress, and how he is at a breaking point. This sequence is filmed mainly with the camera staring at the ground, Szymczyk's feet, or Szymczyk in the corner or edge of the frame as if the camera is too embarrassed to follow this intimate exchange or is following its subject surreptitiously afraid of getting caught. I think this sequence captures both the strengths and weaknesses of the film - we are looking a kind of notes of a curatorial process which is captured well because this is the work of the film and the exhibition, but less forceful when it comes to personal matters. Szymczyk dancing in the dark is an intimate moment but it hides as much as it reveals.

Which leads us to a philosophical point about the documentary as it is practised today. The documentary as exposition for the edification of man - the Grierson policy - is no longer applicable. Reality TV, portable cameras, digital technology, everyone cameras mixed with surveillance cameras, have all changed the nature of the form and seemingly expanded the content. EXERGUE is like a kite caught in the swirl of these forms. It is neither well laid out exposition like THE NEW RIJKSMUSEUM (2014) which is a biting example of internal conflict and external politics in the building of the iconic and venerable museum in Amsterdam, nor is it completely observational like Fred Wiseman's portrait of The National Gallery in London, or for that matter a silent companion to the young workers in Wang Bing's YOUTH. EXERGUE is somewhere in between, a navigation of both external reality and internal self regard. From this point of view it is one of the few dialectical works of the 21st century and is no less for it.

Deadpool and Wolverine - a crew of thousands

X marks the spot

The latest in the MCU saga, this movie about intercourse between parallel timelines with a procession of masked and costumed super heroes of American comic book lore is not so much a narrative as an echo chamber. 

Which is to say that it is an entity in dialogue with itself. It is chock full of in-jokes such as the film studio Fox being sold to Disney which has revived the saga (aka franchise). There are many other references lost on me because I am not a participant in the echo chamber - and probably in the movie going minority as this film is one of the top grossers of all time with box office success around the globe. A lot of folks like Deadpool and a lot of folks like Wolverine so on the basis that not all of them are the same, there is box office bonanza in combining the two.

The film however is not so much a movie as a report on the state of the super hero world circa now. How they feel, what they are up to, what happened to some of the others. People care about that sort of thing even if, or perhaps because it is, a fantasy which has little relationship to contemporary reality. That is one excuse to make this film which appears to have been written by four people one of whom is the film's star (there may have been more writers, given the development process in Hollywood, and especially if one studio is being absorbed into another which always leads to re-thinks, fall-outs etc). The net effect of all of this is a flat, uninspired, inward looking "narrative" which attempts coherence while indulging action effects. 

I have nothing against this and I am sure one can make psychoanalytical probes into the tests of muscularity, manliness, prowess without the usual macho posturing that underpin the film. And the mirroring of say Deadpool in a parade of timeline Deadpools (sorry you'd have to watch the film to understand this description) attempts a spaltung worthy of Freud. But all this is bye-the-bye because Deadpool and Wolverine at its core seems to lack some kind of organising principle beyond the need to demonstrate Dolby's rendition of its sound mix (which is quite good), and the insistence that thousands of eyes and hands are needed to create elaborate effects that blink past in a few seconds.

But maybe that is cinema - the product of a huge effort by a crew (not cast) of thousands in the service of a thought. Now that is a luxury product.

Cannes Takeaways 2024

 There's an article in showbiz trade magazine Variety that proposes the five main takeaways so far from Cannes. You can read it here.

https://variety.com/2024/film/news/cannes-takeaways-emilia-perez-apprentice-trump-1236011980/#recipient_hashed=fc18a256c1afca5010e9ab548484a787fb582c16df102cb779e99d5b01358617&recipient_salt=bd43e8c3a47ee8cabdef20bee5bb236764c5842a2f6ceb7f6650c68c093efa19&utm_medium=email&utm_source=exacttarget&utm_campaign=filmnews&utm_content=523889_05-21-2024&utm_term=303574

The title of each takeaway says it all, more or less:

Hollywood Movies Fail to Ignite

The main points: George Miller returned with “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” ... it didn’t electrify the Palais like “Mad Max: Fury Road” did when it debuted nine years ago. Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Kinds of Kindness” saw the auteur returning to his edgier early style, with diminishing returns. At nearly three hours, the anthology film was divisive: Some hailed its scabrous take on human nature as brilliant, and others derided it as bloated.

“Emilia Pérez” Hits All the Right Notes

"...a Spanish-language musical drama about a Mexican cartel leader who wants to undergo gender-affirming surgery — directed by gritty French filmmaker Jacques Audiard, who has no experience working in the song-and-dance genre..." Since the film is a novelty and Audiard is French and a veteran of the Croisette, it could actually win.

Politics Takes a Back Seat

Unlike some other festivals (notably Berlinale February 2024) there was very little reference - either for or against - the situation in Gaza. And Ukraine? Invisible.

#MeToo Hits Cannes

Pre-Cannes there were warnings of revelations about more celebrities' transgressions. But it's not happening. Shia LeBoeuf and James Franco who have both been accused of sexual misconduct had films doing business in the Market.

The Art of the Donald

In the absence of any real fireworks, the legal acrimony surrounding this film and the conflicts between financier, and the "garbage" appellation from its subject (who hasn't seen the film) has provided at least some life in a festival that usually sags in the second half. The brouhaha only proves the old adage that there is no bad publicity, just publicity and in an election year it takes on an over-sized dimension.

Those are the "takeaways" as seen from a trade magazine writer. But the actual takeaways can be summed up in a couple of bullets:

Bring your own money - we have seen major filmmaker/talents specifically Francis Coppola with "Megalopolis" and Kevin Costner with "Horizon: An American Saga" (two parts with a couple more on the way) financing their own films whether because they have been turned down by studios, or the studio demands are too restrictive, or in their older age these filmmakers have just had enough of being given notes by executives who are young enough to be their grand kids and therefore come from a completely different concept and experience of film. You have to admire Coppola and Costner who are prepared to put their money where their mouths are. This is one of the biggest takeaways of this year's Cannes festival.

Standing Ovations - each report on a film in the official competition includes a reference to the duration of the standing ovation at the end of each film. The duration is taken as a sign of quality whereas it is really only an indicator of relief. 

How so? Most of the audience have struggled to get to Cannes ( transport, accommodation, meals, accreditation all cost) and to get tickets to screenings which is like an on-line endurance test and exercise in frustration. Given that marathon, you are going to be enthusiastic about every film you see. And the longer standing ovation, the more value you seem to have squeezed out of some movie that may not see light of day in your home town. The big takeaway here is: "never mind the quality, feel the width."

There's a great piece on standing ovations in the Guardian from 2023:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/may/24/cannes-film-festival-standing-ovations

 

 THE BUBBLE (Barbie, Expats)

I watched about two-thirds of the first episode of the series EXPATS (dir Lulu Wang) before turning it off mainly out of indifference. The basic premise - based on viewing about 40 minutes of it - is the personal frictions, cheating marriages, and generally luxury living of a group of expatriates in Hong Kong. It's very much a "first world problem" event, and almost aggressively so. While they are a mix of white and non-white bourgeois, none of their problems seem unusual or exceptional to merit our attention to their dramas whatever they may be. Nicole Kidman struggles on like a real trouper in this dud of a series. I am not even a big fan of hers but there were times even in the space of 40 minutes that I felt sorry for her as an actress, not a character. One noticeable point is how unappealing the women are in this piece. Knowing that it is directed by a woman, I can only marvel (but won't waste time doing so) at the Freudian reasons an expatriate Chinese woman filmmaker living in American should adopt this approach. In particular, Kidman's mother-in-law, a Chinese who lives now in America, is a nasty and snobby piece of work - one feels that the director must have met many such types to exact such revenge through such a stereotype (mothers-in-law for example are always negatively portrayed in Hong Kong melodramas of the 1950s). And the relationship between Kidman and her neighbor, an Indian expat goes up and down with such abruptness that you wonder if they are both bi-polar. And even in the first 40 minutes you know the episode is running into trouble when Kidman and her neighbor end up dancing to Blondie's "Heart of Glass" in a noodle shop. OK the song's title may be a reference to the relationships being recounted but when a filmmaker extends the scene to some meaningless dance moves and poor Kidman struggles to adapt her voice to the key of the song in order to screech out a few singalong lines, we know we are facing a paucity of imagination, energy and sense of direction. But then that is life in the bubble is it not?

Something similar can be said for BARBIE which like EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE has bizarrely received acclaim for its pointlessness and inanity. If the Barbie doll did not exist then this film would not, but imagining that someone would make a film about a doll in her world, would this be an interesting film? I doubt it. The extra-diegetic aspect of Barbie (she is a doll in the real world bought by millions of people) is the only thing that keeps this film alive. Once again it is a world with first world problems whether it's Ken or Barbie. Fussing with looks, worried about objects of desire, not having to handle the real world - these would be first world problems that are generally meaningless to the rest of the world IF the Barbie doll did not exist.

The tragedy is that we elevate mediocrity to masterful or at the very least, interesting. That shows a definite perversion of values or maybe an elimination of values so that whatever happens, happens. In that, these two films point a way to the future which I hope will not happen.

Sam Now (Reed Harkness, ITVS, 2023)

 I missed the initial broadcast of this film in May 2023 but glad it is now making the rounds. 

A full account of the film is here on the ITVS website: https://itvs.org/films/sam-now/

Shot over 25 years, this is a voyage of partial discovery by a Portland-based filmmaker Reed Harkness, for his step-mother Jois through his step-brother, Sam, and the intertwining relationships between families that were, that are, and that will be. 

The audience was very receptive to this story of what seems to be a normal family (for example Reed Harkness seems to get on well with his step brothers, and just about everyone else). But the film turns from a road movie looking for Jois after her sudden disappearance (it was voluntary so there is no criminality here), to a search for an explanation of why she left (she's alive and well and living with another man in Oregon). The discovery of reasons, characters and narrative seems deceptively "simple" but begs more questions than answers. Jois was a half Caucasian half Japanese born in Chitose (rural community in Japan) who was adopted by a Caucasian family who say they raised her like their other natural children. Jois' version is different and one of strict compliance against which she rebelled, much to the enduring discontent of the foster parents - the mother for example says she does not regard her as a daughter any longer. The only evident foster family trait that seems to have rubbed off on Jois is to keep her secrets to herself.

Jois herself is an interesting study. Later in life she thought of looking for her birth mother and learned that sometime after her adoption, her mother married and moved to the US. However she consciously did not make an effort to connect, a dose of reality in a world where TV and movies assume that adoptees want to find and connect with their birth parents. 

Much of Jois' story is left uncovered - probably a mixture of Jois's own reticence, and the filmmaker's main focus on Sam's search. Sam shows a vacillating attitude towards his mother. He sometimes needs her and is angry at her absence. This lack of maternal love has led to some character flaws (such as the treatment of girl friends) that he has tried to overcome. Towards the end of the film we see that he (is partnered with an Asian girlfriend which reminds us that he is a quarter Japanese - something that is never dealt with in the film.

So the whole story is not without interest though it sometimes walks the fine line between family home movie history, and the universal essences of a narrative that strangers would find worth following. It's worth noting that the skilful editing has generally avoided this risk.

Apart from the story though, what is very interesting is that this is a film where the filmmaker himself has a direct and personal stake. And that stake is expressed more through the use of cinema than a simple documentary narrative. So I take it that the film reflects some of the filmmaker's thoughts on cinema or its impact on him. As a teenager growing up in Palo Alto in the 1980s, Harkness (in a Q&A) said he frequented his local video store and watched as much (US) indie cinema as he could. For him it was the era of Jim Jarmusch, Harmony Korine et al. These are not necessarily reflective films but certainly reflections of growing up, an enduring theme in the first few films of many indie filmmakers around the world but in the case of US indies of the 1980s, often infused with a sense of irony, of the question: "how did I end up here?"

Harkness was making super 8 and 16 mm films since his teenage years when he found an old super 8 camera in his dad's garage. It seems there was about 24 hours worth of super 8 film alone, and probably hours more of VHS footage. He is known in the Pacific Northwest for making the teenage (and beyond) action type home movies starring his step brother Sam as "The Blue Panther." These were shown in a Super 8 club in Seattle in the 1980s/90s (as I understand it). A number of "The Blue Panther" films - especially those in color - were shot on 16mm. On the basis of the clips included in the documentary the films veer between amateurish to inventive spoofs (one advantage: his half-brother Sam was good at falling down and around so could do some kind of stunts).

All this footage gives the film a compelling texture - from partly grainy black and white super 8 to glitchy VHS, and a little smoother 16 mm as well as current day polished digital footage. It's practically a history of film/video formats from the late 20th century to now. 

That at first would seem peripheral to the main story of the family but like all characteristics of a contemporary medium (film, video in our time/ novels, paintings in previous centuries), memories are formed by the format in which we choose to preserve them. So the memories presented by Harkness are not only original to his own lived experience but also a currency in which to trade with others. And like many first feature films, his story ends on a beach by the water. The most famous film to present this motif is Truffaut's "400 Blows" where a young Jean-Pierre Leaud stares out at the sea facing an uncertain future, a roiling sea that could presage his life to come. And so it is with "Sam Now" that ends with Harkness and Sam playing around on the beach but seemingly without real direction, and a future whose uncertainty is masked by the clear blue sky above.

ENTER THE CLONES OF BRUCE

Enter the Clones of Bruce (director David Gregory, 2023) is a fascinating documentary about the Bruce Lee clones that erupted in a spate of films after the real Bruce Lee died in Hong Kong in 1973. 

Various martial artists not only from Chinese speaking countries, but also from Korea and Japan were positioned as the new Bruce Lee in what seemed to be an unending stream of low budget kung fu films. It was in effect, a market driven sub-genre in a supply-side film economy because in his time, the real Bruce Lee only made four and a half kung fu films which was obviously insufficient for the huge demand created during his action career and especially after. It was also an exercise in homonyms - Bruce Li, Bruce Le, Bruce Lei for example.

 

Many smaller companies with Bruce Lee clones rushed to fill in the gap. For a while, the studio that discovered Bruce Lee – Golden Harvest – held off on releasing a posthumous Bruce Lee movie but eventually following the tidal wave of clone films, Golden Harvest finally put together and released THE GAME OF DEATH which contains the last sequences that Bruce Lee directed and starred in (the famous ascending fights in the pagoda - which was in Korea - that climaxes in the tournament with the 7 foot two inch tall Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. For linking sequences, Golden Harvest used doubles, matte process images etc. One could debate the wisdom and quality of all that but it’s true that some parts of the film are as cheesy as some of the clone movies. One wonders what the film would look like with today's technology.

 

What we learn from the documentary is somewhat tragic, if not sad. By becoming Bruce Lee clones, these actors sacrificed their own careers as themselves – many of them were good martial artists, and some of them had acting ability in their own right. But the need to survive in an exploitation film industry, and the need in some cases to feed families, led them to make a career being in essence someone else. 

 

A couple of them survived but more often than not, many of them disappeared. So it’s a great credit to this documentary that the Bruce Lee clones are given their due, and they turn out to be a sympathetic group. Of course the Bruce Lee clone tide ebbed once Hong Kong’s Jackie Chan appeared with a more action comedy kung fu style, and China's Jet Li with his wushu style.

Twenty Years Later

"These hands speak"

 

The recent enthusiasm for EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE with its Asian inspirations (and references to Hong Kong cinema of the past) reminds me of the similar widespread embrace of films that normally don’t make it to the mainstream, that greeted CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON which was released in 2000 after a runaway success at the Cannes Film Festival and then Oscars.

Although I admire the work of the directors and the impact of the two films, I have less enthusiasm for either of them. The motivation of each film seems weak in the context of their pedigrees and in relation to their varied sources – King Hu, Li Hanxiang, Chau Sing-chi, Hung Kam-bo et al. The insertion of a character driven melodrama into the Matrix-style cyclonic action of CTHD veers on the mechanical unlike say a Chor Yuen film like THE SENTIMENTAL SWORDSMAN where the point of the character is to carry the action not emotion. Similarly with EEAAO, which is almost a text book demonstration of the “montage of distractions,” showy without point, and more important lacking the surprising unconscious of  incongruous and abrupt changes in personality in a movie like Stephen Chow's KING OF COMEDY !999). Simply put, EEAAO seems to me the product of deliberate eccentricity, not a true mise-en-scene of creative freedom.

 

But what is impressive throughout all of these two films, no matter how one sees them, is the presence of Michelle Yeoh. The measure of time is seen in the grace of her movements, the inscription of her face. It is in effect, timeless in its expression and gravity. Michelle Yeoh confirms that she is an actress for the cinema, she defies time as much as she defies gravity.

Already in CTHD she is the aging veteran, living in the Jianghu world that is not too different from the Western – there is always someone ready to defeat you for your position as top dog. The question is not if, and not even when, but HOW. Zhang Ziyi’s (CG-ized) skill in the film as she sprints over rooftops is the signifier of a new world where innovation will displace old school practices. I think this is a question that Wong Kar-wai grapples with in the underrated THE GRANDMASTER where one could contemplate and speculate what that film would have been like with Michelle Yeoh instead of Zhang Ziyi.   

 

PARANOIAC PSYCHO

Hammer studios in the UK are best known for their horror films especially with directors like Terence Fisher and stars like Peter Cushing. 

PARANOIAC made in 1963 by cinematographer Freddie Francis is shot in black and white and features an upcoming actor Oliver Reed. 

Reed's brother died in his teens but a villager who is also the son of the village lawyer and therefore has access to a range of secrets and wills - has found a lookalike of the brother whom he uses to claim an inheritance. 

But the plan runs up against Oliver Reed (the surviving brother and therefore legal heir), his older aunt (who has a thing about Reed), and the sister who thinks she is going mad when she first sees the lookalike. Reed himself is mad and careens his Jag around the family mansion's well manicured driveway. 

The movie's horror mechanism is above average though not exceptional. It's more interesting for its reflection of the impact of Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO which had been recently released by the time of PARANOIAC's production (the title alone should give some clue to its debt to Hitchcock's ground breaking movie). 

The essential elements are there - the dead brother preserved (badly) in the basement as a reference to the mother in PSYCHO; a double undercurrent of incest - the aunt lusts after her nephew, the lookalike brother falls in love with the sister; and most notably, Reed as a beefy psychopathic version of Anthony Perkins. 

Reed however plays it without the subtle creepiness of the original and more like a volatile and raging libertine who broods and roars in equal proportions. 

As with all comparisons, the re-interpretation and "edits" from the original are key. The transformation of the closeted Perkins to campy Reed is a market choice - a more blustery pervert could better impress the audience. 

The omission of stuffed animals and voyeurism is notable. The former is understandable but the latter - the scopophilic gaze that is central to PSYCHO - is puzzling until one realises that Michael Powell's PEEPING TOM released around the same time as PSYCHO, was panned and invoked the British censor's wrath.

There were probably more films around the world that were influenced by PSYCHO. Maybe they constitute a simmering sub-genre like the Bruce Lee clone films, that will at some point erupt!

 

 

 Babenco Tell Me when I Die

 

MILL VALLEY FILM FESTIVAL 43

 

    Mill Valley just north of San Francisco is a great place for a film festival. The journey there is across the Golden Gate Bridge, through redwood forests, and rolling hills. With a village atmosphere, walking around the small enclave encourages networking and meeting friends and filmmakers old and new. The Mill Valley Film Festival is now in its 43rd year which probably makes it the second oldest international film festival in the Bay area, after the venerable San Francisco International Film Festival.

 

    However like many film festivals this year, Mill Valley has had to contend with Covid 19 and replaced normal in-person activities with different strategies. A number of films were streamed online, while live screenings were conducted as drive-in events where everyone is protected within the confines of their cars.

 

    The range and variety of programming for Mill Valley is always worth the experience and I found this year some emphasis in documentaries about films, and music.

 

    The stand out film about film was BABENCO TELL ME WHEN I DIE about the life and career of filmmaker Hector Babenco.

 

    Babenco was from Argentina but lived and pursued his film career in Brazil. His debut film PIXOTE (1980) brought renewed attention to cinema in Latin America after the works of Glauber Rocha and Cinema Novo in the 1960s. He rose to international prominence with the Oscar-nominated feature KISS OF THE SPIDERWOMAN. 

 

    Babenco died in 2016 at the age of 70 and this documentary which won Best Documentary prize at the Venice Film Festival in 2020, was made by his widow, the actress Barbara Paz. 

 

    The film charts Babenco's trajectory - without much of the adulatory glossing over that often attends to legends - following the ups and downs of his career and his personality. And his is quite the personality - sometimes bombastic, sometimes stubborn, sometimes gentle. Beyond the figure of Babenco himself, the film emerges as a discourse on the creative mind, and the determination that both plagues and graces creative and talented filmmakers. 

    BABENCO TELL ME WHEN I DIE was one of several films included in the Valley of the Docs documentary film section of the Mill Valley Film Festival.

 

        It was just one such film about films. Another was SEARCHING FOR MR RUGOFF a documentary about the legendary New York film distributor, Donald Rugoff who died in 1989 at the age of 62. 

 

 

Searching for Mr Rugoff

   

     An old adage of filmmaking is that you should make films about things that you know about. SEARCHING FOR MR RUGOFF is a perfect illustration of that principle as it is the debut feature of another legendary distributor, Ira Deutchman who founded Fine Line Features (which was later acquired by Warner Bros) among other ventures. Over the course of his career and especially in the 1990s, Deutchman has worked on contemporary classics of our time such as HOOP DREAMS, THE PLAYER, MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO and many others. Today he remains one of the respected pioneers of art house cinema in the US, just like the man he worked for at the start of his career, Rugoff. 

    It's possible to see Rugoff as another bombastic, mercurial, aggravating but brilliant personality like Babenco. Stories from his staff (several of whom have gone on to become game changers in their own right) at his company Cinema 5 in the 1960s, describe a personality that was both fatherly and ruthless. Sending one woman to a meeting with a filmmaker at a hotel room, he says he will call her later just to make sure she is all right. For the publicity campaign of MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL he gets his staff to dress up in medieval garb and pound the pavements of Manhattan. In the end his strategies and manoeuvres generally paid off although he was increasingly preoccupied with legal wranglings over a hostile takeover bid. 

 

    Rugoff enjoyed relations with the legendary filmmakers of the time including French New Wave pioneers Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut whose films might seem to be odd bedfellows with Rugoff's big hit MONTY PYTHON comedy. 

Never too Late: the Doc Severinsen Story

     

    I am not a follower of late night talk shows but recognize their contribution to American and television culture. Undoubtedly the leader of this genre was Johnny Carson who had one of the most successful runs in TV history with The Tonight Show from 1962 to 1992. Carson had his sidekick Ed McMahon to bounce off jokes but his band leader was equally important. From 1967 to the end of the run, that band leader was Doc Severinsen. 

 

    Band leaders on late night talk shows get some attention but not too much. They mustn't distract from the show's star so they rarely get to show off their talents in a sustained way. Doc Severinsen managed both - he's definitely a personality but more importantly, a true musical talent. He had a career as a trumpet player and band leader before and after the Tonight Show - he continues to perform and tour. Some of his most interesting work - as this insightful documentary (directed by Kevin S. Bright and Jeff Consiglio) shows - was with the San Miguel 5 (comprising himself and mainly Mexican guitarist Gil Gutierrez, and violinist Pedro Cartas). They met in San Miguel, Mexico, by chance soon after Severinsen moved there. 

 

    As the film shows, at the age of 92, Severinsen is as energetic and creative as ever. How does he manage it? We learn from the film that he has been married three times, and is now with a partner who could easily be his daughter (and in fact looks younger than his real daughter). The real answer perhaps lies in his love affair with the trumpet which continues unabated. 

Frank Marshall : director How Can You Mend a Broken Heart

     

    Frank Marshall is better known as the producer of mega-film franchises like the INDIANA JONES, BACK TO THE FUTURE, and JASON BOURNE among many others. He is a major player in Hollywood so, on the basis that once again you should film what you know about, he has, as director, turned in a compelling and very watchable documentary HOW CAN YOU MEND A BROKEN HEART on supergroup and major players in the world of pop music the Bee Gees.  

    The broad strokes of the Bee Gees story are well known - three brothers (Barry, Maurice, Robin) born in England, grow up and cut their first album in Australia. Taking a chance on the booming pop scene in England in the 1960s they were picked up by NEMS, the company run by Beatles' manager Brian Epstein and placed under Australian staffer, Robert Stigwood. 

 

    Stardom by the late 1960s with attendant ego battles and fueled by drugs blew up the brothers' relationships. Songs like MASSACHUSETTS and I STARTED A JOKE could have ended up as just memorable debris in the history of pop music in the 1960s but Stigwood, who left NEMS to form his own company after Epstein's death, had unshakeable faith in the group, and put them on the comeback trail. Saying goodbye to a grey England, the group found new life in Florida where Stigwood's other falling star, Eric Clapton had recently recorded 461 OCEAN BOULEVARD, the album that brought him back from three years of heroin addiction. It was Clapton who had the insight that the Bee Gees were at heart a R'n'B group which also influenced the way in which Stigwood recorded them. And it was at the Criteria Studios that they developed the falsetto sound (first heard in "Nights on Broadway") that became their trademark.

    The music that the Bee Gees made in Florida (later characterized as the "Miami Sound") took them on the road that led to one of the best selling albums of all time SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977). Among other fascinating details we learn that the record's innovative producer Albhy Galuten invented the drum loop out of necessity when the group's regular drummer had to attend to his dying mother. 

 

    But the group fell off the top of the pop mountain once again due not to drugs, but to an anti-disco movement in the late 1970s that reviled the Bee Gees and their music. Marshall shows Steve Dahl's Disco Demolition Night fracas in Chicago in 1979 and sides with today's perspectives on that incident to show that the anti-disco movement was fueled by racist and homophobic sentiment (disco having evolved from underground gay clubs often frequented by Latinos and Blacks). No mention however is made of punk rock which was  ascendant at the time, and which was also anti-disco and had its fascist fringe. 

 

    It took the best part of the 1980s for the Bee Gees to recover, saved this time by Barbra Streisand. She asked Barry Gibb to write a song for her (he came up with "Guilty" and duetted with her on it) which was so successful that the Gibb brothers then spent the rest of the decade writing a number of hits for other stars (including Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton). 

 

    Marshall skilfully shows the influences on the Bee Gees (Black music in particular) and their influence on younger generations such as Coldplay. One key to their sound is their uncanny ability for deep and moving harmonies that the film explains is only possible between family members.

    The Bee Gees were the chameleons of pop music. They were adaptable, almost it seems to the music forms that prevailed around them. As pop masters, they were well attuned to the public's tastes and trends. To that end they were quintessential survivors, and that in the end may be their enduring genius. 

 

    The dynamics of pop music with its ups and downs, personality clashes and inspired commercialism, is not far from Marshall's world of blockbuster film production. And with the rash of pop biopics recently (Queen, Elton John et al), we should anticipate a Bee Gees movie in the near future. Marshall's documentary is like a live action script for that film. "Stayin' Alive" - indeed!

[HOW CAN YOU MEND A BROKEN HEART has been picked up by HBO for broadcast later this year.]