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.]

 

 

 

 Back to the Blog

 

After a long hiatus, I have returned to writing. Originally this blog stopped because of my work running the Hong Kong International Film Festival Society (which included the Hong Kong Asia Film Finance Forum for co-production) and the Asian Film Awards Academy - two very full time jobs. Although I was watching quite a lot of films, the day to day executive work including hectic festival schedules and travel, prevented me from thinking and reporting about the state of cinema and films.

The need to stay-in-place because of the Covid-19 pandemic has given me pause for thought. Leaving my full-time job in the festival and academy also gave me more time to devote to an activity that I had neglected.

I began my film career as a student who watched films and wrote about them. It was a practice that taught me about films and helped me navigate my way through the industry of film production and film festivals. Over 10 to 15 years of writing notes about films, publishing articles about movies and broadcasting on radio, I practiced and developed my ability to analyze films and write about them in an orderly way. This was not always successful of course but as a believer in "practice makes perfect" I think it's a way of trying to improve.

Writing about films that I see has become more pressing because watching films on digital platforms and TV sets and monitors has a physically different effect that watching celluloid films projected on a screen. Brain retention is better with celluloid projection. It's physiognomy but also the environment in which we watch digital films can be distracting. 

I don't think it's necessarily age creep but after watching films on digital platforms, I find it difficult to remember the kind of detail I remembered when watching celluloid projections. So the practice of writing about films serves two purposes - the act of film analysis, and the facility of memory.

2014 - Some Interesting Films?

I am not a great fan of film lists such as Top 10 etc. They seem to be artificial impositions. But lists do help focus, and if you compile them without trying to remember too hard, then they give you an idea of what films impressed most (whether good or bad) in say, a specific year.

BIRDMAN – Michael Keaton has been scarred by Batman. He is haunted by the monsters of Gotham, he believes he has power over inanimate objects. He exhibits all the signs of dementia including running through Times Square in his boxers. His Icarus leap of faith into the unknown tells us that you win some, lose some.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY – I never imagined Harrison Ford would be re-invented as a chatty Raccoon, or that Wookie would turn into a talking tree (thanks to Vin Diesel) but they have and Star Wars has entered the Twilight Zone.

INTERSTELLAR – Matthew McConaughey is almost the Man Who Fell to Earth. From Top Gun astronaut to farmer, we meet him fighting an advancing Dustbowl that spells the end of the world. Sent back into space on a rescue mission, he discovers worlds that each presage Earth’s impending environmental destruction (tsunami waves, bleak rocks, an ice world). But Kubrick’s narcissistic interpretation of the theory of relativity still rules. Birth to death understood as a four dimensional trip around a floating library is Nolan’s mind-blowing interpretation of spaceship Kubrick and the Stargate trajectory.

BOYHOOD – someone asked me if it would be as interesting (on the assumption that it is interesting) if it had not used the 12-year technique. Linklater, like quite a lot of his contemporaries, is a technician of things – dialogue, emotions, and here of time. The mundane rendered – by Time – as lived experience. The film’s essential question: who cares?

LEVIATHAN -   great film noir that follows the classic adage, cherchez la femme. A worthy successor to CHINATOWN in its charting of political manipulation, personal ambition, and lives frustrated. Curiously a more biblical film than Ridley Scott’s EXODUS.

FARGO – a unique (?) case in film history where the TV derivative has equaled the original movie. A worthy candidate for binge viewing!

A Flowering Promise

Flowers of War (Zhang Yimou)

An American embalmer comes to bury a priest in Nanjing. Trouble is, it’s 1937 and the city is under attack by the Japanese. The American gets involved with the chaste church girls and a group of prostitutes who have sought refuge in the church. In the end, the embalmer puts his cosmetic skills to good use to save the church girls when they are commanded to attend a military celebration. He makes the prostitutes up to look like the church girls and off they go to what is almost certainly going to be an orgy of sex and death with a Japanese army battalion.

Much maligned, especially in its conjunction of sex and holocaust of the rape of Nanjing, Zhang’s Flowers of War has as much to do with that tragic episode in Sino-Japanese relations as David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia had to do with the British flirtation with the Arab National Council during the First World War. Which is to say that historical catastrophe in cinema is seen as just cause for a love story. In Lean’s case it was a case of O’Toole’s (was a screen name ever so apropos) passion for Arabica and in particular men. But Zhang is no David Lean – he just cannot manage the transition from the rural intimacy of individual struggle (cf. The Story of Qiu Jiu) to a a more sweeping historical embrace. Qiu Jiu is a Rohmerian peasant who is relentless in her pursuit of bureaucrats, while Zhang Ziyi in House of Flying Daggers is some kind of whatever-dynasty pole dancer turned on by drum vibrations. His view of women turns on a gimmick, which is often underpinned by self-determination. Intriguing as this may be as a premise for a movie, it’s still not the incisive critique – sexual or otherwise – of imperial dreams that lie at the base of any worthy historical epic.

Actually Zhang is lucky – as China’s answer to David Lean, he would go down in the homosexual glory that is both Lawrence and Doc Zhivago. And Zhang is neither – by which I mean gay, or a literary filmmaker. Watching Flowers of War I was struck instead by his genius for the rambunctious and the faux-macho which means that he is emerging surprisingly, as Chinese cinema’s answer to Raoul Walsh.

Flowers of War is a great film – not in the way that its maker intended it but as a rupture of a filmmaker’s career and view of life. It has the devil-may-care approach to women that one finds in Walsh’s A King and Four Queens – the title says it all for it is a gamble not only with women but what they represent, which is life itself.

There is a Hawksian sentiment to Flowers of War in the presentation of Christian Bale as a drunk (embalmer) who in the Hollywood course of the film is redeemed not only by his life-saving good work (clearly an irony given his profession) but also by his passage to sobriety. This trajectory closely follows Dean Martin in Hawks’ Rio Bravo – a drunk who redeems himself by restoring order in the town that originally despised him. It’s marked by his physical appearance – from bearded loser to well-shaven professional – in the same way that Deano moves from drunk to crooner (though in real life he played on a conjunction of the two).

This passage of the American – as presented in a Chinese film set during the hegemony of Japanese imperialism – is as loaded as it gets, mainly because it relates to the contemporary situation. And like any great Walsh (as opposed to Hawks) film, it’s because the attitude towards women protagonists is at first simple but then very complex. For Hawks, women were guileless, they reflected the repressed trickiness of men. For Walsh, women were the bravado side of men, the “closers” in any deal. Look at one of Walsh’s finest films, Colorado Territory, where Virginia Mayo gives not only one of her greatest screen performances, but also one of the most manly performances in order to lay down the law.

Zhang has not yet reached that apotheosis – he stills see women as subordinate to men in social terms but superior in narrative plot strategies. He cannot yet conjoin the two because the dialectic still needs some syncretisation. But one expects that, like China itself,  it is only a matter of time.

Lino Brocka in San Francisco

I was recently asked for some comments on Lino Brocka by cinesource magazine, a filmmakers' industry newspaper in the Bay Area. Four films by Brocka are being shown at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival in March, 2010. You can find the report here.

www.cinesourcemagazine.com

My original comments which I sent them are below.

Lino Brocka

I invited Lino Brocka to Hong Kong when I premiered his masterpiece INSIANG in our Hong Kong International Film Festival after its debut at Cannes. Over the years that I knew him, Lino was a dynamo of energy whose mind and body were in perpetual motion, a man who constantly seemed to live on the brink of financial collapse (he wanted to talk more to me about his finances than his films!), and an eternal optimist who somehow kept making great movies. We last spoke in Los Angeles where he was visiting family. He was full of gossip and plans for the future. A few weeks (or was it months later?), he was dead. When I think back on Lino, what strikes me is that he is certainly one of the great filmmakers of the 20th century and in the first rank of classic Asian filmmakers along with Satyajit Ray and Akira Kurosawa.

Knowing Lino made his films all the more interesting to me because they are not exactly reflections of his high-strung energy, of his ebullient outward personality. Rather, they are somewhat quiet contemplations about the individual and society, and how individuals at first victims of social injustice try to fight back. Whether they succeed or not is the chronic condition of Filipino life, as lived in Lino’s time especially under the corruption and cronyism of the Marcos dictatorship. Often his protagonists were women who suffer oppression in both their personal and work lives – think of Insiang, and Bona – these great titular roles of films which present their heroines manipulated by both men and women to whom they are close. As an openly gay, politically outspoken filmmaker, Lino clearly identified with this oppression and the need to fight it.

Lino’s depth of understanding of his society – an understanding sprung from personal condition, artistic intuition and political insight – meant that his films proceed from the basis of his audience, not the filmmaker’s ego, and that is what makes him a great artist. His cinema is not about “me” as so many of today’s films shamelessly proclaim, but about the respect of “you.” And his audience responded, at home and abroad. His domestic audience was largely working-class, and I suspect, mostly women who were drawn to the stars like Nora Aunor and Hilda Koronel. Through Lino’s lens, these stars gave dignity and value to their portrayals of working-class women in the audience.

A cinema based on an audience oppressed in a class society was Lino’s legacy, and it’s yet to be followed by today’s filmmakers perhaps because they do not fully understand the extent to which he was politically and socially engaged at the time (the younger generation of Filipinos have little idea of the destruction caused by the Marcos regime!). However in the past few years there have been retrospectives of Lino’s work beginning with the Torino Film Festival, Italy in 2005, and continuing in Vienna in 2009. Some of his works, like INSIANG, are now available on DVD and ready for a new generation to watch and understand. It’s timely that San Francisco will now get a chance to see some of his works on the big screen.