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.