Long Pauses

Tag: Director: Apitchatpong

  • TIFF 2012 – Day 2

    TIFF 2012 – Day 2

    Barbara

    Dir. by Christian Petzold
    Every other contemporary director of traditional narrative films would do well to study Petzold. From shot to shot, cut to cut, Barbara is smart, precise, classical filmmaking at its best. There are no radical or self-conscious gestures in his style — most sequences boil down to some variation on establishing shot / medium shot / closeup / point of view — which here drops us into the secretive perspective of the title character, a doctor (Nina Hoss) who has been relocated by East German authorities to a provincial seaside town. Barbara conforms to all the plot conventions of the “beautiful stranger” genre, which makes the final act — and the final shot, in particular — a bit too neat for my tastes, but the pleasures are all in the filmmaking. There are no clues given about the location of the town, but in the recurring, fairy-tale-like images of Nina Hoss bicycling through the woods, the trees are always being blown by strong gusts, and seagulls can be heard around her; there’s no actual mention of the sea until the film is almost over. A colleague who visits Barbara’s apartment asks if she plays the piano, but, again, we don’t actually see the instrument in her room until a scene late in the film. Petzold’s precision allows him to create a world with suggestions.

    Mekong Hotel

    Dir. by Apitchatpong Weerasethakul
    Mekong Hotel is a small film. It feels homemade, even by Apitchatpong’s small-scale standards. But I found it really moving, especially the final few minutes, when the ghosts that have haunted so much of Apitchatpong’s recent work are embodied by a mother and daughter, who mourn for all of the mothers and daughters who have been lost in Thailand’s tragic past. “Daughter, I miss you,” she says. “I hate that my life has become this,” she says. Apitchatpong has a kind of super-human sensitivity and attentiveness to beauty and sorrow. I’m beginning to think of him as the other side of the David Lynch coin.

    Big in Vietnam

    Dir. by Mati Diop
    It’s a stupid comparison, I know, but this is the messy, ambitious, visually inventive film I wanted Tabu to be. When an actor disappears into the woods while filming a low-budget adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons, the Vietnamese director walks off the shoot and goes wandering through the city (Marseille?) until she finds a karaoke bar and meets a man, also Vietnamese, of her generation. Diop then crosscuts between the film shoot, now being directed by the woman’s son, and images of the woman and man as they talk and walk among French sunbathers. When writing about Big in Vietnam, I feel obligated to preface every statement with “presumably.” The 25-minute film is elliptical to the extreme, and the thematic connections are never made explicit. Diop has apparently received funding to expand this idea into feature length. I can’t wait to see it. Big in Vietnam is my favorite film of the festival so far, and by a fairly wide margin.

    Sightseers

    Dir. by Ben Wheatley
    I suspect I’ll end up writing at length about Sightseers in a few weeks, when I have more time. It’s an interesting and well-made film that I might have liked more had I not seen it with an audience that laughed loudly at every brutal killing. I don’t blame them for laughing. The film is designed for laughs. But if I’d watched it alone, it would have been a straight-up horror film, and if I can convince myself that it’s all in the service of a coherent allegory — working-class anger is the best bet — then I might also convince myself it’s a very good film. This is the first Ben Wheatley film I’ve seen, and I really like his visual style. I’m eager to see what he does next.

    Student

    Dir. by Darezhan Omirbayev
    Several critics I admire and whose tastes are similar to my own are big fans of Student, a concentrated, mostly-silent adaptation of Crime and Punishment (or Pickpocket or American Gigolo or L’Enfant, depending on your point of reference) from Kazakhstan. For now, I’m content to sit on any judgment of the film until I’ve had time to read their reviews. The title character is a brooding, non-verbal Raskolnikov, even by comparison to Bresson’s Michel, and for the first hour of the film, Omirbayev’s visual strategy — watching the student walk, zombie-like, stoop-shouldered, through town — left too much unsaid. But after the murder, as the accumulating guilt begins to spawn fantasies, the slow buildup pays dividends. More to come on this one . . .

    Wavelengths 1

    I’ll cover the Wavelengths shorts programs later, after I’ve had time to watch them again.

  • Phantoms of Nabua and a Letter to Uncle Boonmee

    Phantoms of Nabua and a Letter to Uncle Boonmee

    Dir. by Apitchatpong Weerasethakul

    Mark Peranson’s article at Moving Image Source, “Exquisite Corpus,” is a useful introduction to Apitchatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul’s Primitive project, a collection of shorts, installations, and an in-the-works feature inspired by the director’s new-found interest in reincarnation and, more specifically, by a short book he was given about the many lives of Uncle Boonmee, whose ghosts still haunt the village of Nabua in northeast Thailand. The project also reflects Apitchatpong’s increasing political engagement. Peranson writes:

    Beginning with the onset of a famous gun battle between farmer communists and the totalitarian government on August 7, 1965, Nabua was occupied by the Thai Army from the ’60s into the ’80s to suppress communist agitators. The only thing similar to the story of Boonmee is that, in Apichatpong’s words, “the village is also full of repressed memories. . . . It is a place where memories and ideologies are extinct.” It is with the sons of those communists who were tortured or oppressed, or who died during the brutal period of the occupation, that Apichatpong made the works that constitute Primitive. Set in a place whose history has been forgotten by both the country and local inhabitants, the project reimagines Nabua by bringing light to the ghosts of the past through the lost generation of today, while also confronting the current political turmoil in Thailand.

    Phantoms of Nabua, which will be installed at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art throughout the Toronto International Film Festival as part of the Future Projections program, can be viewed online, but I’d recommend seeing it projected and (hopefully) with surround sound if possible. As has become Joe’s trademark, the ten-minute film is first and foremost a sensory experience. Phantoms takes place at night in a field where a makeshift screen has been assembled, onto which is being projected flashes of lighting that erupt on impact with the ground. (According to Peranson, these are clips from Nabua, another of the shorts from Primitive.) In the foreground, a group of teenage boys, barely visible in the darkness, pass a flaming soccer ball back and forth until it ignites the screen, leaving only the projector, which continues to spray its images into the dark.

    There are ways of “decoding” this film, I suppose — the soccer ball as a synecdoche for military armaments, the cinema as documentarian, the hovering florescent light as ghost (or Ghost) — but reducing Joe’s films to points on a symbolic answer key seems beside the point. Watching Phantoms and A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (playing in Wavelengths 5: Une Catastrophe), I was struck by the idea that Aptichatpong is one of the few true heirs to Tarkovsky. They share thematic obsessions, particularly the intersection of personal (autobiography) and national (History) memory, and they’re certainly two of the cinema’s great mystics. More than any of our other great filmmakers today, I see Apitchatpong consistently striving for — and realizing, with breathtaking clarity — Tarkovsky’s ideal, “the film image,” which, as opposed to the intellectually-reducible symbol, “gives the beholder a simultaneous experience of the most complex, contradictory, sometimes even mutually exclusive feelings” (Sculpting in Time, 109).

    An example: Another of Apitchatpong’s short films, Mobile Men (2008), part of the Stories on Human Rights Project.

    On the YouTube page a well-intentioned commenter offers a point-by-point analysis of what this film means, as if the experience of watching it, especially the last minute, could be so easily expressed in words.

    A Letter to Uncle Boonmee is set at a home in the jungles of Nabua, through which Apitchatpong’s camera tracks and pans — floats, really — observing photos of lost relatives on the walls and peering through open windows. On the soundtrack, we hear first one man then another recite Joe’s desire to make a film about the reincarnated lives of Uncle Boonmee. (Later, we also hear one of the men rehearsing his lines and jokingly chastising Joe for screwing up their dialect, which recalls one of my favorite scenes in Syndromes and a Century, when we hear two actors discussing the minutes-long shot they’re currently filming.) The penultimate shot in the film is particularly Tarkovskian. The camera tracks over the home’s roofline, tilts up, looking into the tree tops, and then returns to ground level, where it sees an animal in the far distance — another of Boonmee’s ghosts and also, like Tarkovsky’s horses, a multivalent, shape-shifting image.

    A Letter to Uncle Boonmee feels a bit like a sketch for a feature-length film, but, especially in juxtaposition with Phantoms of Nabua, it’s the best thing I’ve seen in 2009. I can’t wait to see the rest of Primitive.