Children of the mist
Ralston Jover's Hamog (Haze, 2015) starts appropriately enough with just that: a thick cloud hovering low over humid Manila canals. The camera (presumably mounted on a drone) glides towards and rises over a huge sewer pipe lined with cardboard, on which the homeless young lie sleeping.
(Warning: stories and plot twists discussed in close detail)
Striptease
Liked Gareth Edwards' Godzilla (2014), not the least because the creature looks like Godzilla, not some generically ugly mutant iguana in search of a hiding hole (looking at you, Devlin and Emmerich). Liked the intro, which plunks Bryan Cranston and Juliette Binoche in the same car toether (by way of birthday greeting she showers her husband with kisses--you the man, Mr. White!). Fact is, Cranston's storyline provides much of the pathos and emotion in the film--gives us an unsettling measure of the cost of death and loss, a lesson that puts into perspective all the death and loss that follows. When Cranston's character departs (much too early), so does all that dramatic gravitas, with his son (the blandly handsome Aaron Taylor-Johnson) serving as an uncharismatic substitute (they would have done better to use Walt Jr.).
Which matters surprisingly less than you'd think. Edwards clearly loves his kaiju the way Guillermo del Toro loved his; he swathes them in mist and shadow, hiding them like so many treasured toys clutched close to his chest, allowing only the most miserly of glimpses--a claw here, a leg there--until the precisely timed moment when they are revealed in all their old-fashioned glory (no shakycam, ADHD-style editing nonsense here).
Edwards actually proves to be a remarkably supple filmmaker--he adopts the same strategy used in Jaws, when Spielberg realized that the mechanical shark wasn't working and had to indicate the creature's presence through indirect means (a stratagem used as early as Jack Arnold's The Creature From the Black Lagoon back in the '50s).
The tactic serves another purpose. Never personally been sold on the solidity, much less realism, of digital constructs; no matter how careful the rendering or how much money they throw at all the workstations, the end result always seemed insubstantial, lightweight. This filmmaker seems to have gone a way towards solving that problem--as with Spielberg's flimsy mechanical shark, as with Arnold's clumsy scuba-diving fish suit, Edwards sells the effect by obscuring it with thick fog and even thicker dark, enveloping you with a shiver-inducing wall of sound (the nightmarish chittering of MUTOs (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms), for one--like cockroaches the size of city blocks, moving just a few feet beneath you).
Instead of smash-and-grab scare tactics, the slow burn; instead of monsters that dart forward like real-life predators, a stately (though not necessarily slow) and stylized glide across the nighttime landscape, maybe a fateful pause with clawed arm lifted high above the cable-supported motorway.*
* Sadly, Edwards doesn't seem to have any more idea than Christopher Nolan does on how suspension bridges really work; the cables snap and a large portion of the bridge remains up--by sheer force of script, for all I know.
David Edelstein in his review rakes the movie over coals for changing the original message (we are poisoning ourselves) to something more optimistic; I came out with a different takeaway--that Man is so feeble and unnecessary he's not even needed to deal with these kaiju (Godzilla will take care of it) and anyway he'd only screw it up (exhibit a: the aforementioned Taylor-Johnson); that if anything the Japanese and not the can-do, never-say-die Americans are more likely to understand the mysterious ways of nature. Wouldn't be surprised if American audiences stayed away in droves, or that local critics hated this (didn't happen).
As for me--always liked a striptease, even from a nine hundred foot radioactive lizard, so long as the payoff at the end delivers. This in my opine delivered, filmmakingwise.
Close combat
Steven Knight's Locke (2013) is a nice little chamber piece with at most three elements--man, car, cellphone--that's it. Two kinds of suspense ensue: whether or not the man loses control of his car or his temper; whether or not the director (the more difficult challenge) manages to hold your attention for the full ninety minutes.
Knight does quite well, employing side windows and windshield like video screens where he can throw images, backgrounds, suggested interior states; sometimes he shoots the reflections directly, adding a third layer as we see the landscape beyond the glass, the driver, the background behind the driver.
The sound design's nicely done too--mostly a claustrophobic cushioned silence, punctuated by road sounds and the eponymous' Locke's voice (Tom Hardy, soft-spoken and seductive with his rich Scottish brogue). Not a lot of music--but then the man is understandably in no mood for music: he's just left one of the most important engagements in his career and his wife to be at the side of a woman giving birth to his child, and he's desperately placing calls right and left, trying to keep his chaotic life together.
When it comes to the challenge of shooting in enclosed spaces one thinks of Hitchcock's Lifeboat, Rope, and above all Rear Window, and one smiles; in addition to telling a compelling story in a confined space Hitchcock (at least with Rear Window) also manages to raise important points about privacy, and our voracious need to live life through others. Knight does well here, but he's not quite up to the level of the master, yet.
She works hard for the money
I'd noted before that Ralston Jover's Bakal Boys gave us some of the most harrowing working conditions a Filipino youth--or any youth, for that matter--has ever experienced; with Bendor (Vendor, 2013) Jover pulls back to give us this character study of a woman who works hard selling dry merchandise by a street corner, though her real breadwinning activity is to act as front and liaison for abortions (an illegal procedure in predominantly Roman Catholic Philippines).
Jover again uses his cinema verite style to immerse us in the retail industry that is the Quiapo Church plaza, where everything and anything is for sale, from plastic shopping bags to prayer candles to grilled skewered chicken feet (they're called adidas) to rosaries to aborfacients of dubious effectiveness (you think of Christ and the money changers at the temple, your hand just possibly itching for a leather whip). As the eponymous entrepreneur Blondie, Vivian Velez masks her legendary sensuality (not completely, hard as she may try--she's still a strikingly handsome woman) to focus with laser intensity on the bottom line--and the thin blue line; when the abortionist she works for runs afoul of the police, Blondie has to run literally for her life, everything else fallen by the wayside.
Everything else seems to have fallen by the wayside for Jover too; his focus on his protagonist is every bit as intense as hers is for the profit margin, and you wonder ultimately what point he's trying to make--most intriguingly, what point he's trying to make with the doppelganger figure Blondie glimpses once in a while from the corner of her eye and follows, sometimes to good fortune, sometimes not (you think of the similar figure in Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now and wonder, darkly).
As with a laser, by film's end (it runs for a brief seventy-five minutes) Jover's storytelling comes to a sharp and startling point, not through anything that happens but rather through something that fails to happen; not through any action but rather through unexpected and eloquent inaction. Suddenly the film snaps into focus, and you see the clever, clever design in all its entirety--the whole eloquently and wordlessly expressed in Blondie's careworn face.
Announcement of Dragons and Tigers winners
I'm the hairy dude that makes the dramatic announcement. For some strange reason the focus of my eyes had changed, hence my dramatic whipping off of glasses prior to reading out the director's name.
As for Bakal Boys (which, for the record, I liked very much)--perhaps the film's one major weakness, apparent on first viewing, is the director's seeming admiration--perhaps too much so--of the camerawork of frequent collaborator Brillante Mendoza (Jover had written the script for Mendoza's Foster Child, Tirador, and (easily my favorite of Mendoza's work to date) Manoro). The Dardennes brothers' style of handheld long takes has, for better or worse, become the signature style of the Filipino independent film production.
Jover does develop his own distinct light, a burnished sunset glow where Mendoza usually opts for a harsher, more realistic palette. Paradoxically, while Jover confines himself to warmer colors, his setting is noticeably bleaker than Mendoza's--a desolate concrete landscapes dominated by gigantic rusting machinery, with makeshift shacks that cover the concrete like an encrustation. The sea is the only other major presence, an endlessly roiling, rhythmic mystery, a source of both danger and possible delight for the people living nearby; in the distant horizon are cityscapes of northern Manila, an urban world familiar to us and other Filipino audiences.
As in his scripts for Manoro and Tirador, the last thing Jover seems to want to do is judge these children. In the Q & A that followed, he notes that attempts were made to try put these children in school, and that in a matter of months they were back to what they were doing, diving in Manila Bay for scrap metal--for many of the youths, scrap metal diving was a way of putting food on the table; if they didn't dive, they didn't eat. Diving was what they knew, was in many cases all they knew. As for parents, Jover cited a case where the father was crippled; I don't know about the other children (are all the fathers similarly helpless?), but you do notice in the picture the almost complete lack of adults--these kids, like the kids in Bunuel's Los Olvidados, are left to their own resources, to fend for themselves as best they can.
And yet, and yet, and yet, and this was the most startling thing about the picture, it wasn't completely grim; it wasn't all despair. You come away with an impression of the extraordinary strength and resilience of these children, of their ability to survive the horrifying harshness of their lives (Jover notes that one or two of these boys drown or simply disappear every week) and still be children, laughing, playing, teasing, having the time of their lives. You see a world that continually neglects if not actively oppresses these boys, and they and their kin and friends respond with courtesy, kindness, even love. Amazing film.
We knew Jang Kun-Jae's Hwioribaram (Eighteen) was something special (which was why we gave it the Dragons and Tigers Award) from the very first shot: a gas station late at night, pumps lined up to the right, a white-lined rectangle just below the camera frame, dark city night beyond. It's a shot full of promise, as if anyone could drive in and take over the picture, and someone does--a motorcycle rolls in, and a station attendant buzzes around it, topping off its tank. The rider kick-starts his bike and the camera pulls back, following him through the streets. The protagonist Tae Hoon has just arrived, in effect, and it's his story we follow as the film proper begins.
I'd been quoted as saying it's an old story--boy meets girl, boy and girl have a short affair, boy breaks up with girl. Familiar--too familiar, it's true, but one advantage of familiar old stories is that we don't waste too much time and attention on the narrative, we've seen it all before; instead we concentrate on the details, on how the story is told, visually as well as dramatically. For a plain meat-and-potatoes narrative, this one is told extremely well: understated melodrama, nicely modulated acting, some smartly staged set-pieces. The look is distinctive, in a quietly old-fashioned way (few quick cuts, and only a few instances of the all-too-common handheld camera)--no small achievement on digital video.
Perhaps the first time the story really hooks its audience is the scene in the living room when the parents of Tae-Hoon's girlfriend Park Mi-Jeong confront him and his family (the two had gone off on a seaside winter break without telling anyone), and Mi-Jeong's father loses it--he's pulled a knife from an ankle holster and is stabbing the coffee table. Handheld shots (one of the few instances in the picture and one of the few times it's perfectly justified, I think) convey the chaos; jump cuts keep us startled, off-balance--suddenly he's slapping his daughter; suddenly he's smashing glass with a golf club. Suddenly--the most effective shot in the sequence, I think--Jang cuts to a television set turned up full volume, and the roar of the set suggests the panic inspired by violence better than any onscreen act (and people's reaction to the act) possibly could. It's as if everyone's mind were tuned to the same station and someone accidentally sat on the remote, sending the tuner skittering across several channels.
Yet another example--Jang cuts to a sudden shot of the girl's younger sister, face puffy for some reason; the camera pulls back and we realize that she's being strangled, the hands tight around her neck belonging to Mi-Jeong. The two sisters fight, and their kicking and spitting and shrieking--with the mother desperately trying to pull them apart--seems more authentic than any family interaction I've seen on recent mainstream movies.
While we're at it, I might as well point out that the adults here, from Mi-Jeong's parents to Tae-Hoon's patient, put-upon boss, seem more authentically sketched-in and performed than most other adults in recent teen pictures (a rare virtue for the genre, where adults are usually abusive or ineffectual cartoons rarely given their due, much less a point of view).
Towards the end, we see how the incident (their impromptu seaside vacation) and their subsequent enforced separation has shaped both Tae-Hoon and Mi-Jeong's lives. Tae Hoon can't seem to accept the death of their relationship; he goofs around, tries to follow Mi-Jeong, tries to see her outside of school, or outside her home; Mi-Jeong for her part seems to have made her decision and moved on. But our final glimpses of their respective lives seem to suggest that matters are more complicated--Tae Hoon after struggling so long has (as suggested by the serenity with which he rides away) apparently come to terms with his loss. Mi Jeong puts on an equally brave face, but as she sits on her gym bench we hear the soft sigh of surf, and we see her hair ruffled, as if by an ocean breeze. Jang seems to suggest that Mi-Jeong was every bit as affected as Tae-Hoon was by the experience, only she's done a better job of repressing it; the memory, however, may haunt her for some time, perhaps all her life. Sad, lovely little film.
Finally, after googling around for articles and pictures and videos concerning the award, I found this. Recorded during the Jeonju International Film Festival, in 2006.
