Johnny Delgado, 1948 - 2009

Johnny Delgado, 1948 - 2009

Juan Marasigan Feleo was born on February 29, a leap-year child, the son of director Ben Feleo and Victorina Marasigan. He had taken up banking and finance in the University of Santo Tomas; his first acting role was in his father's Sa Manlulupig, Di Ka Pasisiil (Never to invaders shall you surrender, 1967). He tried lead roles for a while (One-Man Army, same year; Machinegun Johnny and the Sexy Queen, 1970), then made the decision--a smart one, in retrospect--to shift his attention to character roles.

One remembers his anguished husband in the classic Salome (1981, directed by his wife Laurice Guillen), the shame, guilt, anger and humiliation at caring for a sexually ravenous, mentally erratic wife culminates in an act of punishment so cruel one finds oneself shrinking away from him. Delgado had that kind of fearlessness, the ability to play the role whatever it takes, unafraid to completely lose the audience' sympathy. Or rather, confident that whatever he does will only add to the character's complexity, ultimately lead to the audiences' sustained fascination.

Villains came easy to him; he had a strong, chiseled face, and a beard that framed that strength with what seemed like bestial fur, and when he stared at you with those huge eyes he gave the impression of a wild man barely in control, ready to tear into you with his hands, perhaps fangs. Yet even a cartoon portrayal like the Pinoy Grandmaster of the Japanese smuggling ring in Mike de Leon's Kakabakaba Ka Ba? (Will your heart beat faster? 1980) is precisely calibrated never to lose its sense of humor--when he's shot (and in a delightful touch De Leon has animated bubbles and stars popping like an unexpected belch out of the wound), he throws you a hateful glare that should shatter the camera lenses, but there's just this extra something, this slight exaggeration of gesture, that lets you know this is his King Kong moment, and he means to make the most of it. The expression, in effect, is unutterably tragic, but your reaction is hopelessly, exuberantly cathartic.

Then there's the fraternity physician in Mike De Leon's Batch '81--and here it must be noted that for a filmmaker others claim to be so bizarre and cut off from people, De Leon is able to elicit all these radically different yet rigorously naturalistic performances, even from the same actor--anyway, this physician is the very height of Socratic professionalism while examining Sid Lucero (Mark Gil). He gently touches one of Sid's bruises, chides the frat masters for beating the boy too harshly, and--oh, so casually--applies a surgical clamp on the boy's bluish skin.

More clamps follow; Sid's skin and face are visibly turning red from the pain (this is a very difficult scene to watch), and all the while Delgado's soothing, calm, professional voice drones on, and on, spinning the scene quietly into nightmare.

Late in life Delgado played more dramatic roles--the first to grab attention was his award-winning performance as the moody brother in Guillen's Tanging Yaman (2000), an otherwise feel-good, somewhat fuzzy family reunion of a movie; whatever edge or sense of genuine pain found in the film came from his ever-unsettling, never-lazy performance. In Guillen's underrated Santa Santita (2004), he helps write the script, plays the relatively small role of Fr. Tony and, in a scene where he's required to do nothing more than sit and listen to Angelica Panganiban, walks away with the scene tucked snugly in his pocket. As the family patriarch in Brillante Mendoza's Kaleldo (Summer Heat, 2007), he is again an unreservedly hateful presence, a tyrant whose will is never defied, much less questioned, by his three daughters.

Delgado's dead, and I suppose it's a truism to say that doesn't mean he's completely dead, that he lives on in his performances, preserved (more or less) on celluloid and in our memories--but calling the idea a truism and repeating it for the nth time doesn't make it any less true. He was a wonderful actor, by all accounts a wonderful man, he had a wonderful run of performances, and while we love and remember him he will never die.

Danny Deckchair (Jeff Balsmeyer, 2003)

Up, up, and away

Jeff Balsmeyer's Danny Deckchair (2003) rings one unusual variation on the meet-cute rom-com routine--instead of bumping into each other, or entangling each others' dog leashes, or finding each other through the internet, Danny Morgan (Rhys Ifans) by means of an accident flies through the air on a lawn chair lifted by a series of large helium balloons tied to said chair. It takes two of his friends to hold the chair down while they watch a game on TV, during a back yard barbie; when one of them jumps up in his excitement Danny launches into the sky, travels hundreds of miles thanks to a passing storm, falls to earth thanks to some ill-timed fireworks, and lands almost on the lap of Glenda (Miranda Otto), a lonely, spinster-ish young woman whose day job is issuing parking tickets.

Other than that Mythbusters-style bit of engineering (possibly members of that show saw this movie, or was it vice-versa?), it's pretty much paint-by-numbers: Danny sees his mishap as a chance to start a new life (reason why he'd been tying balloons to his chair was because he'd caught his wife Trudy riding in a car with another man). Danny flirts with every girl in this strange new town; catches the attention of a local political figure; organizes pancake breakfasts; stops talk at every party attended; pretty much finds himself running for office, at the brink of winning it all, having it all.

Of course it's going to have a happy ending; of course the path to perfect happiness runs rough, at least temporarily (some kids find the abandoned chair hanging from a tree, and inform the authorities); of course the attraction Danny and Glenda sense simmering behind each others' eyes blooms into a full romance, which is sorely tested--Balsmeyer, with the help of Tim Gooding and Lizzie Bryant, isn't re-inventing the deck chair, just adding some padding and a touch of paint to make the furniture look fresher. One either finds the movie tired and limp, hardly a worthy successor to the cinema of Peter Weir, Bruce Beresford, Gillian Armstrong, George Miller, Fred Schepisi, or one finds it familiar and comforting, the Aussie equivalent of warm chicken soup.

Rom-coms live or die on their casting, and luckily for this bowl of broth Ifans and Otto generate enough heat to hold our attention. Ifans is the kind of actor that (without the luck of a major hit) can develop a following, popping up in small roles in this picture or that; his wide smile and sleepy eyes are matched by Otto's wider smile and lovely, faintly oriental eyes--eyes with the ability to look upon a man, any man (including, most memorably, Viggo Mortensen's Aragorn son of Arathorn, in the Lord of the Rings movies), and convince us she's totally besotted. It's not so much sexual frisson they display as it is a kind of dreamy intimacy, a sense that they share a fantasy life no one else suspect exists--possibly the crucial scene here is that of the two lovers sitting on Glenda's motorcycle, sparking her recollection of how her parents would ride about the countryside together, a pair of adventurers. One only has to look at the two looking at nothing in particular to realize that these two are made for each other.

It's--cute. Understand how some people would take a liking to this, and it's difficult to begrudge them the chance to lean back, relax for about a hundred minutes, dream of a life where a gorgeous woman is available just a balloon ride away.

My problem is this: I remember dreaming of a vast continent Down Under where mutant punks race monster vehicles and a steel boomerang whistles high overhead; I remember a party of young girls vanishing on a field trip, their ultimate fate a metaphysical mystery; I remember a doomed young soldier alone on a battlefield, running as if his life depended on it (it didn't, but he ran anyway); I remember two soldiers seated before a firing squad, sun rising on the vast landscape around them, gloriously calm even if they are guilty of monstrous crimes.

I remember a young girl standing against a similarly vast landscape, determined to achieve her dreams of becoming a writer even at the expense of love or a happy life (I'd like to see her give Glenda a good talking-to); I remember a Catholic monk refusing to even touch his students, being tormented in his deepest nightmares by the sensuous caresses of nymphs; I remember an anguished aborigine wielding an ax, slaughtering every white man, woman and child he knew.

It's a cinema of extraordinary depth and grandeur, playing out against an endless rolling horizon filled with bush and game. We get a glimpse of that grandeur in Danny Deckchair--when his chair takes flight, when we get some sense of the depth of feeling between Danny and Glenda. Otherwise, I'm very much missing what use to make this cinema great.

First published in Businessworld, 11.13.09

Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

Tarantino's talkathon

Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is a clever melange of violence, suspense, slapstick, wit, movie references both arthouse and grindhouse, talk, talk, more talk, even more talk; seems to me he is more in love than ever with the sound of his own words coming out of the mouths of about a dozen different men and women, in several accents and twice as many acting styles.

More Vancouver Festival Films (Serbis; Face; Lebanon; ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction)

Merly (Mercedes Cabral) and Alan (Coco Martin) and unruptured boil in Brillante Mendoza's Serbis

Did I mention that almost nobody I talked to in the festival liked Kore-eda's Air Doll, not even David Bordwell, who's an admirer of the director?

Ah well. Bordwell finds the execution "overcute" and "underdeveloped," but what's "overcute," anyway? The film plays into male notions of female fantasy figures, the same time it offers some kind of critique (the doll herself finds her owner's attentions distasteful, preferring the company of a gentler, geekier video store clerk), and there is something faintly prurient about the early scenes of Nozomi (Du-na Bae, in a courageously unselfconscious performance) standing in her (squeaky clean, rather breathtaking) altogether, totally vulnerable and defenseless, because the idea of putting on clothes doesn't even begin to occur to her.

But I submit that Kore-eda avoids excessive preciousness by focusing on the details--the latex squeal when her hands rub against objects, the occasional moments when she can't help but notice her translucency (either her shadow isn't dark enough or the gases flowing within her fingers are visible), the running gag about another woman's pantyhose lines, which she mistakes for latex mold lines. If one can imagine an American remake (and god knows, the idea of an inflatable sex doll come to life is asking for just such a catastrophe), one can imagine these details being simultaneously sanitized ("not so much nudity, please, and no shots of her cleaning out her removable vagina") and pumped up for slapstick content, with Jim Carrey mugging his face off to plenty of loud music cuing audience laughter.

Bordwell compares the ending to that of Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses. Truth to tell, Oshima's ending left me cold (as I think Oshima intended); Kore-eda's comes off more as a tragic misunderstanding, the kind found in doomed romances or tragedies. Kore-eda's film attempts, as does Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence, to evoke the pathos of the unanimated--how, we imagine, they might be helpless to determine their own fate, and how, we imagine, they would suffer accordingly (beyond that, I think , is an attempt to evoke the pathos one feels when empathizing with inanimate objects--when, at one time or another in our lives, we ourselves feel helpless to determine our fates). Between Spielberg and Kore-eda, though, I think the lighter (and hence more effective) touch is Kore-eda's.

After Air Doll I decided to hell with it and attended a midnight screening, which can often be fun; the crowd is rowdy, the movie usually of the lowbrow, grindhouse persuasion--in this case Kevin Hamedani's ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction. Easy to say Hamedani is no George Romero, and that his zombie picture is too clunky to gracefully shoulder the weight of political metaphor and satire that it is meant to bear, and that anyway the zombie effects are second-rate (owing to a presumably low budget), but zombie flicks are judged more by their gut impact than their subtlety (until we come to the more recent fast-moving remakes, in which case I go all medieval on them). But the picture burns with the fire of a filmmaker out to prove a point, and easily the movie's most unsettling image isn't of the beheadings or flesh-eating or the swinging zombie guts, but of a half-crazed (all-crazed?) man threatening to hammer a young Iranian girl's foot to the floor if she doesn't confess to being involved in some evil Middle-Eastern plot to convert all Americans into zombies.

Hong Sang-soo's Like You Know It All is his second feature on HD, and am I imagining this or has Hong become more ostensibly funny? The film tells the story of a director named Koo Gyung-nam (Kim Tae-woo) invited to sit in as jury member at the Jecheon International Music and Film Festival. It adds something if you've ever been to a film festival before, or served as jury in one--the ubiquitous shoulder bags filled with goodies, the neverending round of polite greetings, the endless catalogs and promotional handouts and calling cards--Hong gets every detail right (Jecheon as depicted onscreen seems like a modest-sized festival, though it could have grown since, or maybe Hong didn't have the budget or inclination to use bigger sets). Add attractive, eccentric, possibly insane festival programmer Kong Yun-hee (Uhm Ji-won) into the mix, and Hong in effect puts poor Koo through the metaphorical and literal wringer, with women alternately enticing and rejecting him, men either inviting or threatening him, fans at times praising, at times humiliating him, and Koo himself wondering just what he had done the night before when he was drunk to deserve this kind of treatment.

Add to this the unmistakable hint of melancholy (Koo is always finding something to regret in either the recent or distant past in his relationships with women (with concurrent repercussions on his relationships with men)), and one might say Hong has executed a light but satisfying omelet of a film--deceptively simple, but flavorsome.

Programmer Shelley Kraicer made it clear (on the Vancouver catalog and when he spoke to me) that he regarded Tsai Ming Liang's Face, about a film crew attempting to stage a film version of Oscar Wilde's Salome, a masterpiece; everyone else, apparently, begs to differ. I wanted to like it, I really did, but where the pacing in Tsai's previous films was leisurely and uncompromising here it felt soporifically slow; where his storytelling was deadpan unpredictable here it felt obtuse and nonsensical. I wondered what made the difference and someone offered this explanation: "He's cut himself off. Where before he was full of angst towards his life and sexuality, now it's all about his love for French cinema. Moreau, Baye, Ardant, Leaud, references to Truffaut--it's all magic and new to him where we've been familiar with all this Francophilia for years, even decades. It's killing his films."

Possibly--all I know is that something's seriously missing in this picture whatever it is. To be fair the imagery is often heartstoppingly beautiful, and there is one sequence--Salome kissing the dead head of John the Baptist--that's incredible, even great (don't want to say too much about it except that instead of using dramatic music or even music of any kind, Tsai employs the ambient sounds found in a deserted abattoir to terrible, unforgettable effect).

Samuel Moaz's Lebanon might be described in the catalog as a "cross between Waltz with Bashir and Das Boot;" I would call it a transposition of Kevin Reynolds' The Beast to Lebanon, albeit with a greater intensity and claustrophobia--much of the film takes place inside a tank, and any contact we have of the outside world comes through the driver's tiny periscope, or through the upper hatch, a moon-shaped aperture through which authority (an Israeli troop commander who seems to have all the answers (at least for a while)) and terror (a Christian Phalangist full of unreliable information and even less certain loyalty) enter from the outside world. One might see the tank as a steel womb inside of which the men overstay their welcome (their gestation period?), wallowing in their own increasingly unbearable filth and refusing to leave the safety of their armored uterus.

Moaz captures the stench of waging war inside a tank--the ever-rising level of rancid water on the vehicle's floor, complete with a flotilla of cigarette butts and paper wrappers floating about its oily surface; the ever-thickening layer of grime and sweat covering the tank men's wide-eyed faces like so much makeup; the increasingly congealed gluey mess dripping from the interior walls (an explosion had sent foodstuff (Matzoh meal?) flying everywhere, and in the film's one hilarious running gag (and, come to think of it, politically weighted line of dialogue) the troop commander keeps demanding that the men "clean up this mess").

One festival viewer had hesitated to go see Lebanon; he said he didn't want to watch Israeli propaganda. I can see it being propaganda all right, but aimed at whom I'm not quite sure--the Israeli commanders order the use of illegal phosphorus shells and order the tank to fire on innocent civilians; the men inside the tank are frightened and barely know what's going on. We know only as much or less, because Moaz has made sure that everything we see and hear are what they see and hear; the experience is a harrowing one.

Managed to see Brillante Mendoza's Serbis, about a day in the life of a provincial movie theater, where they show uncut versions of softcore porn movies and the action in the darker corners of the auditorium are far more interesting than what's happening onscreen. In terms of hygiene the theater can give the tank in Lebanon a run for the money; it's almost as claustrophobic (a dark cavernous space surrounded by an intricate network of rooms and stairways), it has its share of rank sewer water, and people have terrifyingly red and swollen boils growing out of their behinds (come to think of it the relative darkness in the tank made the mess there a touch more tolerable). There's graphic sex aplenty and fellatio plunked front and center for those who appreciate that kind of action, and there's the slapstick interlude of a thief running up and down the theater's stairways seeking escape (if he got lost I don't blame him).

One less-then-enchanted viewer told me "I can tolerate the sex, the boil, the endless stair-climbing. What I can't stand is the goat--why is there a goat in the theater? I don't understand the goat."

I sympathize. But anyone who's actually attended a screening in one of these brokedown movie palaces knows that the occasional non-biped often wanders into its reassuringly shadowy interior--I've heard birds fluttering about in these places, even the occasional bat, and once in a while you hear a cat meowing for leftovers. Plenty of odd things can happen in a Filipino grindhouse, including a patron urinating into an empty soda cup beside you (apparently he couldn't be bothered--or didn't dare--to look for the men's room).

Should we understand the goat? I think these places are beyond understanding, just as I suppose Filipino life can be beyond understanding--like the theater it's full of lust and filth, and everyone's too demoralized to bother trying to keep it fully, continuously clean (the moment when the men's room is flooded is strangely the single most moving moment for me with its silent despair, its patient mop sweeper standing ankle-deep in dark water). The script by Armando Lao--who I used to call the Philippines' most underrated scriptwriter, now less underrated (and thankfully more active)--seems shapeless, lackadaisical, and Mendoza directs his script with a general lethargy, punctuated by the occasional surge of energy (a bursting boil, a bout of oral sex, a thief dangling from a balcony). But Lao and Mendoza (with the help of a wonderfully unglamorous cast that includes Jaclyn Jose, Julio Diaz and Gina Pareno) have carefully attained that lethargy, it's the kind of everyday rhythm fellow Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz strives for and achieves in his hours-long epics, set in the countryside.

Call this then, like Lebanon, an elaborate womb metaphor, with the people trapped inside too self-absorbed and terrified to seek escape, only too happy to wallow in their own waste and fester. If there's anything at all compensatory in these less-than-ideal conditions, it's that the theater snack food seem tastier than the cardboard pap found in most movie theaters, with hot meals over rice, pork rinds sprinkled with spicy vinegar, and boiled duck egg (complete with feathery, days-old fetus for a protein surprise) available at the lobby. Just don't use the men's room afterward.

The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2009)

Bum disposal

Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker has been called the best film yet made about the war in Iraq, and one can see where they’re coming from--it’s crude yet coherent, understated yet intense, and it knows that first and foremost, before you even deal with the politics of war, you portray its head rush, the ‘drug’ mentioned in the film’s opening titles.

Cinemanila 2009 (final weekend)

Lav Diaz's Batang West Side

Cinemanila 2009 (final weekend)

The world on the big screen at Cinemanila

It’s that time of the year again, and again I’m not sure we appreciate the kind of bounty we get at Cinemanila. There are other festivals for foreign films (Cine Europa, Eiga Sai, the various embassy festivals); other festivals for independent films (Cinema One Originals, Cinemalaya), but seeing cutting-edge Filipino films screened side-by-side with the latest offerings from world cinema, that’s a different experience entirely. We see the best of what we have to offer alongside the best of what the world has to offer, and we can come to the conclusion that yes, there is much in the world that’s different and much we can learn from, the same time there’s much we can offer in return. The exchange of ideas, images, interests, cultures, stories and, above all, friendships--that’s the real value of a festival like this.

The world cinema programming in particular--it’s a relief to see programming that’s aware of what’s going on out there, instead of relying on distributors or popular hits or goodness knows what criterion to pick films for one’s festival. Here we have commercial hits (Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds), the latest from any number of exciting filmmakers (Fruit Chan and Jian Cui’s Chengdu, I Love You; Steve McQueen’s Hunger; Lukas Moodysson’s Mammoth; Francois Ozon’s Ricky). We have the latest from the finest Filipino filmmakers working at the moment (Raya Martin’s Independencia; Ralston Jover’s Bakal Boys; Pepe Diokno’s Engkwentro). We have screenings of two of Lav Diaz’s most important works, Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino (Evolution of a Filipino Family), and Batang West Side (West Side Avenue).

Batang West Side is as Diaz himself put it his “first film”--or, at least, the first where he truly realized his vision (I do like his earlier efforts, however flawed he may think they are, particularly the Dostoevskian Serafin Geronimo: Kriminal ng Baryo Concepcion (Criminal of Barrio Concepcion)). Batang West Side explores the different levels of an entire community, the Filipino-American community, from its oldest to youngest generation, from its upper class to middle class to underworld. In its five-hour accumulation of detail, with a density and scope and leisurely pace very much like a novel, it achieves greatness; it even has room for deadpan humor (a gang boss’ trippy speech (“Shabu (crystal meth) is the salvation of the Philippines”) and surreal imagery (a nightmarish dream sequence). Diaz balances severe aesthetic with a novelist’s comprehensive storytelling in this film and achieves, I believe, his masterpiece.

Ebolusyon at eleven hours is an even bigger canvas, and admittedly more impressive (Film critic/iconoclast Olaf Moller, writing for Senses of Cinema, picked it as the Best Film of 2005 and, writing for Cinematheque Ontario just this year, as "Film of the Decade"). I would argue that Diaz had trouble validating his mix of 16 mm and video footage, and that the historical perspective doesn’t really integrate with the personal storylines that crisscross the narrative. But huge canvases and overreaching ambitions are often accompanied by considerable flaws, and there are more than enough themes and surpassingly moving moments here to make it worth one’s while--a grandmother lying among her photographs, spending her final moments in mourning; a man’s pathetic, agonizing death stretched out almost to eternity as the camera follows his dying crawl. Diaz attempts nothing more and nothing less than an epic retelling of thirty years’ of Philippine history, and the results are confusing, fascinating, altogether exhilarating.

These are difficult and essential films to see; if you are Filipino, or a lover of all things Filipino, or a film lover, or a lover of Filipino films, or a combination of any of the aforementioned, you must, must, must see these two works.

(Belated note: the Batang West Side screening apparently didn't push through, but festival director Tikoy Aguiluz hopes to have it screened at a later date)

As for the other films--Israel may not be the most morally upstanding country at the moment, but that doesn’t go for some of its filmmakers. Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir is an animated documentary about an Israeli soldier (Folman himself) trying to recover his memories of what happened during the Lebanon War, in particular the Sabra and Shatila massacre--the animation acts as another level of stylization that helps the filmmaker deal with memories too painful to remember. Bui Thac Chuyen’s Adrift (Cinema 5, Saturday 12 to 1.50 pm) is a gorgeously photographed Vietnamese film much in the tradition of French erotic dramas, only the Vietnamese do the French one better by throwing a few virgins in the mix, to help recall what a surprise and terror and wonder human sexuality can be. Chris Chong’s Karaoke is one of the best films I’ve seen recently, an understated drama about the shattering of a youth’s illusions in life, with a great wordless sequence in the middle that reveals what it’s all about and why nothing the youth can say or do really matters.

First published in Businessworld, 10.23.09

More on Jang Kun-Jae's "Eighteen" and Ralston Jover's "Bakal Boys"

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.