By Won Kim

Winter chills are a good reason to give yourself a break, bundle up and watch a good solid drama. Here are a few films that would go well with crackers, a chunk of rich cheese (I suggest a stilton or brie) and a fortified wine (port or Night Train, depending on your budget).

36 Quai Des Orfevres (2004, France)

A house divided: Daniel Auteuil, Gerard Depardieu, and their respective ‘crews’, a department in mourning, in 36 Quai Des Orfevres.

Recipient of eight Cesar Award Nominations (the French Oscars) including Best Picture, 36 Quai Des Orfevres is a drama about office politics that turn lethal and divide the Paris Police Department. It features fine performances from two of France's greatest actors, Daniel Auteuil and Gerard Depardieu. The two men play the commanders of two elite units in the Paris police force. They also were friends once, until a woman left one for the other. Now they find themselves rivals for the leadership of the department. The prize goes to the man who takes down a pack of vicious armed robbers, who go after armored trucks, and routinely leave dead men in their wake.

Leo Vrinks (Auteuil), the “good cop”, gets the nod early. Every one expects him to take control of the department. He commands the sincere friendship, respect and loyalty of his men, not the least because he shares the risks, as well as the rewards, of their work. At the same time, he manages to maintain circumscribed, but long-standing, relations with ex-cons, madams and career criminals, ties which prove as costly as they are useful as he presses his criminal informants for clues on the “van gang”. Lacking Vrinks' sterling qualities, Denis Klein (Depardieu) still lusts for the position. Long having become a man who uses rather than relates to people, he takes unnecessary risks in the field, exposing his fellow officers to costly risks and he isn’t above strong arming, bribing or blackmailing those who are in his way. When he happens upon damaging information about Vrinks’ underworld ties, he soon shows there is no depth he will sink to get what he wants. Years pass. Vrinks emerges from prison, Klein is the Chief of Police, and a strange justice evolves from what follows.

The cinematography (and the star power confrontation) are both reminiscent of Michael Mann’s Heat and the entire cast give great performances, even the smallest role leaving an impression on the whole. The score is fantastic. With the sole exception of one all-too-convenient plot twist towards the end, 36 Quai Des Orfevres is an excellent film: I wouldn’t be surprised if we soon saw an American remake someday, titled perhaps, “One Police Plaza”. Recommended.

Double Agent (also titled, Comrade, 2003, Korea)

Double Agent: it was truly a cold, ugly war,…

Set in the early 1980’s, Double Agent focuses on the career of Lim Byong-Ho (Han Seok-Gyu), a North Korean specialist in psychological warfare who works out of the North Korean embassy in East Berlin. Shot while defecting to the West, he is met on the other side of Berlin’s infamous Checkpoint Charlie by officers of South Korean Central Intelligence, and is whisked off to an infamous KCIA installation at Namsam Mountain where he is interrogated and tortured until he convinces them of his sincere desire to defect. Though the South Korean’s are never entirely convinced, they put Lim to work training South Korean commandos.

Two years later, Lim earns the trust of Baek Seung-Chul (Jeon Ho-Jin), a rising star in the KCIA, who promotes him to intelligence analyst. Accompanied by a KCIA agent wherever he goes, off duty he still manages to tap into a network of long-term, deep cover North Korean agents operating in the South. When he passes along information that results in the deaths of 16 South Korean commandos, the KCIA tightens surveillance of suspected North Korean agents nationwide with dangerous and dramatic results.

Double Agentshares much in common with Martin Ritt’s excellent film adaptation of John Le Carre's The Spy Who Came in From the Cold: both sides are shown to be equally deceptive, cold-blooded and brutal. Though there is very little overt violence (though when there is, it’s appropriately stunning) we never loose sight of the fact that the characters are walking a tightrope, and could be arrested, tortured or simply shot dead, at any moment. I’ve seen Han Suk-gyu in three films, and he’s never been as convincing as he is here. His scenes with Jeon Ho-Jin are suspenseful even when the two men are simply chatting in an office, sharing a drink or a meal. Song Jae-Ho is equally convincing as an elderly and kind family doctor with a chilling double life. Ko So-Young plays Lim’s courier, primary contact with the network and romantic interest, Yeon Su-Mi. Some argue that Han and Ko lack the necessary chemistry for their characters’ mutual attraction to be convincing, or that Ko shows none of the awareness her character should evince. It’s true, Ko’s performance was somewhat subdued, but I think her character was supposed to be a quite person, even passive, capable of disappearing at a moments notice. Recommended.

Double Agent/Comrade is available in all-region and region 3 editions.

Spider Forest (2004, Korea)

Truly) slow-boil psychological horror in Spider Forest

Though Spider Forest has the structure of a mystery-thriller, first and foremost, it’s a study of one man’s profound grief and anger. There is also a slow middle passage that will turn off viewers looking for more chills and spills. While this film will appeal to critics, I question how well it will do with general audiences despite strong performances and at times stunning cinematography.

Kang Min (Gam Woo-sung) wakes up in the middle of a forest in the dead of night. Stumbling to a nearby cabin, he discovers the bloodied bodies of his boss and his girlfriend, Su-young (Kang Kyeong-heon). Through a window he sees a dark figure rushing away from the cabin and gives chase. Struck down by a speeding car, he awakens in a hospital with a severe head injury and soon finds being interrogated by Detective Choi (Jang Hyeon-seong) who also happens to be a close friend.

We learn that Kang, a TV producer, lost his wife and soon began to drink heavily. Though Su-young comes into his life and while things brighten up for a while, his performance slips at work and his job is on the line. Assigned to investigate rumors that a remote forest is haunted, he travels there to interview a local shopkeeper, Min Su-In (Suh Jung) about the local legends. A mysterious caller leads him to a painful discovery,… but here there are significant gaps in his memory. The pace of the story slows as we move back and forth through Kang’s memory, Su-In’s stories, and Choi attempts to fill in the missing spaces in Kang’s memory, until everything comes to a head in the films final thirty minutes.

While nothing remains unresolved, neither is everything is spelled out for the viewer and the film definitely slows down between the set-up and conclusion. Fortunately, that middle passage is often quite moving, and many images are memorable. The principals are uniformly excellent, delivering nuanced, thoughtful performances. Suh Jung in particular, who plays Kang Min’s wife as well as a village shop keeper will surprise those who remember her as Hee-Jin, in The Isle (2000). Stylistically the film is reminiscent of Krystoff Krieslewski’s Blue, and Jacques Rivette’s Histoire de Marie et Julien though Spider Forest does a far better job of integrating the story’s supernatural elements than the latter film. Spider Forest will appeal to anyone who likes Bergman’s intense psychodramas and deliberately-paced ghost stories like The Others, preferably both.

A Region I DVD edition is due out in the third week of October. Recommended for patient, adult art-crowd audiences.

Seven Swords (2005)

When 17th century ass must be kicked, “who you gonna’ call?”

I find it hard to say anything definitive about Tsui Hark's epic Seven Swords, which opened the Venice Festival this year. The problem is, to the best of my knowledge, the definitive edition of the movie has yet to be screened. Tsui Hark’s original cut ran nearly four hours long: two editions are currently available, a 115 minute version (a bad transfer, with incomplete subtitles), and a 153 minute edition, which is quite nice. I’ve seen both, and they suffer from gaps in the story, not so much in the main narrative, which is pretty simple, but in the subplots, romantic and otherwise, involving members of the large ensemble cast.

Based on a novel, The Seven Swords of Mt. Tian, Seven Swords is set in the early 1660, Manchurians took over the central government of China and established the Qing Dynasty. Throughout the country, sporadic revolts broke out, led by nationalist who didn’t want to be governed by foreigners. The new government responded by setting up an immediate ban on the practice of martial arts. The problem was in those Hobbesian times, many rural villagers practiced marital arts due to the constant threat of roving bandits. Thus Fire-Wind (Song Hong Lei) a holdover from the previous administration gathers an officially sanctioned army of bastards (who look like a cross between the biker Mongols of Disney’s Mulan and the kung fu gypsies of [i]Pact Des Loups), and leads them on a campaign akin to Sherman’s March across the South after the American Civil War. Cutting across rural Northwest China, they work their way from village to village, often indiscriminately slaughtering the entire populations of small and villages. One last holdout "The Martial Village", the last holdout lies directly in his path.

Fu Quinhzu, (Lau Kar_Leung, a veteran fight choreographer) plays a retired executioner who also served the previous government and witnesses the horror that his one-time protégé, Fire-Wind wrecks on one village. Seeking to atone past sins, he recruits two young people from the Martial Village, Yuanyin (Charlie Young in the best period role of her career) and Han (Lu Yin), and travels to Mt. Heaven to seek help from the Odin-like Master Shadow-Glow, who leads a hardcore school of sword fighters on Mt. Heaven’s rocky slopes. Once there, Shadow Glow gives the them three powerful swords (including a weapon Fu Quinhzu abandoned years before) and lends Fu the services of four of his badass disciples, including Chu (action star/choreographer Donnie Yen), a Korean ex-slave, and Yang (Leon Lai), a reticent outcast from a shadowy legion of martial arts rebels, to go back to Martial Village and clean house. Simple enough.

Dark and dramatic, Seven Swords is shot in a style that recalls both Tsui Hark’s 1996 deconstruction of the myths behind wuxia novels, The Blade, though the lighting is much more naturalistic than that nihilistic masterpiece, and a John Ford western. Tsui Hark certainly has not lost his ability to frame stunning images of warriors in motion. Every shot is beautifully composed, the action fast and furious, and the weapons positively medieval in look and effect. There’s one scene early on in the film, where old Fu actually throws a horse across a wide stream. If you liked "The Blade", the first "Once Upon a Time in China"[ film, "Musa the Warrior", "Sword in the Moon" and "Seven Samurai", you should like Seven Swords. Fans of “blood and guts” action will have plenty to feast their eyes upon (though I must concede they might also find the editing choppy in places). The film’s problem sequences are those that take place between the action set pieces, where the film’s numerous subplots come to the fore: Fu’s regret for past misdeeds, Yang’s reticence about his past, Chu’s attempt to free Fire-Wind’s concubine, another Korean slave, mentally as well as physically, a romantic triangles involving child hood friends Yuanyin, Han and the village school-teacher, and the relationship between Yang and an orphan boy he takes under his wing, etc. The actors do what they can with the script, but the characters remain fairly shallow throughout, and most of the subplots lack the clear resolutions of those in Musa the Warrior, all in all, a far more satisfactory period adventure.

The problem is, until the promised full four-hour cut of the film is released, we will not know whether the disjointed feel of the side stories were the result of cuts intended to allow distributors to pack more screenings when the film was shown in theatres in Asia. Compounding matters is Tsui Hark’s fidelity to the original novel in which the characters may have been little more than one-dimensional cut-outs standing for ideals, or base evil, and little else. Another mitigating factor is that the story actually comprises only a single chapter of the original novel (much like Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon which was based on the fourth chapter of a five volume story). Having not read the novel, I cannot tell the reader whether or not the subplots introduced in this film will are to be resolved later on in the novel, and Tsui Hark decided not to give away their resolutions yet. (The film did well in Asia, and Tsui Hark has promised sequels.) Thus] the jury is still out on this film, at least until I see the director's four hour version, which hopefully will flesh out the personalities of the seemingly neglected characters (like the two younger swordsmen from Mt. Tian), and bring the films many subplots to Fu’s past to a much more satisfactory conclusion.