by Won Kim

Short Looks at Three Oscar Contenders From Asia & A Festival Favorite.

I was surprised to learn that countries actually nominate the films that compete for the Best Foreign Film Oscar at the Academy Awards. (I thought academy members nominated stand out films that screened at the international film festivals.) Equally surprising were some of the films that get nominated. In recent years China’s Hero, Hong Kong’s In the Mood for Love> and Japan’s Twilight Samurai certainly deserved their nominations. Those films were well directed, beautifully shot share a certain dramatic gravitas. In contrast, this years entries from South Korea, China and Hong Kong were all crowd pleasers at home, but I question if they are strong enough to compete for an Oscar. In some cases there are clearly better films to choose from, and in one case, however meaningful one comedy might be at home, I question how readily it’s import will translate abroad.

A pleasant mix of drama and comedy, Welcome to Dongmakgol (2005) is the Korean nominee for the best foreign film award. Closely adapted from a successful stage play, Dongmakgol has the look of an extremely well-produced episode of M*A*S*H. The look suits the story: with the exception of a few scenes set on the mountain outside the village, and quick shots of American military radio traffic, most of the action takes place squarely in the center of town. The comic elements and the ‘theatrical quality’ of the production already separates this story from most cinematic treatments of the Korean War era, of which the bombastic melodrama Taegukgi: Brotherhood of War is a good example.

Separated from their company, three North Korean soldiers barely survive an ambush. Stumbling away from the carnage, the injured, bloodied men run right into a simple-minded farm girl on a mountain trail. She leads them to her village, high up in the mountains. There the soldiers are stunned to learn that somehow, miraculously the inhabitants have been spared the ravages of war. In fact they are completely unaware a war is going on at all. More surprises are in store. The villagers already are putting up an American fighter pilot, badly hurt in a crash landing. Soon two lost South Korean soldiers, join them. A tense stand-off results. I held my breath watching the last third of this film. Dongmakgol could have ended up as yet another variation on “Lost Horizon” where the soldiers either (1) learn the meaning of peace by being assimilated into a low rent rural version of Shangri-la, or (2) “Seven Samurai”, where the soldiers band together to fight off outsiders or (3) the soldiers could turn upon themselves, resulting in a nihilistic bloodbath, or (4) learn they stumbled into a time warp, as in < Star Trek and change the course of history. I shouldn’t have worried. I’m pleased to report the film comes to a solid conclusion - a strangely fun spin on the notion of sacrifice.

Jeong Jae-young, the pugnacious squad leader in Silmido, the abusive boxer in No Blood No Tears) is the senior of the North Korean soldiers. Shin Ha-Kyun, the deaf mute factory worker in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, and the alien hunter in Save the Green Planet plays a South Korean demolitions man. While they make the tension between soldiers feel very real, the script doesn’t give them the opportunity to show the range they’ve displayed in earlier roles. Likewise Kang Hye-Jeong (Mido in Oldboy), who is fun as the simple-minded farm girl. The peasants seem there primarily for laughs. Welcome to Dongmakgol is well-made and entertaining: I wish it were more. Like Forest Gump I imagine it will mean much more for domestic audiences in Korea than it will to members of the academy. I agree with those who say it’s a bit light for academy award consideration. Were it up to me, I would have opted for Duelist to represent South Korea despite that films tendency to polarize audiences.

Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globes, director Chen Kaige’s (Farewell My Concubine) The Promise (China, 2005) is an engaging storybook fantasy. The results aren’t half bad, if you can forgive the mystifying production design of the early battle scenes. This sequence has a bizarre Loony Toons feel, one that is underscored by the use of outside battlefield weapons by some of the soldiers, and cheap-looking computer animation. (I could not help but wonder if the director consciously intended to ape the style of the CGI in Stephen Chiao’s dark violent comedy Kung Fu Hustle here.) Here the process shots are unintentionally hilarious, at worst laughably bad. It took me three viewings to get beyond them. This kind of approach works in Stephen Chiao’s films because his comedies are essentially genre farces. However The Promise is meant to be taken straight.

Like Welcome to Dongmakgol, The Promise features an A-List cast. Hiroyuki Sanada (Twilight Samurai) plays Guang-Ming, the Master of the Crimson Armor, a ruthless, if sleazy warrior general. Cecilia Cheung (One Nite in Mongkok is Qing-Cheng a concubine and Princess who is so beautiful that she can bring an army to its’ collective knees. Dong-Kun Jang (Taegukgi: Brotherhood of War is the slave Kunlun, who runs (and sometimes flies) so fast, he can break the time barrier. Kunlun’s utterly guileless and as dopey as Forest Gump.

These three are ably supported by Ye Liu Purple Butterfly as the guilt ridden assassin Snow Wolf, Nicholes Tsu (Time & Tide) as an envious Wu-Haun, the Duke of the North and Guang-Ming’s greatest rival (whose ultimate motivations made we wonder if he was a parody of Yu Yi-Tae’s Wu-Jin in Oldboy) and Hong-Chen (Together) as the Goddess Hanshen, who offers Guang-Ming and Qing-Cheng glimpses of the future while exacting devils’ bargains from them the whole time.

Once the battle scene is over the special effects settle down (though for no lack of drama, action and beautiful costumes and sets) and the story turns out to be the stuff of epic children’s adventure stories (were it not for some brief and racey plot elements). There’s a fair amount of magic, intrigue, betrayal and adventure. There's even some time travel, and almost every shot is beautiful, if at times, silly-looking. The film is worth seeing as all-out no-holds-barred fantasy. Whether an audience finds The Promise entertaining or laughable depends on how willing the viewer is to forgive its’ excesses, and buy into the simple fantasy world on offer here. As an Oscar contender, I don’t think The Promise has a chance in hell: the film asks far, far too much from the audience.

Foriegn Film Watch: Award Season (Part II).

Hong Kong director Peter Chan, is best known in the West for his 1996 film, Comrades: Almost A Love Story a film with Leon Lai and the great Maggie Cheung, as a pair of immigrants, and eventually lovers, from the Mainland, whose lives in early 1990’s Hong Kong, and later, in the United States, criss-cross each other’s over a ten year period of time. The film swept “Best Film” awards across Asia, and made a respectable showing at the international film festivals. Then Chan left directing, seemingly for good, concentrating on producing the films of protégées under the aegis of his United Filmmakers Organization in Hong Kong, a company noted for high production standards and strong source materials. When I heard he was directing a new film, I had high hopes. Comrades remains my one of my favorite films of the Hong Kong new wave, and one of only two that aren’t art films or an action melodramas.

Chan’s Perhaps Love (2005), the academy award nominee from Hong Kong, is an ambitious production about an equally ambitious production, a Broadway style musical being shot in Beijing, essentially a film, within a film, within yet another film.

A Beijing-based filmmaker, (Jackie Cheung) assembles his cast, unknowingly reuniting his lover, business partner and lead actress (Zhou Xun, who is best known for her role in Balzac & the Little Chinese Seamtress) with a rising Hong Kong heartthrob and romantic lead (Takeshi Kaneshiro, last seen in House of Flying Daggers), who was a film student in Beijing, when Zhou, then an impoverished street kid, and struggling would-be actress, befriended, loved then left him for other men, men could advance her career. When the director has to step in to cover for an actor who backed out of the project at the last minute, “the stage is set” for a complex mixture of film business drama, musical production numbers which underscoring the characters emotions in the present, and flashbacks to Zhou and Kaneshiro’s characters’ shared past.

The film’s great strength is it’s realistic (if a bit clichéd) depiction of three people whose lives and loves are twisted by the cold-blooded competition that fuels the film industry, set against the backdrop of the colossal logistic undertaking that is the making of a big budget movie. These scenes make for solid, even riveting drama at times, particularly those scenes depicting Zhou’s and Kaneshiro’s actors salad days in a snow covered Bejing, and Cheung’s director’s struggle to reconcile his need to deliver a successful film with his fears he is losing Zhou’s affections in the present, set (and shot) so

Where the film falters are in some of it’s musical numbers, that underscore the feelings and emotions driving the characters, in the past and the present. These scenes vary in impact depending on who is doing the singing. Jackie Cheung, a long time singing star in Asia and an often under-rated actor (in part because he hasn’t made many films in his long career, preferring to focus on his music career) walks away with his production numbers, where the lyrics are set to music that recalls the great operatic solos in musicals like Les Miserables. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for Kaneshiro and Zhou, who don’t quite pass muster as Broadway-level performers.

That’s not to say there aren’t some really good musical numbers here, my favorite being Zhou Xun’s visit back to the harsh Beijing slum of her youth, where she faces an uncomfortable truth about the price of her ambition, amidst a chorus of singing and dancing whores in cheongsam dresses, a set piece whose style owes much to director-choreographer Bob Fosse’s (All That Jazz, Chicago) influential mix of striptease and dance.

Kaneshiro, who has made a pretty decent art film career of playing men caught up in their contradictions in films as varied as Flying Daggers and Chungking Express, is fine here. It takes a bit longer to warm up to Zhou Xun’s character, whose child like good looks belie her cold blooded, iron will to succeed at any price, but by films end, she’s utterly sympathetic. However understated his troubled, preoccupied director, Jackie Cheung is great from the start. He’s made few dramas in his film career (the best likely being July Rhapsody). I hope he makes more.

Korean actor Jee Jin-Hee (likely best known here as a detective in the Korean serial killer movie, H) is almost unnecessary as a kind of Phantom Stranger-type character, a figure who subtly pushes people towards emotional realizations they need to move on with their lives. He’s decent in the part, but given how little he does in the film, I was amazed his part wasn’t cut out of earlier drafts of the final shooting script.

I recommend Perhaps Love with some minor reservations, for the Chan’s interesting way of telling the story, inter-cutting between past, present and on-set production numbers. Also notable is his depiction of the hard life of young would-be actors and filmmakers in Beijing, his re-creation of life on sets, and the stories satisfying and surprising resolution, where everyone gets what they need, if not necessarily what they want. However I question how much English-speaking audiences enjoyment might be mitigated by the uneven quality of the musical numbers. (I do admit, that inadequate subtitles might have made it difficult to immerse myself in Kaneshiro and Zhou’s musical numbers. I simply don’t know enough Mandarin to be able to say for sure. In my opinion however, all this does is but more of the onus on Kaneshiro and Zhou to carry their musical numbers with the physical qualities of their performances. If Jacky Cheung pulled it off, in his relatively understated musical scenes, where he’s sitting most of the time, Chan should have pushed Kaneshiro and Zhou should have done more to step up to the challenge.)

A Recent Festival Favorite:

Shot in a style reminiscent of the work of American independent filmmaker and actor, John Cassavettes, Butterfly (Hong Kong, 2004) is unsparing look at one woman’s struggle to undo ten years of denial and “come out of the closet” as an openly gay woman. A 3o-year old married school teacher and mother, Flavia (Josie Ho) daily routines and family life are hopelessly upended when she notices twenty-something songwriter and musician Yip (Tian Yuen) quietly shoplifting a meal in a supermarket. Drawn to the Yip, Flavia begins a passionate affair with the younger woman.

As Flavia and Yip’s relationship develops, we learn that the younger Flavia (played by Isabel Chan in flashback) had been involved with a political activist named Jin when the two girls were in high school, a relationship that lasts into their college years. A key event for both woman is the 1989 the massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Tiannamen Square. The televised footage of the tanks rolling over victims galvanizes activists all over Asia, including Jin. Her increasing radicalism, and Flavia’s slavish loyalty to her emotionally weak mother eventually tears the girls apart. Jin disappears, and Flavia buries her feelings for women. She shortly marries the distracted, but well-meaning Ming (Eric Kot in a strong sympathetic performance) and gives birth to a daughter. Flavia’s affair with Yip, forces Flavia’s to face ten years of denial, with painful, but unavoidable consequences for all involved.

Though Jose Ho has very little dialogue in this film, nevertheless, the focus is squarely on her character's emotional state as she struggles to reconcile her re-emerging lesbian instincts with guilt over how her previous relationship ended, the needs of her husband, child and parents in the present. Like some of the finest Chinese actresses: Gong Li (in any of her early films with director Zhang Yimou), or Maggie Cheung (in Comrades, In the Mood for Love), Josie Ho manages to communicate the torrent of conflicting emotions raging within with the simplest of looks and gestures. Butterfly is a great showcase for her talents.

The film's one great flaw is it’s running time. 124 minutes may not seem overly long for a feature film, but the film could have shed up to 20 minutes without losing any impact (in fact, it might have had more. As it is, it feels like it meanders a bit). One obvious place to cut is the surfeit of flashbacks. Though they serve a necessary purpose in the narrative, there are far too many of them, forcing the viewer to maintain focused concentration to follow the storyline. Some struck me as utterly unnecessary. Regardless, it’s a great role for Josie Ho, and the filmmakers don’t cop out when showing the painful consequences of not living true to oneself. Not everyone emerges from the tale unscathed. Butterfly remains the best treatment of homosexual themes out of Hong Kong since Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together came out almost ten years ago, which likely accounts for the accolades the film received at seven Asian and European film festivals.

Love & Pathology: A Guaranteed Crowd-Pleaser

Funny, after two weekends of would-be Foreign Film Oscar contenders from Asia, the most entertaining film I watched this weekend had to be the 2004 French hit comedy Love Me if You Dare, a loving portrait of two young person's shared pathology. This is the way Bonnie & Clyde should’ve been. Highly recommended for those looking for sick laughs akin to Secretary.

Note: For Fan fans of Oldboy, the Tartan Extreme Region-1 DVD Edition of Director Chan-Wook Park's (Sympathy for) Lady Vengeance is due out May 5th.

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