Onna no Issho / A Woman’s Life (d. Yasuzo Masamura)

Incredible. It’s probably a masterpiece. I watched it without subtitles so I’m holding off making a definitive declaration. It’s about this poor woman, beaten like a dog right from the first scene by her aunt, who goes on to mosey into a grand estate and ends up, first, as a maid, confidante next, a wife to one of the estate’s sons later, and, finally, a Mildred Pierce-like, head of the family’s business as the (spoiled) kids can’t be bothered by the vulgarity of making a living. Part of unappealing nature of the business is because they have been cashing in from military contracts since the time of Sino-Russo wars. The film follows the family as Japan becomes more right wing and then finally enter into WWII. Our female protagonist is given a choice between love and war, and grateful as she is to the son who helps her become part of the household, she chooses the latter, which is the patroness’ preference played by the iconic mother figure in Tokyo Story but SO DELICIOUSLY WICKED here. And from here on out, the movie stages incident upon incident where the consequences of her choice keeps splitting in two directions or where the viewers are aware that there are two things going on internally that the heroine can not explain as she interacts with various family members who do not attempt to understand her at all and who do not understand that their middle class lifestyle is really indebted to her sacrifices. Masumura isn’t done yet. As much as we want to sympathize with her, he shows that she is deeply sympathetic to right-wing movements for purely financial reasons. The wealth isn’t for her but for everyone else, including her daughter who slowly begins to resent her, mimicking a long-standing tradition of family members disrespecting her.The heroine’s pursuit for war profit and politics trouble our potential feelings of sympathy with the character. The mis-en-scene is wildly unconventional with chandeliers and telephones looming in the foreground. What is going on, Masumura-san? I read these objects as material manifestations of immovable things like tradition, culture, family, nationalism, etc. that prevent and obstruct the characters from breaking out of their mindsets. The film is clearly anti-war that I couldn’t figure out how the studio signed off on such a script. One character flatly says, “Well Japan is in China just to make money out of it”. (I wonder if this is the reason the film isn’t more well-known or why it doesn’t seem to have Japanese champions because of its hardline stances.) This film was made in 1962. The heroine is played by Machiko Kyo, a huge star, so she too must have known what was up. The most sympathetic character is a war resister and his fate is clear (killed) despite their reappearance later in what amounts as a possible happy ending (as a ghost), and, as I walked home and thought more about the final sequence and its implications, I realized that it is a terribly tragic one: even in death some keep on suffering for the sake of others, which the movie means Family, Nation, and Culture. Um, fuck that shit.

#2019 #76

Ash is Purest White (d. Jia Zhang-ke)

The Long Day’s Journey into the Night (d. Bi Gan)

An Elephant Sitting Still (d. Bo Hu)

Is this what state approved and film festival approved quasi-art quasi-commercial cinema looks like? Ash is well-lighted and bland. Is this the only story they could come up with, where the female protagonist is played by director’s wife, about China Inc.? It’s not quite Antonioni but it’s also there, with its conscious highlighting of architecture and urban landscapes. It’s a well-produced, somewhat intelligent bad cinema. In contrast take a look at The Long Day’s Journey into Night, another bad romance set in modern day provincial China. The story is thin too, but what makes it remarkable is the the twisting of time where the son’s love affair and his mother’s entwine and possibly meet with that noted long take. (Here the references are clearer: Tsai Ming Liang and Tarkovsky.) Ash has none of the time looping because it hews closely to the state ideology and censorship rules. The film gives the Chinese government some of the luster from the accolades given to a career auteur JZK while the film festival west get to fill in their programming with new product from the director. Long Day’s Journey does the same thing, actually. A less compromising work would be Elephant Sitting Still with its refusal to be a feel good movie, politically. It posits that things have neither been better nor worse despite improved conditions in China. For whom has life improved? Nihilistic but clearer headed than these two other films, it offers the most charitable gesture: “let’s go together” even if the proverbial grass isn’t greener on the other side. How else can anyone refuse such an offer? These are slow, meditative, long films. If anything, they give glimpses of how China is changing so fast that documenting it is to already date oneself, thus these varying statements on temporality embedded within the films.

#2019 #70

The Ornithologist (d. Joao Pedro Rodrigues)

What it wants to be: a fantastical voyage of gay self-discovery cast with shadows of Christian faith and art. (Note the deliberate postures which are meant to echo Christ’s body in religious paintings.) Beautifully told and it has a bunch of neat ideas that produces much interest and entertainment especially if you’re into dicks.

What it is: yet another iteration of the centrality and desirability of the white (gay) body as it is set against bodies that are not–Chinese women and costumed “natives” with masks from different cultures. It’s basically a white gay guy saying no fats, Asians, Blacks, and femmes. The most predictable thing that happens when a young white guy enters the picture and they fuck. The Chinese Christian women are already an improbability, so why can’t the love interest be equally improbable, racially? Why this amateurish mishmash of native cultures in the middle of the forest? He even gets some golden shower action too, unintended by the pee-er. Rodrigues has a lot self-examining to do. The entire narrative is basically about a white due going native and what makes the film different is because the it’s been gay-ified. The movie is beyond problematic AF.

#2019 #62

Why is yellow middle of rainbow? (d. Kidlat Tahimik)

This is one of the stronger works by Tahimik and the key to understanding his latest film (Balikbayan Box) except that the latter is still a mess unlike this one which is essentially a video diary of the 80s decade. It’s joyous, witty, observant, and, as far as I’m concerned, riddled with major problematic ideas. It’s a treasure trove of images, especially when the country turned yellow, the party color of Cory Aquino whose husband’s assassination began the beginning of the decline of the Marcoses and where she would eventually run for President. In fact, watching demonstrators in support for Aquino and against Marcos made me incredulous at the current state of the country where another tyrant (Duterte) is in the making who is also ushering the return of the Marcoses back into the limelight. All that fervor and hope for change gone from the affective record of the people’s hearts. The Aquino presidency was in itself a disaster, something that is recounted here as a series of attempted coups instead of continuing corruption that was no different from the Marcos era. There’s also a segment on a road trip that ends up in Death Valley which playfully plays off American Western films and the “indios” and “tontos” of the world. On the other hand, one of Tahimik’s problems is his conception of the indigenous. For him, anyone can be indigenous, including an expat from Estonia. This explains my discomfort of seeing his sons, one of them white, tall, and blonde, wearing an indigenous Filipino garment performing a traditional dance representing the Philippines for foreigners. Gross. For Tahimik being indigenous is cultural and a turning away from European and American cultures all the while speaking English almost entirely in the film and using forms, film essay or the docu-fiction, which doesn’t seem suited for Filipino audiences but to the film festival West. (I’m not saying Filipinos aren’t capable of understanding such forms, but it’s telling, for instance, how Tahimik puts together his films, at nearly 3 hour lengths, where can he show such works in the country? Sure in Manila, it’s not a problem, but Manila isn’t the Philippines. Who has the facilities and time for this? Why is the journey motif in the work all in the West and the one within the country is fairly limited? Tahimik keeps using the phrase “strong contradiction” and his work can be summed up with that phrase all too perfectly.) Another major issue is how he equates the militant communists living in the hinterlands with the Philippine army. He faux-naively wants peace and he doesn’t trouble to explain to his audiences why the rebel communists exist and continue to do so up to this day. Yes, they have committed violent acts, but they’re nothing compared to the army’s. And why are they not quelled? It’s because of land and the gross unevenness of wealth in the country, which is a point that never appears in his films despite his MBA from Wharton. This is why Tahimik’s idea of indigeneity is troublesome, because it’s all cultural to him and the land or material aspect isn’t there. He moans and moans constantly of American pop culture’s intrusion into Filipino society, a valid enough argument, but he keeps using the same references and, if you listen carefully, the same cliched wordings as if there aren’t other non-American cultures one can draw from. So this is why I find him disingenuous and dis-indigenous. On the other hand, these are vital documents, the films of Tahimik as they are unlike any other and it is for that that I’m grateful and these films should be seen as works by someone who struggled with what he had, materially and conceptually, at that time while reckoning with his immediate history, strong contradictions and all.

#2019 #57

Elle (d. Paul Verhoeven)

It’s bullshit, especially when it comes to what Verhoeven thinks is feminism, but there are other things in the film worth examining, like patriarchy, specifically the European kind with its (mass) violence, and a more multicultural Europe even though it’s an all-white neighborhood/ workplace/city—except for the baby and, as the camera suggests with a wink, the true baby daddy.

First, this isn’t feminism at all even though Verhoeven wants us to think some women like it rough and that some women permit men to be rough—to others. It’s the classic what men think what women want, sexually. It’s hoary. It’s cliche. It’s irredeemable. Also, that’s “old” Europe way of thinking about sexuality. So how about “new” Europe? Well, it frankly scares them, the older white people especially that’s why the race and paternity of the baby is a running joke in the film. The only way the movie can assimilate the black body, the stand-in here for all non-white people, is through falsehood. Old Europe can’t imagine how New Europe with its multicultural population can ever be without some hoodwinking by the colonized, the immigrants, the non-whites. This is why the baby story exists in the film. This is also why the movie is partly preoccupied with images of old neighborhood (where the violence took place) and the chic neighborhood of its protagonist. Attached to this is the idea of property. There can be bad occupants and those who have the choice and means to move away in a Europe with a growing multicultural population.

It’s also about patriarchy. Curiously the film has resemblances to another powerful film about the same subject with the same star: White Material. (Note how that too is about property but this time the violence is brought back home to the home country and to the protagonist’s home—and also to other people’s homes if we want to include to think about how video games as violent texts get played inside one’s home/psyche.) The inhumanity of the massacre is underscored by the unacknowledged death of animals where the protagonist cares enough for a dying swallow. The massacre is decades old but people seem to remember and react vehemently to its memories. But my question would be how about the massacre in the streets of Paris of demonstrating Algerians which was not acknowledged or spoken officially for a long time? How about the colonial violence in Vietnam and Algeria? No tears for them. Or that violence isn’t configured in the film’s logic about patriarchal violence. This is some white people shit: blindness, occlusion, misogyny.

#2019 #54

Yang Ki: Made in Hong Kong (d. Kidlat Tahimik)

Japanese Summers of a Filipino Fundoshi (d. Kidlat Tahimik)

What does it mean for a filmmaker from the Philippines making a documentary about a young family and their baby daughter (Yang Ki) in Hong Kong with German sponsorship? is a question that isn’t asked in the work. And it’s a glaring issue in the film. Tahimik is clearly sympathetic to their plight by focusing on the poor labor laws that fail to protect vulnerable employees. Yang Ki’s mother was injured in the job while her husband works long hours in the tollway, which Tahimik notes, means breathing toxic fumes all day. The comparisons being made are with Europe and the United States. Why not the Philippines, too? In effect, he becomes a spokesperson for the more progressive West or that the west is positioned as such. For a film and filmmaker that tackles colonialism, isn’t this positioning very much of the westernized colonized? Even the tacked on “economic analysis” (Tahimik reportedly has an MBA from Wharton), isn’t that comical or insightful. Revealingly, he does this act literally (and inexplicably) whitefaced, which goes to show you how unaware he is of his own westernized colonial identity.

The second film is a much weaker work. It would appear that Tahimik has sons from his marriage to a German woman. What he doesn’t realize is the problematic optics of his children wearing Filipino indigenous garb performing traditional dances for a Japanese audience. This is the biggest issue with Tahimik, this carelessness when it comes to appropriating a specific indigenous identity as his own and the permissiveness he gives to his sons to inhabit the same identity. Reportedly, the filmmaker isn’t an Igorot, the tribal identity that he has assumed and continues to do so. I feel that he has adopted this semi-fictional identity as a response to his experiences abroad: if westerners will not accept him as an equal, since he was educated at Penn and in Paris in the 60s, he will outdo them with an identity that the westerners cannot match, the fictionalized version of a native Filipino. In fact his filmmaking career seems like a response to Herzog whom he worked for and appears briefly in a film of his as an “Indian”. Kidlat Tahimik is that “Indian” with the quotation marks. jWe watch them travel to Hiroshima as Filipino performers when their Filipino-ness is already foreign-ified (my invented word). Take a look at one of his sons, who looks thoroughly Caucasian, who creates a rather insightful series of casts of colonized bodies. They have remained white.

#2019 #52 #53

Wanda (d. Barbara Loden)

It’s interesting that the newly restored film feels like a missing link to the era and 70s American cinema. Though it plays out like a low-key low budget Bonnie and Clyde, Loden isn’t interested in that kind of Hollywood glamour or violent spectacle even though the protagonist tries her best to be presentable at one point. What’s amazing about the film is the way it captures her in the midsts of a kind of an Americana (white obviously) that reflects the economic state and might of the country at the time despite intimations of decline and obsolescence: coal, garment industry, local malls, small town Main Street, the immigrant (Mexican?) section of town, etc. She appears simple-minded but she’s also shown thinking constantly as the camera gazes at her steadily as part of the landscape described above. I don’t think I’ve seen this kind of regard for a female figure who is deep in thought whenever the camera is on her since the Dardennes’ Rosetta, which the film bears some resemblances. It’s also a portrait of what it means to be alienated from American culture as a woman who economically, culturally, and socially disadvantaged, and, more importantly, who dissents in her own way all that the reality offers her. Her abusive male companion wonders if it is death that she wants. It’s not death and it’s not something more either, but something different. Is it feminism? Is it social activism? What is it? It’s this articulacy of representing her inarticulacy that is an achievement of sorts. Ultimately, does Wanda know or is it more important to show that she’s preoccupied with something as she munches on a true red white and blue American hotdog.

#2019 #51

Your Name (d. Makoto Shinkai)

Clearly made with Tohoku/Fukushima in mind, the film is a way of dealing with both the natural and man-made disasters as an engaging fantasy love story. What’s unresolved narratively in the film is what interests me and that’s how the young woman was able to persuade her father, the town mayor, to carry out the evacuation. That scene or the chain of events leading up to the saving of the town’s people isn’t shown, and, for this reason, remains in the realm of mystery, or, worse, fantasy because in reality, they had perished. What the film shows is that even with proper and vital information of impeding disaster, the powers that be, of a small town or the central government in Tokyo, will remain unmoved; and that going against any authority is basically confronting one’s father (or The Father/Nation itself). This is the true heartbreaking lesson of the film. There’s also the ongoing theme of memory in the movie where the main characters keep forgetting each other’s name (and other bits of info) in spite of their best efforts. This slip seems more revealing in that it shows the national tendency to forget, the already mentioned disasters, primarily, but also other moments in the country’s history, like the war and war crimes committed in the name of the nation and its citizens.

#2019 #48

Personal Shopper (d. Olivier Assayas)

Assayas has the ability (and privilege too perhaps?) to pick and anoint the latest “it girl” of French Cinema, and this is round 2 with Kristen Stewart. What does he envision this girl to be? A tomboyish gal who masturbates in her employer’s bed. Is this what he thinks what feminism is? How are we supposed to relate to her with her glamorous job picking up chic expensive clothes from designer boutiques in Paris and London? What if we don’t share his desire for her? What if some of us think this is some white privileged Becky shit? Assayas thinks he is giving us statement about our modern world about the gig economy though I doubt it. He thinks the ghosts and spiritualism is a way for him to make connections between people and the present with the past. It’s way too literal and tacky, this mysticism as a mechanism to make grand statements. I guess what he ends up showing is the vapidity of that kind of life even as he shows how knowledgeable he is of the elite world of fashion. The story isn’t convincing, but what is convincing is getting Cartier to loan him some bling for his latest project because he just might just maybe like the diva in the film, a monster.

Perfumed Nightmare (d. Kidlat Tahimik)

It’s an accomplished docu-fiction that joyfully mocks western standards of progress while envying them too. What differentiates the Kidlat Tahimik of this film, his first one, I believe, from his latest, viewed and reviewed a few days ago, is that he mixes mock naïveté with an open curiosity of where his antics and journeys would take him. The KT persona of today is a bore because he has fully embraced this naive faux native persona as himself as he now goes around the world wearing an indigenous costume—and it’s precisely that, a costume, a culturally misappropriated persona, for personal fame. It’s revealing that upon meeting Duterte as he was awarded National Artist status last year, a much coveted honor for most since it comes with a lifetime salary, took a selfie with his (symbolic) camera. Nowhere in his latest work is a working critique of the Philippine government but lays the full blame to American and Spanish colonialisms which seems like a calculated evasion. Surprisingly and not so much so, there isn’t any mention of the Marcos regime in this early feature. Made in 1977, KT openly wonders when his country will achieve the same level of progress as the West when the reason for the country’s underdevelopment is the economically disastrous plundering of the nation by Marcos and his friends—for decades. So it would seem this foregrounding of European and American progress is a misrepresentation too because it evades the historical record of the time. What KT misses, and it’s so typical of Philippine intelligentsia, as they always address the white foreigner than their brown country men—the film is mostly in English—, is that this decision not to talk about Philippine politics is also another obstacle to the country’s progress.

#2019 #43