There are actually too many intriguing premises for this spiky documentary directed by two Scandinavians. The overall premise is compelling enough: a Slovenian art-rock band becomes the first foreign pop outfit to play a concert in Pyongyang that’s approved by the government. But even beyond that enticing possibility there are other questions that could very well form the basis of their own documentaries. The band, Laibach, for instance, is famous in Europe for being provocateurs in every conceivable way. They formed when Slovenia was still part of Yugoslavia and were an active thorn in the side of the government with their abrasive, industrial, strident, but no less melodic pop songs, many of which were ironic standards. For instance, they’ve played concerts that consisted of nothing but songs from The Sound of Music. They also appropriate Nazi imagery as a means of keeping everyone who sees them on their toes, because despite the martial frippery they seem opposed to both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, as suspicious of communist ideals as they are of capitalist truisms.
Then there’s the whole concept of their playing in North Korea, whose officials don’t understand irony and certainly don’t trust Laibach to follow orders. Which brings us to our third and, in a sense, most telling premise: Laibach’s appearance is brokered by a Norwegian, Morten Traavik, who also happens to be one of the film’s directors, for reasons that seem subversively dangerous, or, at least, dangerous to his own well-being. Traavik is a frequent visitor to the Hermit Kingdom, where he promotes cultural exchange programs, and so has managed to cultivate a relationship with the powers that be despite that fact that every indication given by the film says he’s a prickly, difficult customer. But that may be Traavik playing up to the camera for the sake of boosting the film’s entertainment value, which is already considerable. In any case, Traavik manages to convince officials who want nothing to do with Laibach to allow them to perform, under strict conditions, however.
What’s truly refreshing about Liberation Day is the way Traavik spins the negotiations, rehearsals, and the concert itself into a kind of Herzogian absurdist treatise on the limits of cultural control. One of the ways Laibach convinced the authorities to allow them to perform is to say they will play “We Will Go to Mount Paektu,” a North Korean folk song that is practically a national anthem. They do it in their stentorian style and you can tell by the looks on the officials’ faces that they don’t know if this was a really good idea in the first place. Most documentaries about North Korea tread a fine line between exploitation and enlightenment because of the limits the state puts on recording and talking to citizens. There’s always a feeling that you’re not getting the real deal. Liberation Day makes no such promises in the first place—it’s basically about whether or not Laibach is a serious political entity of a bunch of con artists—and is thus a unique work of art. Calling it a documentary, in fact, seems insufficient.
In English. Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum in Aoyama (03-5766-0114).
Liberation Day home page in Japanese.
photo (c) VFS Films/Traavik. Info 2016
Movies that realistically depict the 1970s force those of us who remember the decade as firsthand observers to slog through several layers of subtext. Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton’s film covers one of the seminal “progressive” events of that time, the contest between former professional tennis player Bobby Riggs (Steve Carrell) and the current women’s tennis champion, Billy Jean King (Emma Stone)—the first woman to be named Athlete of the Year by Sports Illustrated—which became more about personal PR than women’s rights. The more immediate problem with Battle of the Sexes is that Faris and Dayton’s direction doesn’t quite do justice to Simon Beaufoy’s nuanced script. The directing couple seem to be taking their technical cues from David O. Russell, who tends to substitute genre and period signifiers for potent plot points that would actually advance a story. Consequently, the viewer fixates on the musical cues, the automobile models, the wallpaper, the cheesy fashion sense, and relate it all to the story, as if those things determined character and attitudes rather than the other way around. Carrell and Stone, two actors firmly identified with the most recent decade of Hollywood, only intensify this cognitive dissonance.
Hong Sang-soo’s Right Now, Wrong Then, released in South Korea in 2015, is finally opening in Japan, though it should be mentioned that Hong’s films are not temporally fixed. Current events or even trends have absolutely no purchase on his stories. Even the fashion sense is strictly generic. Right Now is one of Hong’s experiments in bifurcated narratives, and while it doesn’t really do anything different with the form, it does show incremental improvements in his command of it when compared to past experiments, like In Another Country.
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During the horror film’s formative heyday in the 80s, trashiness was next to godliness. Perhaps by necessity, the gory goings-on were delivered via hilariously ridiculous plots that were gentle on whatever degree of intelligence was brought to the proceedings. Even a fairly sophisticated shocker like Dressed to Kill was, at base, a comedy.
It’s often difficult to tell with Woody Allen where the satire ends and the pretension begins. The narrator of Wonder Wheel is a would-be writer named Mickey (Justin Timberlake), who toots his own horn often enough while relating the sad tale of the mess he made of the life of a married woman named Ginny (Kate Winslet). It’s easy to poke fun at Mickey’s pronouncements on Eugene O’Neill and Shakespeare, though after a while you begin to wonder if it isn’t the director’s own need for us to understand the allusions he’s making in his own script, which isn’t bad as far as romantic potboilers go, but you can only cut Allen so much slack when it comes to affairs of the heart.
Though stuffed to the gills with macho signifiers and the sentimentalized homoerotic comradeship of men in peril, this action film about the job of forest firefighting is notable for the way it incorporates the minutiae of the job into a kickass storyline without making it feel pedantic or dry. In the opening scenes, a fire department supervisor for the city of Prescott, Arizona, Eric Marsh (Josh Brolin), prepares his team for recertification from your normal fire crew to a coveted federally recognized “hotshot” team, which are called on only to battle the most dangerous forest fires. The crew’s grueling physical training regimen is detailed, but also its logistical knowhow in learning how fires spread, which mostly involves preparing a line at the edge of an area where the fire is heading in order to “contain” it. The work looks unexciting—mostly clearing the area of brush and fuel—but is nevertheless fascinating in the way it enlightens the viewer of what they need to know about the drama that will eventually unfold.
Mexican director Michel Franco’s signature is a sensationalistic storyline told in a dry manner. The basic idea of April’s Daughter is made for tabloid TV—teen pregnancy as the natural outcome of a broken home. However, Franco doesn’t present this scenario in a way you’d expect. The young mother, Valeria (Ana Becerril), is 17 and, we are led to believe from the very start, likes sex a lot. She lives with her older sister, Clara (Joanna Larequi), in a nice rustic house on the beach in Puerto Vallarta, a situation that belies their material circumstances. Both are dropouts working part-time jobs. We soon learn that the house is owned by their mother, April (Emma Suarez), who doesn’t live with them and for some reason isn’t aware that Valeria is pregnant, even though she’s already 7 months along when the movie opens. Clara, a moody, lonely girl who resents Valeria’s dissipated lifestyle, tells April of her sister’s condition against Valeria’s wishes, and April shows up promising to help out. At first Valeria is suspicious and resentful, as if she’s seen this scene before and learned not to believe in it, but her fears over the coming delivery prove to be too much and she asks her mother to stay and see her through. Valeria’s boyfriend, the studly but somewhat clueless Mateo (Enrique Arrizon), is all for it, since his own parents want nothing to do with the child.
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As a documentary filmmaker, Kazuhiro Soda goes with what he knows, or, more precisely, who he knows. In most cases his subjects are people he’s close to, and while the relationship makes the filmmaking process easier and more open it also allows Soda to sort of cruise. His latest film is more ambitious in terms of scale, but it still takes the easy way. Apparently, Soda had a teaching gig at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and he recruited some of his students to help him make a documentary about the university’s famous football stadium, which is supposedly the second biggest sports facility in the world. Filming mainly during a home game against UM’s nemesis Michigan State, the group of more than 15 cameramen try to take in everything, from concessions to rich alumni to scalpers and even the locker room.
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