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It was obvious from all the prefatory statements made by the various officials of the Busan International Film Festival on Sept. 7 to announce what would take place this year that the opening press conference was supposed to be a bigger deal that what it turned out to be. The organizers wanted it to be a live event in front of flesh-and-blood journalists in both Seoul and Busan, with the mayor of the latter city showing up to lend his unqualified support, but, unfortunately, that pesky typhoon showed up and they ended up limiting the event to one venue with reporters participating online. Consequently, it wasn’t much different from the last two opening press conferences, which were online and relatively brief. Why it was doubly disappointing this year is that the four men who talked to us online were bursting with the wonderful news that BIFF was back to full strength from two years of limited exposure due to the pandemic, meaning more sections and screenings than ever in real theaters with full attendance and, more importantly, big guests from Asia and the rest of the world in attendance because without that celebrity cachet, BIFF isn’t BIFF. Though it’s got the best market and the biggest, most eclectic selection of any film festival in Asia, it’s mostly a party for Korean film fans, and they do love their stars and VIPs.

Still, it’s the selection itself that means the most, and while BIFF tends to play down the spectacle when it comes to programming, as programmer Nam Dong-chul said at the press conference, this year he and his colleagues focused on “large-scale films” that were designed to be seen in theaters with an audience. However, the organizers chose Iranian director Hadi Mohaghegh’s Scent of Wind as the Opening Film, a seemingly modest production set in a rural environment among people who must deal with isolation and disability. In 2015, Mohaghegh won the New Currents Award, the only prize given to films themselves by the festival, for his second feature, Immortal, so the honor of opening the event can be seen as a kind of family affair. The Closing Film sounds like more a big deal: Japanese director Kei Ishikawa’s hotly anticipated A Man, which is based on a best-selling mystery about a woman who learns after her husband’s death that he wasn’t who he said he was. While A Man should be a crowd-pleaser—its release had been delayed more than a year due to the pandemic—it won’t be a world premiere, since it was already screened at Venice.

Even the Gala Presentation, which usually includes the festival’s highest-profile films, this year contains only two, both European: Alain Guiraudie’s Nobody’s Hero and Pietro Marcello’s Scarlet. Where the festival hits its stride with regard to the goals articulated by Nam is in the Icons section, which offers a whopping 24 selections by the world’s most famous and/or important directors, and while only one of them, Philippine director Brillante Mendoza’s Feast, is a world premiere, the section fulfills the real mission of BIFF, which is to assemble those movies that other, bigger, flashier (i.e., Western) festivals showed off over the past six months all in one convenient place, including James Gray’s Armageddon Time, Claire Denis’ Both Sides of the Blade, Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, Dario Argento’s Dark Glasses, Francoise Ozon’s Peter Von Kant, and Noah Baumbach’s White Noise. Asia is represented by Kore-eda’s Korean co-production Broker, which already opened in Japan, and two-count-’em-two Hong Sang-soo features, Walk Up and The Novelist’s Film.

Like fellow French filmmaker Michel Gondry, Quentin Dupieux favors plots governed by fantastical, absurd elements, but while Gondry has very definite narrative goals in mind Dupieux seems so hung up on the elements themselves that he can’t quite get them to add up to a story. In his latest economic (74 minutes!) feature, a couple, Alain (Alain Chabat) and Marie (Lea Drucker), purchase their dream house in a leafy, luxurious suburb, in spite of, or perhaps because of, two strange holes in the living room—one on the ceiling and one on the floor. The real estate agent explains the holes openly and at length: When a person enters the hole on the floor he or she exits via the hole in the ceiling, and in doing so time for that person jumps 12 hours into the future while they also become three days younger.

The comic possibilities of this setup seem endless, but Dupieux limits himself to one that, despite the short running time, exhausts its mojo right away. Alain finds the hole a bit intimidating, but Marie can’t get enough of it, and, sure enough, as the movie progresses she becomes visibly younger and, in the process, puts a notable strain on their marriage that no counseling could alleviate. Adding injury to an already farfetched concept, there is a parallel storyline involving Alain’s unpleasant boss, Gerard (Benoit Magimel), who decides to replace his penis with a new electric model that should last longer and work more efficiently as he gets older. 

What Marie and Gerard have in common is a wish to allay the indignities of aging, and for a while Dupieux exploits the humor inherent in such vain pursuits with success. It’s when he tries to offload the plot development onto a more disturbing track that the movie loses its bearings, not to mention the viewer’s faith in the whole enterprise. One thing about Gondry’s ridiculous fantasies is that they revolve around people with real problems and recognizable lives, but no one here, even the relatively grounded Alain, feels genuine. Incredible But True is just an exercise in clever ideas that have nowhere to go.

In French and Japanese. Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011).

Incredible But True home page in Japanese

photo (c) Atelier de production-Arte France Cinema-Versus Production-2022

Characterizing Zola, which is based on a viral 148-tweet Twitter thread that appeared several years ago, as a comedy makes sense only if you have a cautious attitude toward social media. The whole story chronicled in Janicza Bravo’s cinematic adaptation of the thread, as well as the experience of watching it all on screen (any screen), is fully integrated in language that mostly developed online (there are even scenes with subtitles in “standard” English) and attitudes shaped by the kind of interactions you only find on certain platforms. For one thing, I can’t tell say if A’Ziah King, the author of the thread and one of the producers of the movie, is endeavoring to tell a true story or is making this all up, because the medium itself is structured in such a way that receiving something related there as “reality” ends up being a chump’s game. And, in a way, that’s why Zola succeeds, and not just as a comedy: It owns its thrills and weird little moments as elements that organically emerge from the way this story is being told.

The story itself sounds Tarantinoesque. The titular protagonist (Taylour Paige) is a Black waitress who bonds, almost against her will, with a white female customer, Stefani (Riley Keough), who has so thoroughly appropriated nominally Black diction and “attitude” that she comes out the other end as a kind of cartoon character. Stefani is a stripper/dancer, and when she finds out that Zola herself used to dance, she invites her on a road trip to Florida where she has some lucrative dancing gigs lined up. Zola needs the money, though her boyfriend is suspicious, as he should be. When Stefani comes to pick her up for the ride down south, Zola is surprised that she’s not alone but accompanied by two men: Stefani’s somewhat clueless boyfriend Derek (Nicholas Braun, retooling his character on Succession), and an anonymous mystery man (Colman Domingo). 

The road trip gradually moves into dangerous territory, as Zola soon discovers that she is expected to do more than just dance, and that the gig, which the two women initially called a “‘ho trip,” is actually just that. Bravo expertly alternates the plot development between straight up exposition and Zola’s hilarious Twitter-like asides. Often the action is not funny in principle but made so by Bravo’s choice of camera placement and editing devices (most of the film is made to look as if it were shot on iPhones). In one scene where Stefani services a parade of white men, Bravo keeps the focus on the men and their pitiful exertions rather than on Stefani. Moreover, Zola, who is determined not to participate in these transactions, essentially gets out of them by masterminding means—using social media, of course—with which Stefani can make more money than she would normally get working with the mystery man, who turns out to be a pimp, and a typically abusive one. Zola even sort of saves the whole crew when things go really sideways after Derek naively befriends a guy on the street who thinks he has this particular stretch of Tampa sewn up when it comes to prostitution.

Just as Stefani’s accent is so farfetched as to pass beyond offensiveness, Bravo’s handling of King’s baked-in cynicism is so earnest and stylistically bold as to make the ethically problematic actions of all involved truly hilarious. Throughout the movie, Zola keeps saying how this story is about how she “fell out” with Stefani. That concept alone is so ridiculous that you can’t help but laugh everytime she brings it up. Who would ever “fall in” with such a person?

Opens Aug. 26 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Shibuya Parco White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225).

Zola home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2021 Bird of Paradise