Sports movies usually have a common narrative arc about overcoming adversity, one which this Belgian film refuses to follow almost constitutionally. The title character, played by Tessa Van den Broeck, is a teen tennis prodigy. Everyone knows she’s on the road to greatness and is about to be accepted by the Belgium Tennis Federation, but then her coach, Jeremy (Laurent Caron), disappears amid whisperings of inappropriate behavior toward his younger charges and an investigation that eventually snags on Julie, who refuses to talk about him. That’s pretty much the plot.
The main impetus for the investigation is the suicide of another of Jeremy’s students, but even this story is surrounded by hushed innuendo rather than anything that can be definitely determined. Consequently, Julie’s silence becomes all the more irksome to the people whose job it is to keep the Belgian professional tennis mechanism humming, and she is soon a kind of pariah, forced to train with a new coach (Pierre Gervais) whose methodologies are different from Jeremy’s. She doesn’t like working with him at first and mostly practices on her own. Her grades suffer and even her relationship with her supportive parents is strained to the breaking point. Meanwhile, we come to understand that she is actually in contact with Jeremy, who urges her to stay silent. He is still coaching her in a sense, and yet the viewer doesn’t get the idea that Julie is being manipulated. If anything, her reticence is another facet of the singular discipline that has made her a tennis star: She won’t talk because she has decided she isn’t going to be told what to do. In one revealing scene, she drops her guard to a friend and says she feels persecuted, that the federation’s pressure for her to talk is all about class, since she is a scholarship case rather than a kid from a well-to-do family, which describes most of the other budding pros her age. To people outside and, to a certain extent, the audience Julie seems to be protecting a sexual predator, which, of course, poses questions about the nature of Julie’s and Jeremy’s relationship, questions that become more pointed when the two secretly meet in a cafe and Jeremy’s desperation becomes apparent. Whether he is a serial abuser is still up in the air, but he’s obviously a creep. “I stopped,” he says defensively. Stopped what?
What makes Leonardo van Dijl’s feature debut so arresting is the skillful way he juggles the politics of managing a sports scandal with one athlete’s refusal to engage in those politics while staying true to her athletic ambitions. As Julie’s silence deepens, the tension becomes unbearable, until you wonder if even a hard case like Julie won’t break. But the movie doesn’t necessarily go where you expect it to. The new coach eventually breaks through Julie’s self-regard, and while the movie loses momentum in the process, it feels more naturalistic, as if van Dijl knew he had to sacrifice a measure of drama in order to stay true to Julie’s own arc of self-discovery.
In Dutch, French and German. Opens Oct. 3 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608).
Midas Man, a biopic about Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, received a qualified rave review from veteran rock critic Greil Marcus this summer. Marcus saw the movie at a film festival in California, and at the time it had not been released in theaters in the U.S.; nor did it seem to have a streaming deal. It had only been shown on Prime Video in the U.K. A month or so later, a reader wrote to Marcus saying that the movie was available in the U.S. on YouTube, but Marcus countered that the YT version was only 90 minutes and the real movie was almost two-and-a-half hours long, so you couldn’t compare the two. The version being released in Japan is 112 minutes, the same length that’s listed on the film’s IMDb page, so I’m not sure if what I saw is the real deal, but Beatles’ fans will probably not be sorry if they search it out, wherever they are. It’s by no means a great film, but it’s got some great sequences that add something to the mythos which doesn’t feel like fronting.
Jacob Fortune-Lloyd plays Epstein as a preternatural epicure, a choice that emphasizes those stereotypical qualities often associated with a certain type of gay man. And it’s this aspect that the filmmakers focus on in Epstein’s interest in the Beatles as something he wanted to be part of, despite the fact that their group sensibility was so opposite of his own. Epstein is from a good, middle class Jewish family in Liverpool and he manages the family’s furniture shop with a keen eye not only for the aesthetic attributes of his merchandise but a level-headed business sense that makes the shop profitable. One of his ideas is to carve out a section of the store for records, since he recognizes in the tastes of his fellow young people a yearning for foreign music. One day, he happens on a crude single from Hamburg by a quartet of Liverpudlians and buys as many copies as he can for his store. Then he goes to see the group at a local club and instantly understands their appeal. He begs them to dump their current, ineffectual manager (played by Eddie Izzard with a kind of growling cynicism) and take him on. They do, grudgingly. He may be too posh for their tastes, but he’s definitely in their corner. The contrast is thus set—the brash, irreverent Beatles versus the businessman with an eye for beauty and a certain predatory facility. (His negotiation with Ed Sullivan is brilliant, though Jay Leno wrecks the scene by portraying Sullivan as a mafia don) From there, the movie scans the well-known points of development—the fitful search for a record company, the replacement of Pete Best by Ringo, the flowering of Beatlemania, the conquering of America—while showing explicitly how it affected Epstein the closeted gay man with a gambling jones, who suffered blackmail and depression when his father (Eddie Marsan) rejected who he really was. In the meantime, the Beatles themselves grew to not only respect his guidance, but came to love him as a kind of older brother figure.
Due to the production’s budgetary or permission issues, the fake Beatles do not play any of the group’s original songs, but they perform a bunch of covers the Beatles made famous and do a creditable job of it. The version of “Money” may not be definitive, but it’s played at full length, punctuating the importance of the milieu the group was working in: They made honest, enjoyable music for young people whose parents couldn’t stand what they stood for, at least initially. Midas Man itself often feels as if it could learn something from this example. It’s too rooted in Epstein’s emotional landscape, even though it often makes fun of that landscape in its visual choices, thus trivializing the tragedy his life became.
There is a minority critical opinion that Led Zeppelin was the only other band whose artistic contributions to rock were as momentous as the Beatles’. The authorized documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin makes this case up to a point by chronicling in detail how the group came into being, but the contrast with the Fab Foud couldn’t be starker. The Beatles invented themselves as a group from scratch, and with the exception of Ringo each member learned his craft in the band. Led Zeppelin’s members were all fully formed musicians when they got together in 1968 under the auspices of Jimmy Page, who had replaced Jeff Beck as lead guitarist of the Yardbirds in that group’s final incarnation. When the Yardbirds folded, Page needed a new gig and recruited bassist/arranger John Paul Jones, whom he knew from session work. Terry Reid, Page’s first choice for vocalist, had other plans and recommended Robert Plant, who brought along John Bonham, whom he had played with in a short-lived R&B band.
The doc interviews all three surviving members separately and uses snippets of old interviews with Bonham, who died in 1980. It’s all so positive and peppy, and since it only goes as far as 1970 after the release of their breakthrough album, Led Zeppelin II, you get none of the drugs and sex stuff (with underage girls, no less) they were famous for. In fact, it’s all about business, another aspect that distinguishes them from the Beatles. As Page explains it unironically, the formation of the group was more a matter of commercial calculation than creative endeavor. They set their sights on America even before their native UK, specifically Atlantic Records. When they negotiated with Jerry Wexler they already had a finished album to give him. Page was intrigued by the burgeoning FM radio culture, “which played whole sides of albums.” He was sick of the idea of having to come up with hit singles, which is what manager Mickey Most insisted on with the Yardbirds. Consequently, Led Zep conquered America first—and easily, according to the doc—before they even played England.
The only really interesting thing about the band’s early trajectory is that the first album was roundly panned, though because of the hagiographic nature of the production no one bothers to try and figure out why. It’s not a movie that’s interested in analysis. It’s merely self-congratulatory.
Midas Man now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).
Becoming Led Zeppelin now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (IMAX, 050-6868-5068), 109 Premium Cinemas Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (IMAX, 050-6868-5063), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).
Now that he’s dead, all us habitual moviegoers live in the shadow of David Lynch if only because Lynch was the predominant filmmaker of the last 40 years or so whose vision was not only unique but impossible to get away from. It wasn’t his style so much as his particular view of the world as a scary place, which informed even those scenes that conveyed his child-like appreciation of creative endeavor. Jane Schoenbrun, in their second feature, I Saw the TV Glow, gives off a similar vibe, not in the material or even in the creepy atmosphere they create, but in the way they explore possibilities no one has thought of before. Set in the 90s, Schoenbrun’s movie fixates on that point in time when video had become not just an alternative world for some people, but the whole world, a transition that would eventually morph into the screen obsessions we currently can’t avoid. The Japanese title of Schoenbrun’s film is more descriptive of the movie’s intent: I Want to Enter the Television.
The narrative is nothing more than a life trajectory that rejects self-analysis. We first see Owen as a teenager who is so obsessed with a certain late-night TV series called The Pink Opaque that he sneaks out of his house at night to watch with an older, disaffected girl named Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine). The series is never explained in any thorough way, and the viewer only sees snippets, but it seems to be a Lynchian production in that it has occult doings and insecure young people figuring out their sexuality. Owen (Justice Smith) becomes so smitten that over the course of adolescence and beyond he continues watching the show long after it’s cancelled and he himself has started contemplating his own gender fluidity. As a teenager, Owen uses The Pink Opaque to come to terms with his boring, conventional suburban milieu, a situation that apparently had already defeated Maddy, who becomes cynical in the process. The pivotal moment in the film has Maddy asking Owen if he prefers girls or boys, and Owen answers matter-of-factly that he prefers TV shows, meaning he recognizes in TV characters those insecurities he feels himself but lacks the capacity to deal with in a natural, organic way. He can only identify and feel them, so when he gets older they’re still there, gnawing at his soul.
Though Schoenbrun successfully puts across the emotional turmoil of Owen’s life, the scary stuff—meaning the touches that Lynch seemed to pull off by instinct—often feels forced, and as the movie progresses Owen’s disconnections become less distinct. I understood that Owen felt his life had run up against a wall, but couldn’t make sense of it. Perhaps I Saw the TV Glow requires multiple viewings in order for any sense to come into it, but Lynch famously rejected sense, which is one of the qualities that made him great as a filmmaker. I think Schoenbrun hasn’t achieved the kind of inherent confidence that comes with a mindset that’s as free as Lynch’s was, but they’re on their way.
Opens Sept. 26 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).
As usual, I retreated earlier than usual on my last day of the festival. I leave tomorrow morning very, very early, and I’m hoping the subway gets me to the airport on time. The first train is 5:21 am, and my flight is at 7:50. I estimate that I can get to the airport at around 6:10, which wouldn’t normally be a problem, but last time the line to get through security was ridiculously long. But that was during a holiday. I’m seriously thinking about taking a taxi, but I still have some money left on my transportation card. Some habits are difficult to shake.
I saw two movies in the video library this morning. The first, 10s Across the Borders, purports to be a Southeast Asian version of Paris Is Burning, the classic doc about the Ballroom Voguing scene that was born in New York in the 80s. This doc, from a Singapore-based filmmaker, shows how the Ballroom craze spread in Southeast Asia, specifically the Philippines, Malaysia, and Thailand. The doc is impressive in explaining not only how the scene developed in Asia, but how “houses” from New York were sort of franchised in these countries by devotees who perfected their moves in local Ballroom competitions in order to pay their way to New York where their efforts were blessed by the originators of the form and then sent back to Asia. Interestingly, the two most famous and successful franchisees are hetero cis women from Japan and the Philippines. Ballroom, of course, was initiated by Black and Latino trans women in New York, and the scene has always been closely associated with the LGBTQ community. The dancers that dominate the doc are gay men from Thailand—Sun is a BIPOC whose mother was a Thai sex worker and father is Norwegian—and Malaysia. More than Paris Is Burning, 10s Across the Borders feels like a music doc. The tracks are extreme bangers and director Chan Sze-wei captures the dancing with an expert feeling for how it relates to the music. The movie is a banger, too.
Without Permission is one of those film that list Iran as a country of origin, but, like Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just and Accident, it has no official approval from the Iranian authorities, as the title indicates. It’s an odd film in that it starts out feeling like a documentary and then turns into something completely different. The director, acknowledging right from the start that he was never going to gain permission to film in Iran the movie he had in mind, explains that he would have to do it clandestinely. His avatar on the screen is an actor who plays a director who lives overseas and returns to Iran as a “visitor,” and then starts auditioning children to act in his movie, which is about the restrictions he has to face as an Iranian filmmaker. Referencing Kiarostami at length, the movie shows how early classic Iranian cinema concentrated on children’s stories so that the directors could put across their ideas about what Iranian society was really like. Without Permission is basically a gloss on that idea, though I, for one, found it confusing in the beginning since it didn’t make its purposes clear. The avatar director’s idea is a movie that shows children coming to terms with what they perceive as romantic love and trying to act it out on screen, but, of course, the director’s plan is eventually caught out, first by an enraged parent, and then the authorities, who take the director into custody to find out his real motives. A subplot involves the director’s AD, a woman who is trying to separate from her husband because the man she fell in love with doesn’t seem to exist any more. Confusing but provocative nonetheless.
The best movie I saw today, and maybe the best of the festival for me, was Left-Handed Girl, directed by Taiwanese filmmaker Tsou Shih-ching, who is Sean Baker’s AD. In fact, Baker not only produced the movie, but edited and co-wrote it. And you can see his signature style in every scene, which is not meant to take anything away from Tsou. The movie is about a family of females—single mother Shu-fen, who is starting over in Taipei with a food stall, and teen daughter I-Ann and preschooler I-Jing, who is the titular southpaw. Gradually, we come to understand their circumstances, how Shu-fen’s husband abandoned them with debt and mostly messed up the life of former ace student I-Ann in the process. I-Jing’s provenance remains a mystery until the end, and I’m kicking myself for not catching on to the solution. but along the way, the movie has both an honesty in its depiction of women’s lives in Taiwan and a passion for filmmaking rigor. It’s a real movie in that it keeps you enthralled through every unlikely development.
I finished the day in perfect style by meeting Korean director Shin Suwon for coffee. I wrote about her new movie, The Mutation (the Korean title translates as Birth of Love), in an earlier post. She explained the origin of the story, which is actually a novel that wasn’t written by her (she has published fiction in the past) and how she came to adapt it for the screen. I was most interested in hearing about the lead actor who played the Korean Black man who knows nothing except Korea. It turns out he is, in fact, a Korean who speaks no English, though, unlike the character in the movie, he knows his father, a Nigerian national who apparently spoke English around the house. However, his son resisted speaking English for reasons that can probably be ascertained. But like the character in the movie, he has also had to contend with discrimination from other Koreans and Suwon used much of his experience when writing the script. He mainly works as a model and has never acted before. Suwon asked me about the dialogue since she was afraid that some of the expressions used by the Koreans in referring to the Black protagonist would be offensive to subtitle readers, but I assured her they were appropriate in getting her point across. More significantly, when I asked her if she had any indication if the movie might be released in Japan (it’s already been picked up by Finecut, a respected foreign sales agent in Korea), she said she was afraid that the lesbian portion of the story might make it difficult. I don’t think it would be a problem, but maybe I’m naive.
It struck me yesterday that this may be the first edition of BIFF I’ve attended where there is not one new Hong Sangsoo movie. In fact, usually there’s two. It’s difficult to believe they didn’t invite his newest, What Does That Nature Say to You. I’m not sure about his feelings toward BIFF. Often he doesn’t show up for the festival and just sends the cast to do the Q&As.
The reason it struck me is because I thought of Hong Sangsoo while watching Zhang Lu’s Gloaming in Luomu, which is in the Competition section. Like Hong’s movies it’s mostly wry dialogue and little in the way of plotting, and many of the characters drink a lot. Unlike Hong’s movies, it wasn’t very interesting. One reason I like watching Hong’s movies at BIFF is the audience. They laugh all the time, and I’ve learned to appreciated Korean humor through his movies. When I’ve watched his movies in Japan, either at festivals or at press screenings, the Japanese viewers in attendance almost never laugh. During Lu’s movie, which is about a young woman visiting the titular tourist spot because a boyfriend who ghosted her once sent her a postcard from the place, there was scattered laughter at certain points, and I assume it was the Mandarin speakers in the audience, but the jokes, while I got them, didn’t make the kind of impression on me that Hong’s do. I liked Zhang’s last movie, The Shadowless Tower, which delved into one man’s middle age dilemma in a believable way. I couldn’t figure out what exactly this woman was trying to do.
The other three movies I saw were much better. Maze is a Korean indie by a new filmmaker. It’s a good mystery that keeps its secrets well hidden until the appropriate time and then reveals just enough to keep you further intrigued. A woman who works for a detective agency quits and then offers to help a man whose request for help was turned down by the agency. He wants the woman to follow a certain man whom he say he’s never met, and give him pertinent information. The woman does this and, of course, ends up getting caught up in the conflict between these two men. The movie is mainly about depression, a condition that film is not particularly good at explaining, but through incident Maze somehow conveys the feeling in a palpable way. It’s probably too low key for stone mystery fans, but it shows a distinctive talent.
Another feature debut was the Taiwanese Competition entry Girl, though the director, Shu Qi, is a movie veteran, having starred in most of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s later movies. It’s a kind of coming-of-age story set in the early 80s. The titular girl lives with her mother, step-father, and younger sister in a precarious relationship. Apparently, the girl’s real father knocked up her mother when she was a teenager, and the step-father then married her to take away the shame, but he’s an abusive drunk and the mother seems unable to get out of the marriage, so the girl starts acting out and is eventually exiled from the home. Though the story is pretty common, Shu gives it a slightly surreal edge and doesn’t skimp on the brutality, which can sometimes be nightmarish. As befitting an actor-turned-director, the performances are excellent.
But my favorite movie yesterday was Ikaino, a documentary about the area in Osaka that is home to a huge Zainichi enclave, meaning Koreans who were born and raised in Japan. Though much of the information in the movie I already knew, especially the historical stuff, I found it an excellent primer on the Zainichi experience, since it interviewed so many old people whose memory of what went down in the 30s, 40s, and 50s is still good. The movie is a Korean production with a Korean director, and he delves deep into the racism that has hallmarked the Zainichi experience, though almost all the interlocutors in the movie speak Japanese. It did an especially good job of showing how the situation has changed for third and fourth-generation Zainichi, who don’t feel as much pressure to naturalize, though many do. The problem is still the government, which still bureaucratically discriminates against them, but now that Korean culture has a hip cachet in Japan, most young Zainichi lives are easier, but not as easy as they should be.
I finally saw Kokuho yesterday. I’m not on Toho’s mailing list so I wasn’t invited to any press screenings for the movie, and I didn’t catch it after it was released three months ago. I didn’t even know much about it until last month after it had stealthily risen on the Japanese box office chart to claim the top position, where it remains at this moment. Now it’s all the media talks about in Japan. It hasn’t been released here in Korea yet, but word-of-mouth is spreading, and Japanese films do pretty well here, which is both surprising and not surprising, so I assume it will be a hit here, too. I had heard mixed things about it from my friends in Japan, and, in a sense, it met whatever expectations I had of it. For those who aren’t familiar, the story, based on a famous novel, is about the son of a yakuza don who, in the 60s, is adopted by a renowned Kabuki actor and rises to the top of the Kabuki world as an onnagata (specialist in female roles), eventually overtaking the career of the Kabuki master’s own son and presumed heir. It’s supremely watchable and the Kabuki elements are incorporated smoothly and intelligently. It isn’t very deep, though, and mostly gets carried away with dramatic things that should be obvious, the most prominent being the treatment of seshu, or family succession. I would think that could be a topic ripe for extensive exploration in the Kabuki world, but the movie only skimmed the surface and approached the idea of an interloper dishonestly, because there are so many big stars in Kabuki who are adopted like Kikuo. Also, the script could have done so much more with the subtext of a Kabuki actor born into the criminal underworld, but it only used it as a plot point.
At a completely different remove, Shin Suwon’s The Mutation demonstrated the director’s usual wily intelligence with a story that had a slightly fantastical edge, though in the end it was pretty conventional. I’ve always liked Shin’s work, especially her early, more daring stuff, like Pluto and Madonna; and her last movie, Hommage, was a genuine tour de force. The mutation of the title is a Black man named Se-oh, who was born and raised in Korea by Korean parents. He’s constantly mistaken for “an American or an African,” as he points out, but speaks no English and only knows Korea. His origin is the movie’s central mystery because his mother, before she died, always insisted she never slept with a Black man, so Se-oh must be a mutation of some kind. Constitutionally sullen, Se-oh embarks on a mystery journey and enlists the companionship of a woman named Sora, who is also recovering from a loss, the death of her female lover, who, we assume, committed suicide because of her own mother’s shock and resentment at her sexual orientation. The movie is quiet and doesn’t make a big deal out its characters’ disappointments, and I wish that the story didn’t feel so contrived in spots—epiphanies occur just when they are supposed to. I hope there’s an audience for it beyond Shin’s own devoted fan base.
The other two movies I saw were intense action films. The festival is showing the International Version of The Old Woman with the Knife, which has played a bunch of festivals this year to much acclaim. The premise is all there in the title: an old woman who is a legendary assassin. The world depicted in the movie is pure fantasy: the old woman, nicknamed Hornclaw, works for a secret corporation that carries out hits on contract. When the woman first joined the group as a young woman, the group only took cases to “exterminate pests,” meaning the victim had to be some kind of terrible person. Now, however, the group takes almost any job for money, which distresses Hornclaw but doesn’t make her want to quit. Then the group hires a young punk with considerable skills and a bloodthirsty attitude, who seems to have designs on Hornclaw. The action is predictably brutal and relentless, and the plot takes a few too many left turns on its way to an ending that doesn’t make as much sense as the director thinks it does.
The Furious, another kung fu battle movie that endeavors to revive the Hong Kong action genre, is extreme to the max. Though it’s the director’s feature debut, he’s worked as a stunt coordinator in Hong Kong for many years, and the experience shows in the intricate choreography. Even more surprising, the director, Kenji Tanigaki, is Japanese, a nationality that is pretty rare in the HK film industry. During the post-screening Q&A, Tanigaki expounded at length on the pedigree of his film, since it was made in Bangkok and filled with action stars from throughout Southeast Asia. The movie’s almost defensively generic action movie plot seems to be almost a joke, and Tanigaki was keen to suggest that it doesn’t really matter. Basically, a big corporation headed by an evil Japanese guy runs a human trafficking operation that targets children. When a Chinese handyman living in the unnamed Southeast Asian city discovers his daughter had been abducted, he goes to any length to get her back, and that includes single-handedly vanquishing hordes of goons with knives, pipes, and axes. Actually, he’s helped by a guy whose wife was investigating the abductions as a journalist and goes missing. The fight scenes are so fast, intricate, and complicated—and long!—that the audience at the screening erupted in cheers several times, and at the end of the film they practically gave Tanigaki a standing ovation, something I’ve never seen at Busan and probably never will, but this was the closest.
I spoke to two people yesterday who have been working with and within the Korean film industry for a number of years, and both pretty much thought the new Competition Section of the festival is not going to achieve what the festival hopes it will. This is the first year that BIFF has had a Competition Section outside of the New Currents Award, which is for indie art films by emerging filmmakers. The idea of a Competition Section is mainly to gain attention from the media, who like nothing better than a battle. I’ve always admired BIFF because it took itself seriously as the premiere Asian film festival and didn’t bother with stunts like competitions. It just showed quality films. But apparently the festival has hit a wall after COVID and the film industry itself is crumbling, so they have to do something. The trouble is, all the highest quality Asian films try first to get into competitions at the big Western festivals, so there are few left for Busan. Consequently, the films in the BIFF Competition are mostly also-rans, which isn’t to say they aren’t good, but rather that, like the movies that are in the Tokyo International Film Festival Competition Section, nobody really cares that much about them. The two people I talked to said as much.
One of the Competition films I saw yesterday may be a case in point. En Route To is an earnest Korean indie youth film that tackles some weighty issues with a distinctive dramatic flair, but it’s probably not original enough to make a bid impression. A girl attending a boarding high school is knocked up by her teacher, who then disappears after he learns the girl is pregnant. The girl decides to get an abortion, thinking if she does, the teacher will come back, but she has no money for the pills she has to buy illegally on the internet, so she steals money from her roommate, who sells vape liquids to fellow students under the table. This series of events leads to a kind of bitter friendship between the two girls, especially since the roommate is the daughter of a single mother—an illegitimate child who thinks the other girl is better off getting rid of the baby, but then the other girl changes her mind. Besides dealing with its tricky themes frankly and honestly, the movie is always surprising in the choices it makes, though in the end the story becomes a bit too contrived. Everything doesn’t have to fit into place so perfectly.
Been plagued by technical problems ever since I arrived. I bought a Wow card, which you can charge with any denomination of currency and use pretty much everywhere in Korea, including public transportation, which is what I bought it for. The first day it wouldn’t work and I had to go to the station office and they explained to me that I had to set up part of the card just for transportation. It took me a while to figure out how to do that but I finally did. Then, one of my email accounts doesn’t work at all here, not on my phone nor on my computer. It’s always worked here before, so I don’t know what the problem is. Then there’s the ticketing system, which was changed. I haven’t had too much trouble getting the tickets through the online system, though the first day I felt like one of those K-pop fans trying to get a ticket to their favorite idol’s concert. The problem came when I had to pull up the mobile ticket on my phone at the entrance to the theater. It just wouldn’t come up. Fortunately, a volunteer who spoke English believed my story and let me into the theater after the movie started. I had no problem at the next screening, but this morning it happened again, though I was finally able to produce the ticket by logging out and turning off my phone and then starting the whole procedure again. I got in with a minute to spare.
I attended the press conference for Jafar Panahi, who won this year’s Asian Filmmaker Award. As he pointed out a number of times, he was at the first BIFF in 1996 and has been here a half dozen times since, but there was a long gap when he couldn’t attend because he was either in jail or forbidden to leave Iran. The press conference took place before the press screening of his latest film, the Palme d’Or winner It Was Just an Accident, so he didn’t talk much about the film. He talked at length about the movie being submitted for an Oscar the day before yesterday. None of his movies have ever been in Oscar contention because the Academy receives nominations from countries, not individuals or producers, and in Iran Panahi is persona non grata. But this year, France was gracious enough to submit his film because it’s one of the producing countries. I don’t know what that means for France’s submission of a French-language film, because it didn’t come up. He also talked at length about the regime’s ban on his filmmaking activities and how he resisted. “My co-writer was put in jail and just got out,” he said. “He’s spent one-fourth of his life in prison. Under a dictatorship, you must find a way to make the films you want to make; you have to pay for this struggle.”
As a comic filmmaker, Wes Anderson often doesn’t seem to be in on his own jokes. His overly fussy sets and precise camera movements feel so intense that it’s the intenseness that evinces laughs rather than what’s actually going on in the story. In his latest concoction, Benicio del Toro plays Zsa-zsa Korda, a very rich international arms merchant who is constantly the target of assassination attempts, which he just barely escapes. Despite the character’s name and del Toro’s somewhat exotic makeup, not to mention the extreme globetrotting that takes place throughout the film, Korda seems American through and through. With each additional brush with death, he gets closer to religion, a position Anderson has fun with by inserting what he calls a “Biblical troupe,” including F. Murray Abraham, Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Bill Murray as God, judging Korda for his mortal and venal sins. It’s obvious these sketches are all in his head, but guilt is a powerful thing and the plot revolves around his scheme to achieve redemption, presumably for all the suffering he’s caused through his business dealings.
However, in order to do this he has to finalize those business dealings still in play and appoint an heir. Though he has nine sons who live in close proximity, he chooses his estranged daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), who is about to take her vows as a nun. She goes along with his morally dodgy scheme because she somehow thinks she can change his evil ways during the process, which is so hurriedly explained as to be meaningless in terms of plot motivations. What it does is set in motion a series of encounters centered on transactions with other shady characters who Korda wants to finance his scheme, most of whom he has dealt with in the past. And while the individual set pieces are also funny, they feel so dramatically cut off from one another that their only real purpose seems to be to allow another A-list star to take part in the film, a methodology that has become synonymous with Anderson. These stars include Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Mathieu Amalric, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, and Benedict Cumberbatch looking like someone you would never imagine him playing.
Anderson’s films are always a cornucopia of colorful characters and odd sequences, but it’s difficult to sort out what exactly is going on in the movie because there’s just so much stuff, and the whole theme of regaining one’s soul gets lost in the highjinks. In order to make sense of it you have to keep your eye on Korda—or, more precisely, del Toro playing Korda—in order to determine just how seriously he takes all this soul-searching. My estimate is: not very much. One of Anderson’s strong points is creating characters with distinctive personalities that stay with you, and Korda, while clearly an intelligent man who knows the real price of his impact on the world, is obviously out to cheat fate and get into heaven without actually changing his evil ways. That Anderson can get us to not only understand this impulse but actually grow fond of the guy during the course of the movie is a rare accomplishment.
Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Shibuya Parco White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).
Fairly smooth trip from Narita to Busan yesterday—except when I got to Korean immigration, which was packed. I’ve never waited that long before, and consequently, I wasn’t able to get to the Cinema Center before the badge desk closed to pick up my press credentials. They close at 3 pm, which seems pretty early for the first day of the festival, but I guess it’s because they need everyone to work the opening ceremony.
Which I attended. Naturally, the red carpet introductions went on way too long and the ceremony itself was pretty boring. Lee Byung-hun was the emcee, and he was affable and all, but the script was terrible, just filled with cliches about the glory of cinema. I can appreciate how far the festival has come in 30 years, but there was this whole subtext to the speeches that implied Busan was a lowly backwater in 1996, and maybe it was, but they should have mentioned that once and let it be.
The only reason I endured the ceremony was to watch the opening film, which stars Lee: Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice. This was the Korean premiere (the World Premiere was Venice, where it got raves), so it was a big deal. The movie opens wide in Korea next week, I think, and pre-sales have hit a record. It’s very good. And very strange. I was expecting a black comedy but not one as convoluted as this. In a sense, it’s about how a man can be driven insane by his reliance on routine. Lee’s character loses his job at a paper manufacturer and can’t countenance working for any other industry. As it happens, several other “pulp men” have also lost their jobs at other paper companies and are looking for work, so he endeavors to knock them off in wild and woolly ways. They all can’t imagine toiling for anything except paper, which is a great metaphor that Park plays up brilliantly. It’s also about the fragility of Korean masculinity, a common enough theme in Korean movies but the twist that Park and Lee give it here is unique. I’ll have to see it again.
It didn’t end until almost 11:30, so I had to rush back to the beach for the Opening Reception, which wasn’t as crowded as it usually is. There was way too much food. I hope they didn’t throw it all away.
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