Rotterdam Dispatch. 2.

Two Sokurov shorts before breakfast is something I cannot recommend, even in the most extreme of festival moments, particularly when one of them is a complete recording of Mozart's Requiem. About fifteen minutes in to the death dirge, the craving for coffee becomes unbearable. It was an interesting decision on the part of the Rotterdam Film Festival to include these shorts at all, two very disparate entries in Sokurov's largely patchy oeuvre. The first, a student film made in 1986 is a Bava-esque tale of a bedridden woman's neurosis and the audience's awareness her oncoming murder.

As for other festival highlights so far...

Oh, Man, the last installment of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucci's First World War trilogy, is a testament to the hellish bodily damage wrought by war. With the help of the Trento History Museum and the Italian History Museum of War of Roverto, the images for this film come entirely from footage relevant to the WWI. Slowed to a pace more acceptable to the human eye, and lent gravity by their slowness, these images are here to remind us of the pain felt by the living survivors of war. There is also a considerable section devoted to the suffering of children, particularly from starvation . Those with kids of their own might not make it far.

The title here has a double meaning. The first is the standard, "Oh, mankind! Look at the terrible things that you continue to do." The second has more to do with the human body itself. Gianikian and Lucci choose to use footage found in medical archives that deals with both the colossal wounds explosives can render to the human body and, on the flip-side, the vast array of corrective devices and procedures we create to counter them. These problems run the full gamut, starting with the uncontrollable jitters of shell shock. There is an extended close-up of operative eye removal. The images of cosmetic surgery and limb replacement are particularly relevant now considering the prevalence of improvised explosive devices in Iraq. The phrase "Lest We Forget" is invoked on Remembrance Days all around the world, though for me, it always refers to the 11th of November at the 11th hour in WWI, during the battle for Ypres (inspiration for the famous poem "In Flanders Fields"). Films like this are essential viewing for a country, the USA, that seems willfully amnesiac.

Wong Kar-wai's 2046 has reportedly gone through a significant edit since its notoriously belated appearance at Cannes. Wong could no doubt make three or four completely different movies out of the reels of film he's shot for this one. The version showing at Rotterdam, the final cut, is a piece of blissful, beautiful nostalgia for a time and place that never was. Though it's set in the 60s, it seems to occupy a (Philip K) Dickian world, not past, and not really future, either. The key to appreciating this film is that it is, despite Wong's protests to the contrary, a sequel to In the Mood For Love. Tony Leung reprises his role as Chow Mo Wan, a writer, now trying to get over his love for Su Li Zhen (Maggie Cheung). In a dirty hotel in Hong Kong and a gambling house in Singapore, he writes pulp fiction and fools around with some beautiful women. What matters is not whether Leung is playing the same person as in In The Mood for Love; it's whether he is the same character. It's this romantic melancholic, trapped in his memories and surrounded by graceful degradation, that lives on here as an archetype. This isn't the first time Wong has reprised characters in this way. Su Li Zhen could be any woman in a different time, a different situation, but still remain the same character - she's the woman that keeps Chow from being able to change, from escaping his past. Indeed, there is another Su Li Zhen (Gong Li) in this film - here a mysterious professional gambler with one black glove she never removes. Wong could easily follow any of the women here (Gong Li, Faye Wong, Zhang Ziyi) in another film, creating (to my delight) a labyrinthine, unending series of sequels.

Posted by dwhudson at February 1, 2005 2:42 PM