Vancouver Dispatch. 1.

The much anticipated "Dragons and Tigers" series, the Vancouver International Film Festival's focus on the cinema of East Asia, unreeled in a slightly curtailed edition this year, due partly to its proximity to the Pusan Film Festival and partly to the fact that Vancouver precedes that acclaimed festival - and thus has lost out on premieres saved for Pusan's international muscle. So Dragons and Tigers 2005 features fewer commercial and anticipated auteur offerings and a wider selection of independent and underground cinema, with fully eight features produced and projected on digital video. Curiously, the program features no films from the prolific Hong Kong industry. It's Japan, South Korea, and notably China that dominate the selection.

Making its World Premiere at VIFF, Nagasaki Shunichi's Heart, Beating in the Dark (Japan) is a fascinating project with a storied history - it's at once a remake, a sequel and a reimagining of Shunichi's 1982 underground landmark of the same name, with the original stars reprising their roles for a reunion while their tale plays out with a younger couple. It's not exactly Nagasaki's Saraband. For one thing, it's simply more dynamic and multileveled. For another, the original remains little seen, even in Japan, though it's hardly necessary for an understanding or appreciation of the new take. This film stands on its own, with scenes from the original (which was also screened at VIFF, from a video copy of the grungy, grainy Super 8 print with added subtitles) edited in to parallel, contrast and collide with new take. Gangly behind-the-scenes footage is improvised around the whole project, providing some low key humor in the framework.

The essential story follows a young couple who hides out for a night in a vacant apartment and struggles with their guilt and anger and blame as they flee the murder of their infant. Naito Takashi, the actor who plays Ringo (the young man in the 1982 film) opens the film in conversation with the producers, insisting that he be included in this new script so he can provide the punishment the young man never gets the first time through. It doesn't necessarily work out that way, as Nagasaki and Naito bring Ringo up to date as a married father (on the verge of divorce) who meets up with his old love Inako (Muroi Shigeru). As they face the still unresolved reverberations of the crime that still haunts them, their facades break down and old feelings bubble up, though not in ways you might expect.

Nagasaki shifts the dynamics of the young couple and plays with shifting perspectives and role reversals as he tells their stories, always contrasting with bristling blurry old clips of the Super 8 original to create something quite haunting. You could read it as if the reunion of Ringo and Inako has created the crime anew, as in a Japanese ghost story and, in fact, phantom cries echo through the empty apartment. But you'd never confuse it with Japanese genre cinema; the mix of textures is compelling and effective, and Nagasaki's direction is remarkably assured in contrast to the raw 1982 clips. But then he sends the characters out of the smothering atmosphere of their claustrophobic apartment prisons, allowing them to flee their long dark night of the soul to venture out into the world of possibilities. Their interaction creates a whole new story and a touching compassion that even the actor Naito doesn't expect.

The somber Shanghai Dream (China), the Cannes Jury Prize winning drama from Wang Xiaoshuai (Beijing Bicycle), puts a spotlight on the aftermath of the "Third Front," when idealistic and talented young adults in the late 60s responded to patriotic pleas and left the cities for rural factory towns in the middle of nowhere. Fifteen years later, they are not simply stuck, but dispirited and desperate as they grind away in meaningless jobs that refuse to release them from their "temporary" positions. Their dull authoritarian culture is a lazy, ineffectual holdover from decades past. The new revolution is in the cities, like Shanghai, where individual ambition and effort is suddenly being rewarded, and Wu Lao is desperate to get himself and his family back to his bustling urban home. His frustration takes the form of an almost punitive tyrannical control of his teenage daughter, whom he pushes to study endlessly while he tries to keep her from socializing with the local yokels.

The misery of the Wu family is like a disease that the father's quarantine only exacerbates, not that their nowhere town offers much escape. Shot in a realist style with an eye for social detail, Wang reveals a lost society where the young and bored grab American fashions willy nilly from the 50s, 60s and 70s as a form of rebellion. It could be small-town America without the American Dream holding out any hope. Wang apparently draws from first-hand experience, which gives the film a rich detail of culture clash, class divide and youth culture that keeps it from being crushed under the misery.

While Kitano Takeshi made his name internationally with his offbeat crime thrillers and yakuza performances; in Japan, he's a legendary comic. Takeshis' (yes, it's both plural and possessive), a sly satire that sends up not only his image but the entire cinematic fantasy of heroic bloodshed, draws from his comic persona while slipping a little commentary underneath it. Takeshi plays both himself (as an affable but somewhat cocky superstar) and a meek, slump-shouldered, submissive lookalike schlub (under a bleached white mop a la Zatoichi) trying to break into the business while the world tries to break his spirit. The film continually slips into surreal sequences, where the cast keeps popping up in warped reflections of previous characters. When the lookalike finally steps into Takeshi's famed yakuza persona, finding a satisfying power as he dispatches his problems with blasts of bullets, his crime fantasies turn into nightmarish farces, finally melting into a stream of consciousness cascade of poetic abstract absurdist spoofs set to a rave mix club beat. Takeshi deflates the very iconography that made his fame with a twist more clever than it appears, revealing an empty core in the wish-fulfillment fantasies of his gangster tragedies - because they are nothing but fantasies, escapes from any real experience.

Like his pulp genre blasts of the 1960s, Suzuki Seijun's Princess Raccoon (Japan) revels in artifice, but the obvious parallels end there. Zhang Ziyi, all child-like innocence and darling cuteness, is shape-shifting raccoon royalty Princess Tanukihime, who falls in love with the Prince Amechiyo (Odagiri Joe), a kind of Asian Snow White condemned to death by his vain father who will kill to remain the most fair in the land. Emerging from a waterfall like an elemental fairy, she falls for the lost human. They court through song and dance, like a Bollywood film with a score that borrows from the entire spectrum of the pop radio dial - pop, hip-hop and traditional show tunes mix it up in the candy-colored sets. Equal parts fairy tale, storybook musical and theatrical diversion, this energetically naïve operetta is a visual delight to a fault. Suzuki stages it largely on vast stage-bound sets with painted backdrops and light shows on cycloramas, with periodic blasts of picture-perfect location footage (even Suzuki's exteriors feel art-directed to last petal). The story is secondary to the execution and the script is little more than cobbled together set pieces (the third act just rambles on with seemingly arbitrary complications), but where his earlier Pistol Opera felt like a series of static tableaux, Princess Raccoon moves. It's minor Suzuki to say the least, but the old man's delight in his confection never wavers. That delight is infectious, if not always compelling.

Even more stylistically obsessed and less narratively driven is Duelist (South Korea) from Lee Myong-Se. Where his earlier hit crime thriller Nowhere to Hide was visually thrilling but dramatically slim, this empty style bomb is all in service of a simplistic plot and story that seems to dissolve on the screen. Ostensibly a costume adventure about a veteran samurai detective and his young assistant, a self-described "crazy bitch" who likes to kick butt and screw up her face for forced comic effect, it forgoes all sense of tension (dramatic, emotional and otherwise) for a showcase for Lee's dazzling imagery, deliriously staged and shot battles and chases as well as tricks and transitions so clever they overwhelm any sense of story.

Yamashita Nobuhiro's Linda Linda Linda (Japan), named for a hit song by the Japanese 80s punk band The Blue Hearts, is a high school drama about an all-girl rock band that breaks up over personal differences and reforms as a cover band just days before a festival, with a Korean exchange student still struggling with Japanese drafted as lead singer almost arbitrarily. With such a set up, you'd expect either comic farce or a teen melodrama, but this sweet film turns out to be an entertaining, surprisingly engaging character-based drama driven by the dynamics of the four girls as they come together in rehearsals. It communicates a pure, basic connection with music and the simple joy of bashing out rock and roll music.

Curator Tony Rayns called Hur Jin-ho's April Snow (South Korea) the most anticipated film at the festival. That distinction is due solely to the presence of its star, Bae Yong-Jun, a brooding matinee idol whose following stretches from South Korea to Japan (where his latest TV serial was a huge hit). It certainly had nothing to do with the stultifyingly dull drama on the screen. Bae plays a restrained husband who arrives at a hospital emergency room and runs into the woman (Son Ye-Jun) whose husband was in the same car. They confront the awkward fact that their spouses were having an affair in a stilted atmosphere that starts out nicely modulated, and then just drags on while a mood of melancholia hangs over the film like a fog. Nothing happens that you couldn't or wouldn't predict from the synopsis. In fact, not much of anything happens. The leads, however, are pretty to look at, which was enough for much of the audience.

Posted by dwhudson at October 6, 2005 4:27 PM