Vancouver Dispatch. 3.

I've always loved the excitement, the anticipation and the sheer density of cinematic experience of film festivals, but I'm beginning to understand one friend's objection to the festival experience. This year at VIFF, even as I whittled my schedule down to an average of three films a day, I was so overcome by the films squeezed into a marathon viewing endurance event that - with a few notable exceptions - I never really got past the surfaces: stylistic, textural, narrative, thematic. It took literally getting some distance from VIFF via a brief respite back in Seattle (where other assignments loomed) to get some distance on the films.

Heart, Beating in the Dark just gets more interesting as I work back through the textures of performance and the density of experience created through the collision of stories and styles. It's not merely the contrast of the raw footage and defiantly aggressive performances of the 1982 film with the quieter, sadder atmosphere of the more subdued 2005 couple. In his new take on the story, the young couple is running not just from the crime, but from overwhelming feelings that explode in violent outbursts that feel more desperate and pathetic as compared to the same actions performed with the punky attitudes of the 1982 couple.

Shu Qi, the girlish Hong Kong pin-up who so often slides through her performances on looks and charm alone - an image and an idealized object of beauty with no depth - matures as an actress in Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Three Times, her second film for the director (her first was as a typically cute but superficial young beauty in Millennium Mambo). Here she and co-star Chang Chen play lovers of sorts at different stages of a romantic relationship in all three episodes of this trilogy of tales, each set in a different era across the past 100 years. The style is pure Hou: richly textured atmosphere, camerawork that crawls at so deliberate a pace you're tempted to call it lazy when it is anything but, and scenes full of privileged moments of human activity. The first segment is set in the 60s, where Shu is an itinerate pool hall hostess and Chang a young man who meets her on the eve of his military service and then returns on leave only to spend it tracking her down through small town billiard halls. The innocence and hope of all those young feelings are turned to frustration and conflicted motivations in the second, where she's a tea room courtesan in Taiwan in 1911, just before the Wu Chang Uprising, where her favorite customer (Chang) is an activist and reformer. It's shot silently, with a plaintive music soundtrack and intertitles for the dialogue, but is hardly a silent film in any stylistic sense (Hou's visual approach is defiantly the same tiptoeing camerawork and long, languorous takes). As the sound returns in the rustle of paper and fabric and the lute music played in the tea room in the film scene, the effect is complete: the exaggerated naturalism of the hushed environment makes the silence deafening.

The final episode, set in Taipei 2005 with Shu a bisexual rock singer secretly carrying on with a photographer (Chang), feels undercooked next to the deft observations and emotional snapshots of the first two, but it's no less lovely to look at. Even at his worst, Hou creates atmosphere and texture you can lose yourself in. At his best, he connects to the most ephemeral of human experiences in the most modest of revealing gestures and body language. In the most glorious moments, he captures the movements and precious details that define a lazy game of pool or the formal details of pouring tea, holds his camera on a face slowly losing its composure, and makes time a palpable presence.

The three films from Thailand - a spy-movie farce, a social documentary, and a romantic fantasy - all share a curious thematic essence. All chronicle the culture clash of simple, unworldly country boys and girls trying to find a life in the bustling, urbane, big city society of Bangkok. The loose thematic thread was surely unplanned in the programming, but its echoes can be felt in other recent Thai films (from the rural romance of Tropical Malady to the innocent country boy kicking urban gangster ass in Ong-Bak). In the garish spoof M.A.I.D., from Yongyoot Thongkontoon (Iron Ladies), the culture clash takes the form of farce: bubble-headed country girls working as maids in Bangkok wind up playing at Charlie's Angels when they are drafted as special agents by an ambitious government investigator, and their pluck is matched only by their idiocy and their tendency to mug mercilessly for the camera.

Crying Tigers (also a "Dragons and Tigers" competition film) takes the immigration far more seriously as it follows the fortunes of four individuals who hit Bangkok with big dreams. A popular recording artist and stage star on the verge of retirement (who still lives in squalor - by choice, he insists) and a female taxi driver training to helm big rig trucks get cursory attention. Director Santi Taepanich focuses on Man, who works a 12-hour day in a fish costume waving customers into a seafood restaurant before following his dream to become a stage comedian (starting at the bottom rung, of course, as a roadie), and Nath, a stunt-man on B action movies who dreams of appearing opposite Tony Jaa, and does a little catering on the side when work is scarce. There's nothing sensationalistic about their struggles, and amazingly, they find themselves all pursuing their dreams, albeit at the lowest rungs of their chosen professions. The lack of social context is frustrating for me (Thai audiences surely won't have that problem), but Santi's unsentimental portraits of these naïve dreamers plugging along is compelling.

The best of the three is the sophomore film from Wisit Sasanetieng. His debut film, Tears of the Black Tiger, a fantastical blast of adventure movie melodrama in saturated colors and tireless creative energy, has been MIA ever since it grabbed audiences on the festival circuit in 2000 and was immediately snatched up and shelved by Miramax. Citizen Dog is a romantic fable with the same sense of whimsy on a more modest scale. Pod is a country boy who leaves his farm home (a rural innocence exaggerated in impossible pastel colors and clouds imported from Maxfield Parrish paintings) for work in Bangkok, where he falls hopelessly in love with an obsessive compulsive maid whose naïveté and gullibility transforms her into a wide-eyed, empty-headed eco-activist. His adventures are full of absurdities that are woven into the fabric of his reality, from a severed finger that magically reattaches itself after being packed in a sardine can to a talking, chain-smoking teddy bear heartsick after being discarded. There's nothing deep or particularly insightful about the human condition of love, friendship, belonging or happiness in the vignette-like scenes that make up his story, but Wisit has an affection for his characters and an eye for turning creatively fantastic ideas into lovely imagery.

Thailand is also represented in the Digital Shorts By Three Filmmakers 2005, a project commissioned by the Jeonju Film Festival, with a delightful little ditty from Apichatpong Weerasethakul (of Tropical Malady fame). Ostensibly a behind-the-scenes peek at a (fictional) adventure melodrama of a couple escaping through the dense jungle, Worldly Desires is punctuated by a repeated nightclub style song and dance number performed in the same jungle. Less a film than playful lark, it seems to both spoof and celebrate the pop film culture of Thailand while rediscovering the magic in familiar clichés.

Tsukamoto Shinya's Haze (Japan) is a nightmare horror perfectly suited to the short film format (it runs 25 minutes), though the shrouded-in-darkness atmosphere is less attuned to the video format, unless you take the title as a clue and the "haze" of low-light video noise as a part of the claustrophobic experience. The guys from Saw might want to steal some of the ideas here as a man wakes up with no memory in a maze of concrete crawlspaces, spike-encrusted tunnels, blind alleys and booby traps. Tsukamoto has an expressive purpose for his stomach-knotting ordeal, however, one that pays off with a satisfying revelation that pulls the fantasy into a reality the audience can connect with. Song Il-Gon's Magician(s) (South Korea) is little more than a one-act play that drifts back and forth through time and memory in a single, 35-minute take, an experiment more notable for its technical prowess than its imagery or dramatic resonance.

My festival ended last weekend, but the 16-day Vancouver International Film Festival continued until Friday, October 14, when the Dardennes' Palme d'Or-winning L'Enfant closed the festival in a gala screening and awards were distributed. The People's Choice Award for Most Popular International Film went to Rahu Mihaileanu's Live And Become; the Federal Express Award for Most Popular Canadian Feature Film was handed out to Julia Kwan's British Columbia set and shot Eve & The Fire Horse (Jean-Marc Vallée's C.R.A.Z.Y., Canada's official submission for the Foreign Language Film Academy Award, was runner-up); and the Italian documentary A Particular Silence by Stefano Rulli took home the National Film Board Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Posted by dwhudson at October 15, 2005 2:52 PM