Tokyo Dispatch. FILMeX.

Generally regarded by cinephiles as the more important of the city's two major international film festivals, TOKYO FILMeX follows its rival, the Tokyo International Film Festival, by just a few weeks in the calendar. It's the smaller of the two: this year (its seventh), FILMeX showed 34 films. At many festivals, you pick 30 or so films you think you might want to check out, and after scheduling conflicts, socializing and fatigue take their deductions, you manage to see about 15 of them. At FILMeX, you want to see them all (since they have the blessing of festival director Kanako Hayashi and program director Shozo Ichiyama), and you can.

The festival's highlights included Jia Zhangke's Still Life (the opening film); Jafar Panahi's Offside, which won the audience award; a tribute to Daniel Schmid (who passed away in 2006) with screenings of Shadow of Angels and Violanta; and the Japan premiere of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's latest, Sakebi (Retribution), which was rightly welcomed as a return to form for the director, though I couldn't help wishing that he would find something else to do with his talents besides this kind of clever genre-twisting exercise.

The competition section featured nine Asian films, including two world premieres. The jury (led by Pusan International Film Festival director Kim Dong-Ho), of which I was a member, gave the Grand Prize to To Get to Heaven, First You Have to Die, by Djamshed Usmonov, from Tajikistan. A quiet and passive young man, Kamal (Khurched Golibekov), finds himself impotent with his wife. He visits his cousin in the city, where he tries unsuccessfully to make contact with various female strangers. His luck changes when he meets textile worker Vera (Dinara Droukarova, who played the daughter in Julie Bertucelli's Since Otar Left), with whom he spends a night - an adventure that, though it doesn't immediately cure his impotence, leads to his becoming involved with the woman's husband, a sociopathic criminal. Cool and controlled, Usmonov's film observes its protagonist and his world with dark humor and detachment. In its final sections, the film takes a number of turns that justify (metaphorically) its title while also clarifying Usmonov's wry statement on sexual difference.

We gave the Special Jury Prize to The Other Half by Ying Liang, a Chinese director who had received the same award at the previous FILMeX for his first feature, Taking Father Home. The Other Half intersperses scenes in a law office - where a succession of complainants in domestic-dispute cases address their woes to the camera - with a story about a young woman's ill-fated relationship with a shiftless young man. An oblique, even tricky film (despite the directness of the shooting style in the scenes in the law office), The Other Half is impressive for the restraint and compassion with which the director surveys his large cast of characters and for the amount of sociological detail he accumulates about their difficulties. Since the Special Jury Prize includes 35mm Kodak film stock, the fact that The Other Half was shot on DV lent Ying's two consecutive FILMeX wins a certain irony, to which the Kodak representative who presented the award at the closing ceremony alluded gently.

Among the other films in the competition, the Iranian film Have You Another Apple?, by Bayram Fazli, an absurdist parable about the mechanics of hero-making and political oppression, stands out for its narrative audacity and for the relentless vigor of its camerawork and mise-en-scène. The Filipino film The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, by Auraeus Solito, is vivid and refreshingly low-key in its recounting of the unlikely friendship between two people: a 12-year-old boy who sometimes cross-dresses and who appears to be regarded (and accepted) by everyone who knows him as gay, and a policeman investigating the criminal activities of the boy's father and older brothers.

FILMeX offered Tokyo premieres of five of the seven films coproduced with Austrian funding (to celebrate Mozart's 250th anniversary in 2006) under the banner of New Crowned Hope. The five included two great films, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century and Tsai Ming-liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, and a quite good one: Paz Encina's moving and tender Paraguayan Hammock, an extended experiment in the dislocation of sound and image. The Indonesian entry, Garin Nugroho's Opera Jawa, though greeted with enthusiasm by many, seems to me a late and displaced hangover from the "postmodern" theater - all vapid exoticism, cyclical music and contrived tableaux - that intoxicated the West during the 1980s and 1990s (I soaked it up far past my limit at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts). Bahman Ghobadi's Half Moon, a magic-realist road film about Kurdish musicians trying to cross the border from Iran into Iraq, also comes off as somewhat overcalculated, hinting, like Opera Jawa, at the pitfalls of the New Crowned Hope commission.

As in past years, a highlight of the festival was its Japanese retrospective. In the West, Kihachi Okamoto is known mainly for the samurai classics Sword of Doom and Kill!, but, as became clear through the 12-film tribute FILMeX presented at the National Film Center, the director made his mark in a variety of genres. Okamoto can even be said to have systematically disrupted the divisions among genres by directly and iconoclastically addressing a popular audience in films about low-level criminals (the engaging Procurer of Hell), cops and yakuza (The Last Gunfight, featuring the imposing duo of Toshiro Mifune and Koji Tsuruta), and the absurdity of war as experienced by both common soldiers (Desperado Outpost; Nikudan [The Human Bullet]) and the decision makers (Japan's Longest Day, a.k.a. The Emperor and a General).

Two random notes to close. Since this FILMeX was mostly low on glamour, the appearances of Zhao Tao (in a black dress) to help open the festival and Chen Shiang-chyi (in a white one) to help close it were all the more welcome. Finally, this was the first film festival at which I saw two films with scenes of assisted urination: one was I Don't Want To Sleep Alone; the other was Okamoto's Nikudan, in which the beneficiary is a kindly, armless used-book seller played by Chishu Ryu.

Posted by dwhudson at November 30, 2006 12:15 PM