PIFF Dispatch. 2.

It's curious how cults start. A close friend of mine told me several years ago that the new generation of Hong Kong action films were being led by Johnnie To Kei-Fung, and that his The Mission was a great film. I duly saw The Mission; the film is indeed great (with a wonderfully catchy theme melody); but otherwise To's films aren't that easy to track down in Portland, despite the city having one of the better independent video stores in the northwest (Movie Madness). Thus was I excited that To's Triad Election, one of three or four films he directed in 2006, found a berth in the 30th annual Portland International Film Festival. Fortunately, it lived up to To's cult status.

Though called Triad Election in the west, the film is really entitled Election 2 (or Hak sewui: yi wo wai gwai, which is a gangland peacekeeping phrase that means ""harmony is a virtue"); that is, it's a sequel to the 2005 film Election, a moody, talky, intricate account of the biannual election of a new chairman for the Wo Shing Society, the 50,000 member-strong, oldest Triad in Hong Kong. The first film pitted the older, wiser Lok (Simon Yam) against the reckless and irrational Big D (Tony Leung Ka-fai) for the perch, which was like having Charlie and Johnny Boy from Mean Streets running for school superindedant. The film also has a long middle section in which a ceremonial baton representing the power of the chairmanship is lost in transit and wrestled over by reps of the two competing candidates.

Lok and the baton are back in the sequel, which takes place two years later, and are re-joined by Jimmy (Louis Koo) and Jet (Nick Cheung), Lok's hit man. The situation is this. Lok is up for reëlection, but wants to buck tradition by running again. Meanwhile, Jimmy, who is trying to go legit, is financially blackmailed by elements of mainland China to put himself forward as a candidate. Bloody electioneering ensues. The sequel's suspense set piece is a long sequence in what appears to be a meat packing plant, where Jimmy's men work over his competitors. It's like the signature scene in The Long Good Friday times a thousand, with some echos of Abu Ghraib thrown in.

There are also echos of The Godfather, as To has conceded. Much of the film concerns men talking ominously in rooms. Yet also, as in the first film, men take time out to go fishing along a thin stream. The film balances a number of themes. On a pure documentary level, it reveals on the screen for the first time certain Triad rituals, but at the same time, the film is an essay on the degradation of society (in Election, this was shown on the reactive faces of those observing Big D run riot; here it is the reaction of a otherwise stone killer [Mark Cheng, as Bo] to the horrors committed in the plant); and it scrutinizes the malign nature of mainland China on Hong Kong (which is officially a Special Administrative Region). As in the first film, another theme has to do with the absurd extremes to which the candidates will go to win, as if they all lived in a fantasy world. To the mournful, high-pitched strings of Robert Ellis-Geiger's score, the nine Triad bosses watch their world change inexorably.

It is not essential to see Election before viewing Triad Election, but it helps, and in any case the film is worth seeing, and in addition, Nix's review at Beyond Hollywood, Russell Edwards's at Variety, Stefan S's at Nutshell Review and Leo Goldsmith's at Not Coming to a Theater Near You provide helpful background.

La gran final (The Great Match) is a gentle comedy of slight proportions that may well put viewers in mind of The Gods Must Be Crazy and other popular, official-feeling international exports that risk condescension. It's also a kind of easy-going reverse version of Babel as it tells of three unconnected groups of people around the world struggling to find a circumstance in which to view the 2002 World Cup final between Germany and Brazil. In Babel, everyone is alienated, alone, closed off from their culture; in the more upbeat La gran final, everyone is ultimately the same, united, and culture works, dammit. Instead of being alienated by our differences, in this Global McMovie, we are all united by our shared obsession with a singularity. It is perfect middlebrow film festival fare, and you get three cultures for the price of one.

Directed, photographed, and co-written by Gerardo Olivares, the film has great Koyaanisqatsi-style imagery, wherein man is a feeble if defiant figure against the immutable harshness of nature. One striking image shows numerous anonymous people on a truck in the desert, each wearing bright colors, like soccer teams. But overall its humor is broad without being compensatingly funny as it follows groups in the Brazillian Amazon, the Niger desert, and the Mongolian veldt crowding around battered TV sets. In fact, the show they are all united in watching could just easily have been Baywatch or CSI: Miami, as far as the international obsessions of the working classes go. Or more appropriately, perhaps American Idol, the latest (and last) mainstream program to unite a nation despite differences of gender, race, aesthetic, et cetera. In such a case, the filmmakers wouldn't have risked having their film confused with the The Cup, the Tibetan movie on a similar theme.

The end credits include little making of snippets. Reviewers who liked the movie include Scott's Movie Comments and Jonathan Holland at Variety.

Rang De Basanti (also known as Paint It Yellow) is a very interesting Bollywood film, or at least offers an interesting idea for a film, but in the end, Rang doesn't have the courage of its convictions. The story is quite simple but stretched out over a lengthy 157-minute running time. Sue McKinley (Alice Patten), the Hindi-speaking granddaughter of a colonialist, is attempting to make a film about Indian revolutionary Bhagat Singh, and ends up in Delhi where, with few resources, she embarks on a low-budget film she calls The Young Guns of India. She falls in with a group of westernized friends, led by DJ (Aamir Khan of Lagaan). Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra's film (from a screenplay by Renzil D'Silva, Mehra, Kamlesh Pandey and lyricist Prasoon Joshi) spends an ungodly amount of time letting us get to know this crew and their idiosyncrasies, and later intercuts footage from the film she has made with their contemporaneous antics.

That long passage at least has the benefit of letting us "get to know" the characters in detail, so that later we care about their fate, because the film turns deadly serious when one of their number, an air force pilot Ajay (Madhavan) dies when his MIG breakdowns down (in an unseen moment that nevertheless mimics a similar situation in The Great Santini). This leads to a national governmental scandal, with Ajay's mother battered in a riot. The remaining male pals take over a radio station in an effort to get the word out about corruption within the military-industrial complex.

Though the movie is endeavoring to rouse the youth of a nation out of some kind of somnolence, it still adheres to a retrograde movie morality out of 30s-era Hollywood. In other words, though the pals are politically "correct," because they have engaged in violence they, too, must fall in violence. I suppose it would be too "reassuring," or inspire complacency if their activism were rewarded by the film instead of memorialized. Near the beginning of the film, we see video footage of Sue's audition interviews. The kids are hopeful, but awkward and unfocused. This sequence is mirrored by a concluding montage of students across the nation, now radicalized and activated like Bhagat Singh, and indicating the birth of a protest movement, which at least leaves the viewer with some hope.

For more enthusiastic reviews, see Jaspreet Pandohar for the BBC, G Allen Johnson in the San Francisco Chronicle and Abhishek Bandekar at efilmcritic.

Posted by dwhudson at February 14, 2007 11:48 AM